I'd like to welcome people to Moralities for Everyday Life. What I want to do in this short lecture is first introduce myself and have the teaching assistant for the course introduce herself. And then talk about what we'll be doing. Talk about the procedures. Talk about the evaluation. And then, maybe the most interesting part is the lectture. We'll be talking about the course itself. What topics we'll cover, what areas we'll be looking at, and why you should even be thinking about taking it. So, my name's Paul Bloom. I'm a Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Science at Yale University. I was born in Montreal, Canada. I was an undergraduate at McGill University, and did my doctorate degree at MIT. And now I live in New Haven, Connecticut with my wife, my two teenage sons, and my dog Tessie, who is a greyhound. It was an old greyhound and may not survive the course, but we're hoping. My research is, focuses on different areas, including the science of pleasure, of religion and especially morality, and I do scientific experiments that get written up in scientific journals. But I also am interested in presenting the fruits of this research and the fruits of other people's research to a broad audience. So, I, I publish articles in popular magazines, and I also write books. I want to introduce now the teaching assistant for the course, Christine [UNKNOWN] Hi, I'm Christina Starmans. I'll be the teaching assistant for this course. I am a fifth year graduate student here at Yale and I was also born in Canada in Toronto. And I did my undergraduate at the University of Waterloo there in both psychology and philosophy And then I spent a year at New York University working on psychology research with babies, looking at how they come to understand language and communication. So here at Yale I do research with young children and adults, looking at our intuitions about bodies and minds. And in particular what our intuitions are about the self, or the soul. And I'm looking forward to getting started on this course. Thank you. So, a lot of what this course will be, will be lectures. Lectures like this one except we'll be talking about different issues and different questions. If you, if the sound of my voice drives you crazy, this might not be the course for you. The sound of my voice makes you quiver in happiness. This is a great course. Most of you will be somewhere in between. But there'll be lectures. There'll be readings. The readings are all going to be available on line. They are all free. They are all freely accessible. They're all chosen to be interesting and informative and up to date. And and, and just I think some of the best work in the field. So the readings are an exciting part of the course. Some of the readings aren't actually going to be readings. What I mean by this is some of the material we'll be assigned to look at will be video, and so at several points I'll assign TED talks for instance for people to watch, and this will be part of the understanding we'll need to get To go forward in this course. There's also an optional book which is highly recommended. This is my own book Just Babies. And what this book does is it covers the areas of this course, in more detail. It goes over all the same topics I'll be talking about and we'll be reading about and, and, and discussing. But just to a greater extent with more examples and more citations and a deeper discussion. So I, I, although it's not compulsory, I do highly urge people to get a copy. I, I am the writer of the book. I do have a bit of a vested interest and so I hope you forgive me when I also suggest that you buy copies for your friends and family. In addition, we'll have office hours. Now, we don't know how big this course will be. As I'm taping this course has not yet begun. It could be tens of thousands. It will be tens of thousands, we know already. Could be hundreds of thousands, So, we can't be in a situation where everybody gets a chance to talk and meet at once. But there are ways around this, and what we've decided to do for office hours - is that we're going to invite an end of a week of lectures, invite people to send us, via email, questions, comments, counter-arguments, discussion points. And then, Christina Starmans and I will go over and choose a representative sample, focusing on some of the very best, and very funniest, and very most interesting. And then, we'll sit around and she'll ask these questions to me. She'll convey - Your questions and your comments and I'll respond and we'll have a discussion based on this and that will be the office hours part of the course. I'm planning to invite visitors. I'm planning to invite some of the very top researchers in the field. Some people whose names you've heard of. Some people who have had a, had a profound influence to come visit us here. And again we'll do the same thing. We will talk to these visitors. We will invite you to ask questions to the visitors, and we will ask these questions for you on your behalf. And in this way you get to participate in that, in that limited fashion. In how the course progresses and hopefully get answers to some of the questions that might Arise throughout the course. A more direct way to participate is discussions. And we haven't entirely worked out the details of this yet, but there will be some opportunity, in fact some requirement, that everybody engage in discussion. And we will have discussion boards set up so that people can engage in discussion and debate. And for each time we do this, for each discussion we set up Both Christina Starmans the teaching fellow and myself will get into this. We will, we will participate in the discussion, we will add comments, make arguments, defend ourselves and so on. Finally, for evaluative purposes we have quizzes and exams. It'll be quizzes and either at the middle or at the end of each specific lecture. And there will be exams at the end of each week, and at the end of the course itself. The exams will cover both the lectures as well as all of the readings. And they will be the basis for your feedback, for your evaluation of the course. And also the existence of quizzes and exams,um I think, help people focus on things. They help people. Get feedback to as how well their persuing things they motiavate people to get interested in it so we're going to try to keep our quizzes and exams both comprehensive but also interesting. Okay so that's the sort of mechanics of the course what's the course about its primarily about moral judgement and moral action. And what I mean by this is, your judgment as to the morality of something, whether it's right or wrong, follows your choices as to how to live your life, living a, a, a moral life, living an immoral life. Put more generally, this course is about good and evil, and to illustrate In more detail what I'm talking. But I'll giving 3 short examples of the sorts of things we'll be looking at in this course. So one example is kindness, sometimes called altruism or pro-social behavior. As when, with no obvious payoff, we're nice to another individual. Now. I'm primarily a developmental psychologist and a lot of my examples are going to be with children, so I'll give you an example of this with children, and this is from the work of Felix Barnigan and Michael Thomasello. So they set up an experiment where you have a toddler, and the toddler's sitting in a room, and then somebody needs help. And the question is, without anybody prompting the toddler. What does the toddler do? And I'll show you one of the videos from their studies. And I think it's a nice illustration of human kindness. [SOUND] >> Oh! Hmm. [SOUND] Oh! Hmm. >> There's kindness, but there's also cruelty. There's evil. There's viciousness. There's no shortage of examples of this I could give to you on bad behavior, so I'll choose one sort of somewhat strange I think, a little bit amusing, example. It's about something which happened in London a couple of years ago. So some guy loses his cat. He can't find his cat. And so he goes around, where's my cat? And then, when taking out the garbage he opens up the garbage can, bin, in England, the garbage bin, and sees his cat in there. So how did the cat get in there? Well, he goes, he somehow gets access to the video cameras that were on his street. In London, if you know, there's a lot of video cameras everywhere. And he discovers this. And I'll show you the video which he had posted himself on Facebook, and then ended up on YouTube. Sooner or later they tracked down the woman who tossed the cat away. She's pursued and ultimately she's questioned. And she's asked, why did you do this? And she gives all sorts of reasons. She says, at one point she says, it was a split second of madness. I thought it would be funny. And, it's just a cat. And people were not pleased by these excuses. They were not pleased by her behavior. And she was attacked by the press. And, the, then she needed police protection, because people wanted to kill her for throwing the cat in the bin. Now this is interesting, it, it's clear enough why the guy would be upset, the cat owner would be upset. It's clear enough why the cat would be upset, but why would strangers who had nothing to do with this. Why would they be enraged at what the woman did? They weren't involved. They weren't harmed. And I think this sort of incident tells us something interesting about morality. Which is that morality matters. When I see something evil being done, even if I'm not involved in it, there's often a punitive impulse. There's an impulse that. The perpetrator should be punished. Justice should be done. And the question of where that comes from, how the system evolved. How on the one hand do we have a psychology built for empathy and compassion and kindness, as in that child helping the man. And in another way have a psychology built for justice, for punishment, as in the case of the attacks on this woman. Where does this all come from? And those are questions that occupy us. We'll also be interested, and this is my third example, in human differences. Hundreds of years ago, in the state of Conneticut in which I'm lecturing, people owned slaves. That is people owned other people. They could do with them what they will. Now, I'm sure most people now, people are viewing this from all over the world and, I would imagine very few of you think slavery is right. Very few of you think slavery is moral. But hundreds of years ago people did practice slavery. And many people thought it wasn't wrong. In fact, many people thought that slavery was a moral institution justified by the Bible, justified by history. Things have changed. What can we say about the psychology of the people back then who thought so differently from how we think? And what can we say about the changes that brought us form then to now? What is the proper explanation for why our views about something like slavery Have changed so radically over history. And that is again one of the questions we'll occu, that will occupy us in this course. Now moral differences aren't just a matter of history. They're not just a matter of then versus now. They're also a matter of clashes between cultures. I remember very vividly the tax on At 9/11, where thousands of Americans were killed in a terrorist attack. I remember as well, more recently, the jubilation that many of us felt when the perpetrator of the attack, Osama Bin Laden, was killed by American forces. This is one view of things. One view of things, the view which I actually hold is that the, the, the mass murder of Americans was a horribly immoral act. And the punishment however to punishment or murder of Bin Laden was a just retribution. But there are many people around the world who see things very differently. They might see that hack on America as a just, reasonable, moral act and the murder of Bin Laden as a cowardly retaliation. The people who orchestrated That hacks 9/11 were not by any standard insane. They were not by any normal standard psychopaths. Rather, they were driven by a moral vision. Now, again, some moral vision eyes see as grossly mistaken but they see mind as grossly mistaken and at the very minimum then What we need to do as scientists interested in morality is come to grips with the fact that people have such different moral views. And understand why we have these moral views, where they come from, and possibly how we can deal with these conflicts. Now these are all examples of moral differences between different societies separated by time. Or separated by space. But we could also ask about moral differences within a society. So in the United States, there's huge differences in how people think about the morality of same sex relationships of gay couples. Many Americans Think that these are perfectly moral relationships, that gay couples should have a right to be married, to have sex together, to raise children together. And that it is in fact morally unjust, a crime, a sin, to prohibit these individuals from living the life they want to lead. Many other Americans, about anywhere from 40 to 50 to 60%, depending on how you count it, have moral reservations about homosexuality. Many Americans think homosexuality is just plain morally wrong. And many of them think that the idea of gay marriage is a mistake. It is a moral mistake. It would be wrong to permit these people. To do such things. Again, the point of this course is not trying to commit you to, this view is right or that view or right. That is just out of the bounds of what we'll be doing here. But we're very interested in, why do some people think this and why do some people think that. I think this is a question of, both, great intellectual importance, and also great practical importance. And more generally I think, this course will, will talk about specific cases like that, but also deal with foundational issues, that, that I just find incredibly interesting. So one such foundational issue, is attention between. Moral reasoning. Deliberative conscious thought, decision making thinking things through, the head, and your gut feelings. Your compassion, your emotion, your love, your disgust, your anger, your shame, the heart. And psychologists and philosophers along with theologians and legal scholars and many others Have long tried to address the question of the relative roles of reason and the emotion. In how we le, lead our moral lives and how we come to our moral ideas. And that is going to be a central topic in this course. Even more generally than that, we will address the tension between what we en call humanistic views. Our humanistic conception of humanity. Which deals with notions like free will. That sees people as, as agents that can make decisions. That can be blamed, that can be praised, that can be guilty. That, that, that, that can warrant punishment or warrant reward. A view that might see us as almost as spiritual beings. Not reducible to the physical or, or mechanistic world. Beings with, be beings with souls. Creatures capable not only of wrongness, but also capable of sin. You have that and you have that humanistic view. And then you have a scientific view. And a scientific view tries to explain our natures in terms of the language of neuroscience, the language of neurons and dendrites, and the limbic system, and the frontal lobe. The language of genes, talks about environmental ques, talks about the effects of parenting, the effects of, of, of one's physical, and social, and emotional environment. And the question that will occupy us that has occupied me for as, as long as I could remember, is can we reconcile these two views. Can we say both that humans are physical things, our actions determined by our neurons by our brains. By our genes and by our environment. No less determined than actions of a billiard ball or any other physical object. Can we say that, and also say that people make choices. And that people should be blamed for their choices or praised for their choices. That people are moral creatures more than anything else on this planet. Can we reconcile the humanist perspective on us in a scientific perspective? And that's something that we'll be struggling with throughout this course. So, why would you want to take this course? Well, I think there are at least three reasons. One reason is the topics are just fascinating. I, Again, I'm, I'm admittedly biased, but who isn't interested in the question of why do some people become violent psychopaths. Who isn't really interested in questions of how are liberals Different from conservatives. How are the fundamentalists different from atheists? How are they better people? Are they worse people? What's the evidence? This course will cover, it will cover sex. It will cover politics. It will cover religion and I think these questions are just inherently fascinating. A second reason to take the course is that, as we talk about these issues of morality, we will be discussing, and reading, and learning about different domains of both the sciences and the humanities. So a lot of the basis for this work will come from psychology. And we will read and talk about social psychology, developmental psychology, clinical psychology, neuroscience as well as other domains. And then often we'll go beyond that. We'll talk about evolutionary theory, philosophy, behavioral economics, anthropology, literature, theology. And so one way to see this course, even aside from the issues of morality, as a convenient way to get a very high level introduction to the most fundamental sciences of human nature. The third reason to take the course, and I'm raising this maybe most tenatively. Is that it might make us better people. I am under no illusion that after having read about the studies of morality and read the developmental work and anthropology and neuroscience, that will then be particularly well equipped to say oh now I know that's right and that's wrong. Now I know what to think about immigration, gay marriage, torture, capital punishment taxes and so on. I, I think people will take this course and end up having very different views, maybe the same views that they started with, but I do think that understanding where moral views come from, and understanding where moral behavior and immoral behavior come from will help us look. At other people in a more sympathetic way. Will help us look at other people and get more of an understanding of what they're up to and why. It doesn't mean that we'll end up liking them. It certainly doesn't mean we'll end up agreeing with them, or approving of them. But, I think understanding them more has nothing but positive benefits. I also think that turning things inwards that, that coming to a better understanding of why we ourselves make moral decisions. So, that why where my own moral views come from. Why I think this is right and this is wrong. Why my politics is this and my religion is that And my belief about charity is this. Why I believe these things, I think that understanding where these beliefs and behaviors come from will actually help us in a better way improve on our moral lives. I mean I'll end this brief introduction with by, by choosing a passage quoted in one of our readings. For next lecture, and it's from Anton Chekhov, and Chekhov suggests, and I think he's right. He suggests that man will become better when you show him what he is like, and this course is all about what all of us, men and women, are like. I'll see you at the next lecture. [MUSIC] [MUSIC]
