[HN Gopher] Ethicists' Courtesy at Philosophy Conferences (2011)
___________________________________________________________________
Ethicists' Courtesy at Philosophy Conferences (2011)
Author : benbreen
Score : 26 points
Date : 2021-09-04 06:07 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.tandfonline.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.tandfonline.com)
| pessimizer wrote:
| Everything Schwitzgebel writes is worth reading:
| http://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/
|
| including his blog, _The Splintered Mind_ :
| https://schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com/
|
| I got into him because of his thoughts on conscious experience
| and introspection, such as _Why Did We Think We Dreamed in Black
| and White?_ and _How Well Do We Know Our Own Conscious
| Experience: The Case of Human Echolocation._ He ended up getting
| me (indirectly) into Mozi.
| elliekelly wrote:
| > If philosophical moral reflection tends to promote moral
| behavior, one might think that professional ethicists would
| behave morally better than do socially comparable non-ethicists.
| We examined three types of courteous and discourteous behavior at
| American Philosophical Association conferences: talking audibly
| while the speaker is talking (versus remaining silent), allowing
| the door to slam shut while entering or exiting mid-session
| (versus attempting to close the door quietly), and leaving behind
| clutter at the end of a session (versus leaving one's seat tidy).
|
| It seems like there's a pretty big logical leap conflating "moral
| behavior" with "courteous behavior". All of the behaviors
| measured could indicate someone is absent-minded, lacks social
| awareness, or is perhaps rude. But they all could just be honest
| mistakes. Moral (or amoral) behavior, I would think, requires
| intent.
|
| Sometimes you think a door will slowly close quietly and instead
| it slams. Such is life. I don't think it's fair or honest to use
| these behaviors as a proxy for morality.
| MCllorf wrote:
| >"Moral (or amoral) behavior, I would think, requires intent."
|
| That itself is not something all ethicists would agree with.
| Finally, my bachelor's in philosophy comes in handy.
|
| I don't understand the point in even writing an article like
| this because it's impossible to begin without staking out your
| moral positions, and at that point 99% of the work is just
| writing a philosophy paper. I don't think you can even say that
| most philosophers would agree that moral reflection promotes
| moral behavior, because you'd have to get them all to agree on
| what moral behavior is - or in other words, you'd have to solve
| the problem the field has been trying to solve for the entirety
| of its existence.
| toast0 wrote:
| > I don't think you can even say that most philosophers would
| agree that moral reflection promotes moral behavior, because
| you'd have to get them all to agree on what moral behavior is
| - or in other words, you'd have to solve the problem the
| field has been trying to solve for the entirety of its
| existence.
|
| I don't have the philosophy creds, but I don't think you
| really need to agree on what's moral behavior to think that
| thinking about it may promote behavior inline with the moral
| framework of the contemplator, whatever that happens to be.
| Or if the behavior didn't change, perhaps the contemplator
| wasn't really reflecting on morals after all.
| MCllorf wrote:
| It does make sense to use "whatever the contemplator thinks
| to be moral" as a stand-in for moral behavior. My only quip
| would be that whatever the contemplator thinks to be moral
| and what actually is moral are not necessarily the same
| thing though. I suppose in that case the study would just
| be asking if ethicists follow their own rules - I've been
| out of college for a bit but I don't think common courtesy
| is a hot topic in ethics at the moment.
| pessimizer wrote:
| That's how Schwitzgebel would see it:
| http://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzAbs/ActBel.htm
|
| _Acting Contrary to Our Professed Beliefs, or The Gulf
| Between Occurrent Judgment and Dispositional Belief_
| whack wrote:
| This is a hilarious study that lends some support to something
| I've often found frustrating in the moral-philosophy community.
| People spend so much time nitpicking at moral theories, that they
| often don't advocate for a theory that they themselves actually
| believe in. In fact, an alarming number of moral philosophers
| don't even believe in objective morality, even when it comes to
| extreme behaviors such as murder.
|
| Ask an average person about how they make moral decisions, and
| you'll get a jumble of inconsistent beliefs centered around
| appeal-to-authority and gut feelings. Ask a moral philosopher
| about how they make moral decisions, and you'll hear 5 different
| interpretations from 5 different moral theories, and no advocacy
| for which one is correct. Hardly surprising then that they feel
| lost and nihilistic in their own day-to-day lives.
| billsmithaustin wrote:
| I read the offenders were a rogue group of moral relativists.
| They said under the circumstances they did nothing wrong.
| ISL wrote:
| A suggested article linked at the bottom has an even catchier
| abstract:
| https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/095150809034099...
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-09-05 23:02 UTC)