John Finnis is an English philosopher professor of jurisprudence, been very influential in the natural law tradition

the kind of view that he holds incidentally is strongly represented in this university by Professor Robert George. If you want to have a defense of a natural law of you.

Very much alla Finnis take one of Professor George's courses. And you'll get a perspective that's more positive to this. Absolute rights view than the one that you will that you will hear from me. So, provides some balance for you. So John Finnis, this are quotes from John Finnis he thinks it's always unreasonable to choose directly against any basic value whether in oneself or in one's fellow human beings.

And therefore there're absolute rights. For example, the right not to have one's life taken directly as a means to any further end, but also the right not to be positively lied to. So Finnis is here defending at least two absolute rights. That you'll never justify, it's never justified to take someone's life directly as a means to any further end and it's never right to be positively lied to.

So you notice that there are a few little words in there qualifying these statements.

Which make them at least get rid of some of the obvious cases or provide some hedges against what you might think is implied by them. So, for example, lets, lets start with the one about lying since we, we had that with Kant. What does he mean by saying the right not to be positively lied to? Well

I think that one of the things that would be said here might be something that you would be allowed to say to this murderer who comes to your door looking for the victim you would be allowed to say something which is going to mislead the would-be murderer. Although it's not positively a lie.

For example. Suppose that just before you, this person came to your door you were out shopping. So the murderer says, have you seen so and so? You might say, I've just returned from shopping. Okay, so maybe that will mislead the murderer into thinking that you're answering his question. You're sort of saying, no I couldn't have seen anybody because I've only just returned. In fact that's, that's not the case and you are intending to mislead the murderer but you're not positively lying. So in other words it's a way around this So a lot is going to depend here on what you count as a lie, what you count as a direct lie and there are other even stranger doctrines that have been defended by Catholic theologians as a way of avoiding saying that you are sometimes justified in lying. One doctrine that is sometimes used is the doctrine of what's known as mental reservation.

And this can be used in areas of. Medical ethics where there is a problem about whether you should tell the truth to a patient who is prone to anxiety and if you tell the patient the truth about his condition that will make the condition worse because the patient will be very disturbed about the truth because he really does have some serious disease. So suppose that the patient is quite ill and therefore has a, a temperature.

But if the patient knows this, the patient will become more anxious. So the patient says, doctor, how's my temperature today?

Well, according to some Catholic teaching and medical ethics. The doctor may say, your temperature is normal today. But what the doctor actually has in mind is. Your temperature is normal today for somebody who has a raging infection going on in their body.

And that's not considered to be a direct lie because you're telling the truth relating to what you have in your mind. Most of us I think would think that is a lie, or that is near enough to a lie to make a difference. But it's an example about, if you feel that there ought to be absolute rules, you're going to have to somehow narrow what it is that can't, as a breach of the rules.

And perhaps the more serious case here, is the other thing that Finnis is talking about, the right not to have one's life taken. Directly as a means.

that suggests that you can have your life taken as long as it's not being taken directly as a means to some end. And the kind of case that we might talk about here are cases where your life is taken as a side effect of something. Now this is a distinction that, that many people do endorse. So for instance we have this distinction that's drawn in wartime. Between what Donald Rumsfeld, when he was defense minister under Bush, famously called Collateral Damage. So if we think that there are Taliban in a Afghan village. We can send a missile to a tank that, village, even though we know that there are also innocent civilians in that village. We are not intentionally killing the innocent civilians. We're not killing them directly as a means to the further end of killing the Taliban, we are killing them as a side effect of killing the Taliban. Because we don't intend to, if we could avoid killing them, we would, but we can't, we know they're there, we do want to kill the Taliban, we think that's of sufficient military importance, so we go ahead and do it. Whereas on this view, it would not be justified to engage in killing a group of civilians even if you knew that that would advance the cause of, the military cause you're aiming at. So therefore for instance, we regard the terror bombing of civilians as wrong, bombing of cities as wrong.

But not killing perhaps even the same number of people through an attempt to kill a military target.

And that obviously that raises a lot of issues if you look at discussions of, of bombing of the second world war.

on, on both sides. Certainly the, the Germans conducted terror bombing of London. Simply trying to kill civilians. But, then the British, when they got the upper hand conducted the terror bombing of cities like Hamburg and Dresden. And, of course the United States bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And, you know, I could argue that there were military targets there, but it seems clear that the, the point of those bombs in all those cases was to terrorize the enemy into surrender. Therefore, using the deaths of the civilians as a means directly aiming at their death, and this therefore being something that would be wrong. And, and I'm not sure what Finnis' views on this are but certainly one well known Catholic philosopher no longer alive but not that long ago, Elizabeth [UNKNOWN] did think that this was true. And when Oxford University, where she was teaching philosophy gave President Truman an honorary degree, she wrote a pamphlet protesting against this because she said Truman is a murderer, because he dropped the atom bombs and directly intended the deaths of those civilians. So that's how this, that, that distinction is taken and that's obviously a, a more morally significant one than the one about lying.

Okay so here's, here's a test case for something that people do think is an absolute wrong and this in a way just a contemporary version of Dostoyevsky's question but we now know that this is actually a realistic case. Whereas Dostoyevsky's case was an imaginary case.

It's realistic case

in that we can imagine a terrorist who has planted a nuclear bomb in a city unfortunately given, you know, if there are terrorist who can plan to destroy the World Trade Center then there are certainly terrorists who could plan to put plant nuclear bombs in American cities.

It's possible some people will dispute this part of the premise, but it seems possible that torture may the only way to know, to get him to reveal where the bomb is. If you watch the movie about finding Bin Laden called Zero Dark Thirty that movie certainly suggests this, that

torture was a means to find the locations of, of Bin Laden. Other people who're involved in that hunt have questioned whether the film is historically accurate at that point. But, it's certainly an open question. So, I don't think you can just say flatly, torture never provides useful information.

I, I, I think that would be a difficult claim to defend.

So I suggested two different scenarios here.

One is where you torture the, you, you, you torture the actual terrorist, and that gets him to reveal the information, which will enable you to defuse the bomb. And there's no other way in which you can defuse the bomb. The second is, because some people, well, actually lets, lets ask these as questions. So, take the first case. How many of you think it would be justifiable to torture the terrorists in this case if there's no other way of locating the bomb in time for it go up, before it goes off?

How many of you don't think it would be justifiable to torture the terrorists?

Okay, quite a small number don't think and most of you do think. So, the second case clearly makes it more difficult and more like Dostoyevsky's case, except we're not producing utopia on earth, we're just trying to save

couple of million people, let's say from being killed and maybe millions more from suffering radiation sickness. But in this case, the terrorist is, is tough. He's prepared to suffer any amount of pain you might inflict on him, himself. But he loves his five year old daughter. He can't baear to see her seriously hurt, so if you torture her, he will reveal information. He'll have some good psychological profile that tells you that he's going to crack as soon as you start really inflicting serious pain on her. It's not enough just to, you know, give her little scratches or pinch her. You've really gotta start to get serious but then highly probable that he'll crack. How many of you think that it would be justifiable to torture his daughter in these cases?

Significantly fewer I think. How many of you think it would not be justifiable to torture his daughter? Yeah, that is significantly more. [BLANK_AUDIO] So that's, that's a good test case for if there are any absolute rights because you would, you would think that if there are any absolute rights that hold in all circumstances, its the right against torture or at least, the right against torture if you're completely innocent. And, I was assuming with a terrorist you could know for sure that this was the terrorist. Who planted the bomb, but we know also know for sure that five year old children are morally innocent. So that ought to be fair and viable rights, that ought to be one which you would see as inviolable. Okay look I think there's a time, I'm going to skip that, that was an actual case where German proscecuters Didn't actually torture somebody but threatened to torture him and they were convicted of an offense there. Although they didn't get the most severe penalties that the judge could have given. So that's the kind of case that, again that's, that's an actual real life case that comes close to that.

So there are other moral views that are distinct from the consequentialist views that I talked about last time. But they are not absolutes. And I want to present them just to, to complete this picture of the alternative kinds of views.

because I don't want to give you the impression that in order to not be a consequentialist or a utilitarian of some sort. You have to think that there're absolute moral rules. Or absolute rights that must never be infringed. That's not the case and this is a 20th Century British Philosopher W.D. Ross. Who had a, kind of, intermediate position.

He did not think that you can find out what you ought to do just by working out what has the best consequences.

Like, maximizing happiness, or producing pain, or satisfying preferences. He thought that there are some duties, but they're not absolute. He called them prima facie. That means on their face, they're duties, but in actual cases, and when they conflict, you have to weigh them up or balance them out. So what are, what are, what are these examples of these prima facie duties? This is a, a list that he gave.

So a set of distinct duties, that he thought enable us work out what we ought to do.

So duties of fidelity are things like keeping your promises and he included not telling lies as a duty of fidelity. Sort of truthfulness, veracity. reparation. If you've harmed somebody, you have a duty to do what you can to make good to them. If somebody has helped you. You have a duty of gratitude to return the favor, if you can. In appropriate circumstances. Duties of justice to deal with cases like case alike and relevant grounds, so on. Duties of beneficence is a general duty to do good. So this is a kind of utilitarian duty. A utilitarian would say, yes, the duty to do good is the whole of morality. But Ross is saying it's a part of morality. It's not the whole of it. It's one part of it, but it has to be balanced against the other things. So there might be a case where you can do more good by breaking a promise

and sometimes in those circumstances, you might be able to do so much more good. By breaking the promise, that you ought to break the promise. That's the sense in which Ross is not an absolutist. But if you can only do a little bit more good by breaking the promise, then the duty of fidelity to keep the promise may outweigh the amount of good you can do, it may outweigh the duty of beneficence. So, what Ross is saying is, these things can't, they all can't and therefore, it's not a simply matter of calculating the consequences. He thought we have duties to ourselves. Duties of self-improvement. So, you're all fulfilling that duty right now by educating yourselves about Ross' moral philosophy and other things. But he actually thinks it would be wrong if you'd turned your back on getting an education and improving yourself and, just decided to go surfing that would not have been the right thing to do.

And finally you have duties of non-maleficence, of not harming people. And he thought they were separate from the duties of beneficence. So utilitarians tend to think that doing good and not doing harm are just sort of two sides of the same thing. Now they can all be summed up in doing the maximum amount of good. Which means doing good and subtracting the harm from it. But Ross thought that there's a separate and distinct duty of non-maleficence. And he thought we ought to balance all of these things up.

Absolute Rights or Prima Facie Duties

Effective Altruism

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