▶︎ 0:00 In this course, we've seen five different philosophers.
▶︎ 0:05 We began with Socrates' metaethical opening of ethics itself. Socrates is the founder of Western ethics, because he is the person who says we need to apply reason to human behavior. In the Euthyphro, the work that we looked at, he is speaking to a religious expert who bases his beliefs on myths, on tradition, and he unthinkingly follows them and repeats them.
▶︎ 0:37 Socrates says, "I'm going to think about these. I'm going to analyze them. I'm going to think about the stories and see problems with them. I'm going to think about the values that are being discussed, and I'm gonna try to understand. I'm gonna try to analyze. I'm not simply going to repeat. I'm not simply going to listen. I'm not simply going to obey. I'm going to think these things through for myself, and I'm gonna try to get you to do it through this conversation."
▶︎ 1:15 This is one of the most important moments in the history of Western civilization, and he is performing this on Euthyphro within the dialogue, and on all of us with the dialogue, because that is the most important conversation that's happening. Not the conversation inside the dialogue, but the conversation outside the dialogue, because this has been stimulating thinking and talking for 25 centuries. It's been getting people to think about ethics for 25 centuries by coming into conversation with Socrates through these dialogues, coming into dialogue with Socrates through his dialogues.
▶︎ 2:08 And Socrates laid out a demand. Socrates didn't give us a definition of ethics, but he did give us a metaethical claim. The metaethical claim is the nature of ethics, that to be a successful answer to his question, to be a successful ethical theory, he didn't give us one, but he told us what they had to be. To be a successful ethical theory was to be a form, in the Socratic sense, not the Platonic sense, which is to have three properties.
▶︎ 2:41 It must be universal. It must cover all people, all times, all situations. This must be abstract rather than a specific example, but it's only abstract in order to be concrete. It is universal in order to apply to particular situations. It is philosophical in order to be useful.
▶︎ 3:04 It must be action guiding. It must tell us what to do. It's not just for the purpose of thinking. It's not merely philosophical. It's not just so that we can know what is good. It's so that we can be good, as Aristotle says.
▶︎ 3:18 And it is to tell us not just which actions are good and which actions are bad, but what it means to be good, what it means to be bad. Not just giving a list of good actions and bad actions, but explaining to us why these actions are on this list and these actions are on that list. This is what it is to be a successful ethical theory.
▶︎ 3:39 And the three ethicists that we read, that we looked at, Mill, Kant, and Aristotle, all take up and agree with Socrates' demand. They all learned his metaethical lesson, and they begin where he ended. Where his dialogue ended without an answer, they will give us answers. They will stay. Where Euthyphro ran off, they will stay and respond to Socrates' question.
▶︎ 4:15 And they give us a form, each one of them. All of them agree with Socrates' metaethical demands, and they disagree with each other about the ethical answer. They each agree we need a form, but they each give a different form. Mill gives us utilitarianism, with the, in
▶︎ 4:38 His form is the greatest happiness principle. We look at the world, we start ethics by gathering empirical observations. We figure out how people should act by looking at the way people do act, and people seek happiness. This is the only intrinsic good, as much of it as possible. It's a very, very direct, immediate, self-evident claim, as he tells us.
▶︎ 5:06 Some people might ridicule it for the lack of philosophical sophistication, but for Mill, this is its strength, not its weakness. This captures the way people do think. This is the obvious way to value actions, and it's the way that we all do it, in his opinion. What's important is how things affect people. What's important is increasing happiness.
▶︎ 5:27 That's why we do everything we do. And therefore we should get as much of it as possible. And we should make as much of it as possible for as many people as possible, counting our own exactly the same as anyone else's.
▶︎ 5:44 Kant rejects this view. Kant says that the universality, the first requirement that Socrates demanded was not achieved by Mill, that because Mill looked empirically, he could only talk about human nature up until then as it was. But he couldn't say what the future would be like. This was Hume's argument that provoked Kant so much. I discuss this in my other lectures. And it couldn't tell us about other species and other alien forces and anyone else we could encounter. It had to be truly universal, which requires it to be a priori.
▶︎ 6:31 The things that occur in the world are contingent and outside of our control, and therefore they cannot be ethically relevant. You can't be held responsible for what you cannot do, for what you cannot control. The only thing you can control is you. Your thoughts, your will, your decision. And therefore, the motivation is what's crucial to Kant. For Mill, it's the consequences. For Kant, it's the motivation. It's doing the right thing simply because it's the right thing to do and for no other reason.
▶︎ 7:02 And his form is a categorical imperative. He has four versions, and we covered two of them, but it also satisfies Socrates's three demands.
▶︎ 7:15 Then we turn to Aristotle, who criticized Socrates's form, but still answered it. He argued that Mill and Kant have the wrong moral psychology. Mill and Kant think of decisions, focusing on individual actions that are reached through conscious deliberation. And individual action is way, way, way too narrow, and conscious deliberation is extremely rare. That what we should be looking for is a life, an entire life, and the way that our decisions are reached by and large is not through conscious deliberation, but by the inertia of the habits we have built up and the character that we have created.
▶︎ 8:03 And that's what we need to study for him. We need to study the good life, what is a good life to live, which we get through an inner harmony of our reason and our appetites built up through habits, and achieving the golden mean, the moderation between excess and deficiency, and that is his form. It can't fully guide actions, and it can't fully be universal for Aristotle because action is always specific, always particular. We need the virtue of thought called phronesis to apply it. So, he can give us pointers and guides, but it's very limited.
▶︎ 8:44 A limitation that Sartre thought is much, much, much more limited than Aristotle realized. Sartre criticizes all of these philosophers. Sartre says that Socrates was wrong from the beginning, that Socrates's requirement was a misunderstanding of the nature of the universe because Socrates wanted answers where there are no answers. Socrates believed in an orderly structured universe where humans have an essence, humans have a way that we are, and therefore a way that we ought to be. And what we need to find are the rules that will tell us how we ought to be.
▶︎ 9:30 And for Sartre, looking for those rules is the most unethical thing there is because that's a way to try to slough off our responsibility. That's a way to deny our freedom. There are no rules. There is no essence. We just are. We happen, we are born, we are thrown into this world, and then we have to figure out who we are. We have to make ourselves into someone. And that is your responsibility. You need to make yourself into a person. You need to make a set of rules, a set of values. You need to create, not follow.
▶︎ 10:18 This is the fulfillment, he would say, of Kant's notion of autonomy, of truly deciding for yourself. You see, Socrates began this whole journey by saying, "I'm not going to follow. I'm going to think for myself." And what every philosopher has done along the way has tried to come up with a set of rules that will alleviate our need to think for ourselves. Here is the greatest happiness principle. Here is a categorical imperative. Here's a golden mean. Now you don't have to think. You can follow. And each one of them put an ethical theory in place of the tradition that Socrates avoided.
▶︎ 11:01 They're very, very different, of course. They're based on rational thought and argumentation rather than simply stories, but each one of them, Sartre would say, short-circuits what's really important about Socrates's demand. The true quest that Socrates put us on is to think for ourselves, and that means not accepting any moral system that anyone tells us.
▶︎ 11:32 And hopefully, by listening and thinking over these different systems, they've given you a little more ability to think through these things for yourself and to decide which one you agree with the most and which one you find to be the most insightful.