Spring 2015 Ethics Course Lecture Notes A

Return to Ethics

JAN 13

1st Day of Class Information

• Websites in the course

• Course Website: Alfino.org -- courses -- Spring 2015 Ethics -- access grading schemes, ereserves (pdfs of readings), audio files, email.
• Course Wiki: Alfino.org -- wiki -- Ethics (or from course website). All course information is linked from the course wiki page.
• Turning Point] -- Download and install Responseware ($19)
• Peerceptiv -- Register for this peer review site ($5) -- enter trial67 to register for the class.

• Assignments for your grading schemes.
• Buy Paul Bloom's Just Babies print or kindle.
• Grading approach -- friendly grading curve.
• Two rubrics: Flow/Content and Flow/Logic/Insight

The Prep Cycle

• Read for class. Get main ideas. Show reading knowledge on clicker quiz. (Content portion of class.)
• Come to class. (Method portion of class.)
• Note study questions and work to answer them during class. (We will do some short answer exercises to work on this.) Review if you don't feel you can answer the study questions after class. The Flow/Content rubric applies to this.
• Repeat.

This is our basic pattern, but as we learn more we will build toward larger theoretical questions which are the basis of the exam essays and paper.

JAN 15

Ariely, Why We Lie

• Assumptions: we think honesty is an all or nothing trait.
• 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: for current and possible new approaches to limit cheating.

Method: Tips on How to report study findings

• Philosophy makes use of a wide range of evidence and knowledge. In this course you will encounter alot of psychological, anthropological and and cultural studies and theories. You have to practice the way you represent studies (as opposed to theories) and how you make inferences from their conclusions.

• 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?

Turning Point Set up and Testing

Tip on Responseware:

• First set up a free Turning Point account. Then buy a license from within your account page and download your software.

• The ResponseWare Device ID is a unique 8 character identifier that is created when you set up your Turning Account. The Device ID can be found in the Response Devices tab of your Turning Account. After finding it, please report it to me using this form: Form for Reporting your Device ID

• The FAQ page for Response ware is helpful. [1]

JAN 20

Cooper, Chapter 1, "Intro to Philosophical Ethics"

• p. 3: definition of ethics; in terms of value conflict
• some terminology, two points:

• values of actions often reflect their context in institutitional and social context.
• just as there are levels of justification for any action, there are levels of justification for any theory of ethics.

• Zimbardo; implications for ethics

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 - importance of the frontal cortex. orbitofrontal cortex in particular.
• Controlled vs. Automatic

• Failures of Self-control [[2]]
• Haidt's "disgust" studies.

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

JAN 22

Haidt, The Righteous Mind, Intro and Chapter 1

• Track section and subsection title. The argument of the book is laid out clearly in them.

• Intuitions come first, reasoning second. The mind is divided, like a rider on an elephant, and the rider's job is to serve the elephant.

• Method Note: This is explanatory writing. Not philosophy directly. Digression on difference between explanatory and justifactory writing.

• Moral reasoning as a means of finding truth vs. furthering social agendas.

• Chapter 1
• Harmless taboo violations: eating the dog / violating a dead chicken.
• Brief background on developmental & moral psychology: p. 5

• 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. 7: We grow into our rationality like catepillars into butterflies. (note that there are two parts to this: the "growing into" and the rationalism.
• Kohlberg's "Heinz story" - note problems, p. 9. (We'll look more at Piaget and Kohlberg in our next class.)

• Turiel: kids don't treat all moral rules the same: very young kids distinguish "harms" from "social conventions". Harm is "first on the scene" in the dev. of our moral foundations.

• 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.
• In what ways is the concept of the self culturally variable?

• Schweder: sociocentric vs. individualistic cultures. Interview subjects in sociocentric societies don't make the moral/conventional distinction the same way we (westerns) do. (To Kohlberg and Turiel: your model is culturally specific.)
• Note: We don't experience our cultural moral conventions as conventional (17).

• 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. Turiel is right about how our culture makes the harm/convention distinction, but his theory doesn't travel well.

• Identify, if possible, some practices and beliefs from either your personal views, your family, or your ethnic or cultural background which show a particular way of making the moral/conventional distinction. (Example: For some families removing shoes at the door is right thing to do, whereas for others it is just experienced as a convention.)

JAN 27

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. (recall Zimbardo)

• Kohlberg's stages of moral development

• Preconventional, Conventional, Postconventional
• Note theoretical claim: hierarchy represents increasingly more developed ways of staying in equilibrium with environment. Where does this leave ethnicity and culture? p. 78.

• Application to My Lai massacre

Singer, Chapter 1, "About Ethics," from Practical Ethics

• Ethics and religion

• Mentions Plato's dialogue Euthyphro

• 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 29

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?
• def: 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: developmentalist, naturalist, rationalist, eudaimonistic, virtue ethics.

• A note on his primary ethical insight about how to think about virtue: the Golden Mean, a mean between extremes of emotion.

1st Group Short Answer Exercise

Today we will break into groups and each group will produce a short answer to a specified study question. Then, after class you will be prompted to rate the other group's answers using the Flow and Content rubric dimensions. This will be done by Google Forms linked from the main wiki page.

FEB 3

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

• Philosophy's "rationalist delusion" ex. from Timaeus. but also in rationalist psych.
• 30: Plato, Hume, and Jefferson (The Head and The Heart)
• 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 (mention research - The Emotional Nineties). Controversy in E. O. Wilson's Sociobiology.
• 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 in the transcript, also, 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

• Emotions are a kind of information processing
• Moral judgment is a cognitive process.
• Intuition and reasoning are both cognitive. (Note: don't think of intuition in Haidt simply as "gut reaction" in the sense of random subjectivity.

• Values of the rider: seeing into future, treating like cases like
• Values of the elephant: automatic, valuative, ego-maintaining, opens us to influence from others.

• Social Intuitionist Model

FEB 5

Haidt, Chapter Three, "Elephants Rule"

• Personal Anecdote: 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"-- 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

• Transcript from Robert Hare research

• 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. The Trolley Problem

• When does the elephant listen to reason?

• Friends... The Importance of Friends...Friends are really important.....

FEB 10

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.

• Note: Moral virtue continuous with other kinds of human excellence (driven by reason).

• Section 2: Already talking about your "virtue" as something to be nurture, avoiding excess/deficiency
• Section 3: Observing our responses, pleasure and pain (note connection with the "valence" of intuition)

• Objects of choice and avoidance: the noble, advantageous, and pleasant vs. the base, injurious, painful.

• 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. Not only the right thing, but done in the right way.

• Section 5: Virtue defined as state of character rather than passions or faculties (note argument)
• Virtue in the soul: passsions, faculties or states of character.
• Virtue makes its object excellent.
• Section 6:
• 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

Haidt, Jonathan "Out-take from The Righteous Mind: Virtue Ethics"

• Acknowledges deep cultural origins of virtue ethics: East and West

• "cultivation of habits, character taints, and practical skills to be mastered over many years"
• training (cf. Aristotle & confuscious - metaphor of learning an instrument) (Note how this hooks ethics to culture and psychology)
• Haidt: virtue a buffet. can be secular or religious
• More on Hume (though this comes later in RM)
• virtues are social skills;

FEB 12

Bloom, Ch 5 "Bodies"

• Disgust as a method for getting people to do evil things to groups. Jews in Nazi period.
• Orwell on stinky breath.
• Core disgust: blood, gore, vomit, feces, urine, rotten flesh.
• Children learn disgust: analysis of potty training advice. more like unfolding of a psych adaptation that arbitrary enculturation.
• Evidence for evolutionary / adaptive theory of disgust 137-138
• More to disgust than food recognition

• pathgens and parasites
• people themselves: "Disgust is the opposite of empathy...disgust leads you to construe the other as diminished and revolting, lacking humanity"

• Disgust and morality -

• repeat of studies linking disgust sensitivity to moral conservatism.
• disgust makes us mean... (And when do we need that? - mention of ebola issue)

• Disgust and sexuality -

• not clear (for Bloom) why we should include the sexual behavior of others in our sexual morality.
• evolutionary logic of homosexuality