Blackburn – Being Good, an introduction to ethics
Inhoud
Ch2 – some ethical ideas .......................................................................................................................1
Birth ..................................................................................................................................................1
Death ................................................................................................................................................1
Desire and the meaning of life ..........................................................................................................2
The greatest happiness of the greatest number ...............................................................................3
Freedom from the bad ......................................................................................................................4
Freedom and paternalism .................................................................................................................4
Rights and natural rights ...................................................................................................................5
Ch2 – some ethical ideas
Birth
Question: what is more important than people generally realize?
Conclusion: our ability to control how many children are born, the gene pool, which of those that
were born got to grow up (by e.g. selective standards of upbringings)
Evidence: When we use any of these methods of control, we interfere with what would otherwise
have happened. We might be said to interfere with nature
Question: what is the world's biggest issue of justice for women?
Conclusion: Amartya Sen has calculated that there are over 100 million 'missing women'
worldwide. The difference is due to inequalities in medical care and sustenance, as well as deliberate
infanticide
Question: why does the charge of playing God (interfering with nature) have no independent force?
Conclusion: people only raise it when the interference in question upsets them
Evidence: The question is whether the upset and the worry are well-founded
Question: how do many cultures, such as that of the US, ratchet up the issue of abortion?
Conclusion:
1. It is moralized. It is not just a question of sympathy or concern, but one of who has rights,
what justice requires, what our duty is; a question about what is permissible and what is
wrong
a. Deontological notions
2. It is politicized, so it becomes a question of law
Question: why does 'slippery slope' reasoning need to be resisted?
Conclusion: A man with no hairs on his head is bald. A man who is bald is never made not bald by
the addition of just one hair. Hence (working upwards one hair at a time) a man with, say, a hundred
thousand hairs on his head is bald. But that is just false! Such a man is the reverse of bald.
Death
Question: when can death be mysterious?
Conclusion: when we try to imagine how it would be like
Evidence: Death is not the state of a person. It is 'nothing to us' because we no longer exist
Question: how is ethics a motivation to the belief of afterlife?
, Conclusion: Life here is unjust or intolerable. So there must be a better one somewhere else. Or, it is
intolerable that the unjust man meets happiness and success, and the just man meets misery and
failure. So there must be another arena where justice is restored. Or, it is intolerable that some people,
through no apparent fault of their own, are born to lives of want and misery. So, they must be being
punished for some fault in a previous life
Evidence: David Hume: even if we are convinced of Divine purpose, there can only be one source of
evidence of what it is. This must be what we find in the world around us. So if life here is unjust
and intolerable, then the only defensible inference is that Divinity intends a fair dose of things that are
unjust and intolerable.
Question: what does ethical thought seem to need?
Conclusion: a distinction between what we permit to happen and what we actually cause
Evidence: can be very fragile
Desire and the meaning of life
Question: what do some moralists argue that authentic living means?
Conclusion: somehow living in constant awareness of the fact that you will die someday, 'living-unto-
death'.
Question: how can the mood that obsesses over death fall into peril of inconsistency?
Conclusion: It is inconsistent to urge, for instance, both that death is perfectly all right, even a luxury,
in itself, but that one thing that makes life meaningless and delusive is that it ends in death
Evidence: why is it a problem that life ends with death, when death is enviable?
Question: what is meant with the vice of abstraction (George Berkely)?
Conclusion: 'the fine and subtle net of abstract ideas which has so miserably perplexed and entangled
the minds of men'. It is much easier to lament the hollow nature and the inconsistencies of desire if we
stay out of focus, keeping the terms of discussion wholly abstract. Thus, it sounds miserable if the
satisfaction of desire is fleeting, and desire itself is changeable and apt to give rise only to further
dissatisfactions. But is it really something to mope about?
Evidence: , suppose we desire a good dinner, and enjoy it. Should it poison the enjoyment to reflect
that it is fleeting (we won't enjoy this dinner forever), or that the desire for a good dinner is changeable
(soon we won't feel hungry), or only temporarily satisfied (we will want dinner again tomorrow) ? It is
not as if things would be better if we always wanted a dinner, or if having got a dinner once we never
wanted one again, or if the one dinner went on for a whole lifetime. None of those things seem
remotely desirable, so why make a fuss about it not being like that?
Question: what are trump cards of pessimists?
Conclusion:
1. The achievement of wealth often brings either the demand for more, or the inability to
enjoy what we have. Our well-being can certainly be destroyed by poverty, but the briefest
look at the lives of the rich does not suggest that well-being is increased without end by
further riches
2. Erotic desire, is notoriously restless and insecure, and apt to deliver only partial
fulfilments. Perhaps we never quite possess another person as much as we really desire to
Question: what do we have to ask when researching whether life has meaning?
Conclusion: to whom?
Evidence: Perhaps we put ourselves in the position of the judge: each of us can ask whether life has
meaning to me, here and now. The answer then depends.
11.Pleasure
Question: why is the question about pleasure important?
