Sydney University Summer School 2010

In January-February 2010 I am going to be delivering some lectures for a philosophy course being offered at Sydney University Summer School. The course is a first-year introductory subject called ‘Reality, Ethics, and Beauty’. I will be teaching the ‘Beauty’ component of the course, presenting 8 lectures on aesthetics and the philosophy of art.

If you are free, come along, I’d love to see you at some of my lectures! The course costs some $2000-3000 to take, but the lectures are public (free), so feel free to drop by if the time works for you. More details to come closer to the date.

Aesthetics is a very interesting part of philosophy, and an easy (and not too intimidating) way to begin to think about philosophical problems. My lectures will (probably) cover big issues in philosophy like objectivity, meaning, truth, interpretation, ethics, politics, and deal with some of the greats of philosophy such as Plato, Immanuel Kant, David Hume and Michel Foucault.   

Any suggestions for books I should read, topics I should touch on, or artworks I should try to discuss?

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.