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Summary of Blackburn- Being Good...

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Summary Blackburn, Being Good Introduction - Few people are sensitive to what we might call the moral or ethical environment; the surrounding climate of ideas about how we live. What is acceptable, and when are things are going good. These eventually shape our emotional responses. - Our consciousness of ourselves is largely of even essentially a consciousness of how we stand for other people . - An ethical climate is a different things from a moralistic one. One of the marks of an ethical climate is that we care much about our rights than about our ‘good’.  Part One: Seven Threats to Ethics - These threats are ideas that destabilizes us when we think about standards of choice and conduct. 1: The Death of God - For many people ethics is not only tied up with religion, but is completely settled by it. They are given a handbook how to live; to do the will of a Being that is greater than us. - Obedience brings reward, disobedience brings punishment. - The Bible for example, carriers a lot of defend and explanation for embarrassing ethical elements in

it (It is a good thing because the Bible says it, even though it harms other beings). - Gods are not thought of as arbitrary. They have to be regarded as selecting the right things to allow and to forbid. - Plato suggested that religion gives a mythical clothing and mythical authority to humanity’s endless attempt to struggle with death, desire, happiness, good and evil. - Religion is not the foundation of ethics, but it showcases its symbolic expression. - The point is that people behave accordingly to their religious believes and do not develop their own moral values. 2: Relativism - There is no one truth. There are only the different truths or different communities. This is the idea of relativism. - A very attractive side of relativism is its association with toleration of different ways of living. - Many people suppose that if our standards of conduct are ‘just ours’, then that strips them of any real authority. - What is just or right in the eyes of one people may not be so in the eyes of another. - A limitation to relativism suggest that it is necessary for there to be some rule, and hence there is nothing at all to mock about whichever one have hit upon.

- If everybody needs the rule that there should e some rule, that itself represents a universal standard. - Across the whole spectrum of life, it will need some sense of what is expected and what is out of line. For human beings, there is no living without standards of living. However, there is no argument here that the standards have to be fundamentally the same. - There are human rights, which thee practices flout and deny. But the denial of rights is everybody’s concern. - The moral is that once a relativist frame of mind is really in place, nothing – no claims of truth, authority, certainty, or necessity – will be audible except as one more saying like all the others. - It is usually not all certain that the Western values we are upholding are so very alien to others. - Relativism taken to its limit becomes subjectivism: not the view that each culture or society has its own truth, but that each individual has his or her own truth. - Sometimes indeed, ethical conversations need stopping. We are getting nowhere, we agree to differ. This is because of the philosophical view that ethics is somehow ‘ungrounded’. 3: Egoism - We are totally selfish animals. - There are fairly good methods for finding what people actually care about: One is to ask them, and

gauge the sincerity of their response and the plausibility of what they say. The other is to see what they do and try no to do. - All ambition is to due to fear of death: if a man wants statues raised to himself, it is because unconsciously he is afraid of dying. - We can cope with fallibility by shrinking the likelihood of a mistake. We can check on what people say by seeing what they do. - Everyone likes to have the words or ethics on their side. - Perhaps everything comes down to sex, or status, or power, or death. The truth is repressed: it is hidden by false consciousness. - The sociologist Thorstein Veblen posed the theory that people have a need for wasteful display in order to manifest their status. - The Grand Unifying Theory considers that everybody always acts out of their own self-interest. It can be very unclear what this means. People neglect their own interest or sacrifice their own interest of other passions and concerns. 4: Evolutionary Theory - There exists a vague belief that some combination of evolutionary theory, biology and neuroscience will support a Grand Unifying Pessimism. - It is one thing to explain how we come to be as we are. It is a different thing to say that we are

different from what we think we are. - Underneath the mask, we are only concerned to spread genetic material more successfully. - It is sometimes inferred that altruism doesn’t really exist, or that we don’t really care disinterestedly for one another – we only care to maximize our chance of getting a return on our investments of helping behaviour. Most of the times, this is the case. - The first conclusion is to infer that our apparent concerns are not our real concerns, simply from the fact of an evolutionary explanation of them. - The second conclusion is to infer the impossibility that such-and-such a concern should exist, from the fact that we have no evolutionary explanation drift. - It is inferred that the human animal must itself be selfish, since somehow this is the only appropriate psychology for the vehicle in which these little monsters are carried. 5. Determinism and Futility - The idea of determinism is that since it is ‘all in the genes’, the enterprise of ethics becomes hopeless. We cannot kick against nature. - This raises the whole thorny topic of free will. - However, because whatever our genetic make-up programs us to do, it leaves room for what we can call ‘input-responsiveness’. It leaves room for us to vary our behaviour in response to what we

hear or feel or touch or see. - Free will also varies our desires in accordance with what we learn. - Free will also leaves room for us to be influenced by information gathered from others. - Finally, free will leaves room for us to be affected by the attitudes of others. - Many of our beliefs, desires and attitudes show endless plasticity. They vary with our surroundings, including the moral climate in which we find ourselves. 6: Unreasonable Demands  - We should not demand too much from ourselves and each other. - Many theories of ethics highlight the impartial and universal nature of the moral point of view. It is a point of view that treats everyone equally: every person has equal rights. - The centre of ethics must be occupied by things we can reasonably demand of each other. - We still have plenty of standards left to uphold. We should still want to respond to the reasonable demand of decency. We should do our best to solve the problems we can solve. - We have some sense that we should keep our own hand clean, however much other will then dirty theirs.  7: False Consciousness - The Grand Unifying Pessimisms tries to discover hidden unconscious motivations, thigs that really move us, leaving ethical concerns exposed as mere whistles on the engine. - A critic might now suggest that ethics as an institution is a system whose real function is other than it seems. - There are indeed institutions, such as the Church or State, that may seek to control our standards, and their nature and function may need to be queried. But that will means at most a different ethic. It does not and cannot introduce the end of ethics.

- Experiments in free living find they face a dilemma. Either, standards are introduced: standards of truth-telling, privacy, space, use of materials, job rotas, and so on, eventually apt to include property rights and rights connected with sexual bondings, or, the commune breaks up. - Gratitude to those who have done us good, sympathy with those in pain or in trouble, and dislike of those who delight in causing pain and trouble, are natural to most of us, and are good things. Almost any ethic will encourage them. - The difference of luck affects how we think of them, how they think of themselves, and even the penalties imposed by society and by the law. ...