How Can I Know Right From Wrong? Watch Philosophy Animations on Ethics Narrated by Harry Shearer

The his­to­ry of moral phi­los­o­phy in the West hinges prin­ci­pal­ly on a hand­ful of ques­tions: Is there a God of some sort? An after­life? Free will? And, per­haps most press­ing­ly for human­ists, what exact­ly is the nature of our oblig­a­tions to oth­ers? The lat­ter ques­tion has long occu­pied philoso­phers like Immanuel Kant, whose extreme formulation—the “cat­e­gor­i­cal imperative”—flatly rules out mak­ing eth­i­cal deci­sions depen­dent upon par­tic­u­lar sit­u­a­tions. Kant’s famous exam­ple, one that gen­er­al­ly gets repeat­ed with a nod to God­win, involves an axe mur­der­er show­ing up at your door and ask­ing for the where­abouts of a vis­it­ing friend. In Kant’s esti­ma­tion, telling a lie in this case jus­ti­fies telling a lie at any time, for any rea­son. There­fore, it is uneth­i­cal.

In the video at the top of the post, Har­ry Shear­er nar­rates a script about Kant’s max­im writ­ten by philoso­pher Nigel War­bur­ton, with whim­si­cal illus­tra­tions pro­vid­ed by Cog­ni­tive. Part of the BBC and Open University’s “A His­to­ry of Ideas” series, the video—one of four deal­ing with moral philosophy—also explains how Kant’s approach to ethics dif­fers from those of util­i­tar­i­an­ism.

In the video above, Shear­er describes the most util­i­tar­i­an of thought exper­i­ments, the “Trol­ley Prob­lem.” As described by philoso­pher Philip­pa Foot, this sce­nario imag­ines hav­ing to sac­ri­fice the life of one for those of many. But there is a twist—the sec­ond ver­sion involves the added crime of phys­i­cal­ly mur­der­ing one per­son, up close and per­son­al, to save sev­er­al. An anal­o­gous but con­verse the­o­ry is that of philoso­pher Peter Singer (below) who pro­pos­es that our oblig­a­tions to peo­ple in per­il right in front of us equal our oblig­a­tions to those on the oth­er side of the world.

Final­ly, the last video sur­veys one of the thorni­est issues in moral philo­soph­i­cal history—the “is/ought” divide, as prob­lem­at­ic as the ancient Euthy­phro dilem­ma. How, asked David Hume, are we to deduce moral prin­ci­ples from facts about the world that have no moral dimen­sion? Par­tic­u­lar­ly when those facts are nev­er con­clu­sive, are sub­ject to revi­sion, and when new ones get uncov­ered all the time? The ques­tion intro­duces a seem­ing­ly unbridge­able chasm between facts and val­ues. Moral judg­ments found­ed on what is or isn’t “nat­ur­al” floun­der before our ter­ror of much of what nature does, and the very par­tial and fal­li­ble nature of our knowl­edge of it.

The prob­lem is as star­tling as Hume’s cri­tique of causal­i­ty, and in part caused Kant to remark that Hume had awak­ened him from a “dog­mat­ic slum­ber.” What may strike view­ers of the series is just how abstract these ques­tions and exam­ples are—how divorced from the messi­ness of real world pol­i­tics, with the excep­tion, per­haps, of Peter Singer. It may be instruc­tive that polit­i­cal phi­los­o­phy forms a sep­a­rate branch in the West. While these prob­lems are cer­tain­ly dif­fi­cult enough to trou­ble the sleep of just about any thought­ful per­son, in our day-to-day lives, our deci­sion mak­ing process seems to be much messier, and much more sit­u­a­tion­al, than we’re prob­a­bly ever aware of.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2015.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Online Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es

A His­to­ry of Ideas: Ani­mat­ed Videos Explain The­o­ries of Simone de Beau­voir, Edmund Burke & Oth­er Philoso­phers

How Did Every­thing Begin?: Ani­ma­tions on the Ori­gins of the Uni­verse Nar­rat­ed by X‑Files Star Gillian Ander­son

What Makes Us Human?: Chom­sky, Locke & Marx Intro­duced by New Ani­mat­ed Videos from the BBC

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC.