Welcome to the Nexus of Ethics, Psychology, Morality, Philosophy and Health Care

Welcome to the nexus of ethics, psychology, morality, technology, health care, and philosophy

Wednesday, October 5, 2016

Can Morality Be Taught?

Ashley Lamb-Sinclair
The Atlantic
Originally published September 14, 2016

Here is an excerpt:

I am especially disheartened, as are many Americans, when I consider the events of this past summer alone—bombings, riots, shootings—every bit of which derive from a need to identify and destroy the other, or, at the very least, a refusal to understand each other’s perspective. Then there is the presidential campaign with Donald Trump proclaiming “the other” as the source of many societal ills.

Arguments abound regarding laws to pass and policies to implement as solutions to these issues. And while passing bills might feel like a solution—and in some ways it would be—policy can only go so far in changing habits and perception. The only surefire solution to developing tolerance and openness to the perspectives of others is through educating young people.

I believe that the problem is not what is taught in schools, but how it is taught. It is not enough to simply offer curriculum about the ills of racism, homophobia, or bullying, and then expect lasting results from students who are entrenched in cultural beliefs that are reinforced by society.

The article is here.

Is Robust Moral Realism a kind of Religious Belief?

John Danaher
Philosophical Disquisitions
Originally posted September 11, 2016

Robust moral realism is the view that moral facts exist, but that they are not reducible to non-moral or natural facts. According to the robust realist, when I say something like ‘It is morally wrong to torture an innocent child for fun’, I am saying something that is true, but whose truth is not reducible to the non-moral properties of torture or children. Robust moral realism has become surprisingly popular in recent years, with philosophers like Derek Parfit, David Enoch, Erik Wielenberg and Russell Shafer-Landau all defending versions of it.

What is interesting about these philosophers is that they are all avowedly non-religious in their moral beliefs. They don’t think there is any connection between morality and the truths of any particular religion. Indeed, several of them are explicitly atheistic in their moral outlook. In a recent paper, however, David Killoren has argued that robust moral realism is a kind of religious belief: one that must be held on faith and that shares other properties with popular religions. At the same time, he argues that it is an ‘excellent’ kind of religious belief, one that could be attractive to the non-religious and religious alike.

Tuesday, October 4, 2016

Whatever you think, you don’t necessarily know your own mind

Keith Frankish
aeon.co
Originally published May 27, 2016

Do  you think racial stereotypes are false? Are you sure? I’m not asking if you’re sure whether or not the stereotypes are false, but if you’re sure whether or not you think that they are. That might seem like a strange question. We all know what we think, don’t we?

Most philosophers of mind would agree, holding that we have privileged access to our own thoughts, which is largely immune from error. Some argue that we have a faculty of ‘inner sense’, which monitors the mind just as the outer senses monitor the world. There have been exceptions, however. The mid-20th-century behaviourist philosopher Gilbert Ryle held that we learn about our own minds, not by inner sense, but by observing our own behaviour, and that friends might know our minds better than we do. (Hence the joke: two behaviourists have just had sex and one turns to the other and says: ‘That was great for you, darling. How was it for me?’) And the contemporary philosopher Peter Carruthers proposes a similar view (though for different reasons), arguing that our beliefs about our own thoughts and decisions are the product of self-interpretation and are often mistaken.

Replacing the Moral Foundations: An Evolutionary-Coalitional Theory of Liberal-Conservative Differences

Jeffrey S. Sinn, Matthew W. Hayes
Political Psychology
First published: August 2016

Abstract

Moral Foundations Theory (MFT) explains liberal-conservative differences as arising from different moral intuitions, with liberals endorsing “individualizing” foundations (Harm and Fairness) and conservatives also endorsing “binding” foundations (Authority, Respect, and Purity). We argue these labels misconstrue ideological differences and propose Evolutionary-Coalitional Theory (ECT) as an alternative, explaining how competitive dynamics in the ancestral social environment could produce the observed ideological differences. We test ECT against MFT across three studies. Study 1 shows the so-called “binding” orientation entails the threat-sensitivity and outgroup antagonism predicted by ECT; that is, an authoritarian motive. Similarly, Study 2 shows the so-called “individualizing” orientation is better described as a universalizing motive, one reflecting a broader set of moral commitments (e.g., to nature) and a broader sociality than the egocentrism implied by MFT. Study 3 provides a factor analysis reducing “binding” to authoritarianism and “individualizing” to universalism, with the latter loading against social dominance orientation (SDO). A hierarchical regression then provides additional evidence for ECT, showing this dominating motive (SDO) accounts for variance in conservatism that MFT leaves unexplained. Collectively, these three studies suggest that ECT offers a more accurate and precise explanation of the key psychological differences between liberals and conservatives.

The article is here.

Monday, October 3, 2016

Prep school abuse victims file complaints about psychologist

by Michelle R. Smith
Associated Press
Originally published September 8, 2016

Two victims of sexual abuse at the elite Rhode Island boarding school St. George's have filed complaints with state licensing officials about the school's former psychologist.

They tell The Associated Press that Peter Kosseff did not do enough to address and prevent abuse during his 35 years at the school, and they want his license revoked.

Kosseff, who still practices and has offices in South Kingstown and Newport, did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

The first complaint was filed in December and the other soon after, the two women told the AP.  Joseph Wendelken, a spokesman for the Department of Health, which oversees such licenses, said such complaints are confidential and he could not confirm them. The department said Kosseff's license was last renewed in May.

The Associated Press typically doesn't name sexual abuse victims unless they come forward publicly.

The article is here.

Moral learning: Why learning? Why moral? And why now?

Peter Railton
Cognition

Abstract

What is distinctive about a bringing a learning perspective to moral psychology? Part of the answer lies in the remarkable transformations that have taken place in learning theory over the past two decades, which have revealed how powerful experience-based learning can be in the acquisition of abstract causal and evaluative representations, including generative models capable of attuning perception, cognition, affect, and action to the physical and social environment. When conjoined with developments in neuroscience, these advances in learning theory permit a rethinking of fundamental questions about the acquisition of moral understanding and its role in the guidance of behavior. For example, recent research indicates that spatial learning and navigation involve the formation of non-perspectival as well as ego-centric models of the physical environment, and that spatial representations are combined with learned information about risk and reward to guide choice and potentiate further learning. Research on infants provides evidence that they form non-perspectival expected-value representations of agents and actions as well, which help them to navigate the human environment. Such representations can be formed by highly-general mental processes such as causal and empathic simulation, and thus afford a foundation for spontaneous moral learning and action that requires no innate moral faculty and can exhibit substantial autonomy with respect to community norms. If moral learning is indeed integral with the acquisition and updating of casual and evaluative models, this affords a new way of understanding well-known but seemingly puzzling patterns in intuitive moral judgment—including the notorious “trolley problems.”

The article is here.

Sunday, October 2, 2016

Why you should worry about the privatization of genetic data

Kayte Spector-Bagdady
The Conversation
Originally posted September 8, 2016

Here is an excerpt:

But genetic data banks amassed by private companies don’t necessarily have to follow the same regulations regarding access to their data that federally funded researchers do. And a recent proposal to change consent regulations for human research may make it cheaper for private companies to collect and use this data than public ones.

As bioethicists (myself included) have warned, we need to pay attention to concerns about how these private genetic data banks are used and accessed before we enable a system where the future of public genetic research lies in private hands.

The article is here.

Saturday, October 1, 2016

Why So Many Americans Don't Want Social Justice and Don't Trust Scientists

Jonathan Haidt. PhD
2013 Boyarsky Lecture in Law, Medicine & Ethics



This lecture focuses on Moral Foundations Theory and its application to politics, polarization, science, and inequality.

Friday, September 30, 2016

Gender Differences in Responses to Moral Dilemmas: A Process Dissociation Analysis

Rebecca Friesdorf, Paul Conway, and Bertram Gawronski
Pers Soc Psychol Bull, first published on April 3, 2015
doi:10.1177/0146167215575731

Abstract

The principle of deontology states that the morality of an action depends on its consistency with moral norms; the principle of utilitarianism implies that the morality of an action depends on its consequences. Previous research suggests that deontological judgments are shaped by affective processes, whereas utilitarian judgments are guided by cognitive processes. The current research used process dissociation (PD) to independently assess deontological and utilitarian inclinations in women and men. A meta-analytic re-analysis of 40 studies with 6,100 participants indicated that men showed a stronger preference for utilitarian over deontological judgments than women when the two principles implied conflicting decisions (d = 0.52). PD further revealed that women exhibited stronger deontological inclinations than men (d = 0.57), while men exhibited only slightly stronger utilitarian inclinations than women (d = 0.10). The findings suggest that gender differences in moral dilemma judgments are due to differences in affective responses to harm rather than cognitive evaluations of outcomes.

The article is here.