Episode #058 - Transcript

Thank you for wanting to know more today than you did yesterday, and I hope you love the show.

So, in very Philosophize This! fashion, I want to start out the episode today by putting you through an absolutely ridiculous thought experiment. I want you to imagine something. I want you to imagine you’re sitting at home. It’s a Sunday afternoon. You’re relaxing on the couch, drinking some lemonade, maybe watching a little Netflix. You’re laughing at something on the TV, and all of a sudden you hear a knock at the door. It startles you. “Ah, that’s odd. I’m not expecting anyone. It’s Sunday afternoon. Who’s at my door?” You like how I’m telling this like I’m an author, something like it matters what the heck you’re thinking when you’re sitting on your couch and someone comes to your door for the thought experiment?

Anyway, enough of that. You answer the door. And standing before you is a disgruntled-looking man, a really scary-looking gentleman wielding an axe of some sort. Something’s a little off with the guy. You can’t put your finger on exactly what it is. Maybe it’s the dirt-caked clothes he’s wearing. Maybe it’s the greasy, long hair with the unsightly split ends, by the way. He really needs to condition more often. You’re not sure what it is, but you just get this vibe from the guy like he’s taken a human life before and he’s about to do it again. And if there’s any sort of doubt in your mind, he removes it by saying, “Hey, my name’s Harold. You may have heard of me before. I’m the friendly neighborhood axe murderer. I’m here to kill your kids. Is there any way you could direct me to where they are so that I could get on? It’s been a long day. You know, I just want to get this over with.”

Well, instantly your stomach drops because you’re faced with an ethical dilemma here. No, not because some strange man is on your doorstep and he wants to kill your children. No, because you pride yourself on being an honest person, don’t you? This man came to your door. He asked you very nicely to tell him where your kids are. You’re faced with a tough decision. You can tell the man where your kids are, risk him disemboweling them before your very eyes. Or you can lie to him and risk being a dishonest person. What do you do? This is a very difficult decision, isn’t it?

Well, if you’re anything like me or the hundreds of people I’ve asked this question to over the years, it’s not difficult. No, in fact, it’s a very easy decision. You tell the guy they’re down the street where they’re not. You lock the door, and you call the cops. But what if I told you that Immanuel Kant and many others like him thought that if you made that decision in that moment that you had thereby acted immorally? You ought to be ashamed of yourself. And he had very good reasons for feeling that way. Well, by the end of this episode, you’ll understand why Kant felt that way. I guess, let this be a little teaser for you.

But to start us off on the proper trajectory that will eventually land us there at the end of the episode, just to get our minds going in that direction, I want to ask you a question about morality in general right now. What do you think morality should be based on? How’s that for a loaded question? Who or what determines what is moral or immoral in your life, in your home? So many people think of morality as this codified set of behaviors that you hang on the wall. It’s been arrived at. It’s up on the wall in ninth-grade health class. Patience is a virtue. Honesty is the best policy. These things are moral behaviors. If you want to know how to be a more moral person, well, you just go to the dictionary, and you look up what morality is. And you get this set of behaviors that we’ve all somehow collectively arrived at as a species.

Well, yes, things like patience and honesty—these traits are commonly defined to be virtuous by people, but as we’ve talked about many times on this show before, the question of what is moral or immoral is actually much more complex than that. Who came up with the idea that patience was a definite virtue anyway? Like, who was that guy or gal? Who determines what right or wrong is? Who’s capable of determining what right or wrong is? Here's a better way to think of it. Who would you trust to determine for you what right or wrong is? Now, that starts to get to the root of the issue, right?

I mean, we’re all very familiar with the concept of subjective morality. We’re all very familiar with the idea of arriving at our own personal moral code about things in our lives. Every one of us has contemplated this on some level before. Every one of us has asked ourselves the question “What does my ideal life look like? What do I want my life to look like?” And then you picture it in your head. You see how that life would look. You envision it. And when you snap back to reality, if there’s any disconnect between how your ideal life looks in your head and how your life looks right now, well, action needs to be taken, right? I mean, usually the next step once you get to that place is to create a plan, to find some set of behaviors that will take you from where you are now to where you want to be. And then you execute them, right? In a way, this is our own little personalized, subjective moral code that we’ve arrived at, aimed at producing the life that we’ve individually determined to be good.

But for some people this is too shaky of a moral foundation. For some people, who are you to arrive at the proper way to behave day to day to achieve the best life possible? What did you do to earn that distinction? You wouldn’t get operated on by a surgeon who wasn’t an expert. You wouldn’t get operated on by someone that didn’t go to school for it for decades, right? You wouldn’t fly in a plane piloted by some guy that just started flying. No, you fly in a plane piloted by somebody that spent thousands and thousands of hours up in the sky. In that same sense, honestly, how many hours have you really spent contemplating morality, weighing the pros and cons of different actions, really taking them to task, really trying to get to the bottom of which specific behaviors yield specific outcomes that you want in your life?

Many of these people would say, no, you’re not an expert at this. This subjective morality that you have is probably just a disparate collection of social conventions that you’ve gathered all throughout your life from your parents and your teachers and other authority figures that you’ve deemed to be worthy of purveying this wisdom. Many people say that to put this enormous burden of arriving at a system of morality on a single human being with such a limited collection of experiences to draw from while creating it—to do that is a recipe for disaster. These people say that we may need to be willing to accept that we aren’t the most qualified people to arrive at a system of morality for ourselves if for no other reason aside from the ones we’ve already talked about than because far too often as human beings we are slaves to whatever fleeting emotional state we’re in at any given moment.

Therein lies the problem. When you’re the judge, jury, and executioner for what right action is in your life, oftentimes we’re far too willing to make exceptions for ourselves out of convenience in the moment. Typically, stealing would be wrong. But you know what, in this case it’s okay. He’s a musical artist. He has millions and millions of dollars. Technically, I’m only stealing ones and zeros. I’m not stealing a physical CD. Typically, eating until I feel sick to my stomach and I throw up everywhere would be the wrong thing to do. Typically, folding a large pizza over like a giant taco—typically, that would be a lack of temperance that I shouldn’t stand for. But you know what? My friends are in town. I only see them once a year. It’s a worthy cause. It’s a celebration!

No, these people say that this is far too slippery of a moral foundation. There needs to be something more solid. There needs to be something more objective. So, how do we get there? What do we do? Well, what do we typically do when we have a job that we’re not either capable or willing to do? I’ll tell you what you do. You do what every great company ever since World War II has done, our forefathers, you outsource to the Chinese. Just kidding. It wasn’t the Chinese we outsourced it to, but we did outsource all throughout history this task of arriving at a moral code. And typically, what humans would do, historically, is assign that burden to some overseer.

Sometimes it was a deity. Creator of the universe arrives at some way it wants humans to behave, so it finds one lucky human. And it channels this wisdom into them. They chisel it into some stone tablets. And now we have a moral foundation that isn’t laid out by one person. It’s laid out by the creator of the universe. “As God, I hereby decree that you follow this set of behaviors. And if you don’t, bad things will happen to you.” Sometimes it was a monarch. “As king, I hereby decree that you follow this set of behaviors. And if you don’t, you will be hanged. You will be drawn and quartered.” As a citizen of this kingdom, it is your duty to follow these rules that the monarch has laid out for you.

Well, on one hand, Immanuel Kant agreed with this. He agreed that there needs to be a more solid foundation for our ethics. But he thought there was a big, big problem with the way that these people were outsourcing this task to someone or something else. And the problem is that in the case of the deity or the monarch, you can never say if you’re following their moral code that you’re fully to blame for your behavior. This actually goes back to the slavery episode.

Remember when we talked about slavery with Rousseau? Rousseau thought that if a master ordered his slave to kill someone else that it would be wrong for us as people to hold that slave morally culpable for murder. Because they aren’t making this decision based entirely on their own volition. No, the master owns them, and he’s directing them on how to behave. The slave becomes in that moment like a hung jury when trying to render a verdict about what action to take. Well, in that same say, Kant thinks that when some monarch decrees a system of behavior for you to follow, that you’re never totally behind an action that you choose to take, that at least in some small way that monarch is inhibiting your ability to make a different decision when faced with that choice. He’s affecting your behavior in some way. And ultimately, isn’t morality connected to us having a choice in the matter?

I mean, think about it. You don’t think that a lion is bad when it kills a gazelle in the Serengeti, do you? No, that lion is not a bad lion. It’s just responding to impulses in its body. That lion doesn’t sit there and reason about its decision-making, right? “I’m an intellectual lion. Perhaps I shouldn’t kill the gazelle. Perhaps it has a family or a future.” No, it’s very simple, actually. It sees something moving in the grass, and it bites it until it stops moving. It’s very simple if you’re the lion.

The point is, we start to hold people and things accountable for their actions when we believe that they had a different choice that they could have made in that same situation. This is the reason most people advocate a reduced sentence in our justice system for people who commit crimes that are mentally ill. They weren’t in their right mind. They weren’t making a fully autonomous choice between alternatives when they did this terrible thing that they did.

Now, it’s because of this fact that Kant believes that the only way something can be said to be truly a free decision is if it’s based on our own reason. This ability to reason is the foundation for everything that will come after in Kantian ethics. This capacity to reason is Kant’s way of arriving not at what he sees as some flimsy, subjective morality but moral principles. And these principles would prove to be very important to him. In the same way that we can use rational thought to eventually arrive at a conception about an objective reality like we did last episode, Kant believes it’s possible to use rational thought to eventually arrive at a conception of moral principles.

Just think about how awesome this is, alright? In the event you’re the kind of person who’s like Immanuel Kant—in the event you want something more than just subjective morality—maybe you’re not satisfied with just believing in whatever you arbitrarily landed on, your culture, your time period, your family living situation—if you don’t like that and you also don’t like the idea of just conceding to the will of some monarch that tells you what good and bad is, once you’re in that place, you still have a very difficult question to answer. How should we judge human action? Where do we get a more solid foundation for what right or wrong is? Can we get a more solid foundation? Is it even possible? Is it even worth thinking about?

Just think about that for a second. If there was a satisfying answer to this question, just think of how lifechanging that would be. Think of how much more we’d get from every experience. Think about how much more we’d understand about ourselves if we more intimately understood how we judge human action in our own minds. See, to me, it’s this exciting feeling of what’s possible—it’s that that sets the stage for every time I even think about ethics. I can’t even speak. Anyway, I’ll get off my nerd soap box.

Now, that said, I want us to all take a moment right now, alright? Lay out your prayer rugs. Face the nearest library and thank your lucky stars that we always have the luxury of looking at Immanuel Kant in a historical perspective. There’s two good ways to bring clarity to a given subject: you point out the differences between it and something else, or you point out the similarities between it and something else. Well, a good way for us to understand Kant’s ethics better is to look at where he falls into two sides of an age-old ethical disagreement. That’s right, I’m talking about the disagreement between deontologists and consequentialists. Now, those are two words we’ve never said on the podcast before. So, rather than continuing on obliviously, just pretending as though everyone knows exactly what I mean when I say them, let’s discuss them for a bit.

Deontology and consequentialism are two very broad, general, competing categories for how we should look at whether human action is right or wrong. Simply put, deontologists believe that whether an action is right or wrong should be determined by looking at certain things about the action itself and weighing them up against preestablished moral principles. Consequentialists believe that, no, whether something’s ethical doesn’t lie in the action itself; it’s the consequences of the action that determine whether it’s right or wrong.

Now, real quickly, before we continue, just please understand what I’m trying to do here. I’m not trying to outline every deontologist or consequentialist that has ever lived. If you fancy yourself one of these two titles, understand that I understand that there are many different variants, many qualifications and corrections by later thinkers that deal with the weaknesses that I’m going to cite for each one of these. And we’ll talk about them all in due time. I mean, keep in mind, there are many, many episodes of this podcast to come. Right now, I’m just introducing concepts. And one thing we all need to know right off the bat and something you’ll agree with the more and more we learn about these two sides of this debate—deontology and consequentialism—is that people very rarely strongly identify with one side or the other. Most people fall somewhere in between these two camps. Neither of them are perfect. Both of them have their strengths and weaknesses. Let’s talk about them.

Let’s start with deontology. Now, if you go to Google and you just type in “Define: deontology,” it says, “the study of the nature of duty and obligation.” And the reason it says this is because at the core of the system of any deontologist that’s worth their salt is that the right thing to do in any situation has at its core an adherence to duty. “Duty to what?” you may ask. To moral principles—moral principles that have been arrived at in some way. And I leave it vague there purposely because you can talk all day about what method we use to arrive at those moral principles, what those moral principles are or how we prioritize them once we arrive at them. But the ultimate point is that when trying to decide whether something is right or wrong or good or bad, a deontologist is going to look at the actions themselves rather than the consequences of those actions. And because of this, the intention that someone had behind an action that they just did usually plays a key role in how a deontologist perceives that action.

For example, if your mom asks you to clean your room, there’s a big difference between a kid that cleans his room out of a sense of duty—out of a sense of duty to what his mom said the right thing to do is—there’s a big difference between that kid and a kid who just cleaned his room because his mom said she’d buy him an ice cream cone if he did it. See, in both cases, the consequence is the same. The consequence is that the room got cleaned. But are both people equally moral? Is that the same person? I think most of us would say no. I mean, if someone does something just to get a thank you or to get a special prize for having done that thing, it doesn’t matter how moral their actions appear to be; it cheapens it a bit. It seems clear that intentions behind actions matter at least in some small capacity.

Now, because the whole thing revolves around a sense of duty to moral principles, from here, historically speaking at least, it’s never been a far jump away from moral absolutism: the idea that no matter what the consequences of an action are, no matter how seemingly bad they may be, regardless of context, certain actions are just right or wrong. Simple as that. Moral absolutism. It wouldn’t be uncommon for a moral absolutist to say something like, “Murder is just wrong. Stealing is unquestionably wrong. Lying is always wrong. Doesn’t matter how good of a reason you think you have; these things can never be justified.”

Now, this may be clear to some people, but if you still want some clarifying as to what it takes to be a good moral absolutist, well, take it from my good friend Cardinal John Henry Newman—19th-century moral absolutist. Whenever I stay up late at night under the covers with a flashlight and I’m thinking about moral absolutism and how terrifying it is, this passage is what I think of. He said, “It were better for sun and moon to drop from heaven, for the earth to fail, and for all the many millions who are upon it to die of starvation in extremest agony, so far as temporal affliction goes, than to let one soul, I will not say, should be lost, but should commit one single venial sin, should tell one willful untruth, though it harmed no one, or steal one poor farthing without excuse.” So, what this guy is saying is that, in his humble opinion—he’s speaking on behalf of the church in this particular passage—but lying is wrong, plain and simple. It would be better, in his opinion, for the sun and the moon to drop from heaven, for millions and millions of people to die in the extremest agony possible than for one person to tell a single lie that harmed no one. Yeah. That is a true moral absolutist right there.

Now, if this sounds a little emo from Cardinal Newman, look, you got to admire the guy’s conviction at least, right? I mean, who would have thought just that little passage, Exodus 20:16, would get so painful for all of God’s children. I mean, you got to admire the guy. And if this moral absolutist approach overall sounds a little inflexible to you for a way to approach morality, well, I think you’re absolutely right. It is very inflexible. And this is a good lesson to take from our discussion here. There are strengths and weaknesses to both deontology and consequentialism.

This moral absolutism that we’re talking about is only one type of deontology, but the same criticism is leveraged against most deontology. And it’s this. Whenever your approach to morality involves arriving at these hard-and-fast moral principles that you have a duty to adhere to regardless of what the consequences might be, regardless of the context, you always run the risk of being called a little inflexible. Take the axe murderer example from the beginning of the episode. A deontologist who is a moral absolutist that believes that lying is wrong would have to answer their door, look at the axe murderer dead in his eyes, and tell him exactly where their kids are. If this guy was offered a billion dollars to any charity he wants to tell one lie, he would have to say no. If this guy could save a billion innocent lives if he tells one meaningless lie—if he lied about his weight on his driver’s license, he could save a billion lives—he would have to respectfully decline that offer.

Now, I want to make something clear, alright? Deontology is not synonymous with moral absolutism. There are many deontologists out there; we’ll talk about them. They have answers to these criticisms. But the point here today is this: deontology does have many strengths. For one thing, probably its biggest strength, is that whenever you’re faced with an ethical dilemma—when you’re in that place, that awkward place—it does provide complete certainty about what the correct decision is in a given instance. That’s definitely a strength, but it’s not the only one. There’s other ones. Deontology takes into consideration people’s intentions behind why they do an action. That seems to be part of it, right? Deontology’s also good because it removes human discretion from the equation, so there’s no chance of us letting ourselves off the moral hook in that moment. These are all strengths. But these strengths come in coalition with weaknesses. A key weakness—it is tremendously, tremendously inflexible and, if we’re being honest, probably a little oversimplified because of it.

Now, a consequentialist on the other hand would take a look at the axe murderer example, and they’d see it completely differently. A common phrase that people use to describe the ideas behind consequentialism is something that we’ve all heard before. It’s a cliché at this point. The ends justify the means. What makes something right or wrong is not necessarily the act itself but the consequences that that act produces. For example, in the axe murderer thought experiment, it wouldn’t be uncommon for a consequentialist to say that it’s perfectly okay to just lie to the axe murderer’s face. Yeah, the consequentialist may not advocate lying in some situations. They may not advocate lying in 99.9% of all situations. But in this particular situation, lying to the axe murderer about where your kids are preserves human life. Lying may typically be wrong to the consequentialist, but the ends justify the means.

Most Philosophy 101 professors use the example of Anne Frank. Imagine you’re living in the apartment during World War II where Anne Frank and her family were hiding in the attic behind the bookcase. Some Nazi soldiers come to your door, and they ask you, “Is there a family hiding in the attic of this house?” Well, to a consequentialist, knowing that if they tell the soldiers the truth people almost certainly will die as a result of it, to a consequentialist, even if they typically wouldn’t advocate lying in most situations, it’s morally justifiable to lie to the soldiers in this situation because the consequences of doing so are good.

So, let’s think about this. On one hand, this approach is very flexible, right? I mean, hypothetically, you could justify pretty much anything. You could even justify murder with a consequentialist approach. What if we could somehow go back in time before World War II, we could know everything that was going to happen, and we could murder Hitler before he ever comes to power? A consequentialist might say that killing Hitler to save the subsequent tens of millions of people who died as a result of his decisions—that murder in this very specific case would be morally justifiable. Interesting.

But although this approach is incredibly flexible, it certainly comes with its fair share of weaknesses as well, not the least of which is illustrated perfectly by that example we just gave. If we could go back in time and kill Hitler—wait a second. We can’t go back in time. Wait a second. We don’t know the future. We don’t have a crystal ball. The problem with basing the moral worth of our actions only on the consequences that the actions produce is that you can’t always know what the consequences of your actions are going to be. I mean, even if you make your best guess, even if you’re really good at it, you’re really good at predicting the outcome pretty well in the short term, you can just imagine the ripple effect that you may have caused. And who are we as feeble humans to try to understand the long-term repercussions of our actions decades later, centuries later? It just seems very difficult, right?

For example, what if we shift the Anne Frank thought experiment just a little bit? What if now when the Nazis come to your door, asking if a family lives in the attic of your house, what if they told you that if they don’t find this family when they’re out making their rounds today, they’re commanding officer told them that they will be executed if they don’t find that family? Well, now no matter what decision you make standing in that doorway, human life will be lost. And if you’re a consequentialist, how do you make your decision? What criteria do you use to determine what the best outcome’s going to be? Now, you may say, “Well, I’m just going to err on the side of the least human suffering possible—the highest good for the greatest number.” You may look at the situation and see that there are four Nazi guards on your front doorstep and five people living in the attic of your apartment. Seems like an easy decision. The guards die, right? There’s four of them, five people in the attic. Simple as that.

But how about this? What if I change this? What if one of those guards if they weren’t executed that day for not finding that family would eventually go on to find the cure for cancer? Now, obviously you could have never known that in the moment, right? But if you’re being judged solely on the consequences of your actions—this very extreme, rudimentary version of consequentialism that we’re talking about here for the sake of argument—if you’re being judged on that, you have just committed a terrible moral atrocity.

So, in deontology there are these principles; we have a duty to adhere to them, and sometimes that can run us into problems. And while consequentialism is really good in that it allows for a lot of flexibility where deontology doesn’t, it also comes with a lot of problems itself: the fact that the ends justify the means regardless of whether it goes against basic human rights. How about the fact that it’s based on consequences? But when you think about it, it’s very, very difficult if not impossible to predict what the true consequences of our actions will be. How about the fact that it doesn’t consider the intentions behind why people do things? That seems to be part of it.

Anyway. Looking at the time, the end of this show kind of snuck up on me this time. You know, when I first started recording this episode, I thought that I’d get a lot further in a half an hour. But I don’t regret it, and here’s why. This conversation that we just had about morality in general and the differences between these two different approaches—deontology and consequentialism—you will remember this conversation. Like, when we talk about these subjects in the future, you will remember what these concepts mean as opposed to them just being two words that end in “-ism” that confuse you, that are meaningless. And that’s what this show’s about: wanting to know more today than you did yesterday, not just feeling like you know more, actually knowing more.

So, what did we learn? We learned that there are very real strengths and weaknesses to both these systems. People much smarter than me in both camps came afterwards and tried to correct some of these weaknesses. Next time we’ll talk about more of them. You’ll find out whether you consider yourself a deontologist, consequentialist, somewhere in between. And who knows, maybe there’s more than just these two to choose from.

Thank you for listening. I'll talk to you next time.