I'd like to

welcome people to Moralities for Everyday

Life.
What I want to do in this short lecture is
first introduce
myself and have the teaching assistant for
the course introduce herself.
And then talk about what we'll be doing.
Talk about the procedures.
Talk about the evaluation.
And then, maybe the most interesting part
is the lectture.
We'll be talking about the course itself.
What topics we'll cover, what areas we'll
be looking at,
and why you should even be thinking about
taking it.
So, my name's Paul Bloom.
I'm a Professor of Psychology and
Cognitive Science at Yale University.
I was born in Montreal, Canada.
I was an undergraduate at McGill
University,
and did my doctorate degree at MIT.
And now I live in New Haven, Connecticut
with my wife,
my two teenage sons, and my dog Tessie,
who is a greyhound.
It was an old greyhound and may not
survive the course, but we're hoping.
My research is, focuses on different
areas,
including the science of pleasure, of
religion
and especially morality, and I do
scientific
experiments that get written up in
scientific journals.
But I also am interested in presenting the
fruits of this
research and the fruits of other people's
research to a broad audience.
So, I, I publish articles in popular
magazines, and I also write books.
I want to introduce now the
teaching assistant for the course,
Christine [UNKNOWN]
Hi, I'm Christina Starmans.
I'll be the teaching assistant for this
course.
I am a fifth year graduate student here at
Yale and I was also born in Canada in
Toronto.
And I did my undergraduate at the
University of
Waterloo there in both psychology and
philosophy And then I
spent a year at New York University
working on psychology research
with babies, looking at how they come to
understand language and communication.
So here at Yale I do research with young
children
and adults, looking at our intuitions
about bodies and minds.
And in particular what our intuitions are
about the self, or the soul.
And I'm looking forward to getting started
on this course.
Thank
you.
So, a lot of what this course will be,
will be lectures.
Lectures like this one except we'll be
talking about different issues and
different questions.
If you, if the sound of my voice drives
you crazy, this might not be the course
for you.
The sound of my voice makes you quiver in
happiness.
This is a great course.
Most of you will be somewhere in between.
But there'll be lectures.
There'll be readings.
The readings are all going to be available
on line.
They are all free.
They are all freely accessible.
They're all chosen to be interesting and
informative and up to date.
And and, and just I think some of the best
work in the field.
So the readings are an exciting part of
the course.
Some of the readings aren't actually
going to be readings.
What I mean by this is some of the
material we'll be assigned to look at will
be video, and so at several points I'll
assign TED talks for instance for people
to watch,
and this will be part of the understanding
we'll
need to get To go forward in this course.
There's also an optional book which is
highly recommended.
This is my own book Just Babies.
And what this book does is it covers the
areas of this course,
in more detail.
It goes over all the same topics I'll be
talking
about and we'll be reading about and, and,
and discussing.
But just to a greater extent with more
examples and more citations and a deeper
discussion.
So I, I, although it's not compulsory, I
do highly urge people to get a copy.
I, I am the writer of the book.
I do have a bit of a vested interest and
so I
hope you forgive me when I also suggest
that you buy copies
for your friends and family.
In addition, we'll have office hours.
Now, we don't know how big this course
will be.
As I'm taping this course has not yet
begun.
It could be tens of thousands.
It will be tens of thousands, we know
already.
Could be hundreds of thousands, So, we
can't be in a
situation where everybody gets a chance to
talk and meet at once.
But there are ways around this, and what
we've decided
to do for office hours - is that we're
going to invite
an end of a week of lectures, invite
people
to send us, via email,
questions, comments, counter-arguments,
discussion points.
And then, Christina Starmans and I will go
over and choose a representative sample,
focusing on some of the very best, and
very funniest, and very most interesting.
And then, we'll sit around and she'll ask
these questions to me.
She'll convey - Your questions and your
comments
and I'll respond and we'll have a
discussion
based on this and that will be the office
hours part of the course.
I'm planning to invite visitors.
I'm planning to invite some of the very
top researchers in the field.
Some people whose names you've heard of.
Some people who have had a, had a profound
influence to come visit us here.
And again we'll do the same thing.
We will talk to these visitors.
We will invite you to ask questions to the
visitors, and we will ask these questions
for you on your behalf.
And in this way you get to participate in
that, in that limited fashion.
In how the course progresses and hopefully
get answers to
some of the questions that might Arise
throughout the course.
A more direct way to participate is
discussions.
And we haven't entirely worked out the
details of this yet, but there
will be some opportunity, in fact
some requirement, that everybody engage in
discussion.
And we will have discussion boards set up
so that people
can engage in discussion and debate.
And for each time we do this, for each
discussion we set
up Both Christina Starmans the teaching
fellow and myself will get into this.
We will, we will participate in the
discussion, we
will add comments, make arguments, defend
ourselves and so on.
Finally, for evaluative purposes we have
quizzes and exams.
It'll be quizzes and either at the middle
or at the
end of each specific lecture.
And there will be exams at the end of each
week, and at the end of the course itself.
The exams will cover both the lectures as
well as all of the readings.
And they will be the basis for
your feedback, for your evaluation of the
course.
And also the existence of quizzes and
exams,um I think, help people focus on
things.
They help people.
Get feedback to as how well their persuing
things they motiavate people
to get interested in it so we're going to
try to
keep our quizzes and exams both
comprehensive but also interesting.
Okay so that's the sort of mechanics of
the course what's
the course about its primarily about moral
judgement and moral action.
And what I mean by this is, your judgment
as to the morality of
something, whether it's right or wrong,
follows your choices as to how to live
your life, living a, a, a moral life,
living an immoral life.
Put more generally, this course is about
good and
evil, and to illustrate In more detail
what I'm talking.
But I'll giving 3 short examples of the
sorts
of things we'll be looking at in this
course.
So one example is kindness, sometimes
called altruism or pro-social behavior.
As when,
with no obvious payoff, we're nice to
another individual.
Now.
I'm primarily a developmental psychologist
and a lot of
my examples are going to be with children,
so I'll give
you an example of this with children, and
this
is from the work of Felix Barnigan and
Michael Thomasello.
So they set up an experiment where you
have a toddler,
and the toddler's sitting in a room, and
then somebody needs help.
And the question is, without anybody
prompting the toddler.
What does the toddler do?
And I'll show you one of the videos from
their studies.
And I think it's a nice illustration of
human kindness.
[SOUND]
>> Oh!
Hmm.
[SOUND]
Oh!
Hmm.
>> There's
kindness, but
there's also cruelty.
There's evil.
There's viciousness.
There's no shortage of examples of this I
could give to you on bad behavior,
so I'll choose one sort of somewhat
strange I think, a little bit amusing,
example.
It's about something which happened
in London a couple of years ago.
So some guy loses his cat.
He can't find his cat.
And so he goes around, where's my cat?
And then, when taking out the garbage he
opens up the garbage
can, bin, in England, the garbage bin, and
sees his cat in there.
So how did the cat get in there?
Well, he goes, he somehow gets access to
the video cameras
that were on his street.
In London, if you know, there's a lot of
video cameras everywhere.
And he discovers this.
And I'll show you the video which he had
posted himself on Facebook, and then ended
up on YouTube.
Sooner or later they tracked down the
woman who tossed the cat away.
She's pursued and ultimately she's
questioned.
And she's asked, why did you do this?
And she gives all sorts of reasons.
She says, at one point she says, it was a
split second of madness.
I thought it would be funny.
And, it's just a cat.
And people were not pleased by these
excuses.
They were
not pleased by her behavior.
And she was attacked by the press.
And, the, then she needed police
protection, because people wanted
to kill her for throwing the cat in the
bin.
Now this is interesting, it, it's clear
enough why the
guy would be upset, the cat owner would be
upset.
It's clear enough why the cat would be
upset, but
why would strangers who had nothing to do
with this.
Why would they be enraged at what the
woman did?
They weren't involved.
They weren't harmed.
And I think this sort of incident tells us
something interesting about morality.
Which is that morality matters.
When I see something evil being done, even
if
I'm not involved in it, there's often a
punitive impulse.
There's an impulse that.
The perpetrator should be punished.
Justice should be done.
And the question of where that
comes from, how the system evolved.
How on the one hand do we have a
psychology built for
empathy and compassion and kindness, as in
that child helping the man.
And in another way have a psychology built
for justice, for
punishment, as in the case of the attacks
on this woman.
Where does this all come from?
And those are questions that occupy us.
We'll also be interested, and this is my
third example, in human differences.
Hundreds of years ago, in the state of
Conneticut in which I'm lecturing, people
owned slaves.
That is people owned other people.
They could do with them what they will.
Now, I'm sure most people now, people are
viewing this from all over
the world and, I would imagine very few of
you think slavery is right.
Very few of you think slavery is moral.
But hundreds of years
ago people did practice slavery.
And many people thought it wasn't wrong.
In fact, many people thought that slavery
was a
moral institution justified by the Bible,
justified by history.
Things have changed.
What can we say about the psychology of
the people
back then who thought so differently from
how we think?
And what can we say about the changes that
brought
us form then to now?
What is the proper explanation for
why our views about something like slavery
Have changed so radically over history.
And that is again one of the questions
we'll occu, that will occupy us in this
course.
Now moral differences aren't just a matter
of history.
They're not just a matter of then versus
now.
They're also a matter of clashes between
cultures.
I remember very vividly the tax on At
9/11,
where thousands of Americans were killed
in a terrorist attack.
I remember as well, more recently, the
jubilation that many of us felt
when the perpetrator of the attack, Osama
Bin Laden, was killed by American forces.
This is one view of things.
One view of things, the view which I
actually hold is
that the, the, the mass murder of
Americans was a horribly immoral act.
And the punishment however to punishment
or
murder of Bin Laden was a just
retribution.
But there are many people around the world
who see things very differently.
They might see that hack on America as a
just, reasonable, moral act and
the murder of Bin Laden as a cowardly
retaliation.
The people who orchestrated That hacks
9/11 were not by any standard insane.
They were not by any normal standard
psychopaths.
Rather, they were driven by a moral
vision.
Now, again, some moral vision eyes see as
grossly mistaken but
they see mind as grossly mistaken and at
the very minimum then
What we need to do as scientists
interested in morality is come
to grips with the fact that people have
such different moral views.
And understand why we have these moral
views, where they
come from, and possibly how we can deal
with these conflicts.
Now these are all examples of moral
differences between different societies
separated by time.
Or separated by space.
But we could also ask about moral
differences within a society.
So in the United States, there's huge
differences in how people
think about the morality of same sex
relationships of gay couples.
Many Americans Think that these are
perfectly moral relationships,
that gay couples should have a right to be
married, to have sex together, to raise
children together.
And that it is in fact morally unjust, a
crime, a sin,
to prohibit these individuals from living
the life they want to lead.
Many other Americans,
about anywhere from 40 to 50 to 60%,
depending
on how you count it, have moral
reservations about homosexuality.
Many Americans think homosexuality is just
plain morally wrong.
And many of them think that the idea of
gay marriage is a mistake.
It is a moral mistake.
It would be wrong to permit these people.
To do such things.
Again, the point of this course is not
trying to commit you to, this view is
right or that view or right.
That is just out of the bounds of what
we'll be doing here.
But we're very interested in, why do some
people
think this and why do some people think
that.
I think this is a question of, both,
great intellectual importance, and also
great practical importance.
And more generally I think, this course
will, will talk about specific
cases like that, but also deal with
foundational
issues, that, that I just find incredibly
interesting.
So one such foundational issue, is
attention between.
Moral reasoning.
Deliberative conscious thought, decision
making thinking things
through, the head, and your gut feelings.
Your compassion, your emotion, your love,
your disgust, your anger, your shame,
the heart.
And psychologists and philosophers along
with theologians
and legal scholars and many others Have
long tried to address the question of the
relative roles of reason and the emotion.
In how we le, lead our moral lives and how
we come to our moral ideas.
And that is going to be a central topic in
this course.
Even more generally than that, we will
address the tension between what
we en call humanistic views.
Our humanistic conception of humanity.
Which deals with notions like free will.
That sees people as, as agents that can
make decisions.
That can be blamed, that can be praised,
that can be guilty.
That, that, that, that can warrant
punishment or warrant reward.
A view that might see us as almost as
spiritual beings.
Not reducible to the physical
or, or mechanistic world.
Beings with, be beings with souls.
Creatures capable not only of wrongness,
but also capable of sin.
You have that and you have that humanistic
view.
And then you have a scientific view.
And a scientific view tries to explain our
natures in terms of the language of
neuroscience, the language of neurons and
dendrites,
and the limbic system, and the frontal
lobe.
The language of genes, talks about
environmental ques, talks about the
effects of
parenting, the effects of, of, of
one's physical, and social, and emotional
environment.
And the question that will occupy us that
has occupied me for as,
as long as I could remember, is can we
reconcile these two views.
Can we say both that humans are physical
things, our actions determined by our
neurons by our brains.
By our genes and by our environment.
No less determined than actions of a
billiard ball or any other physical
object.
Can we say that, and also say that people
make choices.
And that people should be blamed for their
choices or praised for their choices.
That people
are moral creatures more than anything
else on this planet.
Can we reconcile the humanist perspective
on us in a scientific perspective?
And that's something that we'll be
struggling with throughout this course.
So, why would you want to take this
course?
Well, I think there are at least three
reasons.
One reason is the topics are just
fascinating.
I, Again, I'm, I'm admittedly biased, but
who isn't interested
in the question of why do some people
become violent psychopaths.
Who isn't really interested in questions
of how are liberals Different from
conservatives.
How are the fundamentalists different from
atheists?
How are they better people?
Are they worse people?
What's the evidence?
This course will cover, it will cover sex.
It will cover politics.
It will cover religion and I think these
questions are just inherently fascinating.
A second reason to take the course is
that, as we talk
about these issues of morality, we will be
discussing, and reading, and
learning about different domains of both
the sciences and the humanities.
So a lot of the basis for this work will
come from psychology.
And we will read and talk about social
psychology,
developmental psychology, clinical
psychology, neuroscience
as well as other domains.
And then often we'll go beyond that.
We'll talk about evolutionary theory,
philosophy, behavioral economics,
anthropology, literature, theology.
And so one way to see this course,
even aside from the issues of morality, as
a convenient way to get a
very high level introduction to the most
fundamental sciences of human nature.
The third reason to take the course, and
I'm raising this maybe most tenatively.
Is that it might make us better people.
I am under no illusion that after having
read about
the studies of morality and read the
developmental work and anthropology and
neuroscience, that will
then be particularly well equipped to say
oh
now I know that's right and that's wrong.
Now I know what to think about
immigration,
gay marriage, torture, capital punishment
taxes and so on.
I, I think people will take this course
and end up having
very different views, maybe the same views
that they started with, but I
do think that understanding where moral
views come from, and understanding where
moral behavior and immoral behavior come
from will help us look.
At other people in a more sympathetic way.
Will help us look at other people and get
more
of an understanding of what they're up to
and why.
It doesn't mean that we'll end up liking
them.
It certainly doesn't mean we'll end up
agreeing with them, or approving of them.
But,
I think understanding them more has
nothing but positive benefits.
I also think that turning things inwards
that, that coming
to a better understanding of why we
ourselves make moral decisions.
So, that why where my own moral views come
from.
Why I think this is right and this is
wrong.
Why my politics is this and my religion is
that And my belief about charity is this.
Why I believe these things, I think
that understanding where these beliefs and
behaviors
come from will actually help us in a
better way improve on our moral lives.
I mean I'll end this brief introduction
with by,
by choosing a passage quoted in one of our
readings.
For next lecture, and it's from Anton
Chekhov, and Chekhov suggests, and
I think he's right.
He suggests that man will
become better when you show him what he is
like, and this
course is all about what all of us, men
and women, are like.
I'll see you at the
next lecture.
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