Philosophy 340 John Dreher August 22, 2011 Lecture 1 1.

Ethics, broadly conceived, deals with questions like: How should we treat each other? What, if anything, gives human life value? But these and similar questions are so broad and abstract that they mean very little because they do not give an indication of what would count as an answer to them. Always a moral conflict, there is choice with conflicting motivations. Hegel says that ethic started out when it became clear to people that the conventions of their society might not actually be good according to a higher standard. Aristotle says that how is that possible? Our society must be good?! Hegel says that if we go back to Sophocles, he took a different view. He focused on a state which had become corrupt (Thebes). What happens when the conventional law is in opposition to divine law (natural law, law of conscience)? Plato thought that this was the central question in moral philosophy. Sure, you can ID whats just only by looking at the conventions of ones society. Plato said, how do we know that what we are taught is really just? A society could command things that arent really good at allYoure a better person if you make the sacrificial choice in the mind of Socrates (The Republic). Socrates tries to give a definition of a good society. Is it possible for us to involve self sacrifice in whats good? Socrates tries to defend self sacrifice, saying that whether or not youre better off, it really isnt an entirely objective matter, it depends on your motivational set. Socrates says that the trick depends on where you focus your attention. If you focus it on things of this world, there isnt any way to go on a route that chooses less pleasure in the pursuit of good. However, he said that also what counts in life can also be in the extent to which you have been able to unite yourself intellectually and spiritually in an eternal point of view. Aristotle says that youre in the greatest society, heres how it is. Socrates says if you live a successful life youre above other stuff, take the eternal POV. Aristotle responded, even if you live in a terrible society, by living a virtuous life you can avoid misery. You can avoid shame and degradation. Everything aims at the good, therefore, theres a good in which everything aims. Aristotle. It is in the nature of any thing, organic or not, that it has a certain course of development. Each thing aims to become an excellent example of a thing of its own kind, and in that sense all things aim at the same thing. 2. Thus, one of the most important questions of ethics is to clearly define our expectations of it, and this has proved to be very difficult. One way of thinking about ethics, which tries to avoid question-begging assumptions, is to view ethics as a cluster of distinctions, and then to ask by which principles the distinctions are properly drawn. On this theory ethics seeks to distinguish right from wrong acts, good from bad inner states

2 (or even good from bad souls), and virtues from vices. This way of proceeding is attractive in that it gets us down to business immediately. But it is unattractive in that it already presupposes that the distinctions drawn are valid, that is, that the distinctions mark actual divisions among real things. But this presupposition obscures a central ethical question, whether or not there really is a difference between right/wrong, good/bad or virtue and vice, or whether these distinctions are merely figments of the imagination, or, more darkly, devices to help us to draw others to our way of thinking or more superficially, are merely disguised forms of self-validation. 3. Some people think that there is a close connection between ethics and political and social morality. On this theory ethics is properly viewed as the subject that deals with the behaviors and inner lives of individuals, but it also insists that we may reasonably ask whether some societies are morally better than others, or whether some political systems are morally better than others. During the ancient period, philosophers were especially keen to identify criteria for the ethical evaluation of societies and of political entities. Modern philosophers have tended to focus on the individual and therefore have seen social ethics and political morality as related but independent of the morality of individuals. 4. Incidentally, in the previous discussion there is an implied distinction between ethics and morality. Some philosophers think that these words are used so broadly that there really isnt any distinction to be drawn between them. But I want to distinguish them in this way: Ethics always purports to be systematic, that is, it purports to discover principles by which to discover truths about what is right and wrong, good and bad even if those theories lead to the conclusion that there arent real distinctions between right and wrong, good and bad. A theory that denies the reality of those distinctions is a nihilist ethical theory or at least a radically subjectivist ethical theory. Moral, as I shall use the tem, refers more broadly to any feeling or intuition or thought about what people should do or what they should strive to become. Ethics is naturally viewed as the attempt to produce a system of principles that enable us to distinguish what is moral from what is immoral and amoral. I shall generally use the terms in this way, although I admit that other ways of using the terms are just as reasonable. 4. According to Hegel (1770 1831), Western society began as an attempt to reconcile two conflicting sets of principles about how people should live. On the one hand, there are the conventions of society and the rules of the state. Often when we condemn behavior we simply mean that it contravenes the requirements of the state or more broadly of society. According to Hegel, ethics began as a discipline when people realized that they could intelligibly ask whether or not the requirements of society or the state really are good or bad. This process began, Hegel thought, when people noticed that the requirements of divine or religious law could come into conflict with the expectations of the world. 5. Hegel thought that the first to clearly draw this distinction between earthly and divine law was Sophocles (496 406 BCE) in Antigone. Antigone was conflicted between the religious requirement of a proper burial for her slain brother, Polyneices, and the demand

3 by the king, Creon, that as retribution for treason, Polyneices body should be left unattended, that he should neither be mourned nor wrapped in burial clothes, but rather should be left unattended as food for birds. Ethics, Hegel opined in the sixth chapter of his great work, Phenomenology of Spirit, is an attempt to find principles to sort of fundamental differences about what should be done when grand systems governing behavior conflict. Whether or not one thinks Hegel was right about the centrality role of religion in moral conflict, Hegel certainly appears to have been right in the broader observation that moralities often conflict and there is a need for principles systematically to sort out inevitable conflicts. Indeed, even in modern times philosophers have been deeply concerned about conflicts between the deliverances of conscience and the requirements of society or, more narrowly, of the law.