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  • Here’s the scene: A and B are next door neighbors.

  • They both go to the same party, and they both get equally drunk.

  • Then, A and B each get in their identical vehicles and drive home, A leaving just minutes before B.

  • As A drunkenly wends their way back home, the roads are deserted, and they make it back without incident.

  • But as B drives down the same road just a few minutes later – a child darts into the road.

  • B’s reaction time is impaired by the alcohol, and they are unable to stop or swerve in time to avoid striking and killing the child.

  • So who deserves more blame?

  • Thinkers including 20th century British philosopher Bernard Williams and contemporary American philosopher Thomas Nagel have used examples like this to illustrate some really thorny issues regarding moral responsibility.

  • We talked about some of these issues when we met W.K. Clifford in our discussion of epistemic responsibility.

  • But now that weve got some ethics under our belts, we can examine these questions more closely.

  • Now, it probably seems to you like B is clearly more blameworthy, because B killed a child and A did not.

  • But let’s look closer.

  • A and B made the equally blameworthy choice to drive while intoxicated.

  • B encountered an external factor – a child in the road.

  • Had a child crossed A’s path, A would also have been unable to avoid hitting the child.

  • Both intended to drive while drinking, and neither intended to hit anyone.

  • So what does that mean?

  • It looks like A just got morally lucky.

  • [Theme Music]

  • What does it mean to be morally responsible?

  • In philosophy, moral responsibility refers to acts or states of affairs for which you can be praised or blamed.

  • But, how do you figure out if you really deserve praise or blame for something that happens?

  • Well, there’s a principle in moral philosophy known asought implies can.”

  • This means that if you ought, or should do something morally, then you first must be able to do it.

  • In other words, youre only morally required to do things that are possible for you.

  • And this makes some good sense, right?

  • Ought implies canis one of the few philosophical principles that basically everybody agrees withit just makes logical sense.

  • And most people agree that, since ought implies can, you can’t be held morally responsible for situations that are out of your control.

  • If someone cuts the brake lines of my car without my knowledge, and that leads to me being in an accident, most people would say that I am not morally responsible for any injuries or damage that occur.

  • Yes, I was still part of the chain of events that lead to the damage, because if I hadn’t decided to drive to that place at that time, the accident wouldn’t have happened.

  • But I can’t be blamed for it.

  • Now you see the distinction between causal responsibilitywhere youre one link in a chain of eventsand moral responsibility, which means you deserve positive or negative judgment for what happened.

  • But the concept of moral responsibility is reserved for moral agentsthat is, those who have the ability to think in terms of right and wrong, and to make decisions accordingly.

  • If a coconut falls on my head, it is causally responsible for the lump that it gives me.

  • But, because it is an unthinking thing, it’s not blameworthy, in the way that you would be if you deliberately chucked a coconut at me.

  • You are a moral agent; coconut trees are not.

  • Now, this looks pretty straightforward.

  • But what if I’m aiming a coconut at a pyramid of bottles that I’ve set up for pitching practice, and you suddenly run in front of me, and the coconut hits you instead?

  • Or what if youre standing near my target, and I just have really bad aim?

  • Thinking back to our drunk drivers, if were only morally responsible for what’s in our control, then it looks like A and B are equally morally blameworthy.

  • Because, B couldn’t help that a child ran into the road, just like I couldn’t help it if you ran in front of my coconut.

  • So let’s now take another angle on moral responsibility, over in the Thought Bubble for some Flash Philosophy.

  • We often think that what makes something wrong is that it causes harm.

  • But consider this creepy scenario.

  • Imagine youre changing in a store’s dressing room, and outside, there’s some creep who takes pictures of you, and you never know it.

  • This creep then shares the pictures with his creepy friends.

  • They don’t know who you are, and you experience no ill effects, no uncomfortableness of any kind, because you never know the pictures were taken.

  • So here’s a couple questions: Were you harmed?

  • And did the creeps do wrong?

  • It’s hard to see how you were harmed by the pictures, because harm seems to be the type of thing that has to be experienced in order for it to exist.

  • But most people would agree that the creeps did do wrong, that a violation of privacy is still a violation, even if you don’t know that it happened.

  • The possibility that harm and wrongdoing are actually two different things might not have occurred to you before, but when you think about it, it seems pretty right.

  • The falling coconut could harm me without anyone having done wrong.

  • And likewise, wrongdoing doesn’t have to lead to anyone being harmed.

  • Thanks, Thought Bubble!

  • So the distinction between doing wrong and causing harmjust like the case of our drunk drivers A and B – is probably making you realize that the issue of moral praise and blame is trickier than you thought.

  • Thomas Nagel thinks a key to figuring this out is to look deeper into the different aspects of our actionsones that are both in and out of our control.

  • These external factors can affect the moral quality of our actions, he says, and he describes their effects in terms of different kinds of luck.

  • Constitutive luck, for example, is luck that has to do with our own constitutionour disposition, or personality.

  • We all have different temperaments.

  • Some of us are more prone to anger, and others are easy going.

  • Some seem to be naturally generous, while others have to remind themselves to share.

  • Now, we can definitely work against these dispositions that we haveand good parents and teachers will help us do this as we grow up.

  • But Nagel says, that doesn’t change the fact that some of us have to work really hard not to be greedy, cranky, or anti-social, while others are just naturally gifted with a tendency toward harmony and generosity.

  • Then there’s circumstantial luck.

  • This relates to the situation you find yourself in, and plays a huge role in whether you manage to do good or bad things.

  • It’s easy to blame the officer in the concentration camp, and to praise the 9/11 firefighter.

  • But what would have happened if that firefighter had been a member of the German military in 1933?

  • Or if that SS officer had been a firefighter living in New York City in 2001?

  • Our circumstances play a really strong role in our actions.

  • An ordinary person given the chance to be a hero might step up, but that same person might also take an opportunity to become a monster, if it’s offered in the right way.

  • Nagel says there’s also luck due to antecedent circumstances.

  • In other words, your character is shaped by things that have happened to you.

  • Some people get a lot of breaks in life, while others face hard knocks that lead them to viciousness.

  • People can come out of the best possible environment and still be total jerks, and amazing people can rise out of terrible circumstances.

  • But where you come from isn’t in your control, and it has an undeniable role in who youre going to become.

  • And finally, Nagel says, there’s luck regarding consequent circumstancesthat’s the way your actions actually turn out.

  • Sometimes the best intentions fall flat, and awful plans can produce something that’s unexpectedly awesome.

  • We don’t cheer for the person who fails to save someone’s lifeeven if they tried just as hard as the person who succeeded.

  • This is why most of us find it pretty hard to blame A as much as we blame B – because the fact remains, B’s actions left a child dead, and A’s didn’t.

  • So, Nagel argues that all of these factors affect the morality of our actions.

  • But if theyre out of our control, does moral praise and blame even make sense?

  • In this light, it looks like, usually, we shouldn’t assign any praise or blame.

  • And even when we should, we should assign less than we do.

  • After all, if ought implies can, then we should only be blamed for the aspects of our actions that are in our control - and external factors shouldn’t be considered.

  • So by this logic, Nagel says the two drunk drivers should be blamed equally.

  • Now maybe that just seems wrong to you.

  • Maybe you believe that praise and blame are only partially about assigning responsibility for people’s actions.

  • Perhaps you think we should still praise and blame people, because it’s important for society at large.

  • In this view, it’s ok, even right, to assign praise and blame for things that are outside of a person’s control.

  • For example, we want to shun drunk drivers because of the harm that they do, so we’d like to blame every one of them.

  • But if someone makes it home safely, we don’t necessarily know they drove drunk, so they can’t be blamed.

  • But we can make examples of the ones we do catchand assign them loads of blameeven though the ones who didn’t get caught are really just as blameworthy.

  • And it works the same way with praise.

  • It’s in our interest to make heroes out of people who risk their lives to save otherswhether they succeed or notbecause we want to encourage that kind of behavior in society.

  • So we praise the behavior when we see it, even though it’s the disposition, the intention to do good, that actually deserves praise.

  • So in this view, praise and blame isn’t really about moral responsibility at all.

  • It’s just about encouraging and discouraging different behaviors.

  • Which could explain why you might think B should go to jail, while A, well, A just got morally lucky.

  • Today we learned about moral luck.

  • We considered the difference between moral and causal responsibility, and the reasons we assign praise and blame.

  • Next time, were going to talk about justice.

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  • Crash Course Philosophy is produced in association with PBS Digital Studios.

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  • This episode of Crash Course was filmed in the Doctor Cheryl C. Kinney Crash Course Studio

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德運:哲學速成班#39 (Moral Luck: Crash Course Philosophy #39)

  • 58 11
    Jack 發佈於 2021 年 01 月 14 日
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