Week 1-Post 1: Consequentialist & Categorical Moral Reasoning

 Source: Justice course on EdX by HarvardX

Lecture 1- Doing the Right Thing

• 2 different modes of moral reasoning:
• Consequentialist- locates morality in the consequence of an act
• The most influential example of consequential moral reasoning is utilitarianism: a doctrine defined by 18th century, english political philosopher, Jeremy Bentham.
• An exercise supporting consequentialist thinking is the trolley exercise. 
• "Suppose you're the driver of a trolley car, and your trolley car is hurdling down the track at sixty miles an hour. At the end of the track you notice five workers working on the track and you tried to stop but you can't. Your brakes don't work and you feel desperate because you know that if you crash into these five workers they will all die. Let's assume you know that for sure. And so you feel helpless until you notice that off to the right, there is a side track, and at the end of that track there's one worker working on it. Your steering wheel works so you can turn the trolley car if you want to onto this side track killing the one but sparing the five. What do you do?"
• Another exercise supporting conseuentialist reasoning is a doctor exercise.
• "Let's imagine a different case. This time you're a doctor in an emergency room and six patients come to you. They've been in a terrible trolley car wreck. Five of them sustained moderate injuries, one is severely injured. You could spend all day caring for the one severely injured victim, but in that time the five would die. Or you could look after the five, restore them to health, but during that time the one severely injured person would die." Who do you choose to care for?

• Categorical- locates morality in certain duties and rights
• The most important philosopher of categorical moral reasoning is the 18th century German philosopher Emmanuel Kant.
• An exercise supporting categorical thinking would also be the trolley scenario, but an altered version
• "Let's consider another trolley car case and see whether those of you in the majority want to adhere to the principle, better that one should die so that five should live. This time you're not the driver of the trolley car, you're an onlooker standing on a bridge overlooking a trolley car track, and down the track comes a trolley car. At the end of the track are five workers. The brakes don't work, the trolley car is about to careen into the five and kill them, and now that you're not the driver, you really feel helpless. Until you notice, standing next to you leaning over the bridge is a very fat man. And you could give him a shove and he would fall over the bridge onto the track right in the way of the trolley car. He would die but he would spare the five"
• Another exercise supporting categorical reasoning is a doctor scenario.
• "Now consider another doctor case. This time you're a transplant surgeon and you have five patients each in desperate need of an organ transplant in order to survive. One needs a heart, one a lung, one a kidney, one a liver, and the fifth a pancreas. And you have no organ donors. You are about to see you them die and then it occurs to you that in the next room there's a healthy guy who came in for a checkup. And he is taking a nap, you could go in very quietly, yank out the five organs, and that person would die, but you could save the five. How many would do it?"
• "When people hesitated to push the fat man over the bridge or to yank out the organs of the innocent patient, people gestured towards reasons having to do with the intrinsic quality of the act itself. Consequences be what they may. People were reluctant. People thought it was just wrong" - Shows the difference between the two scenarious and the 2 modes of reasoning. Even though the scenarios were in the same setting, and wanting to save 5 people. Once some factors were changed, people hesitated because the choice became more difficult.
• Philosophy works by taking what we know from familiar unquestioned settings, and making it strange. That's how those examples worked. The hypotheticals with which we began with, their mix of playfulness and sobriety.
• Philosophy estranges us from the familiar, not by supplying new information, but by inviting and provoking a new way of seeing.
• Moral and political philosophy is a story, and you don't know where this story will lead, but what you do know is that the story is about you.
• "That's because philosophy is a distancing even debilitating activity. And you see this going back to Socrates. There's a dialogue, the Gorgias, in which one of Socrates’ friends Calicles tries to talk him out of philosophizing. Calicles tells Socrates, philosophy is a pretty toy if one indulges in it with moderation at the right time of life, but if one pursues it further than one should, it is absolute ruin. Take my advice calicles says, abandon argument learn the accomplishments of active life, take for your models not those people who spend their time on these petty quibbles, but those who have a good livelihood and reputation and many other blessings. So Calicles is really saying to Socrates quit philosophizing, get real go to business school, and calicles did have a point. He had a point because philosophy distances us from conventions, from established assumptions, and from settled beliefs"
• Skepticism: 
• and in the face of these risks there is a characteristic evasion, the name of the evasion is skepticism.
• And Locke and Kant and Mill haven't solved these questions after all of these years, who are we to think that we here in Sanders Theatre, over the course a semester, can resolve them. So maybe it's just a matter of each person having his or her own principles and there's nothing more to be said about it no way of reasoning that's the evasion. The evasion of skepticism.
• These questions have been debated for a very long time but the very fact that they have reoccurred and persisted may suggest that though they're impossible in one sense, they're unavoidable in another. And the reason they're unavoidable, the reason they're inescapable, is that we live some answer to these questions every day. So skepticism, just throwing up their hands and giving up on moral reflection, is no solution.
• Emanuel Kant described very well the problem with skepticism when he wrote skepticism is a resting place for human reason where it can reflect upon its dogmatic wanderings but it is no dwelling place for permanent settlement. Simply to acquiesce in skepticism, Kant wrote, can never suffice to overcome the restless of reason. I've tried to suggest through theses stories and these arguments some sense of the risks and temptations of the perils and the possibilities I would simply conclude by saying that the aim of this course is to awaken the restlessness of reason and to see where it might lead.
• Notes from the reading:
• But notice the pressure we feel to reason our way to a convincing distinction between them-and if we cannot, to reconsider our judgment about the right thing to do in each case. We sometimes think of moral reasoning as a way of persuading other people. But it is also a way of sorting out our own moral convictions, of figuring out what we believe and why.
• Few of us face choices as fateful as those that confronted the soldiers on the mountain or the witness to the runaway trolley. But wrestling with their dilemmas sheds light on the way moral argument can proceed, in our personal lives and in the public square.