The Meaning(s) of Situationism

Michelle Ciurria
Teaching Ethics 15:1 (Spring 2015)
DOI: 10.5840/tej201411310

Abstract

This paper is about the meaning(s) of situationism. Philosophers have drawn various conclusions about situationism, some more favourable than others. Moreover, there is a difference between public reception of situationism, which has been very enthusiastic, and scholarly reception, which has been more cynical. In this paper, I outline what I take to be four key implications of situationism, based on careful scrutiny of the literature. Some situationist accounts, it turns out, are inconsistent with others, or incongruous with the logic of situationist psychology. If we are to teach students about situationism, we must first strive for relative consensus amongst experts, and then disseminate the results to philosophical educators in various fields.

The article is here.

When Deliberation Isn’t Smart

By Adam Bear and David Rand
Evonomics
Originally published January 25, 2016

Cooperation is essential for successful organizations. But cooperating often requires people to put others’ welfare ahead of their own. In this post, we discuss recent research on cooperation that applies the “Thinking, fast and slow” logic of intuition versus deliberation. We explain why people sometimes (but not always) cooperate in situations where it’s not in their self-interest to do so, and show how properly designed policies can build “habits of virtue” that create a culture of cooperation. TL;DR summary: intuition favors behaviors that are typically optimal, so institutions that make cooperation typically advantageous lead people to adopt cooperation as their intuitive default; this default then “spills over” into settings where it’s not actually individually advantageous to cooperate.

Life is full of opportunities to make personal sacrifices on behalf others, and we often rise to the occasion. We do favors for co-workers and friends, give money to charity, donate blood, and engage in a host of other cooperative endeavors. Sometimes, these nice deeds are reciprocated (like when we help out a friend, and she helps us with something in return). Other times, however, we pay a cost and get little in return (like when we give money to a homeless person whom we’ll never encounter again).

Although you might not realize it, nowhere is the importance of cooperation more apparent than in the workplace. If your boss is watching you, you’d probably be wise to be a team player and cooperate with your co-workers, since doing so will enhance your reputation and might even get you a promotion down the road. In other instances, though, you might get no recognition from, say, helping out a fellow employee who needs assistance meeting a deadline, or who calls out sick.

The article is here.

'Fallout 4' tackles morality in an interesting way

By Antonio Villa-Boas
Business Insider
Originally published November 19, 2015

Here is an excerpt:

But the companions that accompany you throughout the game have unique perks that give you useful advantages in certain situations. The thing is, you need to gain their respect with specific behaviours and actions if you want access to those perks.

You can check which behaviours each companion prefers, but overall, they prefer that you are not a “bad” person.

Don’t murder innocent people, don’t use drugs, don’t pick locks to places or things that don’t belong to you, don’t pickpocket, and don’t steal. While you can do all those things in the game, you won’t win over most of your companions and you’ll make it harder to access their perks.

The companions turn out to be “Fallout 4’s” moral arbiters!

The entire article is here.

Is moral bioenhancement dangerous?

Nicholas Drake
J Med Ethics doi:10.1136/medethics-2015-102944

Abstract

In a recent response to Persson and Savulescu's Unfit for the Future, Nicholas Agar argues that moral bioenhancement is dangerous. His grounds for this are that normal moral judgement should be privileged because it involves a balance of moral subcapacities; moral bioenhancement, Agar argues, involves the enhancement of only particular moral subcapacities, and thus upsets the balance inherent in normal moral judgement. Mistaken moral judgements, he says, are likely to result. I argue that Agar's argument fails for two reasons. First, having strength in a particular moral subcapacity does not necessarily entail a worsening of moral judgement; it can involve strength in a particular aspect of morality. Second, normal moral judgement is not sufficiently likely to be correct to be the standard by which moral judgements are measured.

The entire article is here.

Answering 'Why be good?" for a Three-Year-old

By Christian B. Miller
Big Ideas at Slate.com

Here is an excerpt:

I would also mention to my son that the question of, “Why be good?” is especially important because most of us—myself included—are simply not good, morally speaking. We do not have a virtuous or good character. Why do I say that? You might think it is obvious based on watching the nightly news. But my answer is based on hundreds of psychological studies from the last 50 years. In a famous experiment, for instance, Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram found that many people would willingly shock an innocent person, even to the point of death, if pressured from an authority figure. Less well known but also important, are the findings by Lisa Shu of the London Business School. She and her colleagues have found that cheating on tests dramatically increases when it becomes clear to the test-takers that they will not get caught.

So there is a virtuous way to be—honest, compassionate, etc.—and then there is how we tend to actually be, which is not virtuous. Instead our characters are very much a mixed bag, with many good moral tendencies and many bad ones too. Given that most of us are not virtuous people, the question becomes: Why should we bother to try to develop a better character? Why should we care about it? Does developing better character even matter?

The entire article is here.

Should ethics be taught in schools?

By William Isdale
Practical Ethics
Originally published March 4, 2015

Here is an excerpt:

Can we teach ethics?

One problem with teaching ethics in schools is that there are many competing theories about what is right and wrong. For instance, one might think that our intentions matter morally (Kantianism), or that only consequences do (consequentialism). Some regard inequality as intrinsically problematic, whilst others do not. Unlike other subjects taught in schools, ethics seems to be one in which people can’t agree on even seemingly foundational issues.

In his book Essays on Religion and Education, the Oxford philosopher R.M. Hare argued that ethics can be taught in schools, because it involves learning a language with a determinate method, “such that, if you understand what a moral question is, you must know which arguments are legitimate, in the same way in which, in mathematics, if you know what mathematics is, you know that certain arguments in that field are legitimate and certain arguments not.”

The entire blog post is here.

The Virtue of Scientific Thinking

By Steven Shapin
The Boston Review
Originally published January 20, 2015

Here is an excerpt:

So natural science without the capacity of moral uplift, and grown-up scientists, so to speak, without moral authority, are—in historical terms—recent creations. Both the disenchantment of the world and the supposed invalidity of inferring ought from is derive from the historical development of a conception of nature stripped of the moral powers it once possessed. That development reached its culmination in the science and metaphysics of Darwin and the scientific naturalists of the late nineteenth century. Their modern conception of nature could not make those who studied it more moral than anyone else because no sermons in stones were to be discerned. Nature, said the great nineteenth-century biologist T. H. Huxley, “is no school of virtue.”

The insistence that science cannot make you good, or make the scientist into a moral authority, flowed from a natural philosophical position: there are no spiritual forces operating in nature and there is no divine meaning to be discerned in nature. That is to say, Weber was making a sociological statement about what belongs to certain social roles, but he was doing so by way of historical changes in science and metaphysics.

The entire article is here.

Me, My “Self” and You: Neuropsychological Relations between Social Emotion, Self-Awareness, and Morality

By Mary Helen Immordino-Yang
Emotion Review July 2011 vol. 3 no. 3 313-315

Abstract

Social emotions about others’ mind states, for example, compassion for psychological pain or admiration for virtue, are an important foundation for morality because they help us decide how to treat other people. Although these emotions are ostensibly concerned with the mental qualities and situations of others, they can precipitate intimately subjective reflections on the quality of one’s own social life and mind, and via these reflections incite a desire to engage in meaningful moral actions. Our interview and neural data suggest that the shift from social emotion to introspection may be facilitated by conscious mental evaluation of emotion-related visceral sensations.

The entire paper is here.

Moral Saints

By Susan Wolf
The Journal of Philosophy
Vol 79, No. 8, 419-439

I don't know whether there are any moral saints. But if there are, I am glad that neither I nor those about whom I care most are among them.  By moral saint I mean a person whose every action is as morally good as possible.  Though I shall in a moment acknowledge the variety of types of person that might be thought to satisfy this description, it seems to me that none of these types serve as unequivocally compelling personal ideals.  In other words, I believe that  moral perfection, in sense of moral saintliness, does not constitute a model of personal well-being toward which it would be particularly rational or good or desirable for a human being to strive.

The entire article is here.

Reification and compassion in medicine: A tale of two systems

By Anna Smajdor
Clinical Ethics 
December 2013 vol. 8 no. 4 111-118

Abstract

In this paper, I will explore ideas advanced by Bradshaw, Pence and others who have written on compassion in healthcare. I will attempt to see how and whether their assumptions about compassion can be justified, and explore the role compassion should play in a modern healthcare system. I will justify scepticism at the idea of attempting to incentivise compassion through metrics. The Francis Report raises important questions concerning the nature of a healthcare system that harms rather than helps patients. If something is failing in modern healthcare, those in charge should naturally seek to remedy it. I will investigate whether this is due to the disappearance of compassion, and if so, what is it that is emerging to fill its place. I will consider whether we need to rehabilitate or enforce compassion in the system, or to acknowledge that our modern healthcare systems are incompatible with compassion and how we can make the best of what remains.

The entire article is here.

Here is an excerpt:

Compassion is neither necessary nor sufficient for the provision of good healthcare

The following assumptions are commonly made about compassion in healthcare:

1. Compassion is intrinsically, rather than instrumentally valuable
2. Compassion is incommensurable
3. Compassion is a necessary attribute for healthcare professionals

In this paper, I do not question the first two assumptions, though it seems plausible that they
could be challenged. Rather, I want to suggest that if we accept the first two assumptions, the
third cannot follow as a matter of course.

On Aiming for Moral Mediocrity

By Eric Schwitzgebel
The Splintered Mind Blog
Originally published October 2, 2014

People seem to calibrate toward moral mediocrity. If we see, or are told, that many people violate a norm, that seems to increase the rate at which we ourselves violate the norm (e.g., Cialdini et al 2006; Keizer et al. 2011 [though see here]). Commit a good deed or think of yourself in a good light, and shortly thereafter you might be more likely to commit a bad deed, or less likely to commit another good deed, than you otherwise would have been ("moral self-licensing"; though see here). Susan Wolf tells us that people do not, and should not, aim to be moral saints. But maybe she understates the case: Not only do people not want to be saints, they don't even want to be particularly good.

The entire blog post is here.

Should We Teach Plato in Gym Class?

By Mark Edmundson
The New York Times
Originally published August  15, 2014

Here is an excerpt:

Evidence of our neglect is everywhere. Day after day we see athletes, especially male athletes, behaving badly. The players of the most violent sports, football in particular, are too often finding their way to the front pages of the newspaper for crimes like rape and assault. These are young men who have been encouraged to develop speed and strength and, most of all, aggression. Their spiritedness has been amped up by their training.

We need a more thoughtful and sound philosophy of educating the body and the spirit than we currently possess. The athletes who are raising their quotient of thymos with every collision need to be helped to understand what a wonderful but dangerous power they are unleashing in themselves.

The entire story 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.

Can Classic Moral Stories Promote Honesty in Children?

K. Lee, V. Talwar, A. McCarthy, I. Ross, A. Evans, C. Arruda. Can Classic Moral Stories Promote Honesty in Children? Psychological Science, 2014; DOI: 10.1177/0956797614536401

Abstract

The classic moral stories have been used extensively to teach children about the consequences of lying and the virtue of honesty. Despite their widespread use, there is no evidence whether these stories actually promote honesty in children. This study compared the effectiveness of four classic moral stories in promoting honesty in 3- to 7-year-olds. Surprisingly, the stories of “Pinocchio” and “The Boy Who Cried Wolf” failed to reduce lying in children. In contrast, the apocryphal story of “George Washington and the Cherry Tree” significantly increased truth telling. Further results suggest that the reason for the difference in honesty-promoting effectiveness between the “George Washington” story and the other stories was that the former emphasizes the positive consequences of honesty, whereas the latter focus on the negative consequences of dishonesty. When the “George Washington” story was altered to focus on the negative consequences of dishonesty, it too failed to promote honesty in children.

The entire article is here.

A review of the article from ScienceDaily is here.

Are Liars Ethical?

By Emma Levine
SPSP Blog
Originally posted May 1, 2014

We tend to think of lying as a vice and honesty as a virtue. For hundreds of years, theologians and philosophers have suggested that lying is wrong. For example, almost six hundred years ago, St. Augustine stated, “To me…it seems certain that every lie is a sin.” The prohibition of lying is deeply ingrained in most major religions and the presumption that lying is wrong leads scholars, parents, and leaders to broadly condemn lying.

Despite the characterization of lying as unethical, most people don’t completely avoid lying. Sometimes we lie for selfish reasons, but quite often, we lie to help and protect others. We tell prosocial lies.

The entire article is here.

Here is a link to the article: Is it Ever Ethical to Lie to a Patient?

Debating Dishonesty in Context of Morality and Culture

Cross-Coursera Dishonesty Debate
Originally published on April 3, 2014

Watch the legendary moral philosopher Peter Singer, the distinguished psychologist Paul Bloom, and the expert behavioral economist Dan Ariely as they join hands to discuss their views and research on dishonesty, morality, and ethics.

The three authorities will try not to cross moral boundaries as they cross the digital divisions of their online classes: Singer's "Practical Ethics," Bloom's "Moralities of Everyday Life," and Ariely's "A Beginner's Guide to Irrational Behavior."

What anscombe intended & other puzzles

By Richard Marshall
3:AM Magazine
Originally published March 10, 2012

Richard Marshall interviews Kieran Setiya

Here are some excerpts:

KS: That’s an interesting angle. I would separate two aspects or kinds of philosophical therapy: one aims to change how people live, the other treats philosophical problems not by giving answers but by exposing them as illusory or confused. I am wary of the first ambition, but I cautiously embrace the second. One of the central idea of my first book, Reasons without Rationalism is that a common understanding of the question “Why be moral?” is misconceived.

If you are asking “Why be moral?” you might be asking whether so-called “moral virtues,” such as justice and benevolence, are really virtues, whether they are really ways of being good. That is what Callicles does in Plato’s Gorgias. But it has seemed to many philosophers that the question can be interpreted in another way, as conceding that you have to be just and benevolent in order to be good, and asking “Why be good?” Why should I act as an ethically virtuous person would act, if that is not what I want to do? I argue that the second question makes no sense. It assumes that we can interpret the concept ‘should’ as denoting a standard for action distinct from the standard of ethical virtue or good character, a standard by which they can be challenged. What could this standard be? A while back, I mentioned the ambitious thought that principles of reason might derive from the nature of agency, that a criterion for how we should act might fall out of what it is to act intentionally. In Reasons without Rationalism, I show that we can make sense of “Why be good?” as a substantive question only if this ambitious project can be made to work. And I argue that it can’t. There is no standard for how one should act apart from the standard of ethical virtue or good character. In that sense, the question “Why be good?” is a target for philosophical therapy, not direct response.

(cut)

3:AM: So how do we know what it is to be good, if we can’t use moral theory? What if my model of virtue is Pol Pot, a mass murdering political tyrant? Without moral intuitions to rely on, how can you show that I am making a mistake? Your forthcoming book is called Knowing Right From Wrong. Does it answer this question?

KS: Sort of. The book attempts to show how moral knowledge is possible in the face of radical disagreement. A pivotal thought is that the standards of justification in ethics are “biased towards the truth.” There is no ethically neutral, Archimedean point from which to assess the justification of ethical beliefs. Instead, the basic measure of such beliefs is the standard of correct moral reasoning – a standard that is subject to ethical dispute. When I am confronted with someone who believes that self-interest is the only ethical virtue, it is not just that I am right and he is wrong, but that I am reasoning well about ethics and he is reasoning badly: my beliefs are warranted and his are not. This story doesn’t rest on epistemic egoism, since what justifies me is not that my beliefs are mine, but that they are based on reasoning that tracks the truth.

The entire article is here.

Which Beliefs Contribute to Virtuous Behavior?

By Christian Miller
Big Questions Online
June 15, 2012 (and still relevant today)

Which beliefs contribute to virtuous behavior? In other words, which beliefs can we form to make it more likely that we act virtuously in the future – more honestly, more compassionately, more courageously, more humbly, and the like? In this brief essay, I will propose four different answers, but I want to stress that these are not the only ones that could be given. I have included them only because these answers repeatedly show up in my own reading of research in psychology and philosophy.

First we should note that our question is asking specifically about beliefs. Beliefs are not the only mental states worth mentioning – desires and emotions are also incredibly important to virtuous behavior (but will have to wait for another essay).

The entire story is here.

Whose Character?

Why Character Education is Inherently Flawed

Lelac Almagor
Boston Review
November 26, 2013

Here is an excerpt:

In pursuit of character education, our schools have convened research groups to identify the most important character strengths, taught special courses on character alongside electives such as music and art, and assembled “character report cards” with separate ratings from each teacher for each trait. The favored buzzwords are “dual-purpose instruction,” infusing ordinary lessons about fractions or paying attention with the language of character. “Make it the air we breathe,” one administrator told us. “Put it into everything.” When kids misbehave, we urge them to show more character; students who do well win character awards at special assemblies; we start giving points for integrity, and then integrity starts to mean following directions, and then we start taking integrity points away. Instead of teaching these strong and simple values, we muddy and diminish them until they are just another set of arbitrary rules, or new names for the same old rules we’ve always had. Character starts to look a little more like compliance. The lapse in integrity is our own.

For my part, I’ve given up on character education as such, on pre-planned lessons pushing abstract nouns. I won’t set out to repair some deficit in my kids that can be blamed for the trouble they encounter. Nor do I favor reframing our everyday conversations to match the jargon of the day.

The entire article is here.

Why Are Hundreds of Harvard Students Studying Ancient Chinese Philosophy?

By CHRISTINE GROSS-LOH
The Atlantic
Originally published October, 8 2013

Here is an excerpt:

Why are so many undergraduates spending a semester poring over abstruse Chinese philosophy by scholars who lived thousands of years ago? For one thing, the class fulfills one of Harvard's more challenging core requirements, Ethical Reasoning. It's clear, though, that students are also lured in by Puett's bold promise: “This course will change your life.”

His students tell me it is true: that Puett uses Chinese philosophy as a way to give undergraduates concrete, counter-intuitive, and even revolutionary ideas, which teach them how to live a better life.

The entire article is here.