Jessica Tizzard
speaker
286 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2020
last heard Nov 2020
Jessica Tizzard’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And that's what reveals the fact that we're moral beings.
It's not that we do the right thing all the time.
It's that we feel bad when we don't.
And that's what reveals our interest in the good.
Right, yeah.
I'm glad you brought that up because there are even people who attribute that view to Kant.
It obviously sounds very different from the kind of view I've been attributing to him.
So, yeah, I think if that's the sort of basic kind of case, if we want to sort of self-explain or self-interpret our action in this way, I think there are sort of two sort of philosophical accounts that one could give to unpack it.
One is to say, yeah, that is just what happened.
I was overpowered by desire.
So no matter how strong my reasons might be, no matter how robust my moral knowledge is, I'm just the type of creature who can always be overpowered by stronger sort of effective desires that come to me through my capacity to sense and sort of stand in desirous relations to the world.
And then the other way to think about it would be, well, I say that, and it makes sense for me to say that, but all that really reveals is that I am deceiving myself.
And in fact, my basic general moral commitments or principles are to do the thing that I profess to not want to do.
So this kind of way of interpreting humans would insist that I am not the kind of creature
who can just be overtaken by instinct or strong desire.
As a rational moral being, everything that I do is sort of determined by reasons that I have, by principles that I adopt.
And so it just cannot be that I'm overcome and really I'm just lying to myself and in fact I have the opposite principle.
That's sort of saying, you know, it is okay to throw over other obligations for the pursuit of pleasure.
Or it is okay to put my own well-being before other people and sort of be a quote-unquote coward in certain situations.
Right, so these are sort of the two interpretive options we have.
Showing 181–200 of 286 · page 10 of 15
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