Sam's Blog

Students handed in translations of Meditations . We discussed a few cool topics from the field of meta-ethics: the Utility Monster and Hume's Guillotine (also called the is-ought problem).  Since the ideas are fairly subtle, they are summarized here. Briefly, the Utility Monster causes suffering, but enjoys it more than the sufferer dislikes suffering.  It really messes with classical utilitarianism, which says that you can figure out an ethical decision by looking for the decision that maximizes total happiness...  The Utility Monster maximizes total happiness at the expense of causing suffering in all others.  It is similar to this comic: SMBC Utility Comic . Students are expected to understand this idea. Hume's Guillotine was David Hume's observation that prescriptive statements don't logically follow from descriptive statements.  Prescriptive statements are statements like "you shouldn't jump off that," "you ought to be nice," ...

Collect and Discuss "Morals and Ethics II." The homework is to translate a (small) portion of "Meditations" by Marcus Aurelius.  Students are encouraged to translate into a specific dialect: valley girl, surfer dude, bro-speak, or some other modern variant of american english. Meditations is available at MIT's repository of the classics, here: Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. Though students are welcome to read as much of the book as the choose, and translate whichever portion interests them, here are some suggestions (I count each chunk of text as a paragraph, even if it is only one sentence): Book Three , first three paragraphs; Book Three , last four paragraphs; Book Four , from "A man should always have these two rules in readiness; the one, to do only whatever the reason of the ruling and legislating faculty may suggest for the use of men..." to "Or gold, ivory, purple, a lyre, a little knife, a flower, a shrub?...