Posts Tagged Ethics
Topic for #41: Pat Churchland on the Neurobiology of Morality (Plus Hume’s Ethics)
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in General Announcements on June 27, 2011
With special Guest Pat Churchland herself!
What does the physiology of the brain have to do with ethics? We were contacted by Pat Churchland’s publisher and invited to speak with her about her new book Braintrust: What Neuroscience Tells Us about Morality.
She was good enough to chat with us (Mark and Dylan) for a full, regular length show yesterday, and not only about her own book, but also about one of her major influences, David Hume, who pioneered a “naturalistic” approach to ethics: we look not for normative laws to provide commands for our behavior, but at the moral sense we already have, and how this plays as a practical matter into the challenges we face in making laws, deciding on punishments, and just getting along in a society.
Churchland’s addition to this project is reporting on and synthesizing the broad swath of current scientific findings on what exactly this moral sense is: how is it realized in the brain and our endocrine system? What mental operations make moral assessments and rule-following possible? Much of her book is taken up with reporting on animal physiology and behavior, so we can see where on the evolutionary path we picked up the abilities to expand the circle of self-regard to include kin and associates, to represent others’ intentions and beliefs to predict their behavior, and to understand and follow social norms.
Topic for #40: Plato’s Republic
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in General Announcements on June 5, 2011
What is justice? What is the ideal type of government? These are the two questions we’ll be focusing on in our discussion of the most famous book of philosophy ever.
Look, we realize that if you’ve ever taken a philosophy class, you’ve likely already been introduced to this work, and there are many many other places on the Web to find out about it, including some great university lectures and podcasts. By all means, feel free to make use of some of these resources; listen to the book itself, if you’d like.
We’ll do our best to add to the pool, with not one but two guest participants personally trained by Plato himself. We’ll be focusing our discussion primarily on books 1, 2, and 4, but will delve into other portions of the work as needed in pursuit of an adequate definition of justice and details about Plato’s very weird ideal city wherein philosophers rule, everyone stays in his or her little proper career path for life, wives and children are shared in common, and musicians shall not play those damned plaintive minor chords! None of that!
Purchase the translation of the text to be read by 2 out of the 4 participants in the discussion
Does Atheism Entail Nihilism? (Or, is God Necessary for Morality?)
Posted by Wes Alwan in Things to Watch, Web Detritus on May 10, 2011
An interesting debate. And it continues on Prosblogion.
Update: Now that I’ve listened to the whole thing, I have to say Craig is in over his head and Kagan makes minced meat of him. I wish they had been more evenly matched.
Update II: Here’s an interesting article by Wes Morriston (who linked to it in the Prosblogion comments) rebutting Craig: God and the ontological foundations of morality. And then there are the Stanford entries on moral arguments for the existence of god, moral realism, and moral naturalism.
Apparently God is as bad at grounding morality as Science.
– Wes
Science Cannot Ground Morality. But Robots Can
Posted by Wes Alwan in Web Detritus on December 14, 2010
Via Massimo Pigliucci, this gives us a nice overview of the fundamental objection to Sam Harris’ notion that moral questions can be decided by the empirical sciences.
Wes Alwan
Simon Blackburn vs Sam Harris: Can Science Tell us Right from Wrong?
Posted by Wes Alwan in Things to Watch on December 9, 2010
In a debate with Patricia Churchland, Peter Singer, Sam Harris, and Lawrence Krauss, Simon Blackburn explains why Harris simply has it wrong on whether science can provide substantive guidance on morality:
There is no doubt, he notes, that “science can inform our values” (and I would add that this goes trivially for many other types of knowledge). But “as to whether you need nothing but science”, “I don’t agree with Sam about that and neither do the other three speakers we’ve heard so far.”
Episode 29: Kierkegaard on the Self
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Podcast Episodes on November 21, 2010
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:56:32 — 106.8MB)
Discussing Soren Kierkegaard’s “The Sickness Unto Death” (1849).
What is the self? For K. we are a tension between opposites: necessity and possibility, the finite and the infinite, soul and body. He thinks we’re all in despair, whether we know it or not, because we wrongly think we’re something we’re not, or we reject what we are, or we just don’t pay attention to this dynamic at all: we just go along with the crowd. So we need to keep self-examining and (he thinks) ultimately embrace our subservience to God.
Joined by guest podcaster/Kiekegaard’s lawyer Daniel Horne, we consider K.’s 3-step self-help program and whether there’s anything to be gotten here if you don’t subscribe to K’s Christianity.
Read the text free online or buy the book.
End song: “John T. Flibber,” from Happy Songs Will Bring You Down by the MayTricks (1994).
WEIRD vs. World ethics
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Web Detritus on October 24, 2010
Psychologist Jonathan Haidt writes an interesting review of The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen
In evaluating our moral intuitions, we often reflect on whether this kind of phenomenology has resonance beyond other Western (“Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic (WEIRD)”) points of view. Appiah’s book focuses on honor killings and other “honor” practices, which seem only removable when the society in question gets mocked enough for engaging in them that they are dishonored, i.e. honor itself is used to halt the practice that was only kept in place to keep honor. Appiah argues, though, that since WEIRD societies focus on individual ethics and don’t see a moral wrong by an individual as a stain against the group, that removes a prime mechanism for moral improvement at the social level.
Stated this way (and of course I’m sure there’s more to it in Appiah’s book), I don’t quite get it. If we don’t currently have horrific practices perpetuated in the name of honor in the West, then we don’t need this mechanism to remove them. It would be nice if we had social mechanisms to encourage progress on (or dismissal of concerns regarding) alleged socially approved misdeeds like abortion, eating meat, and circumcision (none of which seem directly tied to honor), but the fact that we have a vigorous democracy with lots of parties speaking seems to give more hope of long-term resolution re. these issues (in the way that recent progress has been made re. gay rights and how concerns about interracial marriage have for the most part disappeared) than alternative social arrangements.
(Note: the image here is by Vlad Gerasimov.)
-Mark Linsenmayer
Freud vs. C.S. Lewis: A Roundtable on Religion and Morality
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Misc. Philosophical Musings, Things to Watch on September 30, 2010
Here we see guys in goofy Lewis and Freud costumes putting forward simplistic alternative views on the origin of moral sentiments to set up a round-table discussion:
The discussion interestingly displays no evidence of these folks having read Freud’s discussion of morality in Civilization and its Discontents, specifically his claim that experience in fact does not support the utility of Christian morality, but that its central tenet, “Love thy Neighbor as Thyself,” is an absolute psychological impossibility, and so nonsense as a commandment.
Read the rest of this entry »
“Dexter” as Immoral Fantasy
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Misc. Philosophical Musings, Reviewage on September 20, 2010
In the realm of superhero comics (and movies), there’s been (since Watchmen at least) a realization that what superheros allegedly do, i.e. beat people up, requires a certain psychosis, and comics like The Punisher make that explicit.
With the “Dexter” books by Jeff Lindsay and the TV show based on them, this is approached from the other side, where the main character is beset (thanks to childhood trauma) with the need to kill, that his foster-father channels into killing according to a code, i.e. only killing bad guys. To some degree, the comparison is made ironically: Dexter knows he’s sick and that the world would be better if he were dead, but clearly we’re supposed to root for him, both because the show’s villains are obviously worse and because of Dexter’s intrinsic likability.
The show is trying to pick at the moral sensibilities relevant to our enjoyment of any kind of splatter-fest film fare, for one. Some of us, for whatever reason (there’s certainly been lots of speculation and study on this, but I’m going to assume that we as audience members don’t already have a clear philosophical theory about it), enjoy violence-filled entertainment, and two elements enjoyment in this are 1) when something over-the-top gross happens (and I’ll argue that it doesn’t even have to be realistic, not that we normal people would necessarily know what constitutes realistic in this area, but it includes, e.g. the obviously fake black knight “only a flesh wound” spurting in Monty Python and the Holy Grail), and 2) when particularly bad guys get put down, preferably with poetic justice.
Read the rest of this entry »
Episode 25: Spinoza on Human Nature
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Podcast Episodes on September 10, 2010
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:37:48 — 89.6MB)
Discussing Books II through V of the Ethics. Continues the discussion from Ep. 24.
What is the relation between mind and body? How do we know things? What are the emotions? Is there an ethical ideal for us to shoot for? What is our relationship to God?
Our rational nature prevails over urges to scream, sleep, or slap each other as we plow to the end of this strange and thorny text.
Read a free version online or purchase the book.
End song: “When I Think of You” from The MayTricks’ Happy Songs Will Bring You Down (1994).
Will Your Genes Marry Mine?
Posted by Wes Alwan in Web Detritus on May 21, 2010
Slate reviews the latest excretion of pseudo-scientific, evolutionary psychology-based aspirational ethics, as incorporated into a marriage self-help book:
Tara Parker-Pope, the earnest health reporter for the New York Times, promises a new wrinkle in the self-help genre with her book, For Better: The Science of a Good Marriage. Her basic premise is that there exists a vast, underappreciated repository of “objective, evidence-based advice” about marriage that has not gotten its due. Science, that old bore, is finally going to be deployed into the battlefield of marital harmony and disharmony. Enough with the touchy-feely already: Let’s see what the rats (and voles and chimpanzees) can tell us about finding and keeping Mr. (or Ms.) Right.
…
Here, like so many before her, Parker-Pope enters the creepy retro-future world of Gene Worship. … Parker-Pope falls for the one about the vole and the fidelity gene.
…
The point is this: The human genome is not a department store of traits where each gene can be separately purchased, so that shoppers can mix red hair with shyness, or resistance to breast cancer with a sweet alto voice. Genes don’t come out clean with nothing attached. Everything is attached to them. They operate in a web of unimaginable complexity, not along a simple plot line. The AVPR1A gene, for example, when not responsible for your marital happiness, also is involved with blood pressure regulation, renal absorption of salts and fluids, and who knows what else. The body is a wonderfully contrary machine. Merely referring to AVPR1A as “the cheating gene” perpetuates damaging oversimplification.
Another problem with almost-mindless cheerleading for the power of genetic research is that it is wildly out of sync with the actual pace of scientific progress. The real scientific world decodes reality at the rate of a few millimeters per century. But the alternative world that gene studies and books like this one inhabit moves at the speed of light from a vole gene to a kissing gene to a cheating gene. Parker-Pope is trying to move Oprah World into the bright light of science. But she’d be better off leaving well enough alone. You just can’t marry the self-help book, which forever has been free of information, to the field of genes. It’s the intricate place where the real dreamers live.
Sam Harris Derives Ought from Is
Posted by Wes Alwan in Web Detritus on March 25, 2010
Via OpenCulture.com, Sam Harris seems to think he has come across oughts in the wild. We just needed a big enough microscope to see them.
As physicist Sean Carroll notes, there once was a man named Hume:
Morality and science operate in very different ways. In science, our judgments are ultimately grounded in data; when it comes to values we have no such recourse. If I believe in the Big Bang model and you believe in the Steady State cosmology, I can point to the successful predictions of the cosmic background radiation, light element nucleosynthesis, evolution of large-scale structure, and so on. Eventually you would either agree or be relegated to crackpot status. But what if I believe that the highest moral good is to be found in the autonomy of the individual, while you believe that the highest good is to maximize the utility of some societal group? What are the data we can point to in order to adjudicate this disagreement? We might use empirical means to measure whether one preference or the other leads to systems that give people more successful lives on some particular scale — but that’s presuming the answer, not deriving it.
Sam Harris is one of these popularizers of science — specifically, of its implications for such subjects as faith and morals — who (like, for example, Richard Dawkins) displays little deep curiosity about the philosophical problems he thinks he’s addressing, and no awareness of the vast amount that has been written about them. He makes the very newbie assumption, for instance, that the only alternative to grounding morality in empirical science is moral relativism — moral realism does not require this, and one can think there are moral facts about the world without trying to derive ought from is; there are philosophers who try to overcome the ought-is barrier — but these are highly problematic and much debated.
Episode 14: Machiavelli on Politics
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Podcast Episodes on February 7, 2010
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:33:23 — 85.6MB)
Reading Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince and Ch. 1-20 of The Discourse on the First Ten Books of Titus Livy.
What’s a philosophically astute approach to political matters? What makes a government successful? Should you keep that fortress or sell it for scrap? If you conquer, say, Iraq, do you have to then go and live there for the occupation to work out? Is it OK to display the heads of your enemies on spikes, or should you opt for a respectful diorama?
Besides the famous Prince, Mr. M. wrote, at about the same time, the Discourses on Livy which focus on republics instead of princedoms, so the combined picture is less out of sync with our time than you might think, meaning we talk about G.W. Bush for a bit (sorry).
Plus: An inspirational speech to play at middle school assemblies across the land!
Skim the texts at here and here, or you can buy this book that includes both works.
The Isaiah Berlin article we talk about a bit is “The Originality of Machiavelli,” which you read most of if you search for the essay title in this book preview.
End song: “Se Piangi, Se Ridi” (Mogol/Marchetti/Satti), recorded by Mark Lint in 2000.
Episode 12: Chuang Tzu’s Taoism: What Is Wisdom?
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Podcast Episodes on December 6, 2009
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:50:14 — 101.0MB)
Discussing the “Chuang Tzu,” Chapters 2, 3, 6, 18, and 19.
It’s the second-most-famous Taoist text and the most humorous, with anecdotes about people singing at funerals and jumping out of moving coaches while drunk. What could it possibly mean to “make all things equal?” and how is the Taoist sage different from our other favorite paragons of virtue (hint: magical powers)?
Featuring special guest panelist Erik Douglas, another U. Texas philosophy grad school dropout now living in England, who knows more about Eastern philosophy than we do.
The end song requires explanation: I had a “New Age” period where I investigated Eastern philosophy, tried to be cheerful all the time, and was generally insufferable. This song, “Pass Time Incorporeal,” is an artifact of that time, with lyrics from early fall 1989; the recording is from 1993. It finally slipped out on a 1996 album of similar goofiness rejected from my “real” albums called “Black Jelly Beans & Smokes.”
Episode 11: Nietzsche’s Immoralism: What Is Ethics, Anyway?
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Podcast Episodes on November 10, 2009
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:51:38 — 102.2MB)
Discussing The Genealogy of Morals (mostly the first two essays) and Beyond Good and Evil Ch. 1 (The Prejudices of Philosophers), 5 (Natural History of Morals), and 9 (What is Noble?).
We go through Nietzsche’s convoluted and historically improbable stories about about the transition from master to slave morality and the origin of bad conscience. Why does he diss Christianity? Is he an anti-semite? Was he a lazy, arrogant bastard? What does he actually recommend that we do?
Buy the text
End song: “The Greatest F’in Song in the World,” from 1998′s Mark Lint and the Fake Johnson Trio. Download the album.
Episode 10: Kantian Ethics: What Should We Do?
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Podcast Episodes on October 19, 2009
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 2:05:03 — 114.6MB)
Discussing Fundamental Principles (aka Groundwork) of the Metaphysic of Morals.
We try very hard to make sense of Kant’s major ethical principle, the Categorical Imperative, wherein you should only do what you’d will that EVERYONE do, so, for instance, you should not will to eat pie, because then everyone would eat it and there would be none left for you, so too bad.
Also, Kant on free will, “things in themselves,” our duties to animals, and prostitution! Plus: Should you go to grad school?
The Kant reading can be found at http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/5682. The Allen Wood article “Kant on Duties Regarding Nonrational Nature” is here: http://www.stanford.edu/~allenw/papers/Nonrational.doc.
End song: “Stop” by Madison Lint (2003).
Episode 9: Utilitarian Ethics: What Should We Do?
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Podcast Episodes on September 18, 2009
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:59:04 — 109.1MB)
Discussing Jeremy Bentham’s An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation chapters 1-5, John Stuart Mill’s Utilitarianism, and modern utilitarian Peter Singer’s “Famine, Affluence, and Morality.”)
Going full tilt on the Greatest Happiness principle, with talk of gladiators, consensual cannibalism, and illegal downloads. How many Pleetons were in your last orgasm? Should animals count in the utilitarian calculus? What is Bentham’s skull up to nowadays? This extra long episode (patched together from two recording sessions, as Seth’s audio track got toasted for most of the first one) is disgustingly thorough and only occasionally internally redundant.
Read the Bentham online. Here’s the Mill online, or you could buy it.
End song: “So Whaddaya Think?” by Mark Lint and the Fake (2000). Listen to the whole album online.
Episode 5: Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Podcast Episodes on July 16, 2009
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:41:17 — 0.0KB)
Discussing Books 1 and 2.
What is virtue, and how can I eat it? Do not enjoy this episode too much, or too little, but just the right amount. Apparently, if you haven’t already have been brought up with the right habits, you may as well give up. Plus, is Michael Jackson the Aristotelian ideal?
You can read the text discussed at http://www.constitution.org/ari/ethic_00.htm.
End song: A newly recorded cover of Billie Jean by Mark Lint and the TransAmerikanishers. (Hear it by itself here.)
"I’ve never before heard my work discussed like that, and rarely as intelligently ... I listened to the whole podcast, and felt exalted afterward." -- Arthur Danto
The Partially Examined Life is a philosophy podcast by some guys who were at one point set on doing philosophy for a living but then thought better of it. Each episode, we pick a text and chat about it with some balance between insight and flippancy. You don't have to know any philosophy, or even to have read the text we're talking about to (mostly) follow and (hopefully) enjoy the discussion. Discuss episodes and provide feedback here or via our Facebook group. You can also e-mail comments to mark@marklint.com or wesalwan@gmail.com.
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