Florence Summer 2014 Ethics Course Lecture Notes A

Return to Ethics Florence Summer 2014

Class Dates

Monday May 19, 2014

1st Day Notes

• Introductions

• Name, major, goals, motivation, relevant experiences.

• Course overview

• Course topics and research questions (MA)
• Movie distribution (MA)
• Wiki Instruction (MA)
• Assignments in this course (TH)

• Start Course

• Show clip from GIC (39:00) (TH)
• Prompt for viewing

Tuesday May 20, 2014

=== ROME 5/17: Manifestation against commercialization of water and against nuclear power

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 - contagiousness
• balancing - what the hell

• Priming with 10 commandments or signature on top of form vs chances of being caught

• Implications
• small-scale vs high-profile cheating

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 immediate result?
• what was the significance or inference to be made from the results?

Ethical Issues in "Girlfriend in a Coma"

• Act one la mala Italia:
• political corruption

• extra-state and state terrorism
• organized crime, political connivance, control of elections, money washing in legal enterprises

• Bomb attacks on antimafia magistrates Falcone and Borsellini, 1992,
• Ndrangheta, controllo territoriale; justice and education to fight organized crime
• origins of B's money

• Discrimination of women
• Liva in Taranto, jobs and lives depend on bad government and bad capitalism

• Act II Buona Italia

• The South Project - confiscated property becomes community for differently abled

• GOEL female workforce

• If not now when: women's resistance to B

• Familial/good capitalism
• Marchionne + Elkmann, FIAT

• Ferraro, nutella. Ethics of Sharing with community

• Eataly, slow food, local, fair

• Cultura, Torino museum of cinema occupation of theatres

• Act III Sloth
• Sloth the major and worst of sins; easily absolvable
• Berlusconicmo has put everyone in the purgatory; all are equally involved and all are as solved

• Mauizio Viroli - Machiavelli - church has made weakness "sancta religione: (holy religion) - Leaders of the Unification (1861) were morally strong and critical of the church's tendency to make deals with political power

• Umberto Eco: the lacking sense of the state, church's influence on politics

• Brain drain - new immigration patterns
• search for opportunity and meritocracy; repatriation as import of intellectual resources; attention to Italy reinforces democracy

Wednesday May 21, 2014

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 (nature), empiricists (nurture), rationalists (morality is cognitive, reasoning process)

• 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). If Turiel was right about harm, why do so many non-western cultures moralize things like purity? 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.

Thursday May 22, 2014

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.

Monday May 26, 2014

Haidt, Chapter 2, "The Intuitive Dog and Its Rational Tail"

• Philosophy's "rationalist delusion"
• 30: Plato, Hume, and Jefferson - three models of the mind
• A brief history of moral philosophy:

• Stage 1: 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). Wilson's prophecy.
• Stage 2: Nativism (natural selection gives us minds "preloaded" with moral emotions) in the 90s: Wilson, de Waal, Damasio (note studies of patients with dysfunction vmPFC)
• Stage 3: Evolutionary Psychology in moral psychology.
• studying controlled vs. automatic process by testing under "cognitive load" -- some moral decision making not impaired by load
• Studies of "moral dumbfounding:

• 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: Margolis' "seeing that" vs. "seeing why" -- note that morality involves the latter as well.

• Rider and Elephant

• Important to see Elephant as making judgements (processing info), not just "feeling"
• 45: Elephant and Rider defined

• Social Intuitionist Model

Tuesday May 27, 2014

Haidt, Chapter Three, "Elephants Rule"

• Personal Anecdote: your inner lawyer
• Priming studies:

• "take" "often" -- works 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. "Macbeth effect" (connection between body and morality)
• Helzer and Pizarro: standing near a sanitizer strengthens conservatism.

• 4. Psychopaths: reason but don't feel

• Robert Hare, researcher on psychpaths: testimony.

• 5. Babies: feel but don't reason

• Theory behind startle response studies in infants
• Bloom's moral puppet shows: helper and hinderer puppet shows
• Social interaction appraisal at six months: reaching for helper puppets

• 6. Affective reactions in the brain

• Josh Greene's fMRI studies of Trolley type problems -- The Trolley Problem

• When does the elephant listen to reason?

• Friends... The Importance of Friends -- back to social intuitionism
• Are we determined to follow the elephant (our own or our friends')? The importance of delay

Method: Giving Philosophical Arguments in Ethics

• Distinguish:

• Research results
• Significance of results
• Justification of theories

• What are the reasons for thinking that the nature of morality is disclosed by psychological studies?
• Descriptive (scientific or observational) vs. Justificatory (ought we, can we act otherwise than the way nature disposes us to act?) claims

Wednesday May 28, 2014

Luchetti, "Eluana Englaro"

• In line with Eluana's expressed wish, her father decided to withdraw artificial life support after 17 years (13 years of legal battle)
• The final ruling sparked a fierce and amply press covered crusade from the Vatican and Berlusconi's right wing government
• The general public endorsed the father's stance
• Political manoeuvres of private matter marks shift from bioethics to biopolitics
• As is the case of abortion, the vegetative state requires health professionals to take an ethical stance
• While euthanasia is illegal, patients may refuse treatment
• Is ANH a medical treatment or ethically due act?
• Difficulties involved in finding professionals willing to give or withdraw ethically controversial treatments
• Dr. Luchetti calls for a procedure-based decision process to promote the diverse moral responsibilities at stake in right-to-live cases

Euthanasia and Physician-assisted Suicide

• Not just about dramatic cases such as Eluana Englaro or Terri Schiavo
• When is it permissible for someone to receive help ending their life?
• What does the elephant have to say?
• What principles should govern such decisions?

• Human dignity
• Medical conditions
• Consent and statement of intent

Thursday, May 29, 2014

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.

Monday June 2, 2014

Holiday

Tuesday June 24, 2014

Holiday