What is morality/ethics?

 Anything that deals with the question of good vs.

evil.
 Moral actions are always directed towards other
subjects
 Anthropomorphism
 Good is good because it brings welfare to other
subjects while evil does the otherwise
 What is good and evil then? This is the question
that moral philosophers attempt to answer
 Importance of moral
philosophy
 Classical philosophers have one
central concern in mind: What is the
right way to live?
 All other discussions about
metaphysics, epistemology, and
aesthetics go towards their
arguments about the right way to
live, i.e. morality
 Why moral and existential
philosophy?
 Moral actions are not only measured
by the consequences they have on
other subjects, but by the intent
 E.g. man-slaughter vs. murder,
juvenile vs. adult crimes
 Morality presupposes freewill
 Existential philosophy deals with the
implications of freewill
 Topics in Moral Philosophy
 Meta-ethics

(the origins and nature of ethics)

 Normative ethics

(what makes an act good or evil?)

 Applied ethics

(application of meta-ethics and

normative ethics onto everyday
issues, e.g. abortion)
 Meta-ethics
Two origins of morality:
 Other-worldly: the divine, e.g. God, Heaven,
etc.
 This-worldly: biology, psychology, culture, i.e.
nature or nurture?

Epistemological problem: how do we know

where morality comes from?

Semantics: what do we mean by good or evil? Is

lying necessarily evil?
 Why meta-ethics?
 Moral absolutism/universalism: to find absolute
criteria for moral action and intent
 E.g. Morality is intended by God; good is what
God does and bad is what the devil does
(problem of judgment)

Problem: if there are absolute criteria for good

and evil, does that mean we have no freewill? If
we cannot judge what is good or evil, how can
we claim to have chosen good over evil?
 This-world sources: biology and
psychology
 Biology: we are programmed to behave in
certain manners (e.g. Dawkins’ The Selfish
Gene). But how do we account for our
differences? How about freewill?
 Psychology: what are the intentions behind
being moral? Are all moral actions motivated by
egoism? Why do strangers risk their lives for
other strangers? Are moral actions due to
individual agency? Then it makes no sense to
speak of moral absolutes!
 This-world sources: culture

 Moral relativism: what is good or evil

depends on the cultural contexts
 Can we reduce everything to culture? E.g. “it
is other people’s culture to engage in honor-
killing”
 Should we intervene in the name of moral
absolutes? E.g. free Muslim women from
wearing the Hijab
 Normative ethics

Searching for a single principle to

guide our actions.

Three primary perspectives:

 Virtue theory
 Deontology (Kant)
 Utilitarianism
 Virtue Theory
 Developing good virtues that results in good
actions
 E.g. courage, compassion, wisdom, humility,
benevolence
 E.g. Aristotle and Confucius: the golden mean
 Emphasis on good education

Problem: why are these virtues good? Should we be

compassionate towards tyrants?
Deontology: Immanuel Kant
 Non-consequentialist:fulfil the duty
without regards for consequences

 The Categorical Imperative: Kant’s

synthesis of the concerns for
universalism, freewill, reason, and
this-worldly sources of morality
 Arriving at the Categorical
Imperative
The synthetic apriori proposition

 Analytic apriori: truth-preserving and before

experiences
 Synthetic aposteriori: knowledge expanding
and after experiences

Moral principles must be knowledge-

expanding so that we can know how to act,
and they must be apriori so that they are
universal and unadulterated by subjective
experiences
 Kant’s synthesis
 Morality must come from freewill, if not they
are meaningless
 Freewill comes from exercise of reason, if not
we are mere slaves to desires or biological laws
(hypothetical imperative)  you should not like
what you are doing!
 Universal because all humans have reason
 Reason is unadulterated by experience for we
are all born with it
 Synthetic apriori
Example: Cause and effect

Notion of cause and effect has apriori origins:

we all intuitively see A as a cause of B.

Synthetic: we apply our intuition about cause

and effect onto the systematic study of
nature – Science

Synthetic apriori: merely an explication of

intuition?
 The Categorical Imperative
Reason tells us: “Act on maxim that you can
will to be universal law”

Synthetic: tells us how to behave in any given

situation, long as I can will any principle to
be a universal law

Isn’t that the same as the principle: “do unto

others what you want others to do unto
you”!
 Critiques of Kant
 Problem 1: I would want it to be a universal law, i.e. I want
others to do it. But that doesn’t mean that I myself should do
it!
 Problem 2: Why should I obey my reason only? Am I not also
an emotional being?
 Problem 3: Is freewill really that important? What good does
freewill bring? Erich Fromm: Escape from Freedom: people do
not want choices for it leads to angst (Nazi Holocaust)
 Problem 4: reason not that universal (Sadomasochist would
want everyone to hurt themselves, someone suffering from
chronic sickness would want euthanasia for everyone)
 Problem 5: sticking to duty may result in a lot of suffering for
others (E.g. Killing Hitler to save the world, capital
punishment)
 Critiques of Kant II
Problem 6: is it reason that tells me to will it
to be universal law?

Hume: reason is always a slave to passion

 Moral preferences no different from artistic ones:
they are results of passion rather than reason
The only universal is human potential for
‘sympathy’: being able to feel what others feel.
But the action that comes after is another
question
 If it is passion rather than reason, makes it a
hypothetical imperative, and therefore not
product of freewill? If not product of freewill does
it make morality meaningless?
 Critiques of Kant III
Problem 7: The exercise of reason becomes
enslaving: I must do what reason tells me to.
That’s a paradox!

 Durkheimian solution: reason, categorical

imperative, etc. have origins in society. Inasmuch
as society does not want to give us too much or
too little freewill, reason has come to be the tool
that develops such behaviors in us
 Elementary forms of religious life: respect is the
emotional manifestation of the paradox of reason:
free and not free = love and fear  “respect”
 Utilitarianism: the maximization of
general happiness
Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill

 An act is morally good if the end result

maximizes general welfare
E.g. Killing Hitler to save millions of lives

 A consequentialist conception of morality:

the ends justify the means
 Critiques of Utilitarianism
 Problem 1: technical problem. How can I predict the consequences of
my action? Perhaps killing Hitler will not end the war but make it
worse? Probability and causality problem.
 Problem 2: what do we mean by welfare? Maybe others don’t want
whatever we mean by welfare? E.g. Liberating Afghan women from the
Hijab.
 Problem 3: contradiction with deontology – should a doctor lie to his
patient about the latter’s illness?
 Problem 4: discount the quality of each individual. But ‘welfare’ has a
qualitative dimension, e.g. ‘happiness’ and each human understand
and experience ‘happiness’ differently
Application to distributive justice: allocate resources so that total
welfare is maximized. E.g. split up a liver to give to two persons or give
it to an old man to prolong his life?
 Problem 5: purely future oriented so it discounts retributive justice
E.g. Give organ to a doctor rather than a war veteran
 Problem 6: how to calculate ‘maximum welfare’? Should I kill 1 million
people infected with virus in order to save 1 million and 1 people?
What if the 1 million includes people like Mother Theresa?
 Other theories: human
rights
Rights theory: it is morally good to let people exercise their
rights
Rights and duties are two sides of a coin: others have a
duty to respect my rights
 E.g. Locke’s ‘natural rights theory’: laws of nature
mandate that we should not harm anyone’s life, health,
liberty or possessions
 Problem: how do we know what laws of nature are? Even
if we can, why should we follow them? Some say laws of
nature dictates that we are all heterosexuals, does that
mean that homosexuals should be eliminated? Do laws
of nature come from observing what other animals do? If
that is the case then we should not wear clothes, use
utensils, comb our hair, etc.
 Four principles of moral
rights
 First, rights are natural insofar as they are not invented or created
by governments.
 Second, they are universal insofar as they do not change from
country to country.
 Third, they are equal in the sense that rights are the same for all
people, irrespective of gender, race, or handicap.
 Fourth, they are inalienable which means that I cannot hand over
my rights to another person, such as by selling myself into slavery.

Problem 1: Why do we have these rights? What are the foundations

of these rights? Are they needs or desires? There is always a need
to…what is the to?

Problem 2: we don’t even know what human nature is, how can we
talk about what is natural and what is universal? Is there no such
thing as culture? Are we merely products of nature?
 Applied Ethics
Abortion:
 Rights of baby vs. rights of mother
 Does a baby have a right? What makes a human?
Anthropomorphism
 Deontology vs. utilitarianism: duty not to kill, but
allowing baby to live may make it and the mother
suffer more

Euthanasia:
 Same issue with abortion
 Quality of life vs. quantity of life (question of what
we mean by ‘welfare’)
 ‘Sanctity of life’: meta-ethical question (e.g. if God
does not exist then it is meaningless to talk about
sanctity of life)
 Some principles of applied

ethics
Personal benefit: acknowledge the extent to which an action produces
beneficial consequences for the individual in question (utilitarianism)
 Social benefit: acknowledge the extent to which an action produces
beneficial consequences for society (utilitarianism)
 Principle of benevolence: help those in need (virtue theory,
deontology)
 Principle of paternalism: assist others in pursuing their best interests
when they cannot do so themselves (deontology)
 Principle of harm: do not harm others (deontology)
 Principle of honesty: do not deceive others (deontology)
 Principle of lawfulness: do not violate the law (deontology)
 Principle of autonomy: acknowledge a person’s freedom over his/her
actions or physical body (deontology)
 Principle of justice: acknowledge a person’s right to due process, fair
compensation for harm done, and fair distribution of benefits (rights
theory)
 Rights: acknowledge a person’s rights to life, information, privacy, free
expression, and safety (rights theory)
 What is existential

philosophy?
Human existence is different from that of animals because
we know that we exist as free individuals distinct from the
world

 This knowledge comes from the ability of consciousness to

be conscious of itself

 What then makes me so? Why and how am I so? What shall I
do with it?

“The laws of God, the laws of man,

He may keep that will and can
And how am I to face the odds
Of man's bedevilment and God's?
I, a stranger and afraid
In a world I never made”

: - A. E. Housman, on being a homosexual in a heterosexual

world
 Existential
philosophers/writers
 FriedrichNietzsche
 Soren Kierkegaard
 Martin Heidegger
 Jean-paul Sartre
 Albert Camus
 Theodore Dostoevsky
 Maurice Merleu-ponty
 Jean-paul Sartre:
We are condemned to freedom
 Ontological position: set out to deal with
what it means to be human

 Epistemological position: via analyzing

the nature of human consciousness

 Ethical position: morality is meaningful

insofar as actions are chosen and not
coerced
 Nature of consciousness
 From Edmund Husserl: there is no such thing as
‘pure’ consciousness; consciousness is always
consciousness of something

 Consciousness is directional, i.e. intended

 When I am conscious I am always conscious of

something. This makes me conscious of the act of
consciousness, which precludes the one who is
conscious – I. I am therefore responsible for all
acts of consciousness, regardless of how
spontaneous my consciousness is

 Implication for psychology: we always have

choices, unlike Freud’s argument that there are
factors beyond the grasp of our consciousness.
 The Flee
 What makes me conscious of A rather than B?

 Consciousness always suffers from a ‘lack’, and thus it is

always directed towards that which fills this ‘lack’

 Consciousness has no content; it is a fleeing towards the

world in search of being

 The fact that we can ask questions shows us the

transcendental and the temporal nature of consciousness
and the nothingness of being.

 Freedom not defined as ability to act, but the ability to be

free in thoughts. We are so free that we are unable to not
make choices! (Bourdieu: provided we are always
conscious. But many a times we act unconsciously
because we are embodied creatures.)
 Facticity and Freedom
 I often think I am a unity, but the act of being self-
conscious makes me a duality or a multiplicity: the one
who reflects and the one who is the object of reflection,
the one who reflects upon the one who reflects and the
one who is the object of reflection and so on
 Yet we still seek unity or what Sartre calls ‘being’.
Consciousness is uncomfortable with its freedom.
 Insofar as we are always conscious, human ontology is
always unstable, for consciousness is always in flight,
denying its being in search of other beings. “We are not
what we are and we are what we are not”
 Any being is a facticity that lies in the past, and every act
of being conscious of this facticity is an act of freedom in
its seeking of facticity. My being is therefore always
suspended in time, in my flight from the here and now to
some where and some time else.
 Bad Faith: self-deception and
inauthenticity
 Belief in a stable essence of being
 A contradiction between being a facticity and
a freewill.
 In seeking a being, a person is in an act of
freedom that denies freedom. After settling
into a being, it does not mean that the
consciousness extinguishes itself. But in
order to achieve stability in being, people
give themselves all sorts of justifications.
E.g. ‘fate’, ‘God’, ‘society’, ‘no choice’. Bad
faith is essentially a form of self-deception.
 Ontological, traditional, positivistic, stoical
 Sartre’s point
 The underlying motivation for action is to be
found in the nature of consciousness, which is a
desire for being. Each person must exercise his
freedom in such a way that he does not lose sight
of his existence as a facticity and as a free human
being. Only in so doing can he understand the
relationships between choices and the values
therefore projected. Authenticity is the
recognition of how our freedom interacts with our
facticity, and not utter freedom.

 Facticity refers to the past that is already given. It

is a being that cannot be freed. Everything else
that comes after that can be chosen.
 Sartre’s Ethics
 There is no apriori normative moral values
in our actions, but in choosing, the agent
creates the value the same way an artist
does in his drawing. These values are
universal because humans are, so any
artist put in my situation will be able to
make sense of those values

 The value of morality lies in the act of

choosing, and not the act itself
 On Human Relations
 Shame and guilt is a product of my awareness that I
have been objectified by the freewill of others, and to
deal with this, I objectify others. Human relationships are
therefore constituted by this constant struggle between
trying to be a subject while being aware that one is
being objectified. This is understood as inter-subjective
bad faith

 Love is essentially a paradoxical experience

 “The desire of a freewill to possess another freewill”

 Implications
 Can I ‘choose’ to believe in something?
 Am I able to find purpose in this-worldly
values?
 How do I know that I am free?
 Do I have to be free? What’s so good
about being free?
 Isn’t the act of denying my freedom an
act of freedom too? Suicide
 Kierkegaard and Nietzsche
 Nihilism: pushing the limits of reason results in the realization that
no value as an inherent value in-itself (cf. Weber). Values are
therefore human constructs.

 Kierkegaard: everything we choose to do and believe in is probably

wrong. But we must still do so, and stick to it. Faith is the only
solution to the nihilism that comes from reasoning

 Nietzsche: to craft oneself through oneself, without relying on

anything that transcends one’s life such as God or the soul.

 The Ubermensch: one who creatively destroys and creatively

creates. Values are one’s own constructs, not from external
transcendental sources.

 Eternal return as illustration of inherent meaninglessness of

existence: that there is no purpose for everything repeats itself.
Purpose only exists within a single life-time; no purpose transcends
a life-time.
 Miscellaneous notes
 On fear, angst, and world-openness

 Consciousness is the cause of all sufferings

 Religion is the consequence of the alienating effect

of consciousness

 Monotheistic religion: construct another ‘subject’ to

deal with existential loneliness – God or gods

 Buddhism and Daoism: get rid of consciousness