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

Peter Singer on Rationing Health Care

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

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

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

Martha Nussbaum on Youtube

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

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

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

See the video for more.

Another Brooks Column on Empirical Moral Psychology

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

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

David Brooks Again

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

He attended a recent conference on neuroscience and human psychology:

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

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

Have your say by leaving a comment.

Morality and the Economic Meltdown, Cont.

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

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

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

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

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

Ethical Dilemmas at McSweeney's

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

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

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

More Morality Online from Harvard

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

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!

Click here for an updated link to the Sandel interview.

Philosophy on the Today Show!

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

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

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

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

Watch the whole video here.

Discussion between Rorty and Davidson

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

Iran: Legitimacy of Government, Consent and Revolution

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

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

Does Studying Ethics Make You More Ethical?

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.

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."

More from CNN:

"This is my opinion," Maj. Paul Burney told the inspector-general's office. "Even though they were giving information and some of it was useful, while we were there a large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between aI Qaeda and Iraq and we were not being successful in establishing a link between aI Qaeda and Iraq. The more frustrated people got in not being able to establish this link ... there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate results."

Burney's account was included in a Senate Armed Services Committee report released in April.