Week 6: Utilitarianism & Kantianism (Feb. 4-8)

Mid-course feedback

Sometime this week or next week, please fill out this anonymous survey to provide feedback on how you think the course is going Links to an external site.. This is entirely optional, but please do fill it out if you wish, since that's the best way for me to determine if I need to try to change anything for the rest of the course!

  • The survey isn't available until Feb. 1, and requires a password.
  • I said originally I'd send the password via email, but I realized I can post it on the discussion board & it will be available only to those students registered in the class. Please go to the discussion post about passwords.
  • The survey closes Feb. 22.

 

Assignment due!

Peer feedback on one essay, and self-assessment of your own first essay, are due by 5pm on Friday, Feb. 8.

 

Monday, Feb. 4

Required

Mill, Utilitarianism, excerpts from Chapter 5. There are two options for reading this, just as with last week (the following texts are the same as the ones from last week; just read the last few pages from the file you used last week).

  1. You can read excerpts from Chapter 5 that have been translated into more readable English than Mill's 19th century English, by Jonathan Bennett, from the Early Modern Texts website.

 

2. Alternatively, if the marks in the above files are annoying to you, you can read Mill's text in his original English (a bit archaic). Read pp. 7-8 of either of these:

Mill, Utilitarianism (Original; MS Word) Download Mill, Utilitarianism (Original; MS Word)

Mill, Utilitarianism (Original; PDF) Download Mill, Utilitarianism (Original; PDF)

 

What to focus on in Chapter 5

In this chapter Mill distinguishes rules of justice from other moral rules.

  • How does he do so?
  • Why are rules of justice more obligatory, stronger, somehow more emphasized than other moral rules, according to Mill?
  • How does Mill argue that even so, sometimes we can violate rules of justice?
  • Given what he says in Chapter 5, would Mill think it's okay to sacrifice the rights of a minority for the sake of greater happiness of the majority?

Optional

 

Wednesday Feb. 6

Required

1. Schafer-Landau, R. (2012). The Kantian perspective: Fairness and justice. In R. Shafer-Landau, The Fundamentals of ethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. This chapter from a textbook introduces Kant’s ethics. Please read pp. 154-160 for Feb. 6 (stop at “Morality & Rationality”).

2. Bennett, J. (2017). Translation of Kant’s Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals from the Early Modern Texts website Links to an external site.. 

  • In this text, Jonathan Bennett has taken an English translation of Kant’s text and updated some of the language to make it clearer to readers in the 21st century, changing some of the complicated words and sentence structures, and deleting small passages that, as he puts it, seem to “present more difficulty than [they are] worth.” He has also added a few explanatory notes here and there. 
  • The Kant text, translated by Jonathan Bennett, is on the Library Online Course Reserves page for this course. Please read pp. 1 to part of p. 6 (stop at "But suppose there were") for Feb. 6

 

What to focus on in Kant's text (the text in number 2 above, pp. 1-6)

  • Kant thinks the highest good isn't pleasure, but a "good will." What does a good will seem to be?
  • The examples on pp. 2-3 are meant to show a difference between doing an action "from duty" and doing it "according to duty". What do you understand from the text about this distinction?
  • How do you understand the difference between hypothetical and categorical imperatives? Kant thinks moral rules are categorical imperatives (not hypothetical ones).
  • For Kant, moral rules have to be universally valid, and if you are about to do something that you couldn't will everyone else to do, then what you're about to do is morally wrong. How do you see that idea in the examples on p. 5 to top of p. 6?

 

Optional

 

Discussion meetings

There will be student-led discussions in discussion meetings this week.

 

Checklist of what to do before next week

 

Image credit: Painting of Kant Links to an external site. by Johann Gottlieb Becker, public domain on Wikimedia Commons.