Ethics in the News

Environmental Ethics

2010-10-12T10:47:00.001-04:00

One important issue in environmental ethics, brought to the fore of our social consciousness by the BP oil spill, is the question of responsibility in response to disasters. This question can be asked in a different ways. First, one could focus on who is to blame and argue that those people have the duty to repair their disaster. Or, one could focus on the government as an agency with a duty to protect its citizens. Examples of these lines of thought are presented in the following articles:

http://articles.latimes.com/2010/jun/02/opinion/la-ed-bp-20100602

This opinion piece from the LA Times argues that the government bears a responsibility to solve the crisis in order to protect its citizens from harm. The editorial board obviously believes that the duty of response lies on government in such large scale disasters, even though BP might be at fault for the spill itself. They obviously believe the government is the party with the most responsibility (after the scale of the disaster was known) for clean-up and relief because the citizens depend on its protection.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/25/us/25liability.html?scp=6&sq=bp%20responsibility&st=cse

This story brings to light the legal issues of liability, showing that, according to our current system of law, BP may only be responsible for a limited financial amount. The other companies involved--Anadarko, Mitsui, and Transocean--have all tried to place legal liability on BP or limit their own. Andarko claims BP was “gross[ly] negligent,” which would remove their own liability. Mitusi promised all of their revenues would go to relief efforts, which this article suggests may be in an effort to “shield it[self] from liability.” And Transocean claims, simply, that BP is contractually obligated to assume all liability for pollution and contamination by their drilling agreement. The legal battle this article lays out displays the implicit ideas of responsibility and blame acting in our legal system right now. We should investigate these ideas by asking whether or liability should be reliant on who is blame, or if it is determined by who profits from the risk, or if it can be determined by contracts. This is further explored in the issue of shareholder blame, as discussed here:

http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/10/can-the-u-s-punish-bps-shareholders/

The various views offered in this piece all discuss whether or not the shareholders of BP, the legal owners and those who profit from BP's activities can be held financially responsible for the spill. The arguments offered vary widely. One writer claims that shareholders risk their investments when they buy stock, and can therefore be penalized by the loss of those investments when the company’s actions lead to a disaster. Another claims that we cannot punish BP by more than the $75 million they are limited to paying by the Oil Pollution Act of 1990, even though the cost of clean-up will be far greater, because doing so would do too much damage to the rule of law. Another argues that not paying dividends to its shareholders would demonstrate BP’s good intent to the public. Another asserts that BP should pay those harmed by the spill because they have an ethical duty to do so. All of these arguments, as well as the rest in the piece, demonstrate various ideas on responsibility. We must ask ourselves whether or not those who caused the disaster should be made to undertake the response, or if those who profit from the enterprise, such as the shareholders, are the ones who are responsible for that effort. Or, we must decide whether the government’s duty to protect its citizens places the burden of response of it, and the issue of blame is only secondary, with no impact on how the clean-up is done. The way in which we respond to the BP oil spill demonstrates our thinking on these issues.

Opt-Out Organ Donation?

2010-06-04T08:31:00.003-04:00

The New York State Assembly is considering a radical new policy regarding organ donation in an effort address the needs of the more than 8,000 New Yorkers in need of life-saving organs: make everyone an organ donor unless they explicitly opt out.

The new "presumed consent" law would automatically enroll everyone who applies for a driver license into the state's organ and tissue donation registry unless the applicant declines to be registered. Read the actual bill here.

There are a number of interesting questions here, not the least of which involves the significant paternalistic overtones of the proposed policy. Then there are questions of socio-economic equity: it is easy to think that those with poorer and/or less-educated backgrounds will be less likely to know about opting out and therefore less able to do so.

Regardless of whether this bill makes it to law, it is sure to raise consciousness about the severe need for donor organs, so it's pleasing to see both supporters and detractors discussing ways to increase organ donation.

The Philosopher's Stone

2010-05-16T22:00:00.004-04:00

NYTimes.com has launched a feature focused entirely on philosophy. It's in their "Opinionator" section along with Stanley Fish, Olivia Judson, and Robert Wright. Simon Critchley is to be the editor of The Stone.

Baby Justice

2010-05-09T15:43:00.007-04:00

Paul Bloom writes about the moral judgments babies make.

A growing body of evidence, though, suggests that humans do have a rudimentary moral sense from the very start of life. With the help of well-designed experiments, you can see glimmers of moral thought, moral judgment and moral feeling even in the first year of life. Some sense of good and evil seems to be bred in the bone.

But the morality babies have is, according to Bloom, shot through with in-group preferences.

... 3-month-olds prefer the faces of the race that is most familiar to them to those of other races; 11-month-olds prefer individuals who share their own taste in food and expect these individuals to be nicer than those with different tastes; 12-month-olds prefer to learn from someone who speaks their own language over someone who speaks a foreign language. And studies with young children have found that once they are segregated into different groups — even under the most arbitrary of schemes, like wearing different colored T-shirts — they eagerly favor their own groups in their attitudes and their actions...

And, as Blooms says:

The aspect of morality that we truly marvel at — its generality and universality — is the product of culture, not of biology.

So:

The morality we start off with is primitive, not merely in the obvious sense that it’s incomplete, but in the deeper sense that when individuals and societies aspire toward an enlightened morality — one in which all beings capable of reason and suffering are on an equal footing, where all people are equal — they are fighting with what children have from the get-go.

Photo Credit: Nicholas Nixon for The New York Times

"Second graders at a charter school in Springfield, Mass., take time from math and reading to engage in philosophical debate."

2010-04-17T22:12:00.003-04:00

Here's the New York Times article.

A few times each month, second graders at a charter school in Springfield, Mass., take time from math and reading to engage in philosophical debate. There is no mention of Hegel or Descartes, no study of syllogism or solipsism. Instead, Prof. Thomas E. Wartenberg and his undergraduate students from nearby Mount Holyoke College use classic children’s books to raise philosophical questions, which the young students then dissect with the vigor of the ancient Greeks.

Photo credit: Bryce Vickmark for the New York Times

More Philosophy on TV!

2010-04-07T06:33:00.004-04:00

Moral philosopher Jonathan Dancy on Craig Ferguson's show. If it's not fitting then watch it on youtube.

The Economist Reports on Survey of Philosophers

2010-03-30T14:00:00.008-04:00

Anthony Gottlieb at the Economist reports on PhilPapers.org's survey of philosopher's philosophical positions and beliefs.

With regards to aesthetics and ethics:

By a fairly narrow margin, today’s philosophers believe that judgments of artistic value are not merely matters of individual taste: 41% said aesthetic values are objective, 34% say subjective, and a quarter gave some other answer. They were not asked directly whether moral values are objective, but the responses to related questions suggest that most philosophers believe they are. Some 56% incline towards “moral realism”, which has no precise definition but implies that ethical questions have objectively right (and wrong) answers, and nearly two-thirds endorsed moral “cognitivism”, which suggests that they believe there are moral facts or truths.

And:

When asked which dead philosopher they most identified with, a clear winner emerged, with 21% of the votes: David Hume, the 18th-century thinker, historian, sceptic and agnostic who was a close friend of the economist Adam Smith. Aristotle, Kant and Wittgenstein took second, third and fourth places. The next six spots went to philosophers from the 20th century, most recently Donald Davidson, an American who died in 2003. Plato made 13th place and Socrates limped in at 21st.

Science and Human Values

2010-03-29T13:04:00.005-04:00

Sam Harris at TED talks about science and human values.

I am going to speak today about the relation between science and human values. Now, it is generally understood that questions of morality, questions about good and evil and right and wrong, are questions about which science officially has no opinion. It's thought that science can help us get what we value, but it can never tell us what we ought to value. And consequently, most people... think that science will never answer the most important questions in human life, questions like: "What is worth living for?", "What is worth dying for?" and "What constitutes a good life?". I am going to argue that this is an illusion - that the separation between science and human values is an illusion and actually quite a dangerous one at this point in human history.

Art Evolved Like Ethics Did and Vice Versa

2010-03-15T11:27:00.002-04:00

At the USA Today there's an article about the evolution of morality. The journalist, Cathy Lynn Grossman, attended the....

Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowships in Science & Religion where the ideas are flying among scientists, theologians, philosophers and the reporters who cover them.

Evolutionary biologist Francisco Ayala...

... traced humanity's evolutionary development and linked the capacity for ethics to advanced intelligence, the development of language and the unique-to-humans concept of self-awareness.

He thinks ethics -- which can also exist apart from religion in his view -- evolved at the same time as aesthetics, the awareness of beauty. Art and aesthetics, like human altruism, require value judgments and the ability to compare.

Hitchens Revises the Ten Commandments

2010-03-15T07:17:00.005-04:00

If the video doesn't seem to fit try watching it directly at YouTube.

The Vanity Fair article.

Who Do You Think Possesses 'Moral Authority' in America?

2010-03-01T11:04:00.011-05:00

The question, "Who Do You Think Possesses 'Moral Authority' in America?" is being considered on a popular blog at The Atlantic magazine edited by Andrew Sullivan, with a hat tip to Mark Kleiman.

The excerpt below gives an idea of what they are taking "moral authority" to mean.

“Who in contemporary America has moral authority?”... I took this to mean both “moral authority you are prepared to accept” and “enough public standing to be an actual force....”

who

...has the intellectual force, the moral clarity, and the nerve...

but does not lack the necessary...

... notoriety, nor the impulse to seek it out... I could come up with only one name: Barack Obama. Could it really be true that there is no other political leader, journalist, academic, religious figure, business leader, trade unionist currently active with the stature to summon people to action based on moral authority as opposed to self-interest?

It seems to me that the field wasn’t always so empty.

And then he lists:
Martin Luther King Jr.
Adlai Stevenson
Edward R. Murrow
Walter Cronkite

So, who do you think has moral authority today?

Please post your nominations in the comments section. Let's keep it to living persons.

Author of "Rediscovering Values" Rev. Jim Wallis

2010-01-21T12:22:00.002-05:00

Transcript.

Morality and Mortgages

2010-01-11T16:57:00.008-05:00

Last week in the New York Times, Roger Lowenstein asked whether there are moral implications of failing to pay one's mortgage.

C.E.O. of the Mortgage Bankers Association... said... homeowners who default on their mortgages should think about the “message” they will send to “their family and their kids and their friends.”

Indeed it is sometimes thought to be a moral obligation to live up to your end of a contract you've signed; and maybe therefore people should not walk away from their mortgages. And yet, as Lowenstein points out, corporations will walk away from their debts if it can be calculated the economically rational thing to do.

... the housing collapse left 10.7 million families owing more than their homes are worth. So some of them are making a calculated decision to hang onto their money and let their homes go. Is this irresponsible?

Businesses — in particular Wall Street banks — make such calculations routinely. Morgan Stanley recently decided to stop making payments on five San Francisco office buildings. A Morgan Stanley fund purchased the buildings at the height of the boom, and their value has plunged. Nobody has said Morgan Stanley is immoral — perhaps because no one assumed it was moral to begin with.

What do readers of the Parr Center blog, Ethics in the News, think?

Matthew Yglesias (a Harvard philosophy B.A.) at Think Progress writes:

[Imagine] my friend says he wants to meet for a drink at 8PM, and I say “are you going to show up 15 minutes late as usual?” Then he says “No way. If I’m late, drinks are on me.” [If] he shows up 20 minutes late, but follows through on his promise to pay the tab I think it’s fair to say that he’s still open to moral criticism. Similarly, a person who drives all around town blocking fire hydrants is doing something wrong even if he willingly pays all applicable fines in a prompt manner.

While this is a nice example, Yglesias shows that there is a difference:

... my mortgage is an agreement I’ve made with Bank of America which is a publicly traded for-profit corporation. Companies like that, unlike people ... or other kinds of institutions, don’t recognize any kind of goals other than monetary ones. Under the circumstances, any relationship you might have with Bank of America is a purely transactional, purely commercial one and if you treat it as anything other than that you’re being a sucker.

... families that think it serves their interests to default on mortgage payments shouldn’t feel morally obligated to avoid default.

Comments?

The Ethics of Food

2010-01-06T13:05:00.006-05:00

Here's an interesting New York Times piece called
Sorry, Vegans: Brussels Sprouts Like to Live, Too:

“Plants are not static or silly,” said Monika Hilker of the Institute of Biology at the Free University of Berlin. “They respond to tactile cues, they recognize different wavelengths of light, they listen to chemical signals, they can even talk” through chemical signals. Touch, sight, hearing, speech. “These are sensory modalities and abilities we normally think of as only being in animals,” Dr. Hilker said.

Read it for yourself. In an earlier New York Times piece, Gary Steiner, a philosopher at Bucknell University, argued that...

...people should strive to be “strict ethical vegans” ... avoiding all products derived from animals, including wool and silk. Killing animals for human food and finery is nothing less than “outright murder,”... [an] “eternal Treblinka.”

These articles are a mix of "is" and "ought". By "is" I mean the articles describe facts and make empirical claims about the nature of plants and animals that we may not have thought about before. Just what we ought to do in light of this information is a problem for philosophical ethics and ethical reasoning.

“I’m amazed at how fast some of these things happen,” said Consuelo M. De Moraes of Pennsylvania State University. Dr. De Moraes and her colleagues did labeling experiments to clock a plant’s systemic response time and found that, in less than 20 minutes from the moment the caterpillar had begun feeding on its leaves, the plant had plucked carbon from the air and forged defensive compounds from scratch.

Just because we humans can’t hear them doesn’t mean plants don’t howl. Some of the compounds that plants generate in response to insect mastication — their feedback, you might say — are volatile chemicals that serve as cries for help. Such airborne alarm calls have been shown to attract both large predatory insects like dragon flies, which delight in caterpillar meat, and tiny parasitic insects, which can infect a caterpillar and destroy it from within.

February 23rd, 2010 the Parr Center for Ethics is conducting a panel discussion:

How Should We Eat? Policy and Ethics. Factory farms. Immigrant labor. Sustainability. Food democracy. World Hunger. Access. Environmental impacts. Nutrition. Genetic modification. Organic vs. Conventional. How do we navigate the food industry and make ethical choices about our food consumption? How do we prioritize our ethical concerns? Join a panel of food experts to discuss these questions and determine the issues at stake. This event is free and open to the public. Location: TBA, 6:30 pm.

Parr Center wins APA prize

2009-12-28T22:53:00.003-05:00

The Parr Center was awarded the American Philosophical Association / Philosophy Documentation Center Prize for Excellence and Innovation in Philosophy Programs for 2008. The prize was awarded at the APA's Eastern Division meeting held at the Marriott Marquis in New York City. Previous award winners include the Philosophy Program at Davidson College (2007), the Intercollegiate Ethics Bowl at Illinois Institute of Technology (2006), and the Carroll-Cleveland Philosophers' Program at John Carroll University (2005).

Walter Sinnott-Armstrong Lecturing on the Law and Neuroscience

2009-12-07T00:40:00.000-05:00

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

2009-11-26T23:02:00.001-05:00

Peter Singer on Rationing Health Care

2009-11-24T01:31:00.006-05:00

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

2009-11-17T19:51:00.003-05:00

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

2009-10-21T21:17:00.002-04:00

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

2009-10-13T13:58:00.002-04:00

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.

2009-10-07T00:24:00.007-04:00

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

2009-10-04T20:40:00.003-04:00

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?

More Morality Online from Harvard

2009-09-29T20:39:00.002-04:00

Here are two videos of Harvard professor Marc Hauser lecturing on moral psychology:

Part 1

Part 2

Embedded here is part 2 which starts with everyone's favorite: the trolley problem!

Professor Sandel's Outreach in Philosophical Ethics

2009-09-29T19:48:00.004-04:00

The Times Profiles Professor Sandel's outreach programs in philosophical ethics here.

Would you switch a runaway trolley from one track to another if it meant killing one person instead of five? Would it be just as moral to push a person in front of the speeding trolley to stop it and save the five? What about a surgeon killing one healthy person and using his organs so that five people who needed organ transplants could live? Is that moral? Why not?

Check out Sandel's outreach website: http://justiceharvard.org/ co-produced by Harvard and PBS.

Ethics in the News: Philosophy on the Today Show!

2009-09-25T10:33:00.001-04:00

Click here for an updated link to the Sandel interview.

Philosophy on the Today Show!

2009-09-18T21:51:00.004-04:00

On NBC's Today show Michael Sandel talked with Meredith Vieira about the relevance of philosophy to our everyday lives.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Evolution and Meaninglessness

2009-09-02T18:21:00.004-04:00

Does the theory of evolution leave room for meaning in the universe? Robert Wright’s book Evolution of God was attacked in The New Republic for softening the meaninglessness of evolution. [Late Update: This phrasing may be vague. What I mean is that Coyne says that Wright is making evolution "congenial" to the faithful. Apparently Coyne thinks evolution is not congenial to the faithful. I just wanted to invite our readers to ponder evolution and its significance for our self-image. - Editor]

But Jim Manzi at The Atlantic defends Wright here. He offers a very interesting account of computer algorithms that work like evolution.

Computer scientists were inspired [...] because they observed the same three fundamental algorithmic operators — selection, crossover, and mutation — accomplish a similar task in the natural world. Notice that the method searches a space of possible solutions far more rapidly than random search, but it neither requires nor generates beliefs about the causal relationship between patterns within the genome and fitness beyond the raw observation of the survival or death of individual organisms. This is what makes the approach applicable to such a vast range of phenomena. That such a comparatively simple concept can explain so much about the way nature works is what makes genetic evolution a scientific paradigm of stupendous beauty and power. As Leonardo put it, simplicity is the highest form of sophistication.

Check out Manzi's discussion here.

Relativism and Secularism

2009-08-03T22:24:00.002-04:00

Taking a look at secularism, relativism and morality, The Wall Street Journal reviews In Praise of Doubt by Peter Bergerand and Anton Zijderveld.

Fundamentalism enforces a consensus about ultimate ends without accounting for difference, while relativism makes sharing common values impossible. In “In Praise of Doubt,” Mr. Berger has teamed up with the Dutch philosopher Anton Zijderveld to argue that it is possible to maintain moral certainty about liberal democratic values without succumbing to either of these extremes.

Ethics (in schools!) in the News

2009-07-24T12:40:00.009-04:00

Russian President Medvedev announced a pilot program to require schoolchildren to take courses in religion or secular ethics. The move comes as "part of a Kremlin effort to teach young Russians morals in the wake of a turbulent period of uncertainty following the collapse of the officially atheist Soviet Union."

Medvedev said preteen students at about 12,000 schools in 18 Russian regions would take the classes. They will be offered the choice of studying the dominant Russian Orthodox religion, Islam, Buddhism or Judaism, or of taking an overview of all four faiths, or a course in secular ethics.
Students and their parents must be allowed to choose freely, Medvedev said in addressing top clerics and officials at his residence outside Moscow. "Any coercion, pressure will be absolutely unacceptable and counterproductive," he said.
...
The offer of a choice appeared aimed to ease concerns that Russian Orthodoxy will be forced on schoolchildren as the church gains influence and tightens ties with the state.
Mandatory classes in Orthodox culture were introduced in a few Russian regions three years ago, but they alarmed adherents of other confessions who said religion has no place in schools in a secular state. The classes also were criticized as being reminiscent of the forced study of communism or scientific atheism during Soviet times, with one mandatory ideology being substituted with another.

It is encouraging to see any major state officially recognize the importance of an ethical education. What remains to be seen, though, is whether the students who opt for classes in one or more religions will be exposed to any sort of critical examination of the moral codes they learn about, or whether the courses will stop at, "This is what Muslims (or Jews, or Christians, or Buddhists) believe we ought to do." One hopes that students in the program will at least be invited to consider whether and why anyone ought to do what Muslims (or Jews, or Christians, or Buddhists) believe we ought to do, whether or not they opt for the so-called "secular ethics" classes.

Michael Sandel Speaking on Ethics of Free Market Principles

2009-07-23T16:07:00.002-04:00

Watch the whole video here.

Discussion between Rorty and Davidson

2009-06-27T23:08:00.001-04:00

There's lots of philosophy videos to watch around the internet.

Iran: Legitimacy of Government, Consent and Revolution

2009-06-21T22:21:00.002-04:00

Morally speaking, what are the citizens of a nation-state permitted to do when faced with an illegitimate government; a government that rules without the consent of the people? And what are the citizens permitted to do in terms of violence when the government is violently repressing them?

These are, of course, difficult questions. And you won't find an answer here. But the video below is inspiring.

The reform-agenda protesters face off with government forces and the people make the military turn and run. Watch all the way to the end.

Battle w/ Police - Tehran, Iran - June 20th 2009
by mightier-than

To follow what's going on in Iran Andrew Sullivan's blog at the Atlantic Monthly is a good place to start. The Lede at Nytimes.com is deep into covering it. And there's the always well-informed Juan Cole.

A New Bloggingheads.tv Video

2009-06-15T20:50:00.003-04:00

Josh Greene and Josh Knobe discuss the philosophy and psychology of moral judgments at Bloggingheads.tv.

Does Studying Ethics Make You More Ethical?

2009-06-09T14:23:00.003-04:00

The short answer is no.

Maybe explicit reflection crowds out other forms of moral responsiveness that are even better; or maybe reflection on philosophical examples eviscerates the intuitions on which we must depend; or maybe moral reflection is mostly just self-serving rationalization, at which ethicists are particularly talented.

2009-05-27T13:06:00.004-04:00

The News and Observer, our local paper here at the Parr Center for Ethics, published an opinion piece on torture by Mark Bowden.

It seems his position is that torture should not be made legal, although sometimes it may be justified to torture.

The use of any coercive tactics against prisoners ought to expose those responsible to prosecution...

He says torture should be illegal because it's heinous and to legalize it would remove us from "ethical purity." However...

... few fair-minded people would weigh that ethical purity more heavily than preventing further attacks like those that killed thousands in September 2001.

The real damage done by Bush administration torture policies was the effort to codify coercion.

... all forms of torture, broadly defined, ought to be banned. What does such a ban mean? It means that anyone who gets rough with a prisoner is crossing the line and placing himself at risk. This, history makes clear, is the only way to curb the universal tendency of men to abuse those over whom they wield complete control.

Bowden is saying that it should remain illegal, although on some rare occasions a moral person would break the law and justifiably conduct torture.

Making it illegal...

does not mean that there can be no circumstance in which torture is justified, at least to those who would not adhere blindly to principle. Life presents moral dilemmas, and combat in particular produces them. To obtain life-saving intelligence when no alternative means are at hand, a moral person might reluctantly accept the responsibility for crossing that line. Those who investigate his actions later can determine whether they were justified, but the moral person accepts that he or she may suffer for making that choice.

So that's his position.

But he goes on to suggest that if he were among the "investigators" of those who tortured KSM and Zubaydah he'd be sympathetic with their motivation.

I [...] respect the decision in 2002 to take whatever steps were necessary to pry information from Sheikh Muhammad and Zubaydah. An inquiry may reveal that their questioners were motivated primarily by a desire to inflict suffering and that they achieved nothing, but I doubt it. I believe they were urgently motivated to thwart attacks on al-Qaeda's drawing boards, and probably did so.

Unfortunately, there is reason to believe that the torture we are talking about was conducted not in any kind of ticking time bomb scenario. But rather it was used to find a link between al Qaeda and Iraq. A link we now know did not exist.

Lawrence Wilkerson, republican, retired Army colonel, and former chief of staff for Colin Powel, wrote in the Washington Note:

"Its principal priority for intelligence was not aimed at preempting another terrorist attack on the U.S. but discovering a smoking gun linking Iraq and al Qaeda,"

CNN reports on it here. From CNN:

Wilkerson wrote that in one case, the CIA told Cheney's office that a prisoner under its interrogation program was now "compliant," meaning agents recommended the use of "alternative" techniques should stop.

At that point, "The VP's office ordered them to continue the enhanced methods," Wilkerson wrote.

"The detainee had not revealed any al Qaeda-Baghdad contacts yet. This ceased only after Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, under waterboarding in Egypt, 'revealed' such contacts."

NPR interviews Duke Professor Dan Ariely on Money, Morality and Decision-Making

2009-05-27T11:42:00.005-04:00

Professor Ariely's new book about human fallibility in decision-making is called "Predictably Irrational."

NPR has made a transcript of the interview available and an mp3 file so you can listen to it online.

NewsHour economics correspondent Paul Solman recently sat down with behavioral economist Dan Ariely, who studies irrationality in economic decision making, to discuss why people cheat, the media's influence on markets and whether the public needs to see remorse on Wall Street.

Ariely: "In the media, there's this slogan that says, 'If it bleeds, it leads,' with the idea that if something is emotionally capturing, then we want to emphasize that. And because of this there's a bias both in the media and in ourselves as human beings to overemphasize things that are emotionally grabbing." [...]

Ariely: "So if you think to yourself: What's more important? To have a report about one unfortunate individual who lost their job and has very difficult life circumstances, or something that helps us understand more generally what is going on in AIG, how is the bailout going, what is the future of this company?" [...]

Ariely: "So it's the news feeding our psychology of caring more about emotional things, and because of that much of the news is not really that educational and informative in terms of helping us understand what is going on, instead of just kind of tapping our emotion over and over and over. And I think because of that people also get more fearful. If all the news is focusing on these terrible pieces of information about how frightening this is, and this is, and gloom here, and gloom there, we're going to be much more fearful."

Which Class of Society in America Gives Most Generously to Charity?

2009-05-23T12:22:00.006-04:00

America's poor donate more, in percentage terms, than higher-income groups do, surveys of charitable giving show. What's more, their generosity declines less in hard times than the generosity of richer givers does.

"The lowest-income fifth (of the population) always give at more than their capacity," said Virginia Hodgkinson, former vice president for research at Independent Sector, a Washington-based association of major nonprofit agencies. "The next two-fifths give at capacity, and those above that are capable of giving two or three times more than they give."

Indeed, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics' latest survey of consumer expenditure found that the poorest fifth of America's households contributed an average of 4.3 percent of their incomes to charitable organizations in 2007. The richest fifth gave at less than half that rate, 2.1 percent. [...]

The working poor, disproportionate numbers of which are recent immigrants, are America's most generous group, according to Arthur Brooks, the author of the book "Who Really Cares," an analysis of U.S. generosity. [...]

"When you have just a little, you're thankful for what you have," Pastor Coletta Jones said, "but with every step you take up the ladder of success, the money clouds your mind and gets you into a state of never being satisfied."

Brooks offered this statistic as supportive evidence: Fifty-eight percent of noncontributors with above-median incomes say they don't have enough money to give any away. [...]

What makes poor people's generosity even more impressive is that their giving generally isn't tax-deductible, because they don't earn enough to justify itemizing their charitable tax deductions. In effect, giving a dollar to charity costs poor people a dollar while it costs deduction itemizers 65 cents.

Read the story here.

Parr Center Fellow Pens Op-Ed at the News & Observer Protesting Mukasey Commencement Speech

2009-05-14T20:15:00.002-04:00

Joseph E. Kennedy, an associate professor of law at UNC School of Law and a fellow here at the Parr Center for Ethics wrote a column explaining his decision to wear a orange arm band to protest former U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey's commencement speech at the Law School.

In the Bybee memo of August 2002, a memorandum that Mukasey characterizes as a mistake, the head of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel essentially defined torture as an interrogation technique that causes the equivalent of organ failure. He got that definition not from any legal authority defining torture but from a definition of "severe pain" found in an obscure medical benefits statute.
Such reasoning would receive an F grade if offered by a first-year law student. When offered by the head of the elite Office of Legal Counsel it must be seen for what it was: a lie about the meaning of the law, not a mistake.

Read the whole column here.

More on the Science of Morality

2009-05-12T12:20:00.004-04:00

There have been lots of articles reporting recent work in the science of moral judgments and most of them use a catchy headline based on an intuition that finding out about why we act morally will mean the end of morality. Lots of people have that intuition apparently, but is the claim true? Please talk about it in the comments.

Anyway, here's another article on the science of morality and its title is "So Much For Morality". But of course nothing in the article suggests that the research reported therein spells the end of morality.

When we think of temporally distant events, we think more abstractly, which makes us focus on superordinate aspects and the main purport of the event. But if we think of events that are close to us in time, we think more concretely, which means that subordinate, peripheral aspects take on more importance. For example, if we imagine that we will be asked to donate blood in the future, what dominates is the superordinate moral value of helping other people, but if the time perspective is telescoped, concrete subordinate selfish motives take over, such as the fact that it will be unpleasant to be stuck by a needle.

The article ought to have been headlined with a remark about temporal distance or abstraction in relation to moral judgments, right?

Eyewitness to the Dalai Lama Talking about Religion and Morality

2009-05-08T22:31:00.007-04:00

A pair of bloggers at Huffingtonpost have reported on their first hand experience with the Dalai Lama in Costa Rica. They were impressed by this religious man's insistence that morality can exist without a divine power. Popular culture seems to have it that morality depends on God's laws. But in academic philosophy and in the great thinkers of the past we read in philosophy departments the possibility of secular morality is basic.

He said that only a very small percentage of people, despite their membership in one kind of religion or other, are actually taking their religion very seriously. Most so-called "religious" people are only very superficially involved with the particular faith, in which they happen to have been brought up. To that he added something even more daring and maybe even shocking to many of his academic but still nominally Catholic listeners, when saying, "most people are really only money-worshippers," implying that their religious pretensions are, at rock bottom, only hypocritical.

... in addressing his student audience at the University of Costa Rica, the Dalai Lama affirmed specifically that ethics and morality need not be based on religion or belief in "God." He frankly admitted that, in this respect, he did have a strong disagreement with the Pope, in their recent, private meeting. The latter insisted, of course, that morality had to be based on religious faith. In contrast, the Dalai Lama declared that ethics and morality can arise simply out of recognition of our mutual interdependency, leading in turn to such secular virtues as respect, caring, and compassion for others.

Read their whole post here

"Big Finance is Prowling the Limbic System"

2009-05-05T17:42:00.006-04:00

N.E. Marsden, an "educator specializing in media research" who blogs at the Huffingtonpost has written a post about recent brain science and how banking has changed since the 80s. The financial sector used to facilitate investment in companies, like buying "a piece of the rock," she says. But now money is made on transactions more and more, and by being able to predict how people will react to certain situations, because the market's reaction sets price.

Gone are the days when investors bought "a piece of the rock" and kept the certificates locked in bank vaults. Today, the fast money bets on moment-to-moment fluctuations, and traders profit on both the dips and spikes. In this casino-like atmosphere, profit often derives from winning transactions, not brick and mortar valuation and growth.

Bloomberg reported in 2004 that Arrowstreet, a $4.4 billion investment firm, had developed quantitative models to "identify and exploit" incidents when investors 1) overreact to news, 2) follow the herd, or 3) fail to account for new information.

Now, Big Finance is prowling the limbic system, a primitive slab of gray matter linked to emotions like pleasure, greed, fear, and cravings -- which begs the question, why?

The 2008 bestseller, Buyology provides an explanation:
"Finance and economic research has hit the wall," explains Andrew Lo, who runs AlphaSimplex Group, a Cambridge, Massachusetts hedge fund firm. "We need to get inside the brain to understand why people make decisions."

Neuromarketing guru Martin Lindstrom, the author of Buyology, goes a step further:
...economic modeling is based on the premise that people behave in predictably rational ways. But...what's beginning to show up in the fledgling world of brain scanning is the enormous influence our emotions have on every decision we make.

Today's Universities are as Outmoded as Detroit

2009-04-27T11:46:00.003-04:00

New York Times op-ed contributor, Mark C. Taylor, pens a column on the state of the University.

GRADUATE education is the Detroit of higher learning. Most graduate programs in American universities produce a product for which there is no market (candidates for teaching positions that do not exist) and develop skills for which there is diminishing demand (research in subfields within subfields and publication in journals read by no one other than a few like-minded colleagues), all at a rapidly rising cost (sometimes well over $100,000 in student loans).

In other words, young people enroll in graduate programs, work hard for subsistence pay and assume huge debt burdens, all because of the illusory promise of faculty appointments. But their economical presence, coupled with the intransigence of tenure, ensures that there will always be too many candidates for too few openings.

He gives in particular one example:

The division-of-labor model of separate departments is obsolete and must be replaced with a curriculum structured like a web or complex adaptive network. Responsible teaching and scholarship must become cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural.

Just a few weeks ago, I attended a meeting of political scientists who had gathered to discuss why international relations theory had never considered the role of religion in society. Given the state of the world today, this is a significant oversight.

Read the whole column here.

Link to Executive Summary of the Levin Report

2009-04-27T00:00:00.003-04:00

The Levin report opens with this epitaph:

What sets us apart from our enemies in this fight... is how we behave. In everything we do, we must observe the standards and values that dictate that we treat noncombatants and detainees with dignity and respect. While we are warriors, we are also human beings. - General David Petraeus

Here's the link: Executive Summary of the Senate Armed Services Committee on Detainee Treatment also known as the Levin Report.

The abuse of detainees in U.S. custody cannot simply be attributed to the actions of "a few bad apples" acting on their own. The fact is that senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees.

Reckoning with America's Practice of Torture

2009-04-26T23:32:00.002-04:00

In Frank Rich's column this weekend, he suggests that the recently declassified "Bybee memos" fill in holes in the timeline of events after 9/11 such that denial is no longer possible.

Still, it’s not Bybee’s perverted lawyering and pornographic amorality that make his memo worthy of special attention. It merits a closer look because it actually does add something new — and, even after all we’ve heard, something shocking — to the five-year-old torture narrative. When placed in full context, it’s the kind of smoking gun that might free us from the myths and denial that prevent us from reckoning with this ugly chapter in our history.

[Abu Zubaydah's] most valuable contribution was to finger Khalid Shaikh Mohammed as the 9/11 mastermind. But, as Jane Mayer wrote in her book “The Dark Side,” even that contribution may have been old news: according to the 9/11 commission, the C.I.A. had already learned about Mohammed during the summer of 2001.

As soon as Bybee gave the green light, torture followed: Zubaydah was waterboarded at least 83 times in August 2002, according to another of the newly released memos.

What motivated the enhanced interrogations?

Maj. Paul Burney, a United States Army psychiatrist assigned to interrogations in Guantánamo Bay that summer of 2002, told Army investigators of another White House imperative: “A large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq and we were not being successful.” As higher-ups got more “frustrated” at the inability to prove this connection, the major said, “there was more and more pressure to resort to measures” that might produce that intelligence.

In other words, the ticking time bomb was not another potential Qaeda attack on America but the Bush administration’s ticking timetable for selling a war in Iraq; it wanted to pressure Congress to pass a war resolution before the 2002 midterm elections.

Indeed, it has been said by people who would know that torture is not useful for intelligence, it's useful in creating false confessions, which, of course, have their own uses.

Five years after the Abu Ghraib revelations, we must acknowledge that our government methodically authorized torture and lied about it. But we also must contemplate the possibility that it did so not just out of a sincere, if criminally misguided, desire to “protect” us but also to promote an unnecessary and catastrophic war. Instead of saving us from “another 9/11,” torture was a tool in the campaign to falsify and exploit 9/11 so that fearful Americans would be bamboozled into a mission that had nothing to do with Al Qaeda.

Read the complete column here.

Experimental Philosophy and Acting Voluntarily

2009-04-25T13:54:00.006-04:00

The relevant passage from Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics:

"Done under compulsion" means that the cause is external, the agent or patient contributing nothing towards it; as, for instance, if he were carried some-where by a whirlwind or by men whom he could not resist.

But there is some question about acts done in order to avoid a greater evil, or to obtain some noble end; e.g. if a tyrant were to order you to do something disgraceful, having your parents or children in his power, who were to live if you did it, but to die if you did not — it is a matter of dispute whether such acts are involuntary or voluntary.

Throwing a cargo overboard in a storm is a some- what analogous case. No one voluntarily throws away his property if nothing is to come of it, but any sensible person would do so to save the life of himself and the crew.

From the translation of F.H. Peters

Torture and the Truth

2009-04-22T21:37:00.002-04:00

Andrew Sullivan at the Atlantic makes an interesting connection between the Western Enlightenment's devotion to finding the truth and the prohibition on torture.

The Western anathema on torture began as a way to ensure the survival of truth. And that is the root of the West's entire legal and constitutional system. Remove a secure way to discover the truth - or create a system that can manufacture it or render it indistinguishable from lies - and the entire system unravels. That's why in the West suspects are innocent before being found guilty; and that's why in the West even those captured in wartime have long been accorded protection from forced confessions. Because it creates a world where truth is always the last priority and power is always the first.

Read his post here.

Education and Opportunity

2009-04-16T17:04:00.002-04:00

A very interesting column by Nicholas Kristof about I.Q. in the New York Times today.

Professor Nisbett strongly advocates intensive early childhood education because of its proven ability to raise I.Q. and improve long-term outcomes. The Milwaukee Project, for example, took African-American children considered at risk for mental retardation and assigned them randomly either to a control group that received no help or to a group that enjoyed intensive day care and education from 6 months of age until they left to enter first grade.

By age 5, the children in the program averaged an I.Q. of 110, compared with 83 for children in the control group. Even years later in adolescence, those children were still 10 points ahead in I.Q.

Twitter Will Not Morally Corrupt You

2009-04-14T21:30:00.003-04:00

The blog at Discover Magazine confirms my suspicion about the article I mentioned earlier in the week which said Twitter could undermine your morality.

Quick! Grab the latest scientific study that may have something remotely to do with Twitter! Run it with a “Twitter Will Destroy Humanity!” headline! With a graphic by Hieronymus Bosch!

Somehow, this finding has grave implications for Twitter, since, according to Immordino-Yang:
For some kinds of thought, especially moral decision-making about other people’s social and psychological situations, we need to allow for adequate time and reflection.

Uhh, seriously? So does that mean pre-Internet humanity, with its countless hours of reflection, was also blessed with impeccable morality?

What Immordino-Yang says there may be too vague for assessment, but for some kinds of moral cognition time and reflection is not necessary, as the recent empirical moral psychology of Professor Jonathan Haidt and others has shown.

Posner on Morality and the Downturn

2009-04-14T19:26:00.006-04:00

Here is the best one-paragraph summary of the depression/recession that I've seen.

It's by Richard Posner in an interview with Dwyer Gunn at the Freakonomics blog at the New York Times Online. I'll quote it in full.

Q: What caused the financial crisis? Was it the government’s fault?

A: The government was the facilitator of the crisis, in the following sense. Banking (broadly defined to include all financial intermediation) is inherently risky because it involves borrowing most of one’s capital and then lending it, and the only way to create a spread that will pay the bank’s expenses and provide a return to its owners is to take more risk lending than borrowing — for example, borrowing short (short-term interest rates are low, because the lender has little risk and great liquidity) and lending long (so the lender has greater risk and less liquidity). The riskiness of banking can be reduced by regulation. But as a result of a deregulation movement that began in the 1970’s, the industry was largely deregulated by 2000. Then the Federal Reserve mistakenly pushed down and kept down interest rates, which led to a housing bubble (because houses are bought with debt) and in turn to risky mortgage lending (because mortgages are long term and there is a nontrivial risk of default); and when the bubble burst, it carried the banking industry down with it. The effect on the nonfinancial economy was magnified by the fact that Americans had little in the way of precautionary savings built up. Their savings were concentrated in risky assets like houses and common stock. When the value of those savings fell steeply, people’s savings were inadequate, so they curtailed their personal consumption expenditures, precipitating a fall in production and sales, a rise in unemployment (which made the still-employed want to save even more of their income, lest they lose their jobs too), and, in short, the downward spiral we’re still in.

That's pretty good, I think. Clear, concise and doesn't take too many shortcuts that rely on special knowledge. But then he goes on to say something pretty enlightening about the moral outrage that's been directed at the "excessively risky behavior" of some in the financial community. It's a problem of regulation, not greed. And the regulation is consistent with Adam Smith.

Part of maximizing profits, however, is taking a certain risk of bankruptcy; it does not pay for a firm to reduce that cost to zero. Banking occupies a strategic role in the economy because of the importance of credit to economic activity; borrowing to spend increases consumption — it is how we shift consumption from future to present....

Moreover, banking is the main instrument by which the Federal Reserve creates money, and by doing so reduces interest rates (provided inflation is not anticipated; for if it is, long-term interest rates will rise), which in turn spurs economic activity. By buying government bonds, it pours cash into banks, both directly, when it buys the bonds from banks, and indirectly, when it buys the bonds from private owners but the owners deposit the cash they receive from the purchase into their bank accounts.

When banks start to hoard cash because their solvency is impaired, the money they receive from the Federal Reserve’s purchasing activity does not spread into the rest of the economy. That is why a cascade of bank bankruptcies is far more serious than a cascade of, say, airline bankruptcies. But a rational businessman does not, indeed cannot afford to, consider the cost of bankruptcy to the economy as a whole as distinct from the cost to his firm. So the rational banker will take more risk than is optimal from an economy-wide standpoint. That is the logic of profit maximization, as explained long ago by Adam Smith: the businessman cares about his costs and his revenues, but not about the costs and revenues incurred or received elsewhere in the economy. He is not an altruist. The responsibility for preventing the collapse of the banking system is the government’s, and it has been shirked, with extremely serious consequences.

That is quite an indictment of the regulatory bodies. Does it let the bankers off too easily? Or does he make a good point about risk and limiting risk? For one, this seems to only apply to risk taking and not to the big bonuses which were also a source of moral outrage.

Photo from Wikipedia

Twitter and Facebook could harm moral values, scientists warn

2009-04-13T21:22:00.000-04:00

I found it rather unconvincing.

Using Twitter and Facebook could harm moral values, as they don't allow time for compassion or admiration, scientists have warned.

What do you think?

Provider Right of Refusal

2009-04-13T12:01:00.006-04:00

Stanley Fish blogged at the New York Times last night about the "conscience clause" which says roughly that a pharmacist who has a moral objection to certain medications can refuse to sell them even though the medications are legal and consumers want them.

It's interesting as his stuff usually is.

This sequestering of religion in a private space is a cornerstone of enlightenment liberalism which only works as a political system if everyone agrees to comport himself or herself as a citizen and not as a sectarian, at least for the purposes of public transactions.

Read Fish's post and come back here to leave comment.

Photo culled from The New York Times

Genealogies of Morals

2009-04-11T18:57:00.005-04:00

The New York Times opens a review of Richard John Neuhaus's book "American Babylon" with a reference to the possibility of cloning Neanderthal man, which the Parr Center blog discussed earlier here.

But the book review is less about cloning Neanderthal man and more about religion and the public sphere or the philosophical foundations of democracy.

The fulcrum of “American Babylon” is, in effect, a simulated debate between Neuhaus and the American philosopher Richard Rorty (who died in 2007). Rorty argues precisely that we do just make up morality, and that there is no way to privilege one citizen’s first principles over any others.

Rorty holds that, as with Oakland, Calif., there is no there “out there.” The smartest people are therefore “ironists.” The ironist believes that we know nothing except our own vocabularies, that “nothing has an intrinsic nature, a real essence,” that concepts like “just” and “rational” are simply “the language games of one’s time.” An ironist may worry “that she has been . . . taught the wrong language game,” but “she cannot give a criterion of wrongness.” The cultural assumptions we share with Plato and Kant are less likely to be “a tip-off to the way the world is” than just a “mark of the discourse of people inhabiting a certain chunk of space-time.” Schools of philosophy or science are just different vocabularies. When an ironist works on developing her vocabulary, she is constructing her self, not getting in closer touch with some underlying reality — for if there is one, it isn’t knowable.

If you find the book review interesting, come back here and post a comment.

Photo of Richard John Neuhaus (Alex Wong/Getty Images for “Meet the Press”) culled from the New York Times

David Brooks Pens Column on Empirical Moral Psychology

2009-04-07T13:57:00.017-04:00

Brooks' column is the 'most emailed' article today at the New York Times online and another in a growing series, as the popular press gets wind of what's been going in philosophically informed psychology labs and psychologically informed philosophy departments. I'm going to ignore the headline which is "The End of Philosophy." Such an end is not advanced in the article and in any case not supported in it. I'll chalk it to wanting an eye-catching hook.

Brooks does, however, more than suggest that moral philosophy, which Brooks calls 'bookish', will be surprised by these empirical results which show that emotion plays a large part in morality. Lots of comments at the New York Times online reference David Hume as a counterexample to Brooks' notion.

~~I think that~~ Parr Center for Ethics original reporting indicates that Brooks' interest came from his participation a month ago in Darwin's 200 birthday celebratory activities. Brooks chaired a panel discussion (see here and here) at the John Templeton Foundation that included Michael Gazzaniga (UC-Santa Barbara), Jonathan Haidt (University of Virginia), and Steven Quartz (Caltech). Those are the three people he quotes in the column. Here's a bit cut-and-pasted from the transcript of the panel discussion:

Steven Quartz: Well, certainly, philosophers are rightly, I think, accused of emphasizing the frontal part of the brain to the exclusion of all else, historically, although, there are certain important historical counter-examples to that. For example, much of what contemporary moral psychology emphasizes with the role of emotion is what David Hume emphasized in his theory of ethics as well.

So Brooks knows about Hume, we must assume. I guess, here too, Brooks has 'augmented' his content so as to make it more catchy.

Late Update:

Brooks certainly tries to suggest that philosophy is surprised by the role of emotions psychology has discovered. But let's look to a text many philosophers have engaged with for a long time, Hume's Enquiry into the Principles of Morals from 1751, whose third paragraph begins like this:

There has been a controversy started of late, much better worth examination, concerning the general foundation of Morals; whether they be derived from Reason, or from Sentiment; whether we attain the knowledge of them by a chain of argument and induction, or by an immediate feeling and finer internal sense; whether, like all sound judgement of truth and falsehood, they should be the same to every rational intelligent being; or whether, like the perception of beauty and deformity, they be founded entirely on the particular fabric and constitution of the human species.

Later update:
Philosophers are discussing here and here.

Still later update:
A letter to the editor of the Salt Lake Tribune.

Photo from Language Log.

CEO Salaries

2009-04-05T21:07:00.003-04:00

The New York Times has published here its research on CEO salaries. It's pretty shocking.

The newspaper reports that the median annual compensation is 8.4 million dollars, with the top earner apparently making 104 million dollars per year.

That 8.4 million dollar salary means the average CEO makes $2876 per hour or 23,013 per day (calculating 365 days and 8 hours per day). That's great! The average CEO makes in a day more than I make in a year.

Is there an issue of morality here?

Iowa Supreme Court Rules on Same-Sex Marriage

2009-04-05T18:19:00.003-04:00

This is how Time Magazine put it:

Deep in the rural heartland, a straightforward opinion - written by a justice appointed by a conservative Republican governor - methodically eviscerates one argument after another that for decades has been used to keep marriage the sole preserve of straight couples. "This class of people asks a simple and direct question: How can a state premised on the constitutional principle of equal protection justify exclusion of a class of Iowans from civil marriage?" Justice Mark S. Cady asked.

The answer? It can't.

Read the whole decision yourself here (pdf).

The History of Marriage

2009-04-02T20:45:00.003-04:00

At tonight's event, Marriage... Who's Allowed? Who Decides? a lot of time was spent on the history of the institution (or institutions) of marriage. One panelist claimed that because marriage "came before government" and "government should just recognize what marriage is by design" there should be a change in state or federal law to limit marriage to between a man and a woman. However, two other panelists gave many examples throughout history of different structures of quote-unquote marriage. There is a history of polygamy all around the world and also in early Christianity, for example.

How much does the position in favor of restricting marriage depend on a uniform history of the institution that needs protection or conservation? Isn't the basic idea simply that society needs to be "stable" in some sort of Rawlsian sense? Can't the advocate of restricting marriage argue that marriage between a man and a woman is the best environment for the raising of pro-social children?

But the next question, then, is: is that true?

Discussion Thread: Does Rampant Individualism Threaten the Institution of Marriage?

2009-04-02T20:37:00.002-04:00

At tonight's event one of the panelists said that even if same-sex marriage was not in fact "a threat to marriage," marriage was still in crisis for other reasons. Particularly, it's a rampant individualism that is damaging to marriage. People choose to pursue careers rather than get married. People feel entitled to happiness and so divorce rather than "stick it out;" or, perhaps, rampant individualism also has a component of self-indulgence? In any case, our individualistic society has a social safety net and amounts of prosperity where it's possible to lead a successful life, whatever that might mean, without ever getting married. This is just to put these thoughts out there. Please leave a comment.

Open Thread: Marriage... Who's Allowed? Who Decides?

2009-04-02T20:32:00.003-04:00

This is an open thread to continue online the discussion that was begun at the event tonight, Marriage... Who's Allowed? Who Decides? Just click below to comment on the panel or discuss.

Moral Autonomy and the Corporate State

2009-03-30T13:32:00.003-04:00

Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer prize-winning reporter, and a Senior Fellow at the Nation Institute, has written an essay at Truthout.org.

In decaying societies, politics become theater. The elite, who have hollowed out the democratic system to serve the corporate state, rule through image and presentation. They express indignation at AIG bonuses and empathy with a working class they have spent the last few decades disenfranchising, and make promises to desperate families that they know will never be fulfilled. Once the spotlights go on they read their lines with appropriate emotion. [...]

The single most important quality needed to resist evil is moral autonomy.

Moral autonomy, as Immanuel Kant wrote, is possible only through reflection, self-determination and the courage not to cooperate. Moral autonomy is what the corporate state, with all its attacks on liberal institutions and "leftist" professors, has really set out to destroy. The corporate state holds up as our ideal what Adorno called "the manipulative character." [...]

We live in an age of moral nihilism. We have trashed our universities, turning them into vocational factories that produce corporate drones and chase after defense-related grants and funding. The humanities, the discipline that forces us to stand back and ask the broad moral questions of meaning and purpose, that challenges the validity of structures, that trains us to be self-reflective and critical of all cultural assumptions, have withered. [...]

Theodor Adorno in 1967 wrote an essay called "Education After Auschwitz." He argued that the moral corruption that made the Holocaust possible remained "largely unchanged." He wrote that "the mechanisms that render people capable of such deeds" must be made visible. Schools had to teach more than skills. They had to teach values. If they did not, another Auschwitz was always possible.

Read it and post a comment here.

A Radical Solution to the Gay Marriage Issue: End State Sponsoring of Religious Ceremonies

2009-03-24T21:33:00.003-04:00

An article at Time.com discusses an idea put forth in the San Francisco Chronicle by two Pepperdine law professors, who

issued a call to re-examine the role the government plays in marriage. The authors ... say the best way out of the intractable legal wars over gay marriage is to take marriage out of the hands of the government altogether.

Instead, give gay and straight couples alike the same license, a certificate confirming them as a family, and call it a civil union — anything, really, other than marriage. For people who feel the word marriage is important, the next stop after the courthouse could be the church, where they could bless their union with all the religious ceremony they wanted. Religions would lose nothing of their role in sanctioning the kinds of unions that they find in keeping with their tenets. And for nonbelievers and those who find the word marriage less important, the civil-union license issued by the state would be all they needed to unlock the benefits reserved in most states and in federal law for married couples.

The idea does not seem that pragmatically realizable, although the Time magazine writer reports that the authors apparently think it is. Indeed, they hope it will "short-circuit" the need for another referendum.

Their proposal is aimed at helping speed a resolution on the issue in other states — gay marriage is heating up in Iowa, Connecticut, Vermont and elsewhere — and at the federal level.

Even if it's not likely that we establish a separation of church and state in regards to marriage, the idea gets at a central point and effectively gives "equal protection." Any couple could be recognized as a domestic partner by the state and then additionally recognized as married by a religious organization or not. The two would be separate.

But it is not likely to make defenders of Prop. 8 happy.

For ... the folks who feel most strongly about marriage and most passionately supported the expensive campaign to defeat gay marriage — the issue of nomenclature is only the beginning. They are against not just gay marriage but also gay couples — and especially against government sanctioning of those relationships, no matter what they are called.

What do you think?

If Genetic Selection Can Prevent Certain Diseases, Shouldn't it be Mandatory?

2009-03-23T15:05:00.007-04:00

Physicians at University College in London announced in February,

the birth of what they described as the world's first "breast-cancer gene-free baby," a designer infant pre-screened for the BRCA1 cancer gene.

A discussion began as to whether screening for preventable diseases ought to be mandatory, at least in the case where the method of in vitro fertilization was being used already.

But mandatory screening is also being discussed as to whether we ought to extend,

the process to all parents-to-be via carrier testing:

All would-be parents should be offered screening to alert them to any genetic disorders they risk passing on to their children. Those at risk should then be offered IVF with pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (IVF-PGD) to ensure any children are healthy.

Opponents of mandatory screening, the Opposing View blog says,

will likely point out that such a rule significantly limits the reproductive autonomy of parents. This is certainly true. However, Western societies have long acknowledged that parental authority cannot undermine the medical interests of a child. Jehovah's Witnesses may not deny their children blood transfusions; Christian Scientists cannot substitute prayer for life-saving antibiotics. As United States Supreme Court Justice Wiley Rutledge wrote in the landmark case of Prince v. Massachusetts, "Parents may be free to become martyrs themselves, but it does not follow that they are free, in identical circumstances, to make martyrs of their children."

But let's add another twist to the discussion, which hasn't been mentioned yet on the blogs I've linked to above. So far we are imagining a procedure in which, with existing and in some cases predicted technology, genetic selection is required of parents in order to keep their children from having diseases preventable with this type of intervention. But recently deaf parents have attempted to genetically select for deaf children (read about one case here). Bioethicists may have thought that parents would first select for superficial traits like eye color or height, or maybe they thought that screening would be used to prevent diminishment of 'quality of life' for the would-be parents would-be children. But the deaf case makes us remember that not every one agrees on what counts as good regarding quality of life.

Both cases involve issues about autonomy, but the deaf case adds another dimension which was not at play before.

The Times article mentions a bill which "would make it illegal for parents undergoing embryo screening to choose an embryo with an abnormality if healthy embryos exist."

A coalition of disability organisations will launch a campaign to amend the bill to make it possible for parents to choose the embryos that carry a genetic abnormality.

Francis Murphy, chairman of the British Deaf Association, said: “If choice of embryos for implantation is to be given to citizens in general, and if hearing and other people are allowed to choose embryos that will be ‘like them’, sharing the same characteristics, language and culture, then we believe that deaf people should have the same right.”

What do readers of this blog think? Post a comment.

Morality and AIG's Bonuses

2009-03-20T17:34:00.006-04:00

The discussion right now about AIG paying bonuses with bailout money has a moral tone to it, no doubt. People are "outraged." The condemnation of the paying of these bonuses has been intense and widespread.

Additionally, there have been demands that those who received the bonuses must give them back. The sense of the "must" there is the moral sense. Our moral intuitions seem to suggest that it would be right to return the bonus money; that it ought to be returned.

So people's judgment of the behavior falls within the moral domain, the domain of things having to do with morality. It is not just a case of what's legal or what makes good business sense. It's a matter of morality. (Additionally people's suggested course of action, what they think ought to happen has certainly fallen in the moral domain.)

But what can be said about the moral domain itself? Rather than whether the bonuses violate some sense of justice, this post at The Frontal Cortex considers the sense of justice itself.

Jonah Lehrer, author of "Proust was a Neuroscientist," develops an idea relating our sense of justice and fairness to results from psychological experiments surrounding the Ultimatum Game. Read it and please leave a comment here.

Here's a taste:

After witnessing this injustice, the monkeys earning cucumbers went on strike. Some started throwing their cucumbers at the scientists; the vast majority just stopped collecting pebbles. The capuchin economy ground to a halt. The monkeys were willing to forfeit cheap food simply to register their anger at the arbitrary pay scale.

More on Empirical Research into Morality

2009-02-26T20:17:00.003-05:00

WebMD has an article which leads with "A new study reveals insights into the ancient roots of our modern-day sense of moral disgust."

Morality has been widely considered to be a somewhat recent phenomenon, evolutionarily speaking, that is closely tied to our ability to reason. Disgust, on the other hand, is considered an ancient and primitive emotion, which helped to keep early humans from eating foods that would kill them.

[Adam K] Anderson, lead study author Hanah Chapman, and colleagues conducted a series of experiments designed to determine if morality and disgust are more closely related than experts have thought.

In one experiment conducted to evoke the most basic, primordial form of disgust, participants drank a bad-tasting bitter liquid. In another, they looked at pictures of things generally recognized as disgusting, like dirty toilets.

In the final test, which measured moral disgust, participants were treated unfairly in a classic psychological experiment.

In all three situations, the participants showed activation of the levator labii muscle, indicating that reactions to tasting something bad, looking at something disgusting, and experiencing unfairness all involved similar disgust.

Those are some interesting excerpts. But go read the whole thing.

The Moral Rights of Neanderthals

2009-02-17T20:42:00.004-05:00

Many have thought the most exciting ethical dilemma on the horizon would be the problem of moral rights for artificial intelligences. But at Reason Magazine online Ronald Bailey suggests that sooner than that we may have to decide what rights a cloned Neanderthal has.

A team of researchers led by geneticist Svante Pääbo at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, Germany announced last week that they had completed a draft sequence of the genome of Neanderthal humans.

Bailey writes that a scientist who suggests cloning of a Neanderthal is possible...

would modify a modern human genome so that its DNA matches the Neanderthal version. To avoid ethical problems, [...] this Neanderthal genome would not be inserted into a human cell but instead into a chimpanzee cell. This chimp cell would be reprogrammed to an embryonic state, and then introduced into a chimpanzee's womb where it would develop into a Neanderthal infant.

Assuming that cloning is safe, would it be ethical to clone a human being? The short answer is yes. Clones are basically delayed twins—and there is nothing inherently immoral about twins.

Yet, public opinion polling suggests most Americans oppose cloning of humans.

So I suspect [Bailey writes] that the proposal to use chimpanzee cells to clone a Neanderthal is an attempt to do a kind of ethical end-run around this "yuck factor" reaction to human cloning. In this case, researchers could argue that they are cloning a different species, not a human being.

But a problem there is that Neanderthals are human beings!

I fear that using chimpanzee cells to clone Neanderthals would likely be taken as an indication from the outset that they are in some sense subhuman, and thus less worthy of moral respect.

But let's set that worry aside and assume that scientists are able to produce healthy Neanderthal clones. What rights would they have?

Read the article and post a comment regarding what you think.

Morals Surrounding Food and Sex

2009-02-11T16:34:00.004-05:00

The New York Times "Ideas" blog links today to a paper authored by someone at the Hoover institution. The paper argues, according to the Times, that we are getting

... a “transvaluation” of values in which food is freighted with taboos, but sex much less so.

I guess the idea is that at one time sex had lots of rules about it and food was a matter of taste (forgive the pun), now sex is a matter of taste (do whatever you want) and food has all sorts of rules about it.

For me, though, an interesting part of the article is the account of how some vegetarians have adopted some of the moralizing language of the past to stigmatize non-vegetarians. In the question of moral progress, it's important to have an account of how conceptual change occurs in moral schemas. It can be a counterexample to a theory of moral judgment, if that theory cannot allow for moral progress, or if it is too conservative, or conserving, of existing morays. In the future, a account of how a conceptual change was achieved in relation to vegetarianism will make an interesting ethnography.

Morality and the Economic Downturn, Part 3

2009-02-10T20:25:00.002-05:00

At pbs.org a fellow at the Brookings Institution discussed the moral aspects of the market with a PBS producer. Here is the video.

The World Financial Crisis

2009-02-05T10:32:00.009-05:00

In his recent talk, Gary Parr, Deputy Chairman of Lazard and a much sought after financial adviser in the current credit crunch, addressed the world financial crisis. It is a rare but welcome opportunity to meet someone who has first hand experience with multinational corporations and governments and who is involved in high profile decision-making processes that affect so many people worldwide. And it is even rarer to meet such a person and realize that he is not only a calculating businessman, but actually quite human and ethically concerned. Mr. Parr’s talk was stimulating and, apart from facts and numbers, he touched on many complex ethical issues that have no simple answers. I will discuss some of them, in particular corporate social responsibility, government intervention, and institutional design.

How did it happen?
In his talk, Mr. Parr identified human nature as one of the key causes of the current financial crisis. The problem is not, however, egoistic behavior, as one might have thought. Instead, inductive reasoning is the main culprit. Inductive reasoning, based on the assumption that the future will be like the past, is essential for human beings to survive in this world, but it may also drive them into an existential or financial crisis. If everyone believes that prices will go up, as in our case housing prices, because housing prices always went up in the past, and the issued credit volume by lenders is not fully backed by real assets, then we may face a vicious problem of collective action when prices actually fall.

The problem of collective action that arises in this case is, quite refreshingly, not that no action takes place, as in the Prisoner’s Dilemma game where everybody defects. Instead, the problem is that too much action takes place because everyone tries to sell, and the run on the banks effectively shuts them down. To illustrate this point, Mr. Parr used the metaphor of a ship in danger to capsize because too many people lean on one side of the boat. Coordinated action, then, if everyone runs from the one side of the boat to the other, will surely do the trick and sink the ship. How can we avoid such unwelcome collective disaster?

Possible solutions
Back to human nature. I think that a good starting point to solve this problem is David Hume’s insight that human beings cannot change their nature, but they can change their environment. Human beings can, by intelligent institutional design, artificially create institutions that guard themselves against collective failure such as we currently experience.

One such institutional coordination device is free markets. If everything goes fine, the invisible hand optimally allocates our scarce resources. That is a start. But markets alone do not always produce socially optimal outcomes. Indeed, as the last couple of months have shown, markets may not even produce stable suboptimal outcomes, but instead falter altogether. But what should we do if the invisible hand gets out of hand? The most obvious answer to this question is government intervention. There are two options. We can either follow a piecemeal strategy or call for systematic government regulations.

The general strategy in the US has been, in particular over the last eight years during which the Bush administration reduced regulations for banks, insurers, lenders, and credit raters, to interfere with the market only in emergency cases and otherwise to let the market work as freely as possible. But this strategy is extremely short-sighted because it does not allow us to prevent unfavorable situations such as that which we currently face. It allows only for rescue plans and ad hoc modifications to the current system, as Mr. Parr discussed.

It seems that in order to prevent collective failure, more systematic institutional design is necessary. The government must tame the market by legislating more rigorous rules for the ‘banking game’ that actually produce socially desirable outcomes, or at least avoid collective disaster. But is this sufficient? Does changing the rules of the game prevent corporations from following extremely risky strategies that, if they should go wrong, must be absorbed by taxpayers because a collapse of these enterprises would be even worse for the public?

It seems that there is still a missing link that forces corporations and their managements to be more responsible for their actions. One possible solution to this problem is partial state ownership. The idea is straightforward. If the government bails out ailing companies, then it should receive a share in the company’s ownership in return, and when stock market prices recover, the government should sell the shares to private investors to the benefit of the taxpayers. This ties private interests to the public interest, at least partially, and thus forces all actors to pull in the same direction. No collective action problem here. Paul Krugman’s recent article on this topic is insightful.

Morality and the Economic Downturn, Part 2

2009-01-28T12:49:00.002-05:00

To what extent has the recent failure of our global economic system been a moral failure?

The BBC asks that question in an article here.

It is noted that if you think at first glance that capitalism itself is immoral, you need to remember that the "invisible hand" idea is meant to show that in capitalism there is reward made to those who satisfy the interests of others.

"Wall Street is always motivated by profit, but unfortunately everybody thinks that capitalism is the problem," he says, pointing to how the essential root of capitalism is to reward those who do something that will help others.

But what actually happened in the credit crisis? And was what went wrong a matter of immoral decisions and actions?

Joe Saluzzi says the cause of the current crisis was giving loans to people who didn't qualify, who had no documentation, and no income that could support a mortgage.

"And the reason banks did lend was because they were packing up the risks and selling them off to Wall Street," he says.

"If people become too dependent on loans or are unqualified, the system is wrong and is not going to work," adds Dr Rishi Das.

I'm still not seeing a moral violation. At least not as the BBC reporter is presenting it.

"Everybody is guilty here of trying to make an extra dime and squeeze an extra bit of profit," he says.

Again, that just sounds like the profit motive essential to capitalism. What we are looking for is a moral violation in the pursuit of that profit. Some act of unfairness or harm.

Now, on the other hand, maybe there is more to morality than violations of autonomy (harm) and violations of fairness. The people the BBC interviewed seem to think so. In an earlier post, we discussed the work of Jonathan Haidt, a psychologist who has studied the psychology of moral judgment. He finds that a small population of the world thinks that only violations of autonomy and fairness count as moral violations, and the rest of the world agrees with that while also finding violations of Community, Purity, and Authority to be moral violations.

Globalisation has given us insight into the lives of different people, but it has failed to make us appreciate that we are all connected, she believes.

"The culture of greed has created an individualism, selfishness - a society looking for compensation - a society we don't want to live in."

These seem to be violations of Community, as the psychologist Jonathan Haidt would categorize them.

Does is make sense that capitalism (and the individualism inherent in the profit motive postulation) would work well for cultures with only the Harm and Fairness moral pillars and work not so well in cultures will all five pillars?

2009-01-26T12:42:00.003-05:00

Part of the mission of the Parr Center's Ethics in the News blog is to educate interested members of the Parr & UNC community about ethics and everyday life. There are other ways to do that, to be sure, than merely foregrounding news stories that have an ethical aspect to them.

So today, I wanted to share some resources for understanding some of the recent empirical moral psychology which is playing such a big part in recent discussions in philosophical ethics.

Above is a video of a lecture by psychologist Jonathan Haidt on the evolutionary origins of morality and on what he calls the five main pillars of morality: Harm, Fairness, In-group, Authority, Purity. He says that Blue State Liberals consider only Harm and Fairness violations to be moral violations. Red State Conservatives (and most of non-Western peoples) consider violations of any of the five to be moral violations.

Additionally, here's a video of Haidt speaking at a New Yorker conference. He claims that diversity and mobility (which is what you encounter when you live on water routes) shrink the moral domain to just Harm and Fairness.

And, here is an important paper by Haidt, for those who are interested and want to dig deeper.

The idea of the power of moral emotions and the post-hoc rationalizations that people do to defend their emotional judgments is an important Haidt-idea. It is discussed more in the paper than in the video, although he mentions it in the interview portion of the New Yorker video.

He says, and I'm paraphrasing:

"People's reasoning is not the source of their judgments. We make our moral judgments with our gut. It's like aesthetic judgment. You see something and you have an instant reaction. You can't stop yourself. 'That's beautiful' is your judgment. And then you think of reasons why the artwork is beautiful but that reason may not necessarily be the feature of the painting the caused your reaction/judgment. And analogously in morality, we see something and we just have an immediate reaction. Then we are so good at reasoning... but we don't reason in order to find the truth... moral reasoning developed, I believe, in order to help us persuade others to see things our way. Moral reasoning is practiced very strategically in order just to defend what you already believe because of your emotional response."

By the way, I don't know if I necessarily endorse his view, if it's his view that there may be something irrefutably valuable in the other three moral pillars. Perhaps I think it's better to be committed to a society with high mobility, high diversity and lots and lots of tolerance. The reason Authority and In-Group and Purity go away in modern cultures on trading routes is because they tend to favor unfairness to some group that is trying to live with the other groups.

Enjoy the videos!

Morality and the Economic Downturn

2009-01-20T10:22:00.002-05:00

Some public comments and certainly personal conversations have couched interpretations of the credit crisis on Wall Street in moral terms.

But the New York Times reports today that "Thursday night at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in Manhattan...the Ivy League professors Simon Schama and Michael Walzer and the Wall Street powerbrokers Mort Zuckerman, Michael Steinhardt and William Ackman gathered to discuss 'Madoff: A Jewish Reckoning.'"

As for moral issues, Mr. Walzer, of Princeton, said, “I’m a moral philosopher, but I don’t think morality is all that important in the way we think about Wall Street and the economy.” The drive to make money is at the root of the business world, he noted: “We have to assume human behavior is what it is, and that’s what you need government for."

Is a moral analysis of the credit crisis appropriate?

Moral Relativism

2009-01-15T09:40:00.003-05:00

A columnist at the BBC News Magazine online has addressed moral relativism. Much of the article is filler and anecdotes. The meat, such as it is, is here:

I'd begin with some token reassurance and then go on to discuss some of the parameters of moral relativism, the ways in which such a position derived at least in part from the anthropological insistence upon the uniqueness of separate cultures, from the alleged impossibility of being able to declare one way of living and believing as superior to any other.

I'd also suggest that a thoroughgoing subscription to moral relativism meant that it was no longer valid or appropriate to pass judgement on such practises as wife beating or euthanasia.

But in order not to be too downbeat I'd also point out to my earnest enquirer that there was small consolation to be found in their children's readiness to construct their own ideas of what was right and wrong.

Children who devised their own moral code were far more likely to adhere to it than to one which had been handed down by authoritarian figures such as popes and priests and headmasters and patriarchal fathers. Then I'd say "that'll be ten pounds please", hop back in the van, drive home and count the day's takings.

But then perhaps even more interesting are the comments in which his readers take him to task:

One of my first-day-of-the semester ploys is to have my students say something about themselves by way of introduction. One semester, during this process one boy said, "My name is Aaron and I don't believe in anything."

"Not in ANYTHING?" I asked.

He said, "I don't believe in religion or morality or anything."

I stared for a second and then asked, "'Thou Shalt Not Kill.' I am sure we all would like to know where you stand on that one."

"Oh. I agree with that one."

I waited a heartbeat, then said, "Well, then I can let you stay. If you had expressed ambiguity, I would have felt morally bound to insist you leave."

And this:

Finally the public seem to be catching up with what philosophers have been saying for years; it isn't possible to know anything. Soon we will discount all morality and decide we can no longer pass judgement on anything. Then the law will go. After that we'll decide we aren't sure about science and technology and then we can scrap that. Then we just need to take apart language and we can all be back in caves in no time, getting some damn peace.

What do the readers of the Ethics in the News Blog think?

Designer Babies: Science and Morality in the Magazine New Scientist

2009-01-12T11:19:00.000-05:00

At New Scientist, Dan Jones writes that moral heuristics may be leading us astray in our moral judgments.

Heuristics can be thought of as tools in our mental toolbox that have evolved over millennia to help us make fast decisions in complex situations or where information may be limited, such as when choosing between various options or making everyday predictions. A particularly pervasive example in the moral domain is the injunction "Do not play God" or, in more secular terms, "Do not tamper with nature".

The problem with using moral heuristics to judge science is even starker in some popular perceptions of reproductive technologies. "Designer" babies are a case in point. IVF combined with genetic testing makes it possible to screen the cells of an embryo for specific gene variants before it is implanted into the womb. This pre-implantation genetic diagnosis is primarily used to filter out embryos with genes for heritable diseases, but in future it could be used to choose babies with desired traits, such as tallness or a particular eye colour, and perhaps even physical prowess, intelligence and aspects of personality.

The article then cites Lewis Wolpert, a developmental biologist:

Wolpert believes that knowledge, not a moral heuristic, is the best guide to thinking about the desirability of scientific or technological progress. So while he doesn't oppose "designer" babies on ethical grounds, he doesn't think there should be a genetic free-for-all either... "You might think you know what you're doing when you put in new genes, but it's very tricky, and you're likely to produce abnormalities," he says. "I think it's a safety issue, not an ethical issue."

Is it just a safety issue? If there is an ethical quandary here what is it? What do you think the right thing to do is?

Making babies 'cancer-free'?

2009-01-09T11:35:00.004-05:00

The first baby born in the UK to have been screened as an embryo for a cancer gene is raising again a hornets nest of ethical issues. There is more to discuss with this than can be handled in less than a book, so I won't even attempt it here. It is worth pointing out, though, how even more complicated this issue is than the over-wrought debates about abortion. On top of the question of whether an embryo or fetus has moral status, the issue of designer babies involves serious questions about what duties mothers have to their children, and whether embryonic screening is impermissibly discriminatory or even a form of eugenics. Moreover, there is the considerable cost of genetic screening and in vitro fertilization. As a result, those families who are least able financially to cope with having a child genetically predisposed to disease would be the ones least able to do anything about it. Suffice it to say that bioethicists are going to be busy with this for quite a while.

Comments welcome.

Preventing, Punishing, and Putting Up With Piracy

2008-11-03T09:08:00.006-05:00

An age-old profession is making a comeback off the coast of Somalia. Piracy (of the nautical variety) has flourished in the Gulf of Aden’s major shipping lanes. This resurgence of what many thought to be an long-gone pursuit has been catalyzed by several factors: political instability and violence in Somalia, foreign pillaging of Somalia’s once-rich tuna fishing waters, and a constant stream of international trade vessels heading to or from the vital Suez Canal.

For young men of Somalia, inured to violence and on vulnerable economic footing due to years of intractable political conflict, piracy is an easy way to get rich quick. According to a recent New York Times article, pirate profits in Somalia are “on track to reach a record $50 million” this year. While any sort of economic success in Somalia is a heartening sign, the means to these new riches warrant scrutiny.

Their method is simple: spot a ship, sail next to it in dinghies and skiffs, commandeer the vessel by force and demand a multi-million dollar ransom. There are, of course, complications: both pirates and hostages have been killed, and the UN has given permission for nations to send their warships into Somalia’s territorial waters with the intent of attacking piracy. So far no solution has materialized, and the violence is likely only to increase.

What are the ethical dimensions to this issue? It seems at first to be simply an issue of enforcing universally accepted norms of maritime conduct; that piracy is not to be tolerated is a cornerstone of international law. However, in 2008 the British Foreign Office advised the Royal Navy not to detain pirates from certain nations, as the return of these pirates to their home nations could result in a violation of their human rights, and thus the pirates would be able to claim asylum in Britain under British Human rights law. It is true that many pirates operate out of nations that have particularly violent justice systems, and most often the punishment for piracy in these nations is mutilation or death.

It is unclear, however, that refusing to detain the pirates is the proper course of action. Perhaps it would troublesome to grant pirates asylum, but asylum in Britain does not preclude serving a sentence for piracy there. Failing to detain pirates does nothing to prevent future piracy, and returning the pirates to their countries of origin does constitute a human rights violation if the judicial systems are severely brutal in their punishment of piracy.

Also, a question of whether to return pirates to their nations of origin is only asked when there is a nation to refer to, and it is easy to argue that modern-day Somalia is actually a Somalia-shaped region of perpetual unrest. There are autonomous zones within territorial Somalia, such as Puntland, but the stability and legitimacy of these governments pose open questions.

If nations such as Britain wish to pursue the enforcement of naval law and protection of their shipping, then they are under obligation to pursue these goals in the fashion most just, and that means the fashion that respects all the rights of the accused while subjecting them to the most just legal framework available. If bringing these people to justice involves some inconvenience along the way, so be it.

There is another ethical issue with scope beyond the questions relating to specific acts of piracy. Somali piracy can be seen as a problem in and of itself, but it can also be seen as a symptom of societal malaise. Piracy only became a viable career in Somalia after infrastructure collapsed in the early 1990s. Armed vessels took to the Gulf of Aden to prevent the opportunistic harvest of Somalia’s tuna fishing waters. When foreign ships depleted the tuna, Somali fishermen looking for a living turned to piracy.

Given these circumstances there is a sense in which Somali pirates are not completely responsible for their choice of livelihood. If there has been no stability in one’s country for over fifteen years and nautical violence is seen as just another career, then the role of pirates as fully responsible agents seems diminished against the reality of their situation, a state of effectively coercive hunger and poverty.

Clearly, pursuing Somali piracy from a purely punitive angle misses the real moral issue, much like trying to control smoke, when one’s main concern ought to be the blaze causing it. Piracy will cease when it is no longer profitable, and it will stop being so only when there is a stable Somalia.

-Davis Bennett

Ethics Blog Link

2008-08-29T08:47:00.004-04:00

As we continue to work to make the Ethics in the News blog a prolific and popular place to go for analysis of the ethical dimensions at play in our world today, we're happy to share with you another blog by a Parr Center Fellow Stuart Rennie, Research Assistant Professor specializing in Bioethics. Check it out here.

Torture, By Any Other Name ...

2008-07-03T12:03:00.008-04:00

Acclaimed author Christopher Hitchens — author of the best-selling God is Not Great, notable supporter of the Iraq war, and one of Rush Limbaugh's favorite writers — decided to see for himself whether waterboarding amounted to torture. See for yourself. In his forthcoming Vanity Fair article, he discusses his experience and how it has affected his views on the technique as used by U.S. personnel.

For Hitchens and others the issue seems to be whether to call waterboarding a form of torture. He writes, "I apply the Abraham Lincoln test for moral casuistry: 'If slavery is not wrong, then nothing is wrong.' Well, then, if waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture."

Though settling whether to call it torture may ultimately affect the legality of the practice, from an ethical standpoint it does not matter what to call it. What does matter are the undisputed facts that waterboarding is both physically traumatic (to the point of being life-threatening), and psychologically destructive. On even the most permissive moral theories, waterboarding could be justified in only the most extreme cases where very great losses would be prevented by its application.

Given the current administration's insistence on secrecy with respect to all things related to the "war on terror," though, we simply have no way of knowing whether such exigent circumstances exist. This alone should be enough reason to oppose the practice, even if one isn't bothered by the question Hitchens raises: "It would be bad enough if you did have something ... but what if you didn't have anything? What if they'd got the wrong guy?"

The Torture Question

2008-06-20T13:03:00.003-04:00

The torture question: is it "basically subject to perception" as expressed by CIA counterterrorism lawyer Jonathan Fredman in advising military and intelligence officials at Gitmo? Please discuss on where interrogation becomes torture.

The Parr Center for Ethics will be hosting a two-day symposium on coercive interrogation on September 12-13, 2008. Click here to find out more about this timely event.

Should pharmacists market their beliefs? Is there a line to be drawn?

2008-06-18T12:16:00.005-04:00

The opening of a "pro-life" pharmacy in Chantilly, VA certainly brings up a slew of ethical issues. Beyond the immediate actions of this particular pharmacist, at what point can and should a health worker deny services or access based on their personal beliefs? Please discuss.

Death Penalty a Live Issue

2008-05-19T10:51:00.007-04:00

The Parr Center recently finished a year of programs centered around capital punishment. A timely series indeed. Recently the Supreme Court upheld Kentucky's right to use its current lethal injection protocol for executions, thereby ending a de facto national moratorium and clearing the way for states to resume executing death row inmates.

Arguably, though, the Court's decision to review the case in the first place is just the latest sign that the public opinion in the U.S. is shifting with respect to capital punishment in general, and lethal injection in particular. This is perhaps not so surprising given that 135 countries have abolished the use of capital punishment in law or in practice. If public opinion in the U.S. is shifting, it would seem it is only growing closer to the international norm. It is all the more surprising then to see hints that in Japan something of the reverse is happening -- public support for the death penalty is growing in Japan, says Son-U Jong of Korea's Chosun Ilbo.

Welcome!

2008-05-19T10:13:00.003-04:00

Welcome to Ethics in the News, a new and improved feature of the Parr Center for Ethics. Here we'll be tracking and discussing ethical issues as they turn up in the news both domestically and abroad. We have high hopes for this blog, so we hope you'll check back often for the latest updates. Thanks for stopping by!