Welcome back. In Episode 1
we talked about what reasons are.
I recommend watching episode 1 before watching this otherwise it might not make much sense.
In this episode 2, we're gonna be talking about
"moral" reasons.
Part 1: "I don't care! I love it!"
So you'll remember from last time the distinction
between "Reasons Internalism" and "Reasons Externalism."
"Reasons Internalism" is the idea that if it is rational for you to do something,
you must be, in some sense, motivated to do it.
"Reasons Externalism" is the idea that it can be rational for you to do stuff
that you are not at all motivated to do.
One potential problem for Reasons Internalism
is that it clashes with a popular idea known as "Moral Absolutism,"
which is a simple idea:
Some things are bad,
always, and for everyone, even if you really, really want to do them,
like murder, or,
genocide.
If somebody does something really bad,
and we tell them "you shouldn't have done that," which is to say there are winning reasons
why they shouldn't have done it, is it an acceptable answer for them to turn around and say I
"I don't care about those reasons at all and I just
really, really wanted to do the bad thing?"
This clash between Reasons Internalism and Moral Absolutism is called
"The Central Problem."
How do we make morality apply to everyone even if they don't want it to?
Regardless of what we might say in a philosophy classroom,
that's not the way moral rules are generally enforced in life.
If you murder somebody and your defense is that you don't really care about morality,
and you were really motivated to do it, most people, I think, would not go "Oh okay,"
and certainly the law wouldn't look at it that way.
Though, as we hinted last time, the law may not in fact be concerned with morality anyway.
It's also possible to put across versions of the Central Problem that aren't moral. For instance,
we might want to say that everybody has winning reasons not to drink poison and die,
even if they really, really want to,
and the Reasons Internalist has to deny that.
Or what if somebody is not at all motivated to take life-saving medication?
This can be a real problem.
Some people find motivation a real difficulty,
even for things that they know on some level will be good for them
and that they on some level might want to do.
People with depression, for instance, can really want to do stuff,
but find motivation challenging.
If somebody is not at all motivated to do something that they need to do in order to keep functioning,
are we okay with saying, as the Reasons Internalist has to,
that that course of action is perfectly rational?
One potential answer to the Central Problem is just to bite the bullet and admit that
morality doesn't apply to everybody.
If you don't have the right motivations, whatever those are,
then the rules of morality just do not apply to you.
It is theoretically possible for somebody to turn around and say
"I don't care at all about moral reasons,
and therefore it is literally false to say that I should or should not do whatever it is
that morality commands me to do."
That might be a bit of an unappealing option,
and it also might leave us with some other problems as well.
For instance, we would have to explain what "you should not murder people" actually means.
if we say it to somebody who doesn't have the right moral motivations.
That's not necessarily an impossible task,
but it is philosophical work.
Another option is to say that this isn't going to tear morality down or anything,
we just need to rephrase a few things.
So, instead of saying "you should not murder people" we need to say
"If you don't want to go to prison,
you shouldn't murder people."
"If you don't want to feel guilty, you shouldn't murder people."
"If you don't want people to dislike you, you shouldn't murder people."
We find a way of linking morality to motivations for something else.
That's a bit more selfish, but even then you might not allow that option.
You might want to say, well,
"murdering people is wrong because of what it does to the other person, to the victim,
never mind what you want, or don't want."
"Isn't morality meant to be about other people?"
Part Two: Playing With Yourself
There's a sneaky third tactic here.
Maybe we don't have to give up on Moral Absolutism or Reasons Internalism.
Maybe we can say,
"Yes, moral reasons don't apply unless you have the right motivations,
but, it just so happens that every human being has those motivations anyway, and therefore,
we've basically got the best of both worlds."
One of the more famous attempts to do this comes from Kant,
who we've talked about in more detail on the show before,
Kant says that part of being a rational being, a being that can appreciate reasons,
is that there are some reasons that will always motivate you.
The analogy I like is to gravity.
So, part of having mass, is that wherever you go, if there's gravity, it's gonna be pulling on you.
Similarly, Kant says that part of having a mind is that wherever you go, if there are moral reasons,
they're gonna be pulling on you.
In fact, even deeper than that, Kant thought that because moral reasons are built into
having a mind, they come from within.
You actually give morality to yourself.
You place yourself under moral restrictions.
So he's kind of got the Reasons Internalism angle covered--
That's why morality seems so powerful and always pulls on us--
because it's actually coming from us.
But he's also got the Reasons Externalism angle covered as well;
Everybody with a mind is motivated in this way as part of having a mind.
The combination of these two ideas allows Kant to say that being bad is actually irrational,
because you are not doing what you are necessarily motivated to do.
You're essentially contradicting yourself.
Kant's not the only philosopher to play this card;
Simon Critchley takes a modern crack at it.
He says that the human self is essentially constructed around moral values.
Basically there are no value-neutral human beings who have no preferences about anything.
To be a human is to be essentially value driven.
In particular, he says that moral values help us construct the self.
We experience a moral demand, but a moral demand must be addressed to somebody,
so there must be a self there,
but the self must also already exist
to recognize and approve of the demand.
So, he says that moral demands and the self
construct each other simultaneously, in a very "Inception"-style way.
We create and perceive the self at the same time.
Critchley writes, "The self is something that shapes itself
through its relation to whatever it determines as good,
whether that is the Torah, the resurrected Christ, the moral law,
the community in which I live, suffering humanity, all God's creatures or whatever ...
What we think of as a self is fundamentally an ethical subject,
a self that is constituted in relation to its good."
What this allows, Critchley and, in a different way Kant, to say is that
"if I act in such a way that I know to be evil, then I am acting in a manner
destructive to the self that I am."
Interestingly, Critchley thinks that the human self is essentially in two parts:
There's the self that we experience,
and there's the ideal self that we think we should be.
We don't always live up to our ideal selves,
but nevertheless, we build them up in our minds.
We put them there.
And so, the moral reasons that motivate us,
even though they come from within the self,
can appear to be external to the self that we experience.
Paaaarrrt ThreeEEee: EEEeeeeeviiilllll!
So we've talked a lot about people being motivated to do good,
but what about the inverse:
people being motivated to avoid doing evil?
Critchley argued that the human self is constructed
in relation to the moral good of which it approves,
but why should moral approval be more fundamental to the self than other kinds of approval, like, say,
taking pleasure in something?
Or, indeed, why should it be more fundamental than disapproval?
He's argued that there are no value-neutral humans and, okay fine,
but not all values are moral, or even positive.
To fill part of this gap,
I want to bring in a brand new piece of philosophy
from my teacher, and friend, Justin Snedegar,
and the idea is called "contrastive reasons."
Snedegar argues that wherever you have a reason to, go to the shops,
that will always be a reason to go to the shops
rather than stay at home or rather than go to the pub.
Reasons always provide a contrast against some alternatives,
so if we want to know whether something is rational,
we need to be able to put it in that context and say
"Rational as opposed to what?"
The alternatives are never infinite;
It wouldn't make sense to say that it's rational to
go to the shops rather than go to Venus,
because going to Venus was never really an option,
but whatever is rational is always rational in context.
What happens if we take contrastive reasons, and plug them in to
something like Kant or Critchley's ideas about humans being inherently sensitive to moral reasons?
Well, we'd get the idea that as well as human cells being constructed around our desires to do good,
we are also constructed around the desire to do good as opposed to doing evil.
Critchley's fond of biblical references, so I'll put it like this:
The apple that Adam and Eve ate came not from the Tree of Knowledge of Good,
but from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.
So, to be a human subject is to have built-in impulses about good and evil
Interestingly, Critchley thinks that these moral impulses, if they exist,
and, for lack of a better term, are activated
by the moral demands that other people place on us,
so being open-minded to other people's perspectives is essential for morality,
and that is going to be very important in episode 4.
In this, Episode 2, we've looked at some attempts philosophers have made
to tie rationality to morality.
In Episode 3, we're gonna change tack slightly,
and talk about how the words "rational" and "irrational" are used,
and we're gonna start by getting all emotional.
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*electronic outro*
