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0:00PROFESSOR: OK, so what I want to do today is to finish up
0:05the lecture that we were engaged with last week about
0:09utilitarianism and then to move on to what is perhaps the
0:13most dead-guy-on-Tuesday lecture of the semester, that
0:18is, an explanation of the philosophy of Immanuel Kant.
0:23So in order to make up for the fact that the second part of
0:27the lecture is fairly dry, we'll have a couple of clicker
0:30questions in the first part of the lecture.
0:33OK, so as you recall from our lecture last class, John
0:41Stuart Mill, in the selections from Utilitarianism that we
0:45read, says two extraordinarily famous things that serve in
0:49some ways as the heart of the utilitarian view.
0:54The first thing that he says is that he articulates what's
0:57known as the greatest happiness principle.
1:00This is a principle that's supposed to tell you what it
1:04is for an act to be morally right.
1:09And what Mill says is, there's a proportionality between the
1:13rightness of the act and something that it produces.
1:17In particular, a proportionality between the
1:20rightness of the act and the amount of happiness it
1:25produces, regardless of how that happiness is distributed.
1:31In particular he says "actions are right in proportion as
1:34they tend to promote happiness, they're wrong as
1:37they tend to promote the reverse of happiness," and the
1:41happiness with which we're concerned is not the agent's
1:44own happiness but "the happiness of all concerned."
1:49The second extraordinarily famous saying that he says in
1:53the opening passages of Utilitarianism is that the
1:57motive with which an act is performed is irrelevant to the
2:02act's moral worth.
2:03He says the motive has nothing to do with the
2:06morality of the action.
2:08"He who saves another creature from drowning does what is
2:11morally right, whether his motive be duty or the hope of
2:16being paid for it."
2:19So we might summarize what these principles say, as
2:24saying that the first one tells us that what matters for
2:29the morality of an act is the aggregate amount of happiness
2:36that it produces.
2:38And what we're concerned with here are aggregates, not
2:43individuals.
2:45We're interested in how much good is done overall, not
2:51where those pieces of good might happen to fall.
2:57And what the second principle tells us is that what the
3:01utilitarian, who is after all a consequentialist, is
3:05concerned with are consequences.
3:09They're interested in the outcome of the act, not the
3:15process by which that outcome was achieved.
3:22So the first reading that we did for last class was a
3:25selection from Mill's Utilitarianism where he
3:28articulated these principles.
3:30And it's important to recognize that these get
3:33something profoundly right about what we're thinking
3:37about, I think, when we try to articulate what lies behind
3:41our moral judgment.
3:43It does seem right that what we're interested in is what
3:47the world is like after a particular action is taken,
3:51and to the extent that we're interested in what the world
3:54is like, our primary interest is not in how that state of
3:58affairs came about, but what that state of affairs is.
4:04And our primary concern, if we're taking a moral stance,
4:07is not in how much we ourselves have, but rather in
4:11how much good there is in the world overall.
4:16That said, there have been, since utilitarianism was
4:22articulated, a classic set of objections which are raised to
4:28the view, some of which we'll talk more about today, and
4:33some of which we encountered in the selection from Bernard
4:36Williams that we read last class.
4:40Now you will all recall that Williams' discussion begins
4:46with a story of a gentleman that he calls Jim, who finds
4:54himself in a South American village that's run by a rather
5:04unsavory cowboy.
5:07And some of the citizens of that village have been
5:10protesting the unsavory cowboy's leadership.
5:14And so what the unsavory cowboy has done is he has
5:17rounded up twenty of those villagers, and he's
5:22planning--simply to show the others that he's in charge--to
5:27kill those twenty villagers.
5:30When Jim arrives, Pedro the cowboy tells him that, if Jim
5:38is willing to shoot one of the villagers, the other nineteen
5:44will be set free.
5:46So that's the Jim case.
5:48Jim shows up in a town.
5:50The sheriff of the town has selected twenty people at
5:53random to be shot, but if Jim is willing to kill one of them
5:58the other 19 will be set free, so--
6:02clickers out--
6:05Question: In the Jim case, what is Jim
6:11morally obliged to do?
6:15Is the moral thing for Jim to do in this case to shoot the
6:19one man, thereby liberating the other nineteen, or is the
6:24right thing for him to do to refuse to shoot the one,
6:28thereby letting all twenty die?
6:40OK, so let's see how the numbers came out.
6:43So almost 3/4 of you, actually more than 3/4 of you, think
6:49that what the morally right thing for Jim to do in this
6:53case is to shoot one man, thereby
6:57liberating the other nineteen.
7:01We'll have a chance next week to talk a lot in about these
7:06sorts of questions.
7:07Our reading for Thursday is a series of moral dilemmas with
7:12this structure.
7:14But what I want to ask those 77% of you, who answered
7:18"yes," to do now is to think about whether you take what
7:23Williams says is the natural utilitarian next step.
7:30Williams argues that if you are a committed utilitarian,
7:34and you think that the morally right thing for Jim to do is
7:39to shoot the one and release the other nineteen, then you
7:45ought to feel no moral compunction about doing so.
7:52There's a clear right thing to do.
7:55The right thing is to kill the one, so
7:58it's to save the nineteen.
8:01You may feel moral disapprobation--indeed you
8:04should feel moral disapprobation--towards Pedro
8:07who put Jim in this situation.
8:11But you ought to feel no moral disapprobation towards Jim,
8:15and even more importantly according to Williams, Jim
8:20himself ought to feel no moral compunction.
8:26So among the 77% of you who answered that Jim did the
8:32right thing in killing the one and saving the nineteen, do
8:37you think that in shooting the one man, Jim ought to think of
8:42any hesitation that he feels as mere squeamishness,
8:47something that ought to be overcome?
8:50Or do you think that Jim ought to think of the hesitation
8:55that he feels in doing what the utilitarian and in what
8:59you yourself said was the right thing, do you think he
9:03ought to think of his hesitation as being indicative
9:06of something morally relevant?
9:09So there's roughly seventy of you who should
9:11be answering this.
9:14Let's see how the numbers come out.
9:24OK, so most of you take on only part of the
9:31consequentialist picture here, at least in the way that
9:34Williams understands it.
9:36Most of you think that, although the right thing for
9:40Jim to do in that case is to kill the one to save the
9:43nineteen, it's not the case that he ought wholeheartedly
9:48to endorse that as the right thing to do.
9:54In a minute, I'm going to present to you Williams'
9:58analogy to the case of residual racism to try to help
10:05you see why someone who really has taken on board the
10:10consequentialist outlook thinks that the combination of
10:14views which most of you present, where you think the
10:17right thing to do is to kill the one to save the nineteen,
10:20but you also think the right thing to do is to feel bad
10:23about that in some way, have not fully appreciated what the
10:30utilitarian stance provides you with as a way of
10:33understanding morality.
10:35So Williams, as you know, presents us with two cases.
10:38The first is the case that I've just given you, the case
10:40of Jim and the captive Indians.
10:42The second is the case in high '70's fashion of a man who is
10:50needing to go back to work because it's difficult to have
10:54his wife working outside of the home.
10:57I leave that to you as a period piece.
11:00But the work which George is provided in Williams' example
11:05is work in a bioweapons lab, something to which George
11:09feels moral opposition.
11:11But if George doesn't take the job in the bioweapons lab a
11:15much more gung-ho person, somebody who's likely to
11:18advocate the use of bioweapons in all sorts of contexts, will
11:22get the job instead.
11:24So the two cases that Williams presents us with there have a
11:28common structure.
11:30And a common structure which we're going to see again and
11:32again in moral dilemmas.
11:35There's one act that the person can do that leads to a
11:40particular outcome, another act that the person can do
11:43that leads to a different outcome, where the first act
11:47is worse on its surface than the second.
11:51So Jim has the possibility of shooting one person, or
11:56shooting no people.
11:58Those are the choices that Jim faces.
12:00If Jim does the first act, shooting one person, then
12:05nineteen people will go free; if Jim does the second act,
12:08which is not to shoot anybody at all, to refuse Pedro's
12:11bargain, then all twenty people will be shot.
12:16Likewise, George faces a choice between doing one
12:20thing, taking the job in--
12:22sorry, George faces the choice between taking the job in the
12:29bio lab and not taking the job in the bio lab.
12:33If George takes the job in the bio lab, then the gung-ho
12:37biological weapons fellow won't [will]
12:39get the job, and the outcome will be better [worse].
12:42If George doesn't take the job, then the gung-ho
12:45biological weapons person won't get the job and the
12:48outcome will be better.
12:50So, in both cases we have an act killing the one versus
12:55killing none, taking the job versus not taking the job,
12:59which is worse than another, but the outcomes of those acts
13:05are inverted.
13:07The consequentialist tells us not to look at the act side of
13:13the equation, but to look at the
13:15outcome side of the equation.
13:17The only things, says the consequentialist, that we need
13:20to take into consideration, is how many people are saved or
13:25how much bio-weapons research is done.
13:28According to the consequentialist, what we do
13:31is we look and we see, outcome one is better than outcome
13:35two, and then reading back from that, we decide which
13:39thing we ought to do.
13:41We ought to do act one because it's the thing that produces
13:45the better outcome.
13:47The deontologist or virtue ethicist says, not so fast.
13:57Don't jump straight to the consequence, look also at what
14:02it is that is needed to be done by the individual to
14:07bring about that consequence.
14:09And recognizing that act one is worse than act two, the
14:14deontologist or virtue ethicist says, it's at least
14:18important to take seriously as a possibility that the right
14:23thing to do in this situation is the second act, even if the
14:28outcome that it leads to is worse.
14:33Now what Williams points out is that if one takes seriously
14:40the first of these stances, the one where what we're
14:44looking at is the outcome and not the process which gave
14:50rise to that outcome, then any hesitation we feel towards
14:57bringing about that outcome as the result of that particular
15:01act is due to what we might call a certain kind of
15:07squeamishness.
15:09The utilitarian says, and we started with the quotes from
15:13Mill for this reason, that thinking about who does an act
15:19is morally irrelevant, just as thinking about who gets the
15:24goods is morally irrelevant.
15:27What matters, says the greatest happiness principle,
15:31is how much aggregate happiness is produced; what
15:37matters not, except in so far as it affects the amount of
15:41happiness, is who produces that happiness or where that
15:46happiness goes.
15:49So there is room on the consequentialist picture for
15:52second-order thinking about the
15:55distributions of happiness.
15:57If gross inequities in the amount of happiness across a
16:00society produces itself less happiness, then we can take
16:05that into consideration in our calculus.
16:09If performing a particular kind of act produces in an
16:12individual less happiness, we can take that into
16:16consideration in our calculus.
16:18But ultimately the only things that go into the equation in
16:22determining whether an act is morally right is the amount of
16:27happiness and not where that happiness is distributed.
16:33Now, as Epictetus pointed out, some things are up to us and
16:39some things are not up to us.
16:42And when Jim arrives in Pedro's village, one of the
16:48things that is not up to him is the fact that he faces a
16:54forced choice of the structure that Pedro has
16:58presented him with.
17:01It goes without saying that what Pedro has done is
17:04outrageous, but the structure of the situation that Jim
17:08confronts is a very simple one.
17:10Either Pedro will kill twenty people or Jim will kill one
17:17person and the other nineteen will not die.
17:21That's what's there for Jim to be deciding on.
17:26Nonetheless, 75% of the 75% of you who thought that Jim did
17:32the right thing in that situation think that Jim ought
17:37to feel some squeamishness about carrying out that act.
17:43What Williams points out is that if one takes seriously
17:47the consequentialist picture, then perhaps the morally right
17:52thing to do is to try to cultivate in oneself moral
17:58sentiments that accord with one's moral judgments.
18:04If through rational argumentation and reflection
18:11you come to realize of yourself that--although you
18:16are committed to racial equality, although you are
18:19committed to gender equality, although you are committed to
18:23equality regardless of gender identification, you're
18:27committed to not being ageist, you're committed to not being
18:31discriminatory on the basis of physical disability--you
18:36might, as a result of having lived in a society largely
18:39structured in ways that encode a kind of residual racism and
18:46sexism and homophobia, you might find in yourself certain
18:50sentiments that lead you instantaneously to respond in
18:56ways that run contrary to what your moral commitments tell
19:00you you ought to do.
19:02In those cases, I take it you think that there's some moral
19:08mandate upon you to try to get rid of
19:12those instinctive responses.
19:14If you're really committed to anti-racism, then you want to
19:20the extent possible to have a harmonious soul when engaging
19:24in interracial encounters.
19:26If your reason tells you that you're committed to
19:29anti-racism, you want your spirit and appetite to be in
19:33line in that way.
19:36So there are instances where morality on reflection tells
19:41us that something is right, and the consequence of that
19:46for our behavior towards ourselves is that we ought to
19:49try to cultivate in ourselves instincts that
19:53correspond to that.
19:55Williams says the utilitarian should say that in cases like
20:03the Jim case, Jim is like the residual racist. He knows what
20:11the right thing to do is, but he has a residual tendency to
20:20be pulled in the morally wrong direction.
20:25If you don't think that it's true that Jim ought to change
20:29his attitudes in that case, and you do think that the
20:35residual implicit racist ought to try to change her attitude,
20:40it would be useful to try to think about what holds those
20:44two cases apart.
20:48OK, so that's what I want to say in closing about the
20:53utilitarianism and it's critics.
20:56And we'll return as I said to those issues twice more, once
21:01on Thursday when we read Judy Thomson's trolley problem
21:04paper and once next Tuesday when we look at some empirical
21:08work on that question, which suggests a naturalistic
21:12explanation for why it is that Jim feels the
21:15hesitation that he does.
21:17What I want to do now is to introduce you to the third of
21:22all the main moral outlooks that we're going to consider
21:26this semester.
21:27So last lecture we looked very carefully at consequentialist
21:31moral theories in the form of John Stuart Mill, and those
21:35are theories which locate the moral value of an act in its
21:39consequences.
21:41In the first part of the class we spent a lot of time looking
21:46at Aristotle's virtue theory, which located the moral worth
21:51of an act in the actor.
21:54Remember we looked at acts having more worth only if
21:58they're done as the result of a sort of
22:01constancy of character.
22:04What we're going to look at today is the third piece of
22:09this story, of a moral view that says the morality
22:15attached to an action is not the result of what the actor
22:20is like, it's not the result of what the consequences are
22:23like, rather it is about the act itself.
22:28In particular, we're going to look at the deontological
22:30theory of Immanuel Kant.
22:34So, Immanuel Kant was an 18th century German philosopher
22:42who, like Plato and Aristotle, provided a comprehensive and
22:46systematic philosophical theory that to this day is
22:51taken seriously as one of the ways one might make sense of
22:57the world as a whole.
23:00Kant has theories of metaphysics, that is, what
23:03kind of stuff there is.
23:05He has theories of epistemology, that is, how we
23:07know about what kind of stuff there is.
23:10He has theories of ethics, what the right thing to do is.
23:13And he has theories of aesthetics, that is, what
23:16gives things aesthetic value.
23:20Famously, Kant articulated his views about the three major
23:24domains of philosophy three enormous and dense books: the
23:30first, The Critique of Pure Reason, which told you about
23:35what the world is like and how we know it to be that way,
23:39which he wrote first in 1781 and then revised; the second,
23:43The Critique of Practical Reason, which is an account of
23:46the nature of morality; and the third, The Critique of
23:50Judgment, which is an account of the nature
23:53of aesthetic value.
23:56But in addition to those dense works Kant also wrote what he
24:03took to be more popular presentations of his view.
24:10In the case of metaphysics, he wrote a book called The
24:13Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics.
24:17And in the case of ethics, he wrote something that he calls
24:19the Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, which
24:23is of course the work from which we read
24:26excerpts for today.
24:29So I give you this context because I want you to know
24:33that, as hard as the reading that we did from Kant was, I
24:38chose for you perhaps the easiest part of the easiest
24:43book that he wrote.
24:47So, what should you take home from Kant if you take home
24:53nothing else?
24:55If you take home nothing else from our reading of Kant, I
25:00want you to take home Kant's idea of the categorical
25:04imperative.
25:05And my goal in the remainder of lecture today is to bring
25:10you, by reading through with you the text of Kant that we
25:16had today, to a point where you will be well positioned to
25:20understand what Kant means by the categorical imperative.
25:26And depending on how the next twenty minutes go, we'll get
25:29to that either right at the end of today's lecture or
25:33right at the beginning of Thursday's.
25:39OK, so Kant's text, the Grounding for the Metaphysics
25:43of Morals begins with a very famous passage where Kant
25:48says, "nothing can be regarded as good without qualification
25:53except the good will." This claim should be familiar to
25:59you, O readers of Book II of Plato's The Republic.
26:05This is the classic distinction between things
26:09that have intrinsic value and things that are merely of
26:15instrumental worth.
26:18And indeed much in the way that Plato's Socrates does,
26:24Kant goes on to enumerate some things which fall into the
26:30other category, the category of things that are of mere
26:34instrumental utility.
26:36Among the things that cannot be regarded as good without
26:40qualification, says Kant, are talents of the mind like
26:45intelligence and wit, qualities of temperament like
26:49courage and perseverance, gifts of fortune like power
26:54and riches and honor and health.
26:57And he says, taking a direct gibe at Aristotle, and noting
27:02as such that he's so doing, neither can the ancient
27:06virtues--(oh, my goodness, how do I close that
27:12email?)--neither can the ancient virtues of moderation
27:22and self control be considered as good in themselves.
27:26Why?
27:28Because though being intelligent, or brave, or
27:32rich, or controlled, will help you to achieve the goals that
27:37you have, they don't determine what those goals might be.
27:44They magnify your effectiveness as an agent, but
27:47they don't determine the valence, the
27:50value of your agency.
27:52So, says Kant, a witty, persevering, rich, healthy,
28:00moderate thief will be an outstanding thief--but that
28:06doesn't make his thiefdom good.
28:10Each of the virtues that has traditionally been extolled as
28:14a virtue, says Kant, gains its value only in so far as the
28:21good will is part of it.
28:25Now a good will, says Kant, is good not because of what it
28:30affects or accomplishes, it's good in itself.
28:36When I say that Kant is a critic of consequentialism I
28:42am not exaggerating.
28:45Kant doesn't think that the outcome of
28:50the act is what matters.
28:53And in an extraordinarily famous passage, famous in part
28:58because of the rather shocking translation which has come
29:02down to us of it, Kant says, "the good will would remain
29:08good, even if by the niggardly provision of step-motherly
29:14nature it wholly lacked the power to accomplish its
29:21purpose." By which he means, even if you with your good
29:27will were frustrated in all of the goals that you set out to
29:33achieve, your actions would still have moral worth.
29:37And somewhat more poetically and a bit less vocabulary that
29:45is challenging to the modern ear, Kant says, even if it
29:49didn't achieve its outcome "it would like a jewel still shine
29:53by its own light as something which has
29:56full value in itself.
29:58Its usefulness or fruitlessness can neither
30:01augment nor its value."
30:04Now the question is this: How could anybody come
30:07to have this view?
30:08How could anybody have a view of morality that says, what
30:12matters for an act to be moral is not the outcome that it
30:16produces, but rather the description under which the
30:21act is done?
30:22What I want to try to do right now is to put you inside the
30:26Kantian picture so that you get a sense of what that
30:31worldview looks like.
30:33So in the passages that we read for today, Kant makes
30:37three particular claims. He says that an action must be
30:42done from duty in order to have moral worth.
30:49The first notion that I want to try to explicate for you is
30:51the Kantian notion of something
30:53being done from duty.
30:57An action done from duty, says Kant in his second
31:01proposition, has its moral worth not in the purpose that
31:05is to be attained by it, but in the maxim according to
31:10which the action is determined.
31:14So the way that an action done from duty has more worth is
31:18not by looking to see what outcome you're expecting from
31:23it, but rather by looking to see under what
31:28characterization did you perform the act.
31:32And again, I'll spell out what each of those terms mean.
31:36Finally, says Kant, duty, which lies at the heart of
31:41deontological moral theory, "duty is the necessity of an
31:47action done out of the respect for the law." Kant believes
31:55that it is only when you subject your will to a law
32:02which you have made for yourself--that is, the moral
32:06law whose binding force upon you you have recognized--it is
32:11only in that circumstance that you are truly free.
32:17So Kant says, "duty is the necessity of an action done
32:21out of the respect for the law," and when you perform an
32:25action out of respect for the moral law, says Kant, then and
32:31only then do you act autonomously.
32:34OK, so three, incredibly complicated,
32:37subtle claims from Kant.
32:40Let's try getting to the bottom of what they mean.
32:45So let's start with the first claim, the claim that an act
32:49has moral worth only when it is done from duty.
32:55So Kant points out that there's three kinds of
32:58motivation that we might have in performing an act.
33:01We might do an act out of duty, we might do it out of
33:05inclination, or we might do it out of self-interest. Only
33:11cases of the first kind, in fact only pure cases of the
33:16first kind, have moral worth.
33:22Actions that are done merely in keeping with, but not from
33:26moral duty, have no moral worth according to Kant.
33:33So if you obey the law but you do so only out of self
33:39interest, your obedience, says Kant, has no moral worth.
33:45if you rescue the drowning child from the pond but you do
33:50so only because there's a sign on the tree that says, "Rescue
33:53Drowning Children: $1 Million Reward," your act
33:58has no moral worth.
34:01So we can think about what Kant's claim amounts to and
34:05how it differs from the other ones that we've been looking
34:08at by thinking of the question space in
34:12terms of a flow chart.
34:15So we're trying to decide whether a particular action
34:18has moral worth, and the first thing we want to ask ourselves
34:23is: "Does the action accord with duty?
34:27If the answer to that is no, that is, if you've done
34:29something like lied, or stolen something, or murdered
34:34somebody, or allowed something terrible to happen in front of
34:38you that you could have easily, at no cost to
34:40yourself, prevented, all of the authors that we've read,
34:45not surprisingly, say that the act has no moral worth--
34:50Oh so, did that just disappear that was supposed to
34:53be in red on black?
34:54Is it completely invisible from the back?
34:57Oh, that's a pity--
34:59OK, so what that says in red is no lying and stealing--
35:05but it's in red.
35:08I can't change it in the middle of the slides, but I'll
35:11remind you what those things say.
35:13OK--
35:14The second question that we ask, having eliminated now
35:19from the realm of morally worthy acts those that don't
35:23accord with duty, is: What motive the act was done with?
35:29So perhaps you act in a morally worthy way out of
35:33self-interest without immediate inclinations.
35:36So you pay your taxes because if you don't pay your taxes
35:40you're going to have to pay more taxes.
35:42You obey the speed limit but only because you were afraid
35:45you might get caught otherwise.
35:48Mill says those acts have moral worth.
35:53Kant says no, they don't--
35:58And again, that's supposed to be in red but it's now
36:01invisible--
36:03Suppose that you do an act in such a way that you have an
36:08inclination that's in keeping with duty.
36:10So Kant thinks you have a duty not to commit suicide, and he
36:13considers a case where you fail to commit suicide because
36:17you're happy.
36:18Kant thinks you need to be loyal to your life partner,
36:22but he says that there's no moral worth to remaining loyal
36:25to your life partner while you are in love.
36:29There's no moral worth, says Kant, to acting kindly towards
36:32somebody when you feel sympathy towards them.
36:37Because in those cases, though your act is in keeping with
36:43what morality demands, it's not done because it is the
36:49right thing to do.
36:51You are doing it because your inclination happens to line up
36:57with what morality demands of you.
37:01Now Aristotle, of course, took this situation to be the one
37:07in which moral worth is paradigmatically expressed.
37:13But Kant thinks in such cases you can not tell that an act
37:20was done from the moral law.
37:24All you can see is that it was done in keeping with the moral
37:27law, it corresponds to what the moral law demands, but we
37:32can't see from that that the motive was duty.
37:38It's only in the third case, the case where you act from
37:44duty without any inclination and without any self-interest,
37:49that Kant thinks the moral worth of an
37:51action can be seen.
37:55If you preserve your life when you feel the inclination to do
37:59otherwise, if you act kindly in situations where there's no
38:04reward for you and you feel no sympathy, in those cases, says
38:09Kant, we can see that the act was done, not merely in
38:14keeping with, but from the moral law.
38:20This isn't to say that Kant doesn't think a life lived in
38:24the way that Aristotle suggested life is lived is a
38:28badly [well]
38:28lived life.
38:30Cases where your inclination happens to line up with duty
38:34hopefully keep you out of this box of doing the wrong thing,
38:39but they don't allow you to test your character and see of
38:45yourself that the motivation that you have for doing the
38:49right thing is to conform to what the moral
38:53law demands of you.
38:56So with that understanding of what it is to act from duty in
39:01mind, we're now in a position to make sense of Kant's second
39:06claim in our reading for today.
39:09Then "an action done from duty has its moral worth not in the
39:14purpose that's to be obtained by it, but in the maxim
39:18according to which the action is determined." So remember
39:23we've learned that an action done from duty is one that you
39:26do in conformity with what morality demands, because that
39:33is what morality demands.
39:37Not because it's in your self interest, not because you were
39:41inclined to behave in that way, but because that act is
39:47what morality demands of you.
39:51But in order to determine whether an act is what
39:53morality demands of you, that act needs to be described in a
39:59particular way to you.
40:02And the way that you describe that act to yourself makes use
40:06of what Kant calls a maxim, a subjective principle of
40:13volition--that is, a description of something that
40:16is about you, the subject, that's says what your desires
40:23towards behavior are in that situation.
40:26A subjective principle of volition, that is, a
40:29description under which the act is done.
40:33So it takes the form, perhaps: "In all engagings with all who
40:39come into my shop, I will provide them with an honest
40:45accounting of how much their transaction is worth,
40:51regardless of whether I could be discovered cheating in
40:55this." Or: "In all of my encounters with those who are
41:00weak and in need of my help, I will provide them with the aid
41:05that I can regardless of whether that would be of
41:08benefit to me."
41:11"Only by considering the motive and not by considering
41:17the outcome can the action be expressive of the good will
41:23itself." "The good will is the only thing that is good in
41:29itself," says Kant, and it's only by looking at the
41:34description under which an act is done that we can determine
41:41whether the good will was implicated in the right way in
41:46the choice to perform that action.
41:51Third claim: "Duty is the necessity of an action done
41:57out of the respect for the law." So we know that an act
42:01has moral worth only if it's done from duty.
42:05We know that in order to be done from duty it needs to be
42:08done under a certain description.
42:12And now we're told what it is that this duty amounts to.
42:18In order for an act to be done from duty, says Kant, it must
42:23have been done with explicit recognition that what one is
42:29doing at that point is respecting the moral law in so
42:33far as it articulates what morality demands of you.
42:39Not in so far that it articulates ways that you
42:42might have a well-ordered, harmonious, happy soul.
42:47Not in so far that it articulates ways in which lots
42:50of happiness could be spread around to lots of people.
42:55Out of respect rather, says Kant, for the fact that it is
43:00what morality demands of you.
43:04The moral worth of an act, says Kant, does not lie in its
43:11effect, for the effect could have come
43:15about in multiple ways.
43:17I can set out to release a biological gas in a subway
43:23that's intended to kill thousands of people, and
43:26because I'm not very good at chemistry, the result could be
43:30that I produce an enormous amount of joy in those
43:34thousands of people.
43:36The effect can come about in lots of ways.
43:40Kant says Mill would have to say that in releasing that gas
43:44I have done something with more worth.
43:47Kant says: No--what matters is the description under which
43:54the act is done, and in particular that that
43:57description be that one have respect for the law itself.
44:04So I told you I was going to get you to the point of the
44:08categorical imperative, and I am going to end the lecture
44:11today by bringing you right up to that point, and then next
44:14class we'll talk about it in more detail.
44:17So the question is this, right?
44:18This is a pressing, exciting question in Kant.
44:22All right, I realize that we're in the in-Kant part of
44:24things, but this is really exciting.
44:27"What sort of law...?", says Kant.
44:28He even puts a "but" to get you excited.
44:31But, he says--cliffhanger...--
44:33"what sort of law can that be, the thought of which must
44:37determine the will without reference to any "intent"
44:39expected effect, so the will can be called absolutely good
44:43without qualification?" It's so exciting!
44:44We're finding something that's going to make us genuinely
44:47autonomous and free and moral!
44:50Well remember: it can't be anything particular, it can't
44:53be anything specific about the world or it's outcomes.
44:56What can it be?
44:58It can be the will's universal conformity of its actions to
45:04law as such!
45:06That is, what makes the law binding is the fact that it is
45:13recognized by all rational agents as binding.
45:20In particular, it takes the form of what Kant calls the
45:25categorical imperative.
45:28And here's the formulation of the categorical imperative
45:32that we got in our reading for today: "Never act except in
45:38such a way that I can also will that my act maxim should
45:43become a universal law." Never do anything that you couldn't
45:49will everybody else to do at the same time.
45:55And we'll begin next lecture with the example that Kant
45:58uses to illustrate this, namely the lying promise, talk
46:02a little bit more about various formulations of the
46:05categorical imperative, and then move to Judy Thomson's
46:09trolley problem paper.
46:35[SIDE CONVERSATION]

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