What is philosophy?

This course falls under the umbrella of “philosophy”. Philosophy, and philosophers, are typically interested in trying to understand the world and our place in it. Nearly every degree and discipline available to you in this university was once a branch of philosophy. In fact, for any topic that you find interesting, there is likely a “philosophy of” that topic.

That is not to say that anything goes in philosophy. While there are no “rules” to doing philosophy, there are tools that philosophers use to try and craft arguments which produce truthful and interesting conclusions. Sometimes these conclusions don’t appear to have much practical use in our daily lives. A philosopher of science, for example, may claim that some interpretation of quantum mechanics is better than another for some sophisticated reason. Such a conclusion, though interesting, is unlikely to impact your day to day life. On the other hand, whether or not you are morally required to give money to charities is an issue that directly relates to your life and budget. Ethical philosophy can have deep practical consequences.

What is ethics?

The nature of ethics is a topic that has been discussed and debated by numerous authors over numerous centuries. Despite these many discussions and debates, we can conceive of ethics as one branch of the humanities which is focused on telling you what you should to do (and what you should not do). Ethics, in other words, is normative.

In contrast to the normative is the descriptive.

This is why ethics is a branch of the humanities. In the sciences, for example, the primary purpose is to accurately and precisely describe some aspect of nature. Neither the physics, nor chemistry, nor biology, nor psychology textbooks will tell you how the world should be or what you must do to be a good person. The sciences can only offer a description of the world as we find it. This class will be focused on unpacking theories which claim to tell us how the world should be.

The ethical theories that we will look at will be a combination of moral principles and real-world applications. One popular theory that we’ll examine in chapter three, for example, claims that the only good thing in life is happiness. If true, this principle has enormous moral implications. If happiness is the only good, then an action which is morally good should produce happiness. Conversely, an action which did produce happiness would not be good. The real-world application of such a theory would thus be a matter of trying to calculate how much happiness your actions can produce. As we’ll see, this turns out to be a fairly complex thing to calculate (if even possible!). Additionally, many of the theories that we will look at will disagree with other theories. In contrast to the theory just discussed, other theories claim that something is good only to the degree that it is rooted in rationality. Being ethical, on this theory, is a matter of thinking correctly – regardless of how much happiness is produced by your actions.

In order to try and determine which of our theories is true, we will utilize certain methods for testing. The counterexample method is a common and powerful philosophical tool. Let us focus back on the theory which claims that happiness is the only good thing in life. If you disagree with this theory, then you could utilize the counterexample methodology to argue against it. To do so, you would try to find something which is good but which is disconnected from or does not produce happiness. If it is true that happiness is the only good, then it should be impossible to find such a counterexample. If such a counterexample cannot be found, then this may count as evidence for the theory.

Another common method for testing a moral theory is by examining how intuitively appealing it is. It’s not entirely clear what an intuition is, but it’s related to how something immediately seems to you (either positively or negatively). Take the following case from experimental psychologist and philosopher Jonathan Haidt in a famous paper of his from 2001:

Two things likely happened in your mind while reading this passage: 1) you were grossed out or disgusted, and 2) you judged such actions as wrong.  That immediate reaction is what we call intuition. If someone told you that morality required that all humans behave like Julie and Mark, then you would now say that such a claim is counterintuitive. When something is counterintuitive in a moral theory, many philosophers take that to be a reason to reject or modify the theory. Intuitions are quite powerful and hard to change, and they also seem to guide a lot of our judgments about right and wrong. In the Julie and Mark case above, can you offer a reason why such actions are wrong beyond it being gross to you? Some of you may be quick to note that babies born from incestuous relations are more prone to certain birth defects / genetic abnormalities than the rest of the population. Fair enough, but the case states that the relevant precautions were taken. So, if the possibility of birth defects is not what makes it wrong…then what is it? This is a tough question. Haidt’s only point is that even when people cannot give a reason for judging something as wrong, they will continue to do so because of how strongly they feel about the scenario. You just can’t help but judge Julie and Mark negatively because of how you feel about their actions. Because of how strong such intuitions are, most philosophers try to avoid stepping on our intuitive toes whenever they can. Our project is thus two-fold: we will be looking at theories which claim to tell us how we should live while utilizing counterexamples and our own intuitions to test such theories.

Finally, some authors have made a distinction between the terms ‘ethics’ and ‘morality’. It is common, for example, for a corporation to have an in-house set of “ethics rules”. Such a set of rules often is seen as applying to that company alone (i.e. the ethical policies in place at Amazon have no bearing on how Apple is run). Morality, in contrast, may seem to transcend companies, nations, and cultures. If something is immoral for you to do, then it is immoral for everyone to do. While such a distinction may make sense outside of our classroom, for the purposes of our class, we will make no such distinction. Ethics and morality, for us, can be understood as synonyms. Before moving on, let me say a bit more about intuitions.

Intuitions

In addition to the intuitive plausibility of a theory, intuitions themselves are typically discussed as a kind of epistemic issue. Epistemic issues revolve around discussing the nature of knowledge, and how we can gain it. As an example, you gain a tremendous amount of knowledge just by utilizing your senses. When you look at the clock and see the time, you now know the time. Well, just as your senses give you knowledge of the world, intuitions are usually discussed with regard as to whether or not they can give us knowledge. There are three basic ways to view intuitions in philosophy.

• Optimistic View: The first way views intuitions in certain domains as a source of important evidence regarding how best to understand reality. A proponent of this view would claim that intuitions are to philosophy what physical data is to science. The role of the scientist and scientific theory is to explain physical data, and it is the role of philosopher and philosophical theory to explain our intuitions. Our tools may be different but our projects are similar.
• Skilled View: The second way views intuitions as falling into two basic categories: skilled and unskilled. Skilled intuitions accompany the honing of certain skills. If you have ever mastered a mathematics course, for example, then when you confront a problem you may just “see” the answer even though you don’t see exactly how to solve it. Your skill in this area renders your intuitions evidential. Unskilled intuitions, by contrast, fail to count as evidence in areas where you lack the relevant skill.
• Skeptical View: The final way to view intuitions is to deny that they can serve as evidence for anything other than our own biases. If we recall the incest example from above, it will be remembered that it was hard to isolate any particular reason as to why such behavior was morally wrong. All that we had was a strong emotional response without any articulable reason. Despite this, most of us retain the sense that such behavior is wrong. If all intuitions are like that, then, the skeptic claims, intuitions are merely a reflection of either our upbringing, our genetic predispositions, or certain carry-overs from our evolutionary past. Relying on such socially / genetically conditioned intuitions is a poor basis to determine truths about the world (moral or otherwise).

The skeptical view is an application of a turn in developmental psychology that started in the 1950s – 1970s due to the work of Lawrence Kohlberg. His work focused on conducting experiments designed to study how moral reasoning developed in children. The details of his work are not relevant for our purposes, but it is largely agreed that his empirical exploration of moral reasoning marked a turn in developmental psychology towards what is today known as moral psychology. Moral psychology is interested in conducting experiments on the possible psychological mechanisms involved in moral reasoning. Our own Dr. Joe McCaffrey teaches a moral psychology class if you are interested in this topic.

The skilled view seeks to find a balance between intuitions which are good guides to truth, and those which are not. Philosophers such as Ernest Sosa has sought to defend intuitions in philosophy against the kind of skepticism just described. In order to do this, Sosa attempts to highlight a number of limitations in the skeptic’s argument. Others have argued that intuitions are a kind of way the world seems to us that, while fallible, shouldn’t be rejected without good reason. The optimistic view persists in various ways today, though most of the most prominent proponents are historical. Usually, such a proponent would claim that our intuitions serve as a kind of sixth-sense which helps to learn about truths which our senses cannot give us. We will look more deeply at this view when we get to the moral skeptics.

Regardless of which view of intuitions you hold, the intuitions that you have will be hard to avoid. What matters for our purposes is that we try and get clear on when certain intuitions are relevant. Different moral theories preference different intuitions, and in the next chapter we will utilize various cases to bring some of these intuitions to the surface. Even if you passionately disagree with a theory, knowing what the truth-makers are for that theory and what intuitions unpin it make it much easier to remember the details of the theory. This will be very important if you wish to do well on the exams.

Disagreement

One of the challenges of writing a textbook such as this is that many students enter the classroom with strong convictions about what is right and what is wrong. These convictions may be quite strongly held, and can make it hard to appreciate the views of people who disagree with you. One of the benefits of the college experience is that you get to meet and interact with a wide variety of people from a diverse range of backgrounds. Such interactions will likely lead to some amount of disagreement. When it comes to ethical disagreements, such disagreements can be quite sharp. This, for our purposes, is a good thing.

This class is, in part, an attempt to introduce you to what moral disagreement is and to explore if there is any way to resolve it. Moral disagreement is sometimes hard to explain, so let us use the following case to help unpack it:

Maya and Sofia, then, disagree about the truth of the following claim:

1. Abortion is morally allowable at any stage of pregnancy.

In other words, Maya would say that 1 is true while Sofia would claim that it is false. Moral disagreement, for our purposes, will be a fairly technical concept.

• Moral Disagreement: Two or more parties, A, B, etc., are in moral disagreement when one party (A) claims that X is true, but a different party (B) claims that X is false.

Moral disagreement, however, is about more than just the truth of moral claims. It is about the evidence that each party takes to support their view. Neither Maya nor Sofia arrived at their respective views arbitrarily. That is, both Maya and Sofia take themselves to have good reasons for holding the views that they do. Maya may have been raised by parents who both worked for abortion providers, and Sofia may hold to some religious view that takes fertilization to be a morally significant moment. So, while they both are in moral disagreement, they also can offer reasons for why they each claim to have access to the truth. Maya takes (1) to be true given facts about bodily autonomy. Sofia takes (1) to be false given facts about fetal personhood. We can call this difference between Maya and Sofia a difference regarding what they take to be the truth-maker for (1).

• Truth-maker: A truth-maker is something that is cited as a reason that a claim is true.

Maya, then, believes that facts about bodily autonomy constitute a truth-maker for (1). Sofia, in contrast, does not take there to be any truth-makers for (1). In fact, Sofia could argue that truth-makers exist only for the opposite of (1). Such ‘opposites’ in philosophy are considered to be contradictions.

• Contradiction: Two claims are contradictions if the truth of one claim requires that the other claim be false (and vice versa).

In order to generate the contradictory of a claim, we will introduce the following phrasing: it is false that. The contradiction of X is it is false that X. If X is true, then its contradiction is false. If X is false, then its contradiction is true. The contradiction of (1) is:

1. It is false that abortion is morally allowable at any stage of pregnancy.

Sofia, then, takes (2) to be true since she views (1) as false. Maya, in contrast, views (2) as false because she takes (1) to be true. More will need to be said on the topic of moral disagreement, but for now keep in mind the definition of a truth-maker. When you understand why a theory views certain moral claims as true, and others as false, then you will have a solid grasp of that theory.

Luck

The final thing to discuss is luck. Luck is something that we all are acquainted with, and yet probably do not think much about in our daily lives. If you win the lottery, or contract a rare disease, we will consider you lucky (or unlucky). Moral luck is similar, except that it focuses on a tension between responsibility and control. The philosopher Thomas Nagel views moral luck as a tension between two things which seem true:

(1) We are not responsible for things which are outside of our control.

(2) Most, if not all, things are outside of our control.

Most of you agree with (1) but would likely deny (2). In order to motivate (2) Nagel offers a couple of quick thought experiments.

While both drivers were equally reckless, Nagel’s point is that the presence or absence of the pedestrian is outside the either driver’s control. Granting that, (1) entails that the driver was not responsible for hitting the pedestrian.  As such, we should not blame the driver. We will, however, blame the driver; there is a dead pedestrian afterall. In Nagel’s view, when you blame someone for something that was outside of their control, then that person suffers moral bad luck. Hence, the driver has moral bad luck since we will blame them for something outside of their control. This is, of course, a difficult conclusion to accept because there seems to be something bad about driving recklessly and yet we do not blame the other driver in the same way. I take the problem of moral luck to be a fairly deep and serious issue, but I look forward to your solving it!

The Path Ahead

We will be examining the truth-makers of various moral theories in conjunction with their intuitive plausibility. Additionally, each theory will need to explain how to resolve moral disagreement as well as moral luck.