Who knows whether the zombie apocalypse will end with a whimper or a bang, but we are going to go out in style. Today we will wrap up our discussion of Aristotle if necessary, and then review much of what we’ve covered over the course of the semester.
We began the semester with Plato, and we will end it with his student, Aristotle - also the teacher of Alexander the Great of Macedon. We’re going to read book II of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, which describes the central features of Aristotle’s account of virtue.
Aristotle is often held up along with Kant and Mill as offering a third central but different perspective on the ethical life in the Western philosophical tradition, and in recent years a lot of attention has been paid to similarities and differences between Aristotle’s account of the virtues and many central features of the virtues as characterized in Confucianism and Buddhism. But in contrast to Mill’s utilitarianism and Kant’s categorical imperative, Aristotle doesn’t really try to tell us what is right or wrong in any particular situation. Instead, he tries to tell us what a good person is like, and then we should focus on being good people.
Aristotle makes an intuitively surprising but central claim about virtue in book II of the Nicomachean Ethics. He claims that it is always a mean state between an excess and a deficiency. So as you read, try to think about examples of traits that you think are virtues and whether this is really true!
Warning: unlike Plato’s Republic, the Nicomachean Ethics was not really written or originally intended to be read as a book. It is more like a collection of lecture notes taken by Aristotle’s students from his lectures - or perhaps an exam study guide put together by students over several years of his teaching. Aristotle did, reputedly, publish his own books, some of them dialogues like Plato’s, but none of those exist any more, and all that we have from him are writings like these. Nevertheless, he remains one of the most influential thinkers in both European and world history.
Kant
This week we will continue our turn toward considering whether you have any obligations towards other people who might be out there trying to survive the zombie apocalypse, by reading a little bit from Immanuel Kant, whose moral theory is one of the most common sources of inspiration for people who think that consequentialism is wrong.
Last year Philosophy Twitter became obsessed with “hot Kant”, this digitally de-aged painting of Kant.
We’re going to read about half of Kant’s most famous and influential piece of writing about ethics, which introduces the core of his ideas, which is called the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals. Kant is a famously difficult writer to read, and he uses a lot of vocabulary that he introduces in some of his other philosophical writings. But I think that you will be able to get some of the gist of his main ideas, and then we will fill out the picture a little bit in class.
We’ll read pages 1-26 of the Groundwork, which covers Kant’s preface, part 1 of the main text, and the first half or so of part 2 of the main text. This will cover most of the most-discussed issues that Kant covers in the book.
Oh - and don’t click on the AI-reanimated video of Kant singing in the tweet below unless you are prepared to be traumatized.
Hot Kant x Venga Boys, just like we’ve all been waiting for! pic.twitter.com/fGNoMNDbZi
— Jack (@jackeselbst) March 11, 2021
We had a week of Mill defending utilitarianism, and then a week of Williams criticizing it because utilitarianism is committed to the more general thesis known as consequentialism. This week we are going to get a defense of consequentialism from the philosopher Frank Jackson - the only living philosopher we have read this semester.
Frank Jackson taught for most of his career at Australian National University, from which he is now retired. His most famous work in philosophy is about language and the mind, but the paper that we are going to read for this class spawned a large area of research in moral philosophy that is focused on the question of whether our lack of knowledge about the effects of our actions is the right kind of thing to affect what it is morally right or wrong for us to do.
You will see in Jackson’s article that he is trying to defend consequentialism from a very specific objection - that it doesn’t allow us to prioritize the interests of our friends and family over the interests of complete strangers. But in order to defend it in this way, he gives a very different interpretation of what it means to be a consequentialist than Mill does. The difference between these two interpretations is grounded in Jackson’s idea that uncertainty - our lack of sure knowledge about what will happen as the result of our actions - should affect not only what choices it is rational for us to make, but also which choices count as morally right or morally wrong. As you read it, try to keep track of the difference between what you think it is rational for people to do in the situations that Jackson describes, and what it is morally right or morally wrong for them to do.
Today is a university wellness day, which means: no class for you. Chillax (if you can)! We’ll resume next Monday
If you are dying to think about philosophy today, then here is a podcast episode that I guarantee you will enjoy.
And I leave you with pictures of the controversial example from Williams.
Jim
The Indians
Pascal
Last week we read John Stuart Mill’s defense of utilitarianism. This week we will read most of a prominent criticism of utilitarianism from the 1970s due to the philosopher Bernard Williams.
Bernard Williams, who I believe will be played by Michael Caine if they ever make a movie about philosophy, taught at the University of Cambridge for many years and then at UC-Berkeley. The piece that we are reading by him was written in the early 1970’s to be published as part of a “for and against” book alongside a previously published argument in favor of utilitarianism by the Australian philosophy J.J.C. Smart. You will notice that Smart gets mentioned briefly in next week’s reading.
One of the example that Williams discusses extensively in the reading and has unfortunately become very famous and widely discusses has some very obnoxious colonialist undertones - you will recognize it when you see it. Do your best to ignore these features of the example!
“For our reading this week, you may ignore and skip all of Smart’s contribution to the book, and go straight to Williams’ contribution. Williams’ contribution has seven chapters, but you only have to read the first five.”
You know the drill - we’ll try to wrap up our discussion of utiltiarianism today.
The last four weeks we’ve spent time worrying about how we are allowed to treat zombies. This week we are going to turn our attention to the most important and influential historical idea that gives us a super-simple answer about what we are morally allowed to do in any possible situation. This views is called utilitarianism, and it says that the only morally permissible action is whatever brings about the most happiness - which utilitarians normally say is the greatest balance of pleasure over pain.
Utilitarianism helps a lot, because if Zombies don’t experience pain, then it settles the question of whether it matters, morally speaking, how we treat them. Likewise, if zombies DO feel pain, then that also settles the question. So utilitarianism would allow us to reduce the question of how to treat zombies to the question of whether they can feel pain.
Jeremy Bentham is the writer who first introduced the word ‘utilitarianism’, and argued that it was the proper way to resolve moral questions and decide what laws should be passed. The somewhat gristly image on the right is his mummified head, which is in the collection of University College London, to whom he left it in his will. One of Bentham’s prominent advocates and disciples was James Mill, whose son John Stuart went on to become one of the most prominent and important thinkers in Britain in the 19th century.
We will be reading a short book by John Stuart Mill called simply Utilitarianism. Utilitarianism was written by Mill with the intention of being a widely accessible tract to introduce people to the key ideas of utilitarianism, rather than as an academic treatise for only his educated peers to read. The views developed in this book are a little bit different from those of Jeremy Bentham, but Mill’s book is much shorter and easier to read.
As you read, try to answer for yourself whether you find Mill’s arguments convincing. We can’t apply it to the Zombie Apocalypse if it is not even the right theory for ordinary life, so try to test Mill’s views by asking yourself whether there could ever be a choice that is the right one to make even though it does not make people happiest.
We’re going to take a break this week and read what the most famous medieval Catholic theologian had to say about baby cannibals. Really.
Medieval Christian philosophers were very worried about how the Christian doctrine of the resurrection of the body could be true, given that bodies are made out of material that can be recycled to make up different bodies. So there is some wild speculation that goes on in this passage about how God handles some of the very hardest cases.
Give it a read - it’s relatively short - and then we’ll talk about it on Wednesday and discuss whether Aquinas’ views raise any interesting issues about how we should feel about our bodies being treated if we turn into zombies.
We’re taking a break today. No TIOR this week and no class meeting today.
Okay, last shot to discuss personal identity. We’ll continue with Parfit today, and then you will all be relieved to move on to a new topic next week.
Derek Parfit
This week we’re going to continue our discussion of personal identity with one of the most famous and influential things to be written about personal identity in the last fifty years, which comes from the philosopher Derek Parfit.
If you’re not careful, Parfit will reinforce every bad stereotype that you have ever encountered of what a philosopher might be like. He wrote and taught at All Souls College, Oxford, throughout his career, and is quite an interesting character in his own right. You can read about him in his New York Times Obituary (paywalled), about his photography in the Financial Times (not paywalled), and you can read what Parfit had to say about me in volume 2, chapter 27, of his book On What Matters (you have online access through USC libraries). And if you are incredibly bored this week and looking for a way to procrastinate studying for midterms, you can find what I had to say about Parfit (including about what he had to say about me) here.
Young Parfit
Old Parfit
As you read Parfit’s article “Personal Identity”, try to think about how his views relate to those of the three texts that we discussed last week.
We again have a somewhat longer TIOR assignment for this week - this time 600-700 words. Make sure that you use one paragraph for each part of the TIOR, and again my advice is to draft it as a four-sentence essay first, and then to expand on it, to help keep you disciplined and structured.
We’ll continue today trying to think about personal identity and the self. There is a lot to talk about this week, but if it spills over to next week as well, that is okay because personal identity is still on the docket next week.
This week and next week we’re going to try to think about what makes you a person and whether and why you are the same person who received the birth certificate with your name on it a couple of decades ago, or the person who celebrated their tenth birthday roughly halfway in between. We’ll be particularly interested in how you should feel about the possibility that you might turn into a zombie, and in the relationship between zombies and the people who turned into them.
For a change of pace, I’m going to give different readings to different groups of you different readings for this week, and then in class we’ll bring them together and talk about how they are related to one another. Next week we’ll read a longer piece of contemporary (last fifty years) philosophy that was inspired by all three of our readings for this week.
Our main reading for today is CHAPTER 3 of Mark Siderits’ book Buddhism as Philosophy. I am asking everyone to do this reading for the week. If you are interested in getting more background on Buddhism or Buddhist thought, it will about double your reading if you also read the first two chapters as an introduction, but they are not part of the assigned reading for the week. Siderits is a contemporary secondary source who is trying to give an introduction to historical Buddhist philosophical ideas about the self and who explicitly discusses one of our other readings for this week in detail and compares it explicitly to another.
This is a Buddhist dialogue that dates to roughly two thousand years ago. We will be reading a selection. In particular, you will be reading it if your last name starts with A-G. This is the main Buddhist text that Siderits discusses in the second half of his chapter.
Yes, this is the same John Locke who we read before. If your last name starts with H-P, you will read Book II, Chapter 27 of Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding to see what he has to say about the significance of consciousness in personal identity.
The Scottish Philosopher David Hume, writing after and with knowledge of Locke, also commented on the self or personal identity, but had a more skeptical view. If your last name starts with Q-Z, then you will read selections from his Treatise of Human Nature.
Today we’ll continue the discussion of self-defense from Monday. What can we justify, and what can’t we, morally justify doing to zombies in order to defend ourselves?
Last week we worried about whether any facts about ownership or about our obligations to the dead should make us morally uncomfortable about doing what we need to do in order to protect ourselves from zombies. This week we’re going to worry about what can justify doing things to zombies or to the bodies of the dead to prevent them from becoming zombies, and the most obvious justification is self-defense. So for that, we will return to an important and influential article - again from the last forty years - published by the philosopher Judith Jarvis Thomson.
Thomson, by Steve Pyke, in Philosophers
Caricature obviously based on Pyke photo, from her Wikipedia entry
Judith Jarvis Thomson was one of the leading moral philosophers of the second half of the twentieth century, teaching for much of her career at MIT. She is most famous for her article “A Defense of Abortion”, which is still taught in introductory undergraduate ethics courses all around the world fifty years after it was published. But her paper “Self-Defense”, which we are reading, has been nearly as influential and important among contemporary philosophers. Thomson passed away just about three months ago, in November.
In her article, Thomson is trying to figure out why it is okay to kill people in self-defense. Starting by arguing that it is, in fact, sometimes morally permissible to do so, she tries to give an explanation of why. Zombies, of course, are not people. But if there is some important value to respecting the dead or the wishes of the dead, then destroying zombies may also require some kind of justification. And many of you have already been thinking that this is clearly justified because your lives are at stake - in other words, that it is justified by something like self-defense. If that is right, then the true theory of self-defense might be expected to explain why.
One theory that Thomson considers but rejects says that you are allowed to kill someone in self-defense if they are a malicious threat to you. If that were the right explanation of why you are allowed to kill in self-defense, then that could explain why it is okay to destroy or dispose of zombies only if zombies are really malicious. Fortunately, however, Thomson rejects this explanation. Make sure that you try to understand why she rejects it.
Another theory that Thomson briefly considers and rejects says that you are allowed to kill someone whenever the alternative is that you would die. This would be the right sort of thing to justify destroying zombies, if the alternative is that you will die. And it is a thought that many of you have had about self-defense - that killing in self-defense is okay because the alternative is death. But Thomson also rejects this explanation. Again, make sure that you understand why she rejects it.
As you read, pay attention to Thomson’s style and what makes it different from the older texts that we have read. Do you prefer it? Or is it more difficult to read? Why?
In addition to taking on Thomson in your TIOR, you may also take on one of the views that she considers and rejects, but just make sure that you are not just parroting Thomson’s reasons for rejecting the other idea, and are offering your own reasons for disagreeing with it.
Our goal is to have spent Monday continuing our discussion of Locke with a focus on what he says about ownership of private property, and then to turn today to actually consider whether we owe anything, and if so, what, to the dead - either those who have, or those who have not, turned into zombies. Next week we will turn to consider the justification of self-defense.
This week we are going to continue to discuss Locke in Monday’s class, and then for Wednesday we will read a contemporary (1980’s) paper by the philosopher Joel Feinberg. This paper is unlike everything else that we have read this semester, both because it was written in the last forty years and because even among things written the last forty years it is not a great classic. But Feinberg is well-known for defending the view that we can have obligations to people who are dead, and this is a very short article that directly raises related issues and which applies clearly to treatment of the bodies of the dead - which is what you guys need to be worried about, since zombies are reanimated corpses.
In this article, Feinberg is not really trying to defend his view that we can have obligations to people who are dead, so much as to push back against people who he thinks take too seriously the idea that we need to respect the bodies of the dead. But if you are interested in what he says about why we can have obligations to people who are dead, it comes up in this episode of the Slate podcast Hi-Phi Nation, which I also encourage you to give a listen:
As you read Feinberg’s article, think about what makes his style of writing different from those we have read so far this semester, and what you like or don’t like about that. And try to apply his reasoning to the case of zombies.
For your TIOR topic this week you can take on Feinberg, or you can take on the main author who he criticizes, Willard Gaylin, or you may take on Locke’s claims about private property, so long as you do not overlap with your TIOR from last week.
We have now read bits of state of nature theorists from both the European and Confucian traditions who are nevertheless sometimes compared to each other: Hobbes and Xunzi. This week we will turn to one of Hobbes’s successors in the European tradition, John Locke, whose influence on the language in some of the key founding documents of American democracy some of you may already be aware of.
Locke published a book called ‘Two Treatises of Government that consisted in a first, negative, part criticizing contemporaries, and a second, positive, part laying out his own views. We are going to read the very beginning of the second, positive part. In particular, we will read Chapters I through V. These cover his views about the state of nature and the origins of private property.
As you read, I want you to pay very close attention to the contrasts between Locke and Hobbes, and the contrasts between Locke and Xunzi. In class, we will want to know what Locke thinks of the state of nature as really being like, and what consequences that would have, if we accept it, for how the eighteen of you can get along with one another.
Today is President’s Day, so there is no class. We’ll return on Wednesday to discuss Locke.
Last week we read one of the most famous and important selections from Hobbes, an English philosopher writing in the 17th century in Europe, and motivated by distinctive problems of his own time and place, including the English Civil War, which he saw as creating unnecessary instability. This week, for our second state of nature theorist, we turn to Xunzi, one of the great classical thinkers in Chinese Confucian thought, who is often compared to Hobbes, though he was thinking and writing two thousand years earlier.
Xunzi - literally, ‘master Xun’ - lived and taught in the 3rd century BCE, after the time of Confucius and Mencius, who established the most important and central doctrines of Confucian thought. Like Confucius and Mencius, he lived and wrote during the Warring States Period, just before the rise of the Qin dynasty.
If you are interested in finding some context to Xunzi’s ideas, I found the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry for him to be particularly helpful. The SEP is a valuable free online resource that is regularly updated to include the very latest scholarship.
We are going to read two “chapters” from the collection of Xunzi’s work that has come down to us from his time. But it is important to be clear that this edition of his work was collected by later scholars around two hundred years after his death, from manuscripts that were likely circulating in China at the time. The order of the chapters was determined by the scholars who assembled them - not by Xunzi himself - and contemporary scholars agree that some of the chapters included were probably not written by Xunzi himself. But my understanding is that the two chapters that we are going to read are believed to be actually written by Xunzi, though we do not know which order he actually wrote them in or intended them to be read in - and the titles of the chapters were probably not chosen by Xunzi himself, either.
Chapter 23, “Human Nature is Bad”, lays out Xunzi’s views about human nature, and is intended to push back against Mencius, who emphasized the perfectability of human nature, or at least against a common interpretation of what Mencius believed. My understanding is that this is one of the most-read selections from Xunzi.
Chapter 19, “Discourse on Ritual”, lays out Xunzi’s views about the important of what he calls ‘ritual’, or li. Pay close attention to the relationship between Xunzi’s views of human nature and his claims about the need for ritual.
As always, we are going to want to struggle to try to understand these texts in their own right, but in keeping with our class design, I also want you to think about the contrasts between Xunzi’s and Hobbes’s views about human nature, and also about the contrasts between their solutions. And since we are living through the Zombie Apocalypse, finally what we really want to know is whether Hobbes and Xunzi would agree or disagree about the significance of the predicament of suddenly losing a central government that can enforce the law.
The semester officially begins today, but we won’t have our first class until next Wednesday. Until then, sit tight, settle into your other classes, and think about the safest places on campus to hide from zombies. See you soon…
