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Welcome to the nexus of ethics, psychology, morality, technology, health care, and philosophy
Showing posts with label Relativism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Relativism. Show all posts

Friday, September 10, 2021

Why social liberals are not moral relativists

Thomas Hurka
The New Statesman
Originally published 3 March 21

Here is an excerpt:

We tend to think of morality as issuing commands and prohibitions – Moses didn’t give his people the Ten Permissions – but morality also allows things. Trivially, it lets you choose your hairstyle; there’s nothing morally wrong about having a mullet. More seriously, if you could save two strangers’ lives by sacrificing your own, morality permits you to do that, but it also permits you not to. In cases like this morality allows you to care more about your own life and so again frees you to make either of two choices. A progressive private morality simply grants more of these permissions.

And a progressive morality can perfectly well ground public duties, though of a distinctively liberal kind. It can say that whenever someone is permitted to make a choice, others are forbidden to interfere with that choice or prevent them from making it.

Thus rape is wrong in part because it prevents the other person from deciding, as they’re morally permitted to, not to have sex with someone. By the same token, though, if a state criminalises gay sex, that too prevents people from doing something morally permitted and is wrong – hence liberals’ opposition to such laws.

For liberals, everyone has the right to make certain choices in their private lives, and others are required, as a matter of public morality, to respect that right. It’s wrong to force someone to do what they’re permitted not to do. In the liberal view, just as in the conservative view, a universal public duty rests on a universal truth about private morality. But this truth is now one that permits rather than forbids things.

*   *   *   

If all this is true, why do some progressives say relativist-sounding things that invite a charge like Barr’s? They may be making, in a slightly misleading way, several claims that aren’t relativist but can sound as though they are.

By “values are relative”, for example, liberals may mean only to emphasise that people’s beliefs about morality differ, both between cultures and within a single one, and that we should take account of this in our moral thinking. Recognising this plurality can make us less prone to assume, dogmatically, that our particular moral convictions capture the whole of universal moral truth. Maybe some other culture or person has insights we lack; maybe the most adequate moral view combines some elements from ours with some from theirs.

Sometimes the differences between cultures are simply a matter of the conventional ways they express a shared moral value. In one culture people show respect for each other by taking off their hats, while in another they do so by keeping their heads covered. Here it may be true that the “right” thing to do with headgear differs between these cultures, but that’s not a relativist claim because it concerns only the arbitrary specification of a universal value of respect.

Friday, November 15, 2019

Is Moral Relativism Really a Problem?

Is Moral Relativism Really a Problem?Thomas Polzler
Scientific American Blog
Originally published October 16, 2019

Here is an excerpt:

Warnings against moral relativism are most often based on theoretical speculation. Critics consider the view’s nature and add certain assumptions about human psychology. Then they infer how being a relativist might affect a person’s behavior. For example, for a relativist, even actions such as murder or rape can never be really or absolutely wrong; they are only wrong to the extent that the relativist or most members of his or her culture believe them to be so.

One may therefore worry that relativists are less motivated to refrain from murdering and raping than people who regard these actions as objectively wrong. While this scenario may sound plausible, however, it is important to note that relativism’s effects can only ultimately be determined by relevant studies.

So far, scientific investigations do not support the suspicion that moral relativism is problematic. True, there are two studies that do suggest such a conclusion. In one of them, participants were led to think about morality in either relativist or objectivist terms. It turned out that subjects in the relativist condition were more likely to cheat in a lottery and to state that they would be willing to steal than those in the objectivist condition. In the other study, participants who had been exposed to relativist ideas were less likely to donate to charity than those who had been exposed to objectivist ones.

That said, there is also evidence that associates moral relativism with positive behaviors. In one of her earlier studies, Wright and her colleagues informed their participants that another person disagreed with one of their moral judgments. Then the researchers measured the subjects’ degree of tolerance for this person’s divergent moral view. For example, participants were asked how willing they would be to interact with the person, how willing they would be to help him or her and how comfortable they generally were with another individual denying one of their moral judgments. It turned out that subjects with relativist leanings were more tolerant toward the disagreeing person than those who had tended toward objectivism.

The info is here.

Tuesday, May 14, 2019

Who Should Decide How Algorithms Decide?

Mark Esposito, Terence Tse, Joshua Entsminger, and Aurelie Jean
Project-Syndicate
Originally published April 17, 2019

Here is an excerpt:

Consider the following scenario: a car from China has different factory standards than a car from the US, but is shipped to and used in the US. This Chinese-made car and a US-made car are heading for an unavoidable collision. If the Chinese car’s driver has different ethical preferences than the driver of the US car, which system should prevail?

Beyond culturally based differences in ethical preferences, one also must consider differences in data regulations across countries. A Chinese-made car, for example, might have access to social-scoring data, allowing its decision-making algorithm to incorporate additional inputs that are unavailable to US carmakers. Richer data could lead to better, more consistent decisions, but should that advantage allow one system to overrule another?

Clearly, before AVs take to the road en masse, we will need to establish where responsibility for algorithmic decision-making lies, be it with municipal authorities, national governments, or multilateral institutions. More than that, we will need new frameworks for governing this intersection of business and the state. At issue is not just what AVs will do in extreme scenarios, but how businesses will interact with different cultures in developing and deploying decision-making algorithms.

The info is here.

Sunday, September 16, 2018

Time to abandon grand ethical theories?

Julian Baggini
TheTLS.co
Originally posted May 22, 2018

Here are two excerpts:

Social psychologists, sociologists and anthropologists would not be baffled by this apparent contradiction. Many have long believed that morality is essentially a system of social regulation. As such it is in no more need of a divine foundation or a philosophical justification than folk dancing or tribal loyalty. Indeed, if ethics is just the management of the social sphere, it should not be surprising that as we live in a more globalized world, ethics becomes enlarged to encompass not only how we treat kith and kin but our distant neighbours too.

Philosophers have more to worry about. They are not generally satisfied to see morality as a purely pragmatic means of keeping the peace. To see the world muddling through morality is deeply troubling. Where’s the consistency? Where’s the theoretical framework? Where’s the argument?

(cut)

There is then a curious combination of incoherence and vagueness about just what it is to be ethical, and a bogus precision in the ways in which organizations prove themselves to be good. All this confusion helps fuel philosophical ethics, which has become a vibrant, thriving discipline, providing academic presses with a steady stream of books. Looking over a sample of their recent output, it is evident that moral philosophers are keen to show that they are not just playing intellectual games and that they have something to offer the world.

The info is here.

Friday, August 24, 2018

Religion does not determine your morality

Jim Davies
The Conversation
Originally posted July 24, 2018

Here is an excerpt:

Experimental evidence suggests that people’s opinion of what God thinks is right and wrong tracks what they believe is right and wrong, not the other way around.

Social psychologist Nicholas Epley and his colleagues surveyed religious believers about their moral beliefs and the moral beliefs of God. Not surprisingly, what people thought was right and wrong matched up pretty well with what they felt God’s morality was like.

Then Epley and his fellow researchers attempted to manipulate their participants’ moral beliefs with persuasive essays. If convinced, their moral opinion should then be different from God’s, right?

Wrong. When respondents were asked again what God thought, people reported that God agreed with their new opinion!

Therefore, people didn’t come to believe that God is wrong, they just updated their opinion on what God thinks.

When you change someone’s moral beliefs, you also change their opinion on what God thinks. Yet most surveyed still clung to the illusion that they got their moral compass from what they think God believes is right and wrong.

The information is here.

Monday, August 6, 2018

Why Should We Be Good?

Matt McManus
Quillette.com
Originally posted July 7, 2018

Here are two excerpts:

The negative motivation arises from moral dogmatism. There are those who wish to dogmatically assert their own values without worrying that they may not be as universal as one might suppose. For instance, this is often the case with religious fundamentalists who worry that secular society is increasingly unmoored from proper values and traditions. Ironically, the dark underside of this moral dogmatism is often a relativistic epistemology. Ethical dogmatists do not want to be confronted with the possibility that it is possible to challenge their values because they often cannot provide good reasons to back them up.

(cut)

These issues are all of considerable philosophical interest. In what follows, I want to press on just one issue that is often missed in debates between those who believe there are universal values, and those who believe that what is ethically correct is relative to either a culture or to the subjective preference of individuals. The issue I wish to explore is this: even if we know which values are universal, why should we feel compelled to adhere to them? Put more simply, even if we know what it is to be good, why should we bother to be good? This is one of the major questions addressed by what is often called meta-ethics.

The information is here.

Thursday, April 19, 2018

Artificial Intelligence Is Killing the Uncanny Valley and Our Grasp on Reality

Sandra Upson
Wired.com
Originally posted February 16, 2018

Here is an excerpt:

But it’s not hard to see how this creative explosion could all go very wrong. For Yuanshun Yao, a University of Chicago graduate student, it was a fake video that set him on his recent project probing some of the dangers of machine learning. He had hit play on a recent clip of an AI-generated, very real-looking Barack Obama giving a speech, and got to thinking: Could he do a similar thing with text?

A text composition needs to be nearly perfect to deceive most readers, so he started with a forgiving target, fake online reviews for platforms like Yelp or Amazon. A review can be just a few sentences long, and readers don’t expect high-quality writing. So he and his colleagues designed a neural network that spat out Yelp-style blurbs of about five sentences each. Out came a bank of reviews that declared such things as, “Our favorite spot for sure!” and “I went with my brother and we had the vegetarian pasta and it was delicious.” He asked humans to then guess whether they were real or fake, and sure enough, the humans were often fooled.

The information is here.

Sunday, January 28, 2018

Republicans redefine morality as whatever Trump does

Dana Milbank
The Washington Post
Posted on January 26, 2018

Someday, likely three years from now, perhaps sooner, perhaps — gulp — later, President Trump will depart the stage.

But what will be left of us?

New evidence suggests that the damage he is doing to the culture is bigger than the man. A Quinnipiac University poll released Thursday found that two-thirds of Americans say Trump is not a good role model for children. Every component of society feels that way — men and women, old and young, black and white, highly educated or not — except for one: Republicans. By 72 to 22 percent, they say Trump is a good role model.

In marked contrast to the rest of the country, Republicans also say that Trump shares their values (82 percent) and that — get this — he “provides the United States with moral leadership” (80 percent).

And what moral leadership this role model has been providing!

The article is here.

Thursday, September 14, 2017

Bioethics and multiculturalism: nuancing the discussion

Chris Durante
Journal of Medical Ethics 
Published Online First: 11 August 2017

Abstract

In his recent analysis of multiculturalism, Tom Beauchamp has argued that those who implement multicultural reasoning in their arguments against common morality theories, such as his own, have failed to understand that multiculturalism is neither a form of moral pluralism nor ethical relativism but is rather a universalistic moral theory in its own right. Beauchamp’s position is indeed on the right track in that multiculturalists do not consider themselves ethical relativists. Yet, Beauchamp tends to miss the mark when he argues that multiculturalism is in effect a school of thought that endorses a form of moral universalism that is akin to his own vision of a common morality. As a supporter of multiculturalism, I would like to discuss some aspects of Beauchamp’s comments on multiculturalism and clarify what a multicultural account of public bioethics might look like. Ultimately, multiculturalism is purported as a means of managing diversity in the public arena and should not be thought of as endorsing either a version of moral relativism or a universal morality. By simultaneously refraining from the promotion of a comprehensive common moral system while it attempts to avoid a collapse into relativism, multiculturalism can serve as the ethico-political framework in which diverse moralities can be managed and in which opportunities for ethical dialogue, debate and deliberation on the prospects of common bioethical norms are made possible.

The article is here.

Tuesday, October 18, 2016

Folk Moral Relativism

Hagop Sarkissian, John Park, David Tien, Jennifer Wright & Joshua Knobe
Mind and Language 26 (4):482-505 (2011)

Abstract:

It has often been suggested that people's ordinary understanding of morality involves a belief in objective moral truths and a rejection of moral relativism. The results of six studies call this claim into question. Participants did offer apparently objectivist moral intuitions when considering individuals from their own culture, but they offered increasingly relativist intuitions considering individuals from increasingly different cultures or ways of life. The authors hypothesize that people do not have a fixed commitment to moral objectivism but instead tend to adopt different views depending on the degree to which they consider radically different perspectives on moral questions.

The article is here.

Friday, December 4, 2015

Folk
 Moral 
Relativism

Hagop Sarkissian, John Park, David Tien, Jennifer Wright & Joshua Knobe
Mind and Language 26 (4):482-505 (2011)

Abstract

It has often been suggested that people's ordinary understanding of morality involves a belief in objective moral truths and a rejection of moral relativism. The results of six studies call this claim into question. Participants did offer apparently objectivist moral intuitions when considering individuals from their own culture, but they offered increasingly relativist intuitions considering individuals from increasingly different cultures or ways of life. The authors hypothesize that people do not have a fixed commitment to moral objectivism but instead tend to adopt different views depending on the degree to which they consider radically different perspectives on moral questions.

The entire article is here.

Thursday, November 20, 2014

Teaching Moral Values

Panellists: Michael Portillo, Anne McElvoy, Claire Fox and Giles Fraser

Witnesses: Adrian Bishop, Dr. Sandra Cooke, Professor Jesse Prinz and Dr. Ralph Levinson

Teaching your children a set of moral values to live their lives by is arguably one of the most important aspects of being a parent - and for some, one of the most neglected. In Japan that job could soon be handed to teachers and become part of the school curriculum. The Central Council for Education is making preparations to introduce moral education as an official school subject, on a par with traditional subjects like Japanese, mathematics and science. In a report the council says that since moral education plays an important role not only in helping children realise a better life for themselves but also in ensuring sustainable development of the Japanese state and society, so it should to taught more formally and the subject codified. The prospect of the state defining a set of approved values to be taught raises some obvious questions, but is it very far away from what we already accept? School websites often talk of their "moral ethos". The much quoted aphorism "give me the child until he is seven and I'll give you the man" is attributed to the Jesuits and why are church schools so popular if it's not for their faith based ethos? Moral philosophy is an enormously diverse subject, but why not use it to give children a broad set of tools and questions to ask, to help them make sense of a complex and contradictory world? If we try and make classrooms morally neutral zones are we just encouraging moral relativism? Our society is becoming increasingly secular and finding it hard to define a set of common values. As another disputed epigram puts it "When men stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing. They believe in anything."

Could moral education fill the moral vacuum?

Moral Maze - Presented by Michael Buerk

The audio file can be accessed here.

Friday, July 5, 2013

Objective vs Subjective Morality

Published by Steven Novella
NeurologicaBlog
Originally published January 11, 2013

I am fascinated by the philosophy of ethics, ever since I took a course in it in undergraduate school. This is partly because I enjoy thinking about complex systems (which partly explains why I ended up in Neurology as my specialty). I also greatly enjoy logic, and particularly deconstructing arguments (my own and others) to identify their logical essence and see if or where they go wrong.

In a previous post I wrote about the philosophy of morality. This spawned over 400 comments (so far), so it seems we could use another post to reset the conversation.

The discussion is between objective vs subjective morality, mostly focusing around a proponent of objective morality (commenter nym of Zach). Here I will lay out my position for a philosophical basis of morality and explain why I think objective morality is not only unworkable, it’s a fiction.

First, let’s define “morality” and discuss why it is needed. Morality is a code of behavior that aspires to some goal that is perceived as good. The question at hand is where do morals and morality come from. I think this question is informed by the question of why we need morals in the first place.

I maintain that morals can only be understood in the context of the moral actor. Humans, for example, have emotions and feelings. We care about stuff, about our own well being, about those who love, about our “tribe.” We also have an evolved sense of morality, such as the concepts of reciprocity and justice.

Further, humans are social animals, and in fact we have no choice but to share this planet with each other. Our behavior, therefore, affects others. If we had no cares at all about what happens to us or others, or our actions had no affect on anything but ourselves, then there would be no need for morality, and in fact morality would have no meaning.

We can take as empirical facts, however, that humans have feelings and our actions affect others – these are therefore well-founded premises for a moral system. Philosophers have tried to derive from there further premises as a starting point for a moral system. The goal is to derive the most fundamental principles, or determine the most reasonable first principles, and then proceed carefully from there.

The entire blog post is here.