Ethical foundations: Part 2

- So, let's talk about those values. And unlike the theories and the principles that they come from, I think, partly we already understand these values but there are things that we can get in our minds and think about and constantly review. So there are two sets of values. The first set are values that are based on the wellbeing of others, the wellbeing of other people. There are three, as I count them. So one is, why should I care about another person? What makes another person or other people morally valuable? So one observation is that what makes people valuable is that they're capable of suffering. They can feel pain. Physical, emotional, if there's other kinds of pain, that too. That would all count. I should care about other people just because they can suffer. Because they suffer, it means I have to think about them before I act. Also, autonomy. Autonomy just means something like people are able to control their own actions, to make their own plans, to live life the way they want to. Now, obviously, there's going to be a limit to that, but the fact that other people are autonomous, the fact that other people can control themselves and think about problems and do things the way they want to do them, already, that means that I have to respect that about them. It would be wrong for me to use them because they already have their own agenda. Equality. That would be another reason that I should care about other people because I'm not superior to them or inferior to them. They are equal to me. So when I act, I have to respect that equality. There's another set of values. These values are not strictly based on other people's wellbeing, although, they are in the end, but in the first place, this is about my own wellbeing. This is about what makes life go well for me. So one of these values is character excellence, or virtue, it's called in the ethics literature. This just means that part of being a good person, the kind of person I want to be, is having a certain kind of character. The other value here is trust. Trust is something that makes my life go well. When I'm in a high trust environment, many of the things that I want can happen. If there's no trust or if you're in a society that doesn't have very much trust or if you have the reputation of a liar and people don't trust you, your life's not going to go as well. So, I believe that these things and many ethicists do as well, count as ethics. So both the wellbeing of others and your own wellbeing. Okay, so to illustrate how these values work together, we're going to do a little though experiment. This is a purposely absurd thought experiment. You will never, hopefully, actually ask yourself this but let's say, for the sake of being extreme, you're asking yourself, should I torture an innocent person? Not to find the secret bomb or something like that. Not even talking about that. I just mean torturing someone for fun. Should I do that? That's what you're asking yourself. Well, I hope that you would say, no, that's the obvious answer. And there are few reasons that you might come up with and all these reasons are ultimately rooted in the values that we just talked about. Torturing another person would cause them suffering and that's bad. Torturing another person would be not respecting their autonomy and that's bad. Torturing another person would be treating them as inferior to you, and that's bad. Torturing another person would ruin my character. You can ask some of the soldiers in the past and past wars who've been forced to torture their prisoners. They talk about how that really affected their character. If I torture other people, that's going to destroy the trust in that relationship, certainly, and maybe social trust. It just becomes normal for people to randomly torture each other. Okay, so that's our thought experiment. Don't torture. It's not a good idea at all. Let's ask ourselves what we learned from that thought experiment. The first thing we learned is that engaging in ethical theory is not complicated. So remember the complicated part is talking about and comparing and contrasting all those theories. But you didn't need me to walk you through whether your should torture other people. You already knew that, right? I just gave you some specific reasons based on values. So it's not complicated to engage in ethical reasoning. Now, maybe the best conclusions. There are going to be cases that are more difficult and that's okay, but just engaging in the process is not complicated. The second thing we learned is that if you're an ethical person, you'll appreciate all of those values. I mean, think about how absurd it would be if someone said well, I really care about the suffering of other people. That's why I don't torture. But I don't care about their equality. That would be such a strange thing to hear, right? An ethical person, a person that's concerned with human wellbeing, is going to take all five of those values into consideration. The last thing we learned, this was kind of implied in the thought experiment, that the reason you wanted to apply those values is because you cared about other people's wellbeing in the first place. There's nothing I can really do. I mean, if you don't care about human wellbeing, I don't know. There's no ethics that can really get you to care, but ethics, applying those values, depend on your caring in the first place.