Tem

5: SEP 15

Everyone agrees that honesty is an important virtue, but no one thinks honesty requires you to tell everyone the truth all the time. How do you decide when to tell the truth or say what you're thinking? What makes it morally acceptable to avoid disclosing something or to decide that someone doesn't have a right to an answer. Your answer should present one or more principles that you are implicitly following for deciding what honesty really requires of you. Try to articulate these principles in your answer and briefly justify them. (To prepare for this assignment you might want to listen to this "This American Life" podcast: Need to Know Basis. But you probably don't need to refer to it and you cannot assume that others have heard it.

Follow this link when you are ready to write. Please turn in your writing by Friday, September 18.
We will be using a "single stage" peer review process for this assignment. I will send out instructions for the peer review stage after the deadline.

Some complaints about philosophers
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)

The troubled history of applying evolution to social processes
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 (used to be in the course. See links.); Damasio -- 33 -- seems to be a very different picture than Plato's;

Damasio's research on vmPFC disabled patients. could watch gruesome images without feeling. trouble planning. (Phineas Gage) reasoning (about some practical matters) requires feeling.
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.

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)

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.

Go back to roach juice and soul selling. How would you react to this experiment now that you know it's a pschological trigger we have? What else works like this?
Is Feeling epistemic? Do we process information with emotions?