PHLC05H3 Lecture Notes - Lecture 9: Applied Ethics, Categorical Imperative
•Third last lecture
•Essay due today, should be returned on the last day of class
•Today is the last day of theoretical ethics
•Next week, starting applied ethics, mostly abortion and euthanasia
•Last week of class, will be half applied ethics and then review for the final exam
•Prior to August 5th, a final exam study guide will be posted
•Looking at the handout (July 22 Handout on Varieties of Value): truth and falsity is not up to us, so
whether a triangle has 3 sides, is not up to us
•But judgments of right and wrong, deliberation, are matters that are up to us
•There is correctness in the arena in what is up to us
•A judgment that a particular practical judgment is right cannot be true or false, because Aristotle
distinguishes between things that are up to us and things that are not up to us
•A practical judgment can be right, and Aristotle believes they can be genuinely right or wrong, but
they cannot be true; so it’s a completely separate sphere
•Matters of excellence and deliberation, arriving at the right conclusions on the right grounds at the
right time, but can nevertheless not be true
•So, Doctor Burke came up with the handout
•There are varieties of value; not all types of values are the same and they have different meanings
within the discourse of ethics
•Four types of value found in Karl Marx: exchange value (not moral or ethical value), use value
(what something is used for; what you can do with what you have; a computer has a price but its
real value lies in what it can be used for), intrinsic value (basis of all other forms of value; a widely
held view, that the basis of all different types of value is intrinsic value because human beings are
the only ones that can reflect on the primary source of value), surplus value (the quantity of money
that the capitalist earns over and above what he has to spend on costs and materials; so, for
example if I buy a bushel of corn for $50 and sell it as frozen [so I buy something and do something
to it] at a higher price, then the surplus value is the difference between the cost and what I sell it for)
•Note that these are all different types of value
•Surplus value is expressed as an exact and monetary amount
•Last week, on the handout on Hegel, we saw that not all forms of action have the same status; that is,
they don’t have the same esteem or worth, and that is more closely connected to economics or
exchange value
•What you’re willing to pay a high price for, because they may have certain types of moral qualities
•Moral values are generally understood as Kantian
•Difficulties with Kantian theory: internal consistency, universality, and difficulty of application to real
world situations
•Ethical value is an ethical system of custom, thought to be widely related to culture
•So, moral value is not the same as ethical value; and Kant does not understand moral value to be
relative to cultural value
•From Kantian perspective, moral value is arrive at through the application of the categorical imperative
•Usually what’s meant when there is denial of objectivity of value is different from denial of the objectivity
of all intrinsic value
•The claim that intrinsic value is always relative to a cultural system would not be a widely held view
•Whether the rain is good or bad depends on my circumstances
•The denial of the evaluative properties as objective is not the same as the denial of intrinsic value
•Cognitive is something that is a matter of knowledge; when I judge the rain to be bad, that is a matter of
my knowing of something about an objectively existing property that has the force of compulsion on me,
it’s not just a matter of my will
•Non-cognitive is the viewpoint of Gibbard, all value is a product of the will
•If you wanted to object to McDowell, you could still claim that all entities come with evaluative
properties, but you could deny that they are cognitive at all, that they are exclusively matters of the will,
that judging something to be right or wrong (that rain is bad) may be an evaluative property, but it’s not
