Ep. 370: Christine Korsgaard on the History of Ethics (Part Two)

0:07 Mark: You're listening to Partially Examined Life, episode 370 part 2. We've been discussing the first two lectures within Christine Korsgaard's the Sources of Normativity. And I think given how much time we spent with Hume before this, and Hume is sort of her big first example of what this Reflective endorsement method that she ultimately is going to recommend. She's the first one, she talks at length. Who made use of that. Okay, well, you know, let's do the anthropology, let's do the psychology. Let's figure out what kind of things that we actually do think is moral.

But then now that we've done that, gone through that process, do we still think those are moral? If we discovered we only think these are moral because your society has brainwashed you, because it's the capitalist system, then we might reject morality or at least reject that morality. If we do the Nietzschean thing and we say, oh, this is just the bad Christian ideology that screwed you up, then we reject that.

1:06 Wes: But morality makes us sick.

1:08 Mark: Yes.

1:09 Wes: Nietzsche and Freud, she refers to both of them.

1:12 Mark: So a successful endorsement would say, you know, wherever we get, even if, you know, whether we do it with what we've been handed down or what we find that as reflective adults we now hold, if we can go through that process of looking at its origins and still stand behind it, then, well, that's pretty good. And so that seems to be what Hume did that like, well, here's the stuff we approve of. Well, do you like that? You approve of that? I mean, it seems like you do. You keep questioning it, look at it through different points of view. Does it hurt other people to, you know, what, come up with some standard that would make you reject these morals? And you can't come up with one. So there we go.

1:49 Wes: And it turns out we have multiple standards. And this is on 54. We can look at things actually from multiple points of view. Right. From self interest, from the point of view of sympathy. Right. Other interest. And then the point of view of what she calls direct reflexivity, which is that morality could be found unsatisfactory from its own point of view. This is going into page 55, and it could write. The example of it being unsatisfactory from its own point of view is a Nazi example. Sorry, Seth, but the Nazis come. You know, you're hiding someone from the Nazis, and they come and ask you where that person is.

And you. Right, that's typically, that example is about how we are allowed to lie to the Nazis in that case. But for her purposes, this is about why we might think that if we thought refraining from lying were always the moral thing to do, we might question why we should endure some great sacrifice, assuming that telling the truth is going to lead to a great sacrifice in order to promote the existence of a species that generated these evil Nazis. Right. Assuming that Our big explanatory theory is about morality promotes species preservation. All right, that's confusing.

What I just said is really confusing.

3:13 Mark: This is why we're here. We have 90 pages.

3:15 Seth: Well, she says on page 49 at the end of the last lecture, I argued that normativity is a problem for human beings because of our reflective nature. Even if we are inclined to believe that an action is right, and even if we are inclined to be motivated by that fact, it is always possible for us to call our beliefs and motives into question. This is why, after all, we seek a philosophical foundation for ethics in the first place, because we are afraid that the true explanation of why we have moral beliefs and motives might not be one that sustains them. Morality might not survive reflection. I was going to try to connect that to what you just said, and now I don't remember what I was going to do there.

3:50 Wes: Well, I was just giving us, you know, if we skip ahead back to 54, she's just saying that reflection can involve these different points of view, right? We got to have some standard if we're going to reflect. And this might be confusing to listeners because, like, well, why should those standards be normative? Why should we approve morality just because it. It harmonizes with self interest? That. That might ultimately be confusing, but I think it'll come out in the wash here. But the point is that there's multiple standards. Self interest, other interest, and then morality's own standards, which it could be conflicted with itself.

4:22 Seth: Well, in that context around the page, you're talking about. She's talking about Hume, and she's saying, according to Hume, moral judgments are based on sentiments of approval and disapproval, which we feel when we contemplate a person's character from what he calls a general point of view. So taking up the general point of view regulates our sentiments about a person in two ways. First, we view the person not through the eyes of our own interest, but through the eyes of our sympathy with the. The person herself and her friends, blah, blah, blah.

Secondly, we judge her according to the usual effects of such characteristics rather than according to their actual effects. In this or that case, and she says these two regulative devices bring a kind of objectivity to our moral judgments. Judging in sympathy with the narrow circle and according to general rules, we are able to reach agreement, a sense of a convergence of sentiments about a person's character. We all approve and disapprove of the same characteristics, and as a result, we come to share an ideal of good character. That's her Humean but then she says but this would not be correct.

5:21 Wes: Right, right. So at that point we can still ask the normative question. We can do all the human work and say psychologically we're disposed to have these sentiments, which is what she's saying. But then do we have really reason to yield to those sentiments even if we have them? Yeah, I'm naturally sympathetic, but should I be? And Hume like I think when we did Hume, I think we are sort of confused by the places where he's like well this will make you happier. Right. This is in your self interest to be. Because it didn't seem to be to the point.

And she's saying well that is exactly the point. That is the reflective moment. Hume justifies our sentiments by saying it contributes to the moral agents happiness. It's useful to you and you know, useful and agreeable to you yourself and to others which will lead others to like you. And being liked is generally something we like. That's the justification from the point of view of the self interest of the agent. And we can do that.

6:20 Mark: So we haven't said why she doesn't. She ultimately wants to transcend Hume. What pushes us to the next thing. And I think it's still that, that Hume is still pointing ultimately to sentiment. Sentiment is the thing in the world. It is the moral fact. It's not a fact about the things we're judging. It's a fact about us and our reactions to those things. But still it is a fact in the world and that we're sort of according our. So even that it's not as bad as substantive realism.

6:47 Wes: Well, it's still going to be the same thing when we get to. I mean, you know, I would wait until we get to the second part because it's the same thing. It's just human nature again it's the way we're constituted. But it's for Kant it's just about our rational constitution and the nature of the will as opposed to our sentimental constitution. But it's very similar.

7:05 Seth: Yeah, well what she's trying to say about Hume is that a virtuous person for Hume acts not from the motive of duty or obligation but from some natural motive such as benevolence.

7:15 Wes: Right.

7:15 Seth: Which a spectator would approve. No reason why you are obligated has been given. You just have natural motives to do that and this is just a good way for you to be. And she's saying the Humean sympathy or whatever is. She says it public. It's the sympathetic or the sentimental aspect of Hume is connected because you have to take this general point of view. It comes from a place of self interest. It's still your sentiment, but it's not your sentiment, so to speak. As she says, it's not in a specific act, but it's in the system of justice. So in other words, the sympathy is. You take this external thing and you have this sympathetic feeling based on this general point of view about how we should all feel. And she just says that is too tenuous, it's too loose to sustain motivation. Like the reality is you would not.

8:08 Wes: Where does she say that?

8:09 Mark: This is page 57.

8:11 Seth: 57, yeah.

8:12 Wes: I didn't see her saying that. That's too tenuous to sustain motivation.

8:16 Mark: Well, it says she uses remote. The connection between the individual just actions in the system is too remote to sustain an interested motivation, which is why we need the sense of duty. So all those things that like justice was the main one. Property rights.

8:31 Wes: Ah, yes, this is the case of justice. Yeah.

8:34 Mark: Yes, yes, that the only reason that we follow those. And this is it's unstable because later she said people following this tend to just become utilitarians. Like Bentham specifically read Hume and became a utilitarian, even though that's not what Hume is saying. Hume is saying we have these natural sentiments, we build on them with utility. But then, you know, what makes us in a particular case actually keep with justice. Because I read Hume as, in some ways dismissing justice as, well, justice is not as primary as you say. Yes, it's important, but it's a useful fiction.

So she gives this example way later of when, you know, you're a lawyer for somebody who has originally in his will, he had left everything to scientific research, medical research, and you thought that was great. Well, then there's a later version of the will that only you know about that was leaving everything to his worthless nephew who will throw it away on gambling and booze. So it is just given that you are the executor of that will for you to give it to the nephew. And you might feel like, I'm a lawyer, this is my job, I have a sense of justice.

But you know, that actually the right thing to do is what will help, you know, so there's this gravity toward utilitarianism because we only sort of grudgingly go along with justice, you know, out of obligation. We don't actually love it.

9:53 Wes: The point of this example, right, is yeah, we might be inclined to be utilitarian or consequentialist in that situation. And this is the whole Problem of justice, because it, on average, it's better for us all to do the right thing. But in that particular circumstance, I'm not going to harm the situation of not going to harm the system of justice or anyone in particular if I do this act.

10:15 Mark: Although I, I mean the nephew.

10:16 Wes: I'm harming the nephew. Which complicates the example. She's actually trying to give this as a more sympathetic version of Hume's sensible knave.

10:25 Mark: Let's say the nephew's behavior is self destructive, so it doesn't even help the nephew. The money's going to ruin the nephew.

10:31 Wes: Exactly. So let's leave out that complication. But the point is that Hume has an answer for this, for why we should still do the right thing, even if the consequences of doing the unjust thing are not going to be bad. And what he says is that we're just naturally hardwired to feel ashamed of ourselves if we do that. So we compromise ourselves in a way. And she'll say, yeah, this is a good reason. Right. So this is what Korsgaard says. She'll say, the knave. This is on page 59. I think the knave loses out on a set of pleasures associated with morality.

The sense that you are lovable and worthy in the eyes of others makes you lovable and worthy and your own. And morality provides these feelings regardless of whether you think that morality is justified or not. So you know, even if you're. You think, well, this is, it's not this one instance, I can do this. It's not going to harm anyone, it's not going to harm the system of justice, it harms your self respect.

11:30 Dylan: Yeah. And she says morality provides a set of pleasures of its own, a set of pleasures which the knave loses out on, which is what makes it not circular.

11:39 Wes: Yeah.

11:39 Mark: The example I gave was the variation off the sensible knave quite a bit later in the text, which I think where she problematizes this here, she's accepting it, she's saying. I mean, I think there was a little debate on whether we found it convincing or not when we read this in Hume. Well, if you're inclined to be a parasite, even if no one finds out, you'll still dislike yourself, basically. If you're that kind of person. I don't even know what to say to you. You're just not even a member of the moral community. Just get out of here.

12:08 Dylan: When we read this, I thought both of that question about whether are those pleasures really one that someone is always sensitive to or not? And Then, and maybe this is related to just the cognitive, the neuropsychology aspect of it is, wouldn't we admit that certain people are simply not sensitive to such pleasures?

12:32 Wes: Yeah.

12:33 Dylan: Does that undermine the argument?

12:35 Wes: Babies aren't. Yeah. Therefore they are not part of the moral community. Right. This is the scope problem. If you, if you know, at a certain point, if the hypothetical person, so to speak, doesn't have the constitution, a certain kind of constitution, then yeah, they cease to be part of the moral. They cease to be evaluable in terms of moral judgments.

12:56 Dylan: So I hadn't thought of it this way, but what's nice about that response, that scope and the moral community is it also directly addresses the problem of particles, of moral particles in the following ways. That the reason you would go for moral particles is you want something real in the world. You want something. And what that does, that scope argument says, well, morality applies to the entities that actually are moral detectors. And if you don't have a moral detector just simply doesn't apply to you and it doesn't apply to you in any sense of obligation.

And then you get to the question of why you would feel that obligations. But importantly in this human argument, this reflective endorsement argument is you would also be sensitive to being able to feel that obligation. Right. So it's not just that you are a member of that moral community and therefore you ought to obey the conclusions of that obligation is that you're actually sensitive to them. And so in that way you could be held account to them.

14:04 Wes: Yeah, that's Hume's version of right. We don't convict people of a crime if they don't know right from wrong. Like someone who's psychotic or sleepwalking, for instance.

14:13 Dylan: Yeah, just like the lion who eats the cubs of the pride next door isn't guilty of.

14:20 Wes: No, that guy is a bastard. But what's going on here is right. Reflective endorsement is from the standpoint of self interest. We were getting a non moral or premoral standard by which we judge morality. And that's what she's going to address in 2.2.4 is, does that mean we're identifying morality with self interest? What's going on here? This is kind of the puzzling thing about the reflective endorsement method is we're using these non moral points of view to evaluate. We're using morality also, but we are also using these non moral points of view to evaluate morality. The prudential point of view, Mark, just

15:04 Dylan: to I'm still back on is I hadn't thought of it this Way that scope question as really getting to. I mean, to me the clearest piece that addresses the realism question. It makes it real enough in the realest sense of the word to have that moral force exist.

15:25 Mark: So throughout here we're trying to retain objectivity. We want, yes, there to be correct uses and incorrect uses. I sort of think of Wittgenstein, even though she doesn't, I don't know, bring up his name. But of moral claims.

15:38 Wes: There'll be a lot of Wittgenstein in the second part.

15:40 Mark: Okay, all right.

15:41 Wes: Yeah. And private language argument.

15:43 Seth: Mark, Stop teasing us, Wes.

15:45 Mark: We want people to be able to be wrong about morality for sure. It's not just relativism. There are right and wrong uses of moral terms, but they're not right and wrong because they refer to the thing in the world. That's right. You were saying. Yeah, that would be the clearest way is if they're like everybody. If you're a moral agent, that means you have the moral detector and you detect the thing. And so the thing is what we're ultimately coming toward. And she gives this disanalogy. She says this is how Bernard Williams explicitly thinks of science.

That like there is some fact of the matter and we're trying to get beyond the limitations of our senses to get. So, you know, comparing. Well, I might see green and blue, but the objective, the more objective fact about it is, is the wavelengths. So that even somebody that didn't have my senses could get that. Well, is there something comparable in ethics? Because it seems like maybe there is that. Well, I've got my particular customs. But if we sort of drill really deep into, oh, there's some fundamental things like the principle of utility or something that are.

They're just objective and everybody would agree to it. And she is going to Cord is going to agree with Williams that that's actually not the case. That somehow we still. It's almost more like Charles Sanders Peirce. I was thinking of where what scientific truth is for him is not that getting at the ultimate, you know, the pre existent thing. It's whatever people would agree on if they had infinite time and infinite study. That that's kind of what ethics ends up being is like, well, think more and more, reflect more and more, bring in more and more considerations and points of view and you know, can we socially.

So I see, you know, this is very much compatible. I'm sure he's not going to end up here with Rorty who just describes it as just a collaborative enterprise where we're circling around something that there is no metaphysical thing at the center. It's the very circling itself that is creating the objectivity.

17:41 Dylan: It's the convergence. Yeah.

17:43 Wes: And at this point where we're talking about with Hume, it relies again on this endorsement from these other points of view.

17:50 Mark: Yeah.

17:50 Wes: 2.2.4. Right. Where is it in our interest to be virtuous? This is not to say. Right. That we're reducing morality to self interest. She'll say, you know, the question is actually, is it in our interest to be people who practice virtue for its own sake? It's not suggesting that we do things out of self interest. It's just suggesting that if we do happen to have these dispositions to do things out of obligation, out of duty, then can we come at it from this other perspective, self interest, and endorse it? And then after that, she'll get into. Right.

These other points of views. And the way, you know, I think with Mark, with your circling around analogy, it's a. The way she's thinking of it here is this kind of congruence between these different points of view. Well, every point of view comes to the same conclusion, and then that's a kind of happy result, including morality's own point of view. So she'll talk in the end about this section on Hume. She'll say part of Hume's argument is that when the moral sense looks at itself from its own point of view but one step higher, that's what she calls the reflexivity test.

It also approves. I don't know if we want to go into detail on that, but that's just worth pointing out. Right.

19:05 Mark: Does the moral sense approve of what the moral sense of the moral sense is past verdicts. If the moral sense were twitchy and inconstant, that's not guaranteed. Like maybe.

19:17 Wes: No, it's not of past verdicts, but it's of right. So you can take my moral sense. I have this natural disposition to think that lying is wrong. But if I looked at that reflectively, I might think that's a bad disposition to have, even from the moral point of view.

19:34 Mark: And what would an example that would

19:36 Wes: illustrate that that's the Nazi example, which I really botched.

19:41 Dylan: Should we.

19:41 Wes: You want to go into in more detail.

19:43 Seth: Do you want a summary of the Nazi example?

19:45 Mark: Yeah. Seth, do you want to give us your version?

19:48 Seth: So the Nazi example is you have a family that's opted to shelter a family of Jews from the Nazis and then, you know, the Nazis take over their country or whatever, and they come to the door. And they say, if you're hiding anybody, you have to give it up. So they have sort of like, on the one hand, they have the obligation to the family. They've made this commitment. On the other hand, they have the law or the commitment to the social order. This is the Humean, broader kind of like social order. So it's like, well, I'm supposed to do what the Nazis say because they're in charge and they're the law. But at the same time. And then knowing what the Nazis are going to do to the family, the question comes, but what about why should I be committed?

20:31 Wes: Could I just interject something here?

20:32 Seth: Yeah.

20:33 Wes: This is all against the background of the evolutionary theory. That's what. What's right promotes species preservation. And what's wrong is what doesn't promote species preservation. So it's this particular explanatory theory which you might want to reject, but we're just stipulating it.

20:50 Dylan: It's a version of self interest.

20:51 Seth: Right. Is it right to protect the family or is it right to maintain the social order, obey the law? And. And then she says, but you can question what kind of, you know, my commitment is to the order of the species or maintaining the social order, the species. But how much fidelity do I have to have to that if I am part of a species that created the Nazis? Like, it makes you question, why should

21:14 Wes: I risk my death in order to help preserve the species that produce the Nazis? So in other words, I'm using this moral point of view to condemn the thing that I'm inclined to do pretty reflectively from that same point of view.

21:31 Mark: Although, you know, this, it seems it's just moral progress. Right. And the way that Seth laid it out is we have conflicting duties and we recognize both of them as duties. That is my duty to keep people from harm. And that is also in preservation.

21:50 Wes: This isn't about conflicting duties, though. This is about failing the reflexivity test, having a moral inclination which you can condemn by reflecting on it from the same moral point of view.

22:04 Mark: Right. So. But that's not the example that we just gave. Right. Because if you say the moral point of view that's going into it is something that is just given to me. It says, protect the species. Well, my questioning whether it's worth protecting the species is not from the point of view of protecting the species. So that's not a moral theory failing its own test. That was just for a different reason in there. But I thought we could use the Nazi example to make the point that we wanted to make. I'm just not sure exactly how to do it.

22:31 Wes: She thinks it's a reflexivity test.

22:34 Seth: Right. I don't know if it makes sense to even harp on this, but it's a reflexivity test because you're questioning the basis for the motivation, the obligation around doing what the Nazis ask you to do. Or it's a reflexivity. I don't remember the exact. If it's new and more nuanced than this, but it may simply be, as you say, Wes, so tied to the evolutionary thing that we're kind of like off in the field here. And it's not applicable more broadly that there's the evolutionary theory says the evolutionary model. Not theory, but model is that, you know, we should do what tends to promote the furthering of the species. That's your guiding principle.

23:18 Mark: That's our programming.

23:19 Seth: Yeah, that's our programming. But then if our species. This, by the way, is near and dear to my heart because you know that I think that human beings are like parasites. But, you know, it's like, yeah, so the human species gave us Nazis and Stalin and Pol Pot, and those are just modern examples. Like, why should we have any fidelity to maintaining the species clearly doesn't seem to want to maintain itself, so why should we individually do that?

23:49 Dylan: I love the cherry picking, right?

23:52 Wes: Yeah. So maybe I'm wrong about that example.

23:54 Seth: Hey, man, anytime somebody uses the Nazi example, they're cherry picking. I'm telling you.

23:58 Mark: Of course.

23:59 Dylan: No, it's true.

23:59 Wes: Maybe I'm wrong about that example. But just I think it's worth saying. She begins talking about the reflexivity test again on 63, and she says how Hume tries to answer that, which is that we naturally love virtue. And then if we reflect on it, we're pleased from our moral point of view to see that that love of virtue, in a way, is derived from a noble source. So it's weird, right, because it's just applying the sentiment back to itself. Like, I'm naturally disposed to like morality. Of course, when I think about morality, I'm going to like. Right.

But this is a legitimate test because it might actually fail. Although I guess we haven't given a good example of how it can fail. And then on 65 to 66, she'll say reflexivity shows that human nature, moral government included, is intrinsically normative and that there is no intelligible challenge that can be made to its claims. In other words, in reality, we don't find that this failure of the reflexivity test.

24:59 Mark: Yeah, she brings up Nietzsche A couple times. Not as rejecting all of ethics, but as saying it fails the reflexivity test that you, this Christian morality gives you commands to do things that then fail the test of Christian morality. So just to give, you know, examples that the audience will be familiar, you know, if it says, hey, you should banish your gay son from the family, like, well, no, that's not Christian. You've screwed this up. So it's a matter of moral progress. Is that not an example of something that is failing its own test or.

25:33 Wes: I don't think so. But I don't want to keep dragging. I feel like I've dragged this into a kind of mire here and I'm realizing I don't understand it well enough to explain it. But I don't think that's a failure of the reflexivity test. If we want to get more into it. It's pages 63 and onwards. But sure.

25:47 Mark: I wonder if, though, maybe the source of the problem here is the thing she keeps warning us about is keep separated those two tasks of explanatory adequacy. So explanatory adequacy would include what bucket do the things go in. So is dismissing your son, your gay son, does that go into the good bucket or the bad bucket? That's all supposed to be. And then is reflexivity test about the second one about, is it normative that I've got these standards? Do I think they really apply to me? Do I think. Do I actually find them? Not do I actually find them here, give a justification for them?

I don't know. I'm having trouble actually keeping those separate. And maybe I was wrong about the first, the putting in the boxes being entirely something in the first category, because it does seem like. Well, I'm asking in a particular circumstance, what I should do. Like, specifically, like, is this action obligatory? Is this action what I should do?

26:42 Wes: The explanatory category is like the evolutionary theory or Hume's theory of sentiments. Like, it's just the science of human beings and this is the way we are the science and the psychology. And it's all facts. And it doesn't necessarily tell us what we should do from our perspective, because as the evolutionary example points out, we might be evolutionary compelled to do things that we reject on reflection in the same way that we reject, you know, we're evolutionarily compelled to maybe be promiscuous and we reject that on reflection. Right. Just because it's where it's we're hardwired to do that doesn't mean it's what we should do. So explanation can never rise to the level of justification. And that's the kind of is ought distinction at work.

27:28 Mark: Let's see where in the text we haven't picked apart yet. There's obviously a lot of it left.

27:33 Wes: So one of the, you know, the other. Maybe this will be a more convincing way of putting this on 65, which is that she'll say that again with regard to reflexivity and the way it occurs in Hume. One of the reasons the moral sense approves of itself is that morality contributes to our happiness, and the moral sense approves of anything that contributes to people's happiness. So that's one example of the we're naturally disposed to be interested in doing things that contribute to happiness. And then we look at morality, we look at that, our moral constitution, and we say, oh wow, actually having this constitution contributes to our happiness. So that's moral self endorsement. Does that make sense?

28:22 Dylan: It does. Okay, I was just going to point to the end of this section where she points back to Hutcheson as being where Hume gets the elements of this. And I mean, you've pointed out these three aspects already, Wes. But at the bottom of 64, she summarizes Hutcheson's point that goodness of a sense must be assessed from some point of view from which we judge things to be good or bad, and that we have a limited number of such points of view to which we can appeal. We can judge the moral sense from the point of view of the moral sense itself. We can judge it from the point of view of benevolence towards others, or we can judge it from the point of view of self interest.

What we cannot do is get outside of all the points of view from which we judge things to be good or bad, and still coherently ask whether something is good or bad. There's no place outside of our normative points of view from which our normative questions can be asked. And then the next paragraph, I think, is just great. The same argument can of course be made about the normativity of the verdicts of the understanding. If we fall into doubt about whether we really ought to believe what we find ourselves inclined to believe, that is, if we fall into doubt about whether our beliefs are true, we cannot dispel the doubt by comparing our beliefs to the world to see whether they are true.

We have no access to the world except through the verdict of the understanding itself, just as we have no access to the good except through the verdicts of the various points of view from which we make judgments of goodness. And so this is the answer to me, to the A, there is the world out there that's providing the objective criteria that this is our moral scope question. Right. And then the way in which we have to. Where it's impossible for us to answer any of the normative questions without there being a point of view that we are embedded within.

It's not that we choose between them, it's that we use that embeddedness to sort out what the.

30:36 Wes: We try to get consistency between all the points of view.

30:39 Dylan: Yes. It's the universe for it. And that way it makes it a lot like. A lot like a scientific enterprise where you're trying to figure out what's true by what is consistent between all the ways in which you try to do something. That's one way of just describing an experiment.

30:56 Seth: I want to mention on the tail end of what Wes was saying about reflexive endorsement. She says the reason why it's important in some sense is it's in contrast to what happens via reflexivity of the understanding. She says the understanding, when it reflects on its own operations, this is from Hume, falls into doubt about it and so subverts itself. The moral sense approves of and so reinforces itself. Therefore, skepticism about the understanding is in order, but skepticism about morality is not. I think this ties back to the thread that we've had since the first episode on this topic about realism.

So if you think of the understanding as the faculty that makes judgments about whether the ideas accord with reality, where the real accords with the ideal, that sort of thing, and it functions in one way, and the way that it functions generates skepticism and doubt, and you have this other sentiment or this. This other faculty that does not function in that same way. Then it seems like you can step back a little bit from the notion that morality, you know, you can step away from moral realism to some extent because more reflective sentimentality or reflective sentiment.

I don't know exactly how to say it isn't like the understanding. It's not making the same kind of judgment. It's not working with the same kind of objects.

32:28 Mark: Right. Reflective endorsement is the general term. Reflective sentimentality. I do kind of like. I mean, yeah, that's what it is for you in particular, being sentimental about your sentiments. What are your sentimental reactions to your sentiments or to the verse of your sentiments?

32:45 Wes: Because all motivation for him. Yeah. Comes down the sentiment. She says here on 66. This is just a succinct way of saying what we've been saying. But she says something like, because morality approves of itself from all points of view. It quote, unquote, earns its right to govern us. So it earns its authority and normativity from that. But yeah, and then she compares that to teleology.

33:09 Mark: Yeah. The Greeks thought that since our own good would be realized in being the best version of what we are, we have every reason to be virtuous. Sentimentalism can be seen as a kind of negative surrogate of the teleological ethics of the ancient world. According to the sentimentalists, we have no reason not to be the best version of what we are. And then she there's this long footnote that brings up Shaftesbury, a name that has not come up yet in this book or this discussion, but who was grouped with Hutcheson and Hume in our aesthetics episode, talking about how it's our nature has authority over us and it is a position to give us laws.

So it's like a voluntaristic version of this, which I don't think we pointed out how weird that term is. Voluntarism sounds like you're volunteering for something, but it's exactly the opposite of that. It means somebody has authority over you. You did not volunteer. It's a mandatorism.

34:03 Dylan: It should be volunteer toldism, voluntold.

34:07 Mark: Yes, but I like that idea of if you're going to be immoral, you are going to suffer. Your nature is going to make you suffer and punish you. So it is your boss, your conscience is your. It's not your guide, it is your keeper.

34:20 Wes: Right.

34:21 Dylan: A thing that I want to bring back is. So we get from Hume all this kind of argument that our morality is good for us, it gives us pleasure. And this all points to reasons why we ought to do it. It's still, for me, it's raising the question of why do people find it

34:41 Wes: so hard so often to do the right thing?

34:44 Dylan: Yeah.

34:45 Mark: I mean, she gives the example again, bringing up this sort of trickier version of the sensible knave is that, as she's pointed out with Hume, the thing that we are in favor of is the general principle. Generally, people should be just. And so, yeah, when we're acting according to that general principle, we feel pretty good about that. But there are lots of individual circumstances in which actually we think the general principle is wrong. I think that in general, I should not lie to people, but when the Nazis come, okay, I might have this urge, oh, don't lie to them.

You know, that's it's the right thing to do, to not lie. But actually you would resent Yourself that would not stand up to reflective scrutiny. So that you end up saying that this thing that morality has fed you, that your moral senses approve of some other part of your moral sense. Right. Actually is not approving of that. This is why I keep.

35:33 Wes: Yeah, but that's a consequentialist argument against deontology. So as a strict deontologist you might say, well I've got to not lie to the Nazis regardless, because that's my human nature and I fully endorse that. And I feel ashamed of myself if I didn't. Something like that.

35:49 Dylan: Yeah, but, but doesn't that just come down to that? You've elevated the moral virtue of not lying as the highest one, as opposed to minimizing cruelty. Engaging in cruelty is a far worse activity. Or enabling the possibility of cruelty on another human being is the worst of all possible acts. Because then what you get is you have a hierarchy of. This is part of the choice problem. Maybe this is sort of the. It's not exactly the same thing as the knave question, but you do get moral questions that come into conflict with one another. Right. It's not just.

Maybe that's exactly what's epitomized in this sort of the Nazis are coming for your friend argument or the person you're caring for in your house argument. And we said, well, we have a duty not to lie. But isn't that just amount to just putting off the question of saying which of the moral virtues are the highest ones? What are you more obligated to.

36:48 Wes: Yeah, I mean you could treat it as a conflict between consequentialism and deontology or you could find a way maybe to incorporate the former into the latter. But Dylan, you were asking the question why it's sometimes hard or often hard to do.

37:01 Dylan: Yes.

37:02 Wes: What we're supposed to do. And I think under Hume's theory that's a failure of prudential normativity. Right. Just self interested normativity. Because if I were self interested in an enlightened way, in a long term perspective and understood human nature well enough, I would do the right thing because it is ultimately the best thing for me. Even in the sensible knave example. In which case would be best for me just in the sense of not being ashamed of myself, which I would be naturally disposed to be.

37:33 Dylan: You know, that's just sounding like Plato and Aristotle at the same time. Right. If I really understood what the good was, I would do the good. And my fact that I'm not doing the good thing means. Means it's A failure of my understanding. That's Plato, right?

37:46 Wes: It's like a failure of. Yeah, I agree. And it's a failure of hypothetical reasoning in a way. Yeah, I'm just not figuring out correctly how to do what's in my, my self interest.

37:58 Dylan: I'm not understanding.

38:00 Mark: So this example that I keep bringing up, the second instance of the sensible knave is page 87. And yes, she gives the response you keep giving Wes is Hume's response which she thinks is ineffective. Right. The nave will lose the pleasing sense of self worth. But in this particular case where going and I think the Nazi one actually works for this. But in this particular case was I should actually violate my oath as a lawyer and do the thing that will be the most consequential, will bring about the most happiness by giving the person's money to medical research.

She says in this case the lawyer will think if she could cure herself of the moral feeling for justice in this case, she would. So that is a case in which her sentiments are clear. I should do my job as a lawyer. But it doesn't survive the test of reflective equilibrium. And you were just saying, oh well that's just consequentialism. That's irrelevant to, you know, the. But I don't see her discussing consequentialism versus deontology per se. Maybe it just happens later in the chapters we haven't read.

39:02 Wes: Yeah. Her feeling of disapproval may seem to her to be in this case poorly grounded and therefore in a sense irrational.

39:09 Mark: Yeah.

39:09 Wes: May lead her to set aside to resist its motivational force. She may say to herself, since I approve of just actions because they are generally speaking useful, why not simply do what will be useful? And then of course, she's not a human anymore. She is a utilitarian, she's a consequentialist.

39:28 Mark: So is there a slippery slope?

39:31 Dylan: I feel like there was a God damn in front of utilitarians. She's a God damn utilitarian.

39:37 Mark: She does say the word unfortunately, right. That this leads to utilitarianism. She clearly, for reasons that she's not completely told us about here, I mean it's clearly a crude philosophy, right? That strict utilitarianism is going to make you do all sorts of things that you would then on reflection with your other moral principles say oh no, that's actually horrible to chop up the one person to give their organs to save the 10 people or whatever.

40:05 Dylan: But how many people do I have to say before I can chop up one person into little bitty bits?

40:11 Mark: There's no amount of that. I don't know. This is at least where Wes, you know where she's going. Yeah. Who we said is famous for the trolley problem.

40:19 Wes: Yeah.

40:20 Mark: But we don't know since we didn't read her. If I remember correctly. Yes. She comes on the deontological way as well. Is that. You don't. Right. Is that what foots. This is irrelevant.

40:28 Wes: Well, it's more about the contrast between inaction and action. So, yes. I can't. To save the fight. I can't switch the train onto the five people track.

40:39 Mark: I can't push the fat man onto

40:41 Wes: the one person track in order to save the five people if it's already headed towards the five people. But there's other cases where I could. I can't remember well enough. But yeah, something like that. Yeah.

40:52 Mark: They're on the same team, is what we're saying. This Foot and the Korsgaard, roughly, it seems like they're going in the same direction. It's interesting that the foot was written after the Korsgaard. It's a little hard to tell because the foot, you know, synthesized all this stuff that she'd been writing about for years and years and years.

41:06 Dylan: But.

41:07 Mark: But she doesn't mention Korsgaard once, that I noticed. Korsgaard does mention Foot once, like in a footnote, I believe, as is fitting to put foot. That's why they're called that.

41:17 Dylan: I am sure that joke has never been made to her, ever. 100%. Well, she's no longer with us, so

41:25 Mark: we can't make it to her. We have talked about. Maybe after I've talked about. I didn't ask you whether you thought the. So I'll lay this out because we would send this out, we'd let this at least this episode go out. And if you think then we should actually get Ms. Korsgaard herself, who is alive.

41:42 Dylan: She's only 73 years old.

41:44 Mark: Yeah. To talk about her more recent work

41:46 Wes: and could be the greatest living philosopher. Yeah.

41:50 Dylan: So according to a member of this esteemed podcast.

41:53 Mark: So hopefully she's been taking notes as we've been completely botching things.

41:57 Wes: I mean, seriously, who's better than her? Who's alive today?

42:01 Mark: I mean, maybe Bernard Williams. Is he alive? I think he's alive.

42:05 Wes: Yeah. He's great.

42:06 Dylan: I haven't read any of his stuff.

42:07 Wes: He's no Korsgaard.

42:08 Dylan: Yeah.

42:09 Wes: I've only read a little bit, but

42:10 Dylan: I glanced at her Wikipedia page and she was a student of Rawls. There's something sensible about that.

42:17 Mark: Ideologically, it works out.

42:19 Dylan: Yeah.

42:20 Mark: She mentions Rawls. Only in a complementary Kantian way, mostly, I think, in footnotes. Again, this is one of the books that I was like. Even though it was a lot, I read almost all the footnotes because they were really interesting.

42:34 Dylan: Wes, you were right. It's a really, really great contemporary philosophy book. And in fact, as much as reading sort of original sources is really helpful, there are so few of them that read so well.

42:47 Wes: Yeah. Also, this synthetic thing where she's drawing on so many different figures in the history of philosophy and bringing together. I really like that. And it's interesting to think about the fact that so much has happened since Hume. But as great as Hume is right. Can you imagine a book like this being written in Hume's time? It's. It's impossible. It just shows you how much has happened.

43:12 Mark: And then.

43:12 Wes: So it's like Roger Federer versus, like, someone who's playing tennis in 1920 or something.

43:20 Seth: The Earl of Shaftesbury.

43:22 Wes: Things have gotten so much more complicated.

43:25 Mark: Sometimes people ask you, what's your favorite philosopher? Where should I start reading? And I'm kind of torn because I do love these historical figures and their towering geniuses, but I also really like at least some modern writers that can speak to human beings alive today and synthesize things and have the scholarly chops. And it's just. It can be really rewarding, especially when it's done. You know, obviously, we've done. Had this similar thing with a few other topics where we read, like, a Stanford encyclopedia article, and that's like, the main article. And even though those are also written by professional philosophers, they're never pleasant in the way this book is. They're always really kind of a slog.

44:08 Wes: Totally agree. They're often very useful, very clearly written, but they just. Yeah, they're not. There's no humanity in them.

44:16 Dylan: There's no humanity in them.

44:19 Wes: Speaking of sentiments, that's the way I often feel actually reading analytic philosophy. I joked to Mark this morning that if I had to read any more of this Parfit article that we're doing on close reads, I would become suicidal. But it's just this feeling of being evacuated of any emotions. Almost like it's just sucking them out of me. Like, you know, like in some sort of horror movie where your soul gets sucked out by the. By the zombie or the vampire or whatever it is. That's the way I feel. Yeah.

44:49 Mark: All right. The book that should be the horror movie. It probably is something. You know, it's not the book of

44:55 Wes: the driest that I've ever written that

44:58 Mark: it will suck your moisture.

45:00 Dylan: I feel desperately.

45:02 Wes: Monty Python sketch. Immediately you open up the first page and then you just turn into a skeleton.

45:09 Mark: Any other closing words for this portion before? Yeah, next time we're doing three and

45:14 Seth: four, but okay, let me just close with some of her words. We are supposing that when we reflect on the things which we find ourselves inclined to do, we can then accept or reject the authority those inclinations claim over our conduct and act accordingly. But what I have just described is exactly the process of thought that, according to Kant, characterizes the deliberations of the autonomous moral agent. According to Kant, as each impulse to action presents itself to us, we should subject it to the test of reflection to see whether it is really a reason to act.

Since a reason is supposed to be intrinsically normative, we test a motive to see whether it is a reason by determining whether we should allow it to be a law to us. And we do that by asking whether the maxim of acting on it can be willed as a law. So this brings us back, sets the stage for the next episode. So she's basically said, okay, the history of moral philosophy is ultimately about how morality is about self reflection, or you have a reflexive characteristic. And that we choose whether we determine through that reflexive view whether that any action is something we should or shouldn't do.

And if it is something we should do, we essentially are saying we are obligated to do it or it is a law. And that she's brought us full circle back after these two chapters to where we started and set the stage for whatever she's going to positively promote in the next two. Stay tuned.

46:51 Mark: All right, everybody, you can reach out to us pel@partiallyexaminedlife.com or there's a contact form on our site, partially examined life.com or just put a comment on this episode to say what you thought of here, what we missed, what else you want us to read. We love hearing from you. Follow us on x.com, on Facebook, on Instagram. Good night, everybody.

47:12 Seth: Good night.

47:13 Wes: Good night.