w4 - Moral Frontiers Flashcards
What is a moral bottleneck ?
This is the tension between our resource need (human rights) and our moral sensitivity (non-human rights)
What was the importance of the river in New Zealand and it’s legal representation?
Whanganui River became the first in the world to be considered a legal person.
How is one way in which we resolve the meat-paradox?
We down play the conscious experience (mental lives) of animals to which allows us to justifiably consume them.
- less intellegence = greater edibility
limit to moral sensitivity
What is an appetitive factor ?
Our sensitivity to the rights and needs of non-humans is limited by our appetite for resources
limit to moral convictions
How can money moderate moral convictions?
People who were seen as less likely to benifit from mining reported more of a moral conviction against mining than those who did benifit
What is the meat-paradox and what is it an example of ?
This is an example of a moral bottle neck.
- Meat is an good source of protein for humans (resource need)
- People find animal suffering offensive, disturbing, disruptive to meat eating habbits (non-human rights)
conflict between behaviour and attitude
Meat-paradox becoming stronger
What is the idea of the expanding moral circle?
Moral boundries extending to places that would have once been forign
What is moral expansiveness ?
Refers to the bredth of entities deemed worthy of moral treatment
Define biophilia?
- The tendency of humans to focus on life and lifetaking processes.
- A complex of learning rules that trigger a variety of emotional reactions to animals,
- A selective attentiveness to other forms of life, nether positive or negative
What is the Biophilia Hypothesis ?
That the human mind may be wired to think differently about animals than inanimate objects; part of the brain has evolved to specialise in processing information about animals
What drives identification with animals?
Similarity.
- important predictor of intergroup relations
- important for predicting reactions to animal suffuring
What is Moral Vitalism ?
The duel belief that:
- Good and evil exist
- Good and evil are capable of causing moral and immoral events
What does a moral vitalism scale (MVS) correlate with
- Religiosity
- Right w authoritarianism
- Structure
Weak correlations
Is religous thinking negatively correlated with intellegence ?
No. But it is negatively correlated with analytic thinking.
Analytic thinking is also negatively correlated with MVS
What predicts moral vitalism?
Historical disease prevalence explains almost 50% of the variance in moral vitalism
- Controling for: religious, poltical orientation, moral foundations, GDP
