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Lectures Politics Ethics and Practice (all monday ethics lectures
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All the Monday ethics lectures of PEP
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Lectures Politics, Ethics and PracticeLecture 1 Introduction 6-4-2021
Jonathon Wolff:
When advising, what works and does not?
Top down is a big no no (so don’t come in there as a political scientist telling the other people
what to do because you have the knowledge)
Reason 1: Karl Popper utopian engineering (= big plans, depending on a lot of factors, will
always go wrong)
Reason 2: philosophy is extremism, it is about wild and strong ideas.
Why ideal theory does not work:
- Philosophy is about outrageous ideas
- Works not as road plan, but as a lab experiment under ideal conditions. They are not made
for the real world.
- Doesn’t work because in the real world:
1. There is no room or time to agree to disagree: compromise and solutions are needed
2. Bias for status quo
3. Support/legitimation trumps morality (burdens of reason)
What may work:
Overlapping consensus: what do we agree on? (based on Rawls). We don’t have to agree on
principles or values, as long as we agree on the practices.
Also called: reflective equilibrium (Habermas), or deep consensus
So understand before your criticize: what created the current practices & what has made it stable?
Identify causes of moral difficulties & differences
Then test all parties’ positions on possible changes
How to test positions:
- Not just for weakness, but also strengths
- Respecting the burdens of judgement (=limits to what can be proven or disproven): the
demands of the reasonable
- Can any party, including you, reasonably object anything?
- So: do not undermine and refute, but be undermined and refuted
- Then and only then construct consensus on course of action: bottom-up consensus building.
So: the idea of being reasonable
- Do not reject ideas as unproven or unprovable, but accept them as being for now un-
refutable
- Do not expect others to make room for your ideas but making room for their ideas yourself
1
, - Do not just test, undermine and refute others ideas, but let them first do it to you
Public reason: Rawls
- The burdens of judgement are the many “hazards involved in the correct exercise of our
powers of reason and judgement in the ordinary course of political life”
o Empirical and scientific evidence is often complex and conflicting
o We may reasonably disagree about the relative weight of different considerations
o Concepts are vague and subject to hard cases
o The way we assess evidence and weigh values can be shaped by our total life
experience
o Different normative considerations on different sides can make overall assessment
difficult
o The number of values any social institution can incorporate is limited
Lecture 2 Ethics the basics (ethics) 12-04-2021
Ethics & non-ethics:
- Facts do not exist. The truth is not out there.
- Facts are constructed
- Which is where philosophy comes in: ontology (=what is), epistemology (=how can we know),
ethics (=what to do)
Standards:
- There are no (objective/absolute) standards for truth of philosophy (goodness, rightness,
decency, etc.) human constructions, interventions
- Standards are the/an object of research in philosophy
When is a fact a fact? standard for truth
- Correspondence: proposition p corresponds to phenomenon f is inconclusive as a theory
- Coherence: p is more or less likely to be true the more/less it is logically consistent within a
set of p propositions (like a paradigm/group) we now define truth in terms of consistency
doesn’t relate to reality anymore
So basically we don’t know what is true
Logic:
- Classical logic: a implies b, there is a, so b
- Fuzzy logic: correct versus almost/partly correct
- Citizen’s logic
Ethics, just as fuzzy as the rest:
- History: slow movement away from ontology (=facts, truth)
- Originates in China: Tao
2
, - Living with nature, naturalism
- Divine/determined to human/animal divide humans are free, animals are pre-
programmed
- Virtue = capacity that is useful for you and society, allows you to flourish in your context
- Kant & Hume & De Sade: that something is a fact/tradition doesn’t mean it should also be
that way don’t infer beauty/norms from facts, is/ought fallacy
o Sein and sollen
o Is and ought
o Anything goes
Two levels in ethics:
- Theories of the good
- Theories on the measures of the good
o Main positions: absolutism (there are absolute norms, we just have to find them) &
relativism (there are no absolute truth in ethics, it is all social construction, etc.)
o Tactical compromise: Habermas and Rawls
Rejection of relativism because it leaves us with no reason (except circular
reasoning) to minimize suffering. It makes maximizing just as rational
(because there are no moral standards).
Rejection of absolutism as well: we live in a world of pluralism, with different
views of the good life, there is no way to choose/prove one
Reflective equilibrium (which is never permanent, based on learning): finding
principles on which we can agree but still keep our different views
Three main schools:
1. Virtue ethics (intention)
- Aristotle & Plato (Greeks/Romans): capacity to flourish in your context, the context/society
determine what is a virtue or not
- Augustine & Thomas (Christianity): virtues became absolute (justice, truth, etc.)
- Machiavelli: virtues are the stuff that allow you to reach your goal, means to ends, utility
- Foot & Nussbaum
2. Consequentialism (result)
- All that matters is that you do whatever is necessary, consequences are all that matters
- Happiness as the ultimate goal (distinguished from joy, which is temporary and superficial).
Happiness is deep and lasting.
- Utilitarianism as the main school: sum of pleasure and pain (based on subjective experiences,
but everyone has this so this makes it neutral)
- Mill with reformed utilitarianism: distinction between higher and lower pleasures. What
gives you true happiness and what is fake?
o Harm principle: You can do whatever makes you happy as long as you don’t harm
others
o Most recently: nudging (people think for you what choice you should want to make)
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