Semester Ethics Course condensed (Part 2 of 2)

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This is the second half of an attempt to compresses an ethics course that normally takes 15 weeks into just two videos.

What is the morally right thing to do? Is there some moral law that applies to everyone, or is morality relative in some way? And what’s so good about morality anyway? To answer these questions, we read Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, Hume, Bentham, Locke, Kant, Nietzsche, Nozick, Singer, O’Neill and others. This is an introductory level philosophy course. Students do not need any prior experience with philosophy.

[tuffwitheffs]

Ending the course there sure does leave students wanting to dig deeper doesn't it

[christopherkerr]

Love your videos! I’m a senior philosophy major and this is a great refresher.

[benmore]

Hume's self-contradictory "normative" principle reminds me of one of the main objections to postmodernism, namely that the postmodern rejection of all metanarratives is in itself a metanarrative.

[gm]

I would counter the question of 'Are there objective morals?' with an enquiry as to what morals are and why do we have them.

If you can find the purpose and nature of morals then such purpose becomes the object for which we must judge. What are Morals? (the differentiation between customs behaviours and laws) Why do we have Morals? When is morality to be considered, imparted and applied? Where are morals required? How do we decide on what is to be moral or amoral? What are the boundries that define morality and concepts within morality?

Theory, to answer such questions we look back into the formation of social groups and how they work. The interplay between social pressure (informal mob), appeal to authority through law (temporal institution) or appeal to authority to religion (spiritual institution) is applied.

Differentiating morals from customs, laws, group preferences, individual preferences, religious traditions, supersticious traditions ect will be a considerable task as there are cross overs. These may or may not cross over due to the concepts being universal whether they are objective or subjective. We would also ask ourselves whether a universally found moral standard would be considered objective or customary?

What would the consequences be if we found an objective morality and could prove it?


What would the consequences be if we could not find an objective morality and could prove that all existing morality have been proven subjective?

Does a morality need to be objective for us to find morality to be a useful concept?

Is morality only a social component and therefore an aspect of risk and reward within game theory where we should be searching for a way to reach Nash equilibrium?

[mangos]

For the record, this totally could have been one, 90-min video

[richardgreen]

[1] Do no harm. [2] Try to do some good. [3] Be wary of proposes trading harm for good.
Our legal systems define 'harm'. Aesthetics tend to indicate what might be 'some good' - improvements.
"The good of the many justifies harm to a few." is an example that proposes trading harm for good.

[waggishsagacity]

What I find so fascinating in these lectures is that, in quite a few of them, tautology was used as though it were a legitimate tool in rational, persuasive argument (specifically by Hume and Locke). It's no more difficult to debunk than saying 'a rabbit is called a rabbit because it IS a rabbit." Thanks, Prof. Jeffrey Kaplan: You are a veritable Explainer of clarity of thought, among other virtues, such as being an outstanding communicator.

[isobelstuart]

I am a high school student studying philosophy. I love your videos. You have helped me immensely.

[muwanguzireagan]

Used this guy's video's for jurisprudence. I Honestly did have much use for attending lectures the entire year while studying jurisprudence 1 and 2 .

[thatjeff]

Came here because one of my friends is writing a work of fiction and introduced ethics as part of the backbone of the work. Nice to see this is from someone from my childhood town. This two-parter gave me some basic understanding but it didn't answer some of my core questions. I may have to see if you have other videos that talk about what I'm looking for.

[mmolokekamogelo]

Good day Mr, thank you for the sessions. They are indeed very useful and resulted in me getting good results for Jurisprudence. All the love from South Africa.

[deepdive]

I think a large part of the problem of philosophy relies on not defining certain words in a scientific manner.
Expirience is one of them. In Hume's argument(you should only believe in things that you or someone else has experienced or that must exist to explain what you do experience) has this problem of not defining what expirience is. There's no objective experience of math for example, but math does make objective arguments that seem surely true. 1+1=2 does not seem like a simple in the mind subjective experience. When apple falls, and another falls, you find 2 apples. The apples are objective, real, but the numbers just seem to pop out. In that way one can suppose this sort of twoness is always experienced when you see 2 apples.
In the same way, from what we do expirience, we may be able to derive some ideas, some calculus for what the ideal state is, perhaps a law like the most stable state(scientifically speaking) is the best.

[johnmackay]

Nietzche was drawing a long bow implying that the 'real etymological significance' of güte, 'good' leads back to some lofty sense of 'soul of high order' or 'privileged soul'. PIE languages such as German, Old English, West Frisian, Dutch and Old Norse have meanings for 'good' synonymous with kindly, gracious, benign, benevolent.

[JagGillarGifflar]

Finally, I've been waiting for this!

[YashArya]

That's it? That's how a college course on ethics ends? So there are no valid arguments for or against objective morality?

[aos]

I find myself completing sentences with “or whatever” these days 😂. Thank you professor

[kdhlkjhdlk]

There doesn't need to be an order of operations for moral facts. If you think they exist objectively (in the world somewhere) then they aren't being reasoned in a logical system from some starting set of axioms, they are being discovered. One doesn't ask if the way atoms work was chosen before momentum was chosen as a rule for the universe - they aren't ordered, just there to be discovered, and the order humans discover them is unimportant.

[howielisnoff]

I spent several semesters taking philosophy courses at my alma mater. I’ve learned more from you in this short time than in all of those courses. Should I demand my money back?

[siliconvalleyceo]

The only thing on internet that is worth opening my bag of Doritos.
Was eagerly waiting for this to happen.

[geechan]

Approximately 500bc to 200 bc, hundreds of philosophers played out their thoughts in China.
The the first Emperor (of Qin) united the warring states under a system of laws (rigid or not depending on your point of view).
His dynasty fell and ascended the Han, which ironically used pretty much the same system.
Then a statesman pushed Confucianism (130 bc )to a Han Emperor.
Thus a feudal hierarchical system of order, virtues, and ethics was employed in order to rule the masses.
At times successful.
But…..