May 26, 2025 • 41 mins
Are actions inherently good or bad or do their consequences make them so? Does morality even exist or do things just happen? What makes something good or bad (and how can we know it if people have different religions and worldviews)? In this episode we examine different ethical systems and look at the pros and cons of each.
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(00:00) Start
(0:08) Exploring Complex Ethical Dilemmas Through Various Scenarios
(4:14) Exploring Ethical Systems and Their Limitations
(6:48) Exploring Divine Command Theory and Its Philosophical Challenges
(11:50) Kant's Universal Rational Ethics and the Categorical Imperative
(18:53) Kantian Ethics Versus Utilitarianism in Moral Dilemmas
(22:41) Exploring Utilitarianism's Pleasure-Pain Calculus and Ethical Dilemmas
(27:27) Aristotle's Virtue Ethics and Human Excellence
(30:20) Practicing Virtue Like a Skill for Personal Growth
(32:36) The Challenges and Ambiguities of Virtue Ethics
(36:02) Exploring Virtue, Selfishness, and Happiness in Ethics
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:08):
Hello, and welcome to another edition of Idea Logical.
I'm your host, Zach Lee, and today we're talking about the
sexiest of topics, ethics and morality.
Should you push an old lady downthe stairs?
Should you murder somebody? I know we're going to be dealing
with more difficult questions than that.
We're going to talk about ethics.
Ethics is a major component not only of philosophy, but also
(00:29):
politics and culture. A lot of the areas where we
disagree when it comes to the areas of thought have to do with
ethical issues. And so we're going to be talking
about ethics. Today it's cloudy, by the way,
if I look dark, it's not becauseI'm having a bad day.
It's just it's cloudy today. So this light is blinding my
eyes. Ethics.
Here's what I want to do. I want to walk you through 4
(00:51):
potential ethical scenarios and then we're going to learn how
different ethical systems would answer those different scenarios
on, on what they think that you should do.
Here's the first one. This is pretty common.
It's 1943. You live in Nazi Germany, but
you're not a Nazi cause the Nazis are the worst.
And you're hiding Jews in your basement and somebody knocks on
the door and it's an s s officerand he asked if you're hiding,
(01:13):
you know, as he would say the enemies of the state or
something like that, Like a, like a, like a good German
movie. The question is not do you hand
over the Jews? You don't hand over the Jews.
The question is, have you acted unethically by lying?
That's the question. The question is not what would
you do? I think most people probably not
hand over the Jews. The question is most of us will
(01:35):
probably just lie. That's not the question though.
The question is, have you done something immoral?
When you tell that lie, is that really a lie in that particular
circumstance? Have you done something
unethical? So that's the first scenario.
The second scenario is the one from the book and movie Lone
Survivor. So if you haven't read the book
or seen the movie, this group ofNavy Seals goes in to kill this
terrorist in this town. And this terrorist is going to
(01:58):
kill a ton of people if they lethim get away.
But as they're making their way towards this town to kill this
terrorist, which will save a bunch of lives, they stumble
across a little shepherd boy. And they have to wrestle with
the ethical dilemma of, do we kill this kid?
If we kill the kid, we succeed in the mission and we save more
overall lives. But surely we can't just murder
this innocent shepherd boy. Yeah, he could be a soldier
(02:21):
later, but right now he's just akid tending sheep.
And So what do we do? OK.
And again, the question is not are there other options?
You could leave a SEAL there to guard him and go complete your
mission. You could bring him with you.
You could, you know, do all kinds of other scenarios, but
that's not the issue. The issue is if your only
(02:42):
options are to kill him or let him go, and he's going to let
the terrorists know that you're there and it's going to ruin the
mission and more people will die.
What is the ethical thing to do and why?
The third scenario is weird. Let's say that some sadistic
killer, some weirdo, some guy that's got too many online
profiles, has 50 people locked up in his basement because he's
(03:03):
a weirdo and he captures you. And he says if you will murder
this one woman with your bare hands, I will let all 50 go.
But you have to murder this one woman.
If you don't, I will kill you. I will kill her and I will kill
all 50. What is the ethical thing to do
there? OK, again, this is not what
would you actually do? I would use all my sick James
(03:25):
Bond skills and kill the guy andsave everybody.
That's that's not an interestingquestion.
The interesting question is, should you kill the one to save
50, or should you let him kill the 50?
And you're not culpable, but youcould stop it.
So what do you do? Then there's the fourth
scenario, the dropping of the atomic bombs at the end of World
War 2 on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.The ethics of that.
(03:48):
By doing so, you end the war. You stop a mainland invasion of
Japan, which could cost many more American lives, but you
know, it comes at the cost of nuking civilians.
These are not easy questions, sothose are what we're going to
look at throughout this lecture,but first we need to talk about
some different ethical systems, and then we will talk about how
they would answer these different questions.
(04:09):
Before I get in there, there's three main ethical systems in
the history of Western philosophy.
There's a lot of ethical systems, but three biggies.
Before I get into those, though,I want to talk about two
systems, either of which could be right, but I'm not going to
spend a lot of time on these because I think that they're
both a little bit lazy. I think that they don't do the
(04:29):
hard work that they need to do. So the first is just a system of
ethics that would say there is no such thing as ethics.
We can say that we don't like certain things, but there is no
such thing as right or wrong. Things just happen.
There's different variations of this view.
There's subjectivism, which is just ethics, or one's opinion.
There's relativism, which sort of the contradictory views can
(04:50):
be true at the same time, which makes no sense.
But, but essentially it's, it isthe idea that there is not a
standard of ethics that we can come to, to know which decisions
are moral and which ones are not.
And again, that very well may betrue.
It could be the case that just people assault children and
that's just a fact. And we cannot ascribe a value to
that. We cannot say it's bad or that
(05:11):
it's wrong. It could be the case that
6,000,000 Jews were killed in the Holocaust and that's
something that happened that we don't like.
But if you ask somebody why you don't like it, typically they'll
say because it's bad or that it's wrong.
So that's a view that could be right.
In my view, though, it's it's a little bit lazy because there's
something intrinsic to us that doesn't just want to say the
(05:32):
Holocaust happened, we want to say it was wrong.
There's something where we don'twant to just say when a child is
assaulted or somebody molest them or puts out a cigarette on
them, where we don't just say some facts happened in nature.
We say that shouldn't be that way.
And when you say should and shouldn't ought, you're talking
about ethics. There's what is, that's just the
(05:53):
thing that happens. And then there's the value
that's ascribed to it. What's called ought, This is
also called Humes guillotine, bythe way, the is ought
distinction. So that's one view.
I'm not going to spend a ton of time because that lecture would
be pretty short. Yeah.
If there's no ethics, no morality, nothing has a value
judgement, good or bad things just happen.
The other view is again, very popular and might be right.
(06:13):
Not saying either of these are necessarily wrong, I just think
that they're they don't they don't answer the questions I
think we need them to answer. The second one is called divine
command theory. This is the idea that what makes
something right or wrong is thatGod or the gods, depending on
your religion, say that it's right or wrong.
So what would make murder in this case wrong is if God has
said not to murder. Now, I'm going to use the Bible
(06:36):
as some examples here, just because that's probably the
context that many Westerners in America are in.
But this would apply equally to the Talmud.
This would apply to the Tanakh. This would apply to the Vedas.
This would apply to the Quran. The idea though, is that what
makes something right or wrong is that God has said it's right
or wrong. Now again, to be clear, that
doesn't necessarily mean that view is wrong.
If God exists and he has revealed himself, then that
(06:59):
would not be a bad answer. That would actually be a pretty
smart answer. The reason I say that it's lazy
is you're going to have to deal with some other issues even if
divine command theory were right.
Let me give you a few a few examples.
The 1st is called the Euthyphro dilemma.
Does God say that something's good and that makes it good, or
(07:21):
does he see that it's already good and therefore declares it
to be good? So if you say Zach, murder is
bad because God said murder is bad, the question that people
will then ask is, OK, why did hesay murder was bad?
Did he just decide that it wouldbe bad?
Is it just, it makes him sound almost a bit arbitrary?
Could we really say that if God wanted us to rape each other, he
(07:41):
could command us to rape each other, and that act in and of
itself would now become good just because God said that.
Conversely, though, you don't want to say that God sees that
something's already good and just says it's good.
Like he, he looks and says, well, murder's bad.
So I'm going to say that's bad or rape is bad.
So I'm going to say that's bad because then it almost seems to
put some sort of moral standard above God.
So divine command theory could be true, but it's, it just
(08:02):
pushes the question back furtherof does God think something's
good because he simply declares it to be good?
It's part of his will. He decides it.
Or does his intellect see that it's already good and that's why
he calls it good? But to say it another way, are
all of God's commands just arbitrary?
Everything he said is good, is good just because he said it and
just because it's bad, just because he said it was bad.
(08:23):
Now again, arbitrary. We're talking about arbitrary
from our perspective. Technically, if God exists, then
he might have a reason for something that he hasn't told
us, and it wouldn't technically be arbitrary.
But anyway, that is an issue that you have to deal with.
Religious people have come down on both sides of that.
But that's a a problem with divine command theory.
What about when two things are commanded?
This is why you still have to have philosophy.
(08:44):
OK, the Bible is going to command you not to lie, but
there are times in the Bible where people lie and it seems
like it's OK. There's the Hebrew midwives with
Pharaoh who's killing all the babies, and they lie to Pharaoh
so they can save the Hebrew babies.
There's a chick named Rahab in the Old Testament and she lies
to protect the Hebrew spies, andshe's commended for it.
What do you do if you're supposed to obey your father and
(09:05):
mother and they ask you to do opposite things and neither of
which is technically sin? They're just two commands and
you're going to disobey one by obeying the other.
So what do you do when God has given several commands that it
in at least in certain circumstances, seem to butt up
against each other? So it's you're still going to
have to do philosophy regardlessof your view on divine command
theory. We also have the problem of how
(09:26):
do we interpret God's commands. So let's pretend that God
exists. He may or may not, but for the
scenario, let's say exists and also let's pretend that he's
revealed himself in some sacred book of religion.
How are we to interpret that book?
Like if you have a divine book, but different people interpreted
a bunch of different ways, how can we get to what God has said?
It almost seems like, again, you're going to have to do
philosophy. It's called hermeneutics.
(09:48):
It's the science of interpretation.
Hermanua or hermanuan is to to lead out in Greek.
That's where that term comes from.
And so you're still going to have to do a science of
interpretation. You're still going to have to
bring your philosophy to whatever sacred text you're
studying to figure out what it is about.
Another issue with divine command theory is you start with
that religious presupposition. You don't get there from some
(10:11):
revealed text. Let me say it another way.
If you decide to start reading the Bible, you didn't read that
in the Bible and then come to that conclusion, you started
there. Let's imagine you're just some
guy on an island and you're trying to figure out what
religion's right, and you're like, I think Christianity or
something's right, so I'm going to just start reading the Bible.
You then didn't learn that the Bible is God's word from the
Bible itself. You started with that
(10:33):
presupposition and you would start with the same
presupposition if you were born in a Muslim country with the
Quran. You why are you going to the
Quran instead of the Vedas? Why are you going to the Bible
instead of something else? You're not going to the book
saying what has God said so I can learn about it.
You're assuming that he's already said something in that
particular book, which is why you started there.
So it becomes a bit of a circular argument.
(10:53):
It becomes a bit of a presupposition in where you
start with divine command theory.
And then lastly, you're still going to need an ethical system
in which to put it. All I'm trying to say is, again,
there might be no such thing as ethics.
Divine command theory might be real.
If God is real and he's given his word to us, then that is
true. You're still going to have to do
the hard work of philosophy. Why, Zach?
(11:14):
Well, I'll give you an example. If God has said not to murder,
what counts exactly as murder? What about certain types of in
vitro fertilization, where let'ssay you fertilize 10 eggs, but
you only implant 2? Is that murder?
Notice that you're going to haveto do some philosophy to figure
that out, or the Bible will forbid lying or giving a false
testimony. What if you're a spy in war?
(11:34):
What if you're an undercover cop?
Is it wrong to tell your kids Santa exists?
If, spoiler alert, he doesn't. Sorry for any ardent Santa
worshippers. I anyway.
So what do you do? You're still going to have to do
philosophy. That's my point.
My point is not that these things are necessarily wrong,
they just it's harder than that.It's more difficult than that.
So with that in mind, what are these major ethical systems that
(11:56):
we want to look at today? Well, let me let me explain why
I say there's three there. There's more, but the three big
ones, what philosophers are trying to do is they're trying
to come up with a theory of ethics that is logically
consistent, that everyone can reason to, that doesn't, that
doesn't depend on religion or divine revelation.
(12:16):
Let me say that again, what philosophers are trying to do is
they're trying to come up with aa system of ethics that everyone
can assent to. That's logical, that's
consistent, that has certain reasons why we can say something
is good or bad that are objective, that are not
subjective without appealing to revealed religion.
Again, these could all be wrong,but that's what they're trying
(12:36):
to do. That's why I say these are the
big systems, because what they're saying is these, if
you're an ardent Muslim, you believe that what Allah has said
in the Quran is good, but if you're not a Muslim, that's not
going to be a very persuasive argument to you.
So is there a way to ground ethics in some type of reason,
some type of logical system thateveryone could agree with or
with which they could agree? Don't end a sentence on a
(12:58):
preposition, which I actually doall the time.
Language changes, it evolves. It's fine.
We can end sentences and prepositions.
That's, that's, that's what's up.
That's where it's at. Is there a, a system that
everyone could agree with regardless of their religious
views, so that it's not esoteric, it's not for some
small group, it's, it's for everyone.
That's what they're trying to do.
Most of these systems are going to come down to this question.
(13:20):
Should we take into account the consequences of the action or
just the action itself? Should we take into account the
consequences of what we're aboutto do?
Or is an action right or wrong in and of itself damn the
consequences? That's really the question.
So we're going to go through a few systems.
The first day, ontological ethics day on is the the word
(13:40):
for duty, and this is most oftenassociated with Immanuel Kant.
There are other people that heldthat actions were right or wrong
in and of themselves, duty based, but Kant's going to try
to give it a logical foundation that doesn't appeal to other
things. But this is an idea that an act
is right or wrong depending uponlogical, obligate, obligatory.
That's the word universal rules to which all people are bound by
(14:04):
duty. Let me say that again.
An act is right or wrong depending upon logical,
obligatory universal rules to which all people are bound by
duty. Kant's system believes that an
act is right or wrong inherently, regardless of the
consequences for everyone. The correct reason to do it must
be out of duty, must be because it is the right thing for you to
(14:25):
morally do, and you must treat people as ends, not just means.
OK. He is famous for what is called
the categorical imperative. He actually gives several
different definitions of it. I'll give you one, but there's
several acts so that the maxim may be capable of becoming a
universal law for all rational beings.
OK, so let's just back up for a second.
(14:45):
Here's what Kant's trying to do.Kant never could.
Here's what Kant's trying to do.Kant is trying to create a
logical system where we can havethis maxim.
OK, we can have this categoricalimperative, this overarching
rule, and we will test every ethical action by that rule and
we will know logically whether or not it is ethical or not
ethical. This is this is big ticket
(15:07):
philosophy. He if you can come up with a
system to show logically that some actions are inherently
moral and some are inherently immoral, regardless of
consequence based upon some unbreaking rule, you will have
solved a lot of ethical issues. OK, so acts so that the maximum
may be capable of becoming universal law for all rational
beings. What is what is that?
(15:28):
What is he saying? He's saying when you're asking
if some action is right or wrong, you have to ask yourself,
what if everybody did this? What if this was a universal law
for all rational beings? And then you have to decide
whether or not you're being logical or you're contradicting
yourself. OK, bear with me.
(15:49):
He's not saying this. He's not saying if you're
wondering if something is right or wrong, ask yourself, do you,
would you like to live in a world where everybody did that?
Because you might. You might ask yourself, should
prostitution be legal? And you'd say, yeah, I'd be fine
living in a world where for all rational beings it's a universal
law that prostitution is fine. Or you might be saying, yeah,
I'm fine with lying. I'd be fine living in a world
(16:09):
where everyone can lie. That can be a universal law for
all rational beings. That is not what Kant is saying.
He's not asking if you would like it.
He's saying, does the idea inherently, logically contradict
itself? It's not subjective for Kant,
it's objective. Here's what I mean.
If I were to say, let's, let's use the example of lying.
(16:30):
OK, I'll use two examples. If I were to say to myself,
would I like lying to be a universal maxim for all rational
beings? Well, it would completely
destroy the whole idea of truth telling.
The whole idea of truth telling,the only way we can communicate
information. We have this assumption that
somebody is telling us the truth.
And if lying is OK and people can do it whenever they want, or
(16:54):
let's say I make the rule that's, you know, I can lie as
long as it benefits me. And all of a sudden we were to
make this some sort of universalrule that anyone can lie as long
as it benefits them, Well, the idea of truth telling goes out
the window. The idea.
It's not just that we wouldn't like to live in that society.
The whole idea of us communicating information based
on truth would be contradicted by the idea that people can lie
(17:16):
whenever at best benefits them. And so he would say that there's
a logical problem with that and therefore lying is unethical or
suicide. Let's say we want to take the
idea of suicide. Should suicide be ethical or
not? Well, if I asked myself, and I
want suicide to be a maximum that's capable of becoming
universal law for all rational beings, basically what I'm
saying is, OK, if I say anytime your life is miserable, you can
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end it, is that a universal law for all rational beings or is
there a contradiction there? Well, there's a contradiction
there. How can you make your life
better by not having a life at all?
How can you make your life better by ending it?
You see it doesn't make sense. So what what Khan's trying to
say is not just would you like to live in this world, He's
saying, take the thing you're wrestling with, put it into a,
a, a proposition, and then ask yourself, would there be some
(18:03):
sort of contradiction that wouldhappen if that were to apply
universally? Because what most people do with
ethics is they just try to argueabout their particular thing
instead of you. You have to answer the umbrella
first. You have to ask what is the
general rule. Before you ask should I lie?
In this circumstance, you have to ask what should be the rule
I'm lying. Generally, before you ask if
this particular sexual act is wrong, you have to ask what
(18:24):
should be a sexual ethic. Before you ask how how should I
treat other people? You have to ask or this
particular person, my neighbor that I like or don't like or
whatever. You have to ask, how should we
generally treat each other? To summarize all of this, Kant
thinks that what makes an actionright or wrong is whether it
follows a universal rational standard that is applicable to
all people, that doesn't contradict itself, that doesn't
(18:46):
care about the consequences, where one acts out of the proper
motivation of rational duty and treats others as ends.
OK, so how would Kant answer those 4 scenarios?
Well, for Kant you don't it it would be unethical to lie to the
Nazis doesn't mean we wouldn't. He was just be saying you've
done something wrong in so doing.
Well Zach, what if I lie to the Nazis and I saved the Jews?
(19:10):
What if I say no, I there's no Jews here.
I saw them headed towards Paris,you know, 20 minutes ago.
Head that direction. You might say the Jews there,
but Kant will also point out younever know the consequences of
your unethical action. What if Nazis then drive to
Paris and find a lot more Jews accidentally and kill a lot more
anyway? He would say, we're not saying
you couldn't do something else. Maybe you could fight the Nazis,
(19:30):
maybe you could do whatever. But Kant would say by lying you
have done something immoral whenit comes to the Navy SEAL thing.
He would say you do not get to kill the boy because that would
be inherently be wrong to say. Would we like to make it a rule
to say that we can kill an innocent person who has not done
anything in trying to attack us or illegal within, you know,
(19:51):
this circumstance or whatever? No, that would break the entire
idea of the difference between righteous and unrighteous
killing. There would be a logical
contradiction there. So he would say you may not kill
the shepherd boy in the lone survivor scenario.
He would also say you may not murder one person to save the
lives of 50. He'd also probably point out
that the sadistic killer was killing the 50, not you, and
you're not called to stop. Them from killing the 50th, the
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only way to do so is for you to do something that is unethical.
And then there are Kantians. There are people that hold to D
ontological ethics that disagreeactually on the the nuclear bomb
issue. And so I don't know exactly how
Kant would answer there, but he would probably be against it
because it allows the killing ofinnocent civilians for this
practical purpose and he doesn'tcare about the consequence.
(20:34):
He would want us to ask, would we want to create a categorical
imperative that allowed people to kill innocent civilians as
long as they could hit their badtarget?
So that's probably what they should do.
Now, there are problems with thedeontological system, of course.
What happens if you're stuck between two categorical
imperatives that contradict eachother?
Maybe a categorical imperative is don't hand over Jews to the
Nazis to be killed and also don't lie.
(20:56):
What do you do then? Or how narrowly should you
define the categorical imperatives?
What if I say anyone named Zach,who's the author of this
podcast, can lie, but nobody else, or, you know, one may lie
if the lie will protect the lives of innocent people from an
authority who has no right to murder innocent civilians.
What if I pitched the law that way?
(21:17):
Then could I lie to the Nazis inthe saving the Jews example?
And surely consequences should play some role in ethics, right?
Maybe not the primary role. Is Kant right to say that there
should we don't care about the consequences at all?
Or is that too strong? Well, that's our boy Emanuel.
Let's talk about another system.This is the opposite,
(21:38):
utilitarianism. The big players here are Jeremy
Bentham and John Stuart Mill. We've got a whole lecture on
John Stuart Mill's on liberty. That's a different topic than
this. That's his view of what freedom
you should have politically in asociety.
The utilitarianism, again, is trying to create a system that
doesn't depend on revealed religion to give us a an
objective ethical standard, whereas Kant's was the
categorical imperative. What Bentham and Mill are trying
(22:01):
to do is they're trying to come up with a view that is based on
utility. What do I mean by that?
Here's what I mean. I mean an action is ethical if
it leads to the greatest good for the greatest number of
people. But by good they just mean
happiness. OK, so, so let me say it this
way. Let's let's pretend that God
gave us a computer that knows everything.
(22:23):
It's an all knowing computer. If that computer could know for
any action the amount of pleasure it would cause and all
the people affected and the amount of pain it would cause
and all the people affected. And there's different qualities
of pain and pleasure and there'sdifferent quantities of pain and
pleasure. And it could do that calculus
and it could do all that math. It would be able to spit out
what you should do on any given ethical scenario.
(22:46):
OK. So their standard is, does it
produce more overall pleasure than pain?
Does it produce more overall happiness versus unhappiness?
Notice that they're trying to make it objective.
They're saying what makes something good.
All they mean by good is pleasure and happiness, and all
they mean by bad is is pain and unhappiness.
So it's a pleasure versus pain calculation, if you want to say
(23:08):
it that way. Now we don't have that computer.
There's no way to really calculate it, but that's the
idea. They're trying to ground it in
something that is not ethereal. When we say something's good or
bad, we're making a value judgement.
How can we make that objective for everybody, regardless of
their worldview and theirs is pain over pleasure?
If I do some act, does it produce more pleasure for more
(23:30):
people to a higher degree or does it produce more pain to
more people to a higher degree? And that is how I know whether
or not it is ethical. Give you an example.
Let's say I want to make, I'm, I'm asking the questions of
whether or not people should do drugs.
What I have to ask is for the drug users, would that produce
(23:51):
more overall pleasure for society?
Then it would, then it would produce pain for society and
that would help me determine whether or not doing drugs was
ethical or not ethical. OK.
One of the things that John Stuart Mill will emphasize more
so than others is you can't justcount for the quantity of
pleasure. You have to count for the
(24:12):
quality of pleasure. Finishing APHD dissertation is a
different type of pleasure than watching professional wrestling.
Drinking a $10,000 bottle of Bordeaux wine is a different
pleasure than drinking some sortof cheap beer.
So it's not just, it's not just everybody gets one pleasure
point or one pain point for whatever action it is.
We also have to take into account the quality of the
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pleasure or the pain. Now let's talk about how they
would answer the four scenarios.Do you lie?
Have you done something unethical, lying to the Nazis to
protect the Jews? No.
Why? Because they would make the case
that it produces more overall pleasure to keep Jews from not
getting murdered than it does for the pleasure of the Nazis of
killing them. But you're going to see there's
(24:53):
a problem there. OK, what happens if most of
people in the world become more Nazi leaning and more pleasure
would actually be derived from killing Jews than not?
You see the problem that utilitarianism runs into?
They would definitely say kill the shepherd boy because he
would save more overall lives. They would definitely in the
third scenario say you should strangle the woman because
you're saving 50 people and 50 is a higher number than one.
(25:17):
OK. And then most likely, again,
utilitarians disagree on this, but most likely they would also
say that you should drop the bombs because more people
probably would have been killed by a mainland invasion of Japan
than if you drop the nuclear bomb.
So notice that their answers arealmost the exact opposite of the
kantium, the day ontological ethics.
It's a very different system. Remember, Kant is forget the
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consequences, just the action. Theirs is kind of forget the
action, just the consequences. More pleasure, more pain, more
happiness, less or or I'm sorry,more pleasure, less pain, more
happiness, less unhappiness. You see the problem with the
system? One, we can't calculate it.
There's no way to calculate the long term effects.
If we, if we're saying, should we legalize prostitution, would
that produce more pain than pleasure?
(26:00):
It's very hard to calculate the decay of society and the pain
caused by prostitution, especially to the prostitutes.
How do you qualify that with thepleasure caused to the clients?
It's a good question. The other one that was this,
let's say that there's a societythat takes a great amount of
pleasure in torturing children, and it's only one kid that's
(26:21):
being tortured and that's a lot of pain for him, but that's only
one person, but it gives a lot of pleasure to, let's say, 100
million people. You would then have to say that
it's OK to torture the child, possibly.
Now utilitarians have responses to all this, just like Kantians
have responses to the stuff earlier.
I'm just trying to let you see some of the benefits and then
some of the problems. That's utilitarianism.
(26:41):
It's a little bit easier to understand.
It is good is what is the greatest good or greatest
pleasure or greatest happiness for the greatest number of
people, and bad is what causes more pain than pleasure.
Next one, and this is this one goes back to our boy Aristotle,
is virtue ethics. Whereas the last two systems we
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talked about are trying to assess individual actions,
virtue ethics isn't so much about individual actions.
It's about becoming a certain type of person.
It's about human excellence, magnanimity.
Sometimes it's called Arataic ethics after the Greek word
aratae, which means excellence. But it really refers to like
human excellence, like the the virtue of being a moral person,
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being what a human is meant to be.
Aratae is like like like an eagle is most an eagle when it's
soaring. And being what an eagle is
supposed to be, that makes it a good eagle or a tree that's
healthy, that's growing, that has fruit and leaves, that's
being a good tree. The idea here is what does it
look like to be a good person? But by good there I mean
flourishing. I mean virtuous.
I mean being what a human is meant to be.
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That's kind of the idea for for Aristotle.
But the summary of their position is different.
The other ones focus on individual acts and then they
appeal to an objective standard,the categorical imperative or
pleasure versus pain, happiness versus unhappiness, good versus
bad principle, utilitarianism, whatever.
In virtue ethics, it's different.
In virtue ethics, they're not asking those individual
(28:06):
questions as precisely of shouldI say a curse word here or what
is, is homosexuality good or bador something like that.
They're trying to focus on beingthe type of person that is well
balanced and that is seeking human virtue so that when the
issue arises, you naturally kindof know what to do.
It's very interesting. So I'll give you a little
(28:27):
summary. The virtue ethicist chooses to
act virtuously over time, which causes them to become a virtuous
person who naturally does what is right, who acts from the
right motivations, and who maximizes their virtuous human
potential. We say that again, the virtue
ethicist chooses to act virtuously over time, which
causes them to become a virtuousperson who naturally does what
is right, who acts from the right motivations, and who
(28:50):
maximizes their virtuous human potential.
You can read Udemian Ethics, butthe main one on this is
Nicomachean Ethics. That's kind of Aristotle's big
ethical work that people appeal to.
We have from Aristotle just a bunch of kind of notes that were
put together and it's all kind of thrown together.
It's not like most other authorsin history where they're able to
(29:11):
write these long treatises that are just one thing and 1 theme.
We kind of have just collectionsof different works that are
almost feel like his notes that were thrown together at some
point. So it's it's it's he's a
difficult author to read partially because of that.
So anyway, that that's the view.The view is as I practice human
excellence and practice virtue, I become more virtuous over
time. How do I practice the virtue?
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I have to do it when I'm bad at it.
I have to practice the virtue when I'm not good at it and I
become good at it. Let me give you an example.
We think of courage. I'll use he uses courage as an
example a lot. Courage is a great example.
Curtue, curtue. That's a combination of courage
and virtue. Courage is a virtue for
Aristotle and for most people. Most people see courage as a
(29:53):
good thing. We see it as a virtue.
We think of courage as like taking a shot of liquid courage
before hitting on a girl at a bar, or we think of it as like
just jumping on a grenade when the moment comes, or rushing off
all Willy nilly into battle and getting blown up or something
like that. Aristotle doesn't think that.
Aristotle thinks that if you want to be courageous, you have
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to practice being courageous in a bunch of small things and then
you will actually be it. You don't just hope to be
courageous and one day wake up courageous.
You have to practice overcoming fears over and over and over
again in 1000, small things. And then when you're in battle
and the grenade hits the ground,then you'll jump on it.
It's the kind of person you've become.
(30:35):
Now this is really interesting, so let me give you an example.
Let's say you want to learn how to hit a Major League curveball.
You want to be a good baseball player.
You can't just hope you're goingto do that.
You can't just psych yourself upand step up there and never play
baseball and hit a Major League curveball.
It's not going to happen. You're going to strike out
tremendously. You also can't just pray before
you go to bed. Dear God, give me baseball
skills and I'll wake up and I'lljust have baseball skills.
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Same thing is true with playing the piano.
If you want to be excellent at playing the piano, you can't
just psych yourself up and just sit down and do it.
You also can't just pray God make me good at, you know,
practicing the piano and then you wake up and all the sudden
you're, you're just have piano skills like it's just been
matrix, you know, imported into your mind.
You know what you're going to have to do.
You're going to have to practicehitting curveballs when you're
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bad at it and then you get good at it.
You have to do it and practice it over and over and over while
you're bad at it, while you're not very good at hitting
curveballs. And then you become the person
who can hit them. You have to practice the piano
while you're bad at it. And you suck and everybody's
like, shut up. This is so annoying.
You have to practice that. And then you actually are able
to play the piano. So to say it another way, why
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isn't virtue like that? That's kind of what Aristotle's
asking if you can play a if you can practice being bad at piano
till you're good at it, and you can practice hitting a curveball
while you're bad at it till you're good at it.
Can you not practice being courageous while you're bad at
it until you're good at it? Can you not practice having
fortitous while you're bad at it, till you're good at it?
Can you not practice resisting lust when you're bad at it until
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you're good at it? What if you could practice
virtue like a sport? Why do we think that one day
we'll wake up and be courageous,or we'll one day wake up and not
be anxious, or we'll wake up oneday and not be proud, or we'll
wake up one day and not be lustful?
You have to practice those things.
You create almost a like a like a like an ethical muscle memory.
Every time you do an action. If you continually act in a way
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that's not virtuous, it becomes easier to be not a virtuous
person. If you continuously act in a way
that's virtuous, you become moreof a virtuous person.
And so Aristotle is going to talk about practicing what you
want to become. There's a lot of wisdom there.
I, I, I might do a whole lesson just on that 'cause I think
that's fascinating. Another thing Aristotle
emphasized in his system of becoming this excellent person
is that not on all issues, but in a lot of issues you were
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trying to hit what he calls the golden mean or what is called
the golden mean. It's, it's, it's a phrase that's
usually used to to clarify he, he's not speaking English, by
the way, so it's dumb for me to say it that way.
It's a phrase that scholars usedto talk about this idea and
Aristotle of a lot of times, a virtue stands between two vices.
I'll give you an example. On the one hand, courage is not
cowardice, That's obvious. But on the other hand, it's not
(33:08):
brashness. If you just run out in the
middle of battle to get killed, that's suicide.
That's not courage, right? You have to have the right
amount of knowing what to do to be courageous.
You can't just run out there andcommit suicide, but nor can you
be cowardly. You have to have the right
medium. You have to know where that
middle point is to say, OK, truecourage here is me doing this
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thing I'm scared of even though it's dangerous, but I'm not just
committing suicide. I'm not being stupid.
I've thought through it. So, so there, there's, there are
times to retreat out of cowardice and there are times to
retreat out of being smart, right?
Wittiness is another one that's in between two extremes.
On the one hand, you can be the absolute clown, the absolute
fool that nobody takes seriously, that can only make
the joke that everybody thinks is ridiculous.
(33:49):
That's not good. But you also don't want to be
the boorish person. That's boring if you're somebody
that can't take a joke. I mean, I've met so many people
that have the vice, as Aristotlewould say, of boorishness.
If you're not witty, Aristotle thinks you're not ethical when
it comes to that category, OK, Wittiness, making the joke when
you should, being serious when you should, being witty and
using the pun and doing that kind of thing when you should.
(34:10):
That is the virtue. So a lot of times these are in
between two extremes. Now, it's not the case in every
category. It's not like how many times
should I cheat on my wife? And then there's like a spectrum
and you go he, he's not saying cheat on her sometime or
something like that. That's not the point.
But on most of these issues he'strying to point to, usually
there's a balance of what you'retrying to do with the right time
and the right kind of person you've become, etcetera.
(34:32):
Now, how would they answer the four scenarios?
This is where it gets tricky. Let me give you the biggest
problem with virtue ethics. It's not precise enough to
answer some of our very specificquestions.
If you're asking the question ishomosexuality ethical or
unethical, well, I mean in a Greco Roman world, Aristotle
(34:52):
would probably be fine with certain forms of homosexuality,
but others that are virtue ethicists, like medievals that
follow him think no that's not right.
So how do you answer the individual question?
So OK, I need to be a virtuous person, practice these virtues,
and then I'll know what to do when the time comes.
Will virtue ethicists disagree? Also, how can I practice these
things to become a virtuous person until I know what those
(35:12):
virtues are? We know some.
We know wittiness is better thanbeing a clown, and we know that
courage is better than foolishness.
But what about things like, you know, these these very techno
who who you should vote for? What about things like
discipline of children? What about things like certain
sexual ethics? What about things like certain
(35:34):
things in bioethics? The virtue ethicist doesn't give
us enough clarity as new issues arise of what we should do.
So it's it's a big problem for virtue ethics.
Now, there are other ethical systems you can have
sentimentality that what you do what what we really mean by
ethics is when you see somebody who's hurting you, imagine what
(35:54):
that would be like for you and you have compassion for that
person. That's kind of Jean Jacques
Rousseau. There are other ethical systems
at which we have a whole lesson on.
By the way, there are other ethical systems that should say
just do what's best for you, just like this severe type of
egoism where it's just straight up do whatever's best for you.
Forget everybody else. So there's other ethical
systems, but those are the big ones.
(36:16):
OK. I hope that's a helpful summary
for you. When I ask two more questions
and then we'll be done. One, are moral acts selfish?
What some philosophers have pointed out is that all moral
acts are actually selfish to some degree, because when
somebody does them, they're doing so so that they get
something good out of it. When I help a little old lady
(36:38):
across the street, yeah, she might give me some money, but
even if she doesn't, I feel goodabout myself.
That's a benefit to me. I can maybe post it on social
media. And others think well of me.
I think that's kind of douchey, but others think well of me.
That's a benefit to me. In fact, every ethical thing
that I think that I do, I'm doing because it benefits me.
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I like the kind of person I become.
I feel good about myself. I feel good about doing this
act. They're supposedly, and I don't
know if this is a true story or not, supposedly somebody can
look it up. There's a story of Abraham
Lincoln stopping his carriage tohelp a mother pig whose little
piglets are kind of stuck in themud.
And somebody thinks that he's doing so because he's just being
nice to the pigs. And he's like, no, I wouldn't
(37:19):
have been able to live with myself all day.
My conscience would have bugged me all day.
And the whole point of that story is to say he kind of did
it for him. Why do you want to follow God?
So that you can be saved, be resurrected, go to heaven,
whatever it is that's a big benefit to you.
Even the even the martyr does sobecause they benefit more by
(37:41):
being martyred. So are all these acts selfish?
Well, depends on what you mean. If you mean do you benefit from
ethical acts, sure. But I would ask this is that
wrong? Is that that shouldn't you
benefit by living virtuously? Wouldn't that be what we expect?
Would we expect that when you dosomething good that does make
something better for you? Like wouldn't there be an
incentive which is good? So there's a philosopher and
(38:04):
theologian named Joseph Butler, and one of the things that he
will point out, which I think ishelpful, is this.
There is a difference between doing an act just so you get
something out of it. So like if I was just nice to my
grandmother so I could get in her will and take all her money,
that's different than if I'm actually helping somebody and
it's the right thing to do and Ialso happen to benefit.
(38:24):
So those are different. Last question to ask an ethic.
I mean, last question to ask. We've solved all of ethics.
Last question that we're going to talk about today is can you
be happy without virtue? Let me tell you why this is
profound, So pause for a second if you didn't understand what I
just said. Everyone thinks that they'll be
(38:45):
happy if I just have a bunch of money and a bunch of women and a
bunch of power and everybody knows my name and I'm a rock
star and whatever. And yet a lot of those people
have terrible lives and hate themselves and commit suicide or
do whatever. Hedge fund managers that are
billionaires kill themselves to tremendously high degrees.
What if one of the things you need to be happy is virtue?
(39:07):
I'll tell you what made me thinkabout this.
I, I have a buddy and he used tobe involved in a gang.
He actually used to be involved in a cartel and he's moved away
from that. It was in another country and
he's been clean and illegal citizen and all this kind of
stuff for, you know, a bunch of years, decades.
(39:27):
And one of the things he said that was interesting to me is he
said mob bosses, cartel Lords, these kind of crime syndicate
bosses. He said they have all the money.
It's so much money. They have all the power.
They can have somebody killed bya wink of their eye.
They have all the beautiful women.
(39:47):
They have all that they they have the mansions, they have the
guns, they have all the things. And they are absolutely
miserable because they're not virtuous.
They hate themselves at the end of the day.
And you cannot put a price on living with yourself.
I would say that somebody that'slike a pedophile is probably
really miserable because they really probably hate themselves.
(40:08):
They're doing what they think brings them pleasure, but
actually they have a lot of painbecause they know what they're
doing is evil and so they can't be happy.
So maybe something to ask yourself as you're pursuing
trying to be happy, because everybody's trying to be happy.
Is, is virtue necessary to be happy?
I think that's a great question.Anyway, ethics boring.
(40:29):
Who cares? Just kidding.
It's an interesting topic. Ethics hits US differently than
other philosophical topics because it's it's practical and
it's emotional and it affects usin a different way.
So if we're debating A metaphysical topic of like
realism versus idealism or something like this, how many
substances are there? That's interesting, but people
don't usually punch each other over that.
(40:50):
I'm sure people have, but when we're talking about torturing
and war, we're talking about abortion, we're talking about
sexual ethics, we're talking about these kind of things,
People get really fired up because ethics hits us in a way
that's different than other philosophical topics because it
deals with some of these. This is why I think that when
(41:11):
you just say there's no such thing as ethics, that that could
be true. It just does not at all hit with
the human experience. There's something in us that
thinks these issues are more important than other things.
So there's ethics. I hope it's helpful for you.
This is a super truncated. We could talk about ethics.
You could have a whole podcast that just talks about different
ethical issues. I hope that this is giving you
(41:31):
some clarity. Appreciate you tuning into
ideological and we'll see you next time.
Hello, and welcome to another edition of Idea Logical.
I'm your host, Zach Lee, and today we're talking about the
sexiest of topics, ethics and morality.
Should you push an old lady downthe stairs?
Should you murder somebody? I know we're going to be dealing
with more difficult questions than that.
We're going to talk about ethics.
Ethics is a major component not only of philosophy, but also
(00:29):
politics and culture. A lot of the areas where we
disagree when it comes to the areas of thought have to do with
ethical issues. And so we're going to be talking
about ethics. Today it's cloudy, by the way,
if I look dark, it's not becauseI'm having a bad day.
It's just it's cloudy today. So this light is blinding my
eyes. Ethics.
Here's what I want to do. I want to walk you through 4
(00:51):
potential ethical scenarios and then we're going to learn how
different ethical systems would answer those different scenarios
on, on what they think that you should do.
Here's the first one. This is pretty common.
It's 1943. You live in Nazi Germany, but
you're not a Nazi cause the Nazis are the worst.
And you're hiding Jews in your basement and somebody knocks on
the door and it's an s s officerand he asked if you're hiding,
(01:13):
you know, as he would say the enemies of the state or
something like that, Like a, like a, like a good German
movie. The question is not do you hand
over the Jews? You don't hand over the Jews.
The question is, have you acted unethically by lying?
That's the question. The question is not what would
you do? I think most people probably not
hand over the Jews. The question is most of us will
(01:35):
probably just lie. That's not the question though.
The question is, have you done something immoral?
When you tell that lie, is that really a lie in that particular
circumstance? Have you done something
unethical? So that's the first scenario.
The second scenario is the one from the book and movie Lone
Survivor. So if you haven't read the book
or seen the movie, this group ofNavy Seals goes in to kill this
terrorist in this town. And this terrorist is going to
(01:58):
kill a ton of people if they lethim get away.
But as they're making their way towards this town to kill this
terrorist, which will save a bunch of lives, they stumble
across a little shepherd boy. And they have to wrestle with
the ethical dilemma of, do we kill this kid?
If we kill the kid, we succeed in the mission and we save more
overall lives. But surely we can't just murder
this innocent shepherd boy. Yeah, he could be a soldier
(02:21):
later, but right now he's just akid tending sheep.
And So what do we do? OK.
And again, the question is not are there other options?
You could leave a SEAL there to guard him and go complete your
mission. You could bring him with you.
You could, you know, do all kinds of other scenarios, but
that's not the issue. The issue is if your only
(02:42):
options are to kill him or let him go, and he's going to let
the terrorists know that you're there and it's going to ruin the
mission and more people will die.
What is the ethical thing to do and why?
The third scenario is weird. Let's say that some sadistic
killer, some weirdo, some guy that's got too many online
profiles, has 50 people locked up in his basement because he's
(03:03):
a weirdo and he captures you. And he says if you will murder
this one woman with your bare hands, I will let all 50 go.
But you have to murder this one woman.
If you don't, I will kill you. I will kill her and I will kill
all 50. What is the ethical thing to do
there? OK, again, this is not what
would you actually do? I would use all my sick James
(03:25):
Bond skills and kill the guy andsave everybody.
That's that's not an interestingquestion.
The interesting question is, should you kill the one to save
50, or should you let him kill the 50?
And you're not culpable, but youcould stop it.
So what do you do? Then there's the fourth
scenario, the dropping of the atomic bombs at the end of World
War 2 on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.The ethics of that.
(03:48):
By doing so, you end the war. You stop a mainland invasion of
Japan, which could cost many more American lives, but you
know, it comes at the cost of nuking civilians.
These are not easy questions, sothose are what we're going to
look at throughout this lecture,but first we need to talk about
some different ethical systems, and then we will talk about how
they would answer these different questions.
(04:09):
Before I get in there, there's three main ethical systems in
the history of Western philosophy.
There's a lot of ethical systems, but three biggies.
Before I get into those, though,I want to talk about two
systems, either of which could be right, but I'm not going to
spend a lot of time on these because I think that they're
both a little bit lazy. I think that they don't do the
(04:29):
hard work that they need to do. So the first is just a system of
ethics that would say there is no such thing as ethics.
We can say that we don't like certain things, but there is no
such thing as right or wrong. Things just happen.
There's different variations of this view.
There's subjectivism, which is just ethics, or one's opinion.
There's relativism, which sort of the contradictory views can
(04:50):
be true at the same time, which makes no sense.
But, but essentially it's, it isthe idea that there is not a
standard of ethics that we can come to, to know which decisions
are moral and which ones are not.
And again, that very well may betrue.
It could be the case that just people assault children and
that's just a fact. And we cannot ascribe a value to
that. We cannot say it's bad or that
(05:11):
it's wrong. It could be the case that
6,000,000 Jews were killed in the Holocaust and that's
something that happened that we don't like.
But if you ask somebody why you don't like it, typically they'll
say because it's bad or that it's wrong.
So that's a view that could be right.
In my view, though, it's it's a little bit lazy because there's
something intrinsic to us that doesn't just want to say the
(05:32):
Holocaust happened, we want to say it was wrong.
There's something where we don'twant to just say when a child is
assaulted or somebody molest them or puts out a cigarette on
them, where we don't just say some facts happened in nature.
We say that shouldn't be that way.
And when you say should and shouldn't ought, you're talking
about ethics. There's what is, that's just the
(05:53):
thing that happens. And then there's the value
that's ascribed to it. What's called ought, This is
also called Humes guillotine, bythe way, the is ought
distinction. So that's one view.
I'm not going to spend a ton of time because that lecture would
be pretty short. Yeah.
If there's no ethics, no morality, nothing has a value
judgement, good or bad things just happen.
The other view is again, very popular and might be right.
(06:13):
Not saying either of these are necessarily wrong, I just think
that they're they don't they don't answer the questions I
think we need them to answer. The second one is called divine
command theory. This is the idea that what makes
something right or wrong is thatGod or the gods, depending on
your religion, say that it's right or wrong.
So what would make murder in this case wrong is if God has
said not to murder. Now, I'm going to use the Bible
(06:36):
as some examples here, just because that's probably the
context that many Westerners in America are in.
But this would apply equally to the Talmud.
This would apply to the Tanakh. This would apply to the Vedas.
This would apply to the Quran. The idea though, is that what
makes something right or wrong is that God has said it's right
or wrong. Now again, to be clear, that
doesn't necessarily mean that view is wrong.
If God exists and he has revealed himself, then that
(06:59):
would not be a bad answer. That would actually be a pretty
smart answer. The reason I say that it's lazy
is you're going to have to deal with some other issues even if
divine command theory were right.
Let me give you a few a few examples.
The 1st is called the Euthyphro dilemma.
Does God say that something's good and that makes it good, or
(07:21):
does he see that it's already good and therefore declares it
to be good? So if you say Zach, murder is
bad because God said murder is bad, the question that people
will then ask is, OK, why did hesay murder was bad?
Did he just decide that it wouldbe bad?
Is it just, it makes him sound almost a bit arbitrary?
Could we really say that if God wanted us to rape each other, he
(07:41):
could command us to rape each other, and that act in and of
itself would now become good just because God said that.
Conversely, though, you don't want to say that God sees that
something's already good and just says it's good.
Like he, he looks and says, well, murder's bad.
So I'm going to say that's bad or rape is bad.
So I'm going to say that's bad because then it almost seems to
put some sort of moral standard above God.
So divine command theory could be true, but it's, it just
(08:02):
pushes the question back furtherof does God think something's
good because he simply declares it to be good?
It's part of his will. He decides it.
Or does his intellect see that it's already good and that's why
he calls it good? But to say it another way, are
all of God's commands just arbitrary?
Everything he said is good, is good just because he said it and
just because it's bad, just because he said it was bad.
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Now again, arbitrary. We're talking about arbitrary
from our perspective. Technically, if God exists, then
he might have a reason for something that he hasn't told
us, and it wouldn't technically be arbitrary.
But anyway, that is an issue that you have to deal with.
Religious people have come down on both sides of that.
But that's a a problem with divine command theory.
What about when two things are commanded?
This is why you still have to have philosophy.
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OK, the Bible is going to command you not to lie, but
there are times in the Bible where people lie and it seems
like it's OK. There's the Hebrew midwives with
Pharaoh who's killing all the babies, and they lie to Pharaoh
so they can save the Hebrew babies.
There's a chick named Rahab in the Old Testament and she lies
to protect the Hebrew spies, andshe's commended for it.
What do you do if you're supposed to obey your father and
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mother and they ask you to do opposite things and neither of
which is technically sin? They're just two commands and
you're going to disobey one by obeying the other.
So what do you do when God has given several commands that it
in at least in certain circumstances, seem to butt up
against each other? So it's you're still going to
have to do philosophy regardlessof your view on divine command
theory. We also have the problem of how
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do we interpret God's commands. So let's pretend that God
exists. He may or may not, but for the
scenario, let's say exists and also let's pretend that he's
revealed himself in some sacred book of religion.
How are we to interpret that book?
Like if you have a divine book, but different people interpreted
a bunch of different ways, how can we get to what God has said?
It almost seems like, again, you're going to have to do
philosophy. It's called hermeneutics.
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It's the science of interpretation.
Hermanua or hermanuan is to to lead out in Greek.
That's where that term comes from.
And so you're still going to have to do a science of
interpretation. You're still going to have to
bring your philosophy to whatever sacred text you're
studying to figure out what it is about.
Another issue with divine command theory is you start with
that religious presupposition. You don't get there from some
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revealed text. Let me say it another way.
If you decide to start reading the Bible, you didn't read that
in the Bible and then come to that conclusion, you started
there. Let's imagine you're just some
guy on an island and you're trying to figure out what
religion's right, and you're like, I think Christianity or
something's right, so I'm going to just start reading the Bible.
You then didn't learn that the Bible is God's word from the
Bible itself. You started with that
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presupposition and you would start with the same
presupposition if you were born in a Muslim country with the
Quran. You why are you going to the
Quran instead of the Vedas? Why are you going to the Bible
instead of something else? You're not going to the book
saying what has God said so I can learn about it.
You're assuming that he's already said something in that
particular book, which is why you started there.
So it becomes a bit of a circular argument.
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It becomes a bit of a presupposition in where you
start with divine command theory.
And then lastly, you're still going to need an ethical system
in which to put it. All I'm trying to say is, again,
there might be no such thing as ethics.
Divine command theory might be real.
If God is real and he's given his word to us, then that is
true. You're still going to have to do
the hard work of philosophy. Why, Zach?
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Well, I'll give you an example. If God has said not to murder,
what counts exactly as murder? What about certain types of in
vitro fertilization, where let'ssay you fertilize 10 eggs, but
you only implant 2? Is that murder?
Notice that you're going to haveto do some philosophy to figure
that out, or the Bible will forbid lying or giving a false
testimony. What if you're a spy in war?
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What if you're an undercover cop?
Is it wrong to tell your kids Santa exists?
If, spoiler alert, he doesn't. Sorry for any ardent Santa
worshippers. I anyway.
So what do you do? You're still going to have to do
philosophy. That's my point.
My point is not that these things are necessarily wrong,
they just it's harder than that.It's more difficult than that.
So with that in mind, what are these major ethical systems that
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we want to look at today? Well, let me let me explain why
I say there's three there. There's more, but the three big
ones, what philosophers are trying to do is they're trying
to come up with a theory of ethics that is logically
consistent, that everyone can reason to, that doesn't, that
doesn't depend on religion or divine revelation.
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Let me say that again, what philosophers are trying to do is
they're trying to come up with aa system of ethics that everyone
can assent to. That's logical, that's
consistent, that has certain reasons why we can say something
is good or bad that are objective, that are not
subjective without appealing to revealed religion.
Again, these could all be wrong,but that's what they're trying
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to do. That's why I say these are the
big systems, because what they're saying is these, if
you're an ardent Muslim, you believe that what Allah has said
in the Quran is good, but if you're not a Muslim, that's not
going to be a very persuasive argument to you.
So is there a way to ground ethics in some type of reason,
some type of logical system thateveryone could agree with or
with which they could agree? Don't end a sentence on a
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preposition, which I actually doall the time.
Language changes, it evolves. It's fine.
We can end sentences and prepositions.
That's, that's, that's what's up.
That's where it's at. Is there a, a system that
everyone could agree with regardless of their religious
views, so that it's not esoteric, it's not for some
small group, it's, it's for everyone.
That's what they're trying to do.
Most of these systems are going to come down to this question.
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Should we take into account the consequences of the action or
just the action itself? Should we take into account the
consequences of what we're aboutto do?
Or is an action right or wrong in and of itself damn the
consequences? That's really the question.
So we're going to go through a few systems.
The first day, ontological ethics day on is the the word
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for duty, and this is most oftenassociated with Immanuel Kant.
There are other people that heldthat actions were right or wrong
in and of themselves, duty based, but Kant's going to try
to give it a logical foundation that doesn't appeal to other
things. But this is an idea that an act
is right or wrong depending uponlogical, obligate, obligatory.
That's the word universal rules to which all people are bound by
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duty. Let me say that again.
An act is right or wrong depending upon logical,
obligatory universal rules to which all people are bound by
duty. Kant's system believes that an
act is right or wrong inherently, regardless of the
consequences for everyone. The correct reason to do it must
be out of duty, must be because it is the right thing for you to
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morally do, and you must treat people as ends, not just means.
OK. He is famous for what is called
the categorical imperative. He actually gives several
different definitions of it. I'll give you one, but there's
several acts so that the maxim may be capable of becoming a
universal law for all rational beings.
OK, so let's just back up for a second.
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Here's what Kant's trying to do.Kant never could.
Here's what Kant's trying to do.Kant is trying to create a
logical system where we can havethis maxim.
OK, we can have this categoricalimperative, this overarching
rule, and we will test every ethical action by that rule and
we will know logically whether or not it is ethical or not
ethical. This is this is big ticket
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philosophy. He if you can come up with a
system to show logically that some actions are inherently
moral and some are inherently immoral, regardless of
consequence based upon some unbreaking rule, you will have
solved a lot of ethical issues. OK, so acts so that the maximum
may be capable of becoming universal law for all rational
beings. What is what is that?
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What is he saying? He's saying when you're asking
if some action is right or wrong, you have to ask yourself,
what if everybody did this? What if this was a universal law
for all rational beings? And then you have to decide
whether or not you're being logical or you're contradicting
yourself. OK, bear with me.
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He's not saying this. He's not saying if you're
wondering if something is right or wrong, ask yourself, do you,
would you like to live in a world where everybody did that?
Because you might. You might ask yourself, should
prostitution be legal? And you'd say, yeah, I'd be fine
living in a world where for all rational beings it's a universal
law that prostitution is fine. Or you might be saying, yeah,
I'm fine with lying. I'd be fine living in a world
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where everyone can lie. That can be a universal law for
all rational beings. That is not what Kant is saying.
He's not asking if you would like it.
He's saying, does the idea inherently, logically contradict
itself? It's not subjective for Kant,
it's objective. Here's what I mean.
If I were to say, let's, let's use the example of lying.
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OK, I'll use two examples. If I were to say to myself,
would I like lying to be a universal maxim for all rational
beings? Well, it would completely
destroy the whole idea of truth telling.
The whole idea of truth telling,the only way we can communicate
information. We have this assumption that
somebody is telling us the truth.
And if lying is OK and people can do it whenever they want, or
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let's say I make the rule that's, you know, I can lie as
long as it benefits me. And all of a sudden we were to
make this some sort of universalrule that anyone can lie as long
as it benefits them, Well, the idea of truth telling goes out
the window. The idea.
It's not just that we wouldn't like to live in that society.
The whole idea of us communicating information based
on truth would be contradicted by the idea that people can lie
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whenever at best benefits them. And so he would say that there's
a logical problem with that and therefore lying is unethical or
suicide. Let's say we want to take the
idea of suicide. Should suicide be ethical or
not? Well, if I asked myself, and I
want suicide to be a maximum that's capable of becoming
universal law for all rational beings, basically what I'm
saying is, OK, if I say anytime your life is miserable, you can
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end it, is that a universal law for all rational beings or is
there a contradiction there? Well, there's a contradiction
there. How can you make your life
better by not having a life at all?
How can you make your life better by ending it?
You see it doesn't make sense. So what what Khan's trying to
say is not just would you like to live in this world, He's
saying, take the thing you're wrestling with, put it into a,
a, a proposition, and then ask yourself, would there be some
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sort of contradiction that wouldhappen if that were to apply
universally? Because what most people do with
ethics is they just try to argueabout their particular thing
instead of you. You have to answer the umbrella
first. You have to ask what is the
general rule. Before you ask should I lie?
In this circumstance, you have to ask what should be the rule
I'm lying. Generally, before you ask if
this particular sexual act is wrong, you have to ask what
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should be a sexual ethic. Before you ask how how should I
treat other people? You have to ask or this
particular person, my neighbor that I like or don't like or
whatever. You have to ask, how should we
generally treat each other? To summarize all of this, Kant
thinks that what makes an actionright or wrong is whether it
follows a universal rational standard that is applicable to
all people, that doesn't contradict itself, that doesn't
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care about the consequences, where one acts out of the proper
motivation of rational duty and treats others as ends.
OK, so how would Kant answer those 4 scenarios?
Well, for Kant you don't it it would be unethical to lie to the
Nazis doesn't mean we wouldn't. He was just be saying you've
done something wrong in so doing.
Well Zach, what if I lie to the Nazis and I saved the Jews?
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What if I say no, I there's no Jews here.
I saw them headed towards Paris,you know, 20 minutes ago.
Head that direction. You might say the Jews there,
but Kant will also point out younever know the consequences of
your unethical action. What if Nazis then drive to
Paris and find a lot more Jews accidentally and kill a lot more
anyway? He would say, we're not saying
you couldn't do something else. Maybe you could fight the Nazis,
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maybe you could do whatever. But Kant would say by lying you
have done something immoral whenit comes to the Navy SEAL thing.
He would say you do not get to kill the boy because that would
be inherently be wrong to say. Would we like to make it a rule
to say that we can kill an innocent person who has not done
anything in trying to attack us or illegal within, you know,
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this circumstance or whatever? No, that would break the entire
idea of the difference between righteous and unrighteous
killing. There would be a logical
contradiction there. So he would say you may not kill
the shepherd boy in the lone survivor scenario.
He would also say you may not murder one person to save the
lives of 50. He'd also probably point out
that the sadistic killer was killing the 50, not you, and
you're not called to stop. Them from killing the 50th, the
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only way to do so is for you to do something that is unethical.
And then there are Kantians. There are people that hold to D
ontological ethics that disagreeactually on the the nuclear bomb
issue. And so I don't know exactly how
Kant would answer there, but he would probably be against it
because it allows the killing ofinnocent civilians for this
practical purpose and he doesn'tcare about the consequence.
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He would want us to ask, would we want to create a categorical
imperative that allowed people to kill innocent civilians as
long as they could hit their badtarget?
So that's probably what they should do.
Now, there are problems with thedeontological system, of course.
What happens if you're stuck between two categorical
imperatives that contradict eachother?
Maybe a categorical imperative is don't hand over Jews to the
Nazis to be killed and also don't lie.
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What do you do then? Or how narrowly should you
define the categorical imperatives?
What if I say anyone named Zach,who's the author of this
podcast, can lie, but nobody else, or, you know, one may lie
if the lie will protect the lives of innocent people from an
authority who has no right to murder innocent civilians.
What if I pitched the law that way?
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Then could I lie to the Nazis inthe saving the Jews example?
And surely consequences should play some role in ethics, right?
Maybe not the primary role. Is Kant right to say that there
should we don't care about the consequences at all?
Or is that too strong? Well, that's our boy Emanuel.
Let's talk about another system.This is the opposite,
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utilitarianism. The big players here are Jeremy
Bentham and John Stuart Mill. We've got a whole lecture on
John Stuart Mill's on liberty. That's a different topic than
this. That's his view of what freedom
you should have politically in asociety.
The utilitarianism, again, is trying to create a system that
doesn't depend on revealed religion to give us a an
objective ethical standard, whereas Kant's was the
categorical imperative. What Bentham and Mill are trying
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to do is they're trying to come up with a view that is based on
utility. What do I mean by that?
Here's what I mean. I mean an action is ethical if
it leads to the greatest good for the greatest number of
people. But by good they just mean
happiness. OK, so, so let me say it this
way. Let's let's pretend that God
gave us a computer that knows everything.
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It's an all knowing computer. If that computer could know for
any action the amount of pleasure it would cause and all
the people affected and the amount of pain it would cause
and all the people affected. And there's different qualities
of pain and pleasure and there'sdifferent quantities of pain and
pleasure. And it could do that calculus
and it could do all that math. It would be able to spit out
what you should do on any given ethical scenario.
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OK. So their standard is, does it
produce more overall pleasure than pain?
Does it produce more overall happiness versus unhappiness?
Notice that they're trying to make it objective.
They're saying what makes something good.
All they mean by good is pleasure and happiness, and all
they mean by bad is is pain and unhappiness.
So it's a pleasure versus pain calculation, if you want to say
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it that way. Now we don't have that computer.
There's no way to really calculate it, but that's the
idea. They're trying to ground it in
something that is not ethereal. When we say something's good or
bad, we're making a value judgement.
How can we make that objective for everybody, regardless of
their worldview and theirs is pain over pleasure?
If I do some act, does it produce more pleasure for more
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people to a higher degree or does it produce more pain to
more people to a higher degree? And that is how I know whether
or not it is ethical. Give you an example.
Let's say I want to make, I'm, I'm asking the questions of
whether or not people should do drugs.
What I have to ask is for the drug users, would that produce
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more overall pleasure for society?
Then it would, then it would produce pain for society and
that would help me determine whether or not doing drugs was
ethical or not ethical. OK.
One of the things that John Stuart Mill will emphasize more
so than others is you can't justcount for the quantity of
pleasure. You have to count for the
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quality of pleasure. Finishing APHD dissertation is a
different type of pleasure than watching professional wrestling.
Drinking a $10,000 bottle of Bordeaux wine is a different
pleasure than drinking some sortof cheap beer.
So it's not just, it's not just everybody gets one pleasure
point or one pain point for whatever action it is.
We also have to take into account the quality of the
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pleasure or the pain. Now let's talk about how they
would answer the four scenarios.Do you lie?
Have you done something unethical, lying to the Nazis to
protect the Jews? No.
Why? Because they would make the case
that it produces more overall pleasure to keep Jews from not
getting murdered than it does for the pleasure of the Nazis of
killing them. But you're going to see there's
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a problem there. OK, what happens if most of
people in the world become more Nazi leaning and more pleasure
would actually be derived from killing Jews than not?
You see the problem that utilitarianism runs into?
They would definitely say kill the shepherd boy because he
would save more overall lives. They would definitely in the
third scenario say you should strangle the woman because
you're saving 50 people and 50 is a higher number than one.
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OK. And then most likely, again,
utilitarians disagree on this, but most likely they would also
say that you should drop the bombs because more people
probably would have been killed by a mainland invasion of Japan
than if you drop the nuclear bomb.
So notice that their answers arealmost the exact opposite of the
kantium, the day ontological ethics.
It's a very different system. Remember, Kant is forget the
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consequences, just the action. Theirs is kind of forget the
action, just the consequences. More pleasure, more pain, more
happiness, less or or I'm sorry,more pleasure, less pain, more
happiness, less unhappiness. You see the problem with the
system? One, we can't calculate it.
There's no way to calculate the long term effects.
If we, if we're saying, should we legalize prostitution, would
that produce more pain than pleasure?
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It's very hard to calculate the decay of society and the pain
caused by prostitution, especially to the prostitutes.
How do you qualify that with thepleasure caused to the clients?
It's a good question. The other one that was this,
let's say that there's a societythat takes a great amount of
pleasure in torturing children, and it's only one kid that's
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being tortured and that's a lot of pain for him, but that's only
one person, but it gives a lot of pleasure to, let's say, 100
million people. You would then have to say that
it's OK to torture the child, possibly.
Now utilitarians have responses to all this, just like Kantians
have responses to the stuff earlier.
I'm just trying to let you see some of the benefits and then
some of the problems. That's utilitarianism.
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It's a little bit easier to understand.
It is good is what is the greatest good or greatest
pleasure or greatest happiness for the greatest number of
people, and bad is what causes more pain than pleasure.
Next one, and this is this one goes back to our boy Aristotle,
is virtue ethics. Whereas the last two systems we
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talked about are trying to assess individual actions,
virtue ethics isn't so much about individual actions.
It's about becoming a certain type of person.
It's about human excellence, magnanimity.
Sometimes it's called Arataic ethics after the Greek word
aratae, which means excellence. But it really refers to like
human excellence, like the the virtue of being a moral person,
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being what a human is meant to be.
Aratae is like like like an eagle is most an eagle when it's
soaring. And being what an eagle is
supposed to be, that makes it a good eagle or a tree that's
healthy, that's growing, that has fruit and leaves, that's
being a good tree. The idea here is what does it
look like to be a good person? But by good there I mean
flourishing. I mean virtuous.
I mean being what a human is meant to be.
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That's kind of the idea for for Aristotle.
But the summary of their position is different.
The other ones focus on individual acts and then they
appeal to an objective standard,the categorical imperative or
pleasure versus pain, happiness versus unhappiness, good versus
bad principle, utilitarianism, whatever.
In virtue ethics, it's different.
In virtue ethics, they're not asking those individual
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questions as precisely of shouldI say a curse word here or what
is, is homosexuality good or bador something like that.
They're trying to focus on beingthe type of person that is well
balanced and that is seeking human virtue so that when the
issue arises, you naturally kindof know what to do.
It's very interesting. So I'll give you a little
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summary. The virtue ethicist chooses to
act virtuously over time, which causes them to become a virtuous
person who naturally does what is right, who acts from the
right motivations, and who maximizes their virtuous human
potential. We say that again, the virtue
ethicist chooses to act virtuously over time, which
causes them to become a virtuousperson who naturally does what
is right, who acts from the right motivations, and who
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maximizes their virtuous human potential.
You can read Udemian Ethics, butthe main one on this is
Nicomachean Ethics. That's kind of Aristotle's big
ethical work that people appeal to.
We have from Aristotle just a bunch of kind of notes that were
put together and it's all kind of thrown together.
It's not like most other authorsin history where they're able to
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write these long treatises that are just one thing and 1 theme.
We kind of have just collectionsof different works that are
almost feel like his notes that were thrown together at some
point. So it's it's it's he's a
difficult author to read partially because of that.
So anyway, that that's the view.The view is as I practice human
excellence and practice virtue, I become more virtuous over
time. How do I practice the virtue?
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I have to do it when I'm bad at it.
I have to practice the virtue when I'm not good at it and I
become good at it. Let me give you an example.
We think of courage. I'll use he uses courage as an
example a lot. Courage is a great example.
Curtue, curtue. That's a combination of courage
and virtue. Courage is a virtue for
Aristotle and for most people. Most people see courage as a
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good thing. We see it as a virtue.
We think of courage as like taking a shot of liquid courage
before hitting on a girl at a bar, or we think of it as like
just jumping on a grenade when the moment comes, or rushing off
all Willy nilly into battle and getting blown up or something
like that. Aristotle doesn't think that.
Aristotle thinks that if you want to be courageous, you have
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to practice being courageous in a bunch of small things and then
you will actually be it. You don't just hope to be
courageous and one day wake up courageous.
You have to practice overcoming fears over and over and over
again in 1000, small things. And then when you're in battle
and the grenade hits the ground,then you'll jump on it.
It's the kind of person you've become.
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Now this is really interesting, so let me give you an example.
Let's say you want to learn how to hit a Major League curveball.
You want to be a good baseball player.
You can't just hope you're goingto do that.
You can't just psych yourself upand step up there and never play
baseball and hit a Major League curveball.
It's not going to happen. You're going to strike out
tremendously. You also can't just pray before
you go to bed. Dear God, give me baseball
skills and I'll wake up and I'lljust have baseball skills.
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Same thing is true with playing the piano.
If you want to be excellent at playing the piano, you can't
just psych yourself up and just sit down and do it.
You also can't just pray God make me good at, you know,
practicing the piano and then you wake up and all the sudden
you're, you're just have piano skills like it's just been
matrix, you know, imported into your mind.
You know what you're going to have to do.
You're going to have to practicehitting curveballs when you're
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bad at it and then you get good at it.
You have to do it and practice it over and over and over while
you're bad at it, while you're not very good at hitting
curveballs. And then you become the person
who can hit them. You have to practice the piano
while you're bad at it. And you suck and everybody's
like, shut up. This is so annoying.
You have to practice that. And then you actually are able
to play the piano. So to say it another way, why
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isn't virtue like that? That's kind of what Aristotle's
asking if you can play a if you can practice being bad at piano
till you're good at it, and you can practice hitting a curveball
while you're bad at it till you're good at it.
Can you not practice being courageous while you're bad at
it until you're good at it? Can you not practice having
fortitous while you're bad at it, till you're good at it?
Can you not practice resisting lust when you're bad at it until
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you're good at it? What if you could practice
virtue like a sport? Why do we think that one day
we'll wake up and be courageous,or we'll one day wake up and not
be anxious, or we'll wake up oneday and not be proud, or we'll
wake up one day and not be lustful?
You have to practice those things.
You create almost a like a like a like an ethical muscle memory.
Every time you do an action. If you continually act in a way
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that's not virtuous, it becomes easier to be not a virtuous
person. If you continuously act in a way
that's virtuous, you become moreof a virtuous person.
And so Aristotle is going to talk about practicing what you
want to become. There's a lot of wisdom there.
I, I, I might do a whole lesson just on that 'cause I think
that's fascinating. Another thing Aristotle
emphasized in his system of becoming this excellent person
is that not on all issues, but in a lot of issues you were
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trying to hit what he calls the golden mean or what is called
the golden mean. It's, it's, it's a phrase that's
usually used to to clarify he, he's not speaking English, by
the way, so it's dumb for me to say it that way.
It's a phrase that scholars usedto talk about this idea and
Aristotle of a lot of times, a virtue stands between two vices.
I'll give you an example. On the one hand, courage is not
cowardice, That's obvious. But on the other hand, it's not
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brashness. If you just run out in the
middle of battle to get killed, that's suicide.
That's not courage, right? You have to have the right
amount of knowing what to do to be courageous.
You can't just run out there andcommit suicide, but nor can you
be cowardly. You have to have the right
medium. You have to know where that
middle point is to say, OK, truecourage here is me doing this
(33:28):
thing I'm scared of even though it's dangerous, but I'm not just
committing suicide. I'm not being stupid.
I've thought through it. So, so there, there's, there are
times to retreat out of cowardice and there are times to
retreat out of being smart, right?
Wittiness is another one that's in between two extremes.
On the one hand, you can be the absolute clown, the absolute
fool that nobody takes seriously, that can only make
the joke that everybody thinks is ridiculous.
(33:49):
That's not good. But you also don't want to be
the boorish person. That's boring if you're somebody
that can't take a joke. I mean, I've met so many people
that have the vice, as Aristotlewould say, of boorishness.
If you're not witty, Aristotle thinks you're not ethical when
it comes to that category, OK, Wittiness, making the joke when
you should, being serious when you should, being witty and
using the pun and doing that kind of thing when you should.
(34:10):
That is the virtue. So a lot of times these are in
between two extremes. Now, it's not the case in every
category. It's not like how many times
should I cheat on my wife? And then there's like a spectrum
and you go he, he's not saying cheat on her sometime or
something like that. That's not the point.
But on most of these issues he'strying to point to, usually
there's a balance of what you'retrying to do with the right time
and the right kind of person you've become, etcetera.
(34:32):
Now, how would they answer the four scenarios?
This is where it gets tricky. Let me give you the biggest
problem with virtue ethics. It's not precise enough to
answer some of our very specificquestions.
If you're asking the question ishomosexuality ethical or
unethical, well, I mean in a Greco Roman world, Aristotle
(34:52):
would probably be fine with certain forms of homosexuality,
but others that are virtue ethicists, like medievals that
follow him think no that's not right.
So how do you answer the individual question?
So OK, I need to be a virtuous person, practice these virtues,
and then I'll know what to do when the time comes.
Will virtue ethicists disagree? Also, how can I practice these
things to become a virtuous person until I know what those
(35:12):
virtues are? We know some.
We know wittiness is better thanbeing a clown, and we know that
courage is better than foolishness.
But what about things like, you know, these these very techno
who who you should vote for? What about things like
discipline of children? What about things like certain
sexual ethics? What about things like certain
(35:34):
things in bioethics? The virtue ethicist doesn't give
us enough clarity as new issues arise of what we should do.
So it's it's a big problem for virtue ethics.
Now, there are other ethical systems you can have
sentimentality that what you do what what we really mean by
ethics is when you see somebody who's hurting you, imagine what
(35:54):
that would be like for you and you have compassion for that
person. That's kind of Jean Jacques
Rousseau. There are other ethical systems
at which we have a whole lesson on.
By the way, there are other ethical systems that should say
just do what's best for you, just like this severe type of
egoism where it's just straight up do whatever's best for you.
Forget everybody else. So there's other ethical
systems, but those are the big ones.
(36:16):
OK. I hope that's a helpful summary
for you. When I ask two more questions
and then we'll be done. One, are moral acts selfish?
What some philosophers have pointed out is that all moral
acts are actually selfish to some degree, because when
somebody does them, they're doing so so that they get
something good out of it. When I help a little old lady
(36:38):
across the street, yeah, she might give me some money, but
even if she doesn't, I feel goodabout myself.
That's a benefit to me. I can maybe post it on social
media. And others think well of me.
I think that's kind of douchey, but others think well of me.
That's a benefit to me. In fact, every ethical thing
that I think that I do, I'm doing because it benefits me.
(36:58):
I like the kind of person I become.
I feel good about myself. I feel good about doing this
act. They're supposedly, and I don't
know if this is a true story or not, supposedly somebody can
look it up. There's a story of Abraham
Lincoln stopping his carriage tohelp a mother pig whose little
piglets are kind of stuck in themud.
And somebody thinks that he's doing so because he's just being
nice to the pigs. And he's like, no, I wouldn't
(37:19):
have been able to live with myself all day.
My conscience would have bugged me all day.
And the whole point of that story is to say he kind of did
it for him. Why do you want to follow God?
So that you can be saved, be resurrected, go to heaven,
whatever it is that's a big benefit to you.
Even the even the martyr does sobecause they benefit more by
(37:41):
being martyred. So are all these acts selfish?
Well, depends on what you mean. If you mean do you benefit from
ethical acts, sure. But I would ask this is that
wrong? Is that that shouldn't you
benefit by living virtuously? Wouldn't that be what we expect?
Would we expect that when you dosomething good that does make
something better for you? Like wouldn't there be an
incentive which is good? So there's a philosopher and
(38:04):
theologian named Joseph Butler, and one of the things that he
will point out, which I think ishelpful, is this.
There is a difference between doing an act just so you get
something out of it. So like if I was just nice to my
grandmother so I could get in her will and take all her money,
that's different than if I'm actually helping somebody and
it's the right thing to do and Ialso happen to benefit.
(38:24):
So those are different. Last question to ask an ethic.
I mean, last question to ask. We've solved all of ethics.
Last question that we're going to talk about today is can you
be happy without virtue? Let me tell you why this is
profound, So pause for a second if you didn't understand what I
just said. Everyone thinks that they'll be
(38:45):
happy if I just have a bunch of money and a bunch of women and a
bunch of power and everybody knows my name and I'm a rock
star and whatever. And yet a lot of those people
have terrible lives and hate themselves and commit suicide or
do whatever. Hedge fund managers that are
billionaires kill themselves to tremendously high degrees.
What if one of the things you need to be happy is virtue?
(39:07):
I'll tell you what made me thinkabout this.
I, I have a buddy and he used tobe involved in a gang.
He actually used to be involved in a cartel and he's moved away
from that. It was in another country and
he's been clean and illegal citizen and all this kind of
stuff for, you know, a bunch of years, decades.
(39:27):
And one of the things he said that was interesting to me is he
said mob bosses, cartel Lords, these kind of crime syndicate
bosses. He said they have all the money.
It's so much money. They have all the power.
They can have somebody killed bya wink of their eye.
They have all the beautiful women.
(39:47):
They have all that they they have the mansions, they have the
guns, they have all the things. And they are absolutely
miserable because they're not virtuous.
They hate themselves at the end of the day.
And you cannot put a price on living with yourself.
I would say that somebody that'slike a pedophile is probably
really miserable because they really probably hate themselves.
(40:08):
They're doing what they think brings them pleasure, but
actually they have a lot of painbecause they know what they're
doing is evil and so they can't be happy.
So maybe something to ask yourself as you're pursuing
trying to be happy, because everybody's trying to be happy.
Is, is virtue necessary to be happy?
I think that's a great question.Anyway, ethics boring.
(40:29):
Who cares? Just kidding.
It's an interesting topic. Ethics hits US differently than
other philosophical topics because it's it's practical and
it's emotional and it affects usin a different way.
So if we're debating A metaphysical topic of like
realism versus idealism or something like this, how many
substances are there? That's interesting, but people
don't usually punch each other over that.
(40:50):
I'm sure people have, but when we're talking about torturing
and war, we're talking about abortion, we're talking about
sexual ethics, we're talking about these kind of things,
People get really fired up because ethics hits us in a way
that's different than other philosophical topics because it
deals with some of these. This is why I think that when
(41:11):
you just say there's no such thing as ethics, that that could
be true. It just does not at all hit with
the human experience. There's something in us that
thinks these issues are more important than other things.
So there's ethics. I hope it's helpful for you.
This is a super truncated. We could talk about ethics.
You could have a whole podcast that just talks about different
ethical issues. I hope that this is giving you
(41:31):
some clarity. Appreciate you tuning into
ideological and we'll see you next time.
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