I am a High School teacher with many years of experience. My channel focuses on educational videos in to help students who study A Level Philosophy. This channel was first made to clarify topics my students found hard, I then made these videos public so that other students might also benefit.
I am also an experienced EPQ Coordinator, so i have some videos that help students with choosing their title.
Hope you find some of my videos helpful and I wish you the best on your philosophical journey!
The bridge here is the definition of moral. Why do we have morals. What is the objective of morals. Do morals have an objective. Surely they do. If morals have an objective then you can derive an ought from an is by evaluating whether an action contributes to or detracts from the underlying objective of morals. If morals have no objective then the argument is of course pointless and morals are pointless. Given that we place so much emphasis on morals they must have an objective or utility. Thus they can be used as a bridge from is to ought.
Nice video and intro to the topic. But some of your explanations are woolly and like much of education today is focussed on showing rigid taxonomies rather teaching students how to think for themselves. Then again this is only A-level standard, so teaching students about well known concepts in philosophy rather than how to do it is ok. Some your assertions in your slides are not supportable.
I’ve just discovered your channel. Very impressed with the range of content and arrangement of topics. Great introduction for someone that enjoys popular books on these subjects (e.g Moral Landscape) but had no previous philosophy training. If I could offer one suggestion, it would be to give a couple extra seconds gap to allow the viewer to pause at each step of the quiz. I found myself struggling to do so before the answer started appearing, particularly for the “what am I” quiz at the end of this video.
Explained very basically, Hume is a moral sentimentalist, he argues that morality isn't defined by rationality, but by emotions. For example: if you were to witness a murder, you would feel fear, disgust, sadness, etc... Humans feel sympathy, and this would bring you to the conclusion that murder is wrong, (which is a good conclusion, btw) He sees rationality as a product of emotions, rather than emotions as a product of rationality. You wouldn't feel bad for the murder victim because you think logically "oh, killing is wrong, now I will feel sad"
1. Biological instinct: we have a survival instinct which deters us from suicide and murder. 2. Cultural conditioning: the morals we are brought up to have. We are told early on that murder is bad. One major caveat is that not all cases of moral issues are both. Many morals are purely cultural. For example, gay marriage. It has been deemed as immoral to be with the same sex, because some societies have deemed it as such. There has been a shift in acceptance because the culture slowly began to view it as OK. This is why gen Z is more accepting than generations before them. They grew up in a more accepting culture. @@sync2597
When a moral issue is based in culture. We come up with an explanation under the guise of rationality. "Being gay is unnatural." "Kids grow up best with two parents of the opposite sex." These statements have been proven incorrect.
Yeh maybe one day. Or feel free to make a video yourself. The reason it is included (to fight back a little) is that my students really struggled differentiating between them and every argument they needed to be familiar with at A Level (high school) falls within the parameters of this distinction. It had utility for the intended purpose. But I do take your point. Maybe one day I will find time to update...
I think if we are arguing about objective morality, then Hume's Law holds: The is's of our current existence and the ought's we relatively conclude are not sufficient to prove an objective ought. However, if we accept the combination of subjective/relative morality (think Nash Equilibrium), then our current oughts are sufficient and the proof may be as simple as using the four defintins of ought (advisability, obligation, expectation, consequence) as tests to connect the is's and ought's. yes, there is still a leap from facts to values, but relative morality allows for that.
I think the is/ought problem disappears when you take it to an extreme example of an AI with a particular programming. For that AI, it _ought_ to pursue its programmed values, and it _is_ programmed with those values. With humans, we also ought to pursue our programmed values, and we _are_ programmed with particular values which were somewhat evolutionarily ordained (it's a little more complicated than that; just because our genes want to self-replicate doesn't mean we have the same values). Our programmed values are something along the lines of pursue pleasure/ avoid pain. However, in addition to this programming, we also have rationality, irrationality, and empathy, which makes the whole moral experience much more complex because we are trying to optimize a changing parameter.
Then you run into a separate problem for instance humans aren’t programmed definitively like certain programs are and so there’s a aspect of will in this situation for humans that isn’t applicable to a software. The program ought to follow the program because it has no will. While a human doesn’t ought to be fearful, or ought to be moral. For it has free will.
@@coreydenison4560 It’s not really a problem for me because I don’t believe in free will. But let’s suppose we have free will. That doesn’t change the fact that we are programmed with particular values, it only means we won’t necessarily pursue our values like a computer.
I think your missing something with this analogy, that being with a certain AI, if it has a specific computer programming, it’s not really the case that it ought to follow that programming, it’s more that it has to follow that programming. For me at least, to say someone ought do something implies there is an opportunity for them to do something else, but a computer like this lacks the ability to do something outside its programming, thus it is meaningless to say they ought do something if they can’t do anything else. Same thing with humans, because if we are evolutionary “hardwired” with certain preferences and desires (which I believe we are), then it’s only that we have to follow those desires, not that we ought follow them. Here’s how I would word it: It is the case that an AI has a certain programming It is the case that the AI has to follow that programming Therefore, it is the case that the AI absolutely follows it programming (No ought claims made).
@@omaralsofi9855 I agree with most of what you said, but I think the key difference is that I view all necessary behavior as a type of obligation. Not _meaningless_ obligation, but _trivial_ obligation. Obligation only becomes interesting when we don’t know what actions will be taken, and so we typically discuss morality in terms of _possible_ actions. But there’s no reason we couldn’t discuss morality when there is only a single possible action (ie a necessary action).
I personally think Kant's second formulation of the categorical imperative solves the problem beautifully: *"So act that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means. "* The reason why pushing the fat man is wrong, is because we're using him as a mere means to achieve some greater moral end. It is robbing him of his humanity, we're in a sense objectifying him as nothing more than a mere tool to be used to stop a train, as if he were a heavy rock. That's what makes it morally unacceptable.
The only issue I have with this schema, is the use of objective is applied too loosely. You should stick to the mind-independent classical definition of it. That way you avoid weird oxymorons like describing gut feelings as objective. I also don't like categorising true or false talk as the only meaningful talk, that's just false on its face. Obviously non propositional statements can be meaningful.
