A couple of years ago, I call organized a conference on moral responsibility. I vividly remember that at some point, a colleague from applied ethics left halfway one of the parallel sessions complaining in a loud voice, "I can't stand any longer all these people discussing what we should do if this or that hypothetical situation were to apply. Give me the facts that actually apply, and then we can start talking." To be honest, I was completely baffled. I couldn't help thinking. But as a polite and modest host of the conference, I fortunately refrained from responding. Wondering what we should do if this or that hypothetical situation were to apply, that is exactly what we call philosophy and more specifically, ethics. That's exactly our job description. However, in retrospect, that pent-up response wouldn't have been entirely fair either. Colleagues working in applied ethics focus on the application of moral considerations to specific domains like bioethics or media ethics, and they have to take many factors into account that are specific to the domain at hand, and that can make a difference, morally speaking. That explains why they make less use of evaluative taught experiments. However, in ethics and moral philosophy, the question, what is good or what should we do can be addressed at different levels of abstraction. More abstract than applied ethics is normative ethics, dealing with the criteria for good or right actions independently of specific domains or contexts. As you are about to find out in this first clip and in the next one, evaluative thought experiments play a very important role in both developing and testing views in normative ethics. Still more abstract than normative ethics is metaethics. Metaethics is roughly the metaphysics of ethics. Its main questions are, whether good exists independently of us, whether it can be reductively analyzed, and whether ethical claims can be true or false. In the last clip of this seventh week on ethics and moral philosophy, we'll discuss and contrast the main views in metaethics, and consider a meta thought experiment by George Edward Moore to the effect that all views in normative ethics are bound to face imaginary counterexamples. Let's start with some soul searching. Did you ever, when things hadn't worked out well, try to exonerate yourself saying, "But my intentions were good"? If you did, you appeal to intentionalism, the view in normative ethics that an action is right if it results from a good intention. The medieval French scholastic philosopher Peter Abelard developed and defended intentionalism. One of his main arguments is that it solves the problem of moral luck. That is a problem that quite often significant aspects of our actions or the consequences depends on factors beyond our control. Take for example, two people who want to donate the same amount of money to charity, and while one is successful in doing so, the other gets roped in the process. Although the actions and their consequences differ, Abelard would argue that their actions were equally good because they resulted from the same good intention. One obvious problem for intentionalism is that in contrast to actions and at least some of the consequences, we cannot observe the intentions of other people. We may, of course, ask people about their intentions, but then again, people may lie. This is not merely an academic problem. Think for instance of criminal law cases in which finding out and proving intent and motives is at the same time very important and notoriously difficult. However, for a medieval scholastic philosopher like Abelard, there is an omnipotent solution for that epistemic predicament. Only God has access to our true intentions, and only God will pass the final judgments on our actions. While intentions typically precede actions, consequentialism evaluates whether an action is right in terms of its successive consequences. The most famous and infamous consequentialist view is Jeremy Bentham's utilitarianism. According to utilitarianism, happiness is good or intrinsically valuable, so we should always opt for the action that produces the greatest happiness. Not egoistically for ourselves though, but for all people involved. Hence Bentham slogan, "The greatest happiness, for the greatest number". Bentham even thinks that there are only gradual differences between the happiness produced by various actions. His follower, John Stuart Mill, by contrast, believes that happiness also varies in-kind and so cannot be measured on a single scale. Although at face value, consequences in general and happiness in particular seem criteria that matter a lot in evaluating actions, we can easily think of counter-examples to utilitarianism. Imaginary situations in which it would be wrong to choose the action that maximizes happiness everyone considered. Judith Jarvis Thomson, for instance, contrasts the trolley problem, which she borrows from Philippa Foot with her own transplant problem. In both cases, the consequences of the action and the consideration are exactly the same, and yet there seem to be a fundamental morally relevant difference between the cases. More generally, many thought experiments show that simply bringing about the greatest happiness for the greatest number might require doing things that are immoral, like sacrificing a completely innocent person to prevent violent riots, or hastening the death of a well-to-do, stingy father who gets no joy from life to avail the son and his poor family of the joys of life and so on.
