The Love of Wisdom

If you are a human being capable of thought, you have been doing philosophy your whole life.
You, at this very moment hold many, many philosophical viewpoints. There are certain things
you believe about the world. You believe people should act in certain ways and not act in other
ways. You believe certain things about the metaphysical world, god or the soul or the mind. You
believe certain things about science and mathematics. In short, you have a philosophical world
view. The goal of this intellectual journey is to get you to take the time to examine your
philosophical world view. Socrates famously said ‘the unexamined life is not worth living’. And
so it is not. If we do not examine our own world views we run a high risk of mismanaging our
lives because we are acting on false information. Every one of us right now believes something
to be true that in fact is not true. Or we believe something to be false that is in fact true. This
could be something minor for example perhaps you believe a friend or colleague said something
to you earlier today that was mean spirited. But the truth may be that she did not say anything
mean spirited in the sense that she meant it to be mean, even if it did come out that way, or at
least it appeared that way to you. We make these sorts of mistakes all the time. We are
misinformed. This is not a terrible thing when the mistakes we make are relatively insignificant
or relatively few. But if we can be mistaken about these relatively unimportant matters, can we
not also be mistaken about larger matters? Of course we can, and often are. Philosophy is about
clear thinking. It is indeed a rather stubborn attempt at clear thinking about everything. We will
discuss everything from existence itself to the implementation of justice and all points in
between.

There are two fundamental purposes to this introduction to philosophy. The first is to introduce
you to the major ideas that have influenced western civilization. There are other very interesting
ideas out there to discuss. We must limit ourselves to the most influential and readily apparent
concepts because of time. There are perfectly fascinating ideas that occur in the non-western
world that are well worthy of one’s time and effort. But again, we must limit ourselves. I
encourage you to pursue more philosophy, in both the western and non-western traditions.
People spend their lifetimes studying this subject matter and the reward is well worth the effort.
It is gratifying to be an educated person. There is a certain power that comes from knowing how
your civilization came into existence and how you fit into it. People are motivated by ideas. And
it is the ideas that we will be examining here.

One of the fundamental ideas that we need to examine is that of reality. What we perceive of as
real has an impact on everything we do in our daily lives. It impacts things large and small. We
kill and are killed over what we believe to be true about reality. It impacts whether or not we
come to class, what sorts of things we study, what sorts of friends we have, what sorts of clothes
we wear and what sort of philosophical view point we hold about the world. There are you tube
videos that can give you natural hallucinations. All you do Is stare at this series of mixed up
lines and shapes for about a minute and then when you look away you start hallucinating the
curtains in the room are moving or other such thing. It’s a really neat parlor trick but it points to
a deeper point. If we can alter our reality by simply exposing ourselves to a series of lines for
around a minute, how tenuous is our grasp on reality anyway?

Most humans move through their world with a certainty of belief in the reality of their world that
is not warranted. They are comfortable in their shadows and echoes. Plato tells an allegory in
which prisoners have been held in a cave since birth. They are shackled to the wall and cannot
move their heads to turn to the side. They can simply move their eyes. The details of how they
would survive like this are not terribly important. Like a lot of philosophical problems, the
problem is set up to prove a particular point and one needs to not get bogged down in the detail
that would normally make one reject a situation like this. These prisoners are being fed and kept
by a group of people. The prisoners are tied to a wall in the cave that has a cliff behind it. On the
cliff there is a pass which the caregivers use to bring things in and out of the cave. The caregivers
are all different shapes and sizes sometimes they are carrying things in their hands or on their
heads. Behind the path is a fire. This fire casts a shadow over the caregivers on the path onto the
wall in front of the prisoners. The prisoners see these shadows and hear the echoes in the cave
and since this is all they have known since birth, they believe these shadows and echoes to be
reality. One day, one of the prisoners’ chains break and the prisoner is pulled out of the cave in a
painful process into the light of the day. The prisoner realizes after he sees the true sun and the
true reality outside of the cave that he has been living in a cave and has mistakenly believed
something to be real that ended up being false. He thinks this is a great discovery and he rushes
back into the cave to tell his fellow prisoners what he has found. He expects the other prisoners
will want him to show him what reality actually is. However, when he returns and explains to the
others what he has found, they reject him, ultimately killing him.

Plato tells this story in the beginning of one of his most famous works, The Republic. This story
is still widely told today and now I am telling it to you. The question is why? Why does Plato tell
this story to his students, why do I tell it to you? Because both Plato and I want you to consider
the possibility that you too have been watching shadows and listening to echoes. We understand
this is a difficult and scary thing to do but the alternative is to stay tied to the walls of the cave.
Living in ignorance may be bliss, but it also means you are easily manipulated. It means you will
spend your whole life living a life that is less than what you could have. If you are not willing to
think for yourself, there are plenty of people willing to do it for you. What do we do to people
who threaten our reality? What did we do to Socrates? We killed him. What did we do to Jesus?
We killed him. What did we do to Martin Luther King, Jr.? We killed him. Humans like their
shadows and echoes and will indeed kill to defend them.
DesCartes’ Meditations

So we must look very closely at the question of the truth of reality or the reality of truth, if you
prefer. Both are appropriate here. First we shall turn to DesCartes’ argument in his Meditations
on First Philosophy. DesCartes was a French philosopher and mathematician. Many of you will
have run across DesCartes already in your math classes as in Cartesian coordinates or Cartesian
planes. When DesCartes was a young man, he had extremely vivid dreams, dreams where he
would begin to wake but be still dreaming and in that in between state where sometime it would
be hard to tell what he had dreamed and what had actually happened. This stayed with him for
many years. But he spent many years working on mathematical problems. However, later in his
life he retreated to his country home to spend some time thinking about the problem of reality.

He begins his investigation by searching for truth. He wonders if there is anything that a human
can know to be true even beyond the most radical doubt. The process of radical doubt that he
uses is to doubt everything that can be doubted no matter how absurd the reason may be.
Contrast this with the concept of reasonable doubt that we would use in a court of law. Suppose
someone committed a crime, say robbing a bank, and it was caught on video tape. During the
trial, the jury can clearly see on the tape the person getting out of their car, grabbing their
weapons, going into the bank and holding it up and finally, driving away. It looks like an open
and close case. But then the defendant speaks her turn. “But wait’ she says ‘you don’t
understand. What you don’t see is right before I went into that bank I was driving my car on the
way to the grocery store when aliens came down and took over my body and forced me to rob
that bank.’ Now as a member of the jury, instructed to use reasonable doubt, would this defense
raise a reasonable doubt in your mind? Probably not. It is ridiculous to believe that aliens came
down and invaded her body and forced her to rob the bank, isn’t it? And in a court of law, with
reasonable doubt as the standard, it would indeed be ridiculous and with all likelihood, the jury
would indeed find her guilty. But now let’s look at the case from the perspective of radical
doubt. Is it impossible that aliens occupied her body and forced her to rob the bank? Well, no,
it’s not. It is highly unlikely, but it is not impossible. And therein lies the difference. Because
DesCartes is looking for something to be true beyond even the most radical doubt he is going to
allow things like space aliens taking over your body to be possible. Or rather, he is going to
doubt that it is impossible. He argues that to get to the truth one has to set up a very difficult
process of doubt in order to not believe things that may be false. So he starts to doubt anything
that could be false. As he writes:

reason now persuades me that I should withhold my assent no less carefully from opinions that
are not completely certain and indubitable than I would from those that are patently false. For
this reason it will suffice for the rejection of all of these opinions, if I find in each of them some
reason for doubt…I am eventually forced to admit that there is nothing among the thing I once
believed to be true which it is not permissible to doubt (362)
 He begins with his senses. His senses he says, have deceived him before. Would you trust a
known deceiver? No. So the information about the outside world that comes to him from his
senses must be doubtable. This includes doubting memories then because memories are nothing
but stored senses.

DesCartes goes further though than simply using the process of radical doubt. He makes his job
of finding truth even more difficult (because he really wants to find the truth) by offering the
idea of the Evil Genius. The Evil Genius is a nefarious being who, for whatever reason, has his
brain in a vat and has it hooked up to some sort of machine that inputs information into the brain
so that the brain believes it is seeing, hearing, tasting, touching, etc. but in fact it is not. This Evil
Genius has fooled his brain into thinking that the outside world exists, that he can actually see,
smell, taste, touch and hear. Be careful here though. DesCartes is no fool. He is not actually
arguing this is the case. At this point he is simply pointing out that this could be the case. That as
of right now, we don’t have any proof against this being the case. Is it possible that an Evil
Genius could have you fooled right now that you are sitting here reading this? Well, yes, it is
possible. It is not probable, but it is possible. And since it is possible we must admit of the
possibility. This puts our perception of reality on shaky ground indeed.

DesCartes admits how difficult this process is for him. As he writes:

…this undertaking is arduous and a certain laziness brings me back to my customary way of
living. I am not unlike a prisoner who enjoyed an imaginary freedom during his sleep, but, when
he later begins to suspect that he is dreaming, fears being awakened and nonchalantly conspires
with these pleasant illusions.(353)

This is the conclusion of the Meditation One and at the beginning of the Meditation Two he
returns to the topic of how difficult it is to be in constant doubt.

I cannot ignore, yet I fail to see how they [these questions] are to be resolve. It is as if I had
suddenly fallen into a deep whirlpool; I am so tossed about that I can neither touch bottom with
my foot nor swim to the top.

It is important to point out this confusion. People often think that confusion is a bad thing.
Students are often embarrassed to admit their confusion. But confusion is a necessary process of
problem solving. If you are never confused, then you have never pushed your brain to its limit.
Or you cling so strongly to your shadows and echoes that you will not allow the confusion in.
Either way, this is not good. DesCartes is honest about his confusion because the nature of reality
is in fact a difficult concept to dissect. If it were not, would it worth our time?

DesCartes continues his process of doubting. He points out that the Evil Genius could be fooling
him into thinking that he is sitting in his chair or that he is sitting by the fire or that he is wearing
a red robe or that he is holding a pen in his hand. Why the Evil Genius could even be fooling me
into thinking that I exist when I do not. But then he stops. He has had one of the great epiphanies
of Western civilization. Could the Evil Genius be fooling him into thinking that he exists when
he does not? Well, no, if the Evil Genius is fooling him about anything he must be there to be
fooled. In order to be fooled, one has to be thinking and in order to be thinking, one has to exist.
“[L]et him do his best aat deception, he will never bring it about that I am nothing so long as I
shall think that I am something”(353)

And it is thus that DesCartes comes to the famous Cogito. I think, therefore, I am. As long as I
am thinking, I must exist. While this may seem as obviously true, it is incredibly significant
because DesCartes has found something that passes the test of radical doubt. He has found
something to be true beyond even the most radical doubt. Even if there is an Evil Genius, even if
his senses are lying to him, even if all can be doubted, there is one truth that cannot be doubted.
There is something that can be known even beyond the most radical doubt and that is an
impressive achievement indeed.

After the Cogito, DesCartes divides thoughts into ideas and judgments. Thoughts, he argues are
clear and distinct and whatever I can clearly and distinctly perceive to be true must be true. It is
in judgment where we could be mistaken.

The biggest error in judgment is the fact that I judge that the ideas which are in me are similar to
or in conformity with certain things outside me…what reason do I have for believing that these
judgments are in conformity with things outside of me?

As he is stumbling through his thoughts he comes across two ideas that don’t seem to fit this
scenario. The first one is that of infinity.

Infinity is a special idea for DesCartes because it is unclear where we can get this concept from.
We are finite beings, everything we experience is finite and more cannot come from less. Yet all
humans seem to have this concept of infinity. It is a concept that while we know its definition it
is still difficult for the human mind to grasp. We understand the definition that it is something
with no beginning and no end, but when we truly try to wrap our minds around this it is clear that
there is something about it that seems just out of our understanding. Yet it is there.

The same can be said of perfection. We have never experienced perfection but we understand it.
Even when we say something was perfect we don’t really mean that. It could always be more
perfect. The ice cream could have had whipped topping with sprinkles on it. Something could
always be more perfect. Yet we are not perfect nor is anything we have ever experienced. It is
clear we cannot learn this idea from others as they don’t have a way to get it either. And again,
more cannot come from less. So DesCartes is surely right to ask from where did these ideas
come?

He thinks he has an answer. He argues that since the ideas could not have come from us because
we are finite and imperfect and more cannot come from less and since we could have no direct
experience either in the external or internal world of these ideas there must be some other source
for them. There must be a being that is infinite and perfect from which these ideas arise. This
being must exist and we must somehow be attached to it.(359-361) The existence of the Infinite
Perfect Being or the IPB is, obviously, an incredibly important point to have proved (though
Hume, and others, will argue DesCartes has not here proved the existence of an IPB, he has
offered an excellent argument for the possibility of the existence of the IPB). We must be
careful here however, DesCartes is not arguing here that this argument proves the existence of a
Christian God or any other particular God, but the existence of some sort of an Infinite Perfect
Being. But for his purposes, this is enough. For he will argue that perfection implies truth and
truth will not admit of deception.(363) Because the IPB will not allow for deception to take place
the Evil Genius that DesCartes had previously put forward as a possibility he now dismisses as
impossible because the IPB would not allow this deception to take place. Since the IPB would
not allow for deception we can now conclude that reality is as we perceive it to be.

This is indeed a magnificent conclusion. If we can truly believe that reality is as we perceive it to
be, then science, which of course relies on our observations about reality for its truth value, can
be trusted to in fact give us accurate information. So DesCartes’ argument has truly
accomplished something magnificent. Before DesCartes, Western civilization had been widely
under the rule of the Catholic Church. The Church held not only religious but political and
academic power over civilization. And it had reason to fear that science was going to discover
something that could disprove the existence of God. Because of this scientists were persecuted
and widely feared. But after DesCartes’ argument, it became apparent that if science could be
relied upon to give us accurate information it was only because of the existence of the Infinite
Perfect Being. From here forward, it didn’t matter what science discovered. If we share 98% of
our DNA with chimpanzees, that’s simply the way God put the world together. If the Earth goes
around the sun, that does not mean God does not hold us central, it means that this is the way
God made the universe. After DesCartes, science would simply be describing the manner in
which God put the universe together. There was no threat from science to the existence of God.
This meant that the Church could not only stop persecuting scientists, but would actually turn
around and start funding scientific research. This led to hundreds of years of scientific freedom
and hence advancement in Western Civilization. It is for this reason that DesCartes is widely
viewed as the beginning of the modern era of Western civilization.

Hume’s Skepticism

But DesCartes’ argument was not to stand uncontested for long. DesCartes’ Meditations was
first published in 1647. In 1739, David Hume published anonymously his book titled An
Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. In it, he set out to show that DesCartes’ arguments
for the self, the validity of scientific truth and the existence of the IPB were not valid. He first
divides the perceptions of the mind into ideas and impressions. Ideas are simply copies of
impressions and there is nothing in the mind, no perception whatsoever, that cannot be gotten
through sense impression. Hume’s first target would be the IPB . Though DesCartes had argued
that humans were unable to come up with the ideas of infinity and perfection by themselves,
Hume argued that we could. He pointed out that ideas come from experience and that although it
is true we do not experience infinity, we do experience finiteness every day. We experience
things having a beginning and an end every day. And we experience opposites every day. Hume
argued that we combine the idea of finiteness with the idea of opposites to come up with the idea
of infinity. And we do the same thing with imperfection. Again, we do not experience perfection
but we do experience imperfection and again we experience opposites. Combine the idea of
imperfection and the idea of opposite and we can imagine the idea of perfection. This does not
show that this is how we do indeed get these ideas, but it does show that it is possible to get these
ideas without the necessary existence of an IPB. Ockham’s razor is a rhetorical tool that tells us
that the simplest explanation that answers all the questions is the most logical explanation.
Using Ockhams’ razor, Hume’s explanation is the better one.

Hume next turns his skeptical gaze to the claim that science could be trusted to give us accurate
truths about reality because reality is as we perceive it to be. He argues that all objects of human
enquiry can be divided into relations of ideas and matters of fact. Relations of ideas are exactly
as they sound. They are relations between ideas that we have already perceived through our
senses. They are discoverable by thought for example, that three times five is equal to half of
thirty. But matters of fact are not gotten in the same manner. Matters of fact are impressions that
our senses tell us about the outside world. These impressions all seem to rely on the relation of
cause and effect. But for Hume, this is a problem for the relation between cause and effect is not
something known before a human encounters the physical world. Cause and effect are
discoverable not by reason, but by experience. He writes:

If brought into this world entirely new, we would have no reason to expect one billiard ball to
move the other one; motion in the second billiard ball is a quite distinct event from motion in the
first. (638)

Hume is arguing something quite remarkable here that, if true, calls into question the validity of
any scientific claim to knowledge and indeed, as Hume will later claim, any claim to any
knowledge whatsoever. If causation is learned only through experience then it is an inductive
argument. There is a difference between an inductive an deductive argument. The difference
has to do with the form of the argument and with the strength value of the truth of the
conclusion. In a deductive argument if the premises are true and the logic is valid, then the
conclusion necessarily, positively has to be true. Look at the common deductive argument
below:

All men are mortal.

Socrates is a man.

Therefore, Socrates is mortal.

If premise one is true, that all men are mortal and premise two is true, that Socrates is a man,
then it necessarily follows that Socrates must be mortal. There is no possible way for this
conclusion to be false. We would like the world to be made up of nice deductive arguments
because then we could know all sorts of things. But it is not the way we experience the world for
Hume. Let’s look at an inductive argument. In an inductive argument if the premises are true
and the logic is valid, the conclusion is probably true. Not necessarily true as in a deductive
argument, but probably true. For Hume, causation, the very core of our knowledge about reality,
is an inductive not a deductive argument. Look at the inductive argument below:

Every crow I have ever seen has been black.

There is a crow in the next room.

Therefore, the crow in the next room is probably black.

We cannot conclude that the crow in the next room is necessarily black because we have not
seen it yet. It could have been born an albino, it could have been plucked bald, it could have been
dipped in purple paint. Anything could happen where it is not in fact black. Now depending on
how often I have seen black crows, the probability of the crow being black can become very high
indeed, nearly certain. But not matter how many crows I have seen, even if it’s millions, I cannot
conclude that every crow is black because I have not seen every crow. It is the same with cause
and effect. Hume argues that what we do with causation is to induce that because every time I
see X it is followed by Y then X must have caused Y. But this is not necessarily true. X could
have caused Y, but the observation that X is followed by Y is not the same as the observation
that X caused Y. For Hume, we never experience causation. Through something he calls constant
conjunction, we put the two experiences together because they always seem to appear to be
together. But the fact that X and Y always appear together does not mean they have to
necessarily be related. The first problem could be something logicians call ‘false cause’. In false
cause, a person makes the mistake of seeing X before Y and assuming that X caused Y. One
might say “Every time I wash my car it rains. Therefore, washing my car causes it to rain.” This
is clearly fallacious reasoning but it is exactly the same reasoning Hume is arguing we use when
we make the claim of causation between X and Y. We never directly experience the cause,
simply one experience X followed by another experience Y. Hence the most that we can say
about this is that the more we observe X followed by Y the more probability they have of being
connected. But even if we observe X followed by Y a million times, the next time we experience
X, it is still only a probability, not a necessity, that it be followed by Y. This is induction. And
unfortunately for us, it is an assumption that is at the base of all scientific knowledge.

There is another problem with scientific knowledge for Hume. We make another inductive
argument when we make a claim to scientific knowledge. We claim to know that the future will
always look like the past. But why do we make this claim? We make this claim because in the
past, the future has always looked like the past. But this is the exact form of an inductive
argument. Just because something has happened this way before, no matter how many times it
has happened this way before, it does not prove that this is the way it will happen again. If it is
something we continuously experience together, then it is a high probability that we will
experience them together again, but it is not a certainty.

And this is Hume’s point. The claims that we want to make about science, that it will be able to
give us ultimate truths about the universe, are not warranted. In order for these claims to be true
we have to know with necessity that for every effect there is a cause and that the future will
always look like the past. But we do not know this for certain. It is a probability. It’s a good
probability but nonetheless, it is a probability. So science cannot make claims to absolute
objective truths because it relies on two inductive arguments at its very base. Nonetheless,
Hume will also point out that we should ‘be a philosopher, but be still a man.’ That is, we
should acknowledge that our knowledge is not certain but nonetheless we should continue living
our lives. We cannot live our lives as if nothing is certain for we would be unable to do anything.
But to pretend that we know things that we don’t is dangerous as well.

Hume was a true skeptic. He ultimately argued that nothing could be known for certain by
humans. We are simply in a position of not being able to know the ultimate truth about reality,
even about the existence of the self. The one thing that DesCartes thought passed the test of
radical doubt, that he himself exists, is for Hume not the case. He writes:

If any impression gives rise to the idea of the self, it must continue invariably…but there is no
impression constant and invariable…for my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call
myself, I always stumble upon some particular perception or other… I never can catch myself at
any time without a perception. During sleep I may truthfully be said to not exist and after death,
I should be utterly annihilated.

He argues that in fact, the thing we know of as the self is nothing but a bundle of perceptions that
occur at an inconceivably rapid rate so close together that it appears to be one thing but in fact it
is billions of little, different perceptions.

So Hume has come onto the scene and put many of the ideas that we hold dear to our hearts in
Western civilization (God, science, the self) into doubt. He has cast a dark shadow over all the
previous claims to knowledge. Hume is not the first skeptic but he is one of the most influential
for Immanuel Kant credited Hume with waking him from his dogmatic slumbers.

Kant’s Copernican Revolution

And it is to Kant that we shall now turn. Immanuel Kant was an intellectual superstar. He lived
in Konigsberg Prussia from 1724-1804. A professor of philosophy at the University of
Konigsberg, his opinions were sought far and wide throughout the European enlightenment.
Major figures such as King Frederick of Prussia and Queen Maria Theresa of Austria sought out
his talents. He had been pleasantly going along in his Cartesian world until he read Hume’s
Enquiry. He immediately saw the impact that Hume’s skepticism had on Western knowledge and
set about to do what he could to ‘rescue’ knowledge from the abyss over which Hume had
thrown it.

It took Kant a few years to respond to Hume but when he did his impact would be profound. He
offers a thought experiment in regards to the existence of the self. Suppose that we get to a time
in our scientific knowledge where we are capable of building a machine that is capable of
picking up all the physical activity going on in the brain. And then suppose that we place the
machine onto person A’s head. The machine then picks up all of the information in person A’s
brain and copies it to the machine. We then place person B under another part of the machine.
We transfer all the information from person A’s brain into person B’s brain. And here is the
question that must be answered very carefully. Once this information has been transferred (and
remember, this is the full physical information from person A’s brain), will person B then know
what it is like for person A to be person A? Kant thinks not. Even if all the information was
transferred, the most that person B would be able to know about person A is what it is like for
person B to experience being person A, not what it is like for person A to experience being
person A. Because person A is a human and because we are human we can safely assume that
there is something that it is like to be person A. We can even ask person A ‘is there something
that it is like for you to be you?’ When person A says yes, there is something that it is like for
them to experience being them, we are now put into an interesting position. There is a fact in
existence, what it is like for person A to be person A, that no matter how hard we try, we are
unable to know this fact. We cannot experience this. And to Kant, this is proof of the existence
of the self. This is, of course, incredibly important. If true, then Hume is mistaken and the self
does in fact exist.

But Kant pushes forward. He argues that this is also proof that the human experience needs to be
divided between two standpoints. From one standpoint, the human creature is a physical being.
This is the phenomenal standpoint. It is the world of physical objects, cause and effect, the self as
object and science and technology. From another standpoint, the noumenal standpoint, the
human creature is living in a world of rational principles, ideas and thoughts. It is in this world
that the human self is not an object but an agent. It is in this world that freedom and morality and
human rights and justice exist.

The mind and the brain are not the same thing. The mind is the noumenal aspect of the human
whereas the brain is the physical aspect. If I cut open your head, I will see your brain but not
your mind. In separating these two standpoints, Kant has provided a rather ingenious solution to
the problem of the validity of scientific knowledge that Hume has raised. Kant is arguing that our
minds must order the world. We are born with certain a priori (universal and necessary rules)
concepts about space, time and causation. He writes:
There is a way the world must be, but it is a necessity based on the nature of our minds, not
anything in the world itself. We impose laws on nature; we do not merely find them.

As we go through our physical world, our minds seek to make order out of that world. In order to
do that, our brains must filter and manipulate information according to certain categories. Our
brains could not pick up all of the information going on around us, our heads would simply
explode. It would be an overload of information. We are constantly surrounded by information
that our brains either will not or cannot pick up. And what it does pick up, it puts into certain
categories in order to present to the mind a world that is coherent and ordered. There are many of
these categories but three of these are space, time and causation. We do not know if space exists
outside of ourselves in the manner that it appears to us. We see things in the third dimension.
That is what we experience. Our brains force all information coming in to appear in the third
dimension. And it is the same with time. We experience time linearly, that is, as moving forward
in a single line. But that experience of time comes from us, not from the outside world. Time in
the objective sense may be something quite distinct from the time we as humans observe. Our
brains impose time on the information coming in from the outside world as well. So again, by the
time our consciousness experiences something, it is in the third dimension in linear time. And,
Kant argues, causation is in the same position.

Causation, of course, is the relationship between cause and effect. It is the relationship that Hume
had claimed we could not know for certain but only with a probability. Kant argues that since
our brains force us to experience the outside world as if for every effect there is a cause then we
can know that it is true that for every effect there is a cause. Now, be careful. He is not saying we
can know in some ultimate sense the truth of the outside world. What he is saying is that we can
know that for human beings, as they experience the physical world, causation exists. But again,
it is not that causation exists outside of us, it comes from our minds insistence that the world as
we experience it be ordered. As the information comes in, our brains put it in time, space and
causation. So we can know that the physical world as humans experience it is linear, in the third
dimension and has causation. So science is ‘rescued’ from Hume’s skepticism because we can
know it to be true for human beings about the physical world.

What we cannot know is whether or not time, space or causation exists in reality outside of the
manner in which humans experience it. We cannot use causation to examine things that are not
physical for causation only applies to our experience of the physical world. We cannot suppose
that creatures that have different senses would come up with the same laws of science that we do.
Nor can we suppose that creatures that have a different brain would come up with the same laws
of science that we have. But for humans with regard to their experience in the physical world,
science can be known to be true. It is in this manner that Kant can be said to ‘rescue’ science
from Hume.

And Kant goes further. Not only does he reestablish the validity of the self and of science in
Western civilization, he also believes that we are justified in believing in God. He does not think
that an argument for the existence of God can be proven but he does think that because of the
necessity that these beliefs bring to our daily lives we are justified in believing them to be true.
This is why he writes that he had to ‘limit knowledge to make room for faith’. What he means
here is that in limiting knowledge to the physical world and only in a specific sense at that, he
has left open the possibility that in the non-physical world, there is freedom, morality and
ultimately God.

Kant argues that these concepts are not so ridiculous to believe. After all, we act as if they are
true all the time. When someone does something we think they are responsible for their action.
But if they are a completely physical creature who is simply a product of their genetics and their
upbringing, why would we believe such a thing? In order to believe that someone is responsible,
we must first believe they had a choice that is, that they are free. Without freedom, we cannot
have moral or legal responsibility.

This freedom that we seem to believe though must have some sort of explanation. For Kant,
freedom is necessary for morality. And God is necessary for freedom. While Kant did say that
one could believe in freedom and morality without believing in God, he thought it made more
sense to believe in God than not. It seems logical to Kant that something must be underlying the
metaphysical world. This is not a claim to knowledge of God, but in a way, that is what makes it
so beautiful. If the existence of God could be proven, what need would we have of faith? Would
worshipping God have any meaning if we knew of the existence of God. Or does it have more
meaning if we understand the doubts surrounding it and choose knowingly in the face of those
doubts to believe anyway? Kant clearly thinks that faith is worth having and to limit knowledge
to make room for this faith is a project worth pursuing.

So we act as if others are free and when we reflect on our own decisions they feel as if they are
free and it is these two principles of practical necessity that justifies believing in freedom. This is
not a necessary conclusion of a deductive argument. But it is a justifiable belief. The way we act,
the way we experience the world, indicates that we do use these concepts as practical necessities
in our daily lives. And as such, we are justified in believing them to be true.

So Kant has re-established three ideas that we hold dear in the Western world, the self, science
and God. But these ideas will never be in the position they were in with DesCartes. With
DesCartes we have God in his heaven, the self exists and science is on a pedestal set to answer
all of our questions about the universe. After Hume, we simply cannot return to this state. But
with Kant, we have a way of establishing a basis for all of these concepts that is legitimate. We
are justified in believing that what science tells us about the physical world is accurate for us. We
are justified in believing in the existence of the self. And we are justified in believing in God.
Not quite the certainty that one might like, but better perhaps, than where Hume had left the
situation.
It is called Kant’s Copernican Revolution because just as Copernicus had shifted our focus from
the sun going around the earth to the earth going around the sun and great enlightenment would
follow from that, Kant shifts our focus from the objects in reality being independent and outside
of us to us being the source of the information coming from the outside world and great
enlightenment would follow from that.
 Moral Philosophy

Moral philosophy is thinking about how we make moral decisions. The first question is often
indeed if we can in fact make moral decisions. Often people confuse being tolerant as a moral
goal with allowing anything, meaning we cannot make any moral decisions about the behavior of
other people. We will discuss this first. Needless to say, most philosophers disagree with this.
Not only can we make moral decisions, we do make moral decisions every day. What we eat is a
moral decision, whether or not we come to class is a moral decision, how we interact with people
is a moral decision. So for most philosophers, the question is not can we make moral decisions
but how do we make the best moral decisions?

Often people come into philosophy with the belief that it is somehow inappropriate or rude to
make moral judgments. Moral relativism is the view that morality is either relative to each
individual or to the society and as such one has no basis on which to make a moral judgment.
The argument though is fallacious. It takes the following form:

There are no objective moral standards. Since there are no objective moral standards we
should tolerate anything.

Ironically, toleration is best supported by arguing that it is an objective moral standard. But that
is not what is going on here. What is being said is that there are no objective moral standards and
then, in the very next sentence an objective moral standard is asserted in the conclusion that we
‘should tolerate others’. Either there are no objective moral standards or there are not. One
cannot assert there are none and then assert an objective moral standard. And if there were an
objective moral standard, why would it be that we should tolerate anything? Surely there are
things which we should not tolerate at all such as rape and murder. To claim that we cannot
make a judgment about these actions is to be mistaken about our abilities. We do make claims
about rape (among many other things). We make a very clear claim that rape is immoral and we
back up that claim with the force of the law. This is not to say that toleration is a bad thing,
some toleration is certainly warranted, for example when we truly do not know what is right or
wrong say in the example of whether or not to worship a god and in what manner that
worshipping should be done. This is something that we do not know so to force others to behave
in a certain manner on this issue would be wrong. But to make the claim that it would be wrong,
we have to argue that there is some objective moral standard that would make this wrong. So
what could this objective moral standard be?

Aristotle’s Virtue Ethics

There have been four major moral philosophical traditions in Western civilization. The first one
we will look at is Aristotle’s virtue ethics. Aristotle lived from 384-322 B.C. for most of the time
in Athens. He was not an Athenian but was rather from Macedonia. His father had been court
physician and Aristotle would later tutor Alexander the Great. It is hard to overestimate the
impact that Aristotle has had on Western civilization. He was a student of Plato at his academy
for twenty years but ultimately disagreed with Plato on nearly everything. He left the academy to
form his own school, the Lyceum.

His moral philosophy has had such an impact on Western civilization because it was adopted by
the Catholic Church and was spread throughout its tremendous territories. Indeed, Aristotle was
even made into a pagan saint by the church. In Dante’s Inferno as well as in Aquinas’ Summa
theologiae, Aristotle’s immense presence is demonstrated by these great authors simply referring to
him as ‘the Philosopher’.

Aristotle is what is known as a teleologist. A telos in ancient Greek means a goal or an end. It is that at
which something aims. Aristotle thought that in order to know something we had to know what its
purpose was. If we could know what it was aiming for , we could know a great deal about whatever
particular thing we might be studying, in this case ethics or the good. So he begins his great work the
Nichomachaen Ethics with the question ‘What is the good for man?’ The good, for Aristotle, is that at
which all things aim. So he takes a look around at what it is that people do. They work, they shop, they
eat, they have sex, they talk, they fight, they love, they do many, many things. He divides mans activities
into two categories. The first one he calls instrumental ends. These are acts done as a means to other
ends, that is, acts used as an instrument to get something else. Coming to class might be seen as an
instrumental goal. The student thinks that she needs a degree to get the job she thinks she wants or
perhaps to simply be a better human being. But either way, she needs to do well in the class to get the
degree. To do well in the class, one must come to class. So she comes to class not necessarily for the
class itself but as an instrument to something else. Aristotle will argue that almost all human activity falls
into this category. Nearly everything we do we do for the sake of something else. We seek enjoyment
and pleasure. We seek sex and drink and honor. But none of these we seek in and of themselves, or if
we do, we are mistaken in what our true goal should in fact be.

The other sort of ends that humans pursue Aristotle terms intrinsic. These are ends we pursue for their
own sake. These ends must be self-sufficient. Aristotle points out that people often get confused and
think that what they should be aiming at are instrumental ends i.e. a life of enjoyment and pleasure, a
life of drink and sex, or honor in the eyes of others. But these are not good in and of themselves. When
a human is asked why do you pursue wealth he might answer because it will provide me with a big
house and a nice car. But then one might simly push the question back and ask the person why they
want a big house and a nice car. The person might reply because this will get them respect or perhaps a
beautiful mate. But again we can ask why do you want respect or a beautiful mate? And if the person
thinks about it enough Aristotle will argue that he will eventually answer “. Because I want to be happy
and I believe having these things will make me happy.’
And herein lies a major component of Aristotle’s moral philosophy. The one intrinsic end at which all
human actions aim, knowingly or not, is happiness. This is the one goal that all humans have for
themselves. It may, and often does, happen that a person thinks that what they want is money or sex or
drugs or prestige but this is only because they haven’t thought about it deeply enough. They only want
these things because they believe these things will bring them happiness.

And Aristotle writes one of the great lessons here. ‘Be Careful what you take pleasure in.’ The human
creature is a creature of habit. And people can and do mistake pleasure for happiness. It is not that
pleasure in and of itself is wrong in any way, it’s just that mistaking pleasure for happiness will ruin your
chance at attaining happiness. Pleasure and happiness are not the same thing and indeed often the
things that bring you pleasure will not bring you happiness. Consider the people who get lost to drugs or
sex or money or prestige. They found pleasure in something, mistakenly thought that pleasure was
happiness and started chasing that pleasure to the detriment of the other aspects of their lives. And
they don’t end up happy.

We must understand what sort of creatures we are Aristotle argues. We are creatures who are pleasure
pursuers. We are also lazy. We are lazy intellectually, physically and morally. If there is an easier way to
do something we are often tempted to go down that easier path. But we must understand that that
easier path will not lead us to what we really want. We must remember that what we really want is to
be happy. And although being happy is not easily attainable, it is attainable for Aristotle. He does think
that a human who lives his life in the correct manner can indeed be happy. Now this happiness is not a
constant state of euphoria, it is more a sublime feeling of contentment than euphoria. But it is better
than the alternative. Most humans will not even be able to attain this because they will get lost along
the way to happiness.

So then if happiness is man’s true goal, what exactly is happiness and how is it attained? It is the natural
good for man. But in order to know how to attain happiness we need to know how man is self-realized.
This goes back to Aristotle’s teleology. In order to know how to fulfill something we need to know its
function, what its purpose is. Once we know what mans purpose is, we can figure out how to fulfill it
and man can be happy. The good of anything is determined by how well it fulfills its function. Aristotle
argues that man must have a function as a whole. Each part of him has a function. His eyes see, his ears
hear, etc. so man as a whole must also have a function.

So the question then becomes what is mans purpose? In order to figure this out, Aristotle again looks
around at what it is that people actually do. Mans purpose could be nutrition and growth but these are
functions he shares with the animals. A things function must be exclusive to it. So nutrition and growth
cannot be mans function. It could also be a life of experience and sensation but this too is shared by
animals. What is it that man does that the other animals don’t do? What is his one true function? And
Aristotle will answer this with the answer that has survived down through the ages. What separates man
from animals is his ability to reason. Now Aristotle is a great biologist, he does not mean here that
animals do not reason in the sense of figuring out how to hunt their prey or to manipulate a situation.
This is not the reason that Aristotle is talking about. It is mans ability to reason about reason. That is, his
ability to do philosophy that is specific to man. As far as we can tell, this is the one thing that the other
animals do not do. We may see chimpanzees doing all sorts of complicated communications and puzzle
solving. Indeed some animals are even self-aware and can demonstrate that they are self-aware. But
what they do not do, is philosophize about their condition. They do not, as far as we can tell, discuss
how their society should be organized or what the moral thing to do would be or whether or not there is
a god. These things seem to be the purview of man alone. And so it must be in the fulfillment of this
higher function of reason that mans purpose is to be found. And once we fulfill this purpose, we will find
our happiness.

Aristotle writes that ‘happiness is the activity of the soul in accordance with perfect virtue’. (NE, I) It is
important to note the word activity here. Aristotle thought that in order to be happy one had to be
active. A person who is asleep or who is disengaged is not capable of being happy. But then one must
ask what does he mean by ‘perfect virtue’? First, it is not an excellence of the body but of the soul. It is
not that Aristotle was unconcerned by excellence of the body, he was living in ancient Athens after all,
but this is not the topic here. There are two kinds of virtue. Intellectual virtue is the ability to think
and/or skill at mathematics and philosophy. Moral virtue is different. Moral virtue is acting correctly in
accordance with reason. Aristotle points out here that humans are not animals and as such we should
not allow ourselves to be ruled by passion but rather by reason. Since this is what he concluded before
under how man is to fulfill his function. It is reason that is mans stand alone quality. And it is in the
fulfillment of reason that we will come to happiness. Sometimes our passions might be incredibly strong
indeed, as in a mother who is concerned for the welfare of her child, but still one must reason out one’s
thoughts and activities.

There are three things in the human soul. First there are the passions (emotions), second is the capacity
to experience these emotions or as Aristotle terms them our ‘capacities’ and third is our state of
character which he defines as our disposition to choose how we react to our emotions. Passions and
faculties however are not morally praiseworthy or blameworthy because they are not things over which
we have control. Rather it is in the third part of our soul, our character that we find that we have control
and hence this is where our actions can be morally praiseworthy or blameworthy. He writes:

The virtue of man will be the disposition (state of character) through which he becomes a good man and
through which he will do his job well. (NE,I)

Virtues are acquired by practice. They are a state of character. The virtuous person is one who does
what he is supposed to do because he wants to-it is built into his very character. Character is made
through habit. As children, we must be taught how to behave in certain ways. We may not want to
behave in these ways. For example, being grateful. If you cannot be grateful for what you have, you will
never have enough. However, being grateful is not necessarily an easy thing to be. It is a learned activity.
When children are young they may be taught to act as if they are grateful by saying thank you or writing
thank you notes even when they feel no gratitude whatsoever. But what will happen, Aristotle argues, is
that over the course of many years of being forced to say thank you, eventually they will actually be
grateful. And they will be grateful because it is built into their character. It is what they choose to be.
And this will make their lives better. They will be a better friend, a better student, a better mate, a
better child, a better parent. And this will lead them to being happy with their lives.
Virtue for Aristotle is a disposition involving choice. When one has a choice, which for Aristotle is all the
time, how does one choose? He thinks that most of the time we choose based on our character but that
our character also determines our choices. We can change our character but it is very difficult to do. It is
better if our parents brought us up with the right character so that we already have the advantage of
not choosing to lie, not choosing to steal, not choosing to cheat. We don’t do these things not because
we have weighed the consequences and decided the chance of getting caught is too great, we don’t do
these things because we don’t want to do this things. It is not in our character.

How does one become a virtuous person? We become virtuous by becoming habituated to the proper
choices. Virtue, Aristotle writes, is a ‘habit or trained faculty of choice, the characteristics of which lies in
moderation or observance of the mean relative to the persons concerned, as determined by reason.’
When we were children, it was our guardians’ responsibilities to make correct choices for us. What we
ate, what we read, what music we listened to, what television shows we watched, who our friends were.
These choices were all made by our guardians and hopefully they made the right choices. But even if
they did not we are not children any longer and our choices are now our own. It is our responsibility to
make the correct choices. Habits can be learned and unlearned. It is never too late to make your
character better by making better choices nor is it ever too late to make your character worse by making
bad choices. And the degree to which you are successful in this will determine the degree to which you
are happy.

And it is by our character that we can, and are judged. This moral philosophy is still a widely held one in
Western civilization. We hold people responsible for their choices because we believe they had a
choice. We also talk a great deal about a person’s character. The formation of character is a big topic in
parenting circles, education and civic education circles. We may know someone who we have known to
lie. While we may generally find being around this person enjoyable, when we really have to know the
truth, it is not to them that we will turn. And if we did, we would be foolish to do so. We know they will
lie in the right circumstances. We know they have the character of a liar. And liars lie. True, not all the
time. But that is what they do. So when it really counts, when our back is against the wall and we really
need to know whether or not something is true, we will not call on the person with the character of a
liar.

And this is unfortunate for us but it is more unfortunate for the liar. People with good characters do not
choose to be friends with people who do not have good characters. If you want to have good friends,
you must be a good friend. And in order to be a good friend there are certain things that you must do
and other things you may not do. And you want to have friends because they are a key component to
your happiness. There are basically two things human beings need to be happy. The first one is
companionship and the other is intellectual stimulation in some fashion or another. Not everyone will
find history fascinating but if not history then art or language or farming or nature or music or
something else. But we need these two components. And neither one of them is available to someone
with a bad character.

Aristotle introduces the idea of the mean between the extremes. Nearly all human actions can be put on
a continuum from too little to too much. There are however five actions that are essentially evil and
should be rejected outright. These are malice, envy, adultery, theft and murder. There is never too little
of these actions. One should be careful though what he means by each of these things. Murder is
unjustifiable killing. Killing someone in a justifiable manner is not wrong. But what is malice and why is it
wrong to engage in it? Malice is a general sort of dislike for humanity, someone with a chip on their
shoulder. One might say perhaps that it is someone who is looking for trouble. Why is this always evil
and should be rejected? The answer is that no one of a good character wants to be friends with
someone who carries around malice. It is an unattractive quality and seems to bring trouble along with it
wherever it goes.

What is wrong with envy? Well, think about it. Who does envy harm? Does it harm the person of whom
that you are envious? Probably not. Who does it harm? It harms the person who carries the envy
around. Again, people of good character do not want to be friends with people who engage in envy. It is
troublesome. And Aristotle also thinks it is unreasonable. Everyone’s life is difficult. Everyone has
troubles. Everyone has problems. If you are envious of someone, it is because you mistakenly believe
that your life would be better if you could just have this or that. While your life might indeed be better if
you had this or that, being envious of the person who has this or that does not get you this or that. It
simply weights you down. It makes you have pain. It makes you unattractive to people with good
characters.

And of course being envious or being malicious may lead you to do other things, like steal or cheat. And
these are never acceptable. But one should notice why these are not acceptable. These are not
acceptable because they will not lead to good friendships. If you have the character of a cheater, people
who don’t or won’t cheat will not be around you. If you have the character of a thief, people who don’t
or won’t steal won’t be around you. In other words, if you want friends with good characters, you
yourself must have a good character.

So Aristotle tells us that there are five things that we should reject outright and everything else can be
placed on the continuum and that reason tells us that these things should be pursued by following the
mean between the extremes. Take for example courage. While being courageous in the right
circumstance at the right time is a good thing, too much courage is simply being rash while too little is
being a coward. But how do we know how much? Well, this is different for each person over the course
of their lives. This is why he calls it the mean between the extremes. There is not an exact middle point
to which he can point and say this is exactly where you should be. Where you should be will vary from
person to person and time to time. But it will always be in the mean. Somewhere near the middle, not
too much and not too little. Take for example pride. There will be some times in your life where you
should engage more in pride than in others. If you are in a job interview, you will want to present your
accomplishments unabashedly. But if you are having dinner with friends on a weekend evening,
presenting your accomplishments unabashedly would be crass. How you react is dependent on the
situation and the people in the situation. But, again, it will always be in the mean between the extremes.

When we get in the habit of acting this way, that is, when we become habituated, we have the
disposition to choose the right thing because we want to, not because we have to. It is this disposition
to choose a virtuous activity that forms our virtuous character in us. Character is formed by the
decisions we make and the decisions we make form our character. We may not have been brought up
correctly so we have certain character flaws but we do have control over the choices that we make and
can begin to choose new things that will lead to a better character. And the more often we choose the
virtuous activity, the easier it gets. Eventually, it becomes part of our character and we simply would not
choose to live another way.

Kant’s Deontology

We already discussed Kant when we discussed his response to Hume’s skepticism. He also had
one of the most influential moral philosophies in Western civilization. Most commonly he is
referred to as a deontologist. A deontologist is someone who studies duties and while Kant held
that duties are important, I think it is misleading to classify him this way. But I shall go with
convention and explain.

In his Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals Kant responds to Aristotle. While he agrees
with a lot of what Aristotle argues, he disagrees at the very beginning with a rather simple point.
Like Aristotle, he thinks that humans are separate from the animals because of our ability to do
abstract reasoning and like Aristotle he agrees that nature does nothing in vain, that every organ
has a purpose for which it is adapted. But he thinks that Aristotle got it wrong. If nature had
wanted us to be happy, she would have created us differently. Indeed there is often a correlation
between being unhappy and being intelligent. The better one uses reason, the more unhappy one
can be. If nature had wanted us to be happy she would have left us in a different position. For
Kant, there is a far nobler purpose for which reason is properly intended. But if not happiness,
what could that purpose be? To Kant, there is a rather obvious answer. The purpose of our ability
to be moral is, in fact, to be moral. We are the only creatures who can be moral. If there is to be
morality on this earth, it is going to come from human beings. Chimpanzees can’t do it,
elephants can’t do it. The only being capable of freely choosing right from wrong is the human
being. The far nobler purpose that Kant has in mind is bringing morality into existence. And
because of his teleology, Kant believes that this is man’s ultimate purpose, this is why nature
created him the way she did. This basic disagreement with Aristotle leads Kant down a different
path than Aristotle about what morality is and how it is to be used.

Reason is meant to have an influence on our will. We observe that everything in nature has a
purpose, including in our own nature. This observation is an effort by our understanding to make
the world intelligible to ourselves. Humans, however, are the only being in nature capable of
forming a concept of purposes and who can make out a system of purposes. Most all of nature is
directed towards some end or goal but there must be ends in themselves. Humans, because of
their free will and reason, are the only being capable of being ends in themselves. Kant arrives
here at a quite species-centric conclusion but he thinks that humans are the only thing that
qualifies to be the final end of all of nature. Because man is the only being capable of conceiving
of and of following the sole unconditioned end (what ought to be done), man is thus an end in
himself.

Nature does nothing in vain: reasons purpose is to produce the end of a will that is not merely
good for something else but is good in and of itself. Every rational creature possesses this idea of
a will. Hence it requires clarification, not teaching. There is no need to teach someone how to be
moral. The moral law is already within any rational creature. It is simply the case that people get
mixed up and can’t quite see what the moral law is commanding them to do.

Because we are the only creature who can make out this system of purposes and because we are
the only creature who can bring morality into existence, it is our duty to do so. This will not
always be easy and indeed may in fact at times be very difficult and may make us unhappy. But
it is the creature that we are and we must understand this about ourselves. We serve a purpose,
just like every other thing in the universe. The purpose of something is found by figuring out
what it is that it exclusively adds to the universe. And morality is the one thing that we as
humans can add to the universe. If morality and justice are to come into existence it is going to
be through humans, no one else can do it.

So we must bring morality into existence. But how do we do that? We follow the moral law. This
is rather a simple statement. But for Kant, it has profound truth. A law is a law because it is not
conditional. If it is the law that I stop at a STOP sign, it is not a suggestion, it is not dependent on
circumstances. It is a universal command. I must stop regardless of how I feel about it and I must
stop regardless of the situation. And for Kant, if there is to be a moral law, it must have the same
qualities, that is it must be a universal command, or as many commentators put it, a categorical
imperative.

But if there were to be a universal command that applied to all humans all of the time what could
that possibly be? Kant actually offers several different variations on this, but to my mind the best
instantiation is the following:

One should always act in such a way that humanity either in oneself or in others is always
treated as an end in and of itself and never merely as a means.

For Kant, this one command applies to all humans, everywhere, all the time. It admits of no
exceptions. There is never a time when morality is left behind. All human actions everywhere
fall under this law, that is what makes it a law. What would it mean to follow this law? It would
mean that in every interaction with humans, including yourself, you always treat them as a
subject, never as an object. Why? Because reason tells us that humans are never objects. Humans
experience the world as subjects, not as objects. There is something significantly different
between a human being and a table. The table is an object, it has not subjective experience of the
world. But a human does. There is nothing a human being can do to make themselves into an
object. We are all subjects, all the time. Hence it would be irrational to treat a human as if they
were an object. For Kant, the simple truth is that humans are not objects, ever. To treat a human
as if they were an object is irrational and it is because it is irrational that it is immoral.

But what exactly is it to treat a human as a subject and never merely as an object? When we treat
someone as if they were a means to an end and that is all that they are, then we are treating them
as if they were an object and we are behaving both irrationally and immorally. Take for example,
a cashier at the grocery store. He has a job to do and we use him as a means to an end. So far,
because he has chosen to do this job, this is not immoral. But if we were to treat him as if this
was all that he was, as if his sole purpose in life was to check us out of the grocery store, that he
never had any other purpose in his life, that he has no subjective experience of the world, then
we would be treating him as merely a means to an end. He did not simply snap into existence
when we needed him to check out our groceries and then disappear the second we were done
interacting with him. He has a life. He has things that he likes and dislikes, a personal subjective
experience of the world. And we must treat him as if this were true, because in fact it is true. We
must show him the respect due a human being. So while we can have a transaction with him
wherein he checks out our groceries and we pay him and he gives us change and then we both
move on with our lives, we cannot treat him as if this is all there is to him for we know that is not
the truth.

And it is the same with us. We cannot be treated as if we are simply a means to an end. While it
is true that each of us enters into transactions where we trade our labor for goods and services
(even if we are born incredibly wealthy and never have to labor in our lives, the money we
inherit is stored labor that we trade), and these transactions are perfectly appropriate, it is not true
that these transactions make up the totality of what it is for us to be us. And it is not just the case
that others cannot treat us as merely a means to an end, we cannot treat ourselves that way. This
is why Kant famously argues against masturbation. He argues that masturbation necessarily
treats our bodies as a means to an end. For Kant, when we do this, we reduce ourselves to
animals and this is immoral. Nature made us into something special, something capable of
bringing morality and justice into existence. When we ignore this ability we tragically act in a
manner for which we were not made.

Now Kant allowed for the possibility that certain creatures that were born with human
characteristics would nonetheless be unable to be rational--someone born with an especially low
IQ perhaps or with some other mental defect. These creatures, while being human, carry no
moral agency. That is, they cannot make moral decisions and hence we do not hold them
responsible, morally or legally, for their behavior. And this is indeed the first question that is
asked of a person before they stand trial in the United States. Is this person capable of telling
right from wrong? If so, they go to trial. If not, they go to some other facility. A human who has
an IQ of say 60 and who steals a pack of gum from a store is not held morally or legally
responsible for what they have done because they cannot understand the morality of it. Neither
can a child, though this is different because a child can, and hopefully, will learn how to tell right
from wrong. But this again is why we do not hold seven year olds responsible for their behavior.
They simply do not know right from wrong yet.

In every situation then, across all cultures and across all religions and across all times, humans
have one true purpose. That purpose is to bring morality and justice into existence. This is done
by always treating humanity as an end in itself, as a subject, and never as an object.

While this may seem simplistic, this can be extremely difficult to do. In our busy and frustrating
lives it can be very tempting and very easy to see other people as something we can use as a
means to our own goals. But that is not why they exist and when we do this we behave
immorally. A rational human is never an object. Human cannot make themselves into objects
either. A prostitute may say that she gives her permission to be used as an object but to Kant that
would be like saying that she is a unicorn. It doesn’t matter how many times she says it or with
what urgency she says it, she is not in fact an object and cannot make herself into one. She is a
subject always, like all other rational humans.

The Utiltarians

Living at the same time as Kant there was a man named Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832). While
Kant lived on the continent, Bentham lived in England. Bentham read Kant’s works and
famously called them nonsense upon stilts. He vehemently disagreed with Kant over even the
very basis of morality. Bentham was a consequentialist. This means he thought the
consequences of an action were all that mattered, not the intention. If you look at the moral
philosophies of Kant and Aristotle, you can see that they focus on intentions. The outcome of an
act may be bad, but as long as the intention of the act was moral, the act itself was moral.
Bentham did not think the intention mattered, it was simply the consequences. He wrote:

Nature has placed mankind under two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone
to determine what we should do.

For Bentham, we pursue pain and avoid pleasure. What brings us pleasure we call good, what
brings us pain we call bad. It is that simple. Morality then is the pursuit of the maximum amount
of pleasure and the minimization of pain. But be careful here because Bentham is not simply
talking about our own pleasure and pain but rather everyone’s pleasure and pain. (Even people
who pursue pain pursue it because pain brings them pleasure.) In fact, Bentham would argue
anything that can feel pain, any sentient being, needs to be taken into consideration. The modern
animal rights movement will follow Bentham here. Bentham famously says the question (of
whether or not something counts as being morally relevant) is not can he talk? Or can can he
reason? But can he suffer?
The Principle of Utility is the moral principle for utlitarians. It is simply:

Actions should be approved or disapproved according to the tendency which it appears to have
to augment or diminish the happiness of the party whose interest is in question.

Unlike Aristotle, Bentham is not concerned with any difference between pleasure and happiness.
For him, they are the same thing.

There are a lot of usages for utilitarianism in the modern world. Most governments use it in
determining policy as do most large organizations. These types of organizations are often faced
with the question of how to maximize pleasure and minimize pain for the greatest amount of
people. And they turn to something that Bentham produced called the hedonistic calculus.

The hedonistic calculus is a calculation designed to maximize pleasure and minimize pain. There
are seven different criteria on the hedonistic calculus according to Bentham. They are:

Intensity

Duration

Certainty

Remoteness (how near or how far are the pleasures/pains?)

Fecundity (chance it has of being followed by sensations of the same kind)

Purity-(chance it has of not being followed by sensations of the opposite kind)

Extent

To perform the hedonistic calculus, one is to take an account of the value of each distinguishable
pleasure which appears to be produced by it in the first instance. Second, take an account of the
pain which appears to be produced in it by the first instance. Next, one takes account of the
pleasure produced in the second instance. Then the pain produced in the second instance. Then
we sum up all pleasures on one side and the pain on the other. Take an account of the number of
persons whose interest appears to be concerned and finally sum up all goods and all pains.
Whichever is highest dictates the answer, if more pleasures then the action is moral, if more
pains then the action is immoral. Unhappiness results from acting on the basis of impulses
without rational calculations.

So for example, if we were trying to decide whether or not marijuana should or should not be
legal, we would take into consideration all of the pleasures produced by it’s being legal and all of
the pain produced. It is a complicated issue and one Bentham would have liked. Bentham is
famous for his defense of social and legal reform. He did not think it was appropriate to put
people in jail simply to punish them for this was just causing more pain in the world. If you
could put people in jail and expect to get more happiness out of it, for example, if they could be
reformed, then that would be fine but he did not think one could defend punishment simply for
retribution.

I am not going to delve deeply into the issue here. But it makes a good one for beginning the
discussion on utilitarianism. What would produce the greatest amount of happiness for the
greatest number of people? And whose interests would be at stake in this issue? More than
likely, every American would have a stake, even if a small one in this issue. Mexico and Canada
too would have an interest in this issue. Perhaps the reach of this issue would extend even
further. This illustrates one of the difficulties with using the hedonistic calculus. It is difficult to
put a number on how many people are affected by this issue and to put a number on the manner
in which they are affected. This problem is known as the incommensurability of values. How do
we put a number on how happy it would make people versus how much pain it would cause?
While the difficulty of doing this does not mean that utilitarianism is wrong, it does cause a
problem.

Bentham argued that all pleasure and all pain counted the same. For this, his theory was heavily
criticized. Specifically it was pointed out that if all pleasures and pains counted the same then it
would be best to indulge all of our more base pleasures. It was (and is) argued that the more
esoteric pleasures (say for example in studying art or music) would be overridden constantly by
the pursuit of simpler pleasures like sex or drugs. Bentham himself did not see this and stood by
his claims but John Stuart Mill did see these problems and did think that utilitarianism needed to
address these issues.

John Stuart Mill was Jeremy Bentham’s godson. James Mill, John Stuart’s father, was a good
friend of Bentham and at a very young age subjected John Stuart to quite an intense education.
Mill grew up in the utilitarian world of his father and godfather and was to hold these beliefs the
rest of his life. But he did revise them a bit. He argued that certain pleasures were indeed beter
than other pleasures and should count more on the hedonistic calculus. He added what came to
be known as the ‘quality proviso’ to the utilitarian calculus. Simply stated, this proviso just says
that there are two classes of human pleasure, higher and lower, and that the higher pleasures
should count for more on the calculus.

Higher pleasures, Mill says, are the distinctly human pleasures. They possess greater
permanency, safety and uncostliness and are ennobling, satisfying and enduring. Mill asks us to
look at the life of Socrates. If a pig can live a completely satisfied life while a thoughtful and
morally concerned individual like Socrates cannot ever be satisfied, is the life of the pig therefore
preferable? While some of us at certain points in our lives might answer yes, for Mill the answer
is no. Humans have pleasures that animals do not and when made aware of them do not regard
anything as happiness which does not contain those pleasures. We know higher pleasures are
better Mill argues because people who are exposed to higher and lower pleasures are able to
explain that the higher pleasures fulfill our distinctly human faculties. For Mill, happiness can be
found in the satisfaction of curiosity, and in the pursuit of higher intellectual interests. A
cultivated mind finds sources of interest in everything. Unhappiness results from a lack of mental
cultivation. The uncultivated mind is surrounded by sources of interest and pleasure but
discovers few lasting ones. Unfortunately, a good portion of mankind have uncultivated minds.
As young men and women they may start out pursuing everything noble but because of their
station in life they become disinterested in the higher pleasures. He writes:

This is because as youth, the love of higher pleasures may be killed off by mere want of
sustenance. If the occupations to which their position in life has devoted them, and the society to
which it has thrown them are not favorable to keeping that higher capacity in exercise.

Further:

Capacity for the nobler feelings is in most natures a very tender plant, easily killed, not only by
hostile influences but by mere want of sustenance.

Think of the public education system in the United States. It is the job of the public education
system to create workers for the economy. When planning school subjects, School Boards get
together with local employers and ask them what it is that students need to know to get a job.
Rarely is an employer going to say that the students need to know art history or philosophy.
Instead, they need to know how to be on time, be obedient, to read and write and do some math.
But never enough so that the student can overcome the class to which they were born into.
Industry needs workers and thus the school system sets out to create these workers. If you ask
college students why they choose whatever major they choose it will almost always have
something to do with the job that they want, not with any sort of enrichment of their intellect. In
order to pursue intellectual enlightenment, one must have money first. Hence it seems that only
wealthy students have the luxury of majoring in something like art history or music or
philosophy. I often (jokingly) dare students to call up their parents and tell them they are going to
major in art or philosophy. No doubt their parents’ reaction would be one of fear and perhaps
even anger and of course the question, ‘what are you going to do with that?!’

Consider the following example:

If we took a young healthy person and divided up their different parts, we could create a lot of
happiness. We could give their eyes to one person, their liver to another, their lungs to someone
else, their heart to someone. And if the people we give their organs to are important people who
are well loved and who have a big influence in the world couldn’t we then justify taking their
organs? We understand that this person would die but the pain would be minimal. We could
knock them out and make it painless. Further we could do it in a manner in which they didn’t
know it was coming so that we just drugged them one afternoon and they simply went to sleep.
Finally, let’s add to this that the person is perhaps a lone orphan whom no one would miss. Why
don’t we do this? Should we?

Nietzsche’s Ethical Egoism

We have discussed three of the four major moral philosophies popular in Western civilization.
The last one we will discuss is known as ethical egoism. It is an old philosophy, one that Plato
gives voice to in his Republic. In the Republic, Plato has Glaucon ask Socrates to why he should
be moral. He puts it this way. If I could convince everyone that I was moral while at the same
time being immoral, isn’t that what I really want? He understands the benefit of looking moral.
If you appear to be moral, people trust you. People want to be your friend. All sorts of benefits
can be accrued in this manner. But really, you don’t actually want to be moral. The best benefit
comes from looking moral while being immoral. This is ethical egoism.

In psychology there is a train of thought labeled psychological egoism. It claims that people only
act in their own self interest. Even someone who appears to be doing something altruistic is
doing it ultimately because they want to. Any human action can be reduced to this. A mother
sacrifices for her children because she has made the choice that she would rather suffer than see
her children suffer.

Ethical egoism takes this a step further. Not only is this the way people act, this is the way
people should act. Friedrich Nietzsche made this position famous in the late 1800’s. While he is
not the first person to argue this, in many ways he is the best, and certainly the most passionate.
Plato will ultimately give an argument against ethical egoism in his Republic but I do not want to
go into that here. Let us turn to look at what Nietzsche has to say on the matter.

In his book The Gay Science and in Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche will give credence to
ethical egoism. A healthy society should allow superior individuals to exercise their will to
power, their drive toward domination and exploitation of the inferior. One can immediately
notice that we’re not in a nice ethical world any longer. Superior individuals? Drive toward
domination? Exploitation of the inferior? These are all things that most of us have been taught
are bad things. But we believe this at our own peril.Nietzsche wants us to understand that
morality is the herd instinct of the individual.

Nietzsche looks at the traditional sources of morality, that is God, society and reason and asks
why should a person respect the authority of God or society or reason? In Beyond Good and Evil,
Nietzsche famously writes that God is dead. Hence, we have no reason to follow his morality.
Society is decadent and falling apart and its moral authority need not be binding on a creative
individual who rejects that decadence and disintegration. He even rejects reason as a source of
morality arguing that there are more important things in life than reason, for example passion. He
also rejects utility as the ultimate source of importance. Our primary goal in life is the will to
power or what might be better understood as self-expression.

The major impediment to building a better society is our inheritance of the Judeo-Christian slave
morality. For Nietzsche, morality is a kind of trick used to gain power. It is a trick used by those
in power to enslave those who are not in power. The Judeo-Christian morality teaches us that the
meek shall inherit the earth and that obedience to authority is a good thing. It teaches us that it is
good to be poor and powerless for that is who God loves. It teaches us, from Nietzsche’s
perspective, how to be slaves. It is a morality built by slaves for slaves. It is a trick used to
control masses of people. If we look at the major dictates of morality-don’t kill, don’t steal, don’t
lie, we might ask who benefits from these prohibitions? The answer is clearly not everyone but
simply those who cannot take care of themselves. The strong can take care of themselves
morality is for the weak.

Nietzsche discusses the difference between slave morality and master morality. The master
morality is the morality of the noble caste. The noble caste was always the barbarian caste. Their
superiority does not consist in their physical power but in their psychical power. They were
complete men which, he argues, at every point also implies complete beasts. Society does not
exist for its own sake but rather as scaffolding, by means of which a select class of beings can
elevate themselves to higher duties and in general to a higher existence. We normally think of
exploitation as a bad thing. When we hear that someone has exploited someone else we have a
negative moral connotation with it. But for Nietzsche, exploitation is not a bad thing. It is how
we in fact survive. It is not good or bad, in fact it is beyond good and evil. It is part of our
nature. It belongs to the nature of the living being as a primary organic function. It is a
consequence of the will to power which is precisely the will to live. The will to power wants to
gain ground, to grow to ascend not because of any morality or immorality but precisely because
it lives.

The noble type of man regards himself as the determiner of values. He does not have to be
approved of, he knows that he is the determiner of values. He knows that it is he that determines
what does and does not have value. It is he himself who confers honor upon things. If we live by
this we can live lives of self gratification. We do not need to follow the morality of the slaves. It
is not in our own best interest to do so. Now Nietzsche knows that most people who read his
philosophy will still reject it. He understands that most people have been too brainwashed into
being slaves and will not be able to see past their enslavement. But he also knows that some
people will and it is to these people that he is writing. He is encouraging us to reach beyond the
traditional roles that we have been assigned and to not be ashamed to be what we are, creatures
that need to exploit and dominate their environment in order to thrive. Traditional morality
teaches us to be ashamed of this. Nietzsche is trying to demonstrate that being ashamed of this
aspect of ourselves is to deny who we in essence are and it only benefits those who are able to
seek self gratification unabashedly. Nietzsche thinks that such a type of man is even proud of not
being made for sympathy. He writes:

The noble soul accepts the fact of his own egoism without question, and also without the
consciousness of harshness, constraint or arbitrariness therein, but rather as something that may
have its basis in the primary law of things.

Now the slave is someone who follows the slave morality. It is someone who has been fooled
into believing that there is such a thing as the right thing to do and that one should consider
others. It is the morality of the abused, the oppressed and the suffering. And as such it looks
upon those with a kind heart, sympathy diligence and humility as being virtuous. The slave has
an unfavorable eye for the virtues of the powerful. The slave is skeptical and distrustful of the
powerful and would even try to tell himself that the happiness of the powerful is not genuine. He
would try to convince himself that while the master may be rich and powerful he is not really
happy. He believes that the common man is better off than the rich man. He comforts himself
that he wouldn’t really want a private plane for that would be too much of a headache. And he
would praise those qualities which serve to alleviate suffering.

Nietzsche sees himself as being the man in Plato’s allegory of the cave who is trying to tell his
friends that what they have been looking at their whole life is not real. The morality they believe
in has been ingrained in them by powerful people who want to control them. And it has been
quite effective. Not only do the people in power have control, they have legions of people who
are too stupid (Nietzsche’s perspective) to know that they are being controlled and who turn
around and control other people for them. For slave morality, the evil man inspires fear. For
master morality it is precisely the good man who inspires fear and seeks to arouse it. In slave
morality the good man must in any case be the safe man. He is good natured, easily deceived and
perhaps a little stupid.

These four moral philosophies are the major moral philosophies in Western civilization. There
are other moral philosophies out there, but these four are the ones that are the most common and
have had the most influence. We can see character, respect for human rights, the use of utility
and self interest in our civilization.
 Political Philosophy

The last area to which we will turn is political philosophy. This is the area of philosophy where,
unsurprisingly, we deal with the ultimate application of philosophy. For philosophers like Plato
and Aristotle, the whole point of studying all the other branches of knowledge was to come up
with a better way to manage civilization. The love of wisdom that we gain through painstakingly
maneuvering our way through epistemology, metaphysics and moral philosophy is ultimately
vindicated when we can apply it to our daily lives in a manner that brings justice into existence.

Plato’s Republic

Plato lived in ancient Athens. A student of Socrates, h e was born into wealthy aristocratic
family. After the death of Socrates, Plato took Socrates’ students and held class in a grove of
woods near his home. In ancient Greek, a grove of woods is an academe. Thus began the last two
thousand five hundred years of the academy. One of his most famous books is named the
Republic. The Republic is a work in which Socrates defends his version of what the just person
and the just society would look like. The book is in dialogue form as are most of Plato’s writings.
It begins with the question being raised by Glaucon and Adeimantus to Socrates to prove that it
is better to be just than unjust apart from the rewards. Socrates uses a rhetorical device and shifts
perspective. He does not think that he can explain why it is better for the individual to be just so
he decides to look at the individual writ large. The individual writ large is society. So Socrates
changes the question from why it is better for an individual to be just to why it is better for a
society to be just.

The Republic is a large piece of work with a lot of philosophically important ideas in it and well
worth the investment to read. But we will not discuss the whole work here. For our purposes, I
will point out a few important points and move on.

Plato’s ideal society, at least as stated here, has some things in it that modern readers might find
surprising. One thing that modern readers might find surprising is Plato’s defense of censorship.
He argues that most people are too easily swayed by an impressive speaker so before someone is
allowed to speak freely they must prove themselves wise and moral enough for the privilege.
Given that the Socrates, Plato’s friend and mentor, was killed because of what he said, it is
somewhat surprising that Plato does not defend freedom of speech, especially given that it is one
of the ideas for which Athens is most famous. The reason why Plato does not defend freedom of
speech however is probably because he believed that what got Socrates killed was not that
Socrates was allowed to say anything he wanted but that the Sophists and the poets were allowed
freedom of speech. In Athens at this point in time, Socrates and the philosophers stood in
opposition to the poets and the Sophists. The Sophists were people who taught philosophical
argumentation to the highest bidder. They would help anyone who paid them argue whatever
they wanted to argue.

Plato also argues that rulers of state can lie to the public. (389) Ordinary citizens may not lie
either to each other or to the state, but rulers can lie to their people. This is because rulers have to
protect the interests of the state and Plato, in his superior manner, did not think that most people
were truly capable of understanding what was in the best interest of the state. Rulers can lie to
the people for their own good.

Plato thought that education was the key to the development of an ideal republic. All infants
should be taken from their parents and raised in common. This probably seems like a shocking
idea to most modern readers. But he argues that each child should be raised in common so that
they can all receive the best the state has to offer. The education and care they receive would be
done by professionals whose only role in life was to provide care for the children. Each child
would be taken care of by professionals who were well educated in child care. The professional
would have the resources of the state at their disposal. And they would be specifically trained to
be able to evaluate the children for what role in society they would fit best. Once evaluated, the
child would be given whatever they needed to make them into the best shoemaker or carpenter or
Guardian (ruler).

This would eliminate hereditary power and would make sure that each individual was placed in
the role that best suited them and society. Before this decision was made however, each child
would be exposed to the best society has to offer in order to develop their talents fully. He
writes:

Let our youth dwell in a land of health amid fair sights and sounds, and receive the good in
everything: and beauty, the effluence of fair works, shall flow into the eye and ear…and
insensibly draw the soul from earliest years into likeness and sympathy with the beauty of
reason. (401)

If we expose each child to harmonious music and art and we educate them properly they will
grow to be rational, capable and fulfilled individuals. Plato thought that learning harmony would
attract children to reason because reason is harmony. Thousands of years later, Plato’s suspicions
will be borne out. We now know from repeated studies that children who are good at
mathematics have one common characteristic. They studied music at an early age. Music
contains harmony within it and the brain picks up that harmony and learns to love the
harmonious flow of the music. Later, when the child is exposed to mathematics, their brain
recognizes the harmony within it and can understand and appreciate it more than a child whose
brain has not been exposed to music at an early age.
Plato also famously argues that the state should tell its people a noble lie. (414) By this he means
a story that is meant to ennoble them, to make them want to be members of this particular state
and to make them want to be in their particular role within the state. He suggest a noble lie in
which the state tells people that describes the origins of the several different factions of society.
All people are brothers of mother earth but some people are made of gold, some of silver, some
of iron and some of bronze. Those made of gold will be rulers, those made of silver will be
auxiliaries (members of the military and bureaucracy) and those made of iron and bronze would
be farmers. This would help each person to believe that their role in society was pre-determined
by the gods and that they were where they were supposed to be in society.

Again, while this might seem disturbing to some modern readers Plato has his reasons. And it is
an idea that many believe does in fact happen. In the United State we are told that we are the
land of the free and the home of the brave. We are told that anyone can be anything they want
through hard work. The implication behind this is of course, if you fail, you fail because it is
your fault. Many would argue that the governments of the world tell many lies to their people to
keep them in order. Plato’s lie at least is meant to make the world truly a better place.

Lest we begin to think of Plato as too much of an elitist we need to consider the whole of his
argument. Interestingly, Plato also argued that the Guardians should have no private property.
They are made of gold so they need not possess any. They would be taken care of by the state,
whatever they need would be provided for them, but they themselves would have no private
possessions. (418) Private homes and closed doors would not be allowed. It is intriguing to
consider this possibility. It would more than likely make a substantial difference in who sought
political power if in order to be in power one had to give up all of their private possessions. It is
easy to see what Plato is after here. If the Guardians have no private interests, the interests and
welfare of the state becomes their main and sole interest. So while the Guardians may be in a
privileged position, the position is not hereditary nor does it provide an extreme personal
advantage.

Plato argues that ‘the aim in founding the state was not the disproportionate happiness of any one
particular class, but the greatest happiness of the whole’ (420) Further he argues that ‘wealth
and poverty are both evils’ (422) The harmonious state would seek to make the middle class as
large and as strong as possible so that, ideally, everyone would be middle class.

It is in this manner that we are most likely to find justice. It is apparent by this time in the
Republic that justice has become consistent with harmony. When the state has each of its citizens
playing the role they are supposed to be playing, farmers are farmers, warriors are warriors,
educators are educators and guardians are guardians, then the state will be in harmony and justice
will prevail. From here, it does not take much for Socrates to go back to the original question of
justice in the individual. Justice in the individual is having all of his different parts in harmony.
The individual has three parts to his soul. These are the appetitive, the rational and the spirited.
The appetitive part of the soul is the part that has an appetite for the things necessary to stay
alive, like food and drink. The rational part of the soul seeks out truth. And the spirited part of
the soul desires honor and dignity. The spirited part of the soul also backs up the rational part of
the soul. For Plato, the just soul is one in which these three aspects are in harmony. He tells a
story about a charioteer (reason) who needs to control the two horses that pull the chariot. The
one horse, the dark one is representative of the appetites. The other horse, the white horse is
representative of the spirit. The charioteer (reason) needs to control the dark horse (appetites)
and the white horse (spirit) in order to successfully drive the chariot. This tripartite division of
the soul will be followed for millennia and finds echoes in modern psychological theories like
Freud’s id, ego and superego. These are not the same but they are similar.

Plato’s Republic has been an influential and interesting book in Western civilization for the last
twenty five hundred years. It is a classic and that is why I wanted to discuss parts of it here. But
now we need to move forward about two thousand years to a much more recent tradition.

The Social Contract Tradition

In the United States we live in a tradition known as the Social Contract tradition. This tradition
goes back several hundred years to at least the 1600’s. Some would argue that it goes back
much, much further but for our purposes here we will use Hobbes as the starting point. It is
boldly expressed by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by
their creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of
happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just
powers from the consent of the governed.

This is the height of the enlightenment ideal. It is perhaps most famously expressed by Jefferson,
but it began with Thomas Hobbes.

Thomas Hobbes

Thomas Hobbes was an Englishman. He was born in 1588 and died in 1679. His book
Leviathan published in 1651 is widely held to be the beginning of modern political philosophy.
As the title suggests, Hobbes thought that the state could be understood as a compilation of men
built upon each other to make the monster of the state. In the Leviathan, he asks the reader to
imagine a State of Nature. This would be a time and place before the development of any rulers
but where people did have interaction with each other. It is a hypothetical condition but it is
useful to political philosopher in trying to understand how the state got started and how it could
or could not be justified in its existence and in its functions.

Hobbes does not think much of human nature. Without the intervention of the state, each person
would seek what was in his own interest and would have the right to whatever he could take. If
he could get control over me, he could have control over me. If he could hit me over the head
and take my things, he had a right to take my things. Every man has a right to everything. Each
man is at liberty to use his own power to survive. He thought it would be a constant battle for
self-preservation in a war of all against all. Because of this he argues that the life of man would
be solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. Hobbes thought the social contract was an agreement
of equally selfish and self seeking men not to commit mutual murder or theft.

Hobbes thought that reason dictated that there be two laws of nature. One, that each man
endeavor peace as far as he has hope of obtaining it. But when he cannot obtain it, that he may
seek and use all helps and advantages of war. And two, that a man would be willing to lay down
his rights to everything when others are willing to do the same. A rational man would lay down
these rights to a sovereign, a leader. The sovereign would then have the obligation to enforce the
contract between members of the society. So we lay down our right to everything in exchange
for everyone else laying down their rights to everything. We hire the sovereign, a third party to
come in from the outside to enforce this contract which we have made with each other.

When a man lay down his rights, he should be content with as much liberty as he himself is
willing to allow other men against himself. But no matter what happens there is one right man
can never surrender and that is his right to life. This is because for Hobbes, the only reason why
a man would leave the state of nature and consent to obey someone else is in return for physical
security. If the sovereign can’t or won’t protect him any longer, a man’s obligation to obey the
sovereign becomes null and void. In fact, Hobbes thought this so true that he pointed out that if
an English soldier were captured by the French in a battle the English soldier’s obligation to the
English King became moot the minute the King could no longer protect him. His best hope after
being captured would be to swear allegiance to the French King and hope that he has mercy on
him. The concept of loyalty to the King once the King either could not or would not protect him
was absurd. The only reason he owes the King obedience is his protection. Once that link is
gone, all contracts dissolve.

For Hobbes, the sovereign owes us nothing but physical security. So long as he is providing
security we have an obligation to obey him no matter how ridiculous we might think the order to
be. This is even the case for criminals. If a man were to commit a crime and the King came after
him to punish him, the man had every right to run. The King has every right to seek to punish the
man, but the man owes the King no obedience once the King will not protect him any longer,
even if the reason the King won’t protect him any longer is his own fault. So long as the
sovereign is providing physical security he can demand obedience in return. But a leader who
kills or hurts his own people is not a sovereign. In order to have the right of obedience, the leader
must provide protection.

It is for this reason that a lot of international theorists apply Hobbes’ philosophy to the
international condition. It is argued that states are in now a state of nature similar to the original
one. There is no global sovereign. There is no one to whom a state can turn to if a contract is not
upheld. Of course the United Nations tries to be this but since it cannot enforce its own laws it is
not a sovereign. At the most, the UN can be looked at as offering suggestions. It is indeed
possible to have a leader who holds power but is not a legitimate sovereign. These are leaders
who harm their own people. From a Hobbesian perspective, it is impossible to argue that a
person would consent to be ruled by someone who is going to cause them harm. So if a leader is
causing harm to his own people, he does not have the right of a sovereign to certain things like
non-intervention.

While Hobbes argued that the sovereign must protect our rights to life in order to be legitimate,
John Locke would take it a few steps further.

John Locke

Locke (1632-1704) was also an Englishman. He disagreed a bit with Hobbes’ argument
however. He thought that human nature was not so evil as Hobbes had depicted. He did not think
that life in the state of nature would be as miserable as Hobbes made it out to be. He argued that
the State of Nature would be one of peace and mutual aid. He also argued significantly that
human rights exist in the State of Nature. The rights to life, liberty and property are universal
human rights (as long as you’re a white male, that is) and exist before the beginning of society.
They are simply there by nature’s design. He does point out that we cannot prove the existence
of these rights, but we can know them to exist by the effect they have on us and our fellow
humans. If these rights are violated, perhaps one person steals something from someone else, it
disrupts the peace. And it is this disruption of the peace that is a signal to us that there must be
something there, a human right.

These rights however are not positive rights. They are negative. A right is always a claim against
someone else. A negative right is a claim against someone else about what they cannot do. For
example, if I have a negative right to life, you cannot kill me. But a positive right is a stronger
claim. A positive right is not a claim about what someone else cannot do but rather it is a claim
about what someone else must do. So if I have a positive right to life then if I cannot take care of
myself then others have to take care of me. The American Constitution is full of negative rights.
It is all about what people cannot do to each other and more importantly what the government
cannot do to the people. There is not a positive right in the document. But we now live a society
that claims a lot of positive rights. We hear claims about positive rights to education, welfare,
health care, etc. These rights would have been foreign to the traditional Social Contractarians and
to the framers of the Constitution. This does not make them wrong, it simply means that we have
moved beyond what the traditional Social Contractarians would have been comfortable arguing.

Locke did think that humans could get along pretty well without a government in the State of
Nature. He thought that because we had these negative rights to life, liberty and property that we
would pretty much respect each others’ rights. Not everyone all the time, but most people most
of the time would not violate these rights. Not because they have a respect for the rights or the
concept of rights but because of the disruption to the peace alluded to above. We don’t want to
live in a war zone. Locke thought humans smart enough to understand that violating rights puts
us at war with each other. So we would avoid it as much as possible.

But while he thought the State of Nature to be a better place than Hobbes did, still there are
reasons why a person would leave the State of Nature and join into civil society. There are
several problems in the State of Nature that a government would conveniently solve. So while a
government can be helpful, it is not necessary. This is a major philosophical difference between
Hobbes and Locke. It ends up being one of critical importance. If a sovereign is necessary to
ensure our very survival as Hobbes thought then a government has permission to do all sorts of
things, like take our property or tell us how to use our property or take our liberty. But if a
sovereign is not a necessity but more a matter of convenience then it is only justifiable if it
provides us with protection of life, liberty and property.

What are the problems in the State of Nature that the sovereign can solve? The first one is the
establishment of laws. While it is possible for me to get a good idea, like a stop sign, in the State
of Nature and it is possible for me to make stop signs and go around to everyone in the State of
Nature and tell them what it is and why it’s a good idea for them to stop at the stop sign, it is
simply more convenient for the government to be hired to do this service for me. The second one
is the enforcement of laws. Again, while I can enforce the rule about the stop sign, it is
cumbersome for me to do so. It is simply easier to hire the government to enforce the law. And
the third problem in the State of Nature is the settlement of disputes. While Locke thought we
could do this on our own, that it would difficult and judgments might be unfair and extreme.
Once again, it is better to hire a government to do this for us.

But notice that the government is hired to do a job. For Locke (and for many of the writers of the
Constitution) this is another important distinction. Since the government was hired to perform
certain tasks, it can also be fired if it fails to perform those tasks or worse yet is actually the one
violating human rights. Locke did not think that the justification of revolution was a real problem
as most political philosophers before him had. He thought that under certain circumstances
(when the government violated rights) that revolution was not only justifiable, but morally
required. But he also did not think that this would happen often. Most political philosophers
before Locke has assumed that if you told people they had a right to revolt that revolutions
would happen all the time. But Locke points out that people will suffer through all sorts of
abuses until rising up against the sovereign. Rising up against the sovereign takes time and
money and effort. It is also an extremely frightening thing to do. So he did not think that people
would do it lightly. But he did think that sometimes it could in fact be justified. If the
government fails to protect human rights, or violates human rights or if the government hands
over its power to a foreign sovereign then revolution was justifiable. We can begin to see here
why the people who partook in the American revolution looked in part to Locke for their
justifications.

Another important aspect of Locke’s political philosophy was his defense of private property. He
argued that the earth was given to man in common but there must be some means by which the
individual man can legitimately appropriate goods from the commons for his own benefit.
Otherwise things can’t be of any use to one particular man. Locke argued it is by labor that we
annex ourselves to our property. Our labor is our unquestionable property. If we own our labor
then we own the products of our labor (curiously, Marx will start at this same point and come up
with a startlingly different conclusion.) When we farm a field or build a house we mix our labor
with the earth and the part of the earth that we mix our labor with becomes ours. Now this is
obviously problematic in our modern world, but for Locke this made more sense. He argued that
as long as we leave enough and as good for others, we do no harm by taking something from the
commons, mixing our labor with it and claiming it as our own.

This system of appropriation is an effective one Locke argued. And God gave the earth to the
industrious and rational. At first, this would have meant that man could only take out of the
commons what he himself could use. Anything that he took from the commons that spoiled
before anyone got to use it was a crime against mankind. But man is industrious and clever and
we figured out a way to possess more land than he himself could use.

This was done through the invention of money that this was achieved. Money is stored labor.
And, unlike apples, it can be stored in one’s home for a very long time before it spoils. Money
was invented and its value was agreed upon. It is tacitly consented then that some people would
have more than others. Locke thinks that through tacit and voluntary consent, men agreed upon
an unequal and unfair distribution of the wealth.

In France, shortly after Locke, there would live another man who, while being a Social
Contractarian, would dismiss this idea of property as ridiculous and worse, dangerous. It is to
him that we will now turn.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Rousseau was born in Geneva, Switzerland in 1712. He would however spend most of his life in
France. The French so love the man from Geneva that he is buried in the Pantheon in Paris as
one of the great men of France. Rousseau is regarded as the father of the French Revolution.
And his ideas certainly had a huge impact on the world.

As stated above, Rousseau would reject Locke’s theory of private property. He did not think that
private property could be justified but he did thing he understood why people thought that it
could be justified. In his essay, On the Origin of Inequality, Rousseau writes that:

the true founder of civil society was the first man who enclosed a plot of land and said ‘this is
mine’ and found people simple enough to believe him

We can see straight away that Rousseau will have a different outlook on private property than the
Englishman Locke. The idea of private property evolved in a certain manner. Man’s first
sentiment was his own existence, instincts led him to use the fruits of the earth to preserve
himself. But natural difficulties arose (i.e. the height of trees) and man noticed how ill equipped
he was to deal with these. But he was smarter. He learned to set traps and things of the like. But
this led to its own problems. Man then started to take pride in his own uniqueness. He came
across other humans doing the same thing and found them acting in the same manner (that is, the
love of well being is the sole motive for human action). So man, knowing this, acted towards one
another in a manner that would ensure his safety. Sometimes it was better to join together (more
protection), and other times it was better to be alone (no need to share). Out of this a crude idea
of mutual commitments arose and a crude language and mind development.

The enlightened mind led to industrious minds and man moved into huts instead of caves. So
eventually the idea arose that this is my hut, my land. I want to stay here and use this area to
support myself and my clan so others became a threat and must either go away or be killed. But
it was exactly this procurement of private property that led to conveniences unknown before and
this was the first yoke he imposed on himself without realizing it. Property became something
that man now had to protect. If a man loses his property it makes him unhappy but possessing the
property does not make him happy. It used to be that the only way one could be injured was by
someone physically hurting you. But after the invention of private property, now you could be
injured by someone hurting your property. All property does is in effect extend a persons
vulnerability.

This condition led to alliances which are at first tribal, then local and then national. Slowly these
acquire the idea of merit and beauty which produce preference. Public esteem begins to have
value. And this is the first step toward inequality and also the first step towards vice. This
inequality gives rise to jealousy, outrage and revenge. Rousseau believed that man in his
primitive state is gentle. He becomes corrupt because of the necessity of living with others and
the fight over private property. Property sets man in opposition to each other.
Indeed, private property is really a trick perpetrated on the poor by the rich. In the State of
Nature there were a few people who, for whatever reasons, were better at acquiring property. But
these rich people quickly noticed that there were a lot more poor people than rich people and that
the poor people could easily rise up against the rich. So they got together and made a plan to
trick the poor people. The rich people gathered the poor people together and made them
comfortable. After they were comfortable, one of the rich people took something from one of the
poor people. When the poor person protested, the rich person exclaimed ‘oh, so you believe in a
right to private property as well?’ and the poor person said ‘of course’. And the game was then
over. The rich walked into the room owning everything through force but they walked out of the
room owning everything by right because the poor people gave it to them.

We ran headlong into our chains as Rousseau would put it in another one of his famous essays he
Social Contract. In this essay, Rousseau will take up the idea of the State of Nature. For
Rousseau, men are not born rational, moral or competitive. These are imposed on us by society.
We created society but it now dominates us. There is no natural cause of conflict but we looked
for one and found one in private property.

For Rousseau, the most important question the political philosopher can ask is “is there any way
in which I can submit to a legitimate state without giving up my freedom and autonomy?” And
the solution is found in the social contract. Each of us places our particular will under the
supreme direction of the general will. So long as the general will indeed expresses our particular
will and we follow the general will then we can indeed be said to be obedient and free at the
same time. This is a somewhat difficult concept to understand. The general will is the will of
each particular individual living in the state. But there may be times where the general will
disagrees with my own particular will. However in order to be free, they have to be in agreement.
So in order to be truly free, whenever my own particular will disagrees with the general will, I
need to change my particular will to be in agreement with the general will.

For example, if I think that homosexuals should be allowed to be married but most of my society
does not a process needs to take place. Everyone needs to say what they think and we need to
have a long and open discussion about the topic. At the end of the discussion, everyone votes and
whatever the vote is, I need to change my opinion to match the outcome of the vote. This may
seem a bizarre thing to say. The majority of people are often quite wrong about any one given
issue. But Rousseau is pointing to something significant here. Once the issue has been debated
and decided, if the majority of people in my society hold one opinion and I hold another, then I
would not be free if I still lived within a society where the general will does not express my
particular will. So in order to be free, I need to change my mind. It is this that leads Rousseau to
the quite bizarre statement that we can be ‘forced to be free’.

Scholars have many thoughts on why Rousseau argues in this manner. Some think he’s simply
pointing out a logical correlation. Others think he is trying to make clear that living in society
necessitates a lack of freedom and that he fully understands the contradiction involved in forcing
someone to be free. For our purposes here however we will not go any deeper into this issue. It
will suffice to say that there is a problem here that either Rousseau is pointing out or within his
political philosophy. We will now skip forward a couple hundred years and cross the Atlantic to
discuss the first American political philosopher to make a significant contribution to the Social
Contract tradition (that is, outside of the American revolution).

John Rawls

Rawls was born in 1921 and died in 2002. He is widely regarded as the greatest American
political philosopher. He developed a framework within which to synthesize Kant and the social
contract tradition as the most appropriate basis for a democratic society. In his book A Theory of
Justice he ties justice with equality and fairness. The primary subject of justice for Rawls are the
basic structures of society. Rawls analyzed the way in which the major social institutions fit
together into one system and how this structure distributes fundamental rights and duties. These
structures also shape the division of advantages that arise through social cooperation. (i.e.
political constitution, organization of the economy).

Rawls argues that the social contract is an agreement between all members of society.
Significantly, he is the first major political philosopher of modern Western civilization and as
such he includes women and minorities in his political philosophy. All members of society then
are regarded as free and equal moral persons. Rawls writes:

Every person possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a
whole cannot override…Therefore the rights secured by justice are not subject to political
bargaining or to the calculus of social interests.

Rawls wants to view society as a cooperative adventure for mutual advantage. He offered a
thought experiment in order to analyze what the rules of justice should be. He suggested that we
think about the ideal observe in the original position behind the veil of ignorance. The ideal
observer does not actually exist it is an ideally rational person. The original position is like the
state of nature. It is a point of view from before society began. Rawls asks us to imagine the
ideal observer behind the veil of ignorance. The veil of ignorance is meant to eliminate all
factors of inequality. We are asked to imagine what principles of justice the ideal observer would
come up with in the original position if they knew they had to live under the principles of justice
they made but they did not know any particularities of their position in that society. That is, they
did not know whether they would be rich or poor, male or female, intelligent or not, good
looking or not, well connected or not. If the ideal observer were in the original position behind
the veil of ignorance what sort of principles would they choose?
The first one Rawls thought the ideal observer would come up with is the Equal Liberty
principle. This principle, as Rawls wrote it was:

Each person has an equal right to the most extensive basic liberty compatible with a similar
liberty for others…we all have basic and equal rights in particular with reference to our
personal freedom…freedom of speech, conscience, the right to own property, freedom from
arbitrary arrest.

The second principle is known as the Difference Principle:

Social and economic inequalities, for example inequalities of wealth and authority are just only
if they result in compensating benefits for everyone and in particular for the least advantaged
members of society…not everyone can have equal wealth, health and opportunities but we can
insist that all inequalities are to everyone’s advantage.

For example, it is OK that certain members of society have more money than others. Medical
doctors typically come from the middle class. Medical school costs hundreds of thousands of
dollars. No one from the middle class is going to be able to take on this amount of debt without
being relatively certain that they would have a reasonable chance of being able to pay it off once
they became a practicing doctor. And it benefits all of us that we have medical doctors. The same
can be said about differences in authority. It is ok that we have certain people with more
authority than others. Not everyone should have the authority to sentence other people to jail
time. This should be the role of judges in society.

These two principles make up the basis of Rawls’ principles of justice. All other principles in a
society can be evaluated by how well they support the two principles above. Rawls suggest a
miximin solution. This word combines the word maximum and minimum in order to stress that
we should seek out a solution to problems of justice that helps to maximize the lot of those
minimally advantaged. We do this by focusing on the worst possible outcome for each possible
course of action and choose the least worst. Rawls thought that by focusing on preventing harm
to the most vulnerable in society we would be much less likely to cause unintended damage to
them. Since society is a mutual arrangement, there is no such thing as an unwanted section of
society. All members of society are important and their interest needs to be taken into account.

We should, Rawls argues, evaluate the structures of our society based on the maximin solution
and the principles above. Take for example, our drug laws. Rawls would have us see if they
violate either the equal liberty principle or the difference principle. How do our drug laws affect
the least advantaged amongst us? Do they help or do they hurt? We could (and people do)
evaluate all the structures of our society in this manner.

And So…
In this short introduction to philosophy, we have moved through the various fields of philosophy
rather quickly. We began in epistemology discussing the possibility of human knowledge. We
did not cover the rich history of philosophical thought in this area but rather focused on an
argument that still finds relevance in the modern world. The disagreement between DesCartes
and Hume over the concept of infinity is still debated. Scholars argue that Hume did not prove
DesCartes wrong because more cannot come from less and finite beings such as ourselves could
not come up with these concepts alone. Kant’s attempt to reconcile Hume and DesCartes had
tremendous influence on modern civilization as well. Many scholars point out that there is a pre-
Kantian world and a post-Kantian world, but once Kant had written, all later thinkers had to
respond to him either in agreement or disagreement. One need only prick the pile of
philosophical research in the modern world to determine that this appears to be true. Thenumber
of references made to Kant’s work is in the millions and there are countless journals, associations
and societies devoted to the study of Kant’s works. It is a very impressive legacy indeed.

In moral philosophy we discussed Kant as well. But here it is not Kant’s response to Hume that
is the pivotal point but rather his response to Aristotle. Aristotle had such a tremendous impact
on Western civilization that for hundreds of years he was simply referred to as ‘the Philosopher’.
His virtuous character is still with us today in educational psychology, child psychology, legal
philosophy and more. It is still a good guide to how to live the good life for humans and many
self help books echo Aristotle without even knowing it. Kant though he admired Aristtotle and
thought he was, for the most part, correct, had a grave concern over the point of human nature.
If morality was ours in order to make us happy, there was a problem. Being moral often does not
make us happy. Indeed, doing the right thing is often the most difficult. So Kant thinks there has
to be a more rational reason why nature made us this way, as for both Aristotle and Kant, nature
does nothing in vain. The utilitarians reject both Aristotle and Kant and want to return to the
hedonistic idea of the pursuit of pleasure is good and the avoidance of pain is good. It’s literally
that simple. They argue that Kant and Aristotle and others like them simply make morality too
difficult, too cumbersome and too complicated. And then there’s Nietzsche’s ethical egoism.
This position argues that morality doesn’t actually exist at all but rather it is a mechanism used
by those in power to control those without power. And that it has indeed been very successful at
this. Only a fool would fall for moral principles but that yes, most people are fools and will fall
for moral principles.

Finally, we discussed the ultimate application of philosophy, political philosophy. There have
been many, many more political philosophers than the few we have discussed here. Western
civilization has had many great thinkers who have political philosophies but we only had time to
discuss the ones most relevant to an introduction to political philosophy, indeed, only a partial
introduction. Plato has been extremely influential throughout the last twenty five hundred years
since he wrote. His Republic is a classic of any good liberal arts education where he argues
some surprising things. His defense of censorship, his noble lie, his division of the state into rigid
classes all strike the modern reader as a bit bizarre. But it must be remembered that Plato here
was seeking an ideal, and if we want an ideal society there are certain truths, Plato argued, that
must be told. Some people should not be allowed to reproduce. Parents are not naturally good.
Professionals should raise children. We may disagree with Plato but he is always rewarding to
explore.

And it is hard to overstate the role the Social Contractarians have played in the development of
modern Western civilization and to some extent, Eastern civilization. The United States of
America, the most powerful civilization (militarily, economically and culturally) ever to exist is
founded on a social contract called the Constitution. This alone speaks volumes about how
important this intellectual tradition has been. And it is likely to remain influential for the
foreseeable future. Delving into it then is inherently rewarding as we come to understand
ourselves and our civilization in a much more enlightened manner.

The study of philosophy should not stop with this book. As we began, all rational humans are
philosophers, some are just better trained than others. If we do not want to spend our lives living
in Plato’s cave watching shadows and listening to echoes we need to make an effort to see the
light, even if it can be painful at times.