By Julian Baggini
The Philosophers Magazine
Originally published October 13, 2015
Here is an excerpt:
Smilansky is speculating about optimism and pessimism. But one study has come up with some empirical evidence that extraversion and introversion are correlated with beliefs about free will, concluding that “extraversion predicts, to a significant extent, those who have compatibilist versus incompatibilist intuitions.”
Many are appalled by this idea as it goes against the whole notion that philosophy is about arguments, not arguers. But you only need to read the biographies and autobiographies of great philosophers to see that their personalities are intimately tied up with their ideas. W V O Quine, for instance, recalled how as a toddler he sought the unfamiliar way home, which he interpreted as reflecting “the thrill of discovery in theoretical science: the reduction of the unfamiliar to the familiar.” Later, he was obsessed with crossing state lines and national borders, ticking each off on a list as he did so. Paul Feyerabend recalled how, not yet ten, he was enchanted by magic and mystery and wasn’t affected by “the many strange events that seemed to make up our world.” Only a philosopher with delusions of her subject's objectivity would be surprised to find out that Quine and Feyerabend went on to write very different kinds of philosophy: Quine’s in a formal, logical, systematising tradition (though typically on the limits of such formalisations); Feyerabend’s anti-reductive and anti-systematising. It would take a great deal of faith in the objectivity of philosophy and philosophers to think that Feyerabend and Quine arrived at their respective philosophical positions simply by following the arguments where they led, when their inclinations so obviously seem to be in tune with their settled conclusions.
The entire article is here.
Saturday, October 31, 2015
Friday, October 30, 2015
A Short History of Empathy
By Susan Lanzoni
The Atlantic
Originally published October 15, 2015
Here is an excerpt:
In the past few decades, interest in empathy has spread beyond psychology to primatology and neuroscience. In the 1990s, neuroscientists studying monkeys discovered mirror neurons, cells in the animals’ brains that fired not only when a monkey moved, but also when the monkey saw another one make the same movement. The discovery of mirror neurons spurred a wave of research into empathy and brain activity that quickly extended to humans as well. Other recent studies have further widened empathy’s reach into fields like economics and literature, finding that wealth disparities weaken empathic response and that reading fiction can improve it.
But as Kristof and Bloom illustrate, there is still some cultural debate about what empathy means today. And in the psychology community, the answers are no more clear-cut. Critics of the mirror-neuron theory, for example, question not only the location of these neurons in the human brain, but whether simulation of another’s gestures is a good description of empathy in the first place. The social psychologist C. Daniel Batson, who has researched empathy for decades, argues that the term can now refer to eight different concepts: knowing another’s thoughts and feelings; imagining another’s thoughts and feelings; adopting the posture of another; actually feeling as another does; imagining how one would feel or think in another’s place; feeling distress at another’s suffering; feeling for another’s suffering, sometimes called pity or compassion; and projecting oneself into another’s situation.
The entire article is here.
The Atlantic
Originally published October 15, 2015
Here is an excerpt:
In the past few decades, interest in empathy has spread beyond psychology to primatology and neuroscience. In the 1990s, neuroscientists studying monkeys discovered mirror neurons, cells in the animals’ brains that fired not only when a monkey moved, but also when the monkey saw another one make the same movement. The discovery of mirror neurons spurred a wave of research into empathy and brain activity that quickly extended to humans as well. Other recent studies have further widened empathy’s reach into fields like economics and literature, finding that wealth disparities weaken empathic response and that reading fiction can improve it.
But as Kristof and Bloom illustrate, there is still some cultural debate about what empathy means today. And in the psychology community, the answers are no more clear-cut. Critics of the mirror-neuron theory, for example, question not only the location of these neurons in the human brain, but whether simulation of another’s gestures is a good description of empathy in the first place. The social psychologist C. Daniel Batson, who has researched empathy for decades, argues that the term can now refer to eight different concepts: knowing another’s thoughts and feelings; imagining another’s thoughts and feelings; adopting the posture of another; actually feeling as another does; imagining how one would feel or think in another’s place; feeling distress at another’s suffering; feeling for another’s suffering, sometimes called pity or compassion; and projecting oneself into another’s situation.
The entire article is here.
Microaggression, macro harm
By Regina Rini
The Los Angeles Times
Originally published on October 15, 2015
Here is an excerpt:
The Los Angeles Times
Originally published on October 15, 2015
Here is an excerpt:
There is a serious problem with Campbell and Manning's moral history, and exposing it helps us see that the culture of victimhood label is misleading. Their history is a history of the dominant moral culture: It describes the mores of those social groups with the greatest access to power. Think about the culture of honor and notice how limited it must have been. If you were a woman in medieval Europe, you were not expected or permitted to respond to insults with aggression. Even if you were a lower-class man, you certainly would not have drawn your sword in response to an insult from a superior.
Now think about the culture of dignity, which Campbell and Manning claim “existed perhaps in its purest form among respectable people in the homogenous towns of mid-20th century America.” Another thing that existed among the “respectable people” in those towns was approval of racial segregation; “homogenous towns” did not arise by accident.
People of color, women, gay people, immigrants: none could rely on the authorities to respond fairly to reports of mistreatment.
The cultures of honor and dignity left many types of people with no recognized way of responding to moral mistreatment.
Thursday, October 29, 2015
Choosing Empathy
A Conversation with Jamil Zaki
The Edge
Originally published October 19, 2015
Here are some excerpts:
The first narrative is that empathy is automatic. This goes all the way back to Adam Smith, who, to me, generated the first modern account of empathy in his beautiful book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Smith described what he called the "fellow-feeling," through which people take on each other's states—very similar to what I would call experience sharing.
(cut)
That's one narrative, that empathy is automatic, and again, it’s compelling—backed by lots of evidence. But if you believe that empathy always occurs automatically, you run into a freight train of evidence to the contrary. As many of us know, there are lots of instances in which people could feel empathy, but don't. The prototype case here is intergroup settings. People who are divided by a war, or a political issue, or even a sports rivalry, often experience a collapse of their empathy. In many cases, these folks feel apathy for others on the other side of a group boundary. They fail to share, or think about, or feel concern for those other people's emotions.
In other cases, it gets even worse: people feel overt antipathy towards others, for instance, taking pleasure when some misfortune befalls someone on the other side of a group boundary. What's interesting to me is that this occurs not only for group boundaries that are meaningful, like ethnicity or religion, but totally arbitrary groups. If I were to divide us into a red and blue team, without that taking on any more significance, you would be more likely to experience empathy for fellow red team members than for me (apparently I'm on team blue today).
The entire post and video is here.
The Edge
Originally published October 19, 2015
Here are some excerpts:
The first narrative is that empathy is automatic. This goes all the way back to Adam Smith, who, to me, generated the first modern account of empathy in his beautiful book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Smith described what he called the "fellow-feeling," through which people take on each other's states—very similar to what I would call experience sharing.
(cut)
That's one narrative, that empathy is automatic, and again, it’s compelling—backed by lots of evidence. But if you believe that empathy always occurs automatically, you run into a freight train of evidence to the contrary. As many of us know, there are lots of instances in which people could feel empathy, but don't. The prototype case here is intergroup settings. People who are divided by a war, or a political issue, or even a sports rivalry, often experience a collapse of their empathy. In many cases, these folks feel apathy for others on the other side of a group boundary. They fail to share, or think about, or feel concern for those other people's emotions.
In other cases, it gets even worse: people feel overt antipathy towards others, for instance, taking pleasure when some misfortune befalls someone on the other side of a group boundary. What's interesting to me is that this occurs not only for group boundaries that are meaningful, like ethnicity or religion, but totally arbitrary groups. If I were to divide us into a red and blue team, without that taking on any more significance, you would be more likely to experience empathy for fellow red team members than for me (apparently I'm on team blue today).
The entire post and video is here.
CIA torture survivors sue psychologists who designed infamous program
By Spencer Ackerman
The Guardian
Originally published October 13, 2015
Survivors of CIA torture have sued the contractor psychologists who designed one of the most infamous programs of the post-9/11 era.
In an extraordinary step, psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen now face a federal lawsuit for their role in convincing the CIA to subject terror suspects to mock drowning, painful bodily contortions, sleep and dietary deprivation and other methods long rejected by much of the world as torture.
In practice, CIA torture meant disappearances, mock executions, anal penetration performed under cover of “rehydration” and at least one man who froze to death, according to a landmark Senate report last year. Versions of the techniques migrated from the CIA’s undocumented prisons, known as black sites, to US military usage at Guantánamo Bay, Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan and Abu Ghraib in Iraq.
The entire article is here.
The Guardian
Originally published October 13, 2015
Survivors of CIA torture have sued the contractor psychologists who designed one of the most infamous programs of the post-9/11 era.
In an extraordinary step, psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen now face a federal lawsuit for their role in convincing the CIA to subject terror suspects to mock drowning, painful bodily contortions, sleep and dietary deprivation and other methods long rejected by much of the world as torture.
In practice, CIA torture meant disappearances, mock executions, anal penetration performed under cover of “rehydration” and at least one man who froze to death, according to a landmark Senate report last year. Versions of the techniques migrated from the CIA’s undocumented prisons, known as black sites, to US military usage at Guantánamo Bay, Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan and Abu Ghraib in Iraq.
The entire article is here.
Wednesday, October 28, 2015
The predictive brain and the “free will” illusion
Dirk De Ridder, Jan Verplaetse and Sven Vanneste
Front. Psychol., 30 April 2013
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00131
Here is an excerpt:
From an evolutionary point of our experience of “free will” can best be approached by the development of flexible behavioral decision making (Brembs, 2011). Predators can very easily take advantage of deterministic flight reflexes by predicting future prey behavior (Catania, 2009). The opposite, i.e., random behavior is unpredictable but highly inefficient. Thus learning mechanisms evolved to permit flexible behavior as a modification of reflexive behavioral strategies (Brembs, 2011). In order to do so, not one, but multiple representations and action patterns should be generated by the brain, as has already been proposed by von Helmholtz. He found the eye to be optically too poor for vision to be possible, and suggested vision ultimately depended on computational inference, i.e., predictions, based on assumptions and conclusions from incomplete data, relying on previous experiences. The fact that multiple predictions are generated could for example explain the Rubin vase illusion, the Necker cube and the many other stimuli studied in perceptual rivalry, even in monocular rivalry. Which percept or action plan is selected is determined by which prediction is best adapted to the environment that is actively explored (Figure 1A). In this sense, predictive selection of the fittest action plan is analogous to the concept of Darwinian selection of the fittest in natural and sexual selection in evolutionary biology, as well as to the Mendelian selection of the fittest allele in genetics and analogous the selection of the fittest quantum state in physics (Zurek, 2009). Bayesian statistics can be used to select the model with the highest updated likelihood based on environmental new information (Campbell, 2011). What all these models have in common is the fact that they describe adaptive mechanisms to an ever changing environment (Campbell, 2011).
The entire article is here.
Front. Psychol., 30 April 2013
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00131
Here is an excerpt:
From an evolutionary point of our experience of “free will” can best be approached by the development of flexible behavioral decision making (Brembs, 2011). Predators can very easily take advantage of deterministic flight reflexes by predicting future prey behavior (Catania, 2009). The opposite, i.e., random behavior is unpredictable but highly inefficient. Thus learning mechanisms evolved to permit flexible behavior as a modification of reflexive behavioral strategies (Brembs, 2011). In order to do so, not one, but multiple representations and action patterns should be generated by the brain, as has already been proposed by von Helmholtz. He found the eye to be optically too poor for vision to be possible, and suggested vision ultimately depended on computational inference, i.e., predictions, based on assumptions and conclusions from incomplete data, relying on previous experiences. The fact that multiple predictions are generated could for example explain the Rubin vase illusion, the Necker cube and the many other stimuli studied in perceptual rivalry, even in monocular rivalry. Which percept or action plan is selected is determined by which prediction is best adapted to the environment that is actively explored (Figure 1A). In this sense, predictive selection of the fittest action plan is analogous to the concept of Darwinian selection of the fittest in natural and sexual selection in evolutionary biology, as well as to the Mendelian selection of the fittest allele in genetics and analogous the selection of the fittest quantum state in physics (Zurek, 2009). Bayesian statistics can be used to select the model with the highest updated likelihood based on environmental new information (Campbell, 2011). What all these models have in common is the fact that they describe adaptive mechanisms to an ever changing environment (Campbell, 2011).
The entire article is here.
Exploring Accountability of Clinical Ethics Consultants: Practice and Training Implications
Kathryn L. Weise & Barbara J. Daly
The American Journal of Bioethics
Volume 14, Issue 6, 2014
Abstract
Clinical ethics consultants represent a multidisciplinary group of scholars and practitioners with varied training backgrounds, who are integrated into a medical environment to assist in the provision of ethically supportable care. Little has been written about the degree to which such consultants are accountable for the patient care outcome of the advice given. We propose a model for examining degrees of internally motivated accountability that range from restricted to unbounded accountability, and support balanced accountability as a goal for practice. Finally, we explore implications of this model for training of clinical ethics consultants from diverse academic backgrounds, including those disciplines that do not have a formal code of ethics relating to clinical practice.
The entire article is here.
The American Journal of Bioethics
Volume 14, Issue 6, 2014
Abstract
Clinical ethics consultants represent a multidisciplinary group of scholars and practitioners with varied training backgrounds, who are integrated into a medical environment to assist in the provision of ethically supportable care. Little has been written about the degree to which such consultants are accountable for the patient care outcome of the advice given. We propose a model for examining degrees of internally motivated accountability that range from restricted to unbounded accountability, and support balanced accountability as a goal for practice. Finally, we explore implications of this model for training of clinical ethics consultants from diverse academic backgrounds, including those disciplines that do not have a formal code of ethics relating to clinical practice.
The entire article is here.
Tuesday, October 27, 2015
Cruel and Unuseful Punishment
Book review by Richard J. McNally
Why Torture Doesn't Work: The Neuroscience of Interrogation
Shane O'Mara Harvard University Press, 2015.
Science 16 October 2015:
Vol. 350 no. 6258 p. 284
DOI: 10.1126/science.aad2340
Here is an excerpt:
While denying that these practices qualified as torture, the Administration and its allies also invoked the "ticking time bomb" defense to justify their efforts. In this thought experiment, law enforcement officers have seized a suspected terrorist who harbors information about an imminent attack on American soil. Should interrogators torture the detainee, forcing him to disclose details of the attack? Or should their moral aversion to inflicting temporary pain cost the lives of countless innocent civilians? Advocates of enhanced interrogation argue that, although torture is abhorrent, we must do whatever we can to prevent acts of terrorism.
Legal scholars have published persuasive moral rebuttals to the ticking time bomb defense for torture (1). Yet does torture actually work? To be sure, it can compel people to confess to crimes and to repudiate their religious and political beliefs. But there is a world of difference between compelling someone to speak and compelling them to tell the truth. As Khalid Sheikh Mohammed said, "During the harshest period of my interrogation I gave a lot of false information in order to satisfy what I believed the interrogators wished to hear in order to make the ill-treatment stop." Yet the assumption underlying the ticking time bomb defense is that abusive questioning reliably causes people to reveal truthful information that they would otherwise refuse to disclose. Few scholars have scrutinized this assumption--and none with the rigor, depth, and clarity of Shane O'Mara in his excellent book, Why Torture Doesn't Work: The Neuroscience of Interrogation.
The entire book review is here.
Why Torture Doesn't Work: The Neuroscience of Interrogation
Shane O'Mara Harvard University Press, 2015.
Science 16 October 2015:
Vol. 350 no. 6258 p. 284
DOI: 10.1126/science.aad2340
Here is an excerpt:
While denying that these practices qualified as torture, the Administration and its allies also invoked the "ticking time bomb" defense to justify their efforts. In this thought experiment, law enforcement officers have seized a suspected terrorist who harbors information about an imminent attack on American soil. Should interrogators torture the detainee, forcing him to disclose details of the attack? Or should their moral aversion to inflicting temporary pain cost the lives of countless innocent civilians? Advocates of enhanced interrogation argue that, although torture is abhorrent, we must do whatever we can to prevent acts of terrorism.
Legal scholars have published persuasive moral rebuttals to the ticking time bomb defense for torture (1). Yet does torture actually work? To be sure, it can compel people to confess to crimes and to repudiate their religious and political beliefs. But there is a world of difference between compelling someone to speak and compelling them to tell the truth. As Khalid Sheikh Mohammed said, "During the harshest period of my interrogation I gave a lot of false information in order to satisfy what I believed the interrogators wished to hear in order to make the ill-treatment stop." Yet the assumption underlying the ticking time bomb defense is that abusive questioning reliably causes people to reveal truthful information that they would otherwise refuse to disclose. Few scholars have scrutinized this assumption--and none with the rigor, depth, and clarity of Shane O'Mara in his excellent book, Why Torture Doesn't Work: The Neuroscience of Interrogation.
The entire book review is here.
Intuitive and Counterintuitive Morality
Guy Kahane
Moral Psychology and Human Agency: Philosophical Essays on the Science of Ethics, Oxford University Press
Abstract
Recent work in the cognitive science of morality has been taken to show that moral judgment is largely based on immediate intuitions and emotions. However, according to Greene's influential dual process model, deliberative processing not only plays a significant role in moral judgment, but also favours a distinctive type of content broadly utilitarian approach to ethics. In this chapter, I argue that this proposed tie between process and content is based on conceptual errors, and on a misinterpretation of the empirical evidence. Drawing on some of our own empirical research, I will argue so-called "utilitarian" judgments in response to trolley cases often have little to do with concern for the greater good, and may actually express antisocial tendencies. A more general lesson of my argument is that much of current empirical research in moral psychology is based on a far too narrow understanding of intuition and deliberation.
The entire book chapter is here.
Moral Psychology and Human Agency: Philosophical Essays on the Science of Ethics, Oxford University Press
Abstract
Recent work in the cognitive science of morality has been taken to show that moral judgment is largely based on immediate intuitions and emotions. However, according to Greene's influential dual process model, deliberative processing not only plays a significant role in moral judgment, but also favours a distinctive type of content broadly utilitarian approach to ethics. In this chapter, I argue that this proposed tie between process and content is based on conceptual errors, and on a misinterpretation of the empirical evidence. Drawing on some of our own empirical research, I will argue so-called "utilitarian" judgments in response to trolley cases often have little to do with concern for the greater good, and may actually express antisocial tendencies. A more general lesson of my argument is that much of current empirical research in moral psychology is based on a far too narrow understanding of intuition and deliberation.
The entire book chapter is here.
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