Fundamentals of Ethics

book notes from Landau’s book

The book is split up into three sections:

• Value Theory: What is worth pursuing for it’s own sake? What is a good life?
• Normative ethics: What are our fundamental moral duties?
• Meta ethics: What is the status of moral claims and advice? Can they be ‘objectively’ true?

Hedonism

• According to the hedonists, a life is good to the extent that it is filled with pleasure and is free of pain.

• Originates with Epicurus, he said that pleasure is the only thing worth pursuing, he meant inner peace though. That moderation in all physical matters and intellectual clarity about what is truly important is what inner peace is.
• Philosophy is a path to this clarity.
• Kind of operates in a middle between a one size fits all model and allowing each person to decide for themselves.
• Happiness is considered intrinsically valuable. It just seems self evident so why not just say it is.
• One general premise that Landau points out as false and seems very general.

• If someone know you very well, loves you, and for your own sake wants you to have X, then X makes you better off.

• If someone has some notion of what will make you happy even if it’s objectively true in some sense, you value freedom of choice and have subjective views on this thing.
• Hedonism can overcome this claim with

  If something makes you happier, then it promotes your well being; if something fails to make you happier then it fails to promote your well-being.

The Paradox of Hedonism

• If happiness obviously seems to make us better off, then we should rationally just pursue that.

  If happiness is the only thing that directly makes us better off, then it is rational to single-mindedly pursue it. It isn’t rational to do that. Therefore, happiness isn’t the only thing that directly makes us better off.

• Well being can kind of lie at different levels of hierarchy though and how happiness is measured is necessarily defined.
• It’s interesting as Landau points out to consider evil pleasures. You might think that hedonism could be argued as false because if an equal amount of happiness is gained from evil deeds to good deeds it’s considered the same level of good. They aren’t the same level of good, therefore morality is false.
• Hedonism says they are the same level of good.
• But here, is it not the case if you define happiness as general well-being, you’d see that more evil deeds create less well-being (that’s not self interested) so it actual is less morally good. This is still hedonism, just happiness is defined differently.

• Hedonism does not try to tell us about every way in which things can be good or bad. It tells us only about what directly makes us better off. So long as hedonists do not say that the only value is individual wlfare, they can easily allow that such things as biodiversity, beautiful objects, and morally admirable actions add to the overall value of a world.

Argument from Autonomy

If hedonism is true, then autonomy contributes to a good life only insofar as it makes us happy. Autonomy sometimes directly contributes to a good life, even when it fails to make us happy. Therefore, hedonism is false.

• Landau says we want our life to be authentic, to reflect our values.
• This seems to prompt looking more holistically at ones life. How things play out in the long run.

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Unhappiness as a Symptom of Harm

• What is rational to be unhappy about? If we want to improve our well-being we can just ‘fool’ ourselves or delude ourselves into always being happy as long as we’re alive.
• Landau considers that maybe it’s reasonable to be unhappy or suffer from a lost love or the death of a friend. You’re acknowledging the value of the thing that was.
• Can this not all fall under unhappy though? In this argument he says that we can be harmed in other ways than being unhappy.
• Unhappiness can be a symptom of something like a loss.

Chapter 6

• I would say the strength of natural law is that as Landau says it can be a source of objective moral claims. No amount of science can determine moral values. The ought from is that Hume talks about.
• Natural law theory claims to be able to solve this challenge.

Conceptions of Human Nature

• What is innate, traits we acquire from birth. This would require some knowledge of nature vs nurture in determining the actual traits that are innate.
• Landau also says that if we decide something is morally wrong, we don’t really care if it’s opposite is innate. If it’s something you’re born with to be a psychopath, or sexually attracted to what you shouldn’t be sexually attracted to.
• A more mild example would be altruism, it doesn’t seem too innate to care for others but we still want to do it (although it could be debated that the motives here are still selfish).
• What is common to us all, this is obviously subject to debate, as to what is considered a proportion of humans that are considered enough to represent all humans. Also, you’d have to define what is a full human so if aggression in males is considered a trait then those without this aren’t human, say.
• We are designed to act a certain way. It can be taken in the religious sense of we’re all beings of God. Or in the evolutionary sense of designed by evolution. Just going to look at the latter case, specifically, that we’re designed to maximise reproduction.
• In terms of morality, by the fitness model above, wearing a condom is immoral, or doing something bad because it enhances reproductive success is good. In terms of understanding ourselves and our actions maybe it’s useful but in determining morality it is not. We don’t want these things and can’t yet explain why as Landau puts it.

• Until we are given a better method for determining or nature, the natural law theory is in trouble.

Chapter 13: Social Contract

• The essence of a procedure for defining morals which Landau calls proceduralism.
• A certain number of steps that we use to essentially derive what is right and wrong.

Social Contract Theory

• Stems from the political ideal that: actions are morally right just because they are permitted by rules that free, equal and rational people would agree to live by, on the condition that others obey these rules as well
• We start with the assumptions that we’re
• Largely motivated by self-interest.
• It is rational to be this way.
• Contractarianism tells us that we each do best for ourselves by agreeing to limit the direct pursuit of self-interest, and accept a bargain that gets us a pretty decent life.
• The Prisoner’s dilemma is then used as an example of an equilibrium that’s optimal for both participants.

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• Hobbes lays out that this Prisoner’s Dilemma is our natural state of nature, particularly ‘every man for himself’ resulting in the worst outcomes.
• He says that what we need is some way to encourage cooperation and enforce punishment.
• These rules are the terms of the social contract.
• It justifies the need for a government or some leading, enforcing body because simply saying that it’s more logical for all to do x or y isn’t enough. There needs to be punishment of some kind for those acting purely in self-interest.

Advantages

• Morality is nothing other than special rules of cooperation. In this way, morality is explained as a social phenomenon.