Science and Human Values

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

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

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?

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

Transcript.

Morality and Mortgages

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

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

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

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.

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