Patricia Churchland at Book Works March 9, 2011
Posted by Nina Rosenstand in Current Events, Ethics, Nina Rosenstand's Posts, Philosophy of Human Nature.Tags: Ethics, Patricia Churchland, neuroscience, morality, "Braintrust"
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A quick message for interested San Diegans: Patricia Churchland will be doing a reading Thursday evening , March 10:
In “Braintrust,” Patricia Churchland, professor emeritus of philosophy at UCSD, uses neuroscience to question accepted wisdom about the origins of morality.
She will be at Book Works in Del Mar Thursday at 7 p.m. for a reading.
From a San Diego Union Tribune interview:
What is new about the hypothesis you are offering?
As I see it, moral values are rooted in family values displayed by all mammals — the caring for offspring. The evolved structure, processes, and chemistry of the brain incline humans to strive not only for self-preservation but for the well-being of allied selves — first offspring, then mates, kin, and so on, in wider and wider “caring” circles.
Separation and exclusion cause pain, and the company of loved ones causes pleasure; responding to feelings of social pain and pleasure, brains adjust their circuitry to local customs. In this way, caring is apportioned, conscience molded, and moral intuitions instilled.
A key part of the story is oxytocin, an ancient body-and-brain molecule that, by decreasing the stress response, allows humans to develop the trust in one another necessary for the development of close-knit ties, social institutions, and morality.
Read more here.
Hooked on Stories February 22, 2011
Posted by Nina Rosenstand in Ethics, Nina Rosenstand's Posts, Philosophy of Literature, Philosophy of Human Nature.Tags: narrative ethics, Michael Gazzaniga, William Casebeer, neurocinematics
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For someone like me who has researched and written about Narrative Philosophy (philosophy involving the phenomenon of storytelling) for close to 30 years, with special emphasis on Narrative Ethics, it is particularly gratifying to watch the latest developments in neuroscientific research concerning the human urge to tell stories. Some of my students may remember me showing them a science video of the “man with two brains,” a man who had his two brain hemispheres severed, and resorted to making up stories about his associations because he couldn’t explain them any other way. For years I have told my students that the man with two brains was trying to get control of a chaotic situation, and therefore chose to tell a story about it—-an example of why we tell stories: to get a grip, to make unmanageable life manageable. In short, that’s why we tell stories of historic events, why we have myths and legends, why we love novels and movies, and certainly also why we lie.
The doctor in charge of research in connection with this man’s case was Dr. Mike Gazzaniga, UCSB. And a new article written by Jessica Marshall and published in NewScientist, “Mind Reading: the Science of Storytelling,” notes that Gazzaniga has pursued the phenomenon of our natural capacity to confabulate in his subsequent work:
Nobody has done more to highlight the central role of storytelling in human psychology than neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga of the University of California, Santa Barbara. In studies of people in whom the connection between the two sides of the brain has been severed, he has shown that the left hemisphere is specialised for interpreting our feelings, actions and experiences in the form of narrative. In fact, Gazzaniga believes this is what creates our sense of a unified self. We also seem to use storytelling to reconcile our conscious and subconscious thoughts – as, for example, when we make choices based on subconscious reasoning and then invent fictions to justify and rationalise them (New Scientist, 7 October 2006, p 32).
The psychology of narrativity (Daniel Morrow, Rolf Zwaan) has reached interesting results over the past 20 years, and now neuroscience is weighing in with corroborative research:
It would appear that we don’t just tell stories to make sense of ourselves, we actually adopt the stories of others as though we were the protagonist.
Brain-scanning research published in 2009 seems to confirm this. When a team led by Jeffrey Zacks of Washington University in St Louis, Missouri, ran functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans on people reading a story or watching a movie, they found that the same brain regions that are active in real-life situations fire up when a fictitious character encounters an equivalent situation.
And furthermore, our brains like it:
Stories can also manipulate how you feel, as anyone who has watched a horror movie or read a Charles Dickens novel will confirm. But what makes us empathise so strongly with fictional characters? Paul Zak from Claremont Graduate University, California, thinks the key is oxytocin, a hormone produced during feel-good encounters such as breastfeeding and sex.
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Taking this idea a step further, Read Montague of Virginia Tech University in Blacksburg and William Casebeer of the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in Arlington, Virginia, have started using fMRI to see what happens in the brain’s reward centres when people listen to a story. These are the areas that normally respond to pleasurable experiences such as sex, food and drugs. They are also associated with addiction. “I would be shocked if narrative didn’t engage the same kind of circuitry,” says Montague. That would certainly help explain why stories can be so compelling. “If I were a betting man or woman, I would say that certain types of stories might be addictive and, neurobiologically speaking, not that different from taking a tiny hit of cocaine,” says Casebeer.
So now we’re beginning to understand the power of stories: Our brains are set up to confabulate, we engage naturally in storytelling, and we can apparently get hooked on good stories. But take a look at where some scientists are going with this:
Understanding the mechanisms by which stories affect us can be put to practical use. Hasson has coined the term neurocinematics to describe its application to movie-making. His work reveals how some directors’ styles are particularly effective at synchronising the neural activity among members of the audience. “Hitchcock is the best example I have so far,” he says. “He was considered an expert of really manipulating the audience and turning them on and off as he pleased,” Hasson notes, and this shows up in the scans of people watching his films. Perhaps future directors could use these insights to control an audience’s experience. Hasson’s team has investigated how the order in which different scenes appear affects neural responses to a movie – which could help editors create either more enigmatic or more instantly comprehensible storylines, as required.
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Human history is full of examples of the motivating power of a shared narrative – be it national, religious or focused on some other ideal – and Casebeer wants to investigate the possible military and political applications of a deeper understanding of this kind of storytelling. “One of my interests is in understanding how we can design institutions that more effectively promote moral judgement and development,” he says. He believes, for example, that the right stories could help military academies produce officers who are more willing to exercise moral courage.
Casebeer notes that a compelling narrative can seal the resolve of a suicide bomber, and suggests that developing “counter-narrative strategies” could help deter such attackers. “It might be that understanding the neurobiology of a story can give us new insights into how we prevent radicalisation and how we prevent people from becoming entrenched in the grip of a narrative that makes it more likely that they would want to intentionally cause harm to others,” he says.
At this point I’m seeing the ghosts of Watson and Skinner, the behaviorists, and their grand program, not just to understand human behavior, but to control it. I also see the ghost of Plato and his “Noble Lie.” And the ghost of every parent in the world who has ever told the story of “Little Red Riding Hood.” The fact that we’re story-telling animals (a term coined by Alasdair MacIntyre) also implies that we’re story-consuming animals, and as such we’re vulnerable to well-told manipulative stories. So this is where we need Narrative Philosophy/Narrative Ethics, in addition to brain research and psychological statistics. Even though the article by Casebeer referred to in Marshall’s piece is from 2005, reflecting the urgency of the post-9/11 years (which may of course feel new and fresh with every new terrorist act), the core concept of using stories to change the world remains the same—equally promising, and equally dangerous. Because what Casebeer is suggesting may sound, and be, benign and downright useful in a new century with an ongoing struggle against terrorism (regardless of changing administrations’ different nomenclature): telling stories to counteract the narratives of fanaticism that can lead to radicalization and mass-murder. Science-Fiction has engaged in precisely such narratives for a couple of decades. But we cannot engage in such a practice without first having analyzed the ethical implications of narratives being deliberately told to control the emotions of the audience. We already have a term for such narratives—-we call them propaganda. And in order to evaluate whether such an approach is justified we need to engage in an ethical analysis of all aspects of storytelling, and raise our awareness of when we’re being entertained, and when we’re being manipulated/educated. One level doesn’t preclude the other, and we don’t have to vilify the manipulative/educational aspect, but we need to be aware of it, and the motivations of the manipulators. In other words, we need an Ethic of Narratives, not just Narrative Ethics, understanding ourselves as moral agents in the world through stories.
And we haven’t even started talking about the stories embedded in commercials!
Can Novels Be Philosophical? Part 2 February 6, 2011
Posted by Nina Rosenstand in Ethics, Nina Rosenstand's Posts, Philosophy of Literature.Tags: Martha Nussbaum, James Ryerson, Paul Ricoeur, John Steinbeck, narrative philosophy
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In his NY Times article from Jan.20 James Ryerson brought up arguments supporting the view that there is a world of difference between the analytical arguments of philosophy and the murky feelings of literature (see blogpost below). But he also cites opposing views:
Of course, such oppositions are never so simple. Plato, paradoxically, was himself a brilliant literary artist. Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard were all writers of immense literary as well as philosophical power. Philosophers like Jean-Paul Sartre and George Santayana have written novels, while novelists like Thomas Mann and Robert Musil have created fiction dense with philosophical allusion. Some have even suggested, only half in jest, that of the brothers William and Henry James, the philosopher, William, was the more natural novelist, while the novelist, Henry, was the more natural philosopher.
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David Foster Wallace, who briefly attended the Ph.D. program in philosophy at Harvard after writing a first-rate undergraduate philosophy thesis (published in December by Columbia University Press as “Fate, Time, and Language”), believed that fiction offered a way to capture the emotional mood of a philosophical work. The goal, as he explained in a 1990 essay in The Review of Contemporary Fiction, wasn’t to make “abstract philosophy ‘accessible’ ” by simplifying ideas for a lay audience, but to figure out how to recreate a reader’s more subjective reactions to a philosophical text.
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Unlike Murdoch, Gass and Wallace, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, whose latest novel is “36 Arguments for the Existence of God,” treats philosophical questions with unabashed directness in her fiction, often featuring debates or dialogues among characters who are themselves philosophers or physicists or mathematicians. Still, she says that part of her empathizes with Murdoch’s wish to keep the loose subjectivity of the novel at a safe remove from the philosopher’s search for hard truth. It’s a “huge source of inner conflict,” she told me. “I come from a hard-core analytic background: philosophy of science, mathematical logic. I believe in the ideal of objectivity.” But she has become convinced over the years of what you might call the psychology of philosophy: that how we tackle intellectual problems depends critically on who we are as individuals, and is as much a function of temperament as cognition. Embedding a philosophical debate in richly imagined human stories conveys a key aspect of intellectual life. You don’t just understand a conceptual problem, she says: “You feel the problem.”
So according to Ryerson there are indeed authors whose work straddle the two fields—but I’m curious about his approach, because it seems to be exclusively from the viewpoint of analytic philosophy that a gap exists: Continental philosophers have traditionally felt far closer to fictional literature, and continental authors have blended philosophical thoughts into their works, as Ryerson himself mentions. Paul Ricoeur, the French philosopher, spent decades teaching his readers about the value of narrative philosophy. Here in this country similar lessons have been taught since the 1980s by literature people such as Wayne Booth and Hayden White. But even in contemporary American philosophy there is an increasing rapprochement between literature and philosophy; I’m surprised that Ryerson doesn’t even mention the one contemporary American philosopher who, perhaps more than anybody else, has seen the philosophical value in fiction without getting hung up on whether fiction displays formal arguments and “hard truths”: Martha Nussbaum. And if we want to look for an American novelist who has excelled in writing fictional works of moral philosophy where the reader doesn’t choke on formal arguments, but instead sees moral deliberations come alive through his characters, John Steinbeck is probably the best example of a writer who fuses literature and ethics—to the profound irritation of literary critics, because he broke with the standard rules of literature. From Of Mice and Men to East of Eden, and in particular The Winter of Our Discontent, Steinbeck weaves philosophical arguments about right and wrong, good and evil, into his storylines. And if you read Stephen K. George’s collections of essays, John Steinbeck and Moral Philosophy, and John Steinbeck and His Contemporaries, as well as Ethics, Literature, and Theory, you’ll find that a new generation of literature critics and moral philosophers have no problem recognizing philosophical fiction as simultaneously representative of good philosophy and good fiction.
Habermas on Rawls on Religion December 14, 2010
Posted by Nina Rosenstand in Ethics, Political Philosophy, Nina Rosenstand's Posts, religion.Tags: religion, John Rawls, Jürgen Habermas, deontology
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In his blog on Habermas and Rawls, Thomas Gregersen has published a link to a new afterword by Habermas about the young Rawls’ analysis of religion in his senior thesis from 1942, “A Brief Inquiry into the Meaning of Sin and Faith.” This piece apparently wasn’t known to exist until after Rawls’ death in 2002. In 1942 Rawls was 21, and since I’m right now grading what seems like a stack of several thousand papers 
from students in that age-bracket, I am acutely aware of the quality of writing and argumentation…however, I’ll pursue Rawls’ own text at a later date, and leave it to Habermas to “grade” Rawls!
I thought you might find it interesting to (1) see Gregersen’s blog, (2) read the Habermas piece .
An excerpt from Habermas’ review, quoted by Gregersen:
“I will limit myself here to four observations. (1) This confident work, which is strikingly mature for a twenty-one-year-old, merits interest in the first instance as a surprising biographical testimony concerning the work and personality of the most important political theorist of the twentieth century. (2) The philosophical substance of the senior thesis consists in a religious ethics which already exhibits all of the essential features of an egalitarian and universalistic ethics of duty tailored to the absolute worth of the individual. (3) At the same time the posthumous insight into the biographical sources of the author’s work offers an outstanding example of the philosophical translation of religious motives. It is as if one were examining the religious roots of a deontological morality based on reason alone under a magnifying glass. (4) The student’s senior thesis also foreshadows his later recognition that the secularisation of state power must not be confused with the secularisation of civil society. Rawls owes his unique standing in the social contract tradition to the systematic attention he devotes to religious and metaphysical pluralism.”
Of course it is always fascinating when precursors to a thinker’s prominent contributions can be found in his or her early writings. But that shouldn’t detract from the significance of a good thinker being able to change his or her mind…
Stem Cells Without Scruples? November 8, 2010
Posted by Nina Rosenstand in Ethics, Science, Nina Rosenstand's Posts.Tags: Lab-grown livers, stem cells, cloning, artificial blood
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I think we bloggers often express several kinds of misgivings about the future on this blog, for different reasons, but here’s something that should make us rejoice: medical news has reached a stage that I could only dream about when I devoured science-fiction novels in the 1980s to prepare myself for the what-if scenarios of good ethical discussions (and also because I enjoyed a good space yarn):
First, the prospect of lab-grown livers is now becoming a reality:
The researchers created “working livers” the size of a walnut which functioned normally in laboratory conditions.
They believe that in around five years they will be able to upscale the process and transfer the procedure from laboratory to hospital.
The development could eventually solve the transplant shortage and also remove the need for powerful drugs to prevent the body rejecting the organ.
“We are excited about the possibilities this research represents, but must stress that we’re at an early stage and many technical hurdles must be overcome before it could benefit patients,” said the project director, Associate Professor Shay Soker from the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine in North Carolina.
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The technology opens up the prospect of growing other replacement organs, including kidneys or pancreases, for patients who are able to donate stem cells.
Artificially grown livers could be transplanted into patients or used to test the safety of experimental drugs.
This could be a milestone—not only because it may solve the transplant shortage, but also because it will remove the fear of, and hypothetical need for, reproductive cloning for the sake of organs, the scenario in the movie The Island, for you movie buffs. Which means that other, more realistic arguments for and against cloning can proceed.
And here is the other amazing piece of news, about creating artificial blood supplies, perhaps even in abundance:
Canadian scientists have turned human skin cells directly into blood cells, the first time one kind of mature human cell has been converted into another, they reported Sunday in the journal Nature.
The transformation was completed without first rewinding the skin cells into the flexible pluripotent stem cells that have most frequently been used to grow needed tissues. By skipping the pluripotent step, the researchers believe they have skirted the risk that the replacement cells might form dangerous tumors.
The team created blood progenitor cells — the mother cells that multiply to produce other blood cells — as well as mature blood cells, according to the report. Both types of cells could be useful in medical treatments, said study leader Mick Bhatia, a stem cell scientist at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario.
“There is a great need for alternative sources of human blood,” Bhatia said. “Since this source would come from a patient’s own skin, there would be no concern of rejection of the transplanted cells.”
For some of us the idea of therapeutic cloning, using stem cell research to further life-saving medical intervention, is not a morally questionable issue at all, but there are many Americans for whom the thought of using stem cells is morally repugnant, and while I don’t share that view, I respect it. It isn’t clear what the source of the liver stem cells is, but the creation of blood progenitor cells bypasses the entire moral issue of using embryonic stem cells, because it comes from the adult person’s own skin. We can always be cynical about the ultimate cost, availability, and potential for political manipulation of such new methods, but for now let’s just rejoice that there’s good news to report!
Never Apologize; It’s a Sign of Weakness–? November 1, 2010
Posted by Nina Rosenstand in Ethics, Nina Rosenstand's Posts, Philosophy of Gender.Tags: apologies, contrition, Deborah Tannen, Elizabeth Bernstein
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Recently the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada published two studies on men’s and women’s habits of apologizing, and Elizabeth Bernstein from the Wall Street Journal did a piece about it last week.
According to new research from Canadian psychologists, people apologize about four times a week. But, on average, they offer up these apologies much more often to strangers (22% of the time) than to romantic partners (11%) or family members (7%). The only folks we apologize to more? Friends (46%).
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Men and women have different approaches and different expectations when it comes to acts of contrition.
Conventional wisdom says women apologize too much, and men don’t apologize often enough. Women are good at nurturing relationships, the thinking goes, while men are too egotistical to say they’re sorry or have a different take on social graces. Yet there’s no proof that women are better than men at apologizing—they just do it more often, sometimes for inconsequential offenses.
Two small studies at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, published last month by the journal Psychological Science, indicate men are just as willing as women to apologize if they think they’ve done something wrong. Men just have a different idea of what defines “something wrong.”
In the first study, 66 men and women kept daily diaries and recorded each time they committed—or were on the receiving end—of an offense. They also noted whether an apology was issued. The outcome: Women were offended more often, and they offered more apologies for their own behavior. Yet men were just as likely as women to apologize if they believed they’d done something wrong.
In the second study, 120 subjects imagined committing offenses, from being rude to a friend to inconveniencing someone they live with. The men said they would apologize less frequently. The researchers concluded the men had a higher threshold for what they found offensive. “We don’t think that women are too sensitive or that men are insensitive,” says Karina Schumann, one of the study’s authors. “We just know that women are more sensitive.”
And when men actually apologize, do they know why? Apparently not.
“To be honest, men never—well, almost never—have any idea what we are apologizing for,” says Mark Stevens, 63, chief executive of MSCO, a Rye Brook, N.Y., marketing consulting firm.
Mr. Stevens says during his 35-year marriage he has sincerely apologized to his wife, Carol, just five times—but has said he’s sorry an additional 3,500 times. He calls these mea culpas “fraudulent apologies.” They go something like this: “I don’t know why you’re unhappy, but I’m sorry.”
So here we have 186 Canadian men and women who are experiencing some kind of disconnect when it comes to apologies, and several people interviewed by Bernstein (two from NY, one from Florida) seem to agree. But are we seeing anything other than stereotypes laid out in this piece? I can’t speak for the two Canadian studies—perhaps they have more content. Yes, we all know that men and women have different approaches to apologies, and a strong, silent type such as Jethro Gibbs (NCIS) can quote an even stronger, more silent predecessor (Nathan Brittles, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon) with his classic comment, “Never apologize, it’s a sign of weakness.” But why? Perhaps Deborah Tannen has written her numerous works in vain. Tannen tells us that it is a matter of different linguistic styles: A man, having grown up playing games with groups of other boys where the main objective is to be top dog, can’t afford to be perceived as being one-down, especially if it is in a business setting. Women, on the other hand, have had a few close girlfriends growing up, and a semblance of equality (if not actual equality) must be present in most of their games. The friendship must be maintained, almost no matter what, and an apology isn’t viewed as “giving in,” but as a way to smooth over the rough spots. (And Tannen is not being judgmental here—she is trying to describe it the way she sees it.)
That being said, there is an additional element that the Canadian studies apparently don’t address at all (or else Bernstein didn’t think to mention it): Tannen emphasizes that expressions of sympathy, extended by women, are often mistaken for apologies by men. If I remember correctly, she analyzes such statements in her book Talking from 9 to 5: If a woman, in the workplace, wants to express her sympathy to a male co-worker, employee, or boss, she might say, “I’m sorry you’ve had such a tough time.” She wants to show her empathy, but he hears it as an apology, and responds, “It’s not your fault.” And she is left confused, because she didn’t think it was her fault, either!
As a woman working in a highly male-dominated field for the past 30+ years I can absolutely attest to the reality of such exchanges, in a number of languages and on two continents. And if they count as female apologies, although they weren’t intended as such, it’s no wonder that women are perceived as apologizing far more frequently than men…I’m really sorry to see that we seem to have to reinvent the gender analysis wheel every 20 years or so. And that’s not an apology!
Is Climate Change an Ethical Issue? October 28, 2010
Posted by Dwight Furrow in Dwight Furrow's Posts, Ethics, Philosophy.2 comments
Last week I linked to an article by David Roberts at Grist who argued that although the majority of Americans think climate change is happening and is a threat, most people are not angry about it or motivated to do much about. So the intensity is on the side of those who deny climate change.
Very few of those who correctly believe that climate change is happening are pissed about it. More like “concerned,” the way people are concerned about homelessness or poverty in Africa, like, y’know, somebody (else) should really do something about that. Few write letters to legislators or hassle them about it in town halls. Almost no one will change their vote over it. No legislator stands to be primaried or driven from office over it.
In other words, all the intensity, and thus all the political risk, is on one side. For the political landscape to change in coming years, what’s needed is not a massive education campaign — though it certainly couldn’t hurt! — but a shift in the balance of intensity. The question is how to reduce the intensity of denialists and increase the intensity of climate hawks.
But, in the end, Roberts was optimistic because he thinks generational change will replace the denialists with armies of young, committed environmentalists that will gradually shift the debate in favor of mitigating climate change.
I am not as optimistic as Roberts because I think climate change, from the standpoint of ordinary moral agents (i.e. non-philosophers) is not easily conceptualized as a moral issue.
By “ethics” or “morality”, I am referring to the actions I ought to take as an individual.
With regard to the causes of the predicted harms of climate change, the contributions of individuals are tiny, the actions that lead to climate change are otherwise innocent—they don’t involve any sort of obvious wrongdoing—and the effects of each individual’s actions are displaced over vast amounts of space and time. It is not obvious then how an individual is responsible for the harm, so it isn’t obvious why individuals have a responsibility to do anything about it.
Furthermore, and perhaps more importantly, even if we felt an obligation as individuals to do something about climate change, there is very little we can do about it. Because our contribution as individuals is so inconsequential, any reduction we initiate with regard to our personal discharge of CO2 will also be inconsequential as well.
So, in other words, we have a very big collective action problem on our hands. I can do nothing to solve climate change on my own. And in the absence of global consensus among governments to take action in consort to solve the problem, which in the current political environment seems implausible, I as an individual can do very little.
As a result, people don’t see climate change as an ethical problem. It may be an engineering problem or a technological challenge, or a political problem for governments to solve, but not an urgent ethical problem that demands individuals take action.
The question is can philosophy help to conceptualize climate change more clearly. Do any of our moral theories explain why climate change ought to be a moral issue?
I think the answer is no if we consider only traditional moral theories. I will have more to say about this next week.
Dwight Furrow is author of
Reviving the Left: The Need to Restore Liberal Values in America
For political commentary by Dwight Furrow visit: www.revivingliberalism.com
Should We Be Optimistic About Climate Change? October 20, 2010
Posted by Dwight Furrow in Dwight Furrow's Posts, Ethics, ethics of care.Tags: climate change, public opinion
3 comments
A new study from the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication has some good news and bad news for the planet. NY Times reporter, Felicity Barringer points to the ignorance revealed by the report — for instance, over two-thirds of the public think aerosol sprays contribute to climate change. (It is the ozone layer that is damaged by aerosols, not the climate.) But on a more positive note, most people accept the fact that the climate is changing although they know little about why it is changing. And even more positive is the finding that they trust scientists to provide them with the information they lack.
Americans’ most trusted sources of information about global warming are the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) (78%), the National Science Foundation (74%), scientists (72%), science programs on television (72%), natural history museums (73%), and science museums (72%).
This suggests that the relentless right-wing campaign of obfuscation hasn’t worked.
But David Roberts at Grist argues that misinformation is not the real problem.
Insofar as lack of public engagement is the problem, the cause is not misinformation, it’s the lack of affective information — information that is meaningful, that speaks to core fears and aspirations. The main problem is apathy. People just don’t care much. Green journos and pundits tend to wildly overestimate the significance of accurate knowledge and wildly underestimate the significance of emotional resonance.
Those trying to spread the word on climate change have the advantage in numbers. The majority of Americans accept that climate change is happening and almost three-quarters get a passing grade — C or above — on Yale’s scale of knowledge. Where the denialists have the overwhelming advantage is in intensity. As rejection of climate science and climate solutions has become an ideological litmus test on the right, millions of Republicans have come to believe that climate science is not just incorrect but a hoax meant to further U.N. world government. They are pissed.
Very few of those who correctly believe that climate change is happening are pissed about it. More like “concerned,” the way people are concerned about homelessness or poverty in Africa, like, y’know, somebody (else) should really do something about that. Few write letters to legislators or hassle them about it in town halls. Almost no one will change their vote over it. No legislator stands to be primaried or driven from office over it.
In other words, all the intensity, and thus all the political risk, is on one side. For the political landscape to change in coming years, what’s needed is not a massive education campaign — though it certainly couldn’t hurt! — but a shift in the balance of intensity. The question is how to reduce the intensity of denialists and increase the intensity of climate hawks.
Roberts is optimistic about the future.
The backlash against cap-and-trade — not even the policy, the grotesque caricature of it painted by its opponents — won’t hold back the low-carbon tide forever. Voters already love clean energy; they think fossil fuels should be subsidized less and renewables more. The EPA is moving, states are moving, cities are moving, businesses are moving. As such efforts touch more and more lives, the issue will become less abstract. As people integrate clean energy into their worldview, intensity against climate science will fade and intensity behind reforms will increase.
Y’all know I’m not exactly a glass-half-full kind of guy, but I really think the death of the climate bill is a “darkest before the dawn” kind of moment. The larger forces of history are moving in the right direction. There’s only so long America’s peculiar, dysfunctional political system can resist.
I’m not quite so optimistic, not because of the persuasive power of right-wing politics but because of the peculiarities of climate change and the inherent difficulties in seeing climate change as a moral issue. I think it is a serious moral issue, but it requires a substantial re-conceptualization of ethics to see it as such.
I will have more to say about this over the next few days.
Dwight Furrow is author of
Reviving the Left: The Need to Restore Liberal Values in America
For political commentary by Dwight Furrow visit: www.revivingliberalism.com
The Folk are Not Utilitarians October 4, 2010
Posted by Dwight Furrow in Dwight Furrow's Posts, Ethics, ethics of care, Uncategorized.1 comment so far
Via Ben Goldacre:
Loran Nordgren and Mary McDonnell wanted to see whether our perception of the severity of a crime was affected by the number of people affected. 60 students were given a vignette to read about a case of fraud, where either 3 people or 30 people were defrauded by a financial advisor, but all the other information in the story was kept the same.
In an ideal world, you’d imagine that someone who harmed more people would deserve a harsher treatment. Participants were asked to evaluate the severity of the crime, and recommend a punishment: even though fewer people were affected, participants who read the story with only 3 victims rated the crime as more serious than those who read the exact same story, but with 30 victims.
And more than that, they acted on this view: out of a maximum sentence of 10 years, people who heard the 3 victim story recommended an average prison term one year longer than the 30 victim people. Another study, where a food processing company knowingly poisoned its customers to avoid bankruptcy, gave similar results. […]
[T]hey then go on to examine the actual sentences given in a representative sample of 136 real world court cases, to people who were found guilty of exactly these kinds of crimes, but with different numbers of victims, to see what impact the victim-count had.
The results were extremely depressing. These were cases where people from corporations had been found guilty of negligently exposing members of the public to toxic substances such as asbestos, lead paint, or toxic mould, and their victims had all suffered significantly. They were all from 2000 to 2009, they were all jury trials, and the researchers’ hypothesis was correct: people who harm larger numbers of people get significantly lower punitive damages than people who harm smaller number of people. Juries punish people less harshly when they harm more people.
I’m not sure what explains this result. Perhaps a crime against a small number suggests an intention to harm, whereas a crime against many is perceived more like negligence.
But I think it is more likely that we find it easier to empathize with one or two people than empathize with a large group.
This is what the authors suggest. We feel more sympathy toward identifiable individuals than for abstract individuals. In fact subjects gave richer descriptions of the victims in the small number cases; and in the large number cases, giving subjects a photo of the victims seemed to eliminate the effect.
This helps to confirm that if, as moral theorists, we are interested in describing human nature, the ethics of care gives us a better handle on human motivation than impartialist theories like utilitarianism or deontology.
Dwight Furrow is author of
Reviving the Left: The Need to Restore Liberal Values in America
For political commentary by Dwight Furrow visit: www.revivingliberalism.com
The Death Penalty and Albert G. Brown September 29, 2010
Posted by Nina Rosenstand in Ethics, Nina Rosenstand's Posts, Criminal Justice.Tags: capital punishment, Teresa Lewis, the death penalty, retentionism, abolitionism, Albert Greenwood Brown
4 comments
The state of Virginia executed Teresa Lewis last week, and here in CA Albert Greenwood Brown was scheduled to die this week, but the execution has been put on hold because of a shortage of sodium thiopental, the drug used for the lethal injection. Is there a national, or even a local debate about the death penalty about to happen? Not according to the Los Angeles Times a few days ago:
Brown, 56, is poised to be the first inmate killed in the state’s new death chamber in San Quentin, built after U.S. District Judge Jeremy Fogel ordered a stay on executions in California in 2006 because its three-drug lethal-injection method appeared to violate the constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment. Brown’s attorneys say Fogel’s decision last week not to block their client’s execution was rushed, and that even though Fogel is giving Brown the option of a single-drug method that is considered more humane, the judge still hasn’t examined the new death chamber or properly studied new training procedures for the state’s executioners.
They may have a point, but that’s not why we’re disappointed. We had hoped that Fogel’s stay would start a dialogue in California about the death penalty, which is objectionable for a host of reasons, and not just because the three-drug death cocktail may not ease the pain of the condemned. We’d hoped Californians would be shaken by the case of Cameron Todd Willingham, who was executed in Texas in 2004 following a conviction based on shoddy forensics evidence, or of the 17 death-row inmates in other states who were exonerated by DNA testing. We’d hoped they would notice that capital punishment has no deterrent effect on violent crime, or that the cost of carrying it out is helping to bankrupt the state, or that most developed nations have abandoned it because of its essential inhumanity.
Here you have the essential abolitionist arguments. For the sake of Fairness in Blogging (FIB), let me mention the key arguments in favor of the death penalty (retentionism): No other punishment matches the severity of the crime of murder. No other punishment guarantees that the murderer will never be pardoned/will never escape. No other punishment guarantees specific deterrent (the criminal himself/herself won’t repeat their crime). The high cost is due to the long appeals, not the punishment itself. And the unfair executions of defendants based on shoddy evidence and/or discrimination are flawed, but such situations can be avoided in the future with sufficient reforms.
As reported by MAARS News,
John Hall, a spokesman for the Riverside County district attorney’s office, said prosecutors were pleased with Fogel’s ruling.
“This is a horrific case with horrific facts,” Hall said cited by the Los Angeles Times. “This man showed no remorse. He never claimed innocence…. It’s time for this family to finally see justice. It’s been delayed too long already.”
Brown was convicted of raping and murdering of Susan Jordon a student of Arlington High School in 1980 in Riverside. The 15-year-old was walking to school when Brown pulled her into an orange grove, raped her and strangled her with her shoelaces.
He even called the girl’s parents and the police and told them where to find her body.
Brown had been paroled four months earlier from a prison term imposed for the 1977 rape of a 14-year-old girl.
Here is a recap of the whole, heartbreaking story from AP .
And indeed it appears that we are about to have a debate about the death penalty, at least in CA: Here’s a comment from The Faster Times, by Maureen Nandini Mitra:
The evidence was compelling too. Several witnesses had been seen him approaching Susan. Among other things, police found semen-stained clothes, Susan’s missing schoolbooks and phone directory open to the page with her parents’ phone number in Brown’ possession. At the time of the murder, he was on parole. He’d been released four months earlier after serving four years in prison for the 1977 rape of a 14-year-old girl.
As I discovered the details of Brown’s crime, my rage boiled over. Despite my intellectual opposition to death penalty, part of me felt he deserves to die.
Then I took a second look at the figures. Brown’s lawyers have managed delay his sentencing for 30 years. Which means Susan’s family has been waiting for three decades for some kind of closure to their pain. They’ve had to relive their trauma over and over again through years of appeals and two reversals of the sentences by the California Supreme Court. And it’s still not over.
Is there a “right” view and a “wrong” view? From an abolitionist POV, of course, the answer is easy. But for those on the fence or in favor of capital punishment (70 percent of us!), the cases of Lewis and Brown provide a challenging juxtaposition: One, a borderline mentally disabled woman rushed through the court system (relatively speaking) and put to death, even when there was some doubt about her initiative in the murder-for-hire, and clear evidence of her remorse. The other, a confessed rapist/killer without a shred of remorse whose lawyers have kept him alive on Death Row for 30 years, and who have just won him another reprieve. Is it acceptable to have capital punishment in a nation where justice is meted out with such vast differences in different states? Are individual cases where our sense of justice feels let down enough to undermine an entire judicial tradition? Of course we should have a political debate about capital punishment, allowing both rational and emotional arguments to be heard, because without emotional engagement we are unaffected by the suffering of the victim and her or his relatives, as well as by the concept of mercy, and without reason we are incapable of acting justly, as well as comprehending social consequences. It need not be a partisan discussion, because even if the L.A. Times seems to assume that the reasons the Democrats in CA don’t want to discuss the issue is because they’re cowards, the fact remains that there are retentionists among Democrats as well as Republicans, and abolitionists among Republicans, too. So we need to hear each others’ best arguments. Are we willing to listen?
