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When thinkers of the eighteenth century emphasized the role of experience in many areas of human life and thought, the area of ethics was not excluded. The essence and foundations of morality, it was claimed, lie in the fact that we experience actions or attitudes as good or evil, right or wrong, virtuous or vicious, and that we do so by a special sense – a moral sense that delivers moral sentiments. Claims of that kind constitute the practical, or moral, part of empiricism. Some of them seem to have come to stay – they continue to loom large in contemporary moral philosophy.
At the end of this course, you should know and understand the basic features of the experiential approach to ethics. You should know the major pros and cons both of the approach as such and of competing options within the approach; you should be able to see the relation of prominent contributions from the 18th century to current thoughts in philosophical ethics.
This is mostly a course on ethics, but since ethics of the kind we are studying relies on items in the human mind that need to be characerized with care it is also, although to a lesser degree, a course on the philosophy of mind. There is a methodological aim as well: enhancing the existing ability to annotate, fillet, interrogate, knead, logically reconstruct, represent, structure, summarize, think through, and use a philosophical text.
We will make parts of the journey on our own, thinking without texts, but will accept some help from others – most notably, from David Hume. His moral philosophy in its earliest form, as set out by him in his Treatise, will play a significant role, especially, from Book 3 (”Of Morals”) of the Treatise: part 1, sec. 2, and part 3, sec. 1. We’ll add texts by other authors where appropriate.
Typically, the task from one session to the next will be to read and condense a portion of text and prepare answers to questions; the sessions themselves will typically be centred around your summaries and answers. This is a course for students who are willing to prepare answers to questions from each session to the next and to present, in every session, their answers in class. That’s how this course works.
The course will take place on selected Saturday mornings, from 9:30 to 13:00, including a break. The current plan is to meet on the following Saturdays: 29 Oct, 12 and 26 Nov, 10 Dec, 14 and 21 Jan, 4 Feb. We will ascertain at the end of our first meeting whether you prefer different days of the week, different Saturdays, or different times. If there is unanimous (!) support for an alternative, we may modify the schedule.
The first session, on 29 Oct, will not just be a logistical quickie; we’ll do the full 180 minutes. This is a presential course, not an online course and not a hybrid course. In order to participate, you have to be on campus. The course is in English.
There will be a written exam, on campus, in our final session; the exam tasks will be in English, but you can write your responses in German or English, as you like.
This text about the course has been written on 3 July 2022. It will be up-dated in Moodle. Versions of this text that you do not read in Moodle may well be out of date.
Here is a list of some works on our topic. Buying a book is not necessary for this course (because you will be provided with pdf files of the excerpts we will plough through), but, as always, reading more is not a bad thing, and owning this or that classic, like Hume’s Treatise, is not a bad thing either.
* Simon Blackburn, Ruling Passions, Oxford 1998.
* C. D. Broad, ”Some Reflections on Moral-Sense Theories in Ethics”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, New Series, 45 (1944–45).
* David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739/40), ed. by David Fate Norton and Mary J. Norton, Oxford 2000 (in the series Oxford Philosophical Texts: The Complete Editions for Students); not to be confused with (volume 1 or both volumes of) the same two people’s (!) edition of the same work (!), the Treatise, for another series, the Clarendon Hume Edition Series.
* David Hume, An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals (1751), ed. by Tom L. Beauchamp, Oxford 1998 (in the series Oxford Philosophical Texts: The Complete Editions for Students).
* Franics Hutcheson, An Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (first ed. in 1725), third ed., London 1729.
* –––, An Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections: With Illustrations on the Moral Sense, London 1728.
* J. L. Mackie, Hume’s Moral Theory, Routledge, London 1980.
* Elijah Millgram, ”Moral Values and Secondary Qualities”, American Philosophical Quarterly 36 (1999).
* Thomas Pölzler, Moral Reality and the Empirical Sciences, New York 2018, esp. ch. 5 (”Moral Judgments and Emotions”).
* David Yates, ”Response-Dependence”, Philosophical Books 49 (2008).
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