What is what

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 donâ 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, thatâ 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.
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