Spring 2019 Ethics Reading Schedule

Return to Ethics

Ethics

1: JAN 16

• Introduction to the Course

• Welcome
• About the Course
• Succeeding in the Course
• Course Management
• Transparency in Pedagogy

2: JAN 23

Philosophical Method

Please find time to review the wiki page Philosophical Methods. Today we'll be working with the following methods:

• Theorizing from new or established knowledge
• Identifying presuppositions
• Defining terms
• Fitting principles to cases
• Counter-examples

Ariely, Why We Lie

• Assumptions: we think honesty is an all or nothing trait.
• 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: for current and possible new approaches to limit cheating.
• Philosophical Implications: What, if anything, does this tell us about the nature of ethics?

Method: Tips on How to report study findings

• Philosophy makes use of a wide range of evidence and knowledge. In this course you will encounter alot of psychological, anthropological and cultural studies. You have to practice the way you represent studies (as opposed to theories) and how you make inferences from their conclusions.

• 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?

Singer, Chapter 1, "About Ethics," from Practical Ethics

• Some initial points:

• Ethics not just about sexual morality
• Ethics not an "ideal" that can't be put into practice
• Ethics is not based on religion. Mentions Plato's dialogue Euthyphro- review core argument. Can you think of other positions on religion and ethics that might be compatible or incompatible with Singer's?

• Singer's arguments against Ethics and relativism -- different versions of relativism:

• Version 1: Ethics varies by culture: true and false, same act under different conditions may have different value, but this is superficial relativism. The different condition, for example, existence of birth control, are objective differences. The principle might remain the same and be objective (don't have kids you're not ready to care for)

• Version 2: Marxist relativism (and similar critiques) and non-relativism: Morality is what the powerful say it is. But then, why side with the proletariat? Marxists must ultimately be objectivists about value or there is no argument for caring about oppression and making revolution.

• Problems for real relativists ("wrong" means "I disapprove"): consistency across time, polls could determine ethics

• Problems for subjectivist: making sense of disagreement

• 2 versions of subjectivism that might work: ethical disagreements express attitudes that we are trying to persuade others of (close to Haidt's "social agendas"). Or, ethical judgements are prescriptions that reflect a concern that others comply.

• Singer: Ok to say the values aren't objective like physics (aren't facts about the world), but not sensible to deny the meaningfulness of moral disagreement. Ethical reasoning.

• Singer's view (one of several major positions): p. 10 - ethical standards are supported by reason. Can't just be self-interested. Focus for Singer and many philosophers is that Ethics is the attempt and practice to justify our behaviors and expectations of others The focus falls on reason-giving and argumentation.

• The sorts of reasons that count as ethical: universalizable ones. Note: most standard ethical theories satisfy this requirement, yet yield different analysis and advice.

• Consequences of "equality of interests" in utilitarian thought: Principle of Utility: Greatest good (happiness) for the greatest number. 13: first utilitarians understood happiness in terms of pleasures and pains. Modern utilitarians are often "preference utilitarians".

• Zimbardo (lecture)

3: JAN 28

Haidt, The Righteous Mind, Intro and Chapter 1

• Intro

• Note: starts with problem of "getting along" -- problem of ethics is settling conflict (recall contrast with more traditional goal of finding a method or theory to discover moral truth).
• The "righteous" minds is at once moral and judgemental. They make possible group cooperation, tribes, nations, and societies.

• Majors claims of each section

• Intuitions come first, reasoning second. The mind is divided, like a rider on an elephant, and the rider's job is to serve the elephant.
• There's more to morality than harm and fairness
• Morality binds and blinds -- We are 90 percent chimp, 10% bee.

• Method Note: This is explanatory writing. Not philosophy directly. Digression on difference between explanatory and justifactory writing.

• Moral reasoning as a means of finding truth vs. furthering social agendas. Paradox of Moral Experience: We experience our morality the first way, but when we looking objectively at groups, it's more like the second way.

• Chapter 1

• Harmless taboo violations: eating the dog / violating a dead chicken.
• Brief background on developmental & moral psychology: p. 5

• nativists -- nature gives us capacities to distinguish right from wrong, possibly using moral emotions.
• empiricists -- we learn the difference between right and wrong from experience. tabula rasa.
• rationalists -- circa '87 Piaget's alternative to nature/nurture -- there is both a natural developmental requirement and empirical requirement for understanding the world in the way we consider "rational" (folk physics, folk psychology). (This was supposed to move us beyond nature and nurture, but it took a bit longer. -MA)

• Piaget's rationalism: kids figure things out for themselves if they have normal brains and the right experiences. stages: example of conservation of volume of water (6) "self-constructed" - alt to nature/nurture. 7: We grow into our rationality like caterpillars into butterflies.

• Kohlberg's "Heinz story" - pre-conventional, conventional, post-conventional.

• note problems, p. 9. seems to support a liberal secular world view. Egalitarianism, role playing, disinterestedness.... Is it obvious or suspicious that that's what rationalism leads to? Haidt suspects something's been left out.

• Turiel: note different method. Probing to find contingencies in kids' thinking about rules. kids don't treat all moral rules the same: very young kids distinguish "harms" from "social conventions". Harm is "first on the scene" in the dev. of our moral foundations. (Note: Still following the idea that moral development is a universal, culturally neutral process.) (Note on method: we have, in Turiel's research, a discovery of an unsupported assumption.)

• Haidt's puzzle about Turiel: other dimensions of moral experience, like "purity" and "pollution" seem operative at young ages and deep in culture (witches -- how do human minds create witches in similar ways in different places?). 11-13 examples. Found answers in Schweder's work.

• In what ways is the concept of the self culturally variable?

• Schweder: sociocentric vs. individualistic cultures. Interview subjects in sociocentric societies don't make the moral/conventional distinction the same way we (westerns) do. (Schweder is "saying" to Kohlberg and Turiel: your model is culturally specific.) For example in the comparison of moral violations between Indians from Orissa and Americans from Chicago, it is important that these groups don't make the convention/harm distinction Turiel's theory would predict. That's a distinction individualist cultures make.

• 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 itself culturally variable. Turiel is right about how our culture makes the harm/convention distinction, but his theory doesn't travel well. Roughly, more sociocentric cultures put the morality(wrong even if no rule)/convention (wrong because there is a rule) marker more to the morality side. almost no trace of social conventionalism in Orissa.

• Identify, if possible, some practices and beliefs from either your personal views, your family, or your ethnic or cultural background which show a particular way of making the moral/conventional distinction. (Example: For some families removing shoes at the door is right thing to do, whereas for others it is just experienced as a convention. Would you eat a burrito in a public bathroom? Tell story of dinner out with a vegan friend.)

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

• Note the reference to "The Divided Mind" at the start -- back to akrasia --
• Philosophy's "rationalist delusion" ex. from Timaeus. but also in rationalist psych. -- Maybe humans were once perfect..........
• 30: Plato (Timaeus myth of the body - 2nd soul), Hume (reason is slave of passions), and Jefferson (The Head and The Heart)

• Wilson's Prophecy: brief history of moral philosophy after Darwin. nativism gets a bad name...
• 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).
• Nativism (natural selection gives us minds "preloaded" with moral emotions) in the 90s: Wilson, de Waal, Damasio Controversy in E. O. Wilson's Sociobiology.

• Note, for example, debate over rights: rationalists(moralists) vs. nativists: note the claims and counter-claims. brings in feminism, resistance to science, naturalism.

• de Waal (soon); Damasio -- 33 -- seems to be a very different picture than Plato's;

• Evolutionary Psychology in moral psychology (quick small group: practice your "study reporting skills in reviewing briefly these findings. Be sure to include significance.)

• Damasio's research on vmPFC disabled patients.
• No problem making moral decisions under cognitive load. Suggests automatic processing. Note this also suggests that we shouldn't think of our "principles" as causal.
• Roach-juice
• Soul selling
• Harmless Taboo violations: Incest story; note how interviewer pushes toward dumbfounding.

• How to explain dumbfounding.

• Margolis: seeing that (pattern matching - auto) vs. reasoning why (controlled thought); we have bias toward confirmation, which is seen in the mistake people make on the Wasson Card test. (From this perspective Kohlberg was focused on "reasoning why". Note from p. 44, some "reasoning why" is crucial to moral discourse (similar to universalizability in Singer reading)

• Rider and Elephant

• Important to see Elephant as making judgements (processing info), not just "feeling" (Hard for traditional philosophers to do.)
• 45: Elephant and Rider defined

• Emotions are a kind of information processing, part of the cognitive process.
• Moral judgment is a cognitive process.
• Intuition and reasoning are both cognitive. (Note: don't think of intuition in Haidt simply as "gut reaction" in the sense of random subjectivity. Claims you are processsing information through emotional response.

• Values of the rider: seeing into future, treating like cases like; post hoc explanation.
• Values of the elephant: automatic, valuative, ego-maintaining, opens us to influence from others.

• Social Intuitionist Model: attempt to imagine how our elephants respond to other elephants and riders.

4: JAN 30

• Lecture on Consequentialisms
• Robert Sapolsky, from Behave, Chapter 13, "Morality and doing the Right Thing, Once You've Figured Out What that Is." pp. 478-483.

5: FEB 4

• H C3-4

6: FEB 6

• Lecture on Non-Consequentialisms
• Sap B and C

7: FEB 11

• H C5-6

8: FEB 13

• Hibbing C1
• Add notes on Phil Theories
• Sap D

9: FEB 18

• Haidt C 7-8

10: FEB 20

• Hibbing C2
• Writing workshop with old writing

11: FEB 25

• Haidt C9

12: FEB 27

• Hibbing C4
• SAP 14A

13: MAR 4

• Sap E
• SW1

14: MAR 6

• SAP 14B

15: MAR 18

• Singer R&P

16: MAR 20

• Sachs 1, 2

17: MAR 25

• 1W C1

18: MAR 27

• 1W C2

19: APR 1

• Benhabib Imm

20: APR 3

• 1W C4 Pt 1

21: APR 8

• Macdeo, Imm

22: APR 10

• 1W C4 Pt 2

23: APR 15

• 1W C3

24: APR 17

• H 10

25: APR 22

• Peer Assessed Paper due

26: APR 24

• H 11

27: APR 29

• H 12

28: MAY 1

• Course Conclusion