Notes

I see fit today to add a footnote to my counterexample to the Kantian idea of moral worth . It's a quotation that I read from Michael Moncur's Collection of (Cynical) Quotations for today: A sense of duty is useful in work, but offensive in personal relations. People wish to be liked, not be endured with patient resignation. Bertrand Russell, Conquest of Happiness (1930) ch. 10 British author, mathematician, & philosopher (1872 - 1970) It would have been inappropriate to approach the crying woman out of duty. She would have responded to the emotions of the person approaching her rather than the reasons. If you are approaching someone in that position out of duty, what would be the accompanying emotion? Most likely patient resignation. If you are approaching her out of sympathy, what would be the accompanying emotion? It is probably too strong a claim to say that you like a person that you don't even know. Yet you seem to be at least giving her the benefit of the doubt

I think that something else still needs to be said about moral motives. It is, at least generally, a morally acceptable reason to do something because it is right. However, if one does something because it is right, one is presumably thereby not doing it out of inclination. My moral observation compels me to believe that this girl helped this person for the right reasons. Yet at the same time, the act seems clearly to have been performed out of inclination. I would not claim that just any inclination, however, would be of moral worth. It is for this reason that it is perhaps worth exploring more deeply what consistutes a good inclination. Suppose that one were to ask this girl why she helped this person. If she said, "Because it gave me pleasure," that is not a moral reason. But note also that if she said, "Because I felt like it" or even "Because I felt sorry for her", I do not consider those moral reasons either. But if she said "Because she was up

On Friday I decided that one treated people as ends in themselves by not harming them. Is that all that is required in order to treat people as ends in themselves? Peter Singer would surely claim that we also had duties to help people. But I do wonder whether any such duty is really consistent with treating people as ends in themselves. We are simply considering this from the point of view of the helper. But what about the helpee? If I found myself down on my luck, then would it not be selfish for me to expect that anybody else had a duty to help me? One difficulty here is that I have never been in a situation where I have felt like I actually needed anybody else's help. I don't think that I have ever asked anybody for help in my life, and I probably would feel selfish if I did anything like that. I am not the only person to have this sentiment. I think that we have all heard of people who are too proud to accept charity. I certainly do not refuse help if someone offers it to m

I think we want to elaborate on a philosophical point from yesterday. I would examine further what it actually means to treat people as ends in themselves. It is a rather vague phrase. I actually think that it may be clearer to think of it as the negation of treating people as mere means to ends. I have much clearer intuitions about what it means to treat someone as a mere means to an end. The run-over fat man from yesterday's entry is clearly being treated as a mere means to an end. It also clarifies what I think is wrong in various other counterexamples to utilitarianism that I have heard over the years. One of them, for example, involves killing someone so that her organs can be used to save the lives of four other people. She is also being used as a mere means to an end. What do these two instances have in common with each other? Given them, I can see two different ways of interpreting what it means to treat someone as a mere means to an end. First, it could be that they are be

Would you say that helping someone out of sympathy is not an act of self-interest? I know that I said something similar to this in my Masters' thesis. I don't know. It seems to me to be an act of self-interest, because you are technically acting out of concern for your own interests. But I still consider that it is importantly different from the kind of self-interest that is thought to negate moral worth in actions. First, it is not mere self-interest. You are clearly also acting out of concern for the interests of the other person. Unless other people have some kind of intrinsic value in your motivations, then I do not believe that those motivations could ever be called "moral". Second, those other people's interests are necessarily connected with your own self-interest. A proper motivation of empathy cannot fail to feel something of others' joys and sorrows as if they were your own. Hence, your own interests cannot contradict the interests of the other peo

I have thought of an objection to my counterexample from yesterday. Specifically I am thinking of the claim that the girl did not approach the crying woman out of pleasure. On the one hand, I am sure that she did it out of sympathy, which is importantly different from pleasure. On the other hand, I can still see a Kantian objection to which that motive would be vulnerable. One could argue that in feeling this sympathy she felt something of the woman's pain. It does not sound like it would be of moral worth if the girl did what she did in order to relieve her own pain. If that was indeed the motive, then I seem to be forced to agree with this. It is not morally praiseworthy to do something simply because it is in one's own interests. And yet, look at how different this kind of motive is from what some egoists call "enlightened self-interest". Enlightened self-interest involves acts of reciprocity. Hence, there is a gap in the time between when the other person's in

I saw a convincing counterexample to the Kantian idea of moral worth this morning. While we were still riding through the Inner West on the train, a woman in front of me burst into tears. She was talking to someone on her mobile phone. Her sobs were so great that I could make out almost none of what she was saying. But it seems that she had just found out that someone close to her had died. She was going to call work and then she was going to go straight back home. As the train was starting to empty at Central, a girl on the other side of the aisle took her by the shoulder and asked her if she was okay, and whether she would like a glass of water. The woman started to talk to her a little about what had happened. Again, I could make out very little of it, but the girl decided to sit with this person and unpack her things by her. Apparently she was going to say with her until she got onto a train back to the Mountains. It seemed obvious that this was an act performed out of inclination

I was just reading this web page, an interview with Kurt Vonnegut. His books are full of dark humour. But interestingly, he does actually say in this interview that there are some subjects that he thinks it is inappropriate to joke about, such as the Holocaust. Nevertheless, Vonnegut did think that Voltaire demonstrated that the Lisbon earthquake could be made funny. The interviewer suggested that the difference was in the amount of time after the event. If it were only one year after the Lisbon earthquake it would not be funny. And if it were three hundred years after the Holocaust it might be funny. The difference, in other words, is whether the events affect any actually existing persons. And yet, look at the "Friday Night Sports Machine" from the late 1980s. They poked fun at all sorts of sporting accidents, always less than a week old. I suppose you could argue that that was in bad taste, but there was clearly an audience for it. I suppose the difference here is a matte

Not so long ago, I had a few more thoughts about my Masters thesis. I decided to look into one of the objections raised by the external reviewer: The thesis seemed to depend on the claim that society and its practices could be specified independently of a constitutive reliance on moral terms. As such, s/he said that this claim needed to be defended, or at least more than it was in the thesis. I had not had any thoughts at all about whether society had a constitutive reliance on moral terms. Nor I did not see how it posed a problem for my arguments one way or the other either. My idea for an ethical theory revolved around a putative dependency of ethics on social functioning. How was this weakened if society was constitutively dependent on moral terms? If anything, it seemed to strengthen it if the connection between morals and society were really that strong. I decided to email my supervisor to ask him this question. He replied saying that much of the subject matter was now too far in