SEPT 19

7: SEP 19

Assigned

• Haidt, Chapter 3, "Elephants Rule" (52-72)

• Alfino, "Defining Morality and Values" (shared folder)

• Watch:Beginner's Guide to Kant's Moral Philosophy

• SW1 Assigned on Thursday. But previewed today!

In-class content

• "Defining Morality and Values" Philosophers' critical quetions.

What is Ethics? What are Values? How are they enforced?

• Morality is about problems that can be addressed by values.
• Values are expectations of others to think, speak, feel, and act in particular ways (and sometimes to refrain from thinking, speaking, etc. in particular ways).
• We enforce values in social life by many means, from conversation about expectations, gossip about others’ behavior, and, of course, the justice system.

Summing up Sapolsky: Morality as a product of Evolution

• Some key claims and inferences:

• Evolution shapes our bodies, our behaviors, and our ideas (evo-psych)
• Cooperation and coalitions can give us a fitness advantage.
• A problem with cooperation is to not become a sucker and to avoid free-riders.
• This is a problem we can address with values (e.g. it’s a moral problem).
• Morality isn’t only about cooperation.

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

• Affective Priming - flashing word pairs with dissonance: "flower - happiness" vs. "hate - sunshine"
• Implicit Association Test Project Implicit
• Flashing word pairs with political terms causes dissonance. measurable delay in response when, say, conservatives read "Clinton" and "sunshine". Dissonance is pain.
• Todorov's work extending "attractiveness" advantage to snap judgements. "Competency" judgments of political candidates correct 2/3 of time. note:
• Judgements of competence. note speed of judgement .1 of a second.(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 Belief Change

• Josh Greene's fMRI studies of Trolley type problems. The Trolley Problem
• Research study: 20 stories like trolley: direct personal harm, for good reason. 20 stories of impersonal harm. 18 test subjects put in fMRI and asked about each story. Personal harm stories consistently activate more emotional centers, like vmPFC.
• 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...

Philosophical Moral Theories: Duty Ethics

• Basic intuition behind non-consequential duty ethics: Moral behavior sometimes feels like a "command" or absolute imperative to live up to an ideal. Versions of this include:

• An external command, as coming from a creator God, such as God's command to Abraham to kill Isaac, or, better, to follow the example of Jesus. But then, a revolutionary might also feel this way.
• An internal command, an internalization of Divine laws, like the 10 commandments, or
• A completely secular sense of duty to be true to an ideal or conception of ourselves.

• As rational - "I have to respect X's right to live their own lives" (also respect for autonomy)
• As deserving of basic dignity - "I don't feel morally comfortable with people making degrading choices from limited options." (Famine brides, sex trafficking, organ donation under conditions of poverty, but also humiliation, etc. from discrimination)
• As deserving of care - Human dignity also requires that I care for other's basic needs. (People living in squalor, dying for lack of health care.
• As free people who enjoy liberty. (This relates to our new unit on basic liberties.)

• Typical formulation of "modern" duty ethics comes from Kant. He is focused on autonomy and honoring our rational being, not improving others' material circumstances. Morality has nothing to do with our natural inclinations or self-interest.

• Kant's view:

• What does it mean to be good, for Kant? 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).

• What is it that Kant wants you to love and swear absolute duty to? A little background on Kant. Enlightenment figure. (This is a good time to read a bit about the European intellectual movement called "The Enlightenment". Some Enlightenment ideals: modern free will, importance of reason.

• Kant's ideal: Morality originates in my free will. The ability to make rules for ourselves. Being rational. Being bad is a failure of duty to revere this freedom in me and in others.
• This does involves a pretty radical abstraction from the promotion of happiness. For Kant, what's morally important about us has nothing to do with our well-being, contra eudaimonistic ethics.

• Categorical Imperative - Kant's phrase for the kind of motivation (maxim describing our will) that is moral, as opposed to prudential (prudence is about managing consequences).

• Formulation #1: “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. There is a logical contradiction between the 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. Recall video.

• 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. (Are you on "team Reason"? How do we integrate that with knowledge of morality as a system of evolved social behaviors?)

• Rationalism: Kant thinks we can all agree, in principle, to promote the idea of the world as a place for rational beings.