Introduction to Ethics 1 Karsten Harries Introduction to Ethics Lecture Notes Fall Semester 2013 Yale University Copyright Karsten Harries Introduction to Ethics 2 Contents 1. Introduction I. Plato 2. Piety and Justice 3. Socrates Accused 4. A Dream of Homecoming 5. Body and Soul 6. Morality and Mortality 7. Transcendent Measures 8. The Good Life II. Bentham 9. Goodness and Pleasure 10. A Questionable Calculus 11. Crime and Punishment 12. The Ends of Government III. Kant 13. Duty and Inclination 14. The Categorical Imperative 15. Autonomy 16. Some Critical Questions IV. Kierkegaard 17. The Knight of Faith 18. The Challenge of Abraham 19. The Teleological Suspension of the Ethical 20. Pride and Concealment V. Nietzsche 21. History and Values 22. Beyond Good and Evil 23. Guilt and Bad Conscience 24. God and the gods 25. The Ascetic Ideal 26. Conclusion Introduction to Ethics 3 1. Introduction In the Philosophical Investigations Ludwig Wittgenstein writes that philosophical problems have the form "I do not know my way about." (PI 123) Philosophy, this suggests, has its origin in a loss of way or a dislocation. To be sure, not all problems having this form are therefore already philosophical. For example, to have lost one's way in a strange city hardly suffices to make one a philosopher? But why not? I would suggest that one reason is that in such cases our disorientation is only superficial: In a deeper sense we still know our place and what to do. Thus we could ask someone for help or look for a map. The problem poses itself against a background of unquestioned ways of doing things, on which we can fall back in our attempt to discover where we are and where we should be going. The same holds for countless other situations: say your computer gives you trouble and you are at a total loss as to what to do; or you are on a sailboat for the first time and someone shouts at you to do something, speaks of sheets, and all you can think of are bed-sheets; or you are supposed to prove a theorem in geometry and don't have a clue as to how to begin. But it such cases there are those more expert than we are, persons to whom we can turn to for help, who will helps us find our way, will give us, so to speak, the right map. Philosophical problems have no such background. The loss of way is here of a more radical nature. They emerge only where a person has begun to question the entire place assigned to him by his history, his society, and searching for firmer ground demands that this place be more securely established. The fundamental question of philosophy so understood is: what is our place and what should it be? This of course is to say that at the very center of philosophy we find an ethical concern. What I have called the fundamental question of philosophy is more specifically the fundamental question of ethics. Introduction to Ethics 4 I pointed out that this question presupposes a certain dislocation. First of all and most of the time we find ourselves caught up in situations that suggest to us what is to be done. Family, society, common sense have provided us with maps that we accept more or less unquestioningly. We do what one does and do not worry much about it. And yet there are times when long established and taken for granted convictions disintegrate, when it becomes more and more difficult to rely on a common sense. Such disintegration invites reflection; reflection in turn may compound such disintegration as it lets us see what happens to be our way of life as precisely that: as just happening to be our way of life, as only one possible way of life. But there are of course other possibilities; we all have been placed on certain tracks, but there are other tracks. Perhaps some of these should be preferred. Reflection has thus both a dislocating and a liberating power. Freedom and loss of way belong together. Reflection thus lets us face the future as a future for which we, too, bear responsibility. A certain dislocation is inseparable from facing the future responsibly. But the more pronounced the dislocation, the more insistent the question: what should I do? will present itself. Freedom itself thus leads us to what I have called the fundamental question. Ethics, which traditionally has been understood as that part of philosophy that is concerned with what is morally right or wrong, good or bad, addresses itself to that question. I have suggested that to face the future is to face different possibilities. We consequently face the challenge of having to choose among them, although often the choice seems to us so obvious or so insignificant that it hardly deserves to be called a choice. Even then our actions will bear witness to the criteria we use in arriving at our decision. These criteria will tend to form a pattern; together they govern a way of life. To put this point differently: in our actions we all betray what I want to call an ideal image, by which we measure our own situation. This ideal image may not be very coherent; it may not be clearly articulated. It may present itself in the form of persons we admire; or we may find it in literature; or in religion. Or it may be given to us by what Introduction to Ethics 5 one says and does. But be this as it may: we all have some idea of what we take to be the good life. As long as someone is secure in such an idea, he or she will find little need to question it, will feel little need for philosophy. Such a person may well find philosophy unsettling, for philosophy bids us question that idea, attempts to measure it by the ideal that should govern human conduct. This attempt can of course succeed only if there is indeed such an ideal to be discovered. Is there? That question haunts what I have called philosophy's fundamental question. Philosophers have disagreed on this point. Perhaps the search for an ideal image or a set of values that would furnish all human behavior with the right measure is vain. Perhaps all such ideals are human creations that differ given different circumstances. Perhaps the demand for norms that are more than human inventions and conventions is vain and all ideals are only illusions. But even if this should be the case, it would still be true that human beings need ideals, and if these ideals cannot be discovered, they must be created. To speak of an ideal image of human being or of values presupposes a distinction between what human beings are and what they are to be, between what as a matter of fact is the case and what ought to be, between the actual and the ideal. This implies a radical distinction between science and moral philosophy: Science is concerned with what is the case, not with what ought to be. Science describes and predicts, but as science it does not evaluate. When science uses language that pleads for a particular way of life it speak no longer just as science. Whenever it does so we have to be especially careful: there are words that invite a blurring of descriptive and normative concerns — take the word "normal." Normal is a descriptive term, but we all tend to think that normal behavior is also good, where the fact that the related term "average" tends to carry slightly negative connotations — say someone says of some politician that he is of average intelligence — should make us think. "Normal" has acquired the overtone of "normative." But what is the moral significance of the "normal"? Introduction to Ethics 6 I have pointed to the distinction between what is and what ought to be. It makes little sense to say you ought to be of a certain height, ought to possess a certain I.Q., ought to be beautiful, etc. It makes little sense because what I ought to be must be something that I can choose to become. That is to say it must point to a real possibility and one that I am free to choose. But such choice is not arbitrary; it requires criteria or values if it is to be responsible and not blind. Social science can describe values that are held by certain individuals, but it cannot establish their validity. This is one task that it must necessarily bracket. It is to this dimension that what I called in the beginning the fundamental question of philosophy points. A better candidate for answering that question is religion. Traditionally religions have given answers to such questions as: What constitutes the good life? or What ought to be done? And once, no doubt, and in many parts of the world even today, such answers were felt to be so securely established as to place them beyond philosophical questioning. In such cases philosophy, to the extent that it existed at all, had to serve theology. But to many today faith that can grant such security is no longer a living reality. We have become too free, perhaps too questioning, for such a faith. We have become uncertain about the moral maps we have inherited. To the extent that what Nietzsche calls "the death of God" has become reality, the traditional value system has lost founder and foundation. This has given a new urgency to moral philosophy or ethics, which is often called upon to assume functions that religion once fulfilled.