▶︎ 0:00 Are you a good person? This is a question that most people ask themselves at some time in their lives, often many times in their lives: when they can't get to sleep at 3:00 in the morning, when they reach some kind of milestone in their lives. "Am I a good person? Am I doing what I should be doing? Do I deserve what I have? Do I deserve more? Do I deserve less?"
▶︎ 0:31 These are extraordinarily difficult questions. They're difficult emotionally, existentially, because we have to face up to the possibility of the answer being no, that we ought to be doing more, we ought to be someone else. We are not living up to who we should be. That's very, very difficult to face.
▶︎ 0:57 But they're also intellectually difficult, because to think, to decide whether you're being a good person, you have to know what a good person is. And how do you figure that out? That is extraordinarily difficult. That is so difficult that, as Socrates found many, many centuries ago, most people never explicitly ask that.
▶︎ 1:22 They never get beyond the first question, "Am I a good person?" to the much harder question, "What is a good person?" Most people simply go on inertia. They do what their friends do. They do what is expected of them. They do what their society presents to them as what one does.
▶︎ 1:42 But that's not good enough, because we all know from history that societies have done some terrible things that they all thought was fine and normal and good. And once you realize that, you have to wonder, what are things that we're doing, that we take for granted as normal and good, that the next generations look back at us and be horrified at? We have an obligation to think through the question of what it is to be good so that we might have a chance to be good.
▶︎ 2:21 Aristotle said, "You can't aim at being a good person unless you know where to aim, if you know where the target is." And in this course, we're gonna be looking at some of the greatest answers to that question there have ever been in Western civilization.
▶︎ 2:36 We're going to begin with Socrates, who begins the entire process by applying reason to this answer. He finds that people have been accepting traditional answers, accepting answers from stories that they're told, and accepting what their family, what their friends, what their society expects and not thinking any more than that, whereas he demands that we apply our reason to these questions, that we think through them. Only in that way do we have any hope of coming to a rational decision, a decision that's been examined, that has been considered.
▶︎ 3:22 He is going to give us a definition of what ethics is, of what an ethical theory is. He won't give us an ethical theory, but he will
▶︎ 3:34 tell us what an ethical theory must be like. And then we're going to look at three different ethical theories.
▶︎ 3:41 We're going to look at Mill, Kant, and Aristotle, and each one of these represent perhaps the three most prominent theories in the history of Western philosophy. Mill gives us utilitarianism, Kant gives us deontology, and Aristotle gives us character or virtue ethics. If you watch the course, all that will make sense by the end. These are perhaps the three most important, most prominent, most frequently taught ethical systems in the history of Western philosophy, and each one of them has a great deal to teach us.
▶︎ 4:20 Each one of them has profound insights into what it is to be human, what it is to be alive, how to think about this life that we've been thrust into, because we don't get instruction manuals to it. We don't get an owner's manual. We have to figure it out, and this is one of the very best helps we get with that.
▶︎ 4:43 And we're going to look at them in reverse chronological order, which is a little odd. We're going to look at the most recent one first, Mill, and then Kant, who came about a hundred years earlier, and then Aristotle came 25 centuries earlier. That's a little odd, but through my years of teaching this course, I have found that that works much, much better than reading them in actual chronological order, that these ideas, although each of these thinkers put the ideas in the best form, versions of these ideas were around before them.
▶︎ 5:19 And so even though Aristotle from ancient Greece didn't read Kant or Mill from the 17th, 18th, 19th centuries, he was familiar enough with some of those ideas to formulate criticisms and objections to them and to think about them and talk about them.
▶︎ 5:36 We're going to read Mill, and then we're going to read Kant as a critic of Mill. Even though Kant never read Mill, Kant was 100 years before him, he was aware of those ideas, and he's going to raise very interesting, important objections to Mill and argue for why his theory is better. And then we're going to read Aristotle and see his objections to both of their theories and why he thinks his theory is better.
▶︎ 6:03 And we're going to end with Sartre, giving us another metaethical argument, but one that rejects Socrates' metaethical argument. Socrates is the metaethical opening by saying we should apply reason to these questions. Sartre will be the metaethical closing by saying that that's a futile gesture, that that's a misunderstanding of the nature of the universe, that the demands that Socrates made and that were attempted to be met by Mill, Kant, and Aristotle are the wrong kinds of demands, and he's going to give his reasoning for it.
▶︎ 6:47 We have the metaethical bookends, in between which we have three ethical systems, and by the end of this course, you'll understand the arguments for and against ethics as a whole, and you'll understand the three major ethical systems in the history of Western philosophy. We'll begin where ethics began, with Socrates' questioning.