Spring 2014 Ethics Course Lecture Notes A

Return to Ethics

JAN 14

Course Introduction

1. Call roll. Brief student introductions.

2. Introduction to the course topic.

3. Introduction to the course websites.

4. Turning Point clicker technology.

5. Ereserves, Grading Schemes, and the Prep Cycle.

JAN 16

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

Tips on How to report study findings

• 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?

JAN 21

Haidt, Chapter 1,"The Divided Self"

• opening story
• Animals in Plato's metaphor for soul; contemporary metaphors. metaphors.
• Mind vs. Body
• Left vs. Right
• New vs. Old
• Controlled vs. Automatic

• Failures of Self-control [[1]]
• Haidt's "disgust" studies.

• Add in sociological dimension to consider values as socially instantiated.

Cooper, Chapter 1, "Intro to Philosophical Ethics"

• p. 3: definition of ethics; in terms of value conflict
• some terminology
• Zimbardo; implications for ethics

JAN 23

• Group exercise: Describe some values from your personal and family background that are quasi-moral or moral.

• Examples: removing shoes at the door, allowing urine to stay in the toilet, particularity about the cleanliness of tables at restaurants.

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. "self-constructed" - alt to nature/nurture.
• Kohlberg's "Heinz story" - note problems, p. 9.
• 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). Found answers in Schweder's work.
• Schweder: sociocentric vs. individualistic cultures. Interview subjects in sociocentric societies don't make the conventional/non-conventional distinction.
• 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.

JAN 28

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.

• Kohlberg's stages of moral development

• Preconventional, Conventional, Postconventional

• Application to My Lai massacre

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

JAN 30

Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book 1

• First: What do ancient Greeks mean by "virtue" (arete).

• Politics as the master science: its 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.

• something not desired for the sake of something else: happiness.

• But what is happiness? Search for the function of man to find the answer to the nature of happiness.

• Nutrition and growth?
• Perception?
• Activity of the soul implying a rational principle, in accordance with virtue? (perfective activities)

• Other characteristics needed: complete life, active life.

• Section 13: Aristotle's tripartite division of the soul:

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

• Summing up:

FEB 4

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

FEB 6

Haidt, Chapter Three, "Elephants Rule"

• Personal Anecdote: your inner lawyer
• Priming studies:

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

• Research supporting "intuitions come first"
• 1. Brains evaluate instantly and constantly

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

• 2. Social and Political judgements intuitive

• flashing word pairs with dissonance: "flower - happiness" vs. "hate - sunshine" (affective priming)
• Implicit Association Test
• flashing word pairs with political terms. causes dissonance.
• Todorov's work extending "attractiveness" advantage to snap ju-- note: Dissonance is pain.'
• judgements of competence. note speed of judgement (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
• 5. Babies: feel but don't reason

• Theory behind startle response studies in infants
• helper and hinderer puppet shows
• reaching for helper puppets

• 6. Affective reactions in the brain

• Josh Greene's fMRI studies of Trolley type problems

• When does the elephant listen to reason?

• Friends... The Importance of Friends

FEB 11

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 "state of character concerned with choice," choosing a mean (relative to a rational principle) 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

Aristotle, Book III, Nichomachean Ethics

• Distinguishing the "voluntary" from the "involuntary" (chracteristics and cases)
• Acting from compulsion
• Acting "in ignorance" vs. "out of ignorance"
• Choice, more specific than the voluntary, distinguished from wish
• Deliberation
• Aristotle on the topic, "No man errs willingly" (cf. Plato/Socrates) - "becoming wiked"
• Courage: not just about fear. Noble ends.
• Temperance: exemptions for pleaures and activities informed by reason.

FEB 13

Haidt, Chapter 4, "Vote for Me (Here's Why)"

• Ring of Gyges
• Tetlock: accountability research

• Exploratory vs. Confirmatory thought
• Conditions promoting exploratory thought

• 1) knowing ahead of time that you'll be called to account;
• 2) not knowing what the audience thinks;
• 3) believing that the audience is well informed and interested in truth or accuracy.

• Leary's research on self-esteem importance- "sociometer" -- non-conscious level mostly.
• Confirmation bias

• Wasson again -- number series
• Deann Kuhn -- 80: We are horrible at theorizing (requiring exploratory thought)....
• David Perkins research on reason giving
• Can I believe it? vs. Must I believe it?

• (section 5) Application to political beliefs:

• Does selfish interest or group affiliation predict policy preferences?
• Drew Westen's fMRI research on strongly partisan individuals. dlPFC.
• Good thinking as an emergent property.
• Statement, 90, on H's view of political life in light of this way of theorizing. read and discuss.

Small Group Work

1. Identify situations in which you were with people deliberating together and things went particularly well or badly (That is, in retrospect, you judged the quality of group deliberation as relatively good vs. bad.) How useful is the evidence in this chapter in thinking about that difference?
2. Reread Haidt's statement about political life. What does it imply about political differences? What would it mean to engage in politics in light of the research he is working from?

FEB 18

de Waal, intro & p. 5-21

• Veneer Theory -
• Theory of Mind - (xvi)
• Clue from intro about how commentators will respond: not as veneer theorists, but to question continuity between moral emotions and "being moral".

• Homo homini lupus
• Thesis: No asocial history to humans. And note: unequal in competition for status.
• Distinction between: 1) seeing morality as a "choice" humans made; and 2) morality as "outgrowth" of social instincts.
• T. H. Huxley: gardener metaphor. (contra Darwin, who includes morality in evolution.)
• Freud: civilization as renunciation of instinct.
• Dawkins: genes are selfish, but in the end we can break with them.
• Veneer Theory: "Scratch an altruist and watch a hypocrite bleed"
• Robert Wright (contemporary evolutionist): morality as mask for selfishness.
• Evolutionary "selfishness" vs. moral "selfishness" -- role of intention. Seem opposed, but major thesis for de Waal is that they are not: a "selfish" evolutionary process can produce altruism as a strategy.
• Darwin influenced by Adam Smith
• Westermark: observation of camel's revenge.
• Chimps punish and seek revenge also. Engage in reconciliation.
• "reciprocal altruism"
• "moral emotions" p. 20