Models of Morality

By Molly J. Crockett
Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging

Moral dilemmas engender conflicts between two traditions: consequentialism, which evaluates actions based on their outcomes, and deontology, which evaluates the actions themselves.  These strikingly resemble two distinct decision-making architectures: a model-based system that selects actions based on inferences about their consequences; and a model-free system that selects actions based on their reinforcement history.  Here, I consider how these systems, along with a Pavlovian system that responds reflexively to rewards and punishments, can illuminate puzzles in moral psychology.

The entire article is here.

Thanks to Molly for making this journal article public.

50 Shades of Gray Matter

By Sally Satel
The Chronicle of Higher Education
Originally published July 9, 2013

You’ve seen the headlines: This is your brain on God, envy, cocaine. And you’ve seen the evidence: slices of brain with Technicolor splotches lit up like the Las Vegas Strip.

On average, one new book about the brain appears every week. In universities, new disciplines of neuroeconomics, neuroaesthetics, and neurolaw are flourishing. “If Warhol were around today, he’d have a series of silkscreens dedicated to the cortex; the amygdala would hang alongside Marilyn Monroe,” one observer quipped.

It is easy to see why the brain is a hot commodity. As the organ of the self, it makes sense to think that understanding how the brain works can help us understand ourselves, repair our flaws, and perfect our nature.

The entire blog post is here.

Canadians see misconduct in workplace, but few are reported

By Theresa Tedesco
Financial Post
Originally published July 4, 2013

As many as 42% of working Canadians – or 7.1 million — say they have witnessed breaches of ethical conduct in their workplace and 48% of them did not report the misconduct, according to a new study on ethics in the Canadian workplace.

At the same time, a survey by Ipsos Reid revealed that one in three working Canadians felt that “delivering results in their organization was more important than doing the right thing.” Furthermore, 22% of respondents said they felt they had to compromise their personal ethics to keep their job.

The entire article is here.

UNC Faces Federal Investigation Into Retaliation Complaint By Sexual Assault Survivor

By Tyler Kingkade
The Huffington Post
Originally published July 7, 2013

The U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights is opening a new investigation into the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill over allegations that UNC-Chapel Hill sophomore Landen Gambill faced retaliation for filing a federal complaint against the university. Gambill's case gained national attention after she reported a sexual assault to the school and was later charged with a school honor code violation.

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Gambill filed an additional complaint in March after being charged with the honor code violation by the student-run honor court. The court charged that Gambill created an "intimidating" environment for her alleged abuser, an ex-boyfriend and fellow Chapel Hill student whom she has never named publicly. Gambill would have faced expulsion if she had been found guilty, but the charge was eventually dropped.

The entire story is here.

Prior stores about this case can be found here and here.

Editor's Note: When this story was discussed at a recent ethics education workshop, participants were stunned that there was no other civil rights actions convened against UNC-Chapel Hill.  Obviously, the story has changed.

Interview with Peter Singer-Part I

By Giving What We Can Cambridge  |  Posted June 18th, 2013

In early May, Peter Singer visited Cambridge to give a talk on effective altruism and Giving What We Can at the Cambridge Union. Before the talk, a team from Giving What We Can Cambridge took the opportunity to discuss effective altruism and effective careers with Professor Singer. In the first part of the interview, published below, Singer answers questions on giving and altruism.

Effective Altruism and some of the key questions behind it…

GWWC: How would you see the relationship between effectiveness and altruism? Where would you place an emphasis? Do you see them as being equally important?

Peter Singer: They are both important. I think really what I'm interested in is the impact that we end up having on problems that need to be dealt with, let's say particularly the issue of global poverty. So it's like saying: if what you're interested in is how much water you get into a bucket then it depends on how wide or narrow the stream is as well as the force, the pressure, with which the water is coming out. You want altruism because that will mean that people do more, but you want it to be effective because that will mean it will have a bigger impact.

GWWC: In a nutshell, what is wrong with the morality exhibited by most people, and what is your alternative?

Peter Singer: What is wrong with it is that people tend to look predominantly at what they actually do as determining right or wrong rather than what they omit to do. Very often when we allow things to happen that we could have prevented, the consequences might be much more serious than infractions to moral rules that people take quite seriously. So I think that our attitude towards morality, to what is involved in living well, is warped by too much of a distinction between acts and omissions.

The entire story is here.

Interview with Peter Singer-Part II

By Giving What We Can Cambridge  |  Posted June 27th, 2013

In early May, Peter Singer visited Cambridge to give a talk on effective altruism and Giving What We Can at the Cambridge Union. Before the talk, a team from Giving What We Can Cambridge took the opportunity to discuss effective altruism and effective careers with Professor Singer.

In the second part of the interview, published below, Singer answers questions on effective careers.

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Applying effective altruism to career choices – the idea behind “effective careers”

GWWC: How would you define an effective career?

Peter Singer: An effective career is one in which you seek to make the biggest possible beneficial impact on the world. That would be the most effective career but not many people will reach this. What you see instead is people striving for the most effective career and changing their career choices in order to have a bigger impact, if not the biggest. Overall this is adding another dimension to what effective altruism is all about.

GWWC: Is there a set of stable criteria that identifies a career as effective or good? Or does it differ from person to person? Because ultimately it is very hard to anticipate what impact these big life choices will have. With all that in mind what advice would you give to university students and young people interested in making these decisions?

Peter Singer: The main advice is to think about your career as something you are going to spend a large amount of time and energy on – 80,000 hours – and therefore not just to fall into one career or the other but to make a conscious choice to end up in a career where you can make a significant difference, and expect to get some satisfaction and well-being from doing so. But that’s very general advice, I can’t give advice to students saying either you should become a doctor to go and help people abroad who need health-care, or you should become a scientist so that you can discover renewable energy that doesn’t emit greenhouse gases, or you should go into finance so that you can earn a lot of money and donate to these organisations. That decision is going to depend on the individual’s talent and character. Each individual has to think for himself or herself “what can I contribute and where can I have the greatest impact” and then commit to doing so.

The entire interview is here.

The Morality of Meditation

By David DeSteno
The New York Times - Gray Matter
Originally published July 5, 2013

Here is an excerpt:

Gaining competitive advantage on exams and increasing creativity in business weren’t of the utmost concern to Buddha and other early meditation teachers. As Buddha himself said, “I teach one thing and one only: that is, suffering and the end of suffering.” For Buddha, as for many modern spiritual leaders, the goal of meditation was as simple as that. The heightened control of the mind that meditation offers was supposed to help its practitioners see the world in a new and more compassionate way, allowing them to break free from the categorizations (us/them, self/other) that commonly divide people from one another.

But does meditation work as promised? Is its originally intended effect — the reduction of suffering — empirically demonstrable?

To put the question to the test, my lab, led in this work by the psychologist Paul Condon, joined with the neuroscientist Gaëlle Desbordes and the Buddhist lama Willa Miller to conduct an experiment whose publication is forthcoming in the journal Psychological Science.

The entire story is here.

PA Gay Marriage Ban Faces ACLU Challenge

By Chris Gentilviso
The Huffington Post
Originally published July 9, 2013

Two weeks after the Supreme Court ruled that a federal ban on same-sex marriage is unconstitutional, the American Civil Liberties Union is bringing that decision to the state level.

The Associated Press reported Tuesday that the group is filing a lawsuit against Pennsylvania's same-sex marriage ban. The move will also aim to keep state officials from mounting further challenges against same-sex couples seeking to marry.

The entire story is here.

Editorial note: I would never have imagined that folks in Pennsylvania would be this progressive.

Cruel and Competitive or Compassionate and Cooperative?

Are We Born To Be Cruel and Competitive or Compassionate and Cooperative?

Samuel Knapp, EdD, ABPP
Director of Professional Affairs - Pennsylvania Psychological Association
The Pennsylvania Psychologist

What is the nature of humankind? Are we devils who only occasionally show sparks of morality? Or are we angels who sometimes slip into depravity? This question is not merely an interesting academic exercise. Instead, our assumptions about human nature, and our capacity for good or evil, help shape our expectations of each other and our expectations for ourselves. If we assume that humans are naturally evil and aggressive, we may tolerate or justify insensitive or cruel acts. On the other hand, if we assume that humans have a strong capacity for compassion and cooperation, then we may demand more of it from others and ourselves. [1]

Compassion and cooperation in non-human primates

Some claim that only the restraining force of civilization keeps people from “acting like animals.” Like the children in Lord of the Flies, it is argued that only a modest breakdown of external control can unleash the worst instincts of people that are lurking under a thin surface of civility. However, consider this event that occurred at the Brookfield zoo outside of Chicago on August 16, 1996:

A 3-year-old boy climbed the wall around the gorilla enclosure and fell 18 feet on to concrete into the enclosure, where he remained unconscious. Spectators gasped when the gorilla Binti Jua picked up the child, certain that the gorilla would harm him. However, Binti Jua gently cradled the infant with her right arm and carried him to an access entrance where the zoo keeper was waiting to take the child. Her own baby, Koola clutched her back during the entire incident. (Jones, 2011). 

Primatologist Frans deWaal (2010) could cite this and many other less dramatic incidents to illustrate the complexity of behavior of non-human primates, including their capacity for prosocial behaviors. DeWaal is no sentimentalist. He knows that some primates, such as chimpanzees, can act with great brutality such as when they engage in lethal gang warfare against members of their own species. Nonetheless, he claims that non-human primates also show love, compassion, and social cooperation. It is simply scientifically inaccurate, he argues, to conclude that our biological heritage necessarily drives us toward cruelty and selfishness. On the contrary, empathy and cooperation, deWaal claims, may be an equal or even greater part of our biological nature than callousness and aggression.

Detailed observations of non-human primates support deWaal’s conclusions. Primatologist Barbara Smuts states that “life in African ape societies possesses all the essential ingredients of first-rate soap operas; convoluted plots, passion, lots of sex and politics, surprise endings, and a cast of distinct characters” (2000, p. 80). Non-human primates rely heavily on their social networks and have a detailed mental record keeping system of who has helped them in the past and to whom they owe obligations. They know their kin and they gravitate toward them. Children will remember their mothers; mothers appear depressed at the death of their children. Chimpanzees keep track of who groomed them this morning when they share food in the afternoon, and they support their friends during fights. When endangered they will cling to each other or hold hands. Friendships can last a life time.

Here are some examples of social cooperation:
• Rachael, a monkey raised in the wild and later captured, raised orphaned children as her own (Smith, 2005).
• A bonobo inserted herself between a poisonous snake and her friend at the risk of her own life (deWaal, 2011).
• A high-ranking chimpanzee ensures that all members of his social group, even lower ranking members, get something to eat from his kill (deWaal, 2011). 

Cooperation and a sense of fairness even show up in controlled experiments. For example, monkeys are quite happy to receive a cucumber from experimenters, unless they see a companion getting a much more valued grape, whereupon they may reject the cucumber (deWaal, 2011).

Compassion and cooperation in human primates 

What evidence is there that these findings would generalize to human behavior? Are human primates as motivated by fairness as their non-human cousins? One source of information about human fairness and compassion comes from studies of game theory. Every fan of television crime shows has seen a version of the “prisoner’s dilemma” in which two people are arrested for a crime and are interrogated separately. Each prisoner knows that if they confess to the crime and implicate their partner, they will get a light sentence and their partner will get a heavy sentence (and conversely if their partner in crime confesses, they will get a heavy sentence, and their partner will get a light sentence), but if both prisoners refuse to talk, it is possible that neither of them will get any sentence at all.

Game theory, developed by behavioral economists, refers to simulations that are often modeled loosely on the prisoner’s dilemma. That is, in these situations participants can either gain or lose according to the degree of cooperation between them. Consider the Ultimatum Game:

Players are given a certain amount of money (for example $10) and put in separate rooms. Player one gets to decide how the money is to be split between him or her and player two. Player one could give it all away, keep it all, or give a share to player two. Then player two gets to decide whether to accept or reject the offer. If player two accepts the offer, then the offer is in effect. If player two rejects the offer, then no one gets anything. 

When Americans play the Ultimatum Game, offers of $2 were rejected half the time, but offers lower than $2 were rejected even more commonly. These findings run contrary to traditional economic theory that says that people should be motivated primarily be rational self-interest and player two should accept the offer of any money, because something is better than nothing.

However, consider the outcomes with a second type of game, The Dictator Game:

Player one is given a certain amount of money (for example $10) and is put in a room separate from player two. Player one gets to decide how much money to offer to player two. There is no opportunity to accept or reject: player two has to accept what is offered. 

When the Dictator Game is actually played, the amount most often offered by player one was 20% to 30% of the original amount, although the most common offers were nothing or one-half. That is, player one usually gave something to player two, and frequently gave player two the same amount that he/she took for him/herself. Traditional economic theory would predict that player one should offer player two nothing, since all players should be motivated primarily by their own financial interests.

Over the years behavioral economists have replicated or varied these games in hundreds of experiments. They have learned, for example, that in both the Dictator Game and the Ultimatum Game, several factors can influence the degree of cooperation including whether or not the players are anonymous, come from cultures where trading or commerce is common, or (in round robin games) previous participants were generous to them.

Just like the monkeys who reject the cucumber when it seems that they were being treated unfairly, players will often reject offers in the Ultimatum Game that they consider to be unfair. Like the monkeys, they would rather get nothing than submit to an unfair system. Just like the monkeys, baboons, and chimpanzees who feel social obligations to their relatives and friends, players in the Ultimatum and Dictator Games will be more generous with friends and relatives than with strangers, and will be more generous to those who have been generous to them in the past. Although we cannot automatically extrapolate every finding from the study of the behavior of non-human primates or game theory to other contexts, these sources of data suggest that humans are not motivated exclusively by short-term self-interest, but that fairness and cooperation also help drive human behavior.

References

deWaal, F. B. M. (2005, April). How animals do business. Scientific American, 292, 72-79.

deWaal, F. B. M. (2011). The age of empathy. New York: Harmony Books.

Kish-Gephart, J. J., Harrison, D. A., & Treviño, L. K. (2010). Bad apples, bad cases, or bad barrels: A meta-analytic evaluation about sources of unethical behavior at work. Journal of Applied Psychology, 95, 1-31.

Jones, J. (2011, August 16). From the archives: Gorilla saves boy. Retrieved from http://www.nbcchicago.com/news/local/binji-jua-127910608.html

Smuts, B. (2000, December). Common ground. Natural History, 78-83.

Smith, H. J. (2005). Parenting for primates. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

^[1] Philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes and Niccolò Machiavelli expected the worst from others. But in their review of unethical behavior in business organizations, Kish-Gephart et al. (2010) found that those who had a Machiavellian interpretation of human behavior were more likely to engage in unethical behavior.