Hi, this is Ethics. My name is Mark Thorsman. In this course, we are discussing ethics in the everyday and taking a look at how classic philosophers and classic readings in philosophy can inform our understanding of what it means to live the good life here today. If you'd like to follow along, the book we're using is Ethics, Essential Readings, and Moral Theory, edited by George Scher from Routledge 2012. So, most of the readings we're looking at you can get online free of charge.
Most of them are out of copyright. But if you want to just follow along and get the book and follow us for all the readings you can, it's just by taking a look at this text. So anyway, let's jump into it.
Now, this is our first video and you'll see that over the next 10 to 15 videos, which is going to be roughly an hour apiece, so over the next 10 to 15 hours, we're going to be doing a survey. of ethics and looking at how different ethical theories apply to sort of concrete situations. But what we want to do in this first video is really lay down some of the central ideas about ethics. Now in our previous video on the taxonomy of philosophy, we took a look at the idea of the basic fundamental sort of branches of philosophy.
We distinguished epistemology, metaphysics, and ethics, among other things such as logic. and aesthetics, for instance. So there's lots of branches of philosophy, but ethics is one of these primary branches.
Really, it begins with Socrates, if you want. But I wanted to sort of start off here now. This is a sort of quote from James Fizer of the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and here's how he breaks it down. He says, quote, the field of ethics or moral philosophy involves systematizing, defending, and recommending concepts of right and wrong behavior. Philosophers today usually divide ethical theories into three general subject areas, metaphysics, normative ethics, and applied ethics.
I want to talk about each of those here in just a moment, but let me keep reading the quote from Pfizer. Metaethics investigates where our ethical principles come from and what they mean. Are they merely social inventions?
Do they involve more than expressions of our individual emotions? Metaethical answers to these questions focus on the issues of universal truth, the will of God. the role of reason in ethical judgments, and the meaning of ethical terms themselves.
Normative ethics takes on a more practical task, which is to arrive at moral standards that regulate right and wrong behavior. Now this may involve articulating the good habits that we should acquire, the duties that we ought to follow, or the consequences that our behavior will have on others. Finally, though, applied ethics involves examining specific controversial issues, such as abortion, infanticide, universal...
I'm sorry, animal rights, environmental concerns, homosexuality, capital punishment, and nuclear war. Now, sorry, first off, I think it's sort of disastrous usually to read a long quote like that. But I thought it was sort of good.
Pfizer here makes out a good sort of sense here. Or maybe it's Pfizer. I apologize if it is. They were mispronouncing it.
But these three general areas to think about. So this is ethics. So there's three categories, and let me see if I can explain them in a little bit more precise, though, a general way. Metaethics concerns the question of what wrong and right consist in essentially, right? Metaethics is concerned with questions about how is it possible to be ethical?
What is the meaning of the good, such that we're supposed to pursue the good, and so on and so forth? So metaethics is an evaluation of what you might say is the universal principles that undergird ethical theory as such. Today, a lot of people are familiar with metadata, right?
So when you send an email, your email message has information, but then there's meta-information, which is actually really the organization of what you're trying to talk about in the email, right? That metadata, right, has a certain sort of relation. So you can think of ethics, if ethics is about practical...
concerns about how we ought to live the best sort of lives, to live rightly or wrongly, to evaluate these problems, then we have to first rely upon the general rules and the principles, if you will, the operating system that guides any sort of ethics. So that's what meta-ethics studies. I hope that I didn't confuse you with that illustration.
Normative ethics concerns the evaluation and the articulation of ultimately what the basic rules are and what needs to be evaluated and so on and so forth. What should be the normative standards? Think here of our ordinary concept, our ordinary conception of what's normal, right?
What's normal is considered to some degree to be what one should do, all things being equal, right? Normal is considered the baseline standard. So normative ethics is sort of concerned with articulating... the practical task of what the standards are that regulate right and wrong behavior.
Now finally, applied ethics looks at the concrete situations. So there, for instance, animal rights, homosexuality, just war theory, so on and so forth. So applied ethics looks at trying to apply the principles and evaluate, apply the theories to particular practical problems. So think of it this way. Metaethics concerns really the why.
The normative ethics concerns really the ought, and applied ethics concerns really the how of ethics. How are you going to actually make these things happen? So you can divide ethics in this general way.
There's different ways of dividing ethics, we should say, but it's a sort of helpful way for thinking about it. Now, before we keep going here, I also want to articulate three other sort of points that I think are important. And the first is that I think ethics is a sustained reflection.
right action. So ethics, Aristotle thought that ethics was the science of right action. So for Aristotle, he thought we could determine through universal principles how people ought to act, or at least the sorts of people that they ought to be, and what those virtues and vices correlatively might be.
But ethics is always a sustained reflection. It's an analysis. It's a discussion, a dialogue. But it's always a discussion, a dialogue, an evaluation of right action.
And this is really important, is that action is actually the primary category when we talk about ethics. Because what I would suggest is that not only is ethics sustained reflection, but that it is a sustained reflection that aims towards action itself. So the goal of ethics is not simply to know what's right or wrong, but it's ultimately to...
do what is right or wrong. In fact, Aristotle in his Ethics, thousands of years ago, makes the same point, right? That the goal is not simply to know what it is to be a right person, a just person.
The goal is to become a just person. And so ethics aims towards action. So unlike the, and I sort of say this flippantly, unlike the other branches of philosophy, let's say metaphysics or epistemology or aesthetics, right?
You can live your whole life without really caring or thinking about those things. But when it comes to ethics, one must act. Because action is something that is ultimately unavoidable. All of us must act.
That's what it means to be a human being. That's what it means to live a life. But here's the thing. You can't avoid acting. But you also, if there are right and wrong ways of acting, then we're stuck in a bind here.
Is that we... must reflect in ethics because action is an essential ingredient of what it means to be a human being. So I think that people can avoid lots of parts of philosophy, but what they can't avoid is the evaluation of action.
Now, here's the problem is that a lot of people actually don't really actually evaluate why they do what they do. Most of the time, and I don't have evidence per se, at least not at this point, but I think we could generate it. So it's a hypothesis, I guess, speculation, is that I think that... most people think that they can.
They haven't maybe at some point engaged in a reflection of why they do what they do, but they haven't visited. And most people probably act simply out of habit, right? I think most people are used to believing the things they believe, and most people are used to acting the way they act. And so they continue to do so.
I think that's part of what it means to be a human. That's part of our animal nature, if you will. You know, I think it's a part, and I think increasingly actually in neuroscience, there's lots of psychological evidence and studies that seem to support this notion is that we're habitual creatures.
So ethics is important for a number of reasons. Number one is that we have to recognize that we engage in this sustained ethical reflection because we have to interrupt our habits, right? We have to stop in order to determine whether or not we really are acting rightly or whether or not we're acting on false beliefs. or maybe even beliefs that no longer apply.
So ethics is unavoidable. And so that's why I think it's the perfect way for thinking about how we should live in an everyday context. And thinking about ethics really in this context of the everyday life, right? And here's the key, is that one, I think, studies ethics, at least that's the perspective and the theme for our course, is that one studies ethics with the aim of living well, right?
is to do the right thing, is to live a good life, right? Is to know what it means to live a good life. These are important questions because all of us are living in everyday life and I think many of our actions we think contribute towards living a good life. Whether or not they do though is going to be one of our big questions and that's one of the questions you'll have to consider as we go through this course.
Right now but there's two questions I want us to start that I want us to talk about in this video. There's gonna be two classic readings that I'm going to try to apply to the questions. The first question here is will What is the origin of moral life?
And by the way, there's lots of different answers to this question. I've just chosen one philosopher, Thomas Hobbes, to try to address that question for us. But there's another question here we have to ask is, how should we talk about moral life? I think that we have to have a moment to think about moral language and the ways in which we can get lost in our moral language.
And so we're going to be taking a look at Plato's Dialogue the Thief Road, looking at a very common discussion about the origin of moral life And also looking at particularly how Socrates and Plato deals with the question So that's what we're going to be looking at for this Video here for the rest of the video. We're going to start here with Thomas Hobbes now off to apologize It's been a little sick lately the last couple days. I'll have to probably drink water frequently Okay Now, Thomas Hobbes is a great philosopher that we're going to be taking a look at. He's usually considered one of the primary proponents, early proponent, modern proponents for what's known as social contract theory or contractualism, as it's frequently referred to. Right.
Contractualism as of the core is the notion that the government and morality all are based ultimately in a sort of social contract or agreement. that we hold with other people within our society, and so on and so forth. So we're going to be looking at social contract theory, if you will.
And social contract theory, especially Hobbes, is the basis for modern political democratic theory and liberal theory. We will see, we're not, we're in this course, we're going to take a look at Thomas Hobbes, we're going to see what he says briefly about the origin of civil society and government. But we'll see that our question is really, he also takes the...
This is the origin for our moral theory and our moral concepts and our moral values. So we really want to take a look at what Thomas Hobbes'view is. We'll also see that really I think the distinction we're going to see between Hobbes on the one hand, who really, although he wasn't, he really provides, if you will, a secular explanation for moral theory. Although I think he himself would not have said that.
But I think that he would agree that that I think he would agree today if you were alive, that that's what's. what's at stake here. But he provides a secular articulation for where moral theories may come from. Not moral theories, I'm sorry, where moral values and where moral concepts come from and what the good life consists of. And we'll sort of take a look at Thomas Hobbes, a very modern perspective on the origin of moral values.
But when we look at Plato, we're going to talk about the notion of God. Because most people today, at least many people today, would probably say that God is the origin for what's right and wrong. So we're going to take a look at that. sort of, so we're going to sort of look at both of those things today. We're starting with Hobbes here, sort of modern thinker.
Now what I'm going to do is, what we're reading here comes from the early sections of Thomas Hobbes'book Leviathan. And the Leviathan is his primary text. Now just to say a couple things, Thomas Hobbes is living in what you might call during the northern humanistic renaissance, or sort of Just at the same time as Descartes, at the end of the 1500s, this is when Thomas Hobbes is born and is when he's alive, during the 1600s, is when most of his work would have taken, or 15 to 1600s is when his work takes place. But Thomas Hobbes is ultimately, I mean, he's an Englishman thinking about English social contract theory in his own day, political theory. So he has a whole system here.
And so we've just taken a couple early passages. And that's what we've been reading. What I'm going to talk about through, what I'm going to go through here is really a breakdown of sort of the concepts and the discussions that get laid out in these early passages.
And then we'll link them here ultimately with Euthyphro here in just a minute. So first off, Thomas Hobbes begins with the discussion of our natural condition. Our natural condition is human beings.
And the one thing is felicity and the other is misery, right? In our natural condition, we both are capable of pain and we desire to be happy, right? So felicity is this notion that in our natural condition we're really driven by two things.
One is to be happy and the other is to avoid misery. We're capable of these things or that's what's possible for us, right? Now for Thomas Hobbes this means that we have to recognize that there is a social, a natural equality between and among human beings.
Now it is certainly true that human beings are different. right so i'm different than you and you're different than me and you may even be better at some things than me and vice versa right so there's a but when you look at all human beings right if you put them all together they are by and large equal in terms of their capacities and in terms of their abilities thomas hobbes notion here is that natural quality consistent of the quality of ability now he is looking of course at the the human race as a whole so right? He recognizes this.
Now, he says that, for instance, we can distinguish between the mind and the body, and that there's an equality of mind as well as a relative equality of body. And as examples he gives, for instance, he says that in terms of the mind, in terms of the equality of the mind, you can think here about science. And the notion that, by the way, he defines science as, the skill of proceeding upon general and infallible rules.
Now, Thomas Hobbes is living in at the early beginnings of the scientific revolution. And there, he recognizes that science is essentially some sort of procedure of reasoning. And of course, this eventually develops, you see later with Bacon, into a sort of methodology, experimental methodologies, and so on and so forth, right?
So there's a discussion here about what science is that's quite interesting. But for Hobbes, science reveals that... all people have rational access to do science, which means that there is a universal equality of mind, right? Anyone can think rationally. Anyone can recognize mistakes in reasoning, which means that there's a rational equality.
But he does war against what he says is the conceit of one's own wisdom, which is an important sort of element, which is namely that we can frequently think ourselves so wise and so brilliant. that ultimately we make huge blunders and mistakes, right? So there's a warning there.
And in terms of the body, he says there is a relative body, a relative equality between body. Now, it's clear that some people certainly are stronger than other people, but he gives this example, and I don't have the quote up here, but he says, for instance, don't forget that the weakest person can still kill the strongest person through reasoning and through cunning, right? So even though...
there may be other people who are stronger than us, human beings, through their mind, are able to bodily harm other people. So it looks like there's a relative sort of bodily equality, right? It's not the difference between an elephant and a person. Or, right, well, let's put this, the two people together are relatively equal in terms of the conflicts that they can pursue with each other. Whereas that wouldn't be the case between a huge animal like an elephant or something and a person where there's not bodily equality, right?
So this equality of ability, he says, leads to an equality of hope, actually, right? And the equality of hope is the notion that every person thinks that they can have their own way, right? Is that every person can have their needs satisfied, they can have felicity, they can find happiness, but that they can also avoid misery, right? And since everyone's equal, everyone thinks they get a shot at doing this. So you have an equality of hope.
And what this leads to for Hobbes is the notion that in a natural state of things, what we have is social diffidence. And that, right, is that we have this sort of kind of tension between each other in a natural state in which really everyone views everyone else as either in a form of competition or... as a potential hindrance or a potential benefit, right? We have sort of social diffidence.
And I love sort of Thomas Hobbes when he talks about this. He says, for instance, keeping company is a great deal of grief at one point, right? You get the sense that this man was not a very social creature, right?
But he has the sense that, okay, we have, there's this equality of hope, and so there's this... relative equality and tension and diffidence between human beings and their natural state. Now, there are three different principles for the causes of quarrel. So next the question is, okay, so why is it that people and societies fight with each other? What's up with that?
What are the basic causes? His argument says there's really three causes. The first is competition.
So People in social, because everyone thinks that they have a right to everything else, in a natural state there's relative equality, which means everyone's in competition for everything. So one cause of quarrel is competition. And the second is diffidence, for safety, in order to try to defend oneself against conflict.
And the third possible reason for quarrel is for glory. And he says basically the difference between these is thus, right? On the one hand, the person who quarrels for competition is trying to gain something, right?
The person who quarrels over diffidence is quarreling for safety, right? Against the competition of others or against the conflict and tension with others. And the final possibility is people quarrel for their reputations, right?
For glory. Now, I have to be honest. I recorded this video here in the beginning.
early February 2017, and I'm watching what's happening in the American political system with the new president. And it's sort of hard not to think that, wow, Hobbes seems to sort of have it right. And then ultimately, in many ways, what we see in advanced democratic republic civilization, such as the United States, is really just a sort of complicated version of Hobbes'discussion of conflict and quarreling.
Now, for Hobbes, it's important that each of these utilizes violence in some way, right? So quarreling is the usage of violence for competition for gain, or in competition for gain, right? There's also the use of violence for safety, right?
For instance, invading another in order to protect oneself, invading another for gain, invading another for reputation, right? In order for... And reputation here... You could just even understand reputation as being the notion of quarreling in order to control or alter someone else's view about something else. Don't we talk about changing hearts and minds?
There's something interesting there as well. So now take a look at war and peace. The next thing sort of Hobbes takes a look at here is, okay, well, what is war and what is peace exactly? The first thing he says, which I think is quite fascinating, is that war is not the same thing as fighting.
So most people think this, right, is that if you don't see fighting, that there's not a state of war. This is not what Thomas Hobbes thinks, and I think it's actually quite remarkable and pretty important. For Hobbes, war is defined like this. He says, but war consists in the disposition thereto. During all the time, there is no assurance to the contrary.
What he's saying there is that war, a state of war doesn't consist of the fighting, it consists of the disposition to fight, in which there is no assurance to the contrary. Right, so what does this mean? We've frequently heard people talk about the difference between the Cold War, or people talk about the Cold War between the United States and the then Soviet Union, right? And in this Cold War, there was never a full-on military battle. between the two countries, but there was a constant, there was no assurance that there wasn't going to be one.
And so for Thomas Hobbes, that means that we were, that the United States and the Soviet Union at the time were both in a state of war with regard to each other, even though there was no active fighting. So a state of war does not have to be all out blood bath, right? But a state of war can be if you're never assured that you're not about to be in a blood bath. And so, for instance, if you think about, many of you probably love watching The Walking Dead.
I'm a huge fan. I love The Walking Dead. Someday I'll sound dated, you know, saying this, but I love The Walking Dead. But The Walking Dead is a case that because of the zombie apocalypse, right, they're in a constant state of war, right, according to Thomas Hobbes, right? Rick and his crew in the comic book.
the Walking Dead show, they're not always fighting, but they are always in a state of war because there's never assurance to the contrary. So that means that we have to recognize that war is a disposition. War is a certain sort of disposition. It's not necessarily a state of conflict.
And in fact, moments of conflict are relatively brief, actually. Fighting usually ends, but the disposition of war can entangle a people, culture, a community for a long time. So what is peace?
Peace is nothing other than the negation of war for Hobbes. So war is this disposition, and when you don't have that disposition, that is, when there is assurance that there isn't going to be an immediate eruption of fighting, that you have what we call peace. So that's what peace is. It's important here to recognize that Thomas Hobbes is defining war I'm sorry, he defines peace according to war. So for him, war is the more essential notion, right?
War is the active ordinary state. It's the default state, if you will. Peace is the interruption of that, right?
Okay, so that means that what Hobbes next does, he says, okay, so we've got these senses here is that human beings are naturally equal, right? And if you're in a complete state of... nature, right? That means that everyone really has a right to everyone else's stuff because no one really owns any property. Everyone's out for themselves.
And sort of moving along here, what we see here now is his discussion of what the state of nature itself would look like. And he says it's a war of all against all. He actually gives a very, very, very dark description of what the state of nature would be.
He says it's one in which there'd be no flourishing, really, because there could be industry, there would be transportation. He says there would be art, there would be letters. He says there would be farmers, there would be agriculture. I mean, the list goes on and on, right? In a pure state of nature where there's no political society, no social, and for our purposes, there's no social.
moral norms because everyone's equal and everyone can choose whatever ethical views they want, right? What you end up with is just a state of war where everyone's against everyone else. And this would result in not society, but really a continual state of fear, right?
So it's a real disaster. It really does sort of harken back to the Walking Dead sort of analogy. Now, there's an interesting question here.
If the state of nature is a war of all against all, it's just a nightmare, right? And by the way, one of the things that he famously says in the text is, he says that life, living life in a state of nature, right, where there's no political society or no civil society whatsoever, there's no proven morals, as it were, would be a society, a continual state of fear, life would be short, brutish, and miserable. He really imagines human beings as living, turning into animals, living like animals. It's a nightmare.
And in fact, later on, we'll see that he actually does talk about, well, he makes reference to the Native Americans. And I think it's actually, in the modern, in the contemporary period, it's actually quite shocking for him to say this, and offensive. But we'll talk about that here in a moment. But a question emerges, well, okay.
And imagine Thomas Hobbes is thinking, there's probably lots of you out there thinking, well, listen, if a state of nature is this continual fear, there's no society, it's just a nightmare, then why is it that we're not all accustomed to violence? That is, why are we docile today? And why have we become so disassociated to violence, right?
Now, it's true that we know of violence in our communities, and violence for some of us, unfortunately, is more common than others. But there is a general sense in most societies, it's certainly in in the United States, where I live, that people generally are against violence and think that, you know, committing acts of harm against others is wrong. So how is it that we suddenly find ourselves in a society like this? Well, Hobbes sort of gives this reminder.
He says, well, let him who thinks this, therefore consider with himself when taking a journey, he arms himself and he seeks to go well accompanied. And when going to sleep, he locks his doors. When even at his house, he locks his chest.
And this when he knows there be laws of public officers armed to revenge all injuries. What Hobbes is saying here is, well, wait a second here. You may think that human beings are very good moral creatures and that we would never resort to violence and that we're disassociated. Well, he doesn't think that's natural. And he says part of the evidence of that is what we might call our, we might say is the residue.
of a former moral state, right? And he says, for instance, all of us lock our doors at night. You lock your car door when you go to the grocery store.
Or, for instance, when you travel into a place you've never been, and you travel with someone, you walk together, right? You've heard of these things, right? You should always have a buddy, right?
Things like this. These are all examples of the residue of past violence. He thinks that this is actually evidence that there really is at the basis a sort of state of fear. that if there is no society, what you have is a war of all against all, right?
And he says that one of the things we should notice is that we accuse the actions, not the nature of beings. So it's important here that it may look like Thomas Hobbes has a very dark and mean view about human nature, but that's not the case, right? It's not the nature of human beings that's the problem.
It's the actions that human beings take, right? This isn't a certain report. element here. So this means that he's not judging the natural state of human beings as being morally depraved, right? Though he may think it's because a natural state is premoral as such.
Thomas Hobbes here actually gives the example of Native Americans. He doesn't use the term Native Americans, but he talks about the indigenous peoples who are found in the Americas. And he gives them as an example of people who are in a natural state. Now, I think this is actually Today, what we might call a sort of a racist, not about racist, but a colonialist and an ignorant view of the Native American people.
So I have a sort of quarrel myself with Thomas Hobbes on this sort of example. But Thomas Hobbes does think that we would judge people, we would judge actions, right? So it's not nature that's the problem. Hobbes'ultimate view here is he's committed to what we might call is a form of psychological.
Egoism. Egoism is the notion that you always should do what's in your own interest, right? You should always pursue your own self-interest.
It's not the same notion as selfishness. Sometimes it's conflated to that. But psychological egoism is just the idea that one acts according to one's own interest and how one perceives those interests. And it's a psychological notion in the sense that everyone does it naturally as a sort of unconscious psychological process, right?
So we're all sort of naturally in it for ourselves. We're all in it for self-interest, right? And he thinks that, and so that's a really sort of important point we'll get to here. And what he's going to see here is that self-interest is what motivates moral action. And it's what motivates the law and political society and civil society.
Now, in a state of nature where there is no society, there are no sort of moral covenants, then what you have is you have justice in suspension, right? Because justice cannot exist under those conditions. Because no actions are unjust in a state of nature. So that's the first one. So, for instance, Hobbes may have well thought that, for instance, a person who's in a state of nature, who's resorted to a form of cannibalism for survival, in a certain sense, that person no longer lives in a society in which justice is possible.
And their actions are not, strictly speaking, unjust. They're simply... natural. So you can see here, I mentioned at the beginning of the video that I think Hobbes takes a sort of, or provides us a sort of secular explanation for moral values. And it really begins with this sort of notion, a sort of naturalism for him, is that there's a certain sort of natural state at which point justice doesn't exist, right?
It just is what it is. In the same sense that there's no justice or there's no, even though animals in the jungle are eaten, that's not unjust as such. So what is justice for Hobbes?
Justice is a common power, he says. It's a common power, common in the sense that it's a power between people. And that means that justice is ultimately about law, right? And that means that justice is a sort of process of procedure.
It's a process of procedure for enacting a certain sort of common set of expectations, and so on and so forth, right? So justice is... inherently universal to all under whom the law falls, right? So justice will always be universal to all of these, right? But it's important here to recognize that justice is the result, he's going to argue, of social covenant and agreement.
That means that justice is a product of the society. And ultimately, the moral values that a society holds for Hobbes, right, or at least from this beginning here, begin of... out of this sort of social agreement.
So it's a social product, right? That means that justice is not a faculty of the mind. It's not a state of the soul, like Plato argues. But the justice is a quality of social existence, right?
At least this is how I want to interpret Hobbes, is that justice is about the quality of the social relations we have in common with each other, organized where the power is organized according to some sort of common principle. And this would be the law. So in peace, therefore, has to somehow consist in an agreement among people, or at least among the people who are involved. So, let me zoom out of that, sorry.
So the next thing Thomas Hobbes is going to argue, because remember, he has a sort of natural law theory going on, in which he's going to argue that, okay, we can use this psychological basis of recognizing the self-interest and natural equality among people to recognize there's this natural diffidence, there's this natural conflict, people are in strife potentially, and there's also an equal right where everyone sort of can say that they own one thing or another. or that they have a right to do this or to do that. And that this is, consequentially, this would result in a state of fear, causing anxiety.
Society itself couldn't exist at all. Society depends upon a conception of justice, rather, that is universal to all and exists qualitatively in the social agreement among others. In the... consent in the way in which people naturally work with each other. So what we got to do here is we have to see if we can articulate if there are certain natural laws that would help us organize and understand the fundamental principles according to which society, moral theory, and political theory would rest.
Now, he's really concerned ultimately with political theory. So we're sort of talking about this in terms of ethics in the everyday. But we're really sort of looking at sort of some legal stuff, and I'm trying not to get too lost in that.
But he does lay down some important terms for us. The first is the notion of natural justice, or juie naturel, which is the notion that liberty is the, that refers to the liberty that each has to use their own power as they will themselves for their own self-preservation. So the notion here is that the first... most important thing is that everyone strives to preserve themselves and that they have the power the liberty to do so so the idea here is that you have the natural right to protect yourself ultimately and this is and this is natural right this is not a right that comes out of the social agreement but one which is purely given i think ultimately for hobbes out of the egoistic conception he has of the human being now liberty so this is a natural law right or a principle for natural law precepts he said he calls it. Now, liberty.
What is liberty? What is freedom? Liberty is the absence of external impediments, right?
So liberty is when there is no one to stop me from doing things. So think of when I say I have the liberty to read a book in philosophy, right? Liberty means there's no external impediments.
For instance, if I took your house and locked you in and took all your philosophy books away, you would no longer have the liberty to read philosophy. Why? Because there would now be an external.
Impediment. So what is an impediment? An impediment is anything that removes power, right?
And this is the power you have to preserve yourself according to your own will. So an impediment removes your power in some way through bonds of some fashion. Now liberty is guided, Hobbes argues, by judgment and reason.
So he thinks that human beings utilize their reason and they think through and make judgments about things using their beliefs in order to avoid these impediments and to be free, right? So it's quite natural for human beings to pursue freedom, right? Now, he thinks there's also a law of nature.
A law of nature, though, is just a precept or a general rule, that should be or, my apologies, that's found out by reason by which one is forbidden to do that which is destructive of his own life. I'm sorry, there's a couple typos in here. But he thinks that these are all laws of nature, where in general, This means that you're forbidden as a general rule, if you wanted to look at it naturally, to destroy your own life, because you're really naturally organized to do the reverse, to preserve your own life.
Now, Hobbes makes a distinction here between rights and laws. A right is the liberty to do something, right? Whereas a law is that which determines and binds us together into what we've determined is the right thing to do, right?
So A right, if you will, is the liberty to act in such a way. And the law is what determines how you can act. And it's what binds you to certain duties, particularly how you ought not to act.
So he makes a big point to talk about the distinction between rights and laws. Now the question, though, is what laws of nature follow from a state of nature? So if you're living in a state of nature in which it's a war of all against all, what are the laws of nature?
The precepts we might find that really would apply. And so let me zoom in here. There's really two precepts he gets to.
The first precept is this, is that, and I'm paraphrasing it, he actually lays it out, and I won't do so for sake of time, but he actually lays it out in italics, you'll see in the book. The precepts one, the first is the basic idea that in a state of nature, and due to the law of nature, one seeks peace. So it's natural for one to seek peace.
That is, it's natural for one to somehow end the state of nature. Because the law of nature is to preserve yourself, to survive, and to avoid destruction. The way you do that, ultimately, is by ending the state of nature. Instead of the state of nature, which Hobbes thinks is identical to the state of war, we'll see later social contract theorists don't think this, but that this law of nature as a state of war, what we seek to naturally do is end it. So there's a natural law here which says that a natural law in the state of nature regarding the pursuit of peace as an end.
The second precept is that one must lay down their right to all things. This is very important. So not only is society morality required the idea that we seek peace, which he thinks is natural, but he also thinks that in order to seek that peace, we, number two, have to be willing to give up our rights.
Let me, oh, I can't turn that on. We have to be willing to give up our rights to all things. Because in a state of nature, anything is mine so long as I have the ability to take it, right? But if I'm no longer in a state of nature, that means I've given up my right to certain things.
This means that for him, the very beginning state for morality and political theory begins with the voluntary divestment of liberty. That is, at least abstractly, what means is that we naturally give up our freedom to pursue no impediments. In favor, we grant that there are impediments.
on us, namely, for instance, there's the impediment for me not to kill another person. There's the impediment for me not to steal another person's property, is that I've given up my right of stealing and killing voluntarily so that I can live in a state of peace. So that means that in order to live in, in order to activate the state of peace, there has to be a voluntary divestment of liberty.
And Hobbes says, he says, the people who love freedom and love liberty naturally give up. of their rights and prefer to have impediments, right? And I couldn't help myself but think of George Washington here as a sort of a noble statesman example of that. Now, one of the things he's going to talk about here is the notion of what is a contract? Because as you can see, society must begin when we agree together, ultimately in terms of what the final laws are, right?
In terms of what the common power is, what we're willing to enforce as the wrong and right standard. Think here about, think also here quickly about how Thomas Hobbes is providing discussions for meta-ethical concerns, the question of why something's considered wrong or right. Also, normative ethical concerns, right? The question of what are the standards? And he will also talk about the third there.
But when we talk about this question of normative ethics, you can see immediately its relationship here to his discussion of a contract. Because when we make an agreement to divest ourselves of the liberty to injure each other so that we can engage in a state of peace, that means I have to understand what that means. What is a contract? Hobbes'view here is that a contract is the mutual transferring of a right.
It means that I'm giving some of my right to you, and you're giving some of your right to me, right? So it's the transference of right. between parties.
Contracts require fidelity, right? So in a state of nature, you can make a contract, but a contract is only, has no force, right? So a contract only exists and it depends upon one to keep the faith, right? Then for the parties to remain faithful to each other.
But in a state of nature, right, this depends only on trust. Whereas by contrast in a civil society such as ours or such as yours, right, the state, the... government, as well as others, I think, constrains the violators of the public trust, right? And in the most forceful, explicit fashion, they do so through violence, right? So for instance, if I try to rob a liquor store with a knife and I start stabbing people and stealing liquor and money, when the police show up, I'm going to get shot, right?
They're going to use violence to stop me. And the notion here is that... When you begin to violate laws, the state will use violence against you. And this means that there is a constraint against people who would maybe violate the law. Because in that constraint, consistent fear.
So you can see here, I think Hobbes has a very sort of dark view in one sense, where he thinks that the legitimacy of the government naturally resides, ultimately, in this state of fear we have amongst each other. So he has a very sort of, again, not negative, but almost animalistic view of human nature. And so he thinks that, but he also does say this, which is important, whereas that...
Any sort of covenant that one makes, any sort of contract one makes, which denies their own possibility of defense is naturally void. Because the primary criteria that he's based his entire sort of analysis on here of human morals and politics is in social agreement, is based on the idea that one should and does pursue their own preservation. So there's no contract in which you... take away my ability to defend myself or no contract that guarantees me injury that would be counted as a valid contract for him, not philosophically, right?
Because why would you enter into an agreement that you're injured from, right? Now, here's where he begins to tie this all in with the question of morality, which is our primary concern here in ethics. And this is where he begins to talk about the other laws of nature. And I'm just sort of going through this quickly.
The first is, we've already mentioned that injustice is a breach of covenant. Injustice, therefore, is when you break that social agreement you have with others. So the negation of injustice is justice. Now, the second thing is we can talk about justice in action.
There's one thing to talk about justice as a concept. We think we've been talking about justice really in a meta-ethical sense because we've defined justice as the negation of injustice, right? but there's also the sense of justice in lived action right and so he calls this justice of action and i think it's a second important category for us to consider and he says justice of action is either commutative or it's distributive now if you know anything about logic you know a commutation means that something either is this or this but that they have general uh a sort of kind of logical equality among them whereas distributive justice or justice of action concerns the equality of benefit.
So we have a distinction here for Hobbes, which is commutative justice is the equality of value, right? And distributive justice is the equality of benefit, right? So for instance, think about the flat tax, right? The flat tax, it would be the idea that everyone in the United States would pay the same percentage. Let's say that the flat tax was 40%.
Every person in America had to pay 40% of their income. Now, that would be a commutative form of equality, at least percentile equality. You take all my income, you'd say, okay, you take 40% of my, I made $10, you have $4, I give the government $4, right? You have $100, you give the government $40, right? That would be a sort of equality of value.
But it would not be a distributive equality because it would not be an equality of benefit. Because think about it, if you have... If I only have, let's say I have $10,000. Let's say I have $1,000 as my yearly income.
That means that I would have to give $400 to the government. But let's imagine you make $1,000,000 a year. You would have to give, what, $40,000?
Was I getting this right? I'm probably going to get the math wrong. $40,000, right? I know I've given them that, though I can't think when I'm doing these. But the person who has more money, even though they're giving the same percentage, they're giving way less money in terms of the benefit they personally have.
Think about it like this. A person who lives, let's just make the example simple because I'm an idiot and I can't think well. Let's imagine, for instance, the poverty level is $10,000.
Let's imagine that in order for someone to make a good living, we say that you have to make at least $10,000 a year, right? And let's say there's a person with $10,000 and we tax them, right, through sales tax, and we tax 10% of their income, right? So a person who has $10,000 just lost $1,000, which means now their annual income is $9,000 below the poverty line, right?
But now take the other person, a person who has a million dollars, and let's say we have to take 10% of the million dollars, right? So we're going to take $100,000 away. And when we take that $100,000 away, they still are a millionaire.
Right there. So because of the equality of need, it doesn't distribute equally. So this is so it's funny because the flat tax, there's arguments for a flat tax, but a flat tax represents an equality of value. But it doesn't represent an equality of benefit. So it's not distributively equal or just.
Right. So that's the sort of sense here about the distinction. It's an important distinction in philosophy. political theory and i apologize i know i'm getting the math wrong go ahead in the comments tell me how i got it wrong give us the right calculations now but he goes on as he talks here he begins to talk about gratitude he begins to actually talk about the these natural laws insofar as they conform to our ordinary moral values right he says for instance is that there's this natural law of gratitude right is that when someone helps you there's a and that is that you have that you're gracious there's a certain sort of grace that's required. He also talks about the sense of compliance, which is namely that everyone should strive to accommodate themselves to all the rest of the people.
So there's this natural sense that if we're to escape a state of nature, that we would have to naturally strive to accommodate ourselves and to act in a synchronized, at least, a synchronized or harmonious manner, right? And there's this other notion that we should pardon those who repent, right? So when people ask to be pardoned and they repent, they should be forgiven, he says, because, listen, to forgive is to return one into a state of peace.
Remember, war and peace, war is not fighting. It is the disposition towards fighting. So to repent and to pardon is actually to reinstate a state of peace, which would naturally be consistent with the natural.
thrust we have for peace and to give up certain parts of our freedom for that peace. Now, this means that we also have a sense that there should be retribution for violation. People who commit crimes or commit harms or do wrong things should be punished, right? So this is a natural sort of law, he says, because it's through punishment that people act through, act well, right?
Because that's one of those constraints we looked at. Now, all of this for Hobbes conforms to the golden rule. Here, he's referred directly here. to the invocation by Jesus Christ, right, to do others as you would have them do unto you. And he says, listen, ultimately, the social contract seems to promote this golden rule, namely that in social agreement, you should try to accommodate yourselves to other people, you should aim for peace, you should forgive others.
And you can see here, one of the things Thomas Hobbes is doing, though he doesn't do it fully explicitly in these passages, in these early passages of the Leviathan, We see this sense that he's trying to articulate a secular, sort of naturalistic foundation for some of the moral values that he, as well as his society, holds. He's particularly referencing the key religious figure of his cultural worldview. Now, what this all means is that for Thomas Hobbes, Morality, because there's no justice, right?
Justice is the arbitration of what's right and wrong, is that for us, we see that Thomas Hobbes articulates a conception of morality from a purely naturalistic origin. At least he paints this picture. Whether or not that's fully true, there is a question we ought to ask.
But it certainly is representative of, I think, the modern perspective. Now, this means that this reveals the cause, the generation, and ultimately the definition of what a commonwealth is. is for Hobbes, right? He says those who love liberty and justice introduce that restraint upon themselves, right? The laws of nature themselves are not sufficient, he thinks. Simply having these laws of nature where people want to have peace and simply having laws of nature where people recognize they should be in agreement and that they should trust each other, right, is not enough.
You have to have some sort of constraint. You have to have political laws. So for Hobbes, you have to have a... You have to have formal moral, you have to have formal laws.
And I think he would also say that you also have to have at least an informal moral set of edicts, right? Natural laws themselves are not sufficient. He actually criticizes Aristotle.
Aristotle in his politics actually compares political life to the life of bees. Because he wants to say bees are natural. And you see that bees work together.
They organize with each other. bees have colonies and so on and so forth. And Aristotle gave this example of bees, but That's a purely naturalistic view of political life and moral life and values. And this is not what Hobbes thinks. Hobbes thinks that ultimately political life, the state, is not something natural at all.
Civil society, I'm sorry, a commonwealth is totally artificial because it depends upon alienation. It depends upon people relinquishing their own liberty, right? So in a commonwealth, it is a formal society under a government with laws, etc.
What you have is you have a state of alienation where people are giving up their natural freedom and liberty. And they're giving it up to someone else. Hobbes calls this person the Leviathan.
But you're giving them up to the sovereign. Someone who arbitrates what's wrong and right and enforces the law and enforces the peace. So there's a sort of difference here between the sort of natural... naturalistic foundation upon which certain sorts of moral views like the golden rule rest for Hobbes. But there's a difference between that and the artificiality of a formalized state where you have a sovereign who's actually the ruler, right?
So we get this interesting sort of sense here. So why be moral, right? Well, from Thomas Hobbes'perspective, I think you could say, well, we want to be moral, number one, because we want to avoid the state of nature, right? And it looks like, from his perspective, morality ultimately consists in a form of social agreement for mutual benefit.
But, and here's the big question, what do people actually say in their everyday lives about why they are moral and why one should be moral? And let's take a brief pause here, and then we'll get right back to this question. Okay, so, but why do people actually say why they're moral?
What do people actually say? Most people here, and this isn't always true. Let me get back in here. I hope that's better. The lighting is getting a little dark in here.
I think that most people, at least many people, would say that God is the reason to be moral. Right? Many people believe that God is the source of moral value. And it'd be interesting, I encourage you to... maybe not positive here to do this, but sometime in the next week or so, talk to someone about why, what's wrong and what's right, and where they get their concepts of wrong and right from.
Many of them will get them from a religious conception, a religious source. In fact, I pulled this research from the Pew Research Center, which is sort of interesting. And you can see that when people were asked whether or not belief in God was essential to morality, notice here that within North America and Europe, As well as within Australia, and here Israel, and then some countries in South America, what we see is that most people believe that you do need to have a religious conception. You need to believe in God to ultimately be a moral person.
So it's interesting that many other people don't think this. So what we're going to take a look at here in our next text is Plato's Euthyphro argument, where Plato is really going to ask two sort of questions for us. The first is, he's going to ask us to think through the argument of divine command theory.
And this is the notion that our moral values come from God, and that God has commanded them. And whether or not the notion that God is commanding our moral values makes sense. And I want us to think about not only the problem, but also think about the moral language that he uses. So that's the second task for us.
We're going to sort of look at, okay. With Hobbes, we had this view that moral life is a sort of naturalistic, secular explanation. But in a sort of social contract political sense, it all boils down to power ultimately for Hobbes and fear.
But most people say, no, no, no, the moral values come from God, right? So does that make sense first off? And number two, I want us to think about how people actually do make arguments.
And you're going to see I'm going to introduce, we're going to talk about what we call the dialectic method. Now, Euthyphro is the dialogue that we're using here. We're taking a look. This comes from Plato. It's one of Plato's principal early dialogues, which really lays out for us a historical picture of the historical person of Socrates.
So let's sort of jump into it. In my other videos, you can take a look at it. I lay out more context in some of my other video lectures, especially on Plato, some of the more context and some of the more scholarly elements. But for our context and for this class, all I really want to say is that what you need to know is that Socrates, before you read the text, the Thifro, is that Plato's the writer. Socrates is a character that Plato is using, but Socrates was also a real person.
And the real person of Socrates, he actually never wrote anything, but he was famous for engaging in discussion and dialogue in the Athenian Agora, which was the marketplace. And he got in a lot of trouble because one of the things they found is that the youth started following him around and imitating this method he had. They now call it the Socratic method.
Plato calls it the dialectic method. method. But Socrates would go around and ask people questions, and he would reveal that people didn't know what they thought they knew, or what they said they knew, right?
Oftentimes through discussion and dialogue, Socrates would reveal that the person he's talking to was really just a fool. And then the youth started doing this, and the next thing you know, you started having a sort of political upset. Now Socrates was charged with impiety.
He was charged with He was charged with corrupting the youth, and he was charged of believing in false gods, and he was actually executed for this. Plato, who was his student at the time, eventually would start his own school of philosophy and memorialize Socrates in his dialogues. Now, the Euthyphro dialogue, certainly Euthyphro was a real person, Socrates was a real person.
To what extent this dialogue actually took place is really unknown. What we do know is that this dialogue is usually considered one of the early dialogues, which is probably largely consistent with what may have actually happened. Well, we don't really know, to be honest.
But the Thiefro dialogue is a great dialogue because it's about this question of impiety. Now, what happens in the dialogue? Basically, Socrates is on his way to trial, the trial, the very same trial in which he's going to be executed, or at least he won't be executed in the trial, but he'll be given the death sentence at this trial.
But on his way in the... into the courthouse, as it were, on the steps of the courthouse, he meets this guy, Euthyphro. Now, Euthyphro is a young man. Now, Socrates, just to picture it, was an old man with a big ugly face and famous for his conversation in Athens, well known, right? But he is sort of, and Socrates always proclaimed that he didn't know something.
He always claimed ignorance towards something, and other people would say they knew something. Now, Euthyphro is a young man. who would give religious speeches, actually. And he would articulate, you know, the edicts of what it meant to be, to do the right by the gods and so on and so forth, according to the Hellenic religion. Now, one of the things we're going to see is that Socrates meets him, and Euthyphro sort of meets Socrates and is sort of surprised, or Socrates meets Euthyphro and is sort of surprised he's there.
And he says, why are you at the courthouse? And we'll see that he gives this really crazy story about his father. namely that Euthyphro is there to testify against his own father. And he's doing it because it's the pious thing to do.
Well, Socrates says, well, wait a second. I'm on trial because I'm considered impious. So maybe you can help me out, right? Because I don't even know what piety is. Socrates proclaims ignorance.
And Euthyphro takes the bait and says, well, I'll teach you a thing or two about piety. And what... ensues in the dialogue is really a masterful explication of what's known as the dialectic method.
The dialectic method essentially moves like this. And it's not a cyclical process, but I've sort of drawn it as a cycle here, but it's not exactly a cycle. But it really begins with this question of what is X?
And Socrates begins with this question of what is happiness? I'm sorry, what is pious? But we can ask the question, what is it? what is goodness? What is wrongness?
We can ask our own question. Now, whatever the thing we're asking for is the essence of something. So one of the things we see in the Euthyphro dialogue is that initially Socrates will ask, what is piety?
And Euthyphro will say, well, it's doing what the gods do. It's binding up your unjust father, right? Just like Zeus did to Kronos or whatever, right? And Socrates responds by saying, no, that's an example of holiness. It's an example of piety, but it's not the essence of it.
That's what we're looking for, right? Now, the way these dialectical methods work is as soon as it's clear that they're after the essence, some sort of thesis is usually given. And we're going to see that some sort of definition, if you will, is given to what piety is. And we'll see, I think there's five definitions that Euthyphro gives.
None of which are really that successful. But again, they get better and better over time. There's also, and then what seems to happen is that through dialogue and discussion, a back and forth between Socrates and his interlocutor, or Euthyphro in this case, the thesis, they sort of work out the implications of the thesis, looking to see if there's any refutations possible.
That is, looking to see if there's an antithesis to that thesis. So for instance, someone would say, well, We'll go through the examples, but someone could say that holiness is praying, right? Well, I can give a refutation of that. The Nazis also prayed that God would help them as they murdered the Jews, right? So you can see a refutation.
Theses are offered. You work out the implications. You see if there's a reputation.
And over time, you work to see if there's some sort of resolution or some sort of synthesis that answers the question. And so it's this sort of process. It's not really cyclical, but it looks more sort of like this, where you're sort of working your way, a sort of spiral.
And by the way, I think this dialectic method now, Plato has a different way of defining the dialectic method. I've given you what we might call a Hegelian conception of the dialectic method. But this dialectic method that you see take place, this dialogical form, is something that you can and should do. So I encourage you to pause this video or later on, find someone, have a conversation with someone, sit down and ask them these questions.
Say, well, what do you think happiness consists of? They'll give you an answer. Try to work out if that answer is a good answer or whether or not it's contradictory, whether or not there's refutations possible. And then see if you can work your way to finding an answer to a question that you can actually accept.
And this is the method of Socrates, and we see this on display in the Euthyphro. And I've already mentioned the courthouse, Euthyphro and piety, and Socrates'desire to learn. So that means that we've now hit up upon the core question of the dialogue, if you will, the essential question, the what is question.
And that is, what is the pious and what is the impious? Now, piety refers to holiness, right? So you could read this text in a translation that'll say, what is holiness and what is unholiness?
right um you can see there's going to be a related question here especially for those people that think that our moral values come from god or from religion which is namely what is moral and what is immoral right that's a very that's a related question to what we're looking at though we'll see the dialogue really tracks this question of piety quite closely now what i want to do here is i'm not going to go because of sake of time and i've gone on for a long time i'm going to go through some of the answers that um Euthyphro suggests and some of the problems, some of the implications of those theses. You can see up here, by the way, if you're not accustomed to this, these are known as the Stephanus numbers. That is, in any text of Plato's, you'll see pagination on the side. These are the page numbers for all of these answers that he's given. So this way you can reference exactly where in the text he's going to talk about this.
Of course, there's more to it in more detail. Always, you need to read this on your own. I'll just give you a sort of...
kind of synopsis. No one says it better. No one explains Plato better than Plato. So you have to read Plato for that. Right.
But some of the first answer we get, I already referenced slightly, was the mention of, well, the pious, where Socrates gives the, I'm sorry, Euthyphro gives the answer, well, piety is what the gods do. And he gives this example of Zeus. And Socrates says, that's not it. That's an example. And so there we see this first real answer to the question of what piety is.
Euthyphro says the pious is to prosecute the wrongdoer and not to prosecute is impious. So that means that he basically formalizes what he's doing, which, by the way, is the perfect example of someone who's probably not thinking through what they're doing when they define what's wrong and right by what they themselves do. So he says the pious person is the person who prosecutes the wrongdoer and not doing so is impious.
Now, but here's what Socrates says. He says, well, wait a second. That's not what we're asking for.
We want to know the universal form of piety. That is, he's not interested. Like, it's clear that you should prosecute a wrongdoer, right?
So if a person commits murder and we know it, we should prosecute them. That would be certainly the right thing to do, the moral thing to do. And it would be the holy thing to do, right? God would want judgment on those who commit evil.
right? So the pious thing is certainly that, but that's just an example. That's just one case, right?
For instance, what about if we ask how a person should pray? Is there a certain holy way to pray versus an unholy way to pray? Well, you can see that praying has nothing to do with prosecuting wrongdoers.
So that means that this answer that Euthyphro gives, this first answer, is not a sufficient essence to the question because it's not universal or it doesn't represent the universal extensions all the different ways that piety or holiness can be related so sargassar basically gives you refutations is give me another answer here what is piety and we get this second answer where euthyphra says well okay what's pious is what is dear to the gods is pious and what is not dear to the gods is impious right so what the gods love is pious you And what the gods hate is impious, right? This is the sort of notion here. Now, here's where Socrates says, okay, well, at least you're starting to get my point, which is namely that I want something that's universal, right? And the gods can love praying, and they can love prosecuting wrongdoers.
So at least you're trying to give me a universal form, but it doesn't really quite follow, according to Socrates. And here's why. Well, the first problem is the contentiousness of piety. And he says, well, keep in mind here that we live in a polytheistic society.
There's multiple gods. Some gods love some things. Other gods hate other things. So, for instance, the god of the underworld doesn't love the same things that, for instance, Neptune loves.
The god of the sea. So you can see here, since there's... that means there's contention here.
There's conflict between what the gods love. This means that this would enable a sort of perspectivism, enabling that according to each god, what's wrong or right or holy or unholy is dependent upon their own perspective. This is a problem, right? Because this would allow for contradiction, because it would mean that the same action could be unholy to Zeus, but holy to Athena. Wait, what?
Right? Because if I did right by Athena, shouldn't I have done right by Zeus as well? Right? That doesn't seem universal, and it seems prone to sort of perspectivism, and because of the competition among the gods, right?
So for Socrates, this second answer is formally more on target, but it's not sufficient as an explanation, because it really seems like you can refute it pretty easily. And here's where we get to really the heart, the next third answer that Euthyphro gives, right? And by the way, remember, Euthyphro gives public speeches on this. And so this is the third time, the third different time he's had to explain what he thinks piety is. And here he says, well, okay, piety must be what is dear to all of the gods.
And what's not dear to all of the gods is impious, right? So he takes a very rational operation here, which says, listen, it's simple. What all of the gods love is pious, and what all of the gods hate is impious.
And Socrates will then ask another question, which is namely that, do the gods, no, let me just, sorry, I got a little mixed up there, right? So piety is loved by all of the gods, right? So the next question, though, is that, is something that's loved by the gods because it's pious, or is it pious because the gods love it?
And here's ultimately the problem. This is known as the euthyphro problem that comes from this text. And that Euthyphro answers yes to both questions, right?
Namely, Socrates says, is something loved by the gods because it's pious? And Euthyphro says yes. And then he's asked another different question, is something pious because the gods love it? And his answer is yes, because that's what was his original definition.
This creates a problem, though, and it's known as the Euthyphro problem. Intellectually, it doesn't make sense either way, and it begins to delegitimize the notion that we're all human beings. What's wrong or right, what's holy or unholy, pious or impious, is ultimately the result of my command.
Now, I pulled this from the internet, so I have to admit this is not my graphic, but I'm not sure who did it, but it sort of works well and it fits the text. It sort of looks like this. You get into this problem, the euthyphro problem, which is namely either God commands something because it's right, or it's right because God commands it, right?
So, Here's the formula. Imagine there's an X. Either God commands honesty because it's right, or honesty is right because God commands it.
But wait a second. This creates what you might say is two horns of a dilemma. On one side, that means that if God commands honesty because it's right, well, then that means that there's a standard of rightness that's independent of God, and it means that God simply recognizes that honesty is the right sort of thing to do.
But if that's the case, what's the relevance of God? to the problem of moral standard, or what's the relevance of God to holiness, right? Because God would know, God simply recognizes the same universal form that we're looking for.
This means that this is what you might say is the independent standard, or it's the sort of independent standard. Okay, well, what if you answer the other way? Well, you could also say, well, okay, honesty is right because God commands it.
Well, okay, if that's the case, then rightness... It's purely arbitrary as God could command anything, right? So simply, so you could say here is that if honesty is right because God commands it, well, as soon as God commands me to lie, that means lying is right, right?
But if lying is right, then how can God consistently also think that honesty is right and God can command it? It doesn't make any sense. What it looks like is it looks like God's, it looks like what is wrong or right, pious or impious, or honesty versus lying. It looks like it's purely arbitrary. But that sort of begs the question because we seem to think these moral values have some sort of essential thing to them.
It's not simply a matter of just arbitrary whims, right? So you can see you're forced into a dilemma here. If what's wrong or right, moral or immoral, is dependent upon God's command, then that means either there is some standard independent of God upon which God commands it, Or it is commanded by God in a purely arbitrary fashion, and there's nothing really that makes something wrong or right.
It just happens to be wrong or right because it was named that arbitrarily by another being. And that doesn't seem right either, because it seems to take away the force of the moral objectivity we're seeking for. And this is known as the divine command problem.
I'm sorry, it's known as the Euthyphro problem, and it relates to the divine command theory. The divine command theory in its most central sense is the idea that our moral values come from God because they're commanded by God in the Bible or in the Quran. The problem is that means it's either arbitrary or there's another independent standard at stake.
And there's no way out of that problem. Well, at least no easy way from the get-go. So this is the Euthyphro problem. And Socrates lays this out for Euthyphro, which of course means the Euthyphro gives a fourth answer. Okay, so that's a little problematic because we have this intuition that what's holy and unholy, pious, impious, wrong and right, we have a sense that this is objective, intuitively, in a way that's neither arbitrary nor independent of the gods.
So that means that maybe the pious is a part of the just. And in fact, Socrates really sort of goes on, you think this, because I think this is what Socrates thinks. is that maybe what's holy or unholy is recognized or depends upon its relationship to what's just, right?
And so part of the just is concerned with the care of the gods. And so a discussion ensues about, well, okay, does that mean that people act, that means that people do what's holy because it's concerned, it has something to do with the care of the gods or the improvement of the gods, the aim of the gods? And in fact, a whole bunch of other questions arise in Euthyphro. Which it looks like, okay, wait, in what sense does it mean to be holy is a type of justice? And it's not exactly clear.
This leads to a fifth answer, which is namely that the pious is a sort of knowledge of knowing how to sacrifice and pray. But this leads Socrates to question Euthyphro. And it starts to look like piety from this perspective is a sort of transactional exchange. Where...
We pray and we sacrifice to the gods because we want to get things in return. We want to make requests. But of course, requests and giving things is not very pious, right?
A transactional sort of sense here. And Socrates then says, okay, you thief, your answer doesn't make sense. Please, you told me you know what holiness and piety was.
In fact, you're here on the verge of trying to... try your own father for murder and have him executed because it's the pious thing to do, and you can't really tell me what piety is, let's begin again. And the dialogue concludes with Euthyphro fleeing.
Euthyphro just says, sorry, I gotta go. Time's up, man. I'm out of here. And he leaves, right?
And that's how the Euthyphro ends. So it's interesting that the Euthyphro shows us there's this question of piety, but it sort of cycles through these different answers and refutations. But in the end, it's left as an incomplete. dialogue conceptually.
Euthyphro flees. I think that's really important for us in terms of ethics. And I think it's important. I love this dialogue because on the one hand, we're addressing some of the questions of thinking through a If our moral values come from God, then what does that mean about the nature of God?
Is God just arbitrary? And if there's something else or independent of God that has a relationship to our moral values, well, why are we concerned with God then? And you can see it really becomes a difficult problem when you look at some of these moral elements from Plato's perspective.
The other thing I like about it is it demonstrates how people actually talk. When people talk about... about why they believe what they believe. They talk about their beliefs, their moral beliefs. They oftentimes, when you ask them for their reasons, their reasons will turn out to be inconsistent.
Then the refutations become possible. And I think what you're going to find as you take this course and as you learn, as we read these classical theories and these classical arguments in philosophy and try to apply them to the everyday, I think what you're going to find is that A lot of people are actually living in a sort of habitual mindset and they actually resist ethical reflection. They actually don't want to do it. So I have an ethics challenge for you to end our video tonight. What I want you to do is, right, because one of the key ideas here is that if you're going to live an everyday life and think about ethics, then that means that you have to have a sustained type of reflection going on.
So what I want you to do is I want you to find someone in your life. worlds, your family, a friend, a colleague, someone you know at work, whatever. Find someone, and I want you to engage in an authentic dialogue with them concerning why some particular thing is morally wrong or right.
I say authentic dialogue, meaning that I want you to use this Socratic method like Socrates does, and ask people what they think, and then try to see if you can work out the implications of those thoughts. And then talk with them through any of the possible refutations and see if you can refine your view to come up with something that makes sense. And I want you to do this, but it has to be authentic.
That is, you have to actually talk about something that you're really interested in learning about. And number two, you have to be willing to change your mind. So you have to be honest and willing.
And then when you've done that, I'd love it if people would post their experiences on the YouTube comments here. sort of ethics challenge, go out and begin and enable a sustained reflection because I don't think you can live, have ethics in the everyday life without it. Okay. Thank you very much for watching.
Sorry if this video is long. I look forward to seeing you guys online next time. Bye.