How to Be Good

An Oxford philosopher thinks he can distill all morality into a formula. Is he right?

By Larissa MacFarqhar
The New Yorker
Originally published September 5, 2011

Here are two excerpts:

Parfit is thought by many to be the most original moral philosopher in the English-speaking world. He has written two books, both of which have been called the most important works to be written in the field in more than a century—since 1874, when Henry Sidgwick’s “The Method of Ethics,” the apogee of classical utilitarianism, was published. Parfit’s first book, “Reasons and Persons,” was published in 1984, when he was forty-one, and caused a sensation. The book was dense with science-fictional thought experiments, all urging a shift toward a more impersonal, non-physical, and selfless view of human life.

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Parfit believes that there are true answers to moral questions, just as there are to mathematical ones. Humans can perceive these truths, through a combination of intuition and critical reasoning, but they remain true whether humans perceive them or not. He believes that there is nothing more urgent for him to do in his brief time on earth than discover what these truths are and persuade others of their reality. He believes that without moral truth the world would be a bleak place in which nothing mattered. This thought horrifies him.

The entire article is here.

Moral Dilemmas

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Revised June 30, 2014

Here is an excerpt:

What is common to the two well-known cases is conflict. In each case, an agent regards herself as having moral reasons to do each of two actions, but doing both actions is not possible. Ethicists have called situations like these moral dilemmas. The crucial features of a moral dilemma are these: the agent is required to do each of two (or more) actions; the agent can do each of the actions; but the agent cannot do both (or all) of the actions. The agent thus seems condemned to moral failure; no matter what she does, she will do something wrong (or fail to do something that she ought to do).

The Platonic case strikes many as too easy to be characterized as a genuine moral dilemma. For the agent's solution in that case is clear; it is more important to protect people from harm than to return a borrowed weapon. And in any case, the borrowed item can be returned later, when the owner no longer poses a threat to others. Thus in this case we can say that the requirement to protect others from serious harm overrides the requirement to repay one's debts by returning a borrowed item when its owner so demands. When one of the conflicting requirements overrides the other, we do not have a genuine moral dilemma. So in addition to the features mentioned above, in order to have a genuine moral dilemma it must also be true that neither of the conflicting requirements is overridden (Sinnott-Armstrong 1988, Chapter 1).

The entire page is here.

Editor's note: Anyone interested in ethics and morality needs to read this page.  It is an excellent source to understand moral dilemmas as well as ethical dilemmas when in the role of a psychologist.

Blaming the Kids: Children’s Agency and Diminished Responsibility

By Michael Tiboris
Journal of Applied Philosophy,Vol. 31, No. 1, 2014
doi: 10.1111/japp.12046

Abstract

Children are less blameworthy for their beliefs and actions because they are young. But the relationship between development and responsibility is complex. What exactly grounds the excuses we rightly give to young agents? This article presents three distinct arguments for children's diminished responsibility. Drawing on significant resources from developmental psychology, it rejects views which base the normative adult/child distinction on children's inability to participate in certain kinds of moral communication or to form principled self-conceptions which guide their actions. The article then argues that children's responsibility ought to be diminished because (and to the degree that) they are less competent at using features of their moral agency to meet social demands. This ‘normative competence’ view is philosophically defensible, supported by research in developmental psychology, and provides us with a method to evaluate whether things like peer pressure are relevant to responsibility.

The entire article is here.

We may never teach robots about love, but what about ethics?

Do androids dream of electric Kant?

By Emma Wooliacott
New Statesman
Originally published May 6, 2014

Here are two excerpts:

But as AJung Moon of the University of British Columbia, points out, "It's really hard to create a robot that would have the same sense of moral agency as a human being. Part of the reason is that people can't even agree on what is the right thing to do. What would be the benchmark?"

Her latest research, led by colleague Ergun Calisgan, takes a pragmatic approach to the problem by examining a robot tasked with delivering a package in a building with only one small lift. How should it act? Should it push ahead of a waiting human? What if its task is urgent? What if the person waiting is in a wheelchair?

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Indeed, professor Ronald Craig Arkin of the Georgia Institute of Technology has proposed an "ethical adaptor", designed give a military robot what he describes as a sense of guilt. It racks up, according to a pre-determined formula, as the robot perceives after an event that it has violated the rules of engagement - perhaps by killing a civilian in error - or if it is criticised by its own side. Once its guilt reaches a certain pre-determined level, the robot is denied permission to fire.

The entire article is here.

Beliefs in moral luck: When and why blame hinges on luck

By Heather C. Lench, Darren Domsky, Rachel Smallman and Kathleen E. Darbor
The British Journal of Psychology
DOI: 10.1111/bjop.12072

Abstract

Belief in moral luck is represented in judgements that offenders should be held accountable for intent to cause harm as well as whether or not harm occurred. Scores on a measure of moral luck beliefs predicted judgements of offenders who varied in intent and the outcomes of their actions, although judgements overall were not consistent with abstract beliefs in moral luck. Prompting participants to consider alternative outcomes, particularly worse outcomes, reduced moral luck beliefs. Findings suggest that some people believe that offenders should be punished based on the outcome of their actions. Furthermore, prompting counterfactuals decreased judgements consistent with moral luck beliefs. The results have implications for theories of moral judgement as well as legal decision making.

The entire story is here, behind a paywall.

Moral luck: Neiladri Sinhababu

Published on Dec 2, 2013

A talk on moral luck that will examine when blame and virtue can be assigned to human actions through a number of examples. Neil Sinhababu is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the National University of Singapore. His research is mainly on ethics. His paper on romantic relationships with people from other universes, "Possible Girls", was featured in the Washington Post on Valentine's Day.

Ideology Is Heritable Yet Societies Can Change Their Views Quickly

By Jonathan Haidt
Social Evolution Forum
Originally published December 16, 2013

Here is an excerpt:

From my perspective as a social psychologist, who studies morality from an evolutionary perspective, rapid attitude change is not hard to explain. I am impressed by the consistent data on heritability, showing that some very important parts of our moral and political views are innate. But innate does not mean hard-wired or unmalleable; it  means “structured in advance of experience, and experience can edit and alter that first draft.” (That’s a paraphrase from Gary Marcus). So even if one is born predisposed to questioning authority and seeking out diversity, life experiences can still alter one’s habitual reactions. Becoming a parent, especially of girls, seems to make people more conservative (they perceive more threats in the world).

The entire article is here.

Clang Went the Trolley

‘Would You Kill the Fat Man?’ and ‘The Trolley Problem’

By Sarah Bakewell
The New York Times
Originally published November 22, 2013

Here is an excerpt:

Nothing intrigues philosophers more than a phenomenon that seems simultaneously self-evident and inexplicable. Thus, ever since the moral philosopher Philippa Foot set out Spur as a thought experiment in 1967, a whole enterprise of “trolley­ology” has unfolded, with trolleyologists generating ever more fiendish variants. (Fat Man was developed by the philosopher Judith Jarvis Thomson, in 1985.)

Some find it frivolous: One philosopher is quoted as snapping, “I just don’t do trolleys.” But it really matters what we do in such situations, sometimes on a vast scale. In 1944, new German V-1 rockets started pounding the southern suburbs of London, though they were clearly aimed at more central areas. The British not only let the Germans think the rockets were on target, but used double agents to feed them information suggesting they should adjust their aim even farther south. The government deliberately placed southern suburbanites in danger, but one scientific adviser, whose own family lived in South London, estimated that some 10,000 lives were saved as a result. A still more momentous decision occurred the following year when America dropped atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the argument that a quick end to the war would save lives — and by macabre coincidence, the Nagasaki bomb was nicknamed Fat Man.

The entire story is here.

The Moral Behavior of Ethicists and the Power of Reason

By Joshua Rust and Eric Schwitzgebel

Professional ethicists behave no morally better, on average, than do other professors.  At least that’s what we have found in a series of empirical studies that we will summarize below.  Our results create a prima facie challenge for a certain picture of the relationship between intellectual reasoning and moral behavior – a picture on which explicit, intellectual cognition has substantial power to change the moral opinions of the reasoner and thereby to change the reasoner’s moral behavior.  Call this picture the Power of Reason view.  One alternative view has been prominently defended by Jonathan Haidt.  We might call it the Weakness of Reason view, or more colorfully the Rational Tail view, after the headline metaphor of Haidt’s seminal 2001 article, “The emotional dog and its rational tail” (in Haidt’s later 2012 book, the emotional dog becomes an “intuitive dog”).  According to the Rational Tail view (which comes in different degrees of strength), emotion or intuition drives moral opinion and moral behavior, and explicit forms of intellectual cognition function mainly post-hoc, to justify and socially communicate conclusions that flow from emotion or intuition.  Haidt argues that our empirical results favor his view (2012, p. 89).  After all, if intellectual styles of moral reasoning don’t detectably improve the behavior even of professional ethicists who build their careers on expertise in such reasoning, how much hope could there be for the rest of us to improve by such means?  While we agree with Haidt that our results support the Rational Tail view over some rationalistic rivals, we believe that other models of moral psychology are also consistent with our findings, and some of these models reserve an important role for reasoning in shaping the reasoner’s behavior and attitudes.  Part One summarizes our empirical findings.  Part Two explores five different theoretical models, including the Rational Tail, more or less consistent with those findings.

The entire article is here.

Magnetic Manipulation of the Sense of Morality

By Mo Castandi
Neuroscience
Originally published March 10, 2010

WHEN making moral judgements, we rely on our ability to make inferences about the beliefs and intentions of others. With this so-called “theory of mind”, we can meaningfully interpret their behaviour, and decide whether it is right or wrong. The legal system also places great emphasis on one’s intentions: a “guilty act” only produces criminal liability when it is proven to have been performed in combination with a “guilty mind”, and this, too, depends on the ability to make reasoned moral judgements.

MIT researchers now show that this moral compass can be very easily skewed. In a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they report that magnetic pulses which disrupt activity in a specific region of the brain’s right hemisphere can interfere with the ability to make certain types of moral judgements, so that hypothetical situations involving attempted harm are perceived to be less morally forbidden and more permissible.

The entire article is here.

Second-Person vs. Third-Person Presentations of Moral Dilemmas

By Eric Schwitzgebel

Experimental Philosophy Blog

Originally published on 10/03/2013

You know the trolley problems, of course. An out-of-control trolley is headed toward five people it will kill if nothing is done. You can flip a switch and send it to a side track where it will kill one different person instead. Should you flip the switch? What if, instead of flipping a switch, the only way to save the five is to push someone into the path of the trolley, killing that one person?

In evaluating this scenario, does it matter if the person standing near the switch with the life-and-death decision to make is "John" as opposed to "you"? Nadelhoffer & Feltz presented the switch version of the trolley problem to undergraduates from Florida State University. Forty-three saw the problem with "you" as the actor; 65% of the them said it was permissible to throw the switch. Forty-two saw the problem with "John" as the actor; 90% of them said it was permissible to throw the switch, a statistically significant difference.

The entire story is here.

Research shines light on the dark side of ethics

By Judy Ashton
Phys.org
Originally published March 25, 2013

Here is an excerpt:

"Fundamentally, the research shows that we are programmed to treat in-group members differently than out-group members, possibly as an evolutionary legacy of survival in the ancestral environment," says UC marketing professor James Kellaris, the James S. Womack/Gemini Professor of Signage in the Carl H. Lindner College of Business. "We tend to go easy on fellow in-group members and harder on strangers, due to complications of loyalty."

The entire story is here.

Here is the abstract to the research.

ABSTRACT

Once a matter of safety and survival, loyalty is a moral principle deeply rooted in human evolution—one that may wield a profound influence on ethical judgment and conceptions of just punishment. Consumers live in a complex Web of loyalty obligations woven through affiliations with marketers, fellow consumers, and other groups. This article examines how such affiliations shape consumers’ judgments of ethically controversial marketing conduct and preferences for punishment. In general, the more unethical an act is judged to be, the more severe the preferred punishment. However, the findings show that although consumers judge a controversial marketing act as more unethical when an in-group member targets the consumer's in-group (vs. out-group), a more lenient punishment is preferred (Study 1). Additionally, the extent to which one embraces loyalty as a moral value appears to mediate the relationship between group affiliations and preferred punishment (Study 2). This is a bias participants deny having, but believe others exhibit. This research finds evidence of loyalty to the principle of loyalty itself. A person will view an out-group member transgressing a member from that same out-group with disdain similar to that accorded an in-group member who transgresses the in-group, because the innate badness of the act is compounded by the stigma of disloyalty.

That article is here, behind a paywall, and hopefully accessible through your university library.

Judging Moral Issues in a Multicultural Society: Moral Reasoning and Social Dominance Orientation

By Stefano Passini & Paola Villano
Swiss Journal of Psychology

Abstract

People’s reactions to crimes sometimes change depending on whether the perpetrators are members of their own ingroup or an outgroup. This observation results in questions concerning how moral reasoning works in intergroup situations. In this research, we analyzed the combined effect of the nationality of the protagonist in a moral dilemma and the participant’s social dominance orientation (SDO) attitudes on the participant’s level of moral reasoning. A total of 230 Italian participants responded to two moral dilemmas taken from the Defining Issues Test, which had been modified so that one was about an Italian and the other about a Romanian. The results showed a significant interaction between the dilemma, the protagonist’s nationality, and the participant’s SDO: The P scores (postconventional reasoning) of low-SDO participants were on the same level when they were judging people of either nationality, while high-SDO participants tended to have a higher P score when judging Italians as opposed to Romanians.

Introduction

Although multiculturalism is on the rise in public opinion and politics, people sometimes judge criminal and deviant actions differently depending on the group membership of the person involved. For instance, the Italian media regularly report people being run over and even killed by drunk drivers. People's reactions to such events, however, differ depending on whether the perpetrators are members of their own ingroup or members of an outgroup. Moreover, when the aggressors are immigrants, the media do not consider these events to be related to the problems of road safety and alcohol alone. They often also relate these events to issues of immigration and national security, and they tend to judge the event more harshly than when the aggressors are ingroup members (see van Dijk, 2000). This shift of attention from the event itself to the person involved - in terms of his/her nationality - poses new questions concerning how moral reasoning works in intergroup situations.

The entire article can be found here, hiding behind a paywall.

Once Suicidal and Shipped Off, Now Battling Nevada Over Care

By RICK LYMAN
The New York Times
Published: September 21, 2013

Here is an excerpt:

But that is just a small sampling, Mr. Herrera says, of the estimated 1,500 people who were bused all over the country in recent years from the state-operated Rawson-Neal Psychiatric Center in Las Vegas and other Nevada institutions, 500 of them to California.

“It’s horrifying,” Mr. Herrera said. “I think we can all agree that our most vulnerable and at-risk people don’t deserve this sort of treatment: no meds, no medical care, a destination where they have no contacts and know no one.”

But what makes it “even more tragic,” Mr. Herrera said, “is that on top of the inhumane treatment, the State of Nevada was trying to have another jurisdiction shoulder the financial responsibility for caring for these people.”

The entire story is here.

Here is a prior story describing this practice.

Response to Critics of The Moral Landscape

By Sam Harris
His Blog
January 29, 2011

Here are two excerpts:

The problem posed by public criticism is by no means limited to the question of what to do about misrepresentations of one’s work. There is simply no good forum in which to respond to reviews of any kind, no matter how substantive. To do so in a separate essay is to risk confusing readers with a litany of disconnected points or—worse—boring them to salt. And any author who rises to the defense of his own book is always in danger of looking petulant, vain, and ineffectual. There is a galling asymmetry at work here: to say anything at all in response to criticism is to risk doing one’s reputation further harm by appearing to care too much about it.

These strictures now weigh heavily on me, because I recently published a book, The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values, which has provoked a backlash in intellectual (and not-so-intellectual) circles. I knew this was coming, given my thesis, but this knowledge left me no better equipped to meet the cloudbursts of vitriol and confusion once they arrived. Watching the tide of opinion turn against me, it has been difficult to know what, if anything, to do about it.

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For those unfamiliar with my book, here is my argument in brief: Morality and values depend on the existence of conscious minds—and specifically on the fact that such minds can experience various forms of well-being and suffering in this universe. Conscious minds and their states are natural phenomena, of course, fully constrained by the laws of Nature (whatever these turn out to be in the end). Therefore, there must be right and wrong answers to questions of morality and values that potentially fall within the purview of science. On this view, some people and cultures will be right (to a greater or lesser degree), and some will be wrong, with respect to what they deem important in life.

The entire blog post is here.

Is prostitution harmful? - Views on Sexual Ethics

Ole Martin Moen
J Med Ethics doi:10.1136/medethics-2011-100367

Abstract

A common argument against prostitution states that selling sex is harmful because it involves selling something deeply personal and emotional. More and more of us, however, believe that sexual encounters need not be deeply personal and emotional in order to be acceptable—we believe in the acceptability of casual sex. In this paper I argue that if casual sex is acceptable, then we have few or no reasons to reject prostitution. I do so by first examining nine influential arguments to the contrary. These arguments purport to pin down the alleged additional harm brought about by prostitution (compared to just casual sex) by appealing to various aspects of its practice, such as its psychology, physiology, economics and social meaning. For each argument I explain why it is unconvincing. I then weight the costs against the benefits of prostitution, and argue that, in sum, prostitution is no more harmful than a long line of occupations that we commonly accept without hesitation.

The entire article is here.

Motivated Moral Reasoning

By Peter H. Ditto, David A. Pizarro, and David Tannenbaum

Abstract

Moral judgments are important, intuitive, and complex. These factors make moral judgment particularly fertile ground for motivated reasoning. This chapter reviews research (both our own and that of others) examining two general pathways by which motivational forces can alter the moral implications of an act: by affecting perceptions of an actor’s moral accountability for the act, and by influencing the normative moral principles people rely on to evaluate the morality of the act. We conclude by discussing the implications of research on motivated moral reasoning for both classic and contemporary views of the moral thinker.

The entire chapter is here.

Thanks to Dave Pizarro for making this available.

Whistle-Blowers in Limbo, Neither Hero Nor Traitor

By DAVID CARR
The New York Times
Published: July 31, 2013

Even as Americans expressed increasing concerns about government intrusions into their life in a recently released Pew Research Center study, they have hardly embraced those who decide to take matters into their own hands.

Leakers, often lionized by members of the press, face an indifferent and sometimes antagonistic public.

On Tuesday, when Pfc. Bradley Manning was acquitted of aiding the enemy and convicted of six counts of violating the Espionage Act, a few dozen protesters showed up on his behalf. There has been an outcry from civil libertarians and privacy advocates, but in general, his decision to unilaterally release hundreds of thousands of sensitive documents did not make him a folk hero or a cause célèbre in the broader culture.

The entire story is here.

The Moral Instinct

By Steven Pinker
The New York Times Magazine
Originally published January 13, 2008 (and still relevant)

Here are some excerpts:

The starting point for appreciating that there is a distinctive part of our psychology for morality is seeing how moral judgments differ from other kinds of opinions we have on how people ought to behave. Moralization is a psychological state that can be turned on and off like a switch, and when it is on, a distinctive mind-set commandeers our thinking. This is the mind-set that makes us deem actions immoral (“killing is wrong”), rather than merely disagreeable (“I hate brussels sprouts”), unfashionable (“bell-bottoms are out”) or imprudent (“don’t scratch mosquito bites”).

The first hallmark of moralization is that the rules it invokes are felt to be universal. Prohibitions of rape and murder, for example, are felt not to be matters of local custom but to be universally and objectively warranted. One can easily say, “I don’t like brussels sprouts, but I don’t care if you eat them,” but no one would say, “I don’t like killing, but I don’t care if you murder someone.”

The other hallmark is that people feel that those who commit immoral acts deserve to be punished. Not only is it allowable to inflict pain on a person who has broken a moral rule; it is wrong not to, to “let them get away with it.” People are thus untroubled in inviting divine retribution or the power of the state to harm other people they deem immoral. Bertrand Russell wrote, “The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists — that is why they invented hell.”

We all know what it feels like when the moralization switch flips inside us — the righteous glow, the burning dudgeon, the drive to recruit others to the cause.

The entire article is here.

The mismeasure of morals: Antisocial personality traits predict utilitarian responses to moral dilemmas

Daniel M. Bartels & David A. Pizarro
Cognition 121 (2011) 154–161

Abstract

Researchers have recently argued that utilitarianism is the appropriate framework by which to evaluate moral judgment, and that individuals who endorse non-utilitarian solutions to moral dilemmas (involving active vs. passive harm) are committing an error. We report a study in which participants responded to a battery of personality assessments and a set of dilemmas that pit utilitarian and non-utilitarian options against each other.  Participants who indicated greater endorsement of utilitarian solutions had higher scores on measures of Psychopathy, machiavellianism, and life meaninglessness. These results question the widely-used methods by which lay moral judgments are evaluated, as these approaches lead to the counterintuitive conclusion that those individuals who are least prone to moral errors also possess a set of psychological characteristics that many would consider prototypically immoral.

The entire article is here.

The link to this article will remain in the Articles and Papers Related to Ethics section of this site.