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PROFESSOR: So there's two things
that we need to do in
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today's lecture.
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The first is to finish up our
discussion of deontology,
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which was necessarily
quite rushed.
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We're trying to do Kant
in roughly a lecture.
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But I do want to get to the
end of that discussion.
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And the second, which will allow
you to use your clickers
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and express your opinions, is to
talk through the structure
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of Judy Thomson's trolley
problem paper.
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So you recall from last lecture
that our goal in
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understanding the very brief
selection from Kant's
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Groundwork to the Metaphysics of
Morals that we read was to
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try to make sense of the three
claims that he makes in the
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first book, first chapter,
of that volume.
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And those claims, to which
I've now added some
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underlining, are
the following.
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The first is the claim that in
order to have moral worth, an
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action needs to be
done from duty.
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And the distinction that Kant
is making there is the
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distinction between doing
something in keeping with
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duty, that is, something that
conforms to what morality
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demands of you, and doing
something not merely in
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keeping with, but
also from duty.
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And Kant's picture is that the
moral worth of an action is
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determined not merely by it
being in keeping with duty.
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That's a necessary but not
a sufficient condition.
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What determines the moral worth
of an action is that it
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be done in keeping with duty
for the sake of being in
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keeping with duty, that is,
it be done from duty.
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The second thing that Kant says,
the second proposition
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which he seeks to defend in the
Groundwork, is the claim
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that an action done
from duty--
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that's the thing we were talking
about in the first
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claim-- an action done from duty
has its moral worth not
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in the purpose that is to be
attained by it, not in what
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the Greeks would call its telos,
its goal, its aim, but
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rather in the maxim according
to which the action is
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That is, what determines the
morality of the action on the
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Kantian picture is the
description under which the
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action is performed.
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Now, a number of you came to
office hours yesterday, and we
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had a rather lively discussion
of how it is that one goes
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about determining what things
count as maxims. And I
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encourage those of you who are
interested in that question to
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take an ethics course, where
you can work through Kant's
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writings on this question
in more detail.
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For the purpose of our class,
all we need to hold on to is
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the simple idea that what Kant
is interested in here are acts
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under a description, and that
that description is going to
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