All right, um, technology. All right, let's get going. So anyway,
That's kinda the basics, the central questions of ethics.
Necessary and sufficient conditions.  That was what we were just
talking about. You know if uh, well, necessary and
sufficient interesting kind of term we
usually use the example of making an omelette.
It's a French idea,
as the study of some forms of Existentialism comes from French
philosophy. What is necessary to make
an omelette? [Student: Eggs]. But what about eggs in general?
Does just having eggs make an omelette?
[Student: Well it can] How? If I sit eggs here will I have an omelette?
[Student: Well I guess you have stir them I suppose]. Well
there's a lot of things going on here, lol, well I suppose.
That's the whole point. Eggs are necessary
but are they sufficient? No. And this is that kind of
sense. You have to, well,
necessary and sufficient is an interesting kind of claim.
Simply having eggs does not an omelette make.
Simply having morals does not an ethic make.
It's the same kinda thin. Clearly it's necessary
to have a moral position, but having a moral
position is not sufficient for an Ethics.
That's kind of we're talking about, right?
And that's what they are talking about here.
Any general questions on this short little piece?
Good. Then I am going to move on.
You all can go back and look at that. The next reading was just the sense of
what is a moral issue? Same kind of
thing. I will just real quick stress this:
you know morals in a very real sense,
are the views you hold, the beliefs you
hold, that dictate your ethics. Make sense?
Can you have an ethics without morality?
That's an interesting philosophical
question. Right? What would it mean
to have an ethics without a moral
position behind it? I think we end up
there actually at the end of this class. The kind
of sense that we agree that we need
ethics but we're really unclear about
the morals. That's were we're gonna kind of
end up; right? Because morals are
absolute. That's kind of that sense.
Morals don't seem to have much fluidity.
if you believe that murder is wrong then
it's hard to find exceptions, make sense?
If you believe that four people living is
more important than one then killing one
becomes easier. This is where things get
kind of weird, right? Those videos that I
don't make those are there to give you another
voice. I guess I should explain that. Those videos are
to give you another voice. Not everybody
agrees on this issues, right?
[Student: I have a question on part of it. Inaudible]
Okay I'm sorry, can you read that again?
[Student: It says moral issues are those actions which have the
potential to harm others or
ourselves. And it says unintentional
actions are also still moral issues
only it's dependent on a consistent theory of truth,
for example like a drug user.
That was example about the drug user that was confusing].
Yeah I mean you can, people like
to do that saying you know, like,
a drug abuser unintentionally harms
their family that kind of stuff.
But again why are they saying
we need a consistent view of human nature?
Because that's what they're saying. To
make that claim then we have to really
have a sweeping view that human nature
is a certain kind of thing. Does that make sense? That's
what they're trying to say
there. That's humanism. We're going to read
about humanism. I hate humanism.
because that kind of stuff right there
the same kind of sense that there's only
one way to be human. That's what they mean by a
consistent view of humanity, right? Can we
have a consistent view of humanity? You
can count me amongst the one's that go
umm, i don't know? My experience
with humanity is if there's anything it's
inconsistent? So i don't know? I mean are
they're things like the human condition? Do we
all have to drink water and eat food.
Absolutely. Does that lead to some kind
of moral dictate? I'm not so sure.
So,
make sense? That help a little bit?
That help? We will be doing that the whole
semester. We will be addressing those
issues entire semester. Any other
questions about the general moral/ethics
kind of thing?
All right let's dive into the Greeks.
This week we're dealing with Plato and
Socrates. Just a little piece,
this piece, "The Socratic Paradox".
this was just kind of an explanation of who Plato was,
blah blah blah.
You know it kind of talks about the ring of Gyges
and some stuff like that. But the
interesting reading is the "Republic".
This is Plato. This is actually
Plato. We're reading about the Cave analogy. It comes
out of this text here: Plato's "Republic".
This is by far the best translation of Plato's
"Republic" right here. The Allan bloom
translation. There's a lot of bad
translations out there when it comes to
the Greeks: a lot. Ya know I can show you
how dense this stuff is.
When you read something for a long
time this is what happens. You read
multiple times and it just gets more
and more: there's a lot going on here is all
I'm trying to say.  Um, I'll give you some background
on the Greeks. So here we go. Now we're getting real for the first time.
So here we go.
This is kind of the beginning of Western
morals if you will. We are going to start with the
pre-socratics. The pre-socratics
want to know one thing:
What is phusis? Phusis is an interesting term
This gets translated by the Romans as
natura. And you start to see the movement right,
nature. Prior to Socrates--according to Plato--everybody in
Athens knew everything they
knew about reality through Homer. Who was
Homer? Well, he wrote The Iliad and The Odyssey.
You know, you've seen pictures. Basically
the Greek ethos, this is the term
used. The Greek ethos came through
Homer. And by ethos we really just mean
ethics in a sense, the way to live; the
right and wrong way to live, right?
So in Odysseus we see what it means to
be brave what it means to be you know
strong. What it means to put the State
above your individual desire; all that kind of stuff.
And the idea is that Homer
told you everything you need to know
about right and wrong. And for the most part
the Greeks just accept that, right, kind
of blindly accepted it.
And the first philosophers are not
interested in the ethos. The first
authors want to know what phusis is.
What's phusis made out of. You know
everything is water. Everything is fire.
Everything is ether. These are
the kind of arguments they make.
Everything is atoms. So the atomist
argue everything is atoms. So this question of
what is phusis, what is nature. This was
the first philosophical question and
Socrates changes all of that. Now two
things. One, all we know about Socrates is
that he is dead, because you wrote nothing
down, right? So all we know Socrates is
what Plato tells us about Socrates. There
are a couple of references to Socrates
and a couple other authors such as Xenophon and
Aristophanes. We get this
kind of weird view of Socrates, as this
he's called the midwife, the gadfly, the
torpedo fish. If the midwife helps you give birth,
what is Socrates helping you to do?
[Student: inaudible], Yeah right. He is helping you give birth to what is already in you.
That's the idea.
So the Greeks believe, this is a very
important point. The Greeks believe when it
came to this sense of ethos it was
already in you. You already knew what right
wrong was inside of you. It's just you've
forgotten. I'm not going to dwell on
this too long ago, ya know the Greeks had a very
complex sense of the soul, which by the
way if you want to know what the
translation of soul is, where it comes from,
it comes from this term psuche. Psuche is
a soul. They had a very interesting view of
the soul, and it's basically what's
called transmigration. What does that
mean transmigration? Anybody know? [Student: Inaudible].
Yeah that is what the soul does, right. The soul moves
from place to place, and I mean that is
really the sense of what it means. Um you know I
am not going to dwell on it, but in Plato's Republic
the end of it has this Myth of Er.
In the Myth of Er is a story about the soul. You die and go up to this
place in this big mouth determines
whether you've been good or bad. It's
really kind of crazy stuff, but then also when
it's all said and done you choose another
life here on earth. And trying to
have the soul here determine your
next life, and blah blah blah.
But the idea was the soul kept coming back.
So that's why Socrates is a mid-life
because again the argument is you
already have in you that sense of
right and wrong. It just needs to be brought back,  it's been
lost. Because the idea is when soul comes
back to earth, it has to cross the
river Lethe. And the river Lethe
is the river of forgetting. So the idea
is you have to drink from the river Lethe
before you're allowed back. So
you forget everything about your past
life that's the idea. You can start to see how this
kind of thing plays out, right.
So Socrates is famous for saying
phusis taught me nothing about being
human; which is anthropos by the way.
Don't worry too much about these
Greek terms, I just give them to you for your
own edification. So anthropos means the human.
Socrates said phusis will not teach
me, but Socrates is famous, well Plato
is famous for saying Socrates said: I
spent my youth in phusis. So he spent his
youth following the original
Philosopher's trying to understand what
phusis was. But he realized what he
want to know wasn't what made phusis, he
wanted to know what it meant to be a
good human. And that's what's not going
on in this original question because we had
that. We already knew what it meant to be a good
person. Homer already told us that.
Socrates was the first person to go: how do you
know Homer was not drunk?
Homer could have been crazy, how do you know?
How do we know that what he said is
right? And this is this kind of new move
that cuts off this argument and pushes
it into an argument of the polis. So so
with Socrates, with Plato, the argument
moves from what is phusis? To really,
let's go ahead and just say it, what is justice?
This is where the argument starts to move.
And we start to see real quick that
what's happening is ethics, in the sense of
the anthropos, which gets linked
ethos is really directly linked to
justice which you can't get outside
polis. So we're going to see many philosophers
are going to say there's no, there is no
justice in phusis. There's no justice in
nature. Do you guys agree with that?
There's no justice in nature? [Student: yeah]. Yeah
why?
[Student: cuz it is something that we made up].
Wait, say that again.
[Student: something we made up]. Something we made up.
Well that's an interesting claim. So are
all ethics just an opinion? That may be we're
we end up, right? [Student: We had
more morals, more morality] What's that?
[Student: We had more opinions that were moral]. Well that's
the billion dollar question right? This is really
what Plato wants to know, are all morals
just opinion, or is there something that
transcends opinion? This is
kind of the battle that is going on.
So let me erase this and show you how this
plays out. What Plato says, Plato goes
okay so this whole arguments coming up.
If we believe Socrates, if we
believe the existence of Socrates
and while there is a subtle argument that says we
shouldn't, but I'm going to move past that.
This kind of argument is going on for about a hundred
years, is kind of pushing these points,
kind of going back and forth. And with
Socrates you can finally get to this
point thing that this argument we been
having has kind of shifted from kind
of right and wrong to what Plato wants to
say is what is the Good? And this is this
is the beginning of Western philosophy
as we know it. Plato's little
move where he says all right everybody
just slow down what do you mean when you
say something is good? And this is
kind of how the game changes. Now what
Plato does is fascinating. He says look; and
this is the beginning, and I can't
stress enough, this is the beginning of
the separation we're gonna be watching
the entire semester. He says is the Good
of matter episteme, or is it a
matter of doxa?
This is a juxtaposition of these two
terms. Let me give you this, what doxa is,
as it would be the hardest one to guess. Doxa
basically means belief/opinion. Are
belief and opinion different? Is there
a difference? I'm not asking this
question because I have the right answer
I think this is an interesting question.
All right. I think there is a
lot of back and forth on this. And
there's another one here. What's the
other one that relates to these two,
anyone want to guess? This will come back up
later; faith. All right this one will show back
up. The Greeks don't have a real robust
sense of faith.
Which is kind of interesting if you
start to think about it.
This evolves out of this if you will, and
we'll see whether faith and belief are the same
thing. We'll come back to
this when we get to the Existentialists. But
I'll give you a little hint. What
Kierkegaard is going to say is, it's not
this that makes us human,
it is this that makes us human; but we'll get
there. There's something weird about faith.
So belief, the difference between belief and faith
clearly is; so I might believe that the
Sun goes around the earth. Does that make
sense? I might believe that and I have a
lot of reasons to believe that. Why
do I have a lot of reasons to believe that?
[Student: because you see it everyday?] Right, I see the thing go over the sky.
Right? I mean so if you think about it
observation, this is again more for the
intro class more than this class, but
observation is a bad thing.
Observation is not what it seems like,
right? Just because the Sun looks like it's
moving, the Suns not doing nothing. So I
can believe that, but
then that belief can change because
something can change that belief. Can
faith change? That's what kind of we'll
see. There's this kind of strangeness, and
this becomes a real issue, but for right
now we'll leave it out because it's
not really in play here; in the beginning.
So now what do you think episteme is?
If it's the opposite of, yeah: [Student: it's like knowledge and fact]. Yeah,
right, exactly. What Socrates, or Plato,
wants to know is, look;
is the Good something I can know, in
which case there is a right and wrong. I hope
you can see that. If I can know the
Good, then I can know what is right or
wrong. Make sense? If the good is always
already an opinion, then there really is no
such thing as right and wrong. At least
not beyond, and this is the kind of the
binder, the human.
So the question kind of
becomes, what is the human
relation to the Good? This is what, this
is really the beginning of philosophy. I cannot
stress enough, this is the beginning of
Western philosophy as we know it. Is what's going on here.
This is kind of the beginning of
this movement. You know, if I can know the
Good, then right and wrong transcends the
human. Make sense? Can you see what he's doing
here? So in relation to this question
Plato does this: He says look. It
seems as though we have a problem. [Laughter]
Let me get rid of this. We'll keep the Good cuz
it's always about the Good.
All right? He has this famous thing
called the Divided Line. And here's what
the Cave is going to become. So in this, in the
"Republic"; let me just give you a quick
background. In the "Republic" they're trying
what's going on is that the tyrants been
overthrown. The Republic has been put
into place. The tyrants used to run
Athens. The tyrants are kind of pissed. They
think that they've been Boone swoggled.
That justice is what the strong say it
is and now the weak are in control and
it's bad for us, because they know the
Good. So the "Republic" starts
with this kind of sense that we demand
you tell us what justice is. Which right
there is interesting thing right? I
demand you tell us what justice is! And
Homer had already told you what justice was.
And that's the tyrants used. The
tyrants ruled Athens according to Homer.
They've been overthrown. The
Republic has overthrown the tyrants and
now the tyrants are pissed. They want a
definition of justice, which ultimately
supports their view. Does that make sense?
What Plato is kind of trying to do is say
everybody wants that. Everybody wants
justice to support their view. If it
turns out justice, if the Good is just a
doxa, well [Pause] What Plato is doing
here is trying to say, let's go ahead and
assume that we can know the Good.
So this kind of this assumption that Plato makes.
He says you know it's interesting. We all seem to start out,
everybody starts out seeing shadows.
And by shadows he means just that;
reflections of something else. So we
start out as kids, as children if you will,
seeing shadows. And then we realize those
shadows are being produced by images; objects
if you will. The term object doesn't
exist in attic Greek. So it's kind of a strange
But the best way for us to understand
what's going on here is this. You see a
shadow of a tree, kind of. So it's not
really the tree, it's kind of a shadowy
tree. And you realize that's really the
result of a tree, right? So you realize
there's a tree.
But simply realizing that doesn't equate
to knowing it's a tree. That make sense?
So then there's this kind of dotted
line. Here we start to move into the realm of
knowledge, so this is the realm of doxa.
Everything's an opinion here.
Your opinion of the shadow, is your
opinion of the shadow. Because the shadow doesn't
have a standard zone (measure). The object appears
to stand on its own, but then we
realize it's--and again the term object
does not exist it's just an image. So the
question is what is it an object of? What
is it an image of? And that's the realm of
knowledge. The realm of knowing. So now I know that
the tree is a conifer. See where he is kind of
going with this?
There's a conifer here and a deciduous tree there.
Ya know, we have different types of trees.
So I can know these things. But
knowledge is still not understanding.
Right? And the ultimate is the sense of
understanding the Good. So it's a
hierarchy. That's what's going
on here. It's a movement, and clearly this is
the realm of philosophy. The one of
understanding. At least this is what this
claim is that Plato is making. So he says
look if the shadows are the result of
the Good, then there's a trickle-down kind of
Good. Down here you're getting let's say
2% of the Good. I'm playing fast and loose here. This is not
Plato, this
is me trying to explain it right? Here we
jump up maybe to 10% of the Good.
But we're still, as long as you're in
doxa you are not in the Good.
I want, I hope that is very clear. As you start,
and the reason this is a dotted line and
not a solid line is because there's
sense in which these are very different
places. This is kind of where we bleed.
There's a bleeding between the images and
the knowledge of them. And it's not a solid
so that's why it's not a solid line. It's kind of,
it's hard to tell when we're in the realm of
images and when we're in the realm of knowledge.
That's why there's this kind of bleeding. But
there's a sense in which this is the realm
of knowing up here. And these are the, if
I want to use different type of term, this is
the realm of intelligence.
So opinion versus
intelligence. And you start to see the
structure that we really still hold to
this day, right? If you think about it. One
of the ways we can look at this is to
play this game. What game is this?
In terms of this, what do those represent? [Student: IQ?] Thank you.
[Student: Ooooh] Right? You start to see what I mean. Does
that help kind of explain what's
going on here? You starting to see what's going on?
You really can't separate the question
of the Good from Justice for the Greeks.
And in large part that's because of the
polis. There's a sense in which the
Greeks kind of blindly assumed that
it's better to be civilized than a
barbarian. Because keep in mind there's
lots of different people in the world. The
Greeks are just one of the many. You've got the
Persians. You got the Babylonians.
You got the Hebrews, the Egyptians, the list goes
on and on. You also had kind of
northern roaming tribes. So places
like Germany now, those kind of places. They're
considered barbarians because they didn't have
cities. The American Indians, when they find the
Indians we just went ahead and did the same thing to them.
This assumption about
justice and the Good I think we need to take
serious; especially in Ethics.
Because you know there's a way in which
it just seems blindly assumed. It's not
clear that it is good, but it's clear we're in the
habit of thinking it's Good; and that's
that's an interesting place to be, right?
So back to the kind of sense of
what Plato is doing here.
And I thought today the best thing
would be to show what I hear Plato
saying, not in terms of you know
the prescriptive ethics. But really kind
of a look. If we want to say that X is good
this is what's gonna have to . . .
Going to have to exist to hold that, if
that makes sense?
Like this is the logical necessity if
you will. So again you know I'll point out that
basically the Greeks get all their ethos
it all comes from Homer, right? And Homer's
stories about what it means to be just
and what it means to be brave, and all these
kind of things. And nobody really
challenges that until like I said
Socrates, when he told that kind of story. And
then Socrates, and this is kind of debate
the goes on in Plato scholarship, what is
Plato doing with Socrates? But the story
he tells is pretty clear. Socrates gets
convicted of corrupting the youth and introducing
new gods into the state. Those are the two things
he got convicted of. He could probably gotten away
if he could have just you know went "shucks I'm
sorry". But of course he said you guys
are all morons and well. We learned really
quickly what happens we call people
stupid. Anyway, Socrates drinks the hemlock.
He dies, you can read it.
He describes the death, how
his feet start to go numb and stuff like
this, and blah blah blah. And the
very last word Socrates says is; oh by
the way, make sure you sacrifice a
rooster to the gods, just in case I'm
wrong. Because he's disobeying he's gone
against the rules of the State, right?
The rules the State, which of course come
from Homer, is that certain things
have to be done. When before
you die you sacrifice a cock to the
gods because blah blah blah, all these,
all these stories about what you're
supposed to do. And then Plato has
Socrates right before he dies right
before he dies go oh yeah by the way
just yeah go ahead and go ahead you go
ahead and sacrifice that
just in case, just in case; better
safe than sorry. [Student: inaudible] What's that?
[Student: Is he doubting himself?]. Well
this is kind of what, well, what is Plato doing there?
I mean, right? What's,
why does Plato have Socrates make that
his last words? I mean of all the things he
could have said, right, why that? Is it
a shout out to Plato just kind of
saying you never really know? When
push come to shove you're never going to
know. So pray to all the gods
right. And follow all the
religions because you just don't know.
So back to this kind of sense
were Plato's going to try to deal with this
problem. So like I said,
Plato splits this, he's the first one to
do it; this knowledge versus belief
claim. And you can see that, and
I'll say it one more time, if it wasn't for
that magic from Egypt quote-unquote,
it would be easiest just to say it's all just
opinion, it's all just made up man blah,  blah,
go fast and take chances. Then
he goes oh by the way, this seems to work
with your Egyptian, Greek, Chinese,
on and on. Maybe even the barbarians have
to follow it? But why? What makes that?What's, what's
going on? This clearly is not a belief. We
tend to like, we tend to be comfortable in
belief. It's, it's more comforting
to know. It's very uncomfortable to not know.
In fact this is why philosophy by its
nature should make you uncomfortable. If
it's not making you uncomfortable you're not
paying attention. It should make
you uncomfortable, because what it's doing is
exposing how much we go through life
believing stuff that's really just a
belief.
