Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Adriana on October 25, 2011 at 2:17pm

I like de Waal a lot.

Permalink Reply by Adriana on October 27, 2011 at 12:47pm

Permalink Reply by Dallas the Phallus on April 22, 2012 at 2:11pm

Video gone.

Permalink Reply by Adriana on November 1, 2011 at 11:12am

Paul Zak on oxytocin as the "morality" hormone

Permalink Reply by Adriana on December 3, 2011 at 6:09pm

Killing One Person To Save Five

Researchers test a famous ethical dilemma called the "trolley problem" in a very real setting. Christie Nicholson reports

December 3, 2011 |

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Would you kill one person to save five others?

Philosophers have posed this moral dilemma for decades. Typically they present the situation as a mental exercise. A runaway train is about to strike five people walking along the track. You can reroute the train and save the five people. But you will wind up killing one person walking on the other track.

Recently, researchers tried to make the dilemma feel much more real. They placed 147 subjects in a 3-D virtual environment where they are in front of a railroad switch controlling two tracks. They watch five people hike along a track bordered by a ravine. A single person hikes along the other track. Suddenly a train comes barreling toward the five people. The subject has the option to reroute the train using a joystick.

Ninety percent of the study subjects switched tracks, killing the lone hiker to save five. These findings match past studies that were only abstract thought experiments. The study is in the journal Emotion.

It appears that even in very realistic, action oriented situations, people will go through with a Sophie’s Choice, motivated by accomplishing the apparently greater good.

—Christie NIcholson

Permalink Reply by Dallas the Phallus on April 22, 2012 at 2:07pm

Not easy reading, but here you go:

 

Non-cognitivism

Non-cognitivism is the meta-ethical view that ethical sentences do not express propositions and thus cannot be true or false (they are not truth-apt). A noncognitivist denies the cognitivist claim that "moral judgments are capable of being objectively true, because they describe some feature of the world."^[1] If moral statements cannot be true, and if one cannot know something that is not true, noncognitivism implies that moral knowledge is impossible.^[1]

Non-cognitivism entails that non-cognitive attitudes underlie moral discourse and this discourse therefore consists of non-declarative speech acts, although accepting that its surface features may consistently and efficiently work as if moral discourse were cognitive. The point of interpreting moral claims as non-declarative speech acts is to explain what moral claims mean if they are neither true nor false (as philosophies such as logical positivism entail). Utterances like "Boo to killing!" and "Don't kill" are not candidates for truth or falsity, but have non-cognitive meaning.

.....

Emotivism, associated with A. J. Ayer, the Vienna Circle and C. L. Stevenson, suggests that ethical sentences are primarily emotional expressions of one's own attitudes and are intended to influence the actions of the listener. Under this view, "Killing is wrong" is translated as "Killing, boo!" or "I disapprove of killing; do so as well."

A close cousin of emotivism, developed by R. M. Hare, is called universal prescriptivism. Prescriptivists interpret ethical statements as being universal imperatives, prescribing behavior for all to follow. According to prescriptivism, phrases like "Thou shalt not murder!" or "Do not steal!" are the clearest expressions of morality, while reformulations like "Killing is wrong" tend to obscure the meaning of moral sentences.

.....

As with other anti-realist meta-ethical theories, non-cognitivism is largely supported by the argument from queerness: ethical properties, if they existed, would be different from any other thing in the universe, since they have no observable effect on the world. People generally have a negative attitude towards murder - calling it a disgust. This sentiment presumably keeps most of us from murdering. But does the actual wrongness of murder play an independent role? Is there any evidence that there is a property of wrongness that some types of acts have? Some people might think that the strong feelings we have when we see or consider a murder provide evidence of murder's wrongness. But it is not difficult to explain these feelings without saying that wrongness was their cause. Thus there is no way of discerning which, if any, ethical properties exist; by Occam's Razor, the simplest assumption is that none do. The non-cognitivist then asserts that, since a proposition about an ethical property would have no referent, ethical statements must be something else.

Arguments for emotivism focus on what normative statements express when uttered by a speaker. A person who says that killing is wrong certainly expresses her disapproval of killing. Emotivists claim that this is all she does, that "Killing is wrong" is not a truth-apt declaration, and that the burden of evidence is on the cognitivists who want to show that in addition to expressing disapproval, the claim "Killing is wrong" is also true. Emotivists ask whether there really is evidence that killing is wrong. We have evidence that Jupiter has a magnetic field and that birds are oviparous, but as of yet, we do not seem to have found evidence of moral properties, such as "goodness". Emotivists ask why, without such evidence, we should think there is such a property. Ethical intuitionists think the evidence comes not from science or reason but from our own feelings: good deeds make us feel a certain way and bad deeds make us feel very differently. But is this enough to show that there are genuinely good and bad deeds? Emotivists think not, claiming that we do not need to postulate the existence of moral "badness" or "wrongness" to explain why considering certain deeds makes us feel disapproval; that all we really observe when we introspect are feelings of disapproval. Thus the emotivist asks why not to adopt the simple explanation and say that this is all there is; why insist that a genuine "badness" (of murder, for example) must be causing feelings, when a simpler explanation is available.

 

 

Argument from queerness

"The argument from queerness" is a term used in the philosophical study of ethics first developed by J. L. Mackie in his book Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong ISBN 0-14-013558-8 (1977).

Mackie argues against the view that there can be objective ethical values, and he uses the term to describe a certain sort of reductio ad absurdum which belief in such values implies. He states that "If there were objective values, then they would be entities or qualities or relations of a very strange sort, utterly different from anything else in the universe (1977, p. 38)". Hence Mackie argues that this in itself is sufficient reason for doubting their existence.

.....

In his book Morality without Foundations: A Defense of Ethical Contextualism (1999), Mark Timmons provides a reconstruction of Mackie's views in the form of the two related arguments. These are based on the rejection of properties, facts, and relationships that do not fit within the worldview of philosophical naturalism, the idea "that everything — including any particulars events, facts, properties, and so on — is part of the natural physical world that science investigates" (1999, p. 12). Timmons adds, "The undeniable attraction of this outlook in contemporary philosophy no doubt stems from the rise of modern science and the belief that science is our best avenue for discovering the nature of reality" (1999, pp. 12-13).

The first argument is that our ordinary moral discourse purports to refer to intrinsically prescriptive properties and facts "that would somehow motivate us or provide us with reasons for action independent of our desires and aversions" — but such properties and facts do not comport with philosophical naturalism (page 50).

The second argument is that, if moral realism posits the existence of objective moral properties that supervene upon natural properties (such as biological or psychological properties), then the relation between the moral properties and the natural properties is metaphysically mysterious and does not comport with philosophical naturalism (p. 51).

Also, Timmons says, in connection with both of these arguments Mackie makes the point that a moral realist who countenances the existence of metaphysically queer properties, facts, and relations must also posit some special faculty by which we have knowledge of them (Timmons, p. 51).

In his 1977 book Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong, Mackie uses these arguments to assert that most moral discourse is flawed because it presumes the existence of moral facts which aren't true. He then goes on to propose his own ethical theory, based on an effort to accommodate this deficiency. Mackie's argument from queerness has also inspired fictionalists and has been cited as support for quasi-realism.

Permalink Reply by Dallas the Phallus on April 22, 2012 at 2:11pm

Argghhh! More reading to do:

 

Moral Motivation

First published Thu 19 Oct, 2006

In our everyday lives, we confront a host of moral issues. Once we have deliberated and formed judgments about what is right or wrong, good or bad, these judgments tend to have a marked hold on us. Although in the end, we do not always behave as we think we ought, our moral judgments typically motivate us, at least to some degree, to act in accordance with them. When philosophers talk about moral motivation, this is the basic phenomenon they seek to understand. Moral motivation is an instance of a more general phenomenon—what we might call normative motivation—for our other normative judgments also typically have some motivating force. When we make the normative judgment that something is good for us, or that we have a reason to act in a particular way, or that a specific course of action is the rational course, we also tend to be moved. Many philosophers have regarded the motivating force of normative judgments as the key feature that marks them as normative, thereby distinguishing them from the many other judgments we make. In contrast to our normative judgments, our mathematical and empirical judgments, for example, seem to have no intrinsic connection to motivation and action. The belief that an antibiotic will cure a specific infection may move an individual to take the antibiotic, if she also believes that she has the infection, and if she either desires to be cured or judges that she ought to treat the infection for her own good. All on its own, however, an empirical belief like this one appears to carry with it no particular motivational impact; a person can judge that an antibiotic will most effectively cure a specific infection without being moved one way or another.

Although motivating force may be a distinguishing feature of normative judgments, the phenomenon of normative motivation seems most significant in the case of narrowly moral judgments. Moral motivation has, in any case, received far greater attention than motivation in connection with other normative judgments. Morality is widely believed to conflict, frequently and sometimes severely, with what an agent most values or most prefers to do. Perhaps because of the apparent opposition between self-interest and morality, the fact of moral motivation has seemed especially puzzling. How is it that we are so reliably moved by our moral judgments? And what is the precise nature of the connection between moral judgment and motivation? Of course, the less puzzling and more mundane moral motivation comes to seem, the more puzzling failures of moral motivation become. If we are to explain moral motivation, we will need to understand not only how moral judgments so regularly succeed in motivating, but how they can fail to motivate, sometimes rather spectacularly. Not only do we witness motivational failure among the deranged, dejected, and confused, but also, it appears, among the fully sound and self-possessed. What are we to make of the “amoralist”—the rational, strong willed individual who seemingly makes moral judgments, while remaining utterly indifferent? [continue]

Permalink Reply by Dallas the Phallus on April 23, 2012 at 9:51am

Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others. His culture is based on "I am not too sure." -- H.L. Mencken, writer, editor, and critic (1880-1956)

Permalink Reply by Adriana on April 27, 2012 at 4:10pm

This is FANTASTIC! I so agree!

Permalink Reply by Neal on April 27, 2012 at 4:31pm

Almost too easy.

Permalink Reply by Adriana on June 13, 2012 at 5:05pm

Michael Sandel: 'There are fewer and fewer things that money can't buy'

Michael Sandel, the Harvard political philosospher and teacher of the famous course on 'Justice' discusses his new book What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets. In it he provides examples of areas of life in which the introduction of market forces can have unintended and often negative consequences.

Video can be seen here (can't embed)

Permalink Reply by Adriana on June 18, 2012 at 1:18pm

Excellent interview with peter singer, about utilitarianism, faith, absolute certainty, political ethics:

Politics, faith, philosophy, and Peter Singer

FLORIDA, June 18, 2012 — Is it wise to search for absolute certainty? Does such a thing really exist? Can we use faith to find the answers, or are we better off sticking with science?

Speaking of faith and science, there is a major campaign going on in the political realm, the place where they intersect. If politics is an extension of a nation's culture, what does the rapidly changing American social and political landscape imply about our values? What guides our social evolution on an intellectual level?

Ethics, of course.

In this second and final part of my interview with Dr. Peter Singer, one of the world's foremost authorities on applied ethics, he discusses declining standards in contemporary politics, worsening state of the environment and a modern consideration of traditional Western philosophies.

He also explains what motivated him to become an ethicist in the first place.

****

Joseph F. Cotto: Some might perceive your utilitarian approach to ethics as irrational, or even counterproductive. Why, from your prospective, is utilitarianism a better bet than traditional Western philosophies that promote absolute certainty? 

Dr. Peter Singer: It's difficult to give a short answer to that question - in fact I'm co-authoring a book about it at the moment - but in brief, I think these more traditional Western philosophies may seem to promote "absolute certainty" but of course they do not, as we see from the disagreements between them, and from the fact that they are not even internally consistent, as I have argued in several of my books.  I see acting in the best interests of all those affected by our actions as the most ethical and the most rational way to live.

Read it all here. 

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