Ethics

Mencius human nature capacity questions The Mind of respectfulness and reverence

Capacity that enables us to understand our social roles is the source of propriety and harmony

Plato Wrote about

the nature of reality, knowledge, goodness, beauty, and justice

Xunzi live in what century BCE He disagreed with _________ he was a devoted _______

3rd century BCE Mencius Confucian

Mencius human nature capacity questions The Mind of shame and dislike

Capacity that enables us to see what's fair the source is of right or fair.

The Goodness of Human Nature Mencius concludes that

"One's natural tendencies enable one to do good" Will we always do the right thing? No (all human beings have it. It is only that the exemplary ones that are able to avoid losing it; that is all,) What does this tell us about human nature? We are inherently good. There is something about how we orient ourselves that

The explanation of evil Augustine thinks that this won't work in the case of his theft Need to understand why people want the things they do in the first place Maybe he thinks it won't work in other cases as well? He had better pears, he threw away the pears he got he ate, but didn't enjoy Augustine considers the possibility that it was the theft itself that motivated him. He claims that it was ultimately he was "viciously, perversely, imitating" god God makes the moral law; in contradicting, Augustine was imagining himself to be on par with God Type 1

1

Mencius was a ___ century ____________ philosopher

4th century BCE Confucian philosopher Regarded as the second most important Confucian philosopher "The Second Sage"

Approval and appreciation

"and what is it that gave me pleasure? Only to love, and to be loved." Our desire for love- for approval and appreciation- is central to understanding human motivation. Particularly, in the case of wrongdoing, since this desire is so easily "disordered" or "perverted"

According to XUNZI how do humans become good What

- If human nature is naturally evil, it can only become good through outside instruction and reinforcement - Law and regulations are external ways in which our characters and wills can be "bent" into a good shape - Mencius thought that humans' ability to learn good showed that we are naturally good Xunzi argues that this is a mistake because what is natural will flow from you spontaneously

Hume's Moral Psychology David was a _____ philosopher . Date or century Nationality famous for what

1st modern philosopher Scottish Enlightenment philosopher (18th century - 1711- 1776) Famous for his work on the history of England epistemology (particularly of science), and philosophy of religions and ethics

Explaining Action Hume's general question: what explains human behavior?

Answering this question can help us answer a more specific question: what explains humans' propensity for evil?

Augustine Confessions

Augustine documents his youth and conversion to Christianity Is trying to understand what makes us resist goodness

Mencius human nature capacity questions The mind that knows right and wrong

C`apacity for understanding moral truths Is the source of wisdom

The sun (real goodness)

By comparison, something that is really good is something that is worth pursuing in all context Its goodness is stable If it is really good, it won't distort the way you think about the world. If something does this, then it makes you irrational. Bad to be irrational. The thing can't really be good

Mencius human nature capacity questions The Mind of pity and commiseration

Capacity for empathy is a source of humaneness

Spontaneous goodness

Child and the well case. You are walking, see a child about to fall into the well. He is in distress. Our first thought is to help. This response is natural. What does Mencius think this tells us about human nature? Our nature points us to "rightness"

Conditional goodness

Conditionally good if it appears good, helpful, or useful in one context, but it is bad, harmful, or useless in another A limited kind of goodness

Distorting desires

Conformation Bias When we are testing a hypothesis, we search for confirming (rather than challenging) evidence, and we use different standard to evaluate confirming evidence Self-deception/motivated reasoning can occur when we want something to be good. We'll look for reasons to do the thing, and ignore reasons against it

Confucianisim theory is based on

Education and tradition (Confucianism theory) helps bring the goodness out of us

(T/F) Plato thinks we are not pristoners

False

Background: Confucianism

Conservative moral theory Mencius emphasizes 5 traditional Confucian doctrines Happiness in day-to-day life Importance of tradition Familial relations as central to the good life Importance of ritual Importance of education

The problem with desires

Desires mistakenly present their objects as being good in themselves But the goodness of these things is merely conditional Once you've satisfied your desire, you no longer see its object as good

Human nature goes bad

For Socrates our propensity for evil comes from our appetitive natures (ex. our desires and fears)

Book II

Human motivation is grounded in a desire for approval and appreciation Human motivation is disordered

According to XUNZI human nature is ______ (Good or evil) What reasons does he propose for this

Human nature is evil. What is "evil"? Naturally inclined towards profit (or self-interest) Naturally inclined towards aggressiveness, greed, envy, and hate. It is only possible to do good by conscious exertion, so goodness is not natural for humans. Is it always true? No Is any of this incompatible with Mencius's theory of human nature?

Hume Liked the traditional theory TF Why

Hume's alternative didn't like the traditional theory Hume rejects this account of human action "reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office that to serve and obey them," our desires aren't something we chose to have, they just happen to us On hume's view, our behavior cannot be explained by an intellectual capacity to recognize the good

What we care about

If the source of human behavior is located in what each of us cares about, then what explains our bad actions? Care about bad things failure to care about good things (enough) Suppose that I don't care about good things, how can I become good? Come to see how being good is logically connected to other things you care about (this is the job reason does for hume) But what if nothing I care about is logically connected to what's good? Hume claims that it is perfectly rational However, he is skeptical that describes you: "let all the powers and elements of nature conspire to serve and obey one man" What we care about gives us moral

Imprisoned?

If we are prisoner, what keeps us "chained" What causes us to have the "worthless" skill of only knowing appearances? hint think The Cave

Human nature? mencius was concerned with

Mencius was concerned with human nature What are our natures like? He thinks that we don't need to do violence to our natures to become good We are naturally good, and we need to violate and ignore those desires to become good Willow tree and water \ Gaozi: human nature is like the willow tree; rightness is like cups and bowls. To make humaneness and rightness out of human nature is like ups and bowls out of the willow tree. Mencius: Are you able to make cups and bowls while following the nature of the willow tree? You must do violence to the willow tree before you can make cups and bowls. If you must do violence to the tree to make cups and bowls, must you also do violence to human beings in order to bring forth humanness and rightness? Gaozi: human nature is like swirling. Human nature doesn't distinguish b/w good and not good any more than water distinguishes b/w east and west. Mencius: water doesn't fail to distinguish between up and down? Goodness of human nature is like downward course of water. There is no human being lacking in the tendency to good, just as there is no water lacking in the tendency to flow downward.

The explanation of Evil If we all took seeds home and planted them, would the plant be the same for everyone? So, given that we have these minds, why do we regularly engage in wrongful actions? The importance of External Influences? For humans to be good

No, because environments/situations are different For humans to be good, then, the minds of pity and commiseration, shame and dislike, respectfulness and reverence,

Child and the well case. You are walking, see a child about to fall into the well. He is in distress. Our first thought is to help. This response is natural. What does Mencius think this tells us about human nature?

Our nature points us to "rightness" The Goodness of Human Nature Mencius concludes that "One's natural tendencies enable one to do good" Will we always do the right thing? No (all human beings have it. It is only that the exemplary ones that are able to avoid losing it; that is all,)

Aristotle's teacher

Plato

Student of socrates

Plato

Who asked the following Why do humans act the way they do? Why do people do good things even when its not in their benefit? Why do people act irrationally?

Plato

The problem with desires Who else thinks that our desires systematically mislead us?

Plato Confuse unstable and impure conditional good with unconditional good

Main points in The Republic is

Plato's theory of justice in the individual and in the polis (the city). Structured around the question: why should we be just if injustice is more profitable? Plato thinks only the just individual can truly be happy

Hume's argument FOr tradition

Reason has the power to help us understand what will happen if we act in a certain way but this can't be sufficient to make you act If you are indifferent- i.e., if you don't care about what happens, then you won't be concerned with what reasons tells you so, what moves us to act must not be reason but instead some prior concern or preference or desire Reason is not the source of motivating impulses, it at best directs them in accord with what it predicts

Republic book VII

Socrates and Glaucon are discussing the human condition Glaucon is socrates brother Main Idea: without certain kind of moral education, we are ignorant of the good Most of us lack the kind of education he's describing

Plato

The appetitive part is essentially bad. The greed for non-rational desires lead us to stray Why? Are our desires really so bad at ascertaining what's good?

What about our natures does Mencius think makes us do good?

The mind of pity and commiseration The mind of shame and dislike We are naturally good because we have those four capacities

The cave

The prisoners? The enlightened individual who has been exposed to the light of the sun? Or some combination?

Background Moral Theories

They can be radical or conservative Radical theory: our ordinary ideas about morality are mistaken E.g., Plato's moral theory- you have these desires that tell you what is good and what is bad but don't rely on that. Conservative/traditional theory: preserve our ordinary conception of morality Our basic ideas about right and wrong might need to be systematized But they are still the "data" we build our moral theory around

Argument from learning

Xunzi argues that our need for education shows that moral change can't come from within A straight board does not require any external pressure to be straight

Environment and Goodness

Xunzi concludes that our environments are crucial for our goodness What are our moral environments? Social Environments "If you don't know your son, look at his friends; if you do not know you lord look to his attendants." People we're around have an outsized affect our behavior.

Chained?

Upbringing Society/culture Fears According to Socrates, we are imprisoned by our own non-rational desires (our "appetite") Desires for food and drink, sex, companionship, love, material wealth, power, prestige, success, etc. Think DESIRE

Xunzi's argument from desire

Xunzi further argues that our nature must be evil because we long to be good/live good lives Poor people long for riches, ugly people long to be beautiful, etc. So, you desire to live good lives means we don't already have them. So, the fact that desire to live good lives means we don't already have them.

Socrates will ask is interlocutor offers a definition: e.g., what is knowledge?

a belief that is true Socrates considers whether that definition is consistent with other commitments the interlocutor might have A lucky guess doesn't seem like knowledge, so true belief isn't enough for knowledge

Adolescence Augustine describes his adolescence as a time of

confusion: "I was caught in the vapors of murky lust of flesh, of the bubbling sores of puberty, which so clouded and darkened my heart that I could not distinguish the clear brightness of love from the fog of lust"

Socrates believes: Moral action is

grounded in Knowledge of the good Suggest that we do bad stuff because we don't know what is good. How does Socrates argue for these claims? The Allegory of the Cave The cave Prisoners can see shadows and projections of images They have varying degrees of skill at determining what the shadows appear to be The skill seems worthless once you've been exposed to the sun

Augustine offers an alternative explanation of how desires confuse us about the good For Plato, what we desire is bad (or is only conditionally good) For Augustine, it

how we desire that ultimately leads us astray The desire to love and to be loved- for approval and appreciation- is good But we are extremely poor at recognizing how we can achieve these desires We confuse good desires with poor alternatives (we are happy to settle for something that we initially wanted) Augustine thinks loving and being loved is the most important thing we can do

Implications

if hume is right that reason is "slave to the passions" then it's a problem for the theory of human evil found in Plato Plato thinks that if I know what's good then i would do it But as hume points out, this isn't clearly so I might know x is the right thing to do, but if I don't care about x at all, then I won't be motivated to act. weakness of will

Hume's A traditional theory history Traditional answer to "what explains human action" appeals to our ability to

recognize some things as good or better what we regard or believe to be good or better motivates us to take action motivation follows from judgement if they do bad things, they are said to have poor judgement Something like this is in the background of plato's explanation for why we do evil Wrongdoing has its source in our ignorance of what's really good So the thought goes, if we just knew what was really good, we'd pursue it Knowledge of what's good directly motivates This theory also explains the intuition that when reason (i.e., the intellectual capacity that enables us to recognize and understand what's good) and passion conflict, we should "give preference to reason"

Beyond sex Augustine makes this point with

sexual desire We confuse meaningful forms of engagement with others ("mind to mind") with reductive, objectifying attitudes (lust) But this kind of confusion isn't particular to sex Pears Augustine illustrates this with his account of a pear heist

Who Said "but since there was no pleasure for me in pears, the pleasure was in the crime itself, and it was my companionship with fellow sinners that created this pleasure"

the satisfaction he took in stealing, was predicated on the presence of other people.