Lecture 10: ethics
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.
— Voltaire
Morality is a matter for reason.
— Ross (Zen and the Art of Divebombing)
it's getting better all the time
In sixteenth-century Paris, a popular form of entertainment was cat-burning,
in which a cat was hoisted in a sling on a stage and slowly lowered into a
fire. According to historian Norman Davies, "[T]he spectators, including
kings and queens, shrieked with laughter as the animals, howling with pain,
were singed, roasted, and finally carbonized." Today, such sadism would be
unthinkable in most of the world. This change in sensibilities is just one
example of perhaps the most important and most underappreciated trend in
the human saga: Violence has been in decline over long stretches of
history, and today we are probably living in the most peaceful moment of
our species' time on earth.
In the decade of Darfur and Iraq, and shortly after the century of Stalin,
Hitler, and Mao, the claim that violence has been diminishing may seem
somewhere between hallucinatory and obscene. Yet recent studies that seek
to quantify the historical ebb and flow of violence point to exactly that
conclusion.
— from A History of Violence by Steven Pinker
(The New Republic, 3/19/2007)
slide 3
an exercise in ethics: how to behave towards "the other"?
Option #1:
"I don't like your ethnicity (politics, religion, lifestyle, etc.), so
drop dead."
an exercise in ethics: how to behave towards "the other"?
Option #1:
"I don't like your ethnicity (politics, religion, lifestyle, etc.), so
drop dead."
Option #2:
"I despise your lifestyle (religion, politics, ethnicity), but
a supreme being commands me to love even you, so there you go."
slide 5
an exercise in ethics: how to behave towards "the other"?
Option #1:
"I don't like your ethnicity (politics, religion, lifestyle, etc.), so
drop dead."
Option #2:
"I despise your lifestyle (religion, politics, ethnicity), but
a supreme being commands me to love even you, so there you go."
Option #3:
"The supreme being I was taught to worship doesn't approve of
your religion (politics, ethnicity, lifestyle), so drop dead."
slide 6
an exercise in ethics: how to behave towards "the other"?
Option #1:
"I don't like your ethnicity (politics, religion, lifestyle, etc.), so
drop dead."
Option #2: ["kindergarten ethics"*]
"I despise your lifestyle (religion, politics, ethnicity), but
a supreme being commands me to love even you, so there you go."
Option #3:
"The supreme being I was taught to worship doesn't approve of
your religion (politics, ethnicity, lifestyle), so drop dead."
* Dostoyevsky: "if God does not exist, then everything is
permissible."
(Translation: "If the nanny stepped out, we can turn the
playroom upside down").
Does it work?
slide 7
religiosity and societal health
The following data are from
Cross-National Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health
with Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous
Democracies,
Gregory S. Paul,
Journal of Religion & Society 7:1-17 (2005).
slide 8
Religious belief and acceptance of evolution
A = Australia
C = Canada
D = Denmark
E = Great Britain
F = France
G = Germany
H = Holland
I = Ireland
J = Japan
L = Switzerland
N = Norway
P = Portugal
R = Austria
S = Spain
T = Italy
U = United States
W = Sweden
Z = New Zealand
slide 9
Religious belief and homicide rates
slide 10
Religious belief and youth suicide rates
slide 11
Religious belief and infant mortality rates
slide 12
Religious belief and life expectancy
slide 13
Religious belief and syphilis infection rates
slide 14
Religious belief and teen abortion rates
slide 15
Religious belief and teen pregnancy rates
slide 16
religiosity and societal health: a summary
Cross-National Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health
with Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies,
Gregory S. Paul, Journal of Religion & Society 7:1-17 (2005).
"Large-scale surveys show dramatic declines in religiosity in favor of
secularization in the developed democracies. Popular acceptance of
evolutionary science correlates negatively with levels of religiosity, and
the United States is the only prosperous nation where the majority
absolutely believes in a creator and evolutionary science is
unpopular. Abundant data is available on rates of societal dysfunction and
health in the first world. Cross-national comparisons of highly differing
rates of religiosity and societal conditions form a mass epidemiological
experiment that can be used to test whether high rates of belief in and
worship of a creator are necessary for high levels of social health. Data
correlations show that in almost all regards the highly secular
democracies consistently enjoy low rates of societal dysfunction, while
pro-religious and antievolution America performs poorly."
slide 17
From Religious Cosmologies and Homicide Rates among Nations: A Closer
Look, Gary F. Jensen, Journal of Religion & Society Volume 8:1-14 (2006)
slide 18
which option to choose?
Option #1: [jungle ethics]
"I don't like your ethnicity (politics, religion, lifestyle, etc.), so
drop dead."
Option #2: [kindergarten ethics]
"I despise your lifestyle (religion, politics, ethnicity), but
a supreme being commands me to love even you, so there you go."
Option #3: [crusader/jihadist ethics]
"The supreme being I was taught to worship doesn't approve of
your religion (politics, ethnicity, lifestyle), so drop dead."
None of the above!
slide 19
kindergarten ethics is a flop
- It does not work.
- It is an affront to human dignity.
The very idea of having to be
told to be ethical, whether or not under threat of retribution,
is degrading, dishonorable, and dehumanizing.
slide 20
another alternative: utilitarianism
J. S. Mill:
maximize the well-being of all who may be affected by your actions.
slide 22
a practical approach to ethics
Warren McCulloch's three rungs of computational virtue:
- A machine that is hard-wired to obey the rules. It may behave
virtuously, but deserves no credit for it.
- A machine that has knowledge of the rules, but is not inherently
constrained to obey them.
- A machine that can learn the rules.
slide 23
evolutionary aspects of virtue ethics
Evolutionary pressures ensure that a society composed of individuals who
are ethical merely in the self-centered sense implied by "a desire to win"
can nevertheless foster occasionally altruistic behavior.
Evolutionary considerations (Trivers, 1971):
"The complex, regulating system [...] that results should simultaneously
allow the individual to reap the benefits of altruistic exchanges, to
protect himself from gross and subtle forms of cheating, and to
practice those forms of cheating that local conditions make
adaptive."
[See the
announcement of the 2007 Crafoord Prize in Biosciences being
awarded to
Trivers.]
slide 24
computational aspects of virtue ethics
Computational considerations (McCulloch, 1956):
If a player's counterpart cheats according to some statistically
discernible pattern, the player will learn to do so.
Learning ethics is an instance of the structural credit assignment problem.
(Note connections to causality, selfhood, and free will.)
slide 25
ethics in context: the trolley problem
(After J. Greene)
[The automatic intuition] model suggests that moral judgment is much
like aesthetic judgment: we see an action or hear a story and we have an
instant feeling of approval or disapproval. These feelings are best
thought of as affect-laden intuitions, as they appear suddenly and
effortlessly in consciousness, with an affective valence (good or bad),
but without any feeling of having gone through steps of searching,
weighing evidence, or inferring a conclusion. These intuitions — for
example, about reciprocity, loyalty, purity, suffering — are shaped
by natural selection, as well as by cultural forces.
— Greene and Haidt, How (and where) does moral judgment
work? (2002)
slide 26
personal vs. impersonal ethics
Areas exhibiting greater activity for personal moral dilemmas:
medial frontal gyrus (BA 9/10); posterior cingulate gyrus (BA 31);
superior temporal sulcus, inferior parietal lobe (BA 39).
Areas exhibiting greater activity for impersonal moral dilemmas:
dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (BA 46); parietal lobe (BA 7/40).
slide 27
computational neuroscience of virtue ethics
Areas involved:
- Medial frontal gyrus: integration of emotion into
decision-making.
- Posterior cingulate, precuneus, retrosplenial: integration of
emotion, imagery, and memory (esp. for narrative).
- STS, IPL: socially significant motion, incl. personhood.
- Orbitofrontal and VM FC: reward/punishment, control of
inappropriate behavior, "hot" TOM.
- Temporal pole: imparting affect to experience and memory.
- Amygdala: rapid assessment of reward/punishment, esp. visual.
- DLPFC: working memory.
- Parietal lobe.
slide 28
practical virtue ethics: a summary
"There is no specifically moral part of the brain. Every brain region
discussed in this article has also been implicated in
non-moral processes."
— Greene and Haidt,
How (and where) does moral judgment
work? (2002)
"Judgments of whether an action is wrong, all things
considered, implicate a complex set of psychological processes,
including representations of rules, emotional responses, and
assessments of costs and benefits."
— Nichols and Mallon,
Moral dilemmas and moral rules (2006)
slide 29
ethics and law in the absence of free will
From For the law, neuroscience changes nothing and everything
(Greene and Cohen, Phil. Trans. R. Soc. Lond. B 359, 1775-1785, 2004):
There are two general justifications for holding people legally
responsible for their actions. The retributive justification,
by which the goal of punishment is to give people what they really
deserve, does depend on this dubious notion of free will. However, the
consequentialist approach does not require a belief in free
will at all. As consequentialists, we can hold people responsible for
crimes simply because doing so has, on balance, beneficial effects
through deterrence, containment, etc.
slide 30
ethics and law in the absence of free will
The consequentialist approach to responsibility generates a derivative
notion of free will that we can embrace.
In the name of producing better consequences, we will want to make
several distinctions among various actions and agents.
To begin, we will want to distinguish the various classes of people who
cannot be deterred by the law from those who can. That is, we will
recognize many of the 'diminished capacity' excuses that the law
currently recognizes such as infancy and insanity.
We will also recognize familiar justifications such those associated
with crimes committed under duress (e.g. threat of death).
If we like, then, we can say that the actions of rational people
operating free from duress, etc. are free actions, and that such people
are exercising their free will.
slide 31
a few more words on free will
As defenders of hard determinism and a consequentialist
approach to responsibility, we should briefly address some standard
concerns about the rejection of free will and conceptions of
responsibility that depend on it. First, does not the fact that you can
raise your hand 'at will' prove that free will is real? Not in the sense
that matters. As Daniel Wegner (2002) has argued, our first-person sense
of ourselves as having free will may be a systematic illusion. And from
a third-person perspective, we simply do not assume that anyone who
exhibits voluntary control over his body is free in the relevant sense,
as in the case of Mr Puppet.
slide 32
a few more words on free will
Finally, there is the worry that to reject free will is to render
all of life pointless: why would you bother with anything if it has all
long since been determined? The answer is that you will bother because
you are a human, and that is what humans do. Even if you decide, as part
of a little intellectual exercise, that you are going to sit around and
do nothing because you have concluded that you have no free will, you
are eventually going to get up and make yourself a sandwich. And if you
do not, you have got bigger problems than philosophy can fix.
slide 33
general summary
Cf. the Buddhist doctrine of dependent origination — pratītyasamutpāda
(Sanskrit) or paniccasamuppāda (Pāli); rten.cing.'brel.bar.'byung.ba
(Tibetan); 縁起 (Chinese).
