Challenge to Standard Ethics The role of fellow-feeling Good Quiz - - PDF document

Compassion and Sympathy 1 Phil 240: Ethics

Challenge to “Standard Ethics”

The role of “fellow-feeling”

Good Quiz Question Taylor (“Compassion”) and Bennett (“The

Conscience of Huckleberry Finn”) both challenge the “standard view” of ethics.

• 1. What do both authors AGREE on in

challenging the standard view?

• 2. How are the two authors’ views

DIFFERENT?

Just one or two sentences for each.

My “Earthquake Dilemma”

Come to class to participate

Compassion and Sympathy 2 Phil 240: Ethics

Taylor:

“Goodness of heart, tenderness toward things that can suffer, and the loving kindness that contradicts all reason and sense of duty...shine like a jewel.” (p. 46)

[my emphasis]

“We have in all these cases a real war between the head and the heart, the reason and the will, and the one thing that redeems them all is the quality of the heart, which somehow withstands every solicitation of the intellect. It is the compassionate heart that can somehow make itself felt that makes men’s deeds sometimes noble and beautiful, and nothing else at all.” (p. 47)

Compassion over Reason

“The impulse of compassion so far transcends reason that it can as easily as not contradict it. It is sometimes the very irrationality of compassion, the residual capacity to respond with tenderness and love when all one’s reason counsels otherwise, that confers upon a compassionate act its sweetness, beauty, and nobility. (p. 50)

Compassion and Sympathy 3 Phil 240: Ethics

Taylor: Wrong Approaches

Morality subjective. Protagoras: “man is

the measure of all things” (pp. 134-35)

Subject Object [subjective view] Subject Object [objective view]

For Taylor morality is objective but not

rational.

Taylor: Wrong Approaches

Consequences don’t make actions

moral or immoral

Suffering is part of life. Cancer death

(e.g.) is an evil but not a moral evil (p.50)

Moral goodness and evil comes from

requires moral agent.

Kant is right in locating the morality of

action in the moral agent, not in the results.

But Kant wrong to emphasize reason

instead of compassion.

Compassion and Sympathy 4 Phil 240: Ethics

Taylor and Mayo Both Skeptical

• f Unifying Principles

Ultimate aim of ethics: to formulate a

correct moral theory

Most philosophers recognize that this

may be complex or pluralistic

Still, standard approach struggles for

unifying standards, perhaps through a method of reflective equilibrium.

Mayo and Taylor reject principle- based ethics

Mayo: “Of course we can in theory give a unity to our

principles...but the attempt to construct a deductive moral system is notoriously difficult and in any case ill-founded.” (p. 305, my emphasis)

Taylor: clearly rejects pure rationality, but “most

men...know just what human goodness is when they see it, whether they have read treatises...or...tried to fathom its metaphysical foundations. For the fact is, it seems to have no such foundations.

Romantic vs Rational/Enlightenment Views

Are “innocent” children more moral than

sophisticated, “civilized” adults? Romantic view: yes. Civilization corrupts

Lord of the Flies (novel) counter-example. Taylor: human kinship with rest of creation.

Morality applies to all beings that can suffer.

Compassion and Sympathy 5 Phil 240: Ethics

Bennett: Sympathy vs “Morality”

Huck Finn: acts on his sympathies,

• pposes bad morality

Heinrich Himmler: acts on his bad

morality in spite of his sympathies

Jonathan Edwards: suppresses all

sympathies “What happens to a Russian, to a Czech, does not interest me in the slightest…Whether 10,000 Russian females fall down from exhaustion while digging an antitank ditch interests me

• nly if so far as the antitank ditch for

Germany is finished.”

Nice guy, Heinrich

More Heinrich Himmler

“I also want to talk to you quite frankly on a very grave matter. I mean…the extermination of the Jewish race…Most of you know what it mean when 100 corpses are lying side by side, or 500, or 1000. “To have stuck it out and at the same time…to have remained decent fellows, this is what made us hard. This is a page of glory in

• ur history…”

Compassion and Sympathy 6 Phil 240: Ethics

Sympathy vs “morality”?

The conflict is with a bad morality based

perhaps on custom (for Huck Finn)

Is this a false dichtomy: custom vs

sympathy?

What alternative to customary morality

and sympathy?

Answer: Philosophical/critical ethics

Bennett recognizes this

“Huck clearly cannot conceive of having any morality except the one he has learned…from his society…. “The basic trouble is that he cannot or will not engage in abstract intellectual

• perations of any sort.”

(p. 146)