More Ethics Notes

These notes were taken on Monday, February 10th. We are still missing the second half of the notes taken last Monday. There will be no notes for President's Day since there is no school. We are all very lucky. We will start off by reviewing a few important things learned last week:

• Egoism: it is not prescriptive (1. Sanctioned or authorized by long-standing custom or usage. 2. Making or giving injunctions, directions, laws, or rules. 3. Law Acquired by or based on uninterrupted possession.)
• Psychological Egoism states that a person can't even act without looking at self-interest. It is all about you.

• Rule Utilitarianism: you choose the greatest good for the largest number of people
• It is prescriptive (check definition above)
• Happiness is the only thing that is good in itself
• Assets of Rule Utilitarianism:
• Happiness
• Foreseeability
• Social equity

• Correlate: doesn't protect the individual, but always looks for good for the greatest number

• Rule utilitarianism as seen by John Stewart Mills:
  
• Individual rights must be observed. If no rule is in place, act as if there was one or it is in process of making one.
  

• Plato believed in the universal law (works anywhere in the universe; its out there!)

• THE DIVINE COMMAND THEORY
  
• It is right because God commands it
• St. Thomas of Aquinas believed in three kinds of law
• Divine Law - first priority
• Natural Law - second priority
• Statuatory Law (human law)- third priority
• These three laws must be in harmony
• They must be in consistency
• Criteria: We have a duty to act in conformity with what God wills
• God is perfect
• We know what God wills by revelation
• By sacred scripture or the Koran. We know by revelation, it is overt. Revelation is right out there.
• Known as a matter of conscience; it is covert revelation. It works undercover.
• Intent
• What God wants
• Act
• Choosing or not choosing what God wants
• Results
• Not important to Divine Command Theory
• It is like having an angel sitting on one shoulder and the Devil on the other telling us what to do.
• It is duty to God and not to the community.
• People are infalliable and cannot find their way without divine intervention
• God is our creator and we have a duty to him(her)
• God is perfect and wouldn't demand imperfection

• Problems with Divine Command Theory
• What we can't find we must take as an article of faith
• Doesn't speak with a single voice
• We can't agree on an ethic
• It is based on authority vs. reason (I'm bigger and stronger and I say so!)
  
• Based on obedience and tells to avoid the seven deadly sins
• Pride, envy, anger, lust, sloth, gluttony, greed
• St. Anselm stated "faith before reason"

• IMMANUEL KANT
• Immanuel Kant was born in 1724 in Königsberg, as the fourth of nine children (five of them reached adulthood). He was baptized as 'Emanuel' but later changed his name to 'Immanuel'^[1] after he learned Hebrew. He spent his entire life in and around his hometown, the capital of East Prussia at that time, never traveling more than a hundred miles from Königsberg.^[2] His father Johann Georg Kant (1682–1746) was a German craftsman from Memel, at the time Prussia's most northeastern city (now Klaipėda, Lithuania). His mother Anna Regina Porter (1697–1737), born in Nuremberg, was the daughter of a Scottish saddle and harness maker. In his youth, Kant was a solid, albeit unspectacular, student. He was raised in a Pietist household that stressed intense religious devotion, personal humility, and a literal interpretation of the Bible. Consequently, Kant received a stern education — strict, punitive, and disciplinary — that favored Latin and religious instruction over mathematics and science.

• The Silent Decade

  At the age of 46, Kant was an established scholar and an increasingly influential philosopher. Much was expected of him. In response to a letter from his student, Markus Herz, Kant came to recognize that in the Inaugural Dissertation, he had failed to account for the relation and connection between our sensible and intellectual faculties. He also credited David Hume with awakening him from "dogmatic slumber" (circa 1770). Kant would not publish another work in philosophy for the next eleven years.

  Kant spent his silent decade working on a solution to the problems posed. Though fond of company and conversation with others, Kant isolated himself, despite friends' attempts to bring him out of his isolation. In 1778, in response to one of these offers by a former pupil, Kant wrote "Any change makes me apprehensive, even if it offers the greatest promise of improving my condition, and I am persuaded by this natural instinct of mine that I must take heed if I wish that the threads which the Fates spin so thin and weak in my case to be spun to any length. My great thanks, to my well-wishers and friends, who think so kindly of me as to undertake my welfare, but at the same time a most humble request to protect me in my current condition from any disturbance."^[5]

  When Kant emerged from his silence in 1781, the result was the Critique of Pure Reason. Although now uniformly recognized as one of the greatest works in the history of philosophy, this Critique was largely ignored upon its initial publication. The book was long, over 800 pages in the original German edition, and written in a dry, scholastic style. It received few reviews, and these granted no significance to the work. Its density made it, as Johann Gottfried Herder put it in a letter to Johann Georg Hamann, a "tough nut to crack," obscured by "…all this heavy gossamer."^[6] This is in stark contrast, however, to the praise Kant received for earlier works such as the aforementioned "Prize Essay" and other shorter works that precede the first Critique. These well-received and readable tracts include one on the earthquake in Lisbon which was so popular that it was sold by the page.^[7] Prior to the critical turn, his books sold well, and by the time he published Observations On the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime in 1764 he had become a popular author of some note.^[8] Kant was disappointed with the first Critique's reception. Recognizing the need to clarify the original treatise, Kant wrote the Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics in 1783 as a summary of its main views. He also encouraged his friend, Johann Schultz, to publish a brief commentary on the Critique of Pure Reason.

  Kant's reputation gradually rose through the 1780s, sparked by a series of important works: the 1784 essay, "Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?"; 1785's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (his first work on moral philosophy); and, from 1786, Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science. But Kant's fame ultimately arrived from an unexpected source. In 1786, Karl Reinhold began to publish a series of public letters on the Kantian philosophy. In these letters, Reinhold framed Kant's philosophy as a response to the central intellectual controversy of the era: the Pantheism Dispute. Friedrich Jacobi had accused the recently deceased G. E. Lessing (a distinguished dramatist and philosophical essayist) of Spinozism. Such a charge, tantamount to atheism, was vigorously denied by Lessing's friend Moses Mendelssohn, and a bitter public dispute arose between them. The controversy gradually escalated into a general debate over the values of the Enlightenment and of reason itself. Reinhold maintained in his letters that Kant's Critique of Pure Reason could settle this dispute by defending the authority and bounds of reason. Reinhold's letters were widely read and made Kant the most famous philosopher of his era.

  Kant's later work

  Kant published a second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason (Kritik der reinen Vernunft) in 1787, heavily revising the first parts of the book. Most of his subsequent work focused on other areas of philosophy. He continued to develop his moral philosophy, notably in 1788's Critique of Practical Reason (known as the second Critique) and 1797’s Metaphysics of Morals. The 1790 Critique of Judgment (the third Critique) applied the Kantian system to aesthetics and teleology. He also wrote a number of semi-popular essays on history, religion, politics and other topics. These works were well received by Kant's contemporaries and confirmed his preeminent status in eighteenth century philosophy. There were several journals devoted solely to defending and criticizing the Kantian philosophy. But despite his success, philosophical trends were moving in another direction. Many of Kant's most important disciples (including Reinhold, Beck and Fichte) transformed the Kantian position into increasingly radical forms of idealism. This marked the emergence of German Idealism. Kant opposed these developments and publicly denounced Fichte in an open letter^[9] in 1799. It was one of his final philosophical acts. Kant's health, long poor, took a turn for the worse and he died at Konigsberg on 12 February 1804 uttering "Genug" [enough] before expiring.^[10] His unfinished final work, the fragmentary Opus Postumum, was (as its title suggests) published posthumously.

  A variety of popular beliefs have arisen concerning Kant's life. It is often held, for instance, that Kant was a late bloomer, that he only became an important philosopher in his mid-50s after rejecting his earlier views. While it is true that Kant wrote his greatest works relatively late in life, there is a tendency to underestimate the value of his earlier works. Recent Kant scholarship has devoted more attention to these "pre-critical" writings and has recognized a degree of continuity with his mature work.^{[citations needed]}

  Many of the common myths concerning Kant's personal mannerisms are enumerated, explained, and refuted in Goldwaite's translator's introduction to Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime.^[11] It is often held that Kant lived a very strict and predictable life, leading to the oft-repeated story that neighbors would set their clocks by his daily walks.^[12] Again, this is only partly true. While still young, Kant was a very gregarious socialite and he remained fond of dinner parties through most of his life. Kant's poetry was much admired, and handwritten manuscripts circulated among his friends and associates. He never married. Only later in his life, under the influence of his friend, the English merchant Joseph Green, did Kant adopt a more regulated lifestyle.^[13]

  Kant's philosophy

  Kant defined the Enlightenment in the essay "Answering the Question: What is Enlightenment?" as an age shaped by the motto, "Dare to know" (Latin: Sapere aude). This involved thinking autonomously, free of the dictates of external authority. Kant's work reconciled many of the differences between the Rationalist and Empiricist traditions of the 18th century. He had a decisive impact on the Romantic and German Idealist philosophies of the 19th century. His work has also been a starting point for many 20th century philosophers.

  Kant asserted that, because of the limitations of reason, no one could really know if there is a God and an afterlife, and conversely that no one could really know that there was not a God and an afterlife. For the sake of society and morality, Kant asserted, people are reasonably justified in believing in them, even though they could never know for sure whether they are real or not. Kant explained:

  “

  "All the preparations of reason, therefore, in what may be called pure philosophy, are in reality directed to those three problems only [God, the soul, and freedom]. However, these three elements in themselves still hold independent, proportional, objective weight individually. Moreover, in a collective relational context; namely, to know what ought to be done: if the will is free, if there is a God, and if there is a future world. As this concerns our actions with reference to the highest aims of life, we see that the ultimate intention of nature in her wise provision was really, in the constitution of our reason, directed to moral interests only."[14]

  ”

  The sense of an enlightened approach and the critical method required that "If one cannot prove that a thing is, he may try to prove that it is not. And if he succeeds in doing neither (as often occurs), he may still ask whether it is in his interest to accept one or the other of the alternatives hypothetically, from the theoretical or the practical point of view. …Hence the question no longer is as to whether perpetual peace is a real thing or not a real thing, or as to whether we may not be deceiving ourselves when we adopt the former alternative, but we must act on the supposition of its being real."^[15] The presupposition of God, soul, and freedom was then a practical concern, for "Morality, by itself, constitutes a system, but happiness does not, unless it is distributed in exact proportion to morality. This, however, is possible in an intelligible world only under a wise author and ruler. Reason compels us to admit such a ruler, together with life in such a world, which we must consider as future life, or else all moral laws are to be considered as idle dreams… ."^[16]

  The two interconnected foundations of what Kant called his "critical philosophy" of the "Copernican revolution" which he claimed to have wrought in philosophy were his epistemology of Transcendental Idealism and his moral philosophy of the autonomy of practical reason. These placed the active, rational human subject at the center of the cognitive and moral worlds. With regard to knowledge, Kant argued that the rational order of the world as known by science could never be accounted for merely by the fortuitous accumulation of sense perceptions. It was instead the product of the rule-based activity of "synthesis." This consisted of conceptual unification and integration carried out by the mind through concepts or the "categories of the understanding" operating on the perceptual manifold within space and time, which are not concepts,^[17] but forms of sensibility that are a priori necessary conditions for any possible experience. Thus the objective order of nature and the causal necessity that operates within it are dependent upon the mind. There is wide disagreement among Kant scholars on the correct interpretation of this train of thought. The 'two-world' interpretation regards Kant's position as a statement of epistemological limitation, that we are never able to transcend the bounds of our own mind, meaning that we cannot access the "thing-in-itself". Kant however also speaks of the thing in itself or transcendental object as a product of the (human) understanding as it attempts to conceive of objects in abstraction from the conditions of sensibility. Following this thought, some interpreters have argued that the thing in itself does not represent a separate ontological domain but simply a way of considering objects by means of the understanding alone — this is known as the two-aspect view. With regard to morality, Kant argued that the source of the good lies not in anything outside the human subject, either in nature or given by God, but rather only the good will itself. A good will is one that acts from duty in accordance with the universal moral law that the autonomous human being freely gives itself. This law obliges one to treat humanity — understood as rational agency, and represented through oneself as well as others — as an end in itself rather than (merely) as means.

  These ideas have largely framed or influenced all subsequent philosophical discussion and analysis. The specifics of Kant's account generated immediate and lasting controversy. Nevertheless, his theses -- that the mind itself necessarily makes a constitutive contribution to its knowledge, that this contribution is transcendental rather than psychological, that philosophy involves self-critical activity, that morality is rooted in human freedom, and that to act autonomously is to act according to rational moral principles -- have all had a lasting effect on subsequent philosophy.

• Kant was extremely compulsive: did the same thing the same way all of the time. (Example: philosopher's walk.) He believed that duty is to society. Kant believed that Universal Law is not out there in the universe as Plato believed, but that it is in our heads. Truths are in us. Rules of morality exist inside of us and not "out there". The absolute difference between right and wrong, Universal Moral Law (UML), is known before our birth (A priori).
  

• Deontology: (Greek: δέον (deon) meaning 'obligation' or 'duty') is an approach to ethics that focuses on the rightness or wrongness of actions themselves, as opposed to the rightness or wrongness of the consequences of those actions.^[1] It is sometimes described as "duty" or "obligation" based ethics, because deontologists believe that ethical rules "bind you to your duty".^[2] The term 'deontological' was first used in this way in 1930, in C. D. Broad's book, Five Types of Ethical Theory.

1. The end result is unimportant, it is the intent and the act that count.
2. UML's are known A priori as a category of understanding. The framework is in us.
3. Intent then act- results are unimportant because the results should never effect the intent
4. No one should be treated as a means to an end. If you act by lying or stealing, you use other people. Example: lying is always wrong. We know this even in a trivial situation. You must always tell the truth.
5. Ends never justify the act.
6. Too harsh!

• Deductive
• The type of reasoning that proceeds from general principles or premises to derive particular information.

• Syllogism
• A syllogism (henceforth categorical unless otherwise specified) consists of three parts: the major premise, the minor premise, and the conclusion. In Aristotle, each of the premises is in the form "Some/all A belong to B," where "Some/All A' is one term and "belong to B" is another, but more modern logicians allow some variation. Each of the premises has one term in common with the conclusion: in a major premise, this is the major term (i.e., the predicate) of the conclusion; in a minor premise, it is the minor term (the subject) of the conclusion. For example:
• Major premise: All humans are mortal.
• Minor premise: Socrates is human.
• Conclusion: Socrates is mortal.
• Each of the three distinct terms represents a category, in this example, "human," "mortal," and "Socrates." "Mortal" is the major term; "Socrates," the minor term. The premises also have one term in common with each other, which is known as the middle term -- in this example, "human." Here the major premise is universal and the minor particular, but this need not be so. For example:
• Major premise: All mortal things die.
• Minor premise: All men are mortal things.
• Conclusion: All men die.
• Here, the major term is "die,"the minor term is "men," and the middle term is "[being] mortal things." Both of the premises are universal.
  

• Kant's ideas are too harsh- no one has a pure heart and an empty head. You'd have to be blind. Example given in Larson's class: You have $100,000. You have to choose one of two things to do with the money. First, your grandmother is dying slowly and is in an adequate nursing home. You could place her in a better home where she would be more comfortable and may have a few more days of life. Or, number two, you could use the money for college to help you become a doctor and, in so doing, could help many people. Kant would say grandmother first and the results of number two would only be speculation.

• Soft Deontonlogy
• It removes some of the harshness of strict Deontology.
• Can universalize (example: it is ok for me to lie to save a life, etc.)
1. If some future tragedy is avoided
2. If the result is not solely for my own vested interest; I am not the center of the benefit; I am not alone.
• Example: Lifeboat incident of 1884: four men cast away on a lifeboat. They all ran out of food. One was very ill. Two of the castaways, Dudley and Stevens, decided to murder and eat the weak one, Parker. The fourth, Brooks, wanted no part. Dudley and Stevens killed Parker, ate, and Brooks joined in. Dudley and Stevens were ultimately convicted of murder even though Parker would have died anyway. Parker was not. Queen Victoria ultimately commuted their sentence to six months. Example of a moral situation as an exception to the rule.
  

My God, its over! I gave you more information about Kant than the good doctor. But there it is.