Ethics in the Social Sciences Week 1 Notes PDF

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Video: What is philosophy? Crash Course Philosophy #1 - Science can help us understand our thoughts, feelings and actions - Aspects of the human condition that can’t be explained not only by hormones or neurotransmitters but by personal experiences or hereditary conditions - Early philosophers were using methods that were more analytical and scientific although they didn’t have the concept of science back then - Philosophia: “the love of wisdom” was a new way of trying to make sense of the world - When the earliest philosophers used the word philosophy, they basically meant the academic study of anything - Philosophy came to be understood more as a way of thinking about questions. Big questions - Philosophers still love asking questions, the same questions and they don’t mind that they don’t get an answer - E.g. what is the world is like? The philosophical approach isn’t just based on observation. It has other, much more complex questions packed inside it - When a philosopher asks what the world is like, they might really mean “what’s the nature of reality… is the world just made up of matter and energy, or is there something else going on… if it is just matter and energy, then where did it all come from… is there a god and if so, what is he/she like?” - What kind of being am I? - Do I have a soul? - If there some material inside me that will survive after I die? - Metaphysics is one of the three main branches of philosophy and it studies the nature of reality - We as students of philosophy also have a whole separate set of questions that are about how we know the answers to any of this stuff - Knowing about knowing is epistemology and it studies the nature and scope of knowledge (the second major field of philosophy). It poses questions like, ‘is the world really what I think it is… is everything I see, think and experience true… if it isn’t, then what is true and what’s the way to go about figuring out the truth… is science the best way or are there other theories paths to truths, paths that science can never really travel?’ There’s another area of philosophy that helps frame your thinking around what you actually do, how you should act and what you attach meaning to. It’s called value theory and its usually divided into 2 main branches. The first is ethics (the branch of philosophy that studies and evaluates human conduct). In philosophy, ethics isn’t just a case of what’s right and wrong, it’s the study of how humans should live with each other, rather than just sitting around and judging people, ethics involves questions like ‘how should I live… is there any reason why I should treat strangers differently than the people I love and for that matter, do I owe anything to myself, animals or the earth and if I do have any of these obligations at all then where do they come from, who says?’ the other part of value theory isn’t about what’s right, it’s about what’s beautiful. Aesthetics is the study of beauty and art. For philosophers, the pursuit of aesthetics involves considering what beauty is… and whether it even exists. Aesthetics is a part of value theory because beauty and art are things we value and evaluate and many people who study this particular kind of philosophy known as aestheticians, believe there is such a thing as ‘the

beautiful’. Something that doesn’t just depend on what you find attractive but something that’s just objectively true - One more aspect of philosophy doesn’t ask questions but helps us find answers and that thing is logic. Logic is the philosopher’s toolbox. Logic is about reasoning. Giving strong arguments that don’t fall victims to fallacies which are the mortal enemies of philosophical precision - Philosophy is not your usual field of study - The goal of philosophy is to use your main and find the answers that make the most sense to you Video: What is ethics? - Not quantity, but quality - Ethics is a tool that helps create the difference between a good decision and a bad one - Ethics is the branch of philosophy that asks the practical question “what should we do” - This leads to the study like values, principles, beliefs and norms - Ethics asks us ‘how should we live… what choice should we make and what makes our lives worth living’ - Our values are the things we hold to be good and therefore care about most deeply. Things like justice, knowledge, family and equality - We don’t just need to know what’s well, we need to know what’s right. This is where principles come in., they help us draw a line in the sand. They determine the acceptable ways of the things we value - What helps to orient our judgement is a connection to purpose - Every time we make a choice, we change the world - What’s important is that you make choices that are good and right. Choices you can justify, ones you can be proud of, that’s what makes the choices actively yours Video: Metaethics: Crash Course Philosophy #32 - Ethics: the branch of philosophy that studies morality, or right and wrong behaviour - Metaethics studies the very foundations of morality itself - There are a lot of different metaethical views out there and one way to understand them is to put them to a test to see how they help you solve ethical problems e.g. where you have to steal food or lie for a good cause - One of the most widely held metaethical views is known as moral realism: the belief that there are moral facts, in the same way that there are scientific facts. In this view, any moral proposition can only be true, or false. For a lot of us, our gut intuition tells us that there are moral facts 0 somethings are just wrong, and others are indisputably right - If morality is based on facts, then why is there so much disagreement about what’s moral and what’s not as opposed to science where there often more consensus. This is known as the grounding problem. The grounding problem of ethics is the search for a foundation for our moral beliefs, something solid that would make them true in a way that is clear, objective and unmoving - If you can’t find a way to ground morality, then you might be pushed towards another metaethical view. Moral antirealism is the belief that moral propositions don’t refer to objective features of the world at all – that there are no moral facts. So, a moral anti realist would argue that there’s nothing about gratuitous violence that’s inherently wrong. Likewise, they’d say, if you look at the rest of the animal kingdom, sometimes nurturing your kids doesn’t seem like its that important

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Maybe morality isn’t the same for everyone but still most people you know, including yourself are committed to some form of moral realism and there are many forms

Some people favour capital punishment and think it’s just. Others oppose it and think its unjust. But it doesn’t go any deeper than that. There are no moral facts, only moral attitudes - Moral frameworks are known as ‘ethical theories’. They’re moral foundations that help you come up with consistent answer about right and wrong conduct. All ethical theories have some kind of starting assumptions, which shouldn’t be surprising, because really all of our beliefs rest on some basic, assumed beliefs. E.g. natural law theory relies on the starting assumption that god created the universe according to a well-ordered plan - Another ethical theory known as utilitarianism relies on the starting assumption that all beings share a common desire to seek pleasure and avoid pain - The starting assumptions of a theory can lead us to other beliefs but if you reject those initial assumptions, the rest of the theory just doesn’t follow - Ethical theories also consist or moral principles which are the building blocks that make up the theories. These principles can be shared with more than one theory. E.g. many ethical theories agree on that it’s just wrong to cause unjustified suffering. Some ethical theories hold the principle that any unjustified killing is wrong – and that includes animals – while other theories hold the principle that its only wrong to unjustifiably kill humans. The thing about ethical theories is that most people don’t identify with just one. Instead, most people identify with principles from several theories that help them form their moral views Video: The moral roots of liberals and conservatives – Johnathan Haidt - Liberals are much higher than conservatives on a major personality trait called openness to experience - People who are high on openness to experience just crave, novelty, variety, diversity, new ideas, travel. People low on it, like things that are familiar, that are safe and dependable - This trait also tells us a lot about politics, the main researcher of this trait Robert McCrae says that “open individuals have an affinity for liberal,

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progressive, left wing political views, whereas closed individuals prefer conservative, traditional, right wing views” (McCrae, 1996) This trait also tells us a lot about the kinds of groups people join. “… a global community… welcoming people from every discipline and culture who …seek a deeper understanding of the world, and [who] hope to turn that understanding into a better future for us all.” (Ted, 2008) if our goal is to understand the world, to seek a deeper understanding of the world, our general lack of moral diversity here is going to make it harder because when people all share morals/values, they become a team and once you engage the psychology of teams it shuts down open minded thinking the worst idea in all of psychology is that the mind is a blank slate at birth. Developmental psychology has shown that kids come into the world already knowing so much about the physical and social worlds and program to make it really easy to learn certain things and hard to learn others What’s on the first draft of the moral mind? The five foundations of morality. The first one is harm/care. The second foundation is fairness/reciprocity. The third foundation is ingroup/loyalty. Its only among humans that you find very large groups of people who are able to cooperate, join together, but in this case, groups that are united to fight other groups and this comes from our long history of tribal living/psychology. This tribal psychology is so deeply pleasurable that even when we don’t have tribes, we go ahead and make them because it’s fun. The fourth foundation is authority/respect. Authority in humans is not so closely based on power and brutality as it is in other primates, it’s based on more voluntary deference and even elements of love sometimes. The fifth foundation is purity/sanctity. Purity is not just about surpassing female sexuality, it’s about any kind of idea that tells you that you contain virtue by controlling what you’re doing with your body, by controlling what you put into your body and while the political right may moralise sex much more, the political left is really doing a lot with food. Food is becoming extremely moralised nowadays and a lot of it is about purity and what you’re willing to touch or put into your body. These are the five best candidates for what’s written on th3e first draft of the moral mind If there really are 5 systems that work in the mind, 5 sources of intuitions and emotions, then we can think of the moral mind as being one of those audio equalisers that has 5 channels where you can set it to a different setting on every channel Some people think that religion is an adaptation evolved both by cultural and by biological evolution to make groups to cohere in part of the purpose of trusting each other and then being more effective and competing with other groups It really helps to organise a group, if you have subgroups and those subgroups have some eternal structure and if you have some ideology that tells people to supress their carnality, to pursue higher, nobler ends Liberals speak for the weak and oppressed; want change and justice, even at risk of chaos Conservatives speak for institutions and traditions; want order even at cost to those at the bottom “The restraints on men, as well as their liberties, are to be reckoned among their rights.” – Burke

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Once you see that liberals and conservatives both have something to contribute, that they form a balance on change vs stability, then the way is open to step outside of the moral matrix If you want the truth to stand clear before you, never be for or against. The struggle between “for” and “against” is the minds worst disease. – Sent-ts’an, c. 700 C.E. If you take the greatest insights from ancient Asian philosophies and religions and you combine them with the latest research on moral psychology, you come to the conclusions that Our Righteous Minds were “designed” to…  Unite us into teams  Divide us against other teams, and  Blind us to the truth This is an amazing group of people who are doing so much, using so much of their talent, their brilliance, their energy, their money, to make the world a better place, to fight wrongs, to solve problems but as we learn from Samantha Power, you can’t just go charging in, saying you’re wrong and I’m right because everybody thinks they are right. A lot of the problems that we have to solve are problems that require us to change other people and if you want to change other people, a much better way to do it is to first understand who we are, understand our moral psychology, understand that we all think were right and then step out, check in with Sent-s’an, step out of the moral matrix, check in to see it as a struggling playing out in which everybody does think they’re right and everybody at least has some reasons even if you disagree with them, everybody has some reasons for what they’re doing. And if you do that, that’s the essential move to cultivate moral humility, to get yourself out of this self-righteousness which is the normal human condition There’s a passionate commitment to the truth and the answer is to use that passionate commitment to the truth to try turn it into a better future for us all...