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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.
1:00
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.
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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
2:06
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.
2:28
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.
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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.
4:16
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.
4:39
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.
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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.
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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.
8:57
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.
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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.
9:44
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
10:08
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.
10:35
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?
11:08
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
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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?
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Significantly fewer I think.
How many of you think it would not be justifiable to torture his daughter?
Yeah, that is significantly more.
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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.
13:32
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.
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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.
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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.
15:01
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
16:02
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.
17:03
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.