Spring 2013 Ethics Course Lecture Notes A

Return to Ethics

These are the notes you will see displayed in class. They can be correlated to study questions for each class day.

January 07

First Class Topics

• Course, Materials (books, pdfs, and clicker), and Goals
• Course Methods and web sites - view course research questions

• Course website -- for reading schedule, grading scheme, email, pdfs, audio from class, audio comments on assignments
• Course wiki -- for basic course information, lecture notes, study questions.
• Einstruction site - for registering your clicker, viewing clicker questions.

• A typical prep cycle for the course: read, engage, review, prep SQs.
• Time commitment: 6 hours per week as a baseline.
• Grading Schemes: overview.
• Ereserves - pdfs for course reading not in book form.

January 08

Cooper, Chapter 1, Introduction to Philosophical Ethics

• Defining Ethics: Cooper's pragmatic definition, and others
• Levels of value reflection: actions, institutions, principles, theory, meta-theory
• The Zimbardo Prison Experiment: implications
• Example of philosophical method.
• Core ethical principles or intutions that are the basis of ethical theories. p. 23

January 10

Ariely, Why We Lie

• 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

Haidt, The Righteous Mind, Intro and Chapter 1

• Moral reasoning as a means of finding truth vs. furthering social agendas.
• Harmless taboo violations: eating the dog / violating a dead chicken.
• Brief background on developmental & moral psychology: nativists, empiricists, rationalists

• Piaget's rationalism: kids figure things out for themselves if they have normal brains and the right experiences.
• Kohlberg's "Heinz story,"
• Turiel: kids don't treat all moral rules the same: very young kids distinguish "harms" from "social conventions"

Haidt's puzzle about Turiel: other dimensions of moral experience, like "purity" and "pollution" seem operative at young ages and deep in culture (witches).

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 culturally variable.

January 14

• Small Group Discussion: factors affecting breaks with situational control.

Cooper, Chapter 5: Cognitive and Moral Development

• Review of Piaget's stage 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.

• Kohlberg's stage of moral development

• Preconventional, Conventional, Postconventional

• Application to My Lai massacre

January 15

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

• Ethics and religion
• Ethics and relativism -- different versions of relativism:

• Ethics varies by culture: true and false, same act under different conditions may have different value. Examples?
• Marxist relativism and non-relativism
• Problems for relativists: consistency across time, polls could determine ethics
• Problems for the subjectivist: making sense of disagreement

• Singer: Ok to say the values aren't objective like physics, but not sensible to deny the meaningfulness of moral disagreement. Ethical reasoning.
• Singer's view (one of several major positions): p. 10
• The sorts of reasons that count as ethical: universalizable ones.
• "Interests" in utilitarian thought

January 17

Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book 1

• Politics as the master science: it's 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.
• But what is it? Search for the function of man to find the answer.

• Nutrition and growth?
• Perception?
• Activity of the soul in accordance with virtue?

• Other characteristics needed: complete life, active life.
• Section 13: Aristotle's tripartite division of the soul:

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

January 21

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

• Philosophy's "rationalist delusion"
• 30: Plato, Hume, and Jefferson
• 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
• Evolutionary Psychology in moral psychology

• Roach-juice
• Soul selling
• Harmless Taboo violations: Incest story; Cadaver nibbling; compare to Kohlberg's Heinz stories (reasoning vs. confounding) -- evidence that the elephant is talking.

• Ev. psych. research outside moral psychology

• Wasson card selection test: seeing that vs. seeing why

• Rider and Elephant

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

• Social Intuitionist Model

January 22

Haidt, Chapter Three, "Elephants Rule"

• Personal Anecdote: your inner lawyer
• Priming studies:

• "take" "often" -- working with neutral stories also

• Research supporting "intuitions come first"

• Zajonc on "affective primacy"-- applies to made up language

• Social and Political judgements intuitive

• flashing word pairs with dissonance: "flower - happiness" vs. "hate - sunshine"
• Implicit Association Test
• flashing word pairs with political terms.
• Todorov's work extending "attractiveness" advantage to snap judgements of competence.

• Bodies guides judgements

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

• Psychopaths: reason but don't feel
• Babies: feel but don't reason

• helper and hinderer puppet shows
• reaching for helper puppets

• Affective reactions in the brain

• Josh Greene's fMRI studies of Trolley type problems

• When does the elephant listen to reason?

• Friends...

January 24

Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, Book II

• Virtue not possessed by nature, but potential.
• Role of habit (ethos --> ethike) compare to other things we need training for.
• Section 4: Differences between virtue and the arts. Virture requires:

• Act chosen in knowledge
• Chosen by the agent
• For its own sake
• Proceeding from character.

• Virtue in the soul: passsions, faculties or states of character.
• Virtue makes its object excellent.
• Virtue as a mean that is also an excellence

• Courage as the mean between fear and foolhardiness
• Generosity (liberality)
• Temperance
• Proper pride
• Anger (?)
• Wittiness (vs. Buffoonery and Boorishness)

• Assessing Aristotle's view