Summer1 2014 Ethics Course Lecture Notes A

Return to Ethics Online Summer 2014

Reference Dates: We don't have specific class dates in this online course, but here are some dates that I might post information on.

Tuesday May 20, 2014

Ariely, Why We Lie

• Research on honesty with the "matrix task"

• Shredder condition
• Payment condition
• Probability of getting caught condition
• Distance of payment condition
• Presence of a cheater condition

• Priming with 10 commandments or signature on top of form
• Implications

Tips on How to report study findings

• observational, survey, experimental
• study setup: for observational: who were the test subjects, what were they asked to do; for survey: what instrument was used, to whom was it given?
• what conditions were tested?
• what was the immeditate result?
• what was the significance or inference to be made from the results?

Wednesday May 21, 2014

Haidt, The Righteous Mind, Intro and Chapter 1

• Moral reasoning as a means of finding truth vs. furthering social agendas.
• Harmless taboo violations: eating the dog / violating a dead chicken.
• Brief background on developmental & moral psychology: nativists, empiricists, rationalists

• Piaget's rationalism: kids figure things out for themselves if they have normal brains and the right experiences. "self-constructed" - alt to nature/nurture.
• Kohlberg's "Heinz story" - note problems, p. 9.
• Turiel: kids don't treat all moral rules the same: very young kids distinguish "harms" from "social conventions"

• Haidt's puzzle about Turiel: other dimensions of moral experience, like "purity" and "pollution" seem operative at young ages and deep in culture (witches). Found answers in Schweder's work.
• Schweder: sociocentric vs. individualistic cultures. Interview subjects in sociocentric societies don't make the conventional/non-conventional distinction.
• Point of harmless taboo violations: pit intuitions about norms and conventions against intuitions about the morality of harm. Showed that Schweder was right. The morality/convention distinction was culturally variable.

Thursday May 22, 2014

Haidt, Chapter 1,"The Divided Self"

• opening story
• Animals in Plato's metaphor for soul; contemporary metaphors. metaphors.
• Mind vs. Body
• Left vs. Right
• New vs. Old
• Controlled vs. Automatic

• Failures of Self-control [[1]]
• Haidt's "disgust" studies.

• Add in sociological dimension to consider values as socially instantiated.

Monday May 26, 2014

Haidt, Chapter 2, "The Intuitive Dog and Its Rational Tail"

• Philosophy's "rationalist delusion"
• 30: Plato, Hume, and Jefferson - three models of the mind
• A brief history of moral philosophy:

• Stage 1: moralism (Anti-nativism): reactions against bad nativism, like Social Darwinism, 60s ideology suggesting that we can liberate ourselves from our biology and traditional morality (as contraception appeared to). Wilson's prophecy.
• Stage 2: Nativism (natural selection gives us minds "preloaded" with moral emotions) in the 90s: Wilson, de Waal, Damasio (note studies of patients with dysfunction vmPFC)
• Stage 3: Evolutionary Psychology in moral psychology.
• studying controlled vs. automatic process by testing under "cognitive load" -- some moral decision making not impaired by load
• Studies of "moral dumbfounding:

• Roach-juice
• Soul selling
• Harmless Taboo violations: Incest story; Cadaver nibbling; compare to Kohlberg's Heinz stories (reasoning vs. confounding) -- evidence that the elephant is talking.

• Ev. psych. research outside moral psychology

• Wasson card selection test: Margolis' "seeing that" vs. "seeing why" -- note that morality involves the latter as well.

• Rider and Elephant

• Important to see Elephant as making judgements (processing info), not just "feeling"
• 45: Elephant and Rider defined

• Social Intuitionist Model

Tuesday May 27, 2014

Haidt, Chapter Three, "Elephants Rule"

• Personal Anecdote: your inner lawyer
• Priming studies:

• "take" "often" -- works with neutral stories also

• Research supporting "intuitions come first"
• 1. Brains evaluate instantly and constantly

• Zajonc on "affective primacy"-- applies to made up language

• 2. Social and Political judgements intuitive

• flashing word pairs with dissonance: "flower - happiness" vs. "hate - sunshine" (affective priming)
• Implicit Association Test
• flashing word pairs with political terms causes dissonance.
• Todorov's work extending "attractiveness" advantage to snap ju-- note: Dissonance is pain.'
• judgements of competence. note speed of judgement (59)

• 3. Bodies guide judgements

• Fart Spray exaggerates moral judgements (!)
• Zhong: hand washing before and after moral judgements. "Macbeth effect" (connection between body and morality)
• Helzer and Pizarro: standing near a sanitizer strengthens conservatism.

• 4. Psychopaths: reason but don't feel

• Robert Hare, researcher on psychpaths: testimony.

• 5. Babies: feel but don't reason

• Theory behind startle response studies in infants
• Bloom's moral puppet shows: helper and hinderer puppet shows
• Social interaction appraisal at six months: reaching for helper puppets

• 6. Affective reactions in the brain

• Josh Greene's fMRI studies of Trolley type problems -- The Trolley Problem

• When does the elephant listen to reason?

• Friends... The Importance of Friends -- back to social intuitionism
• Are we determined to follow the elephant (our own or our friends')? The importance of delay

Method: Giving Philosophical Arguments in Ethics

• Distinguish:

• Research results
• Significance of results
• Justification of theories

• What are the reasons for thinking that the nature of morality is disclosed by psychological studies?
• Descriptive (scientific or observational) vs. Justificatory (ought we, can we act otherwise than the way nature disposes us to act?) claims

Wednesday May 28, 2014

de Waal, intro & p. 5-21

• Veneer Theory -
• Theory of Mind - (xvi)
• Clue from intro about how commentators will respond: not as veneer theorists, but to question continuity between moral emotions and "being moral".

• Homo homini lupus
• Thesis: No asocial history to humans. And note: unequal in competition for status.
• Distinction between: 1) seeing morality as a "choice" humans made; and 2) morality as "outgrowth" of social instincts.
• T. H. Huxley: gardener metaphor. (contra Darwin, who includes morality in evolution.)
• Freud: civilization as renunciation of instinct.
• Dawkins: genes are selfish, but in the end we can break with them.
• Veneer Theory: "Scratch an altruist and watch a hypocrite bleed"
• Robert Wright (contemporary evolutionist): morality as mask for selfishness.
• Evolutionary "selfishness" vs. moral "selfishness" -- role of intention. Seem opposed, but major thesis for de Waal is that they are not: a "selfish" evolutionary process can produce altruism as a strategy.
• Darwin influenced by Adam Smith
• Westermark: observation of camel's revenge.
• Chimps punish and seek revenge also. Engage in reconciliation.
• "reciprocal altruism"
• "moral emotions" p. 20

de Waal, "Morally Evolved," 21-42

• Empathy -- posits more complex forms (moral emotions) from simpler (ex. emotional contagion)
• Evidence in primates of simple emotions:

• comforting, response to distress (25) -- from emotional contagion to empathy.
• sympathy defined (26) -- empathy is broader "changing places in fancy" (Adam Smith)
• Rhesus monkeys won't shock each other (29)

• Anecdotes:

• How does Ladygina-Kohts get her monkey off the roof?
• Kuni and the starling
• Krom's helping behavior with the tires "targeted helping"
• Binit Jua, zoo gorilla, rescues child.

• Consolation behavior in apes (chimps and apes and gorillas, but not monkeys)

• de Waal study on post aggression comforting contacts (34)
• Why not monkeys? Self-awareness level -- mirror self-recognition (MSR) in apes. Correlates with children.

• de Waal's "Russian Doll" metaphor: from emotional contagion to cognitive empathy.

• mirror neurons, muscle contractions

• defintion of empathy (finally!) at 39 (roughly, all of the ways that one individual's emotional state affects anothers') and 41: def of cognitive empathy -- targeted helping, distinction bt self/other.

Thursday, May 29, 2014

de Waal, Morally Evolved, Part 3

• Reciprocity and Fairness

• testing hypotheses about food sharing in chimps "spontaneous services" (inc. grooming)

• competing hypotheses: good mood sharing vs. partner-specific reciprocity (favoring those who previously cooperated)
• evidence favored latter hypothesis.

• studying fairness in terms of reward expectation or "inequity aversion"
• limits to monkey fairness: no sharing between rich and poor.

• Mencious and "reciprocity"
• Community Concern: evolution in human thought to expand circle of moral concern.

• Dark side of morality. Groupish behavior.
• Mention of Haidt: intuitionism compatible with de Waal's viewpoint.

• Alien thought experiment. sort of like a trolley problem.
• The Beethoven Error

Tuesday June 3, 2014

Haidt, Chapter 4, "Vote for Me (Here's Why)"

• Ring of Gyges
• Tetlock: accountability research

• Exploratory vs. Confirmatory thought
• Conditions promoting exploratory thought

• 1) knowing ahead of time that you'll be called to account;
• 2) not knowing what the audience thinks;
• 3) believing that the audience is well informed and interested in truth or accuracy.

• Leary's research on self-esteem importance- "sociometer" -- non-conscious level mostly.
• Confirmation bias

• Wasson again -- number series
• Deann Kuhn -- 80: We are horrible at theorizing (requiring exploratory thought)....
• David Perkins research on reason giving
• Can I believe it? vs. Must I believe it?

• Section 3 - Conditions affecting honesty

• Political scandals involving unpublished expense accounts
• Correct change
• Aiely again

• Section 4 - Motivated Reasoning

• Research tracking reason seeking and evidence seeking behaviors under conditions of motivation (self esteem on the line) (examples?)
• Even affects visual perception (perception or reward conferring characters on computer screen) (also, sports examples)

• Section 5 - Application to political beliefs: group affiliation enhances distorted thinking....

• Does selfish interest or group affiliation predict policy preferences?
• Drew Westen's fMRI research on strongly partisan individuals. dlPFC not activated, whereas other areas were.
• Good thinking as an emergent property.
• Statement, 90, on H's view of political life in light of this way of theorizing. read and discuss.

Wednesday June 4, 2014

Haidt, Chapter 5, "Beyond WEIRD Morality"

• WEIRD morality is the morality of Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic cultures

• just as likely to be bothered by taboo violations, but more likely to set aside feelings of disgust and allow violations
• only group with majority allowing chicken story violation.
• "the weirder you are the more likely you are to see the world in terms of separate objects, rather than relationships" "sociocentric" moralities vs. individualistic moralities
• framed-line task 97

• Shweder's anthropology: ethics of autonomy, community, divinity 99-100

• claims schweder's theory predicts responses on taboo violation tests
• ethic of divinity: body as temple vs. playground
• vertical dimension to values. explains reactions to flag desecration, piss Christ, thought exp: desecration of liberal icons.

• Discussion questions:

• Are WEIRD moral cultures more rational and therefore "better" (embodying a most distinctively human morality, for example, following Singer & Koorsgaard?)
• How WEIRD are you?

Thursday June 5, 2014

Haidt, Chapter 6, "Taste Buds of the Righteous Mind"

• explaining moral diversity. argument against the reductive project of philosophical ethics
• "the righteous mind is like a tongue with six taste receptors"
• Enlightenment thought, two sources of transcendence: God & Reason
• Hume represents a third enlightenment option: Nature
• Austism, Bentham (utlitarianism), Kant (deontology)
• Avoiding bad evolutionary theory or evolutionary psychology: "just so stories"
• Modularity in evolutionary psychology: original vs. current triggers
• See chart, p. 125