SEPT 8

4: SEPT 8

Assigned

• Sapolsky, Chapter 10: The Evolution of Human Behavior 328-374 (46). For this class read only pages 328-354 (26). Use notes below also for part two of this chapter.

• Utilitarianism:

• Watch:

• The Trolley Problem The Trolley Problem.
• PBS Philosophy Crash course on utilitarianism. [1]

• Recommended to browse:

• Self-driving cars with Trolley problems: [2]
• The Cold Logic of Drunk People
• Variations on the Trolley Problem: [[3]]

In-class content

• Philosophical Method: Ethics as a kind of language game, or conversational constraints on moral discourse. Today, before turning to Sapolsky, we'll do a short workshop on how ethical conversations work.

• Reviewing samples of first writing

Some writing concepts - Review of first writing

• A general challenge of good writing -- Getting outside of your head.

• Here are a few good writing concepts to look for in the samples on the handout.

• Flow -- How well does one sentence follow another? Do you notice places where flow is interrupted?
• Good starts -- Without good introductions and signals of organization and thesis readers are disoriented and confused. Set context by framing the topic. Tell your readers where you are going to take them.
• Efficient writing -- Literally, how much you say with so many words. Awkward phrasing and limited word choice reduce efficiency.

• Review of writing samples.

• The samples on the handout are drawn from the other section of Ethics. They all do many good things as writers, but there are some differences. As you read the samples, try to notice differences. Do you think one of the samples is generally better written than another? Does one offer more interesting or deeper ideas than another?

Ethics as a "language game"

• Well, not really a game. The term comes from a famous philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein, who was interested in how language is similar to a games. For example, there are lots of rules to using language, not just grammar, etc., but social rules. Like the rules for conversations. You can know a language and still not be very sophisticated in having a conversation!

• Ethical conversations and analyses are general about evaluating "value propositions" - claims that we ought to adopt or reject some value(s) and the associate behavior motivated by those values.

• So what are some of the unwritten, but widely acknowledged rules for having an ethical conversation? What are the legitimate "moves" you can make in an ethical conversation? What moves would earn you a yellow or red card.

• Illegitimate moves:

• appealing to only one person's or group's interests.

• "What's right is what serves my interests!" vs. "In many circumstances, it is morally permissible for everyone to pursue their interests"

• denying the standing (need for consideration) of a person or group arbitrarily. "

• "Everyone deserves human rights except group X"

• most illicit appeals in informal logic (fallacies): ad hominems and appeals to pity, ignorance, etc.

• Legitimate moves:

• appealing to broadly held values about human life and human dignity.
• appealing to cultural and local norms that may be considered well justified.
• appealing to objective knowledge claims that may support or invalidate premises.
• calling into question these norms or their application, often by:

• 1. conceptual analysis -- What does it mean to value human life?
• 2. advocacy for specific understanding of human nature or human needs.
• 3. showing that some value proposition will or will not function to promote desirable outcomes.

• Constraints (or rules of thumb) we might recommend to improve moral or political discourse:

• observe norms of civil discourse,
• avoid calling people liars, implying that they are stupid for not agreeing with you, or impugning bad motives,
• present others' views in ways that shows empathetic understanding,
• recognize common ground,
• show respect for perspectives that seem tied to a person's normal identity, including their personal experience, ethnicity, gender identity/expression, or socio-economic status (SES). Basic and relatively fixed "values orientation" may be part of identity.

Sapolsky, Chapter 10: The Evolution of Human Behavior Part 1 328-354

• Evolution 101 — 3 steps - Inheritance - Variation - Fitness

• Some misconceptions:

• 1. Evolution is not so much about survival as reproduction. Antagonistic pleiotropy — sperm early, cancer later.
• 2. The living are not better adapted than the extinct. Fitness isn't "prospective"
• 3. Evolution is "just a “theory”

• Sexual selection and natural selection. Example of peacocks — trade offs between two forms of selection.

• Sociobiology and evolutionary psychology. Premise: Evolution selects for social and psychological traits and behaviors that improve fitness -- just like it selects for bodies that stand up to selection pressures.

• Marlin Perkins and Mutal of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom. Bad ideas about evolution of altruistic species behavior. Group selection doesn’t work that way.

• Individual Selection — 334: competitive infanticide: why langur monkeys kill babies. How females develop a false estrus to fight back. (Working against mountain gorillas these days.)

• Kin Selection — 336: Basic idea: your nearest kin has most of your genes. Haldane, “I’d gladly lay down my life for two brothers or eight cousins.” Allomothering. Grooming behaviors reflect closeness. 337: vervet monkey study - A treats B badly, then B treat A and A's kin badly. Playback studies. These studies show in various ways how warning behaviors track kinship relationships in social primates.

• problem for kin selection — avoiding inbreeding. Many species mate with 1-3rd cousins. Sperm aggregation. Malagasy giant jumping rat. 340 - women prefer smell of near relatives over unrelated.

• How do animal recognize kin? Major histocompatibility complex (MHC) gives many animals olfactory recognition of kin. Other mechanisms: songs, vaginal fluid smell, milk.

• How do we do kin selection? Pseudo-kin selection or “green beard” effects. We are not limited to actual kin, any conspicuous feature (like a green beard). Humans show green beard effects. Related to parochialism and xenophobia. It could also be that our preference for humans over non-humans is a big green bread effect.

• Reciprocal Altruism.

• Don't just think about evolution as promoting competition toward extinction. Equilibriums are important. Sustaining conditions that meet selection pressures. (problems that can be addressed by values) Maintaining a good community.

• Reciprocal altruism is a third way that evolution shapes human behavior. Unrelated individuals cooperate across nature (fish in schools, birds in formation, herds). "Geometry of the selfish herd." Also unrelated primates. Important 1971 paper by Trivers (344) on reciprocal altruism. How social species incur a fitness cost to benefit another individual with expectation of reciprocation.

• Requirements for reciprocal altruism. Social species, frequent interactions, recognition of individuals (so, also memory).

• cheating and freeriding can create a "Red Queen" situation.

• Two big questions: when is cooperation optimal, how can altruism start?

• What strategy for cooperating is optimal?

• background to Game Theory - John von Neumann. Prisoner's Dilemma connected biologists to game theorists. Short video on PD: [4]
• Basics of a Prisoner's Dilemma payoff: A&B cooperate (hold out): 1 year: A cooperates, B defects (rats out B by confessing): B walks and A gets three years. Cooperation is best, but only if you can count on it. If not, then you have to think of average payoffs or outcomes. Some some sets of payoffs, thinking this way leads to defection, the most rational choice, but not optimal. Quite a little dilemma.

• defection is optimal for single round PD, but what about 3 rounds. Still best to defect. What about "iterated" (uncertain number of rounds)?

• Axelrod's challenge: Optimal strategy for iterated PD. Winner: Anatol Rapoport: Cooperation on 1st round and then match opponent's previous behavior. "Tit for Tat" Always works toward a draw, or slight negative outcome. Not that Tit for Tat tilts toward cooperation, but avoids being a sucker and punishes defectors. famous paper in 1981 by Axelrod and Hamilton.

• "Signal errors" can reduce Tit for Tat payoffs. Remedies: "Contrite tit for tat (retaliate after two defections) and Forgiving (forgive 1/3 of defections). Both address the signal error problem, but have other vulnerabilities.

• Mixed (genetic) strategies: You could start out with one strategy and then change to another. How do you go from punitive Tit for Tat to one incorporating forgiveness? Trust. 350-351: describes a changing environment a events signal to individuals to change strategies. Kind of a model of real life.

• Black Hamlet fish

• Stickleback fish

• But skeptical that tit for tat has been found outside humans.

Philosophical Moral Theories: Consequentialism -- Utilitarianism

• Brief historical intro to utilitarians: Early industrial society, "social statics" (early efforts to measure social conditions). Utilitarians were seen as reformers.

• Eudaimonistic(about Happiness or Well-Being) vs. Non-Eudaimonistic (Duty)

• Two views:

• 1) Morality is fundamentally eudaimonistic "in the long run," even if it in particular proximate circumstances in does not always involve positive emotions (includes Utilitarians).
• 2) Morality and moral responses realize disinterested values like reason and justice, that are not related to promoting happy outcomes (Kant / Duty ethics).

• Fundamental consequentialist intuition: Most of what's important about morality can be seen in outcomes of our actions that promote happiness and human well-being. (Recall "Intentions-Acts-Consequences")

• Basic principles of utilitarian thought:

• Equal Happiness Principle: Everyone's happiness matters to them as much as mine does to me. Everyone's interests have equal weight. (Note this is a rational principle. Emotionally, it's false.)

• Note on method: this is a way to universalize. Recall earlier discussion about conditions for ethical discourse. Ethics is about figuring out when we need to take a moral concern about something and, if we do, then we take on constraint (conversational): universalizability, equality of interests.

• Principle of Utility: Act always so that you promote the greatest good for the greatest number.

• Hedonic version: Act to promote the greatest pleasure ...
• Classical utilitarian: greatest balance of range of qualitatively diverse pleasures and aspects of well-being.
• Preference utilitarian version: Act to maximally fulfill our interest in acting on our preferences.

• But what is utility? What is a preference?
• Utility: pleasure, what is useful, happiness, well-being.

• Is the utilitarian committed to maximizing happiness of individuals directly? A utilitarian focused on promoting utility, might still acknowledge that promoting human happiness is mostly about protecting conditions for an individual's autonomous pursuit of happiness. Consider cases: When does promoting the greater good involve letting people make their own decisions vs. managing or regulating an issue centrally?
• Conditions for the pursuit of happiness: Order, stability, opportunity, education, health, rights, liberty.
• Issue of protection of rights in utilitarian thought.

• Preferences:

• An indirect way to solve the problem of lack of agreement about goods. Let's maximize opportunities for people to express their preferences. Positive: pushing the question of the good life to the individual. Negative: High levels of individualism may reduce social trust. Lack of action on opportunities to reduce suffering.
• Thought experiment: Returning a gun to an angry person. Is the angry person's preference one that has to count?
• Cultural contradictions in our preferences: we prefer health, but we also "prefer" to eat the western diet. Which preference should the utilitarian focus on? Some preferences are based on bias or prejudice.
• Need some standard of rational or considered preference. What a "reasonable person" would do. Maybe less disagreement about that than "the good". (Example: Intervening in the lives of homeless mentally ill and suffering.)

Group Discussion: Assessing Utilitarianism

• Consider applying utilitarianism to different kinds of moral problems (from interpersonal ethics to public policy questions). Identify three situations in which you would want to use utilitarianism and three situations in which you would not.