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Overcoming Bias : Moral Rules Are To Check Power
Three recent papers from the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology combine to tell an interesting tale: We fundamentally care about outcomes, but have rule morality to keep powerful folks from doing bad things to the rest of us.
I cite: Judge
One of the weaknesses of left and liberal political theory over the past decades is the forfeiture of judgment. Politically correct theorists use the term 'judgmental' critically, as if making a judgment were a kind of failing.
Linda Radzik - Making Amends: Atonement in Morality, Law, and Politics - Reviewed by Cheshire Calhoun, Arizona State University - Philosophical Reviews - University of Notre Dame
Linda Radzik's Making Amends begins from this thought: "Our moral theories should tell us not just what is right and what is wrong but also how to deal with wrongdoing once it occurs". Making Amends is an illuminating, elegantly written, and much-needed systematic treatment of the ethical obligations of wrongdoers.
Philosophers' Imprint: A Theory of Wrongful Exploitation
My primary aims in this paper are to explain what exploitation is, when it’s wrong, and what makes it wrong. I argue that exploitation is not always wrong, but that it can be, and that its wrongness cannot be fully explained with familiar moral constraints such as those against harming people, coercing them, or using them as a means, or with familiar moral obligations such as an obligation to rescue those in distress or not to take advantage of people’s vulnerabilities. Its deepest wrongness, I argue, lies in our moral obligation not to extract excessive benefits from people who cannot, or cannot reasonably, refuse our offers.
Less Wrong: Not Technically Lying
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The distinction between telling someone a falsehood with the intention of promoting false beliefs and telling them a truth with the intention of promoting false beliefs seems razor-thin. In general, you're probably not justified in deceiving someone, but if you are justified, I hardly see how one form of deception is totally OK and the other is totally wrong. If, and I stress if, your purpose is justified, it seems you should choose whichever will fulfill it more effectively. I'd imagine the balance generally favors NTL, because there are often negative consequences associated with lies, but I doubt that the balance strictly favors lying; the above doctor hypothetical is an example where the lie seems better than the truth (absent malpractice concerns).
Guest Post: “Why Everyone Younger Than You is Spoiled” Part II « A (Budding) Sociologist’s Commonplace Book
Jeff Lundy (Sociology PhD Candidate at UCSD and visiting scholar at Michigan) completes his discussion of the accounting errors that may partially explain why older people think the kids these days are so profligate.
Richard Deming - Listening on All Sides: Toward an Emersonian Ethics of Reading - Reviewed by David K. O'Connor, University of Notre Dame - Philosophical Reviews - University of Notre Dame
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The "sociality" of language, writes Deming, "brings up close the issue of ethics" (14). In a way, it is no surprise that Ralph Waldo Emerson figures prominently in such a project. "I do then with my friends as I do with my books," Emerson said,<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[1]<!--[endif]--> and he meant it. For Emerson, reading and writing are the paradigm of all human life, and Deming does Emerson no violence in looking to him for an "ethics of reading," that is, to find guidance in our practices of attentive reading for how to treat people.
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Deming, then, does see the darker side of sociality, but he tends to treat competitiveness and rivalry as a pathology to be eliminated rather than as part of the very structure of the "dialectic of mutual recognition." Perhaps the desire to make recognition possible without requiring struggle is a noble one. Nevertheless, this desire seems to distort Deming's discussion of Herman Melville's struggles to free himself from Nathaniel Hawthorne's precedence
SSRN-Preferences for Psychological Enhancements: The Reluctance to Enhance Fundamental Traits by Jason Riis, Joseph Simmons, Geoffrey Goodwin
Four studies examined young healthy individuals' willingness to take drugs intended to enhance various social, emotional, and cognitive abilities. We found that people were much more reluctant to enhance traits believed to be highly fundamental to the self (e.g., social comfort) than traits considered less fundamental (e.g., concentration ability). Moral acceptability of a trait enhancement strongly predicted people's desire to legalize those enhancements, but not their willingness to take those enhancements. Ad taglines that framed enhancements as enabling rather than enhancing the fundamental self increased people's interest in a fundamental enhancement, and eliminated the preference for non-fundamental over fundamental enhancements.
Why your dog is smarter than a wolf | csmonitor.com
After a decade studying dogs in their human habitat, Mr. Miklosi and his colleagues have accumulated a body of evidence suggesting that dogs have far greater mental capabilities than scientists had thought. Dogs' smarts, it turns out, come out in their relationships with people.
Derek Parfit - links and bibliography
companion to a discussion group on Parfit's Reasons and Persons, which I organized while still a student at the University of Toronto.
Just-world phenomenon - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The just-world phenomenon, also called the just-world theory, just-world fallacy, just-world effect, or just-world hypothesis, refers to the tendency for people to want to believe that the world is "just" so strongly that when they witness an otherwise inexplicable injustice they will rationalize it by searching for things that the victim might have done to deserve it. This deflects their anxiety, and lets them continue to believe the world is a just place, but at the expense of blaming victims for things that were not, objectively, their fault.
Less Wrong: Nonparametric Ethics
Nonparametric ethics says: "Let's reason about which moral situations are at least rough neighbors so that an acceptable solution to one should be at least mostly-acceptable to another; and let's reason about where people are likely to be highly biased in their attempt to adjust to specifics; and then, to reduce moral error, let's enforce similar resolutions across neighboring cases."
Glen Pettigrove - General Details - Faculty of Arts at The University of Auckland, New Zealand
My current research focuses primarily on two questions. First, what role should attitudes and emotions play in normative assessment? Second, what does it mean to call a collective agent morally responsible, and under what conditions would such a statement be true?
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