"Right and Wrong" by Thomas Nagel

"Right and Wrong" by Thomas Nagel

• Nagel introduces a scenario about stealing a book from a library to prompt reflection on the meaning of right and wrong.
• Claiming an action is wrong differs from claiming it violates rules because right and wrong evaluate rules themselves.
• Actions can be considered wrong due to their harmful effects on others.
• Nagel explores attempts to justify caring about the impact of one's actions on others.
• Some argue divine retribution deters wrongdoing, and God is the ultimate standard for morality.
• Nagel objects that atheists believe in right and wrong without reference to God.
• Even if God exists and condemns wrong actions, that condemnation doesn't make the actions wrong.
• Acting for divine reward isn't a good motive for morality.
• Nagel deems direct concern for others as the basis of morality.
• He suggests giving selfish people reasons to care by asking how they would like being treated the same way.
• Resenting mistreatment indicates a belief that there's a reason for that mistreatment.
• This reason should apply universally.
• Harming someone isn't the reason an action is wrong; the same action would be wrong regardless of the victim.
• It would be contradictory if someone claimed it's wrong for others to steal their umbrella but not wrong for them to steal someone else's.
• Nagel asserts that people would believe their interests matter to others, giving them a reason to care.
• The fundamental basis of morality is believing that good and harm to individuals is good or bad from a general point of view.
• This gives each person a reason to consider others' interests when deciding what to do.
• Impartiality is a key part of morality, though philosophers disagree on its required degree.
• Utilitarianism implies treating everyone the same, while others criticize this.
• Moral standards' universality is debated.
• Cultural relativism claims morality varies across cultures, rejecting universal moral standards and evaluation of other cultures.
• Nagel opposes cultural relativism because it implies cultures can't evaluate their moral standards.
• Moral progress exists and involves evaluating and improving standards.
• Nagel rejects psychological egoism, the idea that actions are solely motivated by feeling good or avoiding feeling bad.
• Feelings often come from motives that produce the action.

"Moral Distinctions Not Derived From Reason" by David Hume

• Hume states that morality influences human passions and actions.
• Morality cannot be derived from reason because reason doesn't influence behavior and emotions.
• Morality compels people to act or refrain, influencing behavior.
• Reason cannot influence behavior or emotions.
• Morality doesn't originate from reason.
• Hume states that reason discovers truth or falsehood, based on agreement or disagreement of ideas or existence.
• Things not susceptible to this agreement can't be true or false and aren't objects of reason.
• "Relations of ideas" are propositions known by understanding word meanings; they're often definitions or inferences.
• An example of relation of ideas is "A dog is an animal."
• "Matters of fact/existence" are propositions requiring world observation to determine truth.
• Hume's statement indicate that something can be true or false only if it can be expressed as a relation of ideas or a matter of fact/existence.
• Passions, volitions, and actions can't express relations of ideas or matters of fact, lacking a truth value.
• Consequently, they aren't rational or irrational.
• Conformity to reason doesn't make actions praiseworthy, nor does opposition make them blameworthy.
• Reason can't prevent or produce actions.
• Reason can influence conduct by stimulating emotion or discovering means to fulfill it.
• Reason isn't the source of morality.
• Mistakes about emotions or means are factual, not moral.
• Hume attempts to prove the wickedness of evil isn't inherent in actions.
• He examines parricide and incest.
• Reason is comparing ideas and discovering relations; if relations differ, characters aren't discovered by reason.
• Hume compares parricide to a tree overtaking its cause.
• People only condemn parricide by humans, not trees.
• Immorality isn't within the act.
• Human parricide involves conscious volition, absent in trees.
• The choice is a cause but doesn't alter the nature of the act.
• Both kill their cause, but only human parricide receives condemnation.
• What makes the act immoral isn't within the act.
• Only humans are criticized and described as depraved for incest.
• Something that makes incest evil isn't a feature of the act itself.
• Animals lack reason, so they are unable to realize that incest is wrong
• Hume says that people are arguing in a circle, meaning that they presuppose what they are trying to prove (20).
• Evil must exist before reason judges it.
• What makes an action evil exists independently of reason.
• An act evil for humans would also be evil for animals.
• The animal wouldn't realize the act is wrong, but the act would still be wrong nonetheless.
• Hume's believes that this statement refutes that evil in evil actions is discoverable by reason.
• A thorough investigation of any vicious activity would fail to reveal that vice.
• Vice isn't a component of the action and cannot be found within it.
• The vice arises only when we contemplate an act and disapprove of it.
• The vice is something toward which we direct a strong negative feeling of disapproval, and this feeling exists within us, not in the act.
• Hume remarks that philosophers derive "ought” statements from "is” statements without explaining how they arrive at the conclusion.
• "Action X is normal in our society, therefore, the people in our society ought to do X" is an example of this.
• There must be at least one missing logical step between 1 and 2, just as there would be for any argument that begins with an “is” statement and ends with an “ought” statement.

"A Critique of Ethics" by A.J. Ayer

• Ayer explains and defends emotivism, distinguishes it from subjectivism, and argues against utilitarianism and moral absolutism.
• He does so by calling upon the criterion of verifiability.
• According to this criterion, "sentence is factually significant to any given person if and only if the person knows how to verify the proposition which it purports to express".
• Propositions are expressed in the form of sentences, but they are not identical to sentences.
• Only sentences that can have truth values – that are able to be true or false can express propositions, but not all sentences have truth values.
• Multiple sentences from different languages can all express the same proposition.
• Ayer's purpose is to argue that moral judgements lack meaning because they are incapable of being true or false; they are only able to express emotion.
• Ayer relies on the criterion of verifiability to defend emotivism and to reject other ethical theories.
• For ethical statements to be meaningful, they must be translatable into factual statements.
• Ayer discusses two theories that claim to be able to translate ethical statements into factual statements – subjectivism and utilitarianism.
• Subjectivism is a meta-ethical theory according to which sentences containing moral terms can be translated without a loss of meaning into sentences that report the speaker's approval or disapproval of an action.
• Ayer rejects subjectivism on the grounds that some of the actions that people approve of are not good and that people who claim to approve of bad behavior would not be contradicting themselves by doing so.
• Ayer raises a very similar objection to utilitarianism by saying that is possible tot assert that some wrong actions produce the greatest amount of happiness for the greatest number of people without contradicting oneself, which means that the rightness and wrongness of actions cannot be described in terms of the amount of happiness actions produce and the number of people for whom they produce that amount of happiness.
• Ayer concludes that ethical sentences cannot the translated into factual statements.
• According to the absolutist view of ethics, ethical statements are not and cannot be verified via observation, like factual statements can, but only through some kind of esoteric intuition.
• Ayer opposes the absolutist view of ethics, because the intuitions of one person can conflict with the intuitions of another, and there is not and cannot be any empirical test or procedure someone could use to adjudicate between these rival intuitions.
• Emotivism holds that ethical sentences lack truth/falsehood as they express speaker's attitude.
• The Correspondence Theory of Truth suggests to a sentence to hold truth, it must correspond to reality: thus indicating something about reality.
• Sentences used in moral discourse lack describing ability, therefore truth/false hood.
• Sentences used in moral arguments are purely expressive, not descriptive.
• According to subjectivism, all moral statements do nothing more than merely report the speaker's attitude, thus moral statements can have truth values.
• The philosopher G.E. Moore argued that this feature of subjectivism renders it incapable of accommodating and explaining disagreement.
• The Frege – Geach Problem focuses on the fact that the rules of English grammar allow moral terms to be used in descriptive sentences as well.
• Every conditional statement establishes a conceptual relationship such that if the antecedent is true, the consequent must also be true.
• According to emotivism, any sentence using moral terms must be purely expressive.
• If emotivism is true, then there is no coherent and meaningful way to embed simple sentences with moral terms into more complex descriptive sentences.