In this course we study the ancient, Socratic art of blowing up your beliefs as you go, to make sure they're built to last. We spend six weeks studying three Platonic dialogues - "Euthyphro", "Meno", "Republic" Book I - then two weeks pondering a pair of footnotes to Plato: contemporary moral theory and moral psychology. Platonic? Socratic? Socrates was the teacher, but he said he never did. Plato was the student who put words in his teacher's mouth. You'll get a feel for it. We have a book: the new 4th edition of "Reason and Persuasion", by the instructor (and his wife, Belle Waring, the translator.) It contains the Plato you need, plus introductory material and in-depth, chapter-length commentaries. (Don't worry! John Holbo knows better than to read his book to the camera. The videos cover the same material, but the presentation is different.) The book is offered free in PDF form - the whole thing, and individual chapter slices. It is also available in print and other e-editions. See the course content for links and information. The course is suitable for beginning students of Plato and philosophy, but is intended to offer something to more advanced students as well. We seek new, odd angles on old, basic angles. Tricky! The strategy is to make a wide-ranging, interdisciplinary approach. Lots of contemporary connections, to make the weird bits intuitive; plus plenty of ancient color, still bright after all these years. So: arguments and ideas, new possibilities, old stories, fun facts. Plus cartoons. The results can get elaborate (some book chapters and some lesson videos run long.) But each video comes with a brief summary of its contents. The lessons progress. I put them in this order for reasons. But there's no reason you can't skip over and around to find whatever seems most interesting. There are any number of self-contained mini-courses contained in this 8-week course. You are welcome to them. Plato has meant different things to different people. He's got his own ideas, no doubt. (Also, his own Ideas.) But these have, over the centuries, been worn into crossing paths for other feet; been built up into new platforms for projecting other voices. (Plato did it to Socrates, so fair is fair.) So your learning outcome should be: arrival somewhere interesting, in your head, where you haven't been before. I wouldn't presume to dictate more exactly.
Lesson 7 Part 4: Can 'Ick' Imply Ought?
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Reason and Persuasion: Thinking Through Three Dialogues By Plato
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National University of Singapore
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Moral Psychology
We're done with Plato! Well, not really. The point is to prove we'll never be done with him! But we're moving on to contemporary moral psychology. This lesson is on moral psychology. How does the moral mind think – work, function? The moral brain. (Psychologists are natural scientists. They figure your mind is your brain although that identification can get puzzling, we shall see.) I discuss one figure in particular: Jonathan Haidt. A popular writer, with good ideas. Also, some bad ones (I say) so that makes it livelier. He knocks Plato. I try to knock back, sometimes on Plato’s behalf. Plato is obviously very concerned with moral psychology. So many colorful, mythic images of all that! Haidt ventures more than a short distance into philosophy, when he sallies forth to correct philosophers, ancient and modern, for doing bad psychology. All very interesting. And I hope, like me, you find having a bit of Plato under your belt, at this point, helps you to organize your thoughts, see positions and patterns. In the first lesson I compared studying Plato to learning chess gambits. No one knows how to win, outright. But some strategies are more ... winning. (But there are always standard defenses.) l A lot of scientific progress has been made in the study of the human mind. But there are a lot of deep, stubbornly un-dissolved conceptual mysteries hereabouts. That means a lot of ancient debate patterns – same old lines, same old counters to the old lines - stay relevant. It’s important to be able to say: hey, we learned something new today! But also: ah, this debate is a version of that old thing we’ve been batting back and forth for centuries! (Even though it’s got new stuff stuck on – fMRI data, or what have you.) Being able to see the old and the new isn’t everything, but it’s a start. Let’s get started.
Conheça os instrutores
John Holbo, Associate Professor
DEPARTMENT of PHILOSOPHY
Lesson 7, Part 4.
Can 'ick' imply Ought?
It's going to be a long one, kids.
So strap in for the ride.
Jonathan Haidt, The Emotional Dog And Its Rational
Tail: A social intuitionist approach to moral judgement.
Let's get back to the dog.
In the previous video I think I explained the
dogginess of moral judgement according to Haidt pretty well.
Passions rule, reasons serves.
That is the tail, reason.
Doesn't wag the dog.
Tails don't wag dogs.
At most the tail gives some indication of how the dog is feeling: good or bad.
I think probably I should have been a bit more explicit
about how this is supposed to work in practice with some examples.
So now I'm going to do that.
Suppose I say that same sex marriage is bad because it is unnatural.
Or suppose I say that genetically modified crops are bad.
Because they are unnatural.
Hey, you know what, better still, let's pick an example that doesn't have an
obvious left, right, partisan vibe relative to U.S. politics.
Not that what I am about to say can't explain
U.S. pol, partisan politics, maybe it can explain it a lot.
But I don't want to make that leap right at the start.
Let's sort of slide into it by means of a, a less clearly partisan example.
Let's just stick with Miley Cyrus.
Some people say that it's bad for Western civilization that
Miley Cyrus did that twerking routine at the 2013 VMAs.
It's caused our society as a whole to become less virtuous.
Some people also think that it's bad maybe bad for western civilization, but at least
it's bad for the state of our culture, but she's always sticking her tongue out.
Some people just don't like that.
Some other people disagree to varying degrees.
You can get into an argument about Miley Cyrus with people if you want.
What?
You say I can?
Where can I do this?
There's a place called the internet, and if you go there, you
can argue with people about Miley Cyrus and other such pop cultural issues.
Now, if you choose to do this how does it go?
Well, on the Haidt model, which works really well in this case
I think, you have an immediate, rather visceral, reaction to Ms. Cyrus.
You respond emotionally, one way or another, and then you
make up a bunch of stuff about why you're right.
About why it's so bad that she did that.
Or not so bad, to support how ever you feel.
It's kind of a waste of time that argue about this stuff.
But it's fun.
Okay, it gets a bit more serious when people argue about say whether
Obama is a great President or the worst President ever, or somewhere in between.
Unlike the people who are just having fun in the internet, expressing themselves
about Miley Cyrus, analysis of Barack Obama's presidency, it's the sort of thing
a serious political theorist or political scientist or historian might engage in.
At this point, I think it's safe to say, we
would like to think there is a bit more to it.
Then our dog just taking a liking to the guy or not, and
then you invent a bunch of reasons why you like him or you don't.
What would Plato say about all this?
He would say, well obviously people are often very
dog-like, if that's what Jonathan Haidt wants to call it.
They just have a feeling, and then they
invent some rather transparent nonsense to justify it.
In my lectures, I emphasize that
Socrates' interlocutor don't just make bad arguments.
They make obviously bad arguments.
Some readers of Plato find this annoying, like Plato just wants to watch an uneven
fight in which one poor sap just can't
block a single punch the champ is throwing.
Is Plato some kind of sadist, that he wants
to watch these poor guys get crushed over and over?
Eh, maybe.
You can believe what you like.
I think it shows that Plato is shrewd about psychology.
That people, not only make rationally bad arguments about things like virtue,
justice, holiness, but that they make obviously bad arguments about it.
Without noticing this, says a lot about human nature.
But this is precisely why, I'm getting
back to my slide here, Plato doesn't really
want to admit that the gods fight when Euthyphro comes up with that bright idea.
It isn't right, I think Socrates would say in Plato, it isn't right to imply that
the gods, unlike us humans, are at heart these ridiculous doggy creatures.
They get all emotionally invested in stuff.
A stupid beauty contest, for example.
And then to compound their emotional error, they cheat to win.
They fabricate reasons why they should be the fairest, just for example.
People do that sort of thing all the time.
But not the God's, not ideally.
Here's another example, remember what we concluded
about Euthyphro that whole annoying chicken and
egg do the gods love it because it's good or vice versa problem, we
concluded with Plato well, anyway I, I encouraged you conclude that it's very
absurd to say that the reason murder is wrong is because Zeus doesn't like blood.
It disgusts him.
Miasma, remember, all the stuff about Miasma and pollution.
Rather, it should disgust him because murder is wrong.
Saying murder is wrong because it's messy, rather than
the mess is especially disgusting because it's so wrong.
That's some crazy, tail-wagging-the-dog arrangement.
Surely, that can't be morally right.
To have Miasma doing all the pushing, as it were.
If there is a Zeus who hates murder, he
doesn't just hate it because he thinks it's icky.
That wouldn't be the right thing for Zeus to do.
Well what about people?
Are they sometimes able to transcend their doggyness?
Becoming godlike or at least undog like when it comes to moral judgement?
That's kind of the question.
Let's hold off.
We aren't even done reading the subtitle of Haidt's paper yet, are we?
A social intuitionist approach to moral judgment.
Intuition, Haidt says, is perception not like.
That is, it's a kind of cognition.
It's not a kind of reasoning, the reasoning in
so far as it gets involved is post facto confabulation.
Well, confabulation is sort of by definition post fact and let me tell you
what confabulation means if it's not a word that you happen to know yet.
An intuition, this is what we mean by saying it's perception like.
An intuition is the sort of thing that
is immediately caused by seeling, seeing Miley Cyrus.
It's a reaction, usually either attractive or repulsive.
You like, or you don't like.
But it's not even right to say that it's like
a like button you choose to push in your mind.
You choose to click like on someone's Miley Cyrus hate page, if
you hate Miley Cyrus, but you don't choose to hate Miley Cyrus.
You just do.
Or you don't.
In your mind a button goes down but you didn't rationally push.
Confabulation.
Did anyone out there in Coursera land see Up?
Pretty funny movie.
There's this dog, Dug.
He's been given this special technological attachment, which
causes him to be able to speak, and
so, being a dog and being able to speak, he says a lot of hilarious doggy things.
Like, I just met you but I love you!
That's such a dog thing to say.
Now, what they didn't give him was a special extra human attachment, which
not only allowed him to speak, but, like a proper human, allowed him to confabulate.
Now, what would that have meant?
If Dug the dog in Up had had a special confabulation
thing around his brain, not his neck, he would have said.
I just met you, but I love you and then he would've invented a bogus
rational reason, why it was rationally appropriate
to love this person that he just met.
Of course it would have been a ridiculous argument, but that would
have made him more human, and now you know what confabulation means.
Okay, let's do the whole thing a bit more technically.
Let me say it all again more technically, or at least diagrammatically.
Here we see a lot of circles, and arrows, explaining
in circle-arrow terms what Haidt's social intuitionist model comes to.
Incidentally this is Haidt's diagram, not mine.
I simply copied it to make it
more visually clear for the PowerPoint presentation.
We have a situation of some sort, we respond to morally.
That's the little blue situation, circle.
We first have an intuition.
That is a perception like feeling, and then we form
a judgment caused by our intuition in support of that feeling.
And then we reason in support of that judgement and that feeling.
In a sense, the grey arrows at the top ought to be
black, to indicate that reason comes in to support our judgement and intuition.
In fact, it's greyed out to indicate Haidt's
conviction that reason seldom challenges critically, our own judgement.
The seldom.
It seldom operates to change our judgments
or intuitions, although it may reinforce them.
We engage in motivated reasoning.
That is, we're in the market for
arguments, rational arguments, why we are right.
Not in the market for rational arguments, generally.
And definitely we don't like arguments that we're
wrong about virtue or justice or any of that.
Socrates, we hate that guy.
Except that's not quite right.
There are black arrows leading from A's reasoning to
B's intuition, and from A's judgement to B's intuition.
A and B are supposed to be different people in this model.
Isn't it weird?
We're willing to buy critical arguments from other people, to some degree.
That is, they can affect how we feel.
But we are willing to buy critical arguments from ourselves.
It's more like we just don't
sell critical arguments to ourselves, although admittedly
that seems to be because there isn't much of a market for it.
In general the reason some arrows are
grey, pointing to intuitions, and others are black
pointing to intuitions, is that we don't
like being wrong, but we're very social creatures.
We are not very self critical, morally,
but we're highly subject to peer pressure morally.
Let's illustrate this with some simple examples.
How about sushi?
Is sushi a moral problem?
well, no, I wouldn't say that.
But sushi is a good example because it's the
kind of thing that may call forth feelings of
disgust if you don't happen to be from a
culture where you're used to people eating raw fish.
Haidt emphasizes that disgust is a major engine of
moral judgement and we'll go with that for clarity purposes.
Raw fish, you see it.
Ick, that's your reaction.
Then you come up with a judgement.
Eating raw fish, bad.
Then you invent some reason why it's bad?
It's probably, totally, unhealthy.
Now, suppose you have a neighbor.
In most situations, socially, people tend to have
similar intuition, so you could easily reinforce yourselves.
That is, you say ick to sushi and that
makes you think it's unhealthy, he says ick, you
say him saying ick and that makes you even
more likely to say ick and around the circle goes.
So here we have a little mini model of
how social coherence and reinforcement may tend to work.
We can also imagine a model according to where there is social challenge.
Suppose you think it's icky, but then you see some guy eating it and saying yum.
I probably should have put an exclamation point after the" yum"
to indicate the yum is just as powerful as the ick.
Well, now we're have a, a bit of attention, what might resolve it?
Which will effect us more, our neighbor's yum or the
ickiness of the, our own immediate reaction to the raw fish.
Well, it could go either way, but I think we can imagine
that suppose you've never really eaten sushi before and you think it's gross.
But then you go and spend a year abroad in
Japan, and you see all these people saying, yum, yum, yum!
Well, eventually, that sort of peer pressure would probably overwhelm your
own initial negative reaction, and this is how moral change goes.
What's going to change your ick is nothing,
no argument that you give yourself, but
rather the weight of social pressure around
you, which will include arguments from other people.
But it's not really right to say that this is a rational process.
This is a social peer pressure process.
Haidt says this doesn't happen or
actually, he just says this doesn't happen.
You see sushi.
You have no reaction.
You have no intuition.
Raw fish, I don't have any feelings about that.
So you come up with a rational argument against raw fish.
Let's say it's dangerous, unhealthy.
And then, you form a judgement.
Sushi bad.
Your moral judgement is based on pure reason.
Haidt says, this basically just never ever happens.
Certainly, it doesn't happen with sushi.
He wants to say and sushi's a pretty good paradigm.
That is, moral judgement generally doesn't go like this.
But this happens all the time, suppose I know, I hope this doesn't happen to you.
Suppose you're taking a math class, math can be hard.
You're being tested on whether something is a correct expansion of pi.
Well you look at all those digits and you just gotta crunch
the numbers and figure out whether that is a correct expansion or not.
Either it is or it isn't.
You got no feeling about it.
That's what makes math class so darned hard.
You just have to reason about it.
Okay.
Let me tell you a story about an unusual gentleman named Daniel Tammet,
who's written a book called Born on a Blue Day, which I highly recommend.
And this individual is so interesting that you can also find videos about him.
online, on youtube, there have been BBC specials,
and I believe he's given his own TED
talk, so if what I say about him
sounds interesting, you might want to check that out.
He is an interesting case, because he is autistic.
He suffers from Asperger's syndrome, which means he has
cognitive deficients along a certain range of, of phenomenon.
He's not very good at dealing with faces, he's not very good with
social situations, but he's a brilliant savant when it comes to things like math.
He experiences mathematics in a incredible sort of synesthetic
fashion, he, to him numbers are unusual shapes and colors.
As a result to which he can
do tremendously difficult things intuitively and immediately.
For example, he was being tested by scientists,
at Oxford or Cambridge, I can't remember which.
And some of them were understandably a bit skeptical about
his reports on his experience of mathematical colors and shapes.
So, they tested him.
They gave him a long expansion of pi running out diit after digits.
30, 60 digits, I don't know how far it was.
It was far.
And out.
Way out along the lines they took some sixes and they turned them into nines.
That is they made settle little changes to pi
which were not just mathematically settle but typographically settle.
It would be hard to spot that sort of thing.
And they were curious if, if what he said was true, he would be able to
spot it, and indeed, not only was he able to spot it, but when he scanned out
that number line and encountered a six that
should have been nine, or maybe it was
a nine that should have been six, the
hairs on his arm literally stood up on end.
That is he, for him, it was like fingernails on a chalk board.
And at that point, the scientists cheerfully dropped their skepticism
because this was clearly something that he could not have faked.
He had a visceral reaction to pi.
Okay.
Neat.
Why am I telling you about this unique guy?
Well, let me connect it to what I was saying before.
This happens to Daniel Tammet all the time.
And to no one else.
He sees a wrong expansion of pi and he just says, ick!,
internally.
And, on the basis of his ick!,
he immediately judges that it's not pi.
And, later he could go back and recheck the numbers.
But, frankly, he doesn't even need to.
So, he works differently than the rest of us do.
Okay, why is this significant that there's this?
First let's expand on the difference.
All though that, I mentioned that he not only has these abilities
to perform tremendous feats of mental mathematics, but he has unusual deficits.
For example, if you showed him Miley Cyrus and her funny face, he probably wouldn't
react very much, because as a sufferer
from Asperger's, suffering sort of autism he does.
He doesn't really react to faces very strongly.
His social situations confuse him and concerning all that stuff, he has
to do what the rest of us have to do in math class.
Namely, reason about this stuff very elaborately.
If to get to an answer.
Society is exhausting to Daniel Tammet, in just the way
that math is exhausting to most of the rest of us.
Same for Barack Obama.
I imagine that Daniel Tammet doesn't have
very strong feelings about politics, because the sorts
of things that cause the rest of us
to have strong feelings, he's rather immune to.
When he sees Barack Obama's face he may not
have a very strong reaction to it, unusually so.
What does the case of Daniel Tammet prove, about how the human brain does math?
I'll bet it proves something.
I don't know what it is, but there's a
lot of brain scientists who are very interested in
him and they want to give him scans and so
forth, and I'll bet, they'll come up with something neat.
I'll leave it at that, since I am completely
professionally unqualified to say what that neat thing might be.
But, let's move onto what does the case of Daniel Tammet prove about math?
Not math thinking, but math itself?
Nothing.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that nothing, it proves nothing.
Is that right?
Well let's think about it.
Mathematically we aren't prepared to change our mind about what pi is, if
it were to turn out that Daniel Tammet felt pi were something else.
That is suppose we keep going out that number line, and
he turns out to have very strong reactions in bizarre ways that
don't correspond to our mathematical notion of pi, the hairs on his
arm stand on end and he says this is pi or not.
It if didn't correspond to what we think pi is, we wouldn't
accept it as a novel form of proof that pi is something different.
It wouldn't count as a mathematical discovery.
In general brain scans, hair standing up on
your arm, don't count as proofs in math.
Getting more metaphysical about it, we are certainly not going
to decide that numbers really are or have been all
along distinctively colored or shaped things, just because for whatever
mysterious synesthetic brain reason, Daniel Tammet finds him to be so.
Now we comes to it.
But we are all Daniel Tammet, when it comes to virtue as oppose to man.
We're all idiots savants about virtue.
In the sense that we have this tremendous
capacity to respond immediately to questions about virtue.
Just as he has a tremendous capacity
to respond immediately to questions about math.
He has this powerful disgust response which helps
him know whether something is pi or not.
Just as we have a powerful disgust response
that talks a, helps us know what virtue is.
So, what do we prove about ethics?
I just said that Daniel Tammet proves nothing about math, do we prove
something about ethics with our emotional dogs that tell us so much about it?
Let's go back to a slide we saw a couple videos back.
Remember Hume's argument I'll read the quote again.
It is not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction
of the whole world to the scratching of my finger.
It is as little contrary to reason to prefer
even my own acknowledged lesser good to my greater.
There is a metaphysical question here which is can and is some fact about the
word imply in ought, that is a value judgment or a norm, something like that.
Hume is saying strongly No is never implies an ought.
No is implies an ought.
Fact and values are separate.
This isn't really an empirical judgment.
It may be something like a metaphysics of the world, that we live in a world of
facts, and from that it follows that any value
judgments are strictly just as rational as any others.
Let's move from is implies ought to the the title of this video, Can' ick!'
imply ought?
Or, ought not, as the case may be.
I already pointed out that in math, ick
implies ought is not a valid proof procedure.
The fact that Daniel Tammet finds wrong expressions
of pi to be not just wrong, but
immediately, viscerally disgusting, like fingers on a chalkboard,
that's very psychologically interesting, but mathematically it is non-dispositive.
It doesn't, prove anything, mathematically.
Again if Daniel Tammet's visual reactions number ceased to track pi
as we know it we wouldn't change our mind about pi.
We would change our mind about, Tammet being a math savant.
We would just think he was a really weird
synesthetic guy that associated numbers with colors, and so forth.
Getting back to the present slide.
Here, we see the goddess, Athena, watching the 2013 VMA Awards.
She hates Miley Cyrus.
I can tell that just by looking at the expression on her divine face.
Which raises the question.
Sure disgust guides us.
Probably it has value as some kind of heuristic guide.
You shouldn't eat rotten stuff.
But what does disgust really prove about the
object of disgust particularly where ethics is concerned?
Okay, if this is what moral judgement is, essentially.
That is, if this isn't just some cut rate, doggy version of a
thing that can be done much better by humans or by the gods.
Then ick can imply ought, kind of by definition.
The metaphysics of morals is such that the dog
in us is built right in, and built to last.
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