Moral Philosophy�of Christian Korsgaard

Ebrahim Azadegan

Sharif University of Technology

Spring 1399/2020

Who Am I?

• Claim: I am a rational being—constitute myself as an agent, by choosing my actions in accordance with the principles of practical reason, especially moral principles, in order to be a morally good agent.
• Three main questions:

1. Who am I? Autonomous rational agent in the process of self-constitution

2. How could I constitute myself? By free choosing of our actions,

3. How should I construct myself as a good person? By following the rules of morality.

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Autonomy

• It seems that we are capable and able to control our actions. We have control over our actions. How could it be possible?
• We are aware not only of our representations and desires as such but also of the way in which they tend to operate on us. That is what I mean by saying that we are aware of the potential grounds of our beliefs and actions as potential grounds. This awareness [of normative concepts] is the source of Reason.
• This means that the space of reflective distance [between the ground of action/belief and action/belief itself] presents us with both the possibility and the necessity of exerting a kind of control over our beliefs and actions.

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Efficacy

• Autonomous action ought to be efficacious in order to work with the natural causal mechanisms that he can use to make things happen in the world.
• By following the categorical imperative we render ourselves autonomous and by following the principle of instrumental reason, we render ourselves efficacious. So by following these principles we constitute ourselves as agents: that is, we take control of our movements.

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Rationalism vs. Empiricism

• Empiricists take instrumental or prudential rationality as constitutive grounds of normativity.
• Rationalists take practical principles as self evident and so normativity is sui genres requires no ground.
• However, Korsgaard argues “that the empiricist account, while it may explain how we are motivated by rational principles, cannot explain how we can be guided by them, or more generally how they can bind us. The rationalist account, by contrast, cannot explain why rational principles necessarily motivate us.”

Three Kinds of principles as requirements of practical reasons

• 1. Instrumental principle
• 2. prudential principle or self-interest: to maximize the sum total of our satisfactions or pleasures over the course of our whole lives
• 3. Moral principles
• Identifies as categorical imperatives, represent requirements of practical reason. If all of these claims are true, we exhibit practical irrationality in failing to take the means to our ends; in pursuing local satisfactions at the expense of our overall good; and in acting immorally.

Foundation of Moral Requirements

• Empiricists: they are based on the supposedly uncontroversial hypothetical imperatives—say, by showing that moral conduct is in our interest and so is required by the principle of prudence. Positivists, Hume
• Rationalist: or moral Realists believe in the existence of certain normative facts or entities to which moral requirements somehow refer. Kant?, Leibnitz, Nagle, Parfit

Internalism vs. Externalism about moral reason

• Externalism: moral facts or reasons exist independent of our wills.
• Internalism: moral reasons depends on our will in a form that they motivate us to act.
• The internalism requirement specifies that practical reasons must motivate us insofar as we are susceptible to the influence of reason.

Empiricist vs. Rationalist

• More importantly, both empiricists and rationalists have supposed that the instrumental principle itself either needs no justification or has an essentially trivial one.
• Specifically, they have thought that the ‘‘necessitation of the will’’ to which Kant refers can be conceived either as a form of causal necessity or as a response to logical necessity.
• Empiricists who conceive it as a form of causal necessity suppose that the instrumental principle is either obviously normative or does not need to be normative because we are reliably motivated to take the means to our ends. Instrumental thoughts cause motives.

Rationalism

• On a rationalist view, by contrast, to be rational is to deliberately conform one’s will to certain rational truths, or truths about reasons, which exist independently of the will.
• Neither of these general conceptions of practical rationality yields an adequate account of instrumental rationality.
• A practical reason must function both as a motive and as a guide, or a requirement.

Kant and rationalism

• According to the Kantian conception, to be rational just is to be autonomous. That is: to be governed by reason, and to govern yourself, are one and the same thing.
• The principles of practical reason are constitutive of autonomous action: they do not represent external restrictions on our actions, whose power to motivate us is therefore inexplicable, but instead describe the procedures involved in autonomous willing. But they also function as normative or guiding principles, because in following these procedures we are guiding ourselves

The source of normativity

• The source of normativity: the autonomy or self-government of the rational agent.
• the mature Kantian view traces both instrumental reason and moral reason to a common normative source.

Humean Account

• Desire/Belief model of rational action.
• Since categorical imperatives can just be believed so we should ask whether beliefs alone can motivate us to act? Since the idea of being motivated by belief alone seems mysterious, the suspicion arises that categorical imperatives cannot meet the internalism requirement, and they are therefore supposed to be especially problematic.

Humean account

• Distinction between caused and guided by reason
• We accept that the rationality of an action, depends upon the agent’s being motivated by her own recognition of the rational necessity of doing the action.
• But Hume repeatedly asserts that there is only one coherent sense to be given to the idea of necessity (T 1.3.14,171; T 2.3.1,400). All necessity is causal necessity, in Hume’s somewhat special sense: the necessity with which observers draw the conclusion that the effect will follow from the cause (T 1.3.14,171).

Humean failour

• And all that in turn means is that observers who know what the person’s ends are may predict that certain conduct will follow.
• The person herself, the one whose behavior is in this way predicted, is not guided by any dictate of reason.
• This suggests that Hume’s view is that there is no such thing as practical reason at all.

Argument against Humean account

• if Hume believed in instrumental reason he

would have to accept instrumental rationality but

• He would have to believe that the instrumental principle instructs us to derive a reason from what we are going to do.
• But Hume, after all, is famous for arguing that you cannot derive an Ought from an Is.
• So, Hume should deny even the instrumental reason.

Hume

• The problem is coming from the fact that Hume identifies a person’s end as what he wants most, and the criterion of what the person wants most appears to be what he actually does.
• Hume has no resources for distinguishing the activity of the person herself from the operation of beliefs, desires, and other forces in her.

Why be moral

• Definition?
• Moral norms externally exist and following God’s will
• namely, that the normativity of the principles of practical reason springs from, or reflects that fact that, the soul that does not follow them ultimately disintegrates. See also SN 3.3.1, pp. 100–2. If one of the central arguments of this essay is also correct—that there can be no instrumental norms unless there are also unconditional norms—then this lends support to Plato’s claim that a completely unjust soul would also be incapable‘‘achieving anything as a unit’’ (R 1.351e–352a).

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Rationalism

• The instrumental principle cannot be an evaluative truth that we apply in practice, because it is essentially the principle of application itself: that is, it is the principle in accordance with which we are operating when we apply truths in practice. So if we are to use the extended instrumental principle to make the connection between the rational agent and the external facts about reasons, we cannot give the instrumental principle a realist foundation. But if we cannot give a realist account of the instrumental principle, it seems unlikely that we will end up giving realist accounts of the other principles of practical reason

Rational Internalism

willing an end just is committing yourself to realizing the end. Willing an end, in other words, is an essentially first-personal and normative act. To will an end is to give oneself a law, hence, to govern oneself. That law is not the instrumental principle; it is some law of the form: realize this end. That of course is equivalent to ‘‘Take the means to this end.’’

• So willing an end is equivalent to committing yourself

Self-legislation

• The instrumental principle can only be normative if we take ourselves to be capable of giving laws to ourselves—or, in Kant’s own phrase, if we take our own wills to be legislative.
• For this, of course, is almost already the third formulation of the categorical imperative, which Kant associates with ‘‘the concept of every rational being as one who must regard himself as giving universal law through all the maxims of his will’’

Hegelian Question

• But if the argument shows that our unconditional principles must be laws of autonomy, then it brings us back home to the old Hegelian question:
• can any substantive requirements be derived from the mere fact of our autonomy?
• How much determinate content do the constitutive norms of autonomy have?
• And does this content coincide with, or include, morality?

End of self-legislation : furmula of humanity

• The categorical imperative is a principle of practical reason that must tell us to have certain ends, and that is inseparable from the principle that tells us to take the means to those ends.
• Practical principles govern the will, and a principle that governs the will must tell us to pursuit of certain ends.

Conclusion of lecture 1: critic of Korsgaard’s emphatic view

• Categorical imperative is not aimless but it must contain humanity as its aim in order to be moral Law.
• So while the source of normativity is our autonomy, the source of morality is our humanity oriented autonomy.
• The principle of self-love, according to Kant

governs the evil will, dictates something like the maximization of a person’s satisfaction.

Lecture 2: Ethical Egoism

The Myth of Egoism

• Egoism: we ought to do actions that maximizes our own interests and desires. (Broad, Feinberg, Hume, May, Sober, Stich, Smith, Mackie, Kalin, Hobbes)
• Normative ethics: ought/ metaethics: self-interest as good
• Egoism sees itself as a naturalistic view, which meets the requirements of internalism, requires no extravagant assumptions about the metaphysics of the good or the possibility of pure practical reason.

Egoism vs. Utilitarianism

• Utilitarians like Sidgwick think that egoism is the rival of morality while for Kant we can morally want our desires to be satisfied as long as they don’t violate the categorical imperatives.
• Ethical egoism: we ought to deserve the rights of others since they will deserve our own rights so we ought to pretend to weight others.
• Two main problems with egoism: others rights, sacrification

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Can an egoist be a Kantian or utilitrarian?

• One egoist can adopt Kantian principle of morality on her egoist ground! She doesn’t pretend to be a moralist but she adopted based on her egoism to be moralist. Is this a coherent position? NO, since there is a difference between acting according to the law and for the sake of the law.
• Utilitarian ethics is an impartial point of view. So the individual persons interests may be ignored in the average of a better world.
• See Brink 1997, “self-love and Altruism”, social philosophy and policy .

Egoism and internalist requirement

• One could deny that morality must be practical in the required sense.
• We do not always withdraw moral judgments when we learn that the agent could not be motivated to follow them.
• Or perhaps moral judgments must only be capable of motivating rational agents.

Moore’s argument against Egoism

• if x is good, everyone ought to maximize it wherever it appears; egoists hold that I ought to maximize x only when it appears in me.
• So She both would deny and be committed to affirming that others ought to maximize her good.
• Broad’s response: it is not part of egoism to hold that what is good ought to be pursued by everyone. So goodness is agent-dependent.
• Nagle’s response: Egoist will lose her sympathy to alleviate the pains of others.

Prichard’s argument against Egoism

• The source of duty is a moral Law. And a law is universal. So we have no duty to pursue our happiness.
• I do not, for example, think the reason I have a duty to help a drowning child is that helping benefits me.

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Parfit’s argument against egoism

• Egoism conflicts with the conception of personal identity: namely the continuity of consciousness.
• I know that in the future I will interest in X but now I have no interest to satisfy the conditions that in the future I would have been gained X.
• Also I could be a completely different person with different attitudes and desires in the future. So my self-interests now will be differ totally from future. Then what would be really good for me is in contrast with what will be good for me.

Korsgaard’s Regress argument

• Regress argument: She begins by distinguishing conditional values and which are valuable in some circumstances and unconditional values.
• We could ask of all conditional value ‘why is that valuable’. We could ask about the reasons of choosing each end.
• Every instrumental value (even egoistic values) needs to some prudential value—because of conflicts—and every prudential value needs some unconditional rule
• To halt the regress we need an unconditional value that is universal and agent-neutral: impartial
• So any partial and hedonistic reason should be underpinned by moral reason.

Korsgaard’s Private language argument (in the source of normativity)

• Wittgenstein’s PLA: it is impossible that there be a language in which the meanings are determined by a single person and the standard of correctness of applying a term depends solely on the agents judgments.
• Kripke: Skepticism and then pragmatism about normativity of language
• But Korsgaard tries to see the source of normativity of language and of morality in the public agent-neutral reasons.

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Korsgaard’s PLA

• publicity condition: It is essential to a consideration counting as a reason at all that it is possible to exchange and share that consideration with other agents.
• Reason should have normative force for everyone
• Any genuinely private reason cannot be a real reason.
• But, egoism doesn’t violate publicity condition: Nagle.
• My response : Egoism is the violation of the formula of humanity. You sell yourself for a sort of pleasure.

Another argument against egoism

• 1Kantian premise: The rational free will is the source of value.
• 2So rational will is what is unconditionally valuable.
• 3The good will is the only thing that has its value in itself, it is in the strictest sense intrinsically valuable.
• 4Egoism is intrinsically conditional.
• 5So egoism cannot necessarily lead us to goodness.
• 6Egoism cannot be a moral theory: what we ought to do deliberately, consciously and freely, violation of it leads to irrationality, not mistake.

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How Egoism could be compatible with rationalism

• Satisfaction of desires needs conflict-settlement which ultimately needs rationality.
• We don’t talk of “real” desires, as a Hegelian term, but we talk about rational desires. Since our project is to reach a moral theory or practical rationality that consists in norms of free, conscious and deliberate actions.
• So we ought to pursue our rational desires = interests ; neither “real” nor unconscious desires.
• This of course satisfies norms of practical rationality and the internalist requirement .

Happiness in Kant

• “To assure one’s happiness is a duty (at least indirectly); for, want of satisfaction with one’s condition . . . could easily become a great temptation to transgression of duty.” G.4399.
• But we should distinguish between happiness that is grounded upon inclinations and happiness that is grounded upon duty. The latter has moral worth.
• How duty could be the ground of happiness?

Natural Law

• “There is, however, one end that can be presupposed as actual in the case of all rational beings . . . and therefore one purpose that they not merely could have but that we can safely presuppose they all actually do have by a natural necessity, and that purpose is happiness.” (G 4:415)
• Korsgaard’s question: Is this necessity contradict our freedom? No.
• It means that there is a natural law if we freely choose to follow it we will reach our happiness.
• Our duty is not to pursue happiness but to follow the rules of rationality (natural Laws).

�One of the deepest problems of philosophy: Natural Law vs. law of nature

• Natural Law (set of categorical imperatives) is descriptive and normative but laws of nature is descriptive
• Action is the result of following or transgressing natural law but events are description of what happens according to laws of nature.
• This problem rests behind the persistent philosophical temptation to try to reduce both action and reason, as forms of self-determination, to special forms of causation.

Kantian normative conception of natural law

• we can derive the content of the principles of reason from this very conception of what they are.
• The principles of reason, on this view, are not just principles that direct us to do this or that, but principles whose content captures the very essence of activity or self-determination.
• Addiction for example, is not a mistake about “real desires” but it is an irrational action. Hegel-Kant dispute. Since he violates the norms of self-constitution and self-control. Also it violates the internalist requirement, instead of naturalism it becomes dogmatic rationalist.

Kantian internalism

• Natural laws are dependent on our will. We are legislators of the laws.
• the moral law applies to us only if respect for law can serve as an incentive for the will.
• So our desires are neither incentives nor motives, but they can be so.

Rawls example

• A man is going away to fight in a war, in which he may possibly die. The night before he leaves, the devil comes and offers him a choice. Either while he is away, his family will thrive and flourish, but he will get word that they are suffering and miserable; or while he is away his family will suffer and be miserable, but he will get word they are thriving and happy. He must choose now, and of course he will be made to forget that his conversation with the devil and the choice it resulted in ever took place.
• Subjective vs. objective happiness. Pursuing subjective happiness will lead to madness: detachment from reality

Conclusion

• نیچه غروب بتها. نکته پردازی ها و خدنگ اندازی ها 12:
• اگر ادمی برای چرای زندگی خود پاسخی داشته باشد کم و بیش با هر چگونه ای میسازد. انگلیسی است که در پی شادمانی است نه ادمی زاد.
• ترجمه داریوش اشوری

Lecture 3: Plato and Kant on Self-constitution

Reason vs. Passion

• The challenge between empiricist and rationalist that leads to egoist/moralist debate is based on an ancient combat model between reason and passion in every person.
• Reason: divinely inspired, right oriented, good
• Passion: downward, mundane, animal oriented, deceitful
• what is the essence of this person, in whom reason and passion are both forces, neither of them identified with the person herself, and between which she is to choose?
• And how—on what principle—can she possibly choose between them?

Constitutional model vs. combat model

• Combat model: rationalism/empiricism debate on strict contrast between reason and passion. From the third-person perspective, we do sometimes explain a person’s actions as the result of one motive being

‘‘stronger’’ than another, for instance when the person has conflicting passions.

• Constitutional model: The actions which are most truly a person’s own are precisely those actions which most fully unify her and therefore most fully constitute her as their author.
• What makes an action bad, by contrast, is that it springs in part not from the person but from something at work in or on the person, something that threatens her volitional unity.

Plato

• Three arguments in Republic in favor of justice as good:
• Outdoing argument: justice is a form of virtue and knowledge (R 349a–350d)
• Unity Argument: justice is what unites us a s a person, and a group to achieve a purpose as a unit. (R 351b–352c)
• Function Argument: the just person is happiest (R 352d–354a)

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Debate with Thrasymachus 1

• Thrasymachus: “So we see that injustice, given scope, has greater strength and freedom and power than justice; which proves what I started by saying, that justice is the interest of the stronger party, injustice the interest and profit of oneself.”
• Outdoing argument: So the good man, who has knowledge, will not try to compete with his like, but only with his opposite. Analogy between good, wisdom, knowledge and just-man.

‘While the bad and ignorant man will try to compete both with his like and with his opposite.’ like an unjust man.

But we agreed that each of them is of the same kind as the one he is like.’ Thus, the just man is wise and good.

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Debate with Thyramachus 2

• Unity Argument: Thrasymachus had claimed that injustice is a source of strength. He says that a state might be unjust and wrongly try to reduce others to subjection, and having succeeded in so doing continue to hold them in subjection
• On the contrary, says Socrates, it is a source of disunity and therefore of weakness. There must be cooperation among thieves if they are to achieve any common action.
• If it is a function of injustice to produce hatred wherever it is, won’t it cause men to hate each other and quarrel.
• Complete injustice would be incapable of doing anything.

Debate with Thyramachus 3

• Function Argument: Using the idea of ‘function’, he argues that a man needs justice to enable him to perform his own particular function and so to achieve happiness.
• Happiness (eudaimōn )depends on conformity to our nature as active beings
• Function for every individual is leading to her telos (excellence)
• But justice is the peculiar excellence of the mind and injustice its defect . So the man who has a good life is prosperous and happy .

Justice in Plato

• Proper function
• Coherence , no conflict
• Well-formed
• Unjust: usurp, conflict, hatred, issuing war without permission of congress, any unconstitutional action.
• Procedural vs. Substantive justice
• According to the procedural conception of justice, an action of the state is just if and only if it is the outcome of actually following the laws.

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Constitution of the soul

• Three parts of the soul: Appetite/ Reason/ spirit (thymos)
• Part of City: Ruler, Auxiliaries, Craftsmen
• Reason corresponds to the rulers and its function is to direct things, for the good of the whole person.
• Spirit corresponds to the auxiliaries and its function is to carry out the orders of reason.
• The appetites correspond to the rest of the citizens, and their business is to supply the person with whatever he needs.

What does make the soul unified?

• According to Plato, the normative force of the constitution consists in the fact that it makes it possible for the city to function as a single unified agent.
• Socrates says:
• One who is just does not allow any part of himself to do the work of another part or allow the various classes within him to meddle with each other. He regulates well what is really his own and rules himself. He puts himself in order, is his own friend, and harmonizes the three parts of himself like three limiting notes in a musical scale—high, low, and middle. Only then does he act. (R 443d–e)

Justice and goodness in Plato

• So there is a relation between just action, and good action. Just action is a self-legislative self-constitutive action according to the rules of reason.
• That leads to harmony between desires, appetites, inclinations and reason.
• This harmonious system that well functions will lead the agent as a unified agent to her goal that is her happiness and teleological goodness.

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Kant on self-constitution

• Categorical imperatives are the laws of freewill
• Since: Rational action should be universalizable and so should be unconditioned and so should be free.
• since you are autonomous, pleasure is not a law to you: nothing is a law to you except what you make a law for yourself.
• Inclination presents the proposal; reason decides whether to act on it or not, and the decision takes the form of a legislative act. This is clearly the Constitutional Model

How could there be a bad action?

• Plato: if passions rule us we where in conflict and civil war. Then we are not a unified person to act. How could we act badly.
• Kant: heteronymous action violates categorical imperative and so is not a free act of our will. So it is caused. How we could be then responsible for it?
• Plato : metaphysical concept of “constitutionality” (vs conflict)is the ground of normative concept of “justice”
• Kant: metaphysical concept of “autonomy” (vs heteronomy) is the ground of normative concept of “universalizablity”

Good vs. bad action.

• Building a good house and building a house are not different activities: for both are activities in which we must be guided by the functional or teleological norms (internal or constitutive norms) implicit in the idea of a house. Obviously, it doesn’t follow that every house is a good house. It does, however, follow that building bad houses is not a different activity from building good ones. It is the same activity, badly done.
• Highly controversial.
• Performing a good action and performing a bad action are different activities: both are activities in which we must be guided by the functional or teleological norms implicit in the idea of an action but good action is towards Good while bad action directs towards Bad and Evil.

But how can actions be defective, and still be actions?

• Unjust or non-universalizable actions would be defective: they would be bad as actions.
• Defective action is a mistake to put the maxims under the laws. Or to put unjust constitutional procedures .
• So if our reason is defective our constitutional procedures will produce defective actions (substantially defective while procedurally just) and also we cannot put our maxims under universal laws. So morality cannot govern us.
• Kant calls the principle of self-love, by a principle which subordinates moral considerations to those arising from inclination.

Responsibility of bad/good actions

• In Plato’s story, as in Kant’s, bad action is action governed by a principle of choice which is not reason’s own: a principle of honor (timocracy), prudence (oligarchy), wantonness (democracy), or obsession (tyranny). It is action, because it is chosen in accordance with the exercise of a principle by which the agent rules himself and under whose rule he is—in a sense—unified. Yet it is defective, because it is not reason’s own principle, and the unity that it produces is, at least in the three middle cases, contingent and unstable.
• In my opinion what unifies us is not justice but our intention towards our goal, whatever it is.

Unjust benefits!(why be moral)

• Consider a completely just soul, and give him all of the outward disadvantages of injustice and a completely unjust soul, and give him all of the outward benefits of justice
• Socrates is supposed to show that it is better to be just than unjust even then.
• Constitutive of justice requires full commitment to it. Your justice rests in the nature of your commitments. You can’t make a conditional commitment to justice.

Deliberative action is self-constitution

• Plato doesn’t merely prove that the just life is the one most worthy of choice. He proves the just life is the only one you can ought to choose.
• In other words, the principle of justice directs us to perform those actions that establish and maintain our volitional unity unity or integrity as a good person.
• According to Plato volitional unity is essential if you are to act as a person, as a single unified agent.
• So Deliberative action is self-constitution.

Rejoinder to Korsgaard’s unity argument

• Korsgaard: For you can’t, in the moment of deliberative action, choose to be something less than a single unified agent.
• That means you can’t exactly choose to act on any principle other than the principle of justice.
• My Rejoinder: So by choosing to act on any principle you will constitute yourself accordingly. Exactly you CAN choose to act on your passions contrary to reason as unified person who intends to be unjust. So you are responsible for injustice.

Rejoinder to Korsgaard’s universalizability argument

• 1. You regard the choice as yours, as the product of your own activity, because you regard the principle of choice as expressive, or representative, of yourself.
• 2.that particularistic willing makes it impossible for you to distinguish yourself, your principle of choice, from the various incentives on which you act. So particularistic will is impossible.
• 3. If a particularistic will is impossible, then when you will a maxim you must take it to be universal. Otherwisethere is nothing left here that is the person, the agent, that is his will as distinct from the play of incentives within him. He is not one person, but a series, a mere conglomeration, of unrelated impulses.
• 4. The categorical imperative is an internal standard for actions, because conformity to it it’s normative force is constitutive of an exercise of the will intentional action.

Conclusion

• A person can deliberately choose good or evil and constitute herself upon her chooses.

Lecture 4 Aristotle and Kant on virtue

Aristotle’s Ethics

• Ergon or functional view. ‘‘for all things that have a function or activity, the good and the ‘well’ is thought to reside in the function’’ (NE 1.7 1097b26–27).
• Function of the human being is ‘‘an active life of the person that has a rational principle’’ (NE 1.7 1098a3–4).
• Telos or aim: good: eudaimonia (happiness, flourishing, well-being)
• He says, not that happiness is virtue, but that it is virtuous activity. Living well consists in doing something, not just being in a certain state or condition.
• Laws: the rational part of the soul performed well, which is to say, in accordance with virtue (NE 1.7 1098a15–17).

Aristotle’s ethics

• Reaching virtue through learning and education
• Virtue is a form of life
• Virtue is a result of the choice of the mean
• What is then the mean and how it would be defined?
• Speusippus (successor of Plato in Academy) anti-hedonism, Eudoxos: hedonist. Aristotle Eudaimania is between these two positions.
• Value of contemplation and theology
• Aristotle is Elitist (McIntyre)

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Aristotle’s Ethics

• Moral virtue, or excellence of character, is the disposition (Grk hexis) to act excellently, which a person develops partly as a result of his upbringing, and partly as a result of his habit of action. Aristotle develops his analysis of character in Book II of the Nicomachean Ethics, where he makes this argument that character arises from habit—likening ethical character to a skill that is acquired through practice, such as learning a musical instrument.
• In Book III of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle argues that a person's character is voluntary, since it results from many individual actions which are under his voluntary control.

Aristotle’s Ethics

• Aristotle distinguishes the disposition to feel emotions of a certain kind (Shame modesty, indignation. ) from virtue  as the disposition to act excellently. Cardinal virtues: prudence, courage, justice , temperence
• Aristotle claims that a human's highest functioning must include reasoning, being good at what sets humans apart from everything else. Or, as Aristotle explains it, "The function of man is activity of soul in accordance with reason, or at least not without reason.“
• A person that does this is the happiest because they are fulfilling their purpose or nature as found in the rational soul.bookVI

Highest good: philosophical contemplation

• (The wise person will) be more than human. A man will not live like that by virtue of his humanness, but by virtue of some divine thing within him. His activity is as superior to the activity of the other virtues as this divine thing is to his composite character. Now if mind is divine in comparison with man, the life of the mind is divine in comparison with mere human life. We should not follow popular advice and, being human, have only mortal thoughts, but should become immortal and do everything toward living the best in us. (NE 10.7)

Plato’s argument

• First of all, each thing has a function, which is what one can do only or best with that thing (R 352e).
• Furthermore, everything that has a function has a virtue, which enables it to perform its function well (R 352b–c).
• The function of the soul is ‘‘taking care of things, ruling, deliberating, and the like,’’ since these are activities you could not perform with anything except your soul.
• Since the soul only performs its function well if it has the virtue associated with its function, a good soul rules, takes care of things, and in general ‘‘lives’’ well. (R 353e)

Aristotle vs. Plato

• Affinties: functional view about just and good man: teleological view
• Differences: eudaimonia vsVirtue:
• Virtue: arete: it is quite specifically a quality that makes you good at performing your function, that is rational activity. For Plato a just man can be just in the middle of tortures.
• eudaimonia has three different properties : 1. it is intrinsically good, it is good for all humans and 3. it is about whole life not just some moments of happiness.
• For Plato soul consists in reason and passion, and dualism of soul-body but for Aristotle, human being has form (soul) and matter (body) .
• he rejects Plato's idea that to be completely virtuous one must acquire, through a training in the sciences, mathematics, and philosophy, an understanding of what goodness is.
• Therefore practical wisdom, as he conceives it, cannot be acquired solely by learning general rules. We must also acquire, through practice, those deliberative, emotional, and social skills.

Functional view

• Controversies:
• 1. Teleological view: assignment of a purpose to everything + a form of reasoning from relative to absolute purposes
• 2. Granted that a human being who performs the human function well is (in some sense) a good human being, we can still ask whether it is good for a human being to be a good human being. (Peter Glassen)
• The same problem for Plato. His answer is by social view. “Socrates replies Adeimantus that he is aiming at the happiness of the whole, not of any one part (R 419–421c)”.

Nagle and Williams controversy

• 3. Aristotle tries to distinguish human rational life from plants’ growth, nutrition and animals’ perceptual lives. Based on this he infers our peculiar function, and then suggests morality.
• Williams: one could as well, on these principles, end up with a morality which exhorted man to spend as much time as possible in making fire; or developing peculiarly human physical characteristics; or having sexual intercourse without regard to season; or despoiling the environment and upsetting the balance of nature; or killing things for fun.
• Nagle: one should concentrate his energies on inventing and telling jokes!

Rationality vs. goodness

• Why should the good performance of the human function as a rational animal make one a morally good human being?
• Williams: If it is a mark of a man to have a conceptualized and fully conscious awareness of himself as one among others, aware that others have feelings like himself, this is a preconception not only of benevolence but . . . of cruelty as well. There is a gap between free action and good action.

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Phronesis and virtue

• Phronesis or practical wisdom is a faculty that functions based on human rationality in her free and spontaneous action that makes her virtuous.
• definition of virtue: it is a state ‘‘concerned with choice, lying in a mean relative to us, this being determined by reason and in the way in which the man of practical wisdom would determine it’’ (NE 2.6 1106b35ff.).
• Aristotle’s descriptions of the virtues are therefore not merely intended to show us that virtue is in a mean, but to show us how having qualities that are in a mean makes us good at rational activity.

Functional view

• Ergon, energy activity: Self-sustained –activity
• Metaphysics: hylomorphism
• The form, Aristotle argues, is what gives us the real essence of the thing, for it is in terms of the form that we can explain the properties and activities of the thing.
• Form: as the functional construction of the thing; actuality; then activity
• Matter: as the material or the parts which get so constructed. Potentiality

Redefining function

• Function towards purpose versus Function as a structural arrangements
• Function can refer to the way a thing functions or how it works, to its function-ing. If we use ‘‘function’’ in this sense—‘‘how a thing does what it does’’—it will diverge from ‘‘purpose,’’ which is simply ‘‘what it does.’’
• Korsgaard is going to eliminate the teleological view by distinguishing “what it does” and “how it does what it does”

Incontinent vs vice action

• Good/ bad action : subjective sin
• Continent/ incontinent: objective sin: weakness of will
• Incontinent person has no reason and so has no free choice.
• Korsgaard: bad action is paradoxical since no one can choose evil for its own sake.
• I am disagree: there is stubbornly choosing bad as good.
• There is a controversy on Aristotle about this debate.
• all three of these deficiencies—continence, incontinence, vice—involve some lack of internal harmony. there is a type of agent who refuses even to try to do what an ethically virtuous agent would do, because he has become convinced that justice, temperance, generosity and the like are of little or no value. Such people Aristotle calls evil (kakos, phaulos)

Akrasia

• Incontinent : weakness or impetous ( disregard reason)
• But there seems that reading this in conflict model leads to problem: Austin’s objection: Ice cream example.
• For Plato akrasia is impossible

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Ethical Virtue

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• Virtue is Dispositional state induced by our habits in order to provide appropriate feeling. Education; Self-control; Internalist requirement; relation between ethics and happiness; coherence. And beauty (Kalon). Divinely inspired.
• Aristotle insists that the virtues differ from the crafts and all branches of knowledge in that the former involve appropriate emotional responses and are not purely intellectual conditions.
• Every ethical virtue is a condition intermediate (a “golden mean” as it is popularly known) between two other states, one involving excess, and the other deficiency (1106a26–b28)
• Finding the mean in any given situation is not a mechanical or thoughtless procedure, but requires a full and detailed acquaintance with the circumstances.

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Conclusion

• Happiness is virtuous activity
• The happiest kind of life is that of a philosopher—someone who exercises, over a long period of time, the virtue of theoretical wisdom.

Lecture 5: ARISTOTLE'S NICHOMACEAN ETHICS

Book I

• Chapter 1: Good as the aim of every action:
• “Every skill and every inquiry, and similarly every action and rational choice, is thought to aim at some good; and so the good has been aptly described as that at which everything aims.”
• Chapter 2: Science of politics
• “So if what is done has some end that we want for its own sake,…Surely, then, knowledge of the good must be very important for our lives,…Knowledge of the good would seem to be the concern of the most authoritative science, …the science of politics.”

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Book I

• Chapter 2: political science employs the other sciences, and also lays down laws about what we should do and refrain from, its end will include the ends of the others, and will therefore be the human good.
• For while the good of an individual is a desirable thing, what is good for a people or for cities is a nobler and more godlike thing. Our enquiry, then, is a kind of political science, since these are the ends it is aiming at.

Book I

• Chapter 3:
• Student should want to be moral: But knowledge of the matters that concern political science will prove very beneficial to those who follow reason both in shaping their desires and in acting.
• Chapter 4: good in itself rather than wealth, honor, power
• “Certain thinkers used to believe that beyond these many good things there is something else good in itself, which makes all these good things good.”

Book I

• Chapter 5: Three types of life:
• There are three especially prominent types of life: the life of pleasure-seekers (wealth) , the life of politics (honor) , and thirdly the life of contemplation.
• End of political life is honor or even virtue. None of them is good-in itself and completely good.
• Chapter 6: Good is not a Form. So there could not be some common Form over and above these goods. Again, good is spoken of in as many senses as is being.
• Inasmuch as they are human, they will not differ. And if this is so, the same will be true of good.

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Book I

• Chapter 7: every end as good
• in every action and rational choice the end is the good, since it is for the sake of the end that everyone does everything else.
• Complete good:
• Happiness in particular is believed to be complete without qualification, since we always choose it for itself and never for the sake of anything else.
• Honor, pleasure, intellect, and every virtue we do indeed choose them also for the sake of happiness.

Book I

• We are applying the term `self-sufficient‘ good or happiness not to a person of his own, but to a person living alongside a society. Since a human being is by nature a social being.
• Human beings have characteristic activity of functional role. (against Nagle and Williams)
• Specific feature :We should therefore rule out the life of nourishment and growth. Next would be some sort of sentient life.
• The characteristic activity of a human being is an activity of the soul in accordance with reason

Book I

• Chapter 8: the human good turns out to be activity of the soul in accordance with virtue, this must be over a whole life.
• For the end thus turns out to be a good of the soul and not an external good.
• Another belief that harmonizes with our account is that the happy person lives well and acts well, for we have claimed that happiness is pretty much a kind of living well and acting well.

Book I

• The pleasures of the masses, because they are not pleasant by nature, conflict with one another, but the pleasures of those who are fond of noble things are pleasant by nature.
• If this is so, it follows that actions in accordance with virtue are pleasant in themselves. But they are also good and noble as well as pleasant;
• Chapter 9: The source of happiness: Even if it is not sent by the gods, (through our own character and habits according to nature) however, but arises through virtue and some sort of learning or training, it is evidently one of the most divine things.

Book I

• Chapter 10: happiness in this world.
• Should we then call no one happy while they are alive, but rather, wait to see the end? What really matter for happiness are activities in accordance with virtue.
• Happiness is robust and stable
• He will not be shifted easily from happiness, and not by ordinary misfortunes.
• Praising god : we never praise happiness as we might justice, but rather call it blessed, as something better and more divine. ..because it is by reference to gods that other goods are praised.

Book I

• Two faculties of the soul: affective, cognitive.
• For affective faculty the virtue is the virtue of character
• For cognitive faculty the virtue is intellectual regarding our theoretical and practical wisdom.
• Happiness is the happiness of the soul.

Book II

• Habit vs. nature
• We are not virtuous by nature, we should be virtuous b exercising according to our natural law.
• Acquiring virtue is like a skill. So it is not unimportant how we are habituated from our early days; indeed it makes a huge difference , or rather all the difference.
• Virtues, however, we acquire by first exercising them. The same is true with skills.
• Gradual flourishing: By abstaining from pleasures we become temperate, and having become so we are most able to abstain from them.

Book II

• Enjoyment of abstaining pleasures.
• As Plato says(in republic) so we might find enjoyment or pain in the right things; for the right education is just this.
• Difference with Kant is interesting!
• In respect of all of these (noble, useful, pleasant), especially pleasure, the good person tends to go right, and the bad person to go wrong.
• So the whole concern of virtue and political science is pleasures and pains: the person who manages them well will be good, while he who does so badly will be bad

Book II

• Chapter 5. How to act virtuous?
• 1. from rational choice, and rational choice of the actions for their own sake, and, (rational, free, and impartial action)
• 2. from a firm and unshakeable character. (good motivation)
• Virtues are states :by states Aristotle means those things in respect of which we are well or badly disposed in relation to feelings.

Book II

• Chapter 6: virtue and well-functioning
• that every virtue causes that of which it is a virtue to be in a good state, and to perform its characteristic activity well.
• If this is so in all cases, then the virtue of a human being too will be the state that makes a human being good and makes him perform his characteristic activity well.
• Virtue and mean: excess and deficiency are characteristics of vice, the mean characteristic of virtue:
• Virtue, then, is a state involving rational choice, consisting in a mean relative to us and determined by reason , the reason, that is, by reference to which the practically wise person would determine it.

Book III

• Voluntary vs involuntary actions
• What is forced, then, seems to be what has an external first principle, where the person forced contributes nothing.
• Ignorant action: Everything done through ignorance is non-voluntary, but what is involuntary also causes pain and regret; for the person who acted through ignorance, and is not upset in the slightest by what he has done, has not acted voluntarily, in that he did not know what he was doing, nor again involuntarily, in that he is not pained.

Book III

• So, since what is involuntary is what is done by force or because of ignorance, what is voluntary would seem to be what has its first principle in the person himself when he knows the particular circumstances of the action.
• Rational Choice: we describe actions done spontaneously as voluntary, but not as done in accordance with rational choice.
• The incontinent person acts from appetite, but not from rational choice; while the self-controlled person does the contrary, and acts from rational choice, but not from appetite

Book III

• We deliberate not about ends, but about things that are conducive to ends.
• If it appears that there are several means available, they consider by which it will be achieved in the easiest and most noble way; while if it can be attained by only one means, they consider how this will bring it about, and by what further means this means is itself to be brought about, until they arrive at the first cause, the last thing to be found.
• Note that a human being is a first principle of actions.

Book III

• Self-legislation: For each person stops inquiring how he is to act as soon as he has traced the first principle back to himself, that is, to the part of him that gives commands, because it is this that rationally chooses.
• Chapter 5: For no one is involuntarily blessed, but wickedness is voluntary; otherwise we shall have to disagree with what we have just said, and deny that a human being is a first principle.
• Unjust voluntarily: If a person does what he knows will make him unjust, he will be unjust voluntarily.

Book III

• So the appetitive element in a temperate person ought to be in harmony with reason. for the aim of both is what is noble, and the temperate person's appetite is for the right thing, in the right way, and at the right time, and this is what reason requires as well.

Book IV

• Actions done in accordance with virtue are noble and done for the sake of what is noble.
• Courageous, Tempering, and generous people : So the generous person will give for the sake of what is noble and in the correct way to the right people, in the right amounts, at the right time.
• Chapter 3: Great-souled vs. small-souled person. The great-souled person, since he is worthy of the greatest things, must be the best person of all. For the better a person is, the greater the things he is worthy of, and the best will be worthy of the greatest things; so the truly great-souled person must be good: honorable without caring about wealth, power and even honor.

Book IV

• Great-souled man: he cares more for the truth than for what people think.
• Nor is he a gossip, and he will not speak about himself or about anyone else, because he does not care to have himself praised or others blamed.
• Nor is he the sort to praise people; and so he does not speak ill of others either, not even his enemies
• When faced with necessary tasks or with minor problems, he is the last person to complain and to ask for assistance, because such behaviour is characteristic of a person who takes these things seriously.

Book V

• Justice: One can often identify a contrary state from its contrary, and states from their subjects.
• Justice is to act according to law
• Impartiality: The laws have something to say about everything, their aim being the common interest either of all the citizens.
• Utilitarian: So, in one sense, we call anything just that tends to produce or to preserve happiness and its constituents for the community of a city.

Book V

• `In justice is all virtue combined’
• Some hold that reciprocity is just without qualification. This was the claim of the Pythagoreans.
• a city is kept together by proportionate reciprocation

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Book VI

• So one should rationally choose the mean, not the excess or the deficiency, and that the mean is as correct reason prescribes.
• but what is the extent of the mean that is prescribed by correct reason?
• Human saul: affection plus cognition. Virtue of character (affection) vs. Virtue of reason (cognitive) .
• there are two sub-parts with reason: we contemplate those things whose first principles cannot be otherwise (science) , and another those things whose first principles can be otherwise (deliberation) .

Book VI

• Thought and truth can be either practical or theoretical . In the case of thought concerned with contemplation, however, which is neither practical nor productive, what constitute its being good or bad are truth and falsity, because truth is the characteristic activity of everything concerned with thought.
• But in the case of what is practical and concerned with thought, its being good consists in truth in agreement with correct desire.
• The first principle of action, its moving cause, not its goal, is rational choice; rational choice involves not only intellect and thought, but a state of character.

Book VI

• Constitution of Agency:
• Rational choice is either desire-related intellect or thought-related desire, and such a first principle is a human being.

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Book VI

• Reason’s ways to truth/correct: Mind and World
• 1. Skill: productive, deliberative.
• 2. Scientific knowledge: necessary laws of nature (empirical)
• 3. Practical wisdom: a faculty of a person who deliberates nobly about what is good that conduces to living well as a whole. An ability to see good. (ethics, politics)
• (McDowell) It is not scientific knowledge because what is done can be otherwise; and it is not skill because action and production (that its end is not in itself) are generically different.
• 4. Wisdom: faculty of demonstration. (metaphysics, mathematics)
• 5. Intellect: Ruler of all human knowledge consists in first principles. Basic foundations of knowledge regarding eternal and non-changing beings.

Book VI

• Wisdom is practical science combines with intellect.
• Anaxagoras, Thales, their knowledge is extraordinary, wonderful, abstruse, godlike, but useless, because it is not human goods they are looking for.
• Intellect makes natural virtue of our character real virtue through practical wisdom.
• Socrates, then, thought that the virtues were forms of reason (since he believed them all to be forms of knowledge), while we think that they involve reason.
• It is clear from what we have said, then, that we cannot be really good without practical wisdom, or practically wise without virtue of character.

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Book VII

• Three bad characters:
• 1. vice vs. virtue
• 2. incontinent (weakness of will) vs. self-control
• 3. impetuous or violent vs. most reasonable (superman)
• The incontinent person knows what he does is bad, but does it because of what affects him, while the self-controlled person, knowing that his appetites are bad, because of reason does not follow them.

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Book VII

• Socrates was wholeheartedly opposed to this view, since he thought there was no such thing as incontinence: no one who acts against what is best does so on the supposition that he is doing so; rather it occurs through ignorance.
• Who is the unqualifiedly incontinent person?
• it is clear that we should take as incontinence or self- control only the states concerned with the same things as temperance and intemperance.
• One kind of incontinence is impetuosity, the other is weakness. Weak people deliberate, but because of the way they are affected fail to stand by their decision, while impetuous people are led on by the way they are affected because they have not deliberated

Book VII

• Clearly, then, incontinence is not a vice (other than in a qualified sense, presumably), because incontinence is contrary to rational choice, while vice is in accordance with it.
• So the incontinent can easily be persuaded to change his ways, while the intemperate cannot.
• The intemperate person thinks that it is right to do so, while the incontinent does not.

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Book VII

• Why is pleasure good?
• Pleasure is an activity of one's natural state, and that it is our activities that constitutes an end; nor do pleasures result from our coming to be something, but from our exercising our capacities.
• who claim that the person being tortured, or the person who has fallen on very bad times, is happy if he is good are, whether voluntarily or involuntarily, talking nonsense.
• Pleasure according to our nature towards its balance is good for us.

Book VIII

• Friendship
• In friendships based on virtue, however, there are no complaints.
• Rather, the rational choice of the benefactor seems to be the measure, since the authoritative element in virtue and character lies in rational choice.
• Three friendships: Friendship for utility, pleasure and then good.
• Complete friendship is that of good people, those who are alike in their virtue: they each alike wish good things to each other in so far as they are good, and they are good in themselves.

Book IX

• Goodwill, then, seems to be the first principle of friendship, as pleasure through sight is first principle of love. For no one loves another if he has not been pleased beforehand by his appearance.
• Generally speaking, however, goodwill develops because of some virtue and excellence, when one person appears noble or courageous or some such thing to another, as we suggested happens in the case of competitors at the games.
• In all praiseworthy actions, then, the good person is seen to assign himself the larger share of what is noble.
• So, as we have said, we ought to be self-lovers. But in the way that the masses are, we should not.

Book X

• The importance and unavoidability of pleasure:
• What is the most worth choosing is what we choose neither because of nor for the sake of something else. And everyone agrees that pleasure is like this.
• pleasure, when it is added to any other good, such as acting in a just or temperate manner, makes the other good more worthy of choice.
• Pleasure Is not a process but state.

Book X

• Every sense engages in activity in relation to its object, and its activity is complete when it is in good condition in relation to the noblest of its objects. In the case of each sense, then, the best activity will be that of the subject in the best condition in relation to the best of that sense's objects.
• So long, then, as the objects of intellect or perception, and the faculties of judgment or contemplation, are as they should be, there will be pleasure in the activity.
• Life is a kind of activity, and each person engages in activity in relation to those objects and with those faculties that he likes best; the musician, for example, engages in activity with his hearing in relation to songs

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Book X

• Pleasure completes the activities, and therefore also life, which they desire. It is reasonable, then, for them to aim at pleasure as well, since for each person it completes life, and life is something worth choosing.
• that activities that differ in species are also completed by things differing in species.
• Thus the
• pleasure proper to a virtuous activity is good, and that proper to a wicked one bad, because appetites for noble objects are to be praised, those for disgraceful things blamed.

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Book X

• Happiness, then, does not consist in amusement, because it would be absurd if our end were amusement, and we laboured and suffered all of our lives for the sake of amusing ourselves.
• And the happy life seems to be one in accordance with virtue, and this implies a level of seriousness.
• If happiness is activity in accordance with virtue, it is reasonable to expect that it is in accordance with the highest virtue, and this will be the virtue of the best element.

Book X

• But the activity of a politician also involves exertion, and, apart from the business of politics itself, it is designed to secure power and honours.
• The activity of intellect, on the other hand, in so far as it involves contemplation, seems superior in its seriousness, to aim at no end beyond itself, and to have its own proper pleasure, in so far as there is some divine element within him.
• Happiness, then, extends as far as contemplation, and the more contemplation there is in one's life, the happier one is, not incidentally, but in virtue of the contemplation, since this is honourable in itself. Happiness, therefore, will be some form of contemplation.

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Book X

• As we have said, then, the person who is to be good must be nobly brought up and habituated, and then spend his life engaged in good pursuits and do nothing bad whether involuntarily or voluntarily. And this would happen when people lived in accordance with a kind of intellect and a correct system with power over them.
• Politics: For when these issues have been considered, we shall perhaps be more likely to see which political system is best, how each must be arranged, and what laws and habits it should employ.

Lecture 6: Kant and Aristotle on Morally Good Action

Prima facie differences between Kant and Aristotle

• 1. Nature of good: For Aristotle virtue of character that includes good inclination vs. Kantian freedom from all sorts of inclination
• 2.Telos: happiness as the telos of morality but happiness for Kant is irrelevant to morality.
• 3. Methodology: Aristotle emphasizes on practical wisdom seeing the good and bad , while Kant emphasizes on universal rules for testing the morality of chosen maxims.
• 4. Source of Value: Aristotle is a ‘‘virtue theorist’’ who holds that an action’s value consists in its being the expression of a virtue, while Kant is deontologist who thinks that the value of an action rests in its conformity to a rule.

Similarities between Aristotle and Kant

• 1. rational choice as the source of responsibility
• 2. the moral value of an action is a function of the way in which it is chosen and so supervene on the specific character of human action
• 3. Natural law as the moral law
• 4. Rationality is morality

To be moral is to be active

• To say that human beings are rational is not just to say that we are rule-following or logical, but rather to say that we are capable of authentic mental activity, of an engagement with the world that goes beyond mere reaction.
• Spontaneity: And if morality is the full expression of practical reason, then this is the distinguishing feature of the moral agent: that her actions are more truly active, more authentically her own, than those of agents who fall short of moral goodness.
• Aristotle also thinks that the ultimate expression of our rational nature is our participation in the active intellect that imparts form and intelligibility to the natural world.

Moral value of intrinsic rightness

• Main argument of this essay:
• How to reconcile between these two opposing views between Kant and Aristotle.
• Kant’s moral motivation free from natural sympathetic emotion while for Aristotle moral motivation is exactly comes from virtuous emotions.
• 1. Kant’s Position
• 2. Aristotle’s position
• 3. How to reconcile
• 4. remain differences
• 5. Is Korsgaard successful?

Acting from Duty

• Kant’s idea is this: Good-willed actions are good because of the way that they are chosen.
• The principle of a good will is that of choosing actions whose maxims qualify to be universal laws.
• Our duty is to be good. And what is intrinsically good is good will. And good will is the will that is willed according to categorical imperatives. So we ought to freely follow categorical imperatives to act not only according to our duty but for the sake of duty alone.

For the sake of duty

• It is possible to do an action for its own sake just because it is what you like to do. The naturally sympathetic person’s action falls into this category.
• “There are many souls so sympathetically attuned that, without any other motive of vanity or self-interest they find an inner satisfaction in spreading joy around them and can take delight in the satisfaction of others so far as it is their own work. But I assert that in such a case an action of this kind, however it may conform with duty and however amiable it may be, has nevertheless no true moral worth but is on the same footing with other inclinations. (G 4:398)”

Goodness of for the sake of duty

• What is the relation between goodness and acting for the sake of duty alone?
• It would be free, unconditioned, for the sake of the law, maybe unpleasant, but why good?
• I think freewill is not necessarily a good-will. What is intrinsically good is good-will not free will while every good will is free.
• A Nazi officer can claim that he had acted for the sake of his duty!

Korsgaard’s response: Unreflective motive of duty

• For Kant, to act from duty is not just to be moved by a blank conviction that an action is required, but rather to be moved by a more substantial thought which inherently involves an intelligent view of why the action is required.
• But, Why a duty is our duty? What is the source of moral requirement ?
• Korsgaard is going to put Aristotelian response to this question in the mouth of Kant:

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Three types of actions in Kant and Aristotle

• Kant evidently thinks that there are three ways to value, and therefore to choose, an action: as useful (as the prudent merchant values honesty); as good for its own sake, in the sense of being immediately desirable (as the sympathetic person values beneficence); and as morally required (as the dutiful person values beneficence). If the argument of this essay is correct, this coincides with Aristotle’s view that there are three objects of choice—namely, the advantageous, the pleasant, and the noble (NE 2.3 1104b30–31).
• Is it true? There is a big difference between noble and morally required , for the sake of duty. Only formula of humanity can save Kant from this charge.

Two distinctions in help of reconciliation project

• 1. reflective vs. unreflective action for the sake of duty. Natural sympathy can be done for the sake of duty unreflectively.
• 2. good action’s maxim must be a universal law vs. a maxim that can be a universal law. The second category can be matched with Aristotle’s view.
• But, both of the reconciliation maneuvers are not Kantian. 1. Kant emphasizes on reflective form of action. (autonomous action) 2. ‘must be a law’ is what Kant really says. Two parts of formula of humanity: ‘can be’ because no one used as a mere means, ‘must be’ , because every one should be an end in herself. Good vs. permissible.

How Kant can provide motivation

• Kant’s answer is that it is the feeling of respect for law.
• Respect for law is not a desire to obey the moral law, or more generally a feeling that exists independently of the law and interests us in it. It is the law itself, the very thought of a requirement, operating as an incentive.

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Acting for the sake of the noble

• Aristotle says that deliberation concerns what is towards the end rather than the end itself.
• So what sort of a limitation Aristotle means to be imposing on deliberation and choice when he says that they do not concern ends but only what contributes to ends?
• to be chosen = to be an object of deliberate desire. an action must be one that contributes to what is conceived as good.
• It is the fact we have engaged in rational deliberation to arrive at the idea that the action is good, and been motivated by that deliberation, not the form of the rational deliberation, that is definitive of choice.

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Korsgaard-McDowell debate on reading Kant and Aristotle

• Form vs matter (content) of moral principle:
• John McDowell suggests that Aristotle sometimes overstates the extent to which actions that reveal virtue ‘‘issue from actual courses of thinking’’ (in Aristotle, Kant, and the Stoics: Rethinking Happiness and Duty.
• While Kant is envisages a ‘‘straightforward’’ or ‘‘mechanical’’ application of principles
• Agreement: action is good if it is the object of practical reason.
• How much moral content perception must already have before we can begin to deliberate about the application of principles. I believe that even on the most algorithmic conception of the categorical imperative procedure the Kantian answer to that question could not be ‘‘none’ because of the formula of humanity.

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How to reconcile Kant and Aristotle: subsumption under reason

• Aristotle insists that virtuous action must be in accordance with the orthos logos, the right reason or right rule. In fact he says it must not merely be in accordance with it but from it.
• Aristotle says that virtuous actions are done for their own sake for the sake of the noble; indeed, action is distinguished from mere production or ‘‘making’’ (poiein) by the fact that ‘‘good action itself is its end’’
• Kant thinks that a morally worthy action is one whose agent sees it as an embodiment of the very form of law.
• But there is three differences in motivation (desire oriented vs. free from all inclinations), end (good in pleasure vs. good for the sake of duty), moral principle (contentful vs. abstract, formal, and impartial)

Nobility and goodwill

• Korsgaard: As for nobility, Aristotle seems to think of it very much as Kant thinks of good will—it is the specific kind of intrinsic value that moral actions and those who perform them possess.
• But, this is not a similarity. Just it says that they have spoken about moral intrinsic value.
• Korsgaard: Aristotle assigns nobility particularly to actions done for certain purposes, such as to benefit others. In fact, Aristotle suggests here that he shares Kant’s view that moral value is exhibited in a special way in actions from which we are sure the agent gets nothing.
• But, action based on altruistic desires is different from action for the sake of duty and law.

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nonconsequentilism

• Both Aristotle and Kant would say that to value an action merely as a form of production, as consequentialists later did, is not yet to value it in its specifically ethical character as an action at all. As Aristotle says, ‘‘Making and acting are different . . . so that the reasoned state of capacity to act is different from the reasoned state of capacity to make (NE 6.4 1140a4–5) . . . while making has an end other than itself, action cannot; for good action itself is its end’’
• Techne vs. praxis

Form in Aristotle and Kant

• Korsgaard: form in Aristotle is function. The action that is in accordance with the orthos logos is done in the right way and at the right time, directed to the right objects, and so on. So we might think that its overall rightness consists in the way its parts are combined, that is, in its form.
• Kant: Since every human action is done for an end, we may say that a maxim of an action characteristically has two parts: the act and the end. But it ought to be universalizable.
• This similarity seems OK. Both are talking of universalizable norms of morality.

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Consequentialism, virtue, and deontological theories of ethics

• Normative moral theories:
• Consequentialism is the theory that what makes an action right is its consequences;
• deontology is the theory that the action’s rightness moral worth is intrinsic, or consists in its conformity to a rule and for the sake of the rule.
• virtue ethics is the theory that what makes an action right moral worth is that it is the sort of action a virtuous person would want to do.
• Deontology vs, teleology.

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How to categorize Kant, Hume and Aristotle

• Then Kant and Aristotle, along with rationalistic consequentialists like Sidgwick, are deontologists, as opposed to Hume.
• Korsgaard: Kant and Aristotle, like Hume think that what makes an action right is that it is the sort of action a good person—for Kant an autonomous person and for Aristotle a person of practical wisdom—would choose.
• Aristotle is a deontologist, since he thinks moral actions embody the orthos logos and so are good in themselves.
• If teleology is meant to include the view that moral actions are themselves good, then Kant is a teleologist.
• But, I opposed all of Korsgaard’s confusing remarks.

To enhance Kantian ethics with Aristotelian ethics

• Three main problems that Kant faces:
• 1. The subjective source of maxims: “How then can there be, beyond this principle, a law for the maxims of actions?”
• Aristotle’s help: What Kant is asking is how there can be a law that says we must have certain maxims. This is the problem that Kant addresses in The Metaphysical Principles of Virtue. Kant argues that we have a duty to cultivate moral ends and the feelings that are naturally attendant upon having those ends so that we will notice the occasions of virtue

The second problem

• 2. how pure reason can be practical ?
• how the thought of the law gives rise to the incentive of respect?
• Aristotle’s help: habituation
• And if we cultivate moral ends and the feelings that are naturally attendant upon having such ends then in the normal course of events we will also take pleasure in successful virtuous action.

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The third problem

• Difference between naturally sympathetic action and temperamentally c old one.
• Kant in Groundwork: cold minded is better than natural virtuous action.
• Kant in Metaphysic of Moral: sympathy and honor are Kantian natural virtues, corresponding to the real virtues of humanity and autonomy respectively and making us receptive to the development of those real virtues.
• If Kant accepts Aristotelian distinction between continent and virtue then the problem may be solved.

Kant or Aristotle

• This is a thought provoking question!
• Nietzsche: “If we place ourselves at the end of this tremendous process, where the tree at last brings forth fruit, where society and the morality of custom at last reveal what they have simply been the means to: then we discover that the ripest fruit is the sovereign individual, like only to himself, liberated again from the morality of custom, autonomous and supramoral”.

Lecture 7:Moral Approval in Hume’s Ethics

Hume’s morality

• Hume’s position in ethics, which is based on his empiricist theory of the mind, is best known for asserting these theses:
• (1) Reason alone cannot be a motive to the will, but rather is the “slave of the passions”
• (2)Moral distinctions are derived from the moral sentiments: feelings of approval (esteem, praise) and disapproval (blame) felt by spectators who contemplate a character trait or action

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Historical positions in morality

• Epistemology of normativity: 1. from God’s command (Pufendorf), 2. from reasoning (Locke, Hobbes), 3. from sentiments (Hucheson, Hume)
• Metaphysics of normativity: 1. in God’s nature, 2. in reason, 3. in human nature (Butler, Hume)
• His thesis is that reason alone cannot move us to action; the impulse to act itself must come from passion. The doctrine that reason alone is merely the “slave of the passions,” i.e., that reason pursues knowledge of abstract and causal relations solely in order to achieve passions’ goals and provides

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Hume’s ethics: main idea

• T A Treatise of Human Nature
• 1E Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
• 2E Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals
• “Take any action allow’d to be vicious: Willful murder, for instance. Examine it in all lights, and see if you can find that matter of fact, or real existence, which you call vice. In which-ever way you take it, you find only certain passions, motives, volitions and thoughts. There is no other matter of fact in the case. The vice entirely escapes you, as long as you consider the object. You can never find it, till you turn your reflexion into your own breast, and find a sentiment of disapprobation, which arises in you, towards this action. Here is a matter of fact; but ’tis the object of feeling, not of reason. It lies in yourself, not in the object. (T 3.1.1,468–469)
• he characterizes moral terms as ‘‘the terms expressive of our liking or dislike’’ (T 3.3.1,582).

moral virtues are natural abilities

• That is to say, the mental qualities for which we love people are therefore virtues.
• Of course, this idea coheres well with another notorious doctrine of Book 3, Hume’s contention that there is no important distinction between moral virtues and natural abilities (T 3.3.4,606–614).
• One of his arguments for that contention is precisely that natural abilities, like moral virtues, give rise to love.
• He says: Tho’ we refuse to natural abilities the title of virtues, we must allow, that they procure the love and esteem of mankind; . . . and that a man possess’d of them is much more intitled to our good-will and services, than one entirely void of them. (T 3.3.4,607)

Sentiment vs reason

• It is important to note that the judgments that determine what we ought to praise people for are not properly speaking judgments of reason, but rather calm sentiments felt from a general point of view, namely, the moral sentiments.
• Hume claims that moral distinctions are not derived from reason but rather from sentiment. His rejection of ethical rationalism is at least two-fold. Moral rationalists tend to say, first, that moral properties are discovered by reason, and also that what is morally good is in accord with reason (even that goodness consists in reasonableness) and what is morally evil is unreasonable. H.ume rejects both theses

Internalist requirement argument

• According to Hume, intentional actions are the immediate product of passions, in particular the direct passions, including the instincts.
• He claims to prove that “reason alone can never be a motive to any action of the will,” and that reason alone “can never oppose passion in the direction of the will” (T 413)
• The doctrine is that reason alone is merely the “slave of the passions,” i.e., that reason pursues knowledge of abstract and causal relations solely in order to achieve passions’ goals and provides no impulse of its own.

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Representation argument

• Representation argument: Yet the Representation Argument is not empirical, and does not talk of forces or impulses. Passions (and volitions and actions), Hume says, do not refer to other entities; they are “original existence[s],” (T 2.3.3.5), “original facts and realities”. a passion has no “representative quality, which renders it a copy of any other existence or modification” (T 2.3.3.5). Contradiction to truth and reason, however, consists in “the disagreement of ideas, consider’d as copies, with those objects, which they represent” (ibid.). Therefore, a passion (or volition or action), not having this feature, cannot be opposed by truth and reason.
• Two implications: 1. that actions cannot be reasonable or unreasonable; 2. that “reason cannot immediately prevent or produce any action by contradicting or approving of it”

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From “general point of view”

• According to Hume, moral judgments are based on sentiments of approval and disapproval that we feel when we contemplate a person’s character from ‘‘a general point of view’’
• 1. we view the person not through the eyes of our own interests, but instead through the sympathetic eyes of the person herself and her “narrow circle”.
• 2. we judge according to general rules.
• Subjective-objective normativity: ideal good virtue

So

• On Hume’s account:
• our employment of moral ideas results from our occupation of the general point of view
• moral judgments are a product of the general point of view,
• and moral virtues and vices are, in turn, a product of moral judgments.
• Occupation of general point of view requires some sort of passion towards OTHER: love, sympathy, or hate.

Pleasure as the motivation for love

• Passions are impressions, which are either pleasant, painful, or mixed.
• Love is a pleasant impression, and so it is natural for my mind to move from the pleasure of contemplating the beauty to the resembling pleasure of love.
• So natural pleasure is the source of general sympathetic sentiments.
• Objection to Hume: But what is the ground of (because of which we inclined to) that natural pleasure? The grounds of sympathy do seem to have something in common with practical reasons, not because of causal or extrinsic properties. Reasons for love vs. cause of love.

Reason vs. cause of the sympathetic view

• Sympathetic view requires a reason. Something like virtue or vice character in the beloved, intrinsically.
• The ground of sympathy cannot be a pleasure since there are many sympathetic actions, for example kin-sympathy that there would be no pleasure in it.
• Hume response: He argues that “familiarity is itself a source of pleasure” (T 2.2.4,353). Since you are familiar with the passions and sentiments of your acquaintance, your own passions and sentiments are more readily aroused by them, and this makes you find their company stimulating and therefore pleasant.

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Cause of love and sympathy for Hume

• All pleasurable things, extrinsic or intrinsic:
• According to Hume, love for a person can be caused by any of these things:
• In Hume’s official account of love in Book 2 of the Treatise, virtue is identified as one of the ‘‘much diversify’d’’ causes of love, alongside such non-moral psychological attributes as wit, good sense, and good humor; physical attributes such as beauty and athletic ability; and external goods such as money and good family (T 2.2.1,330).

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Virtue for Hume

• when we view a person from the general point of view, we feel a particularly calm species of love or hate, which is moral approval or disapproval. The qualities that arouse these calm passions are the ones we call ‘‘virtues’’ and ‘‘vices.’’ Moral approval and disapproval are corrective of, and normative for, our more violent personal loves and hates.
• So, to take a fairly uncontroversial example, the prisoner who hates the judge has a wrong feeling. When the judge is considered from the general point of view, her justice is seen as a pleasant thing and causes love; and this love is normative for, and ought to be corrective of, the prisoner’s more personal feelings.

What is then the standard for general point of view?

• 1. Following Locke, Hume believed that any simple idea must come from an impression of sense. Our idea of the morally good is a simple, unanalyzable idea, and the impression that gives rise to it is the sentiment of approval. Our capacity for this sentiment is therefore a kind of sense. our practice ‘‘with regard to all the senses’’ to correct our judgments from fixed standpoints in order to eliminate contradictions (T3.3.1,582).
• 2. we fix on the general point of view, Hume frequently mentions the need for us to talk to each other about, and to come to some agreement upon.

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Hume’s quote

• ’tis impossible we cou’d ever converse together on any reasonable terms, were each of us to consider characters and persons, only as they appear from his peculiar point of view. (T 3.3.1,581)
• ’tis impossible men cou’d ever agree in their sentiments and judgments, unless they chose some common point of view, from which they might survey their object, and which might cause it to appear the same to all of them. (T 3.3.1,591) Besides, that we ourselves often change our situation in this particular, we every day meet with persons, who are in a different situation from ourselves, and who cou’d never converse with us on any reasonable terms, were we to remain constantly in that situation and point of view, which is peculiar to us. The intercourse of sentiments, therefore, in society and conversation, makes us form some general inalterable standard, by which we may approve or disapprove of characters and manners. And tho’ the heart does not always take part with those general notions, or regulate its love and hatred by them, yet are they sufficient for discourse, and serve all our purposes in company, in the pulpit, on the theatre, and in the schools. (T3.3.3,603)

Why a general point of view?

• Why do we need to come to an agreement about whose character is good, if that is only an agreement about whom we find pleasing?
• Hume says we experience this particular feeling ‘‘only when a character is considered in general, without reference to our particular interest’’ (T3.1.2,472).
• But why again? there should be some independent reason for taking up the general point of view.
• Impersonal sympathetic action vs. personal one: how we can distinguish them if pleasure is the source of both.

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Felt distinctness: divine, natural or general?

• Contra Hutchson, Hume’s ambition, consonant with his anti-religious aims, is to give a naturalistic explanation of how moral feeling arises in us.
• We do not need a divine origin for moral approval if it can be explained in terms of the principles of natural psychology alone.
• If moral approval can be explained as a modification of love, produced by the fact that we take up the general point of view, then it can be explained naturalistically.
• But it requires an explanation why we choose a general point of view.
• So the standards of general point of view, normative standards are come first.

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Hume’s theory of sympathy

• 1. Association: According to Hume, when two ideas are associated with each other, the mind moves naturally from one to the other. Such associations are produced by resemblance, contiguity in space and time, and causality, which in turn depends on custom or habit.
• 2. Sympathy in a similar way depends on the transmission of force and vivacity by associative connections. When I am exposed to your sentiments, whether by your words, your expressions, or whatever, I first form an idea of them. But you and I, or any two human beings, bear the important associative relation of resemblance—in particular, we are susceptible to the same basic range of sentiments (T2.1.11,318).
• 3. If someone hurts you, I experience your pain sympathetically, and this causes me to hate the person who hurt you. This kind of sympathy-based hate, when regulated by the general point of view, is moral disapproval itself.

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Contradictory views in sympathy

• Contradictory views make pressure on you to reach a shared view.
• if sympathy pressures us to agree about people, it will also pressure us to move towards a shared standard which will make it possible for us to agree. Uncomfortable with our differences, I will try to see the person through your eyes and you will try to see him through mine. Enough of the resulting adjustments will lead to the formation of the general point of view.
• Within the narrow circle, general rules will then produce pressures and adjustments of another sort.

Hume’s philosophy of self

• the person is a bundle of successive perceptions and the personhood of the other person is something of which we are essentially ‘‘not conscious’’ .
• Me vs. other: As the immediate object of pride and humility is self or that identical person, of whose thoughts, actions, and sensations we are intimately conscious; so the object of love and hatred is some other person, of whose thoughts, actions, and sensations we are not conscious. (T 2.1.1,329)
• How do I attach the causes of my love (actions, beauty, money) to their objects (other selves) if those objects are inaccessible bundles of perceptions?

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Hume on persons’ actions

• Hume starts by asserting that we love and hate others for those qualities that are ‘‘constant and inherent in his person and character’’.
• Actions rooted in characters.
• Here, however, Hume seems to suppose that you may be regarded as the cause of your action, provided that the causal chain goes through your character.
• For Kant, agent-causation is achieved when the person is the first cause, the initiator of the causal chain. For Hume, agent-causation seems to be achieved when the person’s character serves as a kind of filter in the causal chain, making the outcome turnout one way rather than another

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Person’s character as the cause of her action

• we may regard someone as the author of actions and so as a person only in so far as we regard him as having a character (disposition).
• Hume thinks that we cannot make a causal inference without regular observation of the constant connection between two kinds of events.
• Now this means that no one can form an idea of you as a cause—that is, as having certain characteristic dispositions—without regular observation of what you do.
• But only certain people observe you with sufficient regularity to see you as the cause of anything. These people are the members of your narrow circle.
• This means that to see you as having a character is essentially to take up the point of view of your narrow circle towards you.

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Kant, Plato and Hume

• Korsgaard argues that, according to Hume’s view, persons are socially constituted, and in particular that we constitute someone as an agent by viewing him from the general point of view. As she reads them, all three philosophers are concerned with the question what is required before a person may be regarded as the cause of his actions (or rather, since nothing without an author can be an action, of his intentional movements). All three think morality is essentially involved in the constitution of an agent: Plato and Kant think that to successfully constitute yourself as the cause of your actions you must act morally, while Hume thinks that to constitute another as the cause of his actions is to view him from the general(moral) point of view. Hume’s view therefore provides a rather exact third-personal analog, as well as a helpful third-personal supplement, to the Kantian/Platonic view.
• I doubt her view about Hume. Person for him is not socially construed but rather a bundle of dispositions. There is a third personal perspective on human rather than first personal. But it is far from being concerned with constitution of agency. It is just a sort of behaviourism.

Virtue or vice is motive

• Hume says: ‘‘when we praise any actions, we regard only the motives that produced them’’ (T 3.2.1,477)
• Charlotte Brown argues that Hume’s arguments identifying action with what springs from character fail to capture the notion of responsible agency needed to support the reactive attitudes or indirect passions
• Katz: Hume really shows only that we respond to the person as a cluster of dispositions, and see the action as a product of those dispositions.
• To hold someone responsible, we must see him as a fellow subject of deliberation, not merely as a cluster of dispositions.
• Korsgaard: We might say that character traits are essentially normative dispositions, not natural dispositions about which we make normative judgments. Character is a normative notion all the way down.
• But , if one can read this type of normativity from Hume still morla responsibility cannot be assigned to his views.

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personhood, is constructed from the general point of view

• We can now see why the general point of view is essential. To view someone through the eyes of virtue or vice is to see him as a person. To see him as a person is to view him as having a character. To view him as having a character is to view him as a cause, that is, a regular source, of happiness and misery to himself and others. And to view him as such a cause is to view him through the eyes of his narrow circle, that is, from the general point of view. A person’s character, his personhood, is constructed from the general point of view.

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Hume vs. Aristotle

• Three differences:
• 1. virtue of character. Ideal virtue in contemplative life, and telos of well-being rather than natural virtue from general point of view.
• 2. Self-constitution of agency. Self is soul, constituted by her actions that conforms to reason. For Hume self is a bundle of dispositions. Agency is third personal.
• 3. Normativity of action. Moral responsibility for Aristotle is essential. Continent/ incontinent. Free choice according to rational norms. But Hume cannot accommodate moral responsibility.

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Summary

• 1. First, the pressure to take up some shared point of view, and form a common standard for judging people, comes from sympathy between those who respond to, and assess, a person. Sympathy ensures that any difference of sentiment about a person is internalized by those who perceive that difference.
• 2. That we judge from the standpoint of the narrow circle, and in accordance with general rules—arise from the fact our responses to people are indirect passions or reactive attitudes, responses of love and hate.
• 3. To have a character is to be the cause of your actions, and more generally of happiness and misery, to yourself and those around you. And given Hume’s theory of causation, your character quite literally exists in the eyes of your narrow circle. This means that love and hate pressure us to view a person through the eyes of her narrow circle. When we view someone through the eyes of her narrow circle, sympathy is again operative, causing us to love or hate the person in sympathy with them. The resulting calm passions are moral approval and disapproval.

Conclusion

• If love and sympathy did not impel us to view the world from the general point of view, our fellow human beings would just be so many useful or dangerous objects to us. According to Hume, it is only when we view the world from the general point of view that the moral world—the world composed of people who have characters and perform actions—comes into focus.

Lecture 8: Nietzsche on the genealogy of Morality

About this book

• His first book on the same concerns: Human, All-too Human: A Book for Free Spirits.
• Schopenhauer (Pity, intrinsic value of unegoism)
• Paul Ree (altruism, Darwinism)

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Main Question

• Who are we really?
• “For us this law holds for all eternity: “Each man is furthest from himself”—where we ourselves are concerned, we are not “knowledgeable people”.”[1]
• A priori: before experience = my origin, my nature (that assumed to be moral) [3]
• Moral theory: “Under what conditions did man invent for himself those value judgments good and evil?”
• Meta ethics: “And what value do they inherently possess?”
• Right and good relation: “Have they hindered or fostered human well-being up to now?”

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Anti- unegoism

• “The most specific issue was the worth of the “unegoistic,” the instinct for pity, self-denial, self-sacrifice”
• “Concerning the worthlessness of pity philosophers up to now have been in agreement. I name only Plato, Spinoza, La Rochefoucauld, and Kant.” [5]
• we must first question the very value of these values—and for that we need a knowledge of the conditions and circumstances out of which these values grew
• Teleological view: So that this very morality would be guilty if the inherently possible highest power and magnificence of the human type were never attained.

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First Essay: Good and Evil

• Anti- English utilitarianism: then I hope from my heart that the situation with these men might be reversed … who at the same time have educated themselves to sacrifice everything desirable for the sake of the truth, for the sake of every truth, even the simple, bitter, hateful, repellent, unchristian, immoral truth. . . . For there are such truths.
• So not nihilist
• Danger of Usefulness of unegoism: people originally praised unegoistic actions and called them good from the perspective of those for whom they were done, that is, those for whom such actions were useful.

Arrogance and pride is the source of utilitarianism

• it was the “good people” themselves, that is, the noble, powerful, higher-ranking, and higher-thinking people who felt and set themselves and their actions up as good, that is to say, of the first rank, in opposition to everything low, low-minded, common, and vulgar. From this pathos of distance they first arrogated to themselves the right to create values, to stamp out the names for values. [2]
• …that is the origin of the opposition between “good” and “bad.”

Importance of evil

• Nietzsche stresses the necessity of physical suffering and intellectual struggle for the self-improvement of each and, by extension, the vitality and happiness of the group.
• He accordingly rebukes the proponent of any morality that makes the reduction of suffering its fundamental goal:
• “[I]f you experience suffering and displeasure as evil, worthy of annihilation and as a defect of existence, then it is clear that besides your religion of pity you also harbor another religion in your heart that is perhaps the mother of the religion of pity: the religion of comfortableness” Gay Science)

Self-love as the source of altruism

• His claim is that neighborly love is (often, at least) merely an oblique expression of the universal drive to conquer, an alternative manifestation of the will to power—a label Nietzsche attached to the underlying force that drives all biological phenomena.
• By devoting yourselves with enthusiasm and making a sacrifice of yourselves you enjoy the ecstatic thought of henceforth being at one with the powerful being, whether a god or a man, to whom you dedicate yourselves: you revel in the feeling of his power, to which your very sacrifice is an additional witness. The truth of the matter is that you only seem to sacrifice yourselves: in reality you transform yourselves into gods and enjoy yourselves as such. (Day Break)

Self-defeating utilitarianism

• “the motives of this morality stand opposed to its principle”
• They characterize pity (which he considers the primary motive for altruistic action) as an indirect manifestation of self-interest.

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Etymology of good

• I found that all of them lead back to the same transformation of ideas—that everywhere “noble” and “aristocratic” in a social sense is the fundamental idea out of which “good” in the sense of “spiritually noble,” “aristocratic,” “spiritually high-minded,” “spiritually privileged” necessarily develops, a process which always runs in parallel with that other one which finally transforms “common,” “vulgar,” and “low” into the concept “bad.”

Nietzche’s skeptical solution

• Men in higher rank: noble (Arya: Iranian)
• Etymology not racism.
• What about our German word “Gut” [good] itself? Doesn’t it indicate “den Göttlichen” [the god-like man], the man of “göttlichen Geschlechts” [“the generation of gods]”? [5]

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Anti-Judaic (priestly) position

• In opposition to the aristocratic value equations (good = noble = powerful = beautiful = fortunate = loved by god), the Jews, with a consistency inspiring fear, dared to reverse things and to hang on to that with the teeth of the most profound hatred that is, to “only those who suffer are good; the poor, the powerless, the low are the only good people; the suffering, those in need, the sick, the ugly are also the only pious people; only they are blessed by God; for them alone there is salvation.
• We know who inherited this Judaic transformation of values: the Christians slave morality.

The source of Pejorative Morality

• 1. Money and Power , Self-love and arrogance are the source of traditional good/bad division in utilitarian and judo-Christian tradition. To reach power they make the people slaves and weak and equal, in the name of God or in the name of justice.
• Christ as the savior of the poor and sinners is the Judaic conception. [9]
• But human as the beloved of God, noble, powerful and autonomous is dangerous for them. Virtue ethics.
• Brian Leiter: 2015. Nietzsche on Morality, 2nd edition, London: Routledge.

Slave morality

• It starts from vengeance
• While all noble morality grows out of a triumphant affirmation of one’s own self, slave morality from the start says “No” to what is “outside,” “other,” to “a not itself.” And this “No” is its creative act.
• —its action is basically reaction. The reverse is the case with the noble method of valuing: it acts and grows spontaneously.
• Anti- Nazi interpretation: In fact, in contempt there is too much negligence, too much dismissiveness, too much looking away and impatience, all mixed together, even too much of a characteristic feeling of joy, for it to be capable of converting its object into a truly distorted image and monster.

Noble morality

• “How much respect a noble man already has for his enemies!—and such a respect is already a bridge to love. . . . In fact, he demands his enemy for himself, as his mark of honour.” [10]
• This “bad” originating from the noble man and that “evil” arising out of the stew pot of insatiable hatred—of these the first is a later creation, an afterthought, a complementary colour.

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Bad vs. evil /good

• Evil is a term in slave (pejorative) morality. It is the source of this morality.
• Bad in noble morality means hatred, resentment.
• Good for pejorative morality refers to humility, powerlessness, weakness
• Good for noble morality is spontaneity, autonomy, freedom, beauty, power,
• But if there are heavenly goddesses who are our patrons, beyond good and evil, then from time to time grant me a glimpse,… a glimpse of a man who justifies humanity, of a complementary and redeeming stroke-of-luck of a man, for whose sake we can hang onto a faith in humanity! A glimpse at man nowadays makes us tired—what is contemporary nihilism, if it is not that? . . .We are weary of man.

Kingdom of God? Or kingdom of revenge.

• In belief in what? In love with what? In hope for what?—There’s no doubt that these weak people—at some time or another they also want to be the strong people, some day their “kingdom” is to arrive—they call it simply “the kingdom of God,” as I mentioned. People are indeed so humble about everything!
• Thomas Aquinas, the great teacher and saint: “In the kingdom of heaven” he says as gently as a lamb, “the blessed will see the punishment of the damned, so that they will derive all the more pleasure from their heavenly bliss.

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Conclusion of first essay

• “Beyond good and evil” not mean “beyond good and bad”.

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Second essay: the law of autonomy

• Promising is the origin of moral responsibility
• “autonomous” and “moral” are mutually exclusive terms
• the human being who possesses his own independent and enduring will… who has become free, who really is entitled to make promises, this master of free will, this sovereign,…, acquires his own standard of value: he looks out from himself at others and confers respect or contempt. And just as it will be necessary for him to honour those like him, the strong and dependable (who are entitled to make promises)—in other words, everyone who makes promises like a sovereign, seriously.

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Conscience/ bad conscience: pregnancy

• Memorizing the principles by hard punishment: moral reasoning.
• How much blood and horror is at the bottom of all “good things”!
• With the help of such images and procedures people finally retained five or six “I will not’s” in the memory, and, so far as these precepts were concerned, they gave their word in order to live with the advantages of society . With the assistance of this sort of memory people finally came to “reason”.
• If the power and the self-confidence of a community keep growing, the criminal law also grows constantly milder. Every weakening and deeper jeopardizing of the community brings its harsher forms of criminal law to light once again.

justice

• A stronger, braver, more noble man, has had on his side a better conscience as well as a more independent eye; by contrast, we can already guess who generally has the invention of “bad conscience” on his conscience—the man of ressentiment!
• Democratic state: the adaptation of a populace hitherto unchecked and shapeless into a fixed form, just as it was initiated by an act of violence, was carried to its conclusion by nothing but acts of violence—that consequently the oldest “State” emerged as a terrible tyranny, as an oppressive and inconsiderate machinery, and continued working until such raw materials of people and half-animals finally were not only thoroughly kneaded and submissive but also given a shape.

The genealogy of the idea of god

• Ancestors gifts to successors: infinite degree of debt leads to scarification an obedience and mystification
• Just as humanity inherited the ideas of “good and bad” from the nobility of the tribe in the same way people also inherited, as well as the divinities of the tribe and of the extended family, the pressure of as yet unpaid debts and the desire to be relieved of them.
• The progress towards universal empires is always also the progress toward universal divinities. In addition, despotism, with its overthrow of the independent nobility always builds the way to some variety of monotheism .

God-human relationship

• He hurls from himself every “No” which he says to himself, to nature, naturalness, the factual reality of his being as a “Yes,” as something existing, as living, as real, as God, as the blessedness of God, as God the Judge, as God the Hangman, as something beyond him, as eternity, as perpetual torment, as hell, as punishment and guilt beyond measure. In this spiritual cruelty there is a kind of insanity of the will which simply has no equal: , his will to imagine himself punished, but in such a way that the punishment could never be adequate for his crime.

Greek gods

• fortunately that’s something we can still infer with every glance we cast at the Greek gods, these reflections of nobler men, more rulers of themselves, in whom the animal in man felt himself deified and did not tear himself apart, did not rage against himself! These Greeks for the longest time used their gods for the very purpose of keeping that “bad conscience” at a distance, in order to be permitted to continue enjoying their psychic freedom

Anti-Christ will come…

• This man of the future, who will release us from that earlier ideal just as much as from what had to grow from it, from the great loathing, from the will to nothingness, from nihilism—that stroke of noon and of the great decision which makes the will free once again, who gives back to the earth its purpose and to the human being his hope, this anti-Christ and anti-nihilist, this conqueror of God and of nothingness—at some point he must come . . .

Third Essay: What do ascetic ideals mean

• How philosophers might think about Nietzsche’s ideas about morality (beyond good and evil, freedom, nobility, God,…)? They seems to talk about ideal ascetic person. What they mean?
• Human beings require a goal—and they prefer to will nothingness than not to will.
• You see that these philosophers are not unprejudiced witnesses to and judges of the value of ascetic ideals! They think about themselves —what concern to them is “the saint”! In this matter they think about what is most immediately indispensable to them: freedom from compulsion, disturbance, fuss, from business, duties, worries: a bright light in the head, dance, the leap and flight of ideas.
• let the world perish, let philosophy exist, let the philosopher exist, let me exist!

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Three ascetic virtues of philosophers

• We know what the three great catch phrases of the ascetic ideal are: poverty, humility, chastity.
• Poverty: We recognize a philosopher by the following: he walks away from three glittering and garish things—fame, princes, and lust.
• Humility: The man over there, for example, must be a real agitator, I mean a hollow head, a hollow pot. But a spirit which is sure of itself, speaks quietly. He’s looking for seclusion. He lets people wait for him. This sort of man doesn’t like to be disturbed by hostile things and by friendships; he easily forgets or scoffs.
• Chastity: There’s no sense of chastity there out of some ascetic scruple and hatred of the senses.
• A certain asceticism, as we have observed, a hard and cheerful renunciation with the best intentions, belongs to those conditions favourable to the highest spirituality

Concluding remarks

• In Dawn, Section 18, I brought out this point. “Nothing has come at a higher price,” it says there, “than the small amount of human reason and feeling of freedom, which we are now so proud of. But because of this pride it is now almost impossible for us to sense how that huge stretch of time of the ‘morality of custom,’ which comes before ‘world history,’ is the really decisive and important history which established the character of humanity, when everywhere people recognized suffering as virtue, cruelty as virtue, pretence as virtue, revenge as virtue, the denial of reason as virtue and, by contrast, well-being as danger, the desire for knowledge as danger, peace as danger, pity as danger, being pitied as disgrace, work as disgrace, insanity as divinity, change as inherently immoral and pregnant with ruin!”

Consequence of our pejorative morality

• 1. Environmental crisis: “Our entire attitude to nature today, our violation of nature, with the help of machines and the unimaginable inventiveness of our technicians and engineers, is hubris.”
• 2. Moral crisis: “our attitude to God is hubris. I mean our attitude to some alleged spider spinning out purposes and morality behind the fabric of the huge fishing net of causality.”
• 3. Humanity crisis: “our attitude to ourselves is hubris—for we experiment with ourselves in a manner we would not permit with any animal and happily and inquisitively slit the souls of living bodies open. What do we still care about the “salvation” of the soul?”

The metaphysics of science

• Faith in any way is dangerous since it follows certainty.
• Our faith in science rests on something which is still a metaphysical belief
• “The truthful person, in that daring and ultimate sense which the belief in science presupposes in him, thus affirms a world different from the world of life, of nature, and of history, and to the extent that he affirms this “other world,” well? Must he not in the process deny its opposite, this world, our world?
• Science itself from now on requires some justification. So it is important to think about the value of truth.
• Ancient response: truth has been established as being, as god, as the highest authority itself, because truth was not allowed to be problematic. But what about now?

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Scientific naturalism vs. philosophy

• By denial of the old ascetic ideal of philosophy we cannot reach science since “science does not stand sufficiently on its own, not nearly; for that it first requires an value ideal, a power to make value, in whose service it could have faith in itself.” [25]
• The foundation of both science and philosophy is the value of truth.
• Isn’t it the case that since Copernicus the very self- diminution of human beings, their will to self-diminution, has made inexorable progress?1 Alas, the faith in their dignity, uniqueness, irreplaceable position in the chain of being has gone—the human being has become an animal, not a metaphorical animal, but absolutely and unconditionally—the one who in his earlier faith was almost God.
• All sciences are in maintaining this labouriously attained self-contempt for human beings.

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Argument for the existence of God

• If everything human beings “know” does not satisfy their wishes and, instead, contradicts them and makes them shudder, what a divine excuse to be allowed to seek the blame for this not in “wishes” but in “knowledge”! . . .
• 1. “There is no knowledge.
• 2. Consequently—there is a God”
• No solution in any idealization: We have it in our hands to “idealize” the entire earth! . . . But why am I talking about courage? Only one thing is necessary here, just the hand, an uninhibited, a very uninhibited hand: Nihilism, anti-semiticism, natural science without teleology.

Against idealization

• Consequently, absolutely unconditional atheism (—and that’s the only air we breathe, we more spiritual men of this age!) does not stand opposed to this ideal, as it appears to do.
• If we leave aside the ascetic ideal, then man, the animal man, has had no meaning up to this point. His existence on earth has had no purpose. “Why man at all?” was a question without an answer.
• The curse that earlier spread itself over men was not suffering, but the senselessness of suffering— and the ascetic ideal offered him a meaning! The ascetic ideal has been the only meaning offered up to this point.

Conclusion

• To will…

Lecture 9: Moral Realism vs. Constructivism

Moral Realism

• Moral realism: propositions employing moral concepts may have truth values because moral concepts describe or refer to normative entities or facts that exist independently of those concepts themselves, and explain our use of moral concepts.
• Moral naturalistic realists may then wish to add that the facts in question may supervene on natural facts, say about pleasure or desire.

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Debate continued …

Price’s realism

• Non-normative words, they insist, cannot just be ‘‘other words’’ for normative ones. It may turn out that what is advantageous, or what is willed by God or commanded by a sovereign, gives us the content or ‘‘subject matter’’ of ethics, but, Price tells us, it cannot be what ‘‘virtuous’’ or ‘‘obligatory’’ means.
• Question: normative reason is subjective or objective?

Moore’s Realism

• Naturalistic fallacy: Moore argued that for any natural or metaphysical quality put forward as the essential characteristic of the good, it is an open question—an intelligible question, worth asking—whether things with that characteristic really ought to be brought about or pursued. ‘‘Good’’ is therefore indefinable, Moore argued, and, as a corollary to that, value must be understood as an intrinsic rather than a relational property.

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Rise and Fall of Positivism, verificationism, expressivism

• 20^th century: Linguistic turn: One of the things it brought with it was a slight change in the emphasis of empiricism. The empiricists of the eighteenth century saw their debate with the rationalists as a debate about the intellectual sources of our concepts or ‘‘ideas’ whether we get our ideas from reason or from sense experience and sentiment. In the early twentieth century empiricism shifted from a view about the sources of our concepts to a view about their contents, about how they are to be analyzed.
• Dilemma: If one filled in the content of moral concepts with some item that is a possible object of experience— say, pleasure— then one ran afoul of the naturalistic fallacy. If one filled it in with some nonnatural object of intuition, like Moore’s intrinsic values, then one ran afoul of the scientific conception of the world.
• Nevertheless, it is undeniable that it is the function of all of our concepts, or anyway all of our authentically cognitive concepts, to describe reality.

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Realism/ cognitivism

• moral realism is the only possible alternative to relativism, skepticism, subjectivism, and all of the various ways that ethics might seem hopeless. And so long as moral realism appears to be the only alternative to these skeptical options, the need to show that moral truth is as solid, as real, as objective, as scientific truth—and also that it is objective in the same way as scientific truth—will seem pressing.
• OK, but, is the dichotomy of realist non-realist match with cogntivist-noncognitivist distinction? Is a non-relist noncognitivist? !
• So see a realist-noncognitivist : Bernard Williams, and non-realist cognitivist: Rawls
• Realism: Normative facts exists. Two versions of realism: Metaphysics of value; metaphysics of normative reasons.
• Cognitivism: Linguistic version: Normative sentences have truth value; Epistemic version: Moral knowledge is possible.

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Bernard Williams

• Book: Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, 1985.
• Making Sense of Humanity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
• Williams appeals to the existence of what he calls ‘‘thick’’ as opposed to ‘‘thin’’ ethical concepts. Thin ethical concepts—like right and good and ought—do not appear to be world-guided, in the sense that their application does not appear to be guided by the facts.
• I say that the sky is blue, and my visitor from Mars says that it makes a humming noise. Are we agreeing? Certainly we don’t mean the same thing, since I am talking about how the sky looks and he is talking about how it sounds. Yet when we reflect on these views we find that the things we both say have implications expressible in terms of a more absolute concept, that of wavelengths. And when we look at those implications our judgments are found to converge. Here we find grounds for confidence that both of our perceptions are guiding us rightly: they are ways of knowing about the world.

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Bernard Williams Ethics

• In ethics we might take both of seemingly opposing remarks to have implications describable in terms of what we think is a more absolute concept— that lying is wrong—and here we find that they converge.
• What about diverge views in ethics?
• He suggests that we should see the values of a culture not as their best approximations of the truth about right and wrong, but rather as a kind of habitation Their values form a part of the structure of the social world in which they live. Social PARADIGM

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Williams evaluative criterion

• Williams proposes that if we did find that a social world promoted the best life or at least a flourishing life for human beings, this would justify the values embodied in that social world.
• So ethical beliefs constitute a kind of map of the social world.

Korsgaard on Williams

• We should distinguish between knowledge and action.
• Map analogy. Williams: Ethics looks like a map through which we find our way around in the social world.
• Korsgaard: If to have knowledge is to have a map of the world, then to be able to act well is to be able to decide where to go and to follow the map in going there.
• Goodness of action requires the ability to apply our knowledge of the good but the ability to apply our knowledge of the good requires our ability to act freely.

Korsgaard on Realism

• Any realist theory has the difficulty of internalist requirement and to show the normativity of instrumental rationality.
• For example utilitarianism: First, it does not tell us why there is such a rule. Nor, if this is a different question, does it tell us why we should conform to the rule. We seem to be caught on the horns of a dilemma when we confront this question: are we obligated to obey the rule? If one is obligated to obey the rule, then the notion of obligation must be prior to the existence of the rule.
• Instrumental rationality is not suffice to explain the goodness of action . We require categorical imperatives or moral rationality beyond that.
• But, she extends the view that any difference between action and goodness is problematic. Since it faces with the difficulty of the source of obligation, BUT, I disagree.

John Rawls a Kantian: non-realist cognitivist

• Paradox of liberalism: how to behave with people who are anti-liberalism. We cannot tyrannize over others in the name of liberalism and still be consistent liberals.
• This problem is not only applied to illiberal societies but also to liberal democracies as well in the case of conflicts between majority and minorities.
• The same problem in Kant’s third formula. How a free will can be self-legislator as a good will.
• The liberal’s need to avoid compromising the freedom of the citizens by forcing a particular conception of the good on them parallels the free will’s need to avoid adopting a principle that will compromise its own freedom.

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Kant’s Solution

• Universal Law is the law of freewill, categorical and rational.
• But we should add the content of universality that comes from the formula of humanity.
• Rawls’s two principles of justice tell us that all citizens must have equal basic liberties, and that our society must otherwise be designed so that everyone has as large a share of primary goods as possible, with which to pursue his or her own conception of the good.
• As categorical imperatives constitute our free agency, Rawls rules constitute the constitution of liberal democracy.

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Kant and Rawls as constructivist

• Practical philosophy, as conceived by Kant and Rawls, is not a matter of finding knowledge to apply in practice. It is rather the use of reason to solve practical problems.
• Negative freedom is the name of a problem: what shall I do, when nothing determines my actions? Positive freedom proposes a solution: act on a maxim you can will as a universal law.
• For Rawls the concept of JUSTICE refers to the solution to the distribution problem, or equality. But the conception of justice proposes a particular solution by reflecting on the problem, fairness.

Practical Philosophy

• The task of practical philosophy is to move from concepts to conceptions, by constructing an account of the problem reflected in the concept that will point the way to a conception that solves the problem.
• So according to constructivism, normative concepts are not the names of objects or of facts that we encounter in the world. They are the names of the solutions of problems, problems to which we give names to mark them out as objects for practical thought.

Functional constructivism?!

• Chair metaphor.
• But there is a question about how ‘‘deep’’ constructivism can go.
• The parties in Rawls’s ‘‘original position’’ choose with a view to what will be best for them, but under constraints of information, the veil of ignorance.
• In T. M. Scanlon’s theory, to take another example, moral principles are constructed; the problem they solve is one of justifiability. Scanlon, in constructing moral principles, asks which principles people might reasonably reject. The notion of reason is also a normative notion, and Scanlon does not think that it is a constructed notion.

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Can even our own most basic reasons themselves be constructed?

• Korsgaard: Kant’s view, as I understand him, and as I have sketched his view in this essay, is that they can.
• If this sort of Kantian argument doesn’t work, then constructivism cannot go ‘‘all the way down.’’ Korsgaard of course thinks that it can.
• I firmly disagree. Formula of humanity shows the source of objective value of humanity in her capability of freedom and rational choice.
• Kant’s religion: God as the highest good and the Law Giver.

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Conclusion

• Restricted Constructivism vs Full constructivism