This Site is Proudly Hosted By:
If you're a college-level
reader, you won't need to work through this material. If your reading
skills are any less than college level, this material will help you
fill in the gap between how good you are and how good you should be.
The reading questions are designed to help you understand the
material. If they turn out to be really, really,
really easy to answer after you've done the reading, then
you don't have to bother with them if you don't want to. If they're
hard to answer, then you really, really, really need to work through
them before you come to class! Please note that these web pages will
get progressively less and less helpful as the course goes on, because
you're expected to get better and better at reading as the course goes
on.
This page will mainly cover the material I covered in the first
lecture. If you missed that lecture, you should read this
page! You should also read your class syllabus and intro01.htm to prepare you for
the next lecture. (If you attended the first
lecture, you don't necessarily have to read this material because it
basically recaps that first lecture.)
The first thing you need to know is that most of the materials for this
course are on the World Wide Web. Most of it is on my web site,
www.madwizard.com, so if I give you a file name, like filename.htm, you
must remember to put www.madwizard.com/ in
front of that file name when you enter it as a URL in your Web browser.
(By the way, make sure the Web browser you're using has its left margin
set to one-half inch.
(Click on file, click on page set up, then set the margins.) This will
prevent the text from being cut off on the right side, and it will save
paper.) To reach the web page for this course, type in
www.madwizard.com/, then type in the course number, then type in.htm
and hit enter. (This URL is also listed on your syllabus.) All pages
related to this course can be reached from that course web page.
My cellphone number is on the syllabus, so you can text me with questions and comments.
You need to provide your
own college-ruled paper, with straight edges, not spiral tear-out, so I
can easily sort your quizes.
This is not class where you can skimp on the reading. I work hard to
make the reading clear and easy to understand, but I absolutely insist
that you do all the assigned reading, work through the assigned
exercises that are on the Web pages, and of course do the homework.
Class participation is really encouraged. Even when
I'm lecturing, feel free to ask questions and make comments. Jokes are
welcome. You can't make a joke about the material unless you understand
the material. If you don't understand something, please let me know.
There are six graded course requirements. They are attendance,
wrangling, odyssey workshop, homework, odyssey and exams.
Attendance is mandatory. Failure to attend class costs you a ten point
penalty for every class you miss. This is the easiest requirement to
fulfill, since all you have to do is show up, stay the whole lesson,
and pay attention.
Wrangling is pretty easy. It's an in-class exercise designed to expose
various aspects of logical reasoning for discussion. To accomplish
this, I will split you into paired teams to attack and defend various
controversial propositions. It's not graded on whether you win or lose
the debate, it's graded on whether or not you make a proper effort to
do the things I ask you to during the wrangle. I'll tell you more about
this later.
The odyssey workshop is also fairly easy. It requires you to talk about
any problems you might be having with the "odyssey" writing assignment.
We do this in class, and everyone takes a turn, so that everyone gets
to hear discussion of all the problems that can come up. It is also
designed to expose various aspects of the critical writing process for
discussion, so you can think of it as a lecture on writing in which
students act as examples of people with specific problems. Again, more
later.
The homework is a little harder, but it purely tests whether you have
really done the reading, which includes working through all the
problems yourself. Whenever reading is assigned to a particular day,
the reading and homework must be done before that day, and the homework
must be handed in on that day. If I assign a reading for July 7th, then
that reading must be completely done before July 7th, the homework must
be done before July 7th, and the homework must be handed in at
beginning of class on July 7th. I cut you a lot of slack on the
homework, but you have to do it before class to
get the credit.
The odyssey is a critical performance requirement, so it is graded at a
very high standard. The odyssey requires you to think through the
evidence and arguments presently available for your chosen topic,
logically determine which thesis is best supported by those evidence
and arguments, and explain in detail the logical reasoning that
supports your determination. The thing to remember is that only things
that support this goal can get you credit. A rambling, disorganized
mess of a paper will get full credit if it turns out to contain all the
necessary critical thinking. A highly polished, elegantly phrased,
beautifully organized, academically worded five-paragraph essay will
get no credit whatsoever if it fails to contain any of the necessary
critical thinking. You can bet I will tell you more about this later.
The exams, two midterms and a final, are the most critical performance
requirement. The questions won't be particularly hard, but they will
expect you to know the material thoroughly, and to be able to recognize
and explain subtle but important distinctions. To get full marks on any
question, you have to get the answer exactly right. Less than perfect
answers will get less than perfect scores, and so on.
See the syllabus for the grade requirements and the point values of the
various assignments. Also see the syllabus for my grading policy (which
probably won't affect you), my drop policy, classroom etiquette and my
policy on accommodations for disabled students.
There are two things in this class that are probably new to you because
I invented them. They are "Wrangling" and "Odyssey."
Wrangling goes like this. In a week or so, I will give out a survey
form that will ask your opinion on various topics. The form will
contain opposing pairs of statements, like "cat juggling is morally
wrong" and "cat juggling is not morally wrong." If you agree with one
of these statements (which means you disagree with the other), you
should circle the number of the one you agree with. If you have no
opinion on the matter, you should leave the pair blank. If you don't
ever want to find yourself up in front of the class talking about this
particular issue, cross out both statements. If you find some
particular issue so interesting that you would like to be up here
defending your opinion of it, put an asterisk in the little square to
the right of the statement pair. If you really want to defend your
opinion on that issue, put a circle around the square as well.
What happens to these forms is that I find somewhere quiet to sit down
and find four issues such that I can put together a team on each side
of the issue. I generally pick the issues based on what's in the little
squares, providing I can put together a team on each side of that
issue. In any case, I try to accommodate everyone's preferences as much
as possible, or at least avoid assigning anyone to a team that he or
she really doesn't want to be on.
The next thing that happens is that I write the teams on the
board, you make sure I have not assigned you to defend a proposition
you really don't want to defend, and write down the statement assigned
to your team. Preparation for the actual wrangle is not actually
necessary, but you can do it if you like.
If you want to prepare, you can practice turning long sentences into
very short sentences. Heck, you can practice picking out keywords, and
not bothering with the rest of the sentence. Writing on the board takes
time, and things go much faster if you can make your point in a couple
of words.
On the day of your wrangle, you'll be called up to stand by one side of
the board with one or two other students while a similar group stands
by the other side of the board. Each group writes its thesis on the
board, and the group that bears the burden of proof will follow this by
writing one or two keywords that indicate their main reason for
thinking that their thesis is true. I'll talk about what the other
group needs to do to answer that reason, and we'll go on from there.
It's actually a lot easier than it sounds.
Odyssey writing is also a lot easier than it sounds, except that some
people seem to have a hard time figuring out that it really is easy.
You can think of it as writing four separate papers, except that the
topics for the later papers are based on your work in the earlier
papers, and you won't know what your next topic is until the previous
paper is graded and returned to you. The second thing to remember is
that you should only use things you learned in English class when those
things make it easier for you to write the paper. If you can do what I
ask you to do while forgetting everything you ever learned in an
English class, go for it. The writing assignments all ask you to
clearly explain what position you think is best supported by the
evidence and arguments available to you. None of them ask you to write
in a particular format, to use a particular style, or to use any
vocabulary that is not necessary to clearly explain your reasoning. I
expect you to spend a lot of time figuring out just what you are going
to say. I don't want you to spend any time worrying about what the
result looks like.
Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of thinking available to people.
There is critical thinking, which seeks to discover the truth by
applying logic to the available evidence, and there is comfort
thinking, which seeks to maintain preferred beliefs independent of
logic and evidence. A comfort thinker is someone who defends his
existing beliefs by any means necessary. These means can include
ignoring, discounting or distorting the available evidence. They can
include ignoring, distorting or misrepresenting the positions,
arguments and motivations of people who disagree with him. And, of
course, these means include abuse, physical threats and violence. Most
importantly for our purposes, the means by which comfort thinkers
maintain their beliefs include plausible sounding but logically
worthless arguments.
In terms of improving the lives of everyone on our planet, comfort
thinking has been a miserable failure. Just about every human action
that has ever made things better has been based entirely on critical
thinking. Critical thinking has given us medicine, social reform, and
technology. If you make a list of things that actually make your life
better, each one of those things, if it really does make your life
better, will turn out to be the result of somebody's critical thinking.
Comfort thinking has given us religious persecution, genocide and a
long list of other horrors.
If you take actions that affect the lives of others, it is morally
wrong for you to base those actions on comfort thinking. This is
because your action is basically a complete gamble as far as morality
is concerned. When you use comfort thinking, you have absolutely no
real reason to think that your conclusion is correct. So if you hurt
someone else, you have done something morally wrong, even though you
might have been able to delude yourself into thinking that it was
morally right. Don't tell yourself that it was an innocent mistake
because you sincerely believed in what you were doing. If you indulged
in comfort thinking to achieve that belief, then that belief
was come by dishonestly. Comfort thinking is fundamentally
dishonest, no matter how sincerely or passionately you believe your
favorite conclusions.
Bad moral rules, or "pseudomorality," are rules that people say are
moral rules, but which aren't moral at all. Remember that just because
people believe something is a moral rule does not make it a real moral
rule. Real moral rules are justified by logic and evidence, not by
consensus or tradition! In this class, we will only be concerned with
real moral rules. Claims about morality that are not supported by logic
and evidence are simply false.
Even among honest and honorable people who apply logic and evidence to
ethical issues, there is considerable debate about the true nature of
morality. There are many different moral theories, but the two we will
be most concerned with in this class are "utilitarianism" and "rights
theory."
Utilitarianism holds that the way to make moral decisions is to
consider all the foreseeable consequences of each of the available
options, and to choose the option that offers the best overall
aggregate trade-off between welfare (including pleasure, health and
mental well-being) and suffering for everyone affected by the decision.
Here is an example of utilitarian thinking. Suppose there are five
patients dying in a hospital from different kinds of organ failure.
Each patient is young, otherwise healthy, and would certainly survive
if given a transplant organ. However, thanks to motorcycle helmet laws,
there are no transplant organs available, and all the patients will die
in about a month. A naive critic of utilitarianism might suppose that
utilitarianism would advocate grabbing a suitable donor from the street
and cutting him up for transplant organs. The consequences of this
would be that the five patients would survive and only the donor would
die. Since it's overall better than one person die rather than five,
the naive critic concludes that utilitarianism demands that the donor
be sacrificed. An actual utilitarian, however, would take into account
all the consequences, and all the options, available here. One option
is that we have a rule that innocent people may never be killed (or
seriously harmed) against their will, even if the alternative is that
several people will die. The real utilitarian compares the consequences
of having that rule to the consequences of not having that rule and
finds that a society in which innocent people can be killed in such
situations is a society in which people suffer more, because they are
individually devalued and disrespected by their society as well as
because they run some risk of being cut up for parts. On this basis,
the real utilitarian sees an overwhelming justification for such a
rule, and that rule rules out the option of cutting up an arbitrarily
chosen donor.
Rights theory holds that there are certain categories of things that
should not be done to individuals, no matter what the consequences. A
rights theorist would come to the same conclusion as the utilitarian,
but for different reasons. The rights theorist would say that the donor
has a compelling right to life so cutting him up for parts would
violate his right to life, and so would be seriously morally wrong
unless failing to do so would be a worse violation of somebody else's
rights. It's true that the recipients also have a right to life, but
withholding the donor's organs does not violate their right to life,
since the right to life is basically a right not be killed, not a right
to be given any particular means of preserving one's life. Furthermore,
the rights theorist would say that we do not need to consider the
consequences of our options here because recognizing the donor's right
to life, (and the fact that the recipients don't have any right to
other people's organs), is all we need to think about. Unlike
utilitarians, rights theorists start by figuring out what moral rights
apply to the situation, and then consider which rights would be
violated by what options, and finally figuring out which option
involves the least serious violations of the least serious rights.
Although these two moral theories are generally seen as opposed to each
other, we do not necessarily have to see them so, or to prefer one over
the other. A moral theory known as "pluralism" holds that morality is
not fully or easily captured by any single moral principle but instead
is best understood by deploying a number of different principles, each
of which is most appropriate in its own particular area. This class
will generally operate from a pluralistic standpoint, and will consider
all moral theories as potentially valid.
Since we are not going to automatically prefer one particular moral
theory, we need to think about how we are going to think about
morality. In any moral question, the answer depends on two things.
First, there is the question of what moral principle, out of those that
apply to the case, is most important. Second, there is the question of
what that most important moral principle actually says we should do in
this particular case. Both of these can turn out to be very complicated
questions, so it is vitally important that we think clearly and
logically about all moral issues.
It should be noted that nothing is morally wrong without a reason. If
Jack claims that something Jill does is morally wrong, but cannot come
up with a logically good reason why that thing is wrong, then follows
that what Jill does is not morally wrong. The burden of proof always
lies on he who seeks to impose rules upon others.
Since moral reasoning is difficult, and ethicists often make claims
that are new and counterintuitive to the ordinary reader, it is vitally
important that we read carefully. Since we are supposed to think about
whether these counterintuitive claims are true or false, we must be
careful to dig out the arguments that the writer offers for his claims.
Therefore I want you to read carefully and closely. Read one word at a
time. Don't skim. Don't hunt for keywords. Don't content yourself with
picking up a "general idea" of what you think the text says. Read every
single word and figure out what the text actually says. Make notes as
you read. In particular, look for new things. Look for ideas you've
never heard before, and ideas that go against the conventional wisdom.
Make sure you get the author's main point, her "thesis," as close to
exactly right as you can get it. Write her thesis out in your own
words. Get her main argument for this thesis, and summarize that in
your own words. Look for places where the author talks about objections
to her thesis. Note down those objections as well as the author's
answers to those objections. Finally, think of your own criticisms, and
search the text for places where the author might have said things that
answer your criticisms.
The essence of comfort thinking is to start with a thesis, and then
look through the available facts, possibilities and speculations to
find whatever claims can be used to make it appear that the thesis is
supported by logic and evidence. A comfort thinker may take this mess
and write a paper that purports to show that this thesis is logically
supported by putting in whatever facts, possibilities, speculations and
falsehoods that can be made to appear to support the thesis, and
leaving out or illogically dismissing any facts and logical principles
that might inconveniently show that the thesis is not in fact supported
by the available evidence. The technical term for this process is
"lying." The essence of critical thinking is to start with the best
available evidence and apply strict logic to that evidence to see just
what thesis turns out to be logically supported by that evidence. The
technical term for this process is "thinking." Thinking is not easy, it
is not simple, and above all else, is not tidy. Real thinking is in
fact a very messy process. You start with whatever you happen to know
about the subject, try to find out as much else as you can, and try to
figure out what else you would need to know to solve the problem. At
every step of the way you try to figure out the implications of
whatever you happen to know at that point. And whenever you manage to
come up with some kind of thesis, you look back at your thinking and
try to find places where you might have gone wrong. Instead of picking
a thesis and sticking with it, a real thinker picks different theses
along the way, switching back and forth and rethinking every time a new
piece of information or a new logical implication comes to light.
Comfort thinkers rarely if ever change their minds. Critical thinkers
change their minds frequently.
The wrangling exercise is designed to expose instances of the thinking
process in action. It is intended to show how various claims can be
deployed to support and oppose a particular thesis. It is both a model
of how two opposing sides may rationally discuss an issue, and a model
of how an individual may work his own way through the logic of an issue
by carefully considering the logical implications of individual claims,
one claim at a time.
Another important aspect of critical thinking is the process of
assembling an argument for the thesis that seems best supported at the
time for the purposes of finding out whether or not that thesis really
is supported. The usual academic way to do this is to write an essay
which you then present to other reasonable people for comment and
criticism. These others often see things in your writing that you
didn't notice. They might see logical problems. They might see factual
problems. Or they might see opportunities to dig even deeper into the
subject. Whatever they see, the critical thinker takes their comments
and criticisms and uses them as a basis to rethink the issue. He might
change his mind entirely, or he may merely tweak his argument a little.
Or, he may decide that his next essay will be about a completely
different aspect of his chosen issue. Whatever he does will be based at
least in part on his understanding of the logical implications of those
comments and criticisms.
The odyssey writing exercises are designed to provide opportunities for
the deepest thinking possible in the confines of a single college
course. They are meant to allow you to do the kind of thinking, and
rethinking, and re-rethinking you would do if you were seriously
researching your topic. They are also structured so that if you choose
not to think deeply about your topic, you will not get a good grade for
the assignment. (Remember that the assignment requires you to attach
all previous work to each subsequent stage when you turn it in. If your
second stage doesn't come attached to your previous stage, with all my
comments and the second stage assignment sheet, then you haven't
fulfilled the assignment.)
The basic thing we think about is arguments. In philosophy, an
"argument" is generally some collection of (supposedly) previously
established facts together with a further claim that somebody thinks is
proved by those previously established facts taken all together. The
supposedly established facts are referred to as "premises" and the
thing that is supposedly proved by the argument is called the
"conclusion." Arguments can be written out in any form, but for
clarity, we philosophers can also write them out in "standard form."
Premise one.
Premise two.
Conclusion.
Once you have got a particular argument clear in your head (which isn't
always easy), you can start trying to evaluate the argument. An
argument is good if it meets two criteria. The first criterion is that,
if the premises were true, it would be
completely unreasonable to think that the
conclusion is not also true. The second criterion is just that the
premises really are established facts. So to
evaluate an argument, you think about two things. First, you think
about whether or not the premises really are previously established
facts. (If it turns out that even one of the premises is not an
established fact, then the argument is no good.) Second, you think
about is whether the premises could be true without
the conclusion also being true. (If it turns out there's a way for the
premises to be true while the conclusion is false, then the argument is
no good.) Here are those criteria again.
1. The premises really are previously established facts.
2. If the premises were true, then it would be unreasonable to think
that the conclusion is false.
If one of these features is lacking, then the argument is no good. In
particular, if someone can come up with an adequate explanation for the
premises that does not itself make the conclusion true, then that
alternative explanation, all by itself, makes the argument no good. For
this reason, argumentative writing concerns itself greatly with coming
up with further arguments to support main premises, with showing that
conclusions really are adequate explanations for the premises, and with
showing that alternative explanations really aren't any good.
Remember to read phil-mythos.htm
before next week. Remember also that you will be quizzed on that
reading! The quiz always tests the reading for that day.
For more on comfort thinking, see hownottothink.htm
Copyright © 2016 by Martin C. Young