Thanks for this video: it’s a very clear survey of her essay, and how it fits into the tradition of moral philosophy - good work! I was wondering whether the ‘courageous thief’ issue could somehow be resolved by returning to her requirement in part 1 that a virtue must be beneficial. I guess that move would then lead to a need to consider each ‘courageous’ action on its individual merits, with some courageous actions being virtuous and others not - contingent on the ends … which seems to bring the argument back towards consequentialism of a sort.
Wow - what a wonderful, clear and informative lecture. I love how you can take the principles and readily translate them into various insightful examples.
This got me thinking about my own opinion on meta-ethics, and whether it ought to be able to answer the question of whether or not an attribute or issue is moral. One quibble, though. Arsenic obviously functions as a poison in treating wood. It's not there to stab the fungi to death. It's not there to negotiate with them, promising them some sugar it they go live somewhere else. It's there to poison them.
Oscar Wilde in The Soul of a Man under Socialism: "We are often told that the poor are grateful for charity. Some of them are, no doubt, but the best amongst the poor are never grateful. They are ungrateful, discontented, disobedient, and rebellious. They are quite right to be so. Charity they feel to be a ridiculously inadequate mode of partial restitution, or a sentimental dole, usually accompanied by some impertinent attempt on the part of the sentimentalist to tyrannise over their private lives. Why should they be grateful for the crumbs that fall from the rich man’s table? They should be seated at the board, and are beginning to know it. As for being discontented, a man who would not be discontented with such surroundings and such a low mode of life would be a perfect brute. Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man’s original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion. Sometimes the poor are praised for being thrifty. But to recommend thrift to the poor is both grotesque and insulting. It is like advising a man who is starving to eat less. For a town or country labourer to practise thrift would be absolutely immoral. Man should not be ready to show that he can live like a badly-fed animal. He should decline to live like that, and should either steal or go on the rates, which is considered by many to be a form of stealing. As for begging, it is safer to beg than to take, but it is finer to take than to beg. No: a poor man who is ungrateful, unthrifty, discontented, and rebellious, is probably a real personality, and has much in him." Analytic philosophy and ethics just don't mix well imo. There can be interesting points here and there (like Benatar's asymmetry argument) but it seems to me that trying to make sense of ethics in this manner is a losing battle.
