Summer1 2014 Ethics Course Study Questions

Class Dates

Monday May 19, 2014

• First Day, no study questions.

Tuesday May 20, 2014

1. What were Ariely's findings on honesty?
2. What is the possible significance of his research for understanding the nature of ethics?

Wednesday May 21, 2014

1. Describe Haidt's research on disgust. What is its possible significance for understanding the nature of ethics.
2. What is Haidt's criticism of developmental psychology's past approach to understanding the nature of ethics?
3. Why does Haidt think that Turiel's and Schweder's research represent an improvement over the nature/nuture debate?

Thursday May 22, 2014

1. How do we use metaphors to think about the psyche, soul, and human identity?
2. What organic features of consciousness does Haidt think we need to consider when doing ethics? How might they be usefull?
3. What picture of the mind does Haidt leave us with and what is its relevance to ethics?

Monday May 26, 2014

1. How does Haidt criticize philosophers on the topic of the relationship between reason and emotion?
2. How do evolutionary psychologists help us see the elephant talking? (And what does that even mean?)
3. What is the social intuitionist model of moral judgement? (Start comparing to other theories, like virtue ethics.)

Tuesday May 27, 2014

1. Do we have an inner lawyer?
2. Does it operate the way Haidt thinks?
3. How do you get the elephant to listen?

Wednesday May 28, 2014

1. What is Veneer Theory? Who believes it and why?
2. How does our "sociality" bear on the question of whether morality evolved from nature?
3. What evidence do Darwin, Smith, and Westermark cite for the naturalness of moral values?

Thursday, May 29, 2014

1. What is empathy? What is sympathy?
2. Distinguish relatively simple forms of empathy from more complex ones using examples from de Waal.
3. What are some of the apparent prerequisites for cognitive empathy?
4. Present and assess the evidence on monkey fairness.
5. What is de Waal's meta-ethical theory? (49-58)

Monday June 2, 2014

Holiday

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"

• Major thesis in Part II of this book: There's more to morality than harm and fairness.

• 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 autonomy: illustrated in anecdote on plane.
• 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.

105

• Connection between ethics and aesthetics -- Haidt began to see the sociocentric view (which includes community and divinity) as a aesthetic whole.

• 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, which he labels "moral monism"

• "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
• But the legacy of the enlightenment in ethics was rationalism
• Represented in the "moral autism": Bentham (utlitarianism), Kant (deontology)
• Ethics as search for "algorithm" apart from empathy and prosocial emotions (Mill is better)

• (not from text): overview of utilitarian and Kantian ethics

• Principle of Utility: calculus of pleasure/pain
• Kantian Deontology: categorical imperative. non-contradiction guiding moral principles

• Evolutionary accounts

• Avoiding bad evolutionary theory or evolutionary psychology: "just so stories"

• Just because you find a structure or trait in human society or physiology, it doesn't mean it has a function. Just so stories make functional claims without foundation: e.g. how the leopard got it's spots, how a camels got its humps, elephants trunks, giraffes necks...
• Modularity in evolutionary psychology: original vs. current triggers. Seems to account for cultural variability, yet grounded in original evolutionary problems.
• CFLAS: See chart, p. 125

Tuesday June 24, 2014

Holiday