IDS 108-08Reasoning about reasoning

October 17, 2008

Announcements

• Reading assignment:– Predictably Irrational: Chapters 1 and 2.

• Assignment: write a draft of an e-mail directed to Professor X in Department Y to inquire about their major. Send that draft to me by email.

Something Fun

• Count the number of passes the white team makes in this basketball video.

• Pay close attention: it’s tricky.• The first pass starts as soon as the play

button is clicked.• Not everybody does well in this task, even

though it seems pretty simple.• Count the number of passes the white

team makes, remember.

“Trying to Learn”by Lydia Davis

I am trying to learn that this playful man who teases me is the same as that serious man talking money to me so seriously he does not even see me anymore and that patient man offering me advice in times of trouble and that angry man slamming the door as he leaves the house. I have often wanted the playful man to be more serious, and the serious man to be less serious, and the patient man to be more playful.

As for the angry man, he is a stranger to me and I do not feel it is wrong to hate him. Now I am learning that if I say bitter words to the angry man as he leaves the house, I am at the same time wounding the others, the ones I do not want to wound, the playful man teasing, the serious man talking money, and the patient man offering advice. Yet I look at the patient man, for instance, whom I would want above all to protect from such bitter words as mine, and though I tell myself he is the same man as the others, I can only believe I said those words, not to him, but to another, my enemy, who deserved all my anger.

Character

• Character: from the Greek charaktêr, which was used to refer to a mark impressed upon a coin.

• Specifically in relation to ethics and morality, what does character mean today?

• Examples of sentences using the word character:– My aunt is a woman of great character: she will

always fight for justice.– He would never do such a thing: he is a man of

character.

• In politics, character is mentioned quite a bit.

Virtue and Vice

• A virtue is a personal characteristic that promotes individual and collective well-being.

• A vice is the opposite of a virtue.• The Greeks thought there were four

cardinal virtues: justice, courage, wisdom, and moderation.

• Faith, hope, and charity are virtues in Judaic, Christian, and Muslim traditions.

Ethics and Morality

• Ethics: refers to questions about human flourishing, about what it means for a life to be well lived.

• Morality: refers to constraints that govern how we should and should not treat each other.

Virtue Ethics

• Central concept: the virtuous person.• Virtuous act: one that a virtuous person would

do, done for the reasons a virtuous person would do it.

• Central question of VE: In all manner of circumstances, what is the right way to behave?

• The Answer: You should act like a virtuous person would.

• Virtuous behavior is the behavior of people with good character.

Basic theory of VE

1. The right thing to do is what a virtuous person would do in the circumstances.

2. A virtuous person is one who has and exercises the virtues.

3. A virtue is a character trait that a person needs in order to live a good life.

Observations about VE

• The rightness of actions is dependent upon the goodness of lives and the content of good character.

• VE urges us to find out what we must be like to live well first, and then decide what to do on any particular occasion by deciding what a virtuous person would do.

• A virtuous person is supposed to respond consistently across many different situations.

The Challenge to Character

• Is character consistent?

• Situationists: “not really.”

• Situationism emerges as the result of a large body of research in social psychology.

• It says that character is a bit of an illusion: people who behave well in some contexts behave badly in others.

Exhibit A

• Hartshorne and May studied ten thousand American children. (1920)

• They gave these children opportunities to lie, cheat, and steal in various situations.

• Deceit was a function of situations!

Exhibit B

• Isen and Levin found that when you dropped your papers outside a phone booth in a shopping mall, you were far more likely to be helped by people if they had just had the good luck of finding a dime in the phone’s coin-return slot. (1970)

Exhibit C

• Darley and Batson discovered that Princeton seminary students, even those who had just been reflecting on the Gospel account of the Good Samaritan, were much less likely to stop to help someone “slumped in a doorway, apparently in some sort of distress,” if they’d been told that they were late for an appointment. (1971)

Exhibit D

• Recently, Baron and Thomley showed that you were more likely to get change for a dollar outside a fragrant bakery shop than standing near a “neutral-smelling dry-goods store.”

Conclusions

• Huge differences in behavior flow from differences in circumstances that seem irrelevant.

• Putting the dime in the slot in that shopping-mall phone raised the proportion of those who helped pick up the papers from 1 out of 25 to 6 out of 7!

• Seminarians in a hurry were one sixth as likely to stop and act like a Good Samaritan!

Skepticism about Character?

• Research also suggests you will go on ascribing good character to people who do good things and bad character to people who do bad things, anyway.

Question

• Remember the helpful people who picked up your papers after getting a free dime?

• What would the answer be if you asked them: “Why did you help me?”

• We just never hear: “I helped you because I was feeling cheerful because I got a dime.”

What’s going on?

• Our rationale for not mentioning these things (like dimes) is that they don’t seem relevant.

• Ask people why they do something and they will give you a reason for doing it.

• We are very good at coming up with justifications for what we do.

What do we do?

• Experiments like these can help us:– Think about how to manage our lives.– Become better people.

• Situationism directs us to focus on social institutions.

• Gil Harman: “Put less emphasis on moral education and on building character and more emphasis on trying to arrange social institutions so that human beings are not placed in situations in which they will act badly.”

On a Personal Level

• Big Question: What can you learn from this?

• Can you identify: – Situations in which you thrive?– Situations that bring out in you the “angry

man” (or woman) of Lydia Davis’ story?– Situations (over which you have control) that

help you be a better student?– Situations that help you live a better life?

Larger Question

• What do you make of all of this?

• Surely, there must be something to this idea that people have character, no?

• If you think so, how do you make sense of all this variation in human behavior from situation to situation?

• Or perhaps you buy completely into situationism?

Foreshadowing

• More experiments.• We will choose which experiments to

perform on SSC students!• Suggestions about how to change our

social institutions to accommodate for the insights of these experiments.

• The idea is to create situations that help people (on average) behave in better ways.