Lecture 1 - Introduction [January 11, 2011]

Chapter 1. Introduction and Course Overview [00:00:00] Professor Tamar Gendler: So, welcome to Philosophy and the Science of Human Nature. It's nice see so many of you here today. I hope to see more of you here again on Thursday. And my goal today is to try to give you a sense of what kind of course this is going to be so that you can make an informed decision about whether this is a course that you actually want to enroll in for credit. With that aim in mind, there are three things I want to do in today's lecture. In the first part of the lecture, I'm just going to give you a very broad overview of what kind of course this is, and to say a few words about what my goals are for the course. In the bulk of the lecture, what I'm going to do is to run through three examples of the kinds of topics that we're going to be addressing this semester, so that you have a sense of what kind of material we're going to be talking about. And in the final section of the course, I'll say a few things about what it is that makes this course distinctive, and a few things about the course's requirements. So the course has this perplexing cross-listed title. It's called Philosophy and the Science of Human Nature, and it's listed both in Philosophy and in Cognitive Science, and it's a course for which you can get credit in the Psychology major. So what kind of course is this? Well, in some ways, this is a course like Directed Studies Philosophy or Philosophy 125-126. That is, we're going to be reading works by Plato, by Aristotle, by Epictetus, by Boethius, by Hobbes, by Hume, and by Mill--all major philosophers from the Western philosophical tradition. We're going to be reading them roughly historically, with an attempt to get at some of the kinds of questions that one would get at in a traditional philosophy course. In addition, you'll get some of the material that you would get in an ethics course. So one of the topics that we'll cover in Philosophy and the Science of Human Nature are the three main ethical theories in the Western philosophical tradition. We'll talk about utilitarianism, we'll talk about deontology, and we'll talk about virtue ethics, and we'll talk about how those relate to one another. You'll also get some of the materials that you would get if you took an introduction to political philosophy course. We'll very briefly look at the work of Thomas Hobbes on the legitimacy of the state, and then we'll read and think about the debate between John Rawls and Robert Nozick about how much weight should be given to the relative values of equality on one hand and liberty on the other. So in that regard, this is, in some ways, a standard philosophy course in the moral and political tradition. It's not a course in metaphysics; it's not a course in epistemology; it's not a course where we're going to be talking about issues like free will or the mind-body problem, all of which could legitimately fall under the topic of philosophy of human nature.

But what's distinctive about this course is that in addition to the contributions that are made by the philosophical side of the equation, we're also going to be drawing from a number of other disciplines. So one of the main themes of the course will be to think about how the questions raised by the traditional philosophers that I've mentioned already are picked up in the contemporary cognitive science tradition. In particular, how they're picked up by what I see as one of the main strands in contemporary cognitive science, the strand that looks at the relation between human beings as rational creatures, capable of a certain kind of calculated and reflective understanding of themselves and their place in the world, and, on the other hand, human beings as evolved animals who are subject to forces that lie beyond their rational control. In light of that recognition that human beings are capable of being affected in multiple ways, we'll look at a number of writings from psychology. So we'll read some Freud; we'll have a discussion of cognitive behavioral therapy; we'll talk about post-traumatic stress disorder; we'll have discussion of happiness, using a wonderful book written by a Yale alumnus, Jonathan Haidt. We'll look at some work on self-regulation, on love and friendship, and we'll also look at empirical work on topics like moral reasoning and punishment, and social psychological work on situations and attitudes. So a lot of the material that we'll address in this course will come from psychology. But some of it will also come from the tradition of political science. So in the course of discussing the legitimacy of the state, we'll introduce ourselves to the notion of the prisoners' dilemma. We'll talk about the tragedy of the commons, and in the closing section of the course, we'll talk about the role of rhetoric and argument in political persuasion. We'll also draw from the field of behavioral economics. One of the reading assignments is to listen to Daniel Kahneman's Nobel Prize speech, accepting the Nobel Price on behalf of himself and his collaborator, Amos Tversky, for the extraordinary work they did founding behavioral economics. But we'll also look at some additional work in the dual processing tradition, and we have some excerpts from Dan Ariely's delightful book, public book on behavioral economics. Finally, we'll even draw a little bit from literature. We're going to read a short excerpt from the Iliad; we're going to read a short story by Ursula LeGuin; and in the second to last lecture of the course, we'll look at what Plato has to say about the role of literature and artistic representation in affecting human self-understanding. So what I'm going to try to do in the course is to bring together these eight fields in a way that provides a coherent story about what kind of things human beings are, and how we can learn about what kind of things human beings are from these various perspectives. In slogan form, the structure of the course is dead guy on Tuesday, cog sci on Thursday. Except not all the philosophers we're reading are dead. And not all of them are guys. And not all the other fields are cog sci. And in fact, most things are going to be covered together on Tuesday and Thursday. And there are going to be sections. But other than that, the slogan.

So that's an overview of the kinds of disciplines that contribute to the course. Let me say a bit about the specific topics that I hope to address in the course of the semester. So the first overarching topic, and I roughly organized the syllabus under these three topics, but in some way, each of them will keep re-emerging throughout the semester. The first topic is the topic of happiness and flourishing. What does the ancient Western philosophical tradition say about what it takes for human beings to thrive in a meaningful sense, and how does that connect to work that's been done more recently in various literary and scientific traditions about what it is that enables human beings to flourish? What is it about human nature that can give us some clue about what kind of thing authentic happiness might be? That's the first set of questions that we'll address. It turns out that the ancient philosophers' answer to that question is that human beings thrive when their souls are well-ordered, to use the ancient metaphor. When the parts of their souls that might pull in different directions are in a certain kind of harmony; and the ancient picture is that when that happens, human beings behave in a moral way. And so the second part of the course will look at both what it feels like from the inside to behave in ways that are conventionally considered moral, and from a higher level, what it is that we mean when we say that an act is moral or immoral. So as I mentioned, we'll look at the three main Western philosophical conceptions of morality, and we'll also look at some interesting related questions. Like, why is punishment justified when it is? And is the justification for punishment psychological or ethical? And in the final unit of the course, we'll move beyond the individual into society as a whole, and ask some questions about what it is that makes political structures legitimate, and how it is that state or civic institutions ought to be organized in order to allow human beings to flourish. So those are the three main topics that we'll be addressing, and as you can see, on the syllabus that I've handed out, there are highlighted examples of a few of those particular topics that we're addressing on page one of the syllabus, and a much more detailed set of questions on pages three and four. But in addition to being about the content of these questions, this is also a course that's going to encourage you to think about the methodology of each of the disciplines from which we're drawing. So it's my goal to introduce you to a number of traditional philosophical discussions of the human being, but it's also my goal to get you to think about what these philosophical discussions have in common, and why it is that thinking about things in the way that philosophy thinks about things can be valuable for answering questions that we care about. And we'll do something very similar with respect to the other disciplines. We'll look at the literature from psychology and behavioral economics and political science and literature, and we'll ask: what is it about this distinctive approach to answering these questions that provides us with a complementary insight on the issues that the philosophers have raised?

And finally, I'm going to ask you to think not only in the context of this class, but in the context of the other classes you're taking about the ways in which the material to which you're being exposed sheds light through multiple disciplinary perspectives on the set of questions that we're concerned with. Chapter 2. First Example of Course Topics: the Ring of Gyges [00:11:30] So that's the opening segment of the lecture. That what I had called the overview and course topics section of the class. And what I want to do now is to give you three examples of the kinds of topics that we'll be addressing this semester. So the first example I'm going to give is actually drawn from the readings that we'll be doing for Thursday. And it's a story from Plato's Republic called the story of the ring of Gyges. I'll give you a little bit more background on Thursday about where this story fits in the context of the book from which it's drawn, but for now, all you need to know is that there's a character named Glaucon who's actually one of the brothers of Plato, the author of this dialogue. And Glaucon is in conversation with the great ancient Greek philosopher Socrates, and he's trying to convince Socrates that when people act morally, the only reason they do it is because they can't get away with it. So even if you've shopped only for today, you'll have a chance to hear some Plato. So I'm going to read aloud to you these numbers on the right. I'll explain to you next class, they're called Stephanus numbers. They enable you, whichever translation of Plato you're using to find the same passage. And what I'm reading to you from is from Stephanus pages 359 to 360. So: "There was once a shepherd named Gyges in the service of the ruler of Lydia. There was a giant thunderstorm, and an earthquake broke open the ground and created a chasm at the place where he was tending his sheep. Seeing this, he was filled with amazement and went down into it. And there he saw a hollow bronze horse. There were window-like openings in it, and peeking in, he saw a corpse wearing nothing but a gold ring on his finger. So he took the ring and came out of the chasm. "He wore the ring at his usual monthly meeting that reported to the king on the state of the flocks. And as he was sitting among the others, he happened to turn the setting of the ring towards himself, to the inside of the hand. And when he did this, he became invisible to those sitting near him, and they went on talking as if he had gone. He wondered about this, and fingering the ring, he turned the setting outwards again, and became visible. So he experimented with the ring to test whether it indeed had this power, and it did. If he turned the setting inward, he became invisible, and if he turned it outward, he became visible again. "When he realized this, he arranged to become one of the messengers sent to report to the king. And when he arrived there, he seduced the king's wife, with her help, attacked and killed the king, and took over the kingdom."

So that's the story of the ring of Gyges. Now why is it that Glaucon tells that story? Glaucon tells that story with the expectation that you, upon hearing this, will think that you would act as Gyges did, if you had the opportunity to get away with crime without being caught. Glaucon's conclusion from this story is that those who practice justice, those who act in conformity with the moral code of their society, do so because they lack the power to do injustice. They act in that way because they fear the punishment of society. They don't act in that way because it's in any way valuable to them. And the reading that we're going to do for this Thursday's class includes [both] the text that surrounds the story that I just told you. So the setup wherein Glaucon raises the challenge of which [this] is supposed to be an example, and the conversation between Glaucon and Socrates that follows the posing of the challenge through this story. And in addition, we're going to read some empirical psychological work on the question of what people do when they think they are unobserved. So we're going to ask the question whether, as a matter of fact, people would, and whether, as a matter of fact, people should behave as Gyges did. That's the first example of the kind of topic we're going to address in the course. Chapter 3. Second Example of Course Topics: Trolley problems [00:16:29] A second set of topics that we'll address in the course will take off from a particular philosophical example that has become quite popular in contemporary discussions of morality, but which is actually traceable, about 40 years old, to some writings by Philippa Foot, and the philosopher Judith Thomson. And the case, with which I suspect some of you are familiar, involves a trolley, which is hurtling down the track in the direction of five people, and if the trolley is not turned, it will hit this group of five. Now, the question that philosophers like to pose is the following. Suppose that there were a switch, which you could use that would divert the trolley so that instead of hitting the five people, it would go down a branch track and hit one. When we have our course clickers, we'll be able to do this scientifically. For now, I just want a show of hands. How many people think it is either morally permitted or morally required, that is, either permitted or required, not forbidden, to switch the trolley in such a way that it hits the one person, rather than the five? How many think it's either permitted or required to switch the trolley so that one person dies rather than five? [pause] OK. And how many of you think it's morally forbidden to turn the trolley so that it kills one person rather than five? How many of you think it's morally forbidden, prohibited? [pause] OK. So as I said, we don't have the clickers, but a vast majority of the class believes that it's either permitted or required to divert the trolley. Now, suppose we had a slightly different situation. Instead of the one person being on the tracks, there is, rather, a bridge that rests over the trolley tracks. And atop the bridge, a large gentleman of ample girth such that were you to dislodge him from his present location

using the same switch that you used in the last case, he would be sufficiently weighty to prevent the trolley from hitting the five. How many of you think it is morally required or morally permitted to push the fat man off the bridge to prevent the trolley from hitting the five? [pause] And how many of you think it is morally prohibited? Hands up again? [pause] All right. We have a very, very different spread this time. Now suppose we end up at the hospital, and the five who were lying on the track when the trolley didn't hit them are terribly injured in such a way that one needs a heart, one needs a lung, one needs a leg, one needs an arm, one needs an eye. And in walks a healthy gentleman with exactly the organs required to save the five. How many of you think it is morally required or morally permitted to cut up the one to save the five? [pause] I won't sit with you in the hospital waiting room. That was three hands. How many of you think it is morally prohibited? [pause] All right. Suppose there is a bear running towards you. You're standing in line of people, and there's a bear running towards you. How many of you think it's morally permitted to move out of the bear's way if the bear is running towards you? [pause] OK. Now when that happens, the bear's going to eat the guy who is right behind you. OK. Case number two: Suppose there's a bear running towards you. How many of you think it's morally permitted to reach behind you, and take that guy and put him in front of you to shield you from the bear? [pause] Very different distribution of hands. OK. What's going on here? In the original switch case where we turn the trolley, one person's going to die if we turn the trolley, and five are going to live. In the push the fat man case, if we push the fat man, one person's going to die, and five people are going to live. In the patient in the hospital case, we bring him into the hospital and cut him up. One person's going to die, and five people are going to live. In the bear case, when you duck, and he gets the guy behind you, the guy behind you dies, and you live. In the bear case, where you take the guy behind you, put him in front of you, and use him as a shield, the guy behind you dies and you live. So the second set of topics that I want to let you know we'll be talking about is the following: What is it that explains the differences in our reactions to these cases? Is there genuinely a morally relevant difference between diverting the trolley so that it kills the one rather than the five, and pushing the fat man, so the trolley kills the one rather than the five? Or is the difference in our reaction to those two cases merely psychological? Is there really a moral difference between ducking in such a way that a harm that was heading towards you hit somebody else instead, and shields you, so that a harm that is heading towards you is visited upon someone else instead? What is it that explains the differences in our reactions in these cases? What moral implications does that have, and what psychological implications does that have? So that's the second set of examples that I want to give you, a topic that we'll be addressing. Chapter 4. Third Example of Course Topics: Procrastination [00:23:07]

Third set of examples. I imagine some of you are familiar with the following situation. You go to the library intending sincerely to read the Plato that has been assigned to you for the next lecture, and you find yourself, instead, answering e-mails. Or you set for yourself a dietary regimen, according to which you will eat large amounts of fruit and vegetables, and instead you find yourself tempted by cake. Or you commit yourself to saving up money for some sort of long-term goal, and instead, find yourself distracted by the prospects of March break in Jamaica with your roommate, or an iPod touch, or a new PlayStation 2 device that you can use to distract yourself from your reading. So what is it about human beings that we can form these sorts of plans, and then not act on them? And what is it that we can do to make ourselves stick to commitments that we've made in moments of reflection? So the reading that I assigned to you for today is a very, very brief chapter from Dan Ariely's popular book. It's a chapter on procrastination. And in it, he describes a number of strategies that we can use to help ourselves stick to long-term commitments. So, for example, one of the things that people do if they want to get themselves to read is that they go to the library, and they surround themselves by other people who are reading. If you are in a social setting where other people are conforming to a standard that you had set for yourself to conform to, you may find yourself conforming to that standard, and not doing that which you will ultimately regret. If you find yourself incredibly tempted by food that you have prohibited to yourself, it may be helpful to limit your access to it. In the chapter that we read, Dan Ariely describes an example of what he called the iced credit card solution, where, if you have a tendency to make impulse purchases on the Internet, you take your credit card, and you put it in a glass of water, which you put into the freezer. And then, if you want to buy something, you remove the credit card from the freezer, and if, when the water has melted, you still want to buy it, then go ahead. So restricting our immediate access to items that are tempting is a way of getting around the problem. A third way of getting around these sorts of problems involves automatizing the behavior that you wish to encourage. So if I set up a system on my credit card where every time I spend $10 an additional $10 goes into my savings account, it will turn out that rather than spending my money on that which I will buy, I will save the money for that to which I am committed. So the philosophical and psychological question that this part of the course raises is the following: What sort of beings are there that are capable, simultaneously, of planning reflectively and of not acting on the basis of their plan? It looks an awful lot like exactly the sort of people that we were getting information about in our previous two examples. They're the kind of beings who have a reflective self, which is capable of reason and commitment, and also aspects of their selves that respond non-reflectively to features in the environment. So given that, what sorts of strategies are available to help these kinds of beings stick to their reflectively endorsed plans? The basic answer is that there are two kinds of strategies. One kind of strategy involves increasing the relative utility of the reflective commitment,

that is, making it more salient to you in whatever kind of way. That reading and broccoli and piggy banks are valuable. And the other sort of strategy involves reducing the appeal of the temporarily tempting strategy: reducing access to e-mail, reducing access to the food, making it harder to take the trip. So one of the things that we'll talk about in the context of the course, both in small ways and in large ways, is this fulcrum point of procrastination as a way of understanding a large number of social structures: laws, moral codes, punishments, strategies for self-regulation. All of these are aspects of society that play off of the two fundamental strategies just described. They play off of how it is that either we make certain things that we reflectively endorse more valuable, or how we make certain things that we wish not to pursue less acceptable. So that's the third example of the kind of topic that we'll be talking about this semester. Chapter 5. What is Distinctive About this Course [00:29:45] So what I want to do in the final few minutes of the course is to say a little bit about some distinctive features of the class. So the first thing, as some of you may have noticed, is that very inconspicuously, in the back of our room, is a videographer. And the videographer in the back of our room is here because this class is being videotaped for the Open Yale Courses network. That means that there is a chance that your voice will be captured on audiotape. And if that happens, we'll need to obtain your permission to reproduce your voice on the iTunes University version of this class. But it's also your chance for fame and fortune, dudes. It's my hope that the fact that this course is with Open Yale Courses will be as unobtrusive as possible, but if any of you have any concerns about it, please feel free to be in touch. The second, and I think more important thing, that's distinctive about this course, is that this course is, in some ways, about itself. The pedagogical features of this course are designed with the fundamental insight that underlies all of the readings in mind. What I am assuming is that on reflection, all of you are committed to reading, and learning, and engaging with the material. And my goal is to make that as easy, and exciting, and interesting for you as possible. So as you've noticed from the syllabus, those of you who have had a chance to look at it, there are almost weekly assignments in this class. But the weekly assignments are designed to make you want to engage with the material. So, for example, the very first assignment for this course, which is described on the back page of the blue handout, asks you to think about whether you want to commit yourself, voluntarily, to not having Internet access during this class, and then to explain your decision, making reference to the work on procrastination that we read for this week. Throughout the semester, my goal will be to make exercises that engage you in that way. One of the exercises involves writing a review of a short story that we read from the perspective of one of the two philosophers that we've read. One of the assignments involves designing a week of a future version of this course. So though there are ten weekly

assignments, it's my hope that engaging in those assignments will keep you connected to the course. In fact, a number of the readings on the syllabus that appears before you were suggestions made by students who took the seminar version of this course in previous years. In addition, as you saw from the trolley cases, I'm going to be asking you, in the context of class, to think about cases and examples. And in doing that, it's been found that making use of clickers is enormously helpful to keep students engaged. So you'll notice that the second part of next week's assignment asks you, if you're enrolled in the course for credit, to pick up a clicker at the Bass Library, and to register its number on the course website. So once the course gets going, starting in the middle of the second week, we'll be making use of clickers. Finally, one of the things that makes this course distinctive is that I actually spent last year, as the Yale Daily News reports, as a full-time student. I had a grant from the Mellon Foundation that allowed me to take classes, and so I spent most of last year sitting in the back row of classrooms like this one, listening to lectures like this one. Which is how I got the idea about the turning off the Internet thing. Ahem. But it also helped me realize that the rhythm of the semester is a complicated one. So as you'll see, the second sentence of the Yale Daily News article notes, "Her grades lately have been sliding a little--from an excellent on the first two assignments to only a checkmark for completion on the most recent two." I promise I will not post your grades in the Yale Daily News. But I promise that I am, as a result of that experience, profoundly aware of the ways in which structuring assignments with enough advance notice is crucial for allowing students to succeed in the class. So I've tried to be incredibly explicit on the syllabus. And if you look at pages four and five of the syllabus, you'll see that there are five kinds of requirements for the course. The first and perhaps the most important requirement of the course are the set of readings that I have assigned you. And these readings come in two forms. Roughly half of them come from the six books which I have ordered on your behalf from Labyrinth Books. All of the books are low-priced student editions. All of them are easily available in used form. And together, even purchased new at full price, they add up to $80. So some of the assignments come either from the three classical works that we'll be reading, Plato, Aristotle, and Epictetus, the two contemporary works that we're looking at, Jonathan Haidt's Happiness Hypothesis, and a book by Jonathan Shea called Achilles in Vietnam, and finally, I've asked you to purchase a small $15 philosophy dictionary, which is enormously useful for looking up terms and concepts with which you might be unfamiliar. I realize, however, that some of you aren't going to have decided whether you're taking the course before this Thursday. And so even though half of Thursday's reading comes from this book, I have put up the relevant pages on our Classes*v2 server. So you can do the reading for Thursday, even if you haven't purchased the book. So roughly half the readings

come from those books. Roughly half the readings come from articles, and all of those readings are available on the *v2 server for next class. But in addition to choosing books that I think are acceptable and interesting, I've also made an effort to provide you with reading guides to the books in a way that will orient you in them. So if you look at the first three pages of the blue handout, you will see an example of a reading guide, and not just an example of a reading guide, it's the reading guide for the reading on Thursday. And you'll see that it does three things. The first thing that it does, is it gives you a bit of background about the author that we're reading, and the text from which we're doing the reading. The second thing that it does, is that it highlights the terms and concepts which I'm hoping that you will get out of the material. Notions and terms that will enable you to express thoughts that you might have had, and the vocabulary that will let you be in conversation with others. And the final thing that the reading guide has are a set of questions to focus your attention as you do the reading. There's no requirement that you write out answers to these. You can use them to make notes for yourselves; you can use them in conversation with your classmates. But you will have, for every one of the required readings, this amount of guidance, and for each of the recommended and optional readings, information about the author. Second important thing about the course is lecture and sections. I really like seeing all these faces, and I really would love to see them all semester long. I promise to give you at least one fun slide, and probably more, per lecture. So I really hope you'll come [to lecture], cause when I post the slides [on the course website], you can't see the animation of the nice shepherd. So I will try to make lectures as engaging as possible, and likewise with sections. We will make an effort to make these settings where you can genuinely engage with the material and with one another. It has been pointed out to me that one of the section times available is Thursdays from 10:30 to 11:20, which is, of course, when the lecture meets. Obviously that's a typographical error, and we'll be adding additional section times to make up for that. Section registration happens in the usual way. There will, in addition, be ten brief directed exercises. I've already said a bit to you about them, and there's information on the syllabus about what point values those have in determining your final grades. There are two short essays. There will be three assigned, and you can choose which two of those you like. And finally, there will be a final exam where, in keeping with the theory of the course, I will distribute every single one of the questions that may appear on the exam in advance. I will encourage you to learn that material in a focused and structured way. And the exam will consist of a proper subset of those questions, which you have been given to prepare in advance. So that's an overview of what I plan to do this semester, first of what kind of course this is, second, three examples of topics that we're going to address, third, some of the things that

are distinctive about the course and some of its requirements. So what questions do you have? Yeah? Student: [inaudible] Professor Tamar Gendler: So the question is, are the videos for the lectures going to be posted? And the answer is, the videos for the lectures take time to be edited and processed, so they will be posted, but they won't be posted during the class. I will post the slides after each lecture, but as you saw today, the slides don't give you that much information. Yes? Student: [inaudible] Professor Tamar Gendler: No. Everything in the course is done electronically; so all assignments for the course are to be submitted on the Classes*v2 server under assignments. And the deadline for the first written exercise is actually next Tuesday at 10 AM, but because that's still during shopping period, that exercise will be accepted without penalty until Friday. But everything for the class, in terms of submission and return of exercises, will be done online on our v2 site. Yeah? Student: When are sections going to start? Professor Tamar Gendler: When are sections going to start? Sections will begin the third week of the semester. Yeah? Student: [inaudible] Professor Tamar Gendler: Yes. So if you look at the sample directed exercise which I gave you, which is on the back side of the blue sheet. So the question is, it says that directed exercises are 1% to 7% each; will I tell you how much a directed exercise is worth? Answer, yes. So if you turn over the blue sheet on the back, you'll see that the directed exercise for next week has two parts. One, take out a clicker; that's worth one point. Two, tell me whether you're going to turn off your Internet and why. Briefly. So the directed exercise will always say: here's the question, here's the point value for the question. Anything else? We're actually at the end of time! So you all have paced your questions extraordinarily well, and I look forward to seeing you next class. [end of transcript]

Lecture 2 - The Ring of Gyges: Morality and Hypocrisy [January 13, 2011]
Chapter 1. Introducing Plato and The Republic [00:00:00] Professor Tamar Gendler: So today's lecture is about the question of the challenge that Glaucon posed in the story of the ring of Gyges. The question is: what sort of motivations do we have for acting morally, and what expectations should we have with respect to those around us about whether they act in that way--for reasons intrinsic to moral motivation, or simply because they wish to appear a particular way? So what I want to start by doing, is tell you a little bit about the extraordinary person whose dialogue, The Republic, we read excerpts from today. It's hard to overestimate the influence of Plato on the Western intellectual tradition. There is no educated person in the Western world in the last 2500 years who wasn't influenced in some way or another by the thought and by the framework of understanding that Plato provided for us some 2500 years ago. Plato was an extremely interesting figure. He was born into an aristocratic family in Athens. Some think that he was descended from one of the Athenian kings, but regardless, it's clear that the family of which he was a part were among the leaders of Athenian political society. Several of his uncles had been part of a coup in the government that took place several years before Plato came to maturity. And the expectation of people like Plato was that they would go into civics or government, public leadership. It was as if he were a Kennedy or a Bush or a Clinton. He came from a family with a long history of political engagement. And the assumption was that he would become politically engaged, himself. But interestingly, for reasons about which there are great speculations, Plato came under the influence of a man about thirty years his elder named Socrates, who, in the portraits that we have of him, looked remarkably like Plato himself. [Image: two faded marble statues] Socrates was a gadfly. He wandered around Athens and asked people to reflect on their commitments. Asked people to think about what the nature of fundamental things like justice, and truth, and reality, and friendship, and love, and honesty were. He asked people to reflect on common opinion, and to ask themselves what, of the things that they believed, were well grounded, and what, of the things that they believed, were simply matters of received opinion. And in part because of his provocation, Socrates was sentenced to death in 399, before the Common Era. When Plato was roughly thirty years old, Plato attended the death of his great teacher. And he describes the story of the trial at which Socrates was accused of corrupting the youth of Athens in an extraordinary dialogue known as The Apology. And the legacy that The Apology provides is something like the legacy that the Gospels provide for the life of Jesus. It's a story of a person willing to die for the sake of principle in a way that became a trope for Western civilization.

So in an extraordinary painting, which you can see if you go to the Metropolitan Museum in New York City, there is a depiction of the death of Socrates. [Image: Marats Death of Socrates] And here is Socrates, drinking from the chalice of hemlock, which is to put him to death. Here are his disciples, including Plato, calmly at the end of the bed, and Crito, holding his leg. Up the stairs here, which you can't see, are some other figures leaving. But what's extraordinary about this picture is that it was painted in 1787 by one of the artists involved in the French revolution. It was, in fact, displayed to Thomas Jefferson, who admired it greatly. And one of the striking things about its composition is that in some ways, it echoes Leonardo da Vinci's famous painting of The Last Supper, where those of you who are familiar with the painting know Jesus sits at the center of the table surrounded by disciples. Whereas that is a story of death for the sake of faith, Socrates's story is a story of death for the sake of reason. And the idea that a life lived on the basis of principle, recorded by disciples who can explain the motivation for that life, the idea that that can influence thousands of years of history and can inspire political change and principled commitment, is one of the legacies that Plato left us. After Socratess death, Plato devoted himself to a life of learning, and in 385 before the Common Era, started what many call the first university, or academy, in the Western world. At that academy, Plato trained many of the thinkers of ancient Athens, including Aristotle, whose works we'll be reading next week. While there, Plato composed a number of works that have endured. Among them is The Republic, which we read excerpts from for today. And here's a particularly beautiful third century manuscript of The Republic, one of the tens of thousands of documents discovered at Oxyrhynchus in Egypt, roughly a century ago. And I've put the spelling up there, so that those of you who are intrigued can go and read about the story of the Oxyrhynchus papyri, which is one of the most incredible detective stories of discovery of a huge trove of documents. As I said again, only a century ago, many of them retrieved only during and after the First World War. So Plato's Republic, as I mentioned, is one of roughly thirty dialogues that Plato composed. So you might have noticed in the course of reading it, as the reading guide indicated, that it's not written as a treatise. It's written in the form of a conversation. And except for some letters that we have of Plato, nearly all of the work of his that we have comes in the form of dialogue. And they address almost every philosophical topic imaginable. The nature of knowledge, the nature of truth, the nature of love, the nature of friendship, and so on. The Republic, in particular, is focused on the question of how society ought to be structured to allow human beings to flourish. And the work, as we've inherited it, is structured into ten books, of which we will read in this class excerpts from the second book and most of the tenth. In the particular part that we're reading, we overhear a conversation among three characters. One of them is Plato's teacher Socrates, the fellow with the snub nose that I showed you the

slide [of] earlier, and the other two are Plato's brothers, Glaucon and Adeimantus. And the conversation that we hear takes place first between Socrates and Glaucon, and then between Socrates and Adeimantus. But we're, of course, not reading off the Oxyrhynchus papyrus. We're not even reading, as some students at Yale are this semester, the text in the original Greek. There's a seminar being offered in my department on Plato's Republic, a full semester, during which they are reading the text in ancient Greek. And there's an extraordinary Yale-London collaboration of a decade during which one week each year, professors from Yale and professors from London get together and read one book of Plato's Republic. So this is a book that is read seriously here. We, however, are fortunate enough to be reading an edition, which I've asked all of you to purchase, which looks like this. And I want to explain to you why I've asked you to buy a book given that, as many of you might have noticed, the translation of the Republic, a late nineteenth century translation by Benjamin Jowett, is available, on the Internet. And I just want to say a few words about what value there is in getting editions of books which are designed to help students engage seriously with the material. So in the copy of The Republic that I've asked you to purchase, there are extensive introductory materials. There are extraordinarily helpful footnotes. There's an annotated bibliography in the preparatory material that tells you what books to look at if you're interested in Plato. There's an incredibly valuable index. And in the margins are what I've told you are called Stephanus numbers, which allow you to make reference to any other translation. Chapter 2. Glaucons Challenge [00:11:39] So let's now move to the substance of the material that we read for today. What is it that Glaucon, Plato's brother, is seeking to do in the course of his conversation with Socrates? There are three questions that Glaucon wants to answer. The first is that he wants to say something about the nature and origin of justice. How is it that people come to behave in cooperative ways, and what is it that we speak of when we talk about the norms of justice? This is a topic that we'll discuss when we get to Hobbes, and so I'm not going to say more today about the particular argument that Glaucon offers there. What I want to focus on, instead, are two things: Glaucon's second and third questions. The first is Glaucon's claim that people act justly unwillingly. That the only reason people act and conform with the laws of morality is because they will gain good reputations thereby. And the second is Glaucon's claim that they are right to do so. So the text begins with a fundamental contrast. One that is useful, not only in the context of Glaucon's discussion of justice, but one that is fundamental throughout Plato's work: and that's the contrast between the way things seem and the way things are. And it's a crucial insight to recognize that seeming and being can come apart, and that in some cases, our concern is with the way things appear, and in other cases, our concern is with the way things are.

So the text actually begins with a challenge that Glaucon raises to Socrates. He says: do you want to seem to have persuaded us that it is better to be just than unjust, or do you want truly to have persuaded us? And clearly, Socratess goal is the latter. He wants to engage in true persuasion. This theme of seeming versus being is then taken up by Glaucon, who asks Socrates the question, whether there's value in being just or whether the value of justice comes merely from appearing to be that way. So we find a contrast in the opening pages between three kinds of value that things can have. Things can be intrinsically valuable--valuable as ends in themselves, valuable for what they are. Socrates gives the example here of things like joy, and harmless pleasures. These are things we value not because of what they provide in addition, but things that we value as ends in themselves. There are, by contrast, things that are merely instrumentally valuable. Things that are valuable as means. Things that are valuable in enabling us to do something else, or in seeming to be a particular way. And into this category fall things like money, which is valuable, let me remind you, not as an end in itself, but as a means to other ends. And, for example, things like seeming dangerous. It's what you're trying to do in an evolutionary sense, or as a nation, is to prevent others from attacking you, it doesn't matter whether you are dangerous. What matters is that you seem dangerous. And there are, of course, things that are valuable for both of these. Things like, Socrates says, sight, which we value both because it enables us to do things, and because it brings pleasure in itself. Or health. Or learning. Or knowledge. And the question which Glaucon and Socrates are disputing is, into which category justice falls. Now, if we had our clickers, this would be a chance for me to reengage all of you by asking you into which category Glaucon thinks justice falls, and into which category Socrates thinks justice falls. But in our last low-tech day, I will instead ask you to raise your hands. Into which of the categories, intrinsically valuable, instrumentally valuable, or both, does Glaucon think justice falls? How many think he thinks justice is merely intrinsically valuable? [pause] How many think he thinks it's merely instrumentally valuable? [pause] And how many think he thinks it's both? [pause] By contrast, Socrates. Intrinsically valuable? [pause] Instrumentally valuable? [pause] Both? [pause] So it's a dispute between them. Both of them expect that there is value to seeming just, but the dispute between them is about whether, in addition, there is value to being just. Does it matter that you actually act in a just way, or does it matter only that you seem to act in a just way? Now, in order to answer this question, Glaucon, as a character in Plato's Republic, makes use of a technique that is and has become one of the fundamental techniques in philosophical thought. It's basically an application of scientific method to our idea. If you're

trying to figure out what makes a seed grow--does it require soil, does it require water, does it require light, does it require air, does it require you to sing sweetly as you walk past it?-what you do is, you conduct a controlled experiment, and you look and see: If you have the seed with water but no soil, does it grow? If you have a seed with air but no singing, does it grow? In this way, Glaucon engages in a number of imaginative exercises to ask what people would do if just behavior were divorced from its typical consequences. So he asks us to imagine somebody who acts either in a just or an unjust way. And to think about what their motivations would be if the consequences were one of a certain kind. So in ordinary cases, if you act morally, you are perceived as acting morally, and if you act immorally, you are perceived as acting immorally. The question that he asks us to consider in the story of the ring of Gyges, which I related last lecture, is how people would act if they were perceived identically, regardless of how it is that they genuinely behave. If your act of immorality were invisible to the world, if you could behave immorally and nobody would see you, so that your reputation remained unscathed, how is it that you would behave? Glaucon's suggestion with the story of the ring of Gyges is that under those circumstances, you would behave as the unjust one does. But in case you aren't convinced by that story, he tells a second story after the ring of Gyges. It's the story of the inversion, and he says this. Suppose the person who acts justly is perceived by everyone as acting unjustly, and the person who acts unjustly is perceived as acting justly. Would you continue to behave in accord with the standards of morality if the opposite reputation attached to you? Now, we can contrast this question about morality with two cases where it seems clear in the first that we value something merely instrumentally, and where it seems clear in the second that we value something both intrinsically and instrumentally. So if the act that you are engaged in is one of taking a repulsive medicine, and if under normal circumstances when you take the medicine, you get better, and when you don't take the medicine, you stay ill, then you will presumably, if you want to get better, take the medicine. In a Gyges scenario, where regardless of whether you take the medicine, you get better, you won't be inclined to take the medicine. And certainly in an inverted scenario, where if you take the medicine, you'd stay ill, and if you don't take it, you get better, you won't be inclined to take the medicine. When things are of merely instrumental value, we can read the motivation off the consequences. The question is this: is justice just like taking a medicine, something that we value because of an end that it produces, but not because of the medicine itself, or is it more like sight? Suppose that, as is the case in normal circumstances, when you see, you have visual experience of the world, and when you engage in motor activity, you don't bump into things. Because I can see this podium, I'm able to regulate my body in such a way that I don't bump into it. In a ring of Gyges scenario, I wouldn't need to see to be able to avoid

bumping into the podium. It seems to me clear that in that case, I would nonetheless prefer to have vision, even if I could get the consequences of seeing without having vision. And the question of what I would do in the inverted case, where I could have either sight and the ability to avoid objects, or the ability to avoid objects and not sight, is one where I don't know how to answer. So the challenge that Glaucon poses to you is the following. Is morality, for you, something merely like taking medicine? Do you behave morally so that you have the reputation of behaving morally, or do you behave morally because morality, like being able to see, is something that's valuable in itself to you, and valuable to you because of the consequences that it produces? That's the challenge of Plato's Republic. And in next week's class, and the week after that, we'll hear some of answers that are offered to Glaucon's challenge. Chapter 3. Batson on Moral Hypocrisy [00:24:44] What I want to move to now is the second text that we read for today, a text by the contemporary psychologist Daniel Batson, which addresses the question of moral integrity and moral hypocrisy from an empirical psychological perspective. Batson's question is this: is it the aim of people to be moral, or is it the aim of people merely to appear to be so? Baston looks somewhat unlike Plato and Socrates. He's a living man. Teaches at the University of Kansas. He even has a computer printer. And in the work that we read for today, we get a description of empirical studies that Batson did on the question of how people behave when they think they are not being observed. How do they construe their actions to themselves, and what factors, if any, lead them to behave in more honest ways? So Batson presents subjects with a very simple experimental scenario. People who participate in his experiments come into his laboratory, and they're told that their job is to decide which of two tasks they are assigned to, and which of two tasks a second person, whom they won't be meeting, will be assigned to. One of the tasks is fun and interesting, and each correct answer that you give provides you with a lottery ticket for a lottery in which you'll win a certain amount of money. And the other task is described as kind of dull, and each correct answer that you give will not result in your being entered in the lottery. So people are told, you can decide to assign yourself to the fun, interesting lottery-chance task and the other person to the boring, no lottery task, or you can decide to assign the other person to the fun, interesting task, and yourself to the boring, no lottery task. Now, what psychologists call the DV, or dependent variable, the thing with respect to which Batson is looking for differences, is the percentage of times people assign themselves to the positive task, and the other person to the neutral task. So if we were just doing it by chance, if you were literally just flipping a coin, what percent of the time would the self-positive task be assigned? What percent of the time would the person assign themselves to the positive task? Hold up the number of fingers times ten, such that it would be that percent of the time. You've got them on one hand: 50%. So if you were just merely

flipping a coin, 50% of the time you would end up with the positive task, 50% of the time, the other person would end up with the positive task. So that's one of the things that Batson is measuring in his studies. And the other thing that Batson is measuring is in his studies is the point value that people assign to themselves with respect to how moral their action was. If they think their action was perfectly moral in making the assignment, then they give themselves a nine. If they think the action was perfectly immoral in making the assignments, they give themselves a one. So those are the things that Batson is measuring. So that's psychology term number one: dependent variable. That at which you're looking to see differences among in your studies. Now, those of you who have taken psychology courses, who have had roommates who have taken psychology courses, know that when psychology studies are conducted, subjects are presented with what are called conditions. That is, when they come in, one thing happens to them or another thing happens to them. The bean that I described in the science study might be in the condition where it has soil plus water and no air, or it might be in the condition where it has soil plus singing and no water. Likewise, subjects in Batson's experiment might be in a case where they just have come in, and they're told there are these two possibilities. You can assign yourself positive or this other person negative, or they're told that they're in some sort of scenario where they can use chance to make the decision. Now, I asked you in the reading guide to try to understand the chart in which Batson presents his results. And what I want to do in the next few minutes of lecture, is to explain to you what the extraordinarily interesting results that he came up mean. So in the first condition, when subjects just come in, and are told they can make the assignment however they want, 80% of subjects, 8 out of 10, assign themselves to the positive condition and assign the other character to the negative condition. Right? So 80% of people do the selfish thing, but they don't consider themselves to have done something particularly generous. They rate themselves at four on a scale of one to nine, with respect to morality. And those who assign the other person to the positive condition rate themselves extraordinarily highly. They think they have done the right thing. Now, if you bring subjects into a room, and you tell them, they can flip a coin, but they don't have to, roughly half of them don't flip the coin. And among those half, 90% of them still assign themselves to the positive condition. No surprise there. The next number is the one that gives us the surprising results. What happens when subjects come into the room, are told that they can flip a coin, flip a coin, and on the basis of that coin flip, assign themselves to one condition, and the other person to the other? What happens is that upon flipping the coin, 90% of them assign themselves to the positive condition! Now, we all just held up five fingers of one hand. So what's going on here?

Well, why don't you think about what would happen if you flipped the coin, and it he came up heads? What does heads mean? Ah, heads! Heads must mean I assign myself to the positive condition, and I assign my opponent to the negative condition. Comes up tails. Tails. Hah. Tails! That means I assign myself to the positive condition, I assign my opponent to the negative condition. But here's what's striking; 90% of the people flipped the coin, assigned themselves to the positive condition, and rate themselves as having acted in an extraordinarily moral way: seven on a scale of nine, with respect to how morally they behave. And the one guy who actually did follow the coin flip, gives himself a nine. All right. So Batson's worried about this, and so he says, OK. Let me see whether I can control for that by actually not making the coins say heads or tails. I'll make the coins say, on one side, self to positive, and I'll make it say on the other side, opponent to negative. What happens in that case? What happens in that case is that 86% of the people who flip up the coin when it says, opponent to negative, do what? What would you do? You flip it again, until it comes up That's not the one that counts! The one that counts is--oh, oh, it must be the fourteenth flip that actually determines. And those people, again, rate themselves as having acted in an incredibly morally appropriate way. Even when Batson labels it with colors, so that he can see through the window who is doing what, he gets the same extraordinary, astounding pattern of results. In eight out of ten, nine out of ten cases, people, given the chance to represent to themselves that they have behaved morally, will do that even if what they've really done is taken advantage of an ambiguous situation. It appears, says Batson on the basis of this, that what people care about is seeming moral to themselves, and not, in fact, about acting in a way that's fair. But what can one do to induce in people prosocial moral behavior? Here's the extraordinary next study that Batson did. He put the subjects, who are engaged in the same experimental design, in a room with a mirror. Now, if the mirror is facing away from the subject so that there's no reflection of them in it, you get exactly the same results as last time. Roughly 85% of people assign themselves to the positive condition. But if the mirror is facing towards them, so that the subject is facing the mirror [and flips the coin], only 62% of them assign themselves to the positive condition. And, sorry, if the mirror's facing them, even when they don't flip the coin, 62% of them assign themselves to the positive condition, that is, that they're behaving almost completely fairly. And if they are facing the mirror and flipping the coin, they behave 50%: exactly as chance would predict. What's going on here? It looks like the simple act of feeling as if one is observed, even when one is observed by oneself, is sufficient to provoke prosocial behavior. And an extraordinary study, carried out about five years ago in England, bears that out.

So in this study, there was an honor system about putting money into a cup if you drank coffee in the department. And some weeks, taped above the cup of the coffee machine were pictures of flowers. [Image: flowers] There's the flowers, there's the flowers, there's the flowers. And those weeks, almost nobody put money into the pot. The other half of the week taped above the pot were pairs of eyes. [Image: eyes] And those weeks, subjects donated large amounts of money into the pot. There is something about us as social beings that encourages us to behave in moral ways when activated within us, consciously or unconsciously, is the sense of being observed. If you want to complete your assignment without procrastinating, put a pair of eyes on your computer and a mirror behind your desk. I kid you not. The profound and shocking insight of Glaucon's story of Gyges in Plato's Republic is, in light of this contemporary research, almost chilling. That he would tell the story of how it is that we can expect somebody to behave if he conceives of himself as unobserved--the story of our shepherd, who finds the ring of invisibility, and when he gets it, takes over the kingdom--is the story that Batson's research tells us about an inclination on the part of human beings. There is a worrisome tendency on the part of at least those about whom these stories are told. That is, ancient Greek civilization seemed to feel that this rings true. Contemporary American college students in Kansas seem to bear that out. When we think of ourselves as unobserved, it is difficult to act in conformity with moral codes. And the question which will recur throughout this semester--both in the unit on morality and in the unit on political philosophy--is the question of how society can be structured in such a way that there are the equivalent of eyes above our computers and mirrors in our room so that we can act in keeping with rules that allow societies to provide the kind of stability that allows human beings to flourish. Chapter 4. Questions [00:40:01] So we have a couple of minutes left, and let me just ask what questions you have about today's lecture. Questions? Student: Would you talk about the consequences of [inaudible] morality, you [inaudible] Professor Tamar Gendler: Good. So the question is, when I talked about the consequences of morality, I've restricted discussion to consequences for you, things like your reputation. And the question is, what about other sorts of consequences? What about when acting in immoral ways brings harm to others? One of the things that we'll talk about next week, and again is the section on justice, is human beings capacity for empathy and sympathy, and the ways in which those features might be leveraged to help do some of the prosocial work that mirrors and eyes do. So excellent question.

Student: [inaudible] when Glaucon is talking about it, [inaudible] Professor Tamar Gendler: So the question is, when Glaucon is talking about it, is he only talking about issues of reputation? So there's a very interesting thing going on in Book II of The Republic. Glaucon and Adeimantus are taking on a conversation that Socrates has been having with Thrasymachus in Book I about reputation. So that's part of why that's being invoked as a reason. But there are also, you'll hear, when Socrates gives his answer, it's about the integrity of the person who acts in moral or immoral ways. And what Socrates is basically going to go on to say is: It may seem to you like all you care about is what you appear to be to others. But as a matter of fact, when you let your soul get out of order, when you behave in ways that are impulsive, that are insensitive to the needs of others, you, yourself will be unable to flourish. And that's the answer we're going to be exploring. Glaucon hasn't raised that as a question yet. Socrates is going to introduce it into the conversation. Good. It is 11:20. I hope that the density of today's lecture doesn't scare off too many of you. It gets [more] more fun after this. And I look forward to seeing many of you next week. [end of transcript]

Lecture 3 - Parts of the Soul I [January 18, 2011]

Chapter 1. Dividing the Soul: Overview [00:00:00] Professor Tamar Gendler: All right. So today's lecture is a lecture about the parts of the soul. And I want to begin with some passages, two from the ancient Greek literary tradition, and two from contemporary mass culture, which bring out the extent to which it is part of the common understanding of human nature that we are often conflicted within ourselves. So in The Republic, the book from which we have been reading excerpts, Plato's Socrates tells a story about a man who is tempted to act against his better judgment. And this is the story of Leontius, and it goes as follows. "Leontius, the son of Aglaion, was coming up from the Piraeus along the outside of the north wall of the city when he saw some corpses lying at the executioner's feet. He had, says Socrates using Plato's terminology of appetite, He had an appetite to look at them. But at the same time, he was disgusted and turned away. For a time," the story goes on, "he struggled with himself and covered his face. But finally, overpowered by appetite, he pushed his eyes wide open and rushed towards the corpses, saying, 'Look for yourselves, you evil wretches! Take your fill of the beautiful sight.'" Now, we'll talk more in today's lecture about the particular picture that Plato has in mind when he speaks of the tripartite soul as involving this force that he calls appetite. But the basic description that we have here doesn't rest in any way on a particular Platonic framework. The idea that one can, on the one hand, feel compelled to do something--eat a piece of chocolate cake, check one's Facebook page--those are temptations that one can try to control, and struggle with oneself about. And the narrative that will take place in the next four or five lectures is about what sorts of strategies are available for us, given that these kinds of conflicts inevitably arise? So that's our first example from the ancient tradition of a kind of conflict; a conflict between a drive of appetite, on the one hand, and a drive of a certain kind of self-regulation on the other. Second example comes from Ovid's Metamorphosis. A long story in which, in the passage that we're reading, a character Medea has, against her better judgment, found herself in love with a young man named Jason. And here I'm using a seventeenth century translation that's actually in rhyming couplets. "Meanwhile Medea, seiz'd with fierce desire, By reason strives to quench the raging fire; But strives in vain! Some God (she said) withstands, and reason's baffl'd counsel countermands."

So here's Medea, seized with desire, trying to control herself through reason, telling herself: it's absurd to be in love with this young man, it's a violation of other obligations that she has. But she strived in vain. She has the feeling of having been overtaken by a force outside herself, and what reason is telling her to do is overridden. It continues--this is a rhyming version of the passage that's actually quoted in prose form in the Jonathan Haidt that we read for today--continues--this is now in Medea's voice. "But love, resistless love, my soul invades Discretion this, affection that persuades. I see the right, and I approve it too, Condemn the wrong--and yet the wrong pursue." So this feeling of seeing what is right, endorsing what is right, condemning what is wrong, and yet nonetheless finding oneself doing what lies against one's better judgment is a fundamental trope in the Western literary tradition. It's a fundamental trope in the Eastern philosophical tradition. And it's an extraordinarily familiar feeling in all of our lives. Third example of the kind of tension that is picked out by this talk of parts of the soul comes from today's Internet. Here's a piece about last year's Sweet Sixteen bracketing decision. And here's the headline: "Emotions and analysis conflict when picking Sweet Sixteen winners. Most of you, says this post, involved in NCAA pools, had difficult decisions last week trying to decide whether your hearts were trying to lead you astray. 'It's difficult,'" he says, echoing Medea, echoing Plato, to remove emotion during (now in his own words), "what many consider to be the best post-season in sports." And he goes on to describe how difficult it is to take reason's mandate and select a team to which you don't bear emotional connections. But we don't find this only in the context of sportsmanship. Here's a fourth example of the sort of conflict of the soul that Plato is talking about. This one comes from the great arbiter of mass culture, Oprah. "Listen up," says Oprah, on Oprah's webpage, "Why Being in your Heart is Better than in your Bead." So in this regard, those of you who have done the reading know that, if we had clickers, she is agreeing with Plato, or Hume? Is she agreeing with Plato--left hands--Plato or Hume? Excellent. Good. So Plato's idea is that reason is in charge. Hume's suggestion in the passage that we read, he says, reason is and ought to be the slave of the passions. Now, Hume isn't exactly saying what Oprah is saying here. That's something we'll have a chance to talk about more in sections. But again, we see, just as we saw in the story of Leontius, the story of Medea, the story of choosing your winning team in basketball betting, and here in Oprah, this idea that the soul has parts, that there are conflicts within us. Chapter 2. Plato, Hume and Freud [00:07:57]

So what I want to do in today's lecture is to talk through with you the five readings which I assigned for today, three required, two supplementary, each of which attempts to give voice through identification of a taxonomy to this idea that we are pulled sometimes in one direction and sometimes in another. So the first, which I'll talk about in detail later in the lecture, is Plato's division between reason, spirit, and appetite. The second is Hume's discussion of the relation between reason and passion. And Jonathan Haidt, in the book that we read the first chapter of today, presents a wonderful metaphor there, for understanding the relation between, on the one hand, reason--the part of ourselves to which we have direct, conscious access, and over which we have direct regulative control--and the other mass of drives and instincts which compose us, which he suggests we can understand as an elephant which we seek to control through whatever mechanisms are possible. Hume's suggestion, in the passage that we read, is that the drive and the impetus towards motion comes through, to continue with the metaphor, the creature whose feet are on the ground. So although it is the case that there's a kind of steering that's possible on the part of the rider, the impetus towards action comes from those parts of us over which we don't have direct rational control. And this idea that we are a bundle of drives that pull us in various directions lies at the heart of the incredibly influential, though highly controversial, picture of the human mind that Sigmund Freud presented in the first half of the century. So Freud's idea is that each of us, when we are born, are a bundle of incoherent desires and needs and passions. We have a desire to eat, we have a desire for certain kinds of comfort, we have incredibly vivid sexual desires. And those desires have no degree of consistency about them. They pull us in every direction, and they cause us to act in ways that aim at their satisfaction. The story of human development, says Freud, is the story of going on to develop two kinds of regulative capacities. The one, which he calls the ego, is a part of the self that is sensitive to reality. It recognizes that you can't simultaneously want to kill your brother and marry your brother, because if your brother is dead, you can't marry him. It may recognize, in fact, that you want neither to kill your brother nor marry your brother, though that bit of information may come from the third part. So we have this bundle of passions that pull us in various directions. And on top of that, as we develop, comes a part of ourselves which is sensitive to reality. And as that happens, we become conscious of our experience. So whereas these desires pull us in various ways without our even being aware of it, the ego, the sense of self, is something to which we have reflective access. As we go on to interact with others in the world, we get information about appropriate ways in which to regulate ourselves so as to conform with the norms of society. And as we internalize those, and take them to be part of what we ourselves endorse, they become what Freud calls the superego, sometimes thought of as the conscience.

So the picture here is that there are all sorts of unconscious parts of ourselves, some of which are drives that pull us to do things like eat and procreate, some of which are aspects more sensitive to the constraints of reality, some of which are the norms of society. And then on top of that, in a rather smaller part of ourselves, is an aspect of which we are conscious. Now, there are details of the Freudian picture which have been discredited for all sorts of reasons. But the basic idea that we have unconscious pulls in directions which we disavow, has become, I think, part of how it is that Western culture self-conceives. I think it's almost impossible to underestimate the extent to which the Freudian picture underlies twentieth century literature, twentieth century film, and twentieth century self-understanding. Notice that the Freudian picture, though it has three parts, isn't exactly the Platonic picture. Appetite and id roughly correspond, but spirit is not the same thing as ego; and reason and superego where are only roughly correlated. Those of you who are intrigued by this discussion can go back and look in this week's reading, and read Freud's own presentation of the theory that I've just described. The fourth distinction which I'll go on to discuss in the main part of the lecture is a contemporary extension between system one and system two, or between a sort of automatic heuristic processing system and a rational reflective processing system. And as I said, I'll talk about that in the bulk part of the lecture. Chapter 3. Haidts Four Divisions [00:15:28] I want to just now introduce our fifth set of divisions. And these are the four divisions which Jonathan Haidt identifies in the opening chapter. So as you know, [that] we read the Plato, we had the option of reading the Hume, the option of reading the Freud, we read the Evans piece, and we read the Haidt. So Haidt's first distinction is between what he calls mind and body. And what he points out there is that though much of our bodily regulation happens through the brain, there are independent loci of processing. In particular, the gut, our digestive organs, can run relatively independently of the brain, and he provides some examples of that. But strikingly, one of the things that he does not discuss is the famous example of Mike, the headless rooster, who was a rooster--here he is on the cover of Life magazine--who soon after the Second World War was beheaded, and who went on to live for another 18 months, perfectly happily. Here he is dancing. And if you go on YouTube, you can actually watch a live version of Mike the headless chicken. Those of you who have pledged to turn off your Internet: Im regretting it now. So the point about Mike the headless chicken is that there's a whole bunch of motor control representations that take place not in the organ where one would typically expect it, in the head, but rather along the spinal cord in various ways. The first division to which Haidt adverts is the fact that it's actually a biological feature of us. That regulation of action happens through all sorts of biological processes, some of which are located up here, and

others of which communicate with the parts of our limbs and so on, only through lower parts of the spinal cord. The second division that Haidt reminds us of the importance of is the division between left brain and right brain. As many of you know, we have running along the middle of our heads something called the corpus callosum, which connects all the stuff that happens on the right side of our head to all the stuff that happens on the left side of our head. It turns out that in certain kinds of epileptic patients, the only way to cure their epilepsy, their electric seizures that run across the brain, is by severing the corpus callosum. And by doing so, for medically necessary reasons, science has discovered the degree to which the processing that goes on in the two sides of the brain is relatively independent. Basically, everything that comes in through the right visual field is processed in the brain's left hemisphere, and everything that comes in through the left visual field is processed in the brain's right hemisphere. And though many features of the brain are duplicated across the hemisphere, others of them are localized. In particular, in the brains of right-handed people, language is a right [correction: left] hemisphere activity. And so Haidt describes some famous research done in the 1950s by the neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga in which a patient who had been subject to a severing of the corpus callosum, is presented with some images that either come in through the left visual field and consequently are processed on the right side of the brain, or images that come in from the right visual field, and consequently are processed on the left side of the brain. Interestingly, because information processed on the left side of the brain, sorry, on the right side of the brain isn't linguistically available--I believe I misspoke earlier. The language center is on the left, in right-handed people--isn't linguistically available, when the subject looks at something that comes in over here, there's no linguistic processing of what he sees. But when he's asked to explain what it is that is in his visual field, he engages in what Gazzaniga called confabulation. So the gentleman here has been shown with this side of the brain a bunch of images of snow, and he is asked to choose--remember, this is right brain, so it's left hand--something that goes with them. And so he selects with his left hand, controlled by the right brain from the left visual field, a shovel, something which would be enormously useful if you had snow. Meanwhile, the left side of his brain through the right eye, controlling the right hand, sees a chicken claw and selects a chicken. So one side of his brain sees a chicken claw, and selecting the thing that goes with it, selects the chicken. The other side of his brain sees the snow, and selecting the thing that goes with it, selects the shovel. So far, so good. Ive told you the brain is segregated in these sorts of ways, so it isn't surprising that the right side is selecting something that goes with what it saw, and the left side, and selecting something that goes with what it saw.

What happens next? What happens next is that the man looks down at the shovel and the chicken, which he has selected, and is confronted with the question of why he has chosen those things. Now, as far as the language center of his brain goes, he has no idea why he's chosen the chicken claw. Right? That information hasn't entered into the part of his brain where the linguistic processing is taking place. Nonetheless, what he does is something called confabulate. He says, Oh. I picked the shovel because I need to shovel out the chicken coop. He comes up with an explanation for why it is that he has chosen as he has chosen. And in cases of hypnosis, there is a similar phenomenology. Subjects will find themselves onstage with their arms and legs in a particular way, and immediately come up with a confabulated explanation for it is why that they are doing what they are doing. We are quite typically people who read our behavior off our experiences. And when we talk about emotion and self-understanding, we will come back to this issue. So the point about left and right brain is two-fold. The first is that this is a second example of a biological underpinning of the idea that we are divided in certain ways. And the second is the idea of confabulation in the sense that--to use the rider-elephant metaphor--it's as if the rider thinks that it's his feet that are on the ground rather than the elephant's. The third division which Haidt describes to us is the division between what he calls old brain and new brain. Roughly, the parts of our brain, the brain stem and subcortical regions, that we share with nonhuman animals, and the parts of our brain that are much more highly developed in human beings, namely the cortical region and in particular, the prefrontal cortex. And Haidt tells there a story, which is useful for understanding how it is that selfregulation, occurs. So my guess is that many of you have seen some version of these famous images of this person. Anybody know the name of this person? Yeah? Student: Phineas Gage. Professor Tamar Gendler: Phineas Gage. This is Phineas Gage, who was a railroad worker in the nineteenth century who was tamping down some dynamite as part of his job as a railroad worker. And the dynamite exploded, and this long metal pole went through his brain. But, like Mike the headless chicken, Phineas Gage was a survivor, and in fact did not die, but went to live for many more years. In reconstructing the accident, it's become clear that the damage, which the pole did, was to an area of Gage's brain called the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. Right up here is the prefrontal cortex.

And the result of the accident which happened to Gage was like what happened to the University of Virginia schoolteacher that Haidt describes in his story. There was a loss of capacity for a certain kind of self-regulation. So in some ways, like Medea, though Gage was able to see what the normatively correct thing to do was--to see what he ought to do, to understand it, to explain it, to articulate it, to say what would be socially appropriate--he found himself unable to act on what it was that he thought would be a better idea. So he would say something like, you shouldn't yell and scream when you're upset in a public setting. He would understand that that sort of behavior was inappropriate, but he would nonetheless find himself unable to act on that. He would end up doing what Freud would say his id told him to do, or what Plato would say his appetite told him to do. Again and again, it's been discovered in subjects with damage to the prefrontal cortex that they face difficulties with self-regulation. So it looks like at least one of the places where what Plato would call reason seats itself is in this particular part of the brain. And, in fact, there is reasonably good evidence that individuals who suffer, for example, from attention hyperactivity deficit disorder, ADHD, have lower prefrontal cortex function than those who do not. So when Haidt speaks of old brain--a part of the brain that we share with beings who act on instinct--and new brain--cortex, and in particular, the parts of the cortex that are especially well-developed in human beings, like PFC--one of the things that he is talking about is this capacity for self-regulation. And when we talk about weakness of the will in roughly five classes, we'll talk about some of the ways in which we can exploit the fact that we have these complex brains capable of learning patterns both though our old systems and through our new ones. So we are capable of regulation both in the way that dogs and cats are. If you want to train your cat not to go on the couch, saying, "Please don't go on the couch, you'll leave fur there, and my aunt is allergic," is in fact not an effective way to train your cat not to go on the couch. To train your cat not to go on the couch you need to do something like put a crinkly piece of paper there that makes an ugly noise every time she sits down. Or perhaps spray her gently with a water bottle whenever she goes on the couch. In so doing, you set up associations between being on the couch and a negative outcome, and you change her associations with it. But you don't do it in a way that engages reflective self-regulation. We as human beings with both old brain and new can regulate ourselves in the way that we regulate and train animals through associating certain activities with positive things and other activities with negative ones. But we can also do so making use of a kind of reflection and self-regulation that involves a certain kind of self-control. And we'll talk about that more in later lectures. So what I want to do now, having given you first some literary texts in which we have articulated the idea of the soul being divided, and then quickly run through the various divisions that we read about today, is to--Oh, sorry! There's a fourth example from

Jonathan Haidt. What I want to do, really, is to tell you about controlled and automatic processing, and then do what I said I would just do. So some of you, at the conclusion of this class, are going to walk from this room, perhaps by taking an elevator, over to a lecture in another part of WLH that is taught by John Bargh. And what I want to describe for you here is a study that John Bargh did roughly fifteen years ago, that brings out the relation between controlled and automatic processing. So Bargh brought subjects into his laboratory, and had them engage in what's called a scrambled sentence task. The scrambled sentence task is a task where you're given a list of words, say, five words: he, beautiful, doorway, relevant, Thursday. And you're asked to put four of them into a sentence. In so doing, you're forced to engage with the meanings of the words. The only idea of the scrambled sentence task is to get you thinking about various words. So subjects in this study were presented either with a set of words that were just a wide range of words, or with a set of words, a portion of which had terms typically associated with the elderly. Words like wrinkly, and bingo, and Florida. Those subjects who unscrambled the sentences that had words associated with the elderly presumably had primed in their minds the idea of old person. And then the dependent variable, DV, which Bargh measured, was how long it took the people, when they left the study, to walk to the elevator. So subjects who had engaged in the typical scrambled sentence task walked quite quickly to the elevator. But those who had been given words associated with the elderly went very slowly. Indeed, subjects who were in the ordinary condition took just over seven seconds to get to the elevator, whereas subjects who had been primed with words associated with the elderly took more than a second and a half longer to get there. Now, presumably this was not because they were consciously thinking, oh, I've got to get to my bingo game. It was because an image of something had been evoked in their mind unconsciously, beneath the level of awareness, and it ended up affecting their behavior. And in a series of studies that Bargh went on to do over the next few years, and which he continues to do now, he found this effect over and over again. So for example, some subjects were primed with terms that had to do with politeness, others with terms that had to do with rudeness, and the dependent variable, the thing which he was measuring, was how likely they were to interrupt the experimenter when they needed to get information from the experimenter. Those primed with words associated with politeness waited almost fifteen minutes, whereas those primed with words associated with rudeness went up right away, and interrupted the experimenter. More recently, in the domain of embodied cognition, he's been looking at things like, what happens if you hold a warm or a cold coffee cup before you evaluate a rsum, and subjects who have, in the elevator, helped the experimenter by (could you just hold my mug, please?) holding a warm mug, as opposed to (could you just hold my mug, please) holding a cold mug, were more likely to evaluate the rsum positively. That is, a sense of

warmth in one domain brings with it a sense of warmth in the other. So that's the fourth division. OK. Chapter 4. Platos Division Between Reason, Spirit, and Appetite [00:36:12] So what I want to do in the last ten minutes of lecture is to talk about the two texts that I haven't discussed already. First, Plato's division into reason, spirit, and appetite, and secondly, the material on dual processing. Though since next lecture is explicitly about dual processing, if we don't get all the way through that material, I'll begin next lecture with it. So in the somewhat salacious material from Plato that I had you read today--I hope you read it: It's really great and really fun. So in it, Plato--here's a wonderful depiction of it by a philosopher named John Holbo who lives in Singapore. Plato describes the three parts of the human soul. The first is what he calls reason, or logos; this is represented here by the chariots here. The second, spirit, sometimes translated as honor, or thumos. And the third, appetite, or epithumos. Now Plato presents a number of metaphors by which we can understand this. In the Republic, in a passage which we're reading for early next week, he describes reason as a human being, spirit as a lion, and appetite as a multi-headed beast. And in the passage that we read for today, from the Phaedrus, he describes reason as "a charioteer, spirit as "a good horse, noble in frame, well-jointed, with a high neck and regal bearing. His coat is white and he is controllable by word alone." Appetite, by contrast, on the Platonic picture, is "a great crooked jumble of limbs with a short bull neck, a pug nose, dark skin, bloodshot white eyes, companion to wild boasts and indecency, shaggy around the ears, deaf as a post, barely yielding to the horsewhip and the goad combined." And Plato goes on to describe in the passage that we read today, a rather exciting event, where a man of Athens has fallen in love with a young boy, and the brown horse within him, his appetites, are ready to engage in those activities which fell into the category of things that Freud talked about in the id. And I don't mean that he wanted to eat lunch with the young boy. Whereas spirit is attracted, but recognizes the ways in which there are social norms, and the charioteer is involved in trying to keep them in line. So Socrates writes of the process by which the charioteer tries to bring the dark horse into line, as the dark horse basically tries to get the man to embrace his young beloved. So he says: "the promised time arrives, the horses pretend to have forgotten what they were told by the charioteer. It reminds them. The horse struggles. It neighs. It pulls them forward. It forces them to approach the boy again with the same proposition, and as soon as they are near, it drops its head, straightens its tail, bites the bit, and pulls towards the boy without any shame at all." The charioteer--that is, reason, self-regulation, the superego, the prefrontal cortex--is struck with the same feelings as before, where he feels like this is not activity that he wants to engage in. "Only worse, and he's falling back as he would from a starting gate. He violently yanks the bit back out of the teeth of the insolent horse, harder this time, so that he bloodies

its foul-speaking tongue and jaws, sets its legs and haunches firmly on the ground, and causes it to stop." Now this idea that one of the ways in which we learn to control our passions is by training ourselves as we would train a wild animal through the creation of negative associations with certain sorts of activities is, in fact, a fundamental insight about how human selfregulation takes place. And with respect to truly forceful passions, sexual appetites in particular, a kind of self-regulation that involves an equally forceful antidote is crucial. Plato's picture is that in the well-ordered soul, reason, the charioteer, does the ruling, and that spirit and appetite are, through a process of self-regulation, tamed and trained. So what the Republic, the book from which we've been reading excerpts, describes is a process by which the rational part of ourselves can come to be in control of our spirits and our appetites. Plato actually tells the story by means of a controlling metaphor, which is that he compares the structure of the human soul to the structure of a city. And he says that just as in the human soul, there is reason, there is spirit, and there is appetite, so, too, in a well-structured city, there are guardians, those governed by reason; auxiliaries, roughly soldiers, those governed by honor; and a kind of worker, who is governed by appetite. And moving back and forth between the individual and the society, Plato goes on to describe a series of processes through which the wills and desires and impulses of, on the one hand, the auxiliaries and the workers, and, on the other hand, spirit and appetite, can be brought into harmony with what reason dictates. And it will turn out, we'll find out in three lectures, that this kind of harmony is the answer that he's going to offer to Glaucon's question about why it is intrinsically valuable to act in a moral way. So that concludes the presentation of Plato's tripartite soul. What we will do next lecture is to talk about the discussion of dual processing accounts in the context of the two pieces that we're reading for next class. The first, as you may know, or may have seen, is Daniel Kahneman's Nobel Prize acceptance speech, and you have your choice of either listening to the speech or reading a somewhat more detailed article in which we describes its content. And the second is a piece that I've written on a notion that I call alief, which tries to bring together some of the ideas that we have today. So I hope to see many of you back on Thursday. [end of transcript]

Lecture 4 - Parts of the Soul II [January 20, 2011]

Chapter 1. Sampling Bias [00:00:00] Professor Tamar Gendler: So what I would like you to do is to answer the following question. Do you have?--Oh, now wait a second--this says polling closed. Let's see whether we can get polling to open. Do you?--No, that didn't work. Oh, this is the most desperately horrible thing that I've ever had happen. OK. [laughter] Current slide. I've had horrible things happen that are worse than this, I'm sorry. I don't want to belittle all the really horrible things that have ever happened to me. [laughter] OK. So let's try again. Click practicalities blah blah. OK. Do you have a clicker yet? Polling is open. OK. And there's ten seconds left. You'll see this little timeline. Eight, seven, six, five, four-- ninety two of you, so many of you have clickers. OK. Let's see what we learned. It looks like 97% of you have clickers. [laughter] Now, I actually began with this exercise to make a point about psychological research. [laughter] We just made a classic and dangerous mistake, a mistake known as sampling bias. We used a measure which doesn't give us accurate information about what we wanted to find out. We wanted to find out, what percentage of people in the room had clickers. And what we found out instead was, what percentage of people in the room with clickers had clickers. [laughter] I don't know who you guys are. This error is an incredibly dangerous one, and it could have persisted. Suppose I then ask you a question whether you're from the class of 2014, '13, '12, or '11, and discovered that 80% of you were freshmen and sophomores. There, again, I would inherited exactly the sampling bias error that we just observed. Freshmen and sophomores have handed in their schedules already. Consequently, they're certain about what classes they're taking. Consequently, they're more likely to have clickers already. So when we do psychological empirical research, we need to be extraordinarily careful that the means by which we are choosing subjects for experiments are, in fact, means that give us an accurate sample of what it is that we're interested in. An article appeared recently in the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences with the title, "The Weirdest People in the World". And "WEIRD" here stands for Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic. That is, American college students. People with access to online Internet polling. And what the article argued was that a great deal of psychological research that claims to make general assumptions, that claims to prove general assumptions about human nature, is biased in exactly the way my poll concerning what percentage of you have clickers was biased. It looks at a small sample of the population, those who are readily available to research laboratories on university campuses, for example, the psych introductory psych pool. And it bases its conclusions about human nature on that sample.

Throughout the semester we need to be attentive, when we read psychological studies which are making claims about human nature, to the fact that it is possible that some of the things which we are told apply to human beings in general instead have at least being shown conclusively only to apply to WEIRD folk. Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic. And in certain cases, the data would look very different if we looked at a different population. This is also the case in the classical texts we used. The process that Plato and Aristotle took on for themselves didn't look experimental in the way that experimental psychology looks experimental. But they looked at a sample of people around them, and on the basis of their experience, they drew conclusions about human nature. So little reminder of something that I said in the first lecture that sometimes gets lost. In some ways, this is a class about philosophy and the science of human nature. And in other ways, this is a class about Western philosophy and the science of Western human nature. And we need to be attentive to that when it becomes relevant. Chapter 2. Dual Processing Accounts of Cognition and the Wason Selection Task [00:05:58] So what I want to do in today's lecture is to return to the issue that we took up last class, which is the issue about the multi-part nature of the human soul. And you'll recall that in the last lecture, we were introduced to Plato's great analogy of rational [correction: reason] spirit and appetite, as exemplified by a charioteer, a calm horse and a wild horse. And also to a number of other distinctions. Left brain, right brain, which I managed to get wrong four times in a row, if I remember correctly. We were introduced to the difference between brainstem and upper brain. We were briefly introduced to Freud's idea of superego, ego and id. But we didn't get to work in the dual processing tradition. And today's lecture will take up where the last lecture left off, with another way in which it is typical to distinguish parts of the soul. Let me say that there is very good reason to think that the research which I'm presenting today is not subject to the WEIRD objection. That is, there have been powerful crosscultural demonstrations of nearly all the results which I'll be talking about today. And there are also good evolutionary reasons to think that the two systems which dual systems theorists posit are, in fact, going to be part of any human being because of the evolutionary process, which all of us underwent. So I wanted to start with a picture of Edward Thorndike not because he's important, but just because he's so fabulous-looking. This is from the New York Public Library Archive. Edward Thorndike was a late nineteenth/early twentieth century psychologist who did a lot of important associationist animal work. But he also did research, published in an article in 1922, that in some ways can be seen as the founding work of the reasoning tradition that Jonathan Evans described in the article that we read for last class. So he describes, in his 1922 article, an experiment that he does, which is entitled "The Effect of Changed Data Upon Reasoning." And what he's interested in there is the question

of whether problems that are posed to people that are formally identical, but that differ in how that formal material is presented, are processed differently. So, for example, he asked people, either what is the square of x plus y, (first, outer, inner, last, I think is how you would do it) and he asked people, what is the square of b1 plus b2? Whereas people found the first question easy, they found the second question much more difficult. Success rates on this [x/y] were up around 90%. Success rates on this [b1/b2] were considerably lower. Or he asked them, what's the square of a2 x3, versus what's the square of r18r112? And so on. Presenting people with problems that were formally identical but which differed in terms of the complexity of the characters used to represent them produced a massive decrement in performance. Fast-forward to a period in the 1960s, '70s, and '80s, in which people began to study syllogistic reasoning, and a number of special instances of this phenomenon emerge. So in the Jonathan Evans piece that you read for last class, you were presented with examples like this. A syllogism that was valid and believable -- that is, whose formal properties guaranteed that if the premises were true, the conclusion was true, and as a matter of fact conclusion was true. And arguments that were valid but unbelievable--arguments where the structure of the argument guaranteed that if the premises were true, the conclusion was true, but where the conclusion was false. So, for example, you might be told:, No Greek tragedies are comedies. Some Greek comedies are plays. And asked whether it followed from that that some Greek plays are not Greek tragedies. No Greek tragedies are comedies, some Greek plays are comedies, therefore, some Greek plays are not Greek tragedies, and 90% of people were able to see that that argument was valid. By contrast, you might be given an argument, equally valid, but with an unbelievable conclusion; like: No Russian novels are short. Some novels by Dostoevsky are short., Therefore, some novels by Dostoevsky are not Russian novels. That's a valid argument. It's a valid argument with a false conclusion, because one of the premises is false. But as a result of the conclusion being implausible, only 55% of people were able to recognize that the conclusion followed from the premises. Notice, however, that these two arguments are structurally identical. They both have a form, no A's are B's, some C's are B's, therefore, some C's are not A's. Formal properties alone don't determine our ability to judge validity. And, in fact, it is also true that formal properties alone don't determine our ability to judge invalidity. So whereas valid arguments with plausible conclusions are judged to be valid roughly 90% of the time, we just heard that valid arguments with implausible conclusions are judged to be valid considerably less often. An opposite error arises in the case of invalid arguments. Invalid arguments with plausible conclusions are judged to be valid. It's judged to be the case that the form of the argument guarantees the truth of the conclusion. Whereas it turns out that what guarantees the truth of the conclusion, in that case, is nothing other than facts about the world, as opposed to facts about the structure of the argument.

In light of this Thorndikean condition, researcher after researcher came up with research paradigms that demonstrated what we've just been talking about. So, famously, the Wason selection task asks people to determine which of four cards they need to turn over to verify the truth of a statement. So, for example, I might give you a statement, if there's an A on the one side, there's a three on the other. And I might present you with four cards, and ask you which ones you need to turn over. [image of 4 cards] Obviously, you need to turn over the A, and everybody recognizes that. You need to check whether there's a three on the other side. Obviously, you don't need to turn over the D. You know that the cards have a letter on one side, and a number on the other. So there's no worry that there's an A on the other side of here. But people have a tendency to think that you need to turn over the three, and that you don't need to turn over the seven. But look out. Right on that other side of the seven was an A, and the statement turns out to be false. The ones you need to check are the A and the seven. People find this task relatively difficult. But here's a structurally identical task that people find relatively easy. If a person is drinking beer, the person must be over 21. I show you four cards. The beer drinker, the soda drinker, the over-21 year old, and the 17 year old. And every single one of you could I take it get a job as a bouncer, walk in, discover that the 17 year old is drinking a beer. And thereby, learn exactly what was hard to see in earlier case, that the cards you need to turn over are the first and the last, rather than the first and the third. Now, there have been all sorts of explanations hypothesized for why it is that we find the second of these tasks easier than the first. Perhaps the most famous of these is a hypothesis advanced by the evolutionary psychologists Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, who argue that we have within ourselves what they call a cheater detection module, and that we're enormously sensitive to cases that involve violations of normative rules. So you notice that the second one is different from the first in two ways. One is that it's socially embedded, whereas the first is purely abstract. And we'll discover, as we continue our readings this semester, that social embedding awakens reasoning processes that aren't present otherwise. In fact, we learned that last week, with the eyes study when we learned that people are more pro-social, more likely to engage in morally normative behavior, when they're presented visually, with eyes, in part, because it awakens and activates a kind of social understanding which all of us have. So the first difference between the bottom and the top is that the bottom one invokes sociality, whereas the top one is purely abstract. And the second difference between the bottom and top is, of course, that this is a normative rule. It's about how things ought to be. Whereas this is a descriptive rule. It's about how things are. So the lesson that we can take away from the Wason selection task, for those of you who are interested in it, there have been thousands and thousands of variations done on it, which are extremely interesting in sorting out exactly where people are good and not so good at the task. The lesson that we can take away from it is the lesson that has been emphasized

throughout this lecture and the previous one: that we have ways of processing information that don't merely track formal properties. And some of those ways of processing information involve bringing on line, so to speak, what Plato would call parts of the soul which had not been previously attentive to the situation. Now--is there a question in the back? Student: Yeah, sorry. For the last one, what exactly were the subjects asked to do? I don't really understand the experimental design. Professor Tamar Gendler: So the experimental design for both of these cases was as follows: you're given a sentence that you need to verify the truth of. So you're asked is it true that if there's an A on one side, there's a three on the other? Is it true that if a person is drinking beer, the person must be over 21? And you're told that you have four items in front of you, and you're asked, which ones do you need to turn over to verify the statement? So to verify the statement, if there's an A on one side, there's a three on the other side, you need to turn over the A and the seven, not the A and the three. And that should become obvious to you if you look at this case, where to determine whether the person was drinking beer, the person must be over 21, you need to turn over the card belonging to the beer drinker, and the card belonging to the person who is in fact not over 21. So does that clarify? [nod from student] Excellent. OK. So dual processing accounts attempt to provide a general explanation for what's going on in the cases I've just described, and in the cases I'm about to describe. They suggest that we have two relatively autonomous mechanisms for processing information, and they're called all sorts of things, but what's become the most normative way of describing them, is to call them simply system one and system two. So whereas system one is evolutionarily primitive--it makes use of parts of the brain that came into our evolutionary process relatively early in the game--system two is evolutionarily relatively recent, it involves higher cortical function. System one is unconscious, or preconscious, whereas system two is conscious. System one operates automatically, whereas system two is consciously controlled. System one is effortless, it happens without our trying. System two is effortful, in the sense that it involves an expenditure of cognitive energy; you have to pay attention. System one is super fast. It processes information almost instantaneously. System two is, relatively speaking, slow, the information that we get through system two takes considerably longer: seconds rather than milliseconds. System one is associative; it recognizes patterns in the world. System two is rule-based; it can apply principles. System one is, people sometimes say, reflexive; it happens without reflection, which is what underlies system two. So the distinction between system one and system two is the result of many decades of work by many people. Here's a chart from a different paper by Jonathan Evans in which he enumerates--and this will be available to you on the v2 site--some of the many researchers whose work went into talking about system one and system two.

And I want to point out to you one important thing here, which is that it's a bit misleading to speak of system one and system two as if they are individual things. System one is sometimes called the autonomous set of subsystems. The idea: there is the visual processing, and the auditory processing, and there's processing that gives us very specific information about things like faces, or the average length of lines, or that enables us to recognize something as predator or prey. All of those systems have the characteristics that system one does. They're quick, they're unconscious, they're evolutionarily primitive, they come online without reflection. But they are not, each of them, they are not altogether a coherent system. So dual processing accounts are a way of trying to make sense of a set of phenomena, some of which have to do with the processing of reasoning, and some of which, as we learned in the absolutely lovely Nobel Prize speech of Daniel Kahneman, which I asked you to watch for today, some of which takes place in a more general domain of reasoning. And I've reproduced for you here Kahneman's beautiful chart explaining his understanding of the relation between system one and system two, where he talks about the similarities between perception and intuition on the one hand and reasoning on the other. And again, I'll leave this slide for you on the website. Chapter 3. Kahneman and Tversky on Framing Effects [00:23:55] So what I want to do in the next part of the lecture, is to move from the discussion of Evans, which in some ways was left over from last lecture though connected to this one, and talk a little bit about the work of Daniel Kahneman and his collaborator, Amos Tversky. So you're now going to get the second chance to use your clickers. We're only doing one other try today, and if this one works, we'll have a whole slew next Tuesday. OK, so this is the famous Asian disease problem from Kahneman and Tversky, and it runs as follows. A terrible disease has struck 600 people in your town. Without treatment, they're all doomed. You are the mayor, and there are two courses of treatment available. If your last name begins with the letters A through L, you're going to need to read the information that I'm going to put in the green box. So with you head pointing over to this side, and only read what happens in the green box. If your last name begins M through Z, you're going to read information in the blue box. And let me tell you, we will use these color conventions throughout, if this ends up working, and that the A through L group will have only numbers '1' and '2' for yes and no, and the M through Z group is going to have numbers '3' and '4' for yes and no. So if you're an M through Z-er, look at the blue, and get your fingers ready on three and four, and if you're an A through L-er, look at the green box and get your fingers ready on one and two. I asked Marvin Chun how to do slides like this, and this was his suggestion. OK. So ready? I'm going to tell you about plan A and plan B, so look at your side of the board and not the other. OK? So read about plan A. And now read about plan B. OK. Get your clickers out, and if you are on the green team, use '1' to indicate if you'd choose plan A, and '2' to

indicate that you'd choose plan B. And if you're on the blue team, use '1' to indicate that you choose plan A and '2' to indicate that you choose plan B. OK. I'm going to put on the timer. We want 64 to 66, zillions and zillions and zillions of responses. And let's see how the numbers come out. OK. Here are our numbers. OK. Those of you on the green team, 40% of you chose plan A. Those of you on the blue team, only 25% of you chose plan A. Ah, you know what? This is actually not--So. We--The relevant size of the bar is relevant but this is divided into a 100. I need to learn a little bit more about how to use clickers. So let me now regroup and make my point again. As you'll notice, on the green team, the relative preference for plan A exceeded the relative preference for plan B. Whereas in the very small second half of the class, which consists of, the problem is that 60% of you are in A through L, and only 40% of you are M through Z (this is our problem). OK. But in this group, if I could quickly do 26 times 0.4, we would be able to find out what that what absolute percentage it was. In this group, the relative preference is for plan B rather than plan A. Notice, however, that plan A and plan B are identical. There's 600 people. And under plan A, 200 people will live; which means, 400 people will die. And on this side, there are 600 people; if we go with plan A, 400 people will die, which means it's certain that 200 people will live. However, the results, which you all showed, are, in fact, exactly the typical set of results. Typically, people presented with a problem that involves a choice between certainty and probability framed in terms of its positive outcomes will go with the certain rather than with risky plan. Whereas people who, told the same thing, where they're given to focus on the certainty that 400 people will die tend to go with the probabilistic option. Notice, again, plan A and plan B on the two sides are exactly the same. Just one is framed in terms of who will live, the other in terms of who will die. And the result is almost a complete inversion of people's preferences. And we get these sorts of framing effects over and over. Here's a study by Kahneman and Tversky's student, Eldar Shafir, from the early 1990s. You go to an ice cream store, and you're hoping to get yourself two flavors of ice cream. One is a good flavor, the other is an excellent flavor, but it has high cholesterol. And you discover that you only have enough money to buy one of the ice creams. So if I asked you which one would you choose, 28% of people choose the good flavor, and 72% of people choose the excellent flavor with high cholesterol. But if I ask you which one do you give up, 55% of the people give up the one with the good flavor, and 45% of the people give up the one with excellent flavor, high cholesterol. So even though, in this case, 28%-- even though these are exactly the same question, which do you choose? If you choose A, you give up B. If you choose B, you give up A. These numbers don't match up. When you're asked which one you choose, the excellent looms large, and so you go for it,

neglecting the high cholesterol. When you're asked which one you give up, the high cholesterol looms larger. This phenomenon occurs over and over again. Suppose you're going to a movie, and when you get to the theater, you discover that you've lost something from your wallet. What you've lost from your wallet is either a $10 bill or a $10 movie ticket which you had purchased last night for the movie. You get to the theater, you open your wallet to go in, either, in the first case, to pull out a $10 bill to buy the ticket, or in the second case, to pull out your Admit 1 ticket to let yourself in, and you discover that you've lost the item that would have enabled you to get into the theater. However, you have another $10 bill in your pocket, and the question is: do you buy another movie ticket? For people who've lost a $10 bill on the way to the movie theater, 90% of them say, I lost a $10 bill, but so what. I'm going to buy a new ticket For people who have lost a $10 movie ticket which is of exactly the same value as a $10 bill, only 42% said that they would spend the $10 to buy another ticket. Chapter 4. Alief [00:32:18] So framing is one of the examples of a heuristic, or bias, which Kahneman and Tversky focus on in their work. We will return to some other examples later in the semester, when we read the work of Cass Sunstein. What I want to point you to now is a particular example, which is going to serve as our segue into the idea of alief. And that's the distinction between frequency and probability. So suppose you're trying to get a red ball because getting a red ball will help you win a prize. And you have a choice about whether you want to draw from this box over here, which has nine white balls and one red one, or this box over here, which has eight red balls and 92 white ones. So here you have a 10% chance, here you have an 8% chance. And you're going to be drawing from the boxes blindfolded. An image for which I don't suggest doing a Google search. [laughter] So, I found blindfolded justice. That did a little better. All right. So you have your choice. Do you want to let this box be the one--you're trying to get a red ball,--do you want to let this box be the one, or do you want to let this box be the one? Obviously, rationally, you've got a better chance over here. But people are in fact pulled in two directions. You had a 10% chance over here, but my goodness, there's 8 balls over here! 8 8! 1! 8! 1! 8! More! More! More! What's going on here, I suggest, is that whereas you have a belief that here, you have 10% chance, you have what I call an alief that here there are eight, whereas over there, there is one. So alief is a notion that I've actually discussed on bloggingheads.tv with Paul Bloom. [series of images from bloggingheads] And though we were filming in different places, here I am in the game room at my house with our geo-puzzles, here's Paul in the study, it appears that we were separated at birth, because that's at the same time as that photo. All right. [laughter]

So suppose I take you to the Grand Canyon, and I bring you out on the glass walkway that extends 4,000 feet above the roaring river below. And you step out there with me, and you voluntarily remain there. I take it if you voluntarily remain on a glass surface 4,000 feet above a roaring river, you believe that surface is safe. Nonetheless, I will wager that most of you would shudder and shiver and shake. And you'd do so because you have what I would call an alief that says to you, I am 4,000 feet in the air, with nothing holding me here, and I'm going to tremble. Or suppose we're watching a Western movie--anybody recognize that gentleman? [picture of Ronald Reagan] Guys, he was president when you were born. When you watch a movie, a Western movie, and the bullets are flying off the stage, obviously you believe that you're safe. You don't think, "oh, what a good thing it was that the bullets didn't come off the screen this time." Nonetheless, particularly in 3D, you will bend your head down. If the green slime is coming off the screen, you'll tremble in your seat. If Anna Karenina is about to die, you will cry. Not because you believe that you're in danger, but because you have an alief. How many of you set your watch five minutes fast, and then subtract back down? When you do it, you believe that it's ten but you have an alief--you look down at it--10:05! It enters your visual system, it gets processed really fast and it says 10:05! Hurry! Or suppose you're watching a rerun of your favorite team on television, and you know that if one of the guys on the team tries to steal second, he's going to be thrown out. And so you yell at the television screen, Don't run! Don't run! Why? Because you believe that your voice is going to go through the television screen, back in time, [laughter] to first base to reach the runner? No. You have a belief that it's a rerun, and your alief says "don't run". Suppose you're on a diet, and you see this beautiful piece of chocolate cake and you have the belief that it's undesirable. Your alief system, in the form of your Platonic horse may nonetheless pull you towards it. [laughter] Suppose I present you with this delicious cake [picture of a cake that looks like a box of kitty litter]. Those are Tootsie rolls, this is a perfectly clean and sterilized pan, that's coconut there. In fact, this one has the same ingredients as that one, exactly. You believe me, right? I'm your professor, you're here, listening to what I tell you. I tell you, this is edible! Tootsie rolls, coconut. [laughter] Nonetheless, I take it that your alief system kicks into gear. Suppose I ask you to sign this contract: "I hereby assert that my soul belongs only to you, O Satan." [laughter] And I write at the bottom, This is not a legal contract. It's just a prompt in a psychology experiment. You will, nonetheless, be reluctant to sign. Not because you don't believe that this is a legal contract, right? [high-pitched voice] Oh my goodness, if I sign my soul over to the devil, I can tell it's the devil--it's parchment. [laughter] No. You believe that there's nothing to it, but nonetheless, you hesitate. Suppose I take you to Monica Bonvicini's bathroom, which is, as you can see, completely opaque from the outside. You stand outside this public restroom, you peer into it, you see that there's no way to see inside. Your belief is that you are totally protected. Nonetheless,

when you go in to use the facilities, it looks like that. [transparent walls] And your alief makes it rather difficult to do what you had gone in with the intention of doing. Suppose we have a bag of sugar and two glasses of water. And you take a spoonful of the sugar, and you put one in this glass and label it Sugar, and one in this glass and label it Poison. You took the sugar, you put it in the glasses, you put the labels on it. Nonetheless, people are reluctant to drink from this glass. Moreover, they're not just reluctant to drink from it when it says Poison. They're reluctant to drink from it when they've written the words Not Poison on it. [laughter] Why? Because the word poison is there. Running into your alief system. Good sugar. Mmm drink sugar. Poison? Poison? Don't drink the poison!--OK. Suppose that I have a kitchen, and I'm interested in making some kitty litter cake, so I have my cake pans stored over here. And a chef comes in and says to me, it would be much more efficient if the cake pan were over on the right. He's very pleased with what he's done. And when I ask him to get the cake pan, he says, "I'm so happy that we moved the muffin tin cake to the right cabinet". And those two get it, believing it could be on the right, exactly where it used to be. His belief is that it's on the right. His alief is a lagging habit. Any of you who have ever rearranged your room knows this feeling. Any of you who has ever put your cell phone in your hand, and then looked for your cell phone. Ive had terrors of having lost my children, and then realized they were on my shoulder. [laughter] So to have an alief is roughly to have a representationally mediated propensity to respond to an apparent stimulus in a particular way. Right? So the apparent stimulus of the glass staircase [correction: skywalk], the apparent stimulus of the kitty litter cake, you have a propensity, that's either innate, as in the case of the glass, or the fudge shaped like feces, or a habitual propensity, as when you arrange the kitchen. These are habitual ways of responding to the world that activate the sort of lower-level systems that we've been talking about. And importantly--although we can recognize alief most easily by looking at these kinds of discordant cases, the cases where belief tells you to do one thing, and alief tells you to do the other--in fact, alief is active all the time. Every time I've used my right thumb to push the key on this, I've done it out of alief. Fortunately, it's one that corresponds with what I intend to do, but it is certainly the case that an enormous proportion of our actions are governed by alief. The question is this: given that I just showed you that there are hundreds and hundreds of ways of describing what I adverted to with the notion of alief, why introduce this new term? The story has something to do with alief itself. So every 20 years or so, the United States government introduces a dollar coin. Here's the one they introduced in 1921. Here's the one they introduced in 1972. Here's the one they introduced later in the 1980s. Here's the one they introduced in 1980, with Susan B. Anthony. Here's the Sacajawea one they introduced in 2003, and in a massive fit of public relations genius, here's the Millard Fillmore golden coin, which will be issued soon.

What's going on here? What's going on here is that it's hard to get people to make use of something if it doesn't fit into the currency system which they have already. Dollar coins don't fit naturally into the ways that Americans use money. Likewise, talk of system one, system two, relatively autonomous systems, heuristics biases and so on, don't fit naturally into the way that we have of talking about ourselves. We talk about ourselves in terms of beliefs and desires. And in order to make use of the gold coin that is the recognition of the multipartite soul, we need a notion that fits into our conceptual currency. And that's the role that my hope is alief will play. So alief is going to return to us in later lectures. We'll hear about it again in the context of the harmony of the soul and in other domains, we'll hear about heuristic and biases and we'll hear about the multipart soul. I look forward to seeing all of you on Tuesday for harmony and happiness. [end of transcript]

Lecture 5 - The Well-Ordered Soul: Happiness and Harmony [January 25, 2011]
Chapter 1. Internet Poll and Self-regulation [00:00:00] Professor Tamar Gendler: OK. So the clicker question that I want to ask you right now is--ah, shoot! This says polling closed. Now polling open. Did you commit to turning off the Internet completely?, Press one. Did you commit to restricting your Internet usage in some way? That is, you're keeping the Internet on, but you're promising not to check Facebook, or play Angry Birds, or go shopping at Zappos, or whatever other indulgent thing you do on the Internet. If that's your case, press two. Did you put no restriction on your in-class Internet use, but you're somebody with a computer? If so, press three. Or is it kind of not applicable to you, because you're somebody who uses a pencil and paper in class? OK. Now it's supposed to be the case that the timer is counting itself down, but no, I've got to prattle for twenty-eight seconds. So here we go. So this is a case--I read through the papers for my section, and my sense there--and I don't know whether it was a random sample--is that about two-thirds of the students committed to totally turning off the Internet, and about a quarter committed to sometimes restriction, and a very small percentage committed to no restriction on Internet use. OK. It should be the case in one second that our slide--yes. OK. So 43% of you, 43% of the students in this room, made a pre-commitment in the form of a promise. It became a precommitment because you wrote it down. Just thinking it didn't make a pre-commitment. But you took an action at a time when you felt yourself to be cool and calm and reasonable, and made a decision at that moment that you took to be binding upon yourself in the future. And an additional 16% of you didn't draw a bright line at the turning off Internet completely, but attempted to put in place some sort of intermediate restriction. Now my next question for you is whether you have strayed. Twenty seconds. One. Not even an itty-bitty bit. Not once. Two. Just once or twice. Three. Um, well, a few times, but I'm trying. Or four, yep, I've been playing Sparkle HD Lite on my iPad all class long. And let's see how the numbers came out. OK. So we should get--that didn't show up automatically. Aha. So 56% of you--excellent. 56% of you have not strayed at all. But notice that half of you have found yourselves unable to carry through with a commitment that you made, and that you provided some enforcement for in the sense that you internalized in your conscience the idea that you had made a commitment. It turns out that for many people, simply making a commitment in their mind is insufficient for them to stay in this not even an itty-bitty bit category. For those people, who end up

here or here or even here, it turns out that putting some sort of external constraints in place are useful. So the New York Times had a piece last week about something called Phone Condoms, whose slogan is, Zip it, lock it, keep it in your pocket. And the idea is that you take your cell phone, and you put it in this little Ziploc bag, and while you're driving, you are unable to gain access to it. One of the students in this class--and you'll have access to this on the slide--e-mailed me a link to a computer program which is basically a computer condom, a zip it, lock it, keep it in your pocket for Internet access. It turns off access to the Internet for a given period of time. But for those of you who feel like you want some sort of external reinforcement, but you're not prepared to make use of the Internet lockup, I thought I'd provide something which would help you stick to your commitment by making use of two things that we learned about last week. One is that when there are eyes in front of you, you feel the gaze of the world upon you. And the other is that when there's a kind of social reinforcement by peers, it's easier to stick with a plan. So not only because they are left over from my older son's bar mitzvah, I have for you smiley face stickers, which the TFs will hand out. And if you would like, you are free to put a red or orange sticker on the corner of your computer, if you're committed to no Internet during class. It'll be there to remind you and to show your peers. And a green or blue sticker on your computer if you are committed to restricted Internet during class. To the TFs, there are 720 of these stickers, so we're not going to run out. You can just hand out--just hand them out, a little piece of them, and people can pass them around, and put them there or not. We're no worse off. They were sitting on my desk since the bar mitzvah, which was in October, and I thought, here, we can make four points at once in a class. In fact, we can make five because the question of self-regulation is, in fact, the fundamental question that we are addressing in the context of the material that we read for today. Chapter 2. Platos Response to Glaucons Challenge [00:05:57] So I want to apologize, because today's lecture really is, in lots of ways, dead guys on Tuesday. I'm going to go through, in some detail, some arguments from Plato, and then in some detail, some arguments from Aristotle. But my hope is that by doing so, I'll provide you with a framework that will allow you, when you go back to the readings, perhaps in the context of writing your papers, to feel like those texts have become accessible. So famously, as you recall, Plato had suggested that our soul can be understood as having three parts. That we have a rational part, which he represents sometimes as a human being, sometimes as a charioteer. That we have one called the spirited part, which he represents sometimes as a cooperative horse, sometimes as a lion. And that we have, in addition, an appetitive part, which he represents sometimes as a wild horse, and sometimes as the multiheaded beast.

Plato's suggestion is that a certain kind of happiness is available to us if we get these parts into line. He writes, "one is just who does not allow the various parts within him to meddle with each other. He regulates well what is his own, and rules himself, puts himself in order, and harmonizes the three parts of himself like three limiting notes on a musical scale. And from having been many things"-- from having been as you are, pulled in two directions, pulled in the direction of keeping the Internet off, and pulled in the direction of checking your Facebook page. Pulled in the direction of going to the library and doing your homework, and pulled in the direction of hanging out in your suite and talking to your suitemate. "From having been many things--pulled in the direction of what reason tells you to do, and pulled in the direction of what spirit or appetite tells you to do--you become entirely one, moderate and harmonious." So the Platonic ideal of the well-structured soul is one regulated by reason in which spirit and appetite are subjected to reason's mandates. Now, what I want to give you now is basically a thirty second--well, five minute--overview of the plot of Plato's Republic in Books, (sort of), II, III, IV and IX. OK? So the story goes as follows: Plato is trying to tell us what the human soul is like. And in honor of the weather, we'll represent the human being like this. [image of snowman] And he points out, as I just noted, that the human soul has three parts. It's got a rational part, it's got a spirited in part, and it's got a part that is full of appetite, appetitive. And you can see the human being, the lion, and the multiheaded beast, in Plato's famous image there. But in order to understand what is good for the human being, Socrates suggests, at the end of the discussion in Book II, which we read for last class, that the best way to understand what it is that's good for the tripartite human being is to think about what would be good for a city that is structured in the same way. What societal structures can help us understand things about the internal structures of human beings? So he proposes the famous city-state analogy, whereby corresponding to the part of the soul that he calls appetite are citizens of the city that he calls workers, or people who do the dayto-day work of the city, and who take their joy and pleasure from the pleasures of the body and of the appetite. There are soldiers, those who defend the city and serve as its defenders in military context, who are motivated by honor. And there are, in addition, philosophers or guardians, those who live the life of the mind. And you'll notice who gets to end up at the top in this story. So the idea is that in order to understand the four cardinal Greek virtues in the context of the individual, we will be helped by thinking about where those virtues can be found in the city. And we can then map what it is that we've learned from looking at the problem writ large in the context of society. We can map that onto what would be the case in the context of the problem writ small, the individual. So Plato's Socrates points out that there are four cardinal virtues, and you know these from your reading. The first of these is wisdom. And the wisdom of the city and of the individual is to be found in its rational part. OK. Those should be--There is courage. And the courage of a city or of an individual is to be found in its spirited parts. They're dancing. And there

are two virtues--the distinction between which is important in some contexts, but not for ours--and those are the virtues of moderation and justice. And the suggestion here is that just as a city is moderate and just when the relations among the people in it are proper, so, too, is an individual moderate or just when the relations among its parts are appropriate and proper. That is, moderation and justice involve a certain kind of harmony among the parts. So that's the Platonic picture. And it turns out that this is Plato's answer--Plato's answer in the voice of Socrates--to the challenge that Glaucon posed to us at the middle of Book II. You remember that we were given, at the beginning of Book II, a three-way distinction among goods. We were told that there were things that are valuable intrinsically, in themselves. There are things that are valuable instrumentally, for the goods that they provide beyond themselves. Those are things like money, which have no intrinsic value, but which have instrumental worth. And that there are things that are valuable both intrinsically and instrumentally. And you recall that Glaucon's argument, first with the claim that when we talk about justice, we make claims for its benefits in terms of the goods that it provides in reputation. Second in his Ring of Gyges story, where he argued that if we can get away with acting unjustly, we should do so. And third, in the story of what's called the statues scrubbed, or the inverted story, that even if you weren't convinced by the Gyges story, surely if justice produced a bad reputation, and injustice a good one, that you would want to act unjustly. So those three arguments are Glaucon's arguments in favor of justice being something with only instrumental value. On his picture, justice is something that is of utility to us in the way that money is of utility to us. It can help us buy our way into things that themselves have intrinsic value. Socratess argument, by contrast, is that justice is something with both of these characteristics. No doubt it is of instrumental utility; he doesn't deny either Glaucon's arguments or Adeimantus's arguments about the ways in which being perceived as just can be of use to us. But in addition, he argues that there is a certain intrinsic worth associated with having ones soul structured in the way that the just soul is. Now, I want to point out to you, to be fair to Glaucon and Adeimantus, that there's a bit of a cheat here. Glaucon and Adeimantus are working with an under-theorized notion of justice. The picture that they have is that justice is roughly acting in conformity with the regulations that society imposes upon us as considered to be meritorious, loosely speaking. Being just is roughly doing what the laws say you should do. Socrates, by contrast, goes on and gives us a much more sophisticated account of justice. But if those two characterizations are what philosophers sometimes like to call extensionally equivalent, then Socrates isn't cheating. What it is to be extensionally equivalent, is that you pick out the same set of actions in the world. So Socrates claim is that it's a law that you're supposed to be honest and not murder people. But it's also the case that somebody with a soul structured in the way that he has

called just will not steal, and not murder people. It's a norm of justice that one will have piety towards one's parents. A norm of justice in the conventional sense. So, too, says Socrates, is it a norm of justice in the sense that he's characterized that you will have piety for one's parents. And so on. So the picture is that the notion, the more filled-out notion of justice that Socrates has provided us with, accords well enough with the notion of justice that Glaucon and Adeimantus were interested in, can make this not cheating. And that allows Socrates to make two kinds of arguments in favor of the intrinsic value of justice. The first comes at the end of Book IV, where he argues that justice is a kind of health. Roughly, justice is to the soul as health is to the body. A healthy body is one whose parts are doing what their parts are supposed to do. Your body is healthy if your heart is pumping blood at the right sort of pace, so that your brain is getting the amount of oxygen that it needs, and your fingertips are getting the amount of blood that they need, and so on. So just as health is of both intrinsic and instrumental value to us in the body, so too is justice, which is the health of the soul, of both intrinsic and instrumental value to us as spiritual in addition to physical beings. We're spiritual here in a very modest sense. So that's the first argument. The first argument is an idea that presupposes that there's a way that it's good for people to work. And we'll revisit this in the context of our discussion of Aristotle. So there's a way that your body is supposed to work: The heart is supposed to do this, the lungs are supposed to do this, you knees are supposed to do this, your ears are supposed to do that, and so on. And we have a picture of what health amounts to. So, too, says Plato, the excavation project that he's engaged in thinking about the city-state analogy brings out what it would be for a soul to be healthy, and it turns out that health for the soul is to be arranged in the way that justice mandates. So that's the first argument that he offers. It's an argument through something that Glaucon and Adeimantus have conceded to have intrinsic as well as instrumental utility, and a claim that once you understand what justice is, you can see the direct analogy between the soul and justice, and the body and health. The second pair of arguments occurs in Book IX, and concern the question of happiness. The first argument there is an argument that we'll actually hear again when we read John Stuart Mill at the beginning of our utilitarianism section. And that's an argument which runs as follows. The person who has developed the capacity for self-regulation, the self-ruler, has along the way, because of the kinds of beings we are, also experienced all of the other kinds of pleasures. In some ways, this is like the Freudian story. We start off as a bundle of desires, and we take the things that we want, without consideration of their long-term consequences for us. And over time, we come and get that unregulated bundle of needs into a certain kind of order. We regulate it first by means of praise and blame, roughly making use of the honor part of ourselves, and then we regulate it by means of reflection and selfunderstanding.

So the person who has gotten their soul into a harmonious state is in a subjectively excellent position, because he or she has experienced all of the pleasures that the person who doesn't do self-regulation has experienced, and in addition, has experienced the kinds of pleasures that are available to us only if our soul is well ordered. So all of us have experienced the pleasure of checking Facebook and playing Tetris. But only some of us have experienced the pleasure of turning off our Internet during class, and leaving it off and listening to what it is that's being said by our professor. And those of us who have had the great pleasure of doing the second, says Plato, have recognized that that pleasure is a greater form of pleasure than the pleasure of Angry Birds. I'll leave it to those of you who have experienced both to assess that argument. So that's the first argument that he makes in Book IX. The second argument is actually a very interesting argument, and one for which full understanding would require my going through the allegory of the cave, which I'm not going to do right now. But suffice to say that it is part of the Republic, and part of Plato's philosophy in general, to say that the kind of earthly pleasures that we experience in interacting with objects are, in fact, a certain kind of unreal pleasure. They aren't interacting with that which is most real. What is most real, says Plato, are not the approximations of circles that we encounter when we use the PowerPoint Draw program to make the snowman in the slide. They are the mathematical ideals of circles. The true nature of wisdom, for example, is not the wisdom that we encounter in the individuals around us, though that's wonderful, but rather the form of wisdom, of which all of these instances are simply imitation. So, too, with every other pleasure that we have. So there's the earthly pleasures, and then there's a domain of things with which we interact which lie beyond the earthly realm. I spend a lot of time watching children's movies, being the parent of two of them. And among the movies that I've seen recently with my younger child is Narnia. And among the movies that I've seen recently with my older child is Inception. And we've also watched The Matrix, and we've also watched The Truman Show. All of these are movies that make Plato's point. The gambit in each of these films is that the reality which you take to be genuine and most profound--this earthly realm, in the case of Narnia, the experience that you're having right now, in the case of The Matrix, and so on--is in fact, but a shadow of that which truly lies beyond. And this theme is, in fact, a central theme of almost every religious tradition. That the domain of the secular, the domain of the mundane, the domain of the worldly, is in some sense unreal, and there is, in addition, a domain of the beyond, interaction with which provides a kind of good that is so immeasurably better than goods of interacting with the world, that there's almost no comparison between them. And Plato's Socrates, when he says, the person with the well-regulated soul spends his or her time contemplating the forms, is making exactly the same kind of claim that, for

example, a religious Christian would make in saying that in giving up the earthly goods and focusing instead on what is spiritually valuable, one gains a kind of possibility for flourishing that is incomparable to that which you can get in the earthly domain. So the second argument around happiness claims not merely that the person with the wellregulated soul has experienced all the pleasures and felt subjectively that this one is the best, but, in fact, that that person is correct. That the greatest form of pleasures comes from the well-regulated soul that spends its time interacting not with the mundane and earthly, but with the ideas of the beyond. Now, final quote. One of the ways of bringing home the point that Socrates has made is by means of vivid imagery. We'll find throughout, in every single one of the authors that we read, that they are trying to make arguments that appeal to the various parts of your soul. I just gave you a bunch of arguments that ran through reason, and now we're going to get an image that's supposed to fix in your mind, the idea for which Plato has just provided argumentation. Here's how the passage goes. You read it for your reading today. "Can it profit anyone to acquire gold unjustly if by doing so, he enslaves the best part of himself to the most vicious?" Right? So the top part of the snowman to the bottom part of the snowman. And here's the analogy. "If he got the gold by enslaving his son or daughter to savage or evil men, it wouldn't profit him, no matter how much gold he got." Right? If I tell you, you can have all the money in the world, all you have to do is sell your brother or sister into slavery, I assume that that trade-off wouldn't be appealing to most of you, and those of you to whom it would be, there are actually courses on peer relations [laughter] over in the psychology department. "It wouldn't profit him, no matter how much gold he got. How, then, could he fail to be wretched if he pitilessly enslaves the most divine part of himself to the most polluted one?" So the idea is this. When you steal, when you murder, when you act in ways that let the lower part of your soul do what the higher part of your soul tells you shouldn't, you're exactly like the person who has these ill-gotten gains. Just as it's not a good way to make money to sell your son or daughter into slavery, so, too, Socrates suggests, it's not a good way to make money to sell the higher part of your soul into slavery. To enslave it to your passions and to your appetites. Now, this idea that we can take some of the common wisdom about the nature of happiness, but recognize that it captures only part of the truth, is one of the things, one of the many things, that's going on in the passages from Jonathan Haidt that I had you read for today. Chapter 3. Jonathan Haidts Two Principles of Happiness [00:28:57] So we read two chapters for today. One was required, chapter five, which was about contemporary theories of happiness. The second, which I recommended to you, was the chapter about virtues. I want to talk about the first of those chapters, the happiness chapter. So we just heard that Plato points out, or argues, or contends, through this long book, that human flourishing comes not from material wealth and physical goods, but rather from

something that it might not occur to you was the source of flourishing: reflection and wisdom. And the arguments that he makes there make use of the resources of the tradition of which he's a part. Theyre set in an ancient Greek context, and they use the argumentative tools of philosophy. In a similar way, the discussion that Jonathan Haidt provides in chapter five tries to do this that is similar to Plato, colon: It tries to show that there's some truth in common pictures of what happiness amounts to, but that they haven't gotten the whole story right. And it does so in part by using the strategy which I described to you earlier. It takes what the common picture looks like, it provides a more profound analysis of it, and it shows that those pick out roughly the same class of things. And Haidt, in particular, in that chapter, presents us with two claims. The first is one that he calls the progress principle. The discovery--for which there seems to be pretty good both behavioral and neuroscientific evidence, both within the domain of American culture and cross-culturally--that most of our pleasure comes not from the achievement of a goal, though there is some pleasure that comes from that, but from the process of achieving that goal. And the second--which hearkens back to the material that we read last week from Daniel Kahneman, and the day before that from Jonathan Evans--that because we are more sensitive to changes in goods than to absolute levels of goods, more of something doesn't always make us happier. More of something tends to make us used to that something and desirous of the change which comes with having even more of that. The next slide is going to ask you to have your clickers, so if you can take them out, we'll turn to them. It's not an interesting slide, I just ask you to have your clickers. So this gives rise to something which is sometimes called the hedonic treadmill. The hedonic treadmill is the idea that in order to maintain the same amount of happiness, if it's based on material goods, requires us to run to stay in the same place. And the psychological principles which underlie the adaptation principle are exactly the principles that governed the cases that Kahneman was describing. That we are, as he showed in the visual system, enormously sensitive to contrasts, and extremely bad at absolute judgments. And we'll come back to that principle when we read the Cass Sunstein paper in the section in ethics.; OK. So my question, polling is open, is Are you ready to move on? Press one if: Yes, I can't wait for Aristotle. Press two if: No, you have a question about Plato or Haidt. OK. So this is just to like re-engage you in case you zoned out, because I've been jabbering, and the clickers are supposed to keep you talking [correction: engaged]. OK. We have--oh, shoot. This clock was supposed to start automatically; we already have 118 of you. OK. So if you are somebody--can we jump this, or not? Oh! That was worse. OK. I'm not going to touch this.

So if you are somebody who was in category two, and you have a question about Plato or Haidt that you would like to ask now, please do it before we discover how rare a being you are. Or perhaps how common. All right. No questions? Question.11 Student: [inaudible] Professor Tamar Gendler: You don't really understand extensional equivalents. Yes. OK. So that is a philosopher's term. Let's see how rare you are, and then I'll--ah, OK. So though you are in the 9%, I will nonetheless answer your question for you. So two characterizations are extensionally equivalent if they pick out the same set of things in the world. So if I say: I'm interested in picking out all geometrical figures that have four corners that are equally spaced from one another, and you say, I'm interested in picking out all geometrical figures that have four sides that are of equal length and at right angles to one another, you're picking out squares and I'm picking out squares, even though we gave different descriptions of what we're picking out. If I'm picking out all female siblings, and you're picking out all sisters, we're picking out the same class of things, even though we're using different descriptions. OK. So it's a democracy. Plato doesn't think that's the best form of government, but here we are. We're going to move on. Chapter 4. Aristotle on Happiness and Teleology [00:34:54] All right. Aristotle. So at the very least, right, you're taking a philosophy class, you deserve to have this picture explained to you. Since you see it on every poster on campus: Come to the writing center! I don't know why they put Plato and Aristotle on the Come to the writing center, but I might as well tell you what's going on in this picture. So this picture is a famous painting by the great Renaissance painter, Raphael. It's called The School of Athens. Many of the figures within the larger painting represent his friends. You can go and see this in the Vatican, if you're interested. In the center of that painting, famously, are Plato, standing right here, and Aristotle, standing right here. Plato is holding in his hand, you can almost read it, a book called the Timaeus, which is a book of cosmology, and he's pointing upward, many say because he's pointing to the realm of the forms. Aristotle, by contrast, is holding in his hand the Ethics, the book that we're reading, right? The Nicomachean Ethics, there it is. You have a book that's on the wall of the Vatican. That's so exciting. You have a $6 paperback copy, but still. You have, in some ways, the book. And Aristotle's hand is here for one of two reasons. Either because he's pointing to the earthly domain as part of his denial of the Platonic picture of forms, or because he's talking about the doctrine of the mean, about which all of you know a great deal, because it's what we read for today.

OK. So next time you see this picture, at least you'll know who these two characters are: Plato and Aristotle. Aristotle, as you know, was a student of Plato's. And the text that we read for today is, to my mind, one of the most profound works of psychology written in the last 2500 years. It is, however, miserably difficult to read, in part because, though Aristotle wrote dialogues, most of those dialogues were lost. And what we have here are basically Aristotle's lecture notes. You notice that on one of the pages he says, and now we'll go and look at the chart. Right? He had--like--some papyrus version of these PowerPoint slides. I don't know if they were animated withlike--people who walked back and forth. But what we have here are notes of a kind that are rather difficult to read. So because this is, in many ways, my favorite book in the whole world, much of what's going to go on in the next slide is that I'm just going to give you some quotes from it, and tell you what's going on in the text. So this is Aristotle's Ethics. If Plato is thirty seconds, this is going to take sixty or so. Let me tell you what's going on. So the discussion that we read starts at the beginning of Book I, with an argument that's sometimes called the argument in favor of the summum bonum--you don't have to write it down, which is why I didn't put it on the slide--sometimes called the highest good. That which is pursued for its own sake. And the argument here is basically what we might call a regress argument. It's like the intrinsic/instrumental value argument that we heard in Plato. The idea is that every good, that is, everything that you seek, is pursued either for itself, or for the sake of something else. And if it's pursued for the sake of something else, it must bottom out or top up. Summum bonum, the highest good: it must top up in something. And so the inquiry that we engage in when we do what Aristotle calls political science--which is not political science like in the Poli Sci department--it's political science in the sense of the study of human beings as political, that is, social animals. So the study of ourselves as socially embedded creatures is the study of what is the highest good for the human. And the highest good for the human being, says Aristotle, is--both in the minds of the common man, that is, both in sort of what you would read in the equivalent of the mass media in ancient Greece, and in the mind of the educated--what was called eudaimonia or flourishing, sometimes translated as happiness. That's what everybody is going for. So that's the beginning of the passages that we read from Book I. There's the question, what's the thing that everybody's after? And the answer is, everybody's after the same thing. They're after happiness, flourishing, eudaimonia. So the next question is this: what sort of happiness? What is it that we mean when we set out to seek happiness? And here Aristotle runs through this inventory of answers that have been provided. And you'll notice, good student that he is of Plato's, that this taxonomy here is going to look pretty familiar. Is it the pleasures of gratification? That is, the pleasures that

Plato would call the pleasures of appetite? No, says Aristotle, and he gives some reasons for that. Is it the pleasures of honor? What Plato would call the pleasures of spirit? No, says Aristotle, and he gives some reasons for it. Is it, then, the pleasures of reflection? The things which come from reason? Yes! Says Aristotle. And now he goes on to give some reasons for it. But the reasons that he gives for it look different from the reasons that Plato gave. Because Aristotle rejects Plato's idea of the forms, Aristotle is not looking to a domain beyond to defend his view. He's looking to a domain within to defend his view. It's 11:17. I'm going to do one more slide, and then we'll finish up with Aristotle next lecture. So the question is, if you can't turn to the forms as your justification for reason--remember, Plato has this explanation: Why is reason so good? It lets you connect to a domain beyond yourselves. Aristotle can't give that answer. What, then, makes reason so good? Well, here's the argument. Every object in the world, he says, has a function. The function of a knife is to cut well. The function of a paperweight is to hold down papers. The function of a laser pointer is to direct attention towards the slide, and so on. And a good one of those things is one which does its function well. Its function is that which set it apart from other entities. So good paperweights are things that are heavy, and bad paperweights are things that are light, or round, so that they roll off. Or invisible, so that you can't find them. Or too heavy to move, so that you can't pick them up off your paper. So when something has a function, a good version of that thing has manifest in itself that which allows that object to perform its function especially well. Well, what's the function of human beings? Well, to answer that question, we have to answer the question what is special about human beings? What distinguishes us from plants, which take in nutrition, and from animals, which are capable of locomotion and feeling sensation? What distinguishes us from those beings is reason. So just as knives are great when they cut well, humans are great when they do that special human thing especially well when they reason well. "Reason is," he writes at 1098, "the special function of a human being." What, then, is the human good? Well, the good for a knife is to be most manifestly knife-like, right? I mean, all those magic swords that you get in plays and movies and books? What makes them good swords? That they're especially able to slay your enemies, right? That's why the swords are good swords. So what makes you the Sword of Lancelot of human beings? It's that your soul is structured in such a way that you do what is best and most completely and distinctly human. The good human being is the one that does the human stuff best of all, and the human stuff turns out to be reasoning and acting in accord with virtue.

So the question that we'll turn to at the beginning of next lecture--and you're all in a position to read the punchline, in fact, you should have read the punchline for today--is what does the virtue look like that makes us distinctly and most excellently human, and how is it cultivated? So for Thursday, we are reading three really fantastic things. We're reading selections from The Iliad, and I've given you two choices of ways to do that. Please look at the reading guide. You can either read all of Book I or you can look at the context of each of the passages that Jonathan Shay gives us, and I've given you instructions how to do that. We're reading Jonathan Shay's incredible book, Achilles in Vietnam, and we're also reading Stanley Milgram's famous 1963 behavioral study of obedience paper. So we'll start with our Aristotle, and then we'll move on to our discussions of those three. [end of transcript]

Lecture 6 - The Disordered Soul: Thmis and PTSD [January 27, 2011]
Chapter 1. Aristotle on Happiness and Harmony [00:00:00] Professor Tamar Gendler: So we have quite a bit to do in lecture today, but there are two main things that are going to happen. The first is that I finish up the discussion of Aristotle's views on happiness and harmony, and the second is that I want to introduce you to the topic of the disordered soul. And for the second part of the lecture, we'll be using our clickers. You do want to make sure you have them out within the next, I don't know, eight minutes or so. So as you may recall, what we were talking about in the last lecture was this ancient idea that there's a certain sort of thriving that's available to human beings. A certain sort of flourishing, a certain sort of what the Greeks called eudaimonia, available to people whose souls exhibit a certain kind of harmony. And you recall that the ancient picture as articulated in Plato and taken on in many ways by Aristotle, was that we have reason, rationality. We have spirit, a set of emotions that are concerned with things like honor. And we have appetite, which are concerned with things like the consumption of food and the procreation that allows our species to continue, and the procreation for the sake of doing procreation. And that the person who is in a position to thrive or flourish is the person whose instincts in the domain of appetite and in the domain of emotions are in line with his or her reflective commitments. That is, somebody who acts automatically in the way that he or she would like to act reflectively. The person who instinctively sits down and does her reading when she's committed to do her reading. The person who instinctively avoids the chocolate cake when she's presented with the chocolate cake, if that's what she's committed to do. So what Aristotle tried to do in the segment of the Nicomachean Ethics that we read is to give us a formula, a strategy, a method, for getting to the point of having our soul in order. And just to remind you where this fits in the context of his argument, the claim that Aristotle makes is that there's one sort of thing that we pursue for its own sake, and it's exactly the thing that I just referred to. It's this flourishing or eudaimonia. It's this feeling that one is living up to the greatest one can be. And Aristotle points out that the sort of flourishing that we're interested in here is not the gratification that comes from satisfying one's lower appetite. It's not the gratification that comes from satisfying the demands that honor or spirit give us. But rather, it's the gratification that comes from making use of our capacity as reflective beings. And you have an argument for that which I went over at the end of last lecture, which is that for each object, there is something that is special about it, something with respect to which it has properties that the rest of the objects in the world don't. And the special

function of a human being, says Aristotle, is the expression of reason: "The soul's activity that expresses reason," in one of the standard translations. So the human good on the Aristotelian picture has got to be the thing about human beings that sets them apart from other sorts of creatures. The other sorts of creatures have the kind of lower appetites that we've described. In fact, almost every biological being seems to have something like what Plato would call an appetitive part of the soul. And it appears that a number of non-human animals also have what Plato and Aristotle would call the spirited part of the soul, at least in some ways. They have emotional connections that seem to be manifest in their behavior. But the best and most complete distinctly human virtue, says Aristotle, is the capacity to engage in reason, and the capacity to engage in reflection. And the capacity, then, to structure one's life in such a way that spirit and appetite fall into line with reason. So virtue on Aristotle's picture is being such that your instinctive responses fall into line with your reflective commitments. It's being such that what happens to you in moments where you're not paying attention to your behavior is the sort of behavior that you would look back on and say, "Wow, I'm so glad that in the moment of crisis, what I did was help that child". Or, "what I did was avoided that temptation that would have led me to do something that I would have disavowed." So the question that Aristotle's concerned with, in the pages that we read, is a question of what that virtue looks like, and how that sort of virtue might be cultivated. The virtue, to remind you, is exactly the virtue that Plato called the virtue of justice. It's the virtue of there being a certain kind of harmony among what they call the parts of the soul, and that harmony being such that it's a harmony we would reflectively endorse. Now I'm going to go relatively quickly through the next two slides, exactly because we're going to come back to this issue in Aristotle two more times in the next three lectures. In lots of ways, this unit of the course is an attempt to provide an exposition of Aristotle's insights. This is attempt number one to introduce it to you, and you're going to get it twice more. Aristotle distinguishes between two kinds of virtue: there's virtues of thought and virtues of character. Virtues of thought are things that grow through straightforward pedagogical instruction. So it's a virtue of thought to know that six times seven is forty-two. It's a virtue of thought to know facts about the periodic table, or to know information of a particular kind about the political structures around you. Those are virtues of thought, and the way that virtues of thought are communicated to others and cultivated in others is through a process of traditional pedagogy. But one of the crucial themes of the ancient philosophical tradition is that in addition to virtues of thought, there are what Aristotle called virtues of character. Virtues of character aren't things that you process rationally and come to acquire as the result of somebody telling them to you. They are things that you process in the spirited and appetitive parts of your soul as the result of a kind of cultivation of habit.

Aristotle says of these virtues of character that they arise in us neither by nature nor against nature. What does he mean by that? Well, suppose I was trying to train my glasses to stay in the air when I let go of them. Would I have much success? I could keep rewarding them every time they stay in the air, and I'll scold them every time they fall on the ground. No matter how many times I try to train my glasses to stay in the air, they will fall to the ground. It is against their nature. It is impossible to change the relation between my glasses and the gravitational force in the world. Aristotle makes the point speaking of a stone. It's impossible to change the character of the glasses. By contrast, if I take a pumpkin seed, and I put it in some soil, and I put water in it, and I put it out in the sunshine, then even with no intervention on my part, the pumpkin seed will give rise to a pumpkin sprout that will come out of the soil and move towards the sunlight in such a way that eventually it will form a pumpkin plant. So if I plant the pumpkin seed, then by nature, it will become, without my intervention, a pumpkin plant. Virtues of character lie in between what a pumpkin seed does for a pumpkin plant and what trying to train you glasses does, given gravity. They arise in us neither by nature--they don't grow out of us naturally in the way that our height grows out of us naturally, or our hair grows out of us naturally. Those are things that happen in the due course of things. Nor are they against nature. They aren't like training ourselves to be able to float in the air, or to be able to stay up for seventy-two weeks at a time with no sleep, or to do with no food for a decade. Those would be things that are against nature. Virtues of character arise in us neither by nature nor against nature. Rather, we are by nature able to acquire them. They are things for which we have the capacity. And they are completed in us through habit. So what does this process of habituation look like? Well, Aristotle points out in one of the most famous quotes in the Nicomachean Ethics that we learn to do things by doing them. "We learn a craft," says Aristotle, "by producing the same product that we must produce when we have learned it. We learn to be a builder"--how? By reading a book called How to Build a House? I read something called "How to Put Together a Table" by IKEA, and it did not result in a table. What resulted in a table was my excellent twelve-year-old son, who obviously is a builder innately, coming and showing me how to put together the table. I thereby learned to be a builder. I become a builder by practicing the art of building. I become a harpist by practicing the art of playing the harp. How many of you play a musical instrument? How many of you learned to play a musical instrument by reading a book called, How to Play the Piano, but never touched any of the keyboard? 0? OK. How many of you learned to play a musical instrument by practicing the musical instrument? How many of you learned to become a pianist or harpist or flautist by playing the piano or harp or flute? All right. So Aristotle's point is that the way we become that which we hope to be is acting like that was what we already were. In the same way as we learn to play the piano by playing the piano, we learn to be just by doing just actions. We learn to be temperate by acting in temperate ways. We learn to be brave by doing brave actions. The way that we cultivate

habits is first by consciously structuring our lives in such a way that the habit that we wish to cultivate becomes part of our behavioral repertoire, and then doing it over and over again until it doesn't require our concentration anymore. It's exactly like any habitual skill you have ever acquired in the domain of music, in the domain of sports, in any domain where you have first consciously, and subsequently instinctively, learned to practice a particular pattern of behavior, you have performed the program that Aristotle describes for the cultivation of virtue. So we'll come back to this again in a couple of lectures. I want to conclude this section by bringing out to you one of the most famous parts of the section of Aristotle's discussion. So Aristotle points out that there's a danger here. There's a danger to learning to play the piano badly, because the habits that you cultivate when you keep your fingers flat instead of curved are habits that ingrain themselves in your behavior in the same way that good habits do. It's not as if we have an automatic filtering mechanism for practice that says, oh, when I practice, only the good habits will stick, and the bad habits won't. Whatever it is that you practice doing will become habitual to you. These actions, these actions of practicing what you aim to become, are the sources and causes both of the emergence and cause of virtues and of their ruin. Practicing brave, you'll become brave. Practice, in the same context, being cowardly, and the cowardice will instill itself in your habitual behavior in the same way. So, says Aristotle, for each of these states, we need to attend to the fact that it is possible to do what we're aiming for either too much or too little, and aim for what is famously called the Aristotelian middle way. The virtues of Aristotle, he says, tend to be ruined by excess and deficiency. So suppose you are confronted with a risky situation. There are two false extremes that you could be drawn towards. You could respond to it in a way that is cowardly, or you could respond to it in a way that is reckless. Between these extremes, says Aristotle, lies the virtue of bravery. Suppose you are presented with a social situation. You could respond to it with hostility. You could respond to it by being ingratiating. Between these, says Aristotle, lies the virtue of friendliness. Suppose you are confronted with a situation where something is being asked of you. You could be stingy. You could be ostentatious in what you do. Or you could be, in the wonderful translation that we have in the Irwin, "magnificent"--that which lies between stinginess and ostentatiousness. Suppose you are studying for the SAT and you're confronted with a situation where you can be either pusillanimous--or vain. What would fall between them? Between them falls the virtue of magnanimity.

Suppose you're confronted with a situation where the possibility is to be either selfdeprecating or boastful. Neither is what's called for. What's called for is the truthfulness that lies between them. Suppose you're presented with a joke. You can be either dour--or buffoonish. Or instead, you can be witty. You might be quarrelsome. You might be ingratiating, again, or, between them, you might be friendly. Huh. There I have that twice. The general principle here is that there are, with respect to each of the Aristotelian virtues, two extremes: an extreme of deficiency and an extreme of excess, and between them lies what is famously called the Aristotelian mean. So you remember when I showed you that famous Raphael painting from the wall, "The School of Athens," where Plato is pointing to the sky, referring to the form, and Aristotle's hand is in the middle of his body, facing flat. And I said to you, there's two ways that that has been interpreted. One is with respect to Aristotle's rejection of Plato's idea of the forms, and the second, I said, is that it's sometimes read as a sort of embodied articulation of Aristotle's idea of the mean. So here, for your pleasure, is Aristotle's idea of the mean. Again, we'll come back to this in two lectures. Let me close this section by quoting for you Aristotle's picture of the virtuous circle of habit formation. And right after this is when we're going to need our clickers, so if you don't have them out yet, you should take them out now. "Abstaining from pleasures," says Aristotle "makes us become temperate." And once we have become temperate, we're more capable of abstaining from pleasure. It is similar with bravery. Habituation in standing firm in frightening situations makes us become brave. And once we have become brave, we are more capable of standing firm. There is a circle to this kind of practiced behavior. And what we will read three classes from now is a contemporary articulation of this idea in the form of something called cognitive behavioral therapy. Chapter 2. The Relationship Between Elite Universities and the Military [00:18:50] OK. So that closes what we were taking from last week's lecture. And what I want to open with and cover in the last twenty-five minutes or so that we have is the topic for today. So let me just give you the punch line right now. The punch line is this. You remember from the opening pages of Book II of Plato's Republic that the character Glaucon poses a challenge to Plato's character Socrates in the form of the claim that behaving justly, behaving in accord with one's reflective commitment, behaving in accord with the norms of morality, is something that we do only for instrumental reasons. There is nothing intrinsically valuable to the ordered soul.

Today's lecture is about two incredible stories. One, the Iliad and the Vietnam war, as read through the writings of Jonathan Shay, two, the experiments of Stanley Milgram, done here on this campus in the 1960s, both of which give us a window into what human experience looks like in Glaucon's dream world. Glaucon said: What we want is to be able to run wild with no consequences to our actions. What we want is to be able to violate the norms of morality. Given the chance, anybody would do that. The stories that Shay and Milgram tell us, the descriptions they give of what human experience is like in these moments where the soul runs amok, suggests that maybe Glaucon is wrong. It suggests that for whatever reasons, there appears to be, at least in these domains, a need on the part of human beings for a certain kind of structure and order. And in the absence of that kind of structure and order, the world seems to fall apart. What I want to start by doing in this lecture, however, is by pointing out to you what an unusual time you live in. So could you answer this question? Press one if you have served in the military, two if you have not served in the military but you plan or expect to serve in the military, and three, if you have not served in the military, and you do not plan or expect to serve. So one if you have been in the military, either in the U.S., or some other country of which you're a citizen, two if your plan is at some point in the near future, to enroll in active military service, and three, if you have no plans to do so. OK. So let's look at the numbers on this--OK. So it looks like 1% of you have served in the military. 5% of you have the plan to do so, and 94% of you have no expectations that military service is something that you will ever do. Next question. Think of the person you know to whom you are closest who served in the military, and let me know whether that's somebody extremely close, a sibling or a best friend. If so, push one. Somebody relatively close, like your first cousin or a school buddy, somebody that you are on a team with, that you feel relatively close to. Or three if the closest person you know who served in the military is like a kid from your school, or a neighbor, or somebody that you don't know very well. And let's see how the numbers come out on this. OK. So almost none of you have a sibling or best friend who is in the military. Roughly half of you know somebody reasonably well who is in service, and fully a third of you have no one in your immediate social circle who has performed military service. Let's go back a generation. I'm asking you about your father because we need a one to one. If I ask you about both parents, we'd be doubling the sampling set. So of your father, please answer one if he served in the military, two if he didn't. OK. And let's look at the numbers here. So you look different from your father. About 5% of you have served or are planning to serve in the military. About 20% of your fathers did. Let's go back another generation. Paternal grandfather, again, because we need one person.

One if he served in the military, two if he did not. Paternal grandfather. That's your father's father. Did he serve in the military? OK. 54% of your grandfathers served in the military. So we went from 4% in your generation, 20% in your father's generation, 55% in your grandfather's generation. You are living in an extraordinarily unusual time. The social distance between American elite universities and the U.S. military is greater now than it has ever been in the 200 years of this country's history. And the architecture that surrounds you gives lived voice to the way in which your experience is unusual. How many of you recognize this building? [Image of Memorial Hall] It's about twenty feet from here. Every single hand in this room should be going up. How many of you have looked closely at what that is? So this building, as some of you know, those of you who are Yale tour guides certainly know, is Memorial Hall. It was built in 1901 without this facade here. And at the conclusion of the First World War, during which a huge number of Yale associates died, this addition was constructed. Across the top are the names of battles of the First World War at which Yale men died. And down below is an empty coffin, "In Memory of the Men of Yale who true to Her Traditions gave their Lives that Freedom might not perish from the Earth." Yale's relation to World War I was an extraordinary one. Here's a passage from a speech given by Henry Simpson at the dedication of the war memorials that I just showed you. "After our entry into the war, and a wide adoption by the government of the principle of universal service, Yale gradually became a military training camp and a completely militarized university. Her faculties and laboratories turned their resources entirely over to the arts of war, and nearly all of her remaining scholars became student members of the Organized Military Forces of the United States. Yale maintained one of the foremost artillery schools in America. She carried on a large naval training unit, commissioned officers for the Navy. She trained officers for the signal corps. Her chemists conducted resources for the chemical warfare service. Doctors and assistants were prepared there for the army hospitals, and a complete army hospital unit was maintained by the University in France. Practically the entire momentum of this institution of learning was thrown effectively into the scales of war." The relation between elite universities and the military during both the first and second World Wars was strikingly different than anything any of you have encountered now. And in an effort to memorialize the contributions to the war effort made by the men of Yale, it was decided that along the interior walls of Memorial Hall would be engraved plaques. So if you walk in on your way to Commons, on your right hand side as you enter, you see the names of Yale men who died in the Revolutionary War. And on the two sides that you pass, those who died on either side in the Civil War, the names of those who died in the SpanishAmerican War, the 227 names of those who died in the First World War, the 514 names of those who died in the Second World War, the 22 names of those who died in the Korean War, and the 37 names of those who died in the Vietnam War.

Now, the question of why the relation between elite institutions and the military came to be what it is today is one whose answer depends upon a number of these incredibly important and complicated facts about U.S. history. Suffice it to say that it was the view of the majority of Yale students and a good proportion of Yale faculty that the war in Vietnam was an unjust war. And it was for that reason that there was an unwillingness on the part of many of them to serve, and indeed, a brave expression of opposition on the part of some of them that had direct consequences in their lives. But the attitude of the Yale campus towards the Vietnam War is perhaps best captured by this image of protesters co-opting this image of something used for commemoration of those who fought in a just war, and using it as a way off expressing their view that the particular war they confronted in Vietnam was an unjust one. For those of you who have not yet been convinced that philosophy is something that matters: this was a philosophical debate about the nature of what justice permits. Chapter 3. Jonathan Shay on the Iliad and PTSD [00:30:58] Regardless of whether Yale students went to fight in the Vietnam War, a huge number of other citizens of the United States went to fight in the Vietnam War. And the work which we read for today by Jonathan Shay is an incredibly powerful reading of their experience that juxtaposes for you quotations from the great ancient description of the subjective experience of war--the founding text, in many ways, of the Western literary tradition, Homer's Iliad--and the in-their-own-voice experiences of the Vietnam veterans with whom Jonathan Shay works in an effort to help them deal with the stress and the trauma that the war experience produced in them. And Shay's thesis in this book, as you know, is that when a leader destroys the legitimacy of the army's moral order by betraying what he calls themis--whats right, the order of things, the structure by which we can understand the world as predictable and wellordered--in so doing, injuries are inflicted on the soldiers that are not physical injuries. They are what Shay calls moral injuries. And these moral injuries arise, he suggests, both in the Iliad, where Homer describes the immediate and devastating consequences on Achilles, first of the feeling of injustice at having had his war prize taken away from him, and then through what Shay calls the berserk behavior that results as the consequence of the death of his friend Patroclus. Now let me pause and say that in talking about this, we're glossing over many, many things that are problematic about that story. What is it that Achilles is upset about? He's upset about the woman who was given to him as a prize for battle being taken away from him and given to another man. I take it that, for most of you, your conception of what the moral order permits does not include war prizes of that form. And we'll talk more about that when we get to the ethics section. How do we make sense of moral standards that are treated as legitimate in one domain, and not in the other?

But for the time being, I would like you to bracket here, as we bracketed in the context of most of the ancient texts that we've been reading, that which you find unfamiliar, and focus instead on what you find familiar. The description of Achilles experience is one that rings true; and it rings true in the same way that the description of the Vietnam soldier's experience rings true. Shay points out that just as the Iliad is a story of the devastating consequences for Achilles and the other soldiers, so, too, are the narratives that the Vietnam soldiers provide an instance of something that forces us to see that the consequences go beyond, and here's a quote from the Iliad, "the war's loss upon bitter loss, leaving so many dead men,"--that the consequence is to taint the lives of those who survive it. One of the greatest harms that the Vietnam War appears to have done to a good portion of those who served there, whether voluntarily or involuntarily, is to have produced in them a set of symptoms that some psychiatrists find helpful to describe as post-traumatic stress disorder. And these are symptoms that affect the soldiers, the survivors of trauma, in three domains. They affect their actions in the world, they affect their perceptions of the world, and they affect their social experiences. So one of the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder is a persistent mobilization of the body and mind toward lethal danger, a potential for explosive violence, as the result of being constantly on alert. All of you know the experience of being in full focus when you feel yourself to be in danger. It's something that occupies a huge percentage of the body's resources. Everything goes on focusing on being hair-trigger responses. And you can have this in all sorts of domains. You can have it if you're engaged in video game, which requires you to do an incredibly quick response, or if you feel yourself in some kind of threat situation: but its a full-body experience of being related to the world in a particular way. Now imagine being on alert in that way all the time. One consequence of being on alert in that way is that one perceives things in the most negative light possible. If you are what's sometimes called risk-averse, then you are going to, for each encounter you have, entertain the possibility that what you confront is the worst-case scenario. And soldiers who are suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder perceive those things around them through the heightened attentional mechanisms that come with this hairtrigger action, and view them as potential dangers. And the things that they pursue as potential dangers are not merely mundane objects in the world, like an object lying on a table that might ambiguously be either a gun or an innocent piece of cardboard, but also in their social interactions. And perhaps the greatest cost, and we'll see why this is such a cost in Thursday afternoon's lecture, perhaps the greatest cost is the loss of the possibility of social trust. And I want to point out to you the way in which this can happen to cultures as a whole. Communities that find themselves subject to certain kinds of terrorist or guerrilla warfare by those who are

opposed to them lose the capacity to behave humanely towards those with whom they struggle. If your opponent's strategy is to bring bombs into your country using ambulances, then you will be forced to treat ambulances as suspicious objects. If, as Shay describes in Achilles in Vietnam, a common strategy is to put a baby atop a pile of explosives, then you will be forced, through your enemy's actions, not to help a needing child. Robbing your enemy of this capacity to behave humanely to you is a strategy that produces a cycle of incredible disorder. Because, of course, it's only a feeling of being cornered with nothing else to do that would lead somebody to take the strategy of using ambulances to carry bombs and so on. The orderliness that governs conventional warfare is a reflection of a certain kind of psychological need. And the disorderliness that is typical of nonconventional warfare, of which Vietnam is an example and terrorism is a second, is something that you produces in societies as a whole some kind of approximation of the post-traumatic stress disorder that Shay identifies in the soldiers. So what I want to do now, in the last five minutes of the lecture, is to give you two examples from Shay of the phenomenon that he's describing, and then connect it back to Glaucon's challenge. So the Iliad is a tale of mania, of anger. And the opening passage, which Shay cites, from Book I of which I had you read for today, is an expression of the indignant rage felt by Achilles at the betrayal of the rules of honor of warfare. And Achilles says--this is actually a quote from Book XVI , but it's talking about the earlier moment. "Only this bitterness eats at my heart when one man has deprived and shamed his equal, taking back his prize by abuse of power. The girl whom the Akhaians chose for me I won by my own spear. A town with walls I stormed and sacked for her, then Agamemnon stole her back out of my hands as though I was some vagabond held cheap." It's a violation of the honor code. It's a violation of the rules and expectations with which Achilles entered this war. "A town with walls I stormed and sacked for her. I am deprived of her not by the rules of war but by abuse of power." Here's a soldier in Vietnam expressing much the same thing. "Walking point"--which is a job that involves basically being placed in the line of soldiers that's most likely to lead to your being killed through an explosive--"Walking point was an extremely dangerous job. The decision of who was going to do it was made not fairly. It was made politically. Certain people got the shift. Certain people didn't. Certain people on the right side of certain people." And this idea that the distribution of dangers doesn't track rules, it tracks whims, is disordering. So the result of this, and I talked about this in the last slide already, is a kind of loss of trust, a recognition that ordinary objects--that's the story of the baby on the mine-holds a potential for danger, nothing is what it seems, all certainties liquefy.

And the second discovery that Vietnam soldiers found themselves making was something that we'll discuss in the context of a paper that we'll read called "Moral Luck." A discovery of what one is capable of in circumstances. Here's the veteran: "It's unbelievable what humans can do to each other. I never, in a million years, thought I would be capable of doing that. Never, never, never." So here's Shay's, here's Homer's answer to Glaucon: Dear Glaucon, Please note. The concern that these soldiers are expressing is not about what they seem to be. It's not about what they are perceived to have done. Indeed, one of their complaints is that when they come home, no one will listen to their stories. The concern of these soldiers is about what they have done, about the being, and not the seeming. And it is the being, what you are, what is intrinsically the case, that is of concern to them. So we'll take up this issue at the beginning of next lecture with the discussion of the Milgram, and then we'll turn to the readings from Epictetus and the contemporary analogues of it. [end of transcript]

Lecture 7 - Flourishing and Attachment [February 1, 2011]

Chapter 1. The Milgram Studies [00:00:00] Professor Tamar Gendler: So I want to begin today by continuing at the point where we left off the in the previous lecture. Which was to talk about, in the context of Jonathan Shay's work, Achilles In Vietnam, the costs that seem to arise when people find themselves through circumstance engaging in behavior that they, on reflection, believe to be immoral or unjust. So in 1961, in newspapers throughout the New Haven area, the following advertisement appeared. It said, "Public announcement. We will pay you $4"--that was quite a bit of money at that time--"$4 for one hour of your time. Persons needed for study of memory. We will pay 500 New Haven men to help us complete a scientific study of memory and learning. The study is being done at Yale University. Each person who participates will be will be paid $4, plus $0.50 in carfare, for approximately one hour's time. We need you only for that one hour. There no further obligations. You may choose the time that you would like to come, evenings, weekends, or weekdays." And then the ad continued by saying that "no special training, education, or experience was needed," that they wanted "factory workers, city employees, laborers, barbers, businessmen, clerks, professional people, telephone workers, construction workers, salespeople, white collar workers, and others." So when people answered this advertisement, they were invited to come to a building whose exterior should be familiar to you. The building was Linsley-Chittenden Hall. And when they walked into that building, they encountered the study of a gentleman who looked like this. [Milgram image] The advertisement that I've just shown you is, of course, the advertisement recruiting subjects to participate in the famous Milgram study. So the participants filled out the coupon at the bottom of the ad and came to laboratory in what is now Linsley-Chittenden Hall. The configuration of the building was different then, but the facade was grand, and the lab was elegant. When subjects entered the lab, they were told that they would be participating in a study of learning and memory, and they were told that there were two roles that they might play. They might be the teacher, or they might be the learner. But as a matter of fact, when they drew the folded pieces of paper, both of them said "teacher," and the other subject, who was apparently participating in this study, was in fact the collaborator. So when the study was actually carried out, the people who played the role of teacher were forty men from the New Haven area who had responded to these ads who ranged in age from twenty to fifty, who had a wide range of occupations and education levels. And all of them were told that that they were going to engage in a task that involved testing the role of punishment on learning, and they were told that the second character, the learner, who was a forty-seven-year-old accountant of Irish-American stock whom almost all of them described as mild-mannered and likeable, would be presented with a series of pairs of

words, and that their task would simply be to provide him with an electric shock every time he got the answer wrong. And in order to supervise the study as it went on, there was a third person present--the experimenter--who was a stern, impassive thirty-one-year-old high school biology teacher. So in every single one of the cases, two of the figures, the experimenter and the learner, were the same, and one of the figures, the teacher, varied. The task was as follows. They were presented with a machine that had on it a series of switches that began with the label slight shock: 15 volt, 30 volt, 45 volt, 60 volt, and continued in increments of 15--75, 90, 105, 120, et cetera, all the way through intense shock: 255, 270, 285, 300, danger severe shock, and finally (don't search for this on Google!)-XXX. So they were each given a shock, purportedly by the machine, of 45 volts, which most of them estimated to be 70 volts. That is, they felt it quite intensely. And then they were told that they would need to administer a shock to the learner every time he made a mistake. Now, before Milgram conducted this study, he surveyed a bunch of Yale senior psychology majors who made predictions about how many shocks the teachers would be willing to give. And if you can see from this graph, that prediction was that no more than 3% of subjects would give shocks at the level 20, which is down at the level of danger, and that virtually no one would go to the highest level. What happened instead, all of you know, with respect to the slight shocks (15, 30, 45, 60), 100% of the teachers gave them. With respect to the intense shocks (255, 270, 285, 300), 88% of the subjects went there. When they expressed dissatisfaction at continuing, they were told by the experimenter, "Please continue," or "The experiment requires that you continue" or "It is absolutely essential that you continue," or "You have no other choice, you must go on," but no other encouragement was provided. Nonetheless, up to the level of danger, severe shock, 68% of the subjects continued, and all the way up to the very last level, 65% continued. This much is frequently emphasized when people discuss the Milgram experiment, and its extraordinary fact about human beings that Milgram was prompted to investigate because, of course, this possibility had just been demonstrated profoundly for the world outside of the laboratory. The research that Milgram conducted was inspired by an attempt to understand what could possibly have explained the behavior of ordinary German citizens in Nazi Germany. That said, what I want to bring out about the Milgram study is in fact the part of the discussion that comes subsequent to what I've just presented. Which is the discussion of what it felt like, subjectively, to these subjects, when they felt themselves to be perpetrating painful behavior on another. As, as you can see from this slide, so many of them did. The psychological response of the subjects sounds like what we read in Jonathan Shay's book for the last lecture. Many subjects showed signs of nervousness, especially upon

administering the more powerful shocks. In a large number of cases, the degree of tension reached extremes rarely seen in such laboratory subjects. They were observed to sweat, to stutter, to bite their lips, to groan, to dig their fingernails into their flesh. These were characteristic rather than exceptional responses. And if you've never seen the film that Milgram made in conducting the experiments--which are not public domain, but I here just give you information about something that's on the Internet--you can listen to the experimenter's calm voice, and watch the subjects agitation. Here's a description. "One might suppose," says Milgram, reporting, that a subject would simply break off, or continue as his conscience dictated. Yet this is far from what happened. There were striking reactions of tension and emotional strain. One observer related, 'I observed a mature and initially poised businessman enter the laboratory, smiling and confident. Within twenty minutes, he was reduced to a twitching, stuttering wreck. He constantly pulled on his earlobe. He twisted his hands. At one point, he pushed his fist into his forehead, and muttered, "Oh God, let's stop it," and yet, and yet he continued to respond to every word of the experimenter, and obeyed to the end.'" So it's a funny thing about we human creatures. That on the one hand, we seem to have a sense of what we can comfortably put up with. And we have, on the contrary, an ability to go beyond that. That capacity can be exploited for the good or for the bad. Those of you who are on sports teams know the experience of being pushed past what you thought could possibly be your limit, and finding yourself carrying through, despite the fact that initially it seems like something impossible. But it's always the case that things with which we feel repulsion are things that we may find ourselves carrying out. Nonetheless, that carries with it psychic costs. And that's the second answer that I want to give in the context of the lecture on themis to Glaucon's challenge. Chapter 2. Personal Interaction and Moral Behavior [00:10:54] I want to turn now to the topic of today's lecture, flourishing and attachment, by actually continuing with a variation on the Milgram studies. Because after Milgram found these results through the 1961 work, he was gripped by the question, under what circumstances was compliance more or less likely? So in a follow-up study done the next year, Milgram explored the question in its most general form, as follows. In its most general form, the problem is this: if X tells Y to hurt Z, under what conditions will Y carry out the command of X, and under what conditions will he refuse? In the more limited form possible in laboratory research, the question becomes: if an experimenter tells a subject to hurt another person, under what conditions will the subject go along with this instruction, and under what conditions will he refuse to obey? Milgram set out to test this by varying along a continuum the degree of human interaction in the study. So in one series of studies, the experimenter, the one telling you to continue, was either in the room with you, or on the phone with you, or such that you only received written instructions. And the tendency of subjects to collaborate, to cooperate, to do what

was asked of them, declined directly with whether the experimenter was present in the room with them. Likewise, Milgram varied the extent to which the subject received feedback from the person being shocked. Did they receive no feedback, called the remote condition? Did they receive the sort of voice feedback, as in the initial experiments, where you'd hear the person shouting through the wall, "It's painful, I'm hurting, please stop?" Were they in the room with the subject, observing him suffer, or did they finally, in the most extreme condition, need to take the subject's arm, put it onto a metal plate, and hold the there in order to give him a shock? What Milgram discovered is that although compliance is extremely high when there's no feedback from the sufferer, it's lower when there's voice feedback, lower still when you're in the room with the person you're harming, and lower still when you yourself need to use your body to cause harm. Youll recall in the very first lecture, the introductory lecture, when I was telling you about one of the questions we would discuss this term, that I presented you with something called the trolley problem, a case where a trolley is hurtling down a track, and it's headed towards five people. And in the first version of that study, I asked you whether it would be morally acceptable to divert the trolley in such a way that it went onto a track where there was only one person, and most of you thought that was all right. In the second variation of the study, I asked you whether it would be OK to stop the trolley by pushing into the track of a trolley a fat man who was standing next to you on a bridge overlooking the tracks. And most of you thought that was NOT OK. There's something in the human perception of our interactions with one another that seems to give rise to anxiety in the face of caused harms whose consequences we see. Milgram articulates it thus. He says, "In the remote, and to a lesser extent, the voice feedback condition, the victim suffering possesses an abstract, remote quality for the subject. He's aware, but only in a conceptual sense." His reason knows, in Plato's terminology, but the other parts of his soul haven't registered what's going on. "This phenomenon," Milgram continues, "is common enough. The bombardier can reasonably suppose that his weapons will inflict suffering and death. In fact, they do just as good a job killing people as bayonets do. But this knowledge is divested of affect, and does not move him to have felt emotional response to the sufferings of his actions." Similar observations had been made in wartime. Visual cues associated with the victim's suffering trigger empathic responses in the subject and provide him with a more complete grasp of the victim's experience. And it turns out that one of the major strategies in Nazi Germany to enable people to commit harm against their neighbors was to use a language of dehumanization that referred to the groups being harmed--the Jews, the gypsies, the homosexuals--as non-human in some way. When we perceive another as human, it is difficult to overcome the tendency not to want to harm them.

And though I've given you a number of examples of the way in which military resistance can be a powerful mechanism for pursuing one's will, this fact that Milgram observed is actually what underlies the possibility of another form of resistance which has been, in some circumstances, shockingly effective. Here's Gandhi, engaging in nonviolent protests in India in the 1940s. Here's a sit-in at the lunch counters in Selma, Alabama in 1963. And here, of course, is one of the most famous pictures of the last two decades. An individual standing alone before tanks in a way that causes them to halt their motion in Tiananmen Square. So what is it in about human beings that makes it easier for us to avoid demands when the person making the demands of us isn't present, and harder for us to carry through demands when we have to look face to face at the person we are harming? Well, what it is about human beings is the unsurprising fact that we are fundamentally, deep down, and profoundly social entities. And we're social entities in a way that is continuous with our non-human primate ancestors. Chapter 3. Attachment in Infants and Non-Human Primates [00:18:26] So Harry Harlow, in the first half of the century, conducted a number of studies using nonhuman primates to try to figure out what role emotional connection and social bonding played in allowing them to flourish. So in the famous wire versus cloth mother studies, monkeys--there's a little one right there--were presented with two beings, wire beings with whom they could spend their time. The wire mother had milk, and they needed to go to her to get food, but the cloth mother had comfort, and if they wanted to be consoled, they needed to go to her. And monkey after monkey after monkey did what you see in this picture. Went--and the fact that you're saying "aw" is evidence of the point that I'm making. So we think this is adorable. We think--in fact, it's very hard to control your facial muscles when you look at that picture. Right? All of us are looking at it, seeing these big warm eyes, and this expression of affection. It is part of the primate maturation experience that in order to become a healthy and flourishing member of the species, early social contact is crucial. And indeed, some of Harlow's more morally problematic studies involved subjecting young monkeys to complete social deprivation, and discovering afterwards that when they came out of that deprivation, their behavior was incompatible with living in a community. Not only were they hostile and aggressive towards their peers, even with respect to the children that they had, they were incapable of engaging in nurturing. So one might wonder, as Harlow's student John Bowlby and his collaborator, Mary Ainsworth, did, whether there's anything that can be said about what's required for human beings to flourish that can be learned from the picture that we see in the Harlow wire baby cloth baby studies. That is, is it possible that for human beings to thrive, we need a certain sort of warmth and interaction that isn't limited merely to the receipt of nutrients required for maturation from a wire mother?

So I take this next slide, this next chart, from a website called Positive Parenting, because I want you to recognize how much the picture that Bowlby and Ainsworth have advanced has permeated contemporary conceptions of how it is that it's appropriate to parent one's children. So famously, Mary Ainsworth brought young children, roughly two years old, into a laboratory setting along with their primary caregiver. And the question she wanted to see was, how comfortable were the children in what was known as a strange situation, a situation in which they would be required to set out on their own, away from their caregiver, in order to engage with some appealing toys. And on the basis of that, that she identified three--it's now been expanded to four--three styles of attachment that children might have to their caregivers. The first, which she called secure attachment, results from early childhood experience that involves predictable responsiveness to one's needs by somebody who feels affection for you. If you are hungry, somebody responds by providing you with food. If you are sore, somebody responds by comforting your pain. If you are cold, somebody responds by warming you up. And all of this is done in such a way that you begin to form an impression of yourself as an agent in the world whose expression of needs and desires can evince in other conscious beings responses that reflect what it is that you need and desire. The world becomes a place in which social trust is possible, and the early instincts that you come to have, when presented with the faces and bodies of conspecifics, cause you, later on, to have as your most primitive response pattern an expectation that, if there's no evidence to the contrary, that conspecific is going to be responsive to your honest and expressed needs. By contrast, a smaller percentage of the children exhibited what Ainsworth called avoidant attachment. They were unwilling to explore the room, and they were unwilling to do so, hypothesized Ainsworth, because their early childhood experience had been one with a disengaged or distant caregiver. Upon expression of need, there was no sense that if there's a social other, that social other will respond to what it is that you are asking for. So there's a sense that develops that the world is not a safe and cooperative place. The third group were children that she called ambivalently attached. Ambivalently attached children experienced a regimen of response which was sometimes in keeping with what they asked, and sometimes ignoring them entirely. So although they didn't have the sense that the world never does what you ask it too, they did have the sense that the world doesn't reliably do what you ask it to. And finally, into a fourth category added subsequently, fall children who are not merely ignored, but who are in fact abused or mistreated in the face of expression of need. Now, this taxonomy is not of a level of precision that it will tell you easily for every child into which category they fall as a result of their treatment. There are lots of issues about innate dispositions that children have, and there are lots of cases where it might not be clear how to put children into this taxonomy.

Nonetheless, it has served as the basis for one of the most extraordinary scientific studies conducted in the last century, which is a thirty-year longitudinal study conducted by people who took attachment theory seriously, who looked at the extent to which predictors of subsequent flourishing could be traced to early childhood experience. And this book, The Development of the Person (which I read over the summer) is extraordinary in the sense that it shows what it takes to establish a complicated social scientific hypothesis with even a reasonable degree of certainty. Because of course, if you want to find out about whether early childhood experience affects subsequent development, we can't use you guys, because we lost our time machine. We left it in the future. So we can't go back and look at what your childhoods were like. All of these studies needed to be done prospectively. So what this group did was to study hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of children, with incredible effort to follow them even when they moved away. And the basic conclusion that they draw--the book is several hundred pages long, but the basic conclusion that they draw confirms the thesis that attachment theory hypothesizes. That early childhood experience, and particularly early childhood experience of a trusting and responsive relationship, significantly shapes later patterns of response to the world. But of course, we've heard that before. We heard it when we were told that it's not unimportant to acquire one sort of habit or another right from youth. It is, in fact, allimportant. Now, none of this is to say that those whose early childhood experiences were not optimal will never flourish or thrive. The human spirit is remarkably resilient, and it is possible, through certain kinds of therapeutic interaction, or certain kinds of cultivation of other trusting relations, to overcome early childhood deprivation. But there is an easier path to flourishing, and that is the one that goes through trusting early childhood. Chapter 4. Importance of Social Interaction in Human Flourishing [00:28:53] Now, the fact that human beings are social beings affects us not just at the beginning of the lifespan, but also at the end. If you want to predict, points out Jonathan Haidt, how happy someone is, or how long they're likely to live, you should find out about their social relationships. Having strong social relationships strengthens the immune system. It extends life more than quitting smoking. It speeds recovery from surgery, reduces the risk of depression and anxiety disorders. Social interactions are crucial to human flourishing. And this is not just something that we discover in the West. Here are some titles of articles that I pulled out of Google Scholar when I was doing my directed exercise three: "Effects of Social Integration: On Preserving Memory Function in a U.S. Elderly Population." Here's one about ten-year survival rate in friendships in an Australian society. Here's one about social integration and mortality in France. Here's one about social interaction and mortality in Sweden. Here's one in Finland. Here's one in Japan. Here's one in China. In every culture, which anybody has looked at, social engagement is crucial to human flourishing.

Now, we might want ask whether this tells us anything about the question that we're concerned within this segment of the course--the question of human flourishing--and whether this tells us anything about the questions that we're going to address in the subsequent units of the course: our discussions of morality and our discussions of political philosophy. So Harrow and Bowlby and Ainsworth and the Minnesota study have pointed out that in order for human beings to develop the kind of trusting relationships that enables a society even to get off the ground, it's crucial that there be a certain sort of stable social connection in infancy. We'll ask, in the context of our discussion of political philosophy, whether this has any implications for how a society needs to be structured if we hope to cultivate in it just citizens capable of domestic and democratic participation. Does it mean, astoundingly, that something we might think would be of no concern as far as political philosophy goes, the internal structure of the family, is of concern, as far as political philosophy goes? And if so, does that turn out to be a victory for the left? For the right? For something else altogether? We'll ask--in the context of Haidt's discussion of romantic love as an extraordinary combination, as you read, of our capacity for attachment, our capacity for caregiving, and our capacity for mating--whether any moral code we have needs to respect the fact that we will have special relationships to certain individuals that will render us incapable of treating them as one among many, even though what morality seems to demand of us is that we treat everybody equally. We'll ask--in the context of Nozick's discussion in the paper that we read of love as a formation of a we--whether when we form connections that extend beyond individuals connections to things like neighborhoods or religious communities or nations, whether that itself has any moral or political bearing. We'll turn back to the question raised by Shane [correction: James] Stockdale who pointed out to us the importance of friendship, of unit cohesion, and of close camaraderie in permitting resilience in the face of suffering, whether it's in fact incumbent upon political structures to promote stability in communities so as to allow people to weather the storms that fortune brings. And in so doing, we'll be able to make sense of this extraordinarily strange phenomenon, which is that Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, a book about ethics that grounds the Western ethical tradition, includes within its twelve chapters, two full chapters devoted to the question of friendship, in which Aristotle begins by pointing out that if you are young or if you are old, if you are rich, if you are poor, if you are at a time of your life when things are going well, or if you're at a time of your life where things are going badly, nothing plays a more central role in allowing you to flourish than friendship does. Chapter 5. Questions [00:34:33]

Thanks to all of you for coming by for an extra lecture. I'm happy to take questions, though technically we've come to the end of the fifty minutes that we were allotted. But I'm happy to answer questions, because there's no deadline. Hello, yeah. Student: [inaudible] Professor Tamar Gendler: No, people can go! Ask your question. I'd love to answer it. Student: [inaudible] between early childhood nurturing, which leads to flourishing, and neglect, which would lead to something bad. But that seems to be kind of morally charged, there's a value judgment inherent in all of this. And I've been wondering because I think that book that you mentioned about different facets of our personality [unintelligible] experience because we can't say that necessarily there's a good way to know how to raise your child. Professor Tamar Gendler: OK so the question was, look, I made a statement that a certain kind of early childhood nurturing seems to lead to social capabilities of a certain kind, whereas early childhood neglect seems to lead to social disabilities. In making that statement, A, am I making a value judgment that's illegitimate about how we want to be able to function in society, B, am I making a value judgment that's illegitimate about what's appropriate in child rearing? So let me turn to the second first. The claims about early childhood nurturing that are made here are primarily about roughly the first eighteen months of life. There is great dispute here on campus and elsewhere about what is appropriate after those first eighteen months. But there seems to be pretty clear evidence, both domestically and cross-culturally, that during the first eighteen months, the idea of too much nurturing, too much responsiveness, is one on which it's hard to get a handle. That is, being such that your needs are responded to seems to be a way of promoting stability and trust. OK. Back to your first question: are we making value judgments about what it's like to be a good person when we say: we're looking to cultivate in ourselves the possibility of trust and connection instead of a life of distrust? I suppose there are circumstances, societies in which being trusting would be a detriment. Being able to respond to somebody without constantly being on guard would be dangerous. And in those circumstances, it would perhaps make sense to cultivate a different kind of early childhood experience. Whether that shows that we've found two equally good forms of flourishing is something we'll talk about when we talk about moral relativism in a few weeks. Good. Thanks. [end of transcript]

Lecture 8 - Flourishing and Detachment [February 3, 2011]

Chapter 1. Epictetus: Overview and Main Themes [00:00:00] Professor Tamar Gendler: So what I want to talk about in today's lecture is a strand in the philosophical tradition that looks not at the ways in which human interconnectedness can provide meaning and the possibility for flourishing, but which looks rather at a certain sort of psychological detachment as a way of dealing with the inevitable vicissitudes of lived experience. And the clearest articulation of the outlook that we'll be considering today in the context of the Western tradition can be found in the writings of the philosopher Epictetus. Here's a wonderful imaginary portrait of him from 1715, sitting at a table, famously with his cane, which he used to walk as the result of his limp. As you know from the reading guide, Epictetus lived at the beginning of two millennia ago. He lived roughly from 50 to 130 in the Common Era. He was born in Greek-speaking Asia Minor, and spent his life living in the Roman Empire during that era. He spent the early portion of his life as a slave. There's some dissent as to whether he spent it until the age of thirteen or until the age of twenty-seven, but in any case, a significant portion of his life was spent in slavery. But he eventually gained freedom, and at some point, either before or after gaining freedom, he studied the works and philosophical outlook of a tradition known as Stoicism. And the works that were produced on his behalf that have survived are two. The first is a major four- volume collection of his discussions of a range of topics: questions in metaphysics, questions about the way the world is, questions in epistemology--how we should understand the world--and also questions in ethics. And in addition to that has survived the extraordinary book that we read for today. The little forty-five-epigraph essay known as The Handbook, which was, as in the case of Aristotle, apparently recorded by one of Epictetus's students and preserved in that way. Now, the work that Epictetus produced in the context of The Handbook was enormously influential for most of the two thousand years that it has been part of the Western tradition. In particular, the frontispiece that I used to show you a picture of Epictetus is drawn from the library of none other than John Adams, the second president of the United States, who had this book in his collection in its 1715 Latin edition. Wait until the eclipse passes. Another interesting thing to know, historically, about the volume that we're reading is that the first English translation of it was, in fact, done by a great eighteenth century woman of

letters, Elizabeth Carter. Though the translation that we're reading is a more modern version of it. So in this work, Epictetus takes on many of the tenets of classical stoicism. So we've been introduced in this class so far first to the writings of Plato, who is a systematic philosopher. He has views about everything, and his commitments are to a certain kind of rationalist, formalist, idealist philosophy. And we've been introduced to the works of Aristotle through one of his writings, the Nicomachean Ethics. But alongside those two traditions, the Platonic tradition and the Aristotelian tradition, the ancient philosophical world produced a number of other systematic philosophical outlooks--outlooks that had views about almost any question you could ask. And among those was the view known as Stoicism. So Stoics held, with respect to the underlying metaphysical facts about reality, that the world itself is an organic physical totality that's governed by what they called logos or divine reason. There is an order to the world. And that the responsibility of human beings, given that order, is to cultivate a particular kind of virtue. Virtue on the Stoic picture is acting in accord with what reason tells you nature demands. It's going along with this grand scheme of things, and not trying to fight against what is predivined for you. So it's not surprising that elements of the Stoic tradition get picked up in subsequent theistic traditions. In some ways, the Stoic view that the world is a well-ordered entity governed by divine reason lies at the heart of many of the religious traditions that are familiar to you today. The question, then, becomes, what is demanded of you prescriptively? What should you do if these two things are the case? And what the Stoics suggest is that you need to accept your fate, that it is the consequence of the power and goodness of the logos, even though the ways in which it is good for you may be unavailable to you to see, and that in order to do so, you need to moderate your desires, you need to avoid excess emotion, and thereby come to act in accord with reason. So the contemporary use of the term Stoic, one who doesn't express suffering in the face of pain, is picking up on the second of these prescriptive aspects. But it's important to recognize that as with all of the philosophers that we're reading, this is part of a systematic worldview. The idea is not, we pick a little bit here and a little bit there and we don't worry about how they go together. The idea is we have an idea about the fundamental nature of reality, a view about how we know that, and then views about what we ought to do as a consequence. Now, Epictetus, in The Handbook, is concerned only with a small portion of the Stoic picture. He's concerned, basically, with writing the very first self-help manual. He's trying to tell you, Mr. or Ms. Citizen of ancient Roman world in about the year 100, what to do if you would like to flourish. And here's what he tells you need to do.

You need to learn how to respond appropriately to experience by doing three things. You need to alter your perceptions of the world so that you come to apprehend things in such a way that they don't influence you harmfully. You need to alter your desires with respect to the world. And you need to structure your life in such a way that you stay on the straight and narrow; you need to structure your social relations in ways that will help you sustain your commitments. And in the next slide, in an attempt to help you read through the text that we have, I suggested ways of putting each of the subpassages of the book into one of these categories. So, for example, when Epictetus tells us that we need alter our perception of the world, there are three specific ways that he thinks we might go about doing it; three components to this instruction. The first is that we need to properly classify things into two categories: things over which we have control--and we'll talk more about that in a moment--and things over which we don't have control. So we need to get our taxonomy down. We need also to anticipate the way the world typically unfolds. So we need not only to know what is up to us and what isn't up to us, but among the things that aren't up to us, we need to structure our expectations in such a way that we are emotionally prepared for what will befall us. And again, I'll talk more about that in a couple of slides. And we need to recognize--in some ways this is a subpoint of the first--the role that judgment and choice play in determining whether it is the case that experiences affect us. So those are the three things that Epictetus says we need to do with respect to perception, and again, I'll give examples of each of them in a moment. In addition, we'll go on to the second thing that we need to do. He tells us that we need to cultivate appropriate desires. We need to get our desires lined up with the world in such a way that we aren't subject repeatedly to frustration. And the way we do this is by inverting the standard relation between desire and the world. Usually, desires express a way things aren't, but you wish they were. I desired firmly yesterday that there not be the eighth snow day in three weeks for my children. But the world refused to cooperate on that question. Had I instead adjusted my desires to the world--I desired that things go on exactly as logos predicts--then I would have been content with their presence in my office. The second thing that Epictetus tells us we can do in strategizing how to cultivate appropriate desires is to make use of this extraordinary human capacity to assimilate things from one category to things from another. So remember when I showed you the Wason selection task, that funny thing which had an A, and an F, and a 4, and a 7, and I asked which card we had to turn over to determine whether it was true that if there's an A on one side, there's a 7 on the other. Doing that task was hard, but when I showed you that it was structurally identical to another task, the task of being shown four cards which had ages and alcoholic or nonalcoholic drinks, and I asked you, which cards do you need to turn over to verify the truth of, if somebody is drinking a beer, then she is over 21. All of a sudden, you

were able to understand the difficult problem in light of the problem with respect which you had traction. Epictetus points out to us that we have a skill set for letting go. We have a skill set for psychological distancing. We have a skill set for saying, "Hah! Stuff happens, and it doesn't matter". And what he suggests we do, and again, I'll give an example of this, is to learn how to assimilate the things which we find hard to let go of to the things which we find easy to let go of, and thereby exploit this capacity that we have for metaphoric understanding. Finally in this category, Epictetus points out the importance of habituating yourself to the inevitability of loss. Here's some bad news for all of you. You're going to die. Shelly Kagan has an entire course about this, about coming to terms with this inevitable fact about human existence. But Epictetus suggests that by taking this on board profoundly, in a way that affects you not just at the level of being able to utter the words, I will die someday, but at the level of really habituating it to your relations to things. All of a sudden, things that seemed incredibly important loom less so. Finally, Epictetus points out the importance, if you're going to act in ways that run counter to the norms of your culture, the importance of realizing that you're going to get negative social feedback. So passage after passage describes the importance of resisting social pressure. When people say of you, "You aren't seeking honor and glory! You must be a loser!" Epictetus says, "Let them say so, and care not what they say about you." And as I point out here, there are almost fifteen passages that identify this strategy. Finally, Epictetus gives you a kind of trick, a persona that he wants you to cultivate. You're supposed to be a kind of silent type: people say stuff, and you just calmly don't respond. Chapter 2. How to Detach from Things [00:15:33] So this strategy that he's presenting to us has these three main parts. And what I want to do in the next bit of lecture is to run through some specific examples of this, looking first at Epictetus's text, quoting it directly, and then suggesting some contemporary analogues for what it is that Epictetus is talking about. So the opening paragraph of Epictetus's handbook is one of the most famous bits of philosophical writing in the Western tradition of the last 2000 years. It begins as follows. "Some things are up to us and some things are not up to us. Our opinions are up to us, and our impulses, our desires, our aversions--in short, whatever is our own doing. But our bodies are not up to us, that is, the physical parts of ourselves, nor our possessions, our reputations, our public offices, whatever is not our own doing." Now he's going to go on and point out a mistake you can make. "The things that are up to us are by nature free, unhindered, and unimpeded, whereas the things that are not up to us are naturally enslaved, hindered, and not our own. But if you

think that things that are naturally enslaved, things that are not up to you, are your own, if you think things naturally enslaved are free, or that things that are not your own are your own, you will be thwarted, miserable, upset and walking around blaming the world for everything that's going wrong with you. The mistake of confusing that over which you have control and that over which you lack control leads to thwarted, upset, miserable, blamingness. By contrast, keeping these categories straight brings the greatest prize: If you think that only what is yours is yours, and that what is not your own is not your own, then no one will ever coerce you, no one will ever hinder you. You will blame no one. You will not accuse anyone. You will do not a single thing unwillingly because the only things over which you seek to have control are the things over which you actually do have control. And as a consequence, no one can coerce you, because you're only concerned about the things that are up to you. No one can hinder you, because nobody can get in the way of the things that are up to you. Now, any of you who has experience with a friend or relative or an acquaintance who has taken part in one of the many contemporary versions of Epictetus in the form of a self-help program knows that at the heart of the contemporary twelve-step tradition lies a version of this Epictetan thought, articulated in prayer form, most likely first by Reinhold Niebuhr. And that is the serenity prayer, which you can find decorated with hummingbirds and daffodils--"God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can't, and wisdom to know the difference." If morning glories aren't your style, you can find it decorated with a dog. Or an angel. Or a young child. You can find it on a bowl, or, most strikingly, you can find it tattooed upon your arm, or your thigh, or your side. So clearly, there is something in the Epictetan picture that speaks to the contemporary mind. And speaks to it in a way that when I did a Google image search for "serenity prayer," I found thousands and thousands of images like this in any language you can think of. So this idea that we need to distinguish between things that we can change and things that we can't, and that an attitude of acceptance is what's appropriate towards things that we can't change, whereas an attitude of effort is what's appropriate towards things that we can, is a lesson that Epictetus has offered to the Western tradition. Second example. Epictetus talks to us about the importance of emotional regulation through anticipating what will happen to you in a particular setting. So he says, suppose you are

going to go to the baths. When you are about to take some sort of action, he says, remind yourself what sort of action it is. You're going to take a bath? Put before your mind what happens at baths! There are people who splash, there are people who jostle, there are people who are insulting. If you're going to go to the airport, remember, you're going to have to wait in a long line. If you're prepared for the fact that you're going to be sitting there, needing to wait for your ticket, you can adjust your emotions. Say to yourself, I want to take a bath. I want to go to the airport. I want to walk across the campus on the icy sidewalks. I want to do so in a way that keeps my choices in accord with nature. If you appropriately expect things to be as they are, then you will not be frustrated. I want to walk across campus. It's an icy day. I realize that in walking across campus on an icy day, I'll need to slide my feet rather than lift them. That which had previously been an annoyance comes to be a fact about the world which is not up to me, and consequently, something which does not perturb my feeling of calm. Third thing Epictetus suggests we do is to recognize that what is upsetting to us are not things that happen, but rather our judgments about those things. And youll recall when I showed you that image from the Metropolitan Museum of Socrates's death upon drinking the hemlock, and told you that a death done with nobility, recorded by a good PR agent-something true both of Socrates and of a carpenter from Nazareth--in such cases, one can serve as a touchstone for people's thoughts about how to deal with human life and its inevitabilities. So Epictetus says, what upsets people are not things, but their judgments about those things. For example, death in itself, he says, must be nothing dreadful. For if it were dreadful, then Socrates, the great wise one, would have felt it to be dreadful. What's scary about death, says Epictetus, is not death itself. What is dreadful about death is the judgment about death that it is dreadful. Nothing is harmful in itself. It's up to you whether you let it harm you. When you teach your children not to be upset by the thoughtless taunts of their classmates, what you point out to them is, what their classmates say about them can't hurt them unless it's emotionally disturbing to them. If you don't let it hurt you, it can't hurt you. And we find voice given to this--here's Laurence Olivier playing Hamlet--in the famous Rosencranz and Guildenstern scene of Hamlet, which I put up here for you, because I understand that there's a production of Hamlet happening in one of the colleges in a couple of weeks. So Hamlet is in conversation with these two emissaries, and complaining about what a rotten place Denmark is, and they disagree. They say, Denmark doesn't strike us as so bad, and famously, Hamlet says back, "Why then, 'tis none to you! For there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so."

When you walk around the world, things have shape and sizes. This table is rectangular. These walls are white. The temperature is such and such. These are facts about the world. Things in the world don't have valences attached to them. It's not attached to an event that it is good or bad. It is your assessment of the event that gives it that valence. That's the third Epictetan point. Fourth point. Epictetus points out that there are two ways of having desires. One can, on the one hand, ask the world to conform to what you want, or one can ask what you want to conform to the world. Epictetus favors the second. Do not want to have events happen to you as you want them to, but instead, want them to happen as they do happen, and your life will go well. Here's a way to get a 100% guarantee that you'll get what you want. Want what you get. If you want what you get, you will get what you want. So contemporary philosophy has a way of describing this. And one of the ways of thinking about it--they use this notion that they call direction of fit--is to think about what a shopping list is. So because I had some parchment left over from that contract that we signed with the devil a few weeks ago, I thought I'd use it for my shopping list. So here I am, unenlightened by Epictetus, and I write on my shopping like that I would like apples, broccoli, and lemons. And so I go to the store, and the fulfillment of my desire depends upon there being apples, broccoli, and lemons. You, enlightened by Epictetus, go to the store, look and see what's there, pull out your parchment paper, and make your list. Apples, broccoli, and lemons. So far there's no difference between us, even though your strategy was to shape your desire to fit the world, and my strategy was to try to shape the world to fit my desire. But what happens to us when the store is out of broccoli? I have on my list: apples, broccoli, and lemons. But there is no broccoli. I'm set up for frustration. You, by contrast, conform you desires to the world. You want what you get. So you change your shopping list, and everything is fine. The Epictetan idea here is that if you shape your desires to the way things actually are, you will never be frustrated. Fourth suggestion. Fourth? Fifth? One of you must be keeping count. Proper perspective. So Epictetus offers this extraordinary analogy in paragraph seven. He says, "On a voyage when your boat has anchored, if you want to get fresh water, you may pick up a small shellfish and a vegetable by the way. But you must keep your mind fixed on the boat, and look around frequently, in case the captain calls. If he calls, you must let all those other things go, so you will not be tied up and thrown on the ship like livestock." The idea is, sure, go around, enjoy stuff in the world, but don't let yourself get attached to it. When a major priority occurs, keep things in order in your mind. "But," he continues, "This is how it is in life." You know how to relate to shellfish and tomatoes. "This is how it is in life, too." I'm quoting again. "If you are given a wife and a child, instead of a vegetable and a small shellfish, that should not hinder you either. But if the captain calls, let all things

go and run to the boat without turning back. Take the strategies that you have available for you for dealing with things whose transience you recognize, and adopt those attitudes towards things who's transience is painful to you. "When your jug breaks," he says, "you say: That is but a broken jug. When your child is lost, say: That is but a lost child." This is the logical consequence of the outlook that I've been presenting to you from Epictetus. It sounded really good when it was the serenity prayer. It sounded pretty good at the grocery store. It sounds pretty disturbing when it's the wife and child. What is it that's going on? Chapter 3. Boethius and The Consolation of Philosophy [00:31:34] I leave that for you as a question, and turn now to the second text that we read for today, a great work composed in the sixth century, in around 524, by somebody whose life trajectory went almost invertedly to the way that Epictetus's did. Epictetus, you'll recall, was born a slave, and tried to make sense of his life experience of suffering once he became free. Boethius, by contrast, was born into a noble family, was enormously successful politically in his early years, had two sons who went on to be enormously successful political figures. And in his later years, was imprisoned for treason. And because The Consolation of Philosophy was one of the most widely read and reproduced works of its era--it was read for centuries and centuries by almost everyone--we have gorgeous illuminated manuscripts that show us the story. So in this one, here's Boethius beforehand, teaching people, and here he is afterwards, locked up in jail. Now in jail, in prison, where he is tortured and suffering, Boethius consoles himself by engaging in an imaginary conversation with a figure that he calls Philosophy. So here is Philosophy, come to visit Boethius in his prison. And what Philosophy says to him is, in many ways, like what Epictetus was talking about. There is, she says, a wheel of fortune. Sometimes things start off badly and get better. Sometimes things start off better and get bad. But there will inevitably be a circle to what comes to you and to what is taken from you. And recognizing that there is nothing to be done, other than to recognize that this is the pattern that life takes, is, to Boethius, enormously liberating. Recognizing that what goes along with having things is the possibility of losing them allows him to come to terms with the experience of having lost all that he previously had. Chapter 4. Stockdale and the Practical Significance of Detachment [00:34:51] What I want to do in the final section of the lecture is to return to a theme that we discussed previously, the question of what philosophical utility there is to these works during times of extreme duress. So my hope, because you read an essay by him, is that even if you don't recognize this gentleman, you can guess who he is. This is Admiral James Stockdale, who

was, among other things, imprisoned alongside John McCain in Hanoi during the Vietnam War, and who was also the Vice Presidential candidate running on the independent ticket, I understand, before you were born. So James Stockdale, as he explains to you in the incredibly moving memoir that we read for today, studied the works of the classical tradition. He read Epictetus. He read a bunch of the other Stoics. He read the Iliad. He read the Odyssey. And all of these were part of his cognitive and emotional repertoire when, in Vietnam, the following thing happened to him. "It was September 9, 1965." I'm reading now from his book. "I flew at 500 knots right into a flak trap at treetop level in a little A4 airplane, the cockpit walls not even three feet apart, which I couldn't steer after it was on fire. Its control system shot out. After ejection, I had thirty seconds to make my last statement of freedom before I landed in the main street of a little village right ahead, and so help me, I whispered to myself, 'Five years down here, at least. I'm leaving the world of technology, and entering the world of Epictetus.' "Ready at hand," he said, now quoting from The Handbook, "Ready at hand from the Enchiridion, The Handbook as I ejected from that airplane," was that opening paragraph that we read a few moments ago. The understanding that a Stoic always keeps separate files in his mind for A, those things that are up to him, and B, those things that are not up to him. Another way of saying this, says Stockdale, is those things that are within his power, and those things that are beyond his power. Still another way of saying it. Those things that are within the grasp of his free will, and those that lie beyond it. All of the things over which you do not have control, which, in the contact of tortured imprisonment, are a huge number, are external. And, says Stockdale, it will doom me to fear and anxiety if I covet them. I need to let go of the thought that those things will change. However--and this is crucial--everything in category A is up to me. Within my power, within my will, and those are the things that are properly subject for my total concern and involvement. These matters include my opinions, my aims, my aversions, my grief, my joy, my judgments, my attitude about what is going on, my own good, my own evil. My internal character," says Stockdale in circumstances which are almost unimaginably difficult. My character and my response to those things are up to me." And he goes on to describe the experience of torture using a trope that we've seen repeatedly in the texts we've read. He says, "When tortured, and released from the torture, what we contemplated was that we had engaged in a certain sort of betrayal of ourselves and what we stood for. It was there that I learned what Stoic harm"-- echoes of the moral harm that we talked about when we discussed the Jonathan Shay work--"a shoulder broken, a bone in my back broken, a leg broken twice, were peanuts in comparison." Epictetus: "Look not for any greater harm than this destroying the trustworthy, selfrespecting, well-behaved man inside you. Situations of extremity that force people to discover in themselves aspects of what they are capable that they don't wish to see, are what is most harmful.

When Plato says, "It will do you no good to gain gold by selling or enslaving your daughter. Why, then, gain gold by selling or enslaving your soul?" he's expressing the thought that we hear here. When we read in the discussions of Jonathan Shay about the experience of feeling that one has betrayed what one stood for--that is what led to a feeling of moral harm. And when Milgram's subjects found themselves doing things that they felt repulsive to them, they shivered, they shook, they felt a disorder in their soul. Here, again, is an answer to Glaucon's challenge. But notice that though Stockdale is taking on board much of the Epictetan picture, he's rejecting the bit about the tomato and the wife. That is, he rejects in Epictetus the idea that social relations aren't important. In the paragraph following the one that I just read to you, he writes as follows. "When people are released from solitary confinement, when put back in a regular cell block, hardly an American came out of that experience without responding something like this, when first whispered to by a fellow prisoner next door. 'You don't want to talk to me. I am a traitor.' But," says Stockdale, doing this sort of listening whose importance Shay emphasized in our reading for last week, "But because we were equally fragile, it seemed to catch on that we all replied something like this. 'Listen, pal. There are no virgins here. You should have heard the kind of statement I made. Snap out of it. We're all in it together. What's your name? Tell me about yourself.'" To hear that last, to hear that you are accepted and that there are others around you willing to listen to the experience which you found painful, was for--I'm now quoting again, "most new prisoners just out of initial shakedown and cold soak, a turning point in their lives." So the question that Stockdale's text raises for us is the question of whether it is possible for us to take on board some of the Epictetan picture without taking on all of it. Is it possible to regulate our desires so that we don't expect more from the world that it's possible to get, but to do so in such a way that we don't thereby lose the possibilities for the most profound types of human connectedness? To that, I don't know the answer, but I think it's worth thinking about as a question. I look forward to seeing many of you at 2:30 this afternoon. Are there questions? We have a minute. [end of transcript]

Lecture 9 - Virtue and Habit I [February 8, 2011]

Chapter 1. Norms, Laws, and Habits [00:00:00] Professor Tamar Gendler: So today's lecture is about the claim that we've been exploring in the context of Aristotle's ethics, that the way to cultivate virtue is by cultivating in ourselves certain sorts of habits. And I want to start by showing you a picture of a T-shirt, which was popular at MIT in the mid-'90s when my husband was a graduate student there. And what it said on the T-shirt was, "Gravity: It's not just a good idea, it's the law." Now, if you guys were MIT students, you would be rolling on the floor. [laughter] As it is, social beings that you are, you're rolling on the floor at the thought that other beings are rolling on the floor at the thought of this. [laughter] But what's interesting about this T-shirt is that it brings out a distinction between two kinds of laws. Because gravity isn't a law that tells you how you ought to behave. It's a law that tells you how things do behave. And philosophers make a distinction between two kinds of laws. There are, on the one hand, normative laws, oughts, things that tell you how you how you should do things, things that express, as the name indicates, norms. Those are things like, look both ways before crossing the street. That's something you ought to do. It wouldn't be funny have a T-shirt that said, "Look both ways before crossing the street: It's not just a good idea, it's the law." Right? It could be the law, and the T-shirt, for lots of reasons, wouldn't be funny. It wouldn't be funny to have a T-shirt that said, "Don't eat in the library: It's not just a good idea, it's the law." Because it could be a law in the library that you not eat. And it wouldn't be funny to have a T-shirt that says, "65 miles per hour: It's not just a good idea, it's the law," because in fact, its a normative law. So normative laws express summative judgments about the way things ought to be. They are laws in the sense that you find over at the Yale Law School. But in addition, there are laws of a very different kind, spread around the rest of campus. Spread around, in fact, everything that you ever do. And those are descriptive laws. They tell you the way things actually are. So it would be sort of funny to have a T-shirt, "If a car hits you, you will die. It's not just a bad thing, it's the law." Because "If a car hits you, you will die" is a description of the way the world is. It's a fact about the world that is a law in the sense that it is in a position to allow you to make predictions about the future on the basis of the past. It tells you about law-like relations between things in the past and things in the future. Likewise, it's a law of biology plus chemistry plus physics, roughly, that crumbs cause book decay. That's a description of a fact about the world to which the normative law, don't eat in the library, might correspond. But they are nonetheless very different claims.

And finally, whereas it's a speed limit on your car that you drive 65 miles an hour, it's a speed limit on everything that it not go faster than 186,000 miles per second. The speed of light expresses a descriptive law about how fast you can go, whereas the speed limit 65 miles an hour expresses a normative law about how fast you may go. Now, why did I start out this lecture on Aristotle and habit with a bunch of remarks about the difference between normative and descriptive laws? The reason is this. Habits are tools for turning oughts into ises. Habits are ways of taking normative commitments that we have about the way we want things to be, and making use of the fact that we are psychological, biological, chemical, physical beings in whom patterns of descriptive law-like relations can be created by repeating the same activities over and over. So when Aristotle says, "We learn a craft by producing the same product that we must produce when we've learned it. We become builders by building, harpists by playing the harp, in the same way we become just by doing just actions, temperate by doing temperate actions, brave by doing brave actions, he is explaining to us the utility of recognizing the connection between normative laws on the one hand--ways we think we want to be--and descriptive laws on the other--ways that we find ourselves naturally becoming. Remember, when he describes for us how it is that we cultivate virtues, he contrasts that to two cases where merely descriptive laws apply. He said, it's not like trying to train a rock to stay in the air, because that's a case where a descriptive law applies. Nor is it like a case of watching a plant unfold when given water and light, because that, again, is a case where merely descriptive laws apply. What's interesting about the middle realm on which almost the entirety of the Nicomachean Ethics focuses is that it's the domain where the principle that I've just articulated holds. It's the domain where it's possible for us to think about the ways we want things to be, to act as if things were already that way, and in a self-fulfilling manner, to have things become that way. So Aristotle's basic insight is that if you want to become something, act as if that is what you already were. If you want to become instinctively brave, act as the brave one does. And then it will become natural to you. If you want to become a piano player, train your fingers to act as the piano player's fingers do. You learn the craft of piano playing by producing the product that you must produce when you have learned to piano play. That is, you learn to become a piano player by practicing the piano. So patterns of behavior that are initially under conscious control can, through a process of repeated practice, become automatized. So initially, when you learned how to drive a car, you had to think very carefully about what to do with each of your feet and each of your hands. Any of you who went to dancing school in junior high know that when you learn how to dance, you start off by counting: One and Two and I won't dance on stage, because this is going forever on the Internet. [laughter] But those of you who learned how to dance in middle school know that behavior that was initially under conscious control

became automatized, such that those of you who were trained to do waltz and tango will now, upon hearing the music of waltz and tango, have a kind of motor routine activated in your feet. The fact that this happens inevitably to biological beings like ourselves gives us a tool for turning normative commitments into descriptive laws. So it has become the case for me that though it began as a norm, look both ways before crossing the street, it's now a description of me: that I look both ways before crossing the street. And any of you who has ever been to England or Australia--countries in which people drive on the left, rather than the right--know how incredibly difficult it is to overcome that ingrained habit. In fact, when I'm in England, I look both directions about thirty times, because I'm so disoriented by the fact that my routine doesn't fit the situation in which I find myself. If you grew up driving a standard shift car or an automatic car and switch to the other, it's incredibly difficult to make the changes. When we become habituated to a certain pattern of behavior, something that was initially a normative rule for us becomes a descriptive one. In fact, one of the main goals of parenting is to instill in one's children instinctive responses that accord with one's reflective commitments. I want it to be the case that when handed an item, without reflection, automatically, my children say, "Thank you." Now, the same capacity that allows us to turn normative commitments that we reflectively endorse into habitual practices can, of course, be deployed in the reinforcement of habits which we wish to get rid of. So for many of us, it is the case that upon opening one's computer, there is an immediate compulsion to open one's Internet browser, and an immediate compulsion to check one's Facebook page. Now, we talked already in the very first class about one of the ways of dealing with this, which is to eliminate the connection that takes you from the computer to the Facebook page. If you turn off your Internet browser, then no matter how instinctive the action is, you won't be able to respond to the compulsion. If you have an instinctive tendency to go down to your refrigerator at midnight and drink the full fat chocolate milk that's there in the fridge, if you take the milk away, then you don't have to change the habit. So one of the strategies for self-regulation involves limiting access to the response that you wish to get rid of. But sometimes either the response that we want to get rid of isn't something that we want to eliminate entirely. Right? I don't want to get rid of all the food in my kitchen. Some of you don't want to get rid of Internet access simpliciter on your computer. Chapter 2. Aristotle on Habituation [00:12:31]

So the question that we're going to consider in lecture today is what additional strategies are available for breaking the link between unwanted habits, or the link between cues and the unwanted habits to which they give rise. So let me ask you to take out your clickers. These are the only times we're going to use the clickers today, but I promise in later lectures we'll use them in less contrived ways. So I want to ask you. Which is true of you? That you have no habitual behaviors that you would like to change? Everything about you is perfect? You're like the figure in Alan Kazdin's opening chapter who wants to change everybody in the world, but who needs to change nothing in him- or herself? Or are you somebody who has at least one habitual behavior that you would like to change? And we'll keep polling open for another six, five, four, three, two, we've got 110 responses, and let's see how it comes out. OK. So 8% of you are perfect. I'm thrilled. I've always wanted to have a class full of perfect people. At least I have, I guess it's that back left-hand corner. [laughter] But 92% of you have at least one habit that you would like to change. For the 92% of you who have that habit that you'd like to change, a second question. So for any of you who has ever gotten rid of a habit and thought to do so, which is true of you? Were you able to change that habitual behavior just by saying to yourself, You know what? I'm not going to check Internet in class anymore. You know what? I'm actually going to practice my violin every morning at ten. You know what? I'm not going to leave my bed unmade in the morning. So how many were able to change your habitual behavior just by talking yourself out of it, and how many of you were not able to change that habitual behavior by talking yourself out of it? And again, we'll cover this for another ten. OK. And let's see how the numbers come out. Four, three, two, one. OK. Oh my goodness! 35% of you can talk yourself out of habitual behaviors. But the other 65% of you are embodied human beings of the sort whom I took myself to be lecturing in this class. OK. It is very often the case, though obviously not always the case, that simply trying to talk yourself out of an unwanted behavior is extraordinarily difficult. And the chapter that we read from Jonathan Haidt, and in fact, the readings that we've been doing all semester long, explain why this is so. Part of the reason that at least 65% of you fall into the category of people who are unable to talk yourself out of an unwanted behavior is that we arent just composed of reason. Plato gave us the metaphor of reason, spirit, and appetite. Haidt gives us the metaphor of the rider and the elephant. Every single one of the authors that we've read so far has talked about the ways in which we are fundamentally processing information at a rational level that may or may not reach down to the other aspects of what Plato calls our soul. So Aristotle, in those incredible closing five pages of the Nicomachean Ethics that I had you read for today, the very last bits of the last book, writes as follows. He says, "If arguments were sufficient in themselves to make people decent, the rewards they would command would justifiably have been many and large. But," he points out, "in a large

majority of circumstances," simply saying to people, "Hey, you know what? You probably ought to pay your taxes by sometime mid-spring," doesn't cause them to act in keeping with what it is that they want, or you want, them to do. Arguments alone, appeals to rationality alone, work in exceptional cases. But they don't work all the time. Now, because I've been glossing over it in most of the material that we've been reading from the ancient authors, I want to point out that the intervening texts, the texts that I'm skipping over in the rest of 1179, is actually an expression of something that runs through every single one of the ancient Greek texts that we've been reading, which is an expression of a certain kind of cultural elitism about the difference between the well-born and the many. But I want to, right now, set aside what is, I think a legitimate ground for challenging some of what Aristotle's saying, and focus instead on what I think is true about what he goes on to remark, which is, that it is impossible to alter by argument what has long been absorbed as the result of one's habits. And Aristotle goes on then to discuss something that we'll talk about in about five weeks. Namely, given this fact about human beings, that early experience shapes subsequent behavior, and that putting regulations in place can shape behavior in ways that is pro-social, it appears that there are implications for how societies ought to be structured. And when we get to the unit on political philosophy, we'll look yet again at these closing pages of the Nicomachean Ethics. What I want to point out to you now is that there it is an extraordinary connection between what Aristotle is saying in this ancient text--here's a beautiful fifteenth century edition of the Ethics in Latin, here's the translation that we're using--and it seems to me, and this is the point that I want to make in the remainder of today's lecture, that the fundamental insight of Aristotle's ethics is what lies behind the literature in a certain kind of therapeutic practice-in particular, cognitive behavioral therapy--and I want to show you how this plays out in a particular kind of self-help book. In particular, a parenting guide. The claim I want to make is roughly that Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics is the greatest parenting guide ever written. So those of you looking for a baby present for your newborn niece or nephew, look no further! [laughter] So what I want to do is to contextualize cognitive behavioral therapy by starting off with a discussion of the animal literature of which it is a part. Behavioral therapy exploits the fact that we are evolved beings, continuous with non-human animals, in the kinds of control over behavior which are available to us. So with apologies to those of you who have taken already Psych 110, a brief introduction to Pavlovian conditioning. Oh! Sorry. With no apologies to anybody, some more quotes from Aristotle. Just as Aristotle says, "We learn a craft by producing the same product that we must produce when we've learned it. We become builders by building, harpists by playing the harp," when

Aristotle says that, what he is pointing out is the importance of structuring your experience in such a way that you have the opportunity to perform the behavior that you wish to cultivate. Give yourself the opportunity to do the things that you want have become habitual, and those things will become habitual. Chapter 3. Classical and Operant Conditioning [00:21:37] All right. Here's the dog. So as I assume most of you know, but it's worth reviewing, there is a technique of regulating animal behavior, which has of course been known for thousands of years. You hear report of the training of domestic animals in the ancient Greek tradition, and in fact, Descartes has a long discussion of how you can train dogs. (Descartes had idiosyncratic views about animals. He thought that they were machines. But with regard to this hypothesis, that mistaken assumption doesn't make a difference.) So the way classical conditioning works, is that before the conditioning takes place, you identify an item--say, food--that produces in the being that you wish to condition a response of salivation, in this case, or excitement. So the dog sees the food, and goes, wow! So the food, in this case, is what psychologists call an unconditioned stimulus. It's something that, without intervention on our part, produces is in the being whom you're trying to condition, an unconditioned response. You show the food, and without any intervention on our part, the dog salivates. By contrast, there are lots of things in the world--bells, for example--which produce in the dog no reaction at all. You ring a bell. Dog goes, Big whoop. Who cares? It's a bell. So in that case, you present what is called a neutral stimulus, and what you get from the dog is what is called no response. Now here comes the conditioning. You take your dog, and you present him with, simultaneously, the bell and the food. And the presence of the food is sufficient to produce in the dog the "Oh, wow". Right? The dog says, Food! Salivate! Excellent! Yum! Something to eat! And so what you've done is, you've taken paired stimuli, the bell and the food, and produced, as a result of the introduction of the paired stimuli, an unconditioned response that is, at this point still, a response to the food. But animals are associative beings. And eventually, this unconditioned response, the "Oh, wow" that results as a matter of hardwiring from the introduction of the food, comes to be paired with the neutral stimulus. And when that happens, when the bell is in a position to produce in the dog the response of salivation, one has thereby conditioned the stimulus to produce in the animal a conditioned response. Now, it's not just with animals that this sort of thing is possible. In the opening pages of the Alan Kazdin textbook that you read, we heard the story of poor Baby Albert who used to think white rabbits were no big deal, until the neutral stimulus of a white rabbit got paired

with the unconditioned stimulus of a loud noise that produced terror in him. And when that happened, Albert came to associate what had previously been neutral, the white rabbit, with a feeling of fear. Human beings are capable of coming to have associations that have valence, either positive or negative, associations that produce in them positive or negative emotional responses. And they are capable of coming to have those associations with entities that previously had no value to them. So with that fact in mind, psychologists began thinking more generally about the relation between objects and behaviors, on the one hand, and outcomes that those objects or behaviors are associated with, on the other. So whereas classical conditioning is concerned with the passive consumption of some item in the world--food is presented to you, a rabbit is presented to you, and a certain association arises--operant conditioning is concerned with the relation between behaviors that you yourself perform and the outcomes to which those behaviors typically give rise. So we have, in our behavioral repertoire, a bunch of things we do that are desired behaviors. It's a desired behavior that you do your reading, that you go to the gym, that you're polite to your roommates, that you call your parents at least once a week. And we also have undesired behaviors. Things that we wish we didn't do. The bad habits that 92% of those of us in this room have. And what psychologists noticed is that we have resources available to us using the mechanisms that conditioning provides for increasing differentially various types of behavior. In particular, if we are attentive to the consequences that behaviors typically give rise to, and if we intervene to control those consequences, we can increase the incidence of certain kinds of behavior, and decrease the incidence of other kinds of behavior. So if there's a desired behavior that you wish to have more of, you can pair with that behavior as a consequence some sort of reinforcer. You can pair with it a positive reinforcer. I can reinforce your efforts on writing a paper by providing you with the positive reinforcer of a letter on your transcript that has signaling value to future employers. So I can provide you with positive reinforcement for desired behavior. Or one can reinforce a desired behavior through what is technically known as negative reinforcement. The removal of an aversive stimulus. If there's noise in the room, you are negatively reinforced in your tendency to put in earplugs if the putting-in of the earplugs reduces the aversive consequence of being in a noisy room. So we can increase behaviors that we want to increase by associating with them consequences that serve to increase the value, subjectively, that that behavior has to the individual, as the result of pairing something that the individual likes already with the behavior. We can, in addition, decrease the likelihood of an undesired, or in fact of a desired, behavior by associating that behavior with some consequence that is a negative consequence. So we can take away something that you like if you act in a way that we don't

want. And we will, in the final two lectures before, or just after March break, talk about punishment and how it works. So behaviors can be associated with positive consequences, or they can be associated with negative consequences. And sometimes, that happens naturally. So when I eat chocolate cake, that is associated with the positive consequence of the flavor that it provides me. It is positively reinforced, because the behavior, eating the cake, gives rise to a natural consequence, the taste of the cake. But it may not be so salient to me that the behavior also gives rise to a consequence which I don't evaluate so positively. It increases the amount of arterial blockage on the way to my heart. Making salient to people what the natural negative consequences of their behaviors are is one of the ways one can make use of this paradigm. So we can take behaviors that occur, that we want to have more of, and associate them with positive consequences. We can take behaviors that occur that we want to have more of and associate them with negative consequences. We can help make people aware of the positive or negative consequences that these behaviors already have. And finally, we may discover that unbeknownst to ourselves, a certain kind of reinforcer is, in fact, preserving a behavior for us that we wish to get rid of. So a parent may discover that the reason a child is continuing to whine is because whining, an undesired behavior, is in fact associated with a reinforcer, parental attention. And one might come to recognize that the removal of that reinforcer will reduce the behavior. So in this regard, operant conditioning takes our capacity for association and uses it in familiar ways to increase desired behaviors and decrease undesired behaviors. But, of course, behaviors don't arise out of nowhere. And the third thing that operant conditioning attends to are the antecedents that gave rise to behaviors. So whether a behavior is likely to occur depends first of all on the setting events. On whether the reinforcer is likely to increase the probability of the behavior occurring. You will be more likely to drink chocolate milk late at night from your refrigerator if you are hungry. So if you drink a glass of water an hour beforehand, then the reinforcement that drinking the chocolate milk had won't be so great for you. You can set circumstances so as to make the reinforcers more or less effective. You can also provide yourself or others with prompts. I want to help you do the reading, so I provide you with reading guides in which I direct you to the parts of the text which I think are most important, and I thereby reduce the barriers to entry that the readings might provide. I help prompt the behavior by making the task more manageable. And finally, we can give rise to behavior differentially by the presence or absence of what are called discriminative stimuli, that indicate, in technical terminology, the availability of a reinforcer. So in the pages of Kazdin that we read today, Alan Kazdin points out that, if the behavior that we're interested in is the answering of one's telephone, that the ringing of the phone is an antecedent that makes the behavior more likely to give rise to the reinforcer. The reinforcer is, being able to talk to somebody at the other end.

So you're standing in front of your telephone. If the phone rings, there's reason to pick it up. If the phone doesn't, there isn't. So what the framework of operant conditioning provides is a way of cashing out the Aristotelian suggestion that what we want to do is to structure our lives in such a way that the behaviors we want to have become part of our repertoire, become habitual. And one of the most effective ways to do that is to structure experience so that the thing we don't want to do is incompatible with an alternative behavior that we put in its place. So in the context of, for example, parenting, Alan Kazdin says, instead of thinking of your child's behavior in terms of what you don't want--right? I don't want to have him whine; I don't want the siblings to be fighting; I don't want my children to be staying up past midnight--Start thinking in terms of the behavior that you do want, and reward that opposite. So instead of saying to yourself, I don't want to spend the evening talking to my roommate and ending up having to stay up all night, say to yourself, what is the behavior that I wish to cultivate and reinforce? What is the alternative that will preclude my acting in the ways that I don't want, and encourage me to act in the ways that I do? In so doing, you open up for yourself the most profound and lasting form of human self control. The form of human self-control that leverages the difference between what reason commits you to and what spirit and appetite may be pulling you towards. You come to associate a behavior that was previously unreinforced for you with positive consequences. When you get rid of a behavior by rewarding its opposite,: says Kazdin, the effects are stronger, and last longer than if you punish the undesired behavior. The best way to build the behavior you want is through reinforced practice. Now, the best way to build the behavior you want is through reinforced practice is something that presumably you've heard before. In fact, you've heard it before three times in today's lecture. "We learn a craft by producing the same product that we must produce when we have learned it. We become builders by building. We become harpists by playing the harp." So what we try to do in Aristotle's challenge, and in the contemporary analogue of it, is to structure our lives in such a way that we can take normative commitments--things that are good ideas--and turn them into descriptions of behaviors that come naturally to us. We take them from being good ideas into being laws. And this provides, I think, new insight on the passage with which I closed the previous lecture, as well. Aristotle writes that "Abstaining from pleasure makes us become temperate, and that once we've become temperate, we are most capable of abstaining from pleasures. It is similar with bravery. Habituation in standing firm in frightening situations makes us become brave, and once we have become brave, we are more capable of standing firm."

So this, I think, is an undeniable aspect of human nature. But it isn't the full story. And the two essays that we're reading for next class bring out a complication to the story that I've told today, and they ask us stop to think about whether this entirely describes what it is that's required for bringing about the kind of change which we hope to achieve. And I look forward to talking to you about those texts on Thursday. We have a couple of minutes for questions, if somebody--by my watch, we have three more minutes. I'll give you positive reinforcement if you raise your hand, then a query that you have will be answered! All right. [end of transcript]

Lecture 10 - Virtue and Habit II [February 10, 2011]

Chapter 1. Aristotle on the Requirements of Virtue [00:00:00] Professor Tamar Gendler: OK. So today I'm going to give you your money's worth in the sense that some of you might be taking this class to see whether you would want to take another philosophy class at some point in the future. And though a lot of what we've been doing in this class is typical of what one would do in a philosophy class, one of the things of which we haven't done that much is close reading of extended passages from texts. And so what I want to do today is to read through as a group--which means I talk and you listen, so it's not really a group. But read through with you all out there smiling back at me, one section of Aristotle's Ethics, in particular Book two Chapter four, to try to situate for you the two responses that we read for today that both exemplify the theme of the course. So roughly the first quarter to third of lecture will be going through this passage from Aristotle. I'll put the text up for you and I'll talk you through it. And then what I want to do is to bring out to you how it is that the two articles we read for today pick up on very specific and very precise portions of the Aristotelian text. So as I said, we're going to be looking closely at something in the book that we've been reading from Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics. In particular, we have heard many times recitation of Aristotle's claim that virtues of character are acquired through habituation. That just as one becomes a player of the harp by playing the harp, so too one becomes just by acting as the just one does, brave by acting like the brave one does. But Aristotle himself realizes that this cannot be the full story and he begins his discussion in Book two, Chapter four, something that we've read twice already in this class--once a few weeks ago and reread for Tuesday. Aristotle remarks that someone might be puzzled by what we mean by saying that we become just by doing just actions and temperate by doing temperate actions. For one might suppose that if we do just or temperate actions, we are thereby just or temperate. Aristotle wants to correct a possible misconception of what it is that he's claiming. In particular, he wants to point out that although it is a necessary condition on being just and temperate, that one do just and temperate actions, it's not a sufficient condition. That is, although it's a requirement to be just and temperate that you have to act in the way that the just or temperate person does, it's not enough to do that. You need some other things in addition. And what we're doing today is refining the understanding that we've gotten already. We knew already from the previous readings and lectures that Aristotle says: in order to be just you have to act as the just one does and habituate yourself to that sort of action. And now he's going to give us some additional conditions on justice, temperance and the other virtues. So he says, for actions to be done temperately or justly, it does not suffice that they themselves have the right qualities; rather the agent must also be in the right state when he does them. Now what could Aristotle mean by that? What does he mean by saying for an

action to be done justly, it does not suffice, it's not sufficient, for the action to have the right qualities? In addition, the agent has to be in the right state when he does it. Well suppose I act in a temperate fashion simply because the resources required for me to act in an intemperate fashion aren't available. Suppose the reason that I refrain from drinking the chocolate milk that's typically in my fridge is because there's no chocolate milk in my fridge for me to drink. Suppose the reason that I refrain from going to a party on Saturday night is because there are no parties available for me to go to. I have in that case, says Aristotle, acted as the temperate person would. But I haven't done so as the result of being in the right state. Or I might, intending to give an object to somebody to whom it doesn't belong, mistakenly return it to its rightful owner. If I do that, I return the object to its rightful owner. I act as the just person would. But I don't do so for the right reason. Aristotle wants to say that if you're temperate only because you don't have the opportunity to act in an intemperate way, but that if you had that opportunity you would, and that if you act as the just person would not because you're aiming to be just, but only because you've got faulty information, your activity doesn't count as an instance of the virtue with which he is concerned. In particular, Aristotle says that there are three conditions that you need to satisfy for your just act to count as a virtuously just act or your temperate act to count as a temperate act and so on. First, you need to do the action knowing that you're doing something virtuous. Second, you need to decide to do the action exactly because doing so is virtuous. And third, you need to do so from what he calls a firm and unchanging state. So the first condition is that you be in a situation where you know what act is the virtuous one. The second is, you choose it because it's the virtuous one. And the third is that your choice isn't a one off thing which is happening in this situation, but not in others. But rather that your choice is expressive of, indicative of, arising from a state of character that you have that persists over time. And I'll give some examples in a minute. Aristotle says in summation that actions are called just or temperate when they are the sort that a just or temperate person would do where the just or temperate person is not the one who merely does the actions, but the one who does them in the way that the just or temperate person does them. So the question that that leaves us with is this: What is the way that a just or temperate or brave or otherwise virtuous person does those acts? So let's run through it with the example of bravery, how it is that we might satisfy the three Aristotelian conditions? The first condition you recall is that you have to do the action knowingly. So suppose I'm out there on the battlefield and I know that there are two groups of soldiers--the brave ones and the cowardly ones. And I am totally clear that I have no interest whatsoever in risking my life. So I make the decision that my plan is to do whatever the cowardly soldiers do. And I set myself up in such a way that I put myself in the middle of a group of people whom I take to be cowardly soldiers and I follow along with what it is that they're doing. If

it turns out that I have mistakenly selected a group of brave soldiers to imitate rather than a group of cowardly soldiers to imitate, I will perform a behavior that is the same behavior that the brave person would, but I won't perform it in the way that the brave person did. I thought that I was imitating the cowardly soldiers, but because I was mistaken about who the brave ones were and who the cowardly ones were, I mistakenly imitated an action that turned out to be brave. Aristotle says: No credit. No credit for virtuous action. The second requirement is that in addition to knowing which action is the virtuous one and which is the non-virtuous one, I have to decide to perform the action because it's virtuous. So suppose now I'm in a similar situation. I'm out on the battlefield. I know which group is the cowardly group and I know which group is the brave group and I decide because I want to get a good reputation that I will do as the brave soldiers do. So I'm knowingly performing an act that is brave, but I'm not performing the act that is brave because it is brave, because in so doing I will express a virtue, because in so doing I will bring to fruition this ideal state that Aristotle has emphasized the importance of. I'm doing it because I'm interested in getting a medal. I'm doing it because I'm interested in getting a good reputation. Aristotle says, even if I do the right thing, even if I do the right thing knowingly, if I do it with the wrong motivation in mind. No credit. Third, Aristotle says that in order for an action to count as an expression of virtue, I not only have to do it knowingly and for the right reason, I have to do it in such a way that it expresses a characterological feature of mine that extends over time. So suppose that I just this once decide to act brave for the sake of being brave, even though usually I tend to act in a cowardly way. Aristotle says even if I do it knowingly, even if I do it under the description "brave act", which I'm doing for its own sake, if in so doing I don't express a continuous feature of my character that leads me to do this typically in circumstances requiring bravery, no credit. And in fact, Aristotle imposes a fourth condition as well. And that fourth condition is articulated in the opening paragraph of Book two, Chapter three. And it reads as follows: "We must take someone's pleasure or pain following on his actions to be a sign of his state. If someone who abstains from bodily pleasures enjoys the abstinence, he is temperate. If he's grieved, he is intemperate. If he stands firm against terrifying situations and does not find it painful, he is brave. But if he finds it painful he is cowardly." So let's go back to our list. In order for an action to count as virtuous on Aristotle's picture, you have to do it knowing that it's the virtuous act. You have to do it because it's the virtuous act for its own sake. You have to do it as an expression or result of a standing character feature that you have. And you have to do it with enjoyment. You have to do it in such a way that it doesn't feel to you like it's an imposition to act that way. The brave person on Aristotle's view is the person who knowingly, for the sake of being brave, regularly, and with pleasure acts as the brave person does. Now next Thursday, we will start looking at an ethical theory which challenges one and two. We're going to look at an ethical theory, consequentialism. A particular version of it, utilitarianism which says that the moral worth of an act doesn't depend in any way on the

knowledge or intentions of the person performing the act. The texts we read for today consider respectively the fourth and third condition. So the text that we read from Julia Annas asks the question, what does it mean to satisfy Aristotle's fourth condition? What does it mean? What does it feel like to be an individual for whom the performance of acts in accordance with virtue is something that one does with enjoyment? And the other text that we read for today--the John Doris text--calls into question whether the idea that in order for an act to be virtuous it has to come from a firm and unchanging state, presupposes something faulty about human psychology. So the two texts that we're reading for today actually come straight out of a careful understanding of what's going on in Book two, Chapter four of The Nicomachean Ethics. So I'm going to turn now to those texts, but before I do so I'm going to check that everybody's clear on where we got these four requirements, on what it is that they add to the initial idea that we become brave by doing brave acts, just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate ones. And that people are clear how that came out of the Aristotelian text that we're looking at. So questions before we move on? Chapter 2. Julia Annas and Flow [00:16:02] All right, so the paper that we read by Julia Annas, who is a scholar of ancient philosophy, asks the following question: what would it be like to be an Aristotelian good person? That is, what is what's sometimes called the phenomenology--the what it feels like from the inside--of Aristotelian virtue? Aristotle's told us that the brave person is the one who acts brave without feeling pain at the bravery, who finds it natural and pleasurable to act as the virtuous person does. Annas's question is, what does that feel like from the inside? And her answer is that what it feels like from the inside is the kind of internal harmony that we've been talking about in many of the lectures in this unit of the course. "Exercising virtue is something that in the virtuous person involves a harmony of feelings and deliberations, rather than a feeling of overcoming inclinations." It is to be in a state of internal harmony. One's reflective commitments, one's instincts, one's apprehension of the world around one, the patterns of attention that one has to the environment, all of those come together in such a way that it doesn't even feel like one is contemplating an alternate possibility. The brave person on the Aristotelian picture doesn't stand on the battlefield and think, "Huh, I wonder what the brave person should do and what the cowardly one should do. Oh, that cowardly thing is so tempting, but I guess I'll avoid it." The brave person stands on the battlefield and--like the person who has turned a normative law into a descriptive one from last class--feels as if there's nothing else to be done then the brave action. On the Aristotelian picture, the just person, when faced with the possibility of giving back the right amount of change or the wrong amount of change in the transaction, doesn't think to himself, "Hm, I wonder if whether I ripped off my partner I would get caught. Hm, I

guess I wouldn't. I suppose I'll do the right thing." The virtuous person on the Aristotelian picture doesn't even contemplate the alternative activity. And consequently feels no need to overcome the alternative temptation. There's not a feeling of resisting a pull in the other direction. There's a feeling that the world presents itself to you with what is to be done, and that you go on to do that. Just as when you go over to your friend's for dinner, there is I take it, no thought on your part, "What beautiful silver candlesticks: should I bring them home with me or should I leave them here?" So too for the Aristotelian virtuous one is that feeling with respect to anything that we might think of as a moral dilemma. Now Aristotle also has quite a bit to say about what it's like to be in a state where these feelings come apart, where they pull in different directions. And the selections that we're going to read from Aristotle for next Tuesday discuss exactly that question. What is it like to be somebody who has to force themselves to be virtuous? Whose instincts run the other direction? But he's in a position and need to ask that question exactly because he's already told us in Book two what it is like to be in this harmonious, virtuous state. Now Julia Annas's suggestion is that we can give articulation to this idea in a contemporary scientific paradigm by drawing on a particular idea from positive psychology, this idea of flow. So Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a Hungarian-born psychologist, has for the last 30 years or so talked to people who excel in some domain or other and asked them what it feels like when they are doing the activity which they do so well in a way that is completely absorbing and engaging. So he talks to composers and he talks to rock climbers and he talks to firefighters and he talks to musicians and he asks them what it feels like to be in a state: an athletic state, a musical state, a creative state, a state of absorption in effective parenting, whatever it is that you do and you do well and you enjoy. What does it feel like to be in that state? And what he says--as you should know, if you had the chance to watch his TED talk--is that it is when our attention is deliberately focused on what we are doing that the action is most experienced as effortless. In a state of complete absorption, we're attentive to the subtle nuances of the experience. You're playing basketball and the location of the hoop and the ball and your hand and the other players is just there for you as a single apprehension. You're engaged in an absorbing chess game and you have a feel for the location of the pieces on the board. You're engaged in a conversation with someone you love or someone you care for and all of the nuances and all of the subtleties of that interaction are apparent to you. Now what Annas notices is that there are two particular features of flow experience that are actually central to the ancient harmony-of-the-soul notion of virtue. And the first is that flow activity, activity in which you are fully absorbed, is experienced as what she calls autotelic. She's actually there making use of terminology that Csikszentmihalyi himself uses. Auto meaning: self, telic meaning: end. Something that is autotelic is an end in itself. It's not a means to an end. It's something that has--wow, I'm remembering something from Plato's Republic, from those opening pages from our very first reading assignment. It's something that we experience as having intrinsic value. It's something that when we do it,

we're not thinking of it merely as a means to some other end. We're thinking of it as something that is enjoyable for its own sake. A painter who's painting paintings thinking: How much am I going to be able to sell this for on the market? is not at the time of painting absorbed in painting for its own sake. An athlete who thinks about their performance only in terms of how many points it will get for them or their team won't become fully absorbed in the activity. It turns out that even for things of instrumental value, the most effective way to do them with excellence is to become so absorbed in them that they feel to us to be of intrinsic worth. And this give us, I think, a new insight on that three-way divide that we had in the opening pages of Book Two of Plato's Republic, when we were told that there are things that are instrumentally valuable, things that are intrinsically valuable and things that are both. It gives us a way of understanding how even for things that are merely instrumentally valuable, we can get caught up in our engagement with them in such a way that they feel to us to have intrinsic worth. And this is of course, both a virtue and a vice. The most famous commodity with merely instrumental value is of course, money. The bills in your pocket, I hasten to tell you, are not worth as pieces of paper much more than a fraction of a penny. But they have instrumental value within a system of economic give and take. But even within that system of economic give and take, they are only of instrumental value because money for its own sake isn't useful. Money is useful because it allows us to purchase other things that are useful for their own sake--beautiful cars, beautiful foods, time to spend with our friends and family, opportunities to visit parts of the world. All of those are things that we can buy with money. But money in itself is of only instrumental utility. Nonetheless, exactly the human psychological function that enables us to treat something like making a shot in a basketball game, which is of course only of instrumental value, as if it were of intrinsic value--that allows us to get caught up in experience, that allows us to have this experience of flow, can be redeployed so that we come to think that whoever dies with the largest number in their bank account has somehow won a game whose point values weren't arbitrary. So there is--as is very often the case--both an upside and a downside to this fact about human psychology: the fact that we are capable of experiencing things that might not have intrinsic value as if they did. And in fact, experiencing things in that way is one of the most powerfully engaging things that we can do. Exactly because when all of our energies are directed towards the activity, we lose ourselves in it. There is a feeling--and Csikszentmihalyi describes this beautifully in the last five minutes of the TED talk that I sent you to. There is this feeling of complete absorption, a feeling of unselfconsciousness, a feeling of a breakdown between the boundaries of the self and the boundaries of the world. You become part of the scene with respect to which you're experiencing the flow. And indeed, the moment you let selfconsciousness reemerge, the flow gets disrupted. Any of you who has ever played a sport or a musical instrument or been in a play or given a lecture knows the danger of stepping out of the scene and listening to yourself doing it, how disruptive that can be of the experience.

So Annas's suggestion is that Aristotle's idea of virtue is the idea that virtue and the activity of virtue should feel flow-like. It should feel absorbing. It should feel non-reflective. It should feel that when you are in the act of being brave or just or temperate or magnanimous or magnificent or any of the other Aristotelian virtues, that what you experience at that moment is a feeling that you're doing something about which there was no choice. This is just the way the world is--with respect to which you feel there to be intrinsic value, and where you feel fully absorbed and unselfconscious. And Csikszentmihalyi goes on in his more systematic work to explain that the reason that this occurs is because there is a profound match between your skill level and the challenge that the activity brings with it. When we are presented with a task, which is not challenging for us and with respect to which we have low skill, we experience what Csikszentmihalyi calls apathy. So if there's something that's not very hard for me, but I'm not very good at it, there's going to be little motivation to respond to that with engagement. If my skill level is low and the task is a little bit harder, I might feel worried in the face of my inability to do it. And if my skill level is low and the challenge level is high, I might even feel anxiety. Moving over, if my skill level is moderate and the activity is of low challenge to me, I'll experience a feeling of boredom. I won't find myself engaged by it. I'll find the situation to be tedious. If my skill level is medium and the activity is of high challenge, I might feel aroused. I might feel intrigued by it. I might feel some motivation to act in that way. But the cases where we feel the most excitement in the world are the cases where we have the coping strategies that enable us to act effectively as agents. You'll recall that when we read the material from Jonathan Haidt for last class and the class before, he described an experiment that was done on the floor of a nursing home where the patients were either given the responsibility for caring for the plants on the floor or somebody else cared for the plants on the floor. And the happiness level of those who were engaged in productive activity was much higher. Skillful coping, being able to be a force of agency in the world is for human beings one of the primary sources of happiness. And if we think back to what we talked about a few classes ago on the importance of early childhood secure attachment, one way of understanding what secure attachment includes is a feeling of agency in the world. If when you cry it causes your caregiver to come to you and satisfy your needs, you come to feel yourself to be effective as an agent. And so when our skill level is high, even if the challenge level is low, we'll feel performing the activity a certain kind of relaxation. Those of you who play bubble pop games on your telephone and are good at them are presumably experiencing that. Many times we have high skill level with a low challenge activity and it enables us to feel that we're relaxing. When we have high skill level and a challenge that's medium for us, we get this thrill of control. The idea that here's something you're trying to do. You have pretty good mastery of it and it gives you this feeling of efficacy. And finally, we have one cell unexposed in this matrix. And that's the cell that asks us what it's like when we have both high skill level and a challenging activity. And it won't surprise you to learn that that is where flow falls.

So Annas's suggestion, drawing on Csikszentmihalyi as a way of understanding Aristotle, is that what it is like to be a virtuous being from the inside is to be fully absorbed in an activity that is in some sense enormously challenging. It involves scanning the world in such a way that you recognize what situations are morally demanding and acting skillfully, naturally, effortlessly, happily in a state of harmony, in a way that conforms with what the world demands of you. And in so doing one is fully absorbed in an activity which feels to one to be of intrinsic worth, and where the feeling of one's self as a distinct agent disappears because of the absorption. So that's the first of the articles that we read for today. One which says, here's a demand which Aristotle makes, here's a way of understanding that demand in the vocabulary of a contemporary work of social psychology. Chapter 3. John Doris and the Situationist Critique [00:35:27] The second piece that we read for today does exactly the opposite. John Doris, following a number of other philosophers including Gilbert Harman and several others, suggests that contemporary social psychology shows that it's circumstance rather than character that's the primary determinant of action. What determines how we act in a situation says Doris, says social psychology--that is, Doris says social psychology says--when we are in a situation, what determines our action is not something stable about our character, not Aristotle's condition three that it be a state that persists over time, but rather incidental features of the situation. And as a result Aristotelian moral psychology, in particular in its third condition, demands that we commit what social psychologists call the fundamental attribution error. In order to explain the fundamental attribution error, let me present you with the study that serves as the paradigm instance showing the ways in which circumstance and not character appear to determine behavior. And I present this study to you both because it's central to this literature, and because our very second class, we read a piece by one of its authors, Batson. And when we get to the punishment section, we'll be reading a piece by its other author, John Darley. So the Good Samaritan parable, as those of you raised in Christian religious traditions know, is a story that Jesus tells in the book of Luke when he is asked basically the question which we've asked Plato and Aristotle to answer for us: How is it that I can behave in the way that morality demands? And the story that Jesus tells runs as follows. A certain man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho and he fell among robbers who both stripped him and beat him and departed leaving him half dead. By chance a certain priest was going down that way. When he saw him, he passed by on the other side. In the same way, a Levite also when he came to the place saw him and passed by the other side. But a certain Samaritan as he traveled came where he was when he saw him, he was moved with compassion. Came to him, bound up his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. That's apparently a nice thing to do to wounds. Set him on his own animal, brought him to an inn, took care of him. And the story continues. He gives the innkeeper money to take care of the man. And Jesus says to the person who asked for a story, this too should you do. So the story of the Good Samaritan is a story that, if you are thinking about it, should lead you presumably to recognize the virtue of helping the stranger in need. It should make it

particularly salient to you that among the moral demands that the world places on you is that if somebody is lying injured along the wayside, and you are in a position to help them, then it would be in keeping with the demands of morality for you to stop and lean down and pour oil and wine onto his wounds--or whatever the contemporary analog of that is. So the study that Darley and Batson did ran as follows. They took a bunch of divinity school students at Princeton--young seminarians. You can see them there in their young seminarian outfits. And it asked some of them to prepare a sermon on the parable of the Good Samaritan. So these are divinity school students, presumably people who are committed to developing moral character in themselves. And what they've been asked to do is to prepare a sermon on something that makes very, very salient to them that if you stumble upon somebody who is in need of your help, you should stop and help them. And then what Batson and Darley did is they told some of these people that they were in a great rush to get to the other side of campus where they needed to deliver their lecture. And some of them they didn't tell this to. And some of the seminarians had been told to do the Good Samaritan story and some of the seminarians had been told to prepare another story. Now you might think if the hypothesis that what determines behavior is character were true, that those seminarians who had prepared a lecture on the Good Samaritan would be particularly likely to recognize the moral needs attaching to stumbling upon somebody who was injured. And that the question of whether they were late or early to give their lecture would have no bearing. Darley and Batson decided to test this. What they did is they had the seminarians walk over towards the lecture hall. And on their way there was somebody lying on the sidewalk in need of their help. Now, what was predictive of whether the seminarians stopped to help this man on the wayside was not whether they had prepared a story about the Good Samaritan. It was whether they were in a rush to get to their lecture. And those of them who were very often not only didn't help the man, they stepped over his body and rushed over to the theater. Now all of us have experienced this. If I'm in a rush to pick up my kids and I have to pull over because there's an ambulance coming the other way, I feel incredible annoyance. Why? Because I think, oh that person in the ambulance, they deserve to die because I've got to pick up my kids? No, it's because when our attention is directed towards an external goal, it is very hard for us to be attentive to the moral features of a situation. And it turns out, over and over and over again, that when we're trying to decide what led somebody to act in a particular way; we have a tendency to over-credit features of their character--dispositional features--and under-credit situational features--features of the circumstance. So we might think for example, that whether or not--this is the opening case in Doris's paper--whether or not you're likely to help somebody pick up their papers when they drop them depends upon a feature of your character. Are you a helpful person or an unhelpful person? But it looks like you can manipulate whether people are going to be willing to help simply by letting them find a dime in a phone booth. (If you don't know what a phone booth is, there's a movie called The Matrix and they have phone booths in it.) Whether or not they find a dime in the phone booth is what determines whether they help.

In the Good Samaritan study, it's not whether they're thinking about being helpful--it's whether they're in a rush. In the Milgram experiments, it's not about whether in general they behave one way or the other--it's whether they find themselves in a circumstance where a demand is made of them. In the Vietnam "moral luck" cases, it's not that these young men who went to Vietnam and found themselves in a circumstance had a character that would lead them to act in that way, says this theory--it's that they found themselves in this circumstance. So, says John Doris, the Aristotelian theory can't be right. It presupposes a faulty picture of human psychology. It's 11:20 now. At the beginning of next lecture, I'll pick up again with two results from social psychology that challenge, in certain ways, the claim that Doris is making against Aristotle, and then we'll continues with our discussion of Aristotle's counter side to this-what we do in cases of weakness of the will and what strategies are available to us if we don't satisfy Aristotle's four conditions. [end of transcript]

Lecture 11 - Weakness of the Will and Procrastination [February 15, 2011]

Chapter 1. Situationism, Virtue Ethics and Character Recap [00:00:00] Professor Tamar Gendler: Alright. So I left you at the end of last lecture with this incredible cliffhanger I put up on the slide, but... So let me get a running start and let you know where we were, finish up that lecture, and then move in to the topics for today. So as you recall, at the end of last lecture I was talking about a particular critique which has been offered by contemporary social psychologists of Aristotle's moral theory. As youll recall, Aristotle has a moral theory whose fundamental notion is that of the person with good character--the one who acts as the well-raised one, the person with practical wisdom would act. Aristotle calls that person the phronimos. And John Doris, in the essay we read, gave voice to a concern which a number of philosophers have expressed in recent years, which is the concern that Aristotle's moral theory commits a mistake. It commits what psychologists call the fundamental attribution error. And that's the idea that it's character rather than circumstance that's the primary determinant of action. And Doris adduced a number of psychological studies that purport to show that the primary determinant of action is circumstance rather than some standing feature of the person. So he told us the story of the guys in the phone booth and suggested that it's a local feature of mood that determines whether people are likely to be helpful rather than a standing feature of character. He told us the story of the Good Samaritan study, again suggesting that it was circumstance or situation that affected behavior, not standing features of character. We ourselves read and thought about the Milgram experiments: circumstances in which people find themselves behaving in ways that one might think are out of character. And we talked about previously, and we'll talk about it again, the idea of moral luck: the idea that one may find oneself in circumstances that lead to behavior. So there is no doubt that there is an element of truth to the claim that circumstance is a major contributor to behavior. It's undeniable that there are circumstances that contribute to how it is that people act. But that strand of social psychology that Doris is stressing is, I think, only part of the story. So in addition to circumstance contributing to character, there's a large body of research in psychology known as personality psychology which looks at a set of traits that seem to be pretty well established in people by their first year of life. These are traits that are quite stable over time, and that end up correlating with a large range of other measures. These are things like openness to new experience, conscientiousness in carrying out responsibilities, extroversion as opposed to introversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism: a certain kind of anxiety. So although it is the case that circumstance plays a major role in determining how it is that people behave, it is also the case that there are contributions from

individual personality. And one of the most dramatic pieces of evidence in favor of that are Walter Mischel's famous deferred gratification studies which I'll discuss now and then again later in the lecture. It looks like, if Mischel's studies which involve thousands and thousands of children are to be trusted, that the early capacity for self-regulation or delay of gratification in the face of temptation is highly predictive of all sorts of things ranging from SAT scores to social relations in school. Social and cognitive functions seem to correlate with the certain features about early experience. So although it is undoubtedly the case that the situationist critique gets something right, and it is undoubtedly a mistake to think that the sole contribution to behavior is character, and that the features of the environment play no role, to say that the only contribution to behavior is circumstance and that there's no contribution on the part of the individual is, I think, a mistake. And those of you who are interested in looking at what those individual differences look like in children early on may enjoy watching some of the videos of the Mischel studies where you get to see children sitting in front of marshmallows, looking like this, or this, or this, or this. Or--poor thing--she's destined for low SAT scores, but wow is that marshmallow going to taste good. So any of you who wants to watch some of these, here are three very different presentations of the marshmallow case. And again, these slides will be up so you can go get them off the Internet. Chapter 2. Aristotle on Weakness of Will [00:05:43] OK. So that's the closing of last lecture, and obviously a straightforward segue into the topic of today's lecture which is the question in some ways with which we began this section of the course: the question of strategies for regulating oneself in the face of weakness of the will. Now, what we emphasized in the last lecture was Aristotle's picture of what it takes for someone to be virtuous. And Aristotle said that in order to be virtuous, you need to satisfy four conditions. You need to know what's the right thing to do, you need to decide to do that thing because it's the right thing, you need to do so stably, and you need to do so in a way that doesn't cut against your inclinations. Those are the four features that are required to be virtuous on Aristotle's picture. And corresponding to virtue on the other end of the spectrum is the Aristotelian notion of vice which is basically its exact opposite. It's a harmonious, stable, knowledgeable, decided tendency to act in keeping with exactly what's wrong. So the vicious person has knowledge of what's the wrong thing to do, decides to do it because it's the wrong thing, stably does so, and doesn't feel any inclination to do the right thing. So those are two ends of the Aristotelian spectrum. In fact, there are two things which lie a bit beyond the end of the Aristotelian spectrum. As you know from you reading guide, Aristotle also identifies the notion somewhat akin to the state that Jonathan Shay calls the berserk state. This is the state that Aristotle calls bestiality, a state below virtue and vice. And he gives examples from some of the Greek tragedies of tearing a body apart limb from

limb. So Aristotle thinks it's possible to move out of the moral realm altogether. Vice, on the Aristotelian picture, is still a kind of stable and predictable way to act in the world. Bestiality lies below that. And above virtue lies this idea of divinity: a state whereby regulating with respect to virtue isn't even required. But the heart of the discussion that we read in chapter seven of Aristotle's Ethics for today concerns itself with this range of states between virtue and vice. And Aristotle gives a really nice taxonomy of those which I think is helpful for understanding what it is to engage in self-regulation. I should stress that I am no Aristotle scholar, and that what I'm providing is a somewhat contrived reconstruction. But I think it's helpful for getting a handle on what these distinctions amount to. So we might ask first, what would a state look like that shares with virtue that one has knowledge of the right thing to do, that one decides to do it for that reason, and that one has the inclination, but that lacks the kind of character, or logical stability, that Aristotle takes to be a hallmark of true virtue? That, I think, is the state that Aristotle calls temperance. One's inclined to do the right thing because it's the right thing. And one knows what the right thing is. But there isn't the sort of predictable, law-like, stability of character that virtue requires. Corresponding to temperance, on the other side of the scale, is what Aristotle calls intemperance which is, in some sense, the mirror image of temperance. Here one is simply inclined to do the wrong thing because it's the wrong thing. But not as a hard feature of character in the way that he gives in the case of vice, but just as a matter of temperament. So the temperate person, with inclination, does the right thing. They're inclined to do the right thing and they act in that way. The intemperate person, with inclination, does the wrong thing and feels no conflict in the face of it. What happens if we remove another one of the Aristotelian features? What happens if we have knowledge of what's the right thing to do and the decision to do the right thing, but our inclination pulls us in the other direction? So we have made a decision to act in keeping with what's right, at least at an abstract level if not a concrete one, we have a sense of what's right. Aristotle says, and I put this approximation in front of the knowledge that what the continent and incontinent person have is the recognition of the general rule, but some difficulty recognizing whether the general rule applies in this particular case. So the continent person has a sense of what the right thing to do is, has made a decision to act in keeping with that, but her inclination pulls her in another direction. She finds it difficult to avoid the chocolate cake. She finds it difficult to get up when her alarm rings. She finds it difficult to resist the marshmallow in order to get the second. But somehow she contains herself and acts against her inclination. The mirror image of the continent person is Aristotle's incontinent person. In terms of their decision, they are like the continent one. They want to do the thing that corresponds with morality. Like the continent person, they have a sense of the general rule, a little difficulty seeing how it applies in this particular case. And like the continent person, they have an inclination to go towards a pleasure which attracts them. But unlike the continent person,

the incontinent person finds herself unable to overcome the inclination. And so, below the line, she acts in keeping with what's wrong. Finally, Aristotle considers a pair of cases where the attraction to doing the wrong thing is not a desire for a pleasure, but a desire to avoid pain. So in some cases, one doesn't get full credit for being continent, one doesn't resist a pleasure, but one is willing to put up with a certain amount of discomfort in the face of doing the right thing. Aristotle calls that resistance: continence in the face of pain. And corresponding to that, below the line, is softness, incontinence in the face of pain. Doing the wrong thing because one has given in to a certain kind of discomfort. So I put this list before you because I think it's not completely clear on a first read, or a second, or a third, or a fourth through Book Seven of Aristotle's Ethics, how carefully structured Aristotle's picture of the human soul and its strengths and weaknesses is. But I think that if we see it as a set of paired characteristics, each of which lacks or has certain of the features of paradigmatic Aristotelian virtue, then we can get a pretty clear sense of what the Aristotelian picture looks like. And I encourage you, armed with this framework, to go back to the text which we've been reading over and over in this class: the text at the end of Book One and beginning of Book Two of Aristotle's Ethics. And try, yet again, to see what the picture of virtue is that Aristotle is concerned with. Chapter 3. Incontinence and hyperbolic discounting [00:14:04] So what I want to do in the remainder of the lecture today--and we're going to need our clickers pretty soon--is to talk about Aristotle's idea of incontinence. What it is to be in a situation where one knows what the right thing to do is, in the abstract. One's committed to doing the right thing. But one has an inclination that pulls in the other direction, and one gives in to that inclination. So we're to ask, by starting to give you a choice. And let me say, this is a real poll. I have here the money, right here in this envelope. And I have here--I'm not kidding--I have here a class list. And during the ten seconds that you're answering this poll, I will close my eyes and select a name from the class list. So I'm asking you right now. You'll have 10 seconds once I start the timer to choose what you want. One of you is really going to get either $5 right now, or $6 on Thursday. And it could be you. OK. So clickers out. We have 10 seconds left. OK. So let's see what the responses are on this. OK. 22% of you want $5 now. 78% of you want $6 in two days. Sarah Cox? Sarah Cox, are you here? Sarah Cox, which did you choose? Student: [inaudible]. Professor Tamar Gendler: OK. Well, I'll keep this right with me, and I'll put it in my copy of Aristotle's Ethics so I'm good for my word. OK. 22% of you, however, would be just getting the envelope right now.

OK, second poll. Which do you choose? And again, I have money. I have a second envelope. It's in my bag. And you can choose $5 in 35 days, or $6 in 37 days. OK? $5 in 35 days, or $6 in 37 days. Polling open. Ten seconds. Ten, nine, eight -- $5, 35 days. $6 in 37 days. And let's see how the numbers came out. OK. Alright. You experimental error folks are very good at showing the experimental error aspect of pushing buttons on these. Or maybe, maybe there are some of you who see this as being different. OK, 20% of you were preferring to take $5 today over $6 on Thursday, even though almost none of you wanted to take the same decision in a month. Now, let me point something out to you which, of course, to the rational part of your soul is completely obvious. These bets are identical. I offered you $5 on the 15th versus $6 on the 17th. Or I offered you $5 on the 22nd versus $6 on the 24th. When it comes to the 22nd of March, oh 22% of you, who gave different answers in these two cases, you will be in exactly the same situation with respect to the $5 and $6 that you are with respect to the $5 and $6 right now. There's no difference between this choice and this choice. Nonetheless, it turns out to be consistently the case that human beings and non-human animals have a tendency to start acting differently towards delayed rewards when they are happening in the far future and when they are happening in the near future. So for many decades the psychologist, George Ainslie, has studied decisions that have the following structure. One has a choice between a smaller reward that one can get sooner, like the $5 as opposed to the $6, or a larger reward that one can get later. And Ainslie has studied this phenomenon in the context of human and non-human animals. And I'm going to read aloud a quote to you, which will be up on the slides on the web site, that gives you a sense of what this phenomenon amounts to. Ainslie calls it hyperbolic discounting. And he says people often, and lower animals always, discount the prospect of future rewards in a curve that's more deeply bowed than a rational, exponential curve. So it's perfectly rational to discount future rewards if there's uncertainty involved, right? If I offered you $5 now or $6 in 20 years, it would make perfect sense to take the $5 now because your degree of uncertainty about whether you would get the $6 is sufficiently great with respect to your degree of certainty that you would get the $5. But the difference, I hope, between thinking whether you and I and this classroom are going to be around this Thursday, as opposed to three weeks from now on a Thursday, is trivial. Over a range of delays, continues Ainslie, from seconds to decades, there are pairs of alternative rewards such that subjects prefer the smaller, earlier reward over the larger later alternative when the delay to the smaller reward will be short., Right? Those of you who preferred $5 today as opposed to $6 on Thursday. But prefer the larger, later reward when the smaller alternative will be more delayed. $5 in 35 days versus $6 in 37 days. Even though the time from the earlier to the later reward stays the same. The curves that fit the observed data best are hyperbolic. That is, they show value as inversely proportional to delay. So again, what happens is, that for a period of time, A, the larger reward is preferred to the smaller one, right? That's you. It's in 37 days. It's in 36 days. It's in 35 days. It's in 34 days. All that time, you prefer the $6 two days later to the $5 now, or to the $5 two days earlier. And then all of a sudden as the event draws near, the value of the smaller reward looms larger in your mind.

Decision after decision has this structure. Suppose you want to train to be a competitive cyclist, or some sort of athletic endeavor, that's your larger, later reward. Suppose that one of the things that's incompatible with your becoming a competitive cyclist is the eating of Crisco covered cupcakes. You're walking along, and at the beginning it's completely clear to you that what you prefer is to be a cyclist. You wake up in the morning, you say: what I'm going to do is plan for my bicycling. I'm not going to be distracted by stupid things like Crisco covered cupcakes. And you walk along and still to you now, there's your eyes, you see ahh, the reward of the bicycle is greater than the reward of the cupcake. And all of a sudden as the cupcake grows nearer, you take the smaller, sooner reward and the larger, later falls out from possibility. Suppose you resolve that tomorrow morning you're going to get up super early to write your paper for Philosophy 181, also called CogSci 281. So you set your alarm, and you have the ringing of the alarm. And when you go to bed you set it for 5:30. You can see that larger later reward is a bigger one. And it comes to be 5:30 in the morning and the alarm is ringing, and you turn it off. And oops, away goes the possibility of the larger, later reward. Or suppose you're one of Mischel's subjects in the marshmallow study. Here's your larger, later reward: two marshmallows. Here's your smaller, sooner reward: one marshmallow. Ask in the abstract, it's pretty clear to you two marshmallows is definitely better than one marshmallow until--until what? Until you're sitting in the room with the one marshmallow and oops, you lost your chance. Chapter 4. How to Self-Regulate [00:23:39] So what I want to do in the remainder of the lecture today, is talk a little bit about the psychological state of the children involved in Mischel's studies, and then connect that for you to some more general research on self-regulation. And finally connect that to the discussion of principles that we had in our reading from Nozick today. So when Walter Mischel began doing these marshmallow studies roughly 40 years ago, there was a theory in place that the best way to engage in self-regulation was to think about the reward that you were going to get if you did the right thing. So on that theory, the best way for kids to be able to resist the one marshmallow in order to get the two marshmallows would be for the experimenter to make it incredibly vivid to them that if they waited, they could have two marshmallows. So kids were brought into the room in one of two conditions. In one of the conditions, there was one marshmallow over here and two marshmallows over there. The rewards were visible. The kids came in. And they lasted, on average, about four minutes before they reached over and grabbed the single marshmallow, thereby losing the second. When the rewards were hidden, however, when the kids couldn't see the marshmallows and were brought into the room and told you can either have one marshmallow now, or if you can wait long enough, you can have two marshmallows. Kids waited, on average, 12 minutes. Then Mischel wondered what was driving the capacity of the children with hidden rewards to sustain their self-control long enough. So the second condition he tried was to take the

kids who were in the circumstance where the rewards were hidden, and tell them to think really hard about the reward, think really hard about those marshmallows. The effect of thinking hard about the marshmallows was that the performance dropped to exactly the level that it had been in the case of the kids for whom the reward was visible. And in fact, thinking about the reward in the visible case made it no worse. So the problem was that when you thought about the reward, it became salient and resistance became difficult. So, thought Mischel, what if we try it the other way? What if we take the kids for whom the reward is visible and ask them to think happy thoughts about something else, right? Look around the room, recite the alphabet, tell yourself a story of the three little pigs, do something to keep yourself distracted. And the result was that if the kids thought distracting thoughts, they acted exactly as the kids in the hidden rewards situation. And it made no difference in the hidden situation to think distracting thoughts. So the presence of the temptation before your mind is part of what makes the temptation difficult to resist. And indeed, Mischel thought about this more generally. He presented kids with either a photograph or a real marshmallow, it didn't matter which, and asked them either to pretend that it was real or to think about tastiness, think about how excellent that marshmallow is going to taste. And the delay which kids were able to impose upon themselves averaged about six minutes. Whereas when he had even a real marshmallow before them, and asked the kids to pretend that it's imaginary or to think about it abstractly, think about the number of marshmallows there are, think about the letter that the word marshmallow starts with, think about the nature of a candy store and how--I mean, these are four-year-olds--think about the nature of a candy store and how candy stores work in an abstract sense. Kids were able to regulate themselves for 18 minutes. So what was going on here? What ties together the cases where we get very short numbers: kids are only able to last four minutes, then give in to the temptation. And what ties together the cases where we get large numbers? Mischel's hypothesis, and this fits with the material that we discussed on January 20th, is that there are two systems of processing rewards. There's a hot system which acts on what Plato or Aristotle would call appetite, or perhaps spirit. It acts on the basis of passion. And when we think about things with a vivid, emotional attraction to them, that system gets activated and Plato's horses, Aristotle's non-rational parts, system one, aliefs and all the rest get going. That's the system that's active when the rewards are visible and there's no instruction. When you're thinking vividly about the rewards, the appetitive parts of soul are brought on line, and resistance to temptation becomes difficult. By contrast, when kids are asked to think abstractly or to pretend that the marshmallow is imaginary, a cool, rational system--a system that is the one involved in belief that is Plato's charioteer, that is the System Two of the dual processing tradition, that is the belief in the alief-belief tradition--comes on line. And in the face of this cool processing system, which gives us a sort of rational distance from what we confront, all of a sudden self-regulation becomes possible.

So Mischel's studies fit in to a larger framework for thinking about how to overcome temptation. One which you'll not be surprised to hear is articulated, as is almost everything that we're thinking about in this course, in one of the two great founding narratives of the Western literary tradition--in this case, Homer's Odyssey. Odysseus, pictured here in elegant, white tunic, is trying to get home from the Trojan War. He's trying to get back to his wife who is waiting faithfully for him at home, and it's taking him about 20 years to do so. And along the way as he tries to go home, he faces all sorts of temptations which threaten to divert him from his path. And the temptation that he faces in this picture, illustrated here in the form of these beautiful flying women who look, to me, a little bit like dementors from Harry Potter. He, however, finds them enormously tempting. And he's trying to figure out how to get the ship past the sirens, whose songs threaten to cause the ship to founder upon the shoal, so that he can get home to Penelope. And what he comes up with are two different strategies. The first strategy he applies to his sailors. You will see that around the ears of each of them is cotton batting. He blocks their ears so that the apparent utility of the sirens is reduced for them. Unable to hear their song, the sailors are able to continue rowing the boat past their source of temptation. What he does to himself, as you can see, is he has himself, at point A on the Ainslie curve, lashed to the mast. Because, like Mischel's children and like Ainslie, he recognizes that when the siren's song is available to him directly, he will be in that B state where the smaller, sooner reward--like turning off your alarm clock or eating that cupcake--looms larger to him. So what Odysseus does is, he ties himself to the mast. Even though the temptation of the reward is evident to him, he has rendered himself unable to act on that temptation. And there is a tradition, in the contemporary decision theory literature, to use this metaphor of Ulysses and the sirens, Odysseus and the sirens depending which translation you use of the name, to think about strategies for self-regulation. And it turns out that it's helpful, I think, to think about these strategies as falling into three categories. If you're trying to get past a temptation that has the structure that we've been looking at in this class; a smaller, sooner reward that, because of temporal discounting, looms disproportionately large in your decision structure. One way to get around it is by means of external constraints. You can separate yourself from the ability to act on the temptation. You can turn off the internet on your computer, you can use one of those cell phone condoms, you can render yourself unable to act on the basis of that which is going to distract you from your path. You can put your alarm clock all the way across the room you can take the cupcakes out of your house, you can put your credit card in a glass of water in the freezer. All of these are ways of separating yourself from the ability to act on the temptation. Or you can separate yourself from the appeal of the temptation in some way. You can reduce its subjective utility to you by, for example, blocking your ears so you won't even notice that the temptation is there. So that's a way of externalizing responsibility for decision making in this case. And it's an extraordinarily effective way of self-regulating.

You are an agent in the world. The actions which you're going to perform are actions on the world. And separating yourself from the ability to perform those actions is one way to get around temptation. A second way to get around temptation, which we've discussed a lot in the last two classes, is by direct appeal to the spirited or appetitive parts of your soul. So you can manipulate incentive structures for yourself. You can change the relative utilities of the various rewards. You can subject yourself to interpersonal pressures. Remember we put the smiley faces on your computers so that the gaze of the eyes of others would help you stick to your tasks. Or you can cultivate habits, right? You can get spirit and appetite into line with reason by cultivating natural ways of responding to things. But the third way that you can get around temptations, is the one which we haven't discussed yet, and that is by means of reason. And it is in this light that Nozick discusses the roles that principles can play in allowing us not to be incontinent. So Nozick points out, quite generally, that what principles do is they group actions by putting them under a general rubric so that linked actions are viewed or treated in the same way. If one takes on as a principle to be a vegetarian, then any act of eating meat is seen as a violation of that principle. Even if one thinks there are circumstances where eating meat might be the right thing to do, all things considered. What the principle does is to classify that act with other acts of eating meat so that the actions become symbolic of one another. Smoking a single cigarette isn't so bad, but smoking lots of cigarettes is. And one thing that a principle can do is to let you have any one instance stand as an example of all. Principles, says Nozick, constitute a way of binding ourselves to the mast, not through external constraints like ropes, but through internal commitments to following their mandates. And he points out that principles are effective in a wide range of cases. Intellectually, if you have the idea that there's a principle that connects one set of facts to another, then the principle can transmit probability or support. The old cases came out a particular way. Every time you observed a certain kind of causation, it had a particular structure. You identified a principle, and you're now in a position to make predictions about new cases. Interpersonally, they let you appear to be a reliable person. Your past actions were of a certain kind, right? Every time I said I would give you money, I gave you money. So you can conclude on that basis I have a principle: repay my debts. And on that basis, you predict my future actions. It's in fact, exactly because of that, that I switched all the written exercises to Thursdays rather than having extensions on some of them. My thought was this: suppose I had given extensions on two of the essays from Tuesday to Thursday? I'd look unprincipled about the regulations for this course. How will I be in a position to enforce the course's requirements if I appear unprincipled? Ah, suppose I adopt a new principle, the Thursday due date, with respect to which I am unwavering? Introspect a minute. Strangely, that seems more authoritative than having most of them due on Tuesdays and some on Thursdays.

Intrapersonally, conceptualizing oneself in terms of principles gives a kind of narrative continuity to one's life. My past self was the kind of person who would never do X. My past self is the kind of person who always does Y. Articulating it in terms of a principle lets me connect my future self to my past self. It gives me a sense of continuity over time. And finally, intrapersonally, principles provide ways of overcoming temptation. Ooh, every time I see a cupcake I want to eat it, but if I have a principle that I don't eat dessert after 4:00 pm, then it's easy. I don't have to make a decision on a case-by-case basis. The single act of eating that cupcake once. Why that once? Why wouldn't I then do it all the time becomes a way of committing myself to future actions. Those of you who practice an instrument know that the easiest practice schedule is to practice every day. Because if you practice every day, there's no question of whether this is one of the days that you're going to practice. If you are committed to a certain kind of religious behavior, or a certain kind of dietary restriction, or a certain kind of exercise regimen, the easiest way to implement it is to say always, with respect to this domain, will I behave in those ways. And, in fact, Nozick suggests that this is exactly the way to use principles to get past the Ainslie curve. The mark of a principle, he says, is that it ties the decision whether to do an immediate particular act to a whole class of actions of which the principle makes it part. The act now stands for the whole class. I discovered that I'm overusing a particular kind of relaxational substance on weekends. And the most straightforward way for me deal with that situation is to put a categorical restriction on my behavior. Moreover, points out Nozick, I can make use of a really interesting irrationality about myself to fight irrationality with irrationality. Remember, I pointed out to you a few lectures ago, that people who lose a $10 bill on the way to the theater are happy to buy a new ticket when they get there. But people who lost a $10 ticket on the way to the theatre are unhappy to do so. That's an instance of a general phenomenon known as sunk costs, that when we've invested a lot of effort in something, we're reluctant to stop acting on its basis, even if right then we don't prefer to do it anymore. And so Nozick suggests that if during A, that period leading up to the Ainslie curve, we invest many resources in the future in pursuit of the larger reward, the fact that we tend not to ignore sunk costs provides us with a way to get past the temptation during the period, B, to choose the smaller, sooner. If I decide I want to go to six plays a year and I buy six tickets, then even if it's raining on one of the nights that I was supposed to go, my tendency towards sunk costs will help me act on my action. All right, last two minutes. Let me connect this to what we've done and where we're going. This, as you know, is the last lecture in the first unit of the course. We began this unit by reading Dan Ariely's Predictably Irrational popular chapter--and we ended this unit by reading Ariely's Predictably Irrational popular chapter on procrastination. But, unlike your experience on January 11th, you now have a philosophical framework in which to place his discussion. Unlike on January 11th, you now have a psychological framework in which to

place his discussion. You've read Haidt, you've read Batson, you've read the dual processing work, you've read Milgram, and Shay, and Stockdale and Kazdin. And you've read his own scientific presentation of the case, and you've thought about the connections between them. What comes next? What comes next is a chance, in your 5th and 6th directed exercises, to address three psychology articles which you, yourself, are going to choose and summarize, and then come up with an experiment on the basis of. What comes next is a chance to think about the philosophical framework by writing your first and second essays. And what comes at the end of the course, and I'll preview it now, is a chance to think about the connections between them in the context of your final directed exercise. Which is going to be to design a week of the course yourself in which you choose texts that you think multiply illuminate the topic. So next lecture we'll move on to our discussion of morality. And I'll connect it back to some of the issues we've been talking about so far. And I look forward to seeing you on Thursday, and especially to giving away the $6 to the very rational student who was lucky enough to earn it. [end of transcript]

Lecture 12 - Utilitarianism and its Critiques [February 17, 2011]

Chapter 1. What is a Moral Theory? [00:00:00] So what I want to do in today's lecture is to shift gears somewhat from what we've been talking about in the first unit of the course. As you know, the first unit of the course was focused on a set of texts that were concerned with what is involved in human flourishing. And though our opening text, Glaucon's challenge from Plato's Republic, concerned itself with morality and the way in which morality contributes to human flourishing, we haven't, up until this point, given much attention to what philosophers have had to say about the nature of morality. And so goal in this unit is, in an incredibly accelerated fashion, to introduce you today and next Tuesday to two of the most prominent moral theories in the Western tradition and then in the remaining sessions before March break to talk to you about some of the empirical research about these questions. And I know we have a wide range of backgrounds in this class. Some of you are now taking your first philosophy course. Some of you have taken an entire course on ethics. And so I've tried to pitch the lecture in such a way that it brings everybody up to speed, but that it does so in a way that I hope won't bore those of you who have encountered this before. In particular, to make up for the fact that there's very little empirical psychology in this lecture I have six polling slides. So those will come in in the middle of the lecture right when all of you are zoning out because you got two hours of sleep last night. So even if you don't pay attention for the first part, you'll get to vote in the middle. All right, so what is it that moral philosophy sets out to do? What is it to provide a philosophical account of morality? What moral philosophy is is the systematic endeavor to understand moral concepts and to justify moral principles and theories. That is: moral philosophy, even if it ends up giving a non-systematic answer to how it is that morality works and what it is that morality does, does so within the endeavor of thinking systematically about the nature of morality. What do I mean by morality? I mean that moral theories aim to provide accounts of terms like "right" and "wrong," "permissible" and "impermissible," "ought" and "ought not," "forbidden," "good," "bad," and the like--and to provide an account of the behaviors to which those terms apply. It is fundamentally, to remind you of a terminological distinction that we've made before, a normative as opposed to a descriptive enterprise. Philosophical moral theory doesn't aim to tell us how people act. It aims to tell us how people ought to act if they wish to conform to the constraints that morality places on them. In particular, moral philosophy is concerned with providing a principled answer to three kind of questions. The first kind of question we encountered already in the context of Glaucon's Challenge. It's the question of moral motivation. Why should we want to act in keeping with what morality demands of us? And in a minute I'll give you a sense of the range of answers that have been provided to that question. So the first question that moral philosophy asks is why would we even want to be moral. It then asks the particular question, "What should we do insofar as we seek to act morally?" And about that we've had

very little to say so far. We know that according to Aristotle, to be brave, one acts as the brave one does. But Aristotle just put forth bravery as a virtue without any explanation of what it was that made bravery fall into the category of virtues and cowardice fall into that category of vices other than the very general analysis of the mean. And we haven't looked at any specific claims about particular actions being morally acceptable or not. So the second sort of thing that a moral theory tries to do--and, again, I'll give some examples in a minute--is give us specific answers to the question "is this act morally OK?" In addition, what a moral theory aims to do is to tell us why we gave the answers that we did in question two. In virtue of what common feature are the acts that fall into the category of moral to be distinguished from the acts that fall into the category of immoral? So what do answers to these three questions look like? Let's start since we've encountered it already with the question of moral motivation. So one category of answers that one might give to why it is that we would be moral, act in keeping with the constraints of morality, is a self-interest account. So one might give an account which says: when you behave morally, things run smoothly. As Socrates argues in response to Glaucon, when you behave in keeping with the constraints of morality, there is harmony in your soul. And that provides you with the possibility of a certain kind of flourishing. Or you might have what's implicit in the very first argument that Glaucon gives, a view that morality provides a certain kind of stability in society. Each of us behaving in pro-social ways increases the likelihood of others around us behaving in prosocial ways. And so we reach a kind of equilibrium state whereby things run smoothly if everybody behaves pro-socially. And we'll talk about that again at the beginning of the political philosophy section. So one kind of self-interest theory is a theory that appeals to a certain kind of coordination, either a coordination among the parts of the soul, or coordination across individuals in a society. A second kind of self-interest theory is what we might call a get good stuff theory. So this lies at the heart on some religious traditions. Here's what you get if you act in keeping with the constraints of morality: you get eternal life in a really nice place. Here's what you get if you don't act in keeping with the constraints of morality: you get eternal continuation in a really unpleasant place. So the notion that there is some reward beyond earth for behaving in moral ways is an example of a self-interested justification of morality. Or one might give the sort of justification that Adeimantus gives in response to Glaucon's challenge. Adeimantus point out that one of the things morality provides you with is enhanced reputation. So as a result of behaving in keeping with the standards of morality, you come to be perceived as having behaved in that way, and that reputation brings to you some value. Or it might be, as Aristotle discusses at the end of Book 10, that society is structured in some way that motivates people to act in keeping with the constraints of morality because doing so is a way of avoiding punishment. Many of us obey speeding laws for precisely that reason. We obey them most especially when there are flashing lights in our vicinity. But we can have an internalized version of the reduction of punishment as well. Part of the Freudian picture that we heard about in the Divided Soul lecture discussed the development of conscience as an internalization of external rules, whereby the superego

gets upset when the id behaves in ways that aren't in keeping with the constraints of morality. And one can have a non-Freudian version of that as well that appeals to the notion of conscience. So the idea that what morality brings you is either the possibility of salvation or enhanced reputation or the possibility of not being punished by external laws or the possibility of not being punished by one's conscience is another version a self-interest theory. So that's one kind of justification one might provide for behaving in moral ways. A second very different kind of justification says the reason we act morally is because normative features are fundamental features of the world. There's a brute ought out there. It's a fact about reality that what we are morally obliged to do is to act in whatever ways it is that morality demands and not out of self-interest, but simply because we are responsive to that feature of the world, we are motivated to act morally. A third kind of justification, third kind of explanation of more motivation, is what we might call a factive theory that says roughly this is just the way people are. So evolutionary accounts that say pro-social behaviors have been selected for, perhaps because they enable the resolution of coordination problems. But whatever the explanation, pro-social behavior says this theory has been selected for. So it's a brute fact about the world that we behave in pro-social ways--not a brute normative fact about the world, just a brute descriptive fact about the world that we behave in that way. Or you might have, not an evolutionary based version of this, but a version that says look, this is just the way the human soul expresses itself when it conforms to its natural state. So you might have a theory of morality that says the reason to behave morally is that of self-interest. You might have a theory of morality that says the reason to behave morally is because of altruism. You might have a theory of morality that says the reason to behave morally is just that's the way we do behave. Or you might have some sort of combination theory. And we've talked already about the first of these, the self-interest theory. And as this section of the course goes on, we'll talk more about some of the other sorts of explanations. So those are some examples of the kinds of answers that are given to the first question, the question of moral motivation. What kinds of issues arise when we think about the question of moral behavior? Well you saw a number of examples of this in the reading that we did for today. One kind question that moral theories set out to provide answers to is the question of whether it's either morally required or morally permitted to harm one person in order to help many others. So Bernard Williams' story of Jim and the Indians, where Jim is presented with a case where if he's willing to shoot one of 20 prisoners, the other 19 will be set free, whereas if he's unwilling to shoot that one, all 20 of them will be shot. Or the Omelas story, where we're told the story of a society whose flourishing depends upon the suffering of a single child. Or the trolley cases that I presented you with in the very first lecture, where a trolley is headed down a track towards five people, and we're in a position to deflect the trolley in some way so that one ends up being killed instead. Those are examples of schematic representations of the kinds of questions that moral theory confronts all the time. Whenever we think about deferrals of threat--is it right to quarantine a population suffering from a

particular illness in a way that will cause harm to them but benefit the rest of society?--we are thinking about these sorts of questions. So one sort of question that moral philosophy aims to answer is the question of whether this sort of trade off is morally required or morally permitted. A particularly profound version of that question comes out when we think about what our moral duties are to those who are less fortunate. So the philosopher Peter Singer has famously argued that the entire structure of the first world and the third world is a morally illegitimate one because it involves an unwillingness on the part of those in the first world to do what is morally demanded of them, namely to take a large proportion of their resources and redistribute those to people who are suffering from extraordinarily easily curable illnesses. People who don't have mosquito nets, people who don't have vaccinations, people who don't have clean water, people who don't have access to basic medical care in the first five years that would, for example, prevent lifelong blindness. So another question that moral theory asks--in some ways of version of the earlier question--is in general what our duties are to those who are less fortunate. It also asks questions like this: Are these sorts of behaviors morally mandatory? Is it morally mandatory for us to behave in ways that help the environment, say by recycling? Is it morally mandatory for us to act in certain ways towards non-human animals, perhaps by being vegetarian? Is it morally required of us to worship a deity in some way? Is religious worship something that's morally mandatory? Is something like respect for elders, a fundamental part of traditional moral frameworks, morally mandatory? And moral theories also ask questions like: Are these kinds of things morally permissible? Is abortion morally permissible? Is euthanasia morally permissible? Is capital punishment morally permissible? How about sex before marriage? How about lying for one or another motivation? How about, as Kant's going to argue in our next reading, failing to cultivate one's talents, which Kant thinks is a violation of moral mandate? Chapter 2. Introducing Utilitarianism [00:15:37] So these are the kinds of questions that moral theories aim to provide answers to. And it might seem like a heterogeneous bunch. But it gives you a sense of the generality of explanation that moral theories seek to provide. So let's turn to four major moral theories in the western tradition and think about how it is that they could simply categorically provide answers to this wide range of questions. So the kind of moral theory that we're going to discuss in today's lecture primarily is a moral theory known as utilitarianism. It tells us an act is moral insofar as it produces the greatest good for the greatest number. It takes as its fundamental notion the notion of good. And it gives us answers to the questions that we've previously asked ourselves as long as we know how goods are distributed in response to them. So if we know what it is that produces happiness in sentient beings, then utilitarianism will give us an answer to the question of whether being vegetarian is morally mandated. It'll tell us to take the amount of happiness that's distributed across sentient beings, and look at which distribution is going to

maximize the amount of happiness. So utilitarianism gives us one sort of systematic answer to this question. A second sort of answer to this question, which we'll discuss in lecture on Tuesday, is the answer given by Kant and the deontological tradition. What Kant says is that an act is moral insofar as it's performed as the result of acting with the correct sort of motivation. It takes as its primary notion not the notion of goodness, but rather the notion of rightness. And on that basis, Kant is going to give a bunch of answers to our specific questions. In particular, he's going to argue that it's not OK to sacrifice the good of the one for the good of the many. And he's going to argue that lying is morally unacceptable. And we'll talk next class about how from a very abstract principle like this one one can derive these sorts of particular answers. We've already looked at the ancient traditional answer to this in Aristotle, that an act is moral insofar as it's performed as the results of having a virtuous character. And so what Aristotle says to us is look and see how the well-raised one would behave. And once you see what is that the virtuous one does, you can learn through his or her example what it is that morality demands of us. And a final tradition about which we won't have much to say in this lecture is, of course, a basis for morality which has stood at the center of western culture for at least 2,000 years, which is the idea that an act is moral insofar as it conforms to what the divinity demands of us. So one can provide an explanation, as the utilitarian does, that makes appeal to the notion of goodness. One can provide a justification that makes appeal, as deontology does, to the notion of rightness. One can provide a justification that makes appeal, as virtue ethics does, to the notion of virtuousness. Or one can provide an account that makes appeal, as religious ethics does, to the notion of divine mandate. So let's think a little more about the relation among these three particular theories, the ones on which we're going to focus in the context of this class, as a way of coming to understand the particular theory that we're thinking about today, namely utilitarianism. So virtue ethics focuses its attention on the actor, not the person who stands up on the stage and recites lines from Hamlet, but rather the actor who performs an act that will be moral or not. Deontology focuses its attention on the act. It looks not at who's doing it, but rather at what act is done and under what description. Consequentialism, by contrast, looks not at who does the act and looks not at the description under which the act is done, but looks rather at the consequences that the act brings about. And we've encountered virtue theory in the voice of-- see if you recognize this gentleman-- in the voice of Aristotle. We will encounter deontology in the voice of Immanuel Kant. And what we're going to discuss today is consequentialism and, in particular, utilitarianism in the voice of John Stuart Mill. So let's look now at what it is that Mill has to say about the fundamental nature of morality. So what Mill contends-- and let me say we're coming up on the clicker slide, so if you're zoning out, it's time to pull out your clicker. And in about four or five minutes, we'll be doing some polls. So Mill contends that the right kind of framework for thinking about

moral theories is a consequentialist framework, so not one that looks at the actor as virtue theory does, not one that looks at the act as deontology does, but rather one that looks at the consequences in the way that consequentialism does. The degree of moral rightness of an act is determined by its consequences. And Mill provides a particular version of this. He says the degree of moral rightness of an act is determined by a particular kind of consequence, namely the utility that the act produces. So you might have a consequentialist theory that says the degree of moral rightness of an act is determined by its consequences, namely, for example, the amount of bananas that it produces. It would be an odd moral theory, but it would be a consequentialist theory that says the degree of moral rightness of an act is determined by its consequences, in particular by its degree of banana production. So that would be a very general kind of consequentialist theory. Utilitarian theories are a particular kind of consequentialist theory that says the degree of moral rightness of an act is determined by its consequences, in particular by the amount of utility--usefulness, happiness in Mill's account of what kind of utility we're concerned with--by the amount of utility that it produces. That means, to remind you of the handouts that you got in section this week, that to be utilitarian is a sufficient condition to be consequentialist, but not a necessary one. And to be a consequentialist is a necessary condition on being a utilitarian, but not a sufficient one. And if what I just said isn't completely obvious to you, take a look at the second side of the handout that you got in section this week. So Mill not only makes a utilitarian commitment, he actually in the course of making that commitment makes two very particular claims that I now want ask you to think about in light of some particular cases. The first is the famous formulation of the greatest happiness principle, which in your text appears right at the beginning on page 77 in the reprint. Mill says famously, "Actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to promote the reverse of happiness." And he continues a few pages later to clarify that what he means is not the agent's own happiness, but that of all concerned. And in a minute we'll think through what that implies. The second commitment of Mill's that I want you to think about is one runs straight on in opposition to what we talked about in Aristotle last week. Mill says the motive has nothing to do with the morality of the action. He who saves another creature from drowning does what is morally right whether his motive be duty or the hope of being paid for his trouble. The motivation with which an act is performed, says Mill, tells us nothing about the morality of the act. He doesn't deny that it tells us something about the actor. He's perfectly happy to say that somebody who does the act out of the hope of being paid is in some way different from the person who does act out of a sense of duty or moral obligation. But as far as the moral value of the act itself is concerned, Mill thinks there is no difference. So that's the first question that I wanted to ask you. Take the case that Mill described. You see somebody drowning in a lake. And the question is this, is your act of saving that person morally right, morally virtuous, moral only if it's done out of duty? I want to save that person because it's the right thing to do or some other sort of pro-social motive. If you think that, push one. Or is the act morally right regardless of its motive even if you do it because there's a big sign up on the trees that say save a drowning person: $10,000 reward. And

so you think: $10,000, that's good money. And in you jump into the water. All right, I'll push the ten second timer. We have roughly 50 of you, 70 of you. Good, numbers are jumping up. Let's just see whether instinctively this room is filled with Kantians or filled with consequentialists. So, interestingly, there's a pretty close to even split. Most of you seem to side with Mill on the question that an act is morally right regardless of the motive. But a sizable portion of you are going to be pleased when we read Kant, who gives the answer that you offer. And one of the things that we want to do in section next week is to have those of you who fall on one or the other side of this question talk through with others around you why it is that you either fell into this group or you felt into this one. So, so far Mill's doing pretty well. He has a slight majority of you on his side. I now want to present you with a series of cases to ask what you think about the greatest happiness principle. Remember, Mill says that an act is moral insofar as it produces the greatest happiness for the greatest number, where we're not concerned with how that happiness is distributed across individuals. So let's start with a following case. There's an act which you can perform which will give you 100 units of happiness. Each of those colorful smiley faces--aren't you all feeling prosocial in their light? Each of those smiley faces represents 10 units of happiness. So suppose you have a fan. It's a very hot day, and you have a fan that blows upon you. And the coolness of that fan just provides you with 100 units of happiness. Or suppose you have some delicious cookies, and eating those cookies provides you with 100 units of happiness. In addition, performing that act provides 100 other people with one unit of happiness each. Suppose your fan blows a little bit outside of your room so that in addition to cooling you off 100 units, it cools the people in the next room off one unit apiece. Or suppose that when you finish eating your 100 cookies, there are 100 cookies left over, and each of 100 people get to have one cookie, and it brings them one unit of happiness. OK. So that's act one. It has a total of two hundred units of happiness. You get 100 units, and each of 100 other people get one unit. So your choice is between performing that act and performing an act which I'm going to call act two, which has exactly the same effects for you, right? It brings you 100 units of happiness. So here you are with your 100 units of happiness. But in this case, if you made a slight change in the angle of your fan, for example, you would be just as cool as you were in the first case. But it would double the amount of happiness of the people on the outside, right? You angle this fan slightly differently. And instead of being cooled one unit, the people are cooled two units. Or instead of throwing out your trash at the end of eating your cookies so that people only get one unit of happiness, you leave the other cookies around so that everybody else gets two units of happiness. In this case, by performing an act which has no different consequences for you as far as happiness is concerned, you double the happiness of a hundred other people with respect to the act. So the question is simply this. Given the choice between act one, which brings a total of 200 units of happiness, 100 units for you and one unit for each of 100 other people, or act two, which brings the same amount of happiness to you, but 200 units of happiness to others and hence a total of three hundred, do you think-- push one if you think only act one is moral. That is only the one where you get 100 units, and everybody else gets one. Push

two if you think only act two is moral, the one where you redirect your fan slightly or whatever it is that you do to double the happiness of those around you, or three, that either one of those is a moral act. OK. And I'm going the turn our timer on so that we have 10 seconds to see how it is that your first take on Mill's Greatest Happiness Principle goes. And let's see how the numbers come out. OK. So very few of you think that the moral act as the one whereby you get 100 units of happiness, and the 100 others get one unit. But you're roughly equally divided on the question of whether morality mandates that you redistribute your resources in such a way that they go also to others. So most of our discussion in the remaining slides will be concerned with when this 44 percent moves over to another place. But I'll be interested to see how all of this plays out. OK. So that was our first case, the case where at no cost to yourself you can bring happiness to others. Let's now contrast exactly the same first case. You get 100 units of happiness; 100 others get one unit each. So there's a total of 200 units, with the second case, we'll call this act three, where in order to redirect the goods, you bring your own happiness down to 50 units. So in order to redirect your fan in such a way that the other people get two units each, you have a slight reduction in the amount of utility for you. But it's still the case that this is more beneficial overall. So act one you get 100 unit of happiness, other people get one. Act two, you've reduced your happiness, you've redirected the fan, you're eating fewer of the cookies, but you've distributed it in such a way that others get their two units. OK. So the question is only act one, where you get 100 units, and everybody else gets one, only act two, where you get 50 units, and everybody else gets two, but the total is higher, or either one? And, again, we'll open polling with the ten second timer. And let's see how the numbers go. All right. So little bit of change over to either act being moral. More of you think that it is morally required to increase the happiness of those around you when there's no harm to yourself than you think is required when there is some cost to yourself. Notice that Mill is very clear that what is morally required is number two here, that only the act which brings the greater amount of utility to the community as a whole is morally required. Lets turn to a third case. The first version is the same as before. You get 100 units. Everybody else gets one. Now, in order to do the good for others you have to experience some kind of disutility. You turn your fan totally away from yourself. But the result of that is that 100 others get three units each. So now the question is this. Is the act that is morally permitted of you, or is the act, that is a moral act, the one that we've initially presented, the one where you have some disutility, but other people get utility? Or are these of equal value? Notice the total of 200 units, 250 units. So the first case, our classic case, the second case one where you experience some discomfort. But in exchange for that discomfort, other people, not you, experience some good. OK. Let's turn on the 10 second timer and see how this comes out. OK. So in this case, it appears that very few of you are siding with Mill. A certain number of you are here, saying that what we need to do is to provide the greatest good for the

greatest number. And a sizable percentage of you is growing to think that perhaps morality doesn't demand any sacrifices of you. Let's go on. Next case exactly like the last one, except it's somebody else who has 50 units of disutility in order to distribute three units of utility to others. So here's the case. Either you get 100 units of happiness, and others get one unit each for a total of 200 units. Or let's assume you preserve your 100 units of happiness here. We're leaving you out of the equation. And the question is this. Suppose you are distributing resources for society as a whole. There's a case where actually, this act one ought to also be someone else, so the case where someone else gets 100 units of happiness, and 100 others get one unit each, or a case where somebody else loses 50 units of happiness, but 100 others get three units each. OK, so let's replace this you in act one with someone else and as the question of whether a distribution of resources across society, which produces 200 units of good in this form or a distribution of resources across society, which produces 250 units of good in this form, a minor 50 units of suffering by one for three hundred units of benefits by another. Which one of those do you take to be what morality demands? And five, four, three, two, one. And let's see if there's any change from the previous case. OK. All of a sudden, here we get a radical shifting of the graphs. Almost 50 percent of you are clear that the act that requires bringing suffering to one person, a reduction of utility is not morally mandated. Later in the section that we are encountering in the class right now, we will consider the question of whether there's actually a fixed matter of where the baseline is and whether in fact this radical shift that we get when we moved from increasing utility to decreasing utility in people's psychology about what morality demands is in fact picking up on an artificial difference. Let's move to our final case. Chapter 3. The Omelas Story [00:37:34] So our final case is one where either someone gets 100 units of happiness, and 100 others get one unit each. So there's 200 units of happiness, or a case-- hmm-- where someone gets 5,000 units of happiness taken away, but 100 other people get five hundred units each so that there are 45,000 units of happiness produced by the performance of act six. So the case here is either a place where nobody has anything bad going on, but the total units of happiness are only 200, or one person has a lot of suffering going on, but the total units of happiness are 45,000. OK. And let's put the poll on with our 10, nine, eight, seven, six seconds and see how it is that you come out on this question. All right. On this question, which I know already for many of your reading responses to the Omelas case, on which this is modeled, it seems clear to a lot of you that suffering of one is not something that morality demands of us even if the result is an increase in general utility. Now, as you know, the Omelas story tells the story of a society where there is a community of people, each of whom has thousands and thousands of units of utility. They're incredibly happy in how they live. But that society exists as it does only because there is a child locked away whose suffering permits the society's joy. And as you know in the story, when children reach adulthood, they are brought to see the suffering child. And most of them return to the community of which they were a part aware of this, shaped by this, but willing to tolerate it. A smaller number of them, upon seeing this, leave the society altogether.

Now, the question that I want you to think about in light of your answer a few minutes ago about what is demanded by morality is some things that seem to have the structure of the Omelas story. I take it that at some point in the last 18 years or so, someone has let you in on the secret that the pleasure that comes from eating meat depends, as does the joy of Omelas, upon the suffering of a large number of non-human animals. I take it that you noticed last week and the week before, when the snow was falling on Yale's campus, and the routes were made clear for you to get to classes, that the possibility of you walking across campus depended upon a large number of people whose lives are already difficult getting up very early in the morning and doing back-breaking shoveling work in the ice cold. I trust that somebody has let you in on the secret that the clothes that you wear and from which you take a certain amount of pleasure are in a great number of cases produced as the result of something quite close to the Omelas story, namely child labor. Indeed I take it that most of you are aware that the structure of the modern world bears a rather shocking similarity to the Omelas story. The possibility of flourishing in the first world is in many ways a consequence of an inequitable structure with regard to the third world. Now, almost all of you gave an answer that said this sort of structure is at least schematically morally acceptable. And the question is what is going on there. Le Guin in her story suggested you as college students are at exactly the age where the salience of this may affect you most profoundly. So she writes--after being exposed to these sorts of facts-she says "often the young people go home in tears or in a tearless rage when they've seen the child on whose suffering the fate of their society depends and face this terrible paradox. They may brood over it for weeks or years. But as time goes by, she says, they begin to realize that even if the child could be released it would not that much good if its freedom, a little vague pleasure of warmth and food, no doubt, but little more." Now one of the interesting things about literature in contrast to philosophy is that it leaves it to you to interpret what's going on. And the fundamental question, I think, of the Omelas story is whether this sentence, "They begin to realize that even if the child could be released, it would not get much good if its freedom, a little vague pleasure of warmth and food, no doubt, but little more," is in fact true--or whether it is the sort of rationalization that recognition of one's comfort brings with it. She goes on perhaps explaining, perhaps protesting too much, to say the following, "It's too degraded and imbeciled to know any real joy. It has been afraid for too long ever to be free of fear. Its habits are too uncouth for it to respond to humane treatment." Indeed think about arguments about bringing democracies to countries with no tradition of democracy. "After so long, it would probably be wretched without walls about it to protect it and darkness for its eyes, its own excrement to sit in. Their tears at the bitter justice dry when they begin to perceive the terrible justice of reality and to accept it." Now, I don't have an answer to which of the two readings that I proposed is the right one to make of the Le Guin case. Is she contending there or helping you to recognize there that that early feeling of rage at the fact that your well-being depends upon the suffering of others is, in fact, an immature response to an inevitable structure of inequity in the world? Or is she suggesting that in coming to think that way you are letting go of your only chance for moral behavior, that it's at the moment when you are profoundly exposed to injustice, and it hits you in the form of tears or rage that you are in a position to bring that into your

life? She suggests regardless that living your life with your eyes open to the fact that your well-being depends upon the suffering of others is morally mandatory. "It is their tears and anger," she continues, "the trying of their generosity and the acceptance of their helplessness, which is perhaps the true source of the splendor of their lives. They know that they, like the child, are not free, that they live in a world of mutual interdependence. They know compassion. It is because of their awareness of suffering in the world," she writes, "It is because of that child that they are so gentle with their children. They know that if the wretched one were not there sniveling in the dark," if we were not provided with the resources that let the first world thrive as it does, "the other one, the flute player would make no joyful music." All of the things that we benefit from, the greatness of this university, wouldn't be here. "No joyful music as a young writers line up for their beauty of the race in the sunlight on the first morning of summer." So I want to leave you with that as one of the many things which we can take from the Omelas story and as an introduction to what really goes into making a claim like the one Mill does. And what we'll talk about next class in the context of Kant are some systematic critiques which are offered of the utilitarian framework from the writings of Bernard Williams and our alternative which is offered in the writings of Immanuel Kant. So I'll see you on Tuesday. [end of transcript]

Lecture 13 - Deontology [February 22, 2011]

Chapter 1. Bernard Williams Objection to Utilitarianism [00:00:00] Professor Tamar Gendler: OK, so what I want to do today is to finish up the lecture that we were engaged with last week about utilitarianism and then to move on to what is perhaps the most dead-guy-on-Tuesday lecture of the semester, that is, an explanation of the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. So in order to make up for the fact that the second part of the lecture is fairly dry, we'll have a couple of clicker questions in the first part of the lecture. OK, so as you recall from our lecture last class, John Stuart Mill, in the selections from Utilitarianism that we read, says two extraordinarily famous things that serve in some ways as the heart of the utilitarian view. The first thing that he says is that he articulates what's known as the greatest happiness principle. This is a principle that's supposed to tell you what it is for an act to be morally right. And what Mill says is, there's a proportionality between the rightness of the act and something that it produces. In particular, a proportionality between the rightness of the act and the amount of happiness it produces, regardless of how that happiness is distributed. In particular he says actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, they're wrong as they tend to promote the reverse of happiness, and the happiness with which we're concerned is not the agent's own happiness but the happiness of all concerned. The second extraordinarily famous saying that he says in the opening passages of Utilitarianism is that the motive with which an act is performed is irrelevant to the act's moral worth. He says the motive has nothing to do with the morality of the action. He who saves another creature from drowning does what is morally right, whether his motive be duty or the hope of being paid for it. So we might summarize what these principles say, as saying that the first one tells us that what matters for the morality of an act is the aggregate amount of happiness that it produces. And what we're concerned with here are aggregates, not individuals. We're interested in how much good is done overall, not where those pieces of good might happen to fall. And what the second principle tells us is that what the utilitarian, who is after all a consequentialist, is concerned with are consequences. They're interested in the outcome of the act, not the process by which that outcome was achieved. So the first reading that we did for last class was a selection from Mill's Utilitarianism where he articulated these principles. And it's important to recognize that these get something profoundly right about what we're thinking about, I think, when we try to articulate what lies behind our moral judgments. It does seem right that what we're interested in is what the world is like after a particular action is taken, and to the extent that we're interested in what the world is like, our primary interest is not in how that state of affairs came about, but what that state of affairs is. And our primary concern, if we're taking a moral stance, is not in how much we ourselves have, but rather in how much good there is in the world overall.

That said, there have been, since utilitarianism was articulated, a classic set of objections which are raised to the view, some of which we'll talk more about today, and some of which we encountered in the selection from Bernard Williams that we read last class. Now you will all recall that Williams' discussion begins with a story of a gentleman that he calls Jim, who finds himself in a South American village that's run by a rather unsavory cowboy. And some of the citizens of that village have been protesting the unsavory cowboy's leadership. And so what the unsavory cowboy has done is he has rounded up twenty of those villagers, and he's planning--simply to show the others that he's in charge--to kill those twenty villagers. When Jim arrives, Pedro the cowboy tells him that, if Jim is willing to shoot one of the villagers, the other nineteen will be set free. So that's the Jim case. Jim shows up in a town. The sheriff of the town has selected twenty people at random to be shot, but if Jim is willing to kill one of them the other 19 will be set free, so--clickers out-Question: In the Jim case, what is Jim morally obliged to do? Is the moral thing for Jim to do in this case to shoot the one man, thereby liberating the other nineteen, or is the right thing for him to do to refuse to shoot the one, thereby letting all twenty die? OK, so let's see how the numbers came out. So almost 3/4 of you, actually more than 3/4 of you, think that what the morally right thing for Jim to do in this case is to shoot one man, thereby liberating the other nineteen. We'll have a chance next week to talk a lot more about these sorts of questions. Our reading for Thursday is a series of moral dilemmas with this structure. But what I want to ask those 77% of you who answered yes to do now is to think about whether you take what Williams says is the natural utilitarian next step. Williams argues that if you are a committed utilitarian, and you think that the morally right thing for Jim to do is to shoot the one and release the other nineteen, then you ought to feel no moral compunction about doing so. There's a clear right thing to do. The right thing is to kill the one, so it's to save the nineteen. You may feel moral disapprobation--indeed you should feel moral disapprobation--towards Pedro, who put Jim in this situation. But you ought to feel no moral disapprobation towards Jim, and even more importantly according to Williams, Jim himself ought to feel no moral compunction. So among the 77% of you who answered that Jim did the right thing in killing the one and saving the nineteen, do you think that in shooting the one man, Jim ought to think of any hesitation that he feels as mere squeamishness, something that ought to be overcome? Or do you think that Jim ought to think of the hesitation that he feels in doing what the utilitarian and what you yourself said was the right thing, do you think he ought to think of his hesitation as being indicative of something morally relevant? So there's roughly seventy of you who should be answering this. Let's see how the numbers come out. OK, so most of you take on only part of the consequentialist picture here, at least in the way that Williams understands it. Most of you think that, although the right thing for Jim to do in that case is to kill the one to save the nineteen, it's not the case that he ought wholeheartedly to endorse that as the right thing to do.

In a minute, I'm going to present to you Williams' analogy to the case of residual racism to try to help you see why someone who really has taken on board the consequentialist outlook thinks that the combination of views which most of you present, where you think the right thing to do is to kill the one to save the nineteen, but you also think the right thing to do is to feel bad about that in some way, have not fully appreciated what the utilitarian stance provides you with as a way of understanding morality. So Williams, as you know, presents us with two cases. The first is the case that I've just given you, the case of Jim and the captive Indians. The second is the case in high '70's fashion of a man who is needing to go back to work because it's difficult to have his wife working outside of the home. I leave that to you as a period piece. But the work which George is provided in Williams's example is work in a bioweapons lab, something to which George feels moral opposition. But if George doesn't take the job in the bioweapons lab, a much more gung-ho person, somebody who's likely to advocate the use of bioweapons in all sorts of contexts, will get the job instead. So the two cases that Williams presents us with there have a common structure. And a common structure which we're going to see again and again in moral dilemmas. There's one act that the person can do that leads to a particular outcome, another act that the person can do that leads to a different outcome, where the first act is worse on its surface than the second. So Jim has the possibility of shooting one person, or shooting no people. Those are the choices that Jim faces. If Jim does the first act, shooting one person, then nineteen people will go free; if Jim does the second act, which is not to shoot anybody at all, to refuse Pedro's bargain, then all twenty people will be shot. Likewise, George faces a choice between doing one thing, taking the job in--sorry, George faces the choice between taking the job in the bio lab and not taking the job in the bio lab. If George takes the job in the bio lab, then the gung-ho biological weapons fellow won't get the job, and the outcome will be better. If George doesn't take the job, then the gung-ho biological weapons person won't [correction: will] get the job and the outcome will be better [correction: worse]. So, in both cases we have an act killing the one versus killing none, taking the job versus not taking the job, which is worse than another, but the outcomes of those acts are inverted. The consequentialist tells us not to look at the act side of the equation, but to look at the outcome side of the equation. The only things, says the consequentialist, that we need to take into consideration, is how many people are saved or how much bio-weapons research is done. According to the consequentialist, what we do is we look and we see, outcome one is better than outcome two, and then reading back from that, we decide which thing we ought to do. We ought to do act one because it's the thing that produces the better outcome. The deontologist or virtue ethicist says, not so fast. Don't jump straight to the consequence, look also at what it is that is needed to be done by the individual to bring about that consequence. And recognizing that act one is worse than act two, the deontologist or virtue

ethicist says, it's at least important to take seriously as a possibility that the right thing to do in this situation is the second act, even if the outcome that it leads to is worse. Now what Williams points out is that if one takes seriously the first of these stances, the one where what we're looking at is the outcome and not the process which gave rise to that outcome, then any hesitation we feel towards bringing about that outcome as the result of the particular act is due to what we might call a certain kind of squeamishness. The utilitarian says, and we started with the quotes from Mill for this reason, that thinking about who does an act is morally irrelevant, just as thinking about who gets the goods is morally irrelevant. What matters, says the greatest happiness principle, is how much aggregate happiness is produced; what matters not, except in so far as it affects the amount of happiness, is who produces that happiness or where that happiness goes. So there is room on the consequentialist picture for second-order thinking about the distributions of happiness. If gross inequities in the amount of happiness across a society produces itself less happiness, then we can take that into consideration in our calculus. If performing a particular kind of act produces in an individual less happiness, we can take that into consideration in our calculus. But ultimately the only things that go into the equation in determining whether an act is morally right is the amount of happiness and not where that happiness is distributed. Now, as Epictetus pointed out, some things are up to us and some things are not up to us. And when Jim arrives in Pedro's village, one of the things that is not up to him is the fact that he faces a forced choice of the structure that Pedro has presented him with. It goes without saying that what Pedro has done is outrageous. But the structure of the situation that Jim confronts is a very simple one. Either Pedro will kill twenty people or Jim will kill one person and the other nineteen will not die. That's what's there for Jim to be deciding on. Nonetheless, 75% of the 75% of you who thought that Jim did the right thing in that situation think that Jim ought to feel some squeamishness about carrying out that act. What Williams points out is that if one takes seriously the consequentialist picture, then perhaps the morally right thing to do is to try to cultivate in oneself moral sentiments that accord with one's moral judgments. If through rational argumentation and reflection you come to realize of yourself that--although you are committed to racial equality, although you are committed to gender equality, although you are committed to equality regardless of gender identification, you're committed to not being ageist, you're committed to not being discriminatory on the basis of physical disability--you might, as a result of having been lived in a society largely structured in ways that encode a kind of residual racism and sexism and homophobia, you might find in yourself certain sentiments that lead you instantaneously to respond in ways that run contrary to what your moral commitments tell you you ought to do. In those cases, I take it you think that there's some moral mandate upon you to try to get rid of those instinctive responses. If you're really committed to antiracism, then you want to the extent possible to have a harmonious soul when engaging in interracial encounters. If your reason tells you that you're committed to anti-racism, you want your spirit and appetite to be in line in that way. So there are instances where morality on reflection tells us that something is right, and the consequence of that for our behavior

towards ourselves is that we ought to try to cultivate in ourselves instincts that correspond to that. Williams says the utilitarian should say that in cases like the Jim case, Jim is like the residual racist. He knows what the right thing to do is, but he has a residual tendency to be pulled in the morally wrong direction. If you don't think that it's true that Jim ought to change his attitudes in that case, and you do think that the residual implicit racist ought to try to change her attitude, it would be useful to try to think about what pulls those two cases apart. OK, so that's what I want to say in closing about the utilitarianism and its critics. And we'll return as I said to those issues twice more, once on Thursday when we read Judy Thomson's trolley problem paper and once next Tuesday when we look at some empirical work on that question, which suggests a naturalistic explanation for why it is that Jim feels the hesitation that he does. Chapter 2. Immanuel Kant and Deontology [00:21:17] What I want to do now is to introduce you to the third of the main moral outlooks that we're going to consider this semester. So last lecture we looked very carefully at consequentialist moral theories in the form of John Stuart Mill, and those are theories which locate the moral value of an act in its consequences. In the first part of the class we spent a lot of time looking at Aristotle's virtue theory, which located the moral worth of an act in the actor. Remember we looked at acts having moral worth only if they're done as the result of a sort of constancy of character. What we're going to look at today is the third piece of this story, of a moral view that says the morality attached to an action is not the result of what the actor is like, it's not the result of what the consequences are like, rather it is about the act itself. In particular, we're going to look at the deontological theory of Immanuel Kant. So, Immanuel Kant was an 18th century German philosopher who, like Plato and Aristotle, provided a comprehensive and systematic philosophical theory that to this day is taken seriously as one of the ways one might make sense of the world as a whole. Kant has theories of metaphysics, that is, what kind of stuff there is. He has theories of epistemology, that is, how we know about what kind of stuff there is. He has theories of ethics, what the right thing to do is. And he has theories of aesthetics, that is, what gives things aesthetic value. Famously, Kant articulated his views about these three major domains of philosophy three enormous and dense books: the first, The Critique of Pure Reason, which told you about what the world is like and how we know it to be that way, which he wrote first in 1781 and then revised; the second, The Critique of Practical Reason, which is an account of the nature of morality; and the third, The Critique of Judgment, which is an account of the nature of aesthetic value.

But in addition to those dense works, Kant also wrote what he took to be more popular presentations of his view. In the case of metaphysics, he wrote a book called The Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics. And in the case of ethics, he wrote something that he calls the Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, which is of course the work from which we read excerpts for today. So I give you this context because I want you to know that, as hard as the reading that we did from Kant was, I chose for you perhaps the easiest part of the easiest book that he wrote. So, what should you take home from Kant if you take home nothing else? If you take home nothing else from our reading of Kant, I want you to take home Kant's idea of the categorical imperative. And my goal in the remainder of lecture today is to bring you, by reading through with you the text of Kant that we had today, to a point where you will be well positioned to understand what Kant means by the categorical imperative. And depending on how the next twenty minutes go, we'll get to that either right at the end of today's lecture or right at the beginning of Thursday's. OK, so Kant's text. The Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals begins with a very famous passage where Kant says, nothing can be regarded as good without qualification except the good will. This claim should be familiar to you, O readers of Book II of Plato's The Republic. This is the classic distinction between things that have intrinsic value and things that are merely of instrumental worth. And indeed much in the way that Plato's Socrates does, Kant goes on to enumerate some things which fall into the other category, the category of things that are of mere instrumental utility. Among the things that cannot be regarded as good without qualification, says Kant, are talents of the mind like intelligence and wit, qualities of temperament like courage and perseverance, gifts of fortune like power and riches and honor and health. And he says, taking a direct gibe at Aristotle, and noting as such that he's so doing, neither can the ancient virtues--(Oh, my goodness, how do I close that email?)--neither can the ancient virtues of moderation and self control be considered as good in themselves. Why? Because though being intelligent, or brave, or rich, or controlled will help you to achieve the goals that you have, they don't determine what those goals might be. They magnify your effectiveness as an agent, but they don't determine the valence, the value of your agency. So, says Kant, a witty, persevering, rich, healthy, moderate thief will be an outstanding thief--but that doesn't make his thiefdom good. Each of the virtues that has traditionally been extolled as a virtue, says Kant, gains its value only in so far as the good will is part of it. Now a good will, says Kant, is good not because of what it affects or accomplishes, it's good in itself. When I say that Kant is a critic of consequentialism I am not exaggerating. Kant doesn't think that the outcome of the act is what matters. And in an extraordinarily famous passage, famous in part because of the rather shocking translation which has come down to us of it, Kant says, "the good will would remain good, even if by the niggardly provision of step-motherly nature it wholly lacked the power to accomplish its purpose." By which he means, even if you with your good will were frustrated in all of the goals that

you set out to achieve, your actions would still have moral worth. And somewhat more poetically and a bit less vocabulary that is challenging to the modern ear, Kant says, even if it didn't achieve its outcomes it would like a jewel still shine by its own light as something which has full value in itself. Its usefulness or fruitlessness can neither augment nor its value." Now the question is this: How could anybody come to have this view? How could anybody have a view of morality that says, what matters for an act to be moral is not the outcome that it produces, but rather the description under which the act is done? What I want to try to do right now is to put you inside the Kantian picture so that you get a sense of what that worldview looks like. So in the passages that we read for today, Kant makes three particular claims. He says that an action must be done from duty in order to have moral worth. The first notion that I want to try to explicate for you is the Kantian notion of something being done from duty. An action done from duty, says Kant in his second proposition, has its moral worth not in the purpose that is to be attained by it, but in the maxim according to which the action is determined. So the way that an action done from duty has moral worth is not by looking to see what outcome you're expecting from it, but rather by looking to see under what characterization did you perform the act. And again, I'll spell out what each of those terms mean. Finally, says Kant, duty, which lies at the heart of deontological moral theory, duty is the necessity of an action done out of the respect for the law. Kant believes that it is only when you subject your will to a law which you have made for yourself--that is, the moral law whose binding force upon you you have recognized--it is only in that circumstance that you are truly free. So Kant says, duty is the necessity of an action done out of the respect for the law, and when you perform an action out of respect for the moral law, says Kant, then and only then do you act autonomously. OK, so three, incredibly complicated, subtle claims from Kant. Let's try getting to the bottom of what they mean. So let's start with the first claim, the claim that an act has moral worth only when it is done from duty. So Kant points out that there's three kinds of motivation that we might have in performing an act. We might do an act out of duty, we might do it out of inclination, or we might do it out of self-interest. Only cases of the first kind, in fact only pure cases of the first kind, have moral worth. Actions that are done merely in keeping with, but not from moral duty, have no moral worth according to Kant. So if you obey the law but you do so only out of self interest, your obedience, says Kant, has no moral worth. If you rescue the drowning child from the pond but you do so only because there's a sign on the tree that says, Rescue Drowning Children: $1 Million Reward, your act has no moral worth. So we can think about what Kant's claim amounts to and how it differs from the other ones that we've been looking at by thinking of the question space in terms of a flow chart. So we're trying to decide whether a particular action has moral worth, and the first thing we want to ask ourselves is: Does the action accord with duty? If the answer to that is no, that

is, if you've done something like lied, or stolen something, or murdered somebody, or allowed something terrible to happen in front of you that you could have easily, at no cost to yourself, prevented, all of the authors that we've read, unsurprisingly, say that the act has no moral worth. Oh so, did that just disappear that was supposed to be in red on black? Is it completely invisible from the back? Oh, that's a pity--OK, so what that says in red is no lying and stealing--but it's in red. I can't change it in the middle of the slides, but I'll remind you what those things say. OK. The second question that we ask, having eliminated now from the realm of morally worthy acts those that don't accord with duty, is: What motive the act was done with? So perhaps you act in a morally worthy way out of self-interest without immediate inclinations. So you pay your taxes because if you don't pay your taxes you're going to have to pay more taxes. You obey the speed limit but only because you were afraid you might get caught otherwise. Mill says those acts have moral worth. Kant says no, they don't--and again, that's supposed to be in red but it's now invisible. Suppose that you do an act in such a way that you have an inclination that's in keeping with duty. So Kant thinks you have a duty not to commit suicide, and he considers the case where you fail to commit suicide because you're happy. Kant thinks you need to be loyal to your life partner, but he says that there's no moral worth to remaining loyal to your life partner while you are in love. There's no moral worth, says Kant, to acting kindly towards somebody when you feel sympathy towards them. Because in those cases, though your act is in keeping with what morality demands, it's not done because it is the right thing to do. You are doing it because your inclination happens to line up with what morality demands of you. Now Aristotle, of course, took this situation to be the one in which moral worth is paradigmatically expressed. But Kant thinks that in such cases you can not tell that an act was done from the moral law. All you can see is that it was done in keeping with the moral law, it corresponds to what the moral law demands, but we can't see from that that the motive was duty. It's only in the third case, the case where you act from duty without any inclination and without any self-interest, that Kant thinks the moral worth of an action can be seen. If you preserve your life when you feel the inclination to do otherwise, if you act kindly in situations where there's no reward for you and you feel no sympathy, in those cases, says Kant, we can see that the act was done, not merely in keeping with, but from the moral law. This isn't to say that Kant doesn't think a life lived in the way that Aristotles suggested life is lived is a badly [well] lived life. Cases where your inclination happens to line up with duty helpfully keep you out of this box of doing the wrong thing, but they don't allow you to test your character and see of yourself that the motivation that you have for doing the right thing is to conform to what the moral law demands of you. So with that understanding of what it is to act from duty in mind, we're now in a position to make sense of Kant's second claim in our reading for today. Then an action done from

duty has its moral worth not in the purpose that's to be obtained by it, but in the maxim according to which the action is determined. So remember we've learned that an action done from duty is one that you do in conformity with what morality demands, because that is what morality demands. Not because it's in your self interest, not because you were inclined to behave in that way, but because that act is what morality demands of you. But in order to determine whether an act is what morality demands of you, that act needs to be described in a particular way to you. And the way that you describe that act to yourself makes use of what Kant calls a maxim--a subjective principle of volition--that is, a description of something that is about you, the subject, that says what your desires towards behavior are in that situation. A subjective principle of volition, that is, a description under which the act is done. So it takes the form, perhaps: "In all engagings with all who come into my shop, I will provide them with an honest accounting of how much their transaction is worth, regardless of whether I could be discovered cheating in this. Or: "In all of my encounters with those who are weak and in need of my help, I will provide them with the aid that I can regardless of whether that will be of benefit to me. Only by considering the motive and not by considering the outcome can the action be expressive of the good will itself. The good will is the only thing that is good in itself, says Kant, and it's only by looking at the description under which an act is done that we can determine whether the good will was implicated in the right way in the choice to perform that action. Third claim: Duty is the necessity of an action done out of the respect for the law. So we know that an act has moral worth only if it's done from duty. We know that in order to be done from duty it needs to be done under a certain description. And now we're told what it is that this duty amounts to. In order for an act to have been done from duty, says Kant, it must have been done with explicit recognition that what one is doing at that point is respecting the moral law in so far as it articulates what morality demands of you. Not in so far that it articulates ways that you might have a well-ordered, harmonious, happy soul. Not in so far that it articulates ways in which lots of happiness could be spread around to lots of people. Out of respect rather, says Kant, for the fact that it is what morality demands of you. The moral worth of an act, says Kant, does not lie in its effect, for the effect could have come about in multiple ways. I can set out to release a biological gas in a subway that's intended to kill thousands of people, and because I'm not very good at chemistry, the result could be that I produce an enormous amount of joy in those thousands of people. The effect can come about in lots of ways. Kant says Mill would have to say that in releasing that gas I have done something with moral worth. Kant says: No--what matters is the description under which the act is done, and in particular that that description be that one have respect for the law itself. So I told you I was going to get you to the point of the categorical imperative, and I am going to end the lecture today by bringing you right up to that point, and then next class we'll talk about it in more detail.

So the question is this, right? This is a pressing, exciting question in Kant. All right, I realize that we're in the in-Kant part of things, but this is really exciting. What sort of law?, says Kant. He even puts a but to get you excited. But, he says--cliffhanger --"what sort of law can that be, the thought of which must determine the will without reference to any intent expected effect, so the will can be called absolutely good without qualification?" It's so exciting! We're finding something that's going to make us genuinely autonomous and free and moral! Well, remember: it can't be anything particular, it can't be anything specific about the world or its outcomes. What can it be? It can be the will's universal conformity of its actions to law as such! That is, what makes the law binding is the fact that it is recognized by all rational agents as binding. In particular, it takes the form of what Kant calls the categorical imperative. And here's the formulation of the categorical imperative that we got in our reading for today: Never act except in such a way that I can also will that my act maxim should become a universal law. Never do anything that you couldn't will everybody else to do at the same time. And we'll begin next lecture with the example that Kant uses to illustrate this, namely the lying promise, talk a little bit more about various formulations of the categorical imperative, and then move to Judy Thomson's trolley problem paper. [end of transcript]

Lecture 14 - The Trolley Problem [February 24, 2011]

Chapter 1. Introducing the Categorical Imperative [00:00:00] Professor Tamar Gendler: So there's two things that we need to do in today's lecture. The first is to finish up our discussion of deontology, which was necessarily quite rushed. We're trying to do Kant in roughly a lecture. But I do want to get to the end of that discussion. And the second, which will allow you to use your clickers and express your opinions, is to talk through the structure of Judy Thomson's trolley problem paper. So youll recall from last lecture that our goal in understanding the very brief selection from Kant's Groundwork to the Metaphysics of Morals that we read was to try to make sense of the three claims that he makes in the first book, first chapter, of that volume. And those claims, to which I've now added some underlining, are the following. The first is the claim that in order to have moral worth, an action needs to be done from duty. And the distinction that Kant is making there is the distinction between doing something in keeping with duty, that is, something that conforms to what morality demands of you, and doing something not merely in keeping with, but also from duty. And Kant's picture is that the moral worth of an action is determined not merely by it being in keeping with duty. That's a necessary but not a sufficient condition. What determines the moral worth of an action is that it be done in keeping with duty for the sake of being in keeping with duty, that is, it be done from duty. The second thing that Kant says, the second proposition which he seeks to defend in the Groundwork, is the claim that an action done from duty--that's the thing we were talking about in the first claim--an action done from duty has its moral worth not in the purpose that is to be attained by it, not in what the Greeks would call its telos, its goal, its aim, but rather in the maxim according to which the action is determined. That is, what determines the morality of the action on the Kantian picture is the description under which the action is performed. Now, a number of you came to office hours yesterday, and we had a rather lively discussion of how it is that one goes about determining what things count as maxims. And I encourage those of you who are interested in that question to take an ethics course, where you can work through Kant's writings on this question in more detail. For the purpose of our class, all we need to hold on to is the simple idea that what Kant is interested in here are acts under a description, and that that description is going to have to satisfy a certain sort of test, as we'll find out in a moment. So that's Kant's second claim. Kant's third claim is that duty, which is the central notion to deontology--deon, duty is at the core of deontology--duty is the necessity of an action done out of respect for the law. And the idea here is that not only do you need to act with the goal of conforming to the law in mind, not only do you need to do so in a way that you articulate your actions as falling

under that norm, but you do so because you take the moral law to be morally binding upon you, because you recognize that it is what rationality demands of you. The moral law turns out be the law of governing your behavior that you set for yourself as a rational being. It is the only aspect of your behavior on the Kantian picture that isn't determined by the contingent forces of the world around you. It's determined by your recognition of your role as somebody capable of binding themselves to a law that they themselves set. So as I said, the reason we were interested in these three principles was to get to Kant's famous formulation of the categorical imperative. And we closed lecture last time by meeting one member of the categorical imperative family in response to Kant's question: What sort of law can it be, the thought of which must determine the will without reference to any expected effect so that the will can be called absolutely good without qualification? Kant sets himself, as I said, this cliffhanger of a question, and answers it with the first member of the categorical imperative family. It's the will's universal conformity of its actions to law as such. only thereby, says Kant, can one act autonomously and not heteronomously. What does it mean to act autonomously as opposed to heteronomously? Let's look at the words: autonomous, heteronomous. You'll notice that they both have here the word nomos, that is, law. And they distinguish the law to which you're subjected by saying that in one case, it's an auto-nomos, and in the other case, it's a hetero-nomos. Auto-nomos. What could that be? Let's think of other words where we have this prefix auto-. How about automobile? What's an automobile? An automobile is something that is self-propelled. It is propelled by its own strength. To act autonomously, on Kant's picture, is to act on the basis of a law that you yourself have imposed. You are auto-nomos, subject to a law that comes from within. By contrast, what is it to be hetero-nomos? Well, what is it to be heterosexual? What it is to be heterosexual is to be attracted sexually to individuals that have a different gender than you do. So what is it to be hetero-nomos? It's to have law given unto you that comes from outside of you, that comes from something different from you. So Kant's picture is that autonomy, self-lawgiving, is possible only when the law to which you conform your behavior comes not from the contingencies of the world, but comes from within. In this way, Kant is concerned with the same sorts of questions that Epictetus and Boethius are. Both of them are profoundly concerned with how it is that human freedom is possible, and Kant's picture is that human freedom becomes possible when you govern your actions on the basis of what you yourself decide to be, norms that you want to conform to. In particular, when you conform your actions to the categorical imperative, which says, in the formulation that we see at the beginning of this section, that you should never act in such a way that you cannot also will that your maxim--there's your maxim again--should

become a universal law. When you act in such a way that you don't take the contingencies of your situation into consideration--but rather that you think of yourself as one among any number of beings who in your situation would do exactly what you do--only then do you become free of the contingencies of circumstance. So the picture is that in some ways, by stepping beyond the bounds of the contingent features of your experience, by stepping beyond the bounds of yourself, you thereby gain freedom from the contingencies of the world around you. And Kant suggests that if you take this on as a picture, you will come to see that it conforms with the rules of rationality. So, he says, suppose you're confronted with a very particular case of an act that you want to perform under a particular maxim. The maxim you set for yourself is, when I make a promise and it's going to be a pain in the neck for me to keep that promise, I'll break that promise. That is, the maxim is, it's OK for me to make lying promises. And Kant asks, suppose that you made, under that description, a promise that you didn't intend to keep. Can that maxim be universalized? Well, he says, suppose that it were. Suppose everybody, when they made promises, did so only with the thought that they would keep them when convenient and not when they were inconvenient. Were that to happen, says Kant, there would be no such thing as reliable promising. Why? Well, because promises are like balconies. We don't step out on a balcony if there's a good chance that the balcony will break when we step out on it. And we don't step out on promises, on commitments that others make to us, unless we are close to certain that that promise will be preserved. Chapter 2. Applying and Characterizing the Categorical Imperative [00:11:30] So, says Kant, since the practice of promising would break down if everybody who found it convenient made lying promises, it is not in keeping with what the moral law demands of us that we make a lying promise. And, Kant suggests, this framework can be extended to all the kinds of duties that there are. There are, suggests Kant, two categories of obligation that we have towards ourselves and to others. We have duties to ourself and duties to other people. And, in addition, says Kant, we have perfect duties, things that we need always to do, and imperfect duties, things that we need sometimes to do. In all four of these cases, says Kant in the reading that we did, we can see that the categorical imperative gives us guidance as to whether an action under a maxim is permitted. The action under the maxim is going to be permitted if it can be universalized, and it's going to be prohibited if it can't. So if we ask the question, is it alright to make lying promises, and we say to ourselves, suppose everybody made lying promises, we discover that the act of lying promises is prohibited by the categorical imperative, because it can't be universalized.

Suppose we ask the question, is it OK to commit suicide when feeling frustrated with the world? And Kant says: suppose everybody did that. The practice, the convoluted argument would break down, because there would be nobody left to kill themselves. So goes the argument. Suppose we ask ourselves whether we have a duty to cultivate our talents? Kant says: suppose nobody cultivated their talents. The world in which we lived would be one in which nobody would want to live. And consequently, we have a moral obligation to do so. Finally, he asks, do we have an obligation to give money to those in need? And asks again: what would happen if it were a universal law that nobody gave money to those in need? And again we discover a breakdown of an ordered world in which we want to survive. Now, there's room for questioning--in fact, there's room for questioning all four of these derivations, though it's generally accepted that the lying promise derivation is the most effective of them. But let's look instead at what Kant says about them, if it were to turn out that these derivations worked. Kant says, these are some of the many actual duties whose derivation from the single principle above is clear. "Is clear" is a bit of a stretch, but we can see how that derivation would go. What does this tell us about morality? Kant says it tells us that when we take an act and try to determine whether it's moral, we need to check and see whether we're making an exception for ourselves. When we act, we need to be able to will that a maxim of our actions become a universal law. When we transgress, says Kant, we don't will that our maxim should become a universal law, but rather that the opposite of this maxim should remain a law universally. So suppose you like to sit in the last two rows of this classroom, even though you arrive not late to class. Can you will that this become a universal law, or is this something that works for you only if others are willing to sit further in so that there's room for people on the stairs? Kant would say that the moral law demands of you that you move inward, because your sitting in those last two rows, despite your not late arrival, depends on other people doing something different. Stealing depends on other people respecting the laws of properly. Your not paying the toll on the subway depends on other people paying the toll so that there's enough money to keep up the subway. When you make an exception for yourself, says Kant, you violate the moral law. And we'll return to this at the opening of our discussion of political philosophy, when we talk about prisoner's dilemmas. Now, I mentioned in passing that you had met one member of the categorical imperative family, that you had met what's sometimes called the formula of the universal law: that one

should act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can, at the same time, will that it become a universal law. Kant puts the categorical imperative four different ways for a number of reasons. One of which, he says, it that in certain cases, it's easier to see how to apply the categorical imperative if we frame it in a slightly different way. And I want to introduce you to the other three, largely because the second of these is going to play a central role in the second half of today's lecture. So Kant claims that it is equivalent to saying that you should act only in such a way that you can will your maxim to be universal to say that you should act so as to treat humanity, whether in your own person or that of any other, in every case as an end, and never merely as a means only. Do not use yourself as a means to an end, and do not use others in your interactions with them merely as means. Treat humanity and all others as ends in themselves. Equivalent to that, says Kant, is the formula of autonomy, which we've already talked about briefly. Act so that through your maxims, you could be a legislator of universal laws. Act in such a way that you are self-lawgiver with respect to rules that reason endorses. And finally, a rather complicated notion, sometimes called the kingdom of ends formulation, act in accordance with the maxims of a member giving universal laws for a possible kingdom of ends--a harmonious society in which everybody exists according to the laws that you give. As I said, we have only about an hour's worth of Kant, so we won't focus on the third and the fourth. But I do want to call your attention to the formula of humanity, because as I said, it's going to play a central role in Judy Thomson's ultimate diagnosis of what may be going on in our intuitions about trolley cases. Chapter 3. The Aim of a Moral Theory [00:20:16] So let me close the discussion of Kant by trying to connect it back to the mini-unit of which it is a part. You'll recall that we began this section of the course on the seventeenth, that is, last Thursday, with thinking about consequentialism as a moral theory. And the question that I want to ask is: what is there that is common to the two concrete moral theories that we've taken a look at the beginning of this unit? We've looked so far at some of the differences between consequentialism on the one hand and deontology on the other. But I think it's important, in moving on to some of their practical applications, to think about what they have in common. And what they have in common is that both teleology, consequentialism--utilitarianism in the particular form that we found it--and deontology prohibit first-person exceptionalism. Kant says: my desire may serve at bases for willed actions only if I can, at the same, coherently will that others in similar circumstances would act in a way that I am choosing to act. I'm only allowed to do things that I'm going to assume other people are also allowed to do.

And Bentham, quoted in Mill, Bentham, the great grandfather of utilitarianism, says, everyone is to count for one, no one for more than one. Mill, in his greatest happiness principle, speaks of the happiness of all, not the happiness from the subjective perspective. So the challenge of morality is that of viewing the world not from the stance of your own needs as the most central set of needs in the world, but rather from the perspective of your own needs as one set of needs among those of six billion equally sentient beings. Now the problem for morality is that the tendency towards first person exceptionalism, the tendency to take one's own needs as more important than the needs of anybody else is perhaps the most widespread and pervasive psychological bias. And when we get to the unit on political philosophy after March break, we'll talk about ways in which social structures are put into place to help deal with this sort of tension. Even in the passages from Mill that we read for last Thursday, Mill talks about what sorts of attitudes it's important to cultivate in individuals so that they begin to view the world from a moral perspective. In the selections that we read from book ten of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle asked: in what way should society be structured to make it easy for people to act morally? And in some ways, the question with which we're going to close the course--how does rational versus nonrational persuasion work, what are the roles of literary as opposed to argumentative representations of the good life--is a version of this dilemma, operationalized. How is it, given an inevitable human tendency to take one's needs as more important than others, how is it possible to structure society in such a way that the needs of all are met? So that's what I want to say by way of the Kant. And in the remainder of lecture, I want to ask you to take out your clickers and enjoy the ride. Chapter 4. The Trolley Problem [00:25:02] So as you know, the paper which we read for today is a great and intricate paper by the philosopher Judith Jarvis Thomson written in the mid-1980s in response to an earlier paper by another mid-century woman philosopher, Philippa Foot. And what Philippa Foot and Judy Thomson are interested in in these papers is a systematic exploration of a number of cases which seem to evoke, in most subjects, pretty powerful intuitions about what the right thing to do is, but which seem to adduce intuitions the explanation for which is hard to systematize. So as you know well, the first case, which we'll call trolley driver--there's the driver--is this. There's a trolley, hurtling down a track, in such a way that its going to kill five people. But it turns out that there is a second track onto which the trolley could be diverted, where there is only one person. And the question is this. The trolley driver is driving the trolley. It's heading towards the five people in such a way that he is going to kill the five. Should he, is he morally required to, morally prohibited from, or perhaps neither prohibited nor required but rather just permitted, to turn the trolley onto the track where there is only the one?

Now notice that though this is framed as an idealized problem, the diversion of threats is something that decision-makers face all the time. Suppose there is an airplane that has become incapacitated, that's falling in such a way that it's going to land on a large city, and it would be possible to divert the plane so that it falls on a less populated area instead. Suppose that there is an illness which is taking the lives of many people, but if one quarantines those who are ill, causing that number to die, the rest of the population will be spared. In case after case, we face dilemmas with roughly the structure of trolley. So though these cases are idealized, in the sense that we're granting ourselves that we know with certainty what the outcomes will be, it is, I think, not a useless exercise, even if our concern is realworld morality, to think through what the right thing to do is in these cases. So let's start with the case of the trolley driver, driver of the trolley. The trolley is heading down the track in such a way that the driver will, with the trolley, kill five people if he doesn't turn it. He faces the choice of turning the trolley onto the track where there is the one. Question: Is it morally mandatory for him to turn a trolley from the five to the one? Is it morally permitted, but not morally mandatory, for him to turn the trolley from the five to the one? Or is it morally prohibited for him to turn the trolley from the five to the one? OK. So let's see how the numbers come out. I'm going to write these down, because we're going to need them for later. So 7% of you, very, very small number, think that it's morally prohibited for him to turn the trolley. The vast majority of you, close to two thirds, think that it's morally permitted, but not morally mandatory, for him to turn the trolley. And about 30% of you, roughly a third, think that he is morally required to make that turn. Case number two: Transplant. You're running a hospital. Five people show up at the hospital, all of them destined to die, because one needs a lung, and one needs a heart, and one needs a kidney, and one needs a liver, and one needs a brain. So they're all going to die, and you are the doctor. And into the emergency room walks a perfectly healthy young man who has a heart and a lung and a liver and a kidney and a really good, active brain. And if you were to chop up that man and give his parts to the five suffering individuals, you could save the five at the cost of the one. Question: For the doctor, is it A, morally mandatory to chop up the healthy man to save the five, B, morally permitted but not morally mandatory to chop up the healthy man, or C, morally prohibited to chop up the healthy man? So let's see how numbers come out. So. 85% of you think it is morally prohibited to cut up the one to save the five. 9% of you think it is morally permitted, but not morally mandatory. And 6% of you--off to med school--think that it is morally mandatory to chop up the healthy man.

So what's going on here? So Philippa Foot, who was the person who initially presented this juxtaposition, has a hypothesis. And her hypothesis is this. That in the trolley driver case, the choice that the driver faces is between killing one and killing five. Whereas in the transplant case, the choice that the doctor faces is between killing one and letting five die. And if we were to graph these on what I'll call the bad-o-meter, which tells us how bad things are, we would discover that letting five die is bad, but killing one is worse, and killing five is even worse. And so this seems to give us the answer that since killing five is worse than killing one, then in the trolley driver case, it's OK for him to turn the trolley, but since killing one is worse than letting five die, then in the doctor case, it's not OK to chop up the one man. Because in the doctor case, you have to kill once to save five, whereas in the trolley case, the driver has to kill one in order not to kill five. And that seems to accord pretty well with your intuitions. 93% of you think it's permitted, in the trolley case, to turn the trolley, whereas only 14% of you think it's permitted in the doctor's case to kill the one. So it looks like this bad-o-meter is pretty well capturing the intuition of those of you in this classroom. And in fact, empirical studies that have been done on thousands and thousands of people throughout the world suggest that your intuitions are pretty much in line with the intuitions of most. But there's a problem. Case number three: trolley bystander. Here's Jim. Poor Jim. Really bad luck. First he shows up in this Latin American town, and he's supposed to shoot some Indians. Now here he is, next to a trolley which is hurtling down a track, about to kill five people. But here there is, in the middle of the track, a switch that if Jim turns will cause the trolley to kill the one. Question: For Jim, the bystander, is it morally mandatory for him to turn the trolley so that instead of the trolley hitting the five, it hits the one? Is it morally permitted, but not morally mandatory for him to turn the trolley? That's answer two. Or is it morally prohibited for him to turn the trolley? Lets see how those numbers come out. OK. And here are your numbers. 15, 70, 15. These are very, very similar to the distribution of answers that you gave in the driver case. In the driver case, 63% of you thought it was morally permitted, whereas here 70% of you think it's morally permitted. In the driver case, 30% of you thought it was morally mandatory. Here slightly fewer of you think it's morally mandatory, 15%. And in the driver case, 7% of you thought it was prohibited. Here 15% of you think it's morally prohibited. So there's a little change, but not a lot of change. Here's the problem. Remember that in Foot's analysis of the case, we knew that letting five die was a little bit bad, that killing one was worse, and that killing five was worse than that. Trolley driver faced the choice of killing one versus killing five. In transplant, you face the choice of killing ones versus letting five die. But what's going on in the bystander case?

Well, in the bystander case, Jim, Jim of the bad luck, faces a choice between killing one-diverting the trolley onto the track in such a way that Jim kills that guy--or letting five die. Letting the trolley hit the five that it's going to hit inevitably. But in contrast to the doctor case, where 85% of you thought it was prohibited to kill the one in order to save the five who would otherwise die, in this case, 85% of you think it's at least permitted to kill the one in order to let the five die. Let me do that again for you. 85% of you--watch the bad-o-meter--think that it goes the other way. Now what's going on? We thought we had a solution to the problem. The solution to the problem that differentiated transplant from trolley driver was the distinction between killing and letting die. And all of a sudden, there's a whole bunch of you who seem to be saying about bystander that letting five die is worse than killing one. You must think that, or you wouldn't think that it's morally, at least, permitted for him to turn the trolley. Moreover, stuff gets even worse. Suppose that the hospital case comes about as follows. Five healthy individuals show up at the hospitals, and a doctor--either because he's tired or because he wants to get the insurance benefits of which he is a beneficiary if there are a lot of sick patients in his hospital--poisons the five who show up, in such a way that one of them needs a liver, one of them needs a kidney, one of them needs lungs, one of them needs a heart, and one of them needs a brain. And so as a result of what that man has done, these five individuals will die. And it's a few hours later, and he thinks, Oh! I forgot about the categorical imperative! Shoot! What am I going to do? And up shows a healthy individual, and he thinks, Oh, Good! I've got a solution, here, I can chop him up. Heart, lung, kidneys, liver, brain, and I can save the five. OK. Question: For the doctor who has poisoned the five individuals who earlier showed up at the hospital, who now faces the option of saving their lives by killing the one, is it A, morally mandatory to chop up the healthy man, B, morally permitted, but not morally mandatory, to chop up the healthy man, or C, morally prohibited to chop up the healthy man? And let's see how the numbers come out. All right. So. 82%, 11%, 7%. So your numbers here are almost identical to what they were in the original doctor case. There it was 6, 9, 85, here it's 7, 11, 82. Almost no difference. But let's go back to our bad-o-meter. We are going to set aside the killing and letting die question, and just look at the kill one versus kill five. So we know from trolley driver that killing one is pretty bad. But according to most of you, according to 93% of you, killing five is worse than killing one. OK. Poison doctor. So here's what choice the doctor faces. He can kill five--right? He's poisoned them, and now they're going to die. Or he can kill just one--that one healthy guy who just showed up. And then the other five won't die. 82% of you told me that it was

better for him to kill five than to kill one. Let me show you this again, on the bad-o-meter. 85% of you thought that it was better for him to kill five than to kill one. So we have these two super-duper, excellent principles that seem to explain what was going on in the trolley case. On the one hand, that killing one was worse than letting five die, and then all of a sudden, bystander made us think, oh no, we don't have that intuition. And then we have the intuition that at least killing one was better than killing five, and the poison case made us rethink that as well. Now, there's an obvious issue that may be making the moral difference here. There's a temporal difference between when the killing of the one and the killing of the five happened. And perhaps, says Thomson, perhaps that's what explains our intuition in the doctor case. Perhaps it is because the killing of the five has become a letting die, as the result of time, that it's misleading to describe this as a kill one versus kill five case. But the temporal is not going to help us with the transplant versus bystander case. Those seem pretty clearly to be both cases where one faces the choice between killing one and letting five die. And whereas it seemed pretty clear to most of you in transplant that killing one was worse than letting five die, it seems pretty clear that for most of you in bystander, it's the other way around. So the trolley problem is the problem raised by these dancing arrows. How is it that we systematize our intuitions about killing and letting die, given that they appear to come apart in these cases? So Thomson suggests that whereas the transplant case gives us a choice between killing one and letting five die, as does bystander, there is a potentially relevant difference between them. And that is that in the case of transplant, you are using the one as a means. You're using the one as a way to achieve the outcome of saving the other five. Whereas in bystander, when you're diverting the trolley onto the track where that one individual is, you're not using that individual as a means, and--oh my goodness, I told you we'd get back to Kant, and we have! What did Kant's formula of humanity say? Kant's formula of humanity said, so act as to treat humanity, whether in your own person or that of any other, in every case as an end, and never merely as a means only. So maybe that's our solution. Maybe the problem in bystander is that since you're not treating him as a means, it's OK to kill the one. Whereas in transplant, since you are treating him as a means, it's not OK to kill the one, and consequently, you're morally obliged to let the five die. Well, says Thomson, that can't be quite right. Suppose that you're Jim, standing next to the trolley. Trolley's on its usual path to kill the five. But here, instead of the straight track on which the one sits, there's a looped track, and the one is in the middle of the track in such a way that if you divert the trolley, it will hit him, thereby saving the five.

Question. In the case that Thomson calls loop, is it A, morally mandatory to turn the trolley, that's one. B, morally permitted, but not morally mandatory, or C, morally prohibited? So remember, trolley's heading down the track towards the five. You're Jim. The trolley's going to hit the five, or you can divert the trolley onto the track with the one, and because the one is there, you will cause the trolley to stop. OK? So let's see how the numbers come out on this. OK. So 68, 18, 14. Not a lot of difference. You've answered bystander in loop in almost the same way that you've answered all our other trolley cases. Generally the distribution has been 15, 70, 15. That was bystander. Here it's 14, 68, 18. But notice that in this case, you were using the guy on the loop track as a means! You're using him as a means to your end. You're trying to stop the trolley by using his body. Kant didn't help us enough! Restock. Let's take stock again, says Thomson. Perhaps some of the work is being done by some notion of rights. Perhaps what's going on in the transplant case, the one where you guys are not going to let the doctor chop up the healthy man, is that you would be violating that man's rights. And perhaps it's true that rights trump utility. That is, that when somebody has a right to bodily integrity, that takes precedence over the needs of the many. The utilities of the five that are going to saved. And we'll close this lecture with the final example, one that's meant to test that hypothesis. And we'll begin next lecture by talking about some of the reasons that people tend to give this response. So suppose now that instead of the looping track, there's a bridge. And suppose that on that bridge is our fairly large gentleman. And you are now faced with the following dilemma. The trolley's heading down the track. It's about to kill the five. And here's how Jim the bystander could stop it. He could push the fat man off the bridge, and thereby cause the trolley to be stopped in its tracks by his weight. Question. For the bystander in fat man, is it morally mandatory to push the fat man, morally permitted but not morally mandatory, or morally prohibited to push the fat man? And let's take responses, and I'll leave you with those numbers and a remark about them as our close. So let's see whether we get any shift in the fat man case. My goodness! That looks awfully different. What is going on? So remember, our classic distribution is that we have roughly 70% here, and no more than 10% in the prohibited. All of a sudden, 78% of you think it's prohibited. What's going on? Cliffhanger! We'll talk about it on Tuesday. [end of transcript]

Lecture 15 - Empirically-informed Responses [March 1, 2011]

Chapter 1. Recap of the Trolley Problem and Three Responses [00:00:00] Professor Tamar Gendler: So we left ourselves at the end of the last lecture in a somewhat perplexing situation. We had thought through the particular scenarios that Judy Thomson presents us with in her trolley paper. And we had discovered the following apparently perplexing feature about the class's responses. In what's called the Classic Bystander case--the case where there's a bystander standing next to a trolley that's hurtling down a track about to hit five people, and the bystander could if he chose turn the trolley onto a track where the trolley will only hit one person-your responses were as follows. Roughly 15% of you thought he was morally required to turn the trolley from the five to the one. 70% of you thought he was morally permitted to do so. And only 15% of you thought that it's a morally prohibited act for him to turn the trolley from the five to the one. By contrast, we ended class with Thomson's famous Fat Man case. This is a case where our bystander is standing next to the trolley as before, the trolley is hurtling down the track about to kill the five, and the bystander has available to him a means for stopping the trolley. In this case, rather than turning it onto a different track, the means he has available to him is to push a fat man off a bridge, thereby stopping the trolley in its tracks. And your responses in this case exhibited a highly different distribution than they did in the first case. Whereas in the first case, 15% of you thought it was prohibited to stop the trolley from hitting the five by killing the one or by causing the trolley to kill the one, in the Fat Man case, 78% of you--4/5 of the class--thought that the act of turning or of stopping the trolley by putting in its way another person was morally prohibited. Now the puzzle that this raises, as you know from the end of last class, is that it seems that in both the Bystander case where one--sorry. The puzzle is this. In the Bystander case, it seems clear to most people that killing one person is bad, but that letting five die is worse. Whereas in the Fat Man case, it seems to be just the inverse. So what Thomson asks us at the end of that paper, having run through a number of cases, including some that I didn't go over in this summary right now, is: what could possibly explain the difference in our reactions to the Bystander case and the Fat Man case? And what she suggests is that whereas utility prohibits letting the five die--that is, it would be better for the number of lives saved if we saved five than if we saved one--the notion of a right is what prohibits killing the one in the Fat Man case. So what has to happen, says Thomson in the Fat Man case, is that you interfere with his right not to have his person used as a means to the end of saving another. Whereas in the case of Bystander, there's no right that is infringed upon. And, suggests Thomson, rights trump utilities. So what the right prohibits is what is mandated in the Fat Man case.

So that's where we were at the end of class last time. And the solution that Thomson proposed there is what we might call a classic solution to trolley-type dilemmas. It's a solution that assumes that Fat Man case and the Bystander case carry different moral mandates, and that the reason they carry those different mandates is because of a deep moral difference that those cases encode. So the difference between our response to Fat Man and our response to Bystander, says Thomson in that 1985 article, is one that we should respect. And the reason we should respect that difference, she contends, is that that difference is tracking a profound moral difference between them, namely that in the case of Fat Man but not in the case of Bystander, the rights of an individual are violated. What I want to do in class today is to go through with you three non-classic responses to the trolley case. And I'll be giving you the chance to use your clickers in the first and third of these. So if you get your clickers out, we'll be prepared for what's going to happen in a few minutes. So what are the three non-classic responses? Remember, in a classic response, the claim is that Fat Man and Bystander carry different moral mandates, and that that difference can be traced to a deeper, morally relevant difference between them. So two of the responses that we'll consider today are ones that suggest that Fat Man and Bystander in fact don't carry different moral mandates. So the first example that I'm going to run through with you is Judy Thomson's rethinking of trolley cases in a 2008 paper in which she ends up assimilating the Bystander case to the Fat Man case. And suggesting that in neither of the cases is it permissible to kill the one to save the five. The second view that we'll consider is Josh Greene's view that the right thing to do in the Fat Man case is the same thing as the right thing to do in the Bystander case, namely that in both cases, the right thing to do is to stop the trolley from hitting the five and cause it instead to kill the one. And finally--I'm shoehorning this a bit, because in truth, Sunstein is a little closer to Greene than he is to Thomson. But we might use his thinking to maintain the position that though our responses to the cases differ, the cases are in some more fundamental sense the same. And what Sunstein is going to suggest we need to do is to push the fat man. So what we have are three views here. Thomson's saying the cases come together, and they come together in telling us never to kill the one to save the five. Greene's saying the cases come together, and they come together in telling us always kill the one to save the five. And then, perhaps, Sunstein's view telling us that the cases come apart. But these three nonclassic responses are interesting not just for the difference in their content, I think they're interesting for the purposes of this class because each of them makes use of a slightly different kind of argumentative methodology. And there's no reason that the methodologies and the answers needed to line up in the way that they did. So one of the things that I want you to think about as we go through today's lecture is what use might be made of each of these methodologies to make one of the alternative arguments. So Thomson's contention that in the Bystander case we shouldn't turn the trolley is one that she makes on the basis of inviting you--as I will do in a moment--to consider additional hypothetical cases, and then asking you to be consistent

about your responses to cases that fail to differ in moral ways. So Thomson's methodology is the same as it was in her 1985 paper, there's just a new case that she's thought about. Sunstein's methodology is to canvas a large array of literature in the heuristics and biases tradition, and to suggest that moral reasoning is no different than any other sort of reasoning. And Josh Greene's method is of course to make use of neuroimaging results and on that basis to argue in favor of his view that what is morally mandated of us is a certain kind of utilitarian stance. Chapter 2. Thomsons New Response to the Trolley Problem [00:09:19] So let's start--and here you'll need your clickers--with the additional hypothetical cases that convinced Judy Thomson, and may convince you, that it's not OK to turn the trolley in Bystander. So the case that Thomson presents us with is a case that we'll call Bystander's Three Options. So here's poor Jim, deeply regretting that he ever enrolled in this class, standing by the trolley in a usual Bystander dilemma where the trolley is about to hit the five and Jim has the possibility of deflecting it to hit the one. But because Jim lives his life in Judy Thomson's thought experiment, she has, in rather dastardly fashion, introduced a third track at the end of which, rather unfortunately for Jim, Jim is standing. Now here's Jim's three-way dilemma. One, allow the trolley to continue on its original path killing the five. Option two: deflect the trolley so that it hits the other guy. Option three: deflect the trolley from the five to the one--oh, except the one is Jim. Question. In three-way Bystander, if Jim decides to turn the trolley--so we're ignoring the case where he lets it hit the five--he's made the decision to turn the trolley, the question is the following. Is it morally required for him to turn the trolley onto the track where it hits the other guy instead of himself? Is it morally permitted, but not morally required, for him to turn the trolley onto the track where it hits the other guy instead of himself? Or is it morally prohibited for him to turn the trolley onto the track instead of to himself? So we're assuming that Jim has made the decision to turn the trolley from the five. After all, it's a straight Bystander case. If he doesn't turn the trolley, it's going to hit the five. 78% of you have previously told me that what one ought to do, or at least what one is permitted to do in this case, is to turn the trolley. How come there's no responses coming, guys? Students: [interposing voices] Professor Tamar Gendler: It's not working? Oh, my goodness. All right. So why is it not open for you? Let's try. Is it open now? Student: No. Professor Tamar Gendler: Tragic. This is really, really, very, very horrible. That did not work. OK, the whole lecture today depends upon these working. So let's try this again. And

tell me now whether this works. Is it working? OK. Is it working now? No? Still no? No? All right. Hm. We're going to have to run--I think there's nothing I can do. I'm going to try resetting once more and see if that works. And I'm going to try removing and then returning this receiver. And then--if not--we're going to do the old-fashioned show of hands and all my beautifully constructed slides will turn out not to be useful, but that's all right. Worse things have happened in the world. All right. Try it again. Yay! Awesome. I have no idea what I changed. OK. So, answering this question. Wow. There's 64 of you. There's 71 of you. We'll do the countdown. 10, 9, 8--so let's see how the numbers come out in--4, 3, 2, 1 seconds. Oh, and it's so exciting. Especially because we had to suffer first. The contrast. OK. So in this case, 6% of you think it's morally required for Jim to turn the trolley onto the other man. But you were the 6% who continue to be outliers, or perhaps you're different people. But let's look at what's going on. 61% of you think it's morally permitted for him to turn the trolley onto the other man. And 32% of you think it's morally prohibited for him to turn the trolley onto the other man. Now interestingly, Judy Thomson thinks--expects that more of you will fall into this category. So it's an interesting question for us to think about as a class why it is that she is under the impression that it's rather surprising that this is the response that you gave. But in any case, let's move to a second contrast case and see how this goes. OK. Suppose now that we have only a two-way case. In the two-way case, bystander Jim has only two options. Either the trolley is going to hit the five or he can deflect the trolley in such a way that it hits him. I want to go back for a second and just get the numbers that I got on the last slide, because I forgot to record those for myself, thrown off as I was by our situation. So let me just record these. 6%, 61%, 32%. OK. So moving on to the new case. It's a two-way trolley, and the question is this. In Bystander's Two Options, is it morally required for him to let the trolley hit the five instead of himself, is it morally permitted for him to let the trolley hit the five instead of himself, or is it morally prohibited for him to let the trolley hit the five instead of himself? OK? So let's think through that case. So remember, it's a two-way case. The trolley's heading down towards the five. And the question is: is it required, permitted, or prohibited for him to turn the trolley from the five to hit himself? OK. And let's see how the numbers come out here. We've got roughly 10 seconds to find out whether your distribution is going to be similar or different here. OK, so here's how the numbers come out: 8%, 70%, 22%. Now, the case with which we want to contrast this is the Bystanderclassic Bystander case. In the classic Bystander case, more of you thought he was morally required to turn the trolley than you think in this particular case. In the classic Bystander case, interestingly, you had roughly the same view about whether it was

morally permitted. And more of you think it's morally prohibited for him to let the trolley hit the five instead of himself. So the interesting difference is this one here. You took a different attitude with respect to whether it's morally required for him to turn the trolley when the person it's going to hit is himself than when the person it's going to hit is another person. So let's go back and do just a classic Bystander case and see whether, as a result of having thought through this case, there's any change in your intuitions. So this is just the standard Bystander case that you've seen before. In the classic two-way Bystander case, do you think it's morally mandatory, morally permitted, or morally prohibited for Jim to turn the trolley? So we're 3, 2, 1. And let's see how the numbers come out. 20%, 65%, 15%. So as a result of having thought about the first-person analogue, some--though many fewer than I would have thought--some of you changed your view. Whereas originally, 15% of you thought it was morally mandatory to turn the trolley--oh, you've changed your view exactly the direction against the one I would have predicted. So here's a mystery. Here's a little bit of experimental philosophy done in our classroom. What Judy Thomson was predicting--and we can talk in sections about why this didn't happen--what Judy Thomson was predicting is that you would react as follows. If it's not morally mandatory for me to turn the trolley onto myself, then it's not morally mandatory, indeed not morally permitted, for me to turn the trolley onto another person. If I'm not willing to take a hit myself in that case, I shouldn't be deciding on behalf of another person that he take that hit. So I want you to think about what it is in Thomson's thinking about this case that made it feel to her so obvious that as the result of considering the first-person case, people would be inclined to rethink the third-person case. And I have to say, I myself in reading Thomson's 2008 paper am very easily brought into the mindset she describes there. So I find it surprising and extremely interesting to see that that isn't what happened in this context. Let's assume, however, that at least for some of you, the intuition that you came to have as the result of considering this case was something like Thomson's intuition. So that whereas on the old view in Bystander case, you thought the right thing was to kill the one rather than to let the five die--that is, in the standard switch case, and this is in fact what most of you think--in the standard Bystander case, most of you think that the right thing to do is to kill the one rather than to let the five die. What Thomson says is that in thinking through the first-person case, you ought to realize that Bystander is a lot more like Fat Man than you initially thought. To the extent that you reject that intuition of Thomson's, you're in a position to disagree with her. Chapter 3. Greene on the Trolley Problem [00:20:28] So let's move to the view with which I take it most of you are going to end up agreeing, since this is exactly the opposite of Thomson's, namely Greene's argument that the assimilation ought to go the other way. So just to remind you where we are in the picture, the puzzle with which we began is that people were giving a different response in Bystander than in Fat Man, and Thomson tried to get rid of the problem by causing you to

assimilate Bystander to Fat Man. I was unable, through Thomson's cases, to get you to shift your intuitions in that case. So we're stuck with a residual difference between your responses. Most of you think it's OK to turn the trolley in Bystander regardless of whether you wouldn't do it on yourself, but that it's not OK to push the man on the bridge in Fat Man. So Greene's going to give us a second way of thinking about how it is that we might bring those responses together. And his argument runs as follows. In general, we're not in a very good position to determine what really underlies our reasoning. There's an entire tradition in social psychology that I talked about in one of the early lectures that aims to show that a lot of what people engage in when they make decisions is post-facto rationalization of intuitive responses that they had which weren't in fact tracking what they would say are the relevant features of the situation. So famously, people are more likely to choose an object that lies on the left-hand side of a visual array than an object that lies on the right-hand side of that visual array. But in making the choice, they don't provide as their reason the location of the object; they provide as their reason some other feature of the object. And when we looked at, in the second lecture, the confabulation results, whereby subjects who had undergone commissurotomy--that is, whose corpus callosum had been severed--so that the right and left hemispheres of their brains weren't in communication, we discovered that when they performed an act that was based on stimulation of the right brain, the left brain, which is the linguistic part, came up with an explanation for what they were doing that was obviously not the real source of their behavior. So there are many cases, Greene points out, where our motivations our opaque us. Where we think we're responding to one thing, but in fact we're responding to something else. One of those cases, says Greene, is the difference in our response to the Fat Man case and to the Bystander case. So what happens in the Bystander case--where we're trying to decide whether to shift the trolley from the five to the one--is that our rational processing system gets activated. Whereas what happens, hypothesizes Greene--and we'll give some evidence in a minute-what happens in the Fat Man case is that our emotional processing system gets activated. And says Greene, given the choice between our rational system and our emotional system, the rational system is the one whose outputs we ought to trust. So says Greene, the morally right thing to do in this case is to push the fat man. Notice that this is a multi-step argument, some of whose premises are a good deal more controversial than others. So the premise that our motivations are often opaque to us is completely undisputed by everyone. There's no question that often we aren't aware of what's causing us to respond in a particular way. I may be particularly irritable because my feet are wet, and unaware of the fact that the reason that I'm responding to you in a short-tempered way is not because you are particularly irritating, but because my feet are uncomfortable. This phenomenon is undeniable. The question of whether what actually explains our different responses in these two cases is an interesting empirical question.

And there has been collected over the last decade or so some pretty interesting neuroimaging data suggesting that there are systematic activation differences in what goes on when people give utilitarian responses to cases and what goes on when people give responses to cases that seem to involve the sorts of notions to which deontologists appeal. Notions like rights. And there is a certain amount of additional evidence coming from other research that the areas that are differentially activated in those two cases correspond on the one hand with what is often thought of as a rational processing system--a calculative processing system--whereas in the other, they correspond with areas of the brain that have been in independent cases implicated in emotional processing. So the first premise is uncontroversial. The second premise is reasonably well-supported. There's controversy about the data, but there is scientific evidence for which there's a good argument to be made that what it shows is roughly what's written here. The controversial question is whether even if the first two premises are true, the third normative premise is true. Is it the case that if our responses to Fat Man are triggered by emotion, whereas our responses to Bystander are triggered by the rational system, is it the case that we ought to go with the rational system? That is a normative claim, not an empirical one. And even if the arguments that we're going to consider in a minute successfully establish the truth of the second premise, we don't yet have the truth of the third premise thereby established. So let's talk about the evidence that Greene has found in favor of the second premise--in favor of the premise that what goes on in cases like Fat Man is an emotional response, whereas what goes on in cases like classic Bystander is a rational response. So Greene has for the last decade or so put people into fMRI machines--into scanners which track where blood is flowing in the brain--and presented them in the scanners with three kinds of dilemmas. The first kind of dilemma are dilemmas that he calls moral/personal dilemmas. These are dilemmas like Fat Man where you're being asked whether you want to push the fat man off the bridge. Dilemmas like the doctor case, which I presented, where we're considering whether to cut up a healthy patient to save the lives of others. Dilemmas like a lifeboat case where there's not enough food and water to go around on the lifeboat and you're considering whether to throw off one of the people on the lifeboat so as to leave enough food and water to go around for the remaining subjects. So that's the first class of cases that he has subjects consider in the scanner. The second class of cases that he has people consider in the scanner are what he calls moral and impersonal cases. So these are cases like Bystander at the switch where you're facing a moral dilemma, but not one where you are imagining, in an up-close and personal way, causing particular harm to a particular individual who's in your proximity. Cases like ones where you've found a lost wallet and you need to decide whether to return it. Cases where you're voting on a policy that will have certain kinds of effects on people, but where those effects are relatively remote from you. And finally, he presents people with what he calls non-moral dilemmas. Questions like, if I'm trying to get from Cleveland to Chicago, should I take the bus or the train or a plane? Or if I'm trying to decide which coupon to use on the Internet to save on shipping, should I do this or that? Cases that involve the same kinds of objects, right? Fat Man involves trains.

Bus versus train involves trains. We might have a coupon-use case where you're using the coupon to buy a boat. Lifeboat involves a boat. So he has the subjects in the scanner and they're presented with these sorts of cases. And you'll notice that I've put a little color-coded box here of black, grey, and white. What Greene discovered in the 2001 paper--and let me say some of these data have since been reanalyzed, so some of the details haven't held up, but many of them have--what he discovered is that if one believes, as many do, that the brain areas listed here--brain areas like medial frontal gyrus, and angular gyrus, and posterior cingulate gyrus--if one believes that those are areas associated with emotion, then we have good evidence that in the moral/personal cases, the areas of the brain associated with emotion are activated. Whereas in the moral/impersonal and non-moral cases that doesn't occur. By contrast, it looks like a bunch of areas that are traditionally associated with working memory--parietal lobe, middle frontal gyrus--are more active in the impersonal case and the non-moral case than they are in the personal case. And here's the famous image from Greene's 2001 paper reproduced in many papers since that shows the brain areas that exhibit differential response in the moral/personal cases as contrasted with the other cases. So it looks like there is some, perhaps decisive, evidence in favor of Greene's second premise. In favor of the premise that what goes on in moral/personal cases is an activation of the part of the brain associated with emotion, whereas what goes on in cases like Bystander is an activation of the part of the brain associated with reasoning and other sorts of more-controlled processes. Moreover says Greene, there's lots and lots of behavioral evidence that supports the hypothesis that one of the things that goes on when we respond to hypothetical moral dilemmas is that we track features of the case that are not morally relevant. So for example, there's a study from the early 2000s by behavioral economists Small and Loewenstein that points out that in a very profound sense, identifiable victims produce in us more powerful emotional responses the non-identifiable victims. And this isn't just the difference between a picture of the child to whom your Oxfam donations will go versus a description of the child to whom your Oxfam donations will go. There is in fact a strikingly large difference between people's willingness to give some of their rewards in a game in a laboratory to person number four--right, so they draw a name from a hat and it says person number four--than in cases where they're told, decide how much money you want to give to the person whose number you're about to draw from the hat. In instance--in neither of these instances do they know who person number four is going to be. But the fact that in the first case, the person they draw from the hat and it says person number four, and they think, oh, I'll give this amount of my proceeds to the person. Whereas in the second case, they decide what amount of proceeds they want to give to the person whose number they are about to draw. The fact that that produces in subjects consistently different responses suggests to Greene, and perhaps to others of you, that perhaps using our intuitions about these sorts of cases to build our moral theories may not be the best way to proceed, since presumably there are few of you who think that there is a relevant moral difference between whether you know the number of the person to whom

you're going to be giving the gift or whether you're about to find out the number of the person to whom you're going to be giving the gift. Here's something else that appears to affect our moral responses to cases. This is work done by Jon Haidt, author of The Happiness Hypothesis, with various collaborators. If you're deciding how much punishment to give somebody--if you're deciding how wrong an act was--if you have been induced to feel disgust, either by sitting at a dirty table or by having been trained to associate certain terms with disgust through a hypnotic suggestion, you will be harsher in punishing people for their misdeeds. Now, I take it that most of you don't think people deserve harsher punishment when you are feeling disgust because the table in front of you is dirty. I take it you think that how bad an act is that somebody else has done is independent of your feelings of disgust. But it looks like one of the things that condemnation tracks is that feeling. And in a minute, I'll talk about how that connects to Sunstein's more general discussion of heuristics. Finally, some work by David Pizarro, a Yale PhD, suggests that in specific trolley cases, we can get people's intuitions to move around in cases like Fat Man just by varying what most people would say are morally irrelevant features of the situation. In particular, Pizarro presents subjects with two different versions of the Fat Man case. In the first, you're asked whether it is morally permitted, required, or prohibited, to push a man named Tyrone Peyton off the bridge in order to save 100 members of the New York Philharmonic. And in the second, you're asked whether it's morally acceptable to push a man named Chip Ellsworth III off the bridge to save 100 members of the Harlem Jazz Orchestra. So the question is whether pushing a white man off the bridge to save 100 people of African descent or pushing a black man off the bridge to save 100 people of European descent should produce different responses. And interestingly--perhaps as the result of a certain kind of self-correction--liberals say it is less morally acceptable to push Tyrone Peyton off the bridge than to produce [correction: push] Chip Ellsworth. Regardless of which direction the numbers come out, what's interesting is the numbers come out differently; tracking a feature which most of us would think isn't a morally relevant feature. So it looks like strengthening Greene's second premise--and this is an argument that he makes in more detail in a paper, from which we'll read excerpts after the break, called "The Secret Joke of Kant's Soul"--it looks like there's pretty good reason to think at least some of our responses to these cases are tracking features which we wouldn't reflectively endorse. And Greene thinks in particular in Fat Man, our reluctance to push the fat man off the bridge is tracking one of those morally irrelevant features. Deontological judgments, says Greene--those where we're unwilling to make the utilitarian move-deontological judgments, says Greene, are driven by emotional responses. Consequentialist judgments are driven by cognitive ones. And the deontological responses, he says, lack moral significance. In fact, deontology itself is a kind of moral confabulation. I'm going to give Kant the last word in this lecture. So those of you who are crying for the sage of Konigsberg, realize that he will get the very last word in today's lecture complete with a beautiful image of his face. But before I do that I want to spend the final 10 substantive minutes of the lecture talking you through the third article which we are considering for today, namely Cass Sunstein's article.

Chapter 4. Sunstein on the Trolley Problem [00:39:41] So Sunstein, in somewhat similar vein to Greene, though drawing on a slightly different literature, argues that a good portion of our moral reasoning operates in exactly the same way that our regular reasoning does, namely by making use of heuristics, which we know about from the lecture on January 20th on dual processing. Heuristics are fast and frugal tools for dealing with the complexity of the world when we're faced with time-sensitive, decision-making tasks. And the way that heuristics work is really smart. They work by means of something called attribute substitution. We're interested in a target attribute--something that's relatively hard to find out about the world. And we focus our attention instead on a heuristic attribute-something that's relatively easy to find out about the world. So some of you may make use of this when you're trying to distinguish your telephone from other people's telephones. The target attribute--the thing you're really interested in is-is this my phone? Something which you're only going to be able to determine by turning on the phone and looking to see whether the numbers in it are the numbers that you've placed into it, let's say. But you might make your life easy by putting a cover on your phone or a sticker on your phone or some surface feature on your phone that will let you find your phone quickly and well. Right? So you're going to make use of an easy to find attribute rather than a difficult to determine attribute. In general, this is an extraordinarily good way to navigate the world. Target and heuristic attributes generally coincide. That's how the heuristic attributes came to be the ones which you're using as the markers of the target. And it takes much less effort to process surface features of the world than to spend your time working through the details of each of the things that you want to make sense of. So I observed myself this morning making use of a target [correction: heuristic] attribute on my way into school. I was stopped at a stoplight, and I noticed out of the corner of my eye that the car next to me had started to move. Now obviously, the attribute in which I was interested in was whether the light had turned green. But because I couldn't quite see the green light from where I was sitting, I was able to use instead the motion of the car next to me as an indicator of the thing that I was concerned with. Now of course, the heuristic could have misfired in this case. It could have been that that car was moving even though the light was still red. It could have been that that car was moving in the left lane and had a special light that I didn't. But for the most part, we make use of heuristics all the time and they help us. Now Sunstein's argument is that in non-moral cases, people often use heuristics. That though these are useful, they may also lead to errors. And that in moral cases, people often use heuristics as well. But just as they may lead to errors in the non-moral cases, so too may they lead to errors in the moral cases. And in particular, he thinks they do in a number of cases that he goes on to discuss.

So, for example--and I realize, I think we're going to close--I said Kant would get the last word, but Kant's going to get the last word on Thursday. We're going to go through Sunstein and one of the examples, and then we'll get to Kant. So Sunstein points out, for example, that there's a heuristic called the availability heuristic. That's a heuristic that says, look, I'm trying to figure out how likely something is to happen, and here's a good way to determine how likely something is to happen. I think about how easy it is for me to think of cases where that did happen. So whenever I'm worried that my children are going to be kidnapped, I think for myself, how many friends do I know whose children were kidnapped? How many people do I know whose children were kidnapped? And when I discover that the answer is none, I relax. This kind of heuristic is often correct, but it can lead us astray. Suppose, for example, you're asked whether it's more likely whether there are more words in the English language that end in I-N-G or more words in the English language whose second-to-last letter is N. It's much easier to think of words that end with I-N-G, and so people tend to say that there are more words ending in I-N-G than words whose second-to-last letter is N. But of course, every word that ends with I-N-G is a word whose second-to-last letter is N. You've been bamboozled by the availability heuristic. Or suppose you make use of what's sometimes called the representative heuristic. That the probability of something occurring tracks its degree of typicality. This too is often correct. What it is to be a typical instance is to be one of the instances that occurs more frequently. But as you know from the Linda the bank teller case or the farmer with a tractor case, if I ask you of our random resident of Iowa whether it's more likely that that resident is a farmer or a farmer with a tractor, the representative heuristic is going to draw you towards saying that it's more likely that the person is a farmer with a tractor. But obviously, every farmer with a tractor is also a farmer. Now remember that Sunstein's arguments for one and two are easy to make because we have an independent way of determining whether somebody has made an error in those cases. We can see what went wrong in the availability heuristic and in the representative heuristic, because we can see that it is in fact more likely that the second-to-last letter of a word is N than it is that the last three letters of the word are I-N-G. We can see that it's more likely that somebody's a farmer than it is that somebody's a farmer with a tractor. Because in both of those cases, one of them is a special instance of the other. Sunstein's argument for moral heuristics is going to take more steps. Because it's not enough for him to show what we'll establish--that in moral cases, people often use heuristics--he's also going to need to show that in so doing, they're making mistakes. Where the question of how we get an independent handle on what it is to make a mistake is a rather complicated one. But let's first think about what his argument in favor of the claim that in moral cases people often use heuristics is. And I'm going to close today's lecture with two examples that he gives. And then we'll begin on Thursday by running through some particular cases where I'll ask you to respond.

So one of the examples that he provides is again some work by Jonathan Haidt on a phenomenon known as moral dumbfounding. As you know from reading Sunstein's paper, people often respond to the question: is it morally acceptable for a brother and sister to engage in consensual, harm-free sibling incestuous relations? by saying that it is morally unacceptable. But when asked to provide reasons for that, subjects find it difficult to do so. Likewise, many people are inclined to think there's something morally problematic about wiping the floor of your bathroom with a flag, or about eating your dog if he's been hit by a car, but they find it difficult to articulate what their reasons are for those responses. Sunstein suggests the reason is an overextension of heuristics. Likewise, he points out in moral framing cases--and we'll start with this next lecture--cases like the Asian disease case that I presented you with in our lecture on January 20, whether you present a moral dilemma as involving lives saved, or by contrast lives lost--even when those are just complementary descriptions of the same outcome--people are likely to have different responses. And Sunstein concludes on that basis that people make use of heuristics in moral reasoning just as they do in non-moral reasoning. And we'll begin on Thursday with Sunstein's discussion of those cases, and then we'll let Kant and Mill get the last words in the trolley debate. I'll see you then. [end of transcript]

Lecture 16 - Philosophical Puzzles [March 3, 2011]

Chapter 1. Sunstein on the Trolley Problem Continued [00:00:29] Professor Tamar Gendler: OK. So I want to start out by finishing up the discussion that we began last class about ways of thinking about the perplexity that the trolley case gives rise to. And you'll remember that the perplexity that the trolley case gives rise to is that there's an apparent asymmetry in our responses to the bystander case and the fat man case, even though both of them seem arguably to involve killing one in order to save five. And we looked, last class, at Judy Thomson's response, which says, look, there's no asymmetry in the two cases, because when we reflect on the additional hypothetical case where there's a third track on which you, yourself, are standing, we come to recognize that it's not morally acceptable to turn in Bystander, just as it's not morally acceptable to push in Fat Man. At the other extreme, we looked at Josh Greene's response, which was that just as it's morally acceptable to turn the trolley in Bystander, it's morally acceptable to push the man in Fat Man. And to the extent that we're getting differential responses in those cases, says Greene, it's due to the fact that the emotional part of our brain response mechanism is activated by the up close and personal nature of the fat man case, and as a result, we give an answer that he thinks remains morally unjustified. And what we started to think about at the end of last lecture was a third possibility, which lies somewhere in between the Thomson and the Greene, though closer to the Greene. And that's Cass Sunstein's argument that though our responses differ, and perhaps differ in ways that will be impossible for us to change, the cases are the same, deep down. And he's inclined, though not as certain as Josh Greene is, to think that if we want the cases to come together, what we ought to do is to push the fat man. And you'll recall that his argument there proceeded as follows. He suggested that in that in non-moral cases, it's uncontroversial that we make use of heuristics, and that those heuristics, though useful, frequently lead us to errors, and then went on to contend that just as this occurs in non-moral cases, so too does it occur in moral cases. And we left at the end of last class thinking about what goes on in Sunsteins argument that in moral cases people often use heuristics. And youll recall that he gave a couple of examples from Jonathan Haidt's work of cases where people were expressing moral disapprobation toward actions for which they could find no justification. So consensual incest between siblings, cleaning your bathroom floor with the American flag: People were inclined to find those morally problematic, and to find them morally problematic even when, if pushed, they were unable to articulate what moral rule those things violated. And what Sunstein suggests in the paper is that in general, we can look at the heuristics and biases literature and see instance after instance where the framing of a case affects our response to the case in ways that they do in non-moral cases, in moral cases as well.

So you'll recall that in the third lecture, right when we were learning how to use our clickers, which I should tell you, we're going to use a bit in this lecture, so you should take out your clickers. When we were first starting to learn our clickers, we were presented with the famous Asian disease case, which is the case that runs as follows. A terrible disease has struck 600 people in your town, right? So there's 600 people in your town who are destined to die. You are the mayor, and two courses of treatment are available, plan A or plan B. And I asked half of you to look at the green side of the description, which says that plan A is the one where 200 people will live, whereas plan B is one where there's a one-third probability that 600 will live, and a two-thirds probability that no one will live. And the other half of you looked at the exact same plan, but described not in terms of who will live, but in terms of who will die. So plan A says, 200 of the 600 people will live, which means 400 will die. And here plan A means 400 of the 600 people will die, which means 200 of the people will live. Nonetheless, and this was our very first clicker response, the attitudes that you had towards the cases differed, whereas when it was presented as the number of people who will live, 66% of you went with plan A, and only 34% with plan B. When we inverted the framing, the numbers came out exactly the opposite. So 66 of you favored plan A in the green case, 64 of you favored plan A in the blue case. But plan A and plan B are mathematically identical. So perhaps something like this is what's going on in the trolley cases. And this is not a real clicker example, but imagine you were presented with the following case. A terrible trolley is hurtling down the tracks towards six people in your town. You are the mayor, and two courses for the trolley are available for you, plan A and plan B. And then I present you plan A, one person will be spared, which means, of course, that five people will die. Or plan B, that one person will die, which means, of course, that five people will be spared. And there's an inclination, I think, to go with plan B in the blue case and plan A in the A [correction: green] case. And this generalizes. Depending on who we're focusing on in these moral dilemmas, we have different responses to them. If we think about Josh Greene's crying baby case, where you're locked in a basement with 19 others and your crying baby, surrounded by enemy soldiers who will kill you if you are found, the dilemma that Greene presents subjects with is, should you smother the baby, whose cries will call the soldiers with certainty to your hiding location and cause them to kill all 20 of you? So very much like the Jim and the Indians case, but with an even more painful premise.

If you focus your attention in that case to the experience of putting your hand over the mouth of your screaming child, it is virtually impossible to judge that as the thing that is morally required. But if you redirect your attention even a tiny bit towards the two year old next to you, and the four year old next to her, and the old man in the other corner of the room, all of whom will die if you don't take this action towards the baby, your response to the case shifts. And the shiftiness in the direction of our attention is something that's going to be endemic to all of these kinds of cases. To some extent, we're able only to focus on part of the world at a time. And As a result of that, it's incredibly difficult to hold in focus in a way that makes them seem stable--these kinds of moral dilemmas. So Sunstein's suggestion is that this phenomenon, whereby features that have got to be morally irrelevant--right? It can't be morally relevant to what's the right thing to do in the trolley case whether you frame it in terms of the number who will live or the number who will die. At least, prima facie, that doesn't seem like the kind of thing that could be relevant. You're making exactly the same decision framed in two different ways. How could that be what makes the difference? Sunstein's suggestion is that the mechanism that underlies the phenomenon that I've just described happens over and over and over again, not just in hypothetical trolley problemstyle cases, but all the time in the kind of moral reasoning that we engage in as citizens of a democracy, trying to make judgments about distributions of resources, trying to make judgments about what sorts of laws should be put in place to regulate or incentivize certain kinds of behavior. So in each of the following four domains, says Sunstein, we very often focus on heuristics, that is, the surface features of the phenomenon, rather than the target attributes, that is, the thing that we ultimately care about. Remember I talked last class about putting a skin on your phone so that it's easily recognizable, that gives you heuristic access to which phone is yours. But of course that decoration on your phone is useful as a way of finding your phone only in so far as it tracks the target attribute that you care about, namely, finding the phone which has in it the phone numbers that you care about having. And when targets and heuristics come apart, we're in trouble. So, says Sunstein, when we're thinking about risk regulation, that is, what do we do with the fact that as human beings, lots and lots of the stuff we do has the potential for causing harm, but we don't want to spend our lives wrapped in large amount of Styrofoam, moving very slowly through the world so as not to bump into things. Given that we are willing to take risks, how is it that our tendency to use heuristics interacts with our regulation of them? In cases of punishment, and this is the first topic that we'll turn to after break, Sunstein thinks we use heuristics in ways that cause us to behave in counterproductive ways in punishing both individuals and aggregates. In our hesitation to make certain kinds of choices in the area of reproductive medicine, thinks Sunstein, we risk mistaking the

heuristics for the targets. And in taking the act-omission distinction so seriously, we risk mistaking heuristics for targets. So we'll turn to the issue of punishment right after break, and we'll turn to the issue of actomission in the later part of the lecture. What I want to do right now is to run through three examples of risk regulation via Sunstein's analysis. And the third of these-- I'm actually really curious, and so I want to see how the clicker numbers come out. Chapter 2. Risk Regulation and Heuristics [00:11:08] So Sunstein points out, and it seems to me that he's exactly right, that people are more likely to condemn a company when their behavior is described in ways that involve certainty than in ways that involve risk. So take company A, which produces a product that 10 million people use, which will kill 10 people. Of the 10 million people who make use of this product, 10 of them will have a reaction to it of a kind that will cause them to die. And the cost of eliminating that risk entirely would be $100 million. There is a feeling, an inclination, at least, on the part of many, to think that the company ought to spend its money getting rid of that risk; that it's unacceptable to produce a product where 10 people are going to die. By contrast, if you frame the case in terms of probabilities, that 10 million people use the product, that it produces a risk of death of one per million, and the risk elimination is exactly as costly, this is the sort of thing that we allow all the time. Without this sort of risk tolerance, there would be no technological innovation, and most of the goods and resources that all of us have come to take for granted would never have come to be. So Sunstein's contention here is that though the target attributes are identical in the two cases, in this case, 10 people are going to die, and saving them would have cost $100 million. In this case, 10 people are going to die, and saving them would cost $100 million, the target attributes are identical. In both cases, 10 people die, and saving them would cost the amount specified. The heuristic attributes differ. This one is framed in terms of certainty; this one is framed in terms of risk. And we have a very good heuristic that goes like this. If 10 people are going to die from what you're doing, don't do it. And Sunstein's contention is that the asymmetry in our response to these cases is irrational. Indeed, if we lifted this [clarification: second case] one to a risk of two deaths per million, and had this [clarification: first case] one with a certainty of 10, people would still be inclined to go with the first choice--sorry--to condemn the first choice, even though in that case, the second choice is clearly the worse one. So as a result of mistaking the heuristic attributes for the target one, we make mistakes in what sorts of behaviors we permit. Sunstein thinks that this is what's going on in the case of emissions trading--cap and trade--of which he was an early advocate. In the model of emissions trading, polluters get given a license to pollute n units of pollution into the air,

and those licenses then get to be traded on the market in such a way that, arguably, there's less pollution at lower cost. Let's grant Sunstein the economics there. Even so, there is resistance to cap and trade. Because even if we're willing to concede that the target attribute--namely, that we've reduced the amount of pollution--is present, the heuristic attribute--People are paying to pollute? You shouldn't be able to pay your way out of serious wrongdoing!--strikes us as problematic. Now, it's an interesting phenomenon that resistance to this sort of reasoning happens depending on the content [correction: context] from both the right and the left. So there is resistance to commoditization of things from the left, and there is resistance from the right to certain other sorts of framings that suggests that their responses in cases, for example, of reproductive technologies like cloning, are due, says Sunstein, to the heuristic, don't play God. And when confronted with the suggestion, you're just using a heuristic there, both sides respond with hostility to the smarty-pants academic analysis. In the 1970s, it was common for advocates of the buildup of nuclear arsenals to make appeal to a notion called "mutually assured destruction" that we'll talk about when we talk about the prisoners' dilemma. The basic idea is that if both sides have enough weapons to knock the other side out, then neither will make use of them, because the deterrence function is too great. There was resistance to that analysis from the left, because it felt too clever. There is resistance to the sort of analysis that Sunstein's posing here from both sides, because it cuts against the idea that we are introspectively transparent in such a way that our judgments are indicative of the things that we care about. So the last example that I want to give you from Sunstein is our poll. Sunstein hypothesizes-- and are your clickers working? Sunstein hypothesizes that we are more uncomfortable being harmed by things which are meant to protect us than being harmed by things which aren't meant to protect us. And he suggests that there is data showing that if people are given a choice between two cars-- the first car is one where there's a 2% chance if you're in an accident that you'll be killed by the steering wheel. And the second is a car where there's a 1% chance if you're in an accident, you'll be killed by the steering wheel, but in addition, there's a 1/10 of 1% chance that the airbag will kill you. And the question is, which car do you choose? The one where there's a 2% chance that you'll be killed by the steering wheel, or the one where there's a 1% chance that you'll be killed by the steering wheel, but a 10th of a percent chance that you'll be killed by the airbag, which was meant to protect you. And let's see how those numbers come out. I have to say, I'm doing this poll because my intuitions didn't line up with Sunstein's, and I'm curious whether yours do. OK. Let's see how the numbers came out.

So 15% of you want to buy a car A, and 85% of you want to buy car B. So 85% of you are doing what is the statistically rational choice. But a good proportion of you are willing to risk greater harm so as to avoid this feeling of betrayal by that which is meant to protect. So Sunstein's suggestion, just to sum up, is that in moral reasoning, frequently, we substitute heuristic attributes for target ones. And to do so is a mistake. So what do the three responses to the trolley problem that we've considered suggest? Well, what Thomson says is this. She says, reconsidering our intuitions in light of alternative cases, like the alternative bystander case where you imagine yourself to be one of the people on the track, reconsidering our intuitions in light of alternative cases can lead to shifts in our assessment of those cases. And those shifts in our responses, she thinks, reveal something morally significant. We can learn from the contemplation of those specific cases what it is that morality demands of us. Greene and Sunstein, by contrast, contend that our intuitive responses to cases frequently track features that are morally irrelevant, and that as a consequence, those features fail to reveal something morally significant. The question is this. Is any of this a problem for Mill and Kant? Let's look back to the very opening pages of Mill's treatise on utilitarianism. He writes there, and I didn't have you read this passage so there's no reason you should know that he says it. "Though in science, the particular truths precede the general theory, the contrary might be expected to be the case with a practical art, such as morals or legislation." So in science, we look at particular instances. We discover we drop this object and it falls with acceleration A, we drop this object and we discover it falls with acceleration A, we drop this object and we discover it falls with acceleration A. And from that, we conclude that the law governing fall of bodies is that they fall with acceleration A. So though in science, particular truths precede the general theory, the contrary might be expected to be the case with a practical art, such as morals A test of right and wrong must be a means of ascertaining what is right or wrongand not a consequence of already having ascertained it." The difficulty (of building a theory out of judgments) the difficulty is not avoided by recourse to what is sometimes now called the moral sense--"a natural faculty," says Mill, "that discerns what's right or wrong in a particular case in hand, as our other senses discern the sight or sound actually present." So as if you can see whether a case is morally wrong. "Rather," he says, moral reasoning, moral understanding, is a branch of our reason, not of our sensitive faculty. The morality of an individual actionis a question of the application of the law to an individual caseAs a result, whatever steadfastness or constancy our moral belief has attained is due to the tacit influence of this reflectively available standard." So Mill is building theory out of theory, not theory out of cases.

Kant. "Worse service cannot be rendered to morality than that an attempt to be made to derive it from examples. For every example of morality must itself first be charged according to principles of morality in order to see whether it is fit to serve as a model." We have here, in some ways, embodied the dialogue of this course. To what extent is our capacity for rational reflection the best way to get at answers to questions that we care about? To what extent is our capacity for emotional response, for sensation, for instinctive judgment on the basis of presentation of particular cases, indicative of answers to the questions we care about? So that closes the discussion of the trolley cases. And what I want to do in the second half of lecture is run through two kinds of puzzles which persist regardless of which of those attitudes that we take. Chapter 3. Ducking vs. Shielding [00:23:26] So the first is something that I presented you with as promissory note in the very first lecture, because this is one of the most fun papers that we're reading all term. And this is Roy Sorensen's paper with [Christopher] Boorse on ducking and sacrificing. And you'll remember, that was the weekend that the senator from Arizona had been shot, so I couldn't do it with bullets. So you'll remember that the case I gave you is, you're standing in a line. You're the yellow guy. And a bear is rushing towards you. And you jump out of the line, and the bear eats the person behind you. Contrast that with the case where you're standing in a line. You're still the yellow guy. A bear is rushing towards you, and you reach behind you, pick up the guy, and put him in front of you, and the bear eats him. The first of these is the classic what's called ducking case. That is, you're in a situation where there's a harm moving in your direction. You move out of the harm's way, and the harm hits someone else instead. The second is a classic sacrificing case. There's a harm moving towards you, and you make you use of another person as a shield. So to duck is to avoid harm, thereby allowing it to fall on someone else. To sacrifice is to avoid harm by bringing about that the harm comes to someone else if you use that person as a shield. And this is analogous to the act-omission distinction, one that we've already looked at, but it's wholly within the realm of acts. Now what Sorensen and Boorse bring out in their article is how resilient this phenomenon is, regardless of how you mess around with the framing of the cases. So they give you the example of the mall gunman. There's a bullet coming towards you, and your choice is to leap aside or to pull somebody in front of you as a way of avoiding the bullet. There's the speeding truck case. You're in a row of cars. There's a truck coming up behind you in such a way that it's going to crash into you. And you have one of two things that you

do. In the first, you switch lanes, and the truck hits the car that was in front of you. In the second, you signal to a car that's behind you to switch into your lane, and the truck hits him. There's the terrorists case. You're on an airplane. Libyan terrorists--quite timely to be speaking about Libya--Libyan terrorists, in this example, come onto your airplane and threaten to kill all Americans. You're a U.S. State Department representative, and on your briefcase is a U.S. State Department sticker, and the terrorists are coming down the aisle, and they're about to shoot you. Two possibilities. One, you cover your sticker with a Libyan airlines sticker, so they skip you and go and shoot the woman sitting next to you, the next one in line. The other, you switch briefcases with the person next to you, and so they shoot her instead of shooting you. Or the sinking boats case. You're in an ocean. You're trying to get your signal, your boat is sinking, the guy-next-to-you's boat is sinking. You're trying to signal to an airplane above you to come and pick you up. And you can do one of two things. You can strengthen your signal, right? Make your light really strong, and then the airplane will come and rescue you. Or you can jam the signal of the other guy, making your signal relatively stronger so that the airline comes and picks you up. Sorensen gives case after case about this. If beetles are eating your roses, it's OK to put beetle repellent on your roses, which will cause them to go over to your neighbor's house, but it's not OK to put beetle attractant on his roses. We have this strange tendency, over and over and over, to think that ducking is OK and that shielding is not. Now the perplexity that Sorensen and Boorse consider is that it seems like there's no systematic way to account for these kinds of discrepancies in intuition. So you might think: Look, the problem with these cases is that when you tie up your opponent's feet, when you're trying to outrun the bear, or when you push him in front of you in the shooting cases, you interfere with fair competition. And that fair competition is what matters in these sorts of circumstances. But of course, there are plenty of these circumstances where the competition was unfair to begin with. And nonetheless, it seems problematic. Even if the guy whom you're trying outrun the bear in front of is a much slower runner than you, so that you were certain to win, it still doesn't seem OK to tie his shoes together. The fairness of the competition doesn't seem to be what's driving the intuition. So perhaps, they say, it's that in each of the shoving cases, what you do is somehow an included wrong. It's wrong to pick somebody up and carry them in front of you. Whereas, it's OK just to duck down so that something hits them. It's wrong to steal somebody's briefcase. It's wrong to jam somebody's signal. But, they point out, it seems just as bad to put the person in front of you in a friendly way by saying, wouldn't you like to see the beautiful view? as it does to pick him up and put him in front of you. It's just as problematic, they suggest, to scare somebody into jumping

off a cliff by yelling, "E equals mc squared!" to surprise them, as it is to cause them to jump off the cliff by yelling a racial epithet. The included wrong doesn't seem to be what's explaining our response. So, too, and I'll leave you to read these responses on your own if you haven't had the chance already, so, too does the act-omission distinction or the doing-allowing distinction not seem sufficient to do the work. So, too, does the idea that what matters is if you were the locus of a causal chain, the originator of some sequence of causality. So, too, does the doctrine of double effect not seem to account for all of these cases. So, too, does appeal to Kant's notion of rights in contrast to utilities not seem to explain all of these cases. So Sorensen and Boorse somewhat reluctantly consider a conclusion of skepticism. Which is roughly, this is a perplexing feature of our psychology. But we, having listened to the first half of this lecture, have one more alternative explanation. And I don't promise that it will work in every case, though it seems pretty promising. Which is that what's going on in the ducking and shielding cases is the overapplication of a heuristic. In general, it does seem like moving out of the way of a harm is not a bad thing to do, whereas putting somebody into the track of a harm is a bad thing to do. So perhaps these first set of puzzles can be explained by means of heuristics. Chapter 4. Moral Luck [00:31:08] In the last fifteen minutes of lecture, I want to focus on a set of puzzles which, I think, can't. And for these, you'll need your clickers. So let's start with four drivers. The first of them, Lucky Albert, or Lucky Alert, does the following. He gets into his car. He has his car in perfect condition. He pays attention at every light. He drives in an extremely safe way. And at the end of the day, gets home from work. That's it. That's lucky alert. Question: When Lucky Alert drives home, setting aside whether he has his mistress in his car with him, setting aside whether he's bought a car that has a high rate of emissions as opposed to buying a Prius. In driving home, setting aside all the other things that Alert might have done morally wrong, did he do something morally blameworthy, driving home from work, having fully fixed his car, and doing no harm to anyone along the way? So this is not a trick question. So if you think Lucky Alert did something morally blameworthy, setting aside all the things that are morally blameworthy about driving a car, push one. Whereas if you think he didn't do anything morally blameworthy, push two. So what you're judging is, is driving home from work, all things considered, if nothing bad happens, a morally problematic thing to do? And let's hope-- OK.

So there's always that 5%. Those anti-car crowds. You're the ones going to med school and chopping up our poor healthy guy in the waiting room. 95% of you think Lucky Alert did nothing morally blameworthy. Let's meet Lucky Alert's twin brother, Unlucky Alert. Here's what Unlucky Alert did. Exactly what Lucky Alert did. Except as he neared his house, a child ran out in front of his car and he hit the child. OK? Unlucky Alert did exactly what Lucky Alert did. Left work, checked his tires, stayed alert the entire time, drove at safe and proper speeds. But due to bad luck, on his way home killed a child. Question: Did Unlucky Alert do something morally blameworthy? If yes, push one. If no, push two. And I'm going to write down the numbers on the first case, which were 5 and 95. OK. So let's see how the numbers come out on this. Here, 81% of you think he didn't do something morally blameworthy, but we're up from 5% to 19% on people who think he did do something morally blameworthy. Let's turn to our third case. Here's Mr. Lucky Cell Phone. Here's what Mr. Lucky Cell Phone does. He gets into his car and starts driving home from work. And on his way home from work, he talks on his cell phone, but you know what, nothing else happens. And he gets home from work having harmed no one. Question: Did Lucky Cell Phone do something morally blameworthy in driving home from work talking on his cell phone? And let's see how these numbers come out. OK. So your verdict here. 78% of you think Lucky Cell Phone did something-- you guys, I don't believe you. I mean, you're anticipating the next case! All of you talk on your cell phones when you drive all of the time, and you don't think of yourself as doing something morally blameworthy! OK. These are not valid data. This has to do with where they are embedded in this experiment. All right. So since you've already answered question four, let me just ask it of you. Unlucky Cell Phone drives home from work while talking on his cell phone. Child runs out in front of his car, and--OK. Question. During his drive home, did Unlucky Cell Phone do something morally blameworthy? And let's see how the numbers come out. All right. Let's see where Unlucky Cell Phone's big red line comes out. OK. So now we've got a complete shift from the original one, and in fact different from our previous case. OK. So what these examples demonstrate is a phenomenon known as moral luck. We have two people here, Lucky Alert and Unlucky Alert, who do exactly the same thing, but Unlucky Alert's actions caused the death of an innocent victim. And whereas only 5% of

you think Lucky Alert did something wrong, 19% of you think Unlucky Alert did something wrong. Here we have, in similar fashion, somebody who in a very slight way has taken a risk, which in this case had no bad consequences and in this case had very severe bad consequences. And 92% of you condemn Unlucky Cell Phone. The phenomenon that this illustrates is a phenomenon known as moral luck. Cases where an agent is assigned moral blame for an action or its consequences, even though the agent didn't have full control over that action or its consequences. Right? It's not the case that Unlucky Alert or Unlucky Cell Phone wanted the child to run out in front of his car. It's not the case that Unlucky Alert or Unlucky Cell Phone could have done it anything different at that moment. The child was in front of the car, and the car hit the child. Moral luck is perplexing because we seem to have two competing commitments when we think about moral responsibility. On the one hand, we seem to accept something which we might call the control principle: that moral praise and blame shouldn't be assigned in cases where the action or the consequences lie beyond the agent's control. And I can see that many of you subscribe to the control principle, because 81% of you thought that the unlucky alert driver did nothing morally wrong, even though he killed a child with his car. And the reason you're inclined to think that he did nothing wrong in that case, I suspect, is because your judgment in that case, as Mill said, is regulated by a principle to which you tacitly subscribe. Namely, something like the control principle. It's intuitively plausible, says Nagel, that people can't be morally assessed for what's not their fault, or for what's due to factors beyond their control. If you bump into me, and I trip, and I accidentally fall on the red button that causes the nuclear war to start all over the planet, it's not my fault. I mean, it's really a terribly bad thing that the planet is destroyed, but I just tripped. By contrast, and directly in competition with the control principle, it seems, as the moral luck principle states, that in some cases, moral praise and blame should be assigned even where the action or consequences lie beyond the agent's control. The difference in your responses between the lucky and the unlucky cases indicate the degree to which you tacitly subscribe to that. So you went from 95% of no blameworthiness to 81%. So you shifted--15% of you shifted your view as a result of something beyond his control. In the cell phone case, again, roughly 15% of you shifted your view. The problem is that both of these principles are incredibly difficult to let go of. The control principle relies on the following kind of reasoning. In general, we have a pretty good sense of what kind of factors increase the blame- or praiseworthiness of an action. In general, if

an act is voluntary, that is, if you've done it not out of coercion and not out of mistake-right? If you specifically chose to perform the action that you performed--then you get more praise for doing it if it was a good action, and more blame for doing it if it was a bad action. Likewise, if you had full information, if you were aware of its likely consequences, you knew that that was water, or you knew that that was cyanide that you were giving the person to drink, it increases the degree of praise- or blameworthiness. And these are pretty robust responses that fall out not merely of our analysis of cases, but also out of our understanding of the principles that seem to underlie moral responsibility. Correspondingly, it seems like the absence of those features decreases moral blameworthiness or praiseworthiness. If you do something under coercion, if you do something accidentally, it's less your responsibility. And if you do something out of lack of information, if I, fully thinking that I'm giving you something totally healthy, end up giving you something that harms you, we tend to think that the degree of blameworthiness is mitigated. The control principle simply says that without a difference in these factors, how could there be a difference in blame- or praiseworthiness? If we hold these factors constant, we must be in a situation where there's no difference in moral responsibility. By contrast, the moral luck principle is also really forceful. It seems undeniable that there are cases where we assess moral praise and blame in the absence of control. The driver case was one. One of the cell phone users hits the child, the other one doesn't. The first is morally blameworthy. I leave the stove on in my house, or your house. I go to visit you, and I leave the stove on in your house. I go out for the day. When I'm unlucky, it causes your house to burn down. When I'm lucky, it doesn't. It seems, even if you think both were bad things to do, a much worse thing to leave on the stove and burn down your house than to leave on the stove, simpliciter. Nagel gives the example of leaving the bath running with the baby in it. An irresponsible thing to do, but immeasurably more problematic when the baby drowns as a result. Or the case where you and I have similar characters. I stay in Germany; you don't. It's the 1930s. I become a Nazi; you live your life in a way that makes no moral demands of you. So there's three kinds of responses that we can give to moral luck cases. We can give a rationalist response. We can say, luck simply can't play a role in moral evaluation. And we can either take the extreme that, one might think, a pure Kantian takes, that all the agent is responsible for is his will, and those things over which he has full control. Or you can take what might be an extreme Millian version. That the agent is responsible for all the consequences of his actions, and that the attitude makes no difference.

You can take an irrationalist attitude towards this. You can say that luck can play some role in moral evaluation. Or, though I think this is ultimately difficult to maintain, you can say that as a matter of fact, we never know how responsible somebody is for an action until we see what its consequences are. That when I hypothesized that these cases were identical, I was idealizing in an illegitimate way. Now, it seems like that third response might work for the classic cases of moral luck which I've been describing, cases which we would call resultant luck, where there's luck in the outcome of the action. I perform an action, and it happens to go awry in a way that I didn't expect. That's one class of cases of moral luck. But it's harder to see how we can use that explanation for some of the deep and profound instances. So take constitutive luck. Some of you were born with genes that make it easier for you to behave in altruistic ways, and some of you weren't. Some of you were raised in families that were supportive of certain kinds of moral outlooks, and some of you weren't. Is your character that resulted from those features something for which you are responsible, and if it's not, how is it something with respect to which moral praise and blame can be assessed? Take circumstantial luck, which Jonathan Shay discussed in our Achilles in Vietnam--luck regarding the agent's surroundings. Sometimes the circumstances you're in either create or reveal otherwise hidden features of your character. Does that mean, since they are in part a matter of luck, that you are not thereby morally responsible for what you did? Finally, if we start thinking about our actions from the perspective of free will, it becomes hard to carve out any space in which we're responsible for what we do. It's a general fact about the world that actions and consequences are in general determined partly by features outside, or at least outside the control of the agent. So we start thinking about why it is that we respond that way in Trolley, and it turns out it's because the emotional part of our brain is lighting up. But why is that happening? Well, that's happening because of blood flow, happening in a certain way in our brain. And why is that happening? Well, the blood is flowing in a certain way because of what certain kinds of molecules are doing. And as we think this through, the area of genuine agency, says Nagel, seems to shrink to an extensionless point. So I leave you for March break with the following perplexing non-solution to a really profound moral problem. Nagel suggests that the problem of luck has no solution because something in the idea of conceiving ourselves as agents is incompatible with the undeniable fact that actions are events, and people are things. As the external determinants of what someone has done are gradually exposed in their effect on consequences, character, and choice itself, it becomes gradually clear to us that actions are indeed events, and that people are indeed things. As a result of this, nothing remains which can be ascribed to the responsible self, and we're left with nothing but a

portion of the larger sequence of events which can be deplored or celebrated, but not praised or blamed. Nonetheless, giving up the language of praise and blame is to remove from our conceptual repertoire what is perhaps the most important tool that we have. And coming to a stable perspective on these matters seems enormously difficult. So I'll see you all at the end of vacation. [end of transcript]

Lecture 17 - Punishment I [March 22, 2011]

Chapter 1. Hypothetical Versus Actual Cases [00:00:00] So what I want to do in today's lecture is to move us onto a topic not unrelated to the one that we were addressing before March break. So as you recall, what we were thinking about before March break were the relations that people bear to one another as far as moral responsibility goes. You might think the first part of the course, the part on flourishing, was about human beings as individuals and the ways in which, within themselves, they might achieve a certain kind of harmony. The second part of the course was about morality, about interpersonal relations between individuals. And the third part of the course, which we'll move to in earnest next week, is about how political structures might play a role in cultivating certain kinds of behavior on the part of individuals. Obviously, that's an idealization. Individuals considered in isolation are always in interaction with others. Individuals in pairwise relations are always embedded within larger communities. But the arc of the course has been to move from individuals, to small groups of individuals, to larger groups of individuals. And the punishment unit, which is just two lectures long, is in some ways a transitional unit between the morality section and the political philosophy section. So what I want to do in our running start, to sort of get people back thinking about the questions that we've been thinking about, is to start with a couple of clicker questions. So I hope that your clickers didn't get lost over March break. And to begin by asking you to think about a couple of cases in real life, tragically, that have the structure that Trolley problems do. And then we'll move on to some cases more directly related to punishment. So you remember that we devoted a reasonable amount of class attention to thinking about an abstract and idealized moral dilemma situation, which is sometimes called the Trolley Bystander case. There's a trolley which is about to run into five people. There's a bystander next to it, who realizes that there's an alternative track on which only one person is standing. And that bystander faces the choice of whether to divert the threat, the trolley, from the track where there are the five to the track where there are the one. Tragically, the world has found itself with something like an actual trolley case, in the form of the effusion of radioactive clouds from the Japanese nuclear power plant. So suppose you were--this is the first clicker question--the Japanese Prime Minister, and it were evident that the radioactive cloud was heading towards Tokyo, with a population of roughly 13 million, and there was the possibility of diverting the cloud to the countryside, to an area with a population of roughly one million.

Your clicker question is this: would it be, one, morally mandatory to redirect the plume from the 13 million to the 1 million, two, morally permitted but not morally mandatory, or three, morally prohibited? So let's see how the numbers come out. One second remaining. And let's see. So 31 percent of you think it would be morally mandatory to redirect, 56 percent think it would be morally permitted, and 13 percent think it would be morally prohibited. Now, let me show you how you thought about this question when we presented it abstractly, as a simple trolley problem. More than twice as many of you, looking at these numbers, 31 percent, as opposed to 15 percent, think that it's morally mandatory in the actual case to redirect the plume. That's interesting. It's interesting methodologically, because it's interesting to ask why a real world case is giving you a different sort of response than a hypothetical case is. But it's also interesting methodologically to notice that on the prohibition, the numbers were almost identical. 15 percent of you thought it was prohibited in the imaginary case. 15 percent of you, actually 13 percent of you, thought it was prohibited in the actual case. So there's a way in which it appears that these imaginary cases are tracking, in their abstraction, the same sort of considerations that the actual cases are, and ways in which they aren't. And I encourage you, in the context of your sections and your conversations amongst yourselves, to think about why that might be. But in addition to being a straight trolley problem, the traditional Bystander case, in the case of the nuclear tragedy in Japan, there's also something not very different from what we might call the Harm's Way case. So you'll recall that the second kind of case that we thought about in the context of trolleys concerned a case where a trolley is hurtling down a track towards five individuals, and resting over the track is a person who, if you put him into harm's way, could prevent the death of the other five. How would that go in the actual situation that we now face? Same nuclear accident, same prime minister, same 13 million people, but now, as the Prime Minister, you face the possibility of conscripting into certain death a small group of engineers, whose work on the plant in, for example, regaining electricity, or pouring water in places that would be inaccessible due to radioactivity to anybody whom you weren't sending to certain death. Individuals who are in a position to save the lives of these 13 million, through the sacrifice of an incredibly small number of individuals. So the question is this: for the Prime Minister, supposing that the job involves conscripting workers to go, the plant is about to explode and bring with it an enormous amount of radiation to an enormous number of people, would it be morally mandatory, one, morally permitted but not morally mandatory, or morally prohibited to conscript the workers, sending them to certain death? So the numbers here are actually extremely interesting, when I show them to you in comparison with the abstract case. So your numbers here are 27 percent say it's prohibited,

41 percent say it's permitted but not prohibited, whereas only--sorry, 41 percent say it's permitted but not mandatory, and only 32 percent think it would be morally prohibited to conscript the workers in a way that would bring about their certain death. How did your numbers look in the fat man case? They looked very different indeed. So just to show you, here were your numbers in the actual case. Roughly 32 percent of you thought it was prohibited, more than twice as many thought it prohibited in the case of fat man. Now, is that because, as Josh Greene suggests, when a situation is up close and personal, the way you imagine engaging in the pushing action somehow plays a role, as either a legitimate or illegitimate moral heuristic, whereas in the case where you're imagining conscripting the workers, what you're doing is somehow more distant, in terms of the harm's way into which you're putting it? Is the difference that, in the case of the workers it feels more like a statistical harm? And as Cass Sunstein suggests, statistical harms are in some ways harder for us to process? Is what's going on in your different response to the Prime Minister case somehow that the numbers 13 million versus a small number change the calculus? But if they change the calculus, then it couldn't have been that an inviolable right was driving your response in fat man. So for those of you who are in the vast majority of having moved your position--note that mandatory went up, prohibited went down, permitted went up--I want you to think about what kind of moral reasoning explains the difference in your response to this actual Prime Minister case and the imaginary Fat Man case. And as always, these slides will be online for you by later today for you to have a chance to look closely at the numbers. Chapter 2. What is Punishment? [00:10:33] So the cases that we've been considering so far, the cases where earthquakes bring about natural disasters that cause great harm to people, are tragedies. But they're tragedies with respect to which it's hard to know where to direct our dissatisfaction at the state of the world. There's very little that we can do to prevent things like earthquakes from happening. And although there are precautions that we can take with respect to things like nuclear power plants, again there are features of the world with which it's difficult for us to exert control. What we moved to in the lectures right before March break, in the context of moral luck, were instances where the wrong-doing that concerned us was perpetuated not by an impersonal agency, like an earthquake, but rather by an individual. And so we considered, for example, the four cases of the driver on their way home from work. Lucky Alert, who simply drove home, Unlucky Alert, who drove home alert and unfortunately hit a child, Lucky Cell Phone, who drove home as none of you ever do, I'm sure, talking on his cell phone, and Unlucky Cell Phone, who drove home talking on his cell phone and tragically hit a child. So I'm going to show you two of your numbers from before, and then ask you one more clicker question. Nearly all of you, 95 percent of you, thought that Lucky Alert did nothing morally blame-worthy in driving home. Remember, we stipulated that we weren't talking

about the ways in which his carbon footprint might be contributing to various kinds of global problems. The issue was just whether he did something morally wrong in driving home, and 95 percent of you thought that he didn't. By contrast, 92 percent of you, nearly everyone in the class, thought that Unlucky Cell Phone, the one who was talking on his phone and hit the child, did something morally blame-worthy. The question that I want to ask you now, if you'll take out your clickers, is whether Unlucky Cell Phone, the person who was talking on his phone and hit the child, did something that merits punishment. And with that, we'll move into the central topic of our discussion today and Thursday. So did Unlucky Cell Phone do something that merits punishment in driving home and talking on his cell phone and, unfortunately, hitting the child? Let's see how our numbers come out. 94 percent of you--Wow, even more of you think he deserves punishment than think he did something wrong. Great class! [laughter] What I want to do in the next two classes is to think seriously with you about this rather perplexing philosophical and psychological phenomenon. The fact that when somebody does something wrong, and we perceive the person, or we perceive the perpetrator of the wrongdoing, as having had a certain sort of agency, there is, across cultures and across times, a tendency to think that that individual is deserving of punishment. So the questions that I want to ask in today's lecture are three. I want to start out by presenting you with a classic characterization of civil punishment, so that we have a sense of what it is that we're talking about, and in so doing, I'll present you with one that Pojman summarized in the outline reading that I had you to do today, that comes from mid-1950's work in analytic legal theory. So I'm going to ask what it is that we mean, when we talk about civil or criminal punishment. I then want to turn to the central philosophical question about punishment, which is what sort of justification does punishment have? And you will discover, as you noticed already from the readings, that two of the dominant justifications that are offered for punishment actually echo two of the dominant justifications for moral constraint. That is, one can give roughly a utilitarian account of punishment, and one can give roughly a deontological account of punishment. And I want to try to get you within the mindset of each of those two conceptions of punishment, both in order to help you think about punishment and in order to help you think about, more clearly, some of the issues in moral philosophy that we were talking about before break. And of course, I will not merely present those views, but will try to give you a sense of why one might think those are reasonable or unreasonable justifications of punishment. Next class, we're going to turn to some very interesting psychological literature that does, with respect to the deontological and utilitarian theories of punishment that we're looking at philosophically today, what some of the empirical moral literature did with respect to deontology and utilitarianism more generally. That is, it suggests the psychological substrate for our reactions, and in some cases tries to argue that that renders those reactions illegitimate. Or illegitimate as a basis for a certain kind of normative judgment.

So again, I want to think about these both as questions about punishment, and as ways of thinking about the practical psychological critique of moral theory more generally, that we talked about last week. And finally, what I want to do next class is to think about the relation between punishment in the civil context and punishment in a much more personal context. You might have noticed that one of the things that we're going to be reading for Thursday is another chapter from I take to be the Aristotelian-inspired parenting guide of Alan Kazdin. So let me offer one caveat, which is the topic of punishment is enormous. We could offer an entire lecture course on this question. And what I'm presenting to you in the class is a pretty bread-and-butter Anglo-American picture of what punishment amounts to. Any of you who have thought about punishment in the context of social theory have encountered some of the sophisticated critiques of punishment that come to the Western twentiethcentury philosophical tradition largely through the writing of Nietzsche and Foucault. And simply due to time constraints, not because these are uninteresting, indeed they are extraordinarily interesting, we won't be thinking about these writers in this class. Though, as always, I'm very happy during office hours or other times to talk to you about those. So let's start with the first of these questions. What do we mean by civil punishment? So when you clicked on your clicker and you said that Unlucky Cell Phone, the man who talking on his cell phone accidentally killed the child, when you said that Unlucky Cell Phone was someone who merited punishment, presumably you were thinking of something with roughly the five characteristics that are taken to be characteristics of paradigmatic instances of punishment, and perhaps even as necessary and sufficient conditions for what it is for something to be punishment. So the first thing, the first characteristic, the one perhaps most salient when we think about punishment, is that punishment is something that involves a certain kind of unpleasantness or suffering. In traditional culture, punishment involved either the infliction of some sort of physical pain, or the infliction of some sort of social isolation, or the infliction of some sort of public humiliation. All of these involved unpleasantness and suffering. In the amazing description of the three horses from Plato's Phaedrus that we read at the beginning of the semester, the charioteer, in his effort to direct the recalcitrant wild horse, pulls on the bit in a way that brings blood to the mouth of the horse in an effort to inflict punishment. So the core notion is that punishment involves unpleasantness and suffering. It involves bringing somebody into a state that brings disutility to them. As far as the felicific calculus goes, the calculus of felicity, the enumeration of the amount of happiness in the world, punishment reduces in that individual the amount of happiness that they have. Second characteristic. Punishment is not merely the infliction of pain or suffering on an individual. It's the infliction of pain or suffering on an individual in response to a particular offense. Either a legal offense, in the case of legal punishment. Or if you think that punishment is also something that can be carried out with regard to moral trespasses, in response to a moral offense. So it's not just a bringing about of pain randomly in the world.

It's a bringing about of pain in the world in response to a legal offense, to the person who committed the offense. So, it's not merely that if something bad happens in a location: you find an individual and visit suffering upon them. The individual on whom suffering is visited is supposed to be the one who has been judged, by whatever procedures are considered the legitimate procedures for making such judgments, to have been an offender. Moreover, the punishment needs to be intentionally administered by a human agent. It's not enough if natural forces somehow bring about the bad consequences. And we'll talk about that, with respect to a puzzle, in the case of retributive punishment, in a moment. And finally, it's imposed and administered not by an individual acting on his or her own, or even by a posse of individuals, who have taken the law into their hands, but rather by a legal authority that has the sanction of the state or civil institution behind it. So the question that punishment raises, and we'll think about this again when we start thinking about political theory more generally, is how is it that a state could ever be justified in bringing harm to one of its members. How could it be legitimate for a society to cause one of its individuals to experience unpleasantness or suffer? Chapter 3. Justifications for Punishment: Overview [00:23:32] So there are two basic kinds of justification that are offered for punishment. The first is a forward-looking justification. It's one that says punishment is an effective mechanism for avoiding future harm. When somebody acts in a way that violates either legal or social norms, that individual indicates, perhaps, a likelihood of acting in that way again. And so disabling them is important. Or, when an individual acts in a way that violates legal or social norms, and others see that the individual has acted in that way, and received no negative consequences from the community as a result, others will be likely to act in that way. And so punishment serves a public deterrence function. Regardless of how it's operationalized, and we'll talk a bit more about that at the end of the lecture, the basic motivation for the forward-looking justification of punishment is that punishment is an effective means of avoiding future harm. So that in some way, the suffering of the individual who is punished on behalf of the state is offset by the benefits to other individuals that will result as a consequence of having caused suffering in one place. It's a trade-off of disutility and utility. The second sort of justification of punishment, and let me say, those of you who felt unsatisfied by number one but frustrated by Kant in our moral theory discussion before March break, have some thinking to do about how your worldviews fit together. The second justification of punishment is that punishment is called for, because when somebody violates moral or legal codes, they deserve to be penalized. The justification is not that it's a way of avoiding future harm, though it might happen to bring that, as a nice added benefit. The reason an individual is to be punished on this picture is because in committing a moral or legal violation, the person has violated the moral or legal code in such a way that what he or she deserves is to be punished.

So those are the two justifications that we're going to think about. But I want to point out that there's another way of thinking about punishment that we'll talk about a little bit more in the context of the lecture, which is, you might think about punishment as being a response to a disruption of the social order, in such a way that at least two individuals are involved. One, the victim, with respect to whom, if you want to restore the pre-harm state, the important thing to think about in the context of punishment is neither the large question about retribution nor the large question about deterrence, though those are important to the individual as a member of society, but rather in the case of this specific crime, what one wants to think about is restitution. What can be done to restore the individual to her preharm state? And, in the case of the offender, one might think about what can be done to restore that individual to what one might think of as a larger, more global pre-harm state, namely towards a situation of pro-sociality. So let's illustrate these four ideas with a particular example. Here's our old friend Gyges, remember him, back in January? There he was, and for now, we've given him a horse. So Gyges has a horse, and up shows Pedro, he's our bad guy from Jim and the Indians, and Pedro goes and steals Gyges' horse. Now, what is to be done? Well, if the question that interests us is that of restoring the situation to its pre-harm state, then our primary concern is with restitution. We want Pedro to give Gyges back his horse. Suppose that instead of stealing Gyges' horse, Pedro had murdered Gyges' horse? We might think then that what restitution requires is presenting Pedro with something as good as the horse he previously had. Perhaps Pedro needs to give Gyges one of his horses. But the picture that lies behind restitution, and we'll talk about the ways in which restitution is problematic, when restoring to the pre-harm state involves something a little more complicated than giving back stolen property or replacing in kind. The notion behind restitution is that the goal in which the state has legitimate reason to be engaged, is that of taking the innocent party and making sure that they are no worse off after having suffered a crime than before having suffered. What does the notion of rehabilitation tell us to do in this state? Well, presumably it tells us to think about how--there's Pedro with a shepherd's staff--how can we help make somebody, whose interactions with society involve violations of its norms, such that he or she comes to internalize those norms in a way that they become the grounding for his or her behavior? In some ways, rehabilitation is the most effective means of deterrence and prevention. If it's possible to reinstate pro-sociality in parts of the individuals towards whom we are expressing concern through punishment, wouldn't that be the most effective means? So that's one version of thinking about what's going on. We might think about restitution for the harmed and rehabilitation for the harmer. Alternatively, we might think about the question in terms of the two categories that we're going to focus on for the remainder of lecture. That is, we might lock up Pedro and do so with the justification that that will prevent him from doing future crime. Or we might lock up Pedro with the thought--watch the slide, it's the only joke all lecture--that in so doing, what we provide is justice. And, actually, there's one more visual joke later in lecture about the ways in which it is part of

our pop culture, part of cartoons, part of comic books, part of movies, that somehow the visiting of justice upon an offender is absolutely critical to society's well-being. So what I want to do is introduce you now, from the inside, from the work of Kant, on the one hand, and then more generally, and then through the work of Rawls on the other, to these two sorts of justifications. Chapter 4. Retributivism [00:32:11] So let's start with the retributivist outlook. That's the outlook, roughly, that when somebody does something that violates legal or moral norms, they've committed a wrong, and in so doing they've put the scales of justice somehow out of line. And that what punishment does is it reorients the scales of justice, it re-balances things. In punishing the harm-doer, we reorient the world in such a way that injustice becomes re-weighted, that desert is visited upon the harm-doer. So the text we read in discussing the retributivist outlook was that of Immanuel Kant. And Kant writes explicitly "juridical punishment can never be administered merely as a means for promoting another good, either with regard to the criminal himself or the civil society." That is, deterrence, prevention of future harm, rehabilitation, all of those--those are other goods--may well come along in the wake of punishment. But that cannot be the justification for the action. "Judicial punishment," says Kant, "can be imposed only because the individual on whom it is inflicted has committed a crime." This is of a piece with Kant's more general outlook. You recall from the opening pages of the Groundwork that Kant isn't interested in thinking about consequences. Kant is interested in thinking about moral rightness, and the way in which our behaviors and our social institutions can reflect our recognition of this fundamental fact about the world. So those of you who are drawn to the picture that criminals deserve their deserts, not for utilitarian reasons but for fundamental ones, need to think about whether that brings in its wake for you a commitment to something like the more general Kantian outlook, whereby a good will is good not because of what it affects or accomplishes, but rather good in itself. That's the core of the retributivist outlook. The retributivist outlook often brings with it--in addition to an answer to the question, what's the justification for punishment? Answer, moral desert--an account of what Kant, in the writings that we read for today, calls the principle and standard of public justice. That is, retributivism includes not merely the idea that criminals deserve penalty, but also a picture of what grounds that penalty, and sometimes a characterization of what those specific penalties amount to. So Kant writes, "the undeserved evil which anyone commits to another is to be one regarded as perpetrated on himself." That is, a principled justification for punishment in kind to the harm one has committed underlies Kant's picture. So, he continues, "whoever steals makes all property insecure. He therefore robs himself of security in property, according to the right of retaliation." The punishment for theft is loss of property, says Kant, on the principle that the undeserved evil which anyone commits on another is to be regarded as perpetrated on himself. The logic of that argument, of course, brings with it the

conclusion that Pojman helpfully italicizes in Kant for us, "whoever has committed murder must die." I'm not sure the italics are in the original German, but they do serve to make the text effective, for those of you coming back from March break and looking for a wake-up call in doing your reading. So the picture that retaliation of the sort that is demanded by moral desert, that retribution for harm brings with it the mandate that a similar harm be perpetrated on you has, in Kant's articulation, a particular form. The thought that death should be visited upon one who commits a crime of killing has struck many as a way of expressing not retribution, but revenge. And I want to present you with a very nice analysis, that was adverted to in one of your readings, that Robert Nozick, whom we'll be reading more from later and read some from before. A nice analysis that he offers of the difference between retribution, on the one hand, and revenge, on the other. Because I want to try to give you a really clean picture of what the retributionist picture amounts to. So one axis along which you might contrast retribution and revenge is what it is that triggers a desire for retribution. And Nozick says retribution is triggered by a legal or moral wrong, a violation of a code that is accepted by all parties, though it may have been violated by one of them, whereas revenge might occur in response to a harm or a slight, not a violation of the moral code as such. There are, says Nozick, limits to retribution. Kant has just articulated one version of that. We penalize exactly in proportion to the harm done, on Kant's picture. By contrast, revenge is, in principle, unlimited. In terms of the personality involved, the degree of personalization, retribution is impersonal, it's carried out by the state. Remember, that was one of our characterizations, one of the elements of our characterization of punishment. Whereas revenge is personal. It's carried out by an individual for the sake of expressing that individual's dissatisfaction. Retribution differs from revenge in emotional tone. When one engages in retribution, one either takes pleasure in justice itself, or has no emotional feeling. When you put a criminal in jail, the pleasure is in having done the right thing, as far as justice demands, not the pleasure in seeing the suffering of another. There's a kind of generality that attaches to retribution. An individual who performs a particular kind of act in a particular kind of circumstance, whoever they are, is going to be worthy of retribution. Whereas in the case of revenge, it's about a specific person at a specific time, not as an instance of a category, but as a particular wrongdoer in eyes of the one taking vengeance. There is a way in which retribution and revenge are similar, and that is that both of them are expressive acts. In the case of both of them, the target is supposed to know why the penalty is being inflicted, and to know that he is intended to know that. So again, these slides will be up, if you didn't get down all the details. But the picture of retribution that we're interested in is the one on the left. So, I want to talk about two cases where this knowledge condition gives rise to potentially amusing or perplexing situations. One, in the case of revenge, and the other in the case of retribution. So it is, as you know, a trope in comic books that the villain is always trying to

kill the hero in such a way that the hero knows why the villain is trying to do that. And those of you familiar with Austin Powers know that Austin Powers is always able to escape Dr. Evil, because Dr. Evil is so concerned with what we might think about the publicity constraint or the expressive role of revenge. But in addition to creating plot lines in parody movies, the phenomenon that retribution involves a particular kind of bringing about of harm gives rise to a perplexing phenomenon, that we might call justice as the world ends. So Nozick writes, "the conditions demarcating retribution explain what otherwise appears to be a ludicrous phenomenon. If someone sentenced to death falls perilously ill or attempts suicide, execution is postponed and measures are taken to bring the condemned person back to health, so that he can then be executed. This is because his punishment is to involve something being visited upon him by others because of the wrongness of his act. His death by natural causes or by his own hand would avoid this so measures are taken to restore him for punishment." Notice the way in which this parallels the discussion of the drowning child case in the work of Mill's Utilitarianism, on the one hand, and Kant's Groundwork, on the other. Mill is just interested in the child getting out of the pond, and isn't, in that passage, interested in whether you do it because you're showing off for somebody that you want to impress on the shoreline, or trying to get a financial reward, or expressing a certain kind of moral commitment. Kant is interested in why you are doing it. So too here. The retributivist picture says what matters is not that the criminal end up dead, at the end of things, in some way. What matters is that the criminal end up dead or punished in the right kind of way, at the end of things, because of a particular process. So we'll close today's lecture and continue with utilitarianism next class with the otherwise perplexing quote from the end of Kant, which you are now in a position to understand. Kant writes, if it's 2012, and the world is ending, in the way that it does in that movie, and the waves are coming in and the lightning is striking, and the new Ice Age is emerging, the first thing you have to do before the world ends, says Kant, is execute everybody on death row. Even if civil society resolves to dissolve itself, the last murderer lying in prison, said Kant, ought to be executed before it does. This ought to be done--this is the retributivist picture--that everyone may realize the desert of his deeds. So we'll pick up again on Thursday, with the utilitarian justification for punishment. And I'll see you then. [end of transcript]

Lecture 18 - Punishment II [March 24, 2011]

Chapter 1. Consequentialist Justifications of Punishment [00:00:00] Professor Tamar Gendler: All right, so where we are in the context of the course is on our second lecture on punishment. So you'll recall that before the break we had been thinking about what sorts of moral norms are appropriate: What sort of principle underlies our specification of moral norms? And we're now looking at those same cluster of questions from the opposite side. We're looking at that cluster of questions from the perspective of what ought to go on when somebody violates those norms, either qua moral norms or qua legal norms as encoded in a society's set of statutes. And we were looking at a number of justifications that might be offered for the practice of punishment. And we talked briefly, and I'll say a little bit more today, about the bottom two of these: restitution and rehabilitation. But we spent the bulk of the second half of Tuesday's lecture thinking about backward-looking justification, which in many ways is analogous to the sort of justification of moral constraint that we see in the deontological picture. What I want to do now is to look at the first of these in some detail, and to think about what a forward-looking or consequentialist picture of punishment looks like. And to think about the ways in which the problems that arise for a consequentialist account of punishment seem to echo a number of the problems that arise for a consequentialist account of morality more generally. So just to remind you what the characterization of punishment that we're working with looks like, of which the most important clause is going to be the first, we're making use of the classic mid-century characterization of punishment that comes out of the AngloAmerican legal philosophical tradition. And what's key in thinking through the justification of punishment from a consequentialist perspective is to remember that punishment is done in response to a legal offense, is done by one judged to be an offender, and so on. But it's also something that, as part of what punishment is, involves the imposition of unpleasantness and suffering on the person to whom conditions two through five apply. And that the question we're trying to answer for ourselves is how a state could ever be justified in bringing deliberate disutility to one of its members. So what the harm reduction or consequentialist outlook says is that the sole goal of, or the sole justification for, punishment is to prevent or deter future wrongdoing. Consequentialist accounts, in their pure forms, are interested solely in consequences. And to the extent that they're concerned with the distribution of utility across members in a society, what they're interested in is the maximization of utility from that moment onwards. They're called future-directed because though they may take the past into account to the extent that the memories of individuals take the past into account, they don't take the past into account as something relevant to the calculation of utility. The sole goal of punishment is to prevent or deter future wrongdoing. And the sole justification for punishment is to prevent or deter future wrongdoing. Now if a utilitarian account is to serve as a justification for punishment as a practice, punishment being the deliberate bringing about of disutility to a member of the community who has violated some moral or legal norm, then it must be the case, for it to be justified on

consequentialist grounds, that punishment is an effective, and indeed, on some accounts, that punishment is the most effective mechanism for bringing about the prevention or deterrence of future wrongdoing. If there's some alternate way of bringing about an equally beneficial result, then it can't be justified on consequentialist grounds to impose harm or suffering on an individual. That's what the consequentialist picture says. And notice, this is the mirror image of some of the perplexities that we found ourselves getting into around things like the surgeon case, where if all one takes into consideration are distributions of utility, then a lot of the factors that go into common sense reasoning about cases seem to fall out with respect their relevance. So the suggestion, if the empirical hypothesis is correct, is that punishment is the most effective mechanism for prevention or incapacitation. That is, it's the best way of precluding the possibility of wrongdoing on the part of the perpetrator, and/or that it's the best mechanism for deterring wrongdoing, either on the part of that individual or on the part of others who--as the result of making public the practice of punishment--come to recognize that what you might think of as the cost-benefit analysis of performing a particular act changes. So Jeremy Bentham famously says that the--Jeremy Bentham was the utilitarian predecessor of John Stuart Mill, the person who originally articulated in the modern philosophical tradition how it is that we should think of consequentialism. So Jeremy Bentham famously said, what punishment does is to change the calculus of costs and benefits associated with a particular act of wrongdoing, and to attach to something which is generally beneficial some sort of cost, so that that can enter into the calculus. In the literature on conditioning and reinforcement, punishment is something that changes the contingencies associated with a particular act. It brings a penalty along with a reward to something that typically carries only a reward. Or it reduces the reward associated with something that generally brings a high reward. Now it should be clear to all of you, because we went through the mirror image of this in the positive case, that thinking merely in terms of consequentialist justifications for punishment seems to carry with it two kinds of problems. The first problem is that the consequentialist justification seems to under-generate reasons for punishment, if we remember that punishment involves the deliberate bringing about of a harm. So, for example, it may well be, with respect to the question of incapacitation, that if our sole goal is to incapacitate individuals who are likely to commit crimes in the future that will bring disutility to society as a whole, if our sole goal is to incapacitate them, then there may well be equally effective non-punitive alternatives. Remember condition one in our characterization of punishment. Punishment involves state-imposed pain or suffering. It involves the deliberate bringing about of disutility to an individual. Presumably, simple incapacitation can be done in a way that does not involve anything more than the minimum amount of imposition of suffering on the individual. So any amount more than required for incapacitation can't be justified on this consequentialist ground. Moreover, it seems, not just with regard to prevention, that there's a possibility of nonpunitive incapacitation, but also with regard to the question of deterrence. Presumably, if one's real concern is to reduce the crime rate, then there are things that are a good deal less expensive than the prison system to bring about that desired goal. Creating social situations in which people have access to education and access to employment may--an empirical

question--be a more effective means of deterring crime than public punishment. Particularly if one of the results of jailing individuals, many of whom are parents, is to leave the next generation of children in a position where the kind of stable households, that we know from our earlier discussions of what it is that allows people to have well-ordered souls. Many children growing up in households that don't provide them with that sort of stability might have social costs. So let me reiterate, these are empirical questions. It is an empirical question whether the most effective form of incapacitation is one that in addition involves the imposition of more suffering than is required for incapacitation at the time. Perhaps that has better long-term consequences in terms of preventing future crimes. Likewise, perhaps the most effective form of deterrence is a kind of punishment that brings with it a publicity that causes others to avoid behaviors of that kind. But if it turns out that the prevention requires simple incapacitation and that deterrence seems more effective through some other means, consequentialism can't give us a justification for punishment. So the first problem with the consequentialist argument, if what you're trying to find is a justification for punishment, is that it under-generates. The second problem is that in certain cases it seems to over-generate punishment. So it seems--and we read about this in the John Rawls piece that we read for last class--to license what's sometimes called telishment. Where telishment means focusing on the telos, focusing on the goal, focusing on the end, rather than focusing on the process. So how might this go? Here's an example. Here's a community of shepherds. They all look like Gyges. And there they all are with their horses. In comes our standard bad guy and steals two of the horses. The police come looking for him. And he leaves town. So there's no one to punish for stealing the horses. Poor Jim, unlucky, shows up just at the time that the police have come looking for a perpetrator. And the police realize that a very effective way to prevent the stealing of future horses, perhaps, would be to put Jim in jail and write a big newspaper article about it: Horse Thief Captured! Sentenced to life in prison. That is, the deterrence effect that is demanded by punishment seems, at least in principle, as if in certain cases it could be carried out equally effectively by bringing punishment, or something like punishment, to bear on an individual who is not in fact the one who perpetrated the crime. If the goal is deterrence, and if the hypothesis that publicizing punishment is what produces deterrence, then it seems as if there aren't resources in the conceptual repertoire of the consequentialist for denying telishment. As with the standard cases of the surgeon cutting up the patient, there are more complicated moves that the consequentialist can make. And the suggestion is not that it's impossible within a consequentialist framework to rule out something like telishment. The thought is just that it's important to be clear what resources are available to you if this is the justification to which you're appealing. And to recognize, that at least prima facie the consequentialist justification seems both to under-generate and over-generate things that look like punishment in cases where, at least as encoded in our inherited legal statutes, it violates the norms to which people feel themselves intuitively drawn. Chapter 2. Two-level theories of punishment [00:15:05]

So how might we get around this problem? Remember there were problems, it seemed, with the retributivist picture, and problems, it seems, with the consequentialist picture. One of the standard ways of getting around this is to introduce what might be called a two-level theory. And we read an example of one of the most sophisticated and influential two-level theories in our readings for last class. So John Rawls, from whom we'll hear again in a couple of weeks, the political philosopher, wrote in the 1950s a famous paper called "Two Concepts of Rules" in which, one of the things that he analyzes is punishment. And what he suggests is that we think about the question of the justification of punishment in a more complicated way. That we think first about what it is that justifies the practice itself: What makes it legitimate for a society to have punishment? And the suggestion is that what justifies the practice itself is that having such a practice in place is something of societal utility. But that once we have set up the practice, what justifies particular actions within the practice is retribution. And he suggests, later in the paper, that we think of this distinction between justifying a practice and justifying actions within a practice, on analogy with something like the rules of baseball. So when we set up the rules of baseball, we can have a debate about whether baseball would be a better game if there are three strikes or four strikes. Whether baseball would be a better game if stealing bases is allowed or disallowed. Whether baseball is a better game if, or if not, pitchers are also treated as batters. So that's the debate about the nature of the practice. And you might think when we're debating the nature of the practice, one sort of consideration comes into play. But once we have the practice in place, we don't have debates in the context of a game about whether it would be better in that particular instance for a batter to get four strikes. Or whether it would be better in that particular instance for a stolen base to count or not count as a way of advancing across the bases. So we can distinguish between what it is that sets up our practice, and what it is that happens once our practice has been set up. And Rawls' suggestion is that what justifies the practice in the case of punishment is a general picture of utility, whereas what justifies acts within the practice is something like retribution. And the suggestion is that this manages simultaneously to resolve two problems. It resolves the problem of under-generation, in some sense, because if the general practice isn't useful, then the practice will be abandoned. And it resolves more clearly the problem of over-generation, the problem of telishment, because it's ruled out as an act within the practice. We've set up the rules of what punishment involves. Those are justified on utilitarian grounds. But within the practice we can't do things like put Jim in jail as a way of deterring, because that's prohibited within the practice. So it might seem that the pluralist challenge, or the pluralist solution, to the dilemma of how punishment might be justified, either retributively or on consequentialist grounds, solves the problem with which we were concerned. Which is, how can the state ever be justified in bringing about harm to its citizens? But there are, I think, three questions that can be raised even with regard to this solution. So we might ask whether utility alone, without appeal to retribution, can really serve as the sole justification of the practice, or whether in fact the under-generation problem is just going to re-emerge at the level of justification of the practice. We can ask whether retribution alone, without appeal to utility, can serve to justify actions within the practice, or whether ultimately in order to capture what it is that we want punishment to do, even once we've established the practice, requires

some appeal to retribution. And I'll talk about the psychology of this in a minute. And finally we might ask whether, given the distinctness of the two levels, we've provided anything like a coherent account of what justifies punishment. If one sort of reason governs the practice, and another sort of reason governs the application of the practice, then even if each of them independently is able to do that work, in fact, especially if each of them independently is able to do that work, one might wonder how the two together provide a coherent account. So that closes what I want to say about the general philosophical issues underlying punishment as a practice. We thought through two of the standard justifications, and then a third which attempts to reconcile them. And let me again remind you that part of what we're doing here is thinking more generally about moral justification. So all of the arguments that we've considered in the context of punishment have direct analogs in the positive mirror image of it. What I want to in the last half of lecture is to talk about three additional questions. These are the readings that we did for today. I want to talk about the psychology and the psychological constraints that seem to constrain any picture of punishment that we're going to have. That's going to accord with how it is that it appears people intuitively respond to particular instances of norm violation. I want to connect what we've talked about in the context of punishment with the issues that we talked about around luck at the end of our classes before March break. And finally, I want to bring us back to some Aristotelian themes about virtuous character by talking about punishment and parenting. Chapter 3. Empirical Research on Punishment [00:22:16] So there's been, in the last thirty years or so, a vast body of empirical research conducted by a number of extremely sophisticated social psychologists who have looked both at people's responses to hypothetical cases and at the legal codes of numerous societies in an attempt to get not at the normative question, what should justify punishment, but at an answer to the descriptive question, what psychological human need does punishment address. And in exploring these questions, John Darley--from whom we've read selections at a number of points in the course, including for today--makes appeal in his discussions to the very distinction that we've been talking about with respect to the normative question. So you can distinguish in looking to see what factors affect people's decisions about punishment, whether what they seem to have their attention directed to are questions of things like just desert and retribution. That is questions--does it affect how likely or how severe their punishment will be, if it looks like the individual in question intended to do a great amount of harm, regardless of whether he or she succeeded at it? Does it affect people's assessment of bringing about of harm, if the individual, for example, stole money to give to a charity, as opposed to stole money to buy herself a Ferrari? If questions about what was going on in the individual's mind--did the individual intend to bring about the harm or not. If questions about what goals the person had with respect to the proceeds of the crime--did they want to use them for something prosocial or something antisocial--then it looks like one of the kinds of considerations that's coming into play when people reason about punishment are things about retribution.

By contrast, if when people are thinking about what kind of punishment to impose, what they look at are things like, how likely is a crime like this one to be detected, or how public is the act of punishment going to be, then it seems like the underlying psychological mechanisms behind punishment are ones that are primarily sensitive to consequentialist constraints. So in a series of studies over the last several decades, psychologists have asked the question, to what sort of variations are punishment judgments sensitive? In general, when people are assigning punishment, when people are assigning severity, when people are deciding whether to punish or not, do they, if given the chance to look for information, want information, for example, about the criminal's state of mind or about the criminal's motivation? Or do they want information about how widely publicized the punishment is going to be or how likely crimes of this sort are to be detected? And it turns out fairly consistently that it's considerations of the first type that seem to be driving people's responses. That is, that a utility calculus doesn't seem to be the primary motivation when individuals who are surveyed in psychology studies, or penal codes, are looked at as indications, of the psychological mechanism that underlie punishment. And we see further evidence in favor of this hypothesis if we consider a phenomenon that's sometimes known as altruistic or costly third-party punishment. So these are cases where an individual, A, punishes--that is brings about harms and costs to--another individual, in a way that, first of all, brings a cost to A, brings no direct benefits to A, and concerns a norm violation that didn't affect A in the first place. So for example, I'm standing in a long line waiting to get my iPad 2, and a person cuts in line behind me. Right--so, he cuts in line behind me. It doesn't affect my access to the iPad. I might punish him by inviting everybody that stands behind him to cut in front of both of us. That makes me worse off, right? I've just let everybody behind me in line cut in front of me. It doesn't directly benefit me in any way. And the thing for which I am causing a harm to the individual behind me is not something that concerned a norm violation directed at me. He cut in line behind me. And we see instance after instance of behaviors with this structure in the behavioral economics literature. It appears for whatever reason. Perhaps because this is a way of promoting a certain kind of evolutionarily stable prosociality. Perhaps because norm violations tap into heuristics that cause people to act in certain ways. Perhaps for some third reason. It appears that in numerous, both laboratory and public settings, individuals engage in punitive acts that have the structure articulated above. Consequentialism, at least in its simple form, can't explain that. Finally, state of mind seems to play a large role in how it is that people respond to situations that potentially involve punishment. So suppose poor Jim comes over to my house, and hidden behind the door is my prize umbrella. And Jim knocks on my door, and I say to Jim, "Come in." And Jim walks in the door and knocks over my prize umbrella in a way that causes him to stamp through it and poke a hole in my umbrella. And he says, "Oh no, your prize umbrella." Case one. Case two, Jim shows up at my house. And I say to him as he knocks on the door, "Jim, Jim look out for my umbrella as you come in!" And Jim opens the door and stomps on my prize umbrella, putting a hole in it, and says, "Oh darn, your umbrella!" Case number three, Jim knocks on my door. I say to him, "Jim, look out

for my umbrella!" Jim opens the door, stomps on my prize umbrella, and looking down at his footwork says, "Yeah! I smashed your umbrella!" What sort of responses do these three cases evoke? Here's our famous Bad-o-meter that you will recall from our various trolley and other cases. When Jim accidentally stomps on my umbrella--the first case where I said, "come in Jim," and he stomped on it and said, "Oh no, your umbrella!" There's harm, but it's treated as pretty low-level. When I say to Jim, "Look out, my umbrella!" And Jim nonetheless opens the door and stomps on it and says, "Oh darn, your umbrella!" he's done something negligent. And there's a sense, on the part of most subjects, that something slightly worse has occurred in the general bad direction. And when Jim comes into my house and stomps on my umbrella and proudly looks down at what he's done, having done so, it seems, intentionally, there is, on the part of most subjects, a sense that something worse has happened. Consequentialism alone can't explain this. In all three cases I've got my poor stomped-on umbrella. What can explain this is a response that individuals seem pretty persistently to have across cultures, which is sometimes called the phenomenon of moral outrage. In the accident case, there's no moral outrage at all. Nobody thinks, that was morally outrageous of Jim to step on my umbrella, given that he didn't know it was behind the door and had just come in in response to my request that he enter. In the negligent case, there's some irritation, there's some moral outrage, there's a feeling: Jim, I told you my umbrella was there. But the moral outrage is relatively low. But in the case where Jim did something that strikes us as having been an intentional bringing about of harm, in direct violation of my request that he not do so, "Jim look out for my umbrella" there's a response of high moral outrage. And what Carlsmith and Darley suggest, in the article that we read for today, is that these attitudes of either no moral outrage, low moral outrage, or high moral outrage direct our attention to different parties in the episode. When there is an event that's happened that doesn't produce moral outrage at all, there is, except with respect to a general desire to make the world a better place, no attention either to the victim or to the perpetrator. Bad stuff happens. We might go about trying to change the world. If there's an extra supply of umbrellas in my car, I might bring one of them in. But in general, when things happen by accident the perpetrator isn't a focus of attention. And the victim is no more a focus of attention than he or she would be if this had been brought about as the result of a gust of wind having destroyed the umbrella. In cases of low moral outrage, attention is directed to the victim. There's a tendency to focus on compensation, on the need to make things better. But there's no focus on the perpetrator as someone in need of our focused punitive attention. But in the case--and in a moment I'm going ask you to take out your clickers because we're going to talk about intentional action. In the case where the act that violates the moral norm is seen as having been intentional, there is a tendency to focus not merely on compensation, but also on punishment. This is an extraordinarily resilient pattern, and one that seems very interesting psychologically if we're trying to come up with moral codes that will seem to evolved human beings, to strike them as satisfactory. But one problem with this picture is that it turns out that determining whether an action was done intentionally may well be more complicated than it had initially appeared. So my

colleague, and your fellow Yale professor, Joshua Knobe, has done a wonderful series of studies on the question of what it is that leads people to think of an action as having been performed intentionally. And we're doing the study in the way that all of you are going to get both vignettes. So we won't get exactly the distribution that's indicative of typical responses. But I think it's nonetheless interesting for you to think through the cases. So how many of you have seen these cases before? Just hands. Ok, so about 5% to 10% of you. So Josh Knobe presents his subjects with scenarios, vignettes like the following. The vice president of a company went to the chairman of the board and said, "We're thinking of starting a new program. It will help us increase profits, but it will also harm the environment." The chairman of the board answered, "I don't care at all about harming the environment. I just want to make as much profit as I can. Let's start the new program." They started the new program. Sure enough, the environment was harmed. The question is this: in starting that program--I don't care at all about harming the environment, I just care about making a profit--is it the case that the chairman harmed the environment intentionally? Did the chairman one, yes harm the environment intentionally, two, no, did not harm the environment intentionally? Huh? People didn't really have their clickers out. There's only 70 of you. OK, let's see how it came out. So 77% of you think that he harmed the environment intentionally. And we'll now try the second case. Second case--try to forget that you just had the first. I know you can't do that, but try to do it anyway. The vice president of a company went to chairman of the board and said "We're thinking of starting a new program. It'll help increase profits. But it will also help the environment." The chairman of the board answered, "I don't care at all about helping the environment. I just want to make as much profit as I can. Let's start the new program." They started the new program. Sure enough, the environment was helped. So the chairman says, "I don't care at all about helping the environment. I just want to make a profit." Question, did the chairman help the environment intentionally? One, if yes. Two, if no. And let's see how the numbers come out. Wow! You guys are amazing! All right, you came in even cleaner than standard Knobe results, even though I gave you the two cases sequentially, which should've mitigated the effect. But there we go. So classically, when you present this to people, in the first scenario where you guys gave 77% yes he harmed it intentionally, roughly 83% of people say that he did. Whereas, in the second case, where you guys gave this amazing 89% that he didn't help the environment intentionally, typically this number [clarification: did help intentionally] is 23%. So that one's [clarification: didnt help intentionally] 67--sorry, 77. OK, now what's going on here? Let me remind you what just happened. We had two identical scenarios. The only difference is that we changed the term help here to harm in the first case. In both cases, what the CEO said is, "I don't care about thing you think I did intentionally in the first case and thing you didn't think I did intentionally in the second. I just care about making a profit." So something that he was ignoring in the first case, most of you thought is something he was intending to do. Whereas something he was ignoring in the second case, almost none of you thought he was intending to do. That's perplexing if what's going on here is that punishment is supposed to be tracking intentional action. Because it looks like what kind of action we take to be intentional is in some way confounded with what sorts of actions we take to be morally problematic. So that makes the

whole question of how we ought to think about punishment even more complicated than it struck us already. But let's set that aside temporarily and think about what implications there are from the psychological results that we've just been studying. On the one hand, it looks like, psychologically, paying attention to backward-looking or retributivist reasons for punishment, to the rebalancing of the scales of justice, is psychologically required for a theory to feel satisfying. Or at the very least, that simply looking forward and thinking about consequentialist considerations and utility doesn't seem psychologically sufficient. So the question is whether, taking human psychology seriously, there's an additional alternative. And a number of psychologists and philosophers have asked the question whether if we look not backwards and forwards, towards the performance of the crime as something that demands a rebalancing of the scales of justice, or towards the utility which can be brought to society, but rather at the things that we were calling three and four in our initial characterization, at restitution and rehabilitation as our motivations, can we somehow get a psychologically satisfying account of punishment, where the goal is not rebalancing or utility, but rather some sort of reparation? This is sometimes called restorative or reparative justice. And those of you who are intrigued by it, I'm pointing you to a location where you can read articles about that question. Chapter 4. Luck and Punishment [00:41:54] OK, so that closes the first part of our discussion, the psychological implications of punishment. And what I want to do in the last five minutes of lecture is to talk about the interaction with luck. And then we'll begin lecture next Tuesday by talking about the connection in the context of parenting. So we've been thinking throughout this unit about the cases like this, where luck seems to play a role in consequences. When the person didn't intend to do harm. Unlucky Cell Phone and Unlucky Alert had no desire to harm the child. But of course, luck can play a role in cases where somebody is deliberately trying to bring about harm. So here's our standard bad guy, who shows up in town where there's a potential victim for him. And he pulls out his gun and says, "Oh yeah, I'm gonna shoot that guy." And luck is on his side. Intention carries out in the way that he intended and he succeeds. His perfect analog, Unlucky Shooter, shows up in town and says, "Oh yeah, I'm gonna shoot that guy." But when he pulls the trigger, unfortunately, just at the moment that his bullet would have hit his intended victim, up comes the truck that was in our last story, and stops the bullet in its tracks. So he doesn't succeed at his intended crime. Notice that this is the mirror analog to the previous case. The intention in the two cases is the same. The action in the two cases is the same. But in the first case the criminal has been lucky with respect to his intended goals. He shot the guy that he tried to shoot. Whereas in the second case the criminal has been unlucky with expected goals. He didn't manage to shoot his victim. The question is why we punish this one more seriously than this one. What sort of justification could possibly underlie this? And David Lewis in the rather complicated, I admit, paper that I had you read for today, and I promise we will talk about in sections to help you understand what the logic of the argument is, but David Lewis suggests that the

only thing that could justify treating this act as more punishment worthy than this one, is if we think it would be alright to impose what he calls a penal lottery. So what he says is, if we knew objectively that when you engage in a shooting action where you pull a trigger there's a one in ten chance that your action will fail and a nine in ten chance that your action will succeed, then punishing you is fundamentally, in our current system, equivalent to having you draw a straw from among a set of straws where there are nine that send you to a long prison term and one that sends you to a short one. And he suggests that we can see that our current practice is akin to that by bringing you through a series of imaginary cases, each of which, he suggests, has the same justification as this straw drawing. So imagine a system where once we've established that the intent was equal in the two cases. We had our two individuals here just draw straws. Each of them has a one in nine chance of getting off the hook-- sorry a one in ten chance. And a nine in ten chance of getting to jail. That corrects for luck. Equivalent to that, says Lewis, is not that the individual draws the straw, but that before the trial takes place, a court representative draws the straw. And though the jury is just deciding, did he intend to do it?, they don't know in advance what the penalty will be. Equivalent to that, he suggests, is that beforehand, the court representative draws the straw and makes public that if they convict him of intending to do the crime, then he will either receive the nine penalty, the more severe one, or the one. Equivalent to that, suggests Lewis, is that beforehand we provide a reenactment of the crime, with similar odds, and if the victim dies in that case, then the individual will get a more severe punishment. And, suggests Lewis, our actual practice of just letting the world play itself out, so that we punish the person whose crime attempt succeeded more severely than the one whose crime attempt didn't, is just a pre-enactment, morally equivalent to a re-enactment, morally equivalent to the drawing of straws in a lottery. So I'll close with that as a way of trying to bring out yet again the perplexity of moral, or perhaps, immoral luck. And we'll open next Tuesday with our discussion of Kazdin and then move on to our selection from the writings of Thomas Hobbes. And I'll post that reading for you by tomorrow. Thanks. [end of transcript]

Lecture 19 - Contract & Commonwealth: Thomas Hobbes [March 29, 2011]

Chapter 1. Punishment Concluded [00:00:00] Professor Tamar Gendler: So we have two basic agenda items today. The first is to finish up briefly our discussion of punishment from last lecture. And the second is to start with the third unit of the course, that is the unit that's concerned not with our status as individuals trying to cultivate a kind of internal harmony, nor with our status as individuals in local relations with others of a moral or immoral sort, but rather with our status as members of a community. And you'll remember from Plato's Republic, the text with which we begin and with which we'll end the course, that Plato sees there being a direct parallel between the individual and the community, between what's mandated for the harmonious soul on the one hand, and what's required for a community to stay stable on the other. And one of the tacit themes that will underlie our discussion in this final unit of the course are the ways in which that parallel is manifest. Now to some extent our discussion of punishment provided a microcosm of this transition. You'll recall that in the first lecture on punishment we looked at three questions. We tried to articulate in a fairly precise sense what we meant by the notion of civil punishment. And then we looked at two families of justification for civil punishment. A family of deontological or desert oriented theories on the one hand--theories that look at what somebody deserves. And on the other hand, we looked at some consequentialist theories-theories that try to justify punishment on the basis of its consequences. And for each of those theories, we asked ourselves how reasonable the justifications are that they offer and what sorts of behaviors do they seem to mandate. And here we had the same sort of structure that we have found throughout the course. On the one hand, an articulation of a principled framework for understanding a large segment of human behavior that tries to lay down rules and guiding principles by which we ought to structure behavior. And on the other, we had intuitions about particular cases. And we found that here, as elsewhere, for many of you at least, certainly for the students in my section and for the students in the sections of the TFs that I've spoken to, that there was a challenge reconciling on the one hand, the philosophical framework that seemed truly compelling and on the other hand, the psychological factors that seemed to be pulling us in one direction or another with regard to particular cases. So what we looked out at in our a discussion on Thursday were some attempts to provide systematic explorations of some of these psychological phenomena: factors that seemed to exacerbate people's desire to inflict punishment, at least most people, most of the time, in Western society. And factors that tend to mitigate it. And we also talked a bit about the role of moral luck in underlying our responses to punishment. What I want to turn to in the first part of today's lecture is the residual question that we had in the context of our punishment lecture. Namely, to look at the question of how on the one

hand civil punishment works, and on the other, how punishment works in a much more personal context. So you'll recall that-- sorry, I guess we don't have the final version of these slides up. OK. There was to have been a slide here--which is not this one--that connected our theories of punishment to our discussion in Alan Kazdin. What we have instead is an earlier slide, where I suggested a connection between the work of Alan Kazdin on the one hand and Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics on the other. You'll recall that when we were trying to think about the question how do we cultivate virtue, I suggested that one of the places to look in your contemporary culture at the question how do we help people become that which we hope they will be? are in scientifically informed, compassionate, parenting guides. And it is, I think, an interesting question to ask with respect to punishment. So you'll recall that when we had the slide with four kinds of justifications for punishment in the earlier lecture, we had on the one hand the utilitarian and the desert-based theories. But we also had, at the bottom of that slide, two motivations for punishment that look on the one hand at the victim and on the other hand at the perpetrator, and aimed somehow to reconcile their situations. And what those motivations for punishment suggested is that with respect to the victim, what matters is restitution and with respect to the perpetrator, if we are truly forward-looking, what matters is rehabilitation. And the question is whether those motivations are sufficiently forceful and sufficiently powerful to capture what we're looking for from punishment in a civil context. It seems fairly clear that those motivations are at least close to sufficient in a personal context. And it's to that question that Alan Kazdin's discussion in the context of this encoding of cultural practices in the parenting guide that we read. So Kazdin points out that if your goal is something akin to rehabilitation, if the goal of punishment is what forward-looking theories suggest, that is the changing of future behavior on the part on the individual who has violated social norms in such a way that you can predictably expect them to behave prosocially, then it's incredibly important not merely to articulate what sort of behavior is disallowed, but also to provide an articulation of what sort of behavior is desired. Instead, says Kazdin, of thinking of your child's behavior in terms of what you don't want, start thinking in terms of what you do want. When you get rid of a behavior by rewarding its opposite, the effects of the getting rid are stronger and last longer than if you punish the undesired behavior. And all of you had the opportunity to think about this structure of practice in the opening segment of the course. The very idea of focusing on what it is that you hope to cultivate as a habit in yourself, and then engaging in behaviors that allow that sort of practice to become instinctive to you, was one of the central lessons of the first unit of the course. The best way we learned to build up a behavior that you want is through reinforced practice. And Kazdin goes on to suggest, in the context of punishment, that punishment teaches what not to do. It says that particular behavior is unacceptable. But a behavior is one among a

panoply of possible modes of action. And simply ruling out one of them doesn't guarantee that what will replace it is something prosocial. So he writes in a very specific context of fighting, if you punish your child for fighting with her brother, it will indeed stop that fight. The next time there's a conflict between them though, fighting will still be in the daughter's repertoire, the default setting. You haven't done anything about changing that. Explaining in words that fighting is bad won't change the state of behaviors either. You need to develop another way of behaving. You need to promote the positive opposite to get another response locked in. Now the question is whether there is any possibility of generalizing this profoundly correct lesson about what one does in deeply personal interactions to a societal context? As I pointed out when we read Plato's Republic, it begins with the suggestion that if you want to understand the structure of the soul, you need to understand the structure of society. And if you want to understand the structure of society, you need to understand the structure of the soul. In some ways, asking the apparently absurd question does a parenting guide have anything to teach us about the criminal justice system? is to ask the fundamental question of Plato's Republic. Does what we do when we engage in the most intimate and personal of attempts to cultivate in others behaviors that will allow them to thrive? Does thinking about that teach us anything about how society ought to structure its institutional practices? And Kazdin gives some indication that he is thinking at least implicitly along those lines. He writes, "Punishment can fail for many reasons. One of them is that reward for misbehaving is often more immediate and reliable than punishment." And goes on to suggest, not in detail, but just as a hint, that a look at the criminal justice system's normal operations makes that clear. If you steal, you get what you stole right away. You are therefore reinforced in a very local sense in the bad behavior by an immediate reward. If you experience a delayed punishing consequence, that punishment is doomed to failure as a method for changing behavior. What's required if punishment is to have a totally deterrent effect is somehow for the calculation of the cost of the punishment to enter in at the moment of practice. Kazdin writes, "One must eliminate the immediate reinforcer for the punished behavior if possible, and that's hard to do." You'll recall long ago, we had a picture of Ulysses trying to get past the sirens. It was a beautiful 19th century portrait of Ulysses on a ship, tied to a mast, with the rowers beside him, with their ears blocked. And that was a slide that we looked at in the context of how you overcome immediate temptation. And we talked about, in our discussion of Nozick on principles and our discussion of Ariely on procrastination, what sort of strategies there are for recalculating or recalibrating our assessments of potential immediate payoff. Thinking about punishment in its broadest sense gives us a way of thinking about that question from yet another direction. And, as you'll see, that issue is going to reemerge very soon when we start thinking about Hobbes. So I leave this puzzle--or this multi-part puzzle--for you, as a question. Punishment illuminated for us, on the one hand, the

distinction between utilitarian and deontological moral theories. It got us thinking about the symmetric or asymmetric relation between praise and blame. And it gave us yet another venue for thinking about the relation between the personal and the societal. Chapter 2. Hobbes and Social Contract Theory [00:13:48] So with that, I want to move to the general topic of today's lecture. So the fundamental question of political legitimacy, as you know from the brief reading that you did before the Hobbes, is the question of why it is ever legitimate for there to be such thing as a state. It is an astounding fact about 21st century human existence that of the roughly seven billion people who live on this planet at this time, nearly all of them are subject to rules and regulations that are imposed on them by a governing body--a government--as a result simply of their having been born within the confines a particular territory. It's worth thinking for a moment about why and perhaps whether that fact is legitimate. And this question--what makes the state legitimate--is the one that we'll address in the context of this final unit of the course. So let's begin by going back to a passage right before the one that we focused on so intently at the beginning of the term from Plato's Republic. So you will remember right before the discussion of the ring of Gyges, Glaucon provides an account of what he calls the nature and origins of justice. And here is what he says. He says, "They say to do injustice is naturally good and to suffer injustice is bad, but that the badness of suffering it so far exceeds the goodness of doing it that those who have done and suffered injustice and tasted both, but who lack the power to avoid suffering it, decide that it's profitable to come to an agreement with each other to neither do injustice nor to suffer it." So the picture is this. Suppose we have two shepherds. And the one steals the other's horses. From that, he gets pleasure of say 15. At the same time, the one whose horses were stolen experiences a dissatisfaction, first 15 at the loss of his horses and then an additional displeasure at having been robbed. So he turns and steals the other horses--sorry, that was supposed to be more nicely animated. There we go--feeling the pleasure of 15, where his opponent feels a displeasure of 25. So the thought is that both recognize that in a situation where stealing is the norm, both have the potential to end up worse off than they would have had they just stuck with their original property. As a result, suggests Glaucon, they come together and they form some sort of interpersonal agreement. Moreover, they institutionalize it. As a result says Glaucon, they begin to make laws and covenants and what the law commands, they call lawful and just. This, says Glaucon, is the origin and essence of justice. It is intermediate between the best and the worst. The best thing to do injustice without paying the penalty. The worst to separate without being able to take revenge. Justice is a mean between two extremes. What we have in this 2,000-year-old text is a preliminary articulation of what has come to be known as the social contract tradition in political philosophy. This is the view that it is

because in some sense living in a society structured by laws is advantageous for all of us, that the state is legitimate. On this picture, what makes it reasonable that seven billion people on this planet live their lives as a result of having been born in a particular place under the auspices of a particular government, what makes that legitimate is the fact that as an aggregate and in fact as individuals, they are better off than they would be without that structure having been in place. And that is the fundamental argument that lies behind the text that we read from Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan. So Hobbes, as you know from reading the text, lived roughly at the time of Shakespeare. He lived from 1588 to 1679. So just as he was born, Shakespeare's first works were being produced. And you can see--sorry, they should stay next to each other for a moment--that they wear the same outfit. My animation is very active today. So, Hobbes was British. He's best known for his work in political philosophy, but he also did work in linguistics and mathematics. And it's important to realize as you think through the ways in which the text that we read is extraordinarily systematic, that Hobbes was highly influenced by the idea that it would be possible to derive very broad principles of political theory from very basic facts about human psychology. And the idea was to base the reasoning here on something like the geometrical method, where you start with a few very simple axioms, you have some rules of derivation, and from them you can build up rather elaborate systems. In particular, Hobbes thought it would be possible to derive political philosophy from thinking about psychology, to derive psychology from thinking about physiology, and to derive physiology from thinking about physics. Facts about the physical world constrained facts about physiology. Those in turn constrained facts about psychology. And those in turn determined the nature of political theory. So the text that we read for today is primarily concerned with these two last stages. The text we read is from Hobbes' 1651 book Leviathan. And I reproduced this frontispiece here because we are, all of us right now, sitting about a hundred yards from a copy of this first edition. And when I taught this class as a small seminar, one of the most exciting things that we did was to take a field trip to the Beinecke Library and to see this in person. And all of you as Yale students are free to walk over there and to make an appointment to look at this. What's amazing about the frontispiece is both the visual imagery on the bottom and the visual imagery on the top. So Hobbes, remember, is concerned with providing a philosophical basis to justify the secular state. And on the bottom what he has is a juxtaposition of the tools of the secular state with the tools of religious authority. So he's talking about the relation between the castle and the church, between the might of weaponry and the might of religion. What's relevant for our discussion here is this incredible image on the top--the image of the sovereign composed of hundreds of individuals, each of whom has, on Hobbes' picture of

things, rationally decided to give up his or her right to self-authority on certain questions in order to guarantee the stability of society. Chapter 3. The State of Nature [00:23:17] So let's ask the question, how does Hobbes get to this conclusion? And what are the fundamental questions he's trying to answer? So, as I said, he starts out with a discussion simply of what human reasoning looks like. What's our sensory system like? How does language allow us to communicate? And he goes on from there to talk about human psychology and the legitimacy of the state, concluding with a very broad discussion of the relation between the civil state and religious law. The questions he's asking are the questions we're going to ask for the next four lectures. What makes the state legitimate? Hobbes' answer is having a civil state, having civil society, is the only effective means of what he calls commodious self-preservation. And I'll say a bit about what that amounts to. And second question, what can we do to guarantee the stability of the state? And Hobbes' rather controversial answer here is that it's only by means of putting in place some sort of absolute sovereign, only by abdicating a certain amount of personal freedom, that the state's continued existence is guaranteed. So how does the argument go? We started our reading for today with the incredibly famous passages from Book I, Chapter 13, of Leviathan, where Hobbes makes the following argument. He says, with respect to the possibility of stealing one another's property and potentially taking one another's lives, human beings are relevantly equal. They are physically equal in the sense that each of them has the live possibility of killing and of being killed. And they are mentally equal, intellectually equal, in the sense that human beings on the whole are capable of using experience to learn how to navigate their environment. And in a somewhat coy argument, he suggests that everybody thinks himself to be somewhat clever, and that the best evidence of rough equality is that each is contented with his share. From this comes the first premise of the Hobbesian argument, that when we have this sort of rough equality in physical and intellectual strength, there is an equality of hope in attaining our ends. Everybody can reasonably expect that pursuing their own self-interest will not necessarily be a futile endeavor. Since, however, self-interests conflict--since, roughly speaking, I want to get as much as I can get and you want to get as much as you can get--Hobbes suggests that the result of this rough equality, this expectation of the possibility of achieving one's goals, coupled with the fact that goals of this sort often involve taking of property, we find three sources of conflict among individuals. The first Hobbes calls competition, where the goal is I want to gain control of stuff over which you currently have control. Note that this use out the term 'your stuff' at this point is still metaphorical. Right. There's no such thing, says Hobbes, as property in the state of nature. I want to control things that you control. And the consequence of that, says Hobbes, is that I will engage in violent behavior to get things that are now under your control.

The second cause of conflict in the state of nature is the preemptive version of this. The recognition that I want to keep control of those things over which I have control, with the resulting action that I may preemptively strike to preserve my possessions. So the first is simply about the acquisition of objects. The second involves an application of intelligence, a recognition that someone might try to acquire things over which I have control and that in order to prevent that, I need to act preemptively. And the third, says Hobbes, is this uniquely psychological feature of human beings, reminding us yet again of our fundamentally social nature. And that is what Hobbes calls glory. The goal here being reputation. I seek your admiration. And in so doing, I engage in violence to earn your respect. Hobbes thinks that in the state of nature, this sort of conflict is inevitable. In particular, when there is an assumption of rough equality and an assumption of a desirous self-interest, the result will be a war, says Hobbes, of every man against every man. Not necessarily a hot war in the sense of violence going on at every moment, but a recognition that at any given moment that which feels secure, might be lost. And we know from living at a time when terrorist threat induces in many of us a feeling of standing fear, how dangerous to the psyche it is to feel that one cannot be certain or safe in one's surroundings. Interestingly, the threat of things going wrong has almost as powerful a psychological effect in anticipation as the actuality of things going wrong. The result of this, says Hobbes, is that there is no industry, no culture, no navigation. He writes rather poetically, in such condition there is no place for industry because the fruit thereof is uncertain. And consequently, there's no culture of the earth, no navigation, no use of commodities that may be imported by sea, no commodious buildings, no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force, no knowledge of the face of the earth, no account of time, no arts, no letters, no society, and what is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death. It's important to think about how many features--in fact, all the features of your daily life-rely on an assumption of a certain kind of stability, a certain kind of predictability. And without that kind of stability and predictability says Hobbes, there's continual fear and danger of violent death. And life is, this being the most famous quote from Hobbes' Leviathan--life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. Hobbes goes on to suggest that this rather unpleasant picture of human psychological tendencies that he's painted in this famous passage is one which is rather widely shared. He asks you to think about whether when you travel, you lock your doors and whether when you leave the library, you bring your computer with you. He doesn't ask about the computer, in those words. But in pointing out the tendency of people to protect themselves with respect to their property and their persons, he asked whether you do not as much accuse mankind by your actions as, says Hobbes, I do by my words. So that's the beginning of the argument in favor of the state. Rough equality, a tendency to want what others also want, and a consequent state of war.

Hobbes steps back for a minute then and makes two important caveats. The first is that he points out that in order for his argument to work--remember his argument is going to be that the reason it's legitimate for seven billion people to be under the political control of states is because if they weren't, they would be worse off. Hobbes says that argument works regardless of whether the state of nature is actually something that happened. The argument doesn't turn on historical facts. The question, says Hobbes, is what manner of life there would be were there no common power to fear. And he points out--so that's the first point that he makes there. He then goes on to point out that most of the things which we take for granted as part of how we organize our lives would be absent without the existence of social structures. The notions of justice and injustice, says Hobbes, are social notions. They depend on there being rules which can be violated and rules which can be upheld. Likewise, in exactly the way that I slipped up four slides ago, there it is in the state of nature no notion of ownership or legal control as such. All there is is possession by force. So that's the nadir of Hobbes' argument. It's really bad news. It's solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. And the question now becomes what could possibly allow us to escape from such a situation? And Hobbes suggests in the conclusion of Chapter 13 that there are three sorts of motivations that might help people get out of this circumstance. One is a natural fear of death. The second is a desire of such things as are necessary for commodious living. Those are all the sorts of things that we just talked about. The things that come only from predictable possibilities of cooperation--buildings, learning, comfort, stability. And finally says Hobbes, there is a hope--the counterpart of the equality hope with regard to the state of nature earlier on--that by one's industry, it would be possible to obtain those things that are necessary for commodious living if only there were stable circumstances to allow the efforts to persist. Chapter 4. The Laws of Nature [00:36:23] So we move now to the fundamental argument of Hobbes, which involves, in the excerpts we read, the derivations of what he calls the first, second, and third laws of nature. So what I want to do first is to introduce you to Hobbes' terminology for this. And then I'm going to give you the first, second, and third laws of nature. And with that we'll close the lecture. So Hobbes talks about rights on the one hand and laws on the other. A right of nature, which Hobbes thinks is fundamental, and we will hear about this again when we do our reading from Robert Nozick for next Thursday, is the idea articulated in the founding documents of the nation in whose boundaries we now sit, that each human being is fundamentally in some profound sense free. Each human being has rights, that Hobbes explicitly calls inalienable, to engage in whatever way he or she can to self-preservation. That's a fundamental assumption of Western political philosophy. Liberty, on Hobbes' picture, is a rather narrow notion. All he means by this is the lack of external impediment. Hobbes considers contracts that are entered into out of fear to be nonetheless binding.

The third term that we need from Hobbes to understand the rest of the argument is the idea of a law of nature. And this is where the trick of Hobbes' reasoning takes place. Hobbes says that while it's true that all of us have fundamental rights to liberty, it's also true that there are things which are binding upon us as a result of reason. There are general rules which reason can lead us to recognize, that specify what is forbidden and what is required to preserve life. And that once we discover that these sorts of things are required to preserve life, it becomes mandatory for us to do them. So the idea of law of nature is the idea that we can determine what it would be that would allow us to preserve our lives. And that it then becomes mandatory for us to do that. So whereas a right is a kind of freedom, a law is a kind of constraint. So what are the laws of nature according to Hobbes? The first law of nature he derives as follows. He says, as we know from Chapter 13, that the natural condition of human beings is a war of all against all. But that as we know from the right of nature, each of us can do whatever it takes to preserve ourselves, including harming others. The result of this is a lack of security for all of us. Once we recognize this, says Hobbes, reason tells us it is a general rule of reason that we are required to seek peace if there is a chance of obtaining peace. And, if not, to engage in war. So the first law of nature, according to Hobbes, has two clauses. It has a peace clause--a must clause. If there's a chance of cooperation, you're required to do it--seek peace and follow it. And a war clause, which gives you a permission. If you cannot have a guarantee of peace, you may defend yourself by all means we have to defend ourselves. Now, the first law of nature raises a puzzle because it asks us what it would take for there to be a chance of obtaining peace. The peace clause only kicks in if other people are doing the same thing as you. And the second law of nature gives voice to how that first clause is to be satisfied. Hobbes says you need to be willing to lay down your rights to the extent that others are willing to do the same with the aim of promoting a peaceful state. You need, says Hobbes, to content yourself with as much liberty against others as others have against you. Now, what we will talk about in the next lecture is a problem that arises from this picture. If other men will not lay down their right as well as you, there is no reason for you to divest yourself of this. For to do that would be to expose yourself to prey, which no man is bound to, rather than to dispose yourself to peace. That is the first law of nature says: Look, without cooperation, without peace, life is miserable; it's solitary, nasty, brutish, and short--so self-interest demands that you seek peace if you can. The second law of nature tells you: you should seek peace insofar as others are willing to do so. But the problem that we will address in the form of the prisoner's dilemma is that without some sort of central coordination, it will always be rational for everybody to drop out of the cooperative situation. And it's in light of that Hobbes gives voice to his solution. The third law of nature according to Hobbes is that you need to perform your covenants. That is, you need to do what you have promised. And in order for you to do that, you need to have the guarantee that others will also do as they promise.

Covenants, he says, are invalid if you fear that the other party may renege. So to have covenants, there must be enforcement. In particular, says Hobbes, there needs to be some sort of coercive power that will compel men equally to the performance of their covenants, by the terror of--I told you punishment was coming back--some punishment greater than the benefit they expect by the breach of their covenant. So Hobbes' solution is the following: He says men naturally love liberty and dominion over others, they recognize that the cost of this is the miserable condition of war. The only means of getting themselves out of this is through the introduction of a restraint among themselves in the form of a commonwealth. And this--because we are unlike ants and bees, cooperation can't be achieved without this external constraint. Conclusion, says Hobbes, is that each of us must say, hypothetically and voluntarily, I authorize and give up my right of governing myself to this man or to this assembly of men on this condition that thou give up thy right to him and authorize his actions in like manner. That is, says Hobbes, it is only when individuals form themselves into a society whereby in return for giving up freedom, commodious living is possible. It's only then that most of the things that we take as definitive of human society and human experience even become possible. What we'll look at next lecture is a schema for thinking about the dilemma that Hobbes thinks we find ourselves in, and ask whether Hobbes' solution, the imposition of an external sovereign, is indeed the only solution to the puzzle which he poses to us in the form all his argument about the state of nature, the first and second laws of nature, and finally the third law of nature. So I'll see everyone on Thursday. [end of transcript]

Lecture 20 - The Prisoner's Dilemma [March 31, 2011]

Chapter 1. The Prisoners Dilemma [00:00:39] Professor Tamar Gendler: All right. So, what I want to talk about today in lecture is a game theoretic notion known as The Prisoners' Dilemma, which can be used to characterize a structure that is brought out both in Book Two of Plato's Republic and in chapter 13 of Hobbes' Leviathan. And the purpose of introducing you to this way of thinking about questions is exactly what we have been doing all semester long. It's taking a traditional set of philosophical issues and asking how it is that another discipline's methodology can shed light on those questions in a complementary way. So you'll recall at the beginning of the last lecture that I started off with a quote from the beginning of Book Two of Plato's Republic when Glaucon is answering Socrates' challenge to articulate the nature and origins of justice--the nature and origins of, roughly speaking, pro-social behavior. And I pointed out that the claim that Glaucon makes there takes the form as follows. They say that to do [justice] injustice is naturally good, to suffer injustice is bad, but that the badness of suffering so far exceeds the goodness of doing it that those who have done and suffered injustice and taken both but lack the power to do it and avoid suffering, decide that it's profitable to come to an agreement with each other neither to do injustice nor suffer it. And we illustrated that with the example of the two shepherds, one of whom steals another's horses and gains a certain amount of pleasure from it, but not as much as the displeasure that the stolen fellow receives likewise when the second steals the first. So both of them end up in a situation with less utility than they would have if they were cooperating and they come together and form some sort of pact. Glaucon continues with the passage that I also read you last class. He says, "Justice is intermediate between the best and the worst. The best is to do injustice without paying the penalty. The worst is to suffer it without being able to take revenge. Justice is a mean between these two extremes." But I didn't read you the sentence that follows that, which is one on which we'll be focusing in today's lecture. Because Glaucon continues by pointing out that on his view, and it will turn out, if you were thinking of justice as this kind of coordination, on anybody's view mathematically--can I ask one of the TFs to fix the door so that it doesn't slam as people walk in? What he says is, People value it not because it is a good, but because they are too weak to do injustice with impunity. Someone who has the power to harm another without being harmed himself, someone who has the power to do this, however, wouldn't make an agreement with anyone not to do injustice in order not to suffer it. For him, that would be madness.

So Glaucon has given us an argument that we're going to see again in a minute in Hobbes that takes the following form. It is rational when you think there is no choice but to cooperate, to cooperate. But if you think you can get away with having the other person cooperate while you act in a non-cooperative fashion, it would be insane for you to cooperate. It would be madness. Hobbes makes exactly the same point in Chapter 13 of Leviathan. You'll remember that he articulates there the first two laws of nature. Laws of nature, remember, are norms to which rational beings qua rational beings are bound, because they recognize that in following those norms they increase the likelihood of preservation and flourishing in their own lives. So the first law of nature is a two-part law. It says seek peace if there's a chance of obtaining peace, and if there is not, engage in war. The second law of nature, as you'll recall, also articulates a conditional commitment to giving up a certain sort of freedom. The second law of nature tells you to be willing to lay down your rights to the extent that others are willing to do the same, and to content yourself with as much liberty against others as they have against you. So again, as in the first law of nature, the giving up of rights is conditional on others giving up rights as well. Like Glaucon, Hobbes gives voice to the concern that this may not be feasible. He writes, If other men will not lay down their right as well as he, there is no reason for anyone to divest himself of his. For to do that would be to expose himself to prey which no man is bound to, rather than to dispose himself to peace. We're going to be using the clickers after the next slide, so if you get your clickers out you'll be prepared for that. Now, I know that some of you in this class are economics majors and some of you in this class have taken game theory. And to those of you, I apologize in the way that I apologize to the philosophy majors for introducing you at a basic level to Plato's Republic. But this is a resource that all of us need to understand the class, and I promise that there are some actual games that we'll be playing in a few minutes. So the Prisoners' Dilemma is a way of representing in graphic form the structure to which both Glaucon and Hobbes adverted. And it involves representing a pair of choices by a pair of people on a two-by-two matrix. So there is on the one hand an individual, A, who faces two possibilities for action. The first is that she can behave in a peaceful way, lay down her rights to attack her enemy and thereby give up a certain kind of freedom. Or she can reserve for herself the right to war and thereby produce in her challenger a feeling of threat throughout. Her counterpart, B, faces exactly the same pair of choices. He can behave peacefully and lay down his right to attack, or he can reserve the pleasures of war for moments when he feels himself, either preemptively or retaliatorily, to need to engage in threatening behavior. Now what's important to notice about the prisoners'--sorry. So that gives us four possibilities. Either A and B can both behave in peaceful fashion. That is, they satisfy the initial clause of Hobbes' first law of nature. They do the handshake of Glaucon's challenge; they each give up to the same amount what Hobbes talks about in the second law of nature. Or, they can both be in a state of war with one another. This is what Glaucon thinks will

naturally arise and what Hobbes thinks is the case in the state of nature. Or it can be the case that A, the letter on the left refers to A, behaves peacefully, whereas B behaves in a war-like fashion. Or it can be the case that A behaves in a war-like fashion, whereas B behaves in a peace-like fashion. Now what's important to notice about the structure of The Prisoners' Dilemma, is that A has control over which row obtains. A can determine whether we're in this row or this row. But A has no control over which column obtains. B, by contrast, has control over which column obtains, and no control over which row obtains. B can determine whether we're on the left hand column or the right hand column, but B can't determine through his direct behavior whether we're in the top row or the bottom row. Now, I want to just start by making sure that everybody has understood the structure of this problem, because as I said I'm about to put some real money on the line for you, and I want to make sure that when you make the decision, you make it understanding the structure of the case. So let me start by telling you what A's preference structure is with regard to outcomes, and then ask you with your clickers to tell me which choice is rational for A to make. So as we know from Glaucon, everybody's first choice is to reserve for themselves all the rights, but to have their opponent lay down his rights. So A's first choice is that A is war-like and B is peace-like. Everybody's fourth choice, as Glaucon points out, is to be stuck having laid down their arms when their enemy hasn't done so. To be cooperating when their enemy is failing to cooperate. So that's A's fourth choice. But as Glaucon and Hobbes both point out, between the choice of peace-peace and warwar, that is, a state of nature or a state of society where there's been a mutual laying down of rights, it is everybody's second choice, in particular A's second choice, to be in a peaceful state and A's third choice to be in a state of total war. So the question that I want you to answer--so the choice that A makes is which row we're in. A can put herself in a row where she's either going to get her second choice or her fourth choice. Or she can put herself in a row where she's going to get either her first choice or her third choice. That's the decision A has to make. Second or fourth choice, versus first or third choice. That's it. So, question, if you'll take out your clickers, is this. Which choice, given this matrix, is it rational for A to make? Is it rational for A to choose row one, where she will get either her second or fourth choice, or is it rational for A to choose row two, where she'll get her first or third choice? OK. So. The 4% of you who want to punish the guy who didn't do things that are wrong, to cut up the guy who showed up naively at the hospital, and to choose the dominated choice in a prisoners' dilemma matrix are here with us always. Those of you reading psychology articles who wonder why it is that in doing statistical analysis one needs to leave room for experimental error, can see over and over in our classroom environment why that is so.

But 96% of the answers brought out what is inherently the structure of this situation, namely, that given a choice between peace, where A will get her second or fourth choice, and war, will she get her first or third, the obvious thing for A to do is to choose the lower row. So now we have A's decision made. What is rational for A to do is to choose the lower row. The situation for B is of course exactly symmetric. B gets to choose the column, so B can choose--B's first choice would be that A is peaceful while B is war-like, B's fourth choice is that A is war-like, while he's peace-like. B's second choice is peace-peace and B's third choice is war-war. So just to check again and let's see if I can get rid of that residual 4%, let's try again. What is the rational choice for B to make in this situation? If you do a good job on this, we'll go to the real money one. What is the rational choice for B to make in this situation, given that peace will give him his second or fourth choice and war will give him his first or third? So let's see how the numbers come out this time for us. Three, two, one second, and... [laughter] Professor Tamar Gendler: Ha, ha, ha. All right. Excellent. So there we go. Ninety-two percent of you on eternity on the internet have given a rational answer, and 8% of you forever, anonymously, will be known to have put yourself in situation one. So the structure of The Prisoners' Dilemma with regard to B is also that the column that is rejected is the peaceful column. So what we have is a situation where A determines the row, sorry, where B determines the column, and chooses the war-like column. A determines the row and chooses the war-like row. And the result of this is that it is a stable situation in dilemmas of this kind that everybody ends up with their third choice. Now, the structure that we've just described in the context of the Glaucon-Hobbes style social contract question is of course a structure that emerges over and over again. Any choice situation where the person choosing the column has an array like this, and the person choosing the row has an array like this. That is, any situation where there is asymmetric first and fourth choices and symmetric second and third choices, will end up stably putting people in a situation where they both end up with their third choice. So, for example, if we put people--we're police officers and we put criminals in a dilemma, this is why it's called The Prisoners' Dilemma--where we incentivize unilateral confession over staying silent, it will turn out that both prisoners will be motivated to confess, ending up with their third choice rather than what would have been their second, both staying silent. If we are in a nuclear arms race with another country where mutual disarmament would leave both countries with a peace dividend, it will nonetheless be the case that the fear of the other party defecting and the fear of perhaps ending up in one of these cells, will push both parties to the third choice. Third choice.

If we are in the situation described at the beginning of today's reading, Hume's story of two individuals, both of whom would benefit if they put in the effort to drain the swamp outside of their field, neither of whom wants to be the only one to do it, you will get a noncooperative situation. And you face analogous situations with any sort of cooperative scenario where multiple people cooperating would produce an outcome that was beneficial for the group as a whole, but no individual wants to be the one who takes on an undue burden. So vaccination is another example of a prisoners' dilemma. There's a certain low risk associated with vaccinating your child or yourself against a disease. There's a very, very low risk that the child will get very ill and a somewhat moderate risk that the child will have slight illness. On the other hand, if nobody engaged in vaccination, we would be much worse off. And, in fact, the motivation not to vaccinate would dissipate. So more generally, prisoners' dilemmas arise when the cooperative situation is dominated by the defect situation. And the puzzle that we will talk about after we run through a few more examples is how, if at all, it's possible to move from this cell to this cell. So as I pointed out, prisoners' dilemmas arise in asymmetric cases where one-sided cooperation is the most costly option, where one-sided defection is the most beneficial option, where twosided defection is somewhat costly, and where two-sided defection [correction: cooperation] is somewhat beneficial. Chapter 2. The Classroom Dilemma [00:20:11] Now, how are we going to do that in this class? Here's what I came up with. This is the classroom dilemma, and it's for real. It's for real. The money's right here and I have a list of the names of the students who are actually going to get money from this for each dilemma that we play. We're playing three right now. One of you, and I'll tell you afterwards, will actually get one of the following payoffs. If you choose one, and the majority of the class chooses one, you will get $15. If you choose one, and the majority of the class chooses one, you will get $15. Here's a twenty right here, and I will make change for you. If you choose two, and the majority of the class chooses one, you will get $50. Fifty dollars. I'm betting on game theory here. If you choose one and the majority of the class chooses two--I wanted to put in a penalty here but I couldn't ask you for money. So you'll just get nothing. And if you choose two and the majority of the class chooses two, you will get $5. Now, just to point out that I am good on my word, Sarah Cox, are you here today? Sarah Cox. Sarah Cox, did you get $5 from me on March--I'm sorry, on February 15? Yeah. Sarah Cox did get $5. And looking back over my notes made me realize that I never selected somebody for the second prize, and March 22 and 24 were last week, so Tara Abraham, are you here? Wow. Tara Abraham, you will get either, you will actually get $6, because I'm just going to assume that you were in the 97%. So come up after class and get your money.

OK. So I want to tell you that I'm serious, and here's the classroom dilemma. Here it is. If you choose one, you will get either $15 or zero dollars, depending on what the majority of the class does. If you choose two--swear, I'm totally serious--you will get either $50 or $5, depending on what the rest of the class does. I mean it. Start clicking. Only eight of you? Nobody wants the money? I'm going to start the timer. Don't miss your chance. This is real money. There is a list of names right here, for real. Those two people that I called are really here. These are not plants. If you're not here somebody else will get the money. So bid away. You have 10, 9, 8, let's see whether game theory is on my side. All right, let's see what we got. OK. The majority of the class chose two, so there I am. And the individual selected is Charles Holmes. Charles Holmes, are you here? Charles Holmes is not getting what Charles Holmes might have gotten, which is either zero or $5--well, Charles Holmes is getting zero dollars, but not as a result of this. Sello Lekalakala, are you here? Sello Lekalakala Sello Lekalakala you-did you give an answer, Sello, of one or two? You gave an answer of two. Sello, after class, you may come up and get $5. Let's try it again. Let's see whether I am going to have to pay my $50. OK? I was betting that I would have to give $5, and I did. Notice, you guys, you ended up in the bottom right hand corner of the prisoners' dilemma. OK? Let's try it again. Same game. Trying it again. I'm really risking, right? Go ahead. Do what you can. Try to get your $50. Give it your best shot. All right. 49 of you. Let me start the timer, and let's see how the numbers come out. Let's see in our 4, 3, 2, 1 second live for television audiences, 68 and 32. OK, so once again the majority has put us in two. So let's see whether the victor, what the victor is going to get. Either $50 or $5. Sorry, either zero or $5. The winner this time is Helen Wang. Helen Wang, are you going to get zero, or $5? Are you here, Helen? OK. Helen, did you give--are you getting zero dollars or $5? You're getting $5. Excellent. All right. I'm out another $5. Let's try it one more time. Game theory on my side. Guys, you're in the bottom right hand corner. What's up? This is the prisoners' dilemma for you. Let's try it one more time. Which do you choose? Same bet all over again. OK? I have all the money right here. I stole it actually from my son's Bar Mitzvah folder. I don't have cash at home but he had a lot. All right. But I will fortunately be able to pay him back most of it, so he'll be grateful. OK. So let's see how our numbers are going. 49 of you up there again. Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one. Let's see whether I'm going to lose some money. Fifty-four percent. You're getting closer. Ah ha. I put it up three times, thinking very, very hard that I didn't want to put it up a fourth. OK. So the winner this time, Jared Jones. Jared Jones, are you here? Jared Jones, OK. Jared, do you get zero dollars or $5? You picked two. So once again $5, and we are in the bottom right hand corner of the prisoners' dilemma. OK, dudes, you missed out on the peace dividend, right? You would have been better off if somehow we could have ended up in the fifteen-fifteen cell. And the cooperation dividend, which was unavailable to you because of course this is a big room and you're seated in rows and you couldn't collude and there were no enforcement mechanisms. The cooperation dividend was unavailable to you.

What's the cooperation dividend look like? Well, it looks like this. Here are our two shepherds in the state of nature and each of them grows a garden. But because it's the state of nature, the green guy goes over to the red guy's garden and steals a tomato, and the red guy, angry at the green guy, goes over to the green guy's garden and smashes it up with his pitchfork. So the green guy says, I don't want the red guy smashing up my garden with his pitchfork. I'm going to put a fence around my garden, and he uses his effort to do that. And the red guy says, I don't want the green guy stealing my tomatoes, and he puts a fence around his garden. If, however, they had somehow been able to cooperate, to make some sort of agreement whereby they would keep their hands off the other fellow's garden, instead of putting that effort into building the fences, they could have put their effort into what Hobbes calls the features of commodious living. So the green fellow could've had a beautiful flower garden that attracts hummingbirds, and the red fellow could have developed a device that allows him to predict the motion of the planets. When we don't have to expend energy on things like protecting our property, we have extra energy left over for things like commodious living. And just to remind you where that fits in the context of things, this is Hobbes' explanation for why it is rational for us to engage in a social contract. Chapter 3. The Problem of the Commons [00:28:59] What I want to do now is to introduce you to a second notion closely related to that of The Prisoners' Dilemma. Namely, The Problem of the Commons. And I'll give you three examples of that, and then we'll get to play one more game. And there's real money on the line there, so let me say I have a lot left over from the last round. So here's The Problem of the Commons. Tragedy of the Commons. So suppose you live around a beautiful green area and you and your fellow shepherds each have a cow. So you put your cow out on the pasture to graze, and everything's going fine. Now there's a nice big pasture there, and in fact you would be better off if you had not one but two cows. So you and each of your fellow shepherds gets a second cow, and puts it out in the pasture. But of course if two cows were good, three cows are better. So you and each of your fellow shepherds puts your extra cow out, and now you have three cows apiece. Three cows great, four cows, super duper. Each of you gets a fourth cow, puts it out to pasture. And the result, if the clicker will work, the result is that there is no more space left to graze. The pasture gets destroyed. So scarce resources become depleted through The Tragedy of the Commons. Likewise, it's now the industrial revolution. We've made it past our shepherd days. You and your fellow industrialists each create one polluting plant, and here it is. Putting out a little bit of pollution. One polluting plant good, two polluting plants better, so out you go, and there's the profit. No idea why these are going non-cooperatively. There we go. You got

your third plant super fast on account of the clicker. And out comes the fourth plant for each of you. Result, the entire environment is polluted. Each of you did the thing that was rational, but the coordinated effect of your actions gave you a wildly sub-optimal result, an environment full of pollution. Notice that we can think of everybody in this class' favorite problem, the problem of procrastination, in light of The Tragedy of the Commons. Suppose this is a representation of the hours in your day. And this is your 9 a. m. self, and this is your noon self, and this is your 6 p.m. self, and this is your 10 p.m. self. Now, your 9 a.m. self and your noon self and your 6 p.m. self, and your evening self, all want to play a round of Angry Birds. But, you know what? One round good, two rounds better. Two rounds, good, three rounds great. Three rounds great, four rounds super, and all of a sudden you've spent your day playing Angry Birds. So the structure that The Tragedy of the Commons confronts us with is not just one of depletion of resources. It's not just one of pollution of the environment and other sorts of degradation that result from actions that are individually non-problematic, but as an aggregate, lead to bad outcomes. It's also a way of thinking about one of the questions we've asked ourselves over and over in this course. Which is, how do we structure our lives in such a way that our long-term goals are the ones we achieve? And when I say I'm not kidding that the trope of the Republic, that the individual and society mirror one another in important ways, here's another place that I'm not kidding. So let's play our own Tragedy of the Commons game. So here's how our Tragedy of the Commons game is going to go. OK. So the deal is this. Each of you can decide whether in this game, if you are the name called, and I have more names on my list, if you are the name called, whether you will take a reward of $1. If so, push one. Whether you will take a reward of $2, in which case, push two. Or whether you will take--Im sorry, of $10, push two. Or whether you will take a reward if called, of $50. Fifty dollars. There's a name on this list. There's roughly a hundred clickers, you have a one in 100 chance of $50 if you choose three. But here's the deal. If the total requested is less than $150, I'll reward the winning student with the amount that he or she has requested. But if the total requested, and I will say, I thought there would be more clickers than there are, this is a riskier game than I meant myself to be playing, but we will see. If the total requested is more than $150, Tragedy of the Commons, bank goes bust, too many requests, no reward. OK? So, the game is there, 22, 23, 24--I'm going to hold off. I want a lot of responses to this game. Let's see how these numbers come in. All right, I am going to play fair. I'm going to start count down now. Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one. You only came in at 85 responses? I may have to do some math. No, I don't have to do some math. Busted. You guys bankrupted the bank. There's no way, right? I mean, at 30 times 10, you're way over the $150. Greedy, greedy, greedy. Who didn't get their dollar? Kyle Cooper, I'm sorry. You would've gotten some money and you got nothing. All right. Now, that's an interesting psychological question, why it's worse to have gotten nothing that way than the way that all the rest of you got nothing? OK.

So, what's going on in The Tragedy of the Commons is what you see here. That is, each of you did what was individually rational, I mean, 18% percent of you went for the big money. But 38% of you went for $10. Only 45% of the students chose the option that was possible for everybody to take. You violated the categorical imperative. All right. Well, that's life. But the question is, now that we've presented ourselves with these two versions of the puzzle, The Prisoners' Dilemma on the one hand and The Tragedy of the Commons on the other, what kind of strategies there are for escape. Chapter 4. Strategies for Escaping the Problems [00:36:39] And in the last 10 minutes of lecture, I just want to talk through at a very general level what kinds of strategies are available. So remember, the issue is this. Three out of three times, you all ended up in the bottom right hand corner of The Prisoners' Dilemma. You ended up with your third choice rather than what could also potentially have been a stable outcome, your second. And in The Tragedy of the Commons, you all, as a result of your expression of rational self-interest, ended up in a situation where, as an aggregate, you were worse off. So what do we need to do to escape this situation? We need somehow to structure the decision situation so that we either decrease the relative utility of the sub-optimal behavior, or increase the relative utility of the optimal behavior. That is, somehow we want to make it the case that B isn't moving us over to the right, and that A isn't moving us down to the bottom. That's the only way for us to get out of this situation. So we have various mechanisms that are available to us for doing this. We can introduce some sort of penalty or reward for the asymmetric cells in a way that will either make the one less appealing, or the four less repulsive. So that the siren call of the first choice doesn't beckon B in the same way to defect, and the fear of the fourth choice doesn't beckon A to defect. The result of having done this will be to create the potential for some sort of stable, sustainable equilibrium at the preferred cell. At our two-two, rather than our three-three. So what sort of mechanisms are available in this context? Well, the first place we might look is to external penalties and external rewards. So one thing that we can do is simply to incentivize the cooperative behavior. We can do it with material incentives, like increased money or goods, things that are valuable. We can do it with social incentives. We can have status markers associated with cooperation. We can bring reputation costs into play. And when we play prisoners' dilemma games in sections next week, you'll have an opportunity to try out all of these things. Or we can induce certain kinds of personal incentives. We can increase your freedoms or your privileges as a result of your having cooperated. And with respect to each of these kinds of incentives, there are counterparts which are penalties. So, there can be material penalties associated with non-cooperation. We can decrease your amount of money. We can take away some of your goods. There can be social penalties associated with noncooperation. You could face a decrease in status or a decrease in reputation. Or, there could be personal costs associated with non-cooperation. Decreases in freedom, or decreases in your privileges.

So these are the sorts of penalties and rewards that can be imposed in such a way to change the incentive structure of The Prisoners' Dilemma. But in addition to there being different sorts of incentives and penalties, one of the things that's important to recognize in thinking about this question is that there can also be different sorts of mechanisms of enforcement that are put into play. And this will ultimately bring us to why it is that Hobbes thinks it's required that we have the sort of external force that the government provides. So we might on the one hand have mechanisms of enforcement that are intrapersonal. We might create within ourselves certain kinds of attitudes that cause us to cultivate cooperative behavior. Conscience is an instance of an intrapersonal solution to coordination problems. You internalize social norms, it becomes part of your self-conception, and as a result, you behave in pro-social ways. It could be in the context of The Tragedy of the Commons. It could be in the context of The Prisoners' Dilemma. It could be in the context of your own cultivation of habits to overcome that intrapersonal, cross-temporal prisoners' dilemma that we all face with regard to the temptations of Angry Birds. It could be some sort of informal, interpersonal, implicit or explicit schema. So, for example, you might adopt a strategy of cooperating in the first round of a prisoners' dilemma game, and then following the lead of whatever your co-player does, in subsequent rounds of the game. That, as you know from your reading, is called the tit-for-tat strategy. And a supplementary reading, which I will post for you, given the sort of war theme that has run through the course, is a wonderful piece by Robert Axelrod about the evolution of a tit-for-tat strategy in trench warfare during World War I. And that will be up later this afternoon. So sometimes informal cooperative strategies arise, and either implicitly or explicitly people engage in relatively stable rounds of cooperation. We can put into place formal, interpersonal, formal impersonal, institutional structures. Things like laws, and the state, where there's in position a regulation from an outside force. And we can finally put in place various kinds of technological controls. Turning off the wireless Internet on your computer. Setting up the missiles during the Cold War so that they fire without human intervention under certain situations. And those two can serve the function of enforcement. So the ways of getting out of The Prisoners' Dilemma, The Problem of the Commons, are manifold. And they make use of virtually all of the sorts of considerations that we've looked at in class this semester. What I want to close with is by letting you see how much more clearly thinking about things in this way has, I hope, enabled you to understand the final bit of Hobbes that we read for Tuesday's class. So you'll recall I gave you the first and second laws of nature. That the first law of nature said, make peace where possible, reserve war where necessary. And the second said, lay down your rights exactly to the extent that others are willing to lay down theirs. The third law of nature, says Hobbes, is to perform your covenants, but he points out that you will be unable to follow this law that self-interest demands if you face the live possibility that the other party will renege. Because if that happens you will move from your second choice to

your fourth choice. And no one wants to end up there. So, says Hobbes, in order to have covenants which will allow you to thrive and flourish and gain the benefits of cooperation, there must be some sort of enforcement in place. And what Hobbes suggests there must be is a coercive power that compels men equally to the performance of their covenants by the terror of some punishment greater than the benefit they expect by the breach of their covenants. That is, Hobbes is articulating in the selections that we read from chapter 15 of Leviathan, one of the strategies, which by mathematical analysis of the case, we realized would be sufficient to move people from the three-three cell to the two-two one. So what we'll look at next week are two different kinds of justifications for various kinds of social structure. We'll look at John Rawls' appeal to our notions of fairness, and Robert Nozick's discussion of the notion of liberty. And the four of you to whom I owe money are welcome to come up now to obtain it. [end of transcript]

Lecture 21 - Equality [April 5, 2011]

Chapter 1. Justice as the First Virtue of Social Institutions [00:00:00] OK, so as you know, we've moved in our discussion to the question of what sort of social structures are either legitimate or contributory to the well being of humans, given our nature. And we ended last lecture by having a game theoretic representation of what I called the cooperation dividend, which you'll recall involves the case of two individuals who, fearful that the other will attack their resources, expend a certain amount of energy walling off their goods. Where if they were somehow to find themselves in a situation where they could cooperate and trust themselves to cooperate, their energy could be devoted, instead of to the protection of their goods, to the production of other sorts of goods. Those required, as Hobbes says, for commodious living and for things like navigation. Goods that would allow both of them to be better off. And in the last two lectures we looked at the writings of Thomas Hobbes in the context of his work, Leviathan, which explored both why it is that the cooperation dividend is expected to be to the advantage of all and also why it is that in order to hold cooperation in place, certain sorts of external enforcement mechanisms--in Hobbes's mind, a Leviathan, a monarch or leader who has absolute power--is required to hold this sort of cooperation in place. What we're going to turn to in the lectures today and Thursday is a contemporary version of this question, which asks us to think about--if we are considering not merely the cooperation or lack of cooperation between two people, but rather the distribution of goods and responsibilities across a larger community--how it is that such a society should be structured if we take as our basic picture something similar to Hobbes. Namely the idea that cooperation is beneficial to all in a way that competition isn't, but that stably promoting cooperation requires certain sorts of incentivizing. And so what we'll at look in particular today is discussion by the 20th-century philosopher John Rawls who lived from 1921 to 2002 and who taught at Harvard throughout his career. We encountered Rawlss writings already in a very early paper, the 1955 paper on punishment that we looked at where he introduced the idea of a two-level justification of punishment. And what we'll be looking at in today's lecture is Rawls's discussion in his enormously influential 1971 book, A Theory of Justice. So Rawls's Theory of Justice, which in many ways brought back into contemporary philosophical discussion consideration of a set of questions which we traced all the way back to Plato's Republic--why is it in people's self interest to participate in a societal structure--and brought it back in a way that entered the public discourse. A Theory of Justice is the kind of book that you'll see cited in legal cases. You'll see it discussed not merely in academic journals, but also in intellectually grounded conversations about the legitimacy of the society.

And A Theory of Justice begins with these famous words. Rawls says, after saying what he hopes to do in the book, that "Justice is the first virtue of social institutions as truth is of systems of thought." He says, "Just as a theory, however elegant and economical, must be rejected or revised if it's untrue, so, too laws and institutions, no matter how efficient or well arranged, must be reformed or abolished if they are unjust." This is an articulation of what Rawls sees as the central commitment of a certain outlook of the legitimacy of government. A Western picture--and perhaps more general picture-according to which, a social structure, an arrangement of fundamental institutions by which lives are governed, is legitimate if and only if the institutions which it supports are just. So just as a theory which is extraordinarily elegant but false should be rejected on the grounds that it's untrue, so too, says Rawls, should a societal structure which is elegant but unjust be rejected. He goes on to identify what he sees as some fundamental commitments of this sort of picture. He writes, for example, that "each person possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override. For this reason, justice denies that the loss of freedom for some is made right by a greater good shared by others." Now we thought about this question--the question of the trade-off of goods across individuals--in the context of our discussion of consequentialism on the one hand and other moral theories, deontology and virtue theory on the other. What Rawls gives voice to--both here and in sections 5 and 26 of Theory of Justice, which I had you read--is another reason related to the reason that we read about in Bernard Williams, this idea of dignity. Another reason for rejecting as a fundamental way of making sense of human responsibility; consequentialism as its grounding basis. But what might not have been apparent to you when we were reading things like The Trolley Problem, was the connection of this outlook--this idea that each person possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare society as a whole cannot override,--and one of the foundational documents of this nation. So among the truths that Thomas Jefferson thought we hold to be self-evident, is that all men are created equal and that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights. And that among these,--these rights such that even the utility of society as a whole is not sufficient to override them--are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Moreover, you'll see in this founding document--this is of course the Declaration of Independence--that there is voice given to exactly the contract-carrying picture that we first recognize in its inchoate form in Glaucon's discussion of the role of justice in Plato's Republic and much more clearly in the work of Hobbes. So listen to what comes next. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. The idea that entering into a social contract with one another--whereby as a way securing the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, we subject ourselves to a rule of law, which we thereby take to be legitimate--is central, both to the social contract tradition as articulated in

Hobbes and his successors, Locke and Rousseau and Kant, and to this document, which all of us have presumably encountered previously. Moreover, continues this document, whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it and to institute a new government. What kind of new government? What's Jefferson's answer? A new government, where laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form as to them shall seem most likely to affect their safety and happiness. So the idea that we set out to create a government that gains its legitimacy through our recognition that thereby our self-interest is advanced is a central notion to the American political tradition. Chapter 2. Rawls on Justice [00:11:33] So how does it manifest itself in the particular text that we're thinking about today? How does John Rawls, in this book from the 1970s, attempt to give contemporary voice to this set of concerns that 200 years prior to him were given voice to by Thomas Jefferson and 150 years prior to that were given voice to by Thomas Hobbes? So Rawls begins by saying what it is that he takes society to be. Society, that which we're trying to identify a set of characteristics for, is a more or less self-sufficient association of persons, who in their relations to one another recognize certain rules of conduct as binding and who, for the most part, act in accordance with them. You'll recall that at the end of the Prisoners Dilemma lecture last week and also in our readings for last Thursday, we looked at mechanisms other than the ones that Hobbes identified for enforcing social contract. Hobbes thought the most effective way was the imposition of a sovereign, whose threat of penalty and punishment would hold people to behave in certain ways. But it turns out that in addition to that, the taking on implicitly through conscience or habit of certain kinds of norms of interaction ends up playing as great if not larger a role in allowing societies to function smoothly. And in next Tuesday's readings we'll look at some social psychological work that directly addresses that question. So Rawls has told us what it is that he thinks a society is for the purposes of discussion. It's a more or less self-sufficient association of persons, who in their relations to one another recognize something--that is certain rules of conduct--as binding and, for the most part--not always, I know some of you talk on your cell phone while you drive--act in accordance with them. These rules specify a system of cooperation that's designed to do what? It's designed to do the thing that Thomas Jefferson was talking about in the Constitution. It's designed to do the thing that Thomas Hobbes was talking about in Leviathan. It's designed to do the thing that Glaucon was talking about in his challenge to Socrates. They specify a system of cooperation that is designed to advance the good of those taking part of it. The legitimacy of government on this picture derives from the fact that it is to the advantage of those who participate in it.

However--and this is the perplexing feature that makes political philosophy a discipline of great intellectual interest--although a society is a cooperative venture for mutual advantage, it is, says Rawls, undeniably typically marked by conflict as well as identity of interests. Why is this? It's because while there is an identity of interests--because social cooperation makes possible a better life for all than any would have if each were to live solely by his own efforts. That is, we get dividends as the result of not having to expend our energy on protecting ourselves from the threat of others' harm. Each of us--as we know from the last two lectures--is better off when we can count on others to be cooperative. It is nonetheless the case that there is a conflict of interests in any society since persons are not indifferent as to how the greater benefits of their collaboration are distributed. Roughly speaking, each prefers a larger to a lesser share. If there are cooperation dividends, that is good and produces a reason for cooperation. But when there are cooperation dividends, each of us--reasonably enough--wants as many of the dividends as we can get. And the consequence of that is that although society is a cooperative venture for mutual advantage, it's typically marked by conflict as well as identity of interests. So this gives rise to the next level question. When we read Hobbes we read only the very beginning of his discussion of the social contract, just a bit from the end of book one and the very beginning of book two. Rawls is now turning to a question beyond that. Namely, what set of principles ought we to adopt, given the fact of conflict? So we're taking it as a given that we want cooperation, we want some sort of societal structure. As a result we're going to end up with more stuff than we would have had if we hadn't been cooperating. How should that stuff, how should those goods--some tangible, some intangible--be distributed? So Rawls points out that a set of principles is required for choosing among the various social arrangements, which determine this distribution of advantages. These principles provide a way of assigning rights and duties in the basic institutions of society. Things like what the legal system looks like. Things like what the economic system looks like. Things like what the fundamental rights and responsibilities of citizens look like. And what they do is to define an appropriate distribution of benefits and burdens of social cooperation. Because, as we've already noted, social cooperation brings with it undeniable benefits but it also brings with it certain kinds of burdens. Your freedom is restricted in certain ways in a cooperative system. And it may well be the case that the benefits that accrue to the social system go to someone else. So we're now at a point where I will give voice to what Rawls calls the main idea of the theory of justice. And then I'm going to explain to you how that fits with his notion of the veil of ignorance. And then just as your attention is beginning to flag, we're going to do some clickers. So hold up, a little more fact and then some fun. So the main idea of The Theory of Justice is, as I've pointed out to you already, something that is part of the social contract tradition. Rawls explicitly says in the first footnote of the text we read for today that he's working primarily from the social contact picture as articulated in Locke, Rousseau and Kant, but that he is harkening back to Hobbes in it. And this, as you know, is the following idea, that each of us recognizes that there's a certain

advantage to living in a society where we're not constantly under threat, that each recognizes that non-threat can be achieved--this idea that you're not constantly at risk in this cold war of all against all. That non-threat can be achieved only under general cooperation. And that general cooperation can be achieved only under some sort of implicit or explicit enforcement system. So Rawls, with that social contract framework in mind, goes on to ask, what would it take to get a clear picture of what that enforcement system ought to look like if, as we recall, it's meant to be something, which is for the good of each of its participants? And here is what he says. He says, "The principles of justice, of the basic structure of society, are those that free and rational persons concerned to further their self-interest would accept in an original position of equality as defining the fundamental terms of their association" That is there are four fundamental ideas that underlie this picture. The rules that govern your society, the rules that govern a legitimate society, into which you ought to contract, are rules that you would accept if you were free, rational, self-interested and in a position of equality with respect to all of the other free, rational and self-interested individuals who are also contracting into this society. How can we possibly get there? How can we possibly determine what free, rational, selfinterested and equal individuals would agree to, given that--as a matter of fact--we're not all equal? Some of us were born into families of wealth and some of us were born into families of poverty. Some of us were born with certain sets of natural talents; others were born with other sets. Some of us were born with certain sorts of conceptions--or some of us were raised to have certain sorts of conceptions--of the good life. Others of us were raised to have others. Rawls's idea is this: the principles that articulate the legitimate structure of society are those to which you would agree if you did not know which person you were going to be. So he asks you to imagine that you sit behind what's he called a veil of ignorance, where no one knows his place in society, his class position, his social status, his fortune in the distribution of natural assets and abilities, his intelligence, his strength or his conception of the good. From this position, where you don't know which person you are going to be, you get the fourth of our four requirements. You get equality. Because nothing particular about your self-interest will play a role. And having put yourself in this imaginary position, where ignorance brings with it a certain kind of ability to think clearly about the question, each party then freely determines on the basis rational self-interest. So that gives us freedom, rationality and self-interest. The framework that they think would be best. So the idea is this: a bunch of people who don't know what role they will play in society sit behind the veil of ignorance and think, how would I want society to be structured if I didn't know whether I was going to end up as a shepherd or a capitalist or a doctor or a construction worker or a police officer or someone who has difficulties with the authority of police officers or somebody who's differently abled or perhaps even as a Yale football player? And from behind this veil of ignorance, recognizing that any one of these identities could end up being the one that they would have, these individuals come up with a framework for how it is that society would be structured.

So recognizing that they might be extraordinarily wealthy, they may take into consideration what it would take for society to allow individuals to flourish under those conditions. But they might recognize at the same time that they might end up as one of the construction workers. Perhaps they would end up as a doctor. Perhaps the set of abilities that they had would differ from those of the majority of the society and so on. So what you have in the articulation of the veil of ignorance as a way of thinking about this question, is Rawls's version of a theme that we have seen over and over and over again in this course. Hobbes says to you: When you think about political structures, think about yourself as not being different from everyone else. Be willing, he says, "to lay down your rights to the extent that others are willing to do this the same. Content yourself with as much liberty against others as others have against you." Mill says, "Actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness. Not the agent's own happiness, but the happiness of all concerned." And Kant, again giving voice to this idea:--When you think from the moral perspective do not think of yourself as special--writes, "Act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it will become a universal law." Chapter 3. Testing Rawls in the Classroom [00:28:09] So if you will take out your clickers, we'll do three quick exercises where we look to see whether Rawls's strategy works. So let me explain to you how this goes. In this case, you are deciding whether to enroll in one of three sections of a course. So the lectures of the course will be identical in all three cases. But in option number one the course has four excellent sections, sections that earn a 9/10 on average student ratings. So four of the sections are excellent and one of the sections is terrible. And you don't know which section you're going to end up in. So in the first option you have the choice of going to the class and then you're going to be randomly assigned to one of sections. Four of them are excellent; one of them is terrible. The second option is that you can take the course and four of the sections are very good-they gave a score of 7/10 on average--and one of the sections is terrible. And you don't know which section you're going to be in. So if you take that, you have a 4/5 chance of being in a very good section, but you have a 1/5 chance of being in a terrible one. And in the third version of the course, four of the sections are very good. They get a 7/10. And one of the sections is so-so. So the question is, which course do you take? Do you sign up for the course that has four excellent and one terrible section? Remember you don't know which section you'll be in. Do you sign up for the course that has four very good and one terrible section? Or do you sign up for the course that has four very good and one so-so section? So is everybody clear on the structure of the question? And I'll start the voting. OK. All right, so let's go. Let's see. All right so, 60% percent of you are with--wow! Where are my outliers? Dudes! Everybody understood! Amazing! We have never--for those visitors who are here--we have never in

this class had 0% percent of people choose my obviously irrational choice. So I'm glad to see that showing off for non-Bulldog days, people are doing a good job. So roughly 60% of you are risk-takers. You're willing to take the 1/5 chance of being in the terrible class. But 40% of you are risk-averse in this context. Let's try it again. Exact same question, different scenario. So here's the scenario: you are entering a housing lottery and you can enter lottery one, lottery two or lottery three. Housing lottery one, there are four excellent and one terrible room. Housing lottery two, there are four very good and one terrible room. And housing lottery three, there are four very good and one so-so room. Again, you don't know where you will end up. Question, do you enter housing lottery one, housing lottery two or housing lottery three? And let's set the timer. Six, five, four, three, two, one. And let's see what we get. So, ha! You guys don't care about class but you're very risk averse on housing. So when it comes to your well-being in terms of the infrastructure in which you live, 68% of you are willing to forgo the possibility of an excellent room for the certainty that you won't end up in a room that is terrible. So let's try it one more time. Now you're going to a hospital. And here's the configuration. Hospital one: four excellent, one terrible doctor. Hospital two, four very good, one terrible doctor. Hospital three, four very good, one so-so doctor. You're asking the ambulance to take you to the ER. You don't know which doctor is on duty but you do know Hospital one has four excellent, one terrible. Hospital two has four very good, one terrible. Hospital three has four very good, one so-so. And let's see how the numbers come out on this. So, four, three, two, one. And let's see where you placed yourselves. So when it comes to high-stakes medical decisions, you are even more risk averse than you were with housing. How much more important than any of these local decisions is the global decision, what sort of societal framework do you want around you if you don't know what role you will play in it? So Rawls's question, which society do you choose, is meant to be a version of those three questions, which I just posed to you. Which medical system do you choose if you don't know what kind of individual you're going to be? And the answer was, you chose one that topped out at very good but bottomed out at so-so. What housing system do you choose? What education system do you choose? Those were special cases of the question Rawls is asking. What society do you choose from behind the veil of ignorance? And Rawls is very clear that the society that you choose has two basic commitments. The first is that when we are contracting into a social framework that will govern all aspects of our lives, the very first condition is that within that framework each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive total system of equal basic liberties that is compatible with a similar system of liberty for all. That is, that each of us is to have equal rights to vote, rights to hold public office, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, liberty of conscience, freedom of thought, freedom of person, right to hold property and freedom to be treated equally with respect to the rule of law. These, says Rawls, are non-negotiable and they're non-negotiable in the sense that if we offered you, from behind the veil of ignorance, the possibility of trading off some of these goods for the sake of utility, if you

did not know which individual you were going to be in that society you would not make that trade. This is the way in which Rawls attempts to derive those inviolable principles, which we saw at the beginning of The Declaration of Independence, from the idea that these are lines in the sand that would be drawn in any social framework to which free, rational, selfinterested, equal parties would sign on. So that's Rawls's first answer to the question, which society do you choose? You choose one that has a non-negotiable baseline right at the level of so-so or better, with respect to these fundamental liberties. These are things that don't get traded off for anything. In addition--and somewhat more controversially--says Rawls, you would, behind the veil of ignorance, subscribe to a societal structure where the distribution of social and economic inequalities followed a certain set of constraints. The first is, to the extent that social and economic inequalities arise in that society, they need to be attached to positions and offices that are open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity. If attending an outstanding educational institution will increase the likelihood that you can go on to have a job, whereby you gain fulfillment and earn a disproportionate share of society's resources, then it needs to be the case, says Rawls, that those positions, those opportunities, are open to all regardless of contingencies of circumstance that are irrelevant to the possibility of their making use of them. In particular, your family's financial resources shouldn't play a role in your ability to access these opportunities. So fair equality of opportunity is the first condition that Rawls thinks needs to hold in order for social and economic inequalities to be acceptable to you from behind the veil of ignorance when you do not know who you will be. In addition, and even more controversially, Rawls thinks that behind the veil of ignorance it would be agreed by the parties that social and economic inequalities would be accepted as legitimate only to the extent that those inequalities are to the advantage of all. And, in particular, to the advantage of those who are least well off. So Rawls does not deny that a rising tide lifts all boats, that there may well be cases where allowing discrepancies in income or resources or educational opportunities or the quality of health care would--as a matter of fact--lead everybody to be better off. Perhaps the fact that there are research hospitals is of great value, even to those who don't have direct access to those hospitals. Nonetheless, it is because, and only because, those inequalities benefit the least well off that Rawls thinks they would be agreed to behind the veil of ignorance. Moreover, Rawls thinks that these principles, which I've articulated--the first principle, the equal liberty principle, and the second principle, which tells us the conditions under which inequality is legitimate--are what he calls lexically ordered so that no utilitarian trade-offs are permitted. In particular, there is no trading freedom for utility. If it would be advantageous to society as a whole to engage in a certain sort of racial profiling, for example, to reduce crime but in so doing the liberties of a certain group would be impinged upon, that utility consideration is not sufficient, says Rawls More over, as I've pointed out, on Rawls's picture, inequality is permitted only when the advantage goes to the least well off. So in the last three, four minutes of class, I want to do

two more polls with you. So if your clickers are available, I want to see what your thoughts are on this. And if your thoughts diverge from Rawls, I'm going to give you four places to identify the locus of disagreement. So let's start with this. You're trying to choose among societies. Society one has an average income of $100,000 and 85% of its citizens have the right to vote and have freedom of conscience and religion and the like. That is, this is a society in which 15% of people lack basic civil rights but the average income is $100,000. Society number two has an average income of $70,000 and 15% of the people lack basic rights. Society number three has an average income of $70,000 but 100% of the people have basic freedoms. You're behind the veil of ignorance. You do not know whether you will be among the 15% in society one or two. As a matter of free, equal, self-interested rationality, which society do you choose? One, two, or three. And let's see how these numbers come out. So, it looks like the lexical priority of the first principle over the second is one over which there isn't a great deal of controversy. Let's try the difference principle. Three societies. You don't know who you will be. Society number one: average income of $100,000. Lowest income: $10,000. Society number two: average income $70,000, lowest income, $10,000. Society number three: average income is $70,000, lowest income, $20,000. You do not know who you will be. Which society do you choose? And let's see how the numbers come out on the difference principle. OK. So, still, huh. Not as much difference as I had expected. Interesting to see, that most of you--even here--are egalitarian. Averse to an increase in the average if is at the cost to the least advantaged. So for those of you who are in the 27% here and for those of you more generally who aren't accepting the Rawlsian framework, I want to point out four different places where you might be stepping away from him. The first is that you may disagree with him about what sorts of principles would be chosen behind the veil of ignorance. You might think that maximin reasoning--remember in section 26 he says, behind the veil of ignorance, people would be risk-averse. They would distribute goods in such a way that they benefited the least well off. So you might deny that behind the veil of ignorance the principles that Rawls says would be chosen would be chosen. You might deny that it's the choice that one make behind the veil of ignorance that represents what free, equal, rational and self-interested persons would accept as fundamental terms of their association. That is, you might think the veil of ignorance is not an effective device of representation for answering the question which Rawls sets out to answer. Or you might think that what free, rational, self-interested equal persons would accept as fundamental terms of association is what the veil of ignorance gives you, but that doesn't determine what's just.

Or you might think--and we'll consider this answer in our lecture on Thursday--that it's not the case that the first virtue of social institutions is justice. But rather that there are other values even more fundamental that lie at the center of political legitimacy. And we'll turn to that question in our lecture on Thursday. [end of transcript]

Lecture 22 - Equality II [April 7, 2011]

Chapter 1. Introducing Nozick [00:00:00] Professor Tamar Gendler: So the topic of today's lecture, as you can see from the title, is liberty. And the best way to get a sense of the project in which we will find ourselves engaged today is to contrast the opening pages of Rawlss Theory of Justice with the opening pages of Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia. So you'll recall that when we were reading the Rawls--for some reason the remote is not working, that's a pity but there we go--you'll recall that when we were reading the Rawls, Rawls began his text by speaking of justice as the first virtue of social institutions. It plays the role with regard to the legitimacy of an institution that truth plays with regard to the legitimacy of a system of thought. Each person, says Rawls, possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override. For this reason, says Rawls famously in these opening pages, justice denies that the loss of freedom for some is made right by a greater good shared by others. So Rawls is concerned with an inviolability of humanity based on a notion of justice. Nozick is also concerned with a kind of inviolability. But rather than seeing the core of that inviolability as lying in some notion of justice, he sees it as lying in a notion of rights. So he says in the opening of the preface, the first sentence which you read for today. "Individuals have rights and there are things that no person or group may do to them without violating those rights." And he goes on to say that the minimal state limited to the narrow functions of protection against force, theft, fraud, the enforcement of contracts and so on is the most extensive state that can be justified. Any state more extensive than the minimal state violates people's rights. So there's something extraordinarily interesting going on in this pair of works. Both of them are concerned with the fundamental question which we first encountered in the context of Hobbes: how could it be that it's legitimate to have a state? Both of them are concerned with structuring the state in such a way that it doesn't violate that which is perceived as being on their picture as inviolable. But they differ profoundly in what sort of state they end up calling legitimate. Perhaps because at the core of Rawlss picture lies a notion of justice, whereas at the core of Nozick's picture lies a notion of rights. So what I want to do in today's lecture is to contrast some of the themes, which we encountered last lecture in the context of Rawlss Theory of Justice by looking at a particular famous chapter of his colleague Robert Nozick's work, Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Even from the brief selections that you read from these two works, the differences between them should have been evident to you. They were written a mere three years apart. Rawlss Theory of Justice was published in 1971. Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia three years later in 1974. Rawls and Nozick at the time had offices down the hall from one another.

But Rawlss work, as you will feel, is part of a major philosophical project. It's extraordinarily self reflective. Rawls is in his middle age when he writes it. And he's been thinking about these questions for decades. Nozick's book is an extraordinarily insightful response to Rawls, as well as being a positive formulation of a view. But it's not a work with the gravitas of Theory of Justice. It was written when Nozick was quite young. He was in his early 30s. And it's important to know that although these works are typically paired in philosophy courses,--(if you took--or are taking--Moral Foundations of Politics or an introductory political theory course, you will get these two books paired together.)--Theory of Justice is, if you look at its citation index, more than three times more influential, if that's the measure, than Anarchy, State, and Utopia. So Theory of Justices Google Scholar citation is roughly 30,000 whereas Anarchy, State, and Utopia is roughly 10,000. These are extraordinarily high numbers in philosophy. Those of you who have encountered works in other domains of philosophy, for example Kripke's Naming and Necessity, written at about this time, its citation numbers are about half that of Anarchy, State, and Utopia, about 5,000. So what I want you to take home from this is the idea that these are enormously influential works with consequences far beyond academic philosophy, but that they differ in their tone. Chapter 2. Justice in Holdings [00:06:28] So Anarchy, State, and Utopia is an attempt to defend the minimal state from two different kinds of objections. In the first part of the work, Nozick defends the state against the position of anarchy. He argues that a minimal state is justified, that it's not the case that it's a violation of people's rights to have basic enforcement of laws, police and the sort of fundamental things that are required for the basic stability of getting out of Hobbes's state of nature. The second part of the book, with which our reading was concerned, defends the minimal state against a more maximalist picture. And in that part of the book, Nozick defends the rights of people to liberty in two kinds of domains. The first is that he defends people's rights to enter into almost any sort of contract that they would like. He defends, for example, the right of people under certain conditions to contract themselves into slavery. He defends, in other contexts, the right to have an enforceable blackmail contract. That's not the part of the book which we read excerpts from. The part of the book that we read excerpts from, and to which the remainder of lecture will be devoted, is Nozick's discussion of our relation to property. So what Nozick tries to do in the famous seventh chapter of Anarchy, State, and Utopia is to articulate a notion of justice in holdings--that is, justice with respect to property--that provides a principled explanation of the relation among the three different kinds of concerns that one has in asking about whether it's legitimate for a person to own a piece of property. The first is the question of justice in acquisition. Under what conditions--when I initially come to acquire something, say a tomato--is my acquisition of it such that my ownership of the object is in keeping with the conditions of justice? And we'll talk about Nozick's views on justice in acquisition in a minute.

The second question that Nozick is concerned with here is the question of justice in transfer. So he's concerned with the question, if I have an object and I wish to transfer possession of that object to you, under what conditions is that transfer justice-preserving? And finally, Nozick is concerned with the question of rectification of injustice. So suppose I own something which you illegitimately take from me, under what conditions and how do I reclaim possession of that object? Nozick's argument is that we can say everything that needs to be said about justice in holdings--everything that needs to be said about the distribution of property in a society that doesn't violate people's rights--by appeal to an inductive definition that runs as follows. He says, "If a person acquires a holding in keeping with the principle of justice in acquisition, the person, p, is entitled to the holding." So, if I come to own something in a way that is legitimate, rule-following, my owning of that object is in keeping with the rules of justice. The second clause is an induction clause. "If a person acquires a holding, in keeping with the principle of justice in transfer, from somebody who was entitled--either as a result of a transfer or as the result of an initial acquisition--to hold that object, then the person is entitled to hold that object. And finally, Nozick has a closure clause. "No one is entitled to a holding except by repeated applications of one and two." Now those of you who have taken mathematics are familiar with this sort of definition. If I wanted to provide an inductive definition of the natural numbers, I might begin by saying one is a member of the set of natural numbers. That's my base clause. I then add, if anything is a member of the set of natural numbers, then that plus one is a member of the set of natural numbers. And then I put in place some sort of closure condition such that the natural numbers, for example, are all and only those things that satisfy the first and second clause. So the picture that Nozick is providing us with here is one that gives us a certain kind of closed system. So let's see how it works in a particular case. Nozick stresses that when you make use of the principles that he's articulated here, what matters is the process not the outcome. So suppose I come to possess a tomato. It makes all the difference in the world, on Nozick's view, what the actual process by which I came to possess that object is. If, for example, there was a garden down the road from me, which I didn't own, where a beautiful tomato sat, and I took that tomato without permission, my possession of that tomato is illegitimate. Hmm. Even if there is an alternative process--a hypothetical one--which I didn't in fact engage in whereby I could have come to have that tomato legitimately. If a thief takes your property, says Nozick, it doesn't make his possession of your property legitimate even if you could have voluntarily given it to him. Moreover, says Nozick, if I come to possess something illegitimately and I transfer it to you--even by legitimate means--it retains its illegitimate status. So the picture that Nozick is presenting in his discussion of holdings is one with the following characteristics. Justice in holdings--and this will be important for his critique of Rawls--justice in holdings is

historical. It depends on what actually happened. In particular, if something is owned as the result of an unjust acquisition, it produces an unjust holding. If something is owned as the result of an unjust acquisition plus a just transfer, it still produces an unjust holding. If something is owned as the results of a just acquisition and an unjust transfer, it produces an unjust holding. And if something is owned as a result of an unjust acquisition and an unjust transfer, it's not that these two injustices cancel one another out. Rather we have, again, an unjust holding. It's only under two conditions that holdings are just on Nozick's picture. The first is if it's a straightforward just acquisition. And the second is if there's a just acquisition followed by one or more just transfers. So far this isn't getting Nozick very far in terms of a critique of Rawls. But the next step will allow you to see how this notion of justice in property does work on the Nozick picture. What Nozick goes on to say is that the holdings of a person are just if he's entitled to them by the principles of justice in acquisition and transfer or in imperfect situations by the principle of rectification. That is, it is a necessary condition on justice in holding that they have been acquired through one of these two steps. But it is also a sufficient condition. If each person's holdings are just then there are no more questions to be asked about the aggregation of holdings. If each person's holdings are just, then the distribution of holdings is just. So we'll see when we get to justice in transfer how it is that this notion, both of taking historical properties as the relevant ones in determining justice and in taking the inductive property holding characterization as necessary and sufficient for justice in holdings, how it is that those pair of things provides Nozick with the leverage to criticize the outlook to which all of you from behind the veil of ignorance last class-- or the majority of you from behind the veil of ignorance last class-- seems to think was what justice mandated. That is, Nozick takes from this very simple picture an argument, which from his perspective renders illegitimate any sort of centralized redistribution of resources. Chapter 3. The Lockean Proviso [00:18:22] So you remember, in order to evaluate Nozick's inductive definition, that we need to know what it is that he thinks justice in acquisition involves. And what it is that he thinks justice in transfer involves. So the discussion of justice in acquisition is a rather complicated portion of the text that I had you read for today's class. What Nozick does is to make appeal to the work of the 17th century philosopher John Locke, whose Second Treatise on Government begins its discussion of property as follows. Locke writes, "Though the Earth and all inferior creatures be common to all men, yet every man has a property in his own person. This nobody has any right to but himself. The labor of his body and the work of his hands we may say are properly his." So on Locke's picture of the state of nature there's a world out there unowned. We're setting aside a set of concerns about whether this picture--that the Earth and all inferior creatures belong in any principled sense to human beings--and rather looking at what it is that Locke's argument for the justice in acquisition clause involves. So Locke says, the world

out there of objects doesn't belong to anybody. But what each person does have is the rights to his or her own body and, in particular, possession, ownership rights over his labor. So, says Locke, "Whatsoever he removes out of the state that nature hath provided and left in it he hath mixed his labor with and joined it to something that is his own and thereby makes it his property." Concluding, "It being by him removed from the common state nature placed it in, it hath by this labor something annexed to it that excludes the common right of other men. For this labor being the unquestionable property of the laborer, no man but he can have a right to what that is once joined to, at least when there is enough, and as good, left in common for others." So Nozick takes from this discussion of Locke two things. The first thing he takes is the idea that what justice in acquisition involves is a certain kind of mixing of what is one's own, one's labor, with something that is previously unowned--potential property in the state of nature. And although Nozick has all sorts of criticisms about the unclarity of this characterization. He says, for example, "If I go to Mars and sweep off a portion of the planet, have I thereby claimed just that portion? Have I claimed the entire planet of Mars? Have I claimed all of the planets that lie beyond it?" He also asks why it is that mixing one's labor with something should lead to possession of the object rather than the losing of one's labor. But ultimately he's willing to accept that something like the Lockean picture is going to underlie justice in acquisition. What worries him, and what he devotes the bulk of the selection that you read for last night to, is this concern about whether what he calls the Lockean Proviso, the idea that in order for acquisition to be legitimate there needs to be enough and as good left in common for others. Whether that Proviso is frequently violated. Because if that Proviso were frequently violated then justice in acquisitions wouldn't be simple and straightforward in the way that Nozick wants it to be. So the basic structure of the argument that you read--and I'll run through it in more detail in a minute--the basic structure of the argument that you read in the context of Nozick's discussion of Locke runs as follows. Locke has a reasonable picture of what acquisition of property involves. We need to fuss with it around the edges but I'm not going to worry about that, says Nozick. What I am going to worry about is whether this notion of there being enough and as good left in common for others is going to undercut the whole Lockean picture. So what's the idea look like? Suppose that four of us come upon a field of previously unclaimed cows. And that one of us claims four of the cows. And then a second of us claims six of the cows and a third of us claims the remaining six cows. Has the Lockean Proviso been violated? Nozick's first worry, which he calls the unzipping worry, is that perhaps it's not just the blue character who took the last six cows who's violated the Lockean Proviso. Perhaps the yellow character, in limiting the blue character, has violated it and the red character, in limiting the yellow character by limiting the blue character, has somehow violated the Lockean Proviso.

Nozick says no. The fact that the red character's activities limited the yellow character's activities, if we took into consideration the blue character's activities, is not sufficient to render red or yellow in violation of the Lockean Proviso. So that's step one. But we still might wonder whether the blue character has violated the Lockean Proviso. After all, how could he have left as much and as good for our fourth character--pink over here--if pink isn't in a position to get any cows? Nozick's answer is that in taking on ownership of objects and mixing one's labor with them, typically what the subject does is to increase the value of those objects for all. So red, from his four cows, might produce one gallon of milk. And yellow might produce two and blue might produce three. As a result, pink--though he doesn't have access to the cows--is better off. And, says Nozick, the Lockean Proviso has not been violated. So what Nozick says in particular, is he asks whether the situation of persons who are unable to appropriate--there being no more accessible and unowned objects--is their situation worsened by a system of allowing appropriation and private property? And the answer he gives is a resounding no. For exactly the sort of reasons that we're familiar with from our Hobbes case--the idea that there is a kind of social contract that kicks in that allows everybody to benefit. And also because Nozick firmly believes that individual ownership brings with it a particular kind of efficiency. So Nozick's worry, which was: is the Lockean Proviso going to knock my theory out of the water such that I can't get the base clause of my inductive argument going? Nozick's conclusion is that appropriation of private property satisfies the intent behind the enough and as good left over Proviso. But, he is careful to point out, this is not based on utilitarian reasoning. It's not based on a utilitarian justification of property. Nozick--like Rawls--is concerned with articulating a rights based theory. And so, like Rawls, doesn't allow trade-offs of rights for utilities. So the argument about the original acquisition of property runs as follows. Nozick says, I have the right to do everything that doesn't harm others and the right to do only what doesn't harm others. My rights begin and end in their restrictions and permissions with consideration of what brings harm to others. Violating the Lockean Proviso, if I managed to do that, would leave others worse off than they would have been otherwise and consequently would harm them. As a consequence, says Nozick, I don't have the right to violate the Lockean Proviso. If, as a matter of fact, my original acquisition of property doesn't leave as much and as good for others, then my original acquisition was not an instance of just property ownership. But, says Nozick, except in very rare cases--he calls them conditions of catastrophe or desert island limitations--acquiring property doesn't violate the Lockean Proviso or harm others. And the argument for this sub-clause, this sub-argument, is a utility-based argument. It's on the grounds of utility that I get the premise that except in rare cases acquiring property doesn't violate the Lockean Proviso. But the fundamental argument, I have the right to do all and only what doesn't harm others. Except in very rare cases acquiring property does not violate the Lockean Proviso and harm

others. That one, plus four, is sufficient to give us the conclusion that except in very rare cases I have the right to acquire property. So that is, by way of exposition, of what I understand to have been a fairly difficult part of the assigned text. Chapter 4. The Wilt Chamberlain Argument [00:30:42] So let's move now to an easier segment of the text. So as we noted, Nozick provides his defense of the base clause by appeal to Locke's notion of original acquisition of property and defends that against the potential objection--the Lockean Proviso objection--in providing a clearer sense of what that amounts to. In many ways the most famous part of the text comes in Nozick's defense of the induction clause. So in defending the induction clause--which, remember, says that if P acquires H, in keeping with the principle of justice in transfer, from somebody already entitled, that P is entitled to H--Nozick is concerned with what justice in transfer amounts to. So he begins by distinguishing something that should be familiar to all of you from your readings of Mill and Kant earlier this semester. He distinguishes between principles that are historical--that is that tell us that whether a distribution is just depends upon how it came about. That is, what we are concerned with when we are concerned about justice is a question of process. And he contrasts those with what he calls end-result principles where, whether a distribution is just depends upon how things are distributed. So you'll remember that when we were reading Kant and trying to determine whether an action counted as moral or morally praiseworthy, Kant was concerned about the process by which that action was carried out. Mill, by contrast, was concerned with outcome. Nozick goes on, in the opening parts of chapter seven that we read, to provide a defense of historical principles and to argue that one consequence of that will be that we can never judge the justice of a society by looking at how its goods are distributed. So, he points out, it has been typical in the articulation of theories of justice, to claim that a society is just if goods are distributed according to some sort of independently specifiable criterion. For example, distribute goods according to the moral merit of those who receive them, or according to the intelligence of those who receive them, or according to the effort that individuals put in, or according to their need for the objects that you distribute. Nozick points out that people want their society to look just. And they also want their society to be just. But in asking their society to look just, Nozick thinks they make a mistake if they take pattern as a way of determining legitimate outcome. Must the look of justice, asks Nozick, reside in a resulting pattern, which we can specify independently and in advance rather than in the underlying generating principles? And to think about this, it's helpful to help ourselves to a three-way distinction that John Rawls makes in the context of Theory of Justice. Rawls distinguishes between three kinds of procedural justice there. The first is a notion of what he calls perfect procedural justice. This is a case where we have an independent criterion for what the right result of our act will be and a procedure that is certain to give us that result. So, for example, if I'm trying to divide a cake, of which all of us want pieces, there's an independent criterion for the right

result. Namely each of us gets a piece of exactly the same size. And there's a sure procedure for arriving at that result. What I do is I allow one person to slice and that is the person who chooses his piece last. So long as he's in a position to make precise cuts, the result of this procedure will always give us what it is that we independently specified as the outcome we sought. We want equal slices, we have an independent criterion for the right result, and we have a sure procedure. He who slices chooses last. By contrast, in most situations, what we find ourselves in is a condition where our only choice is what Rawls calls imperfect procedural justice. Where we have an independent criterion for the right result but the procedure we have for achieving that result is imperfect. So for example, in the legal system we have a goal of convicting all and only those who are guilty of a crime. We have a clear sense of what the right result will be. But though we have a procedure which presumably does a good deal better than chance, it is undeniable that on occasion the guilty go free. And likewise undeniable that on occasion the innocent are convicted. The third kind of procedural justice is what Rawls calls pure procedural justice. This is a case where we have no independent way of specifying the result. And what we do is we adopt a procedure by which we will carry out in real time, in actuality, some sort of distribution. And as the result of having followed that procedure, whichever distribution arises is fair. So gambling has this structure. There is a rule that we have. We all pays our money and then we takes our chances. And whatever distribution of outcomes results from that is legitimate. Nozick's claim is that the distribution of property in a society ought to be understood as subject, not to some sort of perfect or imperfect procedural justice. That is, there's no independent criterion for how it is that goods ought to be distributed across people. Rather, it's simply a matter of living historically through a process whereby things are required in just fashion and transferred in just fashion, and seeing how it is that things distribute themselves. So in contrast to some sort of pattern picture, Marx has this idea, from each according to his ability; to each according to his needs. That's an idea that there's an independent criterion of how things should be distributed. Nozick provides, in contrast, this rather complicated articulation: from each according to what he chooses to do and roughly to each as they are chosen. That is, however things distribute themselves, as long as the process is fair, will end up being fair. And this gives rise to Nozick's famous argument that liberty upsets patterns. So Nozick asks us to imagine a world in which all of our friends from behind the veil of ignorance are given whatever equal share you give them in your fair distribution. So each of them ends up with a piggy bank of the appropriate size. But all of them, says Nozick, are basketball fans and they choose to take a quarter of their own money and to deposit it in the bank account of Wilt Chamberlain. And so do their friends and so do their friends and so do their friends until, as the result of people freely doing what a legitimate transfer permits, Wilt Chamberlain comes to have so much money that his piggy bank gets blurry on the slide. He's that extraordinarily wealthy.

Now Nozick takes the Wilt Chamberlain example to have two implications. The first is a descriptive implication. The general point, he says, illustrated by the Wilt Chamberlain example is that no end-state principle or distributional pattern principle of justice can be continuously realized without continuous interference in people's lives. Any favored pattern will be transformed into an unfavored pattern by the principle--by people exchanging goods and services with other people or giving things to other people, things that the transferers are entitled to under the favored distribution pattern. To maintain a pattern, one must either interfere with the process of transferring resources, or interfere in such a way that one takes away from somebody who has legitimately acquired their pile of quarters and redistribute that. To maintain a pattern, says Nozick, one must either interfere to stop people from transferring resources as they wish to. or interfere to take from them resources that others chose to transfer to them. So that's the descriptive implication of the Wilt Chamberlain example. There's also a normative implication of the Wilt Chamberlain example. Nozick says this, look if D1, the initial distribution where each of our characters from behind the veil of ignorance had their piggy bank, D1 was a just distribution. And people voluntarily moved from D1 to D2, the one where Wilt Chamberlain ended up with the large amount of quarters. Transferring parts of their shares that they were given under D1, isn't D2 also just? If the people were entitled to dispose of the resources to which they were entitled under D1 one, didn't this include their being entitled to give to, or exchange it with Wilt Chamberlain? Can anyone else complain on grounds of justice? Each other person, says Nozick, already has his legitimate share under D1 and after someone transfers something to Wilt Chamberlain, their shares are not changed. So the descriptive claim is that liberty will inevitably upset patterns. And the normative claim is that in so doing, no injustice has occurred. I'm going to close with two reasons that one might think that this argument doesn't work as cleanly as Nozick would think. The first we've encountered already, which is that many more situations have the structure of the problem of the commons than one might antecedently realize. And it's not always the case that individual transactions between pairs of people don't carry with them third-party consequences. The second is that it is sometimes the case that distributions of resources across individuals in unequal ways produces violations of the sorts of freedoms that Nozick wants to defend. So suppose we start out with two groups of people, each of whom have roughly similar amounts of money. And they send their children to school with one another and share the same set of teachers. Suppose that one of those groups, through legitimate transfers from D1 to D2, comes to possess a much larger amount of money and create another school where they send their children and where they hire the teachers who were the most gifted. It may become the case that simply as the result of people having engaged in behavior that involved a series of independently legitimate transfers, the situation that results may impede the freedom of these children to become citizens of the sort whose rights Nozick wishes to defend.

So it's 11:20 now. And we'll finish up today's lecture here. And move next lecture to finish up with Nozicks discussion of justice in holdings and to think about that in the context of some work in social psychology. [end of transcript]

Lecture 23 - Social Structures [April 12, 2011]

Chapter 1. Reading Rawls and Nozick Through the Lens of Moral Luck [00:00:00] Professor Tamar Gendler: OK. So what I want to do in the first part of this lecture is just finish our discussion of liberty from last time, beginning by saying a couple of additional clarificatory things about the particular pages from Nozick that we read, and then moving on to explaining what I think is an important way that Nozick and Rawls are confronting one of the problems that each of the thinkers that we have addressed has confronted, namely, the problem of luck in determining human experience. And when we finish that we'll move on to the two empirical readings that we did for today. So you'll recall that in the pages of Nozick that we read, Nozick is concerned, first of all, to present a general framework for thinking about political philosophy in a context which prioritizes liberty and rights. And, in particular, in the pages that we read from chapter seven, concerned with articulating a view about the legitimacy of the ownership of property that takes as its principal justification only three parts. The first, you recall, is Nozick's discussion of the notion of justice in acquisition. And we talked last time about the conditions under which Nozick thinks it's legitimate for somebody to come to own property. And the basic idea there is that it is legitimate to take something from common stock that is unowned so long as in so doing one doesn't violate what Nozick calls the Lockean Proviso. That is, so long as one leaves as much and as good for others. And we considered two objections to that view. One, the idea that there's a kind of unzipping that occurs that makes even the first acquisition illegitimate if the property ultimately runs out. And the second based on the problem of the commons, that regardless there's going to be a time at which somebody appears to be disadvantaged by another taking ownership, and talked about Nozick's responses to them. And it's my hope that in sections this week you'll have a chance to think through whether those responses are legitimate. We looked next at Nozick's views on justice in transfer, which are basically that any transfer that two people are willing to engage in is a legitimate sort of transfer. It is an illegitimate restriction on people's freedom, on Nozick's view, to restrict what it is that you are permitted to do with your property. But Nozick recognizes--and we didn't get to this in our lecture on Tuesday--that in addition there's a need for a third sort of notion. And this is the idea that sometimes property is illegitimately acquired, either initially or as the result of an illegitimate transfer. And that with regard to that, one is required, on his view, to engage in some sort of rectification. And this idea gives rise to a rather striking passage at the very end of the chapter, which we read for last week. Nozick writes there that as a matter of fact there have been previously in the acquisition of property incidences of injustice. This nation, for example, was founded on black slavery. And Nozick notes that those from the least well off group in society right now have the highest probabilities of being the descendants of victims of the most serious injustice. As a consequence, he says, perhaps the following rule of thumb is a reasonable one for us to make use of. Perhaps we ought to do what Rawls suggests and organize society to benefit

the least well off. Past injustices, says Nozick, may be so great as to make necessary in the short run a more extensive state than the one that Nozick has been advocating in order to rectify them. Page 231, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, telling us that perhaps a good rule of thumb is to organize society to benefit the least well off. So do Nozick and Rawls agree after all? Well notice what Nozick argued earlier. Even if we engage in this temporary act of reorganization, liberty upsets patterns. So give everybody the same sized piggy bank, give them the freedom to do what they want with their quarters, and it will inevitably become the case that some are better off than others. Moreover, as we noted at the end of our lecture last time, these distributions of wealth may end up having consequences, where deciding whether they violate at least the spirit of the Lockean Proviso becomes a rather difficult question to answer. We noted at the end of our lecture last time that there might be a society in which there's an equal distribution of wealth across individuals and a social interaction among them with regard to the institutions that prepare people to become democratic citizens. But if, as our last slide demonstrated, it is inevitable that such a structure will ultimately result in an unequal distribution of wealth, and if an unequal distribution of wealth brings with it the freedom of opting out of certain public institutions, creating private ones from which one may draw away resources that once belonged to the public institutions, then particularly in the case of things like education and health, which one might think are preconditions for participation in democracy, it becomes complicated to think through whether those sorts of distributions are justified. So the Nozick picture presents us with an idea of what sorts of actions are permitted. It seems for a moment as if Nozick agrees with Rawls that a certain kind of redistribution is permitted. But ultimately there isn't the leverage within the framework, in at least an obvious sense, to avoid situations like this one. Now it's an open question whether one takes it as a priority to avoid situations like this one. But it is a striking fact of both A Theory of Justice and Anarchy, State, and Utopia, that a look at their indexes produces no references to education, no references to childhood and only limited awareness of the topic, which will be central to our discussion today. Namely the ways in which the social structures that surround us end up affecting what sorts of preferences we have in addition to what sorts of choices we make. Now you'll remember that the fundamental question, which underlies the debate about what makes a particular structure in society legitimate is the one articulated by Rawls in the beginning of Theory of Justice, which I placed for you as the second essay topic for the final set of essays. Rawls points out that a society is a cooperative venture for mutual advantage typically marked by conflict as well as identity of interests, and notes, following Hobbes in the social contract tradition, that there's an identity of interests in special cooperation makes possible a better life than anybody could have without cooperation. But [clarification: also] a conflict of interests, since people are not indifferent to how those goods are distributed.

Now at some level we can conceive of one aspect of the debate between Rawls and Nozick, where Rawls says: if things come out patterned in a way that behind the veil of ignorance you wouldn't want them to, intervene and redistribute. Whereas Nozick says: if things come out as the result of free actions between free individuals, then regardless of what that pattern looks like, accept it. One can view that difference in outlook between them as a difference in outlook about how we are morally required to deal with the fact that in so far as things that affect us occur, determining what is and is not in our control, in so far as it matters for our own internal reactions to events, as Epictetus pointed out. In so far as it matters to our tendency to respond in keeping with our commitments, as Aristotle and Doris in Doris's debate with Aristotle questioned. And in so far as it covers our attribution of praise and blame in cases of unintended wrongdoing or right-doing, which the discussions of moral luck and punishment and Kant versus Mill on whether there's moral merit to saving a child. In all of these cases, the fundamental question that's being asked is this: what sort of stance is the appropriate stance for human beings to take, given that as Epictetus says, some things are up to us and other things are not up to us? So if we look at Rawls's Theory of Justice, we read the following striking passages. Rawls says, "The two principles mentioned," that is the first principle which says rights are untrumpable, roughly speaking, every individual is entitled to certain basic freedoms, which no amount of utility can override. And the second principle, which says, inequalities are to be distributed as the result of offices which are equally open to all and in such a way that inequalities are to the benefit of the least well off. Rawls says, "The two principles mentioned seem to be a fair agreement on the basis of which those better endowed or more fortunate in their social position neither of which we can be said to deserve, could expect the willing cooperation of others when some workable scheme is a necessary condition of the welfare of all." Or again, once we decide to look for a conception of justice that nullifies the accidents of natural endowment and the contingencies of social circumstance as counters in quest for political and economic advantage, we are led to these principles. Or again, these principles express the result of leaving aside those aspects of the social world that seem arbitrary from a moral point of view--things we cannot be said to deserve. Accidents of natural endowment. Contingencies of social circumstance. Aspects of the social world that seem arbitrary from a moral point of view. Rawls is engaged in the ancient project of thinking about how to deal with moral luck. And because the distribution of goods and advantages--both within the self and between selves--is not in many ways up to us, Rawls concludes that the principles that he articulates in Theory of Justice are what justice mandates. Nozick, by contrast, is also concerned with luck. Let's look at the passages at the end of chapter seven. Here, says Nozick, talking about Rawls's writing, we have Rawls' reason for rejecting a system of natural liberty. It permits distributive shares to be improperly influenced by factors that are so arbitrary from a moral point of view. Nozick says, Rawls is

trying to deal with the problem of moral luck. These factors, he says, quoting Rawls, are "prior distribution of natural talents and abilities as these have been developed over time by social circumstances and such chance contingencies as accident and good fortune." Notice, says Nozick, that Rawls is concerned with things that are not up to us. But there is, says Nozick, no mention at all of how persons have chosen to develop their own natural assets. And it's in recognition of the counterpart of some things being not up to us--namely the fact that some things are up to us-- that we can see Nozick's notion of legitimate dessert in light of this eternal debate. This line of argument, says Nozick in criticism of Rawls, can succeed in blocking the introduction of a person's autonomous choices and actions and their results only by attributing everything noteworthy about the person to certain kinds of external factors. But, says Nozick, if we start thinking about people as defined by their circumstances in the way that a logical extension of this view would suggest, but says Nozick, "Denigrating a person's autonomy and prime responsibility for his actions is a risky line for a theory that otherwise wishes to buttress the dignity and self-respect of autonomous beings." We're back to our fundamental question. Given that we are beings influenced by the world around us in ways which it is extraordinarily difficult to understand, to what extent do we deserve credit for that which we perceive ourselves to have done voluntarily? And to what extent are our characters and circumstances so inextricably linked with things beyond our control that thinking from the perspective of us as willers of structure in the world is a mistake altogether? So I want to point out to you that what started out as looking like a debate about the legitimacy of taxation ends up looking like one of our central philosophical debates. Again and again we're confronted with our status as beings in the world that we both affect and are affected by. So that theme in two particular empirical articles is what I want to address in the remaining thirty minutes of lecture in the context of our social structures discussion. Chapter 2. Structuring Society to Structure Character [00:19:15] So remember that in this political philosophy unit we began with a reading of Hobbes's Leviathan and encountered his argument that because of certain facts about human nature-basically our desire to control goods around us and the limitation in the number of goods that there are--we will in a state of nature be in a war of all against all. And then we looked at a mathematical representation of that in the form of Prisoners Dilemma and then considered two particular responses in the 20th century Western Anglo-American philosophical tradition--namely Rawls and Nozick--to think through what a legitimate society looks like in the context of facts about human nature. What I want to do in the part of the lecture devoted to social structures is to bring out you the way in which the structures that surround us end up determining our attitudes at least as much as our attitudes end up determining the social structures around us. This is a theme that's present already in Aristotle. So in the closing pages of the Nicomachean Ethics, which we read about a month ago, Aristotle, in a chapter entitled, Transition from Morality to Political Philosophy, notes, you'll recall, that if arguments alone were sufficient by

themselves to make people decent the rewards that they would command would justifiably have been many and large. But that it's not easy to alter by argument what has long been absorbed as a result of one's habits. How then, asks Aristotle, might we go about changing people if argument alone is not sufficient to make people decent? Well, he points out, it's difficult for somebody to be trained correctly from his youth if he's not brought up under correct laws. For the young do not find it pleasant to live in a temperate way. That is why one of the things on this ancient picture of governance, one of the things the law must prescribe is their upbringing and practices. For if they are used to behaving in certain ways they will not find them painful. So Aristotle is talking about a function of law that will occupy us both today and Thursday--the function of law in shaping the character of the citizens who are governed thereby. But it's not just in Aristotle that we find this theme. John Stuart Mill, author of the famous work On Liberty and also author of Utilitarianism, which we read for this class, makes much the same point as Aristotle. He writes, in talking about how to structure society appropriately, so as to maximize the amount of utility that it produces, he says utility enjoins that first that laws and social arrangements should place the happiness--or as speaking practically it may be called the interest--of every individual as nearly as possible in harmony with the interests of the whole. A well-structured society on Mills view manages the relation between the individual and the community. And utility enjoins in keeping with that, says Mill, that education and opinion, which have so vast a power over human character, should so use that power as to establish in the mind of every individual and indissoluble association between his own happiness and the good of the whole. Chapter 3. The Psychology of WEIRD Subjects [00:24:13] Education and opinion, which have so vast a power over human character. That's the theme of today's lecture. And in about four slides well have clickers because it's late in the semester and I want you guys to wake up. So if you get your clickers out I'll tell you some facts and then you can tell me some responses. Alright. So the first piece that we read for today is a long survey article from the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences, in which the authors survey a century's worth of anthropological and psychological research in an attempt to bring empirical force to the claim that Mill makes here--that education and opinion, cultural structures, have a vast power over human character. The authors argue in this paper that subjects, whom they call WEIRD, that is Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic, citizens--people who have been brought into consciousness in a society which has these five features. They argue that these subjects are atypical, that is, differ in fundamental ways in their attitude towards the world if you contrast them with subjects who come from small scale non-industrialized societies, if you contrast them with individuals who come from non-Western industrial societies, if you contrast them with individuals who come from other Western industrialized societies, and even if you contrast them with other citizens of their own nation who are not university educated.

In particular, claim the authors, the domains in which we can see the weirdness--in small letters--of the WEIRD--in large--that is the atypicality of Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic, citizens include, they contend, perception, categorization, memory, attention, spatial cognition, self concepts, judgments of fairness, tendencies towards cooperation, tendencies towards conformity, moral judgments and so on. In a vast number of domains, you--including those of you who are not from Western cultures--differ from the vast majority of the 6 or 7 billion other people on Earth. And certainly from the vast majority of those who have lived on Earth throughout time. As a result of the cultural experiences you have had, your perception and apprehension and patterns of attention have been affected. So the authors wrote their article with a particular goal in mind. They wrote it in an effort to argue that psychological research of the sort which fills journals, including the one in which they published this piece, should be based on broader population samples. And they make this argument because they're concerned both with the possibility of revealing differences among human beings, ways in which people raised in one sort of circumstance differ from people raised in another. And because they are profoundly concerned with also identifying the ways in which there are commonalities. And you'll notice as you read through the article that each of the four main sections begins with a series of contrasts between WEIRD folks and whatever the contrast group is, but closes with a set of identified commonalities between the two groups, suggesting at least prima facie that there are deep-seated similarities, presumably the result of evolutionary pressures. But this is not a course in evolutionary psychology. This isn't even specifically a course in the methodology of psychology. So why did we read this article? Four reasons that we read it. The first is that this is a course, as you know, called Philosophy and the Science of Human Nature. And this article, perhaps more densely than any article I can think of, contains a vast number of extraordinarily cool facts about ways people might be. So the first reason we read the article is just to learn some facts about human diversity and similarity. In addition, as you know, this is an "and" course. This is a course, as you will recall from the very first lecture, that's tries to bring together different perspectives on questions. And one of the things that I think this article does beautifully, in particular in conjunction with the second article that we read for today, is to give you a range of tools for thinking about central questions. One of the things that the article challenges you to do when you observe a behavior and make a generalization on its basis is to ask yourself how generalizable really is that behavior? But this is also a course, and this is the third reason we read the article, that introduces you, as you know, to a dead guy on Tuesday and CogSci on Thursday, today being an honorary Thursday. So the third thing that the article does is to make you aware of a live critique, one posed just last year--the article was published less than 12 months ago--to make you aware of a critique that attaches itself to part of the course's research base. One of the things that we have been doing throughout the semester, one of the things that all of you did in directed exercise five, was to take a look at some of the articles, whose limited samplings are being challenged in this piece.

Finally, we're reading this piece in the context of our political philosophy section in a lecture called social structures because it seems to me crucial, if one wants to engage in serious political philosophy, to bring out the complex range of considerations that need to go into thinking about how societies ought to be structured. Chapter 4. How Experience Affects Perception [00:32:34] So what I want to do in the next part of the lecture is to run through three examples of the sorts of cases with which the WEIRD article is concerned. Three cases where a claim is made that experience has affected how it is that you perceive the world. And I start with their most dramatic. Perhaps not the most well established. We'll talk about it. But the most dramatic of their claims. So I'd like you to take out your clickers and look at these things here. And tell me, to you whether the two segments appear to be such that the top is shorter than the bottom or it could be such that they are of the same length. We're talking about just the line segments here. Or to be such that the bottom is shorter than the top. And we'll take 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 4, 3, 2, 1 second to see how these numbers come out. So 41% of you think it appears that the top is shorter than the bottom. 46% of you, it appears that they are the same length. Whereas 14% are such that the bottom appears shorter than the top. 14% percent of you, come on down, you are correct. The bottom is shorter then the top. You want to see that again? All right. So what going on here? I've got the same animation on the next slide because I wasn't sure you could animate on a slide that had graphs. But it turns out you can. OK, so again look at these. These are identical. These are duplicates. I made them, I measured them because I have a measurement program in PowerPoint. So this one is actually 3.1 and this is actually 3 inches long in the creation. So the bottom is shorter than the top. Now it has been argued that your tendency to perceive this line, when embedded within this figure, as longer than this segment when embedded in this figure, is the result of your having grown up in an environment with carpentered corners. And the claim is made on the basis of research done in the 1960s in a vast number of small-scale non-urbanized communities, that the discrepancy between line lengths, segment lengths, required in order to see this one as being the same length as this one is extremely different in small-scale societies where there is roughly, according to this research, no tendency to be taken in by these extensions. To Western society--this is Evanston, Illinois, and South Africa--a tendency to find this illusion massively compelling. Now whether or not these data ultimately hold up, it's complicated to determine because the research was done almost 50 years ago when the tools for asking these questions held themselves to different standards than people hold themselves today, it's nonetheless not implausible to think that this might be true. Experience determines all sorts of things. And it's not unimaginable that among the things that it would determine is what sorts of perceptual features you pick up on when encountering a situation. It is, at the very least, undeniable that there are fundamental and interesting differences between the tendency of those raised in Eastern cultures and the tendency of those raised in Western cultures to avail

themselves of the two kinds of fundamental reasoning processes which are available to all of us. So you know, both from your readings for today and from our readings on the dual processing tradition earlier in the semester, that human beings are capable both of what is called holistic processing. That is orienting towards an object as embedded in a context, paying attention to relationships between the focal object and the field that surrounds it and having a tendency as a result to make predictions and offer explanations on the basis of these relational properties. So that's one kind of thinking. And all of us have it available. But there is, in addition, a second kind of thinking, which every adult human being has available to him and her: analytic processing, through which, one orients towards an object as considered in isolation, pays attention primarily to the objects attributes, not to features of its surround and exhibits a tendency to predict and explain events on the basis of such attributes. So you'll remember when we were reading the Doris critique of Aristotle and the suggestion was made that it's not features of the individual himself, not attributes of the object, that determine how it is that somebody will act in a potentially morally demanding situation. But rather features of his relationship to his context. Whether he's found a dime in the phone booth, whether he's in a rush. The claim that Doris makes in offering that critique of Aristotle, a version of what's called the fundamental attribution error, is that there are cases where analytic processing leads us awry and holistic processing does a better job of explaining. There are, likewise, cases where focusing our attention profoundly on the object itself and not attending to irrelevant features of the environment will leave us better off. It is striking, given that that there appear to be reliable and statistically significant differences over time in members of Western and non-Western cultures with regard to which of these attitudes they take on as a default. So in a series of articles that have been written over roughly the last decade, Richard Nisbett and a number of collaborators have presented subjects with cues like the following. They're shown a series of fish against a particular background. And then shown a series of novel fish, either with the same or different backgrounds. Or a series of polar bears or elk against a particular background and then either novel or previously seen objects against either a similar or different background. So what advantage do subjects demonstrate when they see an object that they've seen before against a familiar background? For the Japanese individuals, whom Nisbett and his collaborators tested, an object seen against its original background yields a high accuracy rate. If you show it without a background at all, there's less accuracy. And if you show it against a novel background, there's a striking decrement in performance. And again with the wolves. If you show it against the original background, high accuracy. Show it against the novel background, a significant decrement. These are clean patterns. What happens with Western subjects? Different pattern altogether. Original background doesn't help with re-identification. No background helps a lot. The distraction of additional information has been removed. And a novel background doesn't leave them much worse off

than the original. Ditto with the wolves. Original background produces some, but not much, advantage. I'm going to skip the next example, which suggests, and you'll be able to watch this yourselves on the slides that I post, that again there are contexts in which Westerners appear to be better at absolute tasks, non-Westerners at relative tasks. Now what sort of business do we have making these generalizations about cultures? Isn't this an outrageous sort of thing to be doing? The claim is not that culture determines everything about an individual. The claim is merely the unsurprising one that growing up in circumstances where your attention is, as a matter of course, directed in particular ways, will lead you exactly in the ways that Aristotle suggested, to find those ways of responding to be natural and habitual. So what I want to do in the closing five minutes of the lecture is to give you a final example from the WEIRD paper. To run you through some of the cases on which the claim that Americans stand out relative to other westerners on phenomena that are associated with independent self-concepts and individualism is based. So these are all clicker questions. And they are a series of survey questions that, at least 15 years ago, typically produced very different responses in North American educated subjects than they did in citizens of other Western and non-Western industrialized nations. In particular, different responses among Americans than they produced among Germans or Australians or Japanese. So I'm just going to give you a series of questions. We're going to see how your numbers come out. And we'll compare them to how those data looked in the original studies. So here's your first question. While you are talking and sharing a bottle of beer--I know none of you would ever do this, this is something to imagine for when you grow up--when you are talking and sharing a bottle of beer with a friend who is officially on duty as a safety controller in the company where you both work, an accident occurs injuring a shift worker. An investigation is launched by the national safety commission and you are asked for your evidence. There are no other witnesses. What right has your friend to expect you to protect him? A, a definite right. B, some right. D, no right. So investigating commission, do you protect your friend? Let's see how the numbers come out. 8% of you think there is a definite right. 48% of you think there is some right. And 44% of you think there is no right. OK let's see whether we can get these numbers up again. Gosh, OK, I was going to show you how your numbers compare to the traditional numbers that were ascertained. What I'm going to do is leave these slides up for you as always and you can go and check the comparison. The idea is that in the original studies, Americans showed, 94% of them in this column, you show 92% of you in the two of these. Whereas if you looked across other countries, people gave different answers. The claim is not that one or the other of these outlooks is a legitimate one. The claim is just to alert you to the fact that there are radical differences in how people think about the world. Let's try a next one. So I don't know why we've got the reveal here. So don't pay no attention to the numbers that appear here. Do you think that only real goal of a company is to make a profit? Or do you think B, that a company, besides making a profit has the goal

of attaining the well-being of various stakeholders such as employees, stockholders and others? Your numbers suggest a tendency to think that it has other goals as well. But 33% of you think the only goal of a company is profit. Among Japanese citizens surveyed in 1993, only 8% sat where 33% of you sit. If you apply for a job in a company, is your thought, one, that you will almost certainly work there for the rest of your life? Or is your thought that you are almost sure that the relationship will have a limited duration? Let's see how these look. 8% of you think you will work there for the rest of your life. 92% percent, limited duration. By contrast, if you look at the numbers here, you are with the Americans. 60% of Japanese asked that similar question gave the answer that you did. Over and over and over again--and I'll leave you three more examples on the slide to look at--you see that whatever it is that you are like--if you are like the Japanese with 41% you were different from the Americans, if you were like the Americans with 99%, you were different than the Japanese--the cultural environment in which you find yourself plays a role in determining your outlook. And we'll begin next lecture with an exploration of a particular version of this in the context of Cass Sunstein's discussion of social norms. [end of transcript]

Lecture 24 - Censorship [April 14, 2011]

Chapter 1. Two Modern Examples of Plato on Censorship [00:00:00] Professor Tamar Gendler: So our topic today is the general question of what sort of nonrational persuasion is legitimate for a government to engage in if we're willing to accept the kind of social contract argument that we were considering in the last few weeks of the course. So you'll recall that starting with the account of justice that's offered in Plato's Republic, and continuing with the account of the state of nature that we get in Hobbes, each of our authors has suggested that it is in our self interest, in a way that we would reflectively endorse governmental structures, to give up some of our freedoms in order to guarantee a certain sort of stability. But the sorts of constraints that we considered in the earlier discussions of this concerned explicit laws. They concerned ways in which we contract into regulations that we recognize as holding upon us, and that we endorse because we see the rational reason for contracting into them. The argument that Hobbes makes appeals to the notion of The Prisoner's Dilemma, which is a paradox of rationality. It's a problem that arises when self interests conflict in particular ways and interact with incentives in particular ways. What we looked at, at the end of last lecture, and what we'll look at in today's lecture are the ways in which human beings are complex. They have, as we know from our early lectures, not only reason but also parts of their soul which are affected by things other than reason. And that, too, turns out to have implications for what political structures end up being rational for us to endorse. In particular, what we'll look at in today's lecture, is on the one hand Plato's argument that in the ideal state there would be rather radical censorship of what sort of fictional representations were permitted, and Cass Sunstein's argument that one of the duties of the government is to establish norms that affect people implicitly in how it is that they structure their behavior. So in the context of a lecture on this topic it seems appropriate to begin with a couple of stories. True stories about false stories and their effects. So in 1992, right around the time when many of you were being born, there was also born on television a young boy who was born to a television character named Murphy Brown. Now that's not in itself newsworthy. What is newsworthy is that Murphy Brown at the time was unmarried. Indeed she didn't have a long-term partner. And the then-Vice President of the United States, Dan Quayle, famously gave a speech in San Francisco in 1992 at which he said, "Marriage is a moral issue that requires consensus and the use of social sanction. It doesn't help matters when prime time television has Murphy Brown, a character who supposedly epitomizes today's intelligent highly-paid professional woman, mocking the importance of a father by bearing a child alone and calling it just another lifestyle choice."

Now in fact Dan Quayle slightly misrepresented what happened on the show. Murphy Brown, though she lacked a long-term partner and did bear a child without the support of a second adult figure, didn't call it just a lifestyle choice. But he was correct in that the show did not go on to depict in any way what the costs were to Murphy Brown's life of having to reconfigure her life in a way that she became a caregiver. What's interesting, of course, is that this is a real person, Dan Quayle, the real Vice President of the real country, the United States of America, calling into question the imaginary birth of a child who was not in fact the child of the actress who played Murphy Brown--in such a way that he saw it as eroding values that are important. Moreover, this debate hit the news in an extraordinary way. It was on the cover of Time. It was on the cover of the New York Post: "Dan rips Murphy Brown." The New York Daily News said, "Quayle to Murphy Brown: You Tramp!" The New York Times ran an article some months later when, in an act of enormous post-modern irony, Murphy Brown the character on television responded to Dan Quayle the actual Vice President. And the New York Times offered an article that began with the paragraph, "Almost everyone who watches television is aware that Murphy Brown responds tonight to Vice President Dan Quayle, who helped push family values to the forefront of the 1992 presidential campaign by criticizing the show's leading character last spring for having a child out of wedlock." That's story number one. Here's story number two. A little more recently, in 2002 the television show 24 had depicting the President of the United States a man of African descent. In 2007 that same show depicted the President of the United States as a woman. In 2008, as all of you know, the two leading candidates for the presidential nomination in the Democratic party were a man of African descent and a woman. And the commentators who look at elections, were commonly saying things like this blog from Newsweek says. What it points out is that the availability in fictional representation of a character who served as President and was of African descent or who served as President and was a woman, played some role in allowing actual citizens in the real world--not imaginary people on TV--to have conceptual space available for the possibility of there being a President of that kind. Now Dan Quayle and the commentators speaking about 24 were, as you know from your readings for today--channeling our friend Plato. Dan Quayle essentially said, if we want the guardians of our city, that is the citizens who are in a position to govern and select leadership, if we want the guardians of our city to think that it's shameful to be easily provoked into hating another--read: shameful to bear a child out of wedlock--then we mustnt allow stories about the gods, says Plato--stories about attractive characters on television says Dan Quayle--warring or plotting against one another. That is, engaging in the activity that we want to forbid. So when Plato says if we want the guardians of our city to think that it's shameful to be easily provoked into hating one another, we mustn't allow stories about gods warring or plotting against one another, he's making an argument that Dan Quayle picks up on 2000

years later. And to the extent that our Newsweek commentators and others in their discussion of the 2008 presidential election were pleased to see an opening up of the range of candidates who were being taken seriously as potential leaders of this nation, they too were channeling Plato, who right after the remark that we just quoted, continues by saying, "If we're to persuade our people that no citizen has ever hated one another and that it's impious to do so, then that's what should be told in our story." That is stories, fictional representations, imaginary experiences that become part of the cultural conversation can provide role models that are both problematic and inspiring. Now the puzzle that this raises if we think only in terms of rationality is the following. How can something that we know to be fictional affect our actual behaviors and attitudes? It's not as if people watching 24 thought that David Palmer was actually the president of the United States. It's not that people watching Murphy Brown thought that the character played by Candice Bergen had actually had a child. People were profoundly aware that these were fictional representations. And even young children are remarkably good at separating pretense from reality. If you engage in an imaginary tea party with a young child where you pour imaginary tea into a series of cups out of an actually empty teapot, the children are perfectly ready to agree that the cups are full in the context of the pretense. But no child who is thirsty thinks that you can actually get something to drink lifting one of those up and bringing it to your mouth. If you engage in a game with a child where you make cookies out of Play Dough, children are shocked and upset if you actually try to bite into one. And adults, too, have the capacity to determine what's merely imaginary and what's actual. Well they have the capacity with one part of their soul. The response to the puzzle that gives rise to the concerns that Plato and Dan Quayle and our bloggers articulate, is that the way that fiction causes problems is by affecting the non-rational parts of the soul in ways that are not easily subject to rational regulation or control. Now this structure is already familiar to us from our general discussions of parts of the soul. We know from our lecture in January that if I stand on a glass surface above the Grand Canyon and look down beneath me and see the roaring Colorado River, though my rationality tells me that I am safe, the non-rational parts of my soul are affected by this visual stimulus in a way that causes me to tremble. And even if I tell you and convince you that what looks to be a box of kitty litter is in fact a box containing chocolate cake covered with coconut and Tootsie Rolls, though the rational part of your soul may believe me, it has a rather difficult time regulating the other parts. So too in the series of puzzles that we looked at in the context of the heuristics and biases tradition. If I present you with a choice where you're trying to get a red ball between a bowl that contains nine white balls and one red one, or a bowl that contains 92 white balls and 8 red ones, though the rational part of your soul is profoundly aware that you have a 10% chance over here and an 8% chance over there, it is nonetheless the case that if I put you under cognitive load in such a way that your rational part isn't in a position to make the decision, you will be drawn towards the bowl with more rather than towards the bowl with a higher proportion. Reason isn't sufficient to regulate the non-rational parts of the soul.

And again in the context of our discussion of temptation, of weakness of the will. Here's Ulysses tied to the mast--rationally committed to making his way past the Sirens but unable to do so without either blocking his ears to prevent himself from hearing the temptation or tying himself to the mast in such a way that he's unable to act on it. Plato says roughly this when he identifies what it is that's so problematic about fictional representations. He says, "the imitative poet appeals to a part of the soul that is inferior." Recall Plato has the hierarchy reason, spirit, appetite. "He arouses, nourishes and strengthens this part of the soul and so destroys the rational one. He puts a bad constitution in the soul of each individual by gratifying the irrational part of the soul." So the fact that we know something to be fictional with the reason part of our soul isn't sufficient to prevent it from affecting us in other ways. In particular, Plato is worried about three ways that fiction can problematically affect the soul. And, importantly, willing to forgive a fourth. And looking through the details of that will allow us to get a better sense of Plato's picture. Chapter 2. Plato on Censorship [00:16:08] So what is it that Plato is worried about when he's worried about fiction's capacity to affect the non-rational parts of the soul? He's worried first of all about that sort of thing that Dan Quayle was worried about. That observing a particular circumstance in a fictional representation and then reasoning about it as an available way of life may lead to mischosen role models. He's worried even more profoundly when we observe something in a fictional context and because we explicitly recognize it as fictional, allow ourselves to respond to it in a way different than we would if it were actual but such that it affects us profoundly emotionally in a way that changes our attitudes of approval or disapproval. What he's not worried about--and this will be crucial to the larger argument that I'm making--is playful imitation. Cases where not just at the level of rationality, but also with regard to the parts of our response system that aren't subject to rational regulation, we engage with the material somehow at a distance. There is available to us, recognizes Plato, a capacity for playful imitation. And it's the contrast between this and the fourth, the thing that Plato finds most problematic, that will help us get to the heart of Plato's picture. Because what's most problematic on Plato's picture--and we'll give some contemporary analogues of this in a moment--are cases where imitation of imaginary figures plus habituation to that mode of behavior leads to what Aristotle warns us so profoundly against: a misguided repertoire of automatic responses. So in order to make sense of this rather subtle argument of Plato, it's helpful for us to take a step back and remember where it is situated in the argument of the Republic as a whole. So you'll remember that at the very beginning of the semester, back in January, we started off by reading the opening pages of Book Two of Plato's Republic in which the character Glaucon, in alliance with his brother Adeimantus, challenges Socrates to answer the question, why should we be just? And Glaucon and Adeimantus together present three kinds of arguments, three kinds of contentions in favor of the view that justice is not something that we engage in for intrinsic reasons, but only something that we engage in

because as a matter of contingency it happens to be instrumentally valuable. Famously, Glaucon gives an argument categorizing justice into the kind of good that we value only because of its reputational benefits and goes on to offer something like a Prisoner's Dilemma analysis of justice being everybody's second-best choice. He then presents a fictional story--the story of the ring of Gyges followed by the story of the pair of statues--which is meant to persuade in a different way. And finally, Adeimantus points out a continuity between what's represented in the context of the fictional stories and what's represented in the context of common sayings. Where does the argument that Socrates provides back then begin? Does Socrates respond directly to one and two and three? To the three rather precise arguments that Glaucon and Adeimantus have presented? No. What he does is to introduce the larger framework for thinking about these questions, the analogy between the person and the city. A discussion subsequently in Book Two that we didn't read of two kinds of cities there might be. And then ultimately in the context of Book Four, he introduces the three parts of the city and the three parts of the soul. That is, he says that just as in the ideal city there are guardians and soldiers and workers, so too in the individual, there is reason, spirit and appetite. And you may remember back when there was so much snow on the ground that there was no way to represent humanity other than in the form of a snowman, that we looked at this parallel in some detail. We looked at the way in which the smallest directive part of the soul is reason. The middle is spirit. The bottom is appetite. And that corresponding to these auxiliaries, soldiers and guardians. Now in order to see what's going on in the discussion in Books Three and Four that we read for today about the censorship of poetry and the discussion in Book Ten about the censorship of poetry, we need to recognize something really extremely interesting about what happens next in Book Two. So remember, we have Glaucon's challenge, why should we be just? And Socrates rather bizarre answer, which involves the invocation of the citystate analogy. What happens next is that Socrates goes on to provide an account of how it is that the guardians should be educated. And the kind of education that he is concerned with is the education of the non-rational parts of the guardians soul. What's going on here is Plato's recognition that, given the picture he has of the state, just as argument alone, as Aristotle would say, is not enough to make men good; rather we must cultivate in them certain kinds of habits. So too suggests Plato, by putting the education of the guardians immediately after the discussion of the nature and value of justice, so too is it crucial in thinking about the structure of the state to think not only about what laws look like--that which regulates by means of reason. But also what non-rational influences look like. So, says Plato, turning to the education of the guardians, the very first question we need to ask when we think about what the ideal state looks like is the question, what does the early education, the cultivation of appropriate spirit and appetite in the guardians look like? And only once that is in place are we in a position to turn to that which is most valorized by Plato in his discussion, the cultivation of reason.

Chapter 3. Plato on Education [00:24:42] So let's hear exactly what Plato has to say about early education. And in pointing this out to you, I want to remind you of something that I mentioned last lecture about the Nozick and the Rawls. You'll recall that I mentioned to you that in the entire index of A Theory of Justice and in the entire index of Anarchy, State, and Utopia, there are two references to children. There are basically no discussions of education, whereas the very first thing that Plato starts with in his discussion of the ideal state is this. For the guardians, he asks, what will their education be? "You know, don't you, that the beginning of any process is most important. Especially for anything young and tender. It's at that time that it is most malleable and takes on any pattern one wishes to impress on it. Shall we carelessly allow the children to hear any old stories and to take beliefs into their souls that are opposite to the ones we think they should hold when they are grown up?" And, this being a Socratic dialogue, his interlocutor says, "We certainly won't." And Socrates continues, "Then we must first of all supervise the story tellers. We'll select their stories whenever they are fine or beautiful and reject them when they aren't. Nurses and mothers will shape their children's souls with their stories much more than they shape their bodies with their handling." There was recently a conversation about this familiar character, Mister Cookie Monster, who, in keeping with remarks like the one Socrates just made, began singing songs like, "A Cookie is a Sometimes Thing" and began appearing in videos about healthy foods. It is the recognition that early narratives play a strangely formative role in the attitudes of young people that would lead to this sort of change. So Plato's first concern is the one that I identified. The idea that you will be presented with a role model, whom you will problematically accept as a reasonable way of existence. When the poets tell stories, he says, where heroes do terrible and impious deeds, these stories are harmful to the people who hear them. For everyone will be ready to excuse himself when he is bad if he is persuaded that similar things have been done by heroes. For that reason, we must put a stop to such stories lest they produce in youth a strong inclination to do bad things. If it's available to you to say, here's a character--real or imaginary--who behaved in a particular way, says Plato, you are at risk of viewing your behavior through that light. Even more dangerous, however, is the fact it is possible because of our complicated relation to fiction, to respond to something imaginary in a way just different enough to distort our experience but just similar enough to affect us implicitly. "Listen and consider," says Plato famously in Book Ten, "when even the best of us hear Homer or some other tragedian imitating one of the heroes or making a long lamenting speech or beating his breast, we enjoy it. We give ourselves up to following it. We sympathize with the hero and we take his suffering seriously And we do so, says Socrates, even when that runs counter to how it is that on reflection we think we ought to behave. "When one of us," he continues, "suffers a private loss, you realize the opposite happens. We pride ourselves if we're able to master our grief. Is it right to look at someone behaving

in a way we would consider unworthy and shameful and enjoy and praise it rather than being disgusted by it?" And he goes through and runs with another series of emotions about this. He says just as we can do this for sadness, so too we appreciate in the context of fiction buffoonish humor. We appreciate in the context of fiction certain kinds of outrageous behavior. But we are, he says, exactly the wrong distance to be safe. Chapter 4. When Engaging with Fiction Can Be Beneficial [00:30:27] Our relation to fiction in this regard is paradoxical. On the one hand, there is sufficient difference between fiction and reality that we let our emotions run loose. Reason says: it's just imagination. It doesn't matter how I respond to it. This isn't reality. This isn't reflective of who I am. But to the extent that there is sufficient similarity between the two cases, to the extent that the distancing happens only at the level of reason, there is a risk of contagion. And we can see that perhaps most profoundly by contrasting the sort of cases that Plato is worried about with the sort of cases that he is ostensibly not. So in Book Three Plato concedes that there are certain contexts in which it seems to be OK to engage with imagination, to engage with fiction. He writes, when he--he's now speaking of the guardians--comes upon a character unworthy of himself, he'll be unwilling to make himself seriously resemble the inferior character. Rather, he'll be ashamed to do something like that unless it is in play. And it does seem--and it's an extremely interesting fact about human beings--that we are capable in some contexts of taking a genuinely play stance. In my section, when I played Prisoner's Dilemma games, the poor freshman who played against me--who's seated here in the third row--didn't understand that I was playing for play, which meant that I was playing for real, which meant that I defected every single round. And she lost a lot of money and I gained a lot. Now in so doing, it is my sense that I had removed myself from a domain where contagion was a risk. That not just at the level of thinking about my engagement, but even in the engagement itself there was a sort of ironic distance. Some fictional representations cause us to bear that to at least part of their content. In Monty Python, when you watch Sir Lancelot chop off the arms and then the legs of the Black Knight, who is leaping around bleeding, it is not--I take it--the case that there is even a small risk of contagion to actual cases of lost limbs. But rather that a certain kind of playful stance is being taken. At least that is until it is disrupted. I was, for very good reason, taken to task on the feedback page by one of the students in this class for presenting playfully in lecture, in the context of our discussion of punishment, an example of somebody who aimed to shoot somebody and failed or succeeded at his aim on a day after there had been a shooting in New Haven. Sometimes the reality that surrounds a situation makes it almost impossible--because of the way in which it permeates our non-rational responses--makes it almost impossible for us to take a playful stance. But the fact that we're able to move in and out of this attitude is, I think, one of the most perplexing and interesting facts about human beings.

What's undeniable is that in addition to being able to engage in this sort of distant imitation, this sort of playful, non-habituating copying, we are also capable of engaging in imitation that gives rise to habituation. So, Plato writes, "Our guardians must imitate from childhood what is appropriate to them. Namely, people who are courageous, self-controlled and pious. They mustn't be clever at doing shameful actions, lest from enjoying the imitation they come to enjoy the reality. Or haven't you noticed that imitations practiced from youth become part of nature and settle into habits of gesture, voice and thought?" Crazy? Well, here's an article from last week's New York Times discussing the video game Madden NFL 12. Any of you play this online game? Excellent. So what is the feature of Madden NFL 12 that struck the New York Times as interesting? It was this. In the new version of Madden NFL 12, a player who gets a concussion is automatically eliminated from play. "Ever since the seriousness of concussions became apparent on the national scale," reads this article from April 2, "the primary message for young football players--if you get a concussion get off the field for the rest of the day--has been one of the most difficult for youngsters to accept and execute. That reality will soon be aided by fantasy,"--it's like it's channeling Plato--"Madden NFL 12, the coming version of the eerily true-to-life NFL video game played by millions of gamers, will be realistic enough, not only it says, to show players receiving the concussions, but also to show that any player who sustains one is sidelined for the rest of the game, no exceptions." So fantasy in the aid of social regulation. Here's another example. How does the US military train soldiers for the battlefield? Some of what it does is obviously to cultivate their bodies in such a way that they have the strength and stamina to engage in certain sorts of behaviors. But one of the primary modes of training is through video games. So here is a group of soldiers playing a game that was initially just used as a part of a recruiting video for the US army, a recruiting tool called America's Army. And subsequently got developed into a training tool for soldiers themselves. Here's a group of soldiers engaging in video game practice. And here's an article in the Washington Post from a few years ago. "Virtual reality play prepares soldiers for real war. One blistering afternoon in Iraq while fighting insurgents in the northern town of Mosul, Sgt. Sinkway Sualez opened fire with his 50-caliber. That was only the second time, he says, that he ever shot an enemy, a human enemy. 'It felt like I was in a big video game,' he said. 'It didn't even faze me, shooting back. It was just a natural instinct. Boom, boom, boom,' remembers Sualez, a fast-talking deep-voice, barrel-chested 29-year-old from Chesterfield, Virginia. He was a combat engineer in Iraq for nearly a year. And Sualez continues, 'the insurgents were firing from the other side the bridge. We called in a helicopter for an airstrike. I couldn't believe I was seeing this. It was like Halo. It didn't seem real. But it was real.'" And later in the article, the reporter goes on to quote an Army official from the office of Defense Modeling and Simulation who says, "The technology in games has facilitated a

revolution in the art of warfare. When the time came for him"--meaning Sualez--says this officer, "to fire his weapon he was ready to do that and capable of doing it. His experience leading up to that time through the on-the-ground training and the playing of Halo and whatever else, enabled him to execute. His situation awareness was up. He knew what he had to do. He had done it before or something like it up to that point." So Plato's argument starts to feel like it has some force. What exactly does the argument look like? The argument that we've been considering in Plato runs as follows. Plato suggests that fiction affects the non-rational parts of the soul in such a way that they are potentially disharmonious with the rational part. That is, fiction may cause us to find appealing things that on reflection we find unappealing, or to find unappealing things that on reflection we find appealing. It may, of course, also allow us to cultivate things that are in harmony with our commitment. Therapy can use exactly the same techniques that video game training in the Army does to bring our non-rational responses in line with our rational ones. But it is certainly a risk that fiction will affect the non-rational parts of the soul in a way that renders them disharmonious with the rational part. We, says Plato, reflectively desire--for all the reasons that we discussed in the first part of this course--to have our souls, at least for the most part, in harmony. When we are not instinctively reacting in ways that we're reflectively committed to act, it is costly to us and undesirable. But what we might think of as the easy way out of this problem, just saying to ourselves, it's only Halo, it's only a video game, turns out not to be sufficient. Individuals, says Plato, even the best of us, cannot regulate these effects internally through our own reason. We are not fully in control of the parts of ourselves through reason alone. Instead, he says, it is possible to regulate these effects externally by letting society make decisions for us about what we are and are not exposed to. Consequently, in an argument much like the one we see in Hobbes, Plato is suggesting in Book Ten that what rationality requires, given our recognition of limits that it hits up against, is a willingness to restrict our freedom in certain ways. Just as Hobbes argues that the coordination problem to which the Prisoner's Dilemma gives rise means that we need to subject ourselves to a sovereign who takes control and enforces contracts, so too does Plato suggest that we need to subject ourselves to a regulation by reflection of aspects of experience that will affect us in ways that from a distance we know to be dangerous, but from up close we're unable to protect ourselves from. Now, that's not an easy argument to take on board. It raises all sorts of questions about who does the deciding. It raises all sorts of questions about whether non-rational manipulation is in fact the role of the state. But it also reminds us that if we are trying to think about what political structures need to look like for complicated creatures such as ourselves, there will, in the end, be no easy answers. And in next Tuesday's lecture, I'll begin with what I'm going to ask as the first question. Which is, what does this have to do with Sunstein?

But I will, in the meantime, post the slides that are associated with Sunstein so that if you want to get a head start on that second question, about how non-rational persuasion might happen in society, you can take a look at those over the weekend. Thanks very much and I'll see those of you who are not visiting Bulldogs on Tuesday.

[end of transcript]

Lecture 25 - Tying up Loose Ends [April 19, 2011]

Chapter 1. Introductory Remarks [00:00:00] Professor Tamar Gendler: OK. So today's lecture is devoted, in some sense, to the tying up of loose ends. I have from you, 29 single-spaced pages worth of questions, which you asked in your directed exercise nine. And I'm going to answer all of them in detail. Actually I'm not going to answer all of them in detail. I'm going to try to pick out some of the ones that I think will be of general interest and welcome those of you whose questions aren't answered to come by during office hours. So one way to think about what we do when we encounter an article in this class is thinking about what you do when you encounter a building for the first time--say, the Eiffel Tower-and are given guidance about how to make sense of that building. So one of the things that I've tried to do for each of the articles or books that we've read is just to give you a sense of its general shape. To give you a sense of what's distinctive about it, to give you a sense of how it's structured internally and how that internal structure determines what it is that we're able to do with that article and what it is that that article is able to illuminate. But I've tried, in certain cases, to give you a sense of the neighborhood in which that article can be found, just as in talking about the Eiffel Tower, I might show you where in Paris it's located. Or I might try to give you a sense of how that article relates to other approaches of the same kind--how the Eiffel Tower relates to other iconic monumental buildings. The question of the relation between the individual articles that we read for today and the larger framework is primarily something that I'll discuss in Thursday's lecture. Though I'll get at some of it in comparing and contrasting the political philosophy views today. What I want to do a bit more of today is to look at some of the details of some of the arguments and articles and writings that we've considered in the way that we might look at part of a building and ask how its structured there, recognizing that in so doing, there's lots of other parts of the building to which we don't pay attention. Or we might want to ask, with respect to what sort of problem is the building constructed? Here are the plans for the Eiffel Tower. So the goal in today's lecture is, with regard to a number of the questions that you raised in your directed exercise nine, to look at some of the details of some of the arguments and, to a smaller extent, to put those in a larger framework. Now in so doing, it's important for me to acknowledge that there are a tremendous number of interesting questions that you asked that I'm not even going to come close to answering. There were a large number of very interesting questions about the connections between the political philosophy of Rawls and Nozick, for example, and the U.S. Constitution. I'm not going to have anything to say about that. There were questions asked about the childhoods of the various authors that we read and how that might have affected their views. I'm not going to have much to say about that. And perhaps my favorite question: I was asked, if I could have coffee at Blue State with any one of the authors that we had read this semester, who would I choose? And I guess I wouldn't choose Robert Nozick because he wouldn't want to go to Blue State. But beyond that it's hard to know how to answer that question.

So what I'm going to do today is basically in three parts. The first large part of the lecture, I'm going to go over in some detail a leftover item from our lecture two classes ago. That is, say a little bit about Cass Sunstein on norms. And I'm going to use that as a way of segueing into certain puzzles that we face about heuristics and the question of how those fit into the dual processing tradition. But that will also be a major focus of Thursday's lecture. So please don't be disappointed if I don't get to your question in that section. And then I'll close that section by identifying for you, a cluster of courses that you might be interested in taking if that was the part of this class that interested you most. I'll then have some things to say about the political philosophy section of the course. And I'll close today's lecture with the moral philosophy section of the course, each time indicating places to go next if you were particularly moved by some of the readings that we did. Chapter 2. Cass Sunstein on Social Norms [00:05:21] So let's start with a somewhat detailed introduction to what it is that Cass Sunstein said in the 1996 article that we read for last Tuesday's class. What Sunstein is attempting to do in that piece is to identify the ways in which our attitudes towards certain kinds of behaviors on our part and the part of others towards certain sorts of decisions on our part and the part of others are affected by what he calls, drawing from a large body of sociological literature, social norms. Social norms are basically social attitudes of approval and disapproval that specify, through the kinds of tacit mechanisms that human beings as social primates have for expressing disapproval and approval of one's and other's actions. That is, social attitudes of approval and disapproval specifying what ought to be done and what ought not to be done. Subtle things like nuanced facial expressions, approaches, avoidances, all of the social cues to which we are extraordinarily sensitive in infancy, to which we are extraordinarily sensitive in our early years, to which we are absolutely, exquisitely sensitive in middle school and high school. And to which we continue to be sensitive throughout our life. What Sunstein points out is that social norms determine social meanings. That is, they determine the attitudes and commitments that a particular type of conduct signals. So, he points out, if you fasten your seatbelt in a country where seatbelt use is not the norm then you express in so doing implicit criticism of the ability of your driver to navigate the car effectively on the highway. Fastening your seatbelt is an insult. When my family and I rent cars in Eastern Europe, where my husband is from, rental cars typically come, if you don't rent them from a major agency, with a small metal plate that you can slide into the seatbelt lock without having a seatbelt attached to it so that the annoying beeping sound goes off and you don't have to wear your insulting seatbelt. Whereas in nations where seatbelt use is the norm, where seatbelt use is in fact the law, the failure to fasten your seatbelt is an expression of disrespect. When I was growing up my family, to my great embarrassment, separated its vegetable scraps from its paper scraps and put them in the backyard into a compost heap. The social meaning of a compost heap in the 1970s in suburban Massachusetts was one of non-

normativity. It was one of an expression, perhaps, that we were more socially conscious than our neighbors, perhaps thought we were better than our neighbors. But whatever it was it wasn't a way of fitting in. It is now the case in large portions of America that a compost heap or the carrying of a recyclable bag or the replacement of your light bulb with a fullspectrum long-term bulb simply expresses respect for the environment rather than an outlier attitude. My Hungarian nephew, when he came to visit us this summer, wore what he thought to be very stylish Iron Maiden t-shirts, which in Budapest were in expression of cool. In our suburban Connecticut environment, his actions were often misperceived as rebellious because of the social signals that his clothing sent. So the reason that I had you read the Sunstein article in the context of our political philosophy discussion was to point out to you how many more layers of complexity there are when we start thinking about what kind of social structures are legitimate. There was, in addition, a very particular question about the Sunstein article, which was raised in the context of our feedback page, about which I want to say a small bit by way of transition. So one of the students asked whether I could characterize Sunstein's somewhat complicated argument about willingness to pay and willingness to allow. So what we're doing now is we're looking at a very particular girder of a very particular argument. So Sunstein in that article, you may recall, introduces a discussion of what's known as the endowment effect, which is basically the tendency of human beings to demand more to give up an owned object than they would be prepared to pay to acquire that object. And the term for how much it is that somebody's willing to sell something for is WTA, willingness to accept payment, whereas the term for that which somebody's willing to pay for an object is WTP, or willingness to pay. It turns out that if I have a beautiful Yale mug, which I seek to sell to you, that our assessments of its value will very often differ. I may well say that I won't part with my beautiful mug for anything less than $10. Whereas you say, "I wouldn't buy your crappy old mug for anything more than $5." Even if, when we alter the situation and you have the mug and I don't, our responses are inverted. I wouldn't buy your crappy old mug for anything more than $5 and you wouldn't part with it for anything less than $10. Now Sunstein, 15 years ago in this article, hypothesizes that what explains this effect is primarily something about social norms. It looks like, at least to some extent, that he was wrong about that. At least that he was wrong that social norms fully explain the phenomena. Because research done in Laurie Santos lab at this very university in the last five years seems to suggest that something akin to the endowment effect can be found even in Capuchin monkeys. A tendency to value more that which is yours than that which is not, even when the objects are identical. That said, there is still reason to think that Sunstein is on to something when he argues that the willingness to pay, willingness to allow distinction, in some ways is tracking something about social meaning. So he points out that in a series of studies done in the context of behavioral economics with WEIRD subjects near the University of Chicago, for at least Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic, adults, it looks like this asymmetry is rather profound. So he described this study, the details of which I had thought I would go through but I won't,

in which what you see is a rather radical asymmetry in subject's willingness to either acquire an object from another or part with an object that they own. Sunstein's response to these sorts of cases is to suggest that the difference here has a lot to do with social norms and meanings. So that being willing to, for example accept a certain amount of money to allow the extinction of a species has a very different social meaning than--what you might think of as structurally the same--accepting, or being willing to pay a certain amount of money to prevent the extinction of the species. Whether you consider the state of the world where the species is extinct or whether you consider the state of the world where the species is present and it's your job to save it, to be the baseline, turns out to affect people's evaluation of it. And Sunstein suggests in the article, more generally, that numerous of our actions, numerous of our decisions, are driven at least in part by internal and external social meaning. And that, as a consequence, an effective mechanism for influencing actions and decisions is to influence the social meanings of those actions and decisions. So that, he suggests, it turns out to be an inevitable role of government to regulate behavior by the affirmation or introduction or disavowal of certain kinds of social meaning. And we address the issue of this sort of indirect non-rational control of behavior in the context of our discussion of Plato on censorship. Chapter 3. Responses to the Trolley Problem [00:16:56] Now this distinction between willingness to pay and willingness to allow, the details of which we're now going to set aside, can be used to think about one of the examples, which we talked about in many lectures and which we'll talk about again on Thursday. Namely, the fact that there is an undeniable tendency of people, this class included, to respond differently to the classic trolley case, where one diverts a trolley from a track where it's about to hit five onto a track where it's about to hit one, and trolley cases involving pushing someone off a bridge. So whereas the first one among you produced only 15% of you saying that it was prohibited to turn the trolley, the second case, the one where you're asked to push the fat man off the bridge, thereby killing one and saving five, produced among you a 78% conclusion that the act was forbidden. Next lecture we'll talk a lot about how to reconcile intuitions about particular cases with more general principled commitment. But what I want to do now is just, by way of answering a couple of questions, point out to you three different ways that one might respond to what's going on in this asymmetry. One might, making use of the vocabulary that Sunstein just introduced, say that what's going on in the case of fat man is a case where one's being asked to accept a cost. Accept the cost of having one die in order to save five. Whereas what's going on in the case of the switch is that one's being asked to pay a cost--something that wasn't part of the calculus to begin with--pay a cost of having one die to save five. And we know as a matter of general theory, that the way human--and perhaps even non-human--primate accounting works, that that the cost of accepting something feels higher to us than the cost of paying. So perhaps what's going on in the trolley cases is that we are assimilating them, by means of a heuristic

mechanism that we often use, to a familiar kind of reasoning process, one that may or may not be tracking our moral commitments. Or perhaps as the cases were originally suggested to show, what we're tracking here in our different responses is a deep and profound morally real distinction between violating rights and considering utility, where in cases that violating rights comes into play, letting one die or killing one in order to save five is morally wrong. Whereas in cases where rights don't come into play, letting one die or killing one to save five is morally acceptable. Or perhaps what's going on in this case is, as Josh Greene suggests on the basis of his neuroimaging work, that in one of the cases we're responding emotionally and in the other case we're responding rationally. What the first and the third, but not the second, response have in common--that is, what the two responses that suggest we should take as differentially informative our responses to the fat man case and our responses to the bystander case suggest--is that in thinking about these cases we are thinking about one of them primarily with one mode of thought and the other primarily with another mode of thought. And throughout the course, we have been introduced to the fact that in every intellectual tradition there has been a suggestion that human understanding of the world proceeds in multiple ways. The contemporary scientific vernacular of this makes use of the notion of dual processing. It suggests that there are two systems: System one and system two. Where system one is evolutionarily primitive and shared with non-human animals, whereas system two is evolutionarily recent and shared, if with any animals at all, only with those closest to us in the evolutionary tree. System one is unconscious or preconscious whereas system two is conscious. System one is automatic whereas system two is controlled. System one is effortless whereas system two is effortful. System one is fast whereas system two is slow. System one is associative whereas system two is rule-based. Now one of the things that we've done throughout the course is to look at various ways of getting at the distinction that this particular version gets at without trying to decide which of these frameworks is the one that's most useful in all contexts. But rather, by recognizing that in certain domains it may be useful to speak, as Plato does, of spirit and appetite pulling in one direction and reason pulling in another. That it might be useful in some contexts to speak as I do of alief causing certain kinds of nonreflective behaviors while belief causes certain kinds of reflective ones. That it might be useful in some contexts to speak of heuristics as causing us to respond in one sort of way and full cognition--or reflection--causing us to respond in another. But it's important to know that in picking out those three particular ways that we looked at this overarching distinction, that we neglected to look at the many, many other sorts of dual processing accounts. Here are 15 or so taken from the Evans article that we read in midJanuary. And that for the purposes of our discussion in this course, the similarities among these views are more relevant than the differences. If however, you are intrigued by the set of questions, which I've just quickly run through, there are numerous places to go next. Most of the courses offered by the cognitive science program look at the sorts of issues that I've just been discussing. How is human reasoning affected by structural features of the

brain? To what extent can we systematize the sorts of errors that human beings seem to make in reasoning? To what extent are those sorts of errors--or what we call errors-actually effective means for navigating various sorts of environments? You can also look at these sorts of questions in the context of social psychology, cognitive psychology, developmental psychology, and there will be numerous courses offered in psychology next year that will go in much more depth into the questions that I've just been mentioning. The School of Management offers courses in behavioral economics, which are open to undergraduates who have the requisite background. And in the context of the philosophy department, there are historical courses that look seriously and in depth at Plato alone. Indeed there's a course this semester that just reads Plato's Republic. There are courses that look at Aristotle or Aristotle's ethics. Courses that look at each of the authors that we've been considering. So intrigued by what we've just talked about, many places to go. Chapter 4. Hobbes, Rawls, and Nozick [00:26:54] Second big cluster of topics that I want to address questions with regard to. I was asked-perhaps because they came so recently--by almost a third of the questions, to discuss again the relation between Nozick and Rawls and to say something, perhaps, about how that fits together with Hobbes and the social contract theory. So borrowing from my colleague Thomas Pogge, here's a helpful way for thinking about the difference among the three of them. And I'll give you first an overview of the difference and then try to present you with a systematic explanation of just where Hobbes, Rawls and Nozick are similar and different. So all three of them are working in what is known as the social contract tradition. All three of them are making the contention that it is in a certain kind of interest on the part of human beings to contract into a certain sort of social structure even if in so doing they give up some of their freedom. Hobbes argues that it is of prudential utility for us to engage in a social contract. We are better off than we would have been had we not been part of a state. But the state of nature to which Hobbes appeals is a purely imaginary one. It is a hypothetical contract, whose value to us is prudential. Rawls suggests that it is of moral utility for us to engage in the sort of social contract that the Rawlsian state represents. We imaginarily go into the original position behind the veil of ignorance. And in so doing come up with something morally worthy. Nozick, in contrast to Rawls, is concerned with how things actually came into being. But like Rawls is interested in what sort of moral justification that provides. So whereas Hobbes is interested in what a hypothetical contract tells us about what's prudential for us, Rawls is interested in what a hypothetical contract tells us about what's moral and Nozick is interested in what a certain historical set of events, where that stands with respect to morality. So let's start by looking at Hobbes' argument. Hobbes presents us, in Leviathan, with what he calls the state of nature. An imaginary situation, what manner of life there would be

with no common power to fear. Where life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. And he suggests that our prudential aim, that which is of use to us, is to escape the state of nature. Why? Because all of us have a fear of death, the desire for commodious living, and the hope that by our industry we might obtain it. But, says Hobbes, that gives rise, if we think about the fact that being in the state of nature is bad for us, to a number of rationally mandated conclusions, of which we examined three. These are what Hobbes calls the laws of nature. The things, which we realize rationality demands of us if we have the prudential aim of commodious living. In particular, we need to seek peace if there's a chance of obtaining peace and if not reserve for ourselves the right of war. First law of nature. We need to lay down our rights to the extent that others are willing to do the same. Second law of nature. And we need to perform our covenants, that is keep our promises, assuming that others are willing to do the same. But there is a structural problem with our doing so. The structural problem is the one articulated by the Prisoner's Dilemma. And because of that, says Hobbes, the only way that we can do what rationality demands of us: seek peace, lay down our rights and perform our covenants, thereby acting on the first half of each of these clauses, is if we institute an authoritarian government. A civil power sufficient to compel non-defection in a prisoner's dilemma. So note the four key steps. Because I'm going to go through these next with Rawls and next with Nozick. We're interested in a situation, a rationally mandated conclusion and a structurally mandated mechanism. So how does it go for Rawls? Rawls says, look. Let's consider the following hypothetical situation. The original position, where we sit behind the veil of ignorance, not knowing who we will be in society, and choose the basic structures by which our society will be governed. The aim that we engage in this activity with is the aim of articulating the conditions of a just society. Why? Because justice is the first virtue of social institutions just as truth is the first virtue of theoretical systems. It is the aim of articulating a political philosophy to come up with one that respects our moral norms. Just as it is Hobbes's aim in articulating the constraints that govern a legitimate political society to identify one that respects our prudential norms. What then is the rationally mandated conclusion of taking this hypothetical situation and this particular aim? Well, says Rawls, just as Hobbes thought, thinking about the structure of the state of nature gives us, through rationality, the three laws of nature. So too does Rawls think, thinking about the structure of the original position with the aim of developing a moral society, give us the principles of justice. In particular, the first equal liberty principle: that in no circumstances are the fundamental rights of the one to be sacrificed for the utility of the many. And second, that to the extent that there are inequalities in the society, those are to be associated with positions fairly open to all and in such a way that they are advantageous to the least well off. Moreover, Rawls thinks not just about a hypothetical situation and the moral aim and the rationally mandated conclusion that we can draw from that, but also about what sort of mechanism, what sort of structure that tells us society needs to have. And his suggestion is that it becomes roughly one with equality and basic rights and duties. Freedom of speech, freedom of expression, freedom of thought, an equal responsibility to

make a contribution to the upkeep of the community as a whole. And because of facts about efficiency, Rawls is ready to, at least tentatively, endorse, as one effective mechanism towards this, a market economy with some tendency towards redistribution. So notice that it is an argument almost parallel to the one that Hobbes makes. We take a hypothetical situation. We have an aim. We reason our way through the situation and determine certain sorts of constraints. And then we identify what kind of social structure that gives us. Let's look next at what that gives us in the context of Nozick. Nozick's interested, not in a hypothetical situation, but in a historical situation. In particular, he's interested in what we should do about the fact that a particular distribution of resources has resulted from a series of just transfers. A series of transfers where property was acquired in a legitimate way and transferred in a legitimate way regardless of what that pattern produced. Notice that although we read only Nozick's discussion of justice in holdings and consequently we looked at a rather narrow question of under what conditions it is legitimate to own property, that Nozick's argument with respect to holdings can be generalized with respect to any sort of decision that people make. What makes holdings legitimate on Nozick's picture is that they are the result of a legitimate process. And as a consequence, any sort of contract that we enter into in a way that Nozick will call free will end up being in the same historical category. So what Nozick is interested in is the question: given that things as a matter of historical contingency happen to end up the way they are in terms of the distribution of goods and in terms of the distribution of contracts, what sort of moral force does that have? Nozick's goal is to determine whether this distribution of holdings--that is property--and contracts--that is commitment--is a legitimate one. And his suggestion is that as long as property is justly acquired and justly transferred, then whatever distribution results from that is a just distribution. And you'll recall that we looked in some detail at Nozick's idea of just acquisition, where he basically says, an object is legitimately held if it was acquired in a way where the value that you add to the object makes your possession of it leave others no worse off than they would be had you not acquired the object. And where just transfers are any that are engaged in voluntarily. One result of that, as we know from the Wilt Chamberlain example, is that even if we begin with a perfectly even distribution of goods across individuals, it's almost guaranteed that we will end up with an unequal one. And notice that exactly the same sort of argument that can be raised for distribution of property can be raised for the distribution of obligations. So Nozick's interested in historical situation. He has a moral aim, namely determining whether the distribution is just. And the conclusion that he draws, as a result of thinking about that structure, is that any intervention into justly generated distributions of holdings or contracts is a violation of rights. After all, the only things that matter to whether holdings are just, on Nozick's picture, is whether they were justly acquired of justly transferred. And the fact that, as a matter of coordination problems of the kind that we face in the problem of the commons, the fact that that will inevitably result in distributions that are unequal is of no concern to the sort of historical picture that Nozick has. Likewise, the fact that as the result of historical contingency, I may end up contracted in a way that leaves me

subordinate to you is, according to Nozick, in no way unjust because no intervention into a justly generated process can be performed without violating rights. So the structurally mandated mechanism which Nozick ends up advocating is that of the minimal state. So what's the picture among our political philosophers? The idea is this. Hobbes is interested in thinking about what a hypothetical state of nature, considered from the perspective of prudence, tells us is rational. What it tells us is rational are certain laws of nature, the enforcement of which is possible only through the introduction of an authoritarian state. Rawls asks us to think hypothetically from the position of the veil of ignorance, what it would take for us to have a moral society, concludes that it would be governed by the principles of justice, and identifies as a mechanism what I've called, because there wasn't much room here, Sweden. And Nozick asks what we can do given that an actual distribution arose as the result of a bunch of fair transfers and concludes that if our goal is to respect rights, then the only state which is legitimate is the minimal state. So we spent roughly four classes on political philosophy. Where to go if you want more? The Philosophy department offers political philosophy courses, both survey courses and courses on each of the individuals that we've read. You can take a course surveying political philosophy from Plato past Nozick. Or you can take a course on any one of the individual authors. The Political Science department, likewise, offers historically structured courses and courses on our individual authors. Nearly every course listed in the Ethics, Politics and Economics department is a course that will address the kinds of questions that I just mentioned in this chart. And in the context of the Economics department and indeed in three or four other departments, you can think about game theory as a way of representing these structures or think about policy in the context of an economic framework. It's 11:19. I will integrate the discussion of morality and the answers to those questions into our final lecture on Thursday. But it's my hope that even if I didn't answer all 500 of the questions that I was asked for today that the lecture gave you some sense of how some of the pieces fit together. And we'll continue on Thursday. [end of transcript]

Lecture 26 - Concluding Lecture [April 21, 2011]

Chapter 1. Three Goals of the Course [00:00:00] So where are we? Well it's the closing lecture. When we first started gathering in this room three and a bit months ago, there was a photo essay in the Yale Daily News with snow everywhere. On January 13, when our second meeting began, campus looked like this, and this, and this, and this, and this. Whereas exactly three months later, the Yale Daily News ran a photo essay with this, and this, and this, and this, and this, and this. It's spring. And we're done. What did we do? Well we started with Plato's Republic and we ended with Plato's Republic. The seasons changed. We, in some ways, performed an intricate reading of one of the most foundational works in the western philosophical tradition. So what I want to do in today's lecture is to take you through the course, using four different paths. The first thing I want to do is to think through how it is that the course goals were realized. The goals of helping you think about how material that you learned in a lecture in Linsly-Chit might relate to material that you learned to a lecture in WLH and how that might relate to thoughts that you had in the library or ideas that came up in the context of conversations in your dining hall. The second path I want to take through the course is to go back to the syllabus's initial description of the three main course topics and to point out to you the way in which your understanding of those topics have changed. So we'll look at the question of happiness and flourishing as we encountered it in the works of Plato, of Epictetus, of Csikszentmihalyi. We'll look at the question of morality as we encountered it in the works of Kant and Mill and again in the context of trolley cases. And we'll think about the questions of social legitimacy and political structures, both in the context of Rawls and Nozick, Hobbes, and in the context of the Prisoner's Dilemma. In the third part of the lecture, I want to move to three themes, which I see as having unified the course. Three central questions, each of which provides us with a way of tracing a path through our readings. The first, unsurprisingly, is the theme of the multi-part soul. The second, the theme of luck and control. And the third, the question of the relation between the individual and society. And I want to close the lecture with, what for me are the three central quotations around which I see the course as having been organized. One from Epictetus, one from Aristotle and one, which we haven't discussed yet as a group, from the closing pages of Plato's Republic. So let's start out by remembering what it said on the syllabus that the goals of the course were. The syllabus told us that the course had three goals, the first of which was to introduce you to a number of traditional philosophical discussions that address profound questions about the human condition and to help you think about ways in which the methodology of philosophy provides insight regarding them. And in the course of so doing, we encountered work by Plato, by Aristotle, by Epictetus, by Hobbes, by Kant, by Mill, by Judy Thomson, John Rawls and Robert Nozick. And what I tried to provide you with, in each of these cases, were the tools to make these texts your own for the rest of your

life. Some of your exercises involved learning how to use the front material or the indices or the critical material that is attached to the texts. So in the case of Plato's Republic and Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics we used highly annotated editions of a kind that let you make your way into an ancient text that might be otherwise unapproachable. In some of the cases the problem was having the terminology necessary to make sense of technical words that the author was using. And there we learned to make use of the Blackburn Dictionary of Philosophy and other resources as a way of orienting yourself in texts that seemed technical. Sometimes the language of the text got in the way. So for many of you reading the Hobbes in the original 16th century English made it harder to understand what the concepts were. And there we learned the possibility of making use of modernizations of texts as ways of understanding them. And throughout, with the reading guides, the reading questions, the lectures and the discussions, the goal was to provide you with the tools so that for the rest of your life when you look on your shelf and you see your copy of Plato's Republic you can open it up and learn from it on your own. The second goal of the course was to introduce you to related discussions of these topics from the perspective of other academic disciplines, particularly contemporary cognitive science and psychology, and to help you think about the ways in which the methodologies of those disciplines provide insights regarding these fundamental questions. So we started our discussion of The Ring of Gyges by looking at empirical work by Daniel Batson inspired by Plato's challenge as posed by Glaucon. When we looked at Plato and Aristotle and Epictetus on flourishing, we did so in light Jon Haidt's Happiness Hypothesis, which brought to bear on these historical questions study after study from the contemporary psychological tradition. When we thought about how the notion of parts of the soul is manifest in our contemporary idiom, we made use of the work of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, the heuristics and biases tradition, as a way of trying to use our vernacular to think about insights that have been part of every wisdom tradition since human civilization began. When we thought about what Plato meant by the harmonious soul and what Aristotle meant by the cultivation of habit to allow virtue to become easy, we thought about it in light of Csikszentmihalyi's notion of flow and considered the ways in which that notion might, in a contemporary idiom, give voice to the concerns that we saw in these earlier authors. When we thought about what the costs of a disordered soul might be, we read Jonathan Shay's extraordinary work, Achilles in Vietnam. And we thought about the ways in which the war experience as described in Homer's Illiad and the war experience as described by returning veterans give voice to a common human experience in the face of the loss of a certain sort of structure. When we thought about the ways in which social activities of those around us--the inevitable human tendency conform to the demands of authority--when we thought about those questions and how they might affect people we did so in light of the work of Stanley Milgram. When we thought about how it is that we might go about cultivating virtue in

ourselves we considered what implications that might have for parenting. When we thought about the question of how it is that we should explain our responses to trolley cases, we considered the question of whether the neural underpinnings with respect to activations in particular part of the brain might be doing some of the explanatory work to answer the questions with which we were concerned. When we thought about how it is that we might make sense of questions in political philosophy and the legitimacy of the social contract, we helped ourselves to game theory's notion of the Prisoner's Dilemma and to the idea of the Problem of the Commons. When we considered the ways in which social structures affect us, we looked at the question of social norms and we thought about the ways in which, though we had cut a fairly wide path through one intellectual tradition, that there was a world full of other intellectual traditions which we had barely touched. In all of these cases the goal, as with the philosophical texts, was to give you the tools and resources to make use of this sort of literature on your own in the future. You performed a directed exercise where you were given a core text and asked to find articles that cited it and articles that it cited. You were asked to take a particular article from an empirical psychological journal and to figure out what question it was asking, what alternatives it was considering, what the logic of the argument was, what the methods were that were being used, what the results were and what the implications were. And then you were asked to come up with your own experimental design, having thought through, in the case of someone else's study, what a study might look like. The goal of this was not only to introduce you to a broad swath of psychological literature, but also to let you know that this too is a body of intellectual resources, which is at your disposal for the rest of your life. The third goal of the course was to help you to think about your own education in a synthetic way by encouraging you to be sensitive to how insights from one academic or other contexts might be echoed or illuminated by insights from another. This course is a case study, a model, an exemplar, for how it's possible to look at a problem from multiple perspectives. And your final exercise, which asks you to think about, for a question that concerns you, how you might bring multiple perspectives to bear on it, is an attempt to get you to think, for the rest of your time at Yale and the rest of your time on this planet, in a synthetic way. To think about the range of courses and choices that are available to you as being interrelated in exploring the fundamental question that defined human experience. So that's path one through the course. Three goals. Three skills. Chapter 2. How Ones Understanding of the Course Themes has Changed [00:13:11] Path number two looked at three fundamental, substantive, questions. The question of what can be said, at least in the context of the Western tradition and perhaps beyond, about the conditions under which authentic happiness and true flourishing are possible. The second was the question of what sorts of demands morality makes on us. And the third was the question of political legitimacy and social structures and the ways that those affect us. So if

you look back at your syllabus you will see that the set of questions which we aim to explore there are the set of questions which we actually explored. In the context of happiness and flourishing, we ask ourselves how we might think about Plato's suggestion that the human soul has various parts in light of contemporary work in psychology. And we explored, not only Plato's idea that we are composed of a reasonable part, a spirited, and an appetitive part, but looked also at numerous manifestations of what's now known as the dual processing tradition. And we'll talk more about that when we talk about the organizing themes. We asked ourselves how Plato's and Aristotle's discussion of the importance of friendship and human attachment are echoed in recent discussions of human happiness and flourishing. And sadly because of the weather that lecture was somewhat abbreviated. I promise next year when I do the class to do it in more detail and you're all invited back, if you're on campus, to hear that. We asked ourselves how the basic ideas of the stoic philosopher Epictetus are reflected in modern therapeutic practices. And we recognized that the central insights he has--of recognizing what is and isn't in your control and of realizing that one can set ones desires in such a way that the world feels more cooperative--lies at the center of modern therapeutic practice. And we read in this context the amazingly moving words of Admiral Stockdale describing the ways in which the words of Epictetus enabled him to survive and even flourish the degrading conditions of a prisoner of war camp in Vietnam. We asked ourselves how Aristotle's discussion of weakness of the will--what he calls akrasia--connects with current discussions of procrastination and how to avoid it. And we presented ourselves with various resources for structuring our external and internal environment in such a way that our reflective commitments could be what guided our practice, rather than our untrained habits. And we asked ourselves how Aristotle's reflections about the role of habit in cultivating virtue are reflected in 20th century and 21st century parenting manuals. All of those were questions that we considered in the context of happiness and flourishing. All of those were words on a syllabus page, whose significance to you three months ago was, I hope, less than it is now. All of these are questions worth asking yourself for the rest of your life. In the context of our discussion of morality, we asked ourselves what are the basic tenets of the fundamental moral theories, which compose the Western tradition: Aristotelian virtue ethics, Kantian deontology and Millian consequentialism. We set aside, for the purposes of this course, a fourth very important strand that grounds morality in religion. But we have, as a result of having thought through the questions, what assumptions do these theories make about human nature and about the role of morality, the tools to think about even moral theories that we didn't consider. We looked for differences in the moral theories, the ways in which they emphasize consequence or actor or character. We looked at similarities among the moral theories, the ways in which they stressed the importance of overcoming a certain kind of first-person exceptionalism. We looked at the ways in which these moral theories deal with the gap between intention and outcome. And we looked at the ways in

which these moral theories do and don't provide different answers to particular normative questions. We went on to ask ourselves, in the context of our discussion of morality, how recent experimental work on moral intuition, particularly discussions of the Trolley Problem but also discussions of related cases, relates to traditional philosophical discussions of morality. And how this work connects with contemporary work in neuroscience and related work in cognitive and social psychology. And through the discovery that it was extraordinarily difficult to come up with systematic explanations for why it is that our intuitions were pulling us one way in one case and another way in other cases, we came to realize how challenging it is to come up with a systematic theory, and thereby gained further insight on our original question about the structure and complexity of the human soul. And we thought about, in the context of our discussion of morality, the relation between moral responsibility and luck. Recognizing, perhaps in the most profound way, that some things are up to us and some things are not. And that the relation between good intentions and good outcomes, bad intentions and bad outcomes, are not as tight as we might wish they would be. And we asked ourselves, finally in this context, when punishment might be justified and what moral political and psychological role it plays as a way of thinking about the counterpart of the moral question. And we learned thereby that one of the ways of thinking about how things should go when they go right is to think about how things should go when they go wrong. And thereby we gained another tool for thinking about a set of fundamental questions. Like the questions about happiness and flourishing, these are questions to ask for the rest of your life. In the third part of the course we asked a question about the role of social structures in allowing human flourishing and moral behavior. And we actually previewed this part of the course back in the beginning section. We asked ourselves what the experience of Greek soldiers in the Trojan War and the experience of American soldiers in the Vietnam War tells us about the role of social order, thmis, in allowing human beings to function effectively. And we, through that and through the discussion of Stanley Milgram's work, got our first hint of the ways in which much of what we are and much of how we act is determined, not merely by things inside ourselves but also by the communal structures with which we are surrounded. And that makes all the more pressing, the set of questions that we asked in the final unit of the course. Inspired by Plato's opening analogy, that to understand the structure of the human soul we must understand the structure of society. And to understand the structure of society we must understand the structure of the human soul. And we asked ourselves how it is that the fact that we are simultaneously desirous of possessing objects that others possess and desirous of being able to be in a position of security with respect to that to which we have become attached, we discovered that there was a mathematical representation, game theory's notion of the Prisoner's Dilemma, that could illuminate Plato's discussion in the opening pages of book two of the Republic and Hobbes's discussion in chapter thirteen of Leviathan of the ways in which social structures come into being legitimately.

We then went on to ask ourselves, looking at two central texts in the 20th century Western political philosophical tradition, how the work of John Rawls and Robert Nozick bring out the importance of what, in many cases, seem to be two competing considerations. Considerations of equality, on the one hand in the work of Rawls, and of liberty on the other, in the work of Nozick, in structuring a just and legitimate society. And we asked ourselves how work in social psychology and behavioral economics might shed additional light on these fundamental questions. And we asked ourselves finally, in our discussion of norms and basic social structures and censorship, what the proper role for non-rational means of persuasion, including mass cultural influences such as cinema, television and music, is in a democratic society. And we noticed, in an uncanny way, that Dan Quayle's remarks about Murphy Brown and the Madden video games' views about displaying concussions in online gaming were echoing almost verbatim the words of Plato from book ten of the Republic when he discussed poetry and censorship. So that's our second path through the course. The three fundamental themes that we identified, the sub-questions that we asked with respect to each of them, and the encouragement to all of you to keep asking yourselves those questions. Chapter 3. Three Unifying Themes of the Course [00:25:07] Path number three: three organizing themes. And I will, because I don't want them to go to waste twice during this section, ask you to use for the very last time in this course, your clickers. So if you'll take them out for a slide about four slides from now and then a couple of slides after that. You will recall that we began our discussion of parts of the soul with Plato's famous story of Leontius. He writes in the Republic of "Leontious, the son of Aglaion, who was going up from the Piraeus along the outside of the north wall of the city when he saw some corpses lying at the executioner's feet. He had an appetite to look at them but at the same time was disgusted and turned away. For a time," writes Plato, "he struggled with himself and covered his face. But finally, overpowered by appetite he pushed his eyes wide open and rushed towards the corpses saying, look for yourselves you evil wretches. Take your fill of the beautiful sight." Tempted by corpses, perhaps we are not. Tempted by contemporary analogs thereof, perhaps we are. And we introduced ourselves, as a tool for thinking about this, to George Ainsle's idea of hyperbolic discounting, whereby a smaller, sooner reward, one that from a distance doesn't seem as valuable as our ultimate reward, comes as the result of the way in which we relate to value over time to seem more valuable to us at a moment of decision making. So even if your goal is to spend the weekend preparing for exams, and even if now, from the perspective of Thursday, the larger, later reward looms greater in your mind, there is--let me remind you--the risk that as you move closer the curves will cross and you will find yourself consuming the smaller, sooner reward and losing the larger, later one. We talked about this in the context of this class, where more than 50% of you committed to turning off the Internet, either completely or restricting your Internet usage in some way in the context of class. And I asked you on January 25th, back when the snow still covered the

ground, how successful you had been. And at that time, of those of you who had committed yourself to some sort of restriction, 56% of you had strayed not even an itty-bitty bit. 25% had strayed just once or twice. 8% said, well a few times but I'm trying. And 11% of you had fallen off the wagon. So the first clicker question, I'll ask only for those of you who made some sort of commitment to yourself, is how did it work out? If you had the internet pledge, did you stray, one, not even once; two, a few times but not very often; three, pretty regularly but not all the time; or four, if for example you're closing Facebook now and looking for your clicker, you might want to push yep. So let's see in the next 10 seconds how our numbers came out in comparison to where we were at the beginning of the semester. So of those of you who took the Internet pledge, 30% of you kept it tightly. From all 30% of you, the rest of us want advice. Why did it work? What did you do? What enabled you to carry through with your commitments? Another third of you strayed a few times but not very often. But nearly 50% of you, despite having resolved to do something, were unable to carry through on your commitments. One of the goals of this course is to remind you that both in the Ancient tradition and in the modern dual processing tradition, there are theoretical frameworks for understanding why it is that we often find ourselves not carrying through on what we were committing to and how it is that we might structure our experience and our surroundings in such a way that that becomes easier. So that's one of the ways in which we thought about the question of the soul having parts in this course. We also thought about the question of the soul having parts in this course as a rather profound challenge to methodology in any discipline. We observed, in the context of the heuristics and biases tradition, that there are cases where we are faced with choices where we know what the right choice is and we are pulled one way by one sort of instinct and another way by another. So for example, in what are called frequency/probability cases, where, for instance, your goal is to choose from the box where you have the greatest likelihood of drawing a red ball. And one of the boxes has one red ball and nine white ones-- a 10% chance--whereas the other box has 8 red balls and 92 white ones--an 8% chance. We know that there is a tendency, when under cognitive load or when exhausted, to be pulled towards frequency-- the presence of eight red balls over here--as opposed to probability--the 10% case over here. But we also know that when were pulled towards frequency rather than probability in that case, we're making a mistake. In other of the cases that we considered, it's not so easy to know which answer is the one that we reflectively endorse. We were presented twice in the course with Kahneman and Tversky's famous disease problem. A terrible disease has struck 600 people in your town, you're the mayor and two courses of treatment are available: plan A and plan B. It turns out that the plans are identical. But plan A is described as a plan where 200 people of the 600 will live. Whereas plan B, in the second case is described as one where 400 of the 600 people will die. And so too with the probabilistic determinations of them.

But here are the data that you as a class provided. Those of you who faced the green description of the choice between A and B were 2/3 of the time preferring plan A. Those of you who faced the blue description of the choice between plan A and plan B, the one that phrased it in terms of 400 deaths rather than 200 lives saved, showed exactly an inverse proportion of responses. But in contrast to the frequency/probability case it's not clear what the right way to frame a question of decision-making under certainty versus uncertainty is. Should we think about how many will live? Should we think about how many will die? Which framing is the right one isn't so obvious. And this problem persisted as we over and over again, in the context of our trolley discussions, found ourselves giving different sorts of responses to cases that were theoretically challenging to distinguish. So only 15% of you thought it was prohibited to turn the trolley in the case of bystander. Whereas 78% of you thought it was prohibited to have the trolley hit the fat man in that version of the scenario. We faced it again in the context of our ducking and shielding cases. Almost all of you thought it was fine, if a bear was approaching you, to move out of the way even if the inevitable consequence was that the bear harmed the person behind you. But almost none of you thought it was acceptable, if a bear is running towards you, to take the person from behind you and put them in front of you as a shield. Does that difference track something real? Or are those just the different responses that the different parts of the soul gives? Again and again we confronted this when we thought about ways in which we should use not reason, but habit as a method for regulating behavior. When we thought about flow as a state of the harmonious soul, where the parts of the soul that can be pulling us in different directions might come together. In the context of the role and justification of punishment, where we asked ourselves whether there is any rational justification for retribution, or whether that only concerns something which, on reflection, we don't endorse. We asked ourselves about the relation among parts of the soul in the context of our discussions last week of the influences of fiction, of norms, and other forms of non-rational persuasion in shaping our lives. And we asked ourselves about it tacitly every single day of this course when we thought about the difficulty, or perhaps impossibility given our complexity, of reconciling our intuitive and reflective responses and reaching what Rawls calls reflective equilibrium. That it is difficult to bring principles and practice together, that it is difficult to bring systematic understanding to particular cases, does not mean that it is not worth trying. But that we discover ourselves repeatedly frustrated by it may in itself bring philosophical lessons. That's theme of the course one: parts of the soul. Theme of the course two: luck, control and circumstances. We presented ourselves as a paradigm case to hold on to with the contrast between two kinds of characters. On the one hand, Lucky Alert and Lucky Cell Phone. One, a person who did nothing wrong drove home and harmed no one. The second, a person who perhaps did something risky, drove home and harmed no one. And we contrasted those cases with their unlucky counterparts, who on their way home, following exactly the same course ended up, through no efforts of their own, harming a child. And when I surveyed you about this in March, almost all of you

thought that lucky alert had done nothing morally problematic. 97% of you answered that he did not do something morally blameworthy. In the case of Unlucky Alert, even though he brought about a harm, still 81% of you were willing to grant him full moral exculpation. But--and I'm going to retest you on this in a moment--when I asked you on March 3rd whether Lucky Cell Phone, somebody who did a slightly risky thing with no harmful consequences had done something morally culpable, 78% of you said that he did. An answer roughly, though not as extremely, in line with your answer to the question about whether Unlucky Cell Phone did something morally culpable, which 92% of you answered yes to. So I'm curious, because these results perplexed me so, whether another six weeks of thinking about moral luck has changed your views. So question, our old friend Unlucky Alert--the one talking on his cell phone who drives home and harms no one--Unlucky Alert you, who take risks in your life every day, risks which could cause consequences that if they occurred, you might regret that you hadn't taken precaution. In so doing, oh holders of clickers, do you do something morally blameworthy? And let's see how these numbers come out. So in contrast to your previous assessment, where in the case of Unlucky Alert, 81% of you thought he did something morally blameworthy, now only 36% of you do. Why? I don't know. But it's worth thinking about why that happened. Let's contrast this with the case of Lucky Cell Phone. Sorry, I just asked you the question about Lucky Alert and put up the question and articulated the question of Lucky Cell Phone. My data are distorted and I'm going to have to skip this question. So I ask you to ask yourselves at home what you think about these cases. But because I misphrased things I need to go on to the next point. Although those are some nice numbers. What question they're in answer to will remain a topic for future research. Alright, there has been--I have only six minutes remaining so I want to talk quickly--a fundamental and recurring puzzle that we faced in this class. Determining what is and isn't in our control regarding our attribution of praise and blame in cases of unintended outcome. Resolving the role of what is and isn't in our control in our own internal reactions to events. In our recognition of the degree to which we're shaped by our societal circumstances, as explored by Aristotle and Doris and Shay and Milgram and the WEIRD studies and Sunstein and Plato and exploring the ways in which this should be normatively factored in, both politically and morally. That's theme number two. Theme number three: individual and society. Sometimes things which are OK to do if you are the only one doing them become problematic if many others are. There's no problem polluting if most of the environment remains clean. There's a major problem polluting if the result is no air for anyone. There's no disruption of patterning if one of us chooses to give money to somebody whose work we admire. But, as Nozick points out, there is a disruption of patterning if many of us have the same response. The costs of those kinds of patterns may be minimal in certain contexts, but in others the fact that differences arise between us may cause a loss of our fundamental democratic institution. So in the context of our discussion of the relation between individual and

society, we were taught, both in the context of the moral philosophy section and in the context of the political philosophy section, that if we want to make real our commitments to living as members of a community, we need to have a vivid way of representing before ourselves that we are only one among many. And we have two beautiful articulations of that. One in Kant's formulation of the categorical imperative, that my own desires may serve as the basis for willed action only if I can at the same time coherently will that others in similar circumstances would act in the way that I am choosing to act. And in Rawls's articulation of the veil of ignorance as a way of thinking about what justice demands. What's beautiful about these articulations is that they are an attempt to bring a consideration that reason had brought us to into a formulation that we can make use of intuitively. Their attempts to give us vivid ways of remaining committed to what all of you, or almost all of you in this class, suggested you are committed to. Which is in education, in housing, in healthcare, and in the distribution of resources, to a somewhat more egalitarian distribution of goods than might arise if we didn't think about our experience from the perspective of the community as a whole. And I'll skip--though put up on the Internet for you--three slides from a recent study showing that your responses in these cases were not exceptional. Chapter 4. Three Organizing Quotations [00:45:39] Let me close by pointing you to three quotations, which for me epitomized the course. The first is the quote from Epictetus that tells us when we are about to encounter an experience that we worry we might find distasteful that we need to think about what it would be like and to prepare ourselves for it. What upsets people, says Epictetus, are not things but are judgments about them. The second is the quote from Aristotle, which I put up almost every lecture in the beginning of the term. That we learn a craft by practicing it and that we cultivate virtues by acting as if we were already virtuous. If there is something that you wish to become, act as if that were what you already are. And I close with, perhaps the most beautiful part of Plato's Republic, the myth of Er, in which Plato describes the story of a bunch of disembodied souls, which people who were about to be born are permitted to choose among. They're given models of lives and asked to select among them. And it is in the context of choosing what sort of life that one wants to live that the questions of this course become most pressing. Think over how the sorts of things we have mentioned from January until now jointly and severally determine what the virtuous life is like. From all this, by considering the nature of the soul, reason out which life is better and which is worse. Choose accordingly, calling a life worse if it leads the soul to become more unjust, better if it leads the soul to be more just. And remember that on the closing page of Plato's Republic, Odysseus, the great hero, celebrated for his exploits in the Trojan War, comes to the recognition that the life which

will allow him to flourish most is the quiet life of a private individual who does his own work, who focuses on the things around him in such a way that he brings joy to those near him and thereby to himself. And with those opening and closing words of Plato's Republic, I thank you for a wonderful semester. [APPLAUSE] [end of transcript]