Spring 2017 Ethics Course Lecture Notes

Return to Ethics

JAN 18

• First Day Notes:

• Course Content: A brief look at the major course research questions.

• Course mechanics:

• Websites in this course. alfino.org --> wiki and courses.alfino.org
• Roster information -- fill in google form
• Main Assignments and "Grading Schemes"

• To Do list:

• Send me a brief introduction through the "Tell Me" form on the wiki. (Soon, please.)
• Login to wiki for the first time and make a brief introduction on the practice page. (3 points if both are done by Friday.)
• After rosters are posted, login to courses.alfino and look around. Note "Links" for pdfs. Retrieve reading for Monday (and read it).
• Browse wiki pages.
• Get the book. Haidt, The Righteous Mind and Peter Singer, One World Now
• Start printing pdfs. Highly recommended.

• The Prep Cycle -- recommendations for success in the course!

1. Read - Follow "Focus" notes on Reading schedule. Be ready for quizes.
2. Track study questions during and after class - use your note taking to express main ideas in your terms, link in-class notes to your reading notes. Remember, almost all assessments in the course are open book & open note.
3. Class -- Our pattern is to consolidate our understanding of the reading and then engage in philosophy on the basis of it.

This is the basic pattern for our coursework. From this cycle we then develop short philosophical writing and position papers using by instructor and peer review.

JAN 23

Philosophical Method

Please find time to review the wiki page Philosophical Methods. Today we'll be working with the following methods:

• Theorizing from new or established knowledge
• Identifying presuppositions
• Defining terms
• Fitting principles to cases
• Counter-examples

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.
• Philosophical Implications: What, if anything, does this tell us about the nature of ethics?

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?

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

• Ethics and religion

• Mentions Plato's dialogue Euthyphro- review core argument. Can you think of other positions on religion and ethics that might be compatible or incompatible with Singer's?

• Singer's arguments against Ethics and relativism -- different versions of relativism:

• Ethics varies by culture: true and false, same act under different conditions may have different value, but this is superficial relativism. The different condition, for example, existence of birth control, are objective differences. The principle might remain the same and be objective (don't have kids you're not ready to care for)

• Marxist relativism and non-relativism: Morality is what the powerful say it is. But then, why side with the proletariat? Marxists must ultimately be objectivists about value or there is no argument for caring about oppression and making revolution.

• Problems for real relativists ("wrong" means "I disapprove"): consistency across time, polls could determine ethics

• Problems for subjectivist: making sense of disagreement

• 2 versions of subjectivism that might work: ethical disagreements express attitudes that we are trying to persuade others of (close to Haidt's "social agendas"). Or, ethical judgements are prescriptions that reflect a concern that others comply.

• Singer: Ok to say the values aren't objective like physics (aren't facts about the world), but not sensible to deny the meaningfulness of moral disagreement. Ethical reasoning.

• Singer's view (one of several major positions): p. 10 - ethical standards are supported by reason. Can't just be self-interested.

• The sorts of reasons that count as ethical: universalizable ones. Note: most standard ethical theories satisfy this requirement, yet yield different analysis and advice.

• Consequences of "equality of interests" in utilitarian thought: Principle of Utility: Greatest good (happiness) for the greatest number. 13: first utilitarians understood happiness in terms of pleasures and pains. Modern utilitarians are often "preference utilitarians".

JAN 25

-before we get to our discussions of today's reading, we will need to finish up on a couple of points from the end of the Singer reading.

-note on meta-theory and ethical theories.

Cooper, Chapter 1, "Intro to Philosophical Ethics"

• p. 3: definition of ethics; in terms of value conflict; note alternative.
• some terminology, two points about the relationship between actions and justifications:

• values of actions often reflect their context in institutional and social context.
• just as there are levels of justification for any action, there are levels of justification for any theory of ethics. Pretty important point when you start trying to relate competing intuitions in your own moral outlook.

• Zimbardo; recall experiment; take a minute to identify some of the episodes;

• implications for ethics: situational control and autonomy; social psychology of responsibility. How do you know when you are acting on authentically held views given the power of social environments to condition our thinking? Also seen in the experience of intercultural value differences.

Haidt, Chapter 1,"The Divided Self"

• opening story
• Animals in Plato's metaphor for soul; contemporary metaphors. metaphors for mind/emotion, but also to explain "weakness of the will"

• Haidt's unstated hypothesis is that looking at the brain's divisions will help us understand our moral experience.

• Mind vs. Body -- the gut brain.
• Left vs. Right -- confabulation
• New vs. Old - importance of the frontal cortex. orbitofrontal cortex in particular. Attractions and failures of the "Promethean script". Damasio's study of patients with orbitofrontal cortext disorder. also impaired rationality.
• Controlled vs. Automatic -- suggested by priming experiments, controlled processes "expensive"; tradeoffs. power of controlled processes are limited in their power over desire, but they do have the ability to remove us from immediate enivronmental and other behavioral controls.

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

• Add in sociological dimension to consider values as socially

Small Group Work

• Within each of the four sections of Haidt's article, "The Divided Self," remind yourselves of the main claims or points, along with things you found particularly interesting. Then try to state, in one sentence, one implication of each feature of the brain for the nature of ethics. Send someone to the board to write it out.

• Principle philosophical methods used: Speculation from new knowledge, finding entailments, finding implications.

JAN 30

Haidt, The Righteous Mind, Intro and Chapter 1

• Intro

• Note: starts with problem of "getting along" -- problem of ethics is settling conflict (recall)
• 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. Paradox of Moral Experience: We experience our morality the first way, but when we looking objectively at groups, it's more like the second way.

• Chapter 1

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

• nativists -- nature gives us capacities to distinguish right from wrong, possibly using moral emotions.
• empiricists -- we learn the difference between right and wrong from experience. tabula rasa.
• rationalists -- circa '87 Piaget's alternative to nature/nurture -- there is both a natural developmental requirement and empirical requirement for distinguishing right from wrong.

• Piaget's rationalism: kids figure things out for themselves if they have normal brains and the right experiences. stages: example of conservation of volume of water (6) "self-constructed" - alt to nature/nurture. 7: We grow into our rationality like caterpillars into butterflies.

• Kohlberg's "Heinz story" - pre-conventional, conventional, post-conventional.

• note problems, p. 9. seems to support a liberal secular world view. Is it obvious or suspicious that that's what rationalism leads to?

• Turiel: note different method. Probing to find contingencies in kids' thinking about rules. 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. (Note: Still following the idea that moral development is a universal, culturally neutral process.)

• Haidt's puzzle about Turiel: other dimensions of moral experience, like "purity" and "pollution" seem operative at young ages and deep in culture (witches -- how do human minds creates witches in similar ways in different places?). 11-13 examples. 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.) For example in the comparison of moral violations between Indians from Orissa and Americans from Chicago, it is important that group don't make the convention/harm distinction Turiel's theory would predict. That's a distinction individualist cultures make.

• 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 itself culturally variable. Turiel is right about how our culture makes the harm/convention distinction, but his theory doesn't travel well. Roughly, more sociocentric cultures put the morality(wrong even if no rule)/convention (wrong because there is a rule) marker more to the morality side. almost no trace of social conventionalism in Orissa.

• 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. Would you eat a burrito in a public bathroom?)

Group Discussion

• Use a google form to discuss Study Question 2 and report your findings.

FEB 1

Some structure for locating philosophical ethics theories

• Intentions (kantian), Act (aristotle), Consequences (utilitarian)

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: review stages with each level.
• Note theoretical claim: hierarchy represents increasingly more developed ways of staying in equilibrium with environment. Where does this leave ethnicity and culture? p. 78.

• "Decentering" of ego crucial to post-conventional stage. Are we all supposed to get to this level? (Note similarity to Utilitarian premise: equal happiness principle)

• Application to My Lai massacre
• Questions for Kohlberg: Revisit Haidt's research story; should we all be postconventional moral agents? Is loyalty and a sense of authority an "inferior" basis for morality?

Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book 1

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

• Opening: Noticing how arts are arranged in society.
• Politics as the master science: its end: happiness (but notice that the means is the cultivation of "excellences," of virtue)
• 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? No
• Perception? No
• def: Activity of the soul implying a rational principle, in accordance with virtue (perfective activities that realize our "highest" and more unique capacities)

• 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. Aristotle gives us the first detailed draft of the "Western rational self" - note it's characteristics. (not really a socio-centric self, though man is a political animal for A).

• Primary ethical insights about how to think about virtue:

• the pursuit of virtue is a movement toward an "end state" of the perfection of the sort of thing we are.
• the Golden Mean, pursuing action that strikes a "mean" between extremes of emotion, is often a good guide to virtuous action. (Further topics in Nichomachean ethics: voluntary action, deliberation and choice, responsibility, moral failure, analysis of specific virtues)

• Primary claim about morality in virtue ethics: Moral virtue is an expression of a virtuous character and (in modern virtue ethics).
• Contemporary virtue ethics adds: If we value the development of human capacities, we will want to see others develop their capacities for human excellence.

• Critical issues:

• Note how developmental moralities look different depending upon one's background theories: Aristotle, Kohlberg, evo-psych.
• Aristotle's rationalism.
• The relationship of virtue to happiness.

FEB 6

Sandel, Utilitarianism

• life boat case: They eat Parker (more canabalism!) - similar to Trolley Problem.
• Is this a case of costs vs. benefit? How does it come out?
• Contrast in Approaches to Justice: consequences vs. right and duties.
• Bentham's defense of the principle of utility: we are driven by pleasure and pain, the rest is illusion. Alternative principles, like rights are ultimately advocated for by appeal to outcomes. (Kind of like Aristotle's teleology). Later Mill would provide the "equal happiness" principle.

• Workhouse for poor: though the form of Bentham's imagining is rough, note that this is the start of modern social welfare.
• Panopticon
• (also the start of social welfare statistics, public health, sewers, etc. These things are easier to justify on grounds of utility.)

• Objection 1: Rights are primary.

• Case of torture under extreme conditions (Trolley Problem on steroids.). New condition: torturing terrorist's daughter. Harder.
• How negotiable are rights in extreme cases?

• Objection 2: Is there a common currency for comparison of pleasures?

• Case: Phillip Morris in Czech Republic.
• Case: Ford Pinto '70s.
• Issue: Does life span enter into value. Older cost less.
• Empirical approach: Actual cost we pay in driving fatalities.
• Utilitarians respond:

• Whose problem is it? The cost-benefit may not only be part of the theory, it may be part of our moral life: even our driving behaviors (trade offs of speed and fatality rate) have implications for how much we value life in monetary terms). generate examples: when is it ok to be "calculative" in social and moral life?
• The theory can recognize higher and lower pleasures. Probably true that all value cannot be captured by pleasure and pain, but most can be captured by "flourishing and the avoidance of unnecessary suffering".

• Mill and the defense of Liberty

• Progressivism: liberty promotes happiness over the long term. (Update on desirability of "liberty" and self-determination as a political ideal.)
• Can a Utilitarian admit difference in kind between pleasures?
• Doctrine of the qualified judge.
• Other approaches to human difference.

• Sandel's claim that appeal to ideal of human dignity independent of wants and desires is an inconsistency.

• not sure it is independent of wants and desires. p. 51: what does "moral ideals beyond utility" mean to a Millian?

• Small group assessment: Develop three examples of situations in which you would definitely want someone to use utilitarian thinking in solving a moral problem and three examples of situations in which you would NOT want someone to follow utilitarian thinking.

• OLD Small Group Assessment: How should we value human life in cases involving compensation or investment (e.g. in safer highways) given that we have a deep intuition that lives are not objects to be bought and sold? Then, take the problem down to a personal level. In your social and moral lives, when is it ok to be calculative? When is it wrong? Think about how you would criticize someone who violates this distinction.

Sandel, Libertarianism

• Libertarianism: fundamental concern with human freedom; minimal state; no morals legislation; no redistribution of income or wealth. Strong concern with equality of liberty and avoidance of oppression, understood as forced labor.
• Facts about concentration of wealth: 1% have 1/3 of wealth, more than bottom 90%.
• objections to redistribution: utilitarian and rights-based.
• general commitments of libertarian. Uneasy to fit directly to conservatism. Cuts across several MFs.

• Argument from self-ownership (Nozick)

• Free Market philosophy
• Redistribution and self-ownership
• First four objections: 1. taxation; 2. importance of resources to poor; 3. social nature of talent; 4. implied consent/participation in democracy; 5. Jordan is Lucky.

• "Hard cases" (note on method) -- Markets in kidneys, assisted suicide, consensual canabalism (again!)

MAR 8

==MAR 13== SB ==MAR 15== SB