_023 The Gettier Problem

_022 The Milgram Experiment

The Milgram experiment was conducted in 1963 by Stanley Milgram at Yale University. It focused on the conflict between obedience and inner morality. It aimed to answer the question: “How long will a person continue to harm another so long as they are told to do so?”

Milgram made an electric-shock generator with 30 switches. Each switch was labelled clearly, evenly distributed between 15 and 450 volts, accompanied by the intensity of the shock (Moderate to Strong to Severe to XXX). However, there were no real shocks and the generator simply produced a sound.

Each subject was told that their payment was just for showing up, and they could keep the money regardless of what happened upon arrival.

The subject met an Experimenter (who was leading the experiment) and another subject who was actually a confederate (pretending to be a subject but really in on it).

Both subjects  (real and confederate) drew slips of paper to indicate who was going to be a Teacher and who was going to be a Learner. This part was rigged so that the real subject would always be the Teacher.

The Teacher watched the Learner being strapped to a chair with electrodes attached. The Teacher was then sent to a different room with the shock generator, unable to see the Learner.

The Teacher was told to teach pairs of words to the Learner. Whenever the Learner made a mistake, the Teacher was told to punish the Learner by shocking them with a higher voltage each time.

The Learner was never actually shocked but rather each switch triggered a pre-taped audio clip and sometimes the Learner would bang against the wall between the two of them.

The Experimenter, who was in the same room as the Teacher, would answer any questions from the Teacher with set responses such as “Please continue”, “Please go on” or “The experiment requires that you go on” or “You have no other choice, you must go on”. This began with the mild responses and became increasingly authoritarian for each time the Teacher contacted him.

If the Teacher asked who was responsible if anything serious happened to the Learner, the Experimenter replied, “I am responsible”. Most of the time this relived the Teacher and they continued.

During the experiment, many Teachers displayed signs of tension. Three Teachers experienced “full-blown, uncontrollable seizures”. Despite being clearly uncomfortable with what they were doing, all the Teachers obeyed up to 300 volts. 25 out of the 40 Teachers continued to shock the Learner until 450 Volts

Before the experiment, it was estimated that about 3% of the subjects continue giving shocks all the way. They believed that only psychopaths would go so far as to do this.

However, almost 65 % continued giving shocks. They didn’t even stop when the Learner said he had heart-trouble. Ultimately, this suggests that in many situations we simply act as an instrument and not as a person, obeying authority despite conflict with our inner values.

Word Count: 496

Milgram, S. (1974). Obedience to authority: An experimental view. Harpercollins.

Milgram, S. (1963). Behavioral study of obedience. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 67, 371-378.

_021 McTaggart & Time

_020 Psychological Egoism

Psychological egoism is the claim that all actions are fundamentally motivated by one’s own self-interest. Even acts which are apparently altruistic have an underlying benefit for agent of the action. One supporter of this view was 18^th Century British philosopher Jeremy Bentham (although he warped this view somewhat when it cam to his ethical theory).

This is a descriptive statement; it claims to be a scientific fact about human nature. It is only possible to be motivated by things that benefit us and we aren’t able to do otherwise. The only reason we get up and go to work or school is because we want money or education which will lead to money in the future, or possibly because it interests us. Regardless, we aren’t doing it for anyone but ourselves.

If it benefited us, we would even commit horrific acts such as murder. The main reason that we don’t is to avoid punishment, which would be bad for us. If we were completely certain that we would get away with it then we might be more inclined to do such an act.

Regarding moral acts, many psychological egoists believe that morality is itself just a social construct, created by the powerful to stop other people from doing things that they dislike. The pride of doing good things and the shame of doing bad things are what motivates us to do the “right” thing, not the apparent rightness of it.

What about soldiers who sacrifice their own lives in order to save a comrade in the war? Surely they cannot be acting in their own interest. For many this is a weakness in the theory but supporters of the theory would argue that the shame and guilt of allowing your comrade to die when you could have saved them would be so great that death would be a better option.

Weak psychological egoism is the claim that we are motivated by what we want to do. If we choose to help other people, an altruistic act, this still benefits us simply because we wanted to do it. Since we choose to do it, it is by definition something which we wanted to do. But many consider this to be mere tautology (the rephrasing of the same point) and thus useless in determining the true motive of someone’s actions.

One major problem is that strong egoism seems to be an empirical claim but there is no solid evidence for it. It is not falsifiable, which is necessary for it to be scientific. No evidence could possibly disprove the theory because it can always be twisted to fit any scenario. If the evidence is irrelevant then it can’t really be considered science, which relies wholly on empirical verification.

Instead this view is more of an internal examination of one’s self and cannot necessarily be assumed to be the same within others. After all, if evidence is meaningless then it is impossible to know if others act in the same way.

Word Count: 498

Feinberg, Joel. “Psychological Egoism” in Ethics: History, Theory, and Contemporary Issues. Oxford University Press: Oxford. 1998

_019 Karl Marx & Alienation

Karl Marx was a 19^th Century German philosopher and economist who attempted to reform the way in which people work. He believed that the current economic system was inherently flawed in the way that it inhibits the true nature of man.

Marx believed that human nature was the sum of all desires, which could be divided into two types of drives: fixed drives like those for food and water, which come from biology, and relative drives like those for money which are a product of social ideas. We share fixed drives with animals but relative drives derived from the social needs of humans helped us to become who we are.

Unlike animals, man can produce things even when he is free from the immediate physical necessity to do so. A bird can build a nest when it needs to, but it would not build a nest without that compulsion. Man has consciousness and doesn’t live solely in the moment; his life is the object of his will and his actions are separate from his being.

Another distinction from animals is that humans can imagine before we create. Bees cannot imagine building a hive; they cannot plan how they want their hive to look because they just do it. They produce and create for survival without thought. Man does the same, making things in order to become self-subsistent, but for man there are other purposes of creation. A man can separate its creations from itself and thus become the subject of his own life.

Man is fundamentally a creator, a producer with the capabilities of creating with purpose and planning. Therefore, what we create is both a reflection of who we are and shapes who we are. He defines man as “tool making animals” and claims that only through the free pursuit of productive activity can human beings truly flourish.

Only through work can we achieve “self-actualisation” whereby we realise our true potential as a human being and fulfil our species essence. Life is under our control, unlike animals, and we have the ability to strive towards our potential selves and that we do this through exerting influence upon material objects i.e. through work.

The best type of work, therefore, is one where we can see ourselves in our creations. It is an opportunity to externalise the virtues and qualities within us and transform the nature of the material world around us. Since our ideas are in turn shaped by environmental and economic factors, we can, in essence, shape the world as we wish through our work and will.

But many of sacrifice our capacity to transform the world by becoming labourers. We work in huge factories where we produce things which don’t reflect our true selves and don’t help us achieve our potential. We can’t get a sense of our contribution to humanity and thus we experience “alienation”. This is the opposite of self-actualisation and is a feeling of disconnection between our identity and our activity.

Word Count: 496

Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels, Collected Works, New York and London: International Publishers. 1975. 

_018 Ayer & Logical Positivism

A.J. Ayer was a 20^th Century British philosopher who introduced the idea of logical positivism to England. This idea states that all problems can be answered either with science or logic.

The origin of the movement comes partly from an interpretation of Wittgenstein (who himself considered it a misinterpretation), following from the idea that all philosophical problems are problems of language. They came to the same conclusion but from a slightly different basis – the principle of verifiability. This claims that only statements which are logically or empirically verifiable can have any cognitive meaning.

Logical positivists also followed from the idea of Kant, that we can only have knowledge of the phenomenal world, the world of experience, and not of anything else. However, they took this one step further to say that anything which is not empirically testable or a logical truth is completely senseless; it has no meaning whatsoever.

This implies that thoughts about ethics, beauty and God were entirely meaningless as they are metaphysical – they are statements about the world but not referring to something in the world. Even concepts like causality, which are not themselves observable, must have no sense.

Science describes the world as we see it, which is all that we can ever know. Logic is known as tautology, meaning it does not tell us any new information but simply presents it in a different way, unpacking complex statements into simpler ones or vice-versa (analytic statements). This was known as strong verification, since its verification provided certain truth. Empiricism is weak verification as its truth is only deemed probably through experience.

For Ayer, there are different ways you could interpret what ethical statements are, since they aren’t meaningful. Ethics could be about what humans want; it could be a command or simply an expression of emotion. If I say that murder is bad, I am expressing my dislike of murder and commanding other people to not murder. I am not, however, creating a meaningful proposition about intrinsic right or wrong. This branch of philosophy is called meta-ethics and deals with what it is that ethics is trying to convey.

So if all of these metaphysical assertions are meaningless, what is the task of the philosopher? Ayer believed that it was to be the right-hand man of the scientist, to refine the methodology of science and clarify forms of argument. In this sense, philosophy was meant as an activity and not a doctrine in itself. This activity was to clear up confusion in language and unverifiable claims which could prevent scientific progress.

However, ultimately, just like Wittgenstein, many of the logical positivists began to take back their claims regarding these matters. Ayer himself said that “the main flaw of [logical positivism] was that nearly all of it was false”. One particular critic of the movement was Carl Popper who instead put forth the idea of scientific falsification, rather than verification due to issues like the problem of induction.

Word Count: 491

Ayer, A.J., 1936, Language Truth, and Logic, London: Gollancz.

_017 Zeno & Stoicism

Stoicism is a philosophy originating in Greece (founded by the 3^rd Century BC philosopher Zeno) with a strong focus on how to live. For this reason, it became very popular well into the Roman Empire, especially since it was useful in teaching us how to act when faced with adversity.

Stoicism placed a great deal of emphasis on virtue, which comprised of the character we display in certain difficult situations. The essence of this virtue is that we should live according to nature

Stoicism is deterministic on a cosmic level; they believe that the entire universe is one organism which is entirely governed by a “divine principle” (pantheism). Therefore, all suffering and hardships are inevitable and we must learn to accept this. True happiness is the ability to co-exist with this complex harmonious structure of nature, thus ridding ourselves of negative emotion.

However, Stoicism advocates a form of soft-determinism, implying that there are still some things which we are free to control for ourselves. Examples of these include: our opinions, desires, goals and beliefs.

On the other hand, the actions of others, our reputation and wealth are simply not up to us to determine. Misery arises when we try to desire these aspects of life which we are not in control of.

In this sense, we often enslave ourselves, subservient to these notions of respect and power. Stoics believe that we can use reason to discard these ideas from our desires, which we can control, thus setting us free from the misery that come with them. They referred to this reason as the “God within us” and believed that reason separated us from other forms of life, an attribute we share with the gods.

As a result, the Stoics suggest that we become indifferent to all that is outside of our control in order to cultivate a type of inner freedom. We are still subject to many natural and social causes upon us, but we can change the way we respond to them in order to live better lives. This is what it means to be virtuous. We should love everything that comes our way equally. Even in times of fortune, we must not grow attached to the benefits that we receive or we will be anxious about losing them. We must not be dependent on anything.

In times of adversity, things only appear to be bad because we judge them to be so. Instead we should view it as a mountain to climb and a hardship to embrace.

It is not what you endure but how you endure it that defines true character.

 

A Stoic Sage is someone who perfectly embodies Stoic principles and, if one existed, would be more god than man. They would use reason to control themselves and be equally happy in any situation, regardless of circumstance. Ultimately, Stoicism flourished in Rome because it offered pragmatic advice on how to cope with the difficulties of living and how to endure suffering.

Word Count: 495

A. A. Long and D. N. Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.

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