How can we explain kindness and cruelty? Where does our sense of right and wrong come from? Why do people so often disagree about moral issues? This course explores the psychological foundations of our moral lives.
Philosophical Approaches
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From the course by Yale University
Moralities of Everyday Life
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From the lesson
The Big Questions
What is morality, anyway? What are the big debates in the field of moral psychology?
Meet the Instructors
Paul BloomBrooks and Suzanne Ragen Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Science at Yale University
Psychology
So, we ended the first lecture by
describing Adam Smith's two approaches to morality.
Philosophical and psychological.
And I want to focus here on the philosophical questions.
I want to talk a little bit about ethics.
About, moral philosophy.
And how people answer the question how should you be a good person?
What is it to be good? What distinguishes good from, from evil?
Right from wrong?
And it turns out there are two very general
approaches that most philosophers and most scholars, fall into.
And one is consequentialism.
Consequentialist approaches are a dominant way of thinking about morality.
Contemporary philosophers who, who endorse
it, include philosophers like Peter Singer.
Who is very influential.
Traditional philosophers include David Hume and John Stuart Mill.
But most of all, Jeremy Bentham.
Who can be taken as the great champion of this approach.
And so for, Bentham argued that when it comes
to morality, when it comes to being a good person.
Comes to, to being moral.
Results matter.
They call, that is why they call consequentialism.
Consequences matter. And what you should do is,
you should always act in a way That's going to
promote the best consequences, that's going to make the world better.
What it is to do good, is to make the world better.
What it is to do bad, is to make the world worse.
Now, what do we mean by better or worse?
And there are different answers to this.
And it gets into, there's quite a lot of debate, and it gets complicated.
But for Bentham, it wasn't actually that complicated at all.
For Bentham it reduced to pleasure and pain.
And, and sometimes people describe pleasure, use the term utility.
To to capture idea of pleasure, or happiness.
And so this theory is sometimes called, utilitarianism.
So Bentham summarizes his view as follows.
He says, nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters.
Pain and pleasure.
It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do.
So, to be a good consequentialist.
To live your life as a consequentialist, would propose.
When it comes to making an action to, to deciding what do do.
What you're supposed to do is calculate, how many people or
how many animals are going to be affected by what you do?
Both negatively and positively?
How intensely are they affected? And you
kind of add everything up for one option,
and you add everything up for your other options.
And then you choose the action that's
going to produce the greatest overall amount of good.
So does, to see real examples of this, take some cases
with people have argued about through history and argue about now.
Should torture be illegal, always?
Or are there ever cases where torture is okay?
And there's a picture of water-boarding
there, done by, by soldiers. What about gay marriage?
Is gay marriage, or homosexuality more generally?
Should it be prohibited by law?
As it is in many countries and used to be in the United States?
Or should the government stay out of it? Should, that's fine.
There's no harm done.
So you ask a consequentialist what he or she thinks of these cases.
And the answer you get is, look, there, there's no simple principle
that will answer it.
What you have to do is you have to look and see, is
the world better or worse if you allow torture versus you don't allow torture?
Is the world better or worse, if you
allow gay marriage or you don't allow gay marriage?
So Bentham himself had interesting views on this.
So take torture. So torture plainly is a bad thing.
Has, has a bad consequence.
Because the person you are torturing experiences
agony, and that makes the world worse.
So the question is, do the benefits of torture ever, are they ever sufficient?
Such that they override, the, the, the negative consequences of torture.
And Bentham said, sure.
Bentham hundreds of years ago introduced
what's now called the ticking bomb scenario.
He said, look imagine the case where you'd have to torture somebody.
And if you tortured them
you can find out where a bomb was placed.
And this bomb will kill hundreds of people.
Should you do it?
Of course.
The suffering caused by the death of hundreds of people, is way
more significant than the suffering caused by this person who was tortured.
And so torture is sometimes justifiable, argued Bentham.
What about homosexuality?
Or gay marriage?
Now I have no idea what Benthum thought about gay marriage.
I don't think
it was a, an issue a few hundred years ago.
But he spoke extensively and quite eloquently on homosexuality.
And he said, what's the problem?
He said, look if, if people's private acts, being permitted to privately
engage in romance and love and sex with someone of the same gender.
If that gives pleasure, then it's good. And if it's private, who could it harm?
Now you could
talk about the pain that people who are
exposed to it, forced to see it, or whatever.
But if these are, since these are private acts.
It, it, it seems, it seems there's no reason to preclude' em.
It would be wrong to block them.
Because by blocking them, you'll lead to more pain in the world.
More suffering.
And so Bentham was actually very progressive,
when it came to matters of sexuality.
Including the rights of women, incidentally.
So, this is consequentialism.
Now consequentialism is a very interesting view.
In part, it's very radical.
Because, it's you notice, there's nothing to be said about God here.
Or divine rules.
There's nothing to be said about abstract moral laws and moral principles.
it, it, it gives up what a lot of people think is central to morality.
It also has beautiful simplicity.
It derives in a straightforward way from a pretty common sense principles.
You know, we can be skeptical about a lot of things.
But it's really hard to argue against the idea
that on the whole, pleasure and happiness is good.
And pain and suffering is bad.
So, there are a lot of strengths to consequentialism.
And there's a lot of, as I said, there's a
lot of contemporary scholars or consequestialists and, and endorse it.
But it has its problems.
And I, I want to be clear about some of its problems.
There's no, I, I will just to jump ahead.
There's no philosophical theory and morality that,
that, that seems to work for everybody.
They all have subtle problems and complexities.
Or not so subtle ones.
So, critics of consenquentialism point out that it often
forces us to accept as moral, things that intuitively
in our gut, just awful. So for a consenquentialist for instance
it is perfectly, it is a good thing to torture a child to death.
If by doing so, you raise the happiness level of other people.
Because the math works out.
Over all, torturing leaves the world a better place than without the torturing.
But, that seems wrong.
Consequentialists give no special credit to bonds of family and friendship.
And in that way as well, their account. It, it's a counter intuitive theory.
My son needs an operation.
And it's an expensive operation, so I save my money.
And, without this operation, he'll go blind.
Save's his money my money.
And I give him the operation.
And most people would say, yeah, that's a good thing to do.
That's what you're
supposed to do.
But for the consequentialist, that's awful.
What I should be doing instead is taking that same
money, and giving to the poor people of the world.
Because the same money that could save my child's sight,
could save the lives of a dozen, a hundred people.
So for a consequentialist, using our money to, to.
Spending our money on, on those we love.
Talk about medical operation,
well what about, sending a child to an expensive school?
Buying him books, buying him toys, or games, is awful.
Because that same money could be used
for far greater benefit, for suffering strangers.
And those are unintuitive consequences.
Now, some consequentialists would say, you know, that really is true.
All of those things are, are, we really
should not be spending money on our own children.
We really should be
willing to torture the child to save others.
We just have to bite the bullet and accept
that sometimes our moral theories, will go beyond our intuitions.
Will tell us things we didn't yet know.
But many people, including me, find these consequences of consequentialists, so
outlandish that it's hard to accept it fully as a moral theory.
Then there's another problem. This problem is in a sense more general.
It's that consequentialism might,
in some way, miss the point of morality. So, why is rape wrong?
Consequentialists agree that violent rape, that rape is wrong, morally wrong.
But here's why they think it's wrong.
They think it's wrong because typically in an
act of rape, the suffering of the victim.
The person who is raped, outweighs the pleasure of the rapist.
And so it's wrong.
But, if you think about it, that seems absurd.
That implies, for instance, that as a rapist gets more
and more pleasure, rape would become more and more okay.
It implies that if there are multiple
rapists who got great pleasure from the act.
And the victim, perhaps was unconscious and didn't
suffer that much, Then rape would be okay.
And this isn't an outlandish circum, an outlandish conclusion.
Because it seems to miss the point.
Which is what's wrong about, about a crime like rape or, or, or murder or torture.
Or something like that isn't that it just affects the
sort of, qquilibrium, the relative ratio of pleasure and pain.
Rather it, it's because you shouldn't do that to somebody.
It's that people have a right not to be harmed.
It, it's that, it's, there's a wrongness to assaulting
somebody, that transcends the balance of pain and pleasure.
And so, so, it, the critics of consequentialism say that although it may
be, to some extent, a reasonable guide to how to live your life.
It fails as a moral theory, because
it captures what's most important about morality.
So now we could shift and, well, before we move on.
I want to say one last thing about Bentham.
utilitarianism, consequentialism as you might have seen by now, is often taken as
a very cold blooded and calculating way of living your life.
And and in fact, Benthum after he died had a very unsentimental ending.
Bentham actually they, they, preserved his head.
And his skeleton.
And he is now on display in University College London.
Now it is said that in faculty meetings, the general faculty of University College
London, they bring Bentham into the room. And then after everything is done.
He is recorded in the ledger as present, but not voting.
This is unfortunately an urban legend that's not entirely true.
Let's move now to the second class of approaches to morality.
So-called deontological approaches.
And deontological approaches, differ in a lot of ways.
But what they share is the idea that there are
moral constraints in some actions, regardless of the consequences.
That is there are moral rules that apply. regardless, you know?
There are moral rules that apply Even if it
turned out an action causes more pleasure than pain.
Still, some of those actions are just plain wrong.
And of course, the great champion of
deontological approaches is the philosopher Immanuel Kant.
And Kant expanded at great length, in great subtlety, on morality.
And tried to ground his approach to morality on pure reason.
Arguing, let's forget about gut feelings or emotion.
We can figure out what the right thing
to do just through our intelligence and our rationality.
And the way he did it was,
he introduced the idea of the categorical imperative.
So a lot of what we do is grounded on our desires.
So if you want to see a movie, which is
a desire, what you should do is go buy a ticket.
If you want to drink some water, go to the sink and pour some water.
And those are a hypothetical imperatives for Kant.
They are if, then given a desire,
do such and so.
But Kant argued there are also categorical imperatives.
And categorical imperatives are grounded solely on reason.
Any rational being would arrive at a categorical imperative.
And so the, in particular, the idea is that any rational being
will appreciate that what you should do, is act as if your action
would become a universal law.
So when you decide to do, to do this versus do that.
You should ask yourself, if everybody did this versus that?
How would the world be?
Would it demolish our way of living?
So, one of Kant's great examples was lying?
If you're a consequentialist, and you're asked, should you lie?
The answer is, well, it depends on the consequences.
Some cases, you shouldn't lie, because it makes thing worse off.
But some cases, you should lie.
Somebody says, you know, how do I look?
I'll say, you look great. And maybe you don't look so great.
But it's better off just to say, you look great.
Kant has none of that.
Kant says you should never lie.
Never.
And the reason for that is that, what if everybody lied?
Well, if everybody lied, communication would fall apart.
Language would fall apart.
And our way of living would be destroyed.
And because of that, Kant says, therefore, no individual should lie.
And he meant it.
You, you, he, one of his examples, I'll, it'll be slightly different.
One of his examples.
Suppose I have Smith.
And Smith is in my, in my my living room. And there's
a knock on the door.
And I open up the door and it's an insane murderer with an axe.
And he says, I want to kill Smith.
Is Smith in your house? For a consequentialist, you say no.
He went that away, and then you call the police.
For Kant, you say, yeah, back there.
Because you shouldn't lie, regardless of the consequences.
So we can ask, as we did for Bentham.
How a deontological philosopher would deal with issues like torture or gay marriage.
And the answer, is it depends.
It depends on what kind of deontological philosopher you're dealing with.
But when you fix yourself on a certain
deontological theory, your theory will give you clean answers.
So many philosophers and many people, actually.
Think there's something wrong with torture.
There's something wrong with intentionally
inflicting pain on another person.
And it's a sort of wrong that transcends the consequences.
So even if torturing one person, would save 100 other people.
You shouldn't do it.
Because it's just not the sort of thing you do.
Some people feel, with regard to homosexuality
and, and, and other forms of sex.
They're just wrong.
It doesn't matter whether on the whole they make the world, people happier, or
they don't make the world, people happier. It's not the issue.
The issue is, these things are intrinsically wrong.
Now, one of the merits, one of the strengths of, deontological approaches.
Is that, unlike the consequentialist approach, they really
do sort of have the flavor of morality.
They, they capture the idea that some things are wrong, intrinsically.
You don't just add up pain and pleasure.
But there are several problems with these deotological approaches.
So one problem is these, these categorical rules that, that people like Kant propose.
Often seem crazy.
The one about never lying under any circumstances, seems insane.
I mean, Elizabeth Anscombe points out, why does
the principle have to be nobody should ever lie?
Why couldn't the principle be
you shouldn't lie unless by lying, you save somebody's life.
And in fact, even if you believe there was absolute principle saying never lie.
Shouldn't there be another absolute principle saying, never
act so that an innocent person gets murdered?
And how do you make sense of when they clash?
And this sort of objection, this category
of objection, speaks to a more general problem.
Which is, where do all these moral rules come from?
So someone like Kant would insist, they come from pure reason.
They come from pure rationality.
But, it turns out that when you look at them.
The critics of Kant, and the critics of deotological
philosophers say, you know, these aren't grounded in rationality.
These are actually grounded in your own prejudices and biases
and, and, and emotions.
So, for instance, Kant thought homosexuality was wrong.
Kant also thought masturbation was wrong.
And, you know, he's not a consequentialist.
He doesn't care how much pleasure is involved in these things.
What he said of both of these is, they're violations of
ones duty to ones self, not to succumb to animal desires.
And he found that convincing.
But many people don't find it convincing.
And it's not clear that there is a way to convince somebody
who doesn't think that, that these things are wrong, that they are.
And so, so the consequentialist starts with an intuitive place.
The goodness of pleasure and the badness of pain.
The deontological philosopher, struggles a little bit more
trying to find a way to ground these abstract rules.
What I've done in this lecture is
I've reviewed two dominant approaches to, moral philosophy.
This discussion is obviously incomplete in many ways.
There's a lot more to be said about consequentialism and deontology.
Fans of these philosophical views will justly complain, I haven't given
enough time to let them give their counter arguments at the criticisms I've raised.
Also, these aren't the only two approaches that exist.
There's also, for instance, virtue ethics. Grounded in the philosophy of Aristotle.
That approaches morality in quite a different way.
And I'm not discussing virtue ethics here.
Not because I think it's unimportant.
But because for whatever reason it plays less of a role in
how people think about moral psychology.
And moral psychology is, is what we are after.
So I can't pretend to have summarized all of
moral philosophy in this, this short few minute lecture.
It would take me really almost an hour.
But what I hope is that a summary
captures, the sort of flavor of these philosophical approaches.
And now that we understand it as, we're now in a position
to explore the question, one of the questions we're after.
Which is, what's the relationship between our philosophical theories of morality?
And Adam Smith's second question, which is the psychology of morality.
And this is the topic of the next lecture.
[MUSIC]
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