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