FEB 8

8: FEB 8. Unit Two: Moral Psychology

Assigned

• View: System 1 and System 2. Veritasium, “The Science of Thinking” 12 mins.

• Utilitarianism: PBS Philosophy Crash course on utilitarianism

• The Trolley Problem The Trolley Problem.
• Recommended to browse: Self-driving cars with Trolley problems: [1], The Cold Logic of Drunk People

• Tomasello - "Human Morality as Cooperation Plus" (143-157); 14)

• Churchland C4 – “Norms and Values” – (96-110; 14) – neurology of rewards, empathy, Ultimatum game, cultural effects.

In-Class

• System 1 and System 2 - Lecture with research from moral psychology
• Giving Peer Criticism

Veritasium video, “The Science of Thinking” -- System 1 and System 2

• examples of letting Sys1 do the job and get it wrong: earth around sun, bat/ball price.

• Sys1 and Sys2 - Gunn and Drew.

• Sys1 is quick, selective, fills in gaps (“The Cat”), part of process for long term memory
• Sys2 is slow, deliberate, limited to working memory.

• ”chunking” - Sys1 finds patterns that help us store long term memory. “Muscle memory” - going from Sys2 to Sys1. Deliberate and effortful at first, then more automatic.

• ”Add 1” task - pupil dilation, heart rate increase. Three cheers for psychophysiology!!!

• In overcoming automatic thinking, you need to bring in Sys2 (Note: This is important in overcoming bias, which relies on automatic thinking.)

• Ads - The “un” campaign got around Sys1’s filter for boring insurance ads.

• Pedagogy - Active pedagogy - making you do something with the information (small groups, worksheets, but also interactive discussion) is better than passive learning environment. (Note caveat - Life learners do this also on their own and cultivate behaviors that keep Sys2 involved. Or, some of the best students in the class making Sys2 work hard even just while listening!

System 1 and System 2 in moral psychology

• gloss Elephant and Rider metaphor in Haidt. Plato's Charioteer. (Diff metaphors for consciousness.)

• (This is from Haidt, C3, "Elephants rule" - In that chapter he's introducing some research in moral psychology that shows how System 1 works, especially with value judgements. "Intuitions comes first" is another way of saying that system 1 is fast and on the scene judging before system 2 gets out of bed.)

• Personal Anecdote from Haidt's married life: your inner lawyer (automatic speech)
• Priming studies: "take" "often" -- working with neutral stories also

• Research supporting "intuitions come first"

• 1. Brains evaluate instantly and constantly - Zajonc on "affective primacy"- small flashes of pos/neg feeling from ongoing stimuli - even applies to made up language "mere exposure effect" tendency to have more positive responses to something just be repeat exposure.

• 2. Social and Political judgements are especially intuitive

• Affective Priming - flashing word pairs with dissonance: "flower - happiness" vs. "hate - sunshine"
• Implicit Association Test Project Implicit
• Flashing word pairs with political terms causes dissonance. measurable delay in response when, say, conservatives read "Clinton" and "sunshine". Dissonance is pain.
• Todorov's work extending "attractiveness" advantage to snap judgements. "Competency" judgments of political candidates correct 2/3 of time. Judgements of competence. note speed of judgement .1 of a second.(59)

• 3. Bodies guide judgements --Fart Spray exaggerates moral judgements (!); Zhong: hand washing before and after moral judgements. Helzer and Pizarro: standing near a sanitizer strengthens conservatism.

• 4. Psychopaths: reason but don't feel - Transcript from Robert Hare research

• 5. Babies: feel but don't reason; Helper and hinder puppets. The babies are thinking with concepts...system 1.

Tomasello - "Human Morality as Cooperation Plus" (143-157; 14)

• Note: The text has a couple of pages at the end from a different part of the book. This material summarizes some of the early childhood research that Tomasello uses to support his theory.

• Diffs bt US and other primates:

• Great apes are "instrumentally rational"; mostly competitive, some friendships, not a lot of helping.
• Chimps and bonobos don't use structured cooperation, don't exclude freeriders, no concept of fairness.

• Hypothesis: We (400K ago) were forced to develop a cooperative rationality that included concern for the well being of the partner, then group. Values this explains: mutual respect, fairness, exclusion of free riders, allowance for "2nd person protest" ("Hey, you said you would..."). From there a collective intentionality that recognizes right and wrong as having an objective status.

• 147: Paraphrased from "Rather.." Morality doesn't develop just by assessing the rational costs for individuals involved, but it might develop if we recognized our dependency on partners and the group. Relationships involve "investment", not just "payoffs" (as in game theory models).

• Cooperation in reciprocal altruism models is fragile. Someone is always ready to make a sucker out of you and then cooperation goes to zero.

• Interdependence cultivates genuine concern for the partner, shared intentionality, self-other equivalence (of roles), "deservingness".

• Ontogeny - how something comes to be.

• Digression from text: "Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" - meaning "This phrase suggests that an organism's development will take it through each of the adult stages of its evolutionary history, or its phylogeny. [2]. Distinguish from the philosophy field: Ontology.

• Contemporary children pass through two stages similar to the stage of the theory (2nd person morality and joint commitment). read at 155. The extra pages are from C3, which he mentions as providing evidence. See summary box at end of pdf.

• prior to age 3, no recognition of social norms, but after, they will engage in 3rd party punishment.

• Go through text boxes from Chapter 3 at the end of the pdf.

Giving Peer Criticism

• Some thoughts on helpful peer commenting:

• You are only asked to write two or three sentences of comments, so choose wisely! Your back evaluation score will be assessed on this.

• Giving the kind of criticism that you would want to consider if it were your paper.

• Give gentle criticisms that focus on your experience as a reader:

• "I'm having trouble understanding this sentence" NOT "This sentence makes no sense!"
• "I think more attention could have been paid to X NOT "You totally ignored the prompt!

• Wrap a criticism with an affirmation or positive comment

• "You cover the prompt pretty well, but you might have said more about x (or, I found y a bit of a digression)"
• "Some interesting discussion here, esp about x, but you didn't address the prompt very completely ...."

• General and specific -- Ok to identify general problem with the writing, but giving examples of the problem or potential solutions.

• I found some of your sentences hard to follow. E.g. "I think that the main ...." was a bit redundant.
• I thought the flow was generally good, but in paragraph 2 the second and third sentence seem to go in different directions.

Utilitarianism - Additional notes

• Let's meet Jeremy Bentham. [3]

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

• 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.

• 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. Utilitarian thinking often involves overcoming a System 1 automatic (evolved) preference.)

• 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. (Note that also get to this result from Tomasello and Wrangham.)

• 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. More wholistic.
• Preference utilitarian version: Act to maximally fulfill our interest in acting on our preferences. (Very compatibile with neo-liberal economic thinking.)

• 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.
• But sometimes we ought to override preferences: Thought experiment: Returning a gun to an angry person. Is the angry person's preference one that has to count? People "prefer" to live in a way that is heating up the planet!
• Cultural contradictions in our preferences: we prefer health, but we also "prefer" to eat the western diet, smoke things, and drink alcohol. Which preferences should the utilitarian focus on? Some preferences are based on bias or prejudice.

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.

Churchland C4 – “Norms and Values” – (96-110; 14)

• This chapter is about how the reward structures in the brain work similarly for social and non-social tasks. This gives us a glimpse of the neurobiology of everyday ethics. Getting norms and values right (learning them, showing them in your behavior, calling others out, moral shunning) involves the same reward system as non-social tasks, like finding a job or any search problems (getting a good deal on something, etc.)

• 100: The knowledge domains for social and non-social tasks are distinct. (Social knowledge tells me whether to make noisily slurping noises while eating noodles. Other knowledge helps me know that I should wait to split my wood till it is dry.

• Applies to emotionally negative situations, like giving negative appraisal. For this, we use empathy. (More on empathy soon. You can think of it both as a way of acquiring knowledge about others’ experience and maintaining social bonds during emotionally negative situations (physical and mental suffering, failures to meet expectations, etc.).

• Churchland’s take on the Ultimatum Game research findings. Typically, we say this research shows that we are not strictly rational as Responder. But, Churchland suggests there might be a “social rationality” . Also culturally variable. P. 105. Cites Henrich, market integration may be a variable (measured as: how much of your food do you get from the store).

• Really complicated Ultimatum Game research. roughly, norm changes are affected by both conscious and unconcscious (Sys 2 and 1) neural processes. Fashion as example of relatively unconscious cultural process. Norms that have changed this way: breastfeeding, recycling, sexually orientation.

• What is happening in the brain during moral experience? We are getting rewarding or not based on lots of social knowledge and cues from others.