well today we're going to watch a dramatization of a conflict of moral reasoning which led to violent and terrible consequences and then afterwards we're going to consider some of the issues it raises the piece is taken from crime and punishment the novel by the great 19th century author dostoyevsky the book tells the story of a young man raskolnikov who commits a terrible murder and the scene we're going to watch takes place fairly early in the book raskolnikov who is contemplating doing the murder goes into a tavern in saint petersburg where he chances to overhear a conversation between two men one of whom is like himself a penniless student but um actually the resources to back it up oh yeah she's ritual right richard the jew if you want you'll let your 5 000 rubles if you want to pawn something for aruba that's all right as well john's a very accommodating old lady she's a look she'll only have a quarter one quarter of the value of anything you take in and she charges seven percent a month let's see this dear old lady has a sister he's a vetter but she she treats her like a child makes it all the housework and that child's about 35. at least six feet tall an extraordinary phenomenon it's really cruel though i mean these are better slaves away night and date has all the cooking and sewing and more than that she even works as a char lady and gives everything she earns to the old woman sounds to me if she has absolutely wretched life oh yes it's bizarre i knew elizabeth is really uncool i mean she's she's extraordinarily tall and she's very long feet i don't know kind of point outwards oh she's clean i'll give her that the really funny thing is though she's always what uh pregnant yeah i don't believe it well she's not all that hideous she looks very good natured and her eyes are quite lovely anyway the proof of it is lots of men find her attractive and she's so soft and good-natured she'll put up with anything anything at all my you she really does have a very sweet smile i think you're rather attracted to yourself or perhaps not only because she's so peculiar tell her tell you one thing i could kill that old woman take all her money and i'll feel the slightest pick of conscience no seriously i mean on the one hand we have a stupid senseless worthless spiteful sick horrible woman who isn't only useless but is doing actual mischief an old woman who doesn't know what she's living for and is gonna die soon anyway yes and on the other hand we have fresh young lives thrown away by the thousand every day for want of a bit of help i could do a thousand good deeds with that other woman's money hundreds thousands of people could be put on the right path dozens of families saved from ruin now i say kill that old woman take her money and use it in the service of humanity and don't you think that one tiny crime would soon be wiped out by a thousand good deeds one day for a come on have thousand simple arithmetic isn't it besides what is the value of that stupider woman's life when weighed in the general good of mankind absolutely nothing nothing at all no more than that of a louse or a black beetle less in fact because she's doing people actual harm do you know what happened the other day she bit lester's finger ain't she bit it almost had to be cut off of course she doesn't deserve to live you are that's nature but the whole point is we must direct and correct the course of nature otherwise we drown in an ocean of prejudice don't you see without that there'd never have been a single great man well people talk about duty conscience what i want to know is what do we mean by drama hey no hold on a minute there's something else i want to hang on a minute there's something i want to ask you well you do all this talking make all these fine speeches you tell me uh would you kill the old woman yourself no of course nothing to do with me i'm only arguing the justice of the case well i think if you wouldn't do it yourself there is no justice in it at all let's play another game well that conversation certainly had a great influence on raskolnikov and his subsequent conduct but of course it also raises some broader questions about moral problems and questions of some relevance to kant's outlook now i have with me today two philosophers with an interest in moral philosophy and i'm going to ask them to discuss these matters they're professor a phillips griffiths of the university of warwick and professor bernard williams of king's college cambridge i'd like to begin by um coming straight to the relevance of this to uh khan's outlook and perhaps i could ask you first of all grief um what do you think kant would have made of that scene if say he had been with us to see it and what he would have said to um to the student's argument about what was the right thing to do in this case well kant uh claimed that anyone who was sufficiently in possession of his faculties to ask himself what it was right to do could find out by applying what he seemed to think was a not too difficult test the first formulation of the categorical imperative which is the supreme for can't the supreme principle of morality is act only on that maxim which could become by our own will a universal law of nature so one has to ask can i will the maxim on which i'm acting should become a universal law of nature now i take it that the axiom the the maxim uh which the student is proposing to act on or as it turns out not proposing to act on in the end is um in order to do good to others to brighten other lives i shall arbitrarily take the life of another the question is whether one could will that that should become universally a maxim of all men's actions and i think kant would say and i base this on what he says about other examples in the book that if all men thought it permissible to take the life of another when they believed that this would be of some value to the welfare of others that this would lead to such a general state of insecurity uh that in fact the general welfare would be harmed not increased and hence that the end of the maxim is in contradiction with what the result would be so that it would be self-defeating and hence it is contradictory to suppose a situation in which every man acted on this principle yes so that that gives us apparently a rather sort of simple straightforward test against which we can measure this argument and we find it doesn't work and that's that we reject it but presumably the situation isn't quite as simple as that or is it well i think there's obviously a great deal to be said for this county in formulation the categorical imperative which griff has referred to of course when uh stripped of its elaborate terminology really is the fundamental of the test how would it be if everybody were to do that or if everybody were to act on that principle is the idea isn't it and i think perhaps it's worth emphasizing um and i think this is a very important point both in itself and in relation to the novel though i think we perhaps want to spend a lot of time on this today that it's absolutely essential to kant's test as it is to a lot of our moral reasoning and after all he thought his test was implicit in our ordinary moral reasoning or in a lot of it that the consequences don't have to be actual ones that is that when we ask the question how would it be if everybody did that it's not appropriate to answer on can't view but they're not going to it the purely imagined test of everybody doing it is enough and i think that's a frankly important point about khan's picture of our moral outlook because it is rather different from raskolnikov's position because russ kolinkov thinks he has a special insight such that the fact that other people aren't going to do it just shows their limitations their blindness and so on so for him they are they aren't going to do it is in fact a relevant consideration but perhaps we'll leave that on one side and confine ourselves shall we to kart's test how would it be if everybody did it even if they are not going to okay now well the thing i first want to add to what greg said which i agree with is that certainly his exposition of kant's outlook is that the facts you have to appeal to in order to show that something pretty dreadful would follow from universalizing this mexican supposing that everybody acted like this depend only on some very general features of human action namely first that we have limited information we all make mistakes don't know what we're doing quite often and secondly that we are in various ways biased have special affections have special concerns and so on you see this man set himself up as the executioner in the name of justice of this old woman really that's what he's claiming to be but you know he's first of all his knowledge of all such situations is enormously limited and secondly he has particular reasons for hating this old woman and we gather to some extent being fond of her sister now if you were to this is khan's point if you were to generalize this practice you'd have absolutely everybody setting themselves up as judges of justice and who should be wiped out for the sake of what and the result would obviously be a collapse totally of the social moral fabric i take it that's the idea isn't it so where does this leave us exactly with with regard to constipation i mean does does can't have uh more or does khan's moral outlook have some application here or are we left no better than we would have can i make one remarks going on a bit i'd like to know very much gross reaction to that i mean i think that what one's just said what we both said is perfectly reasonable i mean there clearly is some force in the point of saying if everybody acted on that principle of setting themselves up as unique judges special judges of the justice and so on and acting as executioners you know everything would fall to bits i think that's that is a powerful one but there's some sense i think in which one feels in that way misses the depth of this question because the thing that frightens one about that student isn't that he's reached the wrong answer it seems to me but that somehow he's embarked on the question that's what i think frightened dostoevsky that it was the idea that people were prepared to consider the idea of wiping people out in order to forward utilitarian aids making things better that really that ought to have been stopped before and even got going that is that that shouldn't be a subject for discussion such a project and i think in a way can't would not totally disagree with that either what do you think about that is his second formulation of the categorical repetitive treat humanity in your own person and in that of others always as an end and never as a mere means uh emphasizes the unconditional absolute value of the individual so much so that it is never right to hurt or harm and certainly not kill another individual for the sake of any other that is to say for the sake of any purpose outside that individual hence to consider whether one may have purposes with regard to the young or to the sister which would justify hurting harming or killing the old woman is ruled out of court immediately on the basic principle of morality for yeah so what we have here is is a balance of two considerations one of which is uh is the life of the old woman and the other is the uh the benefit of the uh and so on but for count these are not commensurate no one of them has an absolute unconditioned value yes and against which the other can't be uh the set of gains that's right i mean can't of course regarded it as a duty to consider the interests of others and to further them but for him it was an imperfect duty that is to say in general one ought to have such a policy but an imperfect duty is overridden by a perfect duty it is never right to kill for the sake of benefit to others yeah it's like an imperfect duty that's a that's a term of art in the county in moral philosophy that means something that it's in general required of one that one should wear possible advance but a strict duty is something was an absolute obligation in the particular case particularly to do or not to do so in the present case we'd have a conflict between you mean the perfect duty in this rather odd terminology which is never to kill anybody or at least in such never to kill anyone for the sake of benefiting others you better come back to that um as against the very general what's called imperfect duty of as it were pushing along the boat of human satisfaction or utility and um as obviously put it just now these aren't actually meant to be put into the scales against one another and for a country and the great sin of utilitarianism is that it's always prepared to weigh anything against anything i mean it make me an offer is the fundamental maxim of indeed a lot of moral consciousness but not for can't that's about you've got to say it's ruled out from the beginning that's the but now you see what i'm unclear about now if i can't is what exactly is ruled out it's it sounded from your exposition i think it is the exposition of kant's doctrine about treating people as aims and never as he puts it merely as means is that you can't for instance bump somebody off to forward some other cause or to satisfy some other duty is that right but what about situations i mean isn't that might be thought rather pious and pure doctrine because in fact there are circumstances are there in which people just are faced with choices are sacrificing the life of one lot of people or indeed bringing about the death of one a lot of people in order to avoid as they suppose some larger evil i don't think this is something that i wanted to bring in to to broaden this thing out a bit because we seem to be agreed generally on the uh raskolnikov case and on the unacceptability of the conclusion but of course um looking around the world today and so we can see that there are uh people resorting to violence because they want to change things that they consider wrong in their society now in a way that's what the student um in the scene there was proposing to do he saw certain evils and he thought it morally right that he should resort to violence to rectify things as he saw it now there are people around the world today terrorists and and guerilla fighters and such like we don't have to look far for example some of them we sympathize with and i suppose some of them we don't but how exactly do we decide does the kantian type of approach give us some insight here about who is right in resorting to violence and who isn't well it seems to me that as bernard said the canton position is a purist position uh and it has an immense appeal the utilitarian position as you say is make me an offer and you can balance anything against anything but it seems to me that the i don't can't talks about the ordinary moral consciousness but a quite common human view is that the kind of calculation which the student engaged in uh is tawdry and wrong but that the count in purism is impossible and that perhaps it's a matter of scale where the stakes are high enough when one's talking about the future of the whole society or the welfare of a very large group that at that point it is right it can be right indeed it can be a duty to engage in violence violence which will in fact dispose of the innocent perhaps not as directly as he was prepared to kill the old woman but with the same effect now um uh when you ask does can't help us in this dilemma it seems to me that uh what vernon was saying in the beginning he's right in a way it rules it out the answer can't is you don't start that kind of calculation well you've got to make a distinction haven't we i mean the the the point about uh engaging in political violence and i'm speaking now violence done by the objectives to a state not violence done by the state itself is of course that it involves the death of the innocent i mean throwing bombs into pubs or burning down the hospital whatever it may be to secure as is supposed some political end of justice and so on um now in the case we were given of course the student didn't represent the old lady as being an innocent party there's some spectator and she was in self-support with the villain so is it where the analogy to the political case between this case and a straight political case is not so much murdering the innocent in the cause it's supposed to justice freedom and so forth but as it were of tyranny's side that's interesting killing the unjust persons themselves sorry that's an interesting point because in a way that puts the the student in a stronger position that's right doesn't it deny this because what kant would say is punishment is right and if a person is immoral then that person ought to be punished but that means he must not only act in accordance with the law i mean he would be in a sense punishing the old woman by killing her perhaps morally she deserves death but you act in accordance with all but not out of reverence for the law because his reason for killing her would be to get other people money and possibly himself not simply that she should suffer the the amount of pain or harm which is appropriate to her immorality i think he's on stronger ground in the first sort of argument we considered both you know once bound to say who's the student to set himself up to quote punish this particular person i got it isn't punishment and it's just it's just a private thing and of course the lady is in a sense though wicked or bad or horrible she's not in the same position as some venomous ruler of a state by any means i mean she is a citizen who's being as nasty as no doubt countless other citizens are being get back to our first target there is an important difference between two kinds of situations but i mean one does feel that uh at least in all i may feel in certain cases that there is justification for resorting to violence um in the in the political situation and i don't see why some of that sympathy shouldn't uh reflect back on the kind of uh situation that the student was in because although there is the difference between a political situation and adjust where one person was involved nevertheless the students saw himself as writing a social wrong i mean he thought he thought it was wrong that there should be all this wealth hoarded up by this whole hag and these other people they're needy and he thought that he ought to rectify well i do think honestly the the um if we think it through more deeply we find a great difference it seems to me that the doctrine about where is just rebellion to use a very old-fashioned phrase that much truth was said about it in for instance bison thomas aquinas i mean in the tradition where you say you resort to this only where the art where the uh the tyranny is of great severity no other means are available to change it and what you you know that what you secure the evils you do are not worse than what you're trying to prevent and so on now in the case of this old woman who's doing this many other means exist if one takes it seriously as a political act for stopping the things she's doing and you get the sister to go away from her you stop people going mental and money and so on now if you say well you can't stop money going people going there to get money from her because they are poor but now you are touching on the genuine political issue the inequalities in the society this may point to political changes in the society but knocking off one old woman because you happen to be fond of her sister is in fact is not serious as an approach to a political revolt or a political issue but i mean i i'd like to ask you that you're saying sorry not serious and that brings me to the thing i want to raise about the the last bit in the scene there and we'll have to be rather brief on this but one thing i did want to ask you at the end of the scene the student as you remember backs away and says no i wouldn't actually do it myself i was just theorizing now is this in fact some sort of kantian insight coming through or is it a piece of moral cowardice on his part i can't see how it's in any way accounting insight well is he in some way seeing that after all in spite of all his uh that his reasoning is superficial that he's undermined by the sort of considering there's no suggestion that the student sees that his reasoning is superficial i think that in the end he feels he can't do it and i think we catch on here on the frankly important point that probably what feelings people have about what they find tolerable not maybe a lot more important than the abstract moral reasonings they engage in to decide that issue would you agree with that i think in general it's true uh i wouldn't say that this means that one shouldn't engage in it once you just do better than the student does so there is an important role for both of these things well thank you very much bernard williams and a phillips griffiths for coming along and giving your views you