Fall 2018 Ethics Course Lecture Notes

SEP 17: 1

• Introduction to the Course

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

SEP 18: 2

GIF Fall 2018 Everyday Value Differences in Italian Culture

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?

SEP 20: 3

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".

SEP 24: 4

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? (Note similarity to Utilitarian premise: equal happiness principle)

• 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?

Haidt, Chapter 1,"The Divided Self"

• Notice how Haidt's approach shifts the focus from "What is reason like and what role does it play in morality?" to "What is a human brain like and what might that tells us about what morality might be like?"

• opening story
• Animals in Plato's metaphor for soul; contemporary metaphors. metaphors for mind/emotion, but also to explain "weakness of the will" What does weakness of the will feel like? H: Just thinking about reason as information processing doesn't help. Older metaphors sort of work better.

• Haidt's unstated hypothesis is that looking at the brain's divisions will help us understand our moral experience.

• Mind vs. Body -- the gut brain. We don't just think with our brains. Embodied cognition, embedded cognition, extended cognition. (Fit Ariely and Zimbardo phenomena.)
• Left vs. Right -- confabulation - Mind as confederation of modules. (No single chariotter.)
• New vs. Old - importance of the frontal cortex. orbitofrontal cortex in particular. Attractions and failures of the "Promethean script". Damasio's study of patients with orbitofrontal cortext disorder. also impaired rationality. The old brain is still with us.
• Controlled vs. Automatic -- suggested by priming experiments, controlled processes "expensive"; tradeoffs. power of controlled processes are limited in their power over desire, but they do have the ability to remove us from immediate enivronmental and other behavioral controls. Does morality only live in controlled processes? Is that plausible?

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

SEP 25: 5

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.)

SEP 27: 6

• This was our first group research report day on the immigration issue. Please read through the posts Fall 2018 Immigration in Europe and US

OCT 1: 7

Some structure for locating philosophical ethics theories

• Intentions (Kantian), Act (Aristotle), Consequences (Mill, Singer - utilitarian)

Hinman (exerpt), Ethics, C 9

• Basic elements of Aristotle's thinking on ethics:

• Centrality of concept of flourishing, "well-being"; eudaimonistic ethics; character ethics
• Connection between "function" and "flourishing" - virtue involves the excellences appropriate to our nature and function. (We're not trying to be excellent pigs, we're trying to excellent human beings.)
• The exercise of virtue is a holistic commitment of thought and emotion; an habituation to a high standard of conduct.
• Assessements, p. 275

• The Structure of Virtues

• Four features of a virtue: habit or disposition involving feeling and action seeking the mean of emotion relative to us. (Note my phrasing emphasizes emotional regulation.) -note glosses on p. 278.
• Virtues and typical human challenges ("spheres of existence") -- note examples, p. 279

• Courage

• Follow the discussion. Note how courage can be thought of as a response to our own fears or objective dangers. In both cases, virtue involve bringing reason to bear on the challenges that fear poses to living a good life.
• Some tough cases -- extreme risk environments,

Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book 1

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

• Opening: Noticing how arts are arranged in society.
• Politics as the master science: its end: happiness (but notice that the means is the cultivation of "excellences," of virtue)
• 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? No
• Perception? No
• def: Activity of the soul implying a rational principle, in accordance with virtue (perfective activities that realize our "highest" and more unique capacities)

• 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. Aristotle gives us the first detailed draft of the "Western rational self" - note it's characteristics. (not really a socio-centric self, though man is a political animal for A).

• Primary ethical insights about how to think about virtue:

• the pursuit of virtue is a movement toward an "end state" of the perfection of the sort of thing we are.
• the Golden Mean, pursuing action that strikes a "mean" between extremes of emotion, is often a good guide to virtuous action. (Further topics in Nichomachean ethics: voluntary action, deliberation and choice, responsibility, moral failure, analysis of specific virtues)

• Primary claim about morality in virtue ethics: Moral virtue is an expression of a virtuous character and (in modern virtue ethics).
• Contemporary virtue ethics adds: If we value the development of human capacities, we will want to see others develop their capacities for human excellence.

• Critical issues:

• Note how developmental moralities look different depending upon one's background theories: Aristotle, Kohlberg, evo-psych.
• Aristotle's rationalism.
• The relationship of virtue to happiness.

OCT 2: 8

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.

Some Questions to consider

• What does Akrasia look like in light of our reading so far?
• What are the challenges of being virtuous or finding good ethical solutions if ethics is more like Haidt is describing it?

OCT 4: 9

Some starters

• 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

Sandel, Utilitarianism

• This is a traditional approach to presenting Utilitarianism. We'll be able to see the theory from this, because Sandel very clear about that, as well as contrasting the concerns of a traditional vs. contemporary metaethics. (Try to track this.)

• life boat case: They eat Parker - similar to Trolley Problem.
• Is this a case of costs vs. benefit? How does it come out?
• Contrast in Approaches to Justice: consequences vs. right and duties.
• Bentham's defense of the principle of utility: we are driven by pleasure and pain, the rest is illusion. Alternative principles, like rights are ultimately advocated for by appeal to outcomes. (Kind of like Aristotle's teleology). Later Mill would provide the "equal happiness" principle.

• Workhouse for poor: though the form of Bentham's imagining is rough, note that this is the start of modern social welfare.
• Panopticon
• (also the start of social welfare statistics, public health, sewers, etc. These things are easier to justify on grounds of utility.)

• Objection 1: Rights are primary.

• Case of torture under extreme conditions (Trolley Problem on steroids.). New condition: torturing terrorist's daughter. Harder.
• How negotiable are rights in extreme cases?

• Objection 2: Is there a common currency for comparison of pleasures?

• Case: Phillip Morris in Czech Republic.
• Case: Ford Pinto '70s.
• Issue: Does life span enter into value. Older cost less.
• Empirical approach: Actual cost we pay in driving fatalities.
• Utilitarians respond:

• Whose problem is it? The cost-benefit may not only be part of the theory, it may be part of our moral life: even our driving behaviors (trade offs of speed and fatality rate) have implications for how much we value life in monetary terms). generate examples: when is it ok to be "calculative" in social and moral life?
• The theory can recognize higher and lower pleasures. Probably true that all value cannot be captured by pleasure and pain, but most can be captured by "flourishing and the avoidance of unnecessary suffering".

• Mill and the defense of Liberty

• Progressivism: liberty promotes happiness over the long term. (Update on desirability of "liberty" and self-determination as a political ideal.)
• Can a Utilitarian admit difference in kind between pleasures?
• Doctrine of the qualified judge.
• Other approaches to human difference.

• Sandel's claim that appeal to ideal of human dignity independent of wants and desires is an inconsistency.

• not sure it is independent of wants and desires. p. 51: what does "moral ideals beyond utility" mean to a Millian?

• Small group assessment: Develop three examples of situations in which you would definitely want someone to use utilitarian thinking in solving a moral problem and three examples of situations in which you would NOT want someone to follow utilitarian thinking. What core moral intuitions, stated as a claim, does this theory align with?

• OLD Small Group Assessment: How should we value human life in cases involving compensation or investment (e.g. in safer highways) given that we have a deep intuition that lives are not objects to be bought and sold? Then, take the problem down to a personal level. In your social and moral lives, when is it ok to be calculative? When is it wrong? Think about how you would criticize someone who violates this distinction.

OCT 8: 10

Sandel, Libertarianism

• Libertarianism: fundamental concern with human freedom; minimal state; no morals legislation; no redistribution of income or wealth. Strong concern with equality of liberty and avoidance of oppression, understood as forced labor.
• Facts about concentration of wealth: 1% have 1/3 of wealth, more than bottom 90%. Some current data
• objections to redistribution: utilitarian and rights-based.
• general commitments of libertarian. Uneasy to fit directly to conservatism. Cuts across several MFs.

• Argument from self-ownership (Nozick)

• Free Market philosophy
• Redistribution and self-ownership
• First four objections: 1. taxation; 2. importance of resources to poor; 3. social nature of talent; 4. implied consent/participation in democracy; 5. Jordan is Lucky.

• "Hard cases" (note on method) -- Markets in kidneys, assisted suicide, consensual canabalism (again!)

• Small group assessment: Develop three examples of situations in which you would definitely want someone to use libertarian thinking in solving a moral problem and three examples of situations in which you would NOT want someone to follow libertarian thinking. What core moral intuitions, stated as a claim, does this theory align with?

OCT 9: 11

Singer, "Rich and Poor"

• definitions and facts about absolute poverty
• difference between grain consumption accounted for in terms of meat consumption. problem of distribution rather than production.
• absolute affluence = affluent by any reasonable defintion of human needs. Go through paragraph on 221. Also, consider UN Millenium Dev. Goals [4]

• figures on giving by country: OPEC countries most generous. U.S. and Japan least. (more in Sachs)

• Is not giving to the relief of absolute poverty the moral equivalent of murder? Five purported differences:

• 1. allowing to die not eq. to killing. no intention to kill.
• 2. impossible to ask us to be obligated to keep everyone alive.
• 3. uncertainty of outcome in not aiding vs. pointing a gun. less direct responsibility, less like 1st deg. murder.
• 4. no direct and identifiable causal connection between consumerist action and death of individuals in other countries.
• 5. People would be starving with or without me. I am not a necessary condition for there to be starving people.

• Singer's point: these differences are extrinsic to the moral problem. there would be cases with these features in which we would still hold the person responsible. read 195.

• Showing the extrinsic character of the differences: Singer's argument strategy at this point is to show that the differences are smaller and more contingent that one might think. Point by point:

• 1. Lack of identifiable victim: Example of salesman selling tainted food. doesn't matter if no identifiable victim in advance.
• 2. Lack of certainty about the value of donations does reduce the wrongness of not giving (concession), but doesn't mean that its ok not to give. Note: development of aid industry since this writing. Measures of effectiveness becoming common, but still an issue.
• 3. Responsibility for acts but not omissions is incoherent way to think about responsibility. Consequences of our actions are our responsibility. Irrelevant that the person would have died if I had never existed. They might also have gotten help if I hadn't existed!

• Considers non-consequentialist justifications for not aiding

• idea of independent individual in Locke and Nozick doesn't make sense. Note appeal to social conception of humans based on ancestry!

• absence of malice also doesn't excuse inaction. involuntary manslaughter (in the case say of a speedin motorist) is still blameworthy.
• 4. Difference in motivation. But again the speeding motorist is blameworthy even though not motivated self-consciously to harm.
• 5. Easier to avoid killing, but saving all is heroic. S. grants that we may not be as blameworthy for not saving many lives if saving those live requires heroic action.

• The obligation to assist: Main Principle: If it is in our power to prevent something very bad happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral significance, we ought to do it.

• goes on to claim that it is within the power of dev. countries to aid the poor without sacrificing . . . etc. (Fits with Sachs article.)

• Considers major objections:

• taking care of your own

• property rights [at most weakens the argument for mandatory giving (but note that governmental means might be the most effective, esp. where problems have a political dimension)

• population and the ethics of triage:
• questions whether the world is really like a life boat

• leaving it to government. .7 GNP figure.

• too high a standard?

OCT 11: 12

Short Writing Exercise: 400 words

• By midnight Monday, October 15, 2018, please write a 400 word maximum answer to the following questions:
• Choose one of the philosophical ethics theories we have been studying (virtue ethics, utilitarianism, or libertarianism) and, after explicating its main principles and rationales, briefly explain its strengths and limits using examples. This should take about 200 words. Then answer this question in the second half of your answer: What does it tell us about the nature of ethics if specific ethical theories do not work for all situations? Feel free to draw on your emerging understanding of moral psychology to answer this question.

• Advice on collaboration and plagiarism: Feel free to discuss this question with classmates, including verbal discussion of particular resources (notes and references to readings) for answering it. To avoid plagiarism, choose your own examples and do not share outlines or drafts of your answer.

• Prepare your answer and submit it in the following way:

1. Do not put your real name or saint name in the file or filename. You may put your student id number in the file.
2. Put your word count in the file.
3. Format your answer in double spaced text in a 12 point normal font.
4. Save the file in the ".docx" file format using the file name "SW1". (So, all files should be saved as "SW1.docx".)
5. Log in to courses.alfino.org. Upload your file to the Q&W dropbox.

Sachs, Jeffrey, "Can the Rich Afford to Help the Poor?" (2006)

• (One of the architects of the UN Millennium Development Goals. Opposed by some noted development economists.)
• Optimist about relief: .7 GNP level of giving adequate.

• Absolute poverty down from 1/3 to 1/5 (interesting to compare US discussion in 1960 at the start of the domestic "war on poverty" of the Johnson administration); the rich world is alot richer than it was; we're better at poverty alleviation.
• Would have taken 1.6% of GNP in 80's now only .7%

• Note analysis on pages 294 of amounts that developing countries can supply to meet their own poverty needs. Middle-income countries like Brazil, Chile, and Mexico have enough.

• Can the US afford to meet a .7 GNP target?

• Sachs considers this obvious. To dramatize his point, on pages 304-308, he points out that the wealthiest 400 US citizens earned more than the total populations of Botswana, Nigeria, Senegal, and Uganda. More to the point, the tax cuts this group received during the Bush administration in 2001, 2002, and 2003 totaled about 50 billion a year, enough to meet the US giving goal of .7% of GNP.

• Digression on actual giving: [5]

OCT 15: 13

Symposium on Rich and Poor

• Today we will focus on the paper and you will have an opportunity to work out some of your views with different groups of students in the class. In addition to working in the small group you are accustomed to, you will switch once or twice to engage different groups of students in the class. Sort of like philosophical speed dating.

Critical Analysis #1 Topic Assignment

What, if any, obligations do we have to alleviate absolute poverty outside of the United States and how should we meet them? In assessing this questions consider both the empirical standards (what are the goals of the aid) and the theoretical basis of any obligation you advocate. Be sure to explain you views and why you do not hold justified alternative views.

• Write a 3-4 page (typed, double spaced) paper on this topic drawing on course reading and discussion as well as your own reading about background knowledge. Successful papers attempt to take a broad view of the problem, incorporate relevant information and argumentation, and consider opposing thought.

• Some advice about your papers.

In the broadest sense, ethical persuasive writing promotes a social or individual agenda based on claims about what is good for humans in a particular place and time. Good persuasive writing does, by definition, attempt to persuade an audience of something, but don't assume this only involves talking to the rider. Empathetic consideration of opposing views is something to aspire to. Provide arguments, but also try to engage the emotions of the reader with examples and considerations the extend the arguments into our emotional life.

• Due Dates

• Final Draft of paper due, October 22 11:59pm

• Prepare your answer and submit it in the following way:

1. Do not put your name in the file or filename. You may put your student id number in the file.
2. Format your answer in double spaced text in a 12 point normal font. Add page numbers.
3. Save the file in the ".docx" file format using the file name "CA1final".
4. Log in to courses.alfino.org. Upload your file to the Critical Analysis 1 dropbox.

OCT 16: 14

de Waal, p. 5-21

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

• note critical comments on rationalist psychology 6. Recall Haidt's similar account of rationalism in psychology and philosophy.

• 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".

• 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.

• Darwin on Ethics

• 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. (Note that you'd have trouble with this if you thought our nature had to be "essential" or found in one trait.)
• Darwin influenced by Adam Smith: look up scottish moral sense theory. Precursors to evolutionary moral psychology.
• Key theoretical claim, bot 16: question isn't whether animals are nice to each other, but whether they possess capacities for reciprocity and revenge, for the enforcement of social rules, for the settlement of disputes and for sympathy and empathy.

• Westermark

• Westermark: observation of camel's revenge.
• Chimps punish and seek revenge also. Engage in reconciliation.
• "reciprocal altruism"
• "moral emotions" p. 20 - disconnected from immediate reactions, involve judgements about how anyone should act or feel.

OCT 18: 15

2nd Wave of Immigration Research

• Today we'll review and discuss the second wave of research on immigration. Team B should post their research on the 2nd wave wiki page.

OCT 22: 16

• No formal class, but I will be in class for paper consultations.

OCT 23: 17

• Bring up Repligate issue.

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 "mere exposure effect" tendency to have more postive responses to something just be repeat exposure.

• 2. Social and Political judgements are especially intuitive

• flashing word pairs with dissonance: "flower - happiness" vs. "hate - sunshine" (affective priming)
• Implicit Association Test Project Implicit
• 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: Yale Theory of Mind & Baby prosociality Basic Puppet set up for prosociality studies on babies.
• reaching for helper puppets "parsing their social world"

• 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?
• Paxton and Greene experiments with incest story using versions with good and bad arguments. Harvard students showed no difference, though some when allowed delayed response.

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

Haidt "Out-Take on Virtue Ethics"

• Main point: Virtue ethics as third alternative to utlity and duty (deontology) which fits the social intuitionist model (if you think of it apart from Aristotle's bias about reason and the contemplative life).

• virtues are "character traits that a person needs in order to live a good, pariseworthy, or admirable life" - the well-trained elephant.

OCT 25: 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". (Recent research on empathy -- Sapolsky)
• 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 to fully taking another's place (mental state attribution).
• Interesting difference between monkey and ape moms. p. 40.
• PAM - Perception - Action Mechanism - perception and action share cognitive representations. seeing disgust is like being disgusted, facile muscles mimic others. (note Sapolky's research analysis.)

• 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.

OCT 29: 19

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

Note: 1/2 of this chapter will be discussed on Tuesday

• 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.

• Section 1: Obsessed with polls
• Leary's research on self-esteem importance- "sociometer" -- non-conscious level mostly.
• Section 2: Confirmation bias and exploratory thought
• Confirmation bias

• Wasson again -- number series
• Deann Kuhn -- 80: We are horrible at theorizing (requiring exploratory thought)....
• David Perkins research on reason giving

• Small Group discussion:

• We all have examples from social life of people who are more or less interested in exploratory thought and holding themselves accountable to external information and "their side" arguments.
• Share examples of the verbal and non-verbal behaviours of people who are not very good at exploratory thought and inviting diversity of viewpoint in social settings (other people, of course).
• Then, try to consider or recall the behaviours of people who do the opposite. What are some verbal or other behaviours that you can use to indicate to others' that you are open to having your views examined? What have you noticed about the practices of people who are good at generating viewpoint diversity in social setting?

• We will cover the second part of the chapter in the next class session.......

• more examples of people behaving as Glaucon would have predicted. Members of parliment, Ariely, Predictably Irrational,
• more evidence of reason in the service of desire: Can I believe it? vs. Must I believe it? We keep two different standards for belief-assent.
• "motivated reasoning" - 84ff.

• Section 5: Application to political beliefs:

• Does selfish interest or group affiliation predict policy preferences? Not so much. We are groupish.
• Drew Westen's fMRI research on strongly partisan individuals. We feel threat to dissonant information (like hypocrisy or lying) about our preferred leader, but no threat, or even pleasure, at the problems for the opponent. the partisan brain. Difference in brain activation did not seem to be rational/cog (dlPFC). bit of dopamine after threat passes.
• Research suggests that ethicists are not more ethical than others. (89 Schwitzgebel)
• Mercier and Sperber. Why Do Humans Reason?
• 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.

OCT 30: 20

• Note: Second part of Haidt, Chapter 4 will be discussed today

de Waal, Morally Evolved, Part 3

• Reciprocity and Fairness

• chimps and capucin monkeys among few primates (ok, let's include humans) that share.

• Chimp gratitude and reciprocity - grooming/food sharing

• 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.

• Monkey Fairness as 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" Ethics as a kind of cultivation of the heart and pro-social emotions. Note, reason comes after in this tradition.

• Community Concern: evolution in human thought to expand circle of moral concern. Claims it was a big step in moral evolution (or new capacities from bigger brains) to show general concern for a group.

• 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. consider the Crying Baby Paradox.

• The Beethoven Error - the mistake of thinking that "since natural selection is a cruel and pitiless process of elimination, it can only have produced cruel and pitiless creatures.

NOV 5: 21

Korsgaard, "Morality and the Distinctiveness of Human Action"

• On Veneer Theory

• not coherent: views morality as contraint of self-interest maximization (morality as needing to defeat egoism)

• Do we really pursue our self-interests (ha!)
• Not a coherent concept for a social animal as complex as us. Can't define our interests in isolation.

• Morality not constraints on self-interest, but defining of a way of life. not just a way of "having", but also of "doing" and "being"

• 101-102: develops an image of the isolated self-interested monster you would have to think we were to believe in veneer theory.

• animals don't have self-interests. They are "wanton" need a conception your long term good and a rational motivation toward it. (evaluate) Ethics news about older criticism of Jane Goodall
• treating as ends/means. What could it mean to treat someone as an "end in themselves"? (Short digression on Kant -- the language of persons/bodies, treating others as persons, as sources of their own life planning.) (How much of this language is captured by social status?)

• On continuity/discontinuity of ethics with evolution

• we're more like apes than people think, but there's still a deep discontinuity 103-104: language, culture, ability to befriend other species.
• we're "damaged" in some way that suggests a break with nature.
• de Waal is like some sentimentalists who incorrectly infer intention from behavior. Sceptical at 105 for example. Embarks on analysis of different levels or meanings of purpose or intention. Core argument here: inferring intention is difficult and inferring awareness of self-interest is unlikely.

"Is the capuchin "protesting the unfairness" or "angling for a grape"?" -- (Note that you can ask a similar question about humans.)

• range or scale: anything with "function organization" can be said to have purposes (ex. p. 107)
• next stage: perceptual animal's movements have purposes, but those purposes are not "before the mind" 108
• next stage: animal that has purposes "before the mind" and can "entertain thoughts about how to achieve them" -- closer to being an agent. Still, at this level there is no choosing. "the animals purposes are given to him by his affective state"
• next stage: Asking "Is wanting this a good reason for pursuing it?" (justification)

• we choose not only means to ends but ends themselves: another brief digression on Kant's deontology: to determine whether there is justification for wanting a particular end, you formulate a maxim about it and try to imagine it as a universal law. Can your maxim serve as a rational principle? Or it is self-contradictory or incoherent when imagined this way? Kant: we always have the possibility of setting natural desire aside for principle. duty to "normative self-government".

• Smith and Darwin on the development of capacity for normative self-government. sympathy for Smith and memory of regret in letting desire overide social instincts for Darwin.

• 117: "not a mere matter of degree" humans can put the idea of themselves before the action...