Morality Guest Lecture Flashcards
Theoretical perspective:
- Arguments that morality is linked to the evolution of cooperation (be it group hunting, caretaking, etc etc)
- to cooperate safely, humans need mechanisms to
- distinguish friends from foes (social evaluation)
- influence others’ social behaviours (inclusion/exclusion;rewar/punishment)
- because humans are the most cooperative species on earth (e.g., Tomasello, 2009) we should also be
the most evaluative and the most retributive
Basic Methodology: Helper/Hinderer Puppet Shows
hill (reach hilltop/fall steep)
ball(obtain object/someone elese has it)
box(obtain object/in box,cant lift lid
result
babies everytime prefered pro-social behaviour
Maybe low-level perceptual cues?
Infants prefer:
- prefer victims then harmer
- protectors to non-protectors
- fair to unfair distributors
Why? Aversion to antisocial, attraction toprosocial, or both? (Hill)
10 months
prefer helper vs harmer
prefer helper then nutral(not helping or harming) - very small difference
prefer nultral then harmer - very big difference
Infants’ Social Preferences…WHY?
- A third-party judgment: Infants do not stand to (immediately) gain or lose from these actions
- Still many possibilities for what babies
attending to: - lowest-level account: something is inherent to the stimuli, not a social judgment at all
- maybe infants just prefer pushing up to pushing down, ball-leaving to ball-taking, or box-opening to box-closing
Maybe low-level perceptual cues?
Infants don’t prefer agentive actors who perform similar acts on inanimate objects
Maybe any action that facilities an agent’s path of movement?
Or, about helpful/unhelpful nature of those acts?
Study 1: Prevent some babies from inferring goal, examine choice
1/2 babies: eyes fixed;
gazes uphill:
Clear, though
unfulfilled goal
1/2 babies: eyes unfixed;
gazes downhill:
unclear goal
Maybe any action that facilities an agent’s path of movement?
Or, about helpful/unhelpful nature of those acts?
Study 2: Do individual differences in goal inference predict choice?
- Under some circumstances, infants visually anticipate agents’ goals
from ~6 months - Thought to reflect robust goal understanding
- 5-month-olds, cartoon hill, brief familiarization (= babies young, &
we made it hard)
result: babies only like helpers when they understanding what they need help with (what their goal is)
Seems to be social, and about protagonist’s unfulfilled goals
But a social preference for helpers need not reflect anything like a moral preference for helpers
alterism or for selfish help for the future(the helper might help me)
One important facet of moral judgment:
Intentions v. Outcomes
Two parts of each action that babies could be evaluating in studies to date:
* The outcome for the protagonist
* The intention of the helper/hinderer
* Adults use both, but privilege intention
* Kids notoriously bad at privileging
intention for moral judgment (e.g., Piaget,
1929 & dozens more)
* But, infants appear to focus on intentions in
other situations…
- 3 cases: Failed Attempts to help/harm,
Accidental Help/Harm, Ignorant help/harm
Intention/outcome distinction case 2: Failed Attempts
3 comparison types:
intent differs, same outcomes
intent pitted against outcome
same intent, different outcome
result
outcomes same with different intentions:prefered intension (good)
outcomes same but different intention:prefered intention
failed help vs failed hinder : prefered intention
intention both good- prefer outcome
intention both bad - prefered outcome
accidental
they prefered
the intended helper vs the accidental helper
they also prefered the accidental harmer then the intended harmer
Is it always good to intentionally facilitate goals?
- Adults sometimes see intentional goal-blocking as good
- e.g., bad/dangerous goals
- e.g., punishment for bad behavior
- Punishment is a human universal (with X-cultural
differences); theorized to stabilize cooperative systems