Spring 2019 Ethics Course Lecture Notes

Return to Ethics

Ethics

1: JAN 16

• Introduction to the Course

• Welcome

• About the Course

• Course Websites (handout)

• Approaching Ethics through contemporary research. Fields involved: Psychology, Moral Psychology, Evolutionary Psychology, Behavioral Economics, Philosophy, Political Science, Sociology, History, Global Studies
• Major Applied Topics: Obligations to Assist, Globalization Ethics (climate, human rights, trade), Immigration

• Succeeding in the Course

• Prep Cycle - view old notes, read, note, quiz, evaluate preparation.
• Keep in Mind Course Research Questions

• Course Management
• Transparency in Pedagogy

• Some Course Dates:

Writing Workshop 2/20

SW1 due 3/4

SW2 due 3/27

Finish optional journals by 4/15

SW3 due 4/29

Critical Analysis Paper due 4/22

Final Essay due at Final Exam time.

• Required Assignments and Weight Ranges

• Critical Analysis Paper 20-30% .3
• Final Essays 20-30% .3
• Q&W 25-40 .4

2: JAN 23

Assigned

• Ariely, Why We Lie (6)

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

• Zimbardo Experiment -- view one of the youtube videos about the experiment. read the wiki page.

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 immediate result?
• what was the significance or inference to be made from the results?

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?

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), but the prohibition on casual sex might change. note: how you state the principle matters alot!

• 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" or "my society disapproves"): but we do choose between societal values, how? Is the non-conformist just making a mistake?, 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".

3: JAN 28

Assigned

• Haidt, The Righteous Mind, Intro and Chapter 1

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" mind is at once moral and judgemental. It makes 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.

• Keep notes that help you tie content back to these claims.

• 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 look 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).

• 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. [1]

• 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.

• Additional criticisms of Kohlberg (also at Haidt 9): seemed to diminish the importance of loyalty, authority, and tradition as less developed levels of moral response.

• 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.

• Haidt's research: Wrote vignettes to ask test subjects, including Turiel's uniform / swing pushing incident. focus on vignettes is "harmless taboo violation" (no victim /no harm), which pits intuitions about norms and conventions against intuitions about the morality of harm. Study in three cities with two socio-economic groups. Showed that Schweder was right. The morality/convention distinction was itself culturally variable.

• Americans make big dist. between morality and convention. upper-class Brazilians like Americans. lower class groups tended to see smaller morality/convention difference. All morality.

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.)

Small Group Problem: Relativisms

• Alot of what Haidt is talking about in Chapter 1 suggests that morality is radically relative, but alot of what Singer was talking about in Chapter 1 of Practical Ethics suggested that relativism looks deeper than it is. How can they both be right? Can they?

4: JAN 30

Assigned

• 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.

Consequentialisms -- Utlitarianism

• A Framework for thinking about moral theories.

• Where should we look for "moral goodness"?
• Intentions (Kantian), Act (Aristotle), Consequences (Mill, Singer - utilitarian)

• How should we expect morality to connect with other goals?
• Eudaimonistic or Hedonic (Well-being or Happiness oriented) vs. Non-Eudaimonistic (Duty)

• Two views: 1) Morality is fundamentally eudaimonistic "in the longrun" even if it in particular proximate circumstances in does not always involve positive emotions. 2) Morality and moral responses realize disinterested values like reason and justice, that are not related to promoting happy outcomes (Kant).

• Fundamental consequentialist intuition. Most of what's important about morality can be seen in outcomes of our actions, for people especially, but also for what they value (animals, the environment, etc.). Virtue will show up in the measuredness of the outcome. Good intentions are especially valuable when they lead to actions that realize them.

• Hard to imagine a non-eudaimonistic consequentialism, but medieval christian europe or a contemporary theocracy might work.

• Basic principles of utilitarian thought:

• One way to universalize is to recognize "equal weight" to interests.
• Equal Happiness Principle: Everyone's happiness matters to them as much as mine does to me.
• Ethics is about figuring out when we need to take a moral concern about something and, if we do, then we take on constrainst (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 ...
• Preference utilitarian version: Act to maximally fulfill the interests (preferences) of others.

• 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? (Preferences are one alternative.) 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.
• Conditions for the pursuit of happiness: Order, stability, opportunity, education, health, rights, liberty.
• Issue of protection of rights in utilitarian thought.

• Preferences: 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.

Sapolsky, Robert. Behave. C 13, "Morality and Doing the Right Thing"

• Is moral decision making mostly reasoning or intuition?

• Lots of examples of reason based rules in law and social institutions. This kind of reasoning activates the dlPFC and TPJ (temporoparietal junction) - theory of mind tasks.
• Moral reasoning is skewed in some predictable ways: doing harm worse than allowing it. commission vs. omission. tend to look for malevolent causes more than benevolent.

• Problem with moral reasoning view: lots of evidence for intuition and emotion.
• Reviews Haidt's Social Intuitionism: "moral thinking is for social doing".

• moral decisions activate the vmPFC, orbitalfrontal cortex, insular cortex, and anterior cingulate. pity and indignation activate different structures. sexual transgressions activate the insula. Important: you can predict moral decision making more from activation of these structures than the cognitively oriented dlPFC. moral quandaries activate emotional centers of the brain prior to waking up the dlPFC.
• people with damage to the vmPFC will sacrifice one relative to save five strangers, something control subjects just don't do!

5: FEB 4

• Haidt, Chapter 3, "Elephants Rule"
• Haidt, Chapter 4, "Vote for Me (Here's Why)"

6: FEB 6

• Lecture on Non-Consequentialisms

• Robert Sapolsky, C 13, "Morality..." pp. 483-493.

• The Trolley Problem

• The Trolley Problem. Variations on the Trolley Problem: [[2]]
• Self-driving cars with Trolley problems: [3]

• The Cold Logic of Drunk People

7: FEB 11

• Haidt, Chapter 5, "Beyond WEIRD Morality"
• Haidt, Chapter 6, "Taste Buds of the Righteous Mind"

8: FEB 13

• Hibbing, John R., Kevin Smith, and John R. Alford, Predisposed: Liberals, conservatives, and the biology of political difference, Chapter 1.
• Lecture: Add notes on Phil Theories
• Robert Sapolsky, C 13, "Morality..." pp. 493-500.

9: FEB 18

• Haidt, Chapter 7, "The Moral Foundations of Politics"

• Haidt, Chapter 8: The Conservative Advantage

10: FEB 20

• Hibbing, John R., Kevin Smith, and John R. Alford, Predisposed, Chapter 2, "Getting Into Bedrock with Politics".
• Writing workshop with old writing

11: FEB 25

• Haidt, Chapter 9, "Why Are We so Groupish?"

12: FEB 27

• Hibbing, John R., Kevin Smith, and John R. Alford, Predisposed, Chapter 4, "Drunk Flies and Salad Greens".
• Robert Sapolsky, from Behave, Chapter 14, "Feeling Someone's Pain, Understanding Soemone's Pain, Alleviating Someone's Pain." 521-535.

13: MAR 4

• Robert Sapolsky, C 13, "Morality..." pp. 501-517.
• SW1

14: MAR 6

• Robert Sapolsky, from Behave, Chapter 14, "Feeling Someone's Pain, Understanding Soemone's Pain, Alleviating Someone's Pain." 535--552.

15: MAR 18

• Singer, "Rich and Poor"

16: MAR 20

• Sachs, Jeffrey, "Can the Rich Afford to Help the Poor?" (2006)
• Jeffrey Sachs, "The Case for Aid" p. 850

17: MAR 25

• Singer, One World Now, Chapter 1, "A Changing World," (1-16)

18: MAR 27

• Singer, One World Now, Chapter 2, "One Atmosphere," (16-69)
• SW2

19: APR 1

• Syla Benhabib, "The Morality of Migration" (766-767)

20: APR 3

• Singer, One World Now, Chapter 4 "One Law," (122-149)

21: APR 8

• Macdeo, Stephen, "The Moral Dilemma of U.S. Immigration Policy Revisited: Open Borders vs. Social Justice?" (768-780)

22: APR 10

• Singer, One World Now, Chapter 3, "One Economy," (69-105)

23: APR 15

• Singer, One World Now, Chapter 3, "One Economy," (105-122)

24: APR 17

• Haidt, Chapter 10, "The Hive Switch" (221-246)

25: APR 22

• Critical Analysis Paper due

26: APR 24

• Haidt, Chapter 11, "Religion is a Team Sport" (189-221)

27: APR 29

• Haidt, Chapter 12, "Can't We all Disagree More Constructively?" (189-221)
• SW3 due

28: MAY 1

• Course Conclusion