Philosophy & What Matters. Ep. 32: Ethics and Law with Garrett Cullity (ANU)

hi i'm jason joaquin and welcome to philosophy and what matters where we discuss things that matter from a philosophical point of view our topic for today is ethics and law now ethics tells us what's good and what we partly ought to do on the other hand law tells us what's legal and what we legally want to do but what's the relationship between the two now here's to discuss uh this question is professor garrett quality professor of philosophy at the australian national university so welcome professor gary thank you very much it's uh it's great to be on your show thank you okay so before we get into answering the question uh let's get into your philosophical background first so how did you get into philosophy how did you get started in philosophy yeah so i was an undergraduate at the university of western australia and i was one of these people who couldn't really make up his mind um what i wanted to specialize in so in my first year of university i did philosophy french english and maths and then as i went through i narrowed things down and i ended up doing a joint honours degree in philosophy and english literature i think i progressively just discovered that the questions i was most interested in were the philosophical ones and then went on from there to do some postgraduate study at oxford in the uk where i did a thesis on an ethics topic and um discovered that that's that's really um what makes me tick and what i wanted to do with the rest of my life yeah so why did you end up specializing in ethics and political philosophy i suppose it was because um the questions that it asks seem to me really important ones i mean that they're ones that engage most of us in in some way and philosophy just offered a way of thinking about these with rigor and clarity and uh depth as well so uh it's it's a subject where uh you keep asking the questions until you get to a point where um you think you've really reached a foundation from which you can answer them okay so who influenced you to pursue a career in academic philosophy you know i think that probably the most influential people were my um phd supervisors um so i had three three of those um one was jonathan glover um there was james griffin as well and derek parker and uh these three people all really impressed me um both with their intellect uh the the intellectual seriousness um the quality of their own work and just uh the way in which they were able to convey this sense of um the importance of philosophy and and the possibility of progress as well and i suppose the support they gave me was was really quite influential in convincing me that um i could go on with this um as a professional philosopher yeah it's interesting so uh you were your supervisor was derek parfit one of your supervisors how was he as uh yeah so he was one of my food advisors well he was a very impressive man um so uh you you kind of got the impression with him that um there wasn't really a limit to the amount of um philosophy that he could absorb and the i suppose the way in which she would engage with your work as well was always looking for um where it was headed and he was able to uh really offer an overview of the structure of your work and the directions in which you might take it um so yeah it was it was a great um uh privilege really to to work with um someone who's so intellectually gifted and i suppose i had a fair amount of interaction with him after um after i've finished my study as well um uh reading and commenting on his own work yeah so derek was one of the best it's one of the best moral philosophers that we have around but let's get into that so how do we define moral philosophy or ethics yeah so i think um words like morality and ethics get used with slightly different meanings and i tend to think of there being four different sorts of ideas that get attached to ethics and morality so one of these is just this very general question how should i live um a second somewhat narrower question is what's the right way to interact with others what are the appropriate forms of regard for others um a third kind of topic um which some would say is uh a a topic which is part of our culture but not part of all ethical cultures is the topic of accountability to others so responsibility being held to standards for which you can be blamed if you don't don't meet them and which give rise to attitudes such as guilt resentment indignation um also you know their positive counterparts um and attributions of obligation and some people see this as a quite a culturally specific phenomenon which they reserve the term morality for and then the fourth thing is connected to the standards of behavior that we should publicly advocate and abide by and uh when you hear people talking about professional ethics they're typically talking about the fourth thing um and i think uh one way of thinking of moral philosophy is it's the topic that deals with all of those things i myself like to keep things simple so i tend to think of morality in the second of those ways so morality concerns the other regarding how we should um treat others and the constraints on our own behavior that of proper regard for others places on us and then it's the business of moral philosophy to say what they are and why okay so what are the dominant ethical theories in this regard yeah so i think um you can see them as belonging to four main families um and the first of them is probably the most familiar so um what moral theories typically try to do is to find one foundation for ethics or morality and perhaps the most popular one is a foundation in uh welfare in concern for the welfare of or interests of of others and the most famous uh philosophical theory of morality utilitarianism is a theory of that kind that says your welfare is your happiness and the right thing to do is to take into account not just your happiness but everyone's happiness or the happiness of uh every person or a non-human animal that has happiness or welfare and to maximize that impartially so that's one kind of view a second kind of uh moral theory focuses on respect for autonomy and the kantian tradition uh tends to emphasize that so that's less about me providing others with things that benefit them but me providing the space for others to lead their own lives to to make their own decisions about themselves and i think restrictions on paternalism on forcing people to do things for their own good appeal to that second kind of source so that's that's two ideas a third one is connected to cooperating together towards the common good and so-called contractualist theories of morality tend to emphasize that third idea and i suppose in the descriptive sciences look at trying to explain where morality comes from and how it has evolved its way into us an emphasis on dispositions to cooperate in groups tend to be prominent and then the fourth idea which is very ancient one connects ethics or morality to achieving perfect excellence as a human being so this sort of relies on the idea that there are capacities that we have as humans and then goodness in a human being involves developing those capacities to the highest extent um i i i think it um it's useful to see um certainly moral philosophy in the western tradition as developing those four ideas in often in competition with each other and then there are some theories that try to combine them in in some way so interesting so these are the four dominant theories you have utilitarianism the kantian judy base yeah yeah your virtual ethics as well i wonder yeah yeah because in your work you're emphasizing these things as well but what do you think is i am right here here right good so so um i think a view of any of those four kinds so the welfarist the respect based the contractualist or the perfectionist kind of view are typically developed as what i would call a monistic kind of theory so they uh ultimately aim to identify one master principle for the whole of morality which is based around one of those four ideas um and in my view so i'm i'm a pluralist and i think it's helpful to think of morality that's to say the other regarding um part of how we ought to live as fundamentally based around the first three of those ideas so i think of concern for others welfare respect for their autonomy and then a willingness to join in with worthwhile collective activities as three independently important parts of treating other people well and relating to other people well so i think if i tell someone say i tell a young child not to be selfish if they're a little philosopher in the making they might um come back to me and say well what exactly do you mean by selfishness what's selfishness and what's unselfishness and i think actually that it's three different things so one way of being selfish is uh not to take other people's welfare into account another is to be domineering and push them around make them do things even for their own good and the third one is just not to be prepared to join in when you see something worthwhile that's being done or so it's something that's being done to produce some public benefit and you take the benefit you're not not prepared to pitch in towards paying the cost um and then the way i think the fourth tradition works um is that one form of excellence in a in a human life or one way of being good um is to respond to those first three sorts of moral reasons so to be unselfish in those those three different ways um so that's the way i um want to kind of put together the insights from those different traditions perhaps here's another way of putting it so we want to be excellent individuals we want to be good individuals and because of that we need to look out for the welfare waters respect their economy and cooperate with them in some cases yeah yeah i think so and um i think one of one of the ideas that the ancient philosophers had was that that's actually a way of benefiting yourself so it's a way of achieving what's good for you is to be excellent in various ways and i think while perhaps it's overly optimistic to think that that's always true so sometimes being morally good can can be self-sacrificing um i think for most of us in most circumstances it actually is true um that it's actually a way of uh flourishing yourself and achieving what's good for you is to relate to other people well um and there are different ways of doing that and those those three ways i think of as the um three basic uh forms of moral um goodness in relation to others that's a good way of doing it so you're a pluralist about the foundations of morality there's no one foundation of morality but i wonder how it reflects your other focus of your work which are issues in political philosophy issues concerning rights equality and citizenship could you tell us something about what you're doing in this area of philosophy yeah so um i think a first point to make um which again seems to be illuminating about this this way of thinking about the foundational ethical ideas is i think you can find different political cultures which emphasize one of those three ideas more strongly so so you've got the what i suppose i would think of maybe this is a bit of a caricature the scandinavian um welfarist uh kind of political ideology where you have um high taxation and you think of the central political value has been looking after people's welfare a more american idea emphasizes the second of these sorts of thoughts that's personal liberty creating a state and regulating a state in a way that maximizes individual freedom and autonomy and then the third kind of idea which i suppose i think is most strongly emphasized in some of the asian political cultures is the idea of uh contribution towards um a collective uh enterprise or activity so so that the central political virtue is seen as um contributing towards the activities of the group um uh now that's that's a bit of um an exaggeration and i think many of us would think that a really good political community is organized in some way around each of those values now i suppose the the other thing that is prominent in my approach towards political philosophy is to think of the kinds of foundations that might be found for thinking of democracy as an important [Music] way of organizing a political community is via principally the application of this third sort of source that's to say there are um things that the group a group can ask of from me just by way of participating in um worthwhile collective activity and one application of this is to decision making itself in a group so if there's a group of us who are given a task to decide on and we have to decide on it together um then one um worthwhile activity i can be asked to uh play my part in or do my share towards is conducting reasonable collective decision making together and that involves being bound by the decisions that we've reached and abiding by them even if i didn't agree with what the majority has decided on and i think accepting the umpire's decision as it were is actually an important part of being a reasonable participant in what a group does together um this is like a coordination and cooperation game um yes so there are elements of that um but i think uh one one way in which we resolve problems we would otherwise have with um coordination problems or problems of cooperation is that um we recognize that one basic form of decency is to pitch in and contribute towards what we're doing together and i think empirical work shows that um uh there is quite a um natural and widespread disposition that most of us have towards at least conditionally cooperating with others um saying look i'll i'll uh play fair with you as long as you play fair with me um and that uh comes quite naturally to most of us yeah so this brings us to our main question so moral philosophers political philosophers are talking about things that we ought to do what considerations we must have in well treating each other but how does that idea connect with law or legal matters yeah so um i suppose it principally does so as i see it in the following way so one question we face together is how are we going to formally regulate ourselves as a community and the laws we come up with are our answer to that now it seems to me that there are then connections between ethics and law that go in two directions so um one is the direction of um laws dependence on ethics and one way in which there is a dependence is when we ask um how does law get its authority over us where by authority we mean more than just um that it may be wise for me or um prudent not to break the law because if i get caught and punished that's going to be bad for me but this thought that there's a demand that the law can rightly make of me and that the rest of the community can make of me to comply with the law and uh i think there are really two ways in which the law gets its authority and both of them um appeal to a moral underpinning so one is just if we appear appeal to the idea that we're sustaining the good of public order law is important because it um uh secures for us uh social order um which it would be terrible for each of us to be without um then one uh basic form of contributing to um the common good is to be abiding by um laws that secure this good for us the good of public order um so that uh again seems to me to appeal to the third of these forms of unselfishness that's to say uh willingness to play my part or do my share towards our all together sustaining some public good um and then the second way in which i think law gets its authority um is through this thing i was mentioning um just a short while ago respect for democratic decision-making so if there are fair and impartial procedures for deciding what we're going to do together and this includes regulating ourselves by agreeing on laws then respect for the process of democratic decision-making which itself is better than a for for each of us than a complete free-for-all does require that i accept the decisions that the group as a whole has reached through some fair procedure um so i think in those two ways law gets its authority uh from morality um and then sometimes the point of the law is to enforce morality where there are really important parts of um interpersonal standards of behavior such as not assaulting people and fundamentally violating their own autonomy and their own rights then it's reasonable for us as a community to say we're going to provide strong incentives for people not to do that we're going to protect them against being mistreated and we as a community are going to insist that these standards are abided by and that's that's where legislation comes in i like the picture here about authority and the legal force or sorry the affirmative force of laws i wonder how you would react to a legal positivist who would say that well loss and morality are separate things so you can't ground one to the other yeah so i think in practice um we do uh when we're giving reasons for um instituting a a law we do appeal to moral reasons and it's hard to see how there's anything problematic without doing so uh i suppose where i would part company from uh positivists most fundamentally um is over the the question what it takes for something not just to be a standard that's going to disincentivize behavior but a standard that really can claim to have authority over us and i think there has to be we have to resort to background moral principles in order to answer that question so a positivist picture of law where where you say look if you're giving an account of what law is [Music] is that is just completely exhausted by facts about uh legislative processes um the instant institution of certain regulations and then uh the existence of certain consequences for breaking them that's that's what it is for something to be a law um that falls short of there being a standard which has um authority over us um so someone could come along and uh threaten to impose a penalty on me um and it might be wise or sensible for me to try to avoid it um it's a separate matter for someone to come along and say here's a standard that actually is not just a an incentive that's been provided to you to act differently than you otherwise would but something that is an expression of the community's authority to require you to do something and i think that does require a moral background and can't be accounted for in a purely positivistic way yeah so where where's the picture that you're giving us is that well here's the law it's grounded on morality or some principle and actually it enforces reinforces our views of morality as well i wonder though how that picture affects how we think about real life issues like climate change uh rights of strangers that you have worked on and international aid as well yeah um so i think it does so in a few ways so one is um we need to ask what laws should there be um and when we're um confronted with these issues either of significant international injustice in in connection with the disparities between um material well-being around the world or these serious problems of coordination that arise surrounding climate change which i would think uh also involves uh a fair element of the first kind of issue of injustice as well um given that um the people who are going to suffer the most from climate changes um typically the people who've contributed at least to producing it um then there are questions for us in deciding uh what law should be which are moral questions but i think um there's also a couple of other issues that come up which are less straightforward to deal with so so one would be um how far do we think we can um resolve uh global issues like this through uh legislation and then in the background there's uh a really big picture question about the extent to which it's actually desirable to have institutions at a global level that actually do have the authority of being able to legislate for the entire global population and i think at uh right now particularly with the issues surrounding climate change we're we're sort of looking for ways of fight finding international institutions that fall short of actually legislating for the world but can provide us with forums in which um we can form agreements with incentives to comply with them and penalties for not complying with them which might uh have the function of coordinating um our actions towards uh something that works to the benefit of everyone um and i suppose what's going on now is is really a huge and very important global experiment in how far we can get in doing that um i'll just add one one other thing so i think with several of these um questions in fact all of the ones that you mentioned the question concerning climate change um rights of strangers international aid um there's a question for each of us that arises given that we don't have legislation that has yet uh solved uh these problems what any of us uh individually morally ought to be doing and i suppose many of us would would think at a minimum we shouldn't ourselves be contributing to making things worse um and more than that where we've got the capacity to uh kind of help with one small corner of the problem ourselves and could do so without significant cost to ourselves we face the question of why we're not prepared to do that and that's a moral question that applies to us independently of how we think large-scale regulations should should be conducted okay so on a more personal though what's your advice for those who want to get into professional academic philosophy okay so um i think this is a lot tougher now than when i was um a graduate student first coming into the profession um it's just a lot harder to establish yourself as an academic philosopher than it used to be and i don't say this in order to put anyone off but i think one tip that i have for for someone who's considering academic philosophy and making a career in the profession is as you set out you do need to have a plan b so you know give it a a a real red-hot go but have some idea of what direction you might go in if uh doesn't come off but having said that my main bit of advice would be to think of your path into the profession as having two streams to it so one is just really to follow your intellectual interests work as deeply and rigorously on the questions that interest you the most as you can so so that that's a that's a kind of um uh advice to in a way be be narrow develop your your own writing and your own research um as deeply and uh rigorously as as you can so but that's that's only one track and the other the other track um is i think to um just get involved in as many aspects of of the profession as you're given an opportunity to do so go to lots of conferences do lots of teaching get involved in professional organizations do outreach activities just do all the all the philosophy you can um and get a feel for all of the aspects of the profession um and uh establishing yourself as a professional philosopher requires being able to juggle those two things at the same time and i think finding finding a balance between them is something we all need to do and the earlier you start doing it um the better so this career is worth it or is your career worth it absolutely yeah so i i feel extremely lucky and privileged to be able to spend a lifetime thinking about important difficult questions you know having the ability to do that having having the opportunity to share ideas with other people and and to teach i think it's um uh yeah i um wouldn't trade it for anything else okay so on that note uh thanks again professor garrett khalidi for this interview and for you guys join me again for another episode of philosophy and what matters where we discuss things that matter from a philosophical point of view cheers