Pinker and Wright: Is Morality Just Something We Make Up?

Peter Singer on Rationing Health Care

Princeton philosophy professor, Peter Singer, appeared on NPR's Talk of the Nation and spoke with Neil Conan about rationing health care. Here's just a taste. Click here to read the transcript or listen online.

SINGER: It would have been much cheaper to save extra life there than some of the things that we already do in other cases, where we're spending a lot on drugs, for example, for people in the last year of life who might get a lot of drugs at a vast cost that does very little to extend their life. So that's just another example of how we're rationing now, but we're doing it in an inefficient way that means that many people die unnecessarily because we're not sort of open and honest enough with ourselves about the rationing....
[....]
SINGER: .... U.S. government agencies, like the Department of Transportation, have to put a figure, a dollar figure, on the value of a life because they have to decide how much to spend to, let's say, rebuild a road where there's been an accident black spot, and they can predict that over the next 10 years, let's say, three people will be killed unless they change it. And currently, the Department of Transportation's figure is much higher than that one million that your caller mentioned. It's actually about $5 million to spend to save a life, and often I think we could save many more lives if we covered the uninsured.

And here is Singer's New York Times article from back in July, mentioned in the interview, called "Why We Must Ration Health Care."

Martha Nussbaum on Youtube

It's a relatively old interview (look at how young Bill Moyers looks); but it was just uploaded to Youtube yesterday.

Moyers: What do you take that phrase to mean, the notion of "a livable life"?

Nussbaum: ... life has many different parts... and these abilities and activities are not entirely under people's control at all times....On this view, a person is like a plant, something that is fairly sturdy but is always in need of support from the surrounding society. And the political leader in that image is like a gardener who has to tend the plant. And I think if you see human life that way and you think of the role of politics as providing conditions of support for all the richly diverse elements in a full human life, then that does have consequences for the way you are going to think.

See the video for more.

Another Brooks Column on Empirical Moral Psychology

This time it's on "character" mostly, although he doesn't mention the philosopher, John Doris, who wrote Lack of Character. Here's an excerpt from Brooks:

...a century’s worth of experiments suggests that people’s actual behavior is not driven by permanent traits that apply from one context to another. Students who are routinely dishonest at home are not routinely dishonest at school. People who are courageous at work can be cowardly at church. People who behave kindly on a sunny day may behave callously the next day when it is cloudy and they are feeling glum. Behavior does not exhibit what the psychologists call “cross-situational stability.”

David Brooks Again

You may have heard about David Brooks' column for today. Here it is.

He attended a recent conference on neuroscience and human psychology:

Since I’m not an academic, I’m free to speculate that this work will someday give us new categories, which will replace misleading categories like ‘emotion’ and ‘reason.’ I suspect that the work will take us beyond the obsession with I.Q. and other conscious capacities and give us a firmer understanding of motivation, equilibrium, sensitivity and other unconscious capacities.

The hard sciences are interpenetrating the social sciences. This isn’t dehumanizing. It shines attention on the things poets have traditionally cared about: the power of human attachments. It may even help policy wonks someday see people as they really are.

Have your say by leaving a comment.

Morality and the Economic Meltdown, Cont.

The Chairman of HSBC Bank said yesterday that the banking industry should apologize to the whole world for causing the economic meltdown, according to the BBC. "The industry collectively owes the real world an apology," Stephen Green said.

Mr Green, in Istanbul for the annual meetings of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, admitted the banking industry collectively owed the world an apology for the financial crisis.

"It also owes the real world a commitment to learn the lessons. Some of them are about governance and ethics and culture within the industry," he said.

Here at Ethics in the News, the Parr Center's blog, we have tried to follow "morality and the economic meltdown" as a theme. Although our research cannot claim to have been comprehensive, early on it seemed the only things to post about were outraged accusations of immoral behavior. Except for here, here and here, there was not much, so to speak, meta-discussion about the interrelation of morality and finance or morality and capitalism. If you've been reading any, post links to what you've read in the comments.

Anyway, a moment on google indicates that last year HSBC Bank asked philosopher A.C. Grayling to talk about morality and business.

Ethical Dilemmas at McSweeney's

Over at McSweeney's there's some joking going on involving the form of ethical dilemmas.

You operate an orphanage and your funding has just been slashed. Kids are now going without dessert. Your friend owns a grocery store and is willing to donate 500 Klondike bars to the orphans if you lie and tell the government that he donated 1,000. What would you do-o-o?

A Klondike bar in your freezer begins talking to you, claiming to be the voice of God. It instructs you to slay your firstborn son. WHAT WOULD YOU DO-O-O?