1 00:00:04,190 --> 00:00:09,290 I'm Tom Douglas, director of research at the Oxford Health Centre, and I'll be chairing this third lecture. 2 00:00:10,360 --> 00:00:16,660 They're welcome to the to the third and final of Professor Tom Hare because oxygen hero lectures on knowledge and achievement. 3 00:00:17,450 --> 00:00:23,470 And thanks for joining us. And thanks especially to those of you have managed to make it to all, all three of the lectures. 4 00:00:25,180 --> 00:00:27,219 Then we might have a slightly smaller crowd than we had on Monday. 5 00:00:27,220 --> 00:00:32,280 But I think I'm also right in saying that we used to have a much faster rate of drop off than this. 6 00:00:32,370 --> 00:00:37,959 And you have achieved you have achieved something significant in such a low rate of fall of attendance. 7 00:00:37,960 --> 00:00:43,300 And I think also that's good evidence that many people have been finding these lectures highly compelling. 8 00:00:44,650 --> 00:00:49,150 So I'm going to let Tom introduce the topic of the lecture and how it relates to what came before. 9 00:00:49,150 --> 00:00:55,570 But let me just mention that the sort of logistical arrangements will be the same as for the previous two lectures. 10 00:00:55,570 --> 00:01:00,340 So we'll have Tom will speak for about 55 to 60 minutes. 11 00:01:01,120 --> 00:01:04,840 Then we'll have just one or 2 minutes for anyone who needs to leave to do so. 12 00:01:05,080 --> 00:01:09,580 And then we'll have some discussion that can go until 6:15 tonight. 13 00:01:10,030 --> 00:01:14,320 But we do again need to finish promptly so that Tom can be whisked off to another dinner. 14 00:01:16,240 --> 00:01:19,330 Okay. So I'm sure we'll be pressed for time when it comes to the discussion. 15 00:01:19,330 --> 00:01:25,240 So let me add without any further delay and over to Professor Tom Hecker for his third and final lecture. 16 00:01:25,270 --> 00:01:38,370 Thank you. I should say thanks again to the centre for the invitation. 17 00:01:38,380 --> 00:01:42,850 This has been an exciting and fruitful week and thanks to you for. 18 00:01:44,430 --> 00:01:51,600 Not being so much diminishing marginal attendance in subsequent lectures. 19 00:01:51,630 --> 00:01:55,950 Okay. So my my first lecture proposed an account of the intrinsic good of perfection, 20 00:01:55,950 --> 00:02:01,200 of the intrinsic perfectionist goods of knowledge and achievement as such are in general. 21 00:02:01,830 --> 00:02:05,030 The second added an account of degrees of value in these goods. 22 00:02:05,040 --> 00:02:05,279 Therefore, 23 00:02:05,280 --> 00:02:13,769 what makes some truth more note worth knowing than others and some goals more worth achieving Its core was a value for both goods of generality, 24 00:02:13,770 --> 00:02:18,120 understood as having two forms that I called intrinsic and relative generality. 25 00:02:18,510 --> 00:02:23,370 In this third lecture, I am going to try to draw some applied ethics conclusions from these goods, 26 00:02:23,550 --> 00:02:31,440 especially given that account of degrees in their value. So what in particular follows for social policy or for how governments should act from the 27 00:02:31,440 --> 00:02:36,030 view that there's value in intrinsically and relatively general knowledge and achievement. 28 00:02:36,900 --> 00:02:42,540 Now perfections values like these two are sometimes thought to bear mainly on self-regarding choices, 29 00:02:42,750 --> 00:02:48,780 ones about what you should seek in your own life. But they also have implications for social and political questions. 30 00:02:49,260 --> 00:02:55,620 Aristotle thought the proper aim of the state of the eudaimonia or the living of objectively good lives by all citizens. 31 00:02:55,890 --> 00:03:04,080 More recently, Gemma Hastings, Rational Elsie Hobhouse and others of their era included perfectionist goods in a standard consequentialist 32 00:03:04,080 --> 00:03:09,510 view that tells both individuals and governments to aim at the greatest aggregate good of all. 33 00:03:10,350 --> 00:03:17,520 Now these views are all excluded by the influential strand in recent political philosophy initiated by John Rawls and Ronald Dworkin. 34 00:03:17,820 --> 00:03:22,950 That requires the state to be constrained by a demand of liberal neutrality or public reason, 35 00:03:23,160 --> 00:03:29,400 and so never to have it as justification for acting that some activities are intrinsically better than others. 36 00:03:29,820 --> 00:03:33,540 In what follows, however, I'm going to ignore all such neutrals demands. 37 00:03:34,230 --> 00:03:39,870 The arguments for them have, to my mind at least repeatedly been exposed as unpersuasive. 38 00:03:40,140 --> 00:03:45,990 And the precedence in the literature is frankly, a puzzle. So I'm going to ask with no hesitation or embarrassment. 39 00:03:46,260 --> 00:03:52,979 What follows for social policy from the two for two perfectionists goods I've described Now, 40 00:03:52,980 --> 00:03:56,940 neutrals and liberals more generally are especially troubled by the prospect of 41 00:03:56,940 --> 00:04:01,259 a perfectionist state trying to force people into objectively good activities, 42 00:04:01,260 --> 00:04:07,380 for example, through coercive legislation. And that's, in principle, possible for the goods of knowledge and achievement. 43 00:04:07,800 --> 00:04:13,950 A state could require adults to take exams in general or other knowledge and imprison those who did badly. 44 00:04:14,370 --> 00:04:17,970 It could also penalise people who fail to complete difficult activities. 45 00:04:18,990 --> 00:04:22,770 But like many other writers, I'm going to assume that at least as regards adults, 46 00:04:23,160 --> 00:04:28,770 the state will limit to limit its perfectionist policies to ones that non-coercive will promote the good. 47 00:04:29,660 --> 00:04:32,990 A directive to promote knowledge and achievement needed need and after all, 48 00:04:33,350 --> 00:04:39,500 be the only one a state faces may also be subject to the ideological constraints, such as one based on a right. 49 00:04:39,710 --> 00:04:42,080 All adults have to choose their own course of life. 50 00:04:42,620 --> 00:04:47,330 Constraints that make any coercive interference with them, whether by individuals or by a government. 51 00:04:47,720 --> 00:04:55,730 Other things equal seriously wrong. Efforts to force people into knowledge or achievement may also be blocked by their effects on other goods, 52 00:04:55,970 --> 00:05:02,750 either non perfectionists such as pleasure or or pleasure or satisfaction or perfectionist. 53 00:05:03,200 --> 00:05:06,829 In the second lecture, I mentioned moral virtue as a separate perfectionist. 54 00:05:06,830 --> 00:05:11,690 Good, and said it involves seeking intrinsically good things in themselves or for their own sakes, 55 00:05:12,440 --> 00:05:17,269 But using the coercive power of the law to promote objective goods introduces a motive 56 00:05:17,270 --> 00:05:22,340 the desire to avoid punishment that's contrary to and could supplant this virtuous one. 57 00:05:22,760 --> 00:05:30,350 It may then be, on balance, less good if citizens pursue better knowledge or achievement only in order to avoid punishment than if 58 00:05:30,350 --> 00:05:35,930 they pursue some lesser good for its own sake and less virtuously a perfectionist view can also treat 59 00:05:36,200 --> 00:05:42,499 autonomous self-direction is itself an objective good that coercive action state action sets back and can 60 00:05:42,500 --> 00:05:48,739 even treat it as an aspect of the good of achievement where you yourself form and realise your life goals. 61 00:05:48,740 --> 00:05:52,700 And actually that came up in the Q&A after the last lecture. 62 00:05:53,090 --> 00:05:58,129 I mean, I, I consider you that there's special value in having knowledge of yourself and 63 00:05:58,130 --> 00:06:02,360 achieving goals inside your own life and achieving goals inside your own life, 64 00:06:02,360 --> 00:06:08,030 and particularly the valuable organising ones. That's a matter of autonomous self-direction. 65 00:06:09,050 --> 00:06:16,370 So there are several reasons why a view in which knowledge and achievement are intrinsic good can resist the use of coercive means to promote them. 66 00:06:16,850 --> 00:06:20,810 But these reasons don't have the same force against non-coercive support of the same goods, 67 00:06:21,080 --> 00:06:23,900 even though neutral ism does object in the same way To that, 68 00:06:24,440 --> 00:06:32,450 there are several policy areas where non-coercive promotion of knowledge and achievement is possible and can be on balance justified. 69 00:06:34,110 --> 00:06:38,430 The first a kind of more abstract topic. It's no. 70 00:06:40,280 --> 00:06:46,700 45 years ago. But Thomas Nagel argued that once argued, the perfectionist values have a distinctive formal structure, 71 00:06:47,090 --> 00:06:50,330 one concerned only with their level and not their spread. 72 00:06:51,530 --> 00:06:54,739 We care, he said. That someone has, for example, proof. 73 00:06:54,740 --> 00:06:59,240 Fermat's Last Theorem. No, some fact about Roman history or has walked on the moon. 74 00:06:59,480 --> 00:07:04,230 But we don't care that others do the same or don't care as much that others do the same or repeat the feat. 75 00:07:04,250 --> 00:07:10,640 As he put it, quote, It's important to achieve fundamental advances, for example, in mathematics or astronomy, 76 00:07:10,880 --> 00:07:15,320 even if very few people come to understand them and they have no practical effect. 77 00:07:15,680 --> 00:07:23,060 The mere existence of such understanding somewhere in the species is regarded by many as worth substantial sacrifices. 78 00:07:24,440 --> 00:07:30,620 Any such advance will be made by some individual. It was a particular mathematician who proved Fermat's Last Theorem, 79 00:07:31,070 --> 00:07:36,320 but Nagel was right to locate its value in the view he describes in the human species as a whole. 80 00:07:36,740 --> 00:07:42,920 Once one person has made an advance, the species has made it and will not have made it any more if someone else repeats it. 81 00:07:43,340 --> 00:07:46,430 Nor does it matter which which individual makes the advance. 82 00:07:46,670 --> 00:07:52,639 What's important important is just that someone does. Neil Armstrong understood this when walking out on the moon. 83 00:07:52,640 --> 00:07:57,820 He spoke of famously one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind. 84 00:07:59,500 --> 00:08:03,830 Nagel was also right that this view is distinctively suited to perfectionist values. 85 00:08:03,850 --> 00:08:11,680 It would be odd to care in the same way that someone somewhere has enjoyed a particular intense pleasure or fulfilled some unusual desire. 86 00:08:12,070 --> 00:08:14,830 With these values, we seem to care only about their spread. 87 00:08:15,430 --> 00:08:20,830 But it's too much to suggest, as Nagel did, that this is the only view appropriate for perfectionist values. 88 00:08:20,860 --> 00:08:25,420 As I've said, many perfectionists have cared that everyone lead an objectively good life, 89 00:08:25,690 --> 00:08:28,870 and that has been and should be the principal perfectionist view. 90 00:08:29,350 --> 00:08:37,239 Still, there can be as an addition with some weight, the species, etc. species centred concern that someone somewhere achieve a perfectionist. 91 00:08:37,240 --> 00:08:43,900 Good. So humanity as a whole achieve it. But doesn't matter to the same degree that the achievement is widely shared. 92 00:08:44,500 --> 00:08:49,000 There can also be a variant of this view in which for any nation or community it matters 93 00:08:49,000 --> 00:08:53,200 that some member of it has done some unique research or achieved some special goal. 94 00:08:53,500 --> 00:08:58,510 So the nation as a whole has done it in either form. The view can have some policy implications. 95 00:08:59,980 --> 00:09:05,740 So under the heading of knowledge, it can favour the use of public funds to support research, for example, at universities. 96 00:09:05,950 --> 00:09:10,960 So some people, even if not many, know a proof of Fermat's Theorem or facts about Roman history. 97 00:09:11,560 --> 00:09:15,670 The aim is just that this knowledge exists somewhere in the species or the community, 98 00:09:16,750 --> 00:09:20,770 though it may be enough in principle on this view that one person knows some fact. 99 00:09:21,040 --> 00:09:26,590 This usually won't be possible unless there's a body of researchers at different universities who support each other's efforts. 100 00:09:26,770 --> 00:09:29,380 And of course, different researchers can know different things. 101 00:09:29,920 --> 00:09:36,310 So in practice, the View favours supporting a cohort of researchers, even though formally it gives no way to numbers. 102 00:09:37,420 --> 00:09:41,290 You know, for one person to have some knowledge, usually several must have it. 103 00:09:41,980 --> 00:09:44,770 The same policy could be favoured under the heading of achievement, 104 00:09:45,130 --> 00:09:49,760 namely that of discovering by complex and challenging means the truth on some topic. 105 00:09:49,780 --> 00:09:54,040 That's a matter that humanity as a whole has successfully proved. 106 00:09:54,040 --> 00:09:59,230 Fermat's Theorem or done all the work involved in confirming the existence of Higgs Boson. 107 00:09:59,500 --> 00:10:04,630 The Higgs boson. Given how difficult that is or arrived at some hard to reach understanding, 108 00:10:05,230 --> 00:10:11,560 there can be a similar justification for supporting from public funds experimental work in the arts that has a limited audience. 109 00:10:11,860 --> 00:10:16,660 Or the achievements of Olympic athletes who set records or have astronauts who walk on the moon. 110 00:10:17,770 --> 00:10:20,830 Of course, there can be other justifications of policies like these. 111 00:10:21,190 --> 00:10:26,410 University faculty who are active in research may be better teachers and impart more knowledge to their students. 112 00:10:26,680 --> 00:10:30,970 Discoveries in what seem arcane branches of physics can have technological spinoffs, 113 00:10:31,300 --> 00:10:34,930 and what was once experimental art can come to be widely appreciated. 114 00:10:35,560 --> 00:10:41,500 Moreover, the actual motives behind such policies of have been pursued may not have been all that perfectionist. 115 00:10:41,860 --> 00:10:50,350 Thus, the US space program of the 1960s was motivated in large part by nationalism, military interest and the perceived demands of the Cold War. 116 00:10:50,770 --> 00:10:55,030 But a perfectionism focussed in nagel's way on unique goods attributable to humanity as a 117 00:10:55,030 --> 00:11:00,280 whole can give an additional justification for funding programs to support these goods, 118 00:11:00,550 --> 00:11:07,140 even if the goods won't be shared by many people. So, you know. 119 00:11:09,710 --> 00:11:18,410 Broadly perfectionist view need not include a part with this distinctive structure doesn't have to include a part with that distinctive structure. 120 00:11:18,590 --> 00:11:24,380 It can stand there only as more in rational did about the total good in all people's lives. 121 00:11:24,620 --> 00:11:29,840 And even if it does include such a part, it needn't give it great weight against the total good. 122 00:11:30,110 --> 00:11:34,310 Still, including it is one option and can make perfectionism distinctively favour. 123 00:11:34,850 --> 00:11:43,740 Public support for individual excellences or superlative instances of knowledge and achievement as goods of humanity apart from their wider appeal. 124 00:11:43,760 --> 00:11:45,559 I think when we're sitting for a time said, 125 00:11:45,560 --> 00:11:53,930 Are you going to give a justification for funding philosophy that requires that philosophy arrives, that knowledge? 126 00:11:59,760 --> 00:12:04,290 Well, we believe it. Okay. Next topic. 127 00:12:04,320 --> 00:12:09,720 The perfectionist policy that's figured most in discussions of liberal neutrality is government funding of the arts. 128 00:12:10,170 --> 00:12:16,470 So we can have nagel's rationale if it aims to ensure that a certain type of art or its appreciation exists just somewhere. 129 00:12:16,710 --> 00:12:22,560 And some may take this view about, say, contemporary classical music and the idea that classical. 130 00:12:23,780 --> 00:12:27,380 I don't mean Mozart. I mean the stuff that people composed today. 131 00:12:29,530 --> 00:12:33,820 Our neighbours in Toronto are a contemporary classical composer and director, 132 00:12:34,240 --> 00:12:41,800 and they I think they think that arts funding should ensure that their type of music still continues. 133 00:12:43,800 --> 00:12:48,240 Well, that's one that's kind of a niggle, like justification of government support for the arts. 134 00:12:48,510 --> 00:12:51,030 But it's more common form involves subsidising museums, 135 00:12:51,030 --> 00:12:55,890 orchestras and theatre companies so they can have lower ticket prices and attract more visitors. 136 00:12:56,100 --> 00:13:02,010 Its main justification then, is to make an intrinsic good of aesthetic appreciation available to more people more often. 137 00:13:02,520 --> 00:13:10,589 There are, however, different views of what this good is, and so different forms of justification can take on one view to improve. 138 00:13:10,590 --> 00:13:13,770 For example, the relevant good is that of appreciating beauty, 139 00:13:14,250 --> 00:13:21,570 where beauty can't be given an informative analysis and there's no common feature that makes all beautiful things beautiful. 140 00:13:22,260 --> 00:13:25,690 But on other views the good is cognitive or involves some kind of knowledge. 141 00:13:26,040 --> 00:13:34,050 The something literature gives us insights into human psychology through the characters it portrays, or that the arts more generally expose us to. 142 00:13:34,260 --> 00:13:37,110 And so teach us about different ways of seeing the world. 143 00:13:37,560 --> 00:13:45,090 For some, art conveys philosophical understanding or expresses abstract truths, while others think it gives us more specifically moral knowledge. 144 00:13:45,270 --> 00:13:48,660 And even that exposure to it can make us morally better people. 145 00:13:50,060 --> 00:13:55,130 A perfectionist justification of government arts funding will be different given a different one of these views. 146 00:13:55,340 --> 00:14:02,780 But there is a specific count of aesthetic value that fits the generality measures, intrinsic and relative generality that I've proposed. 147 00:14:03,320 --> 00:14:09,620 So this view says the beauty or aesthetic value, if that's distinct from beauty of a successful work of art, 148 00:14:09,920 --> 00:14:16,690 depends on the relations between its elements and more specifically on its unifying diverse elements in a way, 149 00:14:16,730 --> 00:14:22,160 in a way that makes for unity in diversity or what's often called within aesthetics, organic unity. 150 00:14:22,430 --> 00:14:29,360 That's a familiar phrase from these lectures, but it's used in a kind of different way related way, but a different way in aesthetics. 151 00:14:30,260 --> 00:14:38,270 In a painting, these elements are lines, colours and other compositional features, as well as in a representational work, its subject matter. 152 00:14:38,900 --> 00:14:44,750 In music, they're notes at a time and a chord through time, in a melody or both, in a whole composition, 153 00:14:45,110 --> 00:14:49,490 in a novel, or play their words, descriptions, and especially incidents of plot. 154 00:14:50,060 --> 00:14:56,270 But in all these cases, different elements are combined in a way that creates an overall emotional or aesthetic effect. 155 00:15:01,810 --> 00:15:05,080 With that effect in its creation. Ah, what has aesthetic value? 156 00:15:05,740 --> 00:15:11,620 So works elements can also include its theme, for example, the philosophical idea it aims to illustrate or express. 157 00:15:12,040 --> 00:15:17,260 If there is harmony between this idea and the way it's expressed or between the work's content and its form, 158 00:15:17,470 --> 00:15:22,299 that can be another source of aesthetic value. But the general idea is that it works. 159 00:15:22,300 --> 00:15:28,270 Aesthetic value rests on unifying relations among, in the ideal case, diverse elements. 160 00:15:28,600 --> 00:15:33,159 Unlike some of some accounts of aesthetic value, this one fits many and even all the arts. 161 00:15:33,160 --> 00:15:36,400 For example, all of painting, music, poetry and drama. 162 00:15:37,120 --> 00:15:38,410 In all these arts it holds. 163 00:15:38,560 --> 00:15:46,300 There's more aesthetic worth both what both want to work is more thoroughly unified, and when the elements it unifies are more diverse. 164 00:15:46,660 --> 00:15:55,149 That last bit is sort of from Robert Nozick's philosophical explanations of a brief discussion about art and the little I've read. 165 00:15:55,150 --> 00:15:59,950 I think kind of organic unity is the ground of aesthetic. 166 00:16:00,070 --> 00:16:05,530 Worth goes back to Coleridge. He's apparently the person who introduced it. 167 00:16:05,530 --> 00:16:13,330 In this case. It's typically assumed that this universal unity in diversity is especially present in works of art as against another beautiful object. 168 00:16:13,600 --> 00:16:16,780 So these works are especially worthy objects of appreciation, 169 00:16:17,020 --> 00:16:23,650 and that appreciation especially is especially worth promoting, for example, through government subsidies. 170 00:16:25,470 --> 00:16:30,480 So there's a clear overlap between this view and the generality measures. 171 00:16:30,480 --> 00:16:38,040 In my second lecture, appreciating a work with this kind of organic unity involves a mental state with first intrinsic generality. 172 00:16:38,250 --> 00:16:45,240 If you have to take in the work in its many elements as a single unit in order to appreciate it fully as you clearly do, 173 00:16:45,630 --> 00:16:52,050 because you have to take in as one unit a whole melody, all of a painting at at least the main lines of a novel's plot. 174 00:16:52,800 --> 00:16:58,570 The also appreciation also involves, as are even more importantly, relative generality. 175 00:16:58,830 --> 00:17:01,950 If you have to see how those elements, especially if they're diverse, 176 00:17:02,280 --> 00:17:07,410 combine to create their common aesthetic effect, you have to see the organic relations. 177 00:17:07,950 --> 00:17:13,080 There are, however, different ways of doing this. In some cases, 178 00:17:14,280 --> 00:17:19,139 you grasp the overall aesthetic property A work's unity makes makes for without 179 00:17:19,140 --> 00:17:23,160 fully or consciously understanding how its elements generate that property. 180 00:17:23,490 --> 00:17:28,830 Thus, you may see that a work has a certain kind of beauty or expresses a certain certain emotion, 181 00:17:29,100 --> 00:17:32,880 but be unable to say exactly which of its features make that so. 182 00:17:33,720 --> 00:17:38,790 So I've always found that, you know, the famous Philip Larkin lines, they [INAUDIBLE] you up, your mum and dad. 183 00:17:38,790 --> 00:17:42,030 They may not mean to, but they do despite. 184 00:17:44,240 --> 00:17:50,760 Sound, despite their informal vocabulary, distinctively poetic and even elevated. 185 00:17:50,780 --> 00:17:54,510 I mean, they. I hope. Does anyone else feel this? 186 00:17:54,750 --> 00:18:00,900 They just sound poetic to me. The reason this rests on several features. 187 00:18:01,020 --> 00:18:06,370 So first of all, the regular iambic rhythm. The internal rhyme of the short. 188 00:18:06,370 --> 00:18:10,070 You sound in the first line. There's three of them. 189 00:18:11,150 --> 00:18:15,229 And the alliteration is first of the M and then of the D starting each lines. 190 00:18:15,230 --> 00:18:18,230 Final word word in hearing the lines is poetic. 191 00:18:18,470 --> 00:18:22,950 You have to in some sense be hearing these elements, but you typically aren't conscious of some of them. 192 00:18:22,970 --> 00:18:31,040 Do you notice the two DS at the last words in each, in the last word of each line, nor of the way they together create the poetic tone. 193 00:18:31,310 --> 00:18:33,440 Much of their effect on you is subconscious. 194 00:18:33,890 --> 00:18:41,150 You can likewise hear in 1960s soul music recording, say, from the Stax studio in Memphis as loose and funky, 195 00:18:42,080 --> 00:18:49,310 but not be aware that this results in part from a delayed backbeat where the rhythm section is slightly laid on the second beat of each bar. 196 00:18:49,850 --> 00:18:55,940 If you're asked what makes the recording funky, you can't say, though you must at some level be hearing the delay. 197 00:18:56,330 --> 00:18:59,600 In each of these cases that it may be bad examples, 198 00:18:59,600 --> 00:19:07,850 but do you get the idea that you can listen to a work of art and notice that aesthetic effect or an emotional feeling or something like that? 199 00:19:07,940 --> 00:19:16,220 And it's created by the weight of the elements in the work relate to each other, but you're not consciously aware of the way they do that. 200 00:19:16,790 --> 00:19:20,300 In each of these cases, critical analysis, either literary or musical, 201 00:19:20,600 --> 00:19:25,340 can reveal more about how the work's elements combine to produce their aesthetic effect. 202 00:19:25,670 --> 00:19:30,590 That's what criticism does. So you can come to understand how the aesthetic effect is generated. 203 00:19:30,740 --> 00:19:34,309 But at least initially, you often don't understand that before you do, 204 00:19:34,310 --> 00:19:39,230 or given the analysis, the elements effect on you occurs largely below consciousness. 205 00:19:40,250 --> 00:19:46,370 There's therefore a question whether when your appreciation of works aesthetic properties is partly subconscious, 206 00:19:46,670 --> 00:19:54,710 it has its full aesthetic value, or that whether that would be greater if you had a more explicit understanding of how they are produced. 207 00:19:55,370 --> 00:20:00,530 If it would have its full value. You're coming to that understanding, say, through critical analysis, 208 00:20:00,770 --> 00:20:06,650 may have the generic value of any knowledge of how something is caused, but no distinctive aesthetic worth. 209 00:20:07,010 --> 00:20:15,620 Anything specific to the value of ascetic appreciation is present in your initial hearing of the lark and as poetic or of the soul music as funky. 210 00:20:16,370 --> 00:20:20,060 But it may instead be that the conscious understanding does have aesthetic worth. 211 00:20:20,330 --> 00:20:24,830 So what's distinctively valuable in appreciating appreciating art is more present. 212 00:20:24,830 --> 00:20:29,000 If you can see what works aesthetic properties rest on or grow out of, 213 00:20:29,330 --> 00:20:34,880 then a merely subconscious awareness is incomplete and critical analysis can make it better. 214 00:20:35,800 --> 00:20:39,790 And. There can, of course, be other benefits to critical analysis. 215 00:20:39,790 --> 00:20:44,320 It may be that regular practice in it improves your initial on thinking responses. 216 00:20:44,620 --> 00:20:47,560 So the more of it you've done, the more you notice from the start. 217 00:20:47,860 --> 00:20:52,210 Aesthetic features, for example, in poetry or music that you would otherwise have missed. 218 00:20:52,900 --> 00:21:02,130 Um, through the practice, your, um, your subconscious sensitivity is sharpened I guess, after 70 minutes. 219 00:21:02,170 --> 00:21:10,480 Well, here's a question. Can knowing how it works, features are produced have the opposite effect of undermining the pre critical aesthetic response, 220 00:21:10,990 --> 00:21:13,090 at least often, in my view, that doesn't happen. 221 00:21:13,420 --> 00:21:19,030 The Larkin still sounds poetic and the soul music still sounds funky after you've learned what makes themself. 222 00:21:20,170 --> 00:21:27,700 Or consider the case with a work theme, say some philosophical idea is mirrored in its form or in the way that theme is presented. 223 00:21:28,000 --> 00:21:33,250 You can't appreciate the organic unity this involves unless you know what the theme is with much criticism, 224 00:21:33,250 --> 00:21:43,240 especially of literary work aims to identify. So here again, some critique, some critical understanding is needed for any aesthetic response to occur. 225 00:21:45,210 --> 00:21:54,990 Going back. I mean, those are just kind of sort of additional reasons why critical understanding of works, of art can be valuable, 226 00:21:54,990 --> 00:22:03,180 because sometimes you can't even have the initial aesthetic response unless you understand something about the elements of the work. 227 00:22:03,750 --> 00:22:09,570 Anyway, so the first few described above where uncritical or subconscious appreciation has full aesthetic value. 228 00:22:09,960 --> 00:22:17,610 The aim of government support for the arts need be only to promote such appreciation, say by making concerts and theatre performances more affordable. 229 00:22:18,090 --> 00:22:21,840 Those attending didn't understand how what they're appreciating is produced. 230 00:22:22,200 --> 00:22:23,099 But on the second view, 231 00:22:23,100 --> 00:22:30,240 it should also include as a central component the promotion of critical understanding and the enriched aesthetic experience that makes for. 232 00:22:30,780 --> 00:22:38,370 This could involve explanatory lectures before symphony or theatre performances or free catalogues to accompany exhibitions of paintings. 233 00:22:38,640 --> 00:22:45,780 But it may also primarily be an issue for education. So schools teach students, as they perhaps now do most with literature, 234 00:22:46,110 --> 00:22:52,140 to go beyond their initial aesthetic response to a work and reach a fuller and more critical understanding of it. 235 00:22:52,560 --> 00:22:58,620 They can then have similarly fuller understandings later in life or more valuable appreciations of the art they encounter. 236 00:22:59,070 --> 00:23:05,670 But the goal of arts policy would be not just some, but a more informed or critical appreciation of aesthetic objects. 237 00:23:09,200 --> 00:23:17,030 Generality based view of the kind my earlier lectures defended can supplement this justification of support for the arts with many others. 238 00:23:17,540 --> 00:23:23,120 If art conveys knowledge of psychological, philosophical or other truths and those are extended and explanatory, 239 00:23:23,300 --> 00:23:28,130 that can be a further reason to promote it. This justification certification is more instrumental, 240 00:23:28,280 --> 00:23:34,520 more about what can result from engaging with art than is in the organic unity one about something intrinsic to the engagement. 241 00:23:35,030 --> 00:23:41,720 But it can be important if some truths can be communicated best or even as some have held, can be communicated only through art. 242 00:23:42,590 --> 00:23:47,210 Of course, all of these justifications have to be weighed against a state's other responsibilities, 243 00:23:47,420 --> 00:23:52,220 both to other perfectionist goods and to non perfectionist concerns, and they'll often be outweighed. 244 00:23:52,580 --> 00:23:59,210 But they do have some force, some of which derives on the view I've presented from the connection between 245 00:23:59,510 --> 00:24:04,580 aesthetic appreciation and mental states with intrinsic and relative generality. 246 00:24:06,680 --> 00:24:11,320 Next topic. And equally relevant policy areas education. 247 00:24:12,010 --> 00:24:16,660 Here are both general questions about the overall justification of a public education system 248 00:24:16,930 --> 00:24:21,580 and more specific ones about its proper content or the curriculum it should ideally teach. 249 00:24:22,720 --> 00:24:28,450 A generality based perfectionism doesn't propose radically new answers to these questions. 250 00:24:28,690 --> 00:24:35,230 On the contrary, it often fits better with much current educational practice than do many non perfectionist views. 251 00:24:36,750 --> 00:24:40,170 Among the many functions of publication, public education. 252 00:24:40,440 --> 00:24:47,880 One is to prepare students for work in a modern economy, while another is by this, another means to enable them to lead enjoyable adult lives. 253 00:24:48,570 --> 00:24:56,250 Neutral as liberals. That's kind of the rolls to work in school often emphasise how education gives students the tools 254 00:24:56,490 --> 00:25:01,650 to autonomously choose a plan of life or to a function effectively as democratic citizens. 255 00:25:02,430 --> 00:25:07,890 But all these justifications have an, at best, indirect connection with much of the standard school curriculum, 256 00:25:08,220 --> 00:25:12,540 such as the teaching of physics, biology and abstract mathematics. 257 00:25:12,900 --> 00:25:18,480 How much do studying these subjects prepare an average student for paid work or for democratic citizenship? 258 00:25:18,900 --> 00:25:24,480 The most obvious thing it does is convey knowledge sometimes of isolated matters of fact, 259 00:25:24,720 --> 00:25:29,670 but often of general principles that make for understanding and on a generality based view. 260 00:25:29,670 --> 00:25:36,750 This is a central purpose of education to give students knowledge or a general understanding of the world as an end in itself. 261 00:25:38,140 --> 00:25:41,740 On this view. Students should learn physics in part because they live intrinsically better lives. 262 00:25:42,010 --> 00:25:49,330 If they know the basic laws governing the motions of objects on earth and have some grasp of magnetism, electricity, and perhaps particle physics, 263 00:25:49,750 --> 00:25:56,800 they should study biology because it's good in itself to understand, say, how the many species in the world today are products of natural selection. 264 00:25:57,220 --> 00:26:02,110 And they should some have some sense of the way abstract mathematical properties relate. 265 00:26:04,140 --> 00:26:08,040 These subjects belong in the curriculum, in part because alongside any other benefits, 266 00:26:08,340 --> 00:26:20,130 learning them gives students intrinsically valuable because intrinsically in a relatively general knowledge or consider just as to more examples, 267 00:26:20,610 --> 00:26:26,670 geography and history. Studying these subjects can increase the extent of your knowledge by teaching your truths, 268 00:26:26,880 --> 00:26:31,440 especially about other people that are distant from you in space time or both. 269 00:26:32,070 --> 00:26:35,670 This could involve intrinsic generality, even one where you know is quite specific, 270 00:26:35,670 --> 00:26:41,460 such as some particular fact about ancient Rome that still takes your mind beyond your own place in time. 271 00:26:41,970 --> 00:26:45,150 But there's the most of this value, what you know is itself extended. 272 00:26:45,690 --> 00:26:47,819 Thus, from studying geography, 273 00:26:47,820 --> 00:26:53,460 you could acquire a mental map of the world as a whole with its different regions and nations in their respective places. 274 00:26:53,880 --> 00:26:58,980 The resultant knowledge is more intrinsically general than if you knew only about your own locale, 275 00:26:59,160 --> 00:27:06,330 and it has more determinate content that if you knew only that there are other places in the world, but not how they relate to yours or each other. 276 00:27:07,230 --> 00:27:13,410 History likewise gives you knowledge of extended sequences, events of events in your or another nation's past. 277 00:27:13,650 --> 00:27:21,540 Now, with the temporal and ideally causal relations between them and these intrinsically general forms of knowledge can lead to better explanations, 278 00:27:21,540 --> 00:27:25,560 and so to more relative generality with knowledge of the world as a whole. 279 00:27:25,800 --> 00:27:30,540 You can see what events in your nation are the effect of factors that have operated similarly elsewhere. 280 00:27:30,930 --> 00:27:37,920 You avoid the parochialism of thinking. Local effects must have local causes, such as the merits or flaws of your particular government. 281 00:27:38,670 --> 00:27:42,720 By applying general principles to your own locale, you can also know, for example, 282 00:27:42,960 --> 00:27:46,980 that its being downwind from mountains explains why your city has limited rainfall. 283 00:27:47,940 --> 00:27:54,060 Knowing history can increase your understanding of present day conditions when the result the result of much earlier ones. 284 00:27:54,330 --> 00:28:01,800 In both subjects provide explanations of different distant facts such as about early Rome or present day Indonesia in their own local terms. 285 00:28:02,250 --> 00:28:06,900 So what you can explain about your place in time is mirrored in what you understand about others. 286 00:28:09,190 --> 00:28:13,570 One of my colleagues pointed me to a book of John Dewey's called Democracy and Education. 287 00:28:13,900 --> 00:28:19,150 And it has. And so it's about education, and it has a chapter specifically about geography and history. 288 00:28:19,450 --> 00:28:26,650 And it says that studying them that these are going to be some quotes from Dewey allows an indefinitely wide scope of intellectual considerations, 289 00:28:27,040 --> 00:28:34,960 gives intellectual perspective to what might otherwise be narrow personal actions and places are doings in their space and time connections. 290 00:28:35,560 --> 00:28:39,490 Those to me, those remarks read as pointing, if somewhat vaguely, 291 00:28:39,760 --> 00:28:46,240 to what I've called intrinsic and relative generality as present in geographical and historical knowledge. 292 00:28:47,500 --> 00:28:54,790 These properties are also found in knowledge of physics or biology, if anything, to a higher degree because of their more extended subject matter. 293 00:28:55,180 --> 00:29:02,080 But geographical and historical knowledge may have a compensating value given a possible addition to the generality account, 294 00:29:02,350 --> 00:29:04,900 one that departs a little from pure formality. 295 00:29:05,380 --> 00:29:13,270 It says there's added a special value in knowing facts about or related to you, and likewise special value in achieving goals in your life. 296 00:29:13,300 --> 00:29:17,320 I think this came up in the in the question and answer on Wednesday. 297 00:29:17,740 --> 00:29:21,520 The idea that there's extra value in self-knowledge. 298 00:29:22,640 --> 00:29:26,270 An extra value in achieving goals in your life. 299 00:29:27,560 --> 00:29:34,070 On this year, there's more. There's more value in self-knowledge or understanding your own character than in similarly understanding other people's. 300 00:29:34,340 --> 00:29:37,370 There's likewise more value in determining facts about your life, 301 00:29:37,370 --> 00:29:42,080 especially large scale or structural ones, than in similarly affecting other people's. 302 00:29:42,350 --> 00:29:47,540 This makes autonomous self-direction not only an instance of achievement, but especially valuable one. 303 00:29:48,110 --> 00:29:57,980 And an extension of this view sets a special value in knowing facts about beings that are related to you, including beings in the same species as you. 304 00:30:00,220 --> 00:30:06,100 I'm reminded of, you know, the famous Alexander Pope line. The proper study of mankind is man. 305 00:30:06,130 --> 00:30:13,910 So the idea is that there's special value in understanding, having explanatory knowledge of the human species or other human beings. 306 00:30:14,260 --> 00:30:18,670 And so that could be special value in knowing facts about the species you belong to. 307 00:30:18,790 --> 00:30:22,000 And by a further extension, about your specific nation or community. 308 00:30:22,510 --> 00:30:26,830 These facts all relate in some ways to you which can give knowing them additional value. 309 00:30:27,070 --> 00:30:31,030 But they're also among the central subjects of geography and history studying, 310 00:30:31,030 --> 00:30:38,320 which therefore can therefore have not only the generic scientific value it shares with learning physics or biology, 311 00:30:38,500 --> 00:30:45,190 but also a distinctive humanistic value that comes from thinking about and understanding human beings and human events. 312 00:30:46,770 --> 00:30:52,770 So these are those are intellectual reasons for teaching a subject, 313 00:30:52,770 --> 00:30:58,680 and they can be sometimes outweighed by more practical reasons, for example, about preparing students for work. 314 00:30:59,250 --> 00:31:05,250 But to me, promoting promoting the intrinsic good of knowledge is at least one important goal of education. 315 00:31:05,670 --> 00:31:11,549 In fact, an appeal to this good may provide the best defence of the traditional school curriculum against 316 00:31:11,550 --> 00:31:17,070 demands to revise it in ways more thoroughly friendly to business or the broader economy. 317 00:31:17,100 --> 00:31:26,340 I mean, I guess there is that pressure in the world, isn't there, to to rejig education to make it better serve the economy? 318 00:31:26,760 --> 00:31:33,180 Well, one reason to resist that is a function of education is simply to produce knowledgeable, informed. 319 00:31:35,170 --> 00:31:39,490 Citizens just have to be particularly citizens, people who are knowledgeable and informed. 320 00:31:39,970 --> 00:31:49,300 And that's the kind of thing that you would, you know, favour if you thought that knowledge was one intrinsic and an important intrinsic value. 321 00:31:50,050 --> 00:31:50,320 Okay. 322 00:31:50,500 --> 00:31:57,790 Other parts of the curriculum aim less at explanatory knowledge than in introducing students to activities that can enrich their lives in other ways. 323 00:31:58,090 --> 00:32:04,569 Think of classes in art, music, and especially literature. Some students may later practice these arts, painting or playing music, 324 00:32:04,570 --> 00:32:09,160 even if only as a hobby, but others may simply read novels or attend the theatre. 325 00:32:09,610 --> 00:32:17,290 This could have the value promoted by government funding of the arts, but it requires that students first be exposed to art and learn to enjoy it. 326 00:32:17,290 --> 00:32:21,490 And it may also, as noted above, require them to start doing critical analysis. 327 00:32:22,030 --> 00:32:26,020 Both of these can happen while they're at school. 328 00:32:27,070 --> 00:32:28,160 In a book about education. 329 00:32:28,180 --> 00:32:35,130 Harry Brighouse argues that schools should mainly introduce students to activities that aren't widely available in the surrounding culture. 330 00:32:35,140 --> 00:32:38,530 This perhaps more these days to classical music than to hip hop. 331 00:32:38,890 --> 00:32:43,120 But the prominence of arts instruction in the standard curriculum is again better 332 00:32:43,120 --> 00:32:47,800 explained on a perfectionist basis than the indirect ways neutral ists have to invoke. 333 00:32:48,640 --> 00:32:52,320 I mean, if you're if you're arguing that, you know, 334 00:32:52,330 --> 00:33:00,460 schools should teach painting because that will make people better democratic citizens, I think your argument is making a stretch. 335 00:33:01,660 --> 00:33:08,680 Just to add, I mean, some a lot of student learning happens not in the classroom, but in extracurricular activities. 336 00:33:09,010 --> 00:33:13,510 Students play in the school band, work on the yearbook, or join the computer science club. 337 00:33:14,110 --> 00:33:19,180 Some of these activities augment classroom teaching for those especially interested in a given subject. 338 00:33:19,210 --> 00:33:22,270 Think of the computer club. But many offer a further benefit. 339 00:33:22,600 --> 00:33:26,229 In my second lecture, I said there's there's value initially of intrinsic, 340 00:33:26,230 --> 00:33:33,610 but also a relative generality in activities that involve cooperation with other people where you intend to make it the case that a larger group, 341 00:33:33,610 --> 00:33:37,150 including you, works successfully towards a common goal. 342 00:33:38,400 --> 00:33:45,720 And the many extracurricular activities that are group activities embody this value in a specially valuable way. 343 00:33:46,020 --> 00:33:52,890 They're usually more structured, involve more participants, and last longer than the more informal collaborations found in children's play. 344 00:33:53,340 --> 00:34:00,750 They therefore can involve more generality than such play, as well as doing more to develop the skills for similar collaborations later in life. 345 00:34:01,110 --> 00:34:07,170 They instantiate in the present and promote in the future one valuable form of achievement. 346 00:34:09,320 --> 00:34:18,570 Now earlier. Just a little while ago, I contrasted promoting students knowledge as an end in itself with preparing them for paid work. 347 00:34:18,960 --> 00:34:25,440 But they could also be a perfectionist justification of the latter if the work in question will have intrinsic value. 348 00:34:25,620 --> 00:34:33,030 So the preparation is for something of genuine worth that will be so if the work is challenging and therefore meaningful, 349 00:34:33,300 --> 00:34:38,070 a topic on which a generality based general view again has implications. 350 00:34:38,280 --> 00:34:41,520 So this is the next topic. What's called meaningful work. 351 00:34:43,100 --> 00:34:47,360 So the word called meaningful is standardly contrasted with the wrote or 352 00:34:47,370 --> 00:34:52,130 mechanical tasks of an assembly line worker or nowadays a call centre employee. 353 00:34:52,820 --> 00:34:55,820 Since paid work occupies a great deal of most people's time, 354 00:34:56,090 --> 00:35:02,900 its character could have significant effects on the quality of their lives and it therefore raises important issues of social policy. 355 00:35:03,380 --> 00:35:10,250 Here's some philosophers have argued that there is a right to meaningful work where the justice demands the opportunity for such work. 356 00:35:10,700 --> 00:35:18,380 For everyone. I mean, among other philosophers, Rawls, in his later work, affirmed a right to the opportunity for meaningful work. 357 00:35:18,920 --> 00:35:26,210 But implicit in these claims is one about value that meaningful work is a good that can enrich human lives as meaningless work does not. 358 00:35:26,540 --> 00:35:33,080 And that claim is best, best explained, all argue, but in key respects by perfectionist measures of generality. 359 00:35:33,680 --> 00:35:34,820 So you know, 360 00:35:34,850 --> 00:35:44,000 it's possible to to value meaningful work on various non perfectionist grounds such as that it's enjoyable or something workers want for its own sake. 361 00:35:44,300 --> 00:35:50,210 But these grounds are only contingently and therefore unreliable, only connected to such work's essential features. 362 00:35:50,780 --> 00:35:57,590 If people enjoy or prefer meaningless tasks as the lower orders in Brave New World do, those tasks are best for them. 363 00:35:58,280 --> 00:36:02,030 Rawls, who I mentioned, tied the right to the opportunity for meaningful work, 364 00:36:02,390 --> 00:36:12,410 which is later work endorsed to his chief primary good of self-respect, saying the lack of this opportunity is destructive of citizen's self-respect. 365 00:36:13,340 --> 00:36:18,560 So if you don't have the opportunity for meaningful work that's destructive of your self-respect. 366 00:36:19,280 --> 00:36:24,890 But you can based self-respect on many things other than the quality of your work, and many people do. 367 00:36:25,160 --> 00:36:30,680 20th century assembly line workers weren't, as Rawls claim suggests, incapable of self-respect. 368 00:36:31,010 --> 00:36:36,260 They could and did find self work worth in the fact that they were earning a living and supporting their families. 369 00:36:36,470 --> 00:36:40,370 Many also valued the personal qualities of blue collar workers like themselves, 370 00:36:40,760 --> 00:36:47,990 such as camaraderie and honesty and directness over what they saw as the egotism and fakery of the materially better off. 371 00:36:48,350 --> 00:36:53,000 In any case, Rawlsian self-respect involves the belief that your activities are worth doing. 372 00:36:53,330 --> 00:36:55,640 And shouldn't it matter whether that belief is true? 373 00:36:56,630 --> 00:37:02,270 The better valuing of meaningful work is more direct based on the objective properties that make it meaningful. 374 00:37:02,960 --> 00:37:10,460 And that's the approach that a lot of writers on this topic take to give at times lengthy lists of such objective properties. 375 00:37:10,760 --> 00:37:15,170 But many of the properties, I think they say meaningful work is work that has. 376 00:37:16,050 --> 00:37:20,970 A list of properties. Yeah, objective properties. 377 00:37:21,630 --> 00:37:25,350 But many of the properties they site in involve at bottom. You know, 378 00:37:25,440 --> 00:37:30,089 the two forms of generality that's meaningful to ask a characteristically not 379 00:37:30,090 --> 00:37:34,440 short term like those in an assembly line look like those in assembly line work, 380 00:37:34,710 --> 00:37:37,350 but extend through time and have to be intended through time. 381 00:37:37,590 --> 00:37:43,170 Think of a defence lawyer strategy in a criminal trial or a years long marketing plan in business. 382 00:37:43,740 --> 00:37:46,350 They also tend to have a great many constituent parts. 383 00:37:46,620 --> 00:37:54,960 Again, unlike assembly line work, which makes them more complex and in that way difficult, placing greater demands on attention and executive control, 384 00:37:55,230 --> 00:37:59,460 especially importantly, their parts are usually varied rather than repetitive, 385 00:37:59,670 --> 00:38:03,450 which increases their complexity and requires a greater diversity of skills. 386 00:38:03,810 --> 00:38:08,670 Thus, the lawyer marketing executive doesn't do the same thing over and over, but many different things. 387 00:38:09,120 --> 00:38:09,900 In particular, 388 00:38:10,230 --> 00:38:18,150 meaningful work typically combines a planning phase where you develop a strategy for your task and then an executive phase where you carry it out. 389 00:38:18,750 --> 00:38:20,850 This distinguishes it from assembly line in other, 390 00:38:20,850 --> 00:38:27,360 less meaningful work where you implement a time in motion study or call centre script devised by somebody else. 391 00:38:28,050 --> 00:38:33,540 That means your your work's having the specific character it does is your rather 392 00:38:33,540 --> 00:38:38,489 than somebody else's achievement reflecting your autonomous choice that invokes, 393 00:38:38,490 --> 00:38:44,790 again, the idea that there's special value in determining facts about your life kind of autonomous self-direction. 394 00:38:45,270 --> 00:38:51,300 If the work is part of a joint project, involve many involving many other people as it is at a large enterprise, 395 00:38:51,510 --> 00:38:57,030 you ideally have at least a rough understanding of how your work fits into that project and can attend what you do. 396 00:38:57,150 --> 00:39:01,080 As remote workers often don't as contributing to that extended end. 397 00:39:02,250 --> 00:39:07,650 These are all instant creations within the work of intrinsic and relative generality reality. 398 00:39:09,360 --> 00:39:13,350 In many discussions, meaningful work is said to demand an exercise skill. 399 00:39:13,800 --> 00:39:21,570 And while that's in part a consequence of its complexity, it's also an equally importantly, a matter of what you need in order to do it competently. 400 00:39:22,350 --> 00:39:27,360 Someone with no training at a task may have no idea whatever of the means required to complete it, 401 00:39:27,600 --> 00:39:30,690 let alone the ability to choose those most likely to succeed. 402 00:39:31,440 --> 00:39:38,580 Work that displays that ability involves competence, which is both essential for the full value of achievement and a good in itself. 403 00:39:39,150 --> 00:39:45,630 And what distinguishes a skilled workers competence from that shown on an assembly line is in part the knowledge it involves, 404 00:39:46,230 --> 00:39:49,110 which is more complex, precise and broadly applicable. 405 00:39:49,320 --> 00:39:56,140 So as work has greater cognitive as well as cognitive value, Moreover, this knowledge and skill must normally develop, 406 00:39:56,250 --> 00:40:00,480 be developed through time and practice insofar as you aim at that development. 407 00:40:00,720 --> 00:40:05,310 Your work has another long term complex goal that of becoming better at what you do. 408 00:40:07,690 --> 00:40:11,650 Several recent books have emphasised how the properties of meaningful work are found 409 00:40:11,860 --> 00:40:15,760 not only in the white collar professional jobs with which they're most associated, 410 00:40:16,270 --> 00:40:21,310 but also in the skilled manual labour of a car mechanic, hairdresser or a carpenter. 411 00:40:22,090 --> 00:40:26,020 Given the formality of its measures, a generality based perfectionism agrees. 412 00:40:26,410 --> 00:40:32,350 Manual work, too, can involve tasks that extend through time and involve varied and interrelated goals. 413 00:40:32,680 --> 00:40:37,840 So you need skill first to identify them and then to realise them in the right order. 414 00:40:39,610 --> 00:40:44,410 Just a pair of just as a doctor needs a unified picture of the whole human body to do her work. 415 00:40:44,680 --> 00:40:49,750 So a mechanic has to think of an entire car engine and a carpenter of the whole piece of furniture. 416 00:40:50,110 --> 00:40:56,080 He's making a doctor may base a diagnosis on the precise way and Oregon feels when she palpate it. 417 00:40:56,350 --> 00:41:01,989 But a mechanic can likewise tell what's wrong with an engine by the specific sounded mix and a hairdresser know 418 00:41:01,990 --> 00:41:07,690 whether a given style will work for a client by the precise way the client's hair feels between her fingers. 419 00:41:08,530 --> 00:41:15,700 The doctor's chosen choices may be more complex than the mechanics or hairdressers, and she may face a greater variety of them. 420 00:41:16,000 --> 00:41:18,520 She may also need more elaborate theoretical knowledge. 421 00:41:18,760 --> 00:41:23,110 So there may be there may therefore be differences in the degrees of value in the two kinds of work, 422 00:41:23,470 --> 00:41:28,720 but both involve broadly similar features of extent and complexity. 423 00:41:29,740 --> 00:41:34,990 A generality of you doesn't, however, value everything that's been thought to make for meaningful work. 424 00:41:35,800 --> 00:41:39,640 In his recent book, [INAUDIBLE] Jobs, people know that book. 425 00:41:40,560 --> 00:41:44,980 Tough. Yeah. It was kind of talked about anyways. 426 00:41:45,510 --> 00:41:48,870 In that book, David Graeber takes the jobs that don't merit that title, 427 00:41:49,050 --> 00:41:54,990 the ones that are worth doing to be jobs with, quote, social value or to provide benefits to other people. 428 00:41:55,890 --> 00:41:59,580 He contrasts these with jobs that are socially useless or pernicious. 429 00:42:00,180 --> 00:42:05,580 As it happens, many of the [INAUDIBLE] jobs he discusses are meaningless in other ways. 430 00:42:05,910 --> 00:42:09,180 That's a lot of them don't involve enough tasks to fill the working day, 431 00:42:09,390 --> 00:42:13,680 so their occupants chat on Facebook or pretend to be working when they're not. 432 00:42:14,430 --> 00:42:19,130 This feeling aside, work with Graber social value has several obvious merits. 433 00:42:19,140 --> 00:42:25,740 It's instrumentally good because the benefits it gives to others, and also often because providing them is satisfying for the worker. 434 00:42:26,220 --> 00:42:33,000 If the benefits are aimed at it has a more extended goal. And if if they're aimed at for their own sakes, it's virtuously motivated. 435 00:42:33,630 --> 00:42:39,900 But given their formality, the generality measures don't think Graber social value is necessary for meaningful work. 436 00:42:40,290 --> 00:42:47,040 Their main concern is the process such work involves, apart from its product and especially from that product value. 437 00:42:47,700 --> 00:42:51,930 In my second lecture, I said that if you found a company and make itself successful, 438 00:42:52,290 --> 00:42:58,710 your product may not be significantly better for consumers than your competitors, as Coke isn't significantly better than Pepsi. 439 00:42:59,340 --> 00:43:03,480 But ensuring the company's success may be a complex and difficult long term process. 440 00:43:03,780 --> 00:43:08,910 And therefore, on the generality of you, a valuable achievement like success in a challenging game, 441 00:43:09,450 --> 00:43:12,749 your employees work may involve similar achievements again, 442 00:43:12,750 --> 00:43:19,620 just as a process and apart from the specific character of its result, I think many business and working people recognise this, 443 00:43:20,160 --> 00:43:24,900 relishing what they do, in part because of the challenge it poses and the skill it requires. 444 00:43:25,800 --> 00:43:30,510 I'm referring to the Count of Games by Bernard Suits that I mentioned in my last lecture, 445 00:43:30,780 --> 00:43:36,810 an executive at an executive at a small I.T. firm that was given $40 million to grow itself. 446 00:43:37,320 --> 00:43:44,670 So this is a quote from a magazine article. This is somebody, a small I.T. firm, and some venture capitalists give them $40 million and say, 447 00:43:44,820 --> 00:43:51,600 you've got so many years to grow the market capitalisation to $1,000,000,000 or $5 billion or something like that. 448 00:43:51,630 --> 00:43:58,260 And he said he said the money served only to, quote, complicate a perfectly pleasant game. 449 00:43:58,740 --> 00:44:02,460 It's hard to admit that work is nothing more than a sightseeing game. 450 00:44:02,760 --> 00:44:07,740 We take our jobs too seriously to admit that jobs are more or less a series of arbitrary obstacles. 451 00:44:08,130 --> 00:44:14,040 If we're serious about how we're spending our time alive, we should pick the job that offers the game we most like to play. 452 00:44:15,600 --> 00:44:20,210 Fumbling for time. Can I say something about philosophy? 453 00:44:23,800 --> 00:44:31,060 Well, I got to tell you so Mike Rich told me of this sort of I think it must be and Mary Mitchell is. 454 00:44:32,530 --> 00:44:38,319 Autobiography or memoir. But she had a friend over to her house and she had an issue of mine lying on the table. 455 00:44:38,320 --> 00:44:45,190 And this non philosopher picked up the issue of mind and was kind of leafing through it and said, These philosophers talk a lot about games. 456 00:44:45,190 --> 00:44:49,830 Do they like playing them a lot? That's kind of a 1964. 457 00:44:49,840 --> 00:44:58,240 Okay. So if you look at philosophy today, isn't there a lot of attention to paradoxes and puzzles? 458 00:44:59,450 --> 00:45:06,650 The sleeping Beauty puzzle the talks and puzzle the liar paradox newcomers puzzle. 459 00:45:07,400 --> 00:45:11,990 And of course, the official view is that these are deeply revealing of fundamental truth. 460 00:45:11,990 --> 00:45:17,780 And we deal with puzzles because they will reveal these underlying truths. 461 00:45:18,410 --> 00:45:25,950 Maybe I think philosophers like puzzles because they're difficult and challenging and interesting. 462 00:45:28,520 --> 00:45:37,940 So it's kind of like this IT guy who is happy to be given how much would be given $40 million because now they've got a new interesting challenge. 463 00:45:38,210 --> 00:45:44,300 All right. Anyways. This account of meaningful work blurs the distinction between work and play. 464 00:45:44,720 --> 00:45:51,080 If work can be defined as any activity engaged in instrumentally in order to earn an income and provide for oneself, 465 00:45:51,080 --> 00:45:56,180 play is at least initially activity chosen for its own sake or auto technically. 466 00:45:56,840 --> 00:46:03,980 But then the two aren't mutually exclusive. A professional athlete can have the same time be playing a sport he loves and earning a salary. 467 00:46:04,400 --> 00:46:10,460 Someone doing meaningful work could likewise be both earning her pay and doing something she finds intrinsically rewarding. 468 00:46:10,790 --> 00:46:15,260 We can, in fact imagine two quite different lives of comparable perfectionist worth. 469 00:46:15,830 --> 00:46:22,100 In one, you do meaningful, meaningless work, perhaps on an assembly line, but at high paying for relatively few hours a week. 470 00:46:22,610 --> 00:46:28,340 This gives you leisure time you use for difficult achievement and, say, the arts or sports and the other life. 471 00:46:29,450 --> 00:46:34,670 You have a meaningful job that takes much more of your time and is itself the source of most of your achievement. 472 00:46:35,150 --> 00:46:38,840 Though in one case the achievement is found outside work and the other within it. 473 00:46:39,080 --> 00:46:43,400 What makes for achievement in the two is roughly the same. So. 474 00:46:47,360 --> 00:46:52,220 Back to meaningful work. Philosophers and others have proposed various policies to promote meaningful work. 475 00:46:52,610 --> 00:46:58,880 One is greater worker involvement in corporate decision making, for example, through rep to representation on boards of directors. 476 00:46:59,150 --> 00:47:05,210 Another is a universal basic income to free workers from the financial pressure to accept meaningless jobs. 477 00:47:05,810 --> 00:47:09,860 More radical proposals involve markets, socialism, or socialism more generally. 478 00:47:10,340 --> 00:47:14,210 In an ideal discussion, I would now defend one or more of these policies. 479 00:47:14,480 --> 00:47:20,420 But the empirical and especially economic issues are too complex for me and especially involve difficult trade-offs. 480 00:47:20,720 --> 00:47:28,280 I will though, venture one suggestion about the broadly free market economies in which most of us live. 481 00:47:28,940 --> 00:47:35,990 On the one hand, a market economy can lead, as it often has, to an extreme division of labour and a great many meaningless jobs. 482 00:47:36,380 --> 00:47:41,810 That's a clear and serious demerit. On the other hand, and especially in contrast with a planned economy, 483 00:47:42,230 --> 00:47:46,250 it gives many people the opportunity for independent entrepreneurship and the 484 00:47:46,610 --> 00:47:50,540 general achievement that could involve recall the value of starting a company, 485 00:47:50,540 --> 00:47:54,800 even just a small one. Making all the main decisions about it and seeing it grow. 486 00:47:55,280 --> 00:48:02,090 This can otherwise a distinctive underwrite, a distinctive perfectionist defence, or at least a partial defence of the free market. 487 00:48:02,420 --> 00:48:04,100 Namely, that enables many people, 488 00:48:04,100 --> 00:48:12,170 and not just a few bureaucrats or planners to pursue the long term and multiple interrelated goals of entrepreneurial and other business activity, 489 00:48:12,440 --> 00:48:15,680 or gives many people the opportunity for that kind of meaningful work. 490 00:48:16,220 --> 00:48:20,750 How far this defence goes depends, of course, on the strengths of the markets, the strength of the markets, 491 00:48:20,750 --> 00:48:27,380 opposite tendency to create rote or meaningless jobs and its other effects, both good and bad, on the quality of people's lives. 492 00:48:27,680 --> 00:48:30,610 And those other effects are clearly important. But defence. 493 00:48:32,060 --> 00:48:36,200 But the defence could be strengthened given certain possible revisions to a market economy. 494 00:48:36,560 --> 00:48:38,030 There's there could, you know, 495 00:48:38,030 --> 00:48:45,230 you can imagine regulations that limit the ability of large corporations to compete against smaller enterprises and drive them out of business. 496 00:48:45,380 --> 00:48:50,060 As has happened so often recently in bookselling restaurants and many other domains. 497 00:48:50,540 --> 00:48:55,190 These regulations might inhibit the largest scale and most impressive business achievements. 498 00:48:55,430 --> 00:49:01,700 Those of a Ray Kroc or a Jeff Bezos. They might also result in somewhat higher prices for consumers, for consumers. 499 00:49:02,240 --> 00:49:06,799 But these effects might be outweighed by the greater opportunities created for many people to 500 00:49:06,800 --> 00:49:12,530 pursue more modest but still valuable entrepreneurial goals for a generality based perfectionism. 501 00:49:12,830 --> 00:49:17,870 More generally, an important question about any economic arrangement is how far it promotes, 502 00:49:17,870 --> 00:49:21,740 rather than hinders the achievements characteristic of meaningful work. 503 00:49:22,460 --> 00:49:28,620 For many people. So I'm going to finish by saying, with the discussion of necessity, 504 00:49:28,620 --> 00:49:34,650 very tentative of a generality base perfectionism implications for economic distribution. 505 00:49:36,200 --> 00:49:39,980 Perfectionist views are often thought to favour unequal economic arrangements, 506 00:49:40,430 --> 00:49:44,960 as they certainly can if they give great way to enable style perfection of humanity view. 507 00:49:45,170 --> 00:49:48,110 Since then, most resources should go to the few who can make. 508 00:49:49,040 --> 00:49:55,970 New advances or from follow nature and making society's ultimate goal the excellence of its few most excellent members. 509 00:49:56,600 --> 00:50:03,080 But if they value all people's good equally and equate that good with knowledge and especially achievement with the two kinds of generality, 510 00:50:03,470 --> 00:50:10,880 they can support a somewhat more egalitarian, not somewhat a more egalitarian distributive program. 511 00:50:11,570 --> 00:50:16,460 At his best, recall achievement is of a goal that's extended both in time. 512 00:50:16,640 --> 00:50:23,060 So it concerns not just the present or immediate future, but also the more distant future and perhaps the past and in the number of 513 00:50:23,060 --> 00:50:27,740 persons it involves and has many other ideally diverse goals as a means to it. 514 00:50:28,190 --> 00:50:33,470 So it's also complex but does pursue this kind of multiple general achievement. 515 00:50:33,770 --> 00:50:39,530 You need material security or the confidence that your basic needs won't be frustrated in the near future. 516 00:50:39,800 --> 00:50:44,810 Without that, it's hard to look safely beyond the here and now or beyond. 517 00:50:45,800 --> 00:50:48,920 You're immediately or beyond immediately pressing concerns. 518 00:50:49,580 --> 00:50:53,870 In the 1960s, a number of sociologists described what they called a culture of poverty, 519 00:50:54,230 --> 00:50:57,560 a set of mental habits found in people facing extreme deprivation. 520 00:50:57,830 --> 00:51:02,210 And that often prevents them from taking steps that will improve their condition even significantly. 521 00:51:02,660 --> 00:51:05,930 At its core is a short and time horizon. 522 00:51:05,930 --> 00:51:14,810 So the extremely poor think mainly of today not saving for the future and often buying even food only when they need it, perhaps several times a day. 523 00:51:15,380 --> 00:51:21,350 They also tend to be self-centred. So for example, they are quick to resort to violence with little thought for the effects on others. 524 00:51:21,920 --> 00:51:27,710 But these narrow wings of focus are a natural and even rational response to extreme poverty. 525 00:51:28,130 --> 00:51:33,740 If you're not certain you can feed yourself or your family tonight, you could hardly devote yourself to long term plans. 526 00:51:34,190 --> 00:51:40,130 Risking your present loss for the possibility of even substantial future gains is difficult and even irrational. 527 00:51:40,610 --> 00:51:45,950 Nor when your survival or minimal comfort is in doubt. Is it easy to think altruistically about others? 528 00:51:47,760 --> 00:51:50,960 This this argument has recently been made by the philosopher Jennifer Morton. 529 00:51:51,380 --> 00:51:59,630 For people facing extreme scarcity, she writes. The most urgent problems are short term and so best dealt with by ignoring longer term possibilities. 530 00:52:00,200 --> 00:52:04,340 But in practical deliberation, we tend to form habits or to follow general norms. 531 00:52:04,670 --> 00:52:09,290 And violent norm of short term thinking is, on the whole, rational in extreme poverty. 532 00:52:09,500 --> 00:52:15,319 It will sometimes lead you not to do what would further a goal you care about, such as not to make a small sacrifice. 533 00:52:15,320 --> 00:52:18,680 Now that could help you lift you, lift you out of poverty later. 534 00:52:19,640 --> 00:52:26,719 Your precarious situation makes it rational for you to prioritise your own needs now, intrinsically, relative, 535 00:52:26,720 --> 00:52:31,160 intrinsically and relatively general achievement then requires a minimal level of 536 00:52:31,160 --> 00:52:35,809 material security and to promote such achievement for all for all its members, 537 00:52:35,810 --> 00:52:39,110 as it should. A society should ensure that security for all. 538 00:52:39,860 --> 00:52:47,360 This can result from full employment in a productive economy, or alternatively alternatively from income transfers through a welfare state. 539 00:52:47,900 --> 00:52:55,070 Either way, it is inconsistent with the extreme inequality present when some severe face severe deprivation 540 00:52:55,580 --> 00:53:00,230 and the measures tendency to favour more equal distribution is strengthened by their formality. 541 00:53:00,560 --> 00:53:03,770 Since the two forms of generality can be found in many activities, 542 00:53:03,770 --> 00:53:08,930 whatever their content or specific goal, they make great wealth unnecessary for a valuable life. 543 00:53:09,650 --> 00:53:13,010 There are indeed worthy achievements that require such wealth, but many don't. 544 00:53:13,340 --> 00:53:17,210 Well, you can pursue a unifying end that involves manipulating vast resources. 545 00:53:17,510 --> 00:53:19,610 You can also have one that requires just few, 546 00:53:20,540 --> 00:53:27,560 so you have the opportunity for some valuable achievement resources beyond the minimum matter less and may continue to matter less the more you have. 547 00:53:28,370 --> 00:53:36,050 This may be less true of the aspect of intrinsic generality that involves intentionally affecting many people, for example, by managing their work. 548 00:53:36,440 --> 00:53:40,190 But though this activity is possible for the private owner of a large corporation, 549 00:53:40,490 --> 00:53:47,330 it's also possible for a hired manager who needn't be paid vast amounts or for a government employee who again doesn't earn extravagantly. 550 00:53:48,050 --> 00:53:52,400 The measures formality also weakens a claim that can tell against equal distribution, 551 00:53:52,640 --> 00:53:56,390 namely that there are significant difference in people's natural abilities. 552 00:53:56,990 --> 00:54:00,469 If some have more innate talent than others, they can achieve more of worth. 553 00:54:00,470 --> 00:54:04,580 Given a unit of resources on that basis should have access to more. 554 00:54:05,520 --> 00:54:12,300 But while there certainly are significant differences in people's abilities for specific goods, so some have much more talent for music or chess. 555 00:54:13,530 --> 00:54:20,190 The formality of the general generality mixed measures makes it less likely that there are similar differences in their overall abilities. 556 00:54:21,120 --> 00:54:26,970 The more possibilities there are for valuable achievement, the greater the probability that each person is suited to at least one. 557 00:54:27,580 --> 00:54:32,550 Though unable to excel in music or chess, you should be able to do meaningful work of some other kind. 558 00:54:32,850 --> 00:54:38,520 Unify his life around some other goal or achieve in some some leisure pursuit. 559 00:54:39,810 --> 00:54:45,090 So the the idea is that though there are sort of great benefits to having a minimum of resources, 560 00:54:45,810 --> 00:54:50,640 these benefits, it's get less the more resources you have. 561 00:54:50,740 --> 00:54:58,880 That's the idea. And that's supposed to be supported by the particular understanding of the value of achievement. 562 00:54:59,680 --> 00:55:07,700 And just I'll just conclude by noting that this isn't a form of argument without historical antecedents. 563 00:55:09,410 --> 00:55:12,920 The idea that there's kind of the measure of. 564 00:55:13,830 --> 00:55:16,350 The value of something like achievement is. 565 00:55:17,340 --> 00:55:26,790 Generality are the unifying of different goals was actually pretty common in the late 19th and early 20th century. 566 00:55:27,060 --> 00:55:28,680 Well, I was I was going to quote Bradley. 567 00:55:28,680 --> 00:55:36,360 So Bradley said, you know, in Bradley was one of the people who used a generality test for the significance of knowledge. 568 00:55:37,180 --> 00:55:45,120 But he also said you use a similar test for practical goods like achievement, saying that an action one goal is, 569 00:55:45,120 --> 00:55:48,810 quote, to reduce the raw material of our nature to the highest degree of system. 570 00:55:49,230 --> 00:55:54,720 That sounds like relative generality, while another is to widen as far as possible the end to be pursued. 571 00:55:55,200 --> 00:56:04,230 That sounds like intrinsic generality, and that was actually a common view among perfectionists of his era, including the new liberal Elsie Hobhouse. 572 00:56:04,470 --> 00:56:08,940 So he took the value of a life depends centrally on the unity or harmony of its impulses, 573 00:56:10,080 --> 00:56:15,270 which he thought gives you a coherent personality as a set of unconnected desires does not. 574 00:56:15,630 --> 00:56:22,860 So in this period, there's often a valuing of personality and what personality means, something like the unification of desires and goals. 575 00:56:23,340 --> 00:56:29,370 And he use these values to defend a broadly egalitarian economic program, including early elements of the welfare state, 576 00:56:29,370 --> 00:56:35,430 at a tax rate that approached and perhaps was 100% on incomes above £5,000. 577 00:56:36,780 --> 00:56:43,230 Just to quote him, needs differ in urgency, he wrote. So a certain minimum in material goods is, quote, an absolute necessity. 578 00:56:43,500 --> 00:56:47,370 Well, further editions have less effect and a law of diminishing returns. 579 00:56:47,490 --> 00:56:54,240 This is a quote applies pretty rigorously to the relations between healthy development and physical conditions. 580 00:56:54,450 --> 00:56:58,169 He also denied that there are large differences in people's abilities, saying, quote, 581 00:56:58,170 --> 00:57:04,680 A fulfilment or full development of personality is practically possible, not for one man only, but for all members of a community. 582 00:57:05,610 --> 00:57:11,339 He didn't connect these claims as closely to the specifics of his account of value as I have, but its formality, 583 00:57:11,340 --> 00:57:16,620 and especially its emphasis through the term personality and what I've called relative generality, 584 00:57:16,920 --> 00:57:24,329 supports them at several points, making material security crucial if you're to pursue goals beyond your own condition now and giving 585 00:57:24,330 --> 00:57:29,550 many activities value so great wealth isn't needed for you to have the opportunity for at least one. 586 00:57:30,240 --> 00:57:33,180 Now that kind of argument can't be taken too far. 587 00:57:33,180 --> 00:57:42,420 It can't generate a smooth, diminishing marginal utility of curve of the kind that people imagine for goods like pleasure or desire fulfilment, 588 00:57:42,810 --> 00:57:49,140 but only something rougher. And with many exceptions, it also have to allow that there are some differences in people's overall ability. 589 00:57:49,770 --> 00:57:51,870 Moreover, it's support for equal distributions, 590 00:57:51,870 --> 00:57:58,890 conflicts with and can be outweighed by considerations based on other intrinsic values or the demands of economic production. 591 00:57:59,160 --> 00:58:08,670 Still, I mean, what I'm suggesting is specific features of the generalities measures I proposed for degrees of value in knowledge and achievement, 592 00:58:09,210 --> 00:58:16,590 especially for achievement, underwrite a perfection are perfectionist arguably of some force for some distributive equality. 593 00:58:17,430 --> 00:58:20,850 So just just targets to wind up all these lectures. 594 00:58:20,880 --> 00:58:31,050 Thank you again for listening. You know, perfectionist values haven't figured much in the recent applied ethics literature. 595 00:58:31,290 --> 00:58:38,700 That's partly because many philosophers reject about those values or deny on liberal neutral grounds their relevance to public policy. 596 00:58:39,150 --> 00:58:44,700 But there's increasing sympathy, I think, for perfectionists, or as they're often called, objective list accounts of the good. 597 00:58:45,240 --> 00:58:51,660 But the sympathy often stays fairly abstract. More for objectivism in general than for any specific version of it. 598 00:58:51,840 --> 00:58:56,520 And there are many such versions with different substantive claims about value. 599 00:58:57,030 --> 00:59:03,360 How any one of them bears on applied questions depends on its particular content or its particular objective goods. 600 00:59:03,660 --> 00:59:07,950 So in my first two lectures, I tried to discuss two such goods, knowledge and achievement. 601 00:59:08,250 --> 00:59:12,090 Both were in general, makes them good and what makes for degrees of value in them. 602 00:59:12,570 --> 00:59:19,200 This last lecture has used this discussion to derive some, albeit tentative, conclusions about more applied issues. 603 00:59:19,500 --> 00:59:26,340 It's tried to move from more abstract discussion descriptions of the two goods to more concrete conclusions about what did I talk about? 604 00:59:26,340 --> 00:59:34,500 Government support for the arts, education, meaningful work, and however tentatively economic distribution. 605 00:59:34,740 --> 00:59:35,900 So thank you very much.