Fall 2020 Ethics Class Notes and Reading Schedule

Return to Ethics

Ethics

1: SEP 1. Course Introduction

• Introduction to the Course

• Welcome - personal introduction and welcome.
• About the Course (technical information and course management)

• Course Websites: Wiki & Courses.alfino.org (linked from alfino.org), Sharepoint site (link at main course wiki page).
• Use of pseudonyms - Saints and animals
• Use of peer review and peer evaluation
• Student choice in work and grading scheme - Default grade scheme shows ranges for grade weights. You will be able to choose optional assignments and assign them weight in your grading scheme. (See courses.alfino.org)
• Transparency in grade information. Never give out your Saint name. Customer service will never ask you for your Saint name. A friendly grade curve gives you good information about your performance while reducing grade stress.

• Succeeding in the Course

• Prep Cycle - view reading notes as you are reading, read, note, quiz, evaluate preparation.
• Writing - Initial writing exercises are completion based. Pay attention to model student writing.
• Keep in mind course research questions Major_Ethics_Course_Questions

• Required Assignments and Default Grade Weights for your Grading Scheme

• Final Essay 10-20%
• Justified Partiality Position Paper 10-15%
• Points 50-70%. "Points" includes small assignments, including these:

• 1. Everyday Ethics Prompts (15 points each x 3): 9/8, 9/15, 9/24
• 2. Evolution and Social Behavior Question (20) Simple Peer Review: Assigned 9/17, writing due 9/19, reviews due 9/29
• 3. How WEIRD is morality? (20) Simple Peer review: Assigned 10/6, writing due 10/10, reviews due 10/18.
• 4. Fair Contract Case (20) Assigned 10/8, due 10/14

• About the Course (Orientation, Content, major research questions)

• Naturalism in Ethics -- What if Ethics has its origins in our natural history? Why this is/was a radical claim.
• Fields of study represented in the course: Biology, Psychology, Moral Psychology, Evolutionary Psychology, Behavioral Economics, Philosophy,

Political Science, Sociology, History

• First six weeks:

• 1. Lots of theory from the fields mentioned above directed toward our research questions Major_Ethics_Course_Questions
• 2. Exercises in "moral phenomenology" (discussion and writing about morality drawing on your experience). Also in Ethics news.

• Next nine weeks: Major Applied Topics:

• The nature of political and moral difference, and implications
• Justified Partiality
• Empathy
• Moral Responsibility Skepticism and Alternatives

• First Day TO DO list:

• make sure you can find the three course websites and that you understand what information and tools each provides.
• Fill out "Roster Information"
• Browse the top 8 links on the course wiki page
• Find reading for next class on wiki and pdfs from courses.alfino.org
• Buy Jonathan Haidt, "The Righteous Mind"
• Read everything you can about Kyle Rittenhouse.
• Keep an eye out for Ethics News!

2: SEP 3. Unit One: Primers and Background

Assigned

• Ariely, Why We Lie (6)
• Haidt, The Righteous Mind, Intro and Chapter 1 (24)
• Zimbardo Experiment -- view one of the youtube videos about the experiment. read the wiki page.

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

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?

Tips on Philosophical Methods and Method in Ethics

• In this interactive segment, we'll use the Kyle Rittenhouse case to demonstrate some key features of a philosophical response. We can also see some things about method in ethics from this case.

• Take 3-5 minutes to identify important specific and contextual facts about the situation that may be relevant to evaluating values at work. Send in your items through voice or chat window. We will also generate items in class.
• What norms already govern situations like Kyle's?
• Closing comments and discussion. Basic ways that method helps us have more sophisticated and reflective views. Yeah!

Haidt, The Righteous Mind, Intro and Chapter 1

• Intro

• Note: starts with problem of "getting along" -- problem of ethics is settling conflict (recall contrast with more traditional goal of finding a method or theory to discover moral truth).
• The "righteous" mind is at once moral and judgemental. It makes possible group cooperation, tribes, nations, and societies.

• Majors claims of each section:

• 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.
• There's more to morality than harm and fairness
• Morality binds and blinds -- We are 90 percent chimp, 10% bee.

• Keep notes that help you tie content back to these claims.

• 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 look 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 understanding the world in the way we consider "rational" (folk physics, folk psychology).

• 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. [1]

• note problems, p. 9. seems to support a liberal secular world view. Egalitarianism, role playing, disinterestedness.... Is it obvious or suspicious that that's what rationalism leads to? Haidt suspects something's been left out.

• Additional criticisms of Kohlberg (also at Haidt 9): seemed to diminish the importance of loyalty, authority, and tradition as less developed levels of moral response.

• 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.) (Note on method: we have, in Turiel's research, a discovery of an unsupported assumption.)

• 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 create 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. (Schweder is "saying" 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 these groups don't make the convention/harm distinction Turiel's theory would predict. That's a distinction individualist cultures make.

• Haidt's research: Wrote vignettes to ask test subjects, including Turiel's uniform / swing pushing incident. focus on vignettes is "harmless taboo violation" (no victim /no harm), which pits intuitions about norms and conventions against intuitions about the morality of harm. Study in three cities with two socio-economic groups. Showed that Schweder was right. The morality/convention distinction was itself culturally variable.

• Americans make big dist. between morality and convention. upper-class Brazilians like Americans. lower class groups tended to see smaller morality/convention difference. All morality.

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? Tell story of dinner out with a vegan friend.)

3: SEP 8

Assigned

• Hibbing, John R., Kevin Smith, and John R. Alford, Predisposed: Liberals, conservatives, and the biology of political difference, Chapter 1, "Living with the Enemy". (32)
• PBS Aristotle and Virtue Theory: Crash Course Philosophy #38
• Everyday Ethics Discussion and Short Writing Prompt #1. Due at midnight tonight!

In-class content

• Discussion segment: Sharing ideas about first writing prompt on trust.
• Lecture Segment: Philosophical Theories: Virtue Ethics
• Lecture Segment: Some Preliminaries about Ethical theory and objectivity

Everyday Ethics Discussion and Short Writing Prompt #1

• Describe a situation in which you decided to trust someone and you were right (or wrong) to do so. What made you decide to trust the person? Try to identify specific behaviors. Alternately, describe things you would do if you were trying to get someone to trust you. What are the characteristic behaviors and statements of trust worthy people?
• Follow this link when you are ready to write. Due midnight tonight!

Some Preliminaries about Ethical theory and objectivity

• A Framework for thinking about moral theories.

• Where should we look for "moral goodness"?
• Intentions (Kantian), Act (Aristotle), Consequences (Mill, Singer - utilitarian)

• The following is pretty standard, but was drawn from Peter Singer's classic, Practical Ethics:

• Singer's arguments against cultural relativism:

• Cultural Relativism: Ethics varies by culture. Singer: This is true and false, same act under different conditions may have different value, but this is superficial relativism. For example, existence of birth control led to a general change in sexual ethics. The moral principle in question (don't have kids you're not ready to care for) might remain the same and be objective (don't have kids you're not ready to care for), but the prohibition on casual sex might change. (Note: Polling data on advisability of living together prior to marriage. So cultural change itself doesn't tell you whether moral principles are changing.

• Subjectivist Relativism Problems for real relativists ("wrong" means "I disapprove" or "my society disapproves"): but we do choose between societal values, how? Is the non-conformist just making a mistake?, polls could determine ethics?

• Problems for subjectivist: making sense of disagreement

• 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.

• Are there minimum conditions for ethical theories?

• The sorts of reasons that count as ethical: universalizable ones. Can't just appeal to one person or group's interest. Note: most standard ethical theories satisfy this requirement, yet yield different analysis and advice. We will look at the specific form of universalization in each theory we discuss.

Philosophical Moral Theories: Virtue Ethics

• PBS Aristotle and Virtue Theory: Crash Course Philosophy #38

• concepts from video...

• Virtue — general idea of being an excellent person. Also, specific lists of virtues (vary by time and culture)

• A bit of Aristotle’s theory of virtue and human nature: fixed nature, species eternal, proper function (telos), distinctive aspect of function: being rational and political.

• Virtue is natural to us. Like an acorn becoming a tree. Being virtuous is being the best of the kind of thing you are. A deep intuition supports this devleopmental approach, even if you don't believe in the eternality of the species!

• Theory of the Golden Mean: Virtue as mean between extremes of emotion: Ex. Courage (story), Honesty, Generosity. Virtue as training of emotional response in relation to knowledge of circumstances and the good.

• How do you acquire virtue? Experience. Practical Wisdom cultivated through habituation. Follow a moral exemplar. Good parenting and shaping by healthy family. It's a training program in becoming the best human you can be based on your "telos".

• What if we don’t want to become virtuous? What is the motivation to virtue? The pursuit of a happy life that “goes well”. Eudaimonia. Human flourishing. Challenge and development of talents. Should be attractive. Connection between virtue and happiness not guaranteed for Aristotle, but could be tighter in other versions.

• Additional points:

• centrality of virtues and practical wisdom. Is practical wisdom real? Discussion opp.
• historic variability and list of virtues. Curiosity was a vice in Medieval Europe. Check out virtue lists on Virtue Wiki.

• From Aristotle to Evolutionary theory. Eternality of the species. What if you drop this false belief? Human excellence may have to do with meeting or exceeding the challenges posed by our environment.

Hibbing, et. al. Predisposed Chapter 1

• Some opening examples of the persistence of partisanship
• opening example: William F. Buckley and Gore Vidal -- meant as example of highly educated partisans who would be able to debate in a civilized way. 60's era political divisions often violent.
• also historical examples of highly partisan politics -- Hamilton & Adams, Hamilton & Burr (duelled). Jefferson's dirty tricks.

• Goal of the Book: to explain why people experience and interpret the political world so very differently. (6): list of difference that track political difference. READ

• A methodological concern
• Does it makes sense to reduce political difference to "liberal" vs. "conservative". They are in fact measuring lots of differences, but claim there is a tradition of recognizing this difference. 11: some terminological issues. Ultimately, labels for clusters of real personality and behavioral differences.

• Think Probabalistically: not biological determinists, rather real persistent differences shape and mold our ideology. Example: relation between conscientiousness and ideology 14. A number of studies replicate a positive correlation bt conscientiousness and conservatism. Lesson on 15: difference between representing data in categories vs. scatterplot. Wilson-Patterson index of conservatism. Brief lesson on correlation, 17. Correlation for conscientiousness and conservatism small r = .2

• What are predispositions?
• Predispositions - some stimuli, like a pencil, are emotionally neutral. Others not. Leibniz speculated about "appetitions" Neurscientist Eagleman: brain running alot of its own programs. Ad hoc defenses (also in Haidt) called "baloney generator" by Pinker. We may have an illusion of rationality and control. examples of self-deception like this, p. 21, also top of 22 read.

• Responses to Political stimuli emotionally salient and not always conscious: Lodge: "hot cognition" or "automaticity"

• 23: clarifying argument: not nature / nurture. predispositions are difficult to change. research on long term stability of pol. orientation. 180 degree turn is very unusual. Technical def: "Predispositions, then, can be thought of as biologically and psychologically instantiated defaults that, absent new information or conscious overriding, govern response to given stimuli."

• Our actual predispositions vary, but also the degree to which we have predispositions is variable across a group. (This is one reason researchers in the field sometimes focus on highly partisan test subjects.)

• 25: some background on theorizing about political dispositions. what is new today is better research, but also research connecting political variation with bio/cog variation.

• 27: resistance to this kind of theory in political science. Philip Converse. also, idea that politics is best understood in terms of history and culture

4: SEP 10

Assigned

• Sapolsky, Chapter 10: The Evolution of Human Behavior 328-387 (59). For this class read only pages 328-354. Use notes below also for part two of this chapter.

In-class content

• Philosophical Method: Ethics as a kind of language game, or conversational constraints on moral discourse. Today, before turning to Sapolsky, we'll do a short workshop on how ethical conversations work.

• Preliminary discussion of trust writing. Stage two. Your writing on trust is posted to the Sharepoint site in a spreadsheet. By Friday, please read at least 10 peers' work. Try to jump around in the spreadsheet so that you aren't all reading the first 10. Select 3 of those 10 that you think give particularly good answers. Do not choose your own entry, even if it is great. Jot down a couple of notes about the ones you select. Then go to this form to submit your entries.

Ethics as a "language game"

• Well, not really a game. The term comes from a famous philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein, who was interested in how language is similar to a games. For example, there are lots of rules to using language, not just grammar, etc., but social rules. Like the rules for conversations. You can know a language and still not be very sophisticated in having a conversation!

• So what are some of the unwritten, but widely acknowledged rules for having an ethical conversation? What are the legitimate "moves" you can make in an ethical conversation? What moves would earn you a yellow or red card.

• illicit moves:

• appealing to only one person's interests,
• denying the standing (need for consideration) of a person or group arbitrarily.

• licit moves:

• appealing to broadly held values about human life and human dignity that may be globally held.
• appealing to cultural and local norms that may be considered well justified (note, even if they are not!).

• constraints we might recommend to improve moral or political discourse

• observe norms of civil discourse:

• avoid calling liars liars,
• present others' views in ways that show empathetic understanding,
• recognize common ground

In a short break out room discussion try to add items to these three categories.

Sapolsky, Chapter 10: The Evolution of Human Behavior

Evolution 101 — 3 steps

• not so much about survival as reproduction. Antagonistic pleiotropy — sperm early, cancer later.

• other misconceptions — living better adapted than the extinct, not just a “theory”

• sexual selection and natural selection. Example of peacocks — trade offs between two forms of selection.

• sociobiology — evolutionary psychology introduced. Premise: Evolution optimizes social behavior (for fitness) and psychological traits just as it optimizes bodies.

• Marlin Perkins and Mutal of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom. Bad ideas about evolution of altruistic species behavior. Group selection doesn’t work that way.

Individual Selection — 334: competitive infanticide: why langur monkeys kill babies. How females develop a false estrus to fight back. (Working against mountain gorillas these days.)

Kin Selection — 336: Basic idea: your nearest kin has most of your genes. Haldane, “I’d gladly lay down my life for two brothers or eight cousins.” Allomothering. Grooming behaviors reflect closeness. 337: vervet monkey study. Playback studies. These studies show in various ways how warning behaviors track kinship relationships in social primates.

• problem for kin selection — avoiding inbreeding. Many species mate with 1-3rd cousins. Sperm aggregation. Malagasy giant jumping rat. 340 - smell studies — women prefer smell of near relatives over unrelated.

How do animal recognize kin? Major histocompatibility complex (MHC) gives many animals olfactory recognition of kin. Other mechanisms: songs, vaginal fluid smell, milk.

How do we do kin selection? Pseudo-kin selection or “green beard” effects. We are not limited to actual kin, any conspicuous feature (like a green beard). Humans show green beard effects. Related to parochialism and xenophobia.

Reciprocal Altruism.

• don't just think about evolution as promoting competition toward extinction. equilibriums are important.

• reciprocal altruism is a third way that evolution shapes human behavior. Unrelated individuals cooperate across nature (fish in schools, birds in formation, herds). Also unrelated primates. Important 1971 paper by Trivers (344) on reciprocal altruism. how organisms incur a fitness cost to benefit another individual with expectation of reciprocation.

• cheating and freeriding can create a "Red Queen" situation.

Two big questions: when is cooperation optimal, how can altruism start?

What strategy for cooperating is optimal?

• background to Game Theory - John von Neumann. Prisoner's Dilemma connected biologists to game theorists. Prisoner's dilemma video

• basics of a Prisoner's Dilemma payoff: A&B cooperate: 1 year: A cooperates, B defects: B walks and A gets three years. Cooperation is best, but each individual calculation leads to defection. Quite a little dilemma.

• defection is optimal for single round PD, but what about 3 rounds. Still best to defect. What about "iterated" (uncertain number of rounds)?

• Axelrod's challenge: Optimal strategy for iterated PD. Winner: Anatol Rapoport: Cooperation on 1st round and then match opponent's previous behavior. "Tit for Tat" Always works toward a draw, or slight negative outcome. Not that Tit for Tat tilts toward cooperation, but avoids being a sucker and punishes defectors. famous paper in 1981 by Axelrod and Hamilton.

• "signal errors" can reduce Tit for Tat payoffs. Remedies: "Contrite tit for tat (retaliate after two defections) and Forgiving (forgive 1/3 of defections). Both address the signal error problem, but have other vulnerabilities.

• Mixed (genetic) strategies: You could start out with one strategy and then change to another. How do you go from punitive Tit for Tat to one incorporating forgiveness? Trust. 350-351: describes a changing environment a events signal to individuals to change strategies. Kind of a model of real life.

• Black Hamlet fish

• Stickleback fish

• But sceptical that tit for tat has been found outside humans.

How can altruism start? 353

• on T for T in a population is doomed, two might find each other, Green beard effects might help grow a circle of cooperators. If the cooperating trait included search behaviors for cooperators it would help. Cooperation could also radiate from isolated groups that wind up inbreeding. If reintroduced to a large population, they might influence cooperative payoffs.

• Note: Reading assignment part 1 ends here.

Standing on Three legs -- Some examples of different ways that these three forces (ind. selection, kind selection, and reciprocal altruism) can work together in animals.

• vampire bat

• pair bonding (A) vs. tournament species (B) -- what follows: B-males are more violent, A-males need less muscle, in B species a few males do all the reproducing, B-males more likely to screw anything, A-males more likely to share responsibilities. B-species puts more emphasis on sexual selection. 360.

• Parent-Offspring Conflict -- weaning conflict. other biological conflicts between fetus and mother.

• Intersexual Genetic Conflict -- In species with low paternal investment, a father's interest might be with the child and against the mother. "imprinted genes" part of the mechanism for intersexual conflict. Tournament species have more imprinted genes than pairbonding.

Multilevel Selection Theory

• genotype vs. phenotype: phenotype is the expressed individual with its specific traits based on the genotype, which is specific genetic makeup of the individual

• Why it matters -- explanations can be sought at either level. unibrow example. Reviews debate in biology: Dawkins, extreme gene centered - individual genes vs. genome, less radical view, genome centered. Seems to disparge single gene selection somewhat. Gould and Mayr: phenotype trumps genotype. Selection acts on expressed individuals. Dawkins analogy of cake recipe vs. taste of cake. Could be the baker or the recipe if the cakes don't taste right.

• Levels: single gene, genome, single pheotypic trait, collection of traits. These are among the levels in Multi-level Selection.

• Resurrection of Group Selection: Culture (the result of advertising, ideology about cakes, etc.) can also act as a selection force.

• neo-group selection: some heritable traits can be maladaptive for the individual but adaptive for a group. As in the PD, to get the optimal total outcome, you have be willing to forego the best individual outcome. Still controversial. Some biologist might agree that it is possible, but that it is rare. However, among humans it seems to occur alot. Cites "parochial altruism" and role of intergroup conflict in promoting intragroup cooperation.

• credits David Sloan Wilson and E.O Wilson. Quite an "encomeum" there! more reading. famous paper "Rethinking the Theoretical Foundation of Sociobiology"

AND US? How do humans fit into these four modes of selection?

• Individual Selection operates on us, but we do not have the same profile as our ancestors. We are neither clearly pair-bonding nor tournament species (pick your favorite comparative anatomy detail).

• Maybe we are reproductive maximizers? Famous examples of super reproducers in History: Pharaoh Rames II to Genghis Khan. But then we have the Shakers.

• Some evidence of competitive infanticide in abuse and killing by a step parent. (These findings have been challenged, though.)

• Kin Selection: Strong evidence of practices tracking and favoring kin. (Note for later question of "justified partiality".) 368: feuds, bendettas, bequests, dynastic rule, protection against adverse testimony. Humans with damage to vmPFC choose strangers over family. (creepy) Story of the Russian who chose country over family and Stalin's reaction.

• So, lots of evidence, but we also fight wars against people we are highly related to. families fight over succession, patricide, fratricide, we also give to strangers.

370: explanation for why we deviate so much from straight kin selection: we don't do it with MHC or imprinted genes, but we are cognitive (which includes feeling) about it. Evidence from kibutz about turning off sexual interest we "family". 46% would save their dog over a stranger. We can also be manipulated into feeling positive or negative toward others.

• we used to think hunter gatherer bands were highly related, but only about 40%. already reciprocal altruism on the scene there. Conclusion: human do deviate from strict mechanisms of evolution found in other species. (Alfino: We've evolved complex and mixed strategies and can use language and reflection to rethink our behaviors and attitudes.)

• Some challenges: hard to identify heritability for traits related to group selection. Just seems like the most parsimonious explanation.

Second challenge, Is evolution gradual? [This is optional reading.]

Is everything adaptive? [THis is optional reading.]

5: SEP 15

Assigned

• Haidt, Chapter 2, "The Intuitive Dog and It's Rational Tail" (25)
• Everyday Ethics Discussion and Short Writing Prompt #2

Everyday Ethics Discussion and Short Writing Prompt #2

• Prompt will be pasted here.
• Follow this link when you are ready to write.

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

• Some complaints about philosophers
• Philosophy's "rationalist delusion" ex. from Timaeus. but also in rationalist psych. -- Maybe humans were once perfect..........
• 30: Plato (Timaeus myth of the body - 2nd soul), Hume (reason is slave of passions), and Jefferson (The Head and The Heart)

• The troubled history of applying evolution to social processes
• Wilson's Prophecy: brief history of moral philosophy after Darwin. nativism gets a bad name...
• 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 Controversy in E. O. Wilson's Sociobiology.

• Note, for example, debate over rights: rationalists(moralists) vs. nativists: note the claims and counter-claims. brings in feminism, resistance to science, naturalism.

• de Waal (used to be in the course. See links.); Damasio -- 33 -- seems to be a very different picture than Plato's;

• Some examples of evolutionary psychology
• Evolutionary Psychology in moral psychology (quick small group: practice your "study reporting skills in reviewing briefly these findings. Be sure to include significance.)

• Damasio's research on vmPFC disabled patients. could watch gruesome images without feeling. trouble planning. (Phineas Gage) reasoning (about some practical matters) requires feeling.
• No problem making moral decisions under cognitive load. Suggests automatic processing. Note this also suggests that we shouldn't think of our "principles" as causal.
• Roach-juice
• Soul selling
• Harmless Taboo violations: Incest story; note how interviewer pushes toward dumbfounding.

• How to explain dumbfounding.

• Margolis: seeing that (pattern matching - auto) vs. reasoning why (controlled thought); we have bias toward confirmation, which is seen in the mistake people make on the Wasson Card test. (From this perspective Kohlberg was focused on "reasoning why". Note from p. 44, some "reasoning why" is crucial to moral discourse (similar to universalizability in Singer reading)

• Rider and Elephant

• Important to see Elephant as making judgements (processing info), not just "feeling" (Hard for traditional philosophers to do.)
• 45: Elephant and Rider defined

• Emotions are a kind of information processing, part of the cognitive process.
• 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. Claims you are processsing information through emotional response.

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

• Social Intuitionist Model: attempt to imagine how our elephants respond to other elephants and riders.

Small Group Discussion

• Go back to roach juice and soul selling. How would you react to this experiment now that you know it's a pschological trigger we have? What else works like this?
• Is Feeling epistemic? Do we process information with emotions?

• Bring up Repligate issue. [2]

6: SEP 17

Assigned

• Sapolsky, Chapter 10: The Evolution of Human Behavior 328-387 (59). For this class read only pages 354-387. Use notes above also for part two of this chapter.
• Writing: Sapolsky Question

Short Writing Assignment #1: Evolution and Social Behavior (600 words)

• Stage 1: Please write an 600 word maximum answer to the following question by September 19, 2020 11:59pm.

• Topic: Sapolsky Question will be posted here.

• Advice about collaboration: I encourage you to collaborate with other students, but only up to the point of sharing ideas, references to class notes, and your own notes. Collaboration is part of the academic process and the intellectual world that college courses are based on, so it is important to me that you have the possibility to collaborate. It's a great way to make sure that a high average level of learning and development occurs. The best way to avoid plagiarism is to NOT share text of draft answers or outlines of your answer. Keep it verbal. Generate your own examples.

• Prepare your answer and submit it in the following way:

1. Do not put your name in the file or filename. You may put your student id number in the file. Put a word count in the file.
2. In Word, check "File" and "Options" to make sure your name does not appear as author. You may want to change this to "anon" for this document.
3. Format your answer in double spaced text in a 12 point font, using normal margins.
4. Save the file in the ".docx" file format using the file name "Sapolsky".
5. Log in to courses.alfino.org. Upload your file to the Points dropbox.

• Stage 2: Please evaluate four student answers and provide brief comments and a score. Review the Assignment Rubric for this exercise. We will be using the Flow, Content, and Insight areas of the rubric for this assignment. Complete your evaluations and scoring by Thursday, March 7, 2019, 11:59pm.

• Use this Google Form to evaluate four peer papers. The papers will be in our shared folder, but please do not edit or add comments to the papers directly. This will compromise your anonymity.
• To determine the papers you need to peer review, I will send you a key with animal names in alphabetically order, along with saint names. You will find your animal name and review the next four (4) animals' work.
• Some papers may arrive late. If you are in line to review a missing paper, allow a day or two for it to show up. If it does not show up, go ahead and review enough papers to get to four reviews. This assures that you will get enough "back evaluations" of your work to get a good average for your peer review credit. (You will also have an opportunity to challenge a back evaluation score of your reviewing that is out of line with the others.)

• Stage 3: I will grade and briefly comment on your writing using the peer scores as an initial ranking. Assuming the process works normally, I will give you the higher of the two grades. Up to 14 points.

• Stage 4: Back-evaluation: After you receive your peer comments and my evaluation, take a few minutes to fill out this quick "back evaluation" rating form: [3]. Fill out the form for each reviewer, but not Alfino. Up to 10 points, in Q&W.

• Back evaluations are due TBD, 11:59pm.

7: SEP 22. Unit Two: More research from moral psychology, politics, and biology and more philosophical moral theories!

Assigned

• Robert Sapolsky, from Behave, Chapter 13, "Morality and doing the Right Thing, Once You've Figured Out What that Is." pp. 478-483.
• Haidt, Chapter 3, "Elephants Rule" (52-72)
• The Trolley Problem

• The Trolley Problem. Variations on the Trolley Problem: [[4]]
• Self-driving cars with Trolley problems: [5]

• The Cold Logic of Drunk People

• Youtube intro to utilitarianism

In-class content

• Consequentialism

Philosophical Moral Theories: Consequentialisms -- Utilitarianism

• How should we expect morality to connect with other goals?
• Eudaimonistic or Hedonic (Well-being or Happiness oriented) vs. Non-Eudaimonistic (Duty)

• Two views: 1) Morality is fundamentally eudaimonistic "in the longrun" even if it in particular proximate circumstances in does not always involve positive emotions. 2) Morality and moral responses realize disinterested values like reason and justice, that are not related to promoting happy outcomes (Kant).

• Fundamental consequentialist intuition. Most of what's important about morality can be seen in outcomes of our actions, for people especially, but also for what they value (animals, the environment, etc.). Virtue will show up in the measuredness of the outcome. Good intentions are especially valuable when they lead to actions that realize them.

• Hard to imagine a non-eudaimonistic consequentialism, but medieval christian europe or a contemporary theocracy might work.

• Basic principles of utilitarian thought:

• One way to universalize is to recognize "equal weight" to interests.
• Equal Happiness Principle: Everyone's happiness matters to them as much as mine does to me.
• Ethics is about figuring out when we need to take a moral concern about something and, if we do, then we take on constrainst (conversational): universalizability, equality of interests.
• Principle of Utility: Act always so that you promote the greatest good for the greatest number.

• Hedonic version: Act to promote the greatest pleasure ...
• Preference utilitarian version: Act to maximally fulfill the interests (preferences) of others.

• But what is utility? What is a preference?
• Utility: pleasure, what is useful, happiness, well-being.

• Is the utilitarian committed to maximizing happiness of individuals directly? (Preferences are one alternative.) A utilitarian focused on promoting utility, might still acknowledge that promoting human happiness is mostly about protecting conditions for an individual's autonomous pursuit of happiness.
• Conditions for the pursuit of happiness: Order, stability, opportunity, education, health, rights, liberty.
• Issue of protection of rights in utilitarian thought.

• Preferences: Thought experiment: Returning a gun to an angry person. Is the angry person's preference one that has to count?

• Cultural contradictions in our preferences: we prefer health, but we also "prefer" to eat the western diet. Which preference should the utilitarian focus on? Some preferences are based on bias or prejudice.
• Need some standard of rational or considered preference.

Small Group: Assessing Utilitarianism

• Consider applying utilitarianism to different kinds of moral problems (from interpersonal ethics to public policy questions). Identify three situations in which you would want to use utilitarianism and three situations in which you would not.

Sapolsky, Robert. Behave. C 13, "Morality and Doing the Right Thing" (479-483)

• Is moral decision making mostly reasoning or intuition?

• Lots of examples of reason based rules in law and social institutions. This kind of reasoning activates the dlPFC and TPJ (temporoparietal junction) - theory of mind tasks.
• Moral reasoning is skewed in some predictable ways: doing harm worse than allowing it. commission vs. omission. tend to look for malevolent causes more than benevolent.

• Problem with moral reasoning view: lots of evidence for intuition and emotion.
• Reviews Haidt's Social Intuitionism: "moral thinking is for social doing".

• moral decisions activate the vmPFC, orbitalfrontal cortex, insular cortex, and anterior cingulate. pity and indignation activate different structures. sexual transgressions activate the insula. Important: you can predict moral decision making more from activation of these structures than the cognitively oriented dlPFC. moral quandaries activate emotional centers of the brain prior to waking up the dlPFC.
• people with damage to the vmPFC will sacrifice one relative to save five strangers, something control subjects just don't do!

Haidt, Chapter 3, "Elephants Rule"

• Personal Anecdote from Haidt's married life: 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"- small flashes of pos/neg feeling from ongoing cs stimuli - even applies to made up language "mere exposure effect" tendency to have more positive responses to something just be repeat exposure.

• 2. Social and Political judgements are especially intuitive

• flashing word pairs with dissonance: "flower - happiness" vs. "hate - sunshine" (affective priming)
• Implicit Association Test Project Implicit
• flashing word pairs with political terms. causes dissonance. measureable delay in response when, say, conservatives read "Clinton" and "sunshine".
• 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: Yale Theory of Mind & Baby prosociality Basic Puppet set up for prosociality studies on babies.
• reaching for helper puppets "parsing their social world"

• 6. Affective reactions in the brain

• Josh Greene's fMRI studies of Trolley type problems. The Trolley Problem
• Pause on Joshua Greene quote, p. 67

• When does the elephant listen to reason?
• Paxton and Greene experiments with incest story using versions with good and bad arguments. Harvard students showed no difference, though some when allowed delayed response.

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

8: SEP 24

Assigned

• Hibbing, Chapter 4: Drunk Flies and Salad Greens (89-96) (7)
• Hibbing, Chapter 5: Do You See What I See? (30)
• Everyday Ethics Discussion and Short Writing Prompt #3

In-class content

• Philosophical Moral Theories: Duty
• Beginner's Guide to Kant's Moral Philosophy

Everyday Ethics Discussion and Short Writing Prompt #3

• Prompt will be pasted here.
• Follow this link when you are ready to write.

Hibbing, Chapter 4: Drunk Flies and Salad Greens (89-96)

• Only pages indicated!

• Point about fruit flies: taste for glycerol has biological basis, manipulable, yet we'd say the fly "likes" beer. Variation in human preferences yet also biologically instantiated. Focus on this chapter: taste/pref diffs of conservatives/liberals, their basis, connection to politics. Later, cars, stocks,

• Obama's arugula faux pas. Hunch.com studies (note problems): supports stereotype. Neuropolitics.org: similar findings
• Hibbing et al research 93: expanded preference research to humour, fiction, art, prefs in poetry, living spaces,
• Market research in politics: mentions RNC

Hibbing, Chapter 5: Do You See What I See?

• Attention Studies research on Political difference:

• Rorschach tests. seem to trigger different attentional and other biases.

• Claim in this chapter: Differences in political temperament are tied to differences in a variety of perception and procession patterns prompted by stimuli. Liberals and conservatives see the world differently.

The Eyes Have it

• eye movement research: gaze cuing test reveal sensitivity to social cues, but tend to be cited as averages. lots of variation.

• research question: Are liberals more susceptible to gaze cuing than conservatives? Yes. liberals slow down under miscuing, but not conservatives. liberal are more sensitive to social context, conservatives to rules. 121: not necessarily one better than the other. But, interestingly (122) conservatives and liberals prefer their own attentional biases (at least weakly)! (Speculate here.)

Fitting Round Pigs into Square Holes 122

• categorization tests allow us to see variations in cognitive temperament. hard categorizers vs. soft. Conservatives / liberals. 124: conservatives more likely to lock onto a task and complete it in a fashion that is both definitive and consistent with instructions.

Italian researcher Luciana Carraro, why do some people tend to pay attention to negative words over positive words? Used a Stroop Task measuring delay in reporting font color of negative words. Strong correlation with political orientation. "conservatives have a strong vigilence toward negative stimuli." Wasn't so much the valuation placed on negative words, but that negative stimuli triggered more attentional resources.

• Same researchers did a Dot Probe Test (measuring speed in identifying a gray dot on a postive or negative image. Assumption that speed equates with attentional disposition toward the stimuli). Liberals a bit quicker with positive images, conservatives with negative.

• Hibbing et. al. wanted to replicate the Italian research. Used a Flanker Task. (measuring speed in reporting a feature of an image when flanked by two images congruent or incongruent to the main image. Assumption is that the less you are slowed down by incongruence, the more attentional resources you had for the image.) Replicated typical results: we are all faster with angry faces, for example. Conservative less impacted by the angry faces. Both groups reacted the same to happy faces.

What Are You Looking At? 129

• Eye tracking attentional studies. Their research measured "dwell time" - time spent looking at an image. in a study, subjects are shown a group of images. General bias toward negative images. Theorized as having survival value. Conservatives spend a lot more time on negative images and quick to fix on negative images. Some weak evidence that liberals focus more on positive images, but sig. results concerned differentials.

Perception is Reality -- But is it real?

• Since liberals and conservatives value positive and negative images in the same way, you might conclude that they see the same world but pay attention to parts of it with different degrees of interest or attention. But Hibbing et. al. are not so sure. In a study, they asked libs and cons to evaluate pos/neg their view of the status quo on six policy dimensions (134). They seem to assess the reality differently, they see different policies at work in the same society, not just attending more to some stimuli. Political difference might not be difference in preference, but in perception.

• They also did some research on ranking degree of negativity of images and, unlike the Italian research, conservatives did rank negative images more negatively. In another study (135-6), researchers found that conservatives ranked faces as more dominant and threatening than liberals.

You're full of Beans

• BeanFest -- a research game in which test subjects try to earn points by deciding whether to accept or reject a bean with an unknown point value. Based on personality, some subjects are more exploratory (accept more beans and get more information), while others are conservative. But political orientation also predicts strategy. Shook and Fazio see the result as indicative of differences in data acquisition strategies and learning styles. Interesting follow-up analysis based on giving test subjects a "final exam" on the bean values. Similar scores, but different patterns of classification.

• 139: good summary paragraph: "New bean? What the hell, say the liberals, let's give it a whirl" Roughly equal scores on the game and exam.

• exploratory behavior and related differences in valuing everyday ethical situations, like forgetting to return a CD. differing attitudes toward science and religion.

Philosophical Moral Theories: Duty Ethics

• Basic intuition behind non-consequential duty ethics: At a very basic level, moral behavior comes to us as a kind of "command". This can be felt as an external command (Divine Law) or an internal command (internalization of Divine law, or autonomous act. Duty in the modern sense is felt as a command to be true to some ideal or conception of ourselves.

• Typical formulation of "modern" duty ethics comes from Kant.

• Beginner's Guide to Kant's Moral Philosophy

• Video: Beginner’s Guide to Kant’s Moral Philosophy

• What does it mean to be good? To have a good will. The will to do the right thing. Not for rewards.

• Bartender example. Self-interested motivations don’t count (fear of getting caught, losing customers, harming customers).

• Morality originates in my free will. The ability to make rules for ourselves. Being rational. Being bad is ultimately irrational.

• Categorical Imperative: “I ought never to act except in such a way that I could also will that my maxim should become universal law.” ...if it makes sense for you to will that everyone act from your maxim. This is a kind of test.

• Lying. Fails the test. Contradiction between maxim of truth telling and maxim of lying. You want people to believe you after all.

• Formulation #2: Act in such a way that you treat humanity... always as an end and never simply as a means. Requires respect of others as source of rational planning.

• Are we using people only as an end when we get services from others? Not necessarily.

• Formulation #3: Act as though through your actions you could become a legislator of universal morals. We are examples, contributing to a rational order or not.

9: SEP 29

Assigned

• Robert Sapolsky, C 13, "Morality" pp. 483-493
• Haidt, Chapter 4, "Vote for Me (Here's Why)" (23)

Sapolsky. Behave. C 13, 483-493

Rough topics:

• Origins of Social/Moral Intuitions in Babies and Monkeys and Chimps

• infants show signs of moral reasoning -- baby helper studies, baby sweets study - rewards helper, baby secondary friends study
• capuchin monkey study (deWaal) - monkey fairness. (demonstrated also with macaques monkeys, crows, ravens, and dogs), details on 485.
• Chimp version of Ultimatum Game - in the deWaal version, chimps tend toward equity unless they can give the token directly to the grape dispensers.
• also studies for fairness without loss of self-interest and "other regarding preferences".
• in one inequity study the advantaged monkey (the one who gets grapes) stops working as well. solidarity?
• Interesting comment: human morality transcends species boundary. starts before us.

• Exemptions for testifying against relatives and vmPFC patients who will trade relatives in Trolley situations

• vmPFC damaged patient will sacrifice a relative to save four non-relatives.
• Interesting note about criminal law exemptions.

• Neuroscience of the Trolley Problem and "Intuition discounting"

• dlPFC in level condition and vmPFC in bridge condition.
• Greene's hyposthesis: in level condition the killing of the one is a side-effect. In bridge condition, its because of the killing. Different forms of intentionality.
• Loop condition -- you know you have to kill the person on the side track, should be like bridge condition, but test subjects match level condition.
• Hyposthesis: Intuitions are local; heavily discounted for time and space. (Think of other examples of this.)
• related point about proximity - leave money around vs. cokes. Singer's pool scenario vs. sending money for absolute poverty relief.
• priming study on cheating involving bankers. a little puzzling.

• Neuroscience of the Fundamental Attribution Error

• p. 492: "but this circumstance is different" - neuro-evidence for the Fundamental Attribution Error [6]
• we judge ourselves by internal motives and others by external actions. Our failings/successes elicit shame/pride others elicit anger or indignation and emulation (envy?).
• Ariely: cheating not limited by risk but rationalization.

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

• Ring of Gyges
• Functionalism in psychology
• Reminder of big theoretical choice about ethics. (74) Is function of ethics truth discovery or pursuit of socially strategic goals?

• 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.

• Section 1: Obsessed with polls
• Leary's research on self-esteem importance- "sociometer" -- non-conscious level mostly.

• Section 2: Confirmation bias and exploratory thought
• Confirmation bias

• Wasson again -- number series
• Deann Kuhn -- 80: We are horrible at theorizing (requiring exploratory thought)....
• David Perkins research on reason giving

• Section 3: We're really good at finding rationalizations for things.
• more examples of people behaving as Glaucon would have predicted. Members of parliament, Ariely, Predictably Irrational,

• Section 4: Can I believe it vs. Must I believe it
• more evidence of reason in the service of desire: Can I believe it? vs. Must I believe it? We keep two different standards for belief-assent.
• "motivated reasoning" - 84ff.

• Section 5: Application to political beliefs: Partisan Brains

• Does selfish interest or group affiliation predict policy preferences? Not so much. We are groupish.
• Drew Westen's fMRI research on strongly partisan individuals. We feel threat to dissonant information (like hypocrisy or lying) about our preferred leader, but no threat, or even pleasure, at the problems for the opponent. the partisan brain. Difference in brain activation did not seem to be rational/cog (dlPFC). bit of dopamine after threat passes.
• Research suggests that ethicists are not more ethical than others. (89 Schwitzgebel)
• Mercier and Sperber. Why Do Humans Reason?
• Good thinking as an emergent property. individual neurons vs. networks. analogy to social intelligence.
• Statement, 90, on H's view of political life in light of this way of theorizing. read and discuss. introduce term "social epistemology"

Small Group discussion

• We all have examples from social life of people who are more or less interested in exploratory thought and holding themselves accountable to external information and "their side" arguments.
• Share examples of the verbal and non-verbal behaviors of people who are not very good at exploratory thought and inviting diversity of viewpoint in social settings (other people, of course).
• Then, try to consider or recall the behaviors of people who do the opposite. What are some verbal or other behaviors that you can use to indicate to others' that you are open to having your views examined? What have you noticed about the practices of people who are good at generating viewpoint diversity in social setting?

10: OCT 1

Assigned

• Hibbing, Ch 6, Different Slates (26)
• Libertarianism in Six Minutes

In-class content

• Libertarianism as a moral and political theory

Hibbing, Ch 6, Different Slates

• Story of Phineas Gage -- 1848 -- early example of biology and personality change.

• 149: lobotomies. Some Parkinson's drugs can trigger behavioral changes.

• I Feel it in my Gut -- psyhophysiology -- emotions as "action dispositions" 151: phsyiology of anger, stress (digress on cortisol), polygraph.

• CNS - central nervous system (head and spine) ANS - Anotonomic Nervous system. Within ANS - SNS (sympathetic) and PNS (parasympathetic) --

• Politics on and in the Brain

• Kanai and Rees MRI study -- looking at ACC (anterior singulate cortext) and amygdala. ACC activated by tasks involving error detection and conflict resolution -- results on 156: found correlation between liberalism and size of ACC. Bigger. However, amygdala (which is involved in face recog and emotion regulation) Conservatives have bigger amygdalas. (157: caution in reading these results. Still, you could predict pol orientation from brain differences.)

• Amodio 2007: looked to see in ACC activity correlated to political ideology -- in "go/no go" task, specific brain wave identified that varied by pol. orientiation.

• Politics Makes Me Sweat

• EDA studies -- electrodermal activity -- skin conductivity, especially as it varies with sweat. Simple way of measuring SNS activity. Study from Hibbing in 2008: EDA activity correlated to policy positions. "People more physiologically responsive to threat timuli were more likely to support policies aimed as reducting or addressing threats to the social status quo" 161

• Also "disgust" reactions: greater for conservatives, but only around sex-issues, not taxes.

• EDA studies have shown increase activity around inter-racial interactions. Studies involving reviewing applications with pitures of in/out groups.

In Your Face Politics

• Studies assessing our ability to determine political orientation from faces. Proxies for this judgement could include "emotional expressivity" (168), which Liberals score higher on. Study involving the facial muscle corrugator supercilii" (the eybrow furrowing muscle). Conservative males were distinctive for lack of emotional expressivity.

Libertarianism as a moral and political theory

• Notes drawn from 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.

• Basic intuition: taxation is a form of forced labor. Only legitimate for a narrow range of goals that we mutually benefit from, such as defense.

• Facts about concentration of wealth: 1% have 1/3 of wealth, more than bottom 90%. :*objections to redistribution: utilitarian and rights-based. Could there be forms of forced labor that come from inequality?

• Libertarianism in Six Minutes

• Libertarianism in Six Minutes

• Historical look: 17th century resistance to oppressive conditions. “Rent seekers”. Payne. Similar to socialism and capitalism, a view about what is fair.

• US libertarianism closer to free market capitalism. Assumption of natural harmony amoung productive people with liberty of contract. Laws limited to protection and protection of natural rights. No regulation of market. Social spending.

• Problems:

• No libertarian candidates on the national stage.
• Monopolies, poverty. Bleeding out in the street.
• Non-aggression principle unlikely in free market.
• Favoring economic freedom assumes it correlates with happiness.
• Environmental regulation seems necessary. Ethics not realized in the market perfectly.

• Some further reflecitons.

• Note that libertarianism can admit variations. Depending upon how concrete your conception of liberty and freedom is, you might decide that promoting liberty requires helping people acquire skills and competencies for life and taking care of the disabled. This isn't pure libertarianism anymore (it mixes thinking from the capabilities approach), but someone could claim to love liberty concretely, but making sure people have the conditions for "actual" freedom.

• Libertarians can argue that social needs should be met through voluntary donations of time and money. What if that doesn't happen? Can you still defend the theory?

11: OCT 6

Assigned

• Haidt, Chapter 5, "Beyond WEIRD Morality" (17)
• Writing exercise: How WEIRD is Morality?

Short Writing Assignment: How WEIRD is morality? (600 words)

• Stage 1: Please write an 600 word maximum answer to the following question by October 8, 2020 11:59pm.

• Topic: Prompt will be posted here.

• Advice about collaboration: I encourage you to collaborate with other students, but only up to the point of sharing ideas, references to class notes, and your own notes. Collaboration is part of the academic process and the intellectual world that college courses are based on, so it is important to me that you have the possibility to collaborate. It's a great way to make sure that a high average level of learning and development occurs. The best way to avoid plagiarism is to NOT share text of draft answers or outlines of your answer. Keep it verbal. Generate your own examples.

• Prepare your answer and submit it in the following way:

1. Do not put your name in the file or filename. You may put your student id number in the file. Put a word count in the file.
2. In Word, check "File" and "Options" to make sure your name does not appear as author. You may want to change this to "anon" for this document.
3. Format your answer in double spaced text in a 12 point font, using normal margins.
4. Save the file in the ".docx" file format using the file name "WEIRD".
5. Log in to courses.alfino.org. Upload your file to the Points dropbox.

• Stage 2: Please evaluate four student answers and provide brief comments and a score. Review the Assignment Rubric for this exercise. We will be using all four areas of the rubric for this assignment. Complete your evaluations and scoring by TBD, 11:59pm.

• Use this Google Form to evaluate four peer papers. The papers will be in our shared folder, but please do not edit or add comments to the papers directly. This will compromise your anonymity.
• To determine the papers you need to peer review, I will send you a key with animal names in alphabetically order, along with saint names. You will find your animal name and review the next four (4) animals' work.
• Some papers may arrive late. If you are in line to review a missing paper, allow a day or two for it to show up. If it does not show up, go ahead and review enough papers to get to four reviews. This assures that you will get enough "back evaluations" of your work to get a good average for your peer review credit. (You will also have an opportunity to challenge a back evaluation score of your reviewing that is out of line with the others.)

• Stage 3: I will grade and briefly comment on your writing using the peer scores as an initial ranking. Assuming the process works normally, I will give you the higher of the two grades. Up to 14 points.

• Stage 4: Back-evaluation: After you receive your peer comments and my evaluation, take a few minutes to fill out this quick "back evaluation" rating form: [7]. Fill out the form for each reviewer, but not Alfino. Up to 10 points, in Q&W.

• Back evaluations are due TBD, 11:59pm.

Haidt, Chapter 5, "Beyond WEIRD Morality"

WEIRD Morality

• 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; Enlightenment moralities of Kant and Mill are rationalist, individualist, and universalist.
• survey data on East/West differences in sentence completion: "I am..."
• framed-line task 97

• Kantian and Millian ethical thought is rationalist, rule based, and universalist. Just the ethical theory you would expect from the culture.

A 3 channel moral matrix

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

• claims schweder's theory predicts responses on taboo violation tests, is descriptively accurate.
• 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. (Note connection to contemporary conflicts, such as the Charlie Hebdot massacre.)

Making Sense of Moral Difference

• Haidt's Bhubaneswar experience: diverse (intense) continua of moral values related to purity. (opposite of disgust). Confusing at first, but notice that he started to like his hosts (elephant) and then started to think about how their values might work. Stop and think about how a mind might create this. Detail about airline passenger.
• Theorizing with Paul Rozin on the right model for thinking about moral foundations: "Our theory, in brief" (103)
• American politics often about sense of "sacrilege", not just about defining rights (autonomy). Not just harm, but types of moral disgust.
• Stepping out of the Matrix: H's metaphor for seeing his own politics as more "contingent" than before, when it felt like the natural advocacy of what seem true and right. Reports growing self awareness of liberal orientation of intellectual culture in relation to Shweder's view. Social conservatives made more sense to him after studying in India.

• Discussion questions:

• Identify some of the key influences on your morality, especially from religious, regional, and family culture. Have you had any experiences similar to Haidt's in which you become aware of a moral culture that at first confused you, but then showed you something about your own moral culture?
• Does Haidt's matrix metaphor makes sense? What does it mean? What hope will we have of having "critical" ethical discussions if very contingent differences of culture are part of the fabric of our morality?

12: OCT 8

Assigned

• Hibbing, Chapter 4: Drunken Flies and Salad Greens (96-117) (21)
• Fair Contract Discussion and Writing Exercise (Points, Google form)

In-class content

• Philosophical Moral Theories: Justice

Rawls' Theory of Justice

• Original Social Contract tradition
• Original Position in Rawls' thought: Choosing principles of justice under a "veil of ignorance"

• Track what we are ignorance of and what we still know under the veil
• Note how this realizes a basic condition of moral thought: neutrality, universalization.
• What are you're ignorant of under the "veil"

• You still know: human psychology, human history, economic knowledge, the general types of possible situations in which humans can find themselves
• You don't know: your sex, race, physical handicaps, generation, social class of our parents, etc

• So, what would it be rational to choose?

• Rawls claims we would choose the following two principles
• 1) Principle of Equal Liberty: Each person has an equal right to the most extensive liberties compatible with similar liberties for all. (Egalitarian.)
• 2) Difference Principle: Social and economic inequalities should be arranged so that they are both (a) to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged persons, and (b) attached to offices and positions open to all under conditions of equality of opportunity.

• Note other possible principles. Small Group assessment

Fairness in Contracts

• from: Sandel, Chapter 6: Rawls (not a reading for this term)

• What is a contract? What moral rules govern contracts?

• Nature of a contract

• fairness of contract may dep. on circumstances of execution. "consent" alone doesn't make a contract fair.
• expectations change with timeline and events (ex of lobsters) "benefits alone" don't determine an obligation
• Two main concepts underlying contracts:

• autonomy
• reciprocity

• Consent and Benefits -- examples of fair/unfair contracts

• baseball card trade among diff aged siblings
• contractor fraud in the leaky toilet case. Charging an older person $50,000 to replace a toilet.
• Hume's home repairs -- no consent but still obligation. Variation: emergency measures to stop damage
• Car repair guy story -- what if he fixed the car? would benefit alone confer obligation.
• squeegee men -- potential for benefit to be imposed coercively

• Point of connection with Rawls: Rawls veil of ignorance establishes theoretical equality of participants to contract. Contract should be fundamentally fair and guarantee autonomy and reciprocity

Hibbing, Chapter 4: Drunken Flies and Salad Greens

• History of research on finding personality traits that predict politcs: First, are authoritarian orientations identifiable as personality traits?

• Nazi research - Erich Jaensch J and S type personalities; background of trying to understand WW2 atrocities; hypothesis of authoritarian personality Theordor Adorno, note quote at p. 100. F-scale for Fascism. No validity, but interesting for using non-political questions. Han Eysenck's work on "tenderminded/toughminded"; 1960's Glenn Wilson. conservatism as resistance to change and adherence to tradition. "C-scale"

• 70's and 80s research on RWA - right wing authoritarianism. measure of submission to authority.

• Hibbing et al assessment: 102: criticisms persist in effort to find an "authoritarian personality". But claim, "there is a deep psychology underlying politics"

• 103: Personality Theory research: Big Five model:

• openness to experience, **
• conscientiousness, **
• extroversion,
• agreeableness,
• neuroticism. Two of these (**) are relevant to political orientation. conscientiousness connected to research on "cognitive closure"

• "What Foundation is Your Morality Built?" 105ff: review of Haidt's Moral Foundations Theory (We will get to this in a couple of weeks from Haidt)

• 108ff: Values theory of Shalom Schwartz. diagram at 109. 10 core values on axis of individual vs. collective welfare and group loyalty versus ind. pleasure. Diagram also looks like an ideological spectrum.

• Why are political orientations connected to so many other preferences? Hibbing et. al. sceptical of theories that politics drive other prefs. Second possibility, broad orientations drive politics and prefs. Third (their pref), difference come from diffs on bedrock social dilemma and mesh with other choices.

• PTC polymorphism (sensitivity to bitterness) linked to conservatism. Preliminary research from them suggesting that sensitivity to "androstenone" is correlated with acceptance of social hierarchies.

• "Conservatives and liberals experience and process different worlds"

13: OCT 13

Assigned

• Sapolsky, Chapter 13, "Culture, context, public goods games, religion" (493-520) (27)

Sapolsky, Chapter 13,"Culture, context, public goods games, religion" (493-520)

• Context, Culture, and Moral Universals
• given all of the ways our moral judgements can be altered by context and culture, are there universals? Some forms of murder, theft, and sexual misbehavior. The Golden Rule is nearly universal.

• Schweder. autonomy,community, divinity

• Public goods game research

• Simple version, pay to punish deadbeats version.
• Robust results: 1) Everyone is prosocial. In no culture do people just not contribute. 2) In all cutlures, people punish low contributors. (Prosocial or altruistic Punishment)
• Interesting recent result: Anti-social punishment is also universal, though it's strength varies. Interestingly, the lower the social capital in a country, the higher the rates of antisocial punishment.
• research by Joseph Henrich, U BC, subjects from wide range of cultures play three simluation games: The Dictator and two versions of the Ultimatum Game. Variables that predict prosocial patterns of play: market integration, community size, religion.

• World Religions and Moralizing Gods
• What is the connection between participation in world religion and prosocial play? 499: When groups get large enough to interact with strangers, they invent moralizing gods. The large global religions all have moralizing gods who engage in third party punishment.

• Bottom of 499: Two hypotheses: 1) Our sense of fairness is an extension of a deep past in which sociality was based on kin and near kin. (don't forget monkey fairness) or, 2) Fairness is a cultural artifact (product of culture) that comes from reasoning about the implications of larger groups size.

• Note theoretical puzzle on p. 500

• the chapter's survey and quest for cultural moral universals continues.....

• Honor and Revenge - (mention Mediterranean hyposthesis - Italian honor culture & research on southerners....)

• Collectivists -- diffs from Individualists

• more likely to sacrifice welfare of one for group. use as means to end. focus of moral imperatives on social roles and duties vs. rights.
• uses shames vs. guilt. read 502. shame cultures viewed as primitive, but contemporary advocates of shaming. thoughts?....examples p. 503.
• gossip as tool of shaming -- as much as 2/3 of conversation and mostly negative.

• Fools Rush In -- Reason and Intuition

• How do we use insights from research to improve behavior?
• Which moral theory is best? (trick question).

• Virtue theory looks outdated, but maybe more relevant than we think.
• reviews the point from trolley research about the utilitarian answer from the dlPFC and the nonutilitariain from the vmPFC. Why would we be automatically non-utilitarian? One answer: nature isn't trying to make us happy, it's try to get our genes into the next generation.
• Moral heterogeneity - new data: 30% deontologist and 30% utilitarian in both conditions. 40% swing vote, context sensitive. theorize about that.
• Major criticism of utilitarian - most rational, but not practical unless you don't have a vmPFC. "I kinda like my liver". Triggers concerns that you might be sacrificed for the greater happiness.

• Sapolsky claims that optimal decisions involve integration of reason and intuition. 508:"Our moral intuitions are neither primordial nor reflexively primitive....[but] cognitive conclusions from experience. morality is a dual process, partitioned between structures for reasoning and intuition.

• More Josh Greene research. Old problem: tragedy of the commons -- how do you jumpstart cooperation. It's a "me vs us" problem. But there's an "us versus them" version when there are two groups (cultures) with competing models for thriving.

• Dog meat. -- used as example of how you could induce us vs. them response. Samuel Bowles example of switching people's mind set in the case of the school responding to late parents.

• Veracity and Mendacity interesting book [8]

• note range of questions 512. Truth telling not a simple policy matter.
• primate duplicity -- capuchin monkeys will distract a higher ranking member to take food, but not a lower one.
• male gelada baboons know when to hold off on the "copulation call"
• differences with humans: we feel bad or morally soiled about lying and we can believe our own lies.

• human resources for lying -- poker face, finesse, dlPFC comes in with both struggle to resist lying and execution of strategic lie.
• 517: Swiss research (Baumgartner et al) -- playing a trust game allowing for deception, a pattern of brain activation predicted promise breaking.
• also cheating on a coin toss study -- again, lots of cheating

• Subjects who don't cheat. will vs. grace. grace wins. "I don't know; I just don't cheat."

• Robert Sapolsky, from Behave, Chapter 14, "Feeling Someone's Pain, Understanding Soemone's Pain, Alleviating Someone's Pain." 535--552.

• Lessons from Sapolsky in this chapter:

• 1. Our brains and emotions don't make us good, but make it possible for us to respond in ways that we identify as moral life.
• 2. Altruism probably needs self-interest.

14: OCT 15. Unit Three: Two Theories of Moral and Political Difference

Assigned

• Haidt, Chapter 6, "Taste Buds of the Righteous Mind" (27)

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

• analogy of moral sense to taste sense. "the righteous mind is like a tongue with six taste receptors"

• unpacking the metaphor:

• places where our sensitivities to underlying value perception have depth from evolution, but have flexibility or plasticity from the "big brain", which allows for shaping within culture and retriggering.
• morality is rich, not reducible to one taste. A way of perceiving the world. against moral monism
• like cuisines, there is variation, but within a range.

• mentions Enlightenment approaches, again: argument against the reductive project of philosophical ethics 113-114. ethics more like taste than science.

• Hume's three way battle: Enlightenment thinkers united in rejecting revelation as basis of morality, but divided between an transcendent view of reason as the basis (Kant) or the view that morality is part of our nature (Hume, Darwin, etc.). Hume's empiricism. also for him, morality is like taste

• Autism argument: Bentham (utlitarianism), Kant (deontology). Think about the person who can push the fat guy.

• Bentham told us to use arithmetic, Kant logic, to resolve moral problems. Note Bentham image and eccentric ideas. Baron-Cohen article on Bentham as having Asperger's Syndrome (part of the autism range). Kant also a solitary. Just saying. clarify point of analysis. not ad hominem. part of Enlightenment philosophy's rationalism -- a retreat from observation.
• the x/y axis on page 117 shows a kind of "personality space" that could be used to locate Enlightenment rationalists. (Note that Haidt is looking at the psychology of the philosopher for clues about the type of theory they might have!)

• Avoiding bad evolutionary theory or evolutionary psychology: "just so stories" -- range of virtues suggested "receptors", but for what? the virtue? some underlying response to a problem-type?

• moral taste receptors found in history of long standing challenges and advantages of social life. The "moral foundations" in Haidt's theory just are the evolved psychological centers of evaluation that make up moral consciousness for humans.

• Modularity in evolutionary psychology, centers of focus, like perceptual vs. language systems. Sperber and Hirshfield: "snake detector" - note on deception/detection in biology/nature. responses to red, Hyperactive agency detection.
• original vs. current triggers, 123
• See chart, p. 125: C F L A S: Care/Harm, Fairness/Cheating, Loyalty/Betrayal, Authority/Subversion, Sanctity/Degradation

• Quick group exchange: Random bumper sticker on a truck in downtown Spokane: Annoy a Liberal. Work. Succeed. Be happy. Note how you can read into this bumper sticker to find the "triggers". This person likely thinks that liberals are not committed to a work ethics (or don't appreciate how hard real work is), may be envious of success, and is always focused on what's wrong with society instead of being happy... For 2-3 minutes, visit the Cafepress website [9] and see if you can read bumper stickers for triggers this way.

15: OCT 20

Assigned

• Haidt, Chapter 7, "The Moral Foundations of Politics" (34)

Haidt, Chapter 7, "The Moral Foundations of Politics"

• Homo economicus vs. Homo sapiens -- column a b -- shows costs of sapiens psych. commitments "taste buds"
• Note on Innateness and Determinism: "first draft" metaphor; experience revises - pre-wired not hard-wired. innate without being universal
• Notes on each foundation:

• Care/Harm -- ev.story of asymmetry m/f (does this seem too gender deterministic?), attachment theory. current triggers.

• Implicit theory about "re-triggering" note red flag. unexplained. Consider plausibility.

• Fairness/Cheating -- We know we incur obligation when accepting favors. So,... Trivers and reciprocal altruism. "tit for tat" ; equality vs. proportionality. Original and current problem is to build coalitions (social networks) without being suckered (exploited).
• Loyalty/Betrayal -- tribalism in story of Eagles/Rattlers. liberals experience low emphasis here. (also Zimbardo); note claim that this is gendered 139. sports groupishness is a current trigger. connected to capacity for violence. (Singer will echo this in next class reading on "Law")
• Authority/Subversion -- Cab driver story. Hierarchy in animal and human society; liberals experience this differently also; note cultural work accomplished by the "control role" -- suppression of violence that would occur without hierarchy. Alan Fiske's work on "Authority Ranking" -- suggest legit recognition of difference. Tendency to see UN and international agreements as vote dilution, loss of sov.
• Sanctity/Degradation -- Miewes-Brandes horror. Mill's libertarianism might be evoked. ev.story: omnivores challenge is to spot foul food and disease (pathogens, parasites). (Being an omnivore is messy. One should not be surprised to find that vegetarians often appreciate the cleanliness of their diet.) Omnivores dilemma -- benefit from being able to eat wide range of foods, but need to distinguish risky from safe. neophilia and neophobia. Images of chastity in religion and public debate. understanding culture wars.

• Old Group Discussion topic: Critical Evaluation of Moral Foundations Theory as explanation of moral and political difference.

• Take each of the moral foundations and try to find examples from your own experience (or others') that helps you identify your general place along the spectrum of each foundation (which is a mixed metaphor). For example, you might recall a reaction your had to something that showed your "trigger" for one of the foundations. Then try to explain to each other what accounts for the different places we occupy in each case. (You could check out political bumper stickers for fun and try to locate them among the moral foundations [10].)
• Follow-up questions (after group work):

• What is the status of our reports?
• Is it odd that the picture of politics in H's theory is so different from our experience of it?

16: OCT 22

Assigned

• Hibbing, John R., Kevin Smith, and John R. Alford, Predisposed, Chapter 2, "Getting Into Bedrock with Politics". (26)

Hibbing, et. al. Predisposed Chapter 2

• Begins with allegations that universities are left-biased. Points out counterexample in Russell. students can be more radical than even lefty faculty. City college story. 34ff: ironically its most lasting intellectual movement was neoconservatism.

• Point of story: 1) colleges political orientations have little predictable effect on their students. 2) Politics and political beliefs are fungible, change dep on time and place. No discussions these days of Stalin-Trotskyism

• Note: Hibbing et al disagree with the second point. their thesis is that human nature is variable but politics is, at its core, dealing with a constant problem, invariable. found in "bedrock dilemmas"

• Back to Aristotle: [M]an is by nature political. -- politics deep in our nature. GWAS studies suggest more influence from gene difference on political orientation than economic prefs. political orientation is one of the top correlate predicting mate selection. (39). considers two objections: mates become similar over time or the correlation is an effect of the selection pool "social homogamy" --politics is connected to willingness to punish difference. 40-41.

• "Differences Galore?" -- issues are what we agree/disagree on, labels distinguish groups contesting issues. Both are contingent are variable over time. (Later, "waves on the surface".)

• Label "liberal" - today means mildly libertarian, but liberal economic policy isn't libertarian at all (involves income transfer). mentions historical origin of Left/Right.
• Conclusion they are resisting: (43): political beliefs are so multidimensional and variable that left and right don't have any stable meaning.

• "Commonality Reigns! Political Universals

• Bedrock social dilemmas: "core preferences about the organization, structure, and conduct of mass social life" 44
• Predispositions defined: political orientations that are biologically instantiated. these differences are more stable than labels and issues.
• Example of conceptual framework at work: attitudes toward military intervention. tells the story of changing conservative views of intervention, Lindbergh and the AFC. These changes make sense in relation to the bedrock challenge of dealing with external threats.
• Example 2: conservatives softening after electoral defeats in 2012. conservatives still consistently more suspicious of out groups. (heightened threat detection)
• Key point in the theory is that these "bedrock dilemmas" occur once cities become too large for people to know each other.

• "Society works best when..."

• history of research on connection between core preferences on leadership, defense, punishment of norm violators, devotion to traditional behavioral standards, distribution of resources. Laponce. Haidt's MFT.
• some of their research from 2007: "Society works best Index" "predicted issue attitudes, ideological self-placement, and party identification with astonishing accuracy"

17: OCT 27

Assigned

• Haidt, Chapter 8: The Conservative Advantage (34)

Haidt, Chapter 8: The Conservative Advantage

• Hadit's critique of Dems: Dems offer sugar (Care) and salt (Fairness), conservatives appeal to all five receptors. Imagine the value of "rewriting" our own or opposing ideologies as Haidt imagined doing.

• Republicans seemed to Haidt to understand moral psych better, not bec. they were fear mongering, but triggering moral foundations.

• The MFQ: consistency across cultures; large n; tracks preferences in dogs, church (content analysis of different denominations sermons), brainwaves (dissonance, "fingerprint", first .5 seconds) see chart.-

• 164: Haidt's beef with liberal researchers. Note ongoing work on bias in the academy. Bad explanations for being conservative. Liberals don't get the Durkheimian vision. But note range of responses excerpted. An Update

• Mill vs. Durkheim - note the abstraction involved in Millian Liberty -- just like the MFQ data for very liberal. (supports a range of positions including liberatarianism, just is considered a conservative position.)

• More on Proportionality (which is 5-channel and Durkheimian)

• 6th Moral foundation: liberty and oppression: taking the "fairness as equality" from Fairness and considering it in terms of Lib/Opp.

• Evolutionary story about hierarchy, p. 170. original triggers: bullies and tyrants, current triggers: illegit. restraint on liberty. Evolutionary/Arch. story about emergence of pre-ag dominance strategies -- 500,000ya weapons for human conflict take off. Parallel in Chimps: revolutions "reverse dominance hierarchies" are possible. Claims that some societies make transition to some form of political egalitarianism (equality of citizenship or civic equality). Mentions possibility of gene/culture co-evolution (as in dairying). We've had time to select for people who can tolerate political equality and surrender violence to the state. (Note Oregon constitution change on dueling.) Timothy McVeigh.

• Tea Party (Santelli) is really talking about a conservative kind of fairness, which shares some features of the "reciprocal altruism", such as necessity of punishment. As seen in public goods games.

• Public Goods games (again). Setup. 1.6 multiplier. Still, best strategy is not to contribute. altruistic punishment can be stimulated (84% do) even without immediate reward. cooperation increases.

• Summary: Liberals have emphasize C, F, Lib while conservatives balance all six. Libs construe Fairness in more egalitarian ways and have diff emphasis for Liberty/Oppression.

18: OCT 29

Assigned

• Haidt, Chapter 12, "Can't We all Disagree More Constructively?" (189-221) ((32)

Haidt, Ch 12, "Can't We All Disagree More Constructively?"

• evidence of polarization in American politics; changes in political culture. compromise less valued.
• theory of ideologies, which might be thought to drive political identity formation
• "right" and "left", simplifications, but basis of study and comparative to Europe in some ways, historical origins in French Assembly of 1789, basis in heritable traits - twins studies. L/R don't map wealth exclusively (as in recent election). (Ideologies appear to be more fluid now.)
• One more time through the modern genetic/epigenetic/phenotype explanation pattern (note what's at stake: if you misunderstand the determiinism here, you'll misunderstand the whole theory):

• 1: Genes make brains - Australian study: diff responses to new experiences: threat and fear for conservative, dopamine for liberal. (recall first draft metaphor)
• 2: Dispositional traits lead to different experiences, which lead to "characteristic adaptations" (story about how we differentiate ourselves through our first person experience. mention feedback loops). (Lots of parents would corroborate this.) Does the story of the twins seem plausible?
• 3: Life narratives; McAdams study using Moral Foundations Theory to analyze narratives, found MFs in stories people tell about religious experience. Thesis: different paths to religious faith. We "map" our moral foundations onto our faith commitment to some extent.

• So, an ideology can be thought of as the political version of a narrative that fits with a personal narrative you tell about your experience.

• Political narratives of Republicans and Democrats.
• Haidt, Graham, and Nosek study: Liberals worse at predicting conservatives responses. Interesting point: the distortion of seeing things as a liberal makes liberals more likely to believe that conservatives really don't care about harm. But conservatives may be better at understanding (predicting) liberal responses because they use all of the foundations.

• Muller on difference bt conservative and orthodox. Post-enlightenment conservatives: want to critique liberalism from Enlightenment premise of promoting human well being. follow conservative description of human nature. 290. - humans imperfect, need accountability, reasoning has flaws so we might do well to give weight to past experience, institutions are social facts that need to be respected, even sacralized. (Consider countries in which judges are abducted or blown up.)
• Moral and Social Capital -- moral capital: resources that sustain a moral community (including those that promote accountability and authority.). moral capital not always straightforward good (293), also, less trusting places, like cities, can be more interesting. Social capital more about the ties we have through our social networks which maintain trust and cooperation relationships.

• Liberals

• blindspot: not valuing moral capital, social capital, tends to over reach, change too many things too quickly. Bertrand Russell: tension between ossification and dissolution..
• strength: 1) regulating super-organisms (mention theory of "regulatory capture"); 2)solving soluble problems (getting the lead out - might have had big effect on well-being. note this was a bipartisan push back against a Reagan reversal of Carter's policy).

• Libertarians. Today's political libertarian started out as a "classic liberal" prioritizing limited gov/church influence.

• Note research suggesting how libertarians diverge from liberals and conservatives on the MFs.
• libertarian wisdom: 1) markets are powerful -- track details -- often self-organizing, self-policing, entrepreneurial)

• Social Conservatives

• wisdom: understanding threats to social capital (can't help bees if you destroy the hive)

• Putnam's research on diversity and social capital : bridging and bonding capital both decline with diversity. sometimes well intentioned efforts to promote ethnic identity and respect can exacerbate this.

19: NOV 3. Unit Four: Justice, Justified Partiality, and Fair Contracts

Assigned

PR Hidden Brain episode on preferential treatment

Justified Partiality: Theorizing the Problem

• Small Group exercise on "justified partiality"

• Imagine your future life earnings and the possibility that you would be responsible for raising one or more humans. Under what scenarios (of income, wealth, and life goals) would "justified partiality" not exhaust your resources? What principles would you use to decide that you had resources that you were not obligated to spend on your loved ones.

• Possibility 1: There are no scenarios like that.
• Possibility 2: Only scenarios involving extraordinary wealth. (Bezo, Gates, Buffett...)
• Possibility 3, 4, 5...

• What, if any obligations to we have to people in absolute poverty?
• Might be an instance of, "How should I think about unequal outcomes within groups of humans and among groups of humans?

• Resources:

• Mixed strategies:

• Assuming that there is some obligation to aid, use the concept of "justified partiality" to find the right mix between self-interest and altruism.
• Consider the problem of aid to absolutely poor as an instance of other distributive justice problems. Locate principles of justice that help justify a position.

• Pure strategies: Thinking about a single principle coming out of a traditional ethical theory that might govern (completely or partially) the case of absolute poverty.

• Libertarian - Self-ownership might limit aid to volutary contributions. Note implication is this is your only principle.
• Utilitarian - Comparable moral significance principle - Singer
• Kantian (example of duty to offer/accept aid)
• Virtue ethics

20: NOV 5

Assigned

• We will continue discussing results of our work and exercise on justified partiality.
• Writing: Position Paper on Justified Partiality

Short Writing Assignment #1: 800 words

• Stage 1: Please write an 600 word maximum answer to the following question by November 7, 2020 11:59pm.

• Topic: Prompt on Justified Partiality will be posted here.

• Advice about collaboration: I encourage you to collaborate with other students, but only up to the point of sharing ideas, references to class notes, and your own notes. Collaboration is part of the academic process and the intellectual world that college courses are based on, so it is important to me that you have the possibility to collaborate. It's a great way to make sure that a high average level of learning and development occurs. The best way to avoid plagiarism is to NOT share text of draft answers or outlines of your answer. Keep it verbal. Generate your own examples.

• Prepare your answer and submit it in the following way:

1. Do not put your name in the file or filename. You may put your student id number in the file. Put a word count in the file.
2. In Word, check "File" and "Options" to make sure your name does not appear as author. You may want to change this to "anon" for this document.
3. Format your answer in double spaced text in a 12 point font, using normal margins.
4. Save the file in the ".docx" file format using the file name "JustifiedPartiality".
5. Log in to courses.alfino.org. Upload your file to the Position Papers dropbox.

• Stage 2: Please evaluate four student answers and provide brief comments and a score. Review the Assignment Rubric for this exercise. We will be using the Flow, Content, and Insight areas of the rubric for this assignment. Complete your evaluations and scoring by Thursday, March 7, 2019, 11:59pm.

• Use this Google Form to evaluate four peer papers. The papers will be in our shared folder, but please do not edit or add comments to the papers directly. This will compromise your anonymity.
• To determine the papers you need to peer review, I will send you a key with animal names in alphabetically order, along with saint names. You will find your animal name and review the next four (4) animals' work.
• Some papers may arrive late. If you are in line to review a missing paper, allow a day or two for it to show up. If it does not show up, go ahead and review enough papers to get to four reviews. This assures that you will get enough "back evaluations" of your work to get a good average for your peer review credit. (You will also have an opportunity to challenge a back evaluation score of your reviewing that is out of line with the others.)

• Stage 3: I will grade and briefly comment on your writing using the peer scores as an initial ranking. Assuming the process works normally, I will give you the higher of the two grades. Up to 14 points.

• Stage 4: Back-evaluation: After you receive your peer comments and my evaluation, take a few minutes to fill out this quick "back evaluation" rating form: [11]. Fill out the form for each reviewer, but not Alfino. Up to 10 points, in Q&W.

• Back evaluations are due TBD, 11:59pm.

21: NOV 10

• Flex Day

22: NOV 12. Unit Five: Empathy

Assigned

• Robert Sapolsky, from Behave, Chapter 14, "Feeling Someone's Pain, Understanding Someone's Pain, Alleviating Someone's Pain." 521-535.

Sapolsky, Behave, C 14, 521-535

• starts with "exposure to an aversive state" -- we call it empathy, but what is that?

q1: When does empathy lead us to actually do something helpful?

q2: When we do act, whose benefit is it for?

• sympathy -- feeling sorry for someone's pain.
• empathy -- includes a cognitive step of understanding the cause of someone's pain and "taking perspective"
• compassion -- S. suggests this involves empathy plus taking action.

• basic account of empathy research:

• we are 'overimitative' - chimp / kids study524
• mouse studies -- alterations of sensitivity to pain on seeing pain; fear association seeing another mouse exp fear conditioning
• lots of species engage in consolation, chimps show third party consolation behavior, no consolation behavior in monkeys -- prairie voles!
• 526: rats, amazing rats -- US/them behaviors, some flexibility

• 527: describes mechanism of empathy: early emo contagion in kids may not be linked to cognitive judgement as later, when Theory of Mind emerges

• Some neurobiology: the ACC - anterior cingulate cortex - processes ineroceptive info, conflict monitoring, (presumably cog. dissonance). susceptible to placebo effect. Importantly, ACC activates on social exclusion, anxiety, disgust, embarrassment, but also pleasure, mutual pleasure.
• ACC also involved in action circuits. Oxytocin, hormone related to bonding. Block it in voles and they don't console. Awwww!
• How does self-interested "alarm" system of the ACC get involved in empathy? Sapolsky's hypothesis 530: Feeling someone's pain can be more effective for learning than just knowing that they're in pain. Empathy may also be a self-interested learning system, separately from helping action.

• Cognitive side of things: How do we bring judgements about desert and character to bear on empathic responses?

• Cognition comes in with less physical pain, judgement abstractly represented pain (a sign), unfamiliar pain.
• socioeconomics of empathy 533: wealth predicts lower empathy. the wealthy take more candy!
• especially hard, cognitively, to empathize with people we don't like, because their pain actually stimulates a dopamine response!

23: NOV 17

Assigned

• Robert Sapolsky, from Behave, Chapter 14, "Feeling Someone's Pain, Understanding Someone's Pain, Alleviating Someone's Pain." 535-552.
• Writing assignment. We will have a short points based assignment on your view of empathy. Google form to follow.

Sapolsky, Behave, C 14, 535-552

• A Mythic Leap forward - covering mirror neurons and what they do and don't show about moral life.

• 1990s U of Parma, rhesus monkeys under study, PMC - premotor cortex, PFC communicates with PMC during decision making, "about 10% of neurons for movement X also activated when observing someon else doing movement X. so called mirror neurons --mirroring can be abstract, involve gestalts, fill in missing pieces, seem to mirror intentional states.
• 537: S is sceptical of theory that mirror neurons are there to enhance learning. Still, there are mirror neuron critics who endorse a version of the social learning theory.
• 538: Do mirror neurons help you understand what someone is thinking, aid to Theory of Mind? are these neurons focused on social interactions? (stronger effect at close distances) -- but Hickok (2014 The Myth of Mirror Neurons) criticizes this as correlation, no evidence that it helps learning. and not clear that intentionality requires this kind of aid. We can understand lots of intentions we can't perform.
• 540: Very skeptical of idea that mirror neurons explain empathy. Specifically of Gallese and Ramachandran -- cites evidence of overhype.

• The Core Issue (in Empathy): Actually doing something.

• S resumes the topic of the 1st half of the chapter. Empathy can be a substitute for action. "If feel your pain, but that's enough." In adolescents (chapter 6) empathy can lead to self-absorption. It hurts to feel others pain when "you" is new.
• research predicting prosocial action from exposure to someone's pain: depends upon heart rate rise, which indicates need for self-protection. 543: "The prosocial ones are those whose heart rates decrease; they can hear the sound of someone else's need instead of the distressed pounding in their own chests." (Echoes research showing less prosocial behavior to strangers under cognitive load, hunger condition, social exclusion, stress. Block glucocorticoids and empathy goes up.)
• research on Buddhist monks, famously Mathieu Ricard. without Buddhist approach, same brain activation as others. with it, quieter amygdala, mesolimbic dopamine activitation - compassion as positive state. (Mention hospice.)
• empathy disorders and misfires: "Pathological altruism"; empathic pain can inhibit effective action.

• Is there altruism?

• 2008 Science study: we predict spending on ourselves will increase happiness, but only altruistic uses of the money did so in the study.
• S suggests that given the design of the ACC, and the abundant ways the social creatures get rewards from prosocial reputations, maybe we shouldn't be looking for "pure" altruism. (recalls that belief in moralizing gods increases prosocial behavior toward strangers.)
• returning to that Science study, important to note that the positive effect from altruism only occurred when observer was present!
• Final study of the chapter. 2007 Science, test subjects in scanners, given money, sometimes taxed, sometimes opp to donate. Follow results 549:

• more dopamine (pleasure response) to the money, hard to part with it.
• more dopamine when taxed, more likely to give voluntarily.
• more dopamine when giving voluntarily.

24: NOV 19. Unit Six: Criminal Justice and Moral Responsibility Skepticism

Assigned

• Sapolsky, Chapter 16: Biology, the Criminal Justice System, and (Oh, Why Not?) Free Will (580-613) (Part One 580-600)
• Article abstract, "Klüver–Bucy syndrome, hypersexuality, and the law"

Sapolsky, Chapter 16: Biology, the Criminal Justice System, and (Oh, Why Not?) Free Will

• discusses professional interaction between biologists and legal scholars that may have started “neurolaw”.

• claim: Current criminal justice system needs to be replaced.

• focuses topic with list of things outside his focus: science in courtroom, min IQ for death sentence, cognitive bias in jurors, cognitive privacy.

• 583: historic example of scientific evidence disrupting criteria for guilt in witches trials, mid-16th century. Older women might not be able to cry.

• no one now disputes that we sometimes are not free (epilepsy example). Yet medieval europe tried animals for guilt.

• Drawing Lines in the Sand 586

• endorses a broad compatibilism and the idea of “moral failure”. “Mitigated free will.” (Ultimately, Sapolsky will try to show that this view doesn’t hold up, in part because it depends up arbitrary use of a “homonculus” to explain things. )

• 1842: M’Naghten. Mentally ill murderer. Many objected to his not being found guilty.

• homonculus view: we all more or less think this way and then the problem of responsibility comes down to figuring out what to expect from the humunculus.

• Age, Maturity of Groups, Maturity of Indidividuals

• 2005 case Roper v. Simmons. Age limit of 18 on executions and life terms. Follows debates on this. 590.

• ”grossly impaired rationality”.

• Gazzaniga’s view: responsibility compatible with lack of free will. Responsibility is a social level concern.

• disputes about the maturity of adolescents: APA has spoken both ways in court

• Causation and Compulsion

• works through example of schizophrenic hearing voices. Not all cases would be compulsion. “thus in this view even a sensible homunculus can lose it and agree to virtually anything, just to get the hellhounds and trombones to stop.” 593

• Libet experiment, 1980s, EEG disclosure of “readiness potential” — activity measured before conscious awareness of will. .5 second delay might just be artifact of experiment design. Time it takes to interpret the clock. Libet says maybe the lag time is the time you have to veto the action your body is preparing you for (“free won’t”)

• Sapolsky’s view is that these debates reflect a consensus about the interaction of biology and free will, whatever that is.

• ”You must be smart” vs. “You must have worked so hard”

• research of Carol Dweck, 90s, saying that a kid worked hard to get a result increases motivation.

• 596: we tend to assign aptitude to biology and effort and resisting impulse to free will. Sapolsky seems very skeptical that we can justify assigning character (impulse control anyway) to non-biological factors (fairy dust).

• some evidence that pedophilia is not freely chosen or easily resisted.

• chart showing how we divide things between biology and “homoncular grit”. — Long list of ways out biology influence the items on the right.

• Conclusions: “worked hard/must be smart” the same.

• But does a tying useful actually come of this?

• back to Stephen Morse. Neurolaw sceptic, ok with M’naugton, but thinks cases are rare. Reviews valid criticisms he makes. Juries might overvalue neuroscience images, descriptive vs. Normative.

• Morse supports a strong distinction between causation and compulsion. Causation is not itself an excuse. But Sapolsky argues that this still involves walling off a “homonculus” and that’s not plausible.

Acknowledges big problem. Neuroscience typically can’t predict individual behavior very much. Fictional exchange with prosecutor.

• Explaining lots and Predicting Little

• works through some cases in which probability of prediction decreases, but no less likely that it could be a case of compulsion. 601

• 602: no less biological, but level of biological explanation is different. Behavior is multifactorial. Example: how much does biology predict depression. Factors are diverse biological mechanisms, including cultural factors.

• Marvin Minsky, “Free will: internal forces I do not understand”. Sapolsky adds “yet”.

• If you still believe in mitigated free will:

• case of Dramer and Springer and the spiritual explanation for epilepsy.
• reductio of inquisitor
• growth of knowledge argument 607-608. Most likely option is that our kids will look at us as idiots about moral responsibility and culpability.

608: practical outcomes. Not about letting violent criminals free. On the biological view, punishment can’t be an end in itself (restoring balance).

brain imaging suggests punishment activates more emotional vmPFC. “A frothy limbic state”. Makes sense that punishment is costly. But we need to overcome our attachment to punishment. It is involved in a lot of unjustified suffering.

• car free will.

25: NOV 24

Assigned

• Sapolsky, Chapter 16: Biology, the Criminal Justice System, and (Oh, Why Not?) Free Will (580-613) (Part Two 600-613)

===Sapolsky, Chapter 16: Biology, the Criminal Justice System, and (Oh, Why Not?) Free Will (Part Two)

• See notes from Part One.

26: DEC 1

Assigned

• Radio Lab Episode on Blame and Moral Responsibility

28: DEC 8

Assigned

• Final Essay on Moral Responsibility

Final Essay

• Please write a 600 word essays on the following prompt. The deadline for this assignment is TBD, 2019, 11:59pm.

• Advice about collaboration: I encourage you to collaborate with other students, but only up to the point of sharing ideas, references to class notes, and your own notes. Collaboration is part of the academic process and the intellectual world that college courses are based on, so it is important to me that you have the possibility to collaborate. It's a great way to make sure that a high average level of learning and development occurs. The best way to avoid plagiarism is to NOT share text of draft answers or outlines of your answer. Keep it verbal. Generate your own examples.

• Prepare your essays and submit them in the following way:

1. Do not put your name in the file or filename. You may put your student id number in the file. Please put your word count in the file.
2. Format your essays in double spaced text in a 12 point font, using normal margins.
3. Save the essay in a Word file, using the ".docx" file format. Use the filename "FinalEssay".
4. Log in to courses.alfino.org. Upload your file to the Final Essay dropbox.

29: DEC 10

• Course Conclusion