I'd like to welcome everybody to the first week of Moralities of Everyday life. Here's how the week will go. In this first lecture, I want to talk about what morality is, what it does for us and why it's interesting to study. Then in the second lecture, I'll turn to philosophical approaches, study of morality. And in the third lecture I'll introduce, a debate that many of us are interested in. Concerning the role of emotion versus the role of reason, in our moral, judgement and moral decision making. That is, how much of morality comes from the heart And how much of morality comes from the head. Then I want to present three case studies, which I think are just amazing, showing some really weird and unusual and powerful effects on our gut feelings on how we think about morality. And then finally I'll end with the seventh lecture talking about some big questions in the study of morality, big questions That as this course progresses we will dove into, we will deal with, and I hope in some extent we're going to answer. Now, you might imagine that I'll begin this course by defining morality, by saying what is morality and providing a definition. But I'm not going to do that. And I'm not going to do that for two reasons. The first is there's no definition of morality that people agree on. So the philosopher Stephen Stich points out that philosophers have deep differences over what morality is. There was a book published in 1970 called Definitions of Morality. And in that book. 13 of the best philosopher's in the world. Philosopher's like Elizabeth Anscombe, Peter Strawson and Philippa Foot. Provided their definitions of what morality is. And Stich points out these definitions had very little in common. People had very different views. It doesn't get any different when you look at psychologists. So the very prominent psychologist, Elliot Turiel, who's done significant work in the psychology of morality, defines morality in a pretty narrow way in terms of justice, rights, and harm. For him, something only counts as immoral if there's a victim, if someone suffers. In contrast, Jonathan Haidt, whose work we're going to talk about throughout this course. Has a much broader definition of morality. For him, anything that suppresses self-interest and makes cooperation possible is part of morality. So for Haidt, a religious ritual might be part of our moral psychology, part of our moral life. For Turiel it wouldn't be. So given the sort of disagreement, it would be arbitrary for me to pick out a single definition of morality and go with that. Also, my view is that beginning with a definition is never a good idea when you're dealing with scientific questions. So forget about morality a bit. Imagine we were talking about diseases and syndromes and problems like cancer or diabetes or autism. You don't start studying these things by having firm definitions. This is cancer, this is diabetes, this is autism. And then Continuing from there. Rather what you do is you begin with a rough idea of what you're talking about, and then you're understanding what counts as falling within that domain shifts as a result of your understanding. So you might say, you know, we used to think that this was cancer, but now we know it isn't. This didn't look like diabetes, but now as we develop a more of an understanding, we realize this really is a type of diabetes. We might think autism is just one thing, but then study it and learn it's many different things, some which are not maybe very related to one another. I think the same thing holds for morality. I think if we ever get a definition of morality, it means we're kind of finished, the study of it. And we're nowhere near that point now. We're just beginning. Still, in order to study anything, you need a rough idea what you're studying and so I want to begin with, by talking about what counts as a moral violation. What counts as something wrong? In the initial lecture, I gave the example of Mary Bale. And the cat, that she threw into a dumpster, and said, that was an example of something wrong. Now I want to give you a different example. And this is also taken from YouTube. It's also an example from London. And it was taken it's a video immediately after some riots. It involves how some people treat this injured man. So you watch the video, and as you watch it, you'll also hear. That the person taking the video commenting on what he's seeing. >> [SOUND] [CROSSTALK] >> Are they actually helping him up. Oh my god. They're going through his bag? He just took something from his, his bag. Dickhead. >> So, we see this as sort of signature properties that are associated with morality. it, it's related mor, a morals violations way to harm, to helping, to pain, to pleasure. And in this case somebody is harmed. It's related to notions of reward and punishment. Good things are rewarded and bad things are punished and it's related to emotion such as guilt, shame anger and gratitude. the, the person taking the film makes a comment that suggests he is full of moral indignation. He says dickhead. And if you go to the Youtube video, you'll see much worse comments about these people's behavior. The behavior strikes us in a sort of significant way as wrong. And because it strikes us as wrong, It, it evokes certain emotional responses. Now, this is a simple example of moral violation. Obviously not the worst thing you could imagine, but a sort of simple and direct. But, there are other moral violations that don't quite fit this mould. So for one thing, you don't have to, make physical contact to somebody, in order to do something wrong. Most of us would believe it's wrong to shout a racist insult at somebody, or threaten to kill them, or spread lies about them. You could harm people in ways that aren't physical. You could be immoral by negligence. So, if after the filming of this lecture I get together with the gentlemen operating the cameras, we all get roaring drunk. And I get back into my car and start to drive home. Most people say I'm doing something wrong. Not because I have any ill feelings not because I've hurt anybody, but because I'm, I'm foolishly acting in a way which could harm people. And so it's, it's a bad thing. You could be immoral in some cases by not doing anything at all. So if I choose not to feed my dog, then my dog starves to death. That's awful. If I choose not to feed my child, my baby, that's even more awful. That's murder. Because I have obligations to those individuals that require, that morally require, that I do things. Now there are some cases where What counts as immoral is different from what counts as illegal and these cases are particularly salient with regard to issues of when you should do something. So the law often tells you, you shouldn't do something, the law very rarely requires you to do something in, in a criminal and, and, and, and there's criminal penalties when you fail to do something. And, in this way, sometimes the law differs from morality. So I'm thinking particularly of an example. A few years ago, these two guys Jeremy Strohmeyer and David Cash Jr., they go into a casino in Nevada. And Jeremy Strohmeyer sees this little girl. Gets her to come with him into the women's bathroom, and molests and murders her. He is later caught, you know, charged, sentenced. Plainly what he did was terrible. But I'm more interested here in what his friend did, which is nothing. His friend sort of said, half-heartedly, tried to get Strohmeyer to stop, got bored, and went for a walk. Now it turns out he didn't do anything legally wrong. At the time in Nevada it's not a crime to allow somebody else to do a crime. And in fact, so, so he wasn't charged with anything. And in fact he didn't really feel wrong about what he did. He was later interviewed on the radio. And, and when he was asked his feelings, he said he said this. The simple fact remains I don't know this little girl. And then he, he said more generally, I don't know people in Panama or Africa who are killed every day, so I can't feel remorse for them. And he went on, why should I feel remorse for this girl? I didn't do anything wrong. Other people disagreed. And although he was never charged with a crime because he didn't commit the crime, there were protests, there were, there were people. He was a student at University of California at Berkeley, and people protested, demanded that he get thrown out of school. For what he did. And even now, years later, if you look up his name online you'll see there are people stalking him. They don't know him. But they'll stalk him. They want to make sure that, that everybody knows what he did, and that he suffers for what he did. And this is another, this is a way in which morality can have broad scope. Another sort of example. Is that not all moral violations. Involve victims. Or least they don't always involve victims in clear and obvious sense. I have here a list of some things. Most of which are illegal in the United States. Homosexuality used to be illegal in the United States. There were sodomy laws that were applied almost exclusively to homosexuals. Now, due to a Supreme Court decision, it's no longer illegal. The rest are still, in various forms, illegal, and they're illegal in other countries as well. Now your mileage may vary. Some people will look at this list and say, I don't see anything wrong with all of that. I mean, I don't want to indulge in any of this, but what consenting adults do is fine. It doesn't bother me. Others will see some of these as morally wrong. And you might see some of these as morally wrong because you believe there really is a victim. You might think that although prostitution involves, on the face of it, consenting adults and so on, Still, the institution of prostitution is coercive and really does make people's lives worse. Or, you might think that these are wrong, not so much because they harm somebody but simply because they're wrong. Take consensual cannibalism. Somebody dies, and in their will they say, after I'm dead someone else could eat me. It's all consent, and so on. But some people say that's just not right. I don't care if nobody's harmed. We shouldn't be doing that, to one another. And this is part of the scope of morality. You, you also get cases where, there isn't apparent harm, and it seems wrong, even when it doesn't rise to the level, of a crime. Suppose I get together with my friends, say fellow Yale professors. Suppose we are sitting in a club, we're sipping sherry, and we're all white males. And we start enga-, telling jokes, and we say, you know, sexist jokes and racist jokes, the most foul jokes you could imagine. We're having a terrific time. Now none of this would be true. I don't, I don't, I don't drink sherry. But still, we're telling, we're telling the jokes and we leave and we're happier than when we came in. And nobody hurts and nobody's feelings were hurt. But still, there is the intuition in at least some of us that, that was wrong. You know, you shouldn't be doing that sort of thing. So, the scope of morality is broad. I'm trying to sort of persuade you that what counts as right and wrong has, has broad scope. Morality is everywhere. A lot of my examples involve sex, and clearly, many, there are certain acts of sex that most everybody find wrong. You, people find it wrong, the idea of sex with a young child. Certainly sex that involves coercion is wrong. People have different attitutes about promiscuity, virginity, heterosexuality, homosexuality bisexuality. Bestiality, masturbation, fetishes. And these differences are profound. What counts as a, a moral violation for one person could be a point of pride for another. This guy walks into a church. And he goes to a confessional booth. And he immediately says, Father, I'm 70 years old. And I have sex. I have had sex with two 20 year olds. And the priest is kind of stunned. And says, how long has it been since your last confession? And the guy says, I've never been to confession before. I'm not Catholic. And the priest says, so why are you telling me this? And the guy says, I'm telling everybody. What could be a point of pride to one could be a point of disgust to another. Food. Most people have some moral restrictions on what to eat. For some of us, these moral restrictions are grounded in religion. We, we are, we believe that, that God does not want to eat this, he wants to eat that instead. Does not want us to eat this at that time, but instead we can eat it at another time. Other people have more restrictions on what they can eat because of concerns about the suffering of animals. Or worries about damage to the ecosystem. The most obvious cases of morality, involve family and friends. So, we feel moral obligation towards our family and friends, we, we feel gratitude when people do right by us, betrayed if they don't. The most obvious example is the obligation that a mother or father has towards a child. But these obligations extend. They extend towards siblings. They extend towards people who aren't related but are married, are close friends and so on. Morality applies to strangers as well. Many of us give to charity and many of us give to charity to help people we don't know and who will never help us back. Even if you don't give this to charity, you believe you have some moral obligations to strangers. You can't kill them, for instance. You can't make them suffer. Politics is full of morality. Now, I don't want to, I don't want to overstate this. There are some political differences that people have that. Aren't moral. You may, you and I may share the same goal. We might want to say, lower unemployment in our country. And we might have different ideas as to how to do it. What should you do with the interest rates? What you should do with the tax code. And those aren't instinctively moral differences. We agree on the morality. Now we're sort of struggling with this, with the question of how to do it? But a lot of the questions that occupy us politically, that, that, that change, that, that influence who we vote for, and what policies we support are moral questions like, abortion, capital punishment, gay marriage, the tax code. What's a fair code for taxation? Foreign policy. As I'm giving this lecture, the United States is currently in, the United States Congress is currently debating over whether to allow Obama to bomb Syria. Now, there's a lot of practical issues here, but a lot of those questions fundamentally moral? Is it right? To, to, to initiate bombing of another country, an act will for surely kill innocents? Is it right to do nothing, and then let a dictator who commits acts of chemical warfare to go free, to go unpunished? And people have very different intuitions. And again, some of the intuitions are instrumental. Instrumental meaning that we agree on the goals, we're just trying to figure how to satisfy them. But some of them are more moral. Honest to God disagreements over what the right thing is to do. My final example of the scope and importance of morality comes from a lovely and quite weird study done in the 1930s by the American psychologist, Thorndike. Thorndike asked people different questions about different activities. And, he asked them questions. How much money would I have to pay you to do this activity? Now some, some of the activities. They were all unpleasant. But, they were different kinds of unpleasant. So, some were unpleasant just because they were painful, or degrading, or, or, or awful in some way. How much would I have to pay you to eat a live earthworm, was one of his questions. Or here's another one. How much would I have to pay you to have one of your front teeth removed with a pair of pliers? No anesthesia. That's one of his questions. He also asks questions about moral violations. How much would he have to pay you to do something bad? And, and it's not physically painful, but they're bad. So, one of his answers was, one of his questions was, how much would I have to pay you to strangle a cat with your bare hands? Here are his answers for those two items. I've taken his answers, he, he got answers, of course in the 1930s dollars. I've translated them, translated them into the money that you'd have to pay now. For the tooth, its an average of 74,000 dollars. For the cat, it's 164,000 dollars. Over twice as much. And that tells us something. That tells us about the pull that morality has. That, that it matters so much that we want to be good people. We don’t want to do this bad thing. That, that we would have to, we would rather have an experience of excruciating pain. So, that's morality as we see it. That, that’s just our starting point. How do we study it? How do we approach it? Well, I want to take my lead here from one of my favorite philosophers, my favorite philosopher, Adam Smith. One of the heroes of the Scottish Enlightenment. And in a wonderful discussion, he draws the distinction. He says, in treating of the principles of morality, there are two questions to be considered. So here's his first question. Wherein does virtue consist? What is the tone of temper and tenor of conduct which constitutes the excellent and praiseworthy character? The character which is the natural object of esteem, honor, and approbation. Now, the language is of course old-fashioned. But the point is pretty clear. He's asking a question. Which we would now says is a philosophical question. A normative question. How should we live? What is it to be a good person? What is it to be a virtuous person? And then he distinguishes this from a second question. By what power of faculty in the mind is it that this character, whatever it be is recommended to us. Or in other words, how and by what means does it come to pass that a mind prefers one tenor of conduct to another? Denominates the one right and the other wrong. Considers the one is the object of approbation on a reward and other of blame center and punishment. But this is a different question. Now he's not asking what is the good. Now he's asking what's going on in our minds, and our brains. That causes us to say, that's good, and that's bad. That's the right way to live, and that's the wrong way to live. And throughout this course we're going to deal with both questions. We're mostly interested in a psychological question. We're mostly interested in how people think about morality. What, what governs people's choices? What governs people's intuitions? But in order to do so, we need to get a philosophical foundation going. And this is the topic of the next lecture. [MUSIC]
