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 studcies?
• 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 achieved the right 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?
• Not a religious but democratic problem related to freedom of conscience
• 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
• Ethical convictions and religious beliefs of health professionals (Difficulties involved in finding professionals willing to give or withdraw ethically controversial treatments)

• http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eutanasia#mediaviewer/File:Euthanasia_in_Europe.png

Paul Rainbow & Nicholas Rose: "Biopower Today" (2006)

• Develops Michael Foucault's concepts and studies conducted in the 1960s and 1970s on 19th- and 20th-Century practices
• Holocaust as extreme example of domination (elimination of vital existence), but Biopower is not necessarily nefarious
• Today a relation between letting die and making live
• Biopwer: more or less rationalised attempt to intervene upon the vital characteristics of human existence

• one or more truth discourses and relative authorities competent to speak about the vital character of human beings
• strategies of intervention upon collective existence in the name of life and death
• Models of subjectivisation through which individuals are brought to work on themselves, under authorities, in relation to truth discourses

• Biopolitics: all the specific strategies and contestations over problematisation of collective human vitality, morbidity, and morality; over the forms of knowledge, regimes of authority and practices of intervention that are desirable, legitimate and efficacious

• race
• reproduction - abortion; intervention in cases of infertility; embryo selection l
• genomic (study of DNA within a single cell of organism) medicine - identify processes and open up to intervention with therapeutic effects (per symptomatic diagnosis and preventive therapy)

• Rhetorics of choice

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 3 - Conditions affecting honesty

• Political scandals involving unpublished expense accounts
• Correct change
• Aiely again

• Section 4 - Motivated Reasoning

• Research tracking reason seeking and evidence seeking behaviors under conditions of motivation (self esteem on the line) (examples?)
• Even affects visual perception (perception or reward conferring characters on computer screen) (also, sports examples)

• Section 5 - Application to political beliefs: group affiliation enhances distorted thinking....

• Does selfish interest or group affiliation predict policy preferences?
• Drew Westen's fMRI research on strongly partisan individuals. dlPFC not activated, whereas other areas were.
• 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 3, 2014

Bellochio, Bella Adormentata

Here are the names of major characters and sub-plot events from the movie, arranged in time order:

• Rosa, drug addict, in church
• Senator Uliano Beffardi, wife Emma (who was terminally ill, and is deceased prior to the timeline of the film, seen in flashbacks), daughter Maria (activist anti-euthanasia in the case of Eluana Englaro). Father and daughter have different views of euthanasia based on the loss of the mother/wife.
• The psychiatrist and member of parliament, who prescribes medications to depressed parlimentarians
• The Brothers: Roberto, and his mentally ill brother, Pepino, who he cares for
• Roberto and Maria have a love affair, but the ill brother frustrates it and Roberto breaks the relationship with Maria
• In a flashback we see Uliano kill his terminally ill wife.
• Dr. Pallido takes an interest in Rosa after she cuts her wrists in the hospital. He stays with her during her recovery.
• Catholic family, parents are actors, son, Federico aspires to be an actor, his sister, Rose, in in a vegetative state and on breathing machine. The mother, (identified as "Divina Madre") a famous actress, is preoccupied with her daughter's condition, ignoring her son and husband.
• At the end of the movie:

• Roberto stays committed to his brother while Maria discloses their love to hear father
• Senator Befardi prepares speech which discloses his act of active euthanasia, shows it to Maria.
• Dr. Pallido and Rose (the drug addict) commit to each other in a care (and possibly romantic) relationship
• Federico's mom remains committed to the possibility that her daughter Rose will wake up.

Wednesday June 4, 2014

Haidt, Chapter 5, "Beyond WEIRD Morality"

• Major thesis in Part II of this book: There's more to morality than harm and fairness.

• WEIRD morality is the morality of Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic cultures

• just as likely to be bothered by taboo violations, but more likely to set aside feelings of disgust and allow violations
• only group with majority allowing chicken story violation.
• "the weirder you are the more likely you are to see the world in terms of separate objects, rather than relationships" "sociocentric" moralities vs. individualistic moralities
• framed-line task 97

• Shweder's anthropology: ethics of autonomy, community, divinity 99-100

• claims schweder's theory predicts responses on taboo violation tests
• ethic of autonomy: illustrated in anecdote on plane.
• ethic of divinity: body as temple vs. playground
• vertical dimension to values. explains reactions to flag desecration, piss Christ, thought exp: desecration of liberal icons.

105

• Connection between ethics and aesthetics -- Haidt began to see the sociocentric view (which includes community and divinity) as a aesthetic whole.

• Discussion questions:

• Are WEIRD moral cultures more rational and therefore "better" (embodying a most distinctively human morality, for example, following Singer & Koorsgaard?)
• How WEIRD are you?

Thursday June 5, 2014

Haidt, Chapter 6, "Taste Buds of the Righteous Mind"

• explaining moral diversity. argument against the reductive project of philosophical ethics
• "the righteous mind is like a tongue with six taste receptors"
• Enlightenment thought, two sources of transcendence: God & Reason
• Hume represents a third enlightenment option: Nature
• Austism, Bentham (utlitarianism), Kant (deontology)
• Avoiding bad evolutionary theory or evolutionary psychology: "just so stories"
• Modularity in evolutionary psychology: original vs. current triggers
• See chart, p. 125

Tuesday June 24, 2014

Holiday