I'm Tom Douglas, director of research at the Oxford Health Centre, and I'll be chairing this third lecture.
They're welcome to the to the third and final of Professor Tom Hare because oxygen hero lectures on knowledge and achievement.
And thanks for joining us. And thanks especially to those of you have managed to make it to all, all three of the lectures.
Then we might have a slightly smaller crowd than we had on Monday.
But I think I'm also right in saying that we used to have a much faster rate of drop off than this.
And you have achieved you have achieved something significant in such a low rate of fall of attendance.
And I think also that's good evidence that many people have been finding these lectures highly compelling.
So I'm going to let Tom introduce the topic of the lecture and how it relates to what came before.
But let me just mention that the sort of logistical arrangements will be the same as for the previous two lectures.
So we'll have Tom will speak for about 55 to 60 minutes.
Then we'll have just one or 2 minutes for anyone who needs to leave to do so.
And then we'll have some discussion that can go until 6:15 tonight.
But we do again need to finish promptly so that Tom can be whisked off to another dinner.
Okay. So I'm sure we'll be pressed for time when it comes to the discussion.
So let me add without any further delay and over to Professor Tom Hecker for his third and final lecture.
Thank you. I should say thanks again to the centre for the invitation.
This has been an exciting and fruitful week and thanks to you for.
Not being so much diminishing marginal attendance in subsequent lectures.
Okay. So my my first lecture proposed an account of the intrinsic good of perfection,
of the intrinsic perfectionist goods of knowledge and achievement as such are in general.
The second added an account of degrees of value in these goods.
Therefore,
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,
understood as having two forms that I called intrinsic and relative generality.
In this third lecture, I am going to try to draw some applied ethics conclusions from these goods,
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
view that there's value in intrinsically and relatively general knowledge and achievement.
Now perfections values like these two are sometimes thought to bear mainly on self-regarding choices,
ones about what you should seek in your own life. But they also have implications for social and political questions.
Aristotle thought the proper aim of the state of the eudaimonia or the living of objectively good lives by all citizens.
More recently, Gemma Hastings, Rational Elsie Hobhouse and others of their era included perfectionist goods in a standard consequentialist
view that tells both individuals and governments to aim at the greatest aggregate good of all.
Now these views are all excluded by the influential strand in recent political philosophy initiated by John Rawls and Ronald Dworkin.
That requires the state to be constrained by a demand of liberal neutrality or public reason,
and so never to have it as justification for acting that some activities are intrinsically better than others.
In what follows, however, I'm going to ignore all such neutrals demands.
The arguments for them have, to my mind at least repeatedly been exposed as unpersuasive.
And the precedence in the literature is frankly, a puzzle. So I'm going to ask with no hesitation or embarrassment.
What follows for social policy from the two for two perfectionists goods I've described Now,
neutrals and liberals more generally are especially troubled by the prospect of
a perfectionist state trying to force people into objectively good activities,
for example, through coercive legislation. And that's, in principle, possible for the goods of knowledge and achievement.
A state could require adults to take exams in general or other knowledge and imprison those who did badly.
It could also penalise people who fail to complete difficult activities.
But like many other writers, I'm going to assume that at least as regards adults,
the state will limit to limit its perfectionist policies to ones that non-coercive will promote the good.
A directive to promote knowledge and achievement needed need and after all,
be the only one a state faces may also be subject to the ideological constraints, such as one based on a right.
All adults have to choose their own course of life.
Constraints that make any coercive interference with them, whether by individuals or by a government.
Other things equal seriously wrong. Efforts to force people into knowledge or achievement may also be blocked by their effects on other goods,
either non perfectionists such as pleasure or or pleasure or satisfaction or perfectionist.
In the second lecture, I mentioned moral virtue as a separate perfectionist.
Good, and said it involves seeking intrinsically good things in themselves or for their own sakes,
But using the coercive power of the law to promote objective goods introduces a motive
the desire to avoid punishment that's contrary to and could supplant this virtuous one.
It may then be, on balance, less good if citizens pursue better knowledge or achievement only in order to avoid punishment than if
they pursue some lesser good for its own sake and less virtuously a perfectionist view can also treat
autonomous self-direction is itself an objective good that coercive action state action sets back and can
even treat it as an aspect of the good of achievement where you yourself form and realise your life goals.
And actually that came up in the Q&A after the last lecture.
I mean, I, I consider you that there's special value in having knowledge of yourself and
achieving goals inside your own life and achieving goals inside your own life,
and particularly the valuable organising ones. That's a matter of autonomous self-direction.
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.
But these reasons don't have the same force against non-coercive support of the same goods,
even though neutral ism does object in the same way To that,
there are several policy areas where non-coercive promotion of knowledge and achievement is possible and can be on balance justified.
The first a kind of more abstract topic. It's no.
45 years ago. But Thomas Nagel argued that once argued, the perfectionist values have a distinctive formal structure,
one concerned only with their level and not their spread.
We care, he said. That someone has, for example, proof.
Fermat's Last Theorem. No, some fact about Roman history or has walked on the moon.
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.
As he put it, quote, It's important to achieve fundamental advances, for example, in mathematics or astronomy,
even if very few people come to understand them and they have no practical effect.
The mere existence of such understanding somewhere in the species is regarded by many as worth substantial sacrifices.
Any such advance will be made by some individual. It was a particular mathematician who proved Fermat's Last Theorem,
but Nagel was right to locate its value in the view he describes in the human species as a whole.
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.
Nor does it matter which which individual makes the advance.
What's important important is just that someone does. Neil Armstrong understood this when walking out on the moon.
He spoke of famously one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.
Nagel was also right that this view is distinctively suited to perfectionist values.
It would be odd to care in the same way that someone somewhere has enjoyed a particular intense pleasure or fulfilled some unusual desire.
With these values, we seem to care only about their spread.
But it's too much to suggest, as Nagel did, that this is the only view appropriate for perfectionist values.
As I've said, many perfectionists have cared that everyone lead an objectively good life,
and that has been and should be the principal perfectionist view.
Still, there can be as an addition with some weight, the species, etc. species centred concern that someone somewhere achieve a perfectionist.
Good. So humanity as a whole achieve it. But doesn't matter to the same degree that the achievement is widely shared.
There can also be a variant of this view in which for any nation or community it matters
that some member of it has done some unique research or achieved some special goal.
So the nation as a whole has done it in either form. The view can have some policy implications.
So under the heading of knowledge, it can favour the use of public funds to support research, for example, at universities.
So some people, even if not many, know a proof of Fermat's Theorem or facts about Roman history.
The aim is just that this knowledge exists somewhere in the species or the community,
though it may be enough in principle on this view that one person knows some fact.
This usually won't be possible unless there's a body of researchers at different universities who support each other's efforts.
And of course, different researchers can know different things.
So in practice, the View favours supporting a cohort of researchers, even though formally it gives no way to numbers.
You know, for one person to have some knowledge, usually several must have it.
The same policy could be favoured under the heading of achievement,
namely that of discovering by complex and challenging means the truth on some topic.
That's a matter that humanity as a whole has successfully proved.
Fermat's Theorem or done all the work involved in confirming the existence of Higgs Boson.
The Higgs boson. Given how difficult that is or arrived at some hard to reach understanding,
there can be a similar justification for supporting from public funds experimental work in the arts that has a limited audience.
Or the achievements of Olympic athletes who set records or have astronauts who walk on the moon.
Of course, there can be other justifications of policies like these.
University faculty who are active in research may be better teachers and impart more knowledge to their students.
Discoveries in what seem arcane branches of physics can have technological spinoffs,
and what was once experimental art can come to be widely appreciated.
Moreover, the actual motives behind such policies of have been pursued may not have been all that perfectionist.
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.
But a perfectionism focussed in nagel's way on unique goods attributable to humanity as a
whole can give an additional justification for funding programs to support these goods,
even if the goods won't be shared by many people. So, you know.
Broadly perfectionist view need not include a part with this distinctive structure doesn't have to include a part with that distinctive structure.
It can stand there only as more in rational did about the total good in all people's lives.
And even if it does include such a part, it needn't give it great weight against the total good.
Still, including it is one option and can make perfectionism distinctively favour.
Public support for individual excellences or superlative instances of knowledge and achievement as goods of humanity apart from their wider appeal.
I think when we're sitting for a time said,
Are you going to give a justification for funding philosophy that requires that philosophy arrives, that knowledge?
Well, we believe it. Okay. Next topic.
The perfectionist policy that's figured most in discussions of liberal neutrality is government funding of the arts.
So we can have nagel's rationale if it aims to ensure that a certain type of art or its appreciation exists just somewhere.
And some may take this view about, say, contemporary classical music and the idea that classical.
I don't mean Mozart. I mean the stuff that people composed today.
Our neighbours in Toronto are a contemporary classical composer and director,
and they I think they think that arts funding should ensure that their type of music still continues.
Well, that's one that's kind of a niggle, like justification of government support for the arts.
But it's more common form involves subsidising museums,
orchestras and theatre companies so they can have lower ticket prices and attract more visitors.
Its main justification then, is to make an intrinsic good of aesthetic appreciation available to more people more often.
There are, however, different views of what this good is, and so different forms of justification can take on one view to improve.
For example, the relevant good is that of appreciating beauty,
where beauty can't be given an informative analysis and there's no common feature that makes all beautiful things beautiful.
But on other views the good is cognitive or involves some kind of knowledge.
The something literature gives us insights into human psychology through the characters it portrays, or that the arts more generally expose us to.
And so teach us about different ways of seeing the world.
For some, art conveys philosophical understanding or expresses abstract truths, while others think it gives us more specifically moral knowledge.
And even that exposure to it can make us morally better people.
A perfectionist justification of government arts funding will be different given a different one of these views.
But there is a specific count of aesthetic value that fits the generality measures, intrinsic and relative generality that I've proposed.
So this view says the beauty or aesthetic value, if that's distinct from beauty of a successful work of art,
depends on the relations between its elements and more specifically on its unifying diverse elements in a way,
in a way that makes for unity in diversity or what's often called within aesthetics, organic unity.
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.
In a painting, these elements are lines, colours and other compositional features, as well as in a representational work, its subject matter.
In music, they're notes at a time and a chord through time, in a melody or both, in a whole composition,
in a novel, or play their words, descriptions, and especially incidents of plot.
But in all these cases, different elements are combined in a way that creates an overall emotional or aesthetic effect.
With that effect in its creation. Ah, what has aesthetic value?
So works elements can also include its theme, for example, the philosophical idea it aims to illustrate or express.
If there is harmony between this idea and the way it's expressed or between the work's content and its form,
that can be another source of aesthetic value. But the general idea is that it works.
Aesthetic value rests on unifying relations among, in the ideal case, diverse elements.
Unlike some of some accounts of aesthetic value, this one fits many and even all the arts.
For example, all of painting, music, poetry and drama.
In all these arts it holds.
There's more aesthetic worth both what both want to work is more thoroughly unified, and when the elements it unifies are more diverse.
That last bit is sort of from Robert Nozick's philosophical explanations of a brief discussion about art and the little I've read.
I think kind of organic unity is the ground of aesthetic.
Worth goes back to Coleridge. He's apparently the person who introduced it.
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.
So these works are especially worthy objects of appreciation,
and that appreciation especially is especially worth promoting, for example, through government subsidies.
So there's a clear overlap between this view and the generality measures.
In my second lecture, appreciating a work with this kind of organic unity involves a mental state with first intrinsic generality.
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,
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.
The also appreciation also involves, as are even more importantly, relative generality.
If you have to see how those elements, especially if they're diverse,
combine to create their common aesthetic effect, you have to see the organic relations.
There are, however, different ways of doing this. In some cases,
you grasp the overall aesthetic property A work's unity makes makes for without
fully or consciously understanding how its elements generate that property.
Thus, you may see that a work has a certain kind of beauty or expresses a certain certain emotion,
but be unable to say exactly which of its features make that so.
So I've always found that, you know, the famous Philip Larkin lines, they [INAUDIBLE] you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do despite.
Sound, despite their informal vocabulary, distinctively poetic and even elevated.
I mean, they. I hope. Does anyone else feel this?
They just sound poetic to me. The reason this rests on several features.
So first of all, the regular iambic rhythm. The internal rhyme of the short.
You sound in the first line. There's three of them.
And the alliteration is first of the M and then of the D starting each lines.
Final word word in hearing the lines is poetic.
You have to in some sense be hearing these elements, but you typically aren't conscious of some of them.
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.
Much of their effect on you is subconscious.
You can likewise hear in 1960s soul music recording, say, from the Stax studio in Memphis as loose and funky,
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.
If you're asked what makes the recording funky, you can't say, though you must at some level be hearing the delay.
In each of these cases that it may be bad examples,
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?
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.
In each of these cases, critical analysis, either literary or musical,
can reveal more about how the work's elements combine to produce their aesthetic effect.
That's what criticism does. So you can come to understand how the aesthetic effect is generated.
But at least initially, you often don't understand that before you do,
or given the analysis, the elements effect on you occurs largely below consciousness.
There's therefore a question whether when your appreciation of works aesthetic properties is partly subconscious,
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.
If it would have its full value. You're coming to that understanding, say, through critical analysis,
may have the generic value of any knowledge of how something is caused, but no distinctive aesthetic worth.
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.
But it may instead be that the conscious understanding does have aesthetic worth.
So what's distinctively valuable in appreciating appreciating art is more present.
If you can see what works aesthetic properties rest on or grow out of,
then a merely subconscious awareness is incomplete and critical analysis can make it better.
And. There can, of course, be other benefits to critical analysis.
It may be that regular practice in it improves your initial on thinking responses.
So the more of it you've done, the more you notice from the start.
Aesthetic features, for example, in poetry or music that you would otherwise have missed.
Um, through the practice, your, um, your subconscious sensitivity is sharpened I guess, after 70 minutes.
Well, here's a question. Can knowing how it works, features are produced have the opposite effect of undermining the pre critical aesthetic response,
at least often, in my view, that doesn't happen.
The Larkin still sounds poetic and the soul music still sounds funky after you've learned what makes themself.
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.
You can't appreciate the organic unity this involves unless you know what the theme is with much criticism,
especially of literary work aims to identify. So here again, some critique, some critical understanding is needed for any aesthetic response to occur.
Going back. I mean, those are just kind of sort of additional reasons why critical understanding of works, of art can be valuable,
because sometimes you can't even have the initial aesthetic response unless you understand something about the elements of the work.
Anyway, so the first few described above where uncritical or subconscious appreciation has full aesthetic value.
The aim of government support for the arts need be only to promote such appreciation, say by making concerts and theatre performances more affordable.
Those attending didn't understand how what they're appreciating is produced.
But on the second view,
it should also include as a central component the promotion of critical understanding and the enriched aesthetic experience that makes for.
This could involve explanatory lectures before symphony or theatre performances or free catalogues to accompany exhibitions of paintings.
But it may also primarily be an issue for education. So schools teach students, as they perhaps now do most with literature,
to go beyond their initial aesthetic response to a work and reach a fuller and more critical understanding of it.
They can then have similarly fuller understandings later in life or more valuable appreciations of the art they encounter.
But the goal of arts policy would be not just some, but a more informed or critical appreciation of aesthetic objects.
Generality based view of the kind my earlier lectures defended can supplement this justification of support for the arts with many others.
If art conveys knowledge of psychological, philosophical or other truths and those are extended and explanatory,
that can be a further reason to promote it. This justification certification is more instrumental,
more about what can result from engaging with art than is in the organic unity one about something intrinsic to the engagement.
But it can be important if some truths can be communicated best or even as some have held, can be communicated only through art.
Of course, all of these justifications have to be weighed against a state's other responsibilities,
both to other perfectionist goods and to non perfectionist concerns, and they'll often be outweighed.
But they do have some force, some of which derives on the view I've presented from the connection between
aesthetic appreciation and mental states with intrinsic and relative generality.
Next topic. And equally relevant policy areas education.
Here are both general questions about the overall justification of a public education system
and more specific ones about its proper content or the curriculum it should ideally teach.
A generality based perfectionism doesn't propose radically new answers to these questions.
On the contrary, it often fits better with much current educational practice than do many non perfectionist views.
Among the many functions of publication, public education.
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.
Neutral as liberals. That's kind of the rolls to work in school often emphasise how education gives students the tools
to autonomously choose a plan of life or to a function effectively as democratic citizens.
But all these justifications have an, at best, indirect connection with much of the standard school curriculum,
such as the teaching of physics, biology and abstract mathematics.
How much do studying these subjects prepare an average student for paid work or for democratic citizenship?
The most obvious thing it does is convey knowledge sometimes of isolated matters of fact,
but often of general principles that make for understanding and on a generality based view.
This is a central purpose of education to give students knowledge or a general understanding of the world as an end in itself.
On this view. Students should learn physics in part because they live intrinsically better lives.
If they know the basic laws governing the motions of objects on earth and have some grasp of magnetism, electricity, and perhaps particle physics,
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.
And they should some have some sense of the way abstract mathematical properties relate.
These subjects belong in the curriculum, in part because alongside any other benefits,
learning them gives students intrinsically valuable because intrinsically in a relatively general knowledge or consider just as to more examples,
geography and history. Studying these subjects can increase the extent of your knowledge by teaching your truths,
especially about other people that are distant from you in space time or both.
This could involve intrinsic generality, even one where you know is quite specific,
such as some particular fact about ancient Rome that still takes your mind beyond your own place in time.
But there's the most of this value, what you know is itself extended.
Thus, from studying geography,
you could acquire a mental map of the world as a whole with its different regions and nations in their respective places.
The resultant knowledge is more intrinsically general than if you knew only about your own locale,
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.
History likewise gives you knowledge of extended sequences, events of events in your or another nation's past.
Now, with the temporal and ideally causal relations between them and these intrinsically general forms of knowledge can lead to better explanations,
and so to more relative generality with knowledge of the world as a whole.
You can see what events in your nation are the effect of factors that have operated similarly elsewhere.
You avoid the parochialism of thinking. Local effects must have local causes, such as the merits or flaws of your particular government.
By applying general principles to your own locale, you can also know, for example,
that its being downwind from mountains explains why your city has limited rainfall.
Knowing history can increase your understanding of present day conditions when the result the result of much earlier ones.
In both subjects provide explanations of different distant facts such as about early Rome or present day Indonesia in their own local terms.
So what you can explain about your place in time is mirrored in what you understand about others.
One of my colleagues pointed me to a book of John Dewey's called Democracy and Education.
And it has. And so it's about education, and it has a chapter specifically about geography and history.
And it says that studying them that these are going to be some quotes from Dewey allows an indefinitely wide scope of intellectual considerations,
gives intellectual perspective to what might otherwise be narrow personal actions and places are doings in their space and time connections.
Those to me, those remarks read as pointing, if somewhat vaguely,
to what I've called intrinsic and relative generality as present in geographical and historical knowledge.
These properties are also found in knowledge of physics or biology, if anything, to a higher degree because of their more extended subject matter.
But geographical and historical knowledge may have a compensating value given a possible addition to the generality account,
one that departs a little from pure formality.
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.
I think this came up in the in the question and answer on Wednesday.
The idea that there's extra value in self-knowledge.
An extra value in achieving goals in your life.
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.
There's likewise more value in determining facts about your life,
especially large scale or structural ones, than in similarly affecting other people's.
This makes autonomous self-direction not only an instance of achievement, but especially valuable one.
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.
I'm reminded of, you know, the famous Alexander Pope line. The proper study of mankind is man.
So the idea is that there's special value in understanding, having explanatory knowledge of the human species or other human beings.
And so that could be special value in knowing facts about the species you belong to.
And by a further extension, about your specific nation or community.
These facts all relate in some ways to you which can give knowing them additional value.
But they're also among the central subjects of geography and history studying,
which therefore can therefore have not only the generic scientific value it shares with learning physics or biology,
but also a distinctive humanistic value that comes from thinking about and understanding human beings and human events.
So these are those are intellectual reasons for teaching a subject,
and they can be sometimes outweighed by more practical reasons, for example, about preparing students for work.
But to me, promoting promoting the intrinsic good of knowledge is at least one important goal of education.
In fact, an appeal to this good may provide the best defence of the traditional school curriculum against
demands to revise it in ways more thoroughly friendly to business or the broader economy.
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?
Well, one reason to resist that is a function of education is simply to produce knowledgeable, informed.
Citizens just have to be particularly citizens, people who are knowledgeable and informed.
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.
Okay.
Other parts of the curriculum aim less at explanatory knowledge than in introducing students to activities that can enrich their lives in other ways.
Think of classes in art, music, and especially literature. Some students may later practice these arts, painting or playing music,
even if only as a hobby, but others may simply read novels or attend the theatre.
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.
And it may also, as noted above, require them to start doing critical analysis.
Both of these can happen while they're at school.
In a book about education.
Harry Brighouse argues that schools should mainly introduce students to activities that aren't widely available in the surrounding culture.
This perhaps more these days to classical music than to hip hop.
But the prominence of arts instruction in the standard curriculum is again better
explained on a perfectionist basis than the indirect ways neutral ists have to invoke.
I mean, if you're if you're arguing that, you know,
schools should teach painting because that will make people better democratic citizens, I think your argument is making a stretch.
Just to add, I mean, some a lot of student learning happens not in the classroom, but in extracurricular activities.
Students play in the school band, work on the yearbook, or join the computer science club.
Some of these activities augment classroom teaching for those especially interested in a given subject.
Think of the computer club. But many offer a further benefit.
In my second lecture, I said there's there's value initially of intrinsic,
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,
including you, works successfully towards a common goal.
And the many extracurricular activities that are group activities embody this value in a specially valuable way.
They're usually more structured, involve more participants, and last longer than the more informal collaborations found in children's play.
They therefore can involve more generality than such play, as well as doing more to develop the skills for similar collaborations later in life.
They instantiate in the present and promote in the future one valuable form of achievement.
Now earlier. Just a little while ago, I contrasted promoting students knowledge as an end in itself with preparing them for paid work.
But they could also be a perfectionist justification of the latter if the work in question will have intrinsic value.
So the preparation is for something of genuine worth that will be so if the work is challenging and therefore meaningful,
a topic on which a generality based general view again has implications.
So this is the next topic. What's called meaningful work.
So the word called meaningful is standardly contrasted with the wrote or
mechanical tasks of an assembly line worker or nowadays a call centre employee.
Since paid work occupies a great deal of most people's time,
its character could have significant effects on the quality of their lives and it therefore raises important issues of social policy.
Here's some philosophers have argued that there is a right to meaningful work where the justice demands the opportunity for such work.
For everyone. I mean, among other philosophers, Rawls, in his later work, affirmed a right to the opportunity for meaningful work.
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.
And that claim is best, best explained, all argue, but in key respects by perfectionist measures of generality.
So you know,
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.
But these grounds are only contingently and therefore unreliable, only connected to such work's essential features.
If people enjoy or prefer meaningless tasks as the lower orders in Brave New World do, those tasks are best for them.
Rawls, who I mentioned, tied the right to the opportunity for meaningful work,
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.
So if you don't have the opportunity for meaningful work that's destructive of your self-respect.
But you can based self-respect on many things other than the quality of your work, and many people do.
20th century assembly line workers weren't, as Rawls claim suggests, incapable of self-respect.
They could and did find self work worth in the fact that they were earning a living and supporting their families.
Many also valued the personal qualities of blue collar workers like themselves,
such as camaraderie and honesty and directness over what they saw as the egotism and fakery of the materially better off.
In any case, Rawlsian self-respect involves the belief that your activities are worth doing.
And shouldn't it matter whether that belief is true?
The better valuing of meaningful work is more direct based on the objective properties that make it meaningful.
And that's the approach that a lot of writers on this topic take to give at times lengthy lists of such objective properties.
But many of the properties, I think they say meaningful work is work that has.
A list of properties. Yeah, objective properties.
But many of the properties they site in involve at bottom. You know,
the two forms of generality that's meaningful to ask a characteristically not
short term like those in an assembly line look like those in assembly line work,
but extend through time and have to be intended through time.
Think of a defence lawyer strategy in a criminal trial or a years long marketing plan in business.
They also tend to have a great many constituent parts.
Again, unlike assembly line work, which makes them more complex and in that way difficult, placing greater demands on attention and executive control,
especially importantly, their parts are usually varied rather than repetitive,
which increases their complexity and requires a greater diversity of skills.
Thus, the lawyer marketing executive doesn't do the same thing over and over, but many different things.
In particular,
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.
This distinguishes it from assembly line in other,
less meaningful work where you implement a time in motion study or call centre script devised by somebody else.
That means your your work's having the specific character it does is your rather
than somebody else's achievement reflecting your autonomous choice that invokes,
again, the idea that there's special value in determining facts about your life kind of autonomous self-direction.
If the work is part of a joint project, involve many involving many other people as it is at a large enterprise,
you ideally have at least a rough understanding of how your work fits into that project and can attend what you do.
As remote workers often don't as contributing to that extended end.
These are all instant creations within the work of intrinsic and relative generality reality.
In many discussions, meaningful work is said to demand an exercise skill.
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.
Someone with no training at a task may have no idea whatever of the means required to complete it,
let alone the ability to choose those most likely to succeed.
Work that displays that ability involves competence, which is both essential for the full value of achievement and a good in itself.
And what distinguishes a skilled workers competence from that shown on an assembly line is in part the knowledge it involves,
which is more complex, precise and broadly applicable.
So as work has greater cognitive as well as cognitive value, Moreover, this knowledge and skill must normally develop,
be developed through time and practice insofar as you aim at that development.
Your work has another long term complex goal that of becoming better at what you do.
Several recent books have emphasised how the properties of meaningful work are found
not only in the white collar professional jobs with which they're most associated,
but also in the skilled manual labour of a car mechanic, hairdresser or a carpenter.
Given the formality of its measures, a generality based perfectionism agrees.
Manual work, too, can involve tasks that extend through time and involve varied and interrelated goals.
So you need skill first to identify them and then to realise them in the right order.
Just a pair of just as a doctor needs a unified picture of the whole human body to do her work.
So a mechanic has to think of an entire car engine and a carpenter of the whole piece of furniture.
He's making a doctor may base a diagnosis on the precise way and Oregon feels when she palpate it.
But a mechanic can likewise tell what's wrong with an engine by the specific sounded mix and a hairdresser know
whether a given style will work for a client by the precise way the client's hair feels between her fingers.
The doctor's chosen choices may be more complex than the mechanics or hairdressers, and she may face a greater variety of them.
She may also need more elaborate theoretical knowledge.
So there may be there may therefore be differences in the degrees of value in the two kinds of work,
but both involve broadly similar features of extent and complexity.
A generality of you doesn't, however, value everything that's been thought to make for meaningful work.
In his recent book, [INAUDIBLE] Jobs, people know that book.
Tough. Yeah. It was kind of talked about anyways.
In that book, David Graeber takes the jobs that don't merit that title,
the ones that are worth doing to be jobs with, quote, social value or to provide benefits to other people.
He contrasts these with jobs that are socially useless or pernicious.
As it happens, many of the [INAUDIBLE] jobs he discusses are meaningless in other ways.
That's a lot of them don't involve enough tasks to fill the working day,
so their occupants chat on Facebook or pretend to be working when they're not.
This feeling aside, work with Graber social value has several obvious merits.
It's instrumentally good because the benefits it gives to others, and also often because providing them is satisfying for the worker.
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.
But given their formality, the generality measures don't think Graber social value is necessary for meaningful work.
Their main concern is the process such work involves, apart from its product and especially from that product value.
In my second lecture, I said that if you found a company and make itself successful,
your product may not be significantly better for consumers than your competitors, as Coke isn't significantly better than Pepsi.
But ensuring the company's success may be a complex and difficult long term process.
And therefore, on the generality of you, a valuable achievement like success in a challenging game,
your employees work may involve similar achievements again,
just as a process and apart from the specific character of its result, I think many business and working people recognise this,
relishing what they do, in part because of the challenge it poses and the skill it requires.
I'm referring to the Count of Games by Bernard Suits that I mentioned in my last lecture,
an executive at an executive at a small I.T. firm that was given $40 million to grow itself.
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,
you've got so many years to grow the market capitalisation to $1,000,000,000 or $5 billion or something like that.
And he said he said the money served only to, quote, complicate a perfectly pleasant game.
It's hard to admit that work is nothing more than a sightseeing game.
We take our jobs too seriously to admit that jobs are more or less a series of arbitrary obstacles.
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.
Fumbling for time. Can I say something about philosophy?
Well, I got to tell you so Mike Rich told me of this sort of I think it must be and Mary Mitchell is.
Autobiography or memoir. But she had a friend over to her house and she had an issue of mine lying on the table.
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.
Do they like playing them a lot? That's kind of a 1964.
Okay. So if you look at philosophy today, isn't there a lot of attention to paradoxes and puzzles?
The sleeping Beauty puzzle the talks and puzzle the liar paradox newcomers puzzle.
And of course, the official view is that these are deeply revealing of fundamental truth.
And we deal with puzzles because they will reveal these underlying truths.
Maybe I think philosophers like puzzles because they're difficult and challenging and interesting.
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.
All right. Anyways. This account of meaningful work blurs the distinction between work and play.
If work can be defined as any activity engaged in instrumentally in order to earn an income and provide for oneself,
play is at least initially activity chosen for its own sake or auto technically.
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.
Someone doing meaningful work could likewise be both earning her pay and doing something she finds intrinsically rewarding.
We can, in fact imagine two quite different lives of comparable perfectionist worth.
In one, you do meaningful, meaningless work, perhaps on an assembly line, but at high paying for relatively few hours a week.
This gives you leisure time you use for difficult achievement and, say, the arts or sports and the other life.
You have a meaningful job that takes much more of your time and is itself the source of most of your achievement.
Though in one case the achievement is found outside work and the other within it.
What makes for achievement in the two is roughly the same. So.
Back to meaningful work. Philosophers and others have proposed various policies to promote meaningful work.
One is greater worker involvement in corporate decision making, for example, through rep to representation on boards of directors.
Another is a universal basic income to free workers from the financial pressure to accept meaningless jobs.
More radical proposals involve markets, socialism, or socialism more generally.
In an ideal discussion, I would now defend one or more of these policies.
But the empirical and especially economic issues are too complex for me and especially involve difficult trade-offs.
I will though, venture one suggestion about the broadly free market economies in which most of us live.
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.
That's a clear and serious demerit. On the other hand, and especially in contrast with a planned economy,
it gives many people the opportunity for independent entrepreneurship and the
general achievement that could involve recall the value of starting a company,
even just a small one. Making all the main decisions about it and seeing it grow.
This can otherwise a distinctive underwrite, a distinctive perfectionist defence, or at least a partial defence of the free market.
Namely, that enables many people,
and not just a few bureaucrats or planners to pursue the long term and multiple interrelated goals of entrepreneurial and other business activity,
or gives many people the opportunity for that kind of meaningful work.
How far this defence goes depends, of course, on the strengths of the markets, the strength of the markets,
opposite tendency to create rote or meaningless jobs and its other effects, both good and bad, on the quality of people's lives.
And those other effects are clearly important. But defence.
But the defence could be strengthened given certain possible revisions to a market economy.
There's there could, you know,
you can imagine regulations that limit the ability of large corporations to compete against smaller enterprises and drive them out of business.
As has happened so often recently in bookselling restaurants and many other domains.
These regulations might inhibit the largest scale and most impressive business achievements.
Those of a Ray Kroc or a Jeff Bezos. They might also result in somewhat higher prices for consumers, for consumers.
But these effects might be outweighed by the greater opportunities created for many people to
pursue more modest but still valuable entrepreneurial goals for a generality based perfectionism.
More generally, an important question about any economic arrangement is how far it promotes,
rather than hinders the achievements characteristic of meaningful work.
For many people. So I'm going to finish by saying, with the discussion of necessity,
very tentative of a generality base perfectionism implications for economic distribution.
Perfectionist views are often thought to favour unequal economic arrangements,
as they certainly can if they give great way to enable style perfection of humanity view.
Since then, most resources should go to the few who can make.
New advances or from follow nature and making society's ultimate goal the excellence of its few most excellent members.
But if they value all people's good equally and equate that good with knowledge and especially achievement with the two kinds of generality,
they can support a somewhat more egalitarian, not somewhat a more egalitarian distributive program.
At his best, recall achievement is of a goal that's extended both in time.
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
persons it involves and has many other ideally diverse goals as a means to it.
So it's also complex but does pursue this kind of multiple general achievement.
You need material security or the confidence that your basic needs won't be frustrated in the near future.
Without that, it's hard to look safely beyond the here and now or beyond.
You're immediately or beyond immediately pressing concerns.
In the 1960s, a number of sociologists described what they called a culture of poverty,
a set of mental habits found in people facing extreme deprivation.
And that often prevents them from taking steps that will improve their condition even significantly.
At its core is a short and time horizon.
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.
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.
But these narrow wings of focus are a natural and even rational response to extreme poverty.
If you're not certain you can feed yourself or your family tonight, you could hardly devote yourself to long term plans.
Risking your present loss for the possibility of even substantial future gains is difficult and even irrational.
Nor when your survival or minimal comfort is in doubt. Is it easy to think altruistically about others?
This this argument has recently been made by the philosopher Jennifer Morton.
For people facing extreme scarcity, she writes. The most urgent problems are short term and so best dealt with by ignoring longer term possibilities.
But in practical deliberation, we tend to form habits or to follow general norms.
And violent norm of short term thinking is, on the whole, rational in extreme poverty.
It will sometimes lead you not to do what would further a goal you care about, such as not to make a small sacrifice.
Now that could help you lift you, lift you out of poverty later.
Your precarious situation makes it rational for you to prioritise your own needs now, intrinsically, relative,
intrinsically and relatively general achievement then requires a minimal level of
material security and to promote such achievement for all for all its members,
as it should. A society should ensure that security for all.
This can result from full employment in a productive economy, or alternatively alternatively from income transfers through a welfare state.
Either way, it is inconsistent with the extreme inequality present when some severe face severe deprivation
and the measures tendency to favour more equal distribution is strengthened by their formality.
Since the two forms of generality can be found in many activities,
whatever their content or specific goal, they make great wealth unnecessary for a valuable life.
There are indeed worthy achievements that require such wealth, but many don't.
Well, you can pursue a unifying end that involves manipulating vast resources.
You can also have one that requires just few,
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.
This may be less true of the aspect of intrinsic generality that involves intentionally affecting many people, for example, by managing their work.
But though this activity is possible for the private owner of a large corporation,
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.
The measures formality also weakens a claim that can tell against equal distribution,
namely that there are significant difference in people's natural abilities.
If some have more innate talent than others, they can achieve more of worth.
Given a unit of resources on that basis should have access to more.
But while there certainly are significant differences in people's abilities for specific goods, so some have much more talent for music or chess.
The formality of the general generality mixed measures makes it less likely that there are similar differences in their overall abilities.
The more possibilities there are for valuable achievement, the greater the probability that each person is suited to at least one.
Though unable to excel in music or chess, you should be able to do meaningful work of some other kind.
Unify his life around some other goal or achieve in some some leisure pursuit.
So the the idea is that though there are sort of great benefits to having a minimum of resources,
these benefits, it's get less the more resources you have.
That's the idea. And that's supposed to be supported by the particular understanding of the value of achievement.
And just I'll just conclude by noting that this isn't a form of argument without historical antecedents.
The idea that there's kind of the measure of.
The value of something like achievement is.
Generality are the unifying of different goals was actually pretty common in the late 19th and early 20th century.
Well, I was I was going to quote Bradley.
So Bradley said, you know, in Bradley was one of the people who used a generality test for the significance of knowledge.
But he also said you use a similar test for practical goods like achievement, saying that an action one goal is,
quote, to reduce the raw material of our nature to the highest degree of system.
That sounds like relative generality, while another is to widen as far as possible the end to be pursued.
That sounds like intrinsic generality, and that was actually a common view among perfectionists of his era, including the new liberal Elsie Hobhouse.
So he took the value of a life depends centrally on the unity or harmony of its impulses,
which he thought gives you a coherent personality as a set of unconnected desires does not.
So in this period, there's often a valuing of personality and what personality means, something like the unification of desires and goals.
And he use these values to defend a broadly egalitarian economic program, including early elements of the welfare state,
at a tax rate that approached and perhaps was 100% on incomes above £5,000.
Just to quote him, needs differ in urgency, he wrote. So a certain minimum in material goods is, quote, an absolute necessity.
Well, further editions have less effect and a law of diminishing returns.
This is a quote applies pretty rigorously to the relations between healthy development and physical conditions.
He also denied that there are large differences in people's abilities, saying, quote,
A fulfilment or full development of personality is practically possible, not for one man only, but for all members of a community.
He didn't connect these claims as closely to the specifics of his account of value as I have, but its formality,
and especially its emphasis through the term personality and what I've called relative generality,
supports them at several points, making material security crucial if you're to pursue goals beyond your own condition now and giving
many activities value so great wealth isn't needed for you to have the opportunity for at least one.
Now that kind of argument can't be taken too far.
It can't generate a smooth, diminishing marginal utility of curve of the kind that people imagine for goods like pleasure or desire fulfilment,
but only something rougher. And with many exceptions, it also have to allow that there are some differences in people's overall ability.
Moreover, it's support for equal distributions,
conflicts with and can be outweighed by considerations based on other intrinsic values or the demands of economic production.
Still, I mean, what I'm suggesting is specific features of the generalities measures I proposed for degrees of value in knowledge and achievement,
especially for achievement, underwrite a perfection are perfectionist arguably of some force for some distributive equality.
So just just targets to wind up all these lectures.
Thank you again for listening. You know, perfectionist values haven't figured much in the recent applied ethics literature.
That's partly because many philosophers reject about those values or deny on liberal neutral grounds their relevance to public policy.
But there's increasing sympathy, I think, for perfectionists, or as they're often called, objective list accounts of the good.
But the sympathy often stays fairly abstract. More for objectivism in general than for any specific version of it.
And there are many such versions with different substantive claims about value.
How any one of them bears on applied questions depends on its particular content or its particular objective goods.
So in my first two lectures, I tried to discuss two such goods, knowledge and achievement.
Both were in general, makes them good and what makes for degrees of value in them.
This last lecture has used this discussion to derive some, albeit tentative, conclusions about more applied issues.
It's tried to move from more abstract discussion descriptions of the two goods to more concrete conclusions about what did I talk about?
Government support for the arts, education, meaningful work, and however tentatively economic distribution.
So thank you very much.