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Lecture 1: Discussion Questions

PHIL 1011

1. Will you watch any of the movies Sam recommends?

2. How would you characterise the (putative) wrong of “queerbaiting”? How would you characterise the notion of cultural appropriation?

3. Do you agree that moral value is only one type of value? Did you understand Sam’s arguments for this claim? What forms of non-moral value are there? Are there any that Sam did not mention? Do you have any thoughts about the relationship(s) between moral and non-moral value? E.g., if Woody Allen is a creep, should we stop watching his films?

4. Sam argued that you are already a (budding) moral philosopher. Do you agree? How would you respond to people who try to reject the idea Sam was pushing—the idea that moral questions are at the core of human life? If you accept this view, what implications might it have?

5. What is the moral issue that matters most to you, and why? Do you think you could convince a friend to care about it?

6. What was your knee-jerk reaction to the vote? Do you think Sam is just virtue-signalling, or wasting your time? Why would he be doing this? How do you think you will vote? Do you have a sense of why the vote is structured in the way that it is?

7. What do you think about the Socratic view that akrasia is impossible? How should Socrates respond to the temptation cases that convince many of us that he must be wrong?

8. Do you see why we can grant Socrates his thesis about akrasia, and still reject the view that being morally good is automatic? You should be able to use this argument to illustrate the importance of the thesis that moral value is only one type of value.

9. In fact, there are other reasons to doubt that goodness is automatic. One is that knowledge of what’s good isn’t automatic. So, we could grant the controversial Socratic thesis, and grant that all value is moral value—just for the sake of argument—while still maintaining that being morally bad is possible. Do you follow?

10. How would you characterise the import of the Ring of Gyges story? You should be able to present Glaucon’s challenge in your own words, paying attention to the difference between descriptive and normative claims. You should also be able to say, in your own words, why Socrates wants to resist the challenge. Once you can do this, you have grasped some of the enduring significance of this parable.

11.  How would you characterise the view Sam called “moral rationalism”? Is moral rationalism the same thing as the denial of hedonism?

12. What’s going on with this Socratic mumbo jumbo about “inner harmony”? You will probably have found the famous city-soul analogy puzzling and problematic. Why? Can we take anything interesting from it?