Ethics lecture 9 - Mill 3

Ethics lecture 8 - Mill 2

Ethics lecture 7 - Mill 1

Here's the handout:

Three Accounts of the Good Life

1. Objective list
--a. external list, e.g. God’s commands.
--b. flourishing: objective needs, interests, potential; successful cultivation of human and individual nature.

2. Desire-satisfaction
--a. actual desires
--b. improved desires: reflectively-endorsed desires; or desires I would have if I had full information and rationality; or desires I would have if I were fully developed.

3. Happiness
--a.simple hedonism: happiness = pleasure (and the absence of pain); pleasure = single, simple mental state; good-makers = intensity, duration.
--b. complex hedonism: happiness = various, complex mental state; good-makers = intensity, duration, felt character, causal properties, authenticity… i.e. anything a competent judge would appeal to in discriminating between goods.

Ethics lecture 6 - Kant 2

This recording cuts out just before the end (my dictaphone's battery went). All that's missing is me reading out the last couple of sentences of Groundwork:

And thus, while we do not comprehend the practical unconditional necessity of the moral imperative, we do comprehend its incomprehensibility. This is all that can fairly be demanded of a philosophy that presses forward in its principles to the very frontier of human reason.

Ethics lecture 5 - Kant 1

Here's the mini-handout I refer to in the lecture:

Kant on sources of action:

1. Inclination (desire, aversion)
2. Imperatives (principles or maxims)
-a. Hypothetical imperatives (X is good for achieving Y)
--i. Problematic hypothetical imperatives (if you want Y, you should do X)
--ii. Assertoric hypothetical imperatives (because you want Y, you should do X)
-b. Categorical imperatives (X is unconditionally good, or is right/ obligatory/ morally required)

Ethics lecture 4 - Hobbes 3

Ethics lecture 3 - Hobbes 2