In this course:
this course lacks any historical flavour and deals with ethics abstractly.
Ethics is not a thing, it cannot be easily described.
It is purely a concept.
It is a kind of configuration of associations, that allows to frame a common intuitive distinction.
This distinction contains many distinctions, eg. right and wrong, good and bad.
It starts with these intuitive distinctions, and then we conceptualise using them.
These oppositions do not mean exactly the same thing. There are quite a lot of them and they vary in meaning and use.
But they all refer to a thing we all seem to experience in our daily life. Spontaneously this distinction is made between more or less everything. For example in relation to our emotions: when we think something is good we might feel happy because it is the case or so on.
We may show respect for someone who shows good traits.
Certain things are awkward, bad or silly, and others are good and feel sympathy and likeness to them.
If ethics is about these inuitive distinctions, it is not entirely abstract, but we are then talking about these kinds of emotions, and reactive attitudes that we seem to feel spontaneously.
These things can be thought about ourselves as well, we can feel worthless, proud and so on, based on the kind of things that have happened to us or that we have done be they good or bad.
The word ethics comes from the greek Ethos, which translates to character. The character of a person can also be the character of a group. eg. Aristotle on rhetorics: if you want to be a good speaker, you need to attune your speech to the ”ethos” (the character) of the audience (their vibes lol).
If you talk to someone and you show that you are similar to them and feel the way they feel, and think the way they think, it will be easier to convince them.
Eg. Marketers will try to do this in order to sell their products. They will try to share the ethos of the group they speak to. One needs to take account of the group mentality.
”Tala med präster på latin, och bönderna på böndernas språk”.
Ethics again is related to the spontaneous distinctions we make between things, certain things are out of the character of the group and certain things participate. And it seems to be all about a kind of feeling we have that are intuitive, or perhaps come out of group mentality.
The course also contains a kind of daily life practice, often things happen where we do not know how to react, and here ethics can serve a purpose to inform us. Furthermore though, you might not even understand what kind of situation you are in, a point at which you have to ask questions in order to reach a clearer picture of what is happening to you.
You need to ask what is at stake.
Thinking about how to judge something in a moral sense, is a certain kind of meaning of ethics.
There is ethics on a social level, and then there is ethics as the thinking-of ethics.
Ethics reflects on ethics itself.
There is a level of practice, and there is a level of discourse.
On the one side you have people who think: let’s try to understand what’s happening on a social level. Why do we feel guilty or that we have responsibility? We need to make explicit what we already know. We need to describe it on the level of practice. And describing it means to reflect on it as closely as it actually functions.
Instead of this descriptive approach however, which seems to focus on group mentality or on how cultures interact with one another and which makes things much too relative, we can also study it through paradigms of structure which explain why things are wrong or right. Perhaps even from a rational point of view. People who follow this approach want to find arguments within ethics which can lead to how intuitive judgements are fundamentally made.
Descriptive vs Normative ethics.
The normative approach is not only a philosophical one. There are also frameworks based on religious or ideological principles. In communist countries there seems to be a right or wrong ideologically. And in religion there are a kind of moral theologians who can find a right or wrong from the religious dimension of revelation.
Generally they carry a clear normative view however.
The more people are convinced that their normative view is right, the more they feel like the can show the way. They might feel that they have a surplus responsibility to guide other people.
As moral philosophers, we can be those people who have the possibility of saying why something is right or wrong.
Moral philosophy can have the force to create a kind of prominent leaders.
There are of course also people who are skeptical towards this sort of approach.
Some of these philosophers might even say that the world would be just as it is now if there were no moral philosophers.
You can’t go around intuitions and cultural affinities that are bound to historically developed institutions.
This doesn’t prevent us to have discussions on ethical issues however. By describing how it feels in our culture, we are already confronted with the fact that the mentality of the group at home and the one amongst students. So clearly there is something here we can study anyhow.
We can understand what it means to have a position from a kind of perspective, and if we argue in regards to these perspectives, we can find sollutions that can exist in agreement between different perspectives.
No matter what principles we can reach: we can talk to each other. And we can understand each other’s positions.
Some people believe that when we turn to a rational approach, we will have a firmer ground. However, as a matter of fact, it seems that things don’t necessarily become more fundamental when we turn to thinking.
When we are on the level of thinking, we are immediately approached by a million theories that seem to have some kind of rational basis. And we will immediately see that these theories are not compatible, they are not even comparable.
You cannot get from one theory to the other, there is a kind of contradiction. You cannot be truthful in defending multiple theories at once.
There are all kinds of visions and ideological visions which root these theories. Being purely on the level of thinking in ethics seems then quite difficult, because it is quite difficult to find a normative vision for these theories themselves.
”Once you start to think and theorise, it is impossible that you become awkward and crazy.”
How is it that the thinking path deviates so vastly from common sense?
One reason could be that, when people start to think, they can hide away from their daily way of dealing with things, they seem independent from the group around them. Once a person reads a book on his own and thinks about what they have read, and one starts to develops one’s theory, there is no person looking over your shoulder and calling you crazy, you can just always from zero develop it. There is no social control anymore. It is freeing.
The risk then is that one starts to come up with crazy theories, not kept in check.
It is different with feeling, and showing emotions.
Reactive attitudes are spontaneous. But they are usually not hidden, give that they have some relevance.
If you show emotions, these emotions become real. When playing a role in an interaction, feelings are the most important initially.
Feelings seem to not be so random as we think them, but as a matter of fact, emotions are taking place in an immediate interaction. The meaning of what I feel is always directly seen and corrected. There is a lot of social control on how we actually show emotions.
If I am reacting, I have a picture of how people see my reaction, and this reaction is inappropriate, I will try to react it, I will shape my emotions in a certain way so that they are acceptable, and we do this kind of spontaneously. We are trained, through socialisation, to do something like this.
Batian Jeskita, Between Us: How culture creates emotions, psychologist studying emotions.
She opposes the idea that there are basic universal emotions. These hardcore emotions do not exist universally and they depend on the kind of culture we were raised. These are all very specific and group bound.
In a western culture, shame is something bad. We don’t want to feel this kind of emotion. While in southern asiatic cultures, it is not something that is seen as bad, rather it is a show of respect and reverance. Feeling anxious what seems to be proper and not is seen as entirely positive.
They are trained to feel ashamed, but the shame that we talk about and that they talk about is different.
So feelings are a result of a kind of socialisation.
These reactive attitudes are not personal but trained. So saying that they are purely subjective is wrong. In each kind of group, there is an appropriate reaction, which is based on evaluation. We are reluctant if someone acts in a way that is inappropriate.
If you became introduced into a different culture, you could learn this even after what you learned as young.
There seems to be something objective about what is appropriate and not. But this seems to not work, as what we think on the level of one group, will be thought of differently on the level of another group.
The goal of this course is not to reassure us that these principles are clear and easy to find.
The fact that we can think more freely than we can feel, is also an interesting point.
One cannot just decide that today I will feel x.
Feelings seems to not be possible to decide about, whilst we have actionable possibilities in regards to thinking.
You can condition yourself however, to certain feelings. You can take actions that lead to certain feelings, but you cannot technically know what feelins will come out of every action.
The use of conceptual frames, are used to think about ethics. When we master the language of ethics, we can decide how to move in that kind of frame.
There is some sort of social control of the different kind of sociologisation that eventually takes places. This is for sure.
But what we are trying to talk about is what the philosopher can do, without that kind of social pressure; theoretically.
We are not trying to figure out what thinking is here.
It is often an idea that people have a thought and then searches for words to express those thoughts. Semenovitch vykoskji Thought and Language. Or Thought and Speaking. The idea is that at the end, the way we think comes from the way we originally spoke. Bed times monologies, children that are starting to speak, often start speaking and talking to themselves, explaining what they have seen and heard. And they do this in a way that is quite understandable.
What is interesting, is that if you observe this, you can see that later on they express certain words without following grammatical rules, only using topical words. What is at stake in this kind of process? When little children start to think, this thinking is like a dialogue had with themselves. Words are however what is needed to have a thought. So we have a kind of acquaintance with ourselves, certain words become signs that express a complex idea, yet lack the technical vocalisation to express that. This relation we have with other people as well. So when children start using just topical words, it’s because these act as abbreviations.
Thinking is a kind of abbreviate way of expressing complex things, much like in a poem.
A long explanation that explicitly states all the things that are implicit, is not much like thinking in reality.
In the writing of an essay, we have to work oppositely to how our thinking works, we need to go against the normal pangs of thinking in a structural and language-based manner.
Some people think that a feeling comes first, and then the impression.
This is a kind of romantic idea. One of the philosophers who oppose the idea of immediacy is Hegel. Immediacy would be so immediate that we cannot say anything about it, rather than that it is there, it is being and that’s it. The idea that all starts in an immediate stage which is then translated into words, seems then lackluster. Concepts don’t necessarily come after the immediate. The immediate itself is conceptual and so more than purely being.
To make it possible to concentrate on certain things, concepts are not in order to explain certain objects, but rather the concepts constitute the substance of our experience.
The experience of observation must be related to a kind of conceptualisation. If we cannot express what we experience, we aren’t concscious of what we are experiencing.
But certainly there is a handling of things that can come after. A concept is not a name for a thing that is already there, instead it constitutes our reality as a whole.
This is done in language. If I recognise that something is a chair, I am doing more than saying what I am seeing. I am projecting all kinds of things on the things I am dealing with, I am introducing an entire system of expectations of that thing.
In a lot of senses, these conceptualisations don’t exist. Nothing real is happening within them. There are rituals and games and ways to do things, but there is no pure reality in these conventional ways to do things. But on the other hand we cannot get away from the necessity of language, as we would get only to the immediacy of being then. Without concepts we are not interacting with anything.
The immediacy of for example smell, is not really part of our world, rather we conceptualise the different kind of smells and their meanings.
These conceptual frameworks are also the tools which help us to be free from the immediate reality. We are not bound to the hear and now. We can choose to talk about certain things and so on to think about certain things, and the better we are acquainted with the language in which think and speak, the more clear and freely we can do this.
If you are well trained in a language, you will be more free to express it.
The more refined the coordination system we use is, the more easily we can orient ourselves within that system. However, with this kind of theory we are also fundamentally stuck within that coordination system, though it seems furthermore possible to combine and construct new things out of this ordinate mass by reducing or adding to it.
What we see in ethics is that there are a lot of groups of people who develop a theory in a particular way, and then accept each others’ presuppositions in their own compartment. The problem in ethics is that there is no forum where everyone meets everyone in order to discuss and develop what is appropriate and not. Ethics as it is currently is quite chaotic.
There is no general message in ethics as it currently stands which can reach the genral populous. Some bad people take advantage of that chaos in order to say things like: ”there is no morals, we can do as we will”.
There has been the idea that we need to return to the pure level of practice and its description.
Then it comes into contact with psychology, anthropology and so on, as these disciplines all try to ask these kinds of questions, but in this kind of approach a problem that arises is that the level of discourse and practice aren’t really seperatable in a very narrow way.
There are no experiences without concepts. We frame the world the minute we use a concept. We trigger certain associations that are fashionable.
And if we think that we can abolish these conceptual frameworks, we miss our past, and so will essentially just have to relearn the same things again.
Understanding ethics, is understanding the conceptual tools through which ethics functions. What kind of theories which are behind any kind of position. We cannot clearly distinguish theory and practice, they are inextricably tied to each other.
The better we have an understanding of why concepts exist, the better we understand the kind of feelings we have today. We cannot except this kind of thing.
The best way to make sense of this chaotic theoretical talking, is to try and tell the story of development, how all these ideas with their conceptual residue created a kind of understanding of ethics.
History is not interesting in and of itself. It helps us to understand why we think like we think today.
The frames we are using today are not unbound to how things have been before. A lot of our speech is based on religion still today, and if we don’t take this into account, we won’t understand it.
We need to reconstruct the geneaology of how things turned up from the past.
Now, history can be explained in a lot of way, but it remains a good tool to disentangle why we defend certain positions.
Where does ethics begin?