Friday, December 16, 2011

Final Exam

Just a reminder: the final exam is Monday, December 19th, in our normal classroom at noon. You'll have 50 minutes to take it.

And Regular America Will Hate Your Fancy Book Learning

Friday, December 9, 2011

System Justification Theory

NYU psychologist John Jost does a lot of work on something he calls system justification theory. This is our tendency to unconsciously rationalize the status quo, especially unjust social institutions. Scarily, his research suggests that those of us oppressed by such institutions have a stronger tendency to justify their existence.

Jost has a new book on this stuff. Here's a video dialogue about his research:

Thursday, December 8, 2011

Your Inner Bigot

There's an insightful article called "Finding Your Inner Bigot" that relates to our discussion in class this week on racism and sexism: does prejudice have to be conscious, or can we unintentionally do something sexist or racist?

Psychological evidence suggests that unconscious prejudice is real, and often a bigger problem today than intentionally discriminatory behavior. As the article puts it,

"If you ask physicians whether all patients should be treated equally regardless of race, everyone says yes. But if you ask doctors how they will treat patients with chest pains who are named Michael Smith and Tyrone Smith, the doctors tend to be less aggressive in treating the patient with the black-sounding name. Such disparities in treatment are not predicted by the conscious attitudes that doctors profess, but by their unconscious attitudes—their hidden brains."
Counteracting these unintentional, hidden prejudices is pretty tough. They require a long-term approach of the kind discussed in Aristotle's virtue ethics: noticing your bad habits, then consciously trying to break them and replace them with better habits. The hardest part about unconscious biases, though, is how difficult they are to notice in the first place.
We Think We Know, But We Have No Idea

Wednesday, December 7, 2011

Term Paper Guideline

Due Date: The beginning of class on Friday, December 16th, 2011

Worth: 15% of your final grade

Assignment: Write an argumentative essay on the topic below. Papers must be typed,
and must be between 600-1200 words long. Provide a word count on the first page of the paper. (Most programs like Microsoft Word have automatic word counts.)

Topic: Explain and defend your definition of person as it relates to morality, and
specifically to the ethics of abortion, stem-cell research, impaired infants, and animal research.
(1) First, briefly explain and critically evaluate the different definitions of “person” that we have discussed in class. Be sure to consider each definition offered by Mary Anne Warren, Insoo Hyun, Gerard Magill and William Neaves, Tristram Engelhardt, John Robertson, and Carl Cohen.

(2) Second, explain how each of the following authors uses the concept of “person” to attempt to settle the particular ethical debate she or he wrote about (Warren and Don Marquis on abortion; Hyun and Magill & Neaves on stem-cell research; Engelhardt and Robertson on impaired infants; and Peter Singer and Cohen on animal research).
[NOTE: Some of these authors think personhood is irrelevant to their issue.]

(3) Third, explain and defend your own definition of “person”: do you agree with one of these authors’ definitions, or do you have one of your own?

(4) Fourth, explain the solution your definition of “person” gives to the ethics of abortion, stem-cell research, impaired infants, and animal research.
When considering your definition of person, be sure to consider and answer the following questions: Which living entities are persons, and which living entities are not persons? Do you believe one needs to be a person in the moral sense in order to be worthy of moral consideration (for instance, do some non-persons have a right to not be killed and a right to not suffer unnecessarily)? Do persons have special moral significance? Can someone have moral rights before they have moral duties? Be sure to fully explain and philosophically defend each of your answers.

Does Rights  Entail Responsbilities?

Tuesday, December 6, 2011

Does Death Harm Animals?

Here is a short post with some thoughtful analysis regarding the topic of our term paper on the moral status of animals (specifically, on non-persons and killing animals):
I recommend reading it to help you start developing your own arguments on these issues for your paper.

Wednesday, November 30, 2011

New Jersey's Own

We're reading an article by well-known philosopher, utilitarian, vegetarian, and New Jersey resident Peter Singer on animal ethics for class. Here's some interviews with him:


Thursday, November 24, 2011

Quiz #2

We're having another quiz! Quiz #2 is worth 10% of your overall grade, and will be held at the beginning of class on Monday, November 28th. You'll have about 25 minutes to complete it. It will consist of about 6 short answer questions, and will be on everything we've covered since the test:
  • abortion (Warren and Marquis articles)
  • stem cells (Hyun and Magill & Neaves articles)
  • prenatal screening (McMahan and Davis articles)
  • cloning (Kass and Strong articles)
  • homosexual parenting (Hanscombe article)
  • impaired infants (Engelhardt and Robertson articles)
  • euthanasia (Callahan, Rachels, and Nesbitt articles)
A Little Too on the Nose, Sean

Wednesday, November 23, 2011

Assisted Dying

Here are a few links on euthanasia:

VERY Active Euthanasia

Wednesday, November 16, 2011

The Ethics of Killing

Creepy CoverI don't often recommend an entire book to students, but if you're interested in some thoughtful analysis of abortion, euthanasia, animals, killing, and personhood, among other things, you should check out Jeff McMahan's The Ethics of Killing. Here's a short description of the book:
"This magisterial work is the first comprehensive study of the ethics of killing, where the moral status of the individual killed is uncertain. Drawing on philosophical notions of personal identity and the immorality of killing, McMahan looks carefully at a host of practical issues, including abortion, infanticide, the killing of animals, assisted suicide, and euthanasia."
McMahan teaches philosophy at Rutgers. (We read his article on prenatal screening.)  He also just wrote a follow-up book called Killing in War (here's an audio interview with him on that book). This is exactly the kind of careful, thought-out approach that I think complicated, serious issues deserve.

Tuesday, November 15, 2011

Infants

Here are some links related to our class section on the ethics of treating infants with severe impairments:

Monday, November 14, 2011

Lesbian Parenting

Since donor insemination first became popular in the U.S. in the 1980's, there was a bit of a baby boom among lesbian parents at that time. As a result, there are some long-term studies that have been wrapping up lately on the effects of being raised by parents who are lesbians. For instance, it seems that child abuse is much less likely to occur in a lesbian household. Other studies can be found here and here.

Also, one of my favorite movies of last year, The Kids Are All Right, is a comedy about a lesbian couple with two children who seek out their sperm-donating biological father. Here's the trailer:


Sunday, November 13, 2011

The Wisdom of Kass

The Leon Kass reading on cloning that we studied in class was part of a longer article that is available in its entirety here.

Many critics take issue with Kass's claim that there is a wisdom to repugnance.  Here is a typical objection to Kass's view:
"Anyone who as ever taken an introductory anthropology course, or read Herodotus -- or gone to a different part of town -- will have learned that different groups feel disgust at different things. The affect seems to be hard-wired into us, but the occasions provoking it are varied.
...
"In short, disgust is not quite so unambiguous and inarguable an expression of timeless values as [Kass] has advertised. Given a choice between 'deep wisdom' and 'reason’s power fully to articulate,' we might do best to leave the ineffable to Oprah."
Moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt argues that one big difference between politically conservative and liberal people is the willingness to consider disgust as a morally relevant factor.  Here's his TED talk on this:

What do you think?  Feel free to let us know in the comments of this post.

LolCats Have Deep, Ineffable Wisdom