Evolutionary Thinking Can Help Companies Foster More Ethical Culture

Brian Gallagher
ethicalsystems.org
Originally published August 20, 2019


Here are two excerpts:

How might human beings be mismatched to the modern business environment?

Many problems of the modern workplace have not been viewed through a mismatch lens, so at this point these are still hypotheses. But let’s take the role of managers, for example. Humans have a strong aversion to dominance, which is a result of our egalitarian nature that served us well in the small-scale societies in which we evolved. One of the biggest causes of job dissatisfaction, people report, is the interaction with their line manager. Many people find this relationship extremely stressful, as it infringes on their sense of autonomy, to be dominated by someone who controls them and gives them orders. Or take the physical work environment that looks nothing like our ancestral environment—our ancestors were always outside, working as they socialized and getting plenty of physical exercise while they hunted and gathered in tight social groups. Now we are forced to spend much of our daytime in tall buildings with small offices surrounded by genetic strangers and no natural scenes to speak of.

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What can business leaders learn from evolutionary psychology about how to structure relationships between bosses and employees?

One of the most important lessons from our research is that leaders are effective to the extent that they enable their teams to be effective. This sounds obvious, but leadership is really about the team and the followers. Individuals gladly follow leaders who they respect because of their skills and competence, and they have a hard time, by contrast, following a leader who is dominant and threatening. Yet human nature is also such that if you give someone power, they will use it—there is a fundamental leader-follower conflict. To keep managers from following the easy route of threat and dominance, every healthy organization should have mechanisms in place to curtail their power. In small-scale societies, as the anthropological literature makes clear, leaders are kept in check because they can only exercise influence in their domain of expertise, nothing else. What’s more, there should be room to gossip about and ridicule leaders, and leaders should be regularly replaced in order to prevent them building up a power base. Why not have feedback sessions where employees can provide regular inputs in the assessment of their bosses? Why not include workers in hiring board members? Many public and private organizations in Europe are currently experimenting with these power-leveling mechanisms.

The info is here.

Seven Key Misconceptions about Evolutionary Psychology

Laith Al-Shawaf
www.areomagazine.com
Originally published August 20, 2019

Evolutionary approaches to psychology hold the promise of revolutionizing the field and unifying it with the biological sciences. But among both academics and the general public, a few key misconceptions impede its application to psychology and behavior. This essay tackles the most pervasive of these.

Misconception 1: Evolution and Learning Are Conflicting Explanations for Behavior

People often assume that if something is learned, it’s not evolved, and vice versa. This is a misleading way of conceptualizing the issue, for three key reasons.

First, many evolutionary hypotheses are about learning. For example, the claim that humans have an evolved fear of snakes and spiders does not mean that people are born with this fear. Instead, it means that humans are endowed with an evolved learning mechanism that acquires a fear of snakes more easily and readily than other fears. Classic studies in psychology show that monkeys can acquire a fear of snakes through observational learning, and they tend to acquire it more quickly than a similar fear of other objects, such as rabbits or flowers. It is also harder for monkeys to unlearn a fear of snakes than it is to unlearn other fears. As with monkeys, the hypothesis that humans have an evolved fear of snakes does not mean that we are born with this fear. Instead, it means that we learn this fear via an evolved learning mechanism that is biologically prepared to acquire some fears more easily than others.

Second, learning is made possible by evolved mechanisms instantiated in the brain. We are able to learn because we are equipped with neurocognitive mechanisms that enable learning to occur—and these neurocognitive mechanisms were built by evolution. Consider the fact that both children and puppies can learn, but if you try to teach them the same thing—French, say, or game theory—they end up learning different things. Why? Because the dog’s evolved learning mechanisms are different from those of the child. What organisms learn, and how they learn it, depends on the nature of the evolved learning mechanisms housed in their brains.

The info is here.

Why Moral Emotions Go Viral Online

Ana P. Gantman, William J. Brady, & Jay Van Bavel
Scientific American
Originally posted August 20, 2019

Social media is changing the character of our political conversations. As many have pointed out, our attention is a scarce resource that politicians and journalists are constantly fighting to attract, and the online world has become a primary trigger of our moral outrage. These two ideas, it turns out, are fundamentally related. According to our forthcoming paper, words that appeal to one’s sense of right and wrong are particularly effective at capturing attention, which may help explain this new political reality.

It occurred to us that the way people scroll through their social media feeds is very similar to a classic method psychologists use to measure people’s ability to pay attention. When we mindlessly browse social media, we are rapidly presenting a stream of verbal stimuli to ourselves. Psychologists have been studying this issue in the lab for decades, displaying to subjects a rapid succession of words, one after another, in the blink of an eye. In the lab, people are asked to find a target word among a collection of other words. Once they find it, there’s a short window of time in which that word captures their attention. If there’s a second target word in that window, most people don’t even see it—almost as if they had blinked with their eyes open.

There is an exception: if the second target word is emotionally significant to the viewer, that person will see it. Some words are so important to us that they are able to capture our attention even when we are already paying attention to something else.

The info is here.

Debunking the Stanford Prison Experiment

Thibault Le Texier
PsyArXiv
Originally posted August 8, 2019

Abstract

The Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE) is one of psychology’s most famous studies. It has been criticized on many grounds, and yet a majority of textbook authors have ignored these criticisms in their discussions of the SPE, thereby misleading both students and the general public about the study’s questionable scientific validity. Data collected from a thorough investigation of the SPE archives and interviews with 15 of the participants in the experiment further question the study’s scientific merit. These data are not only supportive of previous criticisms of the SPE, such as the presence of demand characteristics, but provide new criticisms of the SPE based on heretofore unknown information. These new criticisms include the biased and incomplete collection of data, the extent to which the SPE drew on a prison experiment devised and conducted by students in one of Zimbardo’s classes 3 months earlier, the fact that the guards received precise instructions regarding the treatment of the prisoners, the fact that the guards were not told they were subjects, and the fact that participants were almost never completely immersed by the situation. Possible explanations of the inaccurate textbook portrayal and general misperception of the SPE’s scientific validity over the past 5 decades, in spite of its flaws and shortcomings, are discussed.

From the Conclusion:

4) The SPE survived for almost 50 years because no researcher has been through its archives. This was, I must say, one of the most puzzling facts that I discovered during my investigation. The experiment had been criticized by major figures such as Fromm (1973) and Festinger (1980), and the accounts of the experiment have been far from disclosing all of the details of the study; yet no psychologist seems to have wanted to know if the archives what exactly did the archives contain. Is it a lack of curiosity? Is it an excessive respect for the tenured professor of a prestigious university? Is it due to possible access restrictions imposed by Zimbardo? Is it because archival analyses are a time-consuming and work-intensive activity?  Is it due to the belief that no archives had been kept? The answer remains unknown.The recent replication crisis in psychology has shown, however, that psychologists are not indifferent to the functioning of science. This crisis can be seen as a sign of the good health and vigor of the field of psychology, which can correct its errors and improve its methodology (Chambers, 2017, p.171-217). Hopefully, the present study will contribute to psychology’s epistemological self-examination, and expose the SPE for what it was: an incredibly flawed study that should have died an early death.

Neuroscience and mental state issues in forensic assessment

David Freedman and Simona Zaami
International Journal of Law and Psychiatry
Available online 2 April 2019

Abstract

Neuroscience has already changed how the law understands an individual's cognitive processes, how those processes shape behavior, and how bio-psychosocial history and neurodevelopmental approaches provide information, which is critical to understanding mental states underlying behavior, including criminal behavior. In this paper, we briefly review the state of forensic assessment of mental conditions in the relative culpability of criminal defendants, focused primarily on the weaknesses of current approaches. We then turn to focus on neuroscience approaches and how they have the potential to improve assessment, but with significant risks and limitations.

From the Conclusion:

This approach is not a cure-all. Understanding and explaining specific behaviors is a difficult undertaking, and explaining the mental condition of the person engaged in those behaviors at the time the behaviors took place is even more difficult. Yet, the law requires some degree of reliability and rigorous, honest presentation of the strengths and weaknesses of the science being relied upon to form opinions.  Despite the dramatic advances understanding the neural bases of cognition and functioning, neuroscience does not yet reliably describe how those processes emerge in a specific environmental context (Poldrack et al., 2018), nor what an individual was thinking, feeling, experiencing, understanding, or intending at a particular moment in time (Freedman & Woods, 2018; Greely & Farahany, 2019).

The info is here.

New Jersey will allow terminally ill patients to end their lives

Taylor Romine
CNN.com
Originally posted July 1, 2019

Terminally ill adults in New Jersey will now be able to ask for medical help to end their lives.

In April, Gov. Phil Murphy signed the Medical Aid in Dying for the Terminally Ill Act. It goes into effect Thursday.

It allows adults with a prognosis of six months or less to live to get a prescription for life-ending medication.

Other jurisdictions that allow physician-assisted suicide are: California, Colorado, Oregon, Vermont, Washington, Hawaii, Montana and the District of Columbia.

The law requires either a psychiatrist or psychologist determine that the patient has the mental capacity to make the decision. The prescription is a series of self-administered pills that can be taken at home.

"Allowing residents with terminal illnesses to make end-of-life choices for themselves is the right thing to do," Murphy said in a statement.

The info is here.

Tech Is Already Reading Your Emotions - But Do Algorithms Get It Right?

Jessica Baron
Forbes.com
Originally published July 18, 2019

From measuring shopper satisfaction to detecting signs of depression, companies are employing emotion-sensing facial recognition technology that is based on flawed science, according to a new study.

If the idea of having your face recorded and then analyzed for mood so that someone can intervene in your life sounds creepy, that’s because it is. But that hasn’t stopped companies like Walmart from promising to implement the technology to improve customer satisfaction, despite numerous challenges from ethicists and other consumer advocates.

At the end of the day, this flavor of facial recognition software probably is all about making you safer and happier – it wants to let you know if you’re angry or depressed so you can calm down or get help; it wants to see what kind of mood you’re in when you shop so it can help stores keep you as a customer; it wants to measure your mood while driving, playing video games, or just browsing the Internet to see what goods and services you might like to buy to improve your life.


The problem is – well, aside from the obvious privacy issues and general creep factor – that computers aren’t really that good at judging our moods based on the information they get from facial recognition technology. To top it off, this technology exhibits that same kind of racial bias that other AI programs do, assigning more negative emotions to black faces, for example. That’s probably because it’s based on flawed science.

The info is here.

The Theory That Justified Anti-Gay Crime

Caleb Crain
The New Yorker
Originally posted June 26, 2019

Here is an excerpt:

As preposterous as the idea of homosexual panic may sound today, for much of the twentieth century it was treated as something like common sense. “When a beast attacks, you are justified in killing him,” is the way one defense attorney phrased the principle behind it, in 1940. The press, too, sometimes discussed the idea approvingly. The New York Daily News described a 1944 murder of a gay man as an “honor slaying.” In 1952, homosexual panic was listed as a mental disorder in the first edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, and, as late as the nineteen-nineties, the notion was still so current in the popular mind that a Christopher Street shop selling gay-themed T-shirts was called, in what seems to have been ironic homage, Don’t Panic.

It turns out that the psychological concept has a less than illustrious origin. The term “homosexual panic,” Polchin reports, was coined by a psychiatrist named Edward Kempf, in a 1920 treatise titled “Psychopathology.” Polchin garbles a key quote from Kempf, printing “sexually attracted” where Kempf wrote “sexually attractive,” and I took a look at the relevant chapter to see if I could make sense of it. It’s understandable that Polchin got confused. Kempf’s text is neither lucid nor coherent.

Kempf theorized that homosexual panic emerged from “the pressure of uncontrollable perverse sexual cravings,” that is, from the frustration of homosexual urges that typically arose in same-sex environments, such as prison or the military. According to Kempf, symptoms of the panic included a fearfulness that could lead to catatonia, a “compulsion to seek or submit to assault,” and delusional perceptions of being poisoned or entranced. Indeed, the hallucinations and paranoid delusions that many of Kempf’s patients suffered from were quite serious. One patient imagined that broken pills were being surreptitiously put into his pudding; another went through spells of believing he was God.

The info is here.

Taking Ethics Seriously: Toward Comprehensive Education in Ethics and Human Rights for Psychologists

Duška Franeta
European Psychologist (2019), 24, pp. 125-135.

Education in ethics and professional regulation are not alternatives; education in ethics for psychologists should not be framed merely as instruction regarding current professional regulation, or “ethical training.” This would reduce ethics to essentially a legal perspective, diminish professional responsibility, debase professional ethics, and downplay its primary purpose – the continuous critical reflection of professional identity and professional role. This paper discusses the meaning and function of education in ethics for psychologists and articulates the reasons why comprehensive education in ethics for psychologists should not be substituted by instruction in professional codes. Likewise, human rights education for psychologists should not be downgraded to mere instruction in existing legal norms. Human rights discourse represents an important segment of the comprehensive education in ethics for psychologists. Education in ethics should expose and examine substantial ethical ideas that serve as the framework for the law of human rights as well as the interpretative, multifaceted, evolving, even manipulable character of the human rights narrative. The typically proclaimed duty of psychologists to protect and promote human rights requires a deepening and expounding of the human rights legal framework through elaborate scrutiny of its ethical meaning. The idea of affirming and restoring human dignity – the concept often designated as the legal and ethical basis, essence, and purpose of human rights – represents one approach to framing this duty by which the goals of psychology on the professional and ethical levels become unified.

The info is here.

Why parents are struggling to find mental health care for their children

Bernard Wolfson
Kaiser Health News/PBS.org
Originally posted May 7, 2019

Here is an excerpt:

Think about how perverse this is. Mental health professionals say that with children, early intervention is crucial to avoid more severe and costly problems later on. Yet even parents with good insurance struggle to find care for their children.

The U.S. faces a growing shortage of mental health professionals trained to work with young people — at a time when depression and anxiety are on the rise. Suicide was the No. 2 cause of death for children and young adults from age 10 to 24 in 2017, after accidents.

There is only one practicing child and adolescent psychiatrist in the U.S. for about every 1,800 children who need one, according to data from the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry.

Not only is it hard to get appointments with psychiatrists and therapists, but the ones who are available often don’t accept insurance.

“This country currently lacks the capacity to provide the mental health support that young people need,” says Dr. Steven Adelsheim, director of the Stanford University psychiatry department’s Center for Youth Mental Health and Wellbeing.

The info is here.

Civic honesty around the globe

Alain Cohn, Michel André Maréchal, David Tannenbaum, & Christian Lukas Zünd
Science  20 Jun 2019:
DOI: 10.1126/science.aau8712

Abstract

Civic honesty is essential to social capital and economic development, but is often in conflict with material self-interest. We examine the trade-off between honesty and self-interest using field experiments in 355 cities spanning 40 countries around the globe. We turned in over 17,000 lost wallets with varying amounts of money at public and private institutions, and measured whether recipients contacted the owner to return the wallets. In virtually all countries citizens were more likely to return wallets that contained more money. Both non-experts and professional economists were unable to predict this result. Additional data suggest our main findings can be explained by a combination of altruistic concerns and an aversion to viewing oneself as a thief, which increase with the material benefits of dishonesty.

Here is the conclusion:

Our findings also represent a unique data set for examining cross-country differences in civic honesty. Honesty is a key component of social capital, and here we provide an objective measure to supplement the large body of work that has traditionally examined social capital using subjective survey measures. Using average response rates across countries, we find substantial variation in rates of civic honesty, ranging from 14% to 76%. This variation largely persists even when controlling for a country’s gross domestic product, suggesting that other factors besides country wealth are also at play. In the supplementary materials, we provide an analysis suggesting that economically favorable geographic conditions, inclusive political institutions, national education, and cultural values that emphasize moral norms extending beyond one’s in-group are also positively associated with rates of civic honesty. Future research is needed to identify how these and other factors may contribute to societal differences in honest behavior.

The research is here.

Association Between Life Purpose and Mortality Among US Adults Older Than 50 Years

Aliya Alimujiang, Ashley Wiensch, Jonathan Boss, and others
JAMA Network Open 2019;2(5):e194270. 

Abstract

Importance  A growing body of literature suggests that having a strong sense of purpose in life leads to improvements in both physical and mental health and enhances overall quality of life. There are interventions available to influence life purpose; thus, understanding the association of life purpose with mortality is critical.

Objective  To evaluate whether an association exists between life purpose and all-cause or cause-specific mortality among older adults in the United States.

Main Outcomes and Measures  All-cause and cause-specific mortality were assessed between 2006 and 2010. Weighted Cox proportional hazards models were used to evaluate life purpose and mortality.

Results  Of 6985 individuals included in the analysis, 4016 (57.5%) were women, the mean (SD) age of all participants was 68.6 (9.8) years, and the mean (SD) survival time for decedents was 31.21 (15.42) months (range, 1.00-71.00 months). Life purpose was significantly associated with all-cause mortality in the HRS (hazard ratio, 2.43; 95% CI, 1.57-3.75, comparing those in the lowest life purpose category with those in the highest life purpose category). Some significant cause-specific mortality associations with life purpose were also observed (heart, circulatory, and blood conditions: hazard ratio, 2.66; 95% CI, 1.62-4.38).

Conclusions and Relevance  This study’s results indicated that stronger purpose in life was associated with decreased mortality. Purposeful living may have health benefits. Future research should focus on evaluating the association of life purpose interventions with health outcomes, including mortality. In addition, understanding potential biological mechanisms through which life purpose may influence health outcomes would be valuable.

The research is here.

Does psychology have a conflict-of-interest problem?

Tom Chivers
Nature
Originally published July 2, 2019

Here is an excerpt:

But other psychologists say they think personal speaking fees ought to be declared. There is no suggestion that any scientists are deliberately skewing their results to maintain their speaking income. But critics say that lax COI disclosure norms could create problems by encouraging some scientists to play down — perhaps unconsciously — findings that contradict their arguments, and could lead them to avoid declaring other conflicts. “A lot of researchers don’t know where to draw the line [on COIs],” says Chris Chambers, a psychologist at the University of Cardiff, UK, who is an editor for five journals, including one on psychology. “And because there are no norms they gravitate to saying nothing.”

Researchers who spoke to Nature about their concerns say they see the issue as connected to psychology’s greater need for self-scrutiny because of some high-profile cases of misconduct, as well as to broader concerns about the reproducibility of results. “Even the appearance of an undisclosed conflict of interest can be damaging to the credibility of psychological science,” says Scott Lilienfeld, the editor-in-chief of Clinical Psychological Science (CPS), which published papers of Twenge’s in 2017 and 2018. “The heuristic should be ‘when in doubt, declare’,” he says (although he added that he did not have enough information to judge Twenge’s non-disclosures in CPS). Psychology, he adds, needs to engage in a “thoroughgoing discussion of what constitutes a conflict of interest, and when and how such conflicts should be disclosed”.

The info is here.

It's not biology bro: Torture and the Misuse of Science

Shane O'Mara and John Schiemann
PsyArXiv Preprints
Last edited on December 24, 2018

Abstract

Contrary to the (in)famous line in the film Zero Dark Thirty, the CIA's torture program was not based on biology or any other science. Instead, the Bush administration and the CIA decided to use coercion immediately after the 9/11 terrorist attacks and then veneered the program's justification with a patina of pseudoscience, ignoring the actual biology of torturing human brains. We reconstruct the Bush administration’s decision-making process from released government documents, independent investigations, journalistic accounts, and memoirs to establish that the policy decision to use torture took place in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks without any investigation into its efficacy. We then present the pseudo-scientific model of torture sold to the CIA based on a loose amalgamation of methods from the old KUBARK manual, reverse-engineering of SERE training techniques, and learned helplessness theory, show why this ad hoc model amounted to pseudoscience, and then catalog what the actual science of torturing human brains – available in 2001 – reveals about the practice. We conclude with a discussion of how process of policy-making might incorporate countervailing evidence to ensure that policy problems are forestalled, via the concept of an evidence-based policy brake, which is deliberately instituted to prevent a policy going forward that is contrary to law, ethics and evidence.

The info is here.

Why High-Class People Get Away With Incompetence

Heather Murphy
The New York Times
Originally posted May 20, 2019

Here are two excerpt:

The researchers suggest that part of the answer involves what they call “overconfidence.” In several experiments, they found that people who came from a higher social class were more likely to have an inflated sense of their skills — even when tests proved that they were average. This unmerited overconfidence, they found, was interpreted by strangers as competence.

The findings highlight yet another way that family wealth and parents’ education — two of a number of factors used to assess social class in the study — affect a person’s experience as they move through the world.

“With this research, we now have reason to think that coming from a higher social class confers yet another advantage,” said Jessica A. Kennedy, a professor of management at Vanderbilt University, who was not involved in the study.

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Researchers said they hoped that the takeaway was not to strive to be overconfident. Wars, stock market crashes and many other crises can be blamed on overconfidence, they said. So how do managers, employers, voters and customers avoid overvaluing social class and being duped by incompetent wealthy people? Dr. Kennedy said she had been encouraged to find that if you show people actual facts about a person, the elevated status that comes with overconfidence often fades away.

The info is here.

Immutable morality: Even God could not change some moral facts

Madeline Reinecke & Zachary Horne
PsyArXiv
Last edited December 24, 2018

Abstract

The idea that morality depends on God is a widely held belief. This belief entails that the moral “facts” could be otherwise because, in principle, God could change them. Yet, some moral propositions seem so obviously true (e.g., the immorality of killing someone just for pleasure) that it is hard to imagine how they could be otherwise. In two experiments, we investigated people’s intuitions about the immutability of moral facts. Participants judged whether it was even possible, or possible for God, to change moral, logical, and physical facts. In both experiments, people judged that altering some moral facts was impossible—not even God could turn morally wrong acts into morally right acts. Strikingly, people thought that God could make physically impossible and logically impossible events occur. These results demonstrate the strength of people’s metaethical commitments and shed light on the nature of morality and its centrality to thinking and reasoning.

The research is here.

The moral behavior of ethics professors: A replication-extension in German-speaking countries

Philipp Schönegger & Johannes Wagner
(2019) Philosophical Psychology, 32:4, 532-559
DOI: 10.1080/09515089.2019.1587912

Abstract

What is the relation between ethical reflection and moral behavior? Does professional reflection on ethical issues positively impact moral behaviors? To address these questions, Schwitzgebel and Rust empirically investigated if philosophy professors engaged with ethics on a professional basis behave any morally better or, at least, more consistently with their expressed values than do non-ethicist professors. Findings from their original US-based sample indicated that neither is the case, suggesting that there is no positive influence of ethical reflection on moral action. In the study at hand, we attempted to cross-validate this pattern of results in the German-speaking countries and surveyed 417 professors using a replication-extension research design. Our results indicate a successful replication of the original effect that ethicists do not behave any morally better compared to other academics across the vast majority of normative issues. Yet, unlike the original study, we found mixed results on normative attitudes generally. On some issues, ethicists and philosophers even expressed more lenient attitudes. However, one issue on which ethicists not only held stronger normative attitudes but also reported better corresponding moral behaviors was vegetarianism.

No Support for Historical Candidate Gene or Candidate Gene-by-Interaction Hypotheses for Major Depression Across Multiple Large Samples

Richard Border, Emma C. Johnson, and others
The American Journal of Psychiatry
https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ajp.2018.18070881

Abstract

Objective:
Interest in candidate gene and candidate gene-by-environment interaction hypotheses regarding major depressive disorder remains strong despite controversy surrounding the validity of previous findings. In response to this controversy, the present investigation empirically identified 18 candidate genes for depression that have been studied 10 or more times and examined evidence for their relevance to depression phenotypes.

Methods:
Utilizing data from large population-based and case-control samples (Ns ranging from 62,138 to 443,264 across subsamples), the authors conducted a series of preregistered analyses examining candidate gene polymorphism main effects, polymorphism-by-environment interactions, and gene-level effects across a number of operational definitions of depression (e.g., lifetime diagnosis, current severity, episode recurrence) and environmental moderators (e.g., sexual or physical abuse during childhood, socioeconomic adversity).

Results:
No clear evidence was found for any candidate gene polymorphism associations with depression phenotypes or any polymorphism-by-environment moderator effects. As a set, depression candidate genes were no more associated with depression phenotypes than noncandidate genes. The authors demonstrate that phenotypic measurement error is unlikely to account for these null findings.

Conclusions:
The study results do not support previous depression candidate gene findings, in which large genetic effects are frequently reported in samples orders of magnitude smaller than those examined here. Instead, the results suggest that early hypotheses about depression candidate genes were incorrect and that the large number of associations reported in the depression candidate gene literature are likely to be false positives.

The research is here.

Editor's note: Depression is a complex, multivariate experience that is not primarily genetic in its origins.

Feeling Good: Integrating the Psychology and Epistemology of Moral Intuition and Emotion

Hossein Dabbagh
Journal of Cognition and Neuroethics 5 (3): 1–30.

Abstract

Is the epistemology of moral intuitions compatible with admitting a role for emotion? I argue in this paper thatmoral intuitions and emotions can be partners without creating an epistemic threat. I start off by offering some empirical findings to weaken Singer’s (and Greene’s and Haidt’s) debunking argument against moral intuition, which treat emotions as a distorting factor. In the second part of the paper, I argue that the standard contrast between intuition and emotion is a mistake. Moral intuitions and emotions are not contestants if we construe moral intuition as non-doxastic intellectual seeming and emotion as a non-doxastic perceptual-like state. This will show that emotions support, rather than distort, the epistemic standing of moral intuitions.

Here is an excerpt:

However, cognitive sciences, as I argued above, show us that seeing all emotions in this excessively pessimistic way is not plausible. To think about emotional experience as always being a source of epistemic distortion would be wrong. On the contrary, there are some reasons to believe that emotional experiences can sometimes make a positive contribution to our activities in practical rationality. So, there is a possibility that some emotions are not distorting factors. If this is right, we are no longer justified in saying that emotions always distort our epistemic activities. Instead, emotions (construed as quasiperceptual experiences) might have some cognitive elements assessable for rationality.

The paper is here.

Neuroscience Readies for a Showdown Over Consciousness Ideas

Philip Ball
Quanta Magazine
Originally published March 6, 2019

Here is an excerpt:

Philosophers have debated the nature of consciousness and whether it can inhere in things other than humans for thousands of years, but in the modern era, pressing practical and moral implications make the need for answers more urgent. As artificial intelligence (AI) grows increasingly sophisticated, it might become impossible to tell whether one is dealing with a machine or a human  merely by interacting with it — the classic Turing test. But would that mean AI deserves moral consideration?

Understanding consciousness also impinges on animal rights and welfare, and on a wide range of medical and legal questions about mental impairments. A group of more than 50 leading neuroscientists, psychologists, cognitive scientists and others recently called for greater recognition of the importance of research on this difficult subject. “Theories of consciousness need to be tested rigorously and revised repeatedly amid the long process of accumulation of empirical evidence,” the authors said, adding that “myths and speculative conjectures also need to be identified as such.”

You can hardly do experiments on consciousness without having first defined it. But that’s already difficult because we use the word in several ways. Humans are conscious beings, but we can lose consciousness, for example under anesthesia. We can say we are conscious of something — a strange noise coming out of our laptop, say. But in general, the quality of consciousness refers to a capacity to experience one’s existence rather than just recording it or responding to stimuli like an automaton. Philosophers of mind often refer to this as the principle that one can meaningfully speak about what it is to be “like” a conscious being — even if we can never actually have that experience beyond ourselves.

The info is here.