#moral psychology

[sophiaphile]

"Like The New York Times, CNN and network news programs, it [PowerPoint] appears to be neutral, unbiased and free of any leanings one way or another. Just as a hammer does not tell you what kind of house to build, Microsoft would like us to think...that their product is merely a neutral tool. It is faceless, and it is what you put into it that counts.

However, every piece of software comes with its own set of biases and tendencies. The most obvious bias and the easiest to see in PowerPoint, is the Auto Content Wizard, a feature that makes outlines of presentations with bullet points for those who feel they don't know how to make a presentation themselves...

However, there are more subtle sets of biases at work. The way the PowerPoint is structured and the various options provided have not only been limited...but they have been designed assuming, a priori, a specific world view. The software, by making certain directions and actions easier and more convenient than others, tells you how to think as it helps you accomplish your task. Not in an obvious way or in an obnoxious way or even in a scheming way. The biases are almost unintentional, they are so natural and well-integrated. It is possible that the engineers and designers have no intention of guiding and straightening out your thinking; they simply feel that the assumptions upon which they base their design decisions are the most natural and practical. You are thus subtly indoctrinated into a manner of being and behaving, assuming and acting, that grows on you as you use the program."

—David Byrne, "Exegesis," Envisioning Emotional Epistemological Information

[theidealistphilosophy]

The cost of sanity in this society, is a certain level of alienation.

Terrence McKenna, Source Unlisted.

[omegaphilosophia]

The Philosophy of Praise and Blame

The philosophy of praise and blame explores the ethical, psychological, and social dimensions of attributing moral responsibility to individuals for their actions. Praise and blame are fundamental aspects of moral judgment, where praise is the approval or commendation of a person for their good actions, and blame is the disapproval or criticism of someone for their bad actions. Philosophers investigate the conditions under which praise and blame are justified, the implications of these judgments for moral agency, and their role in shaping human behavior and social norms.

Key Concepts in the Philosophy of Praise and Blame:

Moral Responsibility:

Attribution of Responsibility: Praise and blame are closely tied to the concept of moral responsibility. Philosophers debate what it means to hold someone morally responsible for their actions and under what conditions this is appropriate. This involves questions about free will, intentionality, and knowledge.

Free Will and Determinism: One of the central issues is whether individuals have free will and thus can be justifiably praised or blamed for their actions. If determinism is true, and all actions are the result of prior causes, the basis for moral responsibility—and hence praise and blame—may be called into question.

Conditions for Praise and Blame:

Intentionality: For praise or blame to be appropriate, the action in question typically needs to be intentional. Accidental actions or actions taken under compulsion may not warrant praise or blame in the same way.

Knowledge and Understanding: The agent’s knowledge of the consequences of their actions and their understanding of the moral principles involved are also important. Ignorance or misunderstanding might mitigate blame or enhance praise depending on the circumstances.

Praise:

Recognition of Virtue: Praise is often seen as a way of recognizing and encouraging virtue or morally good behavior. It can reinforce positive actions and promote the development of good character traits.

Social and Psychological Effects: Praise can have significant social and psychological effects, fostering self-esteem and motivating individuals to continue acting in morally commendable ways. It also strengthens social bonds and reinforces communal values.

Blame:

Moral Censure: Blame serves as a form of moral censure, signaling that a person’s actions have violated ethical standards. It can be a way of holding people accountable and deterring future wrongdoing.

Blame and Punishment: In some philosophical traditions, blame is linked to the justification of punishment. If someone is to be blamed for an action, it may be argued that they deserve to be punished in proportion to the harm they have caused.

The Ethics of Praise and Blame:

Fairness and Proportionality: Philosophers debate the fairness of praise and blame, particularly whether they are proportionate to the actions being judged. There is also discussion about whether praise and blame should be distributed equally among all those responsible for a collective action or unequally based on individual contributions.

Moral Luck: The concept of moral luck complicates the ethics of praise and blame, as it raises questions about whether individuals should be praised or blamed for actions influenced by factors beyond their control.

Philosophical Theories:

Consequentialism: In consequentialist ethics, praise and blame are often viewed in terms of their effects on future behavior. Actions that lead to good consequences may be praised to encourage repetition, while those leading to bad outcomes are blamed to discourage them.

Deontological Ethics: In deontological theories, such as Kantian ethics, praise and blame are more focused on the agent’s intentions and adherence to moral duties, regardless of the consequences.

Virtue Ethics: From the perspective of virtue ethics, praise and blame are tools for cultivating virtuous character traits. Praising good actions and blaming bad ones help individuals develop virtues and avoid vices.

Social and Cultural Contexts:

Cultural Relativism: The criteria for praise and blame can vary significantly across cultures. What is considered praiseworthy in one culture might be neutral or even blameworthy in another, leading to questions about the universality of moral standards.

Collective Praise and Blame: In social and political contexts, entire groups or communities may be praised or blamed for collective actions. This raises ethical questions about the fairness of attributing responsibility to individuals for the actions of the group.

Criticisms and Limitations:

Overemphasis on Moral Judgment: Some philosophers argue that too much focus on praise and blame can lead to an overly judgmental society, where individuals are constantly evaluated rather than understood.

Blame and Shame: The relationship between blame and shame is also a topic of discussion, particularly how blame can lead to destructive feelings of shame, which may not contribute to moral improvement.

The philosophy of praise and blame is central to understanding moral responsibility and ethical behavior. These practices play crucial roles in shaping human actions, reinforcing social norms, and cultivating moral character. Philosophical inquiry into praise and blame involves examining the conditions under which they are justified, their ethical implications, and their impact on individuals and society. By exploring these concepts, philosophers aim to illuminate the ways in which moral judgments influence our lives and our relationships with others.

[anaxerneas]

It can be painful - sometimes abhorrent - to us to admit this, but the character of even the very worst among us is in part the product of external contingencies, and somewhere in the history of every soul there are moments when a better way was missed by mischance, or by malign interventions from without, or by disorders of the mind within, rather than by any intentional perversity on the soul's own part.

David Bentley Hart, That All Shall Be Saved

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

Abstract

Scientific and organizational interventions often involve trade-offs whereby they benefit some but entail costs to others (i.e., instrumental harm; IH). We hypothesized that the gender of the persons incurring those costs would influence intervention endorsement, such that people would more readily support interventions inflicting IH onto men than onto women. We also hypothesized that women would exhibit greater asymmetries in their acceptance of IH to men versus women. Three experimental studies (two pre-registered) tested these hypotheses. Studies 1 and 2 granted support for these predictions using a variety of interventions and contexts. Study 3 tested a possible boundary condition of these asymmetries using contexts in which women have traditionally been expected to sacrifice more than men: caring for infants, children, the elderly, and the ill. Even in these traditionally female contexts, participants still more readily accepted IH to men than women. Findings indicate people (especially women) are less willing to accept instrumental harm befalling women (vs. men). We discuss the theoretical and practical implications and limitations of our findings.

Introduction

The promise of achieving “the greater good” has inspired numerous interventions designed to move society toward presumably desirable ends. Companies develop and market products to improve quality of life, organizations introduce policies to improve employees’ workplace experiences, and educators implement practices to improve learning outcomes. These interventions are frequently justified by claims that the benefits to many outweigh the potential harms to a few—a moral argument consistent with a utilitarian ethical framework.Footnote1

A utilitarian approach to morality accepts inflicting harm onto some people if doing so increases the sum total of human happiness and well-being (e.g., Mill, 1861/2010; Singer, 1981, 2020). Guided by the classic tenets, Kahane et al. (2018) identified two elements that reflect the negative and positive features of utilitarian reasoning. The negative dimension—instrumental harm (colloquially known as collateral damage)—gives a moral agent permission to “instrumentally use, severely harm, or even kill innocent people to promote the greater good” (Kahane et al., 2018, p. 132). Impartial beneficence reflects the positive aspect of utilitarianism, requiring prioritization of the greater good above all else. In its purest form, this element demands people ignore personal ties, family loyalties, group memberships, special preferences, and emotional impulses that compromise impartiality and achieving this greater good (e.g., Hughes, 2017).

However, people frequently depart from such prescriptive moralities (Hughes, 2017; Kern & Chugh, 2009), seldom approaching the level of impartiality required to practice utilitarianism and accept sacrifices that may contribute to the greater good. Indeed, judgments about benefit and harm are highly subjective (Schein & Gray, 2018) and even malleable (Haslam, 2016; Rozin, 1999). This subjectivity, coupled with the difficulty of achieving consensus on what constitutes the greater good, undermines impartial calculi of costs and benefits requisite for upholding utilitarian principles.

The current investigation examined one factor that might compromise the impartial evaluation of social interventions: the gender of the person who experiences instrumental harm (Instrumental Harm). Based on prior research on perceptions of harm to women and men, we hypothesized that people asymmetrically support interventions inflicting collateral harm to men versus women. Such a bias violates the principle of impartial beneficence, potentially compromising the evidence-based advancement of men and women alike. As detailed below, our predictions are rooted in extant work on gender and moral decision-making and are extended to contexts depicting low-level harm.

[...]

General Discussion

The current investigation sought to examine whether people were more willing to endorse interventions when IH was borne by men than women. Our first two studies supported this premise. Importantly, however, our results showed that this asymmetry was driven primarily by women, but not men, being more likely to accept IH to men than to women across a variety of contexts (i.e., supporting Hypothesis 2). Study 3 tested a boundary condition to this gender bias in harm tolerance: stereotypically female caregiving contexts. When instrumental harm benefitted vulnerable individuals (e.g., infants, young children, sick, or the elderly), both men and women exhibited a bias in their willingness to accept IH to men versus women (i.e., supporting Hypothesis 1; not supporting Hypothesis 3). That is, contrary to what might be expected by historical gender roles (Eagly & Wood, 1999), people believed men ought to bear greater costs, even in traditionally female sacrificial domains.

Theoretical and Practical Implications

Our findings offer four contributions. First, we extended the literature on gender and harm endorsement, which has primarily emphasized high-conflict sacrificial dilemmas involving questions of life or death (e.g., FeldmanHall et al., 2016; Skulmowski et al., 2014). The current findings revealed this gender bias persists in highly consequential, yet understudied domains: assessments of beneficial interventions carrying negative externalities across a variety of contexts: medical, psychological, educational, sexual, and caregiving. Second, we demonstrated that when evaluating interventions, female participants were more likely than male participants to accept IH borne by men than women. This pattern lends further support to the well-documented finding that women have a stronger in-group bias than men (e.g., Glick et al., 2004; Rudman & Goodwin, 2004) and are more likely to perceive one another as victims than perpetrators (Reynolds et al., 2020). This disparity suggests women may prioritize one another’s welfare over men’s in the construction or approval of social, educational, medical, and occupational interventions. If so, female policymakers might be especially wary of advancing policies or initiatives risking harm to other women, but less so when they risk harming men.

Third, we tested a boundary condition to this gender bias by investigating contexts previously unstudied in sacrificial dilemmas: stereotypically female caregiving roles. Although consideration of gender stereotypes and role congruence (Eagly & Wood, 1999) might predict a greater tolerance for female sacrifice in such contexts, men and women alike were more tolerant of IH incurred by men (versus women). These patterns suggest that although women traditionally fill and sacrifice in these roles, people may not necessarily endorse that ought to be the case. Rather, our results align with emerging evidence documenting diminished concern for men’s suffering due to a greater tendency to stereotype men as perpetrators rather than victims (Reynolds et al., 2020).

Fourth, our findings identified individual-level factors that contribute to asymmetries in harm tolerance. Namely, Studies 2 and 3 revealed that individuals more strongly endorsing egalitarian, feminist, or liberal ideologies exhibited greater disparities in their acceptance of instrumental harm, such that they more readily tolerated instrumental harm borne by men. These patterns suggest those most concerned about rectify- ing historical injustices might most ardently oppose explora- tory interventions potentially providing long-term benefits to women.

[ Via: http://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-023-02571-0 ]

==

Must be all their male privilege.

[harmonic-psyche]

Homophobes often rationalize their bigotry by focusing on how disgusted they feel when they imagine gay sex. Racists in the Southern US rationalized opposing interracial marriage by focusing on how disgusted it made them feel to imagine Black men with white women.

Feeling disgusted is a terrible argument for moral condemnation.

Disgust has absolutely no ethical weight. If you are basing your ethical positions on the emotion of disgust you should stop, it is entirely unjustified and leads to a huge amount of harm.

[chamerionwrites]

Also, there is so much hand-wringing over the ethics of BDSM and while obviously it is worth taking care about ...sensation seeking is a thing. Many, many people enjoy eating habanero peppers and/or watching movies that make them cry. The conceptual leap from there to the idea that it's possible for sex to hurt good is a very short one, and sometimes it REALLY is as simple as that.

[theowldogsguy]

Moral Persuasion: the concept of appealing to someone's ethical and moral opinions to change his or her behavior and/or attitudes, rather than solely using hard facts and logic.

[harmonic-psyche]

Best post I've seen on the topic of "deserving" and the justification of killing.

re: that last post, ive said it before and ill say it again: no one deserves to die (deserving is fake and death is bad) but some people need to be stopped and choose to make death the only way to stop them

[sophiaphile]

Figures from Peter Railton's "That Obscure Object, Desire"

[theidealistphilosophy]

Those who want to abolish all hardships because they themselves are not up to them are like sick people who wish to abolish bad weather—rain, no matter what the consequences might be to others and to the earth generally.

—almost as stupid as would be the desire to abolish bad weather—say, from pity for poor people.

Friedrich W. Nietzsche, Ecce Homo; Why I Am A Destiny.

[lucabyte]

siffrin starts the game with oddly empty pockets for a rogue who has a habit of stashing away every little trinket that isn't nailed down

and a hardy pocketwatch is an indispensable tool for oceanic navigation

[harmonic-psyche]

That's probably because the concept of moral accountability usually means making someone suffer as much as you think they “deserve,” which is itself nonsensical window dressing to rationalize taking revenge out of vindictive anger

"hold accountable" is such a funny nonsense phrase.... the way people use it on the internet it could literally mean anything or nothing

[uramitashi]

women really do need better class consciousness.

before you are religious, before you are a citizen of your nation, before you are anything else; you are a woman. your identity is complex but womahood is one of its first pillars. and womanhood is so important because so strictly tied, during her whole existence, to her implications: the ability to reproduce and the relative independence (ie: not having to desperately find another mate to pass on your genes + developing a physiological selectiveness) coming from it. female objectification, sex work, misogyny, female modesty, FGM, everything that hurts women stems from it. males want to control women sexuality because of it. it is therefore natural that womanhood is ontologically more important than any other label - because if you neglect it, others will surely not.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Helen Pluckrose

Published: Nov 18, 2022

One of the things that most makes me lose faith in our species is our tendency to form our beliefs about what is true based on our political positions and to do so in clusters of issues that don’t actually have any relation to each other. Here are just a few of them.

Critical Social Justice theories (wokeness) are largely false & counterproductive to improving social injustice.

The UK is better off outside the European Union.

Masks and vaccines are ineffective in limiting the spread and severity of Covid19.

Climate change is not being influenced by human actions.

My own (provisional and subject to revision based on evidence) positions on these are:

True

False

False

False

Nevertheless, it is frequently assumed that because I am very vocal in my opposition to Critical Social Justice and advocate for liberalism instead, that I will hold all of the other positions as well. I know this because of the number of times I have been asked to contribute to discussions on the last three with the assumption that I will take a position contrary to the one that I actually have. This is infuriating for two reasons.

Firstly, it is unwarranted for anyone to believe that the fact that I have spent twelve years studying the evolution of postmodern thought into current “woke” theories and activism in any way qualifies me to have respect-worthy opinions on the functioning of the EU, epidemiology or climate science. It simply doesn’t. On those last three topics, I have had to gain my own tentative opinions by reading accessible breakdowns for the layperson written by people who do have relevant expertise and differing opinions.

In the case of the Brexit vote that I participated in, I was forced to accept that the three months I had to gain an understanding of the functioning of the EU was simply not long enough to do so. I particularly lost the will to live when it came to trying to get my head around all the documents on trade agreements and fishing rights. This is simply not my area of expertise nor my area of interest. Also, like the vast majority of people, I am reliant on scientists to form a consensus about the best way to understand and address epidemics and climate change. The fact that these consensuses adjust themselves in accordance with new evidence is a benefit and not a flaw of science. As Bertrand Russell said,

Science is at no moment quite right, but it is seldom quite wrong, and has, as a rule, a better chance of being right than the theories of the unscientific. It is, therefore, rational to accept it hypothetically.

Secondly, there is simply no rational reason for anybody who believes one or more of the above statements to be true to then believe all of them to be true. Nevertheless, it seems that very often they do and this does not appear to be because everybody other than me has somehow managed to become an expert on the evolution of postmodern thought, the workings of the European Union, epidemiology and climate science. Instead, it seems to be because of our tendency to work on loose heuristics of what we should believe in depending on what our values or moral intuitions are.

The thing that links all the issues above is the concept of liberty and an opposition to any suppression of it, particularly by powerful governing bodies. The protection of liberty, freedom of speech and belief and autonomous decision making are important moral intuitions which I share. Nevertheless, we should try to be aware of the intuitive underpinnings of them and limit the extent to which these intuitions lead us to decide what is and isn’t true. The tendency to go with intuition first and then apply ad hoc reasoning is natural to us and even useful in many situations . Jonathan Haidt discusses this at length in Righteous Minds.

Nevertheless, the issues above are either true or false. I strongly believe, based on my years of study, that the first one is true. I am inclined to believe the last three to be false based on the reading for the layperson that I have done. I am open to changing my mind on any of these given sufficient evidence to do so. I oppose any simplistic narratives demonising anybody who has a different position to me. I do not believe those who think the UK is better off outside the EU (including my husband and my parents) to be racist xenophobes and suggesting that they are is no more justifiable than suggesting I am a treasonous hater of democracy. Time will tell how this move impacts us as a country and as autonomous individuals within that country. I do wish that we could stop accusing each other of nefarious motives for having different opinions on this.

When it comes to issues of science as in the case of epidemics and climate change, it is even more ridiculous to base what one believes to be true about the management of these on moral intuitions about liberty. Instead, we should try to establish what is true first and then apply principles of liberty to way we respond to that. One can quite reasonably think that vaccines and masks are helpful in the fight to limit the impacts of Covid and oppose draconian laws that constrain citizens in oppressive ways at the same time. The arguments for and against protective measures would work so much better if we went about things this way. One can also believe that anthropogenic climate change is a real thing and that gluing oneself to roads and preventing people from getting to hospitals or damaging artwork is not going to help anything. Alternatively, people can believe that neither of these things are really true but argue against them being true using evidence and reason and not accusations that anybody who thinks they are is a woke authoritarian.

Above all, it is not helpful to cluster such disparate issues together and take a blanket position on them on political grounds rooted in moral intuitions. I would urge everybody tempted to think “I strongly believe X to be true and therefore I must also believe completely unconnected Y and Z to be true as well” to try to step away from this clustering impulse. Instead, examine issues separately as warranted, have some intellectual humility about what you do and do not know and try to apply your ethics to the facts as you can best ascertain them, rather than trying to make the facts fit your ethics. By doing this, not only are you more likely to be right more often, and thus able to address issues as they actually are, but you will also be able to help resist the increasing polarisation and pressure to accept clusters of disparate beliefs that we seem to be doing with an ever-expanding number of issues. This can only help with the development of both accurate knowledge and ethical responses to that knowledge.

==

“The Lord is not my shepherd, for I am not a sheep.”

If you’ve taken a position on an issue simply because “your” party has taken that position, then you can stop criticizing believers for following what their scripture or preacher says. Cause y’all are doing the exact same thing.

[quantummechanics]

Saturn has 83 moons. 63 moons are confirmed and named, and another 20 moons are awaiting confirmation of discovery and official naming.

This is their dynamic visualization while they travel with Saturn through space