第13讲：《谎言的教训》
康德的道德理论，严格到不允许有任何例外情况，他认为如果说谎，即使是善意的谎言，都是对自己尊严的侵犯。用一个假设的案例来考验他的理论：如果你的朋友藏在你家，一个杀手敲你的门来问他在哪里，你会对他说什么–不要说谎–来救你的朋友？这引发了对“误导性的真理”的讨论-以及对克林顿总统利用精确的语言来否认与莱温斯基的性关系，而没有直接向公众撒谎的讨论。
How can duty and autonomy go together? What’s the great dignity in answering to duty?
Kant: Acting out of duty is following a moral law that you impose on yourself. That makes duty compatible with freedom.
How is a categorical imperative possible? 定言命令怎样成为可能？
Kant: We need to make a distinction between two standpoints from which we can make sense of our experience. As an object of experience, I belong to the sensible world, there my actions are determined by the laws of nature. But as a subject of experience, I inhabit an intelligible world, here being independent of the laws of nature I am capable of autonomy. “Only from this second standpoint can I regard myself as free, for to be independent of determination by causes in the sensible world is to be free.” “When we think of ourselves as free, we transfer ourselves into the intelligible world as members and recognize the autonomy of the will.”
Only because the idea of freedom makes me a member of an intelligible world, categorical imperative becomes possible.
Case of “the murderer at the door”
Kant: lying is wrong, it’s at odds with the categorical imperative.
Benjamin Constant (French philosopher): what if a murderer came to your door, looking for your friend who’s hiding in your house. The murderer asked you point blank, “Is your friend in your house?”
Kant: lying even to the murderer at the door is wrong. Once you start taking consequences into account to carve out exceptions to the categorical imperative, you’ve given up the whole moral framework.
Sandel’s defense for Kant: Is there a way that you could avoid telling a lie without selling out your friend?
Student1: make a plan with friend, “hey I’ll tell the murderer you are in the house, so escape.” He’s still in the house when I tell the murderer he is, but he won’t be later. (- -)
Student2: I don’t know where he is (he might not be locked in the closet. (= =)
Misleading but still true…
Then our question is, whether there is a moral difference between an outright lie and a misleading truth.
Example 1: “What do you think about the tie I gave you?” “I’ve never seen a tie like that before.” （我要看不下去了好累啊- -）
Example 2: Lewinsky affair of Bill Clinton: “I did not have sexual relations with that woman Miss Lewinsky. I never told anybody to lie, not a single time, never. These allegations are false.”
“In his own mind his definition was not…” （印象中克林顿的点在于oral不是…）
Motivations are the same: keep people from knowing the truth
You are misleading the truth while at the same time telling the truth and honoring the moral law and staying within the bounds of the categorical imperative. (honoring the moral law also as part of the motive in misleading truth but not in lie tellings)
第14讲：《协议就是协议》
Sandel介绍了现代哲学家John Rawls和他的“假定契约”理论。Rawls认为，实现最公正和公平的治理的唯一途径是，如果所有立法者都平等的站到谈判桌前。试想，如果他们都在“无知的面纱”之后 –在他们的个人身份信息暂时不公开（他们的种族，阶级，个人兴趣）的时候，他们必须就一系列法律达成共识。Rawls认为，只有这样，治理机构才能商定真正公平公正的原则。
Kant: the contract that generates justice is an idea of reason. It’s not an actual contract among actual men and women gathered in a constitutional convention. Actual men and women gathered in real constitutional convention would have different interests, values, aims, and there would also be differences in bargaining power （好独特的点）, and differences of knowledge among them.
“A contract that generates principles of right is merely an idea of reason, but it has undoubted practical reality, because it can oblige every legislator to frame his laws in such a way that they could have been produced by the united will of the whole nation.”
What is the moral force of a hypothetical contract, a contract that never happened?
John Rawls (a modern philosopher), A Theory of Justice
Rawls’ theory of justice in broad outline is parallel to Kant’s in two important respects
1. Rawls: “Each person possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override… The rights secured by justice are not subject to political bargaining or to the calculus of social interests.”
2. Principles of justice properly understood can be derived from a hypothetical social contract, not an actual one
“veil of ignorance”无知的面纱
The way to arrive at the basic rights that we must respect, the basic framework of rights and duties is to imagine that we were gathered together trying to choose the principles to govern our collective lives without knowing certain important particular fact about ourselves.
Imagine that we are gathered in an original position of equality, and what assures the equality is the veil of ignorance.
Again, what is the moral force of this hypothetical agreement? Is it weaker or stronger than the actual social agreement?
To answer this question, we have to look hard at the moral force of actual contracts.
1. How do actual contracts bind me or obligate me?
2. How do actual real life contracts justify the terms that they produce? They don’t. Actual contracts are not self-sufficient moral instruments of any actual contract or agreement.
Moral force: actual agreements bind us in two ways:
1. Consent-based, points to the idea of autonomy. When I make a contract, the obligation is one that is self-imposed, and that carries a certain moral weight, independent of other considerations.
2. Benefit-based, points to the idea of reciprocity. I can have an obligation to you in so far as you do something for me.
(Question: you have to define what your benefit is, it may varies across people. Example that we should pay the car repair if they fixed the car, but what if we want the car broken? Painter painted Hume’s house blue but Hume doesn’t like the color blue?)
The moral limits of actual contracts:
The fact that two people agree to some exchange does not mean that the terms of their agreement are fair （这里想到了expected value和expected utility）
Main idea: actual contracts have their moral force in virtue of two distinguishable ideals: autonomy and reciprocity. But in real life every actual contract may fail to realize the ideals that give contracts their moral force in the first place. The ideal of autonomy may not be realized because there may be a difference in the bargaining power of the parties, the ideal of reciprocity may not be realized because there may be a difference of knowledge between the parties. Imagine a contract where the ideals of autonomy and reciprocity were not subject to contingency, but were guaranteed to be realized, what kind of contract would that have to be? That is the idea behind Rawls’ claim that the way to think about justice is from the standpoint of a hypothetical contract, behind a veil of ignorance that creates the condition of equality by ruling out the differences in power and knowledge.