SEPT 20

7: SEPT 20

Assigned

• Haidt, Chapter 3, "Elephants Rule" (52-72)

• Watch:Beginner's Guide to Kant's Moral Philosophy

• SW1 Assigned today

In-class content

• What is Ethics? What are Values? How are they enforced?
• A Second look at “Morality as a product of Evolution”
• SW1 Assignment - Review
• Consequentialism - Utilitarianism

What is Ethics? What are Values? How are they enforced?

• Morality is about problems that can be addressed by values.
• Values are expectations of others to think, speak, feel, and act in particular ways (and sometimes to refrain from thinking, speaking, etc. in particular ways).
• We enforce values in social life by many means, from conversation about expectations, gossip about others’ behavior, and, of course, the justice system.

Summing up Sapolsky: Morality as a product of Evolution

• Some key claims and inferences:

• Evolution shapes our bodies, our behaviors, and our ideas (evo-psych)
• Cooperation and coalitions can give us a fitness advantage.
• A problem with cooperation is to not become a sucker and to avoid free-riders.
• This is a problem we can address with values (e.g. it’s a moral problem).
• Morality isn’t only about cooperation.

Haidt, Chapter 3, "Elephants Rule"

• Personal Anecdote from Haidt's married life: 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 positive responses to something just be repeat exposure.

• 2. Social and Political judgements are especially intuitive

• Affective Priming - flashing word pairs with dissonance: "flower - happiness" vs. "hate - sunshine"
• Implicit Association Test Project Implicit
• Flashing word pairs with political terms causes dissonance. measurable delay in response when, say, conservatives read "Clinton" and "sunshine". Dissonance is pain.
• Todorov's work extending "attractiveness" advantage to snap judgements. "Competency" judgments of political candidates correct 2/3 of time. note:
• Judgements of competence. note speed of judgement .1 of a second.(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 Belief Change

• Josh Greene's fMRI studies of Trolley type problems. The Trolley Problem
• Research study: 20 stories like trolley: direct personal harm, for good reason. 20 stories of impersonal harm. 18 test subjects put in fMRI and asked about each story. Personal harm stories consistently activate more emotional centers, like vmPFC.
• 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...

Philosophical Moral Theories: Duty Ethics

• Basic intuition behind non-consequential duty ethics: Moral behavior sometimes "command" or absolute imperative to live up to an ideal. Versions of this include:

• An external command, as coming from a creator God, such as God's command to Abraham to kill Isaac, or
• An internal command, an internalization of Divine laws, like the 10 commandments, or
• A completely secular sense of duty to be true to an ideal or conception of ourselves.

• As rational - "I have to respect X's right to live their own lives" (also respect for autonomy)
• As deserving of basic dignity - "I don't feel morally comfortable with people making degrading choices from limited options." (Famine brides, sex trafficking, organ donation under conditions of poverty, but also humiliation, etc. from discrimination)
• As deserving of care - Human dignity also requires that I care for other's basic needs. (People living in squalor, dying for lack of health care.

• Typical formulation of "modern" duty ethics comes from Kant. He is focused on autonomy, not improving others' material circumstances.

• Kant's view:

• What does it mean to be good, for Kant? To have a good will. The will to do the right thing. Not for rewards.

• Bartender example. Self-interested motivations don’t count (fear of getting caught, losing customers, harming customers).

• What is it that Kant wants you to love and swear absolute duty to? A little background on Kant. Enlightenment figure. (This is a good time to read a bit about the European intellectual movement called "The Enlightenment". Some Enlightenment ideals: modern free will, importance of reason.

• Kant's ideal: Morality originates in my free will. The ability to make rules for ourselves. Being rational. Being bad is a failure of duty to revere this freedom in me and in others.
• This does involves a pretty radical abstraction from the promotion of happiness. For Kant, what's morally important about us has nothing to do with our well-being, contra eudaimonistic ethics.

• Categorical Imperative - Kant's phrase for the kind of motivation (maxim describing our will) that is moral, as opposed to prudential (prudence is about managing consequences).

• Formulation #1: “I ought never to act except in such a way that I could also will that my maxim should become universal law.” ...if it makes sense for you to will that everyone act from your maxim. This is a kind of test.

• Lying fails the test. There is a logical contradiction between the maxim of truth telling and maxim of lying. You want people to believe you after all.

• Formulation #2: Act in such a way that you treat humanity... always as an end and never simply as a means. Requires respect of others as source of rational planning.

• Are we using people only as an end when we get services from others? Not necessarily. Recall video.

• Formulation #3: Act as though through your actions you could become a legislator of universal morals. We are examples, contributing to a rational order or not. (Are you on "team Reason"? How do we integrate that with knowledge of morality as a system of evolved social behaviors?)

• Rationalism: Kant thinks we can all agree, in principle, to promote the idea of the world as a place for rational beings.

SW1 Evolved Morality (600 words)

• Stage 1: Please write an 600 word maximum answer to the following question by Sunday, September 25th, 2022 11:59pm.

• Topic: How does evolution shape moral social behaviors in animals and in species like us? Is there good reason to think that some moral social behaviors or morality itself is a product of evolution? Present Sapolsky's answers to these questions in a detailed and well organized short essay (400-450), and then indicated your view. You may wish to raise and address a critical question you have about these ideas (150-200). (Do not reproduce the questions in your answer, but write a continuous essay that addresses both questions.)

• Advice about collaboration: Collaboration is part of the academic process and the intellectual world that college courses are based on, so it is important to me that you have the possibility to collaborate. I encourage you to collaborate with other students, but only up to the point of sharing ideas, references to class notes, and your own notes, verbally. Collaboration is also a great way to make sure that a high average level of learning and development occurs in the class. The best way to avoid plagiarism is to NOT share text of draft answers or outlines of your answer. Keep it verbal. Generate your own examples.

• Prepare your answer and submit it in the following way. You will lose points if you do not follow these instructions:

1. To assure anonymity, you must remove your name from the the "author name" that you may have provided when you set up your word processing application. For instructions on removing your name from an Word or Google document, [click here].
2. Format your answer in double spaced text, in a typical 12 point font, and using normal margins. Do not add spaces between paragraphs and indent the first line of each paragraph.
3. Do not put your name in the file or filename. You may put your student ID number in the file. Always put a word count in the file. Save your file for this assignment with the name: EvolvedMorality.
4. To turn in your assignment, log into courses.alfino.org, click on the "1 - Points" dropbox.
5. If you cannot meet a deadline, you must email me about your circumstances (unless you are having an emergency) before the deadline or you will lose points.

• Stage 2: Please evaluate four student answers and provide brief comments and a score. Review the Assignment Rubric for this exercise. We will be using the Flow and Content areas of the rubric for this assignment. Complete your evaluations and scoring by Friday, September 30, 2022 11:59pm.

• To determine the papers you need to peer review, open the file called "#Key.xls" in the shared folder. You will see a worksheet with saint names in alphabetically order, along with animal names. Find your saint name and review the next four (4) animals' work below your animal name. If you get to the bottom of the list before reaching 4 animals, go to the top of the list and continue.

• Use this Google Form to evaluate four peer papers. Submit the form once for each review.

• Some papers may arrive late. If you are in line to review a missing paper, allow a day or two for it to show up. If it does not show up, go back to the key and review the next animal's paper, continuing until you get four reviews. Do not review more than four papers.

• Stage 3: I will grade and briefly comment on your writing using the peer scores as an initial ranking. Assuming the process works normally, most of my scores probably be within 1-2 points of the peer scores, plus or minus.

• Stage 4: Back-evaluation: After you receive your peer comments and my evaluation, take a few minutes to fill out this quick "back evaluation" rating form: [1]. Fill out the form for each reviewer, but not Alfino. You must do the back evaluation to receive credit for the whole assignment. Failing to give back-evaluations unfairly affects other classmates.

• Back evaluations are due TBD, 2022, 11:59pm.