Thursday 1/17
Case Discussion
Readings
Cases
Synopsis
Following up on our discussion of the two cases from last time, Keeping Track and Students' Little Helper, today we took up only the first of the two cases in the above bundle of cases: "Who’s Up for an Outing?" and "MeToo Far".
In the "Who’s Up for an Outing?" I asked, Was it right to 'out' participants in the alt-right Charlottesville march? We then split up into groups and collected arguments for--that is, arguments concluding that it was right to 'out' the participants--and against--that is, arguments concluding it was not right to 'out' the participants. The arguments were many, but it was unclear which arguments should have carried weight in our deliberations. Moreover, it was unclear how to go about weighing, in a principled way, the arguments for and against to determine a way out of the moral dilemma.
In the "MeToo Far" case I asked, Has the #MeToo movement gone too far? We again split into groups to consider arguments for (yes, it has gone to far) and against (no, it either has hit just the right note or it has not gone far enough!) The arguments for and against were many and interesting, and in the course of discussing the arguments we ended up illuminating many dimensions of the #MeToo both morally salutory and morally troubling. Such is the way of moral dilemmas: They seem to present a kind of intellectual puzzle which leaves us at once enlightened as we wrestle with the puzzle and yet, nevertheless, still puzzled.
Thus we find in the hard moral cases--cases we've characterized as presenting one or more moral dilemmas challenges to our understanding of morality itself. Hard cases, so to speak, stress-test our understanding, making us question whether we really know what we're talking about when we pronounce an action morally impermissible, morally permissible, or morally obligatory, as the case may be. Put another way, we discover in confronting hard moral cases that we're unsure what to count as good reasons and what to discount as bad or insufficient reasons in our moral deliberations. In this way, hard moral cases are vastly more important to us than easy cases.
Now recall from last time I characterized moral dilemmas as follows:
- In a moral dilemma we find apparently equally good reasons for alternative, incompatible, and consequential courses of action.
- The existence of such competing reasons makes us unsure how to proceed, particularly when the stakes are high.
- Competing reasons raise the difficult question of how we should go about adjudicating between them.
- The challenge of assessing competing reasons in an unbiased, principled way can even make us wonder whether there really is a morally right course of action in the first place!
Today we split up into groups to practice making the case for and against differential tuition rates and for and against teaching intelligent design as a legitimate alternative to evolutionary theory in biology class.
My point in the exercise today of giving arguments for and against was to illustrate a very important point: In a moral dilemma, we seem to have good reasons on both sides (or, in many cases, many sides!) How, then, do we correctly and in principled fashion weigh these reasons? Equivalently, how do we judge arguments? After all, we want to know what is the right thing to do. Presumably, the right thing to do is whatever course of action has the best arguments in its favor. What, though, determines 'best' when it comes to arguments?
This is a deep and difficult puzzle. It is also why we begin next week with some of the most challenging material we will encounter this semester, logic, namely. Logic is where we will begin building a set of standards by which we may adjudicate reasons. Our goal next week will be to have these standards fully fleshed-out and, most importantly, justified as we begin discussing the kinds of reasons that can be given in considering moral dilemmas.
For most students, this is a highly abstract and difficult discussion. It is, as I say, the most challenging material we encounter this semester (as one might well expect, given its foundational nature.) I will do my level best to connect all the dots while I develop as best I can the relevant conceptual apparatus we will be employing. At the same time, it is crucial that you i) do your best to follow the discussion and, simultaneously, ii) be patient with yourself as you struggle to understand it. Again, most--maybe all--students struggle. Being patient with yourself in part demands setting aside once and for all the common fear that everyone else in class understands while you alone do not. It also requires that you recognize some concepts take longer to grasp than others, but that eventually you can and will master this material.