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.