Final Exam

As promised in the course syllabus, the final exam for this course is designed to be completable in two hours by a prepared student. There will be two kinds of questions on the exam, content-based questions and skills-based questions. Every skills-based question will be similar to an exercise that you have performed on a course assignment, and every content-based question will come directly from a study guide that will be posted here before the end of week 15 of classes.

End of Unit 5

We have reached the end of Unit 5, and have now covered all of our material for the semester. If you have completed all of the readings, lectures, and quiz questions on time, and submitted your best efforts on your final paper, then take a moment to pat yourself on the back for a job well done.

You can review for the final exam here.

If you have not fallen behind, then all that you have left is to prepare for and take the final exam. But if you have kept up each week and reviewed your notes at the end of each unit, you should be in a very strong position right now to rock the exam. Congratulations on a great semester, and I look forward to reading your final exams.

Ask Me Anything

We’re going to close on the last day of class with an open session where I will take questions on (virtually) any topic - review about any topic from class, or about what to expect on the exam, but also about what I really think about any topic from class, about philosophy, college, or life.

Review

Where We Are

It's time to review. In class, we're going to use a single contemporary moral issue as a case study, to walk through and review many of the course topics and concepts that have come up throughout the semester.

Police Shootings

If you haven't noticed police shootings in the news over the last few years, either you haven't been in North America, or you haven't been paying close attention. A few years ago, the Tampa Bay Times published a comprehensive study of police-involved shootings in the state of Florida, which is good background for our discussion in class. You should also listen to Radiolab's recent podcast which explores the same problem and interviews the Tampa Bay Times reporter.

Lecture 15.1

Reparations for Slavery

Where We Are

We saw that Nozick argued that the correct theory of distributive justice will be historical rather than patterned. It will require starting in a just starting place, and then proceeding by just rules, and restoring justice whenever something unjust happens. This week we will be looking at issues that arise from the facts that in the real world, we never did start at a just starting point, and even if we had in some distant past, there are still pervasive injustices that have never been corrected. Our topic for this class is the issue of reparations for slavery.

Reparations

The reading for this week is this article by Ta-Nehisi Coates from the Atlantic, published in summer 2014, which is a particularly forceful and influential recent public defense of the importance of race reparations in the United States. Note that it is substantially longer than most things that we have read this semester, but although Coates develops a clear argument, it is not a philosophy paper and you should find it substantially easier to read than most things that we have read this semester. Many of the philosophy articles that we have read this semester have arguments that can fit into a single paragraph, but Coates' article is a good example of what long-form argumentative writing can look like. Try, as you read it, to see if you can write his argument down in a simpler form.

Current Events

Students at Georgetown voted almost exactly two years ago to pay extra fees each semester to fund a reparation fund to benefit contemporary descendants of slaves sold by the university in 1838. Read about it here.

Lecture 14.2

Intellectual Property

Where We Are

We have been using questions about the nature and role of property rights in order to explore the conflict between procedural and distributive considerations of justice, which is the theme of Unit 5 of the course. Whereas Nozick argued that property rights are moral rights that it is the job of the state to protect, we interpreted Piketty as arguing that a reasonable notion of property rights needs to be constrained by an appreciation of the inevitability of wealth accumulation across generations and the many problematic consequences that that engenders and has engendered throughout history.

Rights to Ideas

Our topic for today's class is intellectual property rights. Intellectual property rights are protected by copyright, patent, and trademark law. They include rights of use, control, and transmission for a wide variety of kinds of ideas. In the 18th century and before, most wealth consisted in private property in land. In the 19th century, new wealth arose that consisted in property in equipment and material goods - factories, railroads, ships, and the like. But in the twenty-first century, a large proportion of wealth consists in property in ideas - patents, trademarks, and to a much lesser extent, copyrights. For example, by his own account, a quarter or more of President Trump's net worth consists merely in the value of his name - not even counting the value of the many concrete contracts he has by which people pay him to be able to put his name on their buildings. Similarly, much of the value of Apple consists in the value of their brand, and young people entering a wide variety of fields are encouraged to work on cultivating their 'personal brand'. The most financially successful entertainers in both acting and sports make much of their money not by acting or playing but by leveraging their acting or playing into an ownership interest in their own images. And the most valuable corporations are valued in part for their portfolios of patents. So if we want to understand the nature of wealth accumulation in the twenty-first century, we need to understand the nature and source of intellectual property.

What's Different About Ideas?

In general, property rights include rights to use, rights to control use, and rights of wholesale transfer - which means the right to transfer the whole package of rights to another person. But one of the most obvious features of intellectual property, in contrast to physical property such as land or machinery, is that more people can use the same idea without crowding out the value that others get by using it as well. So whereas it is hard to have a useful right to use a piece of land without also having the right to prevent other people from using that land as well, it is not hard to have a useful right to play a musical recording without also having the right to prevent other people from playing that musical recording as well - they just have to make their own copy.

Many of the interesting questions about whether intellectual property rights have the same status as rights to physical property derive from this important and obvious difference between intellectual property and physical property.

Today's Reading

Today's reading is Daniel Attas's article, Lockean Justifications of Intellectual Property. Attas is considering whether a Lockean theory like Robert Nozick's can justify the idea that there are moral rights to intellectual property that pre-exist the state and which it could be part of the job of the state to protect. Pay attention to whether Attas believes that a Lockean justification can be successful or not, and to what the feature of intellectual property rights is that is responsible for his conclusion. You will see that Attas is particularly interested in whether intellectual property rights should expire or not; for some background on whether some kinds of legal rights to intellectual property legally expire, you can see a summary from the US copyright office here.

Lockean theories are not the only way to try to justify intellectual property rights; you can read a little bit more about other theories of the nature of intellectual property rights here, if you are interested.

A Lighter Take

For a lighter take on some issues related to intellectual property rights, but also to the philosophy of music, we have one last (optional, but fun) final episode of Hi-Phi Nation for the semester.

Lecture 14.1

Wealth Inequality

Where We Are

In our last class we looked at Nozick's arguments against patterned theories of justice. According to Nozick, so long as a state of society has evolved by fair rules from a fair starting point, it must be just. Nozick therefore gives us an extreme and self-explicit case of someone who prioritizes procedural justice over distributive considerations, and the reason that we read him was in order to see that contrast made explicitly.

For today's class we're going to turn to think through the real consequences of Nozick's view. The plan is to think about how inequalities in wealth are self-perpetuating, and about what this means for inherited wealth.

Thomas Piketty

Thomas Piketty is a French economist who is one of the most influential figures in the world thinking about the dynamics and significance of wealth inequality. His book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, first published in French in 2013 and then in English in 2014, offers an accessible and highly influential recent treatment of these topics that brings together very simple mathematical models with extensive surveys of historical data.

You can see him here in a TED talk from late 2014, soon after his book was published in English:

Capital in the Twenty-First Century

Our reading for this class is a selection of three passages from Piketty's book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century. It is a relatively high number of pages to read compared to anything else we have read this semester, but I think you will find it mostly pretty accessible and easy to follow and read. I chose the passages to include part of the introduction, part of a chapter about the differences in income from wealth (accumulated capital) and income from labor, and part of a later chapter about inheritance.

As you read, watch for a few key things: (1) the largest contributor to the dynamics of wealth accumulation, according to Piketty, is a simple inequality between two key economic numbers. What is it? (2) Piketty suggests that social inequality has socially destabilizing consequences. The passages that I've selected don't include a lot that he has to say about this, but pay attention to what he does say. And (3) one striking fact exhibited by the data that Piketty discusses is how unusual the middle of the twentieth-century was in historical terms, in terms of the level of wealth and income inequality. Watch out for the evidence that he gives of just how unusual this period was, in historical terms, and think about how that could have distorted the perceptions of people who grew up during that period.

Remember that Piketty is an economist, not a philosopher, so we are not looking to him for philosophical arguments. What we are looking for, is some context in order to think about what limits there might be on fair procedures of wealth accumulation, and whether such limits could be consistent with procedural justice, so that is what we will try to talk about in class.

Lecture 13.2

Nozick on Distributive Justice

Where We Are: Unit #5

Recall van den Haag's claim that so long as someone really deserves the death penalty for their crime, there is no injustice to executing them, even if only people of their race are executed, and there is a legal policy of never executing people who belong to some other race, no matter how well-deserving.  On van den Haag's view, all that matters for what we should do in a particular case depends on the merits of that very case, and never on the system that it is part of, or how it relates to other cases.  In contrast, as we saw, Cholbi argued that racial patterns in the enforcement of the death penalty all by themselves constitute a wrong against African-Americans who do not commit crimes.  

Our goal for the last unit of the course is to turn to other topics that exhibit a conflict between the conclusions that we draw when we think only of particular actions on a case-by-case basis, and those that we draw when we think of their role as part of broader social patterns.  

In order to be clearer about the ways in which these two perspectives conflict, we turn first to Robert Nozick, who has given probably the most illuminating illustration of how they come into conflict, focusing on the case of the distribution of wealth.

Robert Nozick

Robert Nozick was a brilliant and wide-ranging philosopher who taught at Harvard for many years.  He wrote on many different philosophical topics throughout his career, but is most famous for his 1974 book Anarchy, State, and Utopia, which is a philosophical defense of libertarian thought, and for his 1981 book Philosophical Explorations, whose most famous contribution is to the field of epistemology, which is the study of knowledge and rational belief.  Despite the fact that Anarchy, State, and Utopia became one of the most important works of political philosophy of the twentieth century and generated many responses, Nozick wrote in the preface to Philosophical Explorations that he had never read any of these responses.  He simply thought that he had said his piece and wanted to think about other things.

You may also find him easier to remember as the philosopher who returns pictures of George Clooney in response to a Google image search for his name (try it!).

Anarchy, State, and Utopia

Anarchy, State, and Utopia is a philosophical elaboration and defense of a libertarian political philosophy, and along with Ayn Rand and Friedrick Hayek, is one of the most prominent twentieth-century voices in the development of libertarian thought.  In Nozick's view, which he briefly mentions at the beginning of chapter 7, our selected reading for this class, the purpose of the state is to enforce basic laws and provide for national self-defense, and anything else that a government does is an immoral imposition on the liberty of its citizens.

The selection that we are reading, which comes from the first half of chapter 7 of the book, contains some of Nozick's most forceful arguments that are relevant to his defense of libertarianism.  Since Nozick has given the most forceful arguments in defense of libertarianism, they are among the most important arguments to understand, in thinking about the merits of limited government, graduated income taxes, and the inheritance tax, all issues that we continue to confront in virtually every contested election in the contemporary United States.

I've provided links above both to the full book, in case you are interested in context, and to the first half of chapter 7, which is our reading for class.

Sample Papers

You may find sample papers here, here, here, and here.  All four of these sample papers are actual papers written by students in this class in a previous semester.  None of them is perfect; they could all be improved in some way.  But they are all examples of reasonably strong performances, so they should give you some sense of the range of what a good paper in the class could look like.

Lecture 13.1

End of Unit 4

We have reached the end of Unit 4 - four fifths of the way through the semester. If you have completed all of the readings, lectures, and quiz questions on time, and submitted your best efforts on assignment #5 and the paper draft, then take a moment to pat yourself on the back for a job well done.

If you have not kept up with all of the readings, lectures, and assigned work, now is the time for you to catch up. We have a couple of our longest readings of the semester in the coming weeks and your paper will be due soon, so it will continue to be difficult to catch up.

Either way, I strongly encourage you to go over your notes from the last three+ weeks while they are fresh, as the final exam is cumulative and will cover all five course units equally.

Race and the Death Penalty

Where We Are

We've covered perspectives on the death penalty pro and con. We now turn to consider whether the death penalty - along, perhaps, with many other forms of criminal punishment - falls disproportionately on different racial groups in ways that have nothing to do with desert or deterrence.

Michael Cholbi

Michael Cholbi is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, though he has taught for most of his career at Cal Poly Pomona. His research has focused prominently on death. For example, in addition to writing about the death penalty, he has written a book about suicide and is now working on a book about grief and bereavement, and is a founding member of the International Association for the Philosophy of Death and Dying. You can watch him as a contestant on Jeopardy here.

Race and Capital Punishment

For this class we're reading Cholbi's article, 'Race, Capital Punishment, and the Cost of Murder.' You'll find it clear and engaging, and appreciate that when he gets to the main arguments that he is offering, he sets them out deliberately in premise-conclusion form, so that it is easy to think about where, if at all, you disagree with his premises.

Cholbi takes for granted that his readers will have background knowledge of the large number of studies that have documented disparities in the application of the death penalty between white and black defendants. I encourage you to follow up and read more about this if you are skeptical, and his endnotes include references to several places where you can read more. All of the articles that Chobi cites should be accessible online through the the USC libraries.

Handout 13.1

Here.

Lecture 12.2

Reiman Against the Death Penalty

Where We Are

We've read a short article by Louis Pojman defending the death penalty. In Pojman's article, he defends the death penalty on both retributivist and deterrence grounds, and the version of the deterrence argument that he gives is adapted from another prominent proponent of the death penalty, Ernest van den Haag. For this class we're getting a perspective that is critical of the death penalty, by an author - Reiman - who is responding to van den Haag.

Jeffrey Reiman

Jeffrey Reiman is emeritus professor of philosophy at the American University (recall that means he is retired). He has written seven books (including one death penalty for-and-against book with Louis Pojman) and over a hundred articles, mostly on criminal justice and issues about the value of life, including a book about abortion. His exchanges with van den Haag and Pojman about the death penalty are probably his most famous work.

The Death Penalty and Civilization

The reading for this class is Reiman's article 'Justice, Civilization, and the Death Penalty: Answering van den Haag'. In the article, Reiman responds to both retributivist and deterrence arguments for the death penalty. It is a somewhat long article by the standards of what we have been reading for this class, but shorter than it looks since there are a number of short pages with long footnotes, and much of it should be relatively easy to read, with the very notable exception of some extended references to the historical philosophers Kant and Hegel that I will explain in class. Still, make sure that you leave yourself adequate time.

As you read, pay close attention to make sure that you are able to identify where Reiman and Pojman disagree about what follows from the idea that murderers deserve to die. This is the most important contribution of Reiman's article.

(Don’t blame me if you click on the following video and it traumatizes you about Hegel forever, but deepfake videos of dead philosophers singing took philosophy Twitter by storm in spring 2021, the last time I was teaching this class.)

Lecture 12.1

The Death Penalty

What is the Death Penalty?

The death penalty is when a government executes someone as a form of criminal punishment. Cases of killings by police or soldiers in the heat of duty are not considered to be cases of the death penalty, even though they may be cases of killings on behalf of the state. The death penalty is different in that nothing is at stake in the heat of the moment, because a prisoner has already been apprehended, but it is also different because in normal cases - at least under constitutional regimes like the one we live under - the death penalty is also only administered after a criminal trial and conviction.

Like many of the issues discussed throughout this class, the death penalty involves the case of an action - killing another human being - which hurts another human and would not be morally okay under other circumstances, but which is believed to be morally permissible or even required under special circumstances. That is part of where its interest comes from, and it is the basic structure that makes it a controversial topic. But the death penalty is also a case of state action, not of individual action, and so it raises issues about the relationship between law and morality like those we have discussed elsewhere, and also issues about whether there is any special significance to when the state does something, as opposed to an individual, which again has come up elsewhere, as when we discussed self defense in class and in Steinhoff's discussion of Dirty Harry. And finally, the death penalty, as we will see, raises issues about whether it involves an unfair distribution of burdens - again, another common theme we have seen again and again.

Some Basic Facts

When discussing the death penalty, it helps to start with a solid understanding of the facts surrounding the death penalty, because many people find some of them very surprising and unintuitive. For example, most people who have not researched the question find it obvious that it must be more expensive to sentence someone to a life in prison than to execute them. But in fact, studies have consistently shown that it is far more expensive to use the death penalty. A study in Nebraska, for example, found that each death penalty sentence cost the state about $1.5 million more than a life sentence without parole. And our own state of California, for example, has been estimated to have spent over $4 billion on maintaining its death row since 1978, while executing only 13 inmates over that same time period (these numbers are slightly misleading because there are many inmates on death row in California who have not yet been executed and about $1 billion of these costs are costs of incarceration that would be incurred anyway with life sentences, but the costs are still quite substantial). A 1988 study by the San Francisco Bee estimated that California would save $90 million every year by getting rid of the death penalty - mostly from extra costs associated with trials and appeals for the death penalty.

The Death Penalty Information Center has a large collection of interesting data about the death penalty, together with links to original sources. You should take care to watch out for where their numbers are presented without context, since they are an advocacy group rather than just a pure collector of information, but in general, these facts are not controversial: it is more expensive - usually much more expensive - to maintain the death penalty under our current legal system in the United States than to sentence to life without parole, both executions and death penalty sentences peaked sometime roughly 18-20 years ago and have since been gradually on the decline, over 150 people who were sentenced to death have been later exonerated, and violent crime rates are not lower in states that have the death penalty.

Louis Pojman

You can read about Louis Pojman here.

Today's Reading

Our reading for this class is an article by Pojman called "In Defense of the Death Penalty."

Handout 11.2

Here.

Lecture 11.2

Torture Outside of the Law

Where We Are

We've now spent two classes discussing torture - whether it is ever morally permissible, and whether regulating it might be a way to minimize it. Dershowitz's view was that torture is wrong but should be legal under certain circumstances and regulated, and so far we've seen Steinhoff's arguments that torture is sometimes permissible. We now turn to Steinhoff's response to Dershowitz.

The Reading

The reading for today is the second half of Steinhoff's Dirty Harry article, which you can again find here. The second half of the article begins in the first full paragraph on page 346, where he turns from the moral question to the legal question. But I recommend that you also re-read Steinhoff's initial discussion of the Dirty Harry case in the first two paragraphs on page 242, and compare it to the final paragraph of the article, where he compares his views about the morality and law of torture.

The Movie

For those (I presume, all) of you who have not seen the original Dirty Harry movie, I’ve included three clips here, to help you get the flavor of the picture that Steinhoff seems to be drawing from that movie, and why it goes into his article title.

In the first clip, titled “Do you feel lucky punk?”, we get a key scene establishing the character of Dirty Harry as a cocky but not very conventional cop. It establishes his character for the movie and its sequels, and sets up the final scene of the movie, which is important for us to understand Steinhoff’s interpretation of the film.

In the second clip, titled “Where is the Girl?”, we see the central act of torture described by Steinhoff in his paper. Dirty Harry confronts the villain in a stadium at night, shoots them, and then grinds his foot into their leg. The camerawork zooming out at the end of the scene sets up a direct comparison to the camera’s zooming out shot at the very end of the movie, at the end of the next and final scene, and in the directly following scene (not part of this YouTube clip), the film cuts to the police locating the kidnapped girl.

Finally, in the third clip, titled “Ending Shootout”, from the very end of the movie, Dirty Harry confronts the main villain for the final time. Pay attention to what Dirty Harry does with his badge at the end, and to how the camerawork echoes the torture scene.

Handout 11.1

Handout here.

Lecture 11.1

Is Torture Okay?

Where We Are

For class 10.1, we read Alan Dershowitz's argument that torture should be legal and regulated, even though it is bad (or perhaps even always wrong). For our next two classes on torture, we turn to an article by Uwe Steinhoff, who takes exactly the reverse view. Steinhoff thinks that torture can be morally permissible in some situations, and in fact that these situations are not terribly rare, but that it should nevertheless be illegal.

Uwe Steinhoff

Uwe Steinhoff is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Hong Kong. He has published mostly about just war theory - you may remember him being mentioned by Helen Frowe. But he has also written about self-defense more generally and has a controversial and combative book about the ethics of torture. You may find his tone in our reading for this class combative as well - I do not recommend that you try to write like he does. We are reading it for this class because of the issues that it raises, including how they contrast with Dershowitz and how they set up later topics in the course, not because he is a writer who I believe you should try to emulate.

Is Torture Okay?

Steinhoff's article, which you may find here, argues for two theses: that torture is sometimes - indeed, often - morally permissible, and that it should nevertheless be illegal. The article is a little bit on the longer side and is full of arguments, so we're going to split it into two chunks. For today's class, we'll focus on Steinhoff's arguments that torture is sometimes morally permissible, and for class 11.1 we will turn to his response to Dershowitz. The transition between the two parts of Steinhoff's argument is in the middle of page 346, about halfway through the paper. So please read (at least) through page 346 for today's class.

Torture vs. Killing

The common thread through the arguments in the first half of Steinhoff's article is his idea that torture is not at bad as death. Since it is not as bad as death, and it is sometimes morally okay to kill someone, it follows that it should not be surprising if it turns out to sometimes be okay to torture someone. This basic thought behind his argument comes back in several different forms at different points in the discussion.

Lecture 10.2

Dershowitz on Torture Warrants

Unit 4: Torture and the Death Penalty

In Unit 1, we were introduced to philosophy, ethics, and arguments. In Unit 2, we looked at the beginning and end of life, and in Unit 3, we learned about self-defense, including its application to the ethics of war. The topic for Unit 4 is torture and the death penalty. The reason why we are considering torture and the death penalty together is that both are things that some people believe should be simply out of bounds - not okay under any circumstance, no matter what. At the same time, both topics connect strongly to our topics from past and future units in similar ways. In the following two classes, we will see connections to the morality of self-defense and to the issues that we have discussed about the relationship between law and morality. And by week 12, we will see one version of a conflict between two very general values - procedural justice and distributive justice - that will concern us throughout Unit 5 of the course. But for today we're going to warm up slowly to the topic with a very short piece of reading that is written for a general audience.

Alan Dershowitz

Alan Dershowitz, who spent his career at Harvard Law School, is a controversial figure. You may have seen him as a regular commentator on CNN, or more recently as a prominent defender of President Trump through his impeachment, and you can read about him here. In addition to assisting in O.J. Simpson's criminal defense at the appellate stage, Dershowitz has also been involved in other extremely high-profile defense cases, including the defense of Jeffrey Epstein's prosecution for soliciting sex from minors and obscenity charges against one of the actors in the controversial early pornographic film, Deep Throat, which is related to his reputation for being an outspoken defender of civil liberties. The 1990 movie Reversal of Fortune, starring Jeremy Irons and Glenn Close, is based on Dershowitz's own telling of one of his most famous criminal defense cases.

Torture Warrants

Plausibly the biggest and most controversial idea that Dershowitz has been famous for in the last fifteen years is his defense of the idea of what he calls 'torture warrants'. The idea of torture warrants is simple, and I'll let you read Dershowitz's own explanation. He has explained and defended this idea many times, most prominently in an article called 'Tortured Reasoning' which you can read here, if you are interested. But for class, the assignment is a much shortened and simpler statement of his view, an article called 'The Case for Torture Warrants'. Dershowitz's basic idea is not complicated, so everything that I think is important about it appears in this shorter article. But pay very close attention to try to figure out what Dershowitz thinks the relationship is or should be between the law and morality.

Lecture 10.1

Take a day off…

Take a day off…

Take a day off…

Take a day off…

Take a day off…

End of Unit 3

We have reached the end of Unit 3 - three fifths of the way through the semester. If you have completed all of the readings, lectures, and quiz questions on time, and submitted your best effort on assignment #4, then take a moment to pat yourself on the back for a job well done.

If you have not kept up with all of the readings, lectures, and assigned work, this weekend is the time for you to catch up. We are going to continue to charge ahead and soon you will be working on your final paper for the semester, so it will become increasingly hard to catch up.

Either way, I strongly encourage you to go over your notes from the last three weeks while they are fresh, as the final exam is cumulative and will cover all five course units equally.

Loose Ends on Self-Defense

Where We Are

This is our last class on self-defense, and the last class of Unit 3 of the course. Today we're going to wrap up our consideration of the morality of war and cover some loose ends about the ethics of self-defense.

Reading

The reading for last class was chapter 2 of Helen Frowe's textbook, The Ethics of War and Peace. The reading for today's class is chapter 6.

Missing Course Video: Compound Arguments

There was an error in the course calendar earlier in the semester and course video #4: Compound Arguments never appeared in the course calendar. (“There was an error” as in, “I made a mistake.”) So this is out of order, and for that I apologize, but here it is. (Some of you may have already found it directly through the PlayPosit website, and don’t need to watch it again.)

The Listening

We have one more episode of Hi-Phi Nation looking into issues about war - this time on gender and war. This episode takes us a little aside from our main thread on the morality of self-defense, but I think you will all agree that it is pretty fascinating stuff. You can listen to this episode here:

Click here for additional supplementary materials from Hi-Phi Nation, including a full transcript of this episode.

Lecture 9.2

The Ethics of War

Just War Theory

So far, we have been talking about self-defense in ordinary life. This is interesting both in its own right, and in how it applies to other moral questions. The topic to which it has been most applied is the question of when and how it is morally permissible to go to war and to engage in warfare. This is the topic covered by what has come to be known as just war theory.

Orthodox Just War Theory and its Critics

For our purposes, we will follow Frowe and the Hi-Phi Nation podcast in dividing up Just War Theory into two very rough camps: philosophers who accept a set of traditional or orthodox ideas about when and how it is permissible to engage in war, and those who have come to criticize this set of ideas - the critics. The most prominent proponent of orthodox just war theory is Michael Walzer, an emeritus (that is, retired) professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

The most prominent critic of orthodox just war theory, in contrast, is Jeff McMahan, the White's Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford University (the oldest and most distinguished endowed professorship in ethics in the world). We've already encountered him in Unit 3 as the proponent of the Responsibility theory of self-defense, which came up in the first Frowe reading and which we've discussed in class.

This debate, between orthodox just war theorists and their critics, is quite lively and current. Among the many prominent contributors are Helen Frowe and USC's own Jonathan Quong. Renee Bolinger is also working actively on this topic.

Areas of Disagreement

It turns out that orthodox just war theorists and their critics disagree about a number of related things about what it is permissible to do in war and why. As you read the chapters from Frowe and listen to the Hi-Phi Nation podcast, try to make a list of things that the two camps disagree about. Many of these disagreements turn on what the members of these camps believe about permissible self-defense, and how they apply the theory of self-defense to the case of war. But that is not all that the two camps disagree about.

The Reading

The reading for today's class (class 9.1) is chapter 2 of Helen Frowe's textbook, The Ethics of War and Peace. Officially, chapter 6 is the reading for our next class (class 9.2), but you may benefit from reading them together before today's class.

The Listening

The Listening for Monday's class is another Hi-Phi Nation podcast episode, this one on the topic of just war theory. In the podcast, you will hear from Helen Frowe, Jeff McMahan, some of the same former soldiers who appeared in last week's podcast, and some of the professors who teach the ethics of war at West Point. My advice is to try to read the chapter first, then listen to the podcast, and the re-read the chapter. You will get the most out of it this way. But if you are not up for reading the chapter twice, you will probably get more out of reading the chapter if you listen to the podcast first, since it will help you be aware of what ideas to watch out for.

Click here for additional supplementary materials on this episode, including a full transcript.

Handout 9.1

Lecture 9.1

Uncertainty and Risk

Uncertainty and Risk

When a given action could result in one outcome, but could also result in a different outcome, and one of those outcomes is better than the other, that action involves risks. If the person who is acting is not sure what the outcome will be, he or she is uncertain, or put differently, is acting under uncertainty. So far in this course, we have abstracted away from uncertainty and risk. But our topic today is how these factors might affect what it is morally okay to do.

Some Methodology

In contrast to bare physical distance, the fact that a choice is risky or that an agent does not know for certain what the outcome will be at least seems like the kind of thing that could be morally relevant. At the very least, it should take a good argument to convince us that it is not. But so far in this class, we have ignored or abstracted away from these factors, and assumed when we described possible examples both that we know what will actually happen if the agent takes each choice, and that the agent who is making the choice knows what will happen. There are at least two good reasons to make these assumptions when we first start doing moral philosophy, even though we know that they do not truly describe most interesting real-life situations, and hence even though we know that the answers that we get when we make these assumptions are only an approximation, at best, to the final answers that we get when we try to add uncertainty to the equation.

First, assuming that there is no uncertainty is an idealization that makes ethical questions easier to think about, and lets us control for the other factors that we want to understand. Real-life choices are hard and involve many complicating factors. So it is sound methodology if we want to understand how each of these factors interact, to start by trying to separate them and consider each one separately in as controlled a way as we can. So, for example, if we want to understand the significance of the doing/allowing distinction, then we should try to set aside differences in uncertainty, in order to be able to focus more clearly on what we do want to understand. This reason for idealizing away uncertainty has much in common with the reasons for making idealizing assumptions in science. For example, when we assume for purposes of constructing simple models that gas molecules are point-sized, or that there is no friction, our model only approximates the behavior of the physical system that we are trying to understand, but it is a good first step, and understanding how things work in the absence of friction is a good first step to understanding how they work with friction.

Second, there is a very theoretical reason why it makes sense to start by trying to understand choice without uncertainty before generalizing to include uncertainty. And that is that philosophers, mathematicians, and economists, among others, generally believe that we know a lot about how to make choices under uncertainty. The theoretical framework that tells us how to make choices under uncertainty is called normative decision theory. On the most standard version of decision theory, the way to determine what choice you should make in any situation is to first assign values to the possible outcomes that could follow as a result of your choice, and then weight those values by the probability that those outcomes will follow as the result of any given choice that you might make. Then the action for you to take is the one that has the highest weighted value - or, in a phrase that echoes a philosopher we've recently encountered in class, Jeremy Bentham - the highest expected utility. There is a lot of disagreement, at least within philosophy, about exactly how decision theory should work. But generally speaking, what people disagree about is how the question of what you ought to do under uncertainty depends on the ranking of options independently of your uncertainty, and not whether it does. So even though there are a lot of open and difficult questions in normative decision theory, there is a lot of consensus that the question of how options rank independently of uncertainty is prior to, and needs to be answered before, the question of what you should do when you are uncertain.

When Does Uncertainty Matter Most?

These methodological considerations explain why it makes sense to abstract away from uncertainty, at least when we first start to do ethical theory. But in real life, there are some situations in which uncertainty is harder to avoid than others. Sometimes you can resolve your uncertainty if you just do more research. For example, if you are not sure whether failing to turn in any assignments in Phil 166 will adversely affect your pass/fail grade, you could easily resolve that uncertainty by reading the syllabus, which specifies that a passing grade in every major portion of the course grade is required in order to receive a passing grade in the course. But in other cases, uncertainty is not so easy to avoid.

For example, when you were trying to decide whether to enroll at USC, it would have been impossible for you to figure out in advance whether you would meet the love of your life in your freshman dormitory, get into the fraternity or sorority of your choice, or get at least one 'B+' in your sophomore year. And it would be impossible for you to know exactly how you will feel about USC after you graduate. These things are impossible to know in advance, because they depend on too many other things that you are not in a position to find out.

But another reason why it can be hard to avoid uncertainty is that sometimes the pace of events requires you to act now. For example, in the Trolley case there are no May 1st deadlines which allow you to do more research or a campus visit. You have to act now, and choosing not to act is just one more alternative. Cases in which immediate action is required are among those that are likely to involve ineliminable uncertainty. You can't research whether you or the backpacker are more likely to bring the trolley to a halt if you land on the tracks in front of it - you can only go with what you already know about this. And cases of self-defense - at least, of personal self-defense, as opposed to the self-defense involved in a sovereign state going to war - nearly always involve such ineliminable uncertainty - you can never be 100% confident that the intruder you wake to find in your bedroom is there to harm you or is just as scared to find you home when they came to steal your laptop. So self-defense is a particularly good topic with respect to which to introduce the wrinkle of how things are affected by uncertainty.

Today's Reading and Listening

For this class, we will be listening to a 45-minute podcast and reading an article. The article is particularly difficult by the standards of those that we are reading for this course, and so you should reserve plenty of time to spend re-reading it - especially the first half. Both introduce new ideas in addition to self-defense under uncertainty. The podcast introduces an idea called moral exploitation, and the article introduces issues about racial injustice in the context of self-defense. We will not spend substantial time in class discussing moral exploitation, but we will be listening to two more podcast episodes that are very closely related to this one, and the podcast gives a particularly compelling example of the issue that is raised in the article - of how it is fair to distribute risks.

Moral Exploitation Podcast

The podcast is again from Barry Lam's Hi-Phi Nation podcast series. We'll listen to two more episodes, next week. Because it introduces a really compelling example of the kind of question about the distribution of risks that the article is about, I strongly recommend that you listen to it first. As you listen, pay special attention for a disagreement between two soldiers about the right attitude for soldiers to take when considering tradeoffs between risks to innocent civilians and risks to fellow soldiers. The example in which they disagree is the kind of case that we are interested in this week.

Click here for supplementary materials for this podcast on the Hi-Phi Nation website, including a full transcript.

Moral Exploitation​

One of the concepts the podcast discusses is the idea of 'moral exploitation', which is exploitation that works by imposing moral burdens. The following comic illustrates moral burdens in a way that does not turn on exploitation:

Renee Bolinger

Renee Bolinger completed her PhD in philosophy here at USC about two years ago, and now teaches at Princeton University. Her research is about the fair allocation of risks in cases where agents need to make choices involving uncertainty or risks - our exact topic for this class.

Finally, the Reading

Our reading for this class is Bolinger's paper, 'Racial Bias in Defensive Harm', which is published in the Journal of Political Philosophy, and which she wrote as a philosophy graduate student here at USC. As you read, try to apply what she says about self-defense to the case from the podcast, in which the two soldiers disagree about how to balance risks to soldiers with risks to innocent civilians. And think about what you know or have read about prominent cases of police violence against young black men in the United States over the last few years. What kind of criticism is Bolinger advancing of our criminal justice system?

Handout 8.2

Here.

Lecture 8.2

Theories of Self-Defense

Where We Are

Last class's reading, from Helen Frowe, introduced several theories about why it is permissible to kill in self-defense, one of which was the rights-based theory of Judith Jarvis Thomson (also of famous violinist fame). For this class we are reading a famous article by Thomson in which she lays out this theory and contrasts it with alternatives. Many of the points and comparisons that she makes are ones that Frowe also explains in her chapter, but because Thomson is writing for an audience of professional philosophers and Frowe is writing for an audience of undergraduate students, you will likely find Thomson's line of reasoning harder to follow (I do, too).

To make sure that you are understanding what is going on in the Thomson reading, make sure that you stop yourself after each section, ask yourself what new point she was trying to make in that section, and ask yourself whether it corresponds to a point that Frowe made, either in her section about the rights-based view, or in another section of her chapter. If it takes you less than a few hours to work through Thomson's paper and understand what is going on in it, then you are probably missing a lot. Like her earlier paper on abortion that we read in Unit 2, there is a lot going on in this paper, and you don't want to miss it.

Rights

The key ideas behind Thomson's rights-based account of self-defense are that rights help to explain what we are morally obligated or permitted to do, that in at least some cases, rights can be given up or transferred, and that you do not need to be morally culpable or responsible for a choice, in order to give up one of your rights. Let's take these ideas one by one.

Idea 1: Rights help to explain what we are morally obligated or permitted to do.

Here is an example to illustrate the intuitive force of this idea: Caroline owns a doll, Chloe. It is okay - permissible - for her to sleep with Chloe, just because she wants to. William doesn't own Chloe - she belongs to his sister. So it is not permissible for William to sleep with Chloe, just because he wants to. He needs to first get permission from his sister. In this example, it seems obvious that what Caroline and William are allowed or permitted to do with the doll Chloe is different, and that this difference is explained by who owns the doll. But what ownership is, is a kind of right - what we generally call a "property right". What it means to own something is to have the right to do certain things with it, and to restrict access to others doing similar things with it, without your permission. So since Caroline's permission to sleep with Chloe is explained by her ownership, it is explained by rights. This makes plausible the idea that rights can be explanatory of obligations and permissions, in general.

Idea 2: Rights can, at least in some cases, be given up or transferred.

Not all rights can be given up or transferred - in the language of the Declaration of Independence, for example, some rights are said to be inalienable. That means that nothing you can do can give them up - for example, maybe you cannot sell yourself into slavery. But here is an example to illustrate the intuitive force of the idea that some rights can be alienated - meaning, given up. Suppose that Caroline is not sure what to do for William for his birthday, but notices that he has often been asking for permission to play with her doll, Chloe. Caroline could give William Chloe as a present. After she gives Chloe to William, William will come to own Chloe. Now William has the right to use Chloe, and it is permissible for him to sleep with Chloe just because he wants to, but Caroline cannot take Chloe to bed without William's permission. If ownership is a property right, then since ownership can be alienated - that is, given up or transferred - at least some important rights can be given up.

Idea 3: You do not need to be culpable, or morally responsible, in order to alienate your rights.

Here is an example to illustrate the intuitive force of this idea: Caroline is sleepwalking, and goes and pushes her Amazon Dash button for Cheez-Its twenty times. The next day, twenty cases of Cheez-Its show up at her door and her credit card has been charged $399.80. Just like giving something away is a way of alienating your property rights to it, so is making a transaction - in fact, making a purchase is just a kind of trade, where you transfer your property right over one thing to someone who transfers their property right over another thing to you. But as the Amazon Dash case shows, you can make a transaction that you are not culpable or responsible for - for example, while you are sleepwalking, or even just by turning over in bed, if you make the mistake of keeping your Cheez-Its Amazon Dash button in bed with you. But this doesn't mean that you haven't made the transaction. Caroline really is now the owner of twenty brand-new cases of Cheez-Its, and her credit card balance really is now $399.80 higher than it was yesterday. So examples like this, although they are more contentious than the last two examples, strongly suggest that at least for the kinds of rights that can most clearly be alienated, you can alienate them even without being responsible for what you do.

The Reading

You can find Thomson's article here. As I said above, read slowly and carefully, and go back to compare Frowe's discussion as often as you find it helpful. Here are two big questions that I want you to think about, in particular:

What resources does Thomson's rights-based account have to explain the proportionality requirement on self-defense?

What resources does Thomson's rights-based account have to explain the necessity requirement on self-defense?

I suspect that one of these questions is harder to answer than the other, and that will be one of the things we want to discuss in class.

Handout 8.1

Here.

Lecture 8.1

Self-Defense

Phil 166: Unit 3

We have now complete two out of the five main three-week sections of Phil 166. In Unit 1, we introduced ethics and philosophy, explored why ethical questions might be hard in some of the ways expected of philosophical questions, and explored Singer's arguments as a helpful illustrative example of doing moral philosophy with arguments. Then in Unit 2, we took up a number of interrelated questions about abortion, one of the most controversial moral topics in the contemporary United States. This topic led us to start to learn about some very general theoretical issues in the study of normative ethics.

Now, in Unit 3 of the course, we turn to another kind of moral issue: the morality of self-defense. Self-defense has already come up, because we saw that self-defense could underlie some justifications for abortion. But there are many other important questions that can be asked about the morality of self-defense, and in this section we will also see how issues about the morality of self-defense connect up to questions about when and how it is morally permissible to engage in war, and also about issues of racial justice in the contemporary United States.

Helen Frowe

Our first reading for this section of the course is a brief introduction to issues in and views about the morality of self-defense, written by Helen Frowe, a British moral philosopher who teaches at Stockholm University.

Frowe is the director of the Stockholm Center for War and Peace, and author of The Ethics of War and Peace, a textbook about ethical issues concerning war from which we will read three chapters in this unit of the course. In this unit of the course we will first be thinking about general issues about the ethics of self-defense, and then applying them to the ethics of war.

Introduction to Self-Defense

So when you read Frowe's introduction to theories of self-defense, which is the reading for today, and she keeps mentioning war and "just war theorists", just bear in mind that in her book, the reason that she is introducing the topic of self-defense is in order to be able to draw on it in her discussion of the ethics of war. We will eventually talk about war as well, but first we are going to talk about self-defense in general. As you read, pay special attention to make sure that you understand what Frowe means when she talks about necessity, and what she means when she talks about proportionality. Understanding these two important concepts in the theory of self-defense requires being able to construct examples in which an act of self-defense satisfies the necessity requirement but not the proportionality requirement, and cases in which an act of self-defense satisfies the proportionality requirement but not the necessity requirement. If you can't yet construct such examples, then you don't yet understand these two important concepts. So take extra time over the sections where Frowe introduces these principles and try to make sure that you can see what these examples would be like.

Frowe also spends substantial time in her introduction introducing and explaining several competing theories of what justifies self-defense. You don't need to understand all of these theories simply on the basis of this reading, but what I want you to get out of this is that there is a lot of agreement among moral philosophers about many of the main cases in which it is permissible to act in self defense, but a lot of disagreement about why, and some disagreement about marginal cases involving self-defense. This is analogous to the fact that there is a lot of agreement among moral philosophers that in normal cases it is wrong to kill adult human beings, but a lot of disagreement about exactly why, and some disagreement about marginal cases. Theories of self-defense do disagree about marginal or borderline cases, but these cases are just the edge of a lot of agreement that harming in self-defense is often okay.

Handout 7.2

Here.

Lecture 7.2