Spring 2016 Ethics Course Lecture Notes

Return to Ethics

JAN 12

• First Day Notes:

• Websites in this course.
• Roster information -- fill in google form
• Main Assignments
• The Prep Cycle -- recommendations for success in the course!
• Starting the discussion about ethics. Course questions.

• To Do list:

• Send me a brief introduction through the "Tell Me" form on the wiki. (Soon, please.)
• Login to wiki for the first time and make a brief introduction on the practice page. (3 points if done by Friday.)
• After rosters are posted, login to courses.alfino and look around. Retrieve reading for Thursday (and read it).
• Browse wiki pages.

JAN 14

• a couple of mail failures: mlancaster jgenge2

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.

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 and cultural studies and theories. 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?

Group Work A

Use a google form to report findings from your discussion of the following prompt:

• What does the Ariely research suggest about the nature of ethics or specific presuppositions one might have about the nature of morality?

Group Work B

Use a google form to report findings from your discussion of the following prompt:

• Shifting a bit from "cheating" to "lying", Start by trying to define a lie. Try to state your definition carefully in one sentence. Then identify three reasons why lying is bad. Finally, consider cases in which it is ok not to tell the truth. Can you identify a principle that might govern these cases?

JAN 19

Cooper, Chapter 1, "Intro to Philosophical Ethics"

• p. 3: definition of ethics; in terms of value conflict
• some terminology, two points about the relationship between actions and justifications:

• values of actions often reflect their context in institutional and social context.
• just as there are levels of justification for any action, there are levels of justification for any theory of ethics.

• Zimbardo; implications for ethics

Haidt, Chapter 1,"The Divided Self"

• opening story
• Animals in Plato's metaphor for soul; contemporary metaphors. metaphors.
• Mind vs. Body -- the gut brain.
• Left vs. Right -- confabulation
• New vs. Old - importance of the frontal cortex. orbitofrontal cortex in particular.
• Controlled vs. Automatic --

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

• Add in sociological dimension to consider values as socially

Small Group Work

• Use the Google form for small group discussion to report specific findings from the following question:

• Within each of the four sections of Haidt's article, "The Divided Self," remind yourselves of the main claims or points, along with things you found particularly interesting. Then try to state, in one sentence, one implication of each feature of the brain for the nature of ethics.

• Principle philosophical methods used: Speculation from new knowledge, finding entailments, finding implications.

JAN 21

Haidt, The Righteous Mind, Intro and Chapter 1

• Intro

• Track section and subsection title. The argument of the book is laid out clearly in them.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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
• empiricists -- we learn the difference between right and wrong from experience
• rationalists -- circa '87 Piaget's alternative to nature/nurture -- there is both a natural developmental requirement and empirical requirement for distinguishing right from wrong.

• Piaget's rationalism: kids figure things out for themselves if they have normal brains and the right experiences. "self-constructed" - alt to nature/nurture. 7: We grow into our rationality like caterpillars into butterflies.
• Kohlberg's "Heinz story" - note problems, p. 9. (We'll look more at Piaget and Kohlberg in our next class.)

• Turiel: 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.)

• 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.
• 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. (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 group 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.

• 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.)

Group Discussion

• Use a google form to discuss Study Question 3 and report your findings.

JAN 26

Cooper, Chapter 5: Cognitive and Moral Development

• Review of Piaget's stages of cognitive development:

• Sensorimotor, Symbolic, Concrete, Formal
• Critics: missing variability from rich vs. poor environments. (Vygotsky)
• Importance of Formal Operational level for "breaking" with situational control. (recall Zimbardo)

• Kohlberg's stages of moral development

• Preconventional, Conventional, Postconventional: review stages with each level.
• Note theoretical claim: hierarchy represents increasingly more developed ways of staying in equilibrium with environment. Where does this leave ethnicity and culture? p. 78.
• "Decentering" of ego crucial to post-conventional stage. Are we all supposed to get to this level?

• Application to My Lai massacre
• Questions for Kohlberg: Revisit Haidt's research story; should we all be postconventional moral agents? Is loyalty and a sense of authority an "inferior" basis for morality?

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

• Ethics and religion

• Mentions Plato's dialogue Euthyphro- review core argument. Still, religion may be part of motivational structure of moral life.

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

• 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)
• Marxist relativism 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 arguement for caring about oppression and making revolution.
• Problems for relativists: consistency across time, polls could determine ethics
• Problems for the 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.
• The sorts of reasons that count as ethical: universalizable ones.
• "Interests" in utilitarian thought

JAN 28

Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book 1

• First: What do ancient Greeks mean by "virtue" (arete).

• Politics as the master science: its end: happiness
• Defects of the life of pleasure, honor, even virtue as the meaning of happiness. Defect of money-making.
• Section 7: argument for happiness as the final end of life.

• something not desired for the sake of something else: happiness.

• But what is happiness? Search for the function of man to find the answer to the nature of happiness.

• Nutrition and growth?
• Perception?
• def: Activity of the soul implying a rational principle, in accordance with virtue (perfective activities)

• Other characteristics needed: complete life, active life.

• Section 13: Aristotle's tripartite division of the soul:

• Rational
• Appetitive (desiring) (partly rational)
• Vegetative

• Summing up: developmentalist, naturalist, rationalist, eudaimonistic, virtue ethics.

• A note on his primary ethical insight about how to think about virtue: the Golden Mean, a mean between extremes of emotion.

FEB 2

Notes on Method: Giving an applied ethical analysis (1/2)

Major Sorts of Applied Ethics Rationales

• We'll start with some basic kinds of argumentative rationales that can be used in applied ethics. We'll define them as "core rationales" and then look at how each give rise to application on both an individual and social (justice) level:

• Virtue - eudaimonistic/instrinsic value
• Utility - eudaimonistic
• Respect for Persons - deontological
• Libertarianism - deontological

Basic Method for Researching and Writing about an Applied Moral Issue

• Immerse yourself in authoritative and expert opinion about the topic.
• Collect positions and arguments, both from your reading and your own exploration of the logical possibilities.
• Locate your own intuitions (ways that you (or your elephant) connect with core arguments and values.
• Develop and respond to challenges to your "starting point" -- remain open to position change.
• Refine your focus and core arguments, maintain opposing views.
• Organize your writing to include relevant information, arguments, opposing views, and, hopefully, some insights.

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

• Philosophy's "rationalist delusion" ex. from Timaeus. but also in rationalist psych.
• 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.
• 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

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

• Evolutionary Psychology in moral psychology

• No problem making moral decisions under cognitive load.
• Roach-juice
• Soul selling
• Harmless Taboo violations: Incest story; Cadaver nibbling; compare to Kohlberg's Heinz stories (reasoning vs. confounding) -- evidence in the transcript, also, that the elephant is talking.

• Ev. psych. research outside moral psychology

• Wasson card selection test: seeing that (pattern matching) vs. seeing why (controlled thought); we have bias toward confirmation.

• Rider and Elephant

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

• Emotions are a kind of information processing
• 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.

• Small Group Discussion: Is emotion an obstacle or enabling condition for moral life and judgement or something in between? (Please report on Google form. Separate claims and reasons or explanations.)

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

FEB 4

Haidt, Chapter Three, "Elephants Rule"

• Personal Anecdote: 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 cs stimuli - even applies to made up language

• 2. Social and Political judgements are especially intuitive

• flashing word pairs with dissonance: "flower - happiness" vs. "hate - sunshine" (affective priming)
• Implicit Association Test
• flashing word pairs with political terms. causes dissonance. measureable delay in response when, say, conservatives read "Clinton" and "sunshine".
• 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.
• 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

• Theory behind startle response studies in infants
• helper and hinderer puppet shows
• reaching for helper puppets

• 6. Affective reactions in the brain

• Josh Greene's fMRI studies of Trolley type problems. The Trolley Problem
• Pause on Joshua Greene quote, p. 67

• When does the elephant listen to reason?

• Friends... The Importance of Friends...Friends are really important...

Notes on Method: Giving an applied ethical analysis (2/2)

• Some additional detail on the general argumentative appeal of virtue, utility, respect for person, and liberty

• Virtue ethics: based on claims about human nature. Why should I care about developing others' capacities and virtues? Could tell a story about human growth and development, the social nature of it, how family and community give rise to virtues. See also "communitarianism"
• Utility: Group house example. How can utilitarians make justice claims. act vs. rule. How can utilitarians show respect for persons? (Trolley Problem). Could be that better outcomes are promoted by not always maximizing good in a particular situation. Core intuition: you need a rationale for partiality. Everyone's utility is equally important to them as yours is to you.
• Respect for Persons: the language of bodies vs. the language of persons. Adopting rules for persons: Golden Rule, Privacy, Rights, Consent, Autonomy.
• Libertarianism: Liberty and self-ownership as a basis for a strong view of rights. Self-ownership as the basis for social relations (response to a critic alleging that lib is anti-social). Libs and charity. Libs and anarchy. (A right/left crossover position.)

• Note how each position as relative strengths and weaknesses in dealing with various aspects of moral life. You can see this by posing particular issues that bring out these strengths.

• Some ethical problems seem like more or less "paradigmatic" fits for specific argumentative appeals.

• Why support public education?
• How should we help people in absolute poverty?
• Why is it important to respect property rights?

FEB 9

• Today we review collaborative research pages on A Good Death, Treatment of Animals, and Basic Income Gaurantee.

FEB 11

Notes on Philosophical Method

Particularly for today's class:

• Consider both what your head and heart tell you (Let the elephant speak, but makes sure reasoning comes in too.)
• Philosophers collect, sketch, analyze compare arguments.
• Consider opposing views, both radically different ways to frame a problem and near variants of your position.
• Try to experience the "productive resistance" that considering opposing views gives you. You can use comparisons to clarify principles at work in your own thinking, values that have priority in the case, and to identify common presuppositions of arguments.
• Philosophers as mid-wives.

FEB 16

Questions and Advice about your papers

• Keep in mind the rubric and consider your use of philosophical methods
• Scope of topic
• Justifications and "ethical appeals" and more...

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

• Ring of Gyges - example of veneer theory.
• Functionalism in psychology
• Reminder of big theoretical choice about ethics. 74
• 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 5) Application to political beliefs:

• Does selfish interest or group affiliation predict policy preferences?
• Drew Westen's fMRI research on strongly partisan individuals. dlPFC.
• Good thinking as an emergent property. individual neurons vs. networks. analogy to social intelligence.
• Statement, 90, on H's view of political life in light of this way of theorizing. read and discuss.

Small Group Work

1. Reread Haidt's statement about political life. What does it imply about political differences? What would it mean to engage in politics in light of the research he is working from? How do you explain the puzzle that we do not experience our political beliefs quite the way the explanation portrays them.

de Waal, intro & p. 5-21

• Veneer Theory - starts in a story about Enlightenment efforts to explain morality. social to the core.

• Clue from intro about how commentators will respond: not as veneer theorists, but to question continuity between moral emotions and "being moral".

• Thesis: No asocial history to humans. And note: unequal in competition for status.

• note critical comments on rationalist psychology 6.

• 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 (13). Seem opposed, but major thesis for de Waal is that they are not: a "selfish" evolutionary process can produce altruism as a strategy. very important theoretical claim.
• Darwin influenced by Adam Smith: look up scottish moral sense theory.
• Key theoretical claim, bot 16.
• Westermark: observation of camel's revenge.
• Chimps punish and seek revenge also. Engage in reconciliation.
• "reciprocal altruism"
• "moral emotions" p. 20

FEB 18

de Waal, "Morally Evolved," 21-42

• Empathy -- posits more complex forms (moral emotions) from simpler (ex. emotional contagion)

• Culture modifies empathy just as higher order mental functions modify lower (prefrontal orders memory recall).

• Evidence in primates of simple emotions:

• comforting, response to distress (25) -- from emotional contagion to empathy.
• sympathy defined "sorry and concern"(26) compared to "personal distress" in which we try to resolve our own pain -- empathy is broader "changing places in fancy" (Adam Smith) "feeling another's pain".
• children and pets.
• Rhesus monkeys won't shock each other (29)
• Note the theoretical alternatives at 29: 1) aversion to distress signals; 2) distress from emo contagion; 3) true helping motivations.

• Apes appear to engage in perspective taking more than monkeys. Hypothesis at 30: this is due to a cognitive overlay, a differentiation of self-other plus a capacity to imagine the other's perspective. Kuni and the starling. Kuni capable of imagining the "good" for a bird.

• Anecdotes:

• How does Ladygina-Kohts get her chimpanzee off the roof?
• Kuni and the starling
• Jakie's helping behavior toward Krom with the tires "targeted helping" (ToM - understanding intentions)
• 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.
• PAM - Perception - Action Mechanism - perception and action share cognitive representations. seeing disgust is like being disgusted, facile muscles mimic others.

• defintion of empathy at 39 (ranging from "matching the mental state of the other" to cognitive empathy which includes knowing the reasons for another's emotions (as in Jakie's case)) and 41: def of cognitive empathy -- targeted helping, distinction bt self/other.

FEB 23

de Waal, Morally Evolved, Part 3

• Reciprocity and Fairness

• testing hypotheses about food sharing and grooming study in chimps

• 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" results p. 47 --mention Ultimatum Game here.
• limits to monkey fairness: no sharing between rich and poor.

• Mencious and "reciprocity" (note: this is a way of making the "strong" argument for evolved morality.) (note veneer theory at work 50-51)
• 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
• some hints at theory...

Bloom, Chapter 2, "Empathy and Compassion"

• violent psychopaths have understanding of what they are doing to people, but don't have the associated emotions. quotes p. 35.
• by contrast, testimony of Darwin about his son, William. sympathy, then generosity, then guilt/shame at transgression.
• terms:

• compassion -- (like sympathy in deWaal) caring about a person.
• empathy -- experiencing the emotions of the other person. empathy a relatively new word.

• mirror neurons -- not really the answer, might not be sufficient for social learning, not in parts of brain governing emotion. [upshot is that the metaphor makes sense, but the mechanism is probably elsewhere, like in the face.]
• claim: evolutionary function of empathy is to motivate compassion and altruism. 43

• 1. Note that we choose whom to empathize with, typically. stranger shock study, p. 44 - note this bring in acceptance of punishment as well.
• 2. We can experience compassion (and action) without empathy. Singer pond example.
• 3. And empathy without compassion. Nazi example.

• also, schadenfreude.
• theoretical issue: How are empathy and compassion related to morality?

• No morality without them. (But also, pre-moral: Widely observed in nature: distress response. rat example, chimp comforting - deWaal)
• Consolation behaviors in 1 year olds. Could be self-soothing.
• Toddler helping behavior -- hard to know the causes, but seems spontaneous. 51ff: children in helping study override request when more appropriate object is available. in other study, toddlers seem to track reciprocity (as in de Waal's primates, 42-43) (Alison Gopnik is all about this. Browse if interested.)
• Toddler sharing behavior -- esp, emergence of sharing with strangers. around 4yo.
• Toddler self-evaluation -- gradient of guilt in child toy study 55-56.

Small Group Discussion: Theorizing Empathy and Compassion

What is the future of empathy and compassion as part of human morality? Should we shift from emotional to cognitive judgements in cases of response to human suffering? In what circumstances? What principles should govern the extension of empathy and compassion beyond kin and in groups? Consider examples of "misplaced empathy" or inappropriate empathy. If you found out that empathy were in decline, would you think it was a problem or possibly just a transition?