Interesting List of Philosophy Students in Other Fields

This comes from the APA (American Philosophical Association).  We are proud of some people on the list, but others . . . not so much.  (And maybe you're proud of different members than we are.)  Here it is.

Just so you know, our posting is less regular during the craziness of January term.  Bethel alumni, or alumni of other schools who have January terms, will understand how busy (and fun) this time can be.  We will increase production as second semester begins.  If any of you readers has something you want to contribute to the blog, please contact us through our facebook page, which is here. 

What should we teach our children?

Another contribution from Bethel and UW-Milwaukee graduate John Grandits.

The last post, about lying to your children by telling them about Santa Claus and the Elf on the Shelf, raises the question of child education in general: what should we teach our children? Take a common topic that has some parallels with Santa: what should we teach our children about God? David Johnson thinks Santa and God share some characteristics, although he doesn't mention which ones. Some atheists argue that we shouldn't believe that God exists for the same reasons we don't believe that Santa exists. That seems false to me, but you don't have to think it's false to think that it's an open question whether one should teach his children to believe/not believe that God exists. What are the criteria?

David Johnson mentions some. For instance, don't lie to your children unless there is some overriding/noble reason to. Certainly those who believe/don't believe that God exists wouldn't be lying to their children if they told them that God exists/doesn't exist.

But might there be a related criterion that says something like, "Don't tell your children that P unless you have good reasons that P"? And what if you believe you have good reasons for believing that P, but there is still reasonable disagreement about P – as in the case of belief in God? Does your child have a legitimate complaint against you if she, upon growing up, comes to disagree with you about P when you always told her that P? She might say something like, "You had no (epistemic) right to tell me that P because there isn't much evidence in support of P. And even if you believed that there was such support, you should have realized that this was a matter about which one could reasonably disagree."

All of this leaves me wondering: shouldn't we teach our children as if they were, say, students in a college classroom? Views about college teaching certainly differ, but whatever our view is, shouldn't that just be our view about teaching our own children? Or is there something about them (e.g. our relation to them as parents) that makes this not the case?

Immanuel Kant and the Elf on the Shelf

Anyone who tells a child (or anyone else) that Santa exists is doing wrong, according to Immanuel Kant (1724 – 1804).  After all, to do so is to lie, and lying violates the Categorical Imperative, the fundamental moral rule that governs all actions by rational agents.

Here’s a brief summary of one version of the Categorical Imperative.  (I’m borrowing the explanation from James Rachels’ book The Elements of Moral Philosophy, which provides an excellent introduction to ethical theory.)  The Categorical Imperative says that you must always act in such a way that you can will that the rule you are following be adopted universally – i.e. that everyone always follow it.

But you cannot tell a lie and will that everyone always lie.  After all, lies wouldn’t work if everyone always lied.  (It’s hard to imagine what would happen if everyone always lied – communication would be difficult, that’s for sure!)  The rule that everyone always lie would be self-defeating.  But then you simply may not lie.  And that includes telling children that there is a Santa Claus.

If Kant would hate that particular lie, imagine what he’d think about the Christmas toy, the “Elf on the Shelf.”  This toy supposedly sits quietly on a shelf during the day and spies on the children, flies to the North Pole at night to give Santa a report about their behavior, and returns the next day to some other location in the house to spy some more.  A whole bucketful of lies built into one toy!

Philosopher David Kyle Johnson from King’s College in Pennsylvania argues persuasively in this blog post that we ought to refrain from telling children that there is a Santa Claus and that a magical elf informs Santa about how they are behaving.  And perhaps he’s right:  perhaps we should strive to keep lying out of Christmas.

Wondering about an argument against abortion

There are many arguments for the conclusion that abortion is immoral, but some are more compelling than others.  In today’s blog post, John Grandits (a Bethel graduate who recently earned his MA in philosophy from the U of Wisconsin-Milwaukee) considers one common argument and makes the case that most of us don’t in fact believe its central premise . . .

Consider the following argument against abortion:

1)      It is prima facie wrong to deliberately kill an innocent person.

2)      Human embryos are innocent persons.

3)      Therefore, abortion, which is the deliberate killing of a human embryo, is prima facie wrong.

Although not always stated in this exact form, this is a common argument made against the permissibility of abortion. Let me go over each premise. Premise (1) states that deliberately killing an innocent person is wrong. I include "prima facie" here because I want to leave open the possibility that there may be circumstances in which, all things considered, the deliberate killing of an innocent person is justified. However, I will take it as uncontroversial that the deliberate killing of an innocent person is wrong in the absence of overriding reasons.

Premise (2) states that all human embryos are persons, a claim that is usually taken to be entailed by the more common claim that life, or more appropriately personhood, begins at conception. Here, "persons" and "personhood" are moral terms that are meant to suggest something with "full moral status," i.e. the moral status that we normally take adult human beings to have. Specifically, if we believe that human embryos have full moral status, that means we believe they should be given the same weight in our ethical decisions as adult persons. For example, if we have moral obligations to protect an adult person from being killed or to prevent them from dying in a certain situation, the same obligations hold for a human embryo in those situations.

As premise (2) is commonly defended by political conservatives (at least in the United States), let's call this the conservative claim. The conclusion, then, is that abortion is prima facie wrong - wrong in the same way the deliberate killing of an innocent adult person is wrong (hence the common saying, "abortion is murder").

Proponents of abortion can respond in different ways to this argument. They can concede (1)-(3) but argue that, in some or all cases of abortion, overriding reasons to premise (1) are present. This would include those who argue that the rights of the mother trump those of the embryo. Another way to respond would be to argue that premise (2), the conservative claim, is false; that is, they can argue that embryos are not persons and, as a result, don't have the sort of moral status necessary to protect them from being deliberately killed. A third way to respond--and one that in some ways I find most interesting--is to attempt to show that very few people, if any, actually believe the conservative claim. This is the argument I will present below.

If you're familiar with abortion debates, you've probably heard about burning-building thought experiments. These thought experiments usually ask you to imagine a scenario in which two buildings are on fire, one of which has a living human baby, the other of which has a container filled with lots and lots of human embryos. The question is posed: assuming you only have time to save one, do you save the baby or the container? Most of us respond by choosing the baby.

In an article entitled, "The Scourge: moral implications of natural embryo loss," Toby Ord updates this thought-experiment by showing empirical data that something like the burning-building is happening everyday on a massive scale: spontaneous abortion. According to various sources of medical data, roughly 50 percent of all embryos two weeks old or younger are spontaneously aborted each year. To use some raw numbers, it is estimated that roughly 200 million spontaneous abortions occur each year.

These numbers may not carry much argumentative weight by themselves, but if they are combined with the conservative claim that embryos are persons with full moral status, it logically follows that roughly 50 percent of all human persons conceived each year die within two weeks of conception. Or, that more than 200 million persons die each year from spontaneous abortion alone. This is a remarkable result of accepting the conservative claim, so remarkable that it should lead us to ask why, if we accept the conservative claim, are we not advocating to combat this great loss of life, what Ord calls "The Scourge"?

I'm not sure all of what this shows us about our moral beliefs, but one thing it seems to show is that we don't believe that human embryos and adult human persons have the same moral status. If we did, we should expect to see many individuals and organizations attempting to eliminate the occurrence of spontaneous abortion with as much or more effort and resources as current attempts to eliminate cancer and various other deadly diseases. As no disease, natural disaster, war, or human rights catastrophe has ever killed so many persons as spontaneous abortion, we should expect that solving this problem would be our top priority. But it isn't. When compared to the likes of cancer or war, spontaneous abortion isn't even on our moral radar.

Ord takes this argument to be a sort of reductio of the conservative claim because, while it doesn't show us that the conservative claim logically entails a contradiction, it does show us that the conservative claim logically entails a conclusion that we don't believe - that, for instance, more than 200 million persons die each year from spontaneous abortion and that we should be putting in immense effort to eliminate its occurrence. If we don't believe that--which seems likely given our actions (or lack thereof) and attitudes about spontaneous abortion--then it seems likely that we don't believe the conservative claim upon which it rests. To the extent that we do believe the conservative claim, this argument reveals a morally egregious inconsistency between our actions and what we avow.  

Assuming that this is right, where does this leave us with the abortion debate? It certainly doesn't settle it, but Ord's argument raises doubts about a fundamental premise often used in arguments against the permissibility of abortion - the claim that human embryos are persons or the related claim that personhood begins at conception. It raises doubts, not by showing that these claims are false, but by showing that very few of us, if any, actually believe them to be true.

Runaway Trains and Moral Intuitions

In this week's post, Bethel philosophy alumnus Michael Hands considers two puzzles about runaway trains, and talks about where our moral intuitions surrounding these puzzles might come from.

A runaway train hurtles towards 5 people tied to a track. A railroad switch sits just a few feet from you. Flipping the switch diverts the train to another track. A single person is tied to this other track.

Do you flip the switch?

If you're like most people, you do. Surveys show that around 90% of respondents say they'd flip the switch. Their reason? Better to save 5 at the expense of 1.

Now imagine the same scenario: A train is bearing down on 5 people tied to a track. Only this time you're standing on a footbridge above the track. Next to you stands a fat man. If pushed, the fat man will fall to his death, blocking the train and saving the 5 people behind him.

Do you push him?

Most people—75% to 90%, depending on which surveys you believe—don't push the fat man.

But what happened to the logic of saving 5 at the expense of 1? What changed?

Some argue the salient difference between the two cases is emotional. In the abstract, you're okay with killing someone by pulling a lever, but you don't like pushing anybody. Not only wouldn't you push someone, you also think it's wrong for someone else to push the fat man.

In both cases, you've made a moral judgment or an evaluation of the rightness or wrongness of a given action. Our life is full of moral judgments, though fortunately most don't involve locomotive catastrophe.

The field of moral psychology asks how we make moral judgments.  On this question, there are two competing views: rationalism and sentimentalism.

As the name suggests, rationalists believe that individual reason plays the primary role in forming moral judgments. According to rationalism, moral dilemmas engage our reasoning process. We call to mind the facts of the situation and reflect on the relevant principles. When our internal dialectic ends, we render moral judgment.

While rationalists exalt reason, sentimentalists are decidedly more pessimistic about its role in moral decision-making. According to sentimentalists, reason is like a puppet show with emotions pulling the strings. Or, as psychologist Jonathan Haidt puts it, emotion is the "dog wagging its rationalist tail.” He offers an alternative to the rationalist model of moral decision-making: the Social Intuitionist Model (SIM). 

Like all sentimentalists, Haidt believes that the majority of our moral judgments are driven by emotional intuitions or instincts, not reasoned deliberation. However, he introduces a new dimension to the discussion: social vs. private decision-making.

According to Haidt, our moral intuitions are rarely formed in a vacuum of private reflection. Instead they are formed interpersonally. As social creatures, we look to each other for clues about what to believe or how to act. A kind of finger in the air. We are so adept at this that we often don't realize we are aggregating and internalizing our neighbors’ beliefs. Once our social intuition is formed, reason acts like a “press secretary,” assuming the podium only to justify our intuitions to others. This is the basic insight of the Social Intuitionist Model: that social forces shape the emotions that determine our moral judgments.

This is a brief sketch of two competing positions in the field of moral psychology: rationalism and sentimentalism. Which do you find more compelling? Would you flip the switch but not push the fat man? Why or why not?