Week 8 Plans and Assignments

To help you stay organized, let me review what our activities will be this week and the ways in which they differ from what’s on the course syllabus.

Monday:

We still need to take the quiz over virtue ethics. The way to prepare for this quiz, which was postponed last Friday, is to look over the notes you took during lecture, look over the assigned readings (Aristotle and Bernard Mayo), make sure you understand the (point of the) questions on the in-class exercise, and read the blog post if you haven’t already.

There is a comment due over the assigned reading, which is a New Yorker article by Michael Specter titled “Big Foot.” We’ll probably have time to discuss this for a few minutes, but the bulk of our conversation will carry over to Wednesday.

Wednesday:

We’ll finish the discussion from Monday of Specter’s article. One question I would like us to discuss in class is: Why does the subtitle say “In measuring carbon emissions, it’s easy to confuse morality and science“?

The other part of the assignment is to take a look at two ecological footprint models.

The two I recommend because they are easy to compare with each other are:

1. http://www.myfootprint.org/en/visitor_information/
2. http://sustainability.publicradio.org/consumerconsequences/

It would be nice if some of you would pick other similar quizzes from elsewhere in cyberspace. This will allow us to talk about a wider range of differences between the available models. (Lists of calculators available here and here.)

I will record a grade that takes into account your answers to the questions below and participation in our in-class analysis. For each footprint calculator you examine, record (or print out) this information:

1. The name or URL of the calculator/quiz.

2. The results and the units of measurement (e.g., “4.9 Earths” or “12 tons of CO₂”).

3. The average footprint for Americans or for New Yorkers (if your calculators report it–you might need to poke around on the FAQ page).

4. The company or organization that sponsors each quiz.

5. The sorts of questions that each quiz asks. How detailed is it? Does it ask about travel? Diet? Recycling habits? Is your result based on averages of “people like you”?

In class, we’ll analyze footprint calculators in some detail. I’m curious about these questions:

• How can such models be helpful? What is their goal?
• What do they measure?
• What are the differences among them?
• Is there a standard way of measuring carbon footprints?
• What are some obstacles to lowering carbon emissions?
• Is the use of fossil fuel an ethical problem or a practicalproblem or an economic problem?
• Is the solution to excessive carbon emissions a technological one? A political one?
• What motivates people to lower their energy use? What are some obstacles?

If you live in a dorm, you might feel unsure what numbers to use for the calculator. One option is to fill it out for your parent’s house. Another is to use this information that a former student got from RIT’s Facilities Management Services:

Our dorm rooms are about 240 sq. ft. and for each square foot, the university spends $1.201 on electricity and 83.1 cents on gas each year. Calculated out, this would mean that $24.02 is spent on electricity, and $16.62 is spent on gas per month per dorm room.

Friday:

No reading assignment. Argument outline #2 is due (which might require some online research), and we’ll watch the feature film No Impact Man in class.

Utilitarianism and the Science of Happiness

Utilitarians claim that ethics boils down to happiness. Not your happiness but total happiness.

Happiness is…        -fill in the blank.

If happiness is so fundamental, why can it seem like such a mystery? The Barnes & Noble stocks shelves of self-help books largely because we know we want it, but we don’t know how to get it.

Although Bentham claimed that utilitarianism would give us a “moral calculus,” the science of happiness really got going in the last couple of decades, largely due, initially, to the finding that drugs like SSRI’s (fairly) reliably help people get out of depressions. Psychologists began to think more seriously about happiness as a chemical brain state–but as a brain state that is incredibly sensitive to many factors of experience.

For instance, one’s happiness is relative to perceived social standing. People with the same level of income and material comfort but living among others who are wealthier than they are, tend to be less happy than if they compare themselves to people less well-off than they.

Another unexpected finding is that people are not very adept at predicting which events or states of affairs will make them happy. (Perhaps that’s why we think those self-help books will provide guidance.)

One finding on happiness is especially relevant to our readings: below the poverty-level, happiness tracks wealth. It is very rare to be happy if one is hungry, subject to violence, or worried about survival. On the other hand, once a population becomes middle-class, the effects of increased wealth have less and less of an effect on happiness.

This gets well out of the realm of philosophy and into the realm of psychology. However, since utilitarians depend on getting the facts right, this science could change their beliefs. Here are some links for further reading/watching:

Economists now agree: ‘You can’t buy happiness’
Buying ‘stuff’ doesn’t do it, survey shows (Associated Press article)

Time Magazine interview with happiness researcher Dan Gilbert

TED talks: Dan Gilbert and Nancy Etcoff

Eric Weiner on Bloggingheads

The Source of Moral Rules

In my last post I said that there is

a problem for objectivist accounts of morality. Objectivists need to explain why, if there are universal moral rules, so many people seem to be wrong or mean or unjust so much of the time. If there are universal moral rules and they are knowable, then why isn’t it easy to a) act morally and b) agree on what the most moral action is?

How objectivists explain moral diversity depends, in part, on what they think is the source of moral rules.

Ignorance and fallibility: One possible explanation for moral disagreements is that the human mind is fallible. Thus, moral rules might be knowable but some people might be mistaken about what they are. For instance, if moral rules exist independently of us in what philosophers call a “Platonic realm”–much like mathematical truths–then they can be discovered by reasoned thought. However, following through with reasoned thought can be quite difficult or even impossible for some people in some situations.

Self-interest or evil: Another possible explanation for disagreements about morality is that self-interest leads us to deceive ourselves about what is right or leads us to reject what is morally right in favor of what is profitable or pleasurable. Some people believe that there is a natural (psychological, biological, social) source for morals. According to a naturalist account, moral rules are the set of actions that make human lives go well–by avoiding pain, by getting love and admiration, by having healthy lives. But on this account, there is often a trade-off between short-term self-interest and the long-term public or general interest. This preference for immediate pleasure over helping others is sometimes construed as weakness of the will or as desire winning out over reason.

Free will: It seems like some religious accounts might have an especially hard problem dealing with this question of moral diversity or of people defying moral rules. Because if God is the creator of humans, and also perfect, and also good, why weren’t humans created so that they could know and do only good? Why is there evil behavior in this world? One answer that religious accounts give to this question is that humans were created with free will. Having the freedom to act immorally also gives humans the possibility of acting morally. Having the ability to make a wide range of choices and of taking credit (or blame) for those choices is a central feature of being human.

Morality and Consistency

Last week I argued that a shared human psychology and social experience provide the foundations for morality. That observation is relevant to what we’ll discuss in class this week: moral relativism and moral objectivism.

The moral relativist and subjectivist hold that there are no universal moral rules. Basically, morality is relative to something else, like the culture that you were raised in.

This view has (at least) one virtue, which is that it explains the diversity that we see in various people’s and society’s moral beliefs. It also points to a problem for objectivist accounts of morality. Objectivists need to explain why, if there are universal moral rules, so many people seem to be wrong or mean or unjust so much of the time. If there are universal moral rules and they are knowable, then why isn’t it easy to a) act morally and b) agree on what the most moral action is?

Looking at the survey questions that I gave you the first week of class, it appears that only one person can be clearly identified as a moral objectivist or what Pojman calls a “moral absolutist.” Such a view has certain virtues: it is obviously consistent, and its consistency makes it rational. According to this view, there are universal moral rules that are either given to us by a higher being or can be discovered. For this reason, it is possible to identify individuals who act immorally and cultures who have immoral norms. Morals are thus a matter of fact and not mere opinion. When two people disagree about a moral choice, it’s possible that they have different interpretations of more general moral rules, or it’s possible that one of them is wrong. It’s not possible that “what’s right for me may not be right for you” any more than it’s possible that mathematics is different for me than it is for you.

I also identified (at least) six consistent relativists or subjectivists among the surveys. Relativists hold that:

• moral rules do not exist as absolutes independent of individuals or cultures,
• moral rules can and do change from place to place, time to time,or person to person
• we may make our own moral rules (technically, that’s subjectivism)
• moral choices legitimately differ from one person to the next or that people are unconstrained by moral rules
• (and sometimes) that morals are a matter of opinion and not fact.

The remaining 31 responses to the survey gave a set of responses that I could not clearly interpret. Probably, some of these sets of answers are inconsistent. That would be easy to understand: the testing conditions were not ideal, we had not yet spent time talking about morality, some of the questions were ambiguous, and some of these insights about the nature of morality require deeper thought than many people have given to them. It is also likely that some of these sets are not inconsistent. Rather, they express subtle positions that require more words to explain than this survey permits.

If you feel like commenting, I’d be interested in seeing your reaction to the quiz and whether you have thought about these questions before. It should be possible to comment anonymously.

Why Study Philosophy?

In an article in a past issue of the magazine Philosophy Now, St. Joseph College professor Wayne Buck points to the value that can be found in lower-level philosophy classes:

There are practical benefits to be gained from studying philosophy. First, it will improve your ability to reason, and to think originally. In reading and writing about abstract problems, you practice and develop analytical, critical and argumentative skills which are useful in many other endeavors. In turn, this will give you confidence in yourself and in your ability to think through problems and come to your own conclusions. It will make you less dependent on others and their thoughts, and put you in a better position to understand yourself and others.

Second, you will learn something about the philosophical tradition. Philosophy has been and still is a central force in Western culture and intellectual life. It is philosophers who have most clearly and thoroughly elaborated the values, ideals and theories which shape the way we live and think, even today. This is true not only for morals and religion, but also for the natural sciences, for political science, for economics and for literature.

Of course, what you get out of a class depends on many things: your level of engagement, your background, the way it’s taught, and countless other factors. As a teacher, I’d like to encourage you to focus not just on the obvious, which is the content. Yes, understanding some facts about Kant’s ethical theory and how it differs from Mill’s is an essential part of being an educated person. But at a higher level, there is something that we work on in a philosophy class which can transfer to any other class and all other classes. Namely, we work on giving reasons for conclusions and responding–tactfully but decisively–to poor reasoning.

Here are quotes from an e-mail exchange written by two people who now teach philosophy:

Teaching students to differentiate between a premise and a conclusion, and to evaluate arguments with respect to the reasoning supporting the conclusion, rather than the usual “stratch-and-sniff” approach (i.e. I just don’t like that conclusion), gives them the powerful tools necessary to successfully complete college and for developing their thinking in other courses.  For me, as an undergraduate, my first philosophy course was transformative in this way. -Debra

Debra, it was a pleasure reading your response because your experience so closely matches my own.  I was the first in my family to go to college, and unprepared for it; my grades went up, in all of my classes, as a result of my taking a philosophy course and learning to be explicit about giving reasons for what I thought. -Lynne