Master 279: Contemporary Moral Issues Proto-Syllabus

This is only a proto-syllabus.  (Really, it's just a way for me to muse while developing a syllabus.)  I'm going to be teaching Contemporary Moral Issues at UCR for Summer 2013, and I'm trying to sort out how to design the course.

CMI is a lower-division philosophy courses.  Many students taking it will be non-majors, and for many of them it may be their only philosophy course.  I'm not sure whether those students, as a separate requirement, have to take Critical Thinking.  Assuming that they do not, one of the goals of this intro-level philosophy course should be to inculcate and develop in students skills and techniques for critical thinking.  Engagement with contemporary moral issues, then, becomes the context in which to introduce and practice these skills.

To engage articulately in reflection and debate about complex issues requires a number of skills.  Students need to be able to read well.  They also need to be able to paraphrase what they read--express the ideas and main points in their own words.  And they need to be able to recognize the structure of a piece of writing.  So, for instance, a straightforward argument might involve a number of pieces of information offered as support for a conclusion.  To capture this, it's not enough to list a bunch of pieces of information.  Which pieces count as support and which piece(s) counts as the conclusion must be differentiated.

Other arguments have a more complicated structure.  In a reductio ad absurdum argument, a number of pieces of information will be presented.  At least two of those pieces of information will contradict one another or lead to a contradiction.  The conclusion of this sort of argument will be the negation of one of those pieces of contradictory information.  Notice, this argument is not as simple as A + B + C = D.  It's more like A + B + (B entails not-A) = not-B.

Being able to recognize and analyze arguments that have this logical form is no small matter.  Probably the first two-to-three weeks (of a ten week course) should be spent introducing and developing some of these skills.  That would also be the time during which we would talk (briefly) about the history of ethics.  Much of philosophical ethics may be helpfully characterized as being tied up with trying to develop a complete and consistent set of sound ethical principles.  Why, you might ask, is it so important that our ethical principles be consistent?  Why think that my beliefs about capital punishment touch, at all, my beliefs about the humane treatment of animals or my duties to citizens of third-world countries?  For some people, it will just seem obvious that we want consistency.  But when you actually try to get it, it turns out to be quite a challenge.  So some justification of the project might be called for.

After this two-to-three-week introduction to the course, I think, we could then move to talk about substantive issues.  My thought, at this stage, is that we would spend six weeks covering a trio of issues.  I've thought of four sets of issues.  Conceivably, I could have four different Contemporary Moral Issues courses--each one dealing with a different set of issues.  (Or in a fifteen-week term, we might cover material from two of these groupings.)  Here are my ideas:

A. Value of life and right to life issues:
     1. Abortion
     2. Euthanasia
     3. Capital punishment

B. Humanity's relationship with and duties to the natural world:
     1. Eating animals
     2. Product and medical testing on animals
     3. Environmental consumption

C. The duty to care for one another; promoting equality and individual responsibility:
     1. Preferential hiring
     2. Access to health care and universal health care
     3. Humanitarianism and charity

D. The relationship of nations and people groups to one another:
     1. War and pacifism
     2. Globalization
     3. Famine relief; the relationship between rich and poor nations

Are you intrigued?  At this stage, though, I have not filled out the reading list for any of these course outlines.  Terrorism and torture could be dealt with under "D".  Gay marriage is a big issue these days, but doesn't seem to fit well under any of these categories.  Maybe a fifth outline (E) could be developed that covers issues related to pluralism, religion and the state, and tolerance.

One reason for grouping the topics together under these headings is that that would allow, in the last one-or-two weeks, for us to take up directly the issue of holding to consistent ideas across individual issues.  Can our views about abortion, euthanasia, and capital punishment be rendered consistent.  Does a commitment to preserving the life of the unborn mean that one must also be opposed to the death penalty.  Is it possible for rich nations to export basic resources to foreign nations without also exporting some of their culture?  Should a commitment to helping the under-privileged and marginalized extend to things like job placement and health coverage?

Some of the last one-to-two weeks of the course could also be given over to evaluating the current debates on these topics.  Many of the articles on abortion, for instance, that you'll find in ethics anthologies are from a few decades ago.  That does not, automatically, mean that they are outdated.  They still inform the contemporary philosophical debate about these issues.  It's also the case that philosophy articles are going to generally be more meticulous and careful in their presentation than your average op-ed, blog, or online blurb.  So the six-week middle part of the course should be spent working through these richer, more complicated arguments.  That should also provide students with a framework in terms of which they may think about the issues in question--whichever side they decide to ultimately come down on.  Then, in the last week or so of the course, students could look at op-ed pieces, blog posts, etc. and their task would be to evaluate those arguments in light of the framework they've developed in the course.

Well, that's my ideas so far.  Of course the hardest part of this (it feels like to me right now) is figuring out what literature I want to read.  The way I would like this course to work is highly integrated.  So during the first couple weeks, even though we're dealing with general methodological issues, we still want to be reading material that is relevant to the broad topic of the course.  (I'd like to avoid reading stuff that's disconnected from ethics, just so that the students can get a sense of how arguments work, and then jump into the ethics stuff.)  Each one of the individual issues comes with an expansive literature.  I need to pick articles that are accessible to students, that deal with the same set of ideas within each of the individual issues, that present different positions in a thoughtful way, and that can all be woven together at the very end of the course.  Challenging?  Just a little.

Well, I'll let you know how it goes.  Stay tuned.

--

God is in this place,
And that reality, seen and understood by the grace of God in Christ Jesus through the work of the Holy Spirit, makes all the difference in the world.

Master 278: The Peculiar Character of Moral Requirements

i.  It's been a few weeks since the Winter quarter started and I'm TA-ing for a Contemporary Moral Issues course.  This post is based on some stuff I was thinking about related to our first discussion section.

The approach that we're taking to this course is very interesting because it starts right off the bat by setting before students some tough ethical dilemmas.  Not only are these ethical dilemmas difficult to resolve but they all involve hypothetical cases.  Now if you're setting up a long-term program of moral education, I would definitely not recommend this approach.  You really ought to start with the clear cases, inculcate a well-rounded moral outlook, and only then raise the difficult cases.  Otherwise it's too easy for students to just dismiss the idea that there is anything coherent grounding moral and ethical requirements.  But this philosophy course is not set up as part of a long-term program of moral education, so it might not be so inappropriate for us to take this approach.

Still, one of the things that I want to work on is making sure that my students do have a solid grasp on how the puzzle cases that we're working with are related to larger and overarching ethical issues.  So many interesting philosophical issues were raised in my first thirty-minute discussion with them.  We couldn't deal with any of them at any depth.  But that's why blog posts are nice.

ii.  In the beginning of my discussion section, I tried to lead them through a process of clarifying the subject matter of ethics.  I started by drawing a basic distinction between the descriptive and the normative.  So where human behavior is concerned, we may distinguish between what people actually do and what people should do.  The former is descriptive, the latter normative.  Now keeping these straight can be a little tricky.  After all, we might ask a question like, "What do most Americans believe one should do in such-and-such a scenario?"  This question is descriptive--it asks what Americans' believe.  But it asks about Americans' normative beliefs--about their beliefs about what one should do.  As long as we can keep the distinction straight, it's a useful one.  What distinguishes the subject matter of ethics from that of other fields is that it is concerned with the normative rather than with the merely descriptive.

iii.  But further clarification is required.  After all, normative statements come in a variety of contexts.  So compare the statement, "You should be kind and not bully people," with the statement, "You should take the LSAT."  There are a number of differences between these two statements.  For instance, the first one concerns one's conduct toward other people while the second concerns how one promotes one's own ends.  One of the things that these statements share in common is use of the word "should."  Both are normative statements; however (and this is the difference that I want to focus on) one is a moral requirement while the other is not.  We could multiply examples of both moral requirements and non-moral requirements.  What we then want to get clear on is what determines whether a particular requirement is moral or not.

It seems like one could have moral requirements that are directed at one's self (which means that moral requirements do not necessarily concern one's conduct toward others).  Perhaps certain forms of self-mutilation, for instance, are immoral.  But one thing that is often thought of as distinguishing the moral from the non-moral is the requirements' universal scope.  "You should take the LSAT," only applies to a person who has as their goal getting into law school.  If I am not planning or interested in going to law school, then it's simply not the case that I should take the LSAT.  That requirement does not apply to me.  But many have thought that the application of moral requirements does not depend on the particular interests or aims that one happens to have.

Actually the requirement of universal scope is probably not enough to distinguish moral from non-moral requirements.  Some might think that certain rational and prudential requirements also apply universally.  So it might not be a moral requirement that one so act as to promote one's long-term self-interest, but it is plausibly a requirement of rationality or prudence.  Someone who was neglectful of their well-being would not be acting as they should, even if they would not be acting immorally.  But I won't say more about that.

iv.  Let's just consider for the moment that morality and ethics are concerned with the normative, as opposed to the descriptive.  And they are concerned with universal requirements rather than local or contingent requirements.

What I want to focus on now is one way of trying to isolate the distinctive character of moral requirements and one of the curious features of this approach.  You can try this exercise as well: consider, for a moment, why it is the case that (generally) people should not lie.  What are the reasons that people (generally) should not lie?

My students listed a number of reasons.  If you're caught, bad consequences may follow.  If you're caught, that lie can undermine future trust.  The consequences of being found in a lie are sometimes (maybe often) worse than the consequences of what you lied about.  The list could go on, of course.  But now I'd like to point out one particular reason that is separate from three that I've listed so far: people should not lie because it's morally wrong.

v.  What's interesting is the thought that the moral badness of lying seems to be distinct from the various possible bad consequences of not lying.  And this raises a question: exactly what does moral wrongness amount to?  "Lying is morally wrong"--what exactly does that entail?  It's natural to think that the badness (including the moral badness) of certain actions is tied primarily to their negative consequences.  But some have worried that this places moral requirements on shaky footing.

Consider, if you could tell a lie and knew that (1) no one would find out, (2) no one would be emotionally hurt, (3) no damage to people's trust in you would result, and (4) no harm to anyone would result from the deception, and (5) telling the lie would be advantageous--would you tell the lie.  Would it be permissible for you to tell the lie?  Or would it still be the case that you should not tell the lie?  And if it would be the case that you should not tell the lie, why should you still not tell the lie.  We're supposing that no bad consequences whatsoever would follow.  So what sense can then be given to the idea that it would be morally wrong to tell the lie?

vi.  When we frame the question in this way, it can appear that the concepts of moral rightness and wrongness are tenuous at best.  A consequentialist might charge that these concepts, when divorced of any connection with particular consequences, are indeed simply empty.  Actions cannot be morally good or bad, says the consequentialist, apart from their good or bad consequences.

I, myself, doubt that consequentialism is true.  Must I, therefore, commit myself to the notions of right and wrong, accepting that no intelligible account of their underpinnings can be given?  I'd like to think not.  Indeed, I think it would be problematic to think that any action that has no negative consequences is still morally impermissible.  But that is not because the negative consequences are what make the action morally bad.  Rather, it is because negative consequences necessarily follow from morally bad actions.

So I accept the following conditional: if action A is morally bad, then action A will have bad consequences.  From this, it follows by contraposition that if action A will not have bad consequences, then action A is not morally bad.  But this conditional does not demonstrate that what makes an action morally good--the explanation of its being morally good--is the fact that it leads to good consequences.  Rather, it is precisely because an action is morally good that we expect good (in various forms) to result from it.  And it is because an action is morally bad that we expect bad to result from it.  I don't know that I can offer a strong positive argument for preferring my order of explanation to the alternative.  Arguments against consequentialism are not too hard to find.

vii.  But if this is right, then what are we to make of the exercise I introduced earlier?  When we imagined stripping away all the various negative consequences of telling a lie, it looked like we couldn't maintain (except dogmatically--in the pejorative sense of that word) that lying in that situation would be bad.  But notice, that doesn't mean that only results/consequences are what make lying immoral.  That just means that the complete absence of negative consequences would show that the action was not bad to begin with.

But this also suggests a further thought.  We might have been too quick in supposing that we could imagine a scenario in which a person told a lie without there being any negative consequences.  We may not have been looking at the situation aright.  And, indeed, there have been some who claimed that all immoral acts are always accompanied by some negative consequence.  (Again, this does not mean that what makes some action moral or immoral is the consequences of that act.  It just means exactly what we would expect of bad actions--that they lead to bad consequences.

What negative consequence might always accompany an immoral action?  If we look at the external consequences of that act (lying, cheating, stealing, murdering) we probably won't find it.  Instead, we'll have to look at the immoral act itself.  Plato made a suggestion about this in the Republic.  He suggested that unjust acts always have a negative effect on that person's soul--leading to a state of disorder and unhealth.  He compares justice in the soul to health in the body.  Unjust acts weaken and disable the soul--interfering with its ability to function as it ought and to facilitate the flourishing of that individual.  The kind of deception, manipulation, self-absorption that are reflected in lying cannot be divorced from it.  If they could, well, that would just show that lying in that instance is not a bad thing.  But I think we ought to be skeptical of anyone who claims to be so self-aware that they can assure us that in any particular case of speaking an untruth, they don't have to fear for any such consequences.  Just ask them to tell you why they feel the need to lie.

Are there hard cases?  Absolutely.  But dealing with those hard cases comes at a later stage in the process of moral education.  That's a cop-out, I know.  (Haha.)  Or is it?  Have you mastered the basics in this instance?  Think about it.

--

God is in this place,
And that reality, seen and understood by the grace of God in Christ Jesus through the work of the Holy Spirit, makes all the difference in the world.