In this 1989 clip from the British sketch comedy show A Bit of Fry & Laurie an enthusiastic entrepreneur seeks a startup loan to fund his new business. However, upon presenting his business plan, the befuddled loan-seeker is begrudgingly forced to confront the question: just because this is a way that I can make money, is it something that I ought to do?
While teaching an introductory ethics class there is an abiding temptation to revert to—or to exclusively rely upon—traditional pedagogical methods. For example, let’s consider teaching the renowned Is/Ought Problem (a.k.a. Hume’s Law, Hume’s Guillotine, or the Fact-Value Distinction), which is an almost ubiquitous presence in introductory ethics courses. In the past, and especially while teaching introductory ethics to engineers, I would walk the students through the basic claim—perhaps scribble something on a whiteboard—and then ask goading questions, ranging from abstract to concrete, such as:
“Is everything that is ‘totally natural’ morally permissible?”, or “Just because you’ve always done X does that entail that you always should do X?”
While this method is not totally dysfunctional, it bore the marks of needing improvement. So, in my recent Contemporary Moral Issues and Engineering Ethics classes I showed the above clip to concretize the Is/Ought problem. It worked brilliantly and resonated much better than relying simply upon the previously mentioned method.
The clip has several merits as a philosophical tool for teaching this problem, two of which I will mention. The first is that it’s funny—at least to the majority of students as well as to myself—and so there is an increased likelihood that the students will remember the philosophical idea represented by it. The second is that it humorously conveys the chasm between is and ought, and demonstrates Hume’s point that knowledge of the present world (herein represented by the idea of “market forces”) does not necessarily entail knowledge of how the world ought to be. Students laugh as the caricature of a motivated entrepreneur explains his business model: He will sell heroin and cocaine (in tasteful and appropriate sachets, mind you) to a target market of 12-15 years old adolescents, and he predicts that the adolescents will acquire the capital needed to purchase his products through “their mother’s handbag, car stereos, old-age pensioners, wherever it is!” While the students immediately recognize that there is a moral lacuna in the loan-seeker’s reasoning—even though his idea is justified within the world of market forces—the loan-seeker struggles to understand the loan officer’s question about whether his business plan is moral.
Desperately, the loan-seeker scrambles in his bag to see if he has any “precise figures” or “bar charts” demonstrating the morality of his plan.
Obviously, the loan-seeker is ill-equipped to answer this question, because for him the nature of “market forces” delimits the bounds of what is morally permissible (or at least not impermissible), but the loan officer disrupts this tacit belief by appealing to an idea of morality extraneous to market forces alone, and he does not permit the loan-seeker to go from “is” to “ought” unchallenged.
This clip easily and effectively opens up discussions about the Is/Ought Problem, and isolates a clear example of this failure in moral reasoning. The loan-seeker seems to believe “This is the way market forces are, therefore I ought to act in accordance with them.” The discussion of Hume in conjunction with the Fry & Laurie clip helps the students understand and articulate the shortcomings of this implicit argument. But not only this, this clip also opens up the chance to discuss the role of bridge premises in ethical reasoning, and eventually can also lead to other ethically relevant topics, such as G.E. Moore’s naturalistic fallacy, moral realism, and general meta-ethical inquiries. The clip is a wonderfully effective teaching tool because not only does it introduce a light-hearted tone into the classroom, but also because it’s engaging and philosophically relevant, especially to introductory ethics courses.
Suggested Readings:
Hume, David. A Treatise of Human Nature, book III, part I, section I.
Moore, G.E. Principia Ethica (excerpts).
This section of the Blog of APA is designed to share pedagogical approaches to using humorous video clips for teaching philosophy. Humor, when used appropriately, has empirically been shown to correlate with higher retention rates. If you are interested in contributing to this series, please email the Series Editor, William A. B. Parkhurst, at parkhurst1@usf.edu.
Christopher Black
Christopher Black is a PhD student (soon to be candidate) in the Texas A&M University Department of Philosophy.
