[0:13]My name is Mark Pierce and I'm here today to provide one more approach to the study of ethics. You've already heard presentations about philosophy, uh, and also about literature. And I would like to bring to our attention today another way to think about ethics, about the study of right and wrong, and ought and ought not.
[0:43]And, uh, I will discuss two things really. First of all, the the nature of science itself and the scientific method which gives us yet one more tool to think about the ethical dilemmas that you'll face in this class and also in life after you leave school. I'll talk about that a little bit and I'll also talk about psychology as a branch of science. It's in the field of social sciences. We'll talk about that just a little bit and I will raise five questions today, uh, of, uh, what I will call touch points of where psychology and ethics come together. First of all, a a definition of psychology. Psychology is the scientific study, the scientific study of behavior and experience. And, uh, the scientific method, uh, is used more and more and more in the social sciences today. Uh, and it deserves a little bit of explanation. The scientific method is nothing but a way of thinking about reality. And it's quite different from what people on the street think about science. When people on the street think about science, they typically think in terms of absolute proof. Yeah, science proves this or disproves that, but I want you to know that that's not what the scientific method does. Uh, science is probabilistic. We do not speak in terms of absolutes. If you want absolutes, you have to go to the philosophers or the theologians, or much worse than that, the politicians and they're quick to give you definitions of absolute right or absolute wrong. But the scientific method thinks about it differently. The scientific method says, we do not speak beyond what our data will support. And based on what we know today, the truth is probably this, but we're open to revising that later today or tomorrow if we get more information or better, uh, information. And some people are quite frustrated, uh, with that approach that science uses because they want a clear, uh, absolute answer and science says, we don't do that. We just tell you what we think we know at this moment based on the best evidence that we have and we're completely willing and open to revising that tomorrow. So that's how the scientific method works. Um, so it's neutral, uh, and that's very, uh, disquieting to some people, especially in the study of ethics.
[3:59]But I found a quote from a, uh, a Chinese philosopher, uh, Sidsan, and he said this, if you want the truth to stand before you, never be for or against.
[7:05]The struggle between for and against is the mind's worst disease. And that's the philosophy of science. We are not for the medicine, we're not against the medicine, we just put the medicine out there and we test it with the best methods we have and we see where it comes out. So, what is the nature of the interaction then between science, the social science of psychology and ethics or behavior? Um, and and I want to raise five questions with you in this presentation and you think about these five and I'll give brief examples from psychology of how this scientific method interacts with the study of right, wrong, ought, and ought not. Number one, what is the nature of the relationship between the mind and the body? We can study that empirically with the scientific method. We can't tell you if the thing is absolutely right or absolutely wrong, but we can study the interaction between the physical and the metaphysical or, um, the mind and the body. Second question is, are there limits on what, uh, moral reasoning a human being can do? And you'd think beyond that a little bit, are we all the same? Do we have exactly the same ability to make moral choices? Are there individual differences there? Third question, where do these moral thoughts originate? Where do human beings get these moral ideas? That can be studied empirically. Number four, how does morality change over the human lifespan? Or you might go beyond that and say, does it even change over the lifespan and if it changes, where does it change and how does it change at different levels of human development? Science can study that. And then we might ask another question, the fifth question, how is it that people differ in their moral choices? So, those are the five questions I want us to think about in the rest of our time and to, uh, bring at least some brief examples from the science of psychology to that. We're we're at the nexus between science and ethics here and and how those two interact. Let's think about the nature of the relationship between the mind and the body just a little bit. This is a very complex problem and one could study this for years or decades and people have spent their lives studying this and and we're still exactly not sure, uh, where this comes out. Uh, there just to be brief, I'll say there are two ways of thinking about this. Some people are what we would call dualists. You've already heard about Plato in this, this course. Uh, and they believe that the mind is one thing and the the body is something else. The physical is sharply distinguished from the the spiritual or the metaphysical or something, uh, whatever term you you want to use, uh, for that. Uh, that, uh, dualistic, uh, way of thinking has has been with us, uh, from ancient times. Uh, those of you who study the history of of, uh, of religions or or study the scripture will recall the gnostics who made a very sharp distinction between spirit and flesh. Uh, so it's a very old thing, but in science, we really came across that through the work of a man named Renee Descartes, who's one of my favorite philosophers. And also he was he was uh quite a scientist and mathematician. He's the one who gave us the cartesian coordinate system. You remember that X axis and the Y axis and you can draw, uh, graphs and parabolas on that. He also gave us the, uh, X and the Y to represent unknowns in algebra, so he he was quite a well-rounded individual. But one of the things that he did was he made a sharp distinction between mind and body. And science has struggled forever and still to this day struggles what is that relationship between mind and body? In this day of computer science, some people would say it's like the difference between hardware and software. That's a a great oversimplification, but it's one way to think about it. And where would that come into, uh, the, the nexus between science and ethics? Well, uh, one place where that might come in is were there any characteristics that you have in your moral choices today that are hardwired, built into you, that you just came that way? People who study temperament like Buss and Plomin and others would say that, uh, your basic temperament was inherited. There's pretty good evidence to say that your emotional reactivity, your activity level and your sociability level, uh, seem to be consistent across generations of genetically related people and it's more than just environment that that conveys that because they always seem to have the same characteristics.
[12:34]So I would ask you to think about this and to discuss it among yourselves at some other time, what would your emotional reactivity, your activity level and your sociability have to do with your ability to make moral choices? Could that have something to do with it? Now, to be sure, we know that, uh, it's it's not a simple this or that dichotomy. That kind of dualism is has faded. It's probably both and we all would recognize that. But in science, we must recognize that some of the ways that you think came from your your parents and your grandparents and those before you and they're not simply learned from an environment. So you might ask this question, is conscience inborn or learned? And I always tell my students, yes. Somewhere in there, there is the truth. Question number two, what are the limits of human ability to make moral choices? There's a famous case in legal studies called the McNaughton case. In 1843, there was a a poor, unfortunate soul named Daniel McNaughton, who lived in France and in Scotland and England at various times in his life. And he was a wood turner for a while and an actor for a while and he actually made quite a bit of money, but by today's standards, we would call this man paranoid schizophrenic. And Daniel McNaughton went out one day because he believed that the government was working against him. He was very deeply paranoid.
[14:15]He he thought the Tories, one of the the British political parties, were trying to persecute him and he determined in his, um, his mind, as it was at that time, that that the only way he could save himself was to go out and assassinate the Prime Minister whose name was Robert Peel. Uh, and he thought that would get the Tories away from him and he would be safe. And and by mistake, he shot the fellow named Drummond, who was an assistant to the Prime Minister and the man died. There was no question about, uh, guilt because he did this in a very public place and he was apprehended immediately. But in even in 1843, they recognized that this man is not well. This man is insane, he may lack the basic ability to know right from wrong because the nature of his disability. And they determined at that time that they would not, uh, uh, use capital punishment, they would not hang this man, which is what would have normally happened in 1843 in England. And they put him in a in an asylum and he spent the rest of his natural life there because he had a diminished capacity to choose right and wrong. We all recognize that there are such cases, but then if we get more practical about it, we ask this. Are we all the same? Do we all have an equal chance of making the right choice? We all recognize that there is such a thing as mental retardation. Uh, in science, we say it's those at least two standard deviations below the mean on a typical intelligence score and they do not have the ability to take care of themselves. We know that that exists, but does it also exist morally? That's a very hard question and it can be, uh, studied, uh, empirically. Question number three, that uh, science can discuss when talking about ethics and morality. Where do these moral thoughts originate? We think that something is right or something else is wrong. Why do we think that? Where does that come from? Does it come from our parents? Are we simply taught that, or as some of the cognitive neuroscientists are saying today, probably more from peers than from parents, or does it come from culture? Or does it come from spirituality, or is it inborn? Where do these moral thoughts come from? Uh, two scientists who studied that are Jerome Kagan and Sharon Lamb back in the late 80s, they wrote a book called The Emergence of, uh, morality in young children. Their theory at that time and they've tried to frame this in terms of testable hypothesis, was that you probably get your moral ideas in the second and third year of your life, in which typically mothers teach their children these things. Possession, politeness, destruction, dirt, place order, sharing and hurting others. And their theory at the time was that if you don't get that somewhere toward the second or third year, you may be deficient later on in life and you may not be able to, uh, make good moral choices. If you think about two-year-olds, I have a three-year-old grandson, uh, he, uh, like all children of his age, uh, struggles with his older brother over possession. And you've heard them say, mine, mine, and they're struggling over possession and and he's he's learning this as all children learn it. Uh, but, uh, can we test that? Can we scientifically study where do moral choices begin? And we can, that's that's one theory. We we also might ask, well, who who matters most in the moral development of the human being, the parents or the peers? And, uh, you might say for the first few years of life, well, probably the parents, but in the teenage years, you think about typical 14-year-olds, do they copy their parents or do they copy their peers? Do they listen to the music of their parents or the music of their peers? And and uh some like Judith Rich Harris say it it's both parents and peers, but somewhere up around the age of puberty, after 12, 13, 14, uh, the peers matter more to the children. That's where they get it. Question number four, does morality change over the lifespan? I want you to think about the way you were when you were five. And then I want you to think about the way you are now at this point in life. Some of you are traditional age college students and some are returning college students or non-traditional college students. But compare you at five to you at at your current age. Do you think the same morally now as you did then? And I think most of us would say, no, we probably don't. So, we would say that your your ability to make moral choices changes over the lifespan and so science can study that. We can look at it and say, well, where does it change? At what age does it change? How does it change? What causes these changes at the different, uh, points of life? Lawrence Kohlberg and Carol Gilligan are two psychologists who studied that very deeply and they said, uh, that there seems to be some kind of a progression, uh, that human beings make, uh, the conventional, uh, or preconventional morality, uh, and then conventional morality, and then postconventional. And it sort of matches what Piaget said about the developmental stages of life. In other words, they said somewhere up to about age nine, children reason with what's called preconventional morality and it's based on on punishment and reward. But after that, it's it's called the conventional stage and they they base their morality more on what's fair. If you've ever been around a schoolyard with a bunch of fourth and fifth graders and they're playing some kind of a game, uh, you've heard this phrase, that's not fair. Or the fair thing to do is and so somewhere about that age, they start thinking in conventional morality. And Kohlberg said somewhere about 14-ish, they start to think in terms of higher morality. Like, is it right to do this in that circumstance, but not in that one? Uh, Kohlberg's history played a great part in his study because he was from a Jewish family in New York. And, uh, during World War II and immediately after that, he was in the merchant marines and he would go to, uh, European port cities and found Jews on the, uh, in the port area and they were trying desperately to get out of Europe where they were being persecuted. And they wanted to go to Palestine. And the problem was, it was against the law. It was against the declarations of the the British law who at that time ruled Palestine. They were not supposed to take Jews there and he he was a Jewish man, looking at these, uh, pitiable people standing on docks in Europe trying to get out of there. And, uh, he broke the law. He would smuggle the Jews out of Europe into Palestine, knowing it was against the law. And he always thought about that the rest of his life. There are times where the law says one thing, but there's a higher good or higher law that says that you do something else. And he he he struggled with that a great deal and it and it shaped his theory. His colleague, Carol Gilligan, added this to it. They said, she said, men and women do this differently. They go through the moral choices differently.
[22:06]She said in a in a great book called In a Different Voice that women reason relationally. I did not say emotionally, I said relationally and men reason from abstraction when they're making moral choices and she was one of the first of the difference feminist who said that men and women do not do things the same way. Uh, one might go on to the fifth question, why are uh, different groups of people different? And uh, one of my favorite, uh, recent authors in the study of morality, is the fellow named Jonathan Haight, who at for good many years was at University of Virginia and, uh, now, uh, is, uh, at at NYU and in the School of Business. And he says that conservatives and liberals reason morally in different ways. He says that conservatives use a five-factor model of moral reasoning. And people who self-identify as politically liberal use more of a two-factor, uh, model of moral reasoning and, uh, naturally they reach different conclusions about what's right and what's wrong. Uh, and, um, it's a very fascinating study.
[23:17]Uh, uh, Jonathan Haight says that people who self-identify as liberal will focus on harm or care, the positive side of that, and they will focus upon fairness and reciprocal treatment. Uh, and he says that conservatives also do that, but they add to it, uh, uh, loyalty, respect, and purity to that. So they have a a broader, uh, moral base. Now, he's not saying that one's right and the other's wrong. He's just saying that they're they're very different. So psychology can study that. That can be studied empirically or scientifically. It can't tell you who's right and who's wrong, but it can study that. So I want to repeat my five questions of of the nexus, the connection points between, uh, science and ethics or morality. What is the nature of the relationship between mind and body? You will not resolve that in this course. People have been thinking about that for centuries, but uh, they do want you to put that in your toolbox. Number two, what are the limits of human ability to do moral reasoning? Number three, where do moral thoughts originate? Are they inborn? Do we learn them? Where do we learn them? That's that kind of thing. Number four, does morality and moral reasoning change over the lifespan and if so, how so? And number five, why are groups of people different? These are the contributions of science in general and the social sciences a little more specifically and very specifically, how does psychology contribute to, uh, your thinking about right, wrong, ought, and ought not.
