Soc 209: Ethics and Sociology Study Guide PDF

Study Guide for Quiz \#1 The following is a list of key concepts and arguments that I want you to know and be able to explain and explore in plain English on our first quiz. I have grouped the key terms by the title of the reading or lecture whence each originates. ***Opening day lecture on Facts...

Study Guide for Quiz \#1 The following is a list of key concepts and arguments that I want you to know and be able to explain and explore in plain English on our first quiz. I have grouped the key terms by the title of the reading or lecture whence each originates. ***Opening day lecture on Facts and Values*** - *The fact/value dichotomy* - *Moral theories as ways of assembling facts and values to yield guides for human conduct* - *Consequentialist vs. deontological moral theories* ***Nagel, "Right and Wrong**"* - **Rules vs. moral principles.** Distinction between "rules" \[actual social, legal, customary constraints that are socially enforced\] vs. "morality" as a set of transcendent abstract principles - ***Why be moral?** Problem of why people should heed or obey this transcendent "morality." Conventional answers include:* - ***Religious answer**: God commands it. This answer faces multiple difficulties:* - *What motivates the many atheists who try to live morally?* - *Which is prior---God or morality? If God ordered you to put on your left sock prior to your right sock in the morning, would this make such a commandment sacred and inviolable?* - *If you accept that God's will is supreme, it lends credence to possibly "absurd" answers: does God really care that, per the Old Testament, some locusts are un-kosher, whereas others are?* - *If you accept that morality is supreme, then why bring God into the conversation in the first place?* - *Simple fear of punishment by God seems to some like a tawdry, egotistical motive for doing the right thing.* - *\[Nagel's own argument\] **Postulate of fundamental human worth and equality**... "*There is no substitute for a direct concern for other people as the basis of morality" (63). - ***The postulate of moral substitutability/neutrality.** Fundamental postulate of human worth and equality implies "the moral substitutability of different persons"* - *\[Instructor's note: Does this "moral substitutability" derive from some fundamental trait possessed by most morally "normal" people, like, for instance 1) people's ability to suffer and feel joy, and/or 2) people's ability to behave reasonably---perhaps, including accepting the postulate of fundamental human equality? Consequentialists/utilitarians like Bentham have argued for 1), whereas deontologists like Kant have typically argued for 2)\]* - *"Moral substitutability" rephrased by Nagel: "The basis of morality is a belief that good and harm to particular people (or animals) is good or bad not just from their point of view, but from a more general point of view, which every thinking person can understand" (67). \[Instructor's note: This bullet point is so important that I am "promoting" it by a hierarchical level for consideration in the next bullet point.\]* - ***The limits of moral substitutability/neutrality.** If we accept the full "moral substitutability of different persons," this will clash with the way "ordinary mortals" experience morality:* - *\[Instructor's note: if Joseph Henrich is right, modern people are unusual in their willingness to extend moral respect and norms of interpersonal cooperation to complete strangers. If you look at a news reel of children starving in a poor country or protesters being shot by police in an authoritarian country and you feel a pang of pity and an urge to do something about it, you are modern in this sense.\]* - *Even the most modern person accepts that people should treat their family and friends somewhat preferentially, even if this only means spending extraordinary amounts of the scarce resources of our care, resources, time, attention, and assistance on them. Someone who treated his daughter no differently than a needy bag lady on the street would be somewhat monstrous to us.* - *\[Instructor's note: In practice, this troubling inconsistency may not matter if so much if people's moral partiality toward kith and kin is tightly controlled by social norms---e.g., turn in your mother, brother, or buddy if s/he is a dangerous criminal---and symmetrical across all people.\]* - ***The multicultural objection.** Do these allegedly universal moral imperatives actually vary across cultural lines? \[Instructor's note: Is this question an "is" or an "ought" question? The one people really care about is the "ought" question, usually.\]* - ***Nagel's reply:*** Cultural relativism "is very hard to believe, mainly because it always seems possible to criticize the accepted standards of your own society and say that they are morally mistaken" (72-3). \[Instructor's note: This is a clever answer to the multicultural objection that strategically ignores the is/ought question. In my view, the more history you know, the more you'll know how profoundly true this is.\] - *\[Instructor's note: If you really buy the multicultural objection as an important argument against universal morality at the level of transcendent values or "ought" claims, you will need to admit that you are giving up any grounds for criticizing, e.g., Nazi atrocities against Jews and Slavs during WWII. How many of us are really willing to do that?\]* - ***The economist's \["revealed preference"\] objection to morality.** What if all moral action was simply an expression of people's preferences? Doesn't that mean that morality and egotistical action are the exact same thing?* - **Nagel's reply:** This involves a confused account of people's motives. People do derive pleasure from "doing the right thing," but that is because they are convinced intellectually of what "the right thing" is, not because they have a timeless innate impulse to do it. If you could convince moral people that an act is *actually* immoral, they'd lose one of their main motives for doing it. Morality is prior to pleasure, not derivative of it. ***Sloman and Fernbach, The Knowledge Illusion*** - *"Knowledge illusion:" the phenomenon whereby people's confidence in what they think they know about how the world works is eroded once they are asked to explain in detail how some phenomenon actually works* - *The problem of policy ignorance: Empirical finding that many people's "opinions" about public policy rest on very thin factual knowledge* - *"Groupthink:" empirical finding that people's views, even when based on shallow knowledge, tend to be intensified when exposed to other equally ignorant people who think the same way. (The causal mechanism here is that individuals overestimate other people's knowledge about an issue in a manner akin to the way they overestimate their own knowledge; thus, thinly-sourced "convictions" are strengthened by apparent group unanimity.)* - *A sort of individual "groupthink" can be induced by asking people to reflect on the reasons behind their political convictions. This tends to make people more extreme and confident in their political views, because they are consulting only the facts and values that support their perspectives. On the other hand, though:* - *Experimental technique of demonstrating to people that they suffer from the "knowledge illusion" can be applied to make people's political views less confident and less extreme:* - *This technique works for "consequentialist" policy reasoning, in which people's ultimate policy objectives are similar but their views are dominated by empirical claims about how things work in practice. (An example of such a policy domain is health care: we all want cheap, accessible and effective health care and don't really care how we get it.)* - *This technique doesn't work for "deontological" reasoning in which people's views don't depend much on facts, but rather on ultimate values. (Examples might include nationalist policies for right-wingers, anti-racist policies for left-wingers, or abortion policy for both.)* - *Because politicians are implicitly aware of this psychological fact, they often emphasize sacred values rather than empirical consequences when trying to persuade the public of their policy positions. (Sacred values also have the virtue of seeming simpler and less cognitively challenging than long skeins of causal reasoning.)* - *Another pragmatic problem with using this "show people how little they know" technique is that it often angers those who are "shown up" to know less than they thought; people like to feel knowledgeable (and, hence, competent). In a democracy, showing people how ignorant they are is rarely a successful electoral strategy.* - *Jonathan Haidt's psychological research shows that people's most basic value commitments tend to be rooted in knee-jerk emotional responses that have little to do with careful reasoning* - *Example of our "ick" reaction to the incestuous siblings* - *Given this fact, people's value commitments may be resistant to reasoned political discussion. \[Instructor's note: contra this claim, see the example of homosexuality's treatment over time in American politics and public opinion. On this issue, "ick" judgments have proved vulnerable to rational criticism in a way that the taboo on sibling incest is unlikely to be vulnerable in the longer run, given the host of weighty consequentialist objections to the latter.\]* ***Rauch, "The Constitution of Knowledge: The Operating System of the Reality-Based Community"*** - *The U.S. Constitution is mirrored in a parallel institutional logic that Rauch calls "the Constitution of Knowledge," which powers modern communities seeking to cope optimally with important disputes where reasonable argument is possible. Similarities include:* - *Division and dispersion of authority so that no one can easily exercise despotic and arbitrary power* - *Exploitation of rivalry as an energy source driving compromise and adaptation* - *Stability through gradual change and continual self-correction* - *Liberalism in the sense of endorsing processes rather than particular outcomes* - *"What reality really is"* - *Earlier theory of reality: Reality is an external world "out there"* - *Problem that the world "out there" is rarely open to completely unmediated observation* - *Later theory of reality: Reality is the set of well-tested propositions which can be publicly articulated and tested/validated* - *Some of these look like the propositions of the empirically "obvious" earlier theory of reality, like "the sky is blue," whereas...* - *Some are incomprehensible to intuition and require laboriously acquired expertise to comprehend, like the rules of quantum mechanics* - *Propositions are neither 1) material things nor 2) feelings but 3) "the world of objective contents of thoughts" (86).* - *This world of propositions is a human creation, but it exceeds the comprehension of single individuals and undergoes a process of natural selection when subjected to criticism by the best minds at work* 1. *Such propositions are themselves inert, but possess great power if properly apprehended by intelligent minds. \[Instructor's note: FYS students of mind may recognize this as being close to Booth's arguments about the "potential energy" of texts."* - *The "reality based community" is any community of thinkers devoted to discovering the truth by following the error-seeking rules of the "Constitution of Knowledge," which has been proven by historical experience to be a uniquely powerful truth-seeking institutional design. The most important rules of the "reality-based community" are:* - *The fallibilist rule: No One gets the final say* - *Assertions of truth require that propositions be checkable, and actually have survived good-faith efforts to check/debunk it* - *Members of the community must assume their own and everyone else's fallibility and must hunt for errors in any pattern of thought* - *The empirical rule: No one has personal authority* - *Methods for checking/verifying propositions must give the same result regardless of the identity of the checker and regardless of the source of the proposition* - *Anyone should be able, in principle, to check a proposition. No one's identity matters to the truth of a proposition* - *These rules have several restrictive consequences:* - *Reality is inherently social. No single individual's experience counts as "reality" until checked by others* - *Personal experience and history can inform knowledge, but cannot be allowed the final word on it* - *Claims to expertise always merit no more than provisional deference* - *The reality-based network is a "dynamic web of mutual persuasion: critical persuasion, so to speak, a social process of continuously comparing notes and spotting errors and proposing solutions" (93).* - *The reality-based network creates an "epistemic funnel" with the following characteristics:* - *The "wide" end of the "funnel" is open to any contributor no matter who they are, but few hypotheses are judged worthy of further examination. Most get ignored* - *The few hypotheses admitted to the wide end of the "funnel" begin undergoing evaluation; if they fail, they are ejected* - *Those who make it further down the funnel are subjected to increasingly searching attention and criticism* - *The very few hypotheses that survive are rewarded with recognition as "well accepted" or even canonical. The greatest professional rewards accrue to those whose ideas reach the narrow end of the funnel or whose criticisms modify or eject those near this end* - *Even the most "canonical" knowledge is never beyond questioning and criticism by anyone, and the more canonical the knowledge, the higher the rewards for successful criticism* - *The "epistemic funnel" requires absolute freedom of speech at the "wide" end, where nothing is rejected out of hand. But free speech provides only raw materials, and does not guarantee that all ideas earn respect* - *The reality-based community's process of checking ideas can never be reduced to simple formulas, nor can the distinctions between those in the reality-based community and those outside it (and between "legitimate" vs. "pseudo"-science) ever be cut and dried. But they do not need to be for the system to work* - *Because the rules for checking ideas are not hard and fast, the reality-based community can "digest" a wide variety of claims, from those in the "hard" sciences to philosophical, moral, and even aesthetic claims. The "funnel" can digest and promote many different varieties of "truth claims."* - *The reality-based community incorporates people in a wide variety of pursuits: anyone, indeed, who has to process truth-claims carefully. This can include:* - *Scholars, scientists and academic researchers* - *"Mainstream" journalism* - *Government agencies which compile statistics, develop regulations, and produce intelligence* - *World of law and jurisprudence* - *Common empirical indicators of the reality-based community is that its practitioners, despite their frequent disagreements with one another:* - *Hate being told to arrive at pre-ordained conclusions* - *Regard lying and making stuff up as the gravest of professional offenses* - *Common patterns of proper behavior in the reality-based community include:* - *Fallibilism: an openness to admitting error* - *Objectivity: a rejection of perspectivism and a search for universal, "reasonable" standards* - *Exclusivity: a sense that departing from the community's epistemic rules invites anarchy and an unacceptable instability of knowledge* - *Disconfirmation: an acceptance that everyone is in the business of refuting shaky claims* - *Accountability: because being wrong is undesirable but inevitable, a balance between being too lenient and too punitive toward error is needed:* - *Multiple layers of accountability are needed, from each individual's internal integrity to the awarding of prestige within the discipline to an individual discipline's openness to criticism and input from without* - *Pluralism: a willingness to invite a broad (if not infinitely so) range of ideas* - *Civility: discussion protocols tend to emphasize collegiality and cooperation along with a recognition that criticism should not be taken personally* - *Professionalism: earned credentials are painstakingly accumulated; connections to the reality-based network are helpful; specialization and expertise often arises spontaneously* - *Institutionalism: Considerable resources are usually needed to maintain the various branches of the reality-based network. These include norm maintenance, archiving of knowledge, recruitment and cultivation of expertise, etc. Hence, "enemies of the reality-based community are in the business of demolishing, discrediting and circumventing institutions" (107)* - *No bullshitting: Willful obscurantism and making arguments without caring about the truth are discouraged.* - *"Reality is a Part-Time Job." There are limits to the reach of the "reality-based community." It does not "run your life, rule the world, or control your brain."* - *Religion, tradition, identity, and rootedness are fully permitted to participants of the reality-based community outside the workplace* - *Rather than demanding unanimity on a set of common facts, a liberal society instead requires:* - *Some factual literacy* - *Some baseline commitment to common institutions, including those of government and of the reality-based community* - *Elite consensus, and preferably a public consensus on the method of establishing facts. More specifically, the following are needed:* 2. *General acceptance of reality-based rules and the professionals and institutions that uphold them* 3. *General consent to public decisionmaking systems which are reality-based (e.g., in the running of the Food and Drug Administration or of the medical profession)* 4. *Enough public trust to legitimize the reality-based community's privileged epistemic standing* 5. *Enough public commitment to the Constitution of Knowledge's underlying values (e.g., truthfulness, freedom of expression, intellectual pluralism, valuing of learning) to allow the reality-based community to maintain itself and its institutions* ***Rachels, "Subjectivism in Ethics"*** - *Ethical Subjectivism claims that there is no wrong and no right in moral judgments: that all are simply based on personal feelings and nothing more* - *Simple ethical subjectivism holds that assertions of the sort "X is morally right" simply mean "I (the speaker) approve of X" and nothing more* - *An important objection to this simple version of ethical subjectivism is that it makes it impossible to understand why anyone perceives moral disagreement between people, since all moral statements are simply expressions of personal sentiments* - *A refinement of simple ethical subjectivism that is not so easily dismissed is "emotivism." This holds that language can be used in different ways---to communicate that something is true and false, but also to express emotions or issue commands. Moral statements don't merely report sentiments, as simple ethical subjectivism holds; instead, they deliver imperatives and express attitudes.* - *This explains why moral assertions can imply disagreement: conflicting assertions make conflicting demands of the listener* - *Emotivism, however, cannot explain why some retorts to moral claims are more powerful than others; it cannot explain the importance of reason in ethics* - *Rather than denying that values are different from facts, as David Hume claims, ethical philosophers claim that moral truths are neither simply facts nor subjective feelings, but a third sort of thing: truths of reason. \[Instructor's note: As some of you noted in your reading responses, this should have a familiar ring to it, since Jonathan Rauch insists that the well-tested propositions generated by the "reality-based community," the propositions which we call the best available "knowledge," are a third sort of thing, apart from material things and subjective feelings.\]* - *Rachels's discussion of homosexuality points out how claims that homosexuality are wrong can be attacked with reason, including facts such as the observation that homosexuality doesn't disrupt the smooth functioning of any of society's key institutions that bear on consequentialist moral theories and deontological arguments about open homosexuality's non-harm of persons---and, indeed, its essential contribution to some persons' flourishing. Ethical subjectivism doesn't recognize any part of this reasoned conversation about homosexuality: "in focusing on attitudes and feelings, Ethical Subjectivism seems to be going in the wrong direction" (43).* ***Hammersley, "Should Sociology be Normative?"*** - *Advocates of incorporating normative judgments into sociological work put forward a variety of justifications, from multiculturalist "perspectivalism" on ethics to recommendations that sociologists be given systematic training in thinking about norms. \[Instructor's note: The latter perspective is incorporated into this course's statement of purpose, and Hammersley agrees with this recommendation in his final paragraph.\] These recommendations are sometimes constructive, but they ignore the power of Max Weber's perspective on ethics in social science.* - *Max Weber's methodological writings argued that social science must be "value-neutral," a somewhat unfortunate term that masked his more complex position. This consisted of the following claims:* - *The knowledge produced by social science should be value-relevant. \[Instructor's note: This is what contemporary social scientists mean when they say research plans must answer the "so what" question. A statistical investigation of how frequently people favor hoodies over hats worn as separate garments would probably be less valuable than a study that establishes a relationship between increases in economic inequality and decreases in upward mobility in a society.\]* - *Researchers' value commitments \[aside from the commitment to truthfulness\] should be separated from the causal conclusions they try to establish in their research. Value commitments should not be allowed to close off reasonable causal hypotheses in research. This is what Weber means by "value-neutrality."* - *Furthermore, "the distinction between facts and values must be clearly indicated, so that there can be no pretense that value conclusions have been drawn entirely from research findings" (33).* - *Hence, social scientists should be committed to creating the most reliable possible value-relevant knowledge. This can serve the public seeking to make value judgments, better informing the ethical tradeoffs (or lack thereof!) involved in policymaking. But it cannot replace the public's own democratic right to arrive independently at value judgments.* ***Lukianoff and Schlott, "DEI Statements and the Conformity Gauntlet" in academia*** - *Since 2014, university faculty have come under increasing pressure to tailor what they say and teach from the right and the left. Threats to academic freedom from within the academy come largely from the left, however, as academia has become more and more uniformly left-leaning in outlook.* - *A 2022 anonymous survey of university professors by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) found that half of respondents considered Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) statements to be political litmus tests. Ideological minorities on campuses (moderates and conservatives) agree at higher rates.* - *About a quarter of tenured or tenure-track professors in another survey said that it was appropriate to use DEI statements for ideological screening. Experiments with DEI statements that didn't discuss racial and gender diversity were penalized. More than a third of faculty evaluating a diversity statement advocating greater socioeconomic diversity recommended not advancing such a candidate. A majority of faculty advocated culling applicants with a DEI statement supporting greater viewpoint diversity.* - *A "conformity gauntlet" confronts would-be scientists:* - *High school students must avoid discipline or expulsion for violating speech codes.* - *Many college applications require students to do a DEI statement.* - *Once in college, students must negotiate an atmosphere of ideological uniformity among students, including some institutions with administrative "bias response teams" that encourage students to report on one another for impermissible speech* - *Graduate applications often require DEI statements.* - *Faculty often fear being reported and disciplined by administrators for what they say in the classroom. In one survey, 91 percent of faculty member say they self-censor, in comparison with only 9 percent of social science faculty members who said so during the McCarthy era.* - *Tenure provides less protection for faculty than it used to. Even the American Association of University Professors had advocated a more constraints on academic freedom.* - *Academic journals like Nature and Human Behavior have articulated a commitment not to publish findings which they consider could "harm" certain groups.* ***Barro, "Universities are Not on the Level"*** - *Public confidence in colleges has fallen across all ideological groups since 2015. There are good reasons for this: these institutions are increasingly dishonest.* - *Much university research doesn't aim at the truth but is politicized or slanted for more egotistical motives* - *Social justice messaging is often insincere* - *Their public accounting for internal decisions is often implausible* - *They lie about the role of race in admissions and hiring practices* - *They sometimes (especially at the graduate level) confer degrees that are not worth investing in* - *The "replication crisis" in psychology, or the failure of published results to stand up to independent testing, resulted from poor incentives:* - *counterintuitive findings are more likely to be rewarded with publication, and marginally statistically significant findings were often cherry-picked for emphasis; sometimes, data was simply faked* - *studies did not "pre-register" findings* - *scholars were not expected to share their raw data or analytical procedures with others* - *Universities have been slow to punish research dishonesty.* - *Findings of plagiarism by Harvard's president, Claudine Gay, are defended publicly with references to her identity (she is a black woman) when undergraduates could be expelled for the same conduct* - *Historical conclusions based on no evidence at all are defended on grounds of their alleged political helpfulness* - *These cases make it seem like "a lot of what's happening at universities isn't really research---it's social activism dressed up as research, which need not be of good quality as long as it has the right ideological goals"* - *University administrators may often be the ones pushing trendy but questionable scholarship, and departments must go along or risk forfeiting hiring in their disciplines* - *Tyler Harper says some humanities departments whose enrollments are in decline may try to "sell" students on the "unfounded hope" that the humanities will make them more effective activists* - *During the COVID epidemic, many subject-matter experts (like public health experts) used the guise of expertise to impose their values and policy preferences on the public* - *Affirmative action in admission is dishonestly sold as not being about an institution's demographic balance, when everyone knows that this is exactly what it is for.* - *Top university presidents had a hard time defending free speech in academia in Congressional testimony because they have such a biased track record on this issue* - *Universities need to do some introspection about why they have lost public confidence.*