Author: William Payne

Locke and Rawls represent traditional ‘center right’ and ‘center left’ political thought in America. Both are in the broad realm of liberal political thought. Liberal political philosophy is just political thought that takes liberty to be a central value in how we structure our society. What we call conservative thought (until recently anyway) was firmly in this liberal tradition, as should be apparent in Locke’s political thought.

I wrote this chapter (Chapter 13) before the Trump era. Several times I’ve considered adding some warning about our current drift towards authoritarianism. Authoritarianism never looks quite like it did last time. The defining feature to watch for is the undermining of the rule of law in favor of the rule of man. A free and open democratic society is one where everyone, from leadership on down, is governed by the laws and institutions we have put in place through democratic processes. When powerful individuals thwart these for their own ends, government by the people and for the people is undermined. 

While philosophers and political thinkers have had lots to say about how authoritarianism comes to power and how it works, there is no governing philosophy of authoritarianism. Authoritarianism, like moral relativism, is a “say so” view. No principles are involved, just the will of a ruler or a ruling class. Because of this, there just isn’t much to say about authoritarianism as a governing philosophy. 

What I’ve tried to do in this chapter, and what I now think I’ll stick with, is to explain the more interesting branches of liberal political philosophy (the so called “liberal” and the so called “conservative”), with the hope of shedding some light on how these slightly different ways of thinking about what counts as a free and open society can function collaboratively. This in fact is what has happened for much of American history. 

We are now a decade into the Trump era. I realize that most of my students now have little memory of more functional periods in American politics. But the often-boring interplay between politicians and policy makers who thought more or less like Locke or more or less like Rawls produced the most prosperous flourishing society the world has ever seen. This country has never been flawless, that would be too much to ask of any human enterprise. But is has been great. And what made us great, I think anyway, was good faith critical thinking and problem solving across reasonable disagreement. What are becoming is looking more and more like professional wrestling or real housewives. Or maybe UFC. Our politics is indeed a reflection of our broader culture.

I was a physically uncoordinated and social awkward child. My mother assures me I would have gotten the Asperger’s diagnosis my son has had it existed at the time. As a tall, skinny, awkward kid, I drew plenty of unwanted attention from the playground bullies. All I could manage to do in response was to patiently explain how mean and unfair their treatment of me was. Aside from being entirely ineffectual, I suspect the ruffians on the playground found this mildly amusing.

I eventually developed some physical skills and grew some muscle. Swim team helped, marching band not so much. As I found myself in the company of more mature people, I also found ways to deploy my limited social aptitude to somewhat better effect. But those playground experiences are formative. That sense of powerlessness in the face of chaos and cruelty sticks with a person. Now in my sixties, as my limited physical grace and power have entered their inevitable decline, I’m encountering other reminders of my vulnerable childhood. My society as a whole seems to be regressing back to the chaos and cruelty of that elementary school playground.

Last night I had a call from a good friend who is Indian-South African. He spent a substantial part of his life fighting apartheid in South Africa. The news that the administration is welcoming Afrikaner “refugees” into the US was painful and personal for my friend. The Afrikaner claims of persecution, in a land where the 7% of the population who is white still owns 70% of the land, are unsubstantiated. Their role in the system of apartheid is well documented. Nevertheless, these bullies are back on the playground here in the US. And as an immigrant himself, my friend feels powerless to say or do anything about it.

“Just try to stay out of their way,” was the best advice my father could offer. But this isn’t the playground and it’s not about surviving recess. What’s at stake here is much larger. What’s at stake includes things like our basic rights, the right to speak our mind for instance, the rule of law, our standing as the leader of the free world, and our moral character as a society.

My anti-authoritarianism reading list has grown long over the past few years. I’ll wrap up with some noteworthy titles (please add to this list in comments). But for now, I’ll spare you the detailed philosophical analysis in favor of a more relatable way of thinking about authoritarianism. Authoritarianism is when the bullies are in charge.

Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

Anne Applebaum, Autocracy Inc.

Eric Hoffer, The True Believer

Steven Levitsky and Kaniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die

Masha Gessen, Surviving Autocracy

Jason Stanley, How Fascism Works

The idea of a philosophical zombie is the idea of a being that is just like a person in every functional respect but lacks subjective conscious experience. There is simply nothing it is like to be my zombie twin. Even if it is hard to see how such a being could exist, the mere logical coherence of the idea of a being that is functionally just like me but lacks consciousness tells us that subjective consciousness can’t be understood in terms of functionality. But analyzing mental states and processes in terms of functionality is the first step in cognitive science. With no associated functionality, we can’t then identify physical processes in the brain that realize that conscious experience. This makes it hard to explain conscious experience. This is what Chalmers calls the hard problem of consciousness.

Perhaps then science can’t explain consciousness. Chalmers thinks science can make progress if we accept mental properties like consciousness as basic elements of the world and give up on limiting ourselves to explanations purely in terms of physical properties.

However this works out, conscious experience remains philosophically significant. Imagine a world with no conscious beings in it. This is a place where nothing matters, simply because there is no consciousness anything could matter to. And this suggests that conscious experience is the seat of value. Things matter because they matter to someone. And things only matter to beings that are conscious.

Religious traditions seem to be onto this idea already. God is the conscious being that makes things matter in Christianity, Islam and Judaism. Perhaps our consciousness constitutes the spark of the Divine that we carry on these views. Even religious traditions like Buddhism or Taoism that don’t require a personal god recognize the ethical significance of conscious beings like us. 

So, if we are looking for a metaphysical foundation for value, whether moral value, the value of love and community, meaning in life, or even the value of inquiry and understanding, conscious experience looks like fertile ground to explore.

Free speech has become a problem. Provocateurs and trolls routinely appeal to free speech as license to say things they know will be hurtful or outrageous. Of course, there is nothing principled about the rhetorical bully’s appeal to free speech as license to abuse. The same parties are often enough eager to punish universities like this one for allowing speech they don’t like. So, free speech has been abused and weaponized. It’s no surprise that some are losing faith in free speech. Clearly, we aren’t doing free speech very well.

Still, free expression has a critical role to play in inquiry, democracy and human autonomy. Free expression is an engine of inquiry. Open sharing of diverse views expands our base of evidence to reason from. Of course this is true for cutting edge research, but the sort of inquiry I’m primarily concerned with here is that of ordinary people trying to make sense of things and sort out what is true. Free speech is foundational to free and open democratic society. We can hardly participate in self-governance without free and open advocacy. Perhaps most basically, free expression is a critical aspect of human liberty. Respect for persons demands that we allow people to speak for themselves.

So, I’m committed to free speech, but I don’t think this means we have to just live with the problems we’ve identified. Rather, I think it will be worthwhile to look into how we can get the best out of free speech while mitigating the worst.

We might start with itemizing some of the assorted things we do with speech. Sometimes we express ourselves clearly and thoughtfully. The goal here may be simply to share with others so that they might better understand us. But then we also use speech to amuse people, make ourselves look good, manipulate people, deceive people, or to instill fear and dominate people. I do think there is value in making people laugh, but maybe not so much for some of these other things.

I’d submit that using speech to better understand each other, in dialogue especially, is liberating. Aside from its obvious practical value, understanding each other can help to free us from our own fetters, including false views, biases, confusions and other sorts of problematic neural pathways. Here I’m alluding mainly to the epistemic value of understanding through speech, but this often overlaps with the moral value of understanding. People who understand each other have a shared foundation for mutual respect. Mutual respect, as opposed to domination and subordination, enhances human liberty.

So, clear and thoughtful expression through speech can further the cause of human freedom. Some of the other uses of speech aren’t so liberating. Leaving laughter aside, using speech to polish your image, manipulate, deceive, or to instill fear and dominate are all ways of using speech to enhance or exert influence or power. And herein lies the risk of undermining liberty. It is clear enough that speech used to deceive, intimidate or dominate undermines liberty.

Perhaps we’ve already given the lie to the postmodern slogan that every claim to truth is a claim to power. It’s hard to see how speech as sharing constitutes a claim to power. Our assorted assertions can be, in various ways and to varying degrees, assertions of power or ways of enhancing liberty through facilitating understanding.

It won’t do to simply bless speech as sharing and condemn speech as assertion of power. There is no clean distinction to draw between these in our acts of speech. When I advocate for a cause I believe in, I am both sharing and aiming to influence others. When I argue against some bit of misinformation, I am both sharing a perspective and hoping to steer others clear of deception. Further, as both these examples suggest, not every exertion of power through speech is a bad thing. In inquiry, for instance, it is a good thing when criticism of a faulty view nudges people closer to the truth. In democratic government it is a good thing when sharing my legitimate concerns helps guide us towards creative solutions that accommodate these.

Perhaps it is just manipulating, deceiving or dominating through speech that is problematic. The problem here is not one with speech per se. Manipulating, deceiving and dominating are morally problematic ends regardless of the mode of action through with they are pursued.

As with other modes of action, we do regulate speech in some cases where the motives are morally problematic. Threatening speech is assault and can be prosecuted as such. Hate speech is not covered under a right to free speech. Manipulative or deceitful speech can count as fraud. Our right to free speech is not absolute. Yet perhaps we should worry that these modest limitations on free speech error on the side of liberty, at the expense of allowing harms including systematically unjust harms, say in the case of coded racial denigrations commonly designated as microaggressions.

Can further regulation of speech help? The history of racist speech is instructive here. In the wake of the civil rights movement, overt racial epithets became taboo. Informal social regulation of speech was significantly successful. The response by racists to this social regulation of racist speech was to deploy coded language with plausible deniability in denigrating others. This deception is, I think, quite pernicious. It combines domineering aggression with evasion of accountability. So, I worry that the successful social regulation of overt racist speech has backfired to some degree (though I do not mean to suggest we should be more tolerant of overt racism). But I do worry that further attempts at regulating speech would be similarly gamed. Helpful or harmful, free speech is hard to suppress.

So, if regulation of speech is not helpful, how then can we mitigate against the harms we see propagated so routinely under the guise of free speech. Here I would suggest more sharing and less power. We push discourse towards building community and trust and away from harmful speech whenever we steer discourse towards sharing and at least de-emphasize the role of influence and power. As educators we are well positioned to do this as we guide students in inquiry and try to instill intellectual virtues like open mindedness an intellectual humility. Ours is one of the few remaining social contexts where our students participate in speech that is not necessarily about influence and power.

Would that I could stop on that hopeful note. But we should be clear about how precarious our position is in the age of the “attention economy.” Attention is what we have. I’m not sure there is anything more intimate and personal than our attention. And yet much of is it auctioned off to the highest bidder in our online lives. Functionally, much of what passes for entertainment is just advertising for other advertising. Peddling junk entertainment engineered for addiction that benefits advertisers is the business model for social media. And our speech is often the raw material for this junk entertainment. When speech is commodified, as it routinely is on social media, it becomes manipulative as such. Hence, our orators are now known as influencers. As divisive outrage consumes more and more of our attention for the sake of selling Toyotas and such, less and less attention remains available for the sort of sharing that builds community and trust. It would be wonderful if we could regulate the algorithms. This could help to give speech as sharing a bit more space.

My goal here has just been to seed discussion with a couple of thoughts about how to approach the matter of free speech. At this point, my proposed prescription for getting the best out of free speech while avoiding the worst looks like basic playground guidance: more sharing and less shoving, please. I’ll be eager to hear further suggestions.

I’ve been thinking about the process I go through when I launch a new course in philosophy. Writing outcomes and an outline for the CAC is just some documentation of a more extensive process of research, literature review, review of faculty qualifications, and curriculum development with the needs and abilities of our students in mind. When I submit a proposal to the CAC, I document some of this activity. So long as the content of the course is squarely in the domain of philosophy, the CAC has good reason to trust the short write up I provide as evidence of robust academic and curricular standards. After all, anyone who teaches in the philosophy program will have extensive demonstrated professional qualifications that will have been vetted through hiring committees, periodic reviews, promotion applications, and routine day to day interdepartmental collaboration. When ethics is taught in the philosophy program, it is taught by ethicists who are teaching curriculum that meets the expectations of the chair of philosophy and other members of the department. None of this institutional infrastructure exists when another program teaches ethics curriculum. In practice, it has fallen entirely to the CAC to provide what it can in the way of quality assurance for that curriculum when it is taught outside the program. There is no vetting of instructor qualifications, curriculum quality or programmatic expertise in this situation. Nor is the CAC well qualified to fill in the gaps.

I find it curious that Philosophy now finds itself struggling with this issue for the second time in just a year. Last year, our two-year nursing program decided on its own to remove the ethicist from its ethics curriculum and replaced a class that had been offered by the philosophy program and co-taught by philosophy and nursing with their own course without consulting or notifying Philosophy. Several years prior, Philosophy had been asked to develop that course in collaboration with the Associate’s in Nursing program to satisfy the expectations of the SBCTC’s Associate in Nursing DTA. The SBCTC intended ethics to be a Gen Ed component of the Associate’s in Nursing and had asked programs around the state to work with philosophy programs on this. I am not aware of any changes in the expectations of the SBCTC on this matter and I’ve heard no news of anyone looking into the matter. So, on this matter, I suspect that BC is now out of alignment with the SBCTC policy. But that’s a policy matter beyond my purview.

I’m more concerned with what we can do to uphold the integrity of curriculum that sometimes legitimately crosses the boundaries of specific disciplines or programs here at BC. This is a matter of serving our students well. What I would propose is that the CAC uphold a firm requirement that when a program A incorporates significant curriculum that falls clearly in the domain of program B, program A collaborates with program B on things like curriculum and faculty development before course proposals are submitted to the CAC.

To cite a successful case, we have long offered a cross listed course in Criminal Justice Ethics. It has always been taught by Charlene Freyberg who is CJ faculty. She and I had several conversations about the ethics component of this course as she was developing it, and we have consulted many times since. I don’t think the CAC expected this to happen at the time, but it was the best practice and I’m recommending that the CAC begin to expect this.

I am a proponent of the idea that people should study the things that they teach. Within programs we have extensive hiring and faculty review processes to assure this. For all I know this may be the case with Gordon Gull’s proposal for an ethics course in Computer Science. I don’t know what his background is in philosophy or ethics. But we currently have no institutional policy or mechanism to assure this aspect of integrity when a significant piece of curriculum is taught outside of its home discipline. I believe it falls to the CAC to remedy this.

I’ve been philosophically opposed to retribution for a good while, largely as a result of thinking about free will. I’ve come to see the urge for retribution as thinly veiled vengefulness. And I like to think of urge for revenge as a kind of after the fact fight or flight response. To quote the immigrant Russian Armenian tile-setter who helped me remodel my bathroom many years ago “When the fight is over, you stop swinging your arms.” I’ll explain the free will line shortly, but first a less involved line of argument.

The Socratic line

Thanks to Agnes Callard’s wonderful new book, Open Socrates, I’ve recently taken to the Socratic argument against vengeance and retribution. While the free will line of argument is metaphysical, the Socratic line is epistemic. Socrates thinks that retribution presumes a degree of ethical knowledge that people generally lack. Socrates is well known for the idea that “to know the good is to do the good.” On this view, bad action is always grounded in ignorance. This view is frequently dismissed with apparent cases of people doing bad when they know better. Callard explains these cases in terms of wavering conviction. So, when I eat that extra slice of pizza and earn myself a night of heartburn, this is because I temporarily judged the slice of pizza to be the better good. My unstable judgment is itself an indicator of ignorance. In this instance I haven’t fully come around to well-established knowledge about what is best for me. First, under the influence of appetites, I think I know the extra slice is best, then I later come to a contrary conviction.

To varying degrees, most of us shuttle back and forth between conflicting convictions and embrace varying levels of self-deception to paper over our inconsistencies. So, in the heat of indignation over some injustice I’ve suffered, I may abandon charitable understanding of others in favor of settling a score. Charitable understanding and score settling don’t really go together, but it is easy to temporarily forget this under the influence of what Callard calls our internal “savage commands.” The root of evil, on this view, is abandoning the inquisitive Socratic stance in favor of arrogantly and ignorantly taking ourselves to know more than we do about what is best.

None of this is to say we should give up on pursuing justice. Rather, intellectual humility counsels that we should pursue justice first through inquisitively trying to understand people (including ourselves), and then persuading (or being persuaded, which is often the kicker).

The Free Will line

A very common but poorly justified conviction has it that we are in control of our actions and that this is what it means to have free will. This view of free will that takes us to be in control in the sense that we could have willed for or against an action regardless of causal influences is known as the “libertarian” conception of free will (no connection to libertarianism as a political philosophy). The justification for retributive punishment has always been predicated on the libertarian conception of free will. It is hard to see people deserve blame (or praise) for the things that they do if they don’t have the sort of control libertarian free will supposes.

The libertarian conception of free will has been a bone of philosophical contention since Descartes, who unsuccessfully argued in favor of libertarian free will by cleaving us in two, a fully determined material body and an undetermined spiritual mind (thus, Cartesian dualism). Descartes was grappling with the emerging mechanistic understanding of the world, one that continues to dominate our thinking. The successes of science, even 400 years ago, were suggesting that all physical events are the result of prior causes. This is the metaphysical view known as causal determinism. Since our bodily movements are physical events, the worry is that these too are ultimately causally determined beyond our control, since the causal chains of determining factors for the things we do extends back prior to our own deliberation and willing.

Newton’s physics was causally deterministic. Of course, Newton has been superseded by quantum physics which is indeterministic. Some have latched onto this as opening space for libertarian free will. However, quantum indeterminacies don’t put us in the driver’s seat, in firm control of our actions through libertarian free will. They merely render us governed mainly by causal factors along with some the random influence of quantum indeterminacies. Quantum indeterminacies just introduce undetermined elements to the causal matrix of the world. And the causal matrix remains barren ground for the sort of control we like to think free will can afford.

Stanford professor Robert Sapolsky has recently popularized the scientific case against libertarian free will in his book Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will. Philosophers around the world have been shaking their heads in dismay over this newfound “discovery” by philosophically untrained scientists. Sapolsky has nicely documented the contemporary scientific case for rejecting libertarian free will. The philosophical conversation, however, moved beyond this as far back as Hume, who outlined a different way to understand free will, one that is compatible with causal determinism. The reigning view among philosophers today is “compatibilism,” the view that we do have free will, but it’s probably not what you think it is. And properly understood, free will is compatible with causal determinism.

Compatibilism in the philosophy of free will is a very active area of research today. I won’t canvas the varying approaches and views in any detail here. But we can get a general idea of what many compatibilist approaches to free will aim to do by thinking about bicycle drive trains. My bike’s drive train is a fully causally determined system. The wheels of my bike are determined to turn or not based on my peddling or braking. Still, the wheels will turn freely, or not, depending on how the drive train is functioning. If the gears, bearings and chain are clean, well lubricated and free of corrosion, the mechanism will function freely, and the bike will roll smoothly. If the crank or wheel bearings are corroded, or if the chain is grimy or rusted, the bike’s drive train will not turn freely, and it will be a bear to ride. Most compatibilist conceptions of free will operate with this this notion of “free” as something like freely functioning. Compatibilist philosophers of free will then aim to explain just what it means for our minds to function freely in formulating our wills.

The notion of freedom at work here is not at odds with causation. But it is also not exactly a causal notion. The notion of freely functioning is not itself a causal factor. Rather it is a concept concerned with what it is for a causal process to function well in achieving certain ends. That is, free will belongs to the realm of normative, teleological concepts. Normative concepts are not concerned with how things are, for instance how they are caused. They are concerned with evaluative standards of how things should be. Moral concepts like right or wrong are normative. So are epistemic notions of rational belief and knowledge. Normativity can’t be analyzed in descriptive terms like causal explanations. The normative is teleological, or ends oriented. Teleological explanation doesn’t look back to prior causes, but forwards to ends and goals. Your reasons for acting are about the ends you aim to achieve. A broad range of concepts dealt with in philosophy are normative or teleological.

A short list of indispensable teleological concepts includes belief, desire, action (as opposed to mere behavior), reasons (for acting or for believing), rationality (again concerning action or belief), moral categories of right and wrong, all other sorts of goodness and badness, beauty, love, personhood, agency and meaning. Over the past century and a half or so, many philosophers have attempted to either reject these and other teleological concepts or reduce them to the causal. The attempt to reduce everything to what can be explained scientifically in causal terms is to try to get along without all of these; love meaning, morality, beauty, and even rationality.

It is only over the past few decades that philosophers have broadly begun to appreciate the untenably high cost of abandoning the teleological and the normative. Of course, there are plenty of notable philosophers who never fell for the 20th century scientistic fashion of relegating philosophy to the janitorial task of cleaning up the language of science. The Oxford philosophers, Elizabeth Anscombe, Phillipa Foote, Mary Midgley and Iris Murdoch come to mind as early holdouts (See Metaphysical Animals by Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman). But a broad revitalization of serious philosophical inquiry into the teleological and normative has unfolded just over the course of my own lifetime. Ethics and metaphysics are serious business again, and philosophers are far better at illuminating the teleological and the normative now than in earlier centuries, perhaps going all the way back to ancient Greece. I’d even go so far as to say that we are catching up with Aristotle, who recognized teleological explanation as its own thing distinct from causal explanation.

We have multiple ways of understanding the world and ourselves. Causal explanation is one, and progress on this front has been wildly successful over the past few centuries. It has been so successful that many intelligent people have been led to believe that the world as revealed by science is all there is to discover. But really? And as soon as we ask that question, we are back in the philosophical realm of metaphysics.

In spite of its recent dominance, the scientific/causal paradigm is just one of the indispensable frameworks we have for making sense of our world and ourselves. The teleological is another and it needs to be engaged on its own terms. Compatibilist free will belongs in the teleological realm. Our attempts to ignore the teleological and normative haven’t made these realms of understanding any less crucial and relevant to leading becoming human lives. Rejection of the teleological and normative has led some into nihilism and despair and others into relativism and narcissism, though I suspect these to be just different ways of falling into the same philosophical and spiritual holes. Alternatively, perhaps, love and beauty are as real as truth after all.

At least as far back as Descartes, we have made the mistake of intermingling the causal and teleological paradigms in the notion of Libertarian free will. But the causal and the teleological paradigms are incommensurable. The rationale for retributive punishment is based on the untenable attempt to straddle the teleological and causal. In this confused attempt to merge the causal and the teleological paradigms, we have deceived ourselves into thinking that we can do good by doing bad. In retribution we “hold each other accountable” as if we were god-like unmoved movers, originating causes of things that we will. And we relish this grandiose sense of power, at least when are not being judged for our shortcomings. But then things can get pretty ugly when we would-be gods sit in judgement of each other. We can quickly lose sight of the preciousness of the fragile light of consciousness we all bear through the flux of forces beyond our control.

Last week we examined some problems with anti-realist views of morality: nihilism, the view that there are no moral truths and a range of views that take moral truths to be a matter of say so (whether God’s, the say so of cultures, or the say so of individuals). In spite of the philosophical problems we ran into, the idea that morality is a matter of say so or authority remains broadly popular. Part of the problem is surely that rather few people ever study ethics and think about the problems that views like DCT (Divine Command Theory) or CMR (Cultural Moral Relativism) raise. But there are other factors. We learn basic moral guidelines as a matter of authority. We are told to be honest and kind by our parents, teachers, churches, etc. When you learn something on the basis of someone’s say so it’s not entirely unreasonable to assume that say so is what makes it so. Until you consider the philosophical consequences anyway. 

But the idea that morality is a matter of say so has straightforward logical consequences that are pretty unpalatable. Perhaps the central problem is that say so is arbitrary. Anything could be commanded by God or society. Indeed, many clearly morally awful things have been commanded under the authority of religious doctrine or social convention.  So, the time has come or us to consider the alternative: that morality might be a ‘figure it out’ sort of thing rather than a ‘somebody gets to decide’ sort of thing. 

If we are fully prepared to treat morality as something we can inquire into, then we need to remind ourselves of some key points about how inquiry works. As always in inquiry we start from a position of basic human fallibility. We each have our own limited grasp on the world, and our own individual experience doesn’t provide us with the full picture. This calls for humility, along with respect and tolerance for our fellow fallible inquirers. Hopefully, with this reminder, we can see that the view that there are moral truths does not fit well with dogmatic attitudes. People who think there are objective moral truths, and that they know what these are, may feel entitled to impose them on the rest of us. But the disrespect implicit in the imposing is a pretty good indicator that they are mistaken in thinking they know what the moral truths are.

Still, we require some starting point for inquiry. If there are moral truths and we can inquire into them, then we will require some starting point for inquiry, something like evidence. Lots of people find ‘say so’ views of morality appealing because they think we lack evidence in this realm. Perhaps we don’t have empirical evidence of quite the sort used in science. But then we all know how awful it feels to find that we might have done a bad thing. Perhaps this is a sort of evidence. Most of us are horrified at the idea of cruelty. This is a part of our experience, as much as observing an image under a microscope. Of course, this evidence is fallible (as are microscope observations). We might find some other explanation for our moral sense of approval for some things and disapproval for others. But we have a starting point for inquiry into morality in our moral intuitions and the scientist looking through a microscope can ask no more of what she observes empirically.

Lots of you will be worried about differences in people’s moral judgements. First, this presents no more difficulty for inquiry into morality than it does for inquiry into astronomy, say, or biology. The history of science is filled with differing interpretations of the evidence.

Beyond this, we should note that our moral intuitions and judgements more often agree than disagree, in spite of a handful of well-worn moral controversies. We all pretty much agree that lying, assault, rape, murder, etc. are wrong. We all pretty much agree that helping people in need is a good thing. Of course, the sociopaths among us may not agree, but that’s exactly why we take these unfortunates to suffer a pathology. We have little reason to doubt that some things are blue because some people are color-blind. The sociopath is in position similar to the color-blind person. This person is just morally blind.  More generally, universal agreement is not required for inquiry into morality to proceed any more than it is required for inquiry into astronomy to proceed. Some of our initial perceptions will miss the mark. 

Perhaps then, we are ready to dive in. We’ll be examining Utilitarianism and Respect for Person’s as theories of morally right action. We’ll want to consider how well they account for our moral intuitions and judgements, at least where these are widely shared. At the same time, the explanatory power of these theories may lead us to reevaluate other moral judgements and intuitions, widely shared or not. We’ll only get to scratch the surface of this very active branch of philosophical inquiry this week. But hopefully this introduction will give you some sense for how inquiry into morality proceeds.