Final Flashcards
(47 cards)
What is moral intuition?
Rapid, effortless moral judgements and decisions that are made every day
Why does the Moral Foundations Theory think that intuition comes before rational thought?
Immediate emotional responses and gut feelings about a situation often precede and shape our conscious reasoning and justification of those feelings
Rider and elephant metaphor:
- Rider = controlled processes, including reasoning-why
- Elephant = automatic proesses, including emotion, intuition, and all forms of seeing-that
- Rider evolved because it did something useful for elephant: see further into future to help better elephant’s actions, learn new skills and master new technologies to influence elephant, act as spokesperson for elephant, skilled at post-hoc explanations to justify what elephant has just done, good at finding reasons to justify what elephant wants to do next
- Rider (reason) is what changes and adapts, whereas elephant (intuition) remains the same
What are some research findings that show moral intuition comes before rational thought (6)?
Brains evaluate instantly and constantly
- Affect: small flashes of positive or negative feeling that prepares us to approach or avoid something
- Affective reactions are so integrated with perception that we find ourselves liking or disliking something the instant we notice it, even if we don’t know what it is
- Affect/feeling first, thinking second
Social and political judgements are particular intuitive
- Word pair experiment: takes longer to make a judgement between incongruous (different) words
- Effect is “affective priming”: first word triggers a flash of affect that primes the mind to go one way or the other
- Social groups are primes, prejudge political enemies
Our bodies guide our judgements
- In humans, the insula both processes information about food, but also guides our taste in people
Psychopaths reason but don’t feel
- Moral emotions they lack: compassion, guilt, shame, embarrassment
- Makes it easy for them to lie and hurt family, friends, and animals
Babies feel but don’t reason
- Understand things like harming and helping
- Don’t like hinderer, want to reach for helper when given the choice
- Capacity to evaluate individuals on basis of their social interactions is universal and unlearned
- Moral intuitions emerge early, but ability to reason emerges much later
Affective reactions are in the right place at the right time in the brain
- When people read stories involving personal harm, they show greater activity in several regions of the brain related to emotional processing
What are the 5 moral foundations?
Care/Harm
- Makes us sensitive to signs of suffering and need
- Makes us despise cruelty and want to care for those who are suffering
- Original trigger: suffering of own children
Fairness/Cheating
- Makes us sensitive to indications that another person is likely to be good (or bad) partner for collaborations and reciprocal altruism
- Makes us want to punish or shun cheaters
- Original trigger: acts of cooperation or selfishness that people show toward us
Loyalty/Betrayal
- Makes us sensitive to signs that another person is (or isn’t) a team player, and makes us trust and reward such people
- Makes us want to hurt, ostracize, or kill those who betray us or our group
- Original trigger: anything that tells you who is a team player and who is a traitor
Authority/Subversion
- Makes us sensitive to signs of rank or status, and to signs that other people are (or are not) behaving properly, given their position
- Original triggers: patterns of appearance and behavior that indicate higher vs lower rank
Sanctity/Degradation
- Makes it possible for people to invest objects with irrational and extreme values - both positive and negative - which are important for binding groups together
- Original trigger: smells, sights, or other sensory patterns that predict the presence of dangerous pathogens in objects or people
What are the evolutionary reasons for each of the 5 moral foundations?
Care/Harm - mammals make fewer bets and invest more in each one when it comes to children; need to keep child safe, alive, and from harm
Fairness/Cheating - ancestors faced the adaptive challenge of reaping benefits without getting suckered
Loyalty/Betrayal - adaptive challenge of forming and maintaining coalitions that could fend off attacks from rival groups
Authority/Subversion - maintain beneficial relationship with legitimate authorities that maintain order and justice
Sanctity/Degradation - need to avoid pathogens, parasites, and other threats spread by physical touch or proximity
How do each of the moral foundations affect moral thinking today?
Care/Harm - provides innate sense of compassion for victim and anger at perpetrator; relevant virtues of caring and kindness
Fairness/Cheating - provides innate sense of anger, gratitude, and guilt; relevant virtues of fairness, justice, and trustworthiness
Loyalty/Betrayal - provides innate sense of group pride and rage at traitors; relevant virtues of loyalty, patriotism, and self-sacrifice
Authority/Subversion - provides innate sense of respect and fear; relevant virtues of obedience and deference
Sanctity/Degradation - provides innate sense of disgust; relevant virtues of temperance, chastity, piety, and cleanliness
How does ethics of care critique universal ethical theories like deontology and utilitarianism?
Values emotions and relationships with others when making decisions, rather than doing the greatest good for the greatest number or fulfilling an ethical duty
Believes that people are inherently connected and that decisions you make don’t always benefit yourself but they are the right decisions to make for those in your life
Critiques the other theories because they involve a universal, impartial, and emotionless approach to ethics
Why does ethics of care value emotion?
Emotions are always indications about something important in your life that you really care about and is essential to your well-being
We have good reasons for emotions that have evolved over time
Emotions are instinctual, so it’s easy to put into practice and you get an immediate sense of good and bad
Therefore, we should value emotions when making ethical decisions
Why does ethics of care value the claims of “particular others”?
Focuses on the unique, relational context of moral action
Values the specific needs and vulnerabilities of individuals with whom we have a direct relationship, viewing moral obligations as stemming from these relationships rather than from abstract principles
Who are “particular others”?
People who have claims on you through a relationship of care
Relationship does not necessarily benefit oneself (ex: mother is not always benefitting self when caring for child)
Relationship does not always act in everyone’s interest
Why does ethics of care insist on understanding people as inherently connected?
Recognizes that relationships and mutual dependence are foundational to human development, well-being, and ethical decision-making
By emphasizing interconnectedness, ethics of care challenges the idea that individuals are primarily driven by self-interest
How does ethics of care reevaluate traditional notions of public and private?
Dominant moral theories have been heavily biased toward seeing the “public” life of men as significant for morality, and toward missing the moral significance of the ‘‘private” life of women in the family
- They concern themselves with moral issues in relations between individual strangers assumed to be equal, and fail to illuminate moral issues between interconnected people through family ties or friendship (unequals, like parents and children)
Ethics of care reevaluates this by emphasizing moral issues regarding interdependence and relationships in both private and public settings because individuals are not solely self-sufficient in both private and public life and they often rely on others in both settings
What are the primary objects of disgust?
Objects that fulfill evolutionary reasons for disgust and remind us of human animality and mortality
Ex: feces, bodily fluids, corpses, rodents/disease-carriers, bugs, decaying meat
Why do we find the primary objects of disgust disgusting?
Steers us away from danger when there is no time for detailed inquiry
Fulfill evolutionary reasons - safety, avoid sickness, prevent contamination
What is projective disgust?
Disgust that is projected onto something or someone, even if it is not inherently disgusting itself
What ethical problems does projective disgust raise?
Influenced by social norms and personal projections of one’s own feelings onto others - often at marginalized or stigmatized individuals
Projective disgust does not hold significance in moral judgement, but it can influence society to think/act a certain way towards these individuals in a dehumanizing manner because they associate them with primary objects of disgust
Why does Aristotle think ethics is about flourishing?
Flourishing is something we always value for itself, and never as a means to something else - don’t want it for anything else
To flourish and prosper is the ultimate goal - it means living a life that meets all our needs and it’s the goal of everything we do
All other goals work toward flourishing
What does Aristotle mean by flourishing?
Succeeding at being human and being a good human
Pleasure, wealth, prestige (can differ depending on your current condition)
What are virtues?
Dispositions that make someone a good human being, a good person, and good at performing the task of a human being
Traits and habits that promote moral well-being and lead to flourishing
What does it mean to say that virtues are “dispositions”?
Virtues set us in a good or bad way as regards our emotions
- Ex: set in a bad way if feelings of anger are too intense or feeble, and in a good way if they’re somewhere in the middle
What does it mean to say that virtues are the midpoint between “going too far” and “falling short”?
For every disposition, you can have too much of it (going too far) or too little of it (falling short), both of which are undesirable vices
The virtue for each disposition/trait lies in the middle at the midpoint, where you have just enough
Have to work to deliberately exercise virtues so that we habituate our emotions, behaviors, and nature towards the right aim (midpoint)
What does it mean to say that virtues are “relative to us”?
Some are objective midpoints - amount doesn’t vary, same for everyone, equidistant between two extremes
But some virtues have a midpoint relative to us - amount that isn’t too much or too little, can vary, not the same for everyone (circumstantial)
- Ex: Michael Phelps has to eat a lot more than the average person to reach his midpoint calories because of how much he exercises
What does Aristotle mean when he says virtue and vice are up to us?
We are responsible for developing virtuous habits and traits, and we can choose to avoid vices
Developing virtues/midpoints takes time and practice and must be done willingly
Choosing to do something implies doing it willfully - making a choice is central to being a good person, must willfully choose to be virtuous
What does the virtue of being brave concern?
Ability to confront fear and risk in order to do what is right or necessary
Taking the appropriate amount of risk given the degree of danger
