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Hi, welcome, this is a discussion section that we're going to have today.

We're trying something a little bit different to give you a sense about some

of these issues fit together,

some of the ones we've been talking about in the first segments of the class.

So today with me, I have three people who have been really instrumental in

actually making this class real.

They've been helping me produce a lot of the lectures and

edit things, and work through a lot of the content.

additionally, you'll get a chance to

interact with them some on the message boards.

And they'll be helping to ask questions, and

sort of organize some of the discussion there.

So I'd like to give you a chance to meet them a little bit, and so we're going to

have a discussion today, talking through some of the issues of the class.

Before that, I'd like to give them a chance to introduce themselves.

So, first, this is Daniel Friar, Karen Colaca, and Pierce Randall.

And they'll say a little bit about themselves.

Daniel, why don't you start.

>> Hello everyone.

My name is Daniel Fryer, and I'm originally from Yonkers, New York.

Currently, I am a PhD candidate at the University of Pennsylvania in

the Philosophy Department.

My research interests are Legal and Political Philosophy, Philosophy of Race,

Social Epistemology, and the ways in which they overlap.

Prior to coming to the U Penn,

I did a Master's degree at University College London in philosophy, and

a Bachelor's at John Jay College in criminal justice.

>> Hi, I'm Karen Kovaka.

I grew up outside of Louisville, Kentucky, and I did my undergraduate in

philosophy and environmental geoscience at Boston College.

I've been in Philadelphia at the University of Pennsylvania for

two years now, and I'm working on my PhD in Philosophy of Science.

I am really interested in biology, evolutionary theory, and

environmental policy.

>> Hi, my name is, Pierce Randall, and

I'm a second year PhD student at the University of Pennsylvania.

I have a masters in philosophy from Georgia State University, and

I'm originally from Atlanta, Georgia.

I mainly work on moral and political philosophy.

And I specialize in the philosophy of John Rawls.

>> So one question I had was in relation to what's morally arbitrary and

what's morally relevant?

So, this concept,

this phrase comes up multiple times in the lecture, primarily in reference to Rawls.

So, you say that Rawls and others have stressed the idea that,

that which is morally arbitrary ought not has a,

ought not have effects on the opportunities that we have.

And I'm just trying to get clear on what the idea, what it, what it means to be,

morally arbitrary.

One way in which we can understand something that's morally arbitrary is that

something which we are not responsible for.

And since were responsible for it,

it ought not have any unduly effects on the benefits of burdens that we receive.

So cool, I would like for the moment to just speak about that,

just open up a discussion about what's morally arranged what's morally relevant.

And if we could make those distinctions, who are in ch,

who was in charge of those distinctions and what does that mean for

the distributive principle that the State has to put in place.

>> Yeah, it's something, something that Rawls emphasizes when

thinking about well here are some things that do seem arbitrary about it.

It's like where we're born or the particular parents that we're born to.

And I think, so that's an important idea, this idea of moral arbitrary.

So, and what are your thoughts about that?

Any reactions?

So how, how do we decide that some factor, something about us is morally arbitrary,

or is, on the other hand, morally important or morally relevant?

>> I almost think it makes more sense to start by saying what you mean by morally

relevant, and then just by elimination, everything else is morally arbitrary.

And it's, it's more intuitive to just give cases of

things that obviously seem arbitrary, like which town you were born in.

But kind of operating behind that,

I think is something about what counts as morally relevant.

And if we can say that clearly, then what is arbitrary?

Maybe it will be more obvious and kind of, it'll seem like there's good grounding for

why we're saying something is arbitrary.

>> Yeah, I think one thing Rawls wants to do is, he wants to rule out,

facts about groups, like specific names, from general moral principle.

And sometimes he says he thinks that's just a general thing about morality,

that morality doesn't just apply to one group over here, or

take the point of view of one specific group of people.

So, like a moral, a rule that says, you know,

everyone does what the king says, isn't really a moral rule,

Rawls thinks, because it takes the point of view of the king.

It doesn't take the point of view of morality.

And similarly a rule that says group a serves group b

is in general in the right way.

It isn't, it it fails the constraint of morality,

because it just looks likes it in, in favor of group a's interest.

For instance, because I think that's, that's one of the reasons you know,

throughout some morally relevant facts.

Although that doesn't necessarily tell you what, what's morally relevant and

what isn't, just that, whatever your principles of justice are, at least,

Rawls' things, they shouldn't include, like the names of groups or individuals or

something like that, >> Yeah, that seems, that seems right,

that there is a kind of, important difference between a principal that

specifies a you know, particular group of some kind and

one that is stated more generally, so that in principal could apply to everybody.

And you know, so in the lectures we talk some about this idea of

the expanding circle of morality, where it isn't just about you know,

treating other people well who we happen to know, who are our friends or maybe our

family, maybe initially that's how some moral thinking got started, who knows?

There's a complicated story there about the history and evolution of morality.

But there might be something to learn from those in, initial thoughts about morality.

And once we see what seems to matter, it might be facts that you know,

while the person is sentient or

conscious and has certain kinds of interests and experiences, and

maybe that's enough to start making it seem like morality gets hold.

And so, what we want to do are have moral principles that apply to all of

those people.

But then other facts don't seem relevant.

And I think those are supposed to be the ones that are glossed as arbitrary.

But I, I think it, it's tricky to say, well where are we going to draw that line?

So one example that is controversial is say people's talents.

And so, some people want to say look, no,

that's, that's not an arbitrary fact about us.

Our abilities or our talents e,

especially things like how hard we were willing to work or our efforts.

Some people thing, no that's a core factor about us, and

so it's okay to distribute things based on whether or not we work really hard.

But then other people point out well, you know, how hard you're willing to work is

itself a function of the genes you have, your environment growing up,

your experiences, your opportunities, your sense of what you can accomplish.

And so, and some of those things might not be things we're responsible for.

And so, I think there's a real back and forth about that.

And that's sort of at the center of a lot of these big political debates.

>> And, and you could imagine someone saying to Rawls,

well what about a principle,

like everyone gets what they deserve on the basis of their talents, right?

And, that, that would be something that's generally stated, that still might ref,

refer to things that he takes to be morally arbitrary facts, like, you know,

how you fared in what he calls, the genet, the,

the, natural lottery at birth, or something.

Right, so if you happened to, come into a very, you know, if you had to, come, be

born into many talents or if you were born into a relatively well-off socioeconomic

position, Rawls wants to say that's a morally, morally arbitrary fact about you.

But at the same time, that's a kind of fact that would feed into a principle

like, everyone gets what they deserve.

And Rawls also wants to rule out those kinds of, things as well,

those sorts of principles.

>> Well, we could talk here a little bit about the opportunities that we want to

afford to everyone kind of at a baseline level.

And those kinds of opportunities,

we want to say that things like talent are morally arbitrary.

But then, after that kind of starting point,

then maybe some of the opportunities that people get afterwards could be

a little bit more talent-based, like, you wouldn't have to have the exact same,

like, way of thinking about opportunities all throughout, right?

>> Yeah so, maybe, so everyone should have access to education, or

to shelter, some of these basic things?

You might think, whether or not you're very you know, talented or

you work really hard, at least that might be one thought.

And then, if you wanted to work really hard, in a certain way, or

spend all of your time doing one thing, or

had a certain kind of talent, then maybe you could get extra, something like that.

Yeah, I think that's definitely an idea that you see a lot in a lot of

contemporary societies, something like,

there should be a sort of minimum that everyone gets kind of no matter what,

just because they're people and they have certain kinds of interests.

And then we can depart from that in some cases.

But there's big debates about like, when that's permissible and

how, how we should think about the ways in which people actually get

rewarded say through a market economy or something, where you might think certain

things are actually really hard work but you don't get paid very much to do them.

So I'm, I'm a professor, I work pretty hard,

it's not actually that hard, like great life.

I get to do what I want most of the time.

And I know people who work really, really hard in jobs that they

don't particularly like, and every day feels like work.

But they don't get paid the same amount and in many cases they get paid much less.

And so there's questions about distribution based on,

what the market thinks is valuable in terms of what it's going to reward,

from a perspective of talent, so called.

And I think that's a, a hard issue.

because we might think, well, markets are good for some things, but if we're just

going to let that determine what people get we might really end up in a situation

where you get a lot, but it's detached from how hard you're really working.

This idea of hard work in the background I think

>> So all that was very helpful, but

I'm going to actually continue the discussion about

who determines what's morally arbitrary?

Right? So, at least one way to

think about the issue is just liberalism,

if it's anything is a theory that wants to get rid of unfair advantages, right?

So, any advantages that come from the caste system or a feudal system, it

seems that liberalism is going to want to get rid, rid of those advantages, right?

So if we, and we've been speaking a lot about talent, right?

But even that is a sort of ambiguous term, right?

Talent seems to be particular to the thing in question, or the goal in question.

Right, to say the partic, say if we're discussing a job, speaking a language

could be a particular talent, right, if someone is trying to work in a bank or for

any position in the US, the United States, where they're expected to speak English.

But they're coming from say countries, let's say they're coming from Mozambique,

where they're not speaking the language.

they, their, they don't speak English.

In that particular circumstance, then it seems that speaking English is a talent,

but nevertheless that person, so

this puts the person from Mozambique at an unfair advantage.

Right so, what do we say in those circumstances where this person is at

an unfair advantage, because of the particular circumstance that they were

born in to, but nevertheless,

there's not really any alternative ways in which we could set a fair, qualification?

>> Yeah, I think it's a hard question, what's going to count as talent that we

don't mind coming into play, and then talent's where it does seem like,

well that's really arbitrary whether you have that particular talent or not.

And you know, one might worry that in particular, in any particular society,

there's going to be certain kinds of things that could get awarded.

But you could have that talent somewhere else and there'd be no option.

So actually, I think Nozick, Robert Nozick uses this example of,

like, a professional basketball player.

well, they're fortunate, because they have all the background structure of

the league in which they can play.

And so the particular odd talent of being able to dunk a basketball on a ten

foot high hoop, comes into play, and you can get millions of dollars for it.

But that same exact person with that same exact skill, was moved somewhere else,

they wouldn't get any rewards from that.

And so, similarly, with language skills or

all kinds of different things that we might have or

not have we might worry both that it's arbitrary whether we have it, and

it's arbitrary whether it can get rewarded in some way or another on the market.

And so I think those are the kinds of things that Rawls was concerned about,

and wanted us to sort of reflect on, in terms of

thinking about whether those facts should enter in to distribution questions.

yeah.

>> And, and also, I mean, as we mentioned, it's hard to measure the viable talent

without already having some idea of the way society is, but

we might think the original question we started with is how society ought to be.

Right, so if we really want to know the fair measure of the value of talent or

something like that, we might already,

we might need an idea of what kind of society is just or correct, before we

can determine that some talents are worth something and some talents aren't.

Right, so it maybe for instance in a justly arranged society.

There's not such great difference between the value of some language abilities or

others, or there may be, right, and that would be something that would have to do,

perhaps with the just arrangement of society or its history or

something like that.

But those would be the kinds of things we would need to determine first, before we

determine whether or not some abilities or talents are worth more than others.

>> Yeah so how, how should we go about doing that?

I mean, it's a hard problem, and I think, yeah?

>> Well Rawls says, you don't take talents into consideration when you determine how

society ought to be, right?

So, that would be one, one way to do that, right, is to not take those things into

consideration when determining how society should be structured.

>> Well I guess the way that he gets there, is he wants to talk about

the original position if we all imagined, not knowing facts about ourselves.

And we could be talented in this way, or not, we just don't know.

Then we would realize that those things shouldn't really come into

play when we're deciding what opportunities we should be given.

So that's, that idea of kind of imagining, if we didn't know things about ourselves,

what we would still think we deserved,

is one way of starting to kind of decide what counts as morally relevant or not.

>> Yeah, I think it's certainly helpful for getting us to not go in with

certain pre, preconceived, you know, biases with respect to what's important.

because we often think, oh, what we're good at,

that's the important stuff, and that's what should get rewarded.

But maybe that's just, you know, kind of bias on our part.

yeah.

Now, of course, one, one place that Rawls get some pushback here is really, well,

how do we know what we're not supposed to know in the original position, like,

what do we end up knowing about ourselves?

And I think that's a really hard question, like, he wo,

wants to work with some relatively thin sense of who we are,

that we could actually use in this kind of original position behind a veil of

ignorance to make judgements about society, the basic structure that

would be just on the principals we'd want to regulate that structure.

But I think it can be really tricky to actually figure out well what's left when-

>> Yeah. >> We strip everything away and

how do we know whether something should be stripped away?

>> Yeah you get the sense that he wants to,

kind of identify what we all have in common say, and race and gender and

talent are not something that everyone has in common, so they shouldn't matter.

But its very hard to say what all humans have in common, if anything, so

nobody's done it yet, I guess as much as we'd like to.

>> But I do think that's a helpful way to think about it like,

what is it that we have in common sort of as human beings in some sense.

because, it does seem like, well that's at least a place to

make grounds some kind of floor, that we want something, just in, so

far as we are human beings that may have certain needs.

And so we might think that's a, a place to start, let's, let's begin there.

And this I think a big background question that Daniel was sort of raising with the,

the whole question of who decides these things, because we might

we might worry that some of our own views about what really matters or

what's really important about all of us, can be somewhat parochial.

It can be somewhat relative to our particular situation, or

particular place in time.

So, we can imagine these same conversations happening at different

points in history, or different societies with different groups of people.

And, we might worry, they would come to say really different things about

what all of us have in common.

And the us there, might be really different,

it might just apply to white men who own property or something.

That's the relevant group that we need to think about what they have in common.

At other places, they might have very different views.

Now we've sort of, in, in some places they would have said what really matters is

that we all have souls given to us from god, like that's the core.

Many philosophers today want to move away from that kind of religious foundation,

thinking about what,

what do we have in common if we sort of suspend that kind of question.

And then, we get down to things like, well we're all conscious in a certain way or

we have certain kinds of capabilities or we, you know, the Nussbaum inside of you.

And then there's questions about that.

Well, do we all have the same kinds of capabilities?

Is that what really makes us, sort of morally important as human beings?

Any thoughts about that?

>> Yeah, I think if we think of the strategy that Rawls has,

where we need to exclude information that people might use to gain

unfair advantage in a bargaining position.

What we're going to have to do is really,

its going to come down to us having a list of things that we think are morally

arbitrary before we enter that bargaining position.

And rolls has his own list and some of the things are relatively uncontroversial at

least in the United States in the 20th and 21st centuries,

things like race class gender, stuff like that, maybe your religious faith.

And then Rawls has things that are maybe more controversial, like your talents or

maybe, you know, some facts about your upbringing that, that some people may

still take to be morally relevant in the United States today.

But ultimately it's going to come down to what that list should be and

what that argument is for including or excluding things from that list.

And so Rawls' argument for excluding things like talents, or

that we already need an idea of what kind of society would be just before we know

what talents are worth.

But there may be other things that, we,

we may need arguments to figure out what other things we need to leave off as well.

But we, that, presumably that would be the work of,

of philosophy, if people wanted to continue that strategy.

>> And the main thing that would be more innovating best idea is intuitions.

because you could see that while we stand out as sort of fatal privilege position.

And our intuition would certainly be different from-

>> Mm-Hm. >> Someone in a sort of

less fortunate position, right?

So we may think, well of course, those who have better talents are able to

receive better circumstances on the free market.

But someone who's coming from an area in which not many people around them

where people are have a shortage of food and water and, and so on and

many other things that are required to live a fulfilling life may think well, no,

from this sort of original position,

the only thing that will make sense is a strict form of equality.

Whatsoever and since these people aren't sort of norm,

typically arguing, in these academic papers then what,

who, who, how the, how does those sort of intuitions get counted, right?

>> Yeah, I think it's, a real question too about, sort of,

who's doing the philosophy, who's included in the conversation,

what views are we taking into account?

because we might worry if the way philosophy works, is by thinking about it,

setting out some cases, trying to offer certain factors as relevant or not, and

then making a judgement about whether they seem morally arbitrary or not.

We might really want to make sure the people included in that isn't just

some elite subset of people, educated in some very narrow set of traditions,

with very comfortable material circumstances that might be

really different than, you know, 70 or 80 or 90% of the world.

And I think that's an important thing about, you know, how we

go about doing philosophy and trying to open up philosophy to more people.

You know, really not just have it be something done by the very elites,

sort of in some ways, offering views that seem to,

if anything, kind of justify the status quo in which they're doing pretty well.

Or maybe offer some substantial modifications to the status quo, but in

one direction rather than another, based on sort of where they're coming from.

>> I, I feel like, some of the things, that stay off the list, that we argue for

are just out of intuition, right?

So things like race and gender, at least with the way

Rawls approaches the question, and many philosophers have approached it,

is just to say intuitively, those are just morally arbitrary facts about you.

but, although, although perhaps a good argument could be given also for

excluding them from the,

or including them on the list of things we don't consider about ourselves.

But then there are other things that maybe require further argument, like remove,

like not considering talent, you know, Rawls gives an argument for that.

And so that would be some of the,

it shouldn't just rest on intuition because it's controversial.

And ideally, what we would do if we have an original position is,

we would consider the broadest sets of reasonable arguments that we can,

from people with different intuitions and we'd consider those, and

hopefully we would have some sort of agreement going into that position,

about what sorts of things should be arbitrary and what shouldn't.

Although, you know, possibly you wouldn't get agreement.

That would be a problem for that view, I would think.

>> So, earlier you said, that the focus ought, may not just be about the society

that we are, but also the society that we ought to be, or that we want to be.

and, when, thinking about those issues, we may actually think that, you know,

this is a society with, many disadvantages in the past of people of particular races,

particular genders and we want to move to a society in which we're

achieving equality along racial or gender lines, right?

So, for that reason, someone going into their original position, and, and, you,

you've mentioned this in a lecture but, like it may not, sometimes we have our own

prejudices and we can't, sort of strip away, these sort of features from,

our identity when thinking about, ourself in an original position.

So, we're all suggesting an alternative path,

some, someone's acting as a representative for, for us, right?

So, but, either, either whether it's, ourselves or a representative,

you can imagine someone going into the particular situation saying, well I have

this goal in mind, I have this goal to achieve racial justice, or gender justice.

And, if that's their goal going in, then one would imagine that those

are things that ought to be considered morally relevant in a initial position,

where we're choosing how to distribute resources in society.

Roundtable Discussion: Question 1

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