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Story I
Tim sent me this link about the rape case in California, which happened a little over a week ago now.
http://www.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/10/28/california.gang.rape.bystander/index.html
He points out that this is linked to our discussion of the Genovese case. I brought this case up in relation to the article about famine by Peter Singer to point out that there can be moral culpability in doing nothing.
Warning: this case is difficult to hear about. The CNN article makes it abundantly clear that many people are both morally and legally at fault for the girl’s suffering. But I think the article struggles (as any of us would) to explain how it could have happened.
Story II
Daniel passed on this link to a method of cutting carbon emissions. He writes, “the simple task of having a white rooftop saves a substantial amount on the energy cost of cooling buildings. The US Energy Secretary Steven Chu says that white rooftops and roadways would have the same effect as removing the world’s cars for 11 years.”
In class, we’ve distinguished between descriptive theories and prescriptive (or normative) theories.
Psychological egoism is descriptive: it says that people act selfishly (as a matter of fact). We can disprove this thesis when we give examples of people acting unselfishly.
Ethical egoism is normative: it says that people should act selfishly (whether they actually do or not). Acting to further one’s own self-interests becomes the way to define morality for the ethical egoist. An ethical egoist believes that an altruist is not living up to the highest standards of integrity. The egoist believes that the altruist is manipulated and weak for not pursuing egoism.
Looking at actual behavior does not necessarily tell us much about how people ought to behave. If morality were nothing more than always following our intuitions, there would be no point to having either moral codes or ethical theories.
However, I do think (and many other philosophers agree) that we can learn something from studying actual behavior. For example, we can learn whether people find it easy or difficult to act in ways they believe are moral.
I used the example in class of the ultimatum game, which shows that many people value fairness above self-interest. Studies by economists and psychologists have shown that while extreme acts of altruism are rare, altruism that meets the following criteria is quite common:
1. People are willing to sacrifice their own material well-being to help those who are being kind.
The attempt to provide public goods without coercion departs from pure self-interest. Experiments show that people cooperate to contribute toward a public good to a degree greater than would be implied by pure self-interest. Individually optimal contribution rates, as defined by the standard utility model, are close to 0 percent. However, in experiments, the willingness for an individual to contribute to a public good is highly contingent on the behavior of others.
2. People are willing to sacrifice their own material well-being to punish those who are being unkind.
Evidence is provided by the ultimatum game, consisting of two people, a proposer and decider, splitting a fixed amount of money. The proposer offers a division of the money, then the decider decides if he or she refuses or accepts the proposal. If the decider says yes, they split the money according to the proposer’s offer, but if the decider says no, neither person gets any money. The standard utility model would find that any offer proposed to the decider should be expected if it is greater than zero because utility should increase with any increase in income. Along the same lines, the standard utility model would predict that the proposer would offer the smallest amount of money possible to the decider in order to maximize his or her own utility. However, data shows that deciders are willing to punish any unfair offer and proposers tend to make fair offers.
3. Both motivations 1 and 2 have a greater effect on behavior as the material cost of sacrificing becomes smaller.
In the article we read for class, Pojman wrote that “Ethical relativism is the doctrine that the moral rightness and wrongness of actions vary from society to society and that there are not absolute universal moral standards” that apply to all people at all times.
Although there are many ways that different theorists fill in the details about moral relativism, the key idea is that there are not moral standards that can be applied to judge people’s actions across cultural boundaries and through history.
Many people think that moral relativism is compatible with tolerance for moral difference. But this is not necessarily the case. A relativist commonly thinks that morality is dependent on culture, so in the case of an intolerant culture, intolerance would be a morally correct position (according to the relativist).
Also, some people want to be tolerant of others’ views because they believe tolerance is a virtue. And then, from the idea that all views deserve to be heard and all people deserve to be respected, they derive the idea that all views are equal. The flaw in this argument is that by taking tolerance as a moral principle, relativism is abandoned from the outset. A conclusion that is better supported by this argument than moral relativism is the conclusion that moral judgments which proceed from a position of tolerance for cultural differences are (all other things being equal) better justified than judgments which proceed from intolerance.
In arguing against relativism, I hope I made it clear that we can be tolerant without being relativists. The reason is that relativism has strong consequences: it undermines any grounds we might have for thinking our beliefs or ways of life are more correct than someone else’s. Without rational grounds for our beliefs, we adopt one belief rather than another just because it is more popular or because we inherited it or for some other non-rational reason. Therefore, relativists have no reason to change or improve their way of life. They can have no account of moral development.
Some people would like to adopt a position that ethicists call value pluralism. This is the idea that there are many admirable moral values, and they may even conflict with one another. This means that moral deliberation is necessarily messy. There may be no uniquely perfect solution to moral dilemmas. However, unlike moral relativism, value pluralism does not give up on deliberating about values.
Our political system is set up to support tolerance but not relativism. That is, our democracy supports people expressing their views (”free speech”). Our newspapers publish all kinds of views in letters to the editor. But we also have laws that are based on legal principles and on deliberation. If someone wants a law changed, they have to convince others that the change would be right. That is tolerant but not relativist.
Last week I suggested that a shared human psychology and social experience provide the foundations for morality. That observation is relevant to what we’ll discuss in class today: 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 peoples’ 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? I think this is essentially the challenge that Jared throws down on the comment he posted here.
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