Movie Recommendation

Last night I went and watched the wonderful new Pixar movie Up with my wonderful girlfriend. It really is an amazing film and I unreservedly recommend it to everyone. You’ll definitely laugh, you’ll probably see your life in a new light, if only for a moment, and you may even cry.

Admittedly, I am a sucker for Pixar movies. But Up is particularly touching and hilarious. For a movie filled with silliness, it communicates a lot about the human need for companionship, the personal liberation which comes only with genuine acts of selflessness, and the adventure that it can be to befriend, empathise with, and even love, odd and different people/animals. The comparison between the life the protagonist led with his wife, and the life that the evil villan ended up living – alone in some parallel odd world with only his bones and ambition for company – is a great example of the way good film can simply communicate profound insights about the human condition.

I feel like to justify blogging about a children’s movie on my ‘philosophy’ blog I need to include some sort of philosophical reflection on the film. Well, the film involves an act of civil disobedience which would have made Henry David Thoreau and Dr. King smile from ear to ear; it raises metaphysical questions about the existence of possible worlds which David Lewis and perhaps Gottfried Leibniz would find illustrative; it raises the issue of animal ethics and the value of non-human life which would make Peter Singer sing showtunes; and suggests that the most happy life is one filled with activity, not passivity, which would rock Aristotle’s ancient socks.

p.s. This is my 50th blog post!

Prosperity and Ethics

For the present let this be our fundamental basis: the  life which is best for men, both separately, as individuals, and in the mass, as states, is the life which has virtue sufficiently supported by material resources to facilitate participation in the actions that virtue calls for.

– Aristotle, The Politics (tr. T. A. Sinclair), 1323b36 (italics mine)

In this short passage Aristotle asserts that there is a fundamental connection between prosperity and the ability to live a virtuous life. He holds that there is an obvious connection between having the basic material necessities of life and ethics. This seems to make a lot of sense – you need food and shelter and other basic goods to survive, and without these you may not be able to live an ethical life.  You may be forced into crime or deception as a matter of survival, or you just may not have the means to live altruistically. The playwright Bertolt Brecht summed this up in a catchy way when he said, ‘Food first, then ethics.’ You’ve got to live before you can be concerned with the question of how to live well.

In the west, this mood can act as one of the largest barriers to altruism and acts of kindness. People say: ‘If I had a better house, I would be a more hospitable person’, ‘If I had more freedom in my week, I would be able to practically help others’, ‘If I had more money I would be able to give much more to charity’, ‘If I had the time, I’d be able to be informed about the needs of peoples and countries on the other side of the world so I could help’.  These common sayings seem to make sense in the same way that Aristotle and Brecht’s remarks make sense. But all these remarks make ethics dependent on a certain kind of comfort and security being secured through material resources. But ought ethics to be contingent upon these facts of life in this way?

A different approach to charity and benevolence was suggested by Jesus, when he said:

So do not worry, saying, “What shall we eat?” or “What shall we drink?” or “What shall we wear?” For the pagans run after these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness and all these things will be given to you as well.  — Matthew 6.31-33

Ethics and Reality – Part 1: David Hume’s Critique

In this post and the next I’ll be discussing ethics and how it is related to reality. The question I want to pose and offer some thoughts on is: in what sense can our ethics be derived from observing, living in, thinking about, and feeling our way through the reality we inhabit? In ethics, this is usually termed the question of ‘moral realism’, and attracts related questions such as: are there objective moral facts? Are these moral facts universal or contingent? Is certain knowledge in ethics possible? If so, how is it acquired?

Addressing this issue is a good place to begin in thinking about ethics, since what answer you reach on this abstract question will shape how you proceed in the normative and concrete arena as you actually decide upon and judge specific acts. So someone who held that ethics and reality were strongly linked could consistently prescribe moral laws, hold these to be universal, and believe they are justified through reference to a natural or moral order. Someone who held that there is no clear or necessary connection between reality and ethics could consistently hold to a more relativist ethics or an ethics based on personal taste, goals or pleasure, or insist that it is necessary for humans to construct ethics for mutual benefit. I’ll being by addressing this latter kind.

The Eighteenth Century Scottish philosopher David Hume introduced a famous distinction into ethics, insisting that an ‘is’ is not and ‘ought’. That is, there is no logical connection between statements which describe the world – the world ‘is’ this way – and statements which recommend or command a certain kind of action – you ‘ought’ to do this. For example, there is no logical connection between someone telling me that there is delicious coffee in Newtown, and their telling me that I ought to go purchase some. Hume felt that something was going unsaid here, and there was no clean correlation between the ‘is’ and ‘ought’ statements. He states:

In every system of morality, which I have hitherto met with, I have always remarked, that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary ways of reasoning, and establishes the being of a God, or makes observations concerning human affairs; when all of a sudden I am surprized to find, that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not. This change is imperceptible; but is however, of the last consequence. For as this ought, or ought not, expresses some new relation or affirmation, ’tis necessary that it should be observed and explained; and at the same time that a reason should be given; for what seems altogether inconceivable, how this new relation can be a deduction from others, which are entirely different from it.  – David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739), III.I.i

Hume had Christian and Greek ethics in his sights. Since Aristotle, much of ethics has been was influenced by attempting to derive what the natural function of a thing is, and then to ascribe excellence (or virtue) to that thing if it executed its function well. So to judge whether a human being was virtuous, one needed to engage in the prior task of description in order to ascertain what the natural purpose of a human being was, and then to judge whether this particular human being was executing his natural function. Just as a good hammer is one which is able to do some good hammering, a good human is the one which is able to do some good human-ing. This argument may sound odd or obvious, but it is still frequently appealed to in normative ethical discussions. ‘A study of human biology shows you that human beings were built for heterosexuality, therefore homosexuality is unnatural and wrong’, or ‘Proper activity for young ladies is to get married, contribute to the community and respect their elders, therefore those that don’t are witches and witchcraft is wrong’ (that last one might be drawing a bit of a long bow, but you get the picture).

Christian ethics was influenced by this Aristotelian model in the early church, and it added to it the existence of a God and the existence of a moral order. Hence, most contemporary Christian ethics begins with a description of God, an insistence that a moral order has been placed in creation by the Creator, and normative statements derived from and justified by this.

Hume’s critique stands as a challenge to this whole approach to ethics which seeks to derive any moral truth from a description of the natural or supra-natural world. He maintained that there is a world of difference between saying that something is real about the world, and this necessarily leading us to do something as a result. In the next post, I’ll outline an alternative account of reality and ethics.