conflicts between two modern way of moral reasoning

The Moral Side of Murder

Suppose you're the driver of a trolley car, and your trolley

car is hurtling down the track at 60 miles an hour. And at
the end of the track you notice five workers working on the
track. You try to stop but you can't, because your brakes
don't work.
 Case 1: Let's assume you know that for sure. And so you
feel helpless until you notice that there is a side track and
at the end of that track, there is a worker working on the
sidetrack. Your steering wheel works, so you can turn the
trolley car onto the side track, killing the one but sparing
the five.

what's the right thing to do?

Most of them believe “it wouldn't be right to kill five if you
could kill only one person instead.”

It's a tragic circumstance but better to kill one so that five

can live.
Some people think that's the same type of mentality that
justifies genocide and totalitarianism.
Case 2:

Suppose you're an onlooker. You're standing on a bridge

overlooking a trolley car track.

The trolley car is about to careen into the five and kill them.
Standing next to you, leaning over the bridge is a very fat man.
You could give him a shove.

He would fall over the bridge onto the track right in the way of
the trolley car.

He would die but he would spare the five.

How many would push the fat man over the bridge?
Some people who have endorsed sacrificing one person to
save the other five choose not to push that fat man. Why?
The second one involves an active choice of pushing a
person down.
A: In the first case you have to make a certain choice and
people are going to die anyway.

You're making a split second choice.

But pushing the fat man over is an actual act of murder.

No matter what you choose to do, you are consciously
killing them on purpose.

You should be convicted of murder.

The act of actually pushing someone over onto the tracks
and killing him, you are actually killing him yourself. You're
pushing him with your own hands.

That's different than steering something that is going to

cause death into another.
Case 3: Suppose the fat man was standing over a trap
door that you could open by turning a steering wheel.
Would you turn it and let the fat man fall down?

Notice: In the first situation you're involved directly with the

situation. In the second one, you are getting yourself
involved in the situation. What about this one, then? Will
you get yourself involved by turning the steering wheel to
get the fat man fall down on the tracks?
Case 4: This time you're a doctor in an emergency room and
six patients come to you. They've been in a terrible trolley car
wreck.

Five of them sustain moderate injuries, one is severely injured,

you could spend all day caring for the one severely injured
victim but in that time, the five would die.

Or you could look after the five, restore them to health but
during that time, the one severely injured person would die.
How many would save the five? How many would save the
one?

5 VS. 1, it’s a simple math.

Case 5: Now consider another doctor case. This time,
you're a transplant surgeon and you have five patients, each
in desperate need of an organ transplant in order to survive.
One needs a heart, one a lung, one a kidney, one a liver,
and the fifth a pancreas. And you have no organ donors.
You are about to see them die. And then it occurs to you that
in the next room there's a healthy guy who came in for a
check-up. And he's taking a nap, you could go in very quietly,
yank out the five organs, that person would die, but you
could save the five. How many would do it?
Somebody suggested that he should take the organs of the
one who dies first and use his four healthy organs to save
the other four. it Seems like a good idea. But is there
something wrong with it?
Certain moral principles （moral reasoning） have
already begun to emerge from the questions about the
cases. And let's consider what those moral principles look
like.
Consequentialist moral reasoning：better that five
should live even if one must die.

Consequentialist moral reasoning locates morality in the

consequences of an act.
Categorical moral reasoning: the intrinsic quality of the
act itself.

It was just wrong, categorically wrong, to kill an innocent

person, even for the sake of saving five lives.

Categorical moral reasoning locates morality in certain

absolute moral requirements, certain categorical duties and
rights, regardless of the consequences.
Contrast between consequentialist and categorical moral
principles.

: utilitarianism invented by
Jeremy Bentham, English political philosopher.

: deontology invented by
German philosopher Immanuel Kant.
We will look at those two different modes of moral
reasoning, assess them, and also consider others.

We’ve recommended a number of great and famous books,

books by Aristotle, John Locke, Immanuel Kant, John
Stewart Mill, and others.
 Reference Books
1. Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1980.

2. Aristotle. Politics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

1984.

3. Gilligan, Carol. In a Different Voice: Psychological

Theory and Women's Development. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1982.

4. Hauerwas, Stanley. A Community of Character: Toward a

Constructive Christian Social Ethic. Notre Dame, IN:
University of Notre Dame Press, 1981.
5. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Practical Reason.
Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merril, 1986.

6. Kant, Immanuel. The Moral Law (or Groundwork of the

Metaphysics of Morals). London: Hutchinson University
Library, 1961.

7. Maclntyre, Alasdair. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory.

Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984.

8. Mill, John Stuart. On Liberty. New York: Viking Penguin Inc.,

1987.

9. Mill, John Stuart. Utilitarianism. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett

Publishing Co., 1979.
10. Newman, John Henry. The Idea of a University, Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1976.

11. Noddings, Nel. Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics

and Moral Education. Berkeley, CA: University of California
Press, 1984.

12. Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, MA:

Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971.

13. Wolff, Robert Paul. The Ideal of the University. Boston:

Beacon Press, 1969.
We also take up contemporary, political, and legal
controversies that raise philosophical questions.

To make clear what's at stake in our everyday lives.

 Warning
To read these books in this way carries certain risks.

These risks spring from the fact that philosophy teaches

us and unsettles us by confronting us with what we already
know.
It works by taking what we know from familiar
unquestioned settings and making it strange.

Philosophy estranges us from the familiar, not by supplying

new information but by inviting and provoking a new way of
seeing.

Once the familiar turns strange, it's never quite the same
again.
Self knowledge is like lost innocence, however unsettling
you find it, it can never be un-thought or un-known.

Those are the personal risks.

By reading these books and debating these issues, you will
become a better, more responsible citizen, you will
examine the presuppositions of public policy, you will hone
your political judgment, you will become a more effective
participant in public affairs.
 POLITICAL RISKS

You have to allow for the possibility that political philosophy

may make you a worse citizen rather than a better one or
at least a worse citizen before it makes you a better one,
and that's because philosophy is a distancing, even
debilitating, activity.
Socrates' friends, Callicles, tries to talk him out of
philosophizing.

"Philosophy is a pretty toy if one indulges in it with

moderation at the right time of life. But if one pursues it
further than one should, it is absolute ruin.Take my advice,
abandon argument. Learn the accomplishments of active
life, take for your models not those people who spend their
time on these petty quibbles but those who have a good
livelihood and reputation and many other blessings."
Callicles had a point because philosophy distances us from
conventions, from established assumptions, and from
settled beliefs.

Those are the risks, personal and political.

There is a characteristic evasion.

The name of the evasion is skepticism, it's the idea that
goes something like this,

“If Aristotle and Locke and Kant and Mill haven't solved
these questions after all of these years, who are we to
think that we can resolve them? And so, maybe it's just a
matter of each person having his or her own principles and
there's nothing more to be said about it, no way of
reasoning. ”
It's true, these questions have been debated for a very long
time.

The reason they're debated, the reason they're

UNAVOIDABLE is that we live some answer to these
questions every day.

Skepticism is no solution.
Immanuel Kant once wrote,

"Skepticism is a resting place for human reason, where it

can reflect upon its dogmatic wanderings, but it is no
dwelling place for permanent settlement." "Simply to
acquiesce in skepticism can never suffice to overcome the
restlessness of reason."
The aim of this course is to awaken the restlessness of
reason and to see where it might lead.
Thank you very much!
 The Case for Cannibalism

We tried to articulate the reasons or the principles lying

behind our judgments.
We noticed that sometimes we were tempted to locate the
morality of an act in the consequences.

We called this consequentialist moral reasoning.

The intrinsic quality or character of the act matters.

Some people argued that there are certain things that are
just categorically wrong even if they bring about a good
result, even if they saved five people at the cost of one life.

We contrasted consequentialist moral principles with

categorical ones.
 The philosophy of utilitarianism

Jeremy Bentham, an English political philosopher gave the

first clear systematic expression to the utilitarian moral
theory. And Bentham's idea is a very simple one:

The right thing to do, the just thing to do is to maximize

utility.
What did he mean by utility?

the balance of pleasure over pain, happiness over suffering.

All of us, all human beings are governed by two sovereign
masters: pain and pleasure.

We human beings like pleasure and dislike pain.

So the right thing to do individually or collectively is to

maximizing the overall level of happiness.
"The greatest good for the greatest number."

A real case story: the case of the Queen versus Dudley

and Stevens. It’s a British law case that's famous and much
debated in law schools.

How would you rule, imagining that you were the jury?
A sadder story of disaster at sea was never told than that
of the survivors of the yacht, Mignonette.

The ship floundered in the South Atlantic, There were four

in the crew, Dudley was the captain, Stevens was the first
mate, Brooks was a sailor, all men of excellent character
the newspaper account tells us.
The fourth crew member was the cabin boy, Richard
Parker, He was an orphan, he had no family, and he was
on his first long voyage at sea. He went, the news account
tells us, rather against the advice of his friends. He went in
the hopefulness of youthful ambition, thinking the journey
would make a man.
The facts of the case were not in dispute.

A wave hit the ship and the Mignonette went down. The
four crew members escaped to a lifeboat. The only food
they had were two cans of preserved turnips, no fresh
water. For the first three days, they ate nothing. On the
fourth day, they opened one of the cans of turnips and ate
it. The next day they caught a turtle. Together with the
other can of turnips, the turtle enabled them to subsist for
the next few days. And then for eight days, they had
nothing. No food. No water.
Imagine yourself in a situation like that, what would you
do?
By now the cabin boy, Parker, is lying at the bottom of the
lifeboat in the corner because he had drunk seawater
against the advice of the others and he had become ill and
he appeared to be dying.

Dudley, the captain, suggested that they should all have a

lottery to see who would die to save the rest.

Brooks refused. He didn't like the lottery idea. So no lots

were drawn.
The next day there was still no ship in sight，so Dudley told
Brooks to avert his gaze and he motioned to Stevens that the
boy, Parker, had better be killed.

Dudley offered a prayer, he told the boy his time had come,
and he killed him with a pen knife, stabbing him in the jugular
vein.

Brooks emerged from his conscientious objection to share in

the gruesome bounty.
For four days, the three of them fed on the body and blood of
the cabin boy. And then they were rescued. Dudley in his diary
said，“as we were having our breakfast, a ship appeared at
last.”

They were taken back to Falmouth in England where they

were arrested and tried.

Brooks turned into state's witness. Dudley and Stevens went

to trial. They claimed they had acted out of necessity. Better
that one should die so that three could survive.

The prosecutor wasn't swayed by that argument. He said

murder is murder, and so the case went to trial.
Now imagine you are the jury, put aside the question of law,
how many would vote 'not guilty', that what they did was
morally permissible? And how many would vote 'guilty',
what they did was morally wrong?
There is a distinction between what's morally reprehensible
and what makes someone legally accountable.

The degree of necessity does, in fact, exonerate us from some

kind of guilt.
In a situation that desperate, you have to do what you have to
do to survive.

Someone just has to take the sacrifice so that people can

survive.

There might be a possibility for the survivor to benefit our

society in the future.
Most people think what they did was wrong.

They believe that’s wrong because there's no situation that

would allow human beings to take other people's lives.

We don't and shouldn’t have that kind of power.

 The idea of consent
What if Dudley and Steven had asked for Richard Parker's
consent, would that exonerate them from an act of murder?
And if so, is that still morally justifiable, suppose Parker in
his semi-stupor says "Okay."? ?
One might agree with that if he was making a decision to give
his life and he took on the agency to sacrifice himself，that's
the only kind of consent we could have confidence in morally.
Otherwise, it would be coerced consent.
Does this argument make sense? Could the voluntary consent
of Parker justify their killing him?

Why does consent make such a moral difference?

What about the lottery idea? Does that count as consent?

As to this supposition, I think what makes it a crime is the idea
that they decided at some point that their lives were more
important than parker’s, and that's the basis for any crime,
because it's against equlity (the principle of equal respect).

If they had all agreed to draw a lottery, it's like they're all
sacrificing themselves to save the rest. Only then, could their
killing parker be justified.
The cabin boy was never consulted about whether or not he
would like to be a part of that.

If there were a lottery and they'd all agreed to the procedure,

then it would be okay.

The cabin boy didn't know what was gonna happen.

Now, suppose everyone agrees to the lottery, they have the
lottery, the cabin boy loses, and he changes his mind. could he
do this? Can dudley still kill him?

“If you know that you're dying for the reason of others to live. If
someone else had died, you know that you would consume
them too.”

Had Parker known what was going on, killing him would be a
bit more understandable.
key: lack of consent

If we add consent, then more people are willing to consider

the sacrifice morally justified.

BUT we must concede that even with consent, it would still be

wrong.

Why would it be wrong, categorically wrong, with or

without consent?
We, as human-beings, shouldn't be eating human anyway.

Murder is murder in every way.

This is the categorical way of thinking.

But using the consequentialist way of thinking, we might get a
very different answer.

In this case, there were three lives at stake versus one, the
cabin boy, who had no family, no dependents. The other three
had families back home in England, they had dependents,
they had wives and children.

We have to consider the utility, the happiness of everybody.

“If they weren't motivated by affection and concern for their
loved ones at home and their dependents, surely they wouldn't
have done this, there’s no difference from people on a corner
trying, with the same desire, to feed their family. ”
T h e d e f e n s e s h a d t o d o w i t h n e c e s s i t y, t h e i r d i r e
circumstance and the idea that numbers matter.

Not only numbers matter but the wider effects matter.

So if you add up, you might have a case for saying what they
did was the right thing.
And there are at least three different types of objections.

1. (A categorical objection against utilitarianism) The first

objection said what they did was categorically wrong, murder is
murder, it's always wrong even if it increases the overall
happiness of society.

Q1: Is it because cabin boys have certain fundamental rights?

And if that's the reason, where do those rights come from?
2. (procedural objection against inequality)The second
objections said there should be a lottery, and the lottery would
make it morally permissible. It's saying everybody has to be
counted as an equal and be treated fairly with the same
procedure.

Q2: This leaves us with another question to investigate. Why

does agreement to a certain procedure, a fair procedure,
justify whatever result flows from the operation of that
procedure?
3. (consent-based objection against coersion) The third
objection has to do with the basic idea of consent. If the cabin
boy had agreed by himself, then it would be all right to take his
life to save the rest.

Q3: But this raises a third philosophical question: What is

the moral work that consent does? Why does an act of
consent make such a moral difference, that an act that would
be wrong, taking a life without consent, is morally permissible
with consent?
To investigate those three questions, we're going to have to
read some philosophers whom we will talk about in the future
classes.
Thank you!
teleological moral reasoning

A famous ancient philosopher, Aristotle, ties justice to honor,

virtue, merit and moral desert.
Justice is a matter of giving people what they deserve, giving
people their due.

But what is a person's due? What are the relevant grounds

of merit or desert?

Aristotle says that depends on the sort of things being

distributed.
"Persons who are equal should have equal things assigned to
them."

Equals in what respects?

It depends on the sort of thing we're distributing.

Suppose we're distributing flutes, what is the relevant merit or
basis of desert for flutes? Who should get the best ones?

The best flute players.

All justice involves discrimination.

The discrimination should be based on virtue.

He says it would be unjust to discriminate on some other

bases, like wealth, nobility of birth, physical beauty or chance.
Aristotle says birth and beauty may be greater goods than the
ability to play the flute.

But the fact remains that he is the person who ought to get the
best flute, because we're looking for the best musician.
Why should the best flutes go to the best flute players?

“ Because they'll produce the best music, and everybody will

enjoy it more. ”

Aristotle is not a utilitarian.

His answer is the best flutes should go to the best flute players
because that's what flutes are for, to be played well.
The purpose of flute playing is to produce excellent music.
And those who can best perfect that purpose, ought properly
to have the best ones.

Aristotle's reason for giving the best flute to the best flute
players is not a utilitarian reason.

It's a reason that looks to the purpose, the point, the goal, i.e.
'telos'.
You have to consider the telos of the thing.

This idea of reasoning from from the telos is called

"teleological moral reasoning".

And that's Aristotle's way of moral reasoning, Reasoning from

the goal, from the end.
It does have a certain intuitive plausibility.

Consider the allocation of the best tennis courts in Jinan

University. How should they be allocated? Who should have
priority in playing on the best courts?

"Those who can best afford them."

Aristotle would say "No".

"The big shots, the most influential people at Harvard. ”

Aristotle would also reject that.

The tennis player is the one who should have priority for
playing in the best tennis court, because that what tennis
courts are for.
Now, one of the things that makes it strange is that in
Aristotle's world, in the ancient world, it wasn't only social
practices that were governed by teleological reasoning and
teleological explanation. All of nature was understood to be a
meaningful order and what it meant “to understand nature, to
grasp nature, to find our place in nature”, was
.
And with the advent of modern science, it's been difficult to
think of the world, and justice, in a teleological way, but there
is still a certain amount of naturalness to thinking about things
in this way.
Winnie the Poo gives you a great idea of how there is a
certain, natural, childlike way of looking at the world in a
teleological way.

"He came to a place in the forest, and from the top of the tree
there came a loud buzzing-noise. Winnie-the-Poo sat at the
foot of a tree, put his head between his paws, and began to
think."
“That buzzing-noise means something. You don't get a
buzzing-noise like that just buzzing and buzzing without its
meaning something. If there's a buzzing-noise, somebody's
making a buzzing-noise. And the only reason for making a
buzzing-noise that I know of, is because you're a bee. And the
only reason for being a bee that I know of, is making honey.
And the only reason for making honey, is so I can eat it.”

This is an example of teleological reasoning.

It isn't so implausible after all.

Even if teleological explanations don't fit with modern science,
even if we've outgrown them in understanding nature, isn't
there something still intuitively, and morally plausible about
Aristotle's idea that the only way to think about justice is to
reason from the telos of the social practice?

And isn't that precisely what we were doing when we talk

about what we should do in a certain kind of social practice
(e.g. learning) or social institution?

Aristotle says that's indispensable to thinking about justice. Is

he right?
 Summary
Aristotle argues that justice is a matter of giving people what
they deserve. And the central idea of Aristotle's theory of
justice is that in reasoning about justice and rights we have to
reason about the telos of social practices.

Justice requires giving equal things to equal persons, but the

question immediately arises, equal in what respect?

Aristotle says we should answer this question by looking to the

characteristic end or telos of the thing we're distributing.
And so we discussed Aristotle's example of flutes, “who
should get the best flutes?”

Aristotle's answer was the best flute-players, because that's

the way of honoring the excellence of flute playing. It's a way
of rewarding the virtue of the great flute-player.

Even nowadays, it's not easy to dispense with teleological

reasoning when we're thinking about social institutions and
political practices. It's hard to do without teleology when
we're thinking about ethics, justice, and moral argument.
According to teleological moral reasoning, what should
Dudley and the doctor do under their respective
circumstances?
THANK YOU!