Overview
Use the reading- Utllitiarianism by John stuart mill, base your argument on his view of lying. Lying should be the focus.
Do a draft of exegesis of the traditional text(s) you'll be using.
Make sure to read this page on philosophical exegesis. This assignment involves you doing an examination and analysis of the text(s) you've chosen.
Several (1-3 at least) paragraphs of a general overview of the argument you'll be examining.
Close textual analysis of passages you've identified that are central to the traditional philosophers view on lying.
The length of this will depend on what you find, but you should have at least 2-3 quotes/passages and at least 2-4 pages of writing here.
- Exegesis
In Brief: - a clear and critically astute explanation and analysis of the relevant parts of a particular argument.
Argument Structure:
- Motivation
- Negative or positive thesis.
Thesis itself
Premises and how they support the thesis
How to Do It:To reconstruct an argument, you’ll need to present it in a way that someone unfamiliar with the material will understand. Depending on the parameters of your essay, you may also have to narrow down your exegesis to only part of the argument. If you do this, make sure that you give reasons for narrowing the focus.There are two main ways to reconstruct an argument: in regular prose or as a formal series of numbered steps. The latter is normally done in logic classes -- most of your essays will require the former.
- Keep your ideas separate from the author’s. Your purpose is to make the author’s argument clear, not to tell what you think of it.
Be charitable. Give the best version of the argument you can, even if you don’t agree with the conclusion.
- Define important terms.
Organize your ideas so that the reader can proceed logically from premises to conclusion, step by step.
- Explain each premise.
- Practice: Here is a passage by 18th-century British philosopher David Hume:Take any action allowed to be vicious: Willful murder, for instance. Examine it in all lights, and see if you can find that matter of fact, or real existence, which you call vice. In whichever way you take it, you find only certain passions, motives, volitions and thoughts. There is no other matter of fact in the case. The vice entirely escapes you, as long as you consider the object. You never can find it, till you turn your reflection into your own breast, and find a sentiment of disapprobation, which arises in you, towards this action. Here is a matter of fact, but it is the object of feeling, not of reason. It lies in yourself, not in the object. So that when you pronounce any action or character to be vicious, you mean nothing, but that from the constitution of your nature you have a feeling or sentiment of blame from the contemplation of it. (David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature).Step 1: Reread the passage a few times, stopping to look up any unfamiliar words—”disapprobation,” maybe. Be sure you understand the important terms, like “vicious.” (By “vicious,” Hume seems to mean “wicked, depraved, or immoral,” which probably isn’t the way you use the word in everyday speech.)Step 2: Identify the conclusion. (Caution: It won’t always be the first or the last sentence in the passage; it may not even be explicity stated.) In this case, Hume’s conclusion is something like this: The viciousness of an action is a feeling of disapprobation in the person who considers it, not a property of the action itself.Step 3: Identify the premises. Consider the conclusion and ask yourself what the author needs to do to prove it. Hume’s conclusion here seems to have two parts:
- When we call an action vicious, we mean that our “nature” causes us to feel blame when we contemplate that action.
- There is nothing else that we could mean when we call an action “vicious.”
- Step 4: Identify the evidence. Hume considers an example, murder, and points out that when we consider why we say that murder is vicious, two things happen:
We realize that when we contemplate murder, we feel “a sentiment of disapprobation” in ourselves.
- No matter how hard we look, we don’t see any other “matter of fact” that could be called “vice”—all we see “in the object” (the murder) are “certain passions, motives, volitions, and thoughts.”
- Step 5: Identify unspoken assumptions. Hume assumes that murder is a representative case of “viciousness.” He also assumes that if there were “viciousness” in the “object” (the murder), we would be able to “see” it—it isn’t somehow hidden from us. Depending on how important you think these assumptions are, you may want to make them explicit in your reconstruction.Step 6: Sketch out a formal reconstruction of the argument as a series of steps.
- If we examine a vicious action like murder, we see passions, motives, volitions, and thoughts.
- We don’t see anything else.
- So we don’t see any property or “matter of fact” called “viciousness.”
- Assumption: What we don’t see is not there.
When we examine our feelings about murder, we see a “sentiment of disapprobation.”
Unstated premise: This feeling of disapprobation is the only thing all the acts we think are vicious have in common, and we feel it whenever we confront a vicious act—that is, all and only vicious acts produce the feeling of disapprobation.
Conclusion: So the viciousness of a bad action is a feeling of disapprobation in the person who considers it, not a factual property of the action itself.
Step 7: Summarize the argument, explaining the premises and how they work together. Here’s how such a prose reconstruction might go:To understand what we mean when we call an action “vicious,” by which he means “wrong,” Hume examines the case of murder. He finds that whenever we consider a murder itself, all we see are the “passions, motives, volitions, and thoughts” of the people involved. For example, we might see that the murderer feels the passion of anger and is motivated by a desire to make his victim suffer, and that the victim feels the passion of fear and is thinking about how to escape. But no matter how hard we look, we don’t see “viciousness” or wrongness—we see an action taking place, and people with motives and feelings are involved in that action, but none of these things seem to be what we mean by “viciousness” or wrongness. Hume next turns his inquiry inward, and considers what is happening inside a person who calls a murder “vicious.” The person who thinks or says that murder is wrong always seems to be feeling a certain “sentiment of disapprobation.” That is, the person disapproves of the action and blames the murderer. When we say “murder is wrong,” we usually think that we are saying something about murder itself, that we are describing a property (wrongness) that the action of murder has. But Hume thinks what we are in fact describing is a feeling in us, not a property of murder—the “viciousness” of a vicious action is just an emotion in the person who is thinking about or observing that action, rather than a property of the action itself.Sources: http://writingcenter.unc.edu/handouts/philosophy/