Chapter Review: Between Facts and Norms: Ethics and Empirical Moral Psychology

Humans idolize, suffer, rejoice, kill and die in the name of morality. We are a hypersocial species -- nearly everything we do involves other people. So it's not surprising that the rules governing our interactions -- what we owe to one another and how we ought to treat transgressors -- occupy a prime spot in the human psyche.  Benjamin Voyer and Tor Tarantola, editors, Moral Psychology: A Multidisciplinary Guide, page 1 

For most of its history, philosophical moral psychology has been in bad shape. People were asking the right questions, but their methods were questionable; rampant speculation was revised in light of pure guesswork; guesswork had to be amended on the account of arbitrary superstition; superstition was corrected by flimsy moralizing, and the whole thing was rounded off by a healthy dose of wishful thinking. Philosophical theories of human nature had to state how human beings ought to be, rather than how they actually are. .... It is not a good idea, generally speaking, to speculate about the nature of the moral mind without systematically investigating how the mind works. Why philosophers failed to appreciate this rather obvious truth is something I can only speculate about myself.  Hanno Sauer, Moral Psychology: A Multidisciplinary Guide, page 3

Context

Current hypotheses about how the human brain-mind works when dealing with politics posits that we do not do logic much, but instead we reason. Reasoning can include some logic, but is usually far more influenced by psychological and social factors including morals, beliefs, ideology, religion, self and tribe identity, innate and learned biases such as motivated reasoning, social context, sex, race, language, life experiences and so forth. Most reasoning is unconscious and the conscious mind defends what little we do become consciously aware of. Conscious reasoning did not evolve to find truth or logic. It evolved to defend what the unconscious mind believes. Reasoning is what can lead some people to believe the Earth is flat, climate science is a hoax, aliens control our minds and vaccines do not prevent or treat infections, but instead cause mental illness and disease.

Some researchers now believe that morals are central to people's political beliefs and behaviors. Emotions and feelings are deeply entwined with reasoning and they shape what we think we see and think, even when perceptions are false and thinking is flawed. For the most part, most humans are not mostly rational creatures. Most, maybe about 98%, are much more intuitive, emotional, moral and social creatures than mostly rational or logical ones. That is what we are from our evolutionary heritage.

If one accepts that as basically accurate, it raises the question of whether moral truths exist, what they are if they do exist, and how one can find them, assuming they can be found.

Chapter Review

The first chapter of the 2017 book, Moral Psychology: A Multidisciplinary Guide, is entitled Between Facts and Norms: Ethics and Empirical Moral Psychology, (edited by Benjamin Voyer and Tor Tarantola). Chapter 1 tries to pin down whether there are moral truths and what the state of modern science is in the quest for moral truth. Chapter 1 was written by Hanno Sauer, a philosopher at Utrecht University in the Netherlands.

This book was published a year after S. M Liao's excellent book, Moral Brains: The Neuroscience of Morality, which I reviewed here. Like Moral Brains, Moral Psychology integrates philosophy with modern empirical science on morality and where we stand in terms of trying to do empirical science on human morality.

Also like Moral Brains, Moral Psychology is an academic book and not easy for a lay audience to understand. It is intended to breach the siloes that researchers in different disciplines tend to be stuck in, e.g., sociology, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, anthropology, psychology, analytic philosophy, etc. This book attempts to familiarize scientists in different areas of research on morality about the progress and technical language that related disciplines routinely employ.

This line of research strikes me as one of the most complicated and subtle endeavors that humans can undertake. It still isn't clear whether humans will ever be able to figure morals out or find moral truths that are more or less universal. This chapter summarizes the approaches that scientists have employed to try to understand morals and moral thinking.

Sauer's chapter focuses on what he calls the gap. The gap is what separates philosophical accounts or theories of what moral judgment is and what empirical science understands we are. We just cannot get from what is (what we are) to what ought to be (what a true moral values says we should be).[1] Sauer concedes that some modern philosophers now believe that research on morality is doomed to fail because no one has ever been able to convincingly state how anyone can get from what we are to what we ought to be. Philosophers are skeptical that empirical evidence of what we are reveals moral truths. Neuroscientist Sam Harris argued in his 2010 book, The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values, that science will eventually be able to find universal moral values. Harris has been ferociously attacked for his belief and the thinness of the supporting data he relied on.

Due to the complexity of his brief (18 pages) but dense summary of where the science was as of 2017, I will try to explain just two points that Sauer raises. I hope these give a glimpse of just how complex and tricky research on human morality is.

Point 1 - free will 

Research from the 1980s found that humans make decisions in laboratory experiments unconsciously before we become consciously aware that we made the decision. We operate under an illusion that we consciously make decisions at the instant we become aware of it. We decide things about 0.4 to about 10 seconds before conscious awareness. That research has been repeated and verified dozens of times. It is no longer questioned. That led many experts to conclude that humans have little or no free will, if one defines free will as something that the conscious mind controls.

The moral implications of that were huge. The argument is that since we lack free will, we cannot be morally responsible for our bad acts. Thus, punishments for crimes arguably are misplaced because criminals have no moral culpability for their bad acts. Empirical evidence shows that people who do not believe in free will are more aggressive and tend to cheat and lie more than other people.

Other research indicated that (1) we often do not understand why we make moral decisions, and (2) often make up reasons that in fact have no logic connection with the decision. That also supports the idea that we don't have much or any free will. Sauer comments that "people can have a sense of agency [moral control] when their agency couldn't possibly have made a difference and are more than happy to come up with reasons for their actions that couldn't possibly have a role in what they did."

Despite the empirical evidence that looks solid on its face, deeper thinking about this questions the 'no free will' interpretation of the data. The timing experiments only show when a decision was made, but not what the decision was. Also, the lab decisions were trivial, e.g., push a button or not. More consequential decisions are often accompanied by some conscious thinking about what to do before doing it. Some evidence supports the idea that in the time between an unconscious decision and a conscious action on it, the conscious mind can veto what the unconscious mind decided. Sauer says that we may have some conscious control, indicating that we have some free will: "An unfree will may not be so hard to swallow if we have at least a free unwill."

Point 2 - evolution

Some experts have argued that evolution dictates what is moral and what isn't. For the most part, we evolved to try to avoid pain, punish bad acts and cheaters, care for family, reciprocate favors and so forth. Therefore, those evolutionary traits define universal moral truths. That sounds reasonable. But is it?

Sauer says no: "Evolutionary pressures select for traits which are adaptive; but unlike in the nonmoral case, where false beliefs can get you killed, moral beliefs don't have to be true to allow you (and your genes) to survive." In other words, it would be pure chance if our moral beliefs coincided with objective moral truths. Evolution shapes how we make moral judgments, but moral judgments have no necessary connection to their objective truth. That's the gap again.

On top of that problem, there's modern society and technology to consider. Our moral mindsets evolved in very different times under very different conditions: "Our intuitive morality has been shaped to meet the demands of stable, intimate, small-scale tribal groups in the Pleistocene (starting about 2.6 million years ago and lasting until about 11,700 years ago). We are ill-equipped to deal with environments very unlike this one -- namely, the one we currently happen to live in."

Conclusion

This area of research is in its infancy. Researchers are just beginning to integrate information flowing from different disciplines into an understanding from which better informed theories of moral truth can flow. There is one point that Saure makes and I have been harping on for years. We both assert that it is necessary for people to have a better understanding of themselves and the human mind or condition. If we are self-aware, we can at least hope to tamp down some of the reality and reason distorting biases and heuristics[2] our minds use to simplify the wold into something we believe we understand, true, false, ambiguous or mixed. Sauer argues that we can do that if "we know how, why, when and under what conditions they operate." Those biases include our moral beliefs and a host of other psychological factors.

Sauer concludes with this:

"In fact, we have no way of knowing, in general, what causes our thoughts and desires, and our folk theories of how our thinking works are often hopelessly inadequate. Empirical research is essential for this reflexive purpose, and ignoring or dismissing it is reckless and foolish."

Footnote:
1. Candidates for moral truths include (1) not lying, not cheating and not stealing are good, (2) God says that X is good, or (3) that Y is good for society. Despite that, lots of people are liars, cheaters or thieves, and people cannot agree on what they believe God says is good or what is good for society. The property of being good cannot be reduced to other tangible properties or realities. An argument that discrimination against women and selfishness are good because women have always been discriminated against and we evolved to be selfish are not logically established due to the gap. What we are does not define what we should be.

2. This chart shows some of the biases and heuristics the human mind unconsciously uses to make the world understandable and acceptable. Those mental data processing operations tend to distort reality and reasoning whenever they contradict a person's mindset or beliefs, morals, self identity, tribe identity, etc. In essence, we distort reality and reasoning unconsciously and see a distorted reality that is better aligned with what our unconscious minds want to see.

The President's Latest Attack on the Press and Free Speech

On February 26, 2020, the president filed a defamation lawsuit against the New York Times in New York state court. The complaint asks for various forms of compensation including "compensatory damages in the millions of dollars, according to proof; presumed damages according to proof; and punitive damages according to proof." The eight page complaint is here.

This is how the complaint describes the defamatory content the NYT alleged in an opinion piece that the NYT published on March 27, 2019:

On or about March 27, 2019, The Times published an article by Max Frankel entitled “The Real Trump-Russia Quid Pro Quo” (the “Defamatory Article”), which claims, among other things, that “There was no need for detailed electoral collusion between the Trump campaign and Vladimir Putin’s oligarchy because they had an overarching deal: the quid of help in the campaign against Hillary Clinton for the quo of a new pro-Russian foreign policy, starting with relief from the Obama administration’s burdensome economic sanctions. The Trumpites knew about the quid and held out the prospect of the quo.” On information and belief, The Times published the Defamatory Article in The Times’ print and online editions. 

The legal standard was established by the Supreme Court in the 1964 case, New York Times Co. v. Sullivan. The Sullivan decision held that if a plaintiff in a defamation lawsuit is a public official or person running for public office, he or she must (1) prove normal defamation, i.e., publication of a false defamatory statement to a third party, and (2) prove that the statement was made with actual malice. Actual malice requires a proof that the defendant either knew the statement was false or recklessly disregarded whether or not it was true.

Legal experts dismiss the president's lawsuit as nonsense and not close to the legal standard needed for defamation of a public person such as the president. One expert writing for the Washington Post commented:

"On Wednesday, Donald Trump became the first sitting president ever to file a defamation lawsuit against a news organization. The lawsuit against the New York Times is almost certainly dead on arrival in the courts, but it exemplifies the threat the Trump presidency poses to First Amendment values and freedom of the press. 

Frankel cited published news reports about the Trump campaign’s interactions with Russians, including the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting and former national security adviser Michael Flynn’s guilty plea for lying about whether he discussed sanctions relief with the Russian ambassador during the transition. Based on these and other “known facts,” Frankel expressed his view on what he called the “real” deal between the Trump campaign and Russia.  

As the Supreme Court declared in its landmark 1964 decision in New York Times Company v. Sullivan, the First Amendment embodies our 'profound national commitment to the principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide-open, and that it may well include vehement, caustic, and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks on government and public officials.'"

It isn't clear at all to me that this lawsuit is frivolous. The Supreme Court created the Sullivan standard and the Supreme Court can reverse itself in any later case. The reversal can be a 5-4 decision even thought the original Sullivan decision was a unanimous 9-0 vote. All the president needs is five supreme court votes to make Sullivan go away.

If that happens, the president will still need to prove that the NYT was negligent in making a defamatory statement. A defense against such a proof is truth. Thus, if the NYT could try to prove there was an unspoken quid pro quo using the circumstantial evidence available to the public and whatever they could dredge up in discovery if the case goes that far. On his side, the president has plausible deniability, which is a powerful and usually effective shield for liars, white collar criminals and politicians in hot water.

To win here, even if he loses, all the president needs to do is get rid of the Sullivan standard. If that happens, it will go a long way toward muzzling the press. When Trump calls the press the enemy of the people, he means it literally. The president very much wants to shut the press up and have radical right sources like Fox News, Sinclair Broadcasting, Breitbart, Rush Limbaugh and InfoWars established as the new standard bearers of news for the American people.

With any luck, the courts, including the Supreme Court will view this lawsuit as frivolous and toss it out. But given the radical right extremism of the people that GOP presidents, Trump, the old GOP and the current Trump Party senators have put on the Supreme Court, all bets are off. It will take a couple of years for this lawsuit to get to the Supreme Court. Only then will we know if this is frivolous or not.

And, if Ginsberg has to retire or the president is re-elected in 2020, the odds of this being not frivolous goes up significantly.

Coronavirus Update: Looking More Concerning

In an OP I posted last week, I cited statistics from a New York Times article indicating that the death rate from coronavirus infections was about 0.4%, making it about four times more lethal than the flu virus. The same article mentioned earlier estimates that put the death rate at about 2.3% for all of China and about 2.9% for Hubei Province in China. I cited the 0.4% rate because the higher rates were due to Chinese medical facilities being overwhelmed and many mild cases being left uncounted.

With additional data coming in from other countries, it is starting to look like the lethality of the coronavirus maybe be closer to the 2.9% rate for China's Hubei Province. An article today in the NYT indicates that about 87,000 people in 60 countries have been infected and almost 3,000 people have died. If that death rate holds up over time, the virus would have a lethality rate of about 3.4%, making it 34 times more lethal than the flu virus.

The caveat with that possibility is the same as it was for the early infection rates calculated for China: Maybe a lot of mild cases are going undetected and are therefore not counted. If 10 mild infections go undetected for every diagnosed infection, that would reduce the lethality rate to about 0.34%, which is fairly close to the 0.4% rate cited in my OP last week. The US has not had the ability to test many people, so most infections here maybe be going undetected.

Today's NYT article comments on the uncertainty: "The first death from the infection was reported on Saturday: a man who lived near Seattle. A model produced by infectious disease experts hints that the coronavirus may already have infected up to 1,500 people in the area. .... Much remains unknown about the virus, including how many people may have very mild or asymptomatic infections, and whether they can transmit the virus. The precise dimensions of the outbreak are hard to know. .... Scientists don’t know how long the new coronavirus can live on surfaces, and preliminary research suggests that hot and humid environments may not slow down the pathogen’s spread. Warm weather does tend to inhibit influenza and milder coronaviruses. Infected people may be able to pass on the new coronavirus even if they have few obvious symptoms, a study in Germany has found. .... Symptoms of this infection include fever, cough and difficulty breathing or shortness of breath. The illness causes lung lesions and pneumonia. But milder cases may resemble the flu or a bad cold, making detection difficult. .... The best thing you can do to avoid getting infected is to follow the same general guidelines that experts recommend during flu season, because the coronavirus spreads in much the same way. Wash your hands frequently throughout the day. Avoid touching your face, and maintain a distance from anyone who is coughing or sneezing. .... At the moment, the risk of infection with the new coronavirus in the United States “is way too low for the general public to start wearing a face mask,” said Dr. Peter Rabinowitz, co-director of the University of Washington MetaCenter for Pandemic Preparedness and Global Health Security."

Some genetic testing of the virus in Washington State indicates that the virus has been spreading for several weeks without being detected. The point of all that is to point out that there still is uncertainty about infections and the rate of lethality. Over time more data will come in and more testing will be done.

It is not time to panic. All regular people can do is watch this carefully and take advice from real experts, but not Trump or Pence. They are ignorant.

Tyranny of the Minority: Voting in the Primary, or Maybe Not

My candidate Mayor Pete dropped out yesterday, as we all know. I voted for him a week or so ago, but reluctantly predicted I would probably wind up voting for an old white guy. At least that prediction seems to still be on track. Looks like my Mayor Pete vote went down in flames.

A disgruntled primary voter who hasn't voted yet (actual photo of real person)

Once again, the fine people of the states of IA, NH, NV and SC got to eliminate everyone else's choice before their state officially votes. California votes tomorrow, on Dipstick Tuesday, so I almost got to vote for someone still in the race. In essence, those folks led me to vote for a ghost and thus exert zero influence. Guess that teaches me a lesson for voting early.

Anyway, I think I recall an analysis that said each primary vote in IA and NH is worth about 8-10 primary votes in other states. It's a form of tyranny of the minority. Other folks have made the same observation on the minority tyranny phenomenon in recent years. Between (1) various constitutional rots, e.g., in the form of the self-described Grim Reaper, Moscow Mitch McConnell,[1] (2) a recent sharp electoral college tilt in favor of the minority Trump Party, and (3) the IA, NH, NV and SC primaries, there are plenty of reasons to feel like one is being abused by a minority if one doesn't like the way things are going.

Of course, if one likes all of this, it is good times in MAGA!! land. LOCK HER UP!, LOCK HER UP!, LOCK HER UP!

I suppose it is out of bounds to ask for a different order of voting in the primaries, maybe a regional one that lets one of 5 or 6 regions or clusters of states go first on a rotating basis. Or, maybe there could a rotating batch of 3-4 states that go first, e.g., one large population state a middle pop state and 1-2 pipsqueaks. Yeah, I know. The pipsqueaks would howl in protest. Well what the heck. People in all other states are ignored now, so why not a few pipsqueak states after all the decades of IA, NH, NV and SC telling all of us what they want. I do not care what IA, NH, NV and SC want. I care what I want.

One thing for sure, I'll be writing a position paper for my little wannabe third party recommending that the party break completely free from official democratic and republican voting dates and set its primary vote date a few days or maybe a week before the nutty Iowa caucuses.


Footnote:
1. As of a couple of weeks ago, Moscow Mitch had 365 bills the House passed sitting in his in-box waiting to be shredded. Grim Reaper Mitch blithely comments, "We're not going to pass those." Ah, the wonder of politics. Trump and the Trump Party like to refer to the democrats as do nothings. I guess that shredding bills from the House constitutes doing something in the eyes of Trumplandia. We live in strange, constitutionally rotted, hypocrisy- and corruption-tinged times. If things keep going like this, these fine times are likely to morph into a constitutionally crisis-riddled time of the liar-kleptocrat-tyrant. That will make these tyranny of the minority times look like a golden age of freedom and semi-honest governance.

A disgruntled dog, upset at the tyranny of the minority

The Jobs Impact of a $25/Metric Ton Carbon Tax

Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology analyzed effects of the Green New Deal’s the US Green Party proposed about 3 years ago. Details of the plan were fed into the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s National Energy Modeling System. They analyzed effects of a $25 and a $60 tax on each metric ton (2204 lbs) of CO2 released into the environment. Among other things, the model projected that CO2 emissions would decrease, and the $25 tax would create more jobs than the $60 tax. This is reported in the March 2020 issue of Scientific American.

Most climate science deniers, the carbon energy sector and anti-government ideologues will probably reject the data as flawed, biased, fabricated or whatever else serves to either make it go away completely or to trivialize it into insignificance.

What Is an Internet Troll?

 and How to Handle Trolls

Internet trolls are people who want to provoke and upset others online for their own amusement. Here’s how to spot the signs that someone is a troll, and how to handle them.

What Are Internet Trolls?

If you’ve been on the internet for any period of time, you’ve likely run into a troll at some point. An internet troll is someone who makes intentionally inflammatory, rude, or upsetting statements online to elicit strong emotional responses in people or to steer the conversation off-topic. They can come in many forms. Most trolls do this for their own amusement, but other forms of trolling are done to push a specific agenda.

Trolls have existed in folklore and fantasy literature for centuries, but online trolling has been around for as long as the internet has existed. The earliest known usage of the term can be traced back to the 1990s on early online message boards. Back then, it was a way for users to confuse new members by repeatedly posting an inside joke. It’s since turned into a much more malicious activity.

Trolling is distinct from other forms of cyberbullying or harassment. It is normally not targeted towards any one person and relies on other people paying attention and becoming provoked. Trolling exists on many online platforms, from small private group chats to the biggest social media websites. Here’s a list of places online where you’re likely to see online trolls:

• Anonymous online forums: Places like Reddit, 4chan, and other anonymous message boards are prime real-estate for online trolls. Because there’s no way of tracing who someone is, trolls can post very inflammatory content without repercussion. This is especially true if the forum has lax or inactive moderation.
• Twitter: Twitter also has the option to be anonymous, and has become a hotbed for internet trolls. Frequent Twitter trolling methods involve hijacking popular hashtags and mentioning popular Twitter personalities to gain attention from their followers.
• Comment sections: The comment sections of places such as YouTube and news websites are also popular areas for trolls to feed. You’ll find a lot of obvious trolling here, and they frequently generate a lot of responses from angry readers or viewers.

You’ll find trolls anywhere online, including on Facebook and on online dating sites. They’re unfortunately pretty common.

Signs Someone Is Trolling

It can sometimes become difficult to tell the difference between a troll and someone who just genuinely wants to argue about a topic. However, here are a few tell-tale signs that someone is actively trolling.

• Off-topic remarks: Completely going off-topic from the subject at hand. This is done to annoy and disrupt other posters.
• Refusal to acknowledge evidence: Even when presented with hard, cold facts, they ignore this and pretend like they never saw it.
• Dismissive, condescending tone: An early indicator of a troll was that they would ask an angry responder, “Why you mad, bro?” This is a method done to provoke someone even more, as a way of dismissing their argument altogether.
• Use of unrelated images or memes: They reply to others with memes, images, and gifs. This is especially true if done in response to a very long text post.
• Seeming obliviousness: They seem oblivious that most people are in disagreement with them. Also, trolls rarely get mad or provoked.

The list above is by no means definitive. There are a lot of other ways to identify that someone is trolling. Generally, if someone seems disingenuous, uninterested in a real discussion, and provocative on purpose, they’re likely an internet troll.

How Should I Handle Them?

The most classic adage regarding trolling is, “Don’t feed the trolls.” Trolls seek out emotional responses and find provocation amusing, so replying to them or attempting to debate them will only make them troll more. By ignoring a troll completely, they will likely become frustrated and go somewhere else on the internet.

You should try your best not to take anything trolls say seriously. No matter how poorly they behave, remember these people spend countless unproductive hours trying to make people mad. They’re not worth your time of day.

If a troll becomes spammy or begins to clog up a thread, you can also opt to report them to the site’s moderation team. Depending on the website, there’s a chance nothing happens, but you should do your part to actively dissuade them from trolling on that platform. If your report is successful, the troll may be temporarily suspended or their account might be banned entirely.

https://www.howtogeek.com/465416/what-is-an-internet-troll-and-how-to-han