Welcome to the Nexus of Ethics, Psychology, Morality, Philosophy and Health Care

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

Wednesday, January 6, 2021

Moral “foundations” as the product of motivated social cognition: Empathy and other psychological underpinnings of ideological divergence in “individualizing” and “binding” concerns

Strupp-Levitsky M, et al.
PLoS ONE 15(11): e0241144. 

Abstract

According to moral foundations theory, there are five distinct sources of moral intuition on which political liberals and conservatives differ. The present research program seeks to contextualize this taxonomy within the broader research literature on political ideology as motivated social cognition, including the observation that conservative judgments often serve system-justifying functions. In two studies, a combination of regression and path modeling techniques were used to explore the motivational underpinnings of ideological differences in moral intuitions. Consistent with our integrative model, the “binding” foundations (in-group loyalty, respect for authority, and purity) were associated with epistemic and existential needs to reduce uncertainty and threat and system justification tendencies, whereas the so-called “individualizing” foundations (fairness and avoidance of harm) were generally unrelated to epistemic and existential motives and were instead linked to empathic motivation. Taken as a whole, these results are consistent with the position taken by Hatemi, Crabtree, and Smith that moral “foundations” are themselves the product of motivated social cognition.

Concluding remarks

Taken in conjunction, the results presented here lead to several conclusions that should be of relevance to social scientists who study morality, social justice, and political ideology. First, we observe that so-called “binding” moral concerns pertaining to ingroup loyalty, authority, and purity are psychologically linked to epistemic and, to a lesser extent, existential motives to reduce uncertainty and threat. Second, so-called “individualizing” concerns for fairness and avoidance of harm are not linked to these same motives. Rather, they seem to be driven largely by empathic sensitivity. Third, it would appear that theories of moral foundations and motivated social cognition are in some sense compatible, as suggested by Van Leeuween and Park, rather than incompatible, as suggested by Haidt and Graham and Haidt. That is, the motivational basis of conservative preferences for “binding” intuitions seems to be no different than the motivational basis for many other conservative preferences, including system justification and the epistemic and existential motives that are presumed to underlie system justification.

Friday, April 10, 2020

Moralizing biology: The appeal and limits of the new compassionate view of nature

Maurizio Meloni
History of the Human Sciences, 
July 2013 vol. 26 no. 3 82-106

Abstract

In recent years, a proliferation of books about empathy, cooperation, and prosocial behaviours (Brooks, 2011a) have significantly influenced the discourse of the life sciences and reversed consolidated views of nature as a place only for competition and aggression. In this article I describe the recent contribution of three disciplines: moral psychology (Jonathan Haidt), primatology (Frans de Waal) and the neuroscience of morality, to the present transformation of biology and evolution into direct sources of moral phenomena, a process here named the ‘moralization of biology’. I conclude by addressing the ambivalent status of this constellation of authors, for whom today ‘morality comes naturally’: I explore both the attractiveness of their message, and the problematic epistemological assumptions of their research programs in the light of new discoveries in developmental and molecular biology.

Here is an excerpt:

However, why should the dichotomous framework, which sets up an opposition between biology as a solid bedrock and cultural/psychological processes, persist in the light of the new epistemology of the gene? Philosophers of biology have often attributed such persistence to the fact that scholars who usually ‘know better’ occasionally lapse into epistemologically outmoded views (Griffiths, 1999; Linquist et al., 2011), possibly confused by notions like innateness that permit unjustified inferences too easily (Griffiths, 2002).  While this is certainly a plausible explanation it does not rule out a second one, namely that this outmoded epistemology still pays political dividends today, making it inconvenient to let it go. I refer to the returns that this stratigraphic view of biology still yields today in terms of political hope and optimism.

The paper is here.

Monday, March 12, 2018

The tech bias: why Silicon Valley needs social theory

Jan Bier
aeon.com
Originally posted February 14, 2018

Here is an excerpt:

That Google memo is an extreme example of an imbalance in how different ways of knowing are valued. Silicon Valley tech companies draw on innovative technical theory but have yet to really incorporate advances in social theory. The inattention to such knowledge becomes all too apparent when algorithms fail in their real-life applications – from automated soap-dispensers that fail to turn on when a user has dark brown skin, to the new iPhone X’s inability to distinguish among different Asian women.

Social theorists in fields such as sociology, geography, and science and technology studies have shown how race, gender and class biases inform technical design. So there’s irony in the fact that employees hold sexist and racist attitudes, yet ‘we are supposed to believe that these same employees are developing “neutral” or “objective” decision-making tools’, as the communications scholar Safiya Umoja Noble at the University of Southern California argues in her book Algorithms of Oppression (2018).

In many cases, what’s eroding the value of social knowledge is unintentional bias – on display when prominent advocates for equality in science and tech undervalue research in the social sciences. The physicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson, for example, has downplayed the link between sexism and under-representation in science. Apparently, he’s happy to ignore extensive research pointing out that the natural sciences’ male-dominated institutional cultures are a major cause of the attrition of female scientists at all stages of their careers.

The article is here.