Keyboard Shortcuts?f

×
  • →Next step
  • ←Previous step
  • ↓Skip this slide
  • ↑Previous slide
  • mShow slide thumbnails
  • nShow notes
  • hShow handout latex source
  • NShow talk notes latex source

Click here and press the right key for the next slide.

(This may not work on mobile or ipad. You can try using chrome or firefox, but even that may fail. Sorry.)

also ...

Press the left key to go backwards (or swipe right)

Press n to toggle whether notes are shown (or add '?notes' to the url before the #)

Press m or double tap to slide thumbnails (menu)

Press ? at any time to show the keyboard shortcuts

 

How to Ethics?

 

Lecture 09

Moral Psychology

Let me finish where I started ...

Why study moral psychology?

3

ethics?

1

human sociality

2

political conflict,

e.g. over climate change

theme for today (and the whole course)

we have limited ethical knowledge

This is the main thing we get from studying moral psychology.
Doesn’t seem like much.
Actually it’s an enormous thing.
Taking seriously the limits on our ethical knowledge requires a fundamental change to how most philosophers do ethics.
And it holds the key to working around political conflicts which threaten the future of all humans, like that over climate change.
There is a gap between progress in technology and progress in ethics.
To apply our discoveries in moral psychology, we need three things.
1. we need to be sure that there is a gap;
2. second we need to know why there's a gap;
3. and third we need to know what we might do about the gap.
Let me start with the first. How do we know there is a gap?
Image source: Chazan (2025)

ethical successes

government-sponsored slavery and serfdom

landmines reduced (partial)

ozone depletion

vaccination (e.g. smallpox)

...

Why are these *ethical* successes and failures? Because ethical attitudes play a key role in solving, or failing to solve, these problems.
You can see this in the case of vaccination, which requires lots of people to pay a small cost for a large collective benefit.
The current anti-vax movement is driven by ethical concerns (ignorance is not the root cause; it is ethical attitudes).
Illustrated by Martin Sichert (AfD): ‘vaccines are a massive encroachment on people’s bodily autonomy and every one should be free to decide’ quoted in (Chazan, 2025)
‘Björn Höcke, AfD leader [...] likened Covid vaccines to the Nazis’ experiments on humans’ (Chazan, 2025)
Martin Sichert (AfD) claims that the AfD defended your freedom (Chazan, 2025).

ethical failures

global poverty
 

nuclear deterrence

climate change

driving cars (?)

...

Why are what I am calling ‘failures’ failures?
You might object that from a libetarian perspective, global poverty is not an ethical failure at all.
This ignores that eliminating global poverty is easy, relatively inexpensive, and would bring enormous benefits for almost everyone.
This is nicely illustrated by the billionare Bezos’ motive for building space civilizations. He talks about having hundreds of living Mozarts.
The quickest and most direct way to get there is probably to unleash the wasted potential of those perhaps 700 million people who currently experience extreme poverty (World Bank, 2024).

Why is there a gap?

(The gap is between the progress we have made in technology and the progress we have made in ethics.)
Previously I stressed that it’s because we have been doing ethics in the Aristotelian mode.
But we can get an even clearer picture of the gap by looking at the main findings from moral psychology.

1. ethical abilities are for solving problems

2. moral pluralism (within culture)

3. cultural variation

4. faster processes are unreliable outside familiar situations

Discoveries in moral psychology pose a challenge to theories in normative ethics which aim to endorse universal and strongly justified moral principles.

- consequentialism, contractualism (?), Kantian ethics, ...

BUT: the problems *are* universal (e.g. global poverty, climate change, bioethics)

We have to solve for both the limits and the universality of the problems!
What, if anything, do these main findings tell us about the limits of humans’ ethical knowledge?

Can we do ethics with limited knowledge?

financial ethical bets

In the financial domain, we have many theories and much conflicting evidence. Traders also have a pressing need to act. They will not usually make money by attempting first to identify the correct theory and then sticking to that. They will probably instead combine approaches that are inspired by a mix of evidence and theory.

Do ‘the global poor have a much stronger moral claim to that 1 percent of the global product they need to meet their basic needs than we affluent have to take 81 rather than 80 percent for ourselves’?

(Pogge, 2005, p. 2)

Primary consideration: the upside of being right about the ethics outweighs the downside of being wrong (will not do great harm even if we are wrong)
Other consideration: Pogge argues that you can justify a positive answer from a wide range of philosophical views, including libertarianism (which is typically a view opposed to redistribution because it emphasizes property rights)

... and humility

We also have to recognize that there is a lot we do not know.
This is going to be very hard given that many of us have quite strong ethical views in some areas. The strong views may concern environmental issues, identity and self-expression, social justice, or sexuality.
It’s hard for me because I feel that anti-vaxxers are literally killing babies and children.
It is particularly difficult because respecting others’ ethical positions can sometimes feel unethical.
The important thing is to try to include everyone, all of the human beings, as moral agents with their limited knowledge.