The Trolley Method of Moral Philosophy

2012 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 243-256 ◽  
Author(s):  
James O’Connor ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Moral Reasoning ◽  
Human Behavior ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Trolley Problems ◽  
Trolley Cases

The hypothetical scenarios generally known as trolley problems have become widespread in recent moral philosophy. They invariably require an agent to choose one of a strictly limited number of options, all of them bad. Although they don’t always involve trolleys / trams, and are used to make a wide variety of points, what makes it justified to speak of a distinctive “trolley method” is the characteristic assumption that the intuitive reactions that all these artificial situations elicit constitute an appropriate guide to real-life moral reasoning. I dispute this assumption by arguing that trolley cases inevitably constrain the supposed rescuers into behaving in ways that clearly deviate from psychologically healthy, and morally defensible, human behavior. Through this focus on a generally overlooked aspect of trolley theorizing – namely, the highly impoverished role invariably allotted to the would-be rescuer in these scenarios – I aim to challenge the complacent twin assumptions of advocates of the trolley method that this approach to moral reasoning has practical value, and is in any case innocuous. Neither assumption is true.

Stupid Goodness

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Garrett Cullity
Keyword(s):  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Paradise Lost ◽  
Real Life ◽  
The Way

In Paradise Lost, Satan’s first sight of Eve in Eden renders him “Stupidly good”: his state is one of admirable yet inarticulate responsiveness to reasons. Turning from fiction to real life, this chapter argues that stupid goodness is an important moral phenomenon, but one that has limits. The chapter examines three questions about the relation between having a reason and saying what it is—between normativity and articulacy. Is it possible to have and respond to morally relevant reasons without being able to articulate them? Can moral inarticulacy be good, and if so, what is the value of moral articulacy? And, thirdly, can moral philosophy help us to be good? The chapter argues that morality has an inarticulacy-accepting part, an articulacy-encouraging part, an articulacy-surpassing part, and an articulacy-discouraging part. Along the way, an account is proposed of what it is to respond to the reasons that make up the substance of morality.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Subramanian Rangan
Keyword(s):  
Moral Reasoning ◽  
Economic System ◽  
Market Power ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Economic Paradigm ◽  
Modern Economic ◽  
Great Output

Our quest for prosperity has produced great output (i.e. performance) but not always great outcomes (i.e. progress). Despite mounting regulation when it comes to fairness, well-being, and the scope of our humanity, the modern economic system still leaves much to be desired. If practice is to evolve substantively and systematically, then we must help evolve an economic paradigm where mutuality is more systematically complemented by morality. The bases of this morality must rest, beyond the sympathetic sentiments envisaged by Adam Smith, on an expanded and intentional moral reasoning. Moral philosophy has a natural role in informing and influencing such a turn in our thinking, especially when education is the preferred vehicle of transformation. Indeed, rather than just regulate market power we must also better educate market power.

scholarly journals A Deeper Look at Autonomous Vehicle Ethics: An Integrative Ethical Decision-Making Framework to Explain Moral Pluralism

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jimin Rhim ◽  
Ji-Hyun Lee ◽  
Mo Chen ◽  
Angelica Lim
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Moral Reasoning ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Ethical Decision ◽  
Ethical Decision Making ◽  
Autonomous Vehicle ◽  
Moral Dilemma ◽  
Individual Factors ◽  
Ethical Decisions ◽  
Ethical Behavioral Intentions

The autonomous vehicle (AV) is one of the first commercialized AI-embedded robots to make autonomous decisions. Despite technological advancements, unavoidable AV accidents that result in life-and-death consequences cannot be completely eliminated. The emerging social concern of how an AV should make ethical decisions during unavoidable accidents is referred to as the moral dilemma of AV, which has promoted heated discussions among various stakeholders. However, there are research gaps in explainable AV ethical decision-making processes that predict how AVs’ moral behaviors are made that are acceptable from the AV users’ perspectives. This study addresses the key question: What factors affect ethical behavioral intentions in the AV moral dilemma? To answer this question, this study draws theories from multidisciplinary research fields to propose the “Integrative ethical decision-making framework for the AV moral dilemma.” The framework includes four interdependent ethical decision-making stages: AV moral dilemma issue framing, intuitive moral reasoning, rational moral reasoning, and ethical behavioral intention making. Further, the framework includes variables (e.g., perceived moral intensity, individual factors, and personal moral philosophies) that influence the ethical decision-making process. For instance, the framework explains that AV users from Eastern cultures will tend to endorse a situationist ethics position (high idealism and high relativism), which views that ethical decisions are relative to context, compared to AV users from Western cultures. This proposition is derived from the link between individual factors and personal moral philosophy. Moreover, the framework proposes a dual-process theory, which explains that both intuitive and rational moral reasoning are integral processes of ethical decision-making during the AV moral dilemma. Further, this framework describes that ethical behavioral intentions that lead to decisions in the AV moral dilemma are not fixed, but are based on how an individual perceives the seriousness of the situation, which is shaped by their personal moral philosophy. This framework provides a step-by-step explanation of how pluralistic ethical decision-making occurs, reducing the abstractness of AV moral reasoning processes.

Tragical Pathos

2020 ◽  
pp. 179-218
Author(s):  
Paul M. Blowers
Keyword(s):  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Moral Vision ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
Greco Roman ◽  
Moral Intelligence ◽  
Fear Of God ◽  
Hellenistic Philosophy

This chapter argues that the Christian “tragical conscience,” as described in the preceding chapter, was a conscience that demanded its own “cleansing” (catharsis) and clarified moral vision, which further relied on the cultivation, psychologically and existentially, of a whole panoply of tragical emotions that enriched Christian response to real-life tragedies. The assessment here of the development of a Christian “tragical pathos” draws from Martha Nussbaum’s work on the “moral intelligence” of emotions in Hellenistic philosophy and from Robert Kaster’s identification of “emotional scripts” in Greco-Roman moral philosophy and ethics. The bulk of this chapter is devoted to early Christian reworking or “re-scripting” of the classic (Aristotelian) tragical emotions of fear and pity, fear being relativized and recontextualized in relation to the superior fear of God, and pity reframed as empathetic mercy. Christian moralists, moreover, expanded the repertoire of “tragical” emotions beyond fear and pity, especially by encouraging a whole gamut of emotions of grief (lamentation, compunction, etc.) that were pivotal in Christian response to the tragic realities of sin, suffering, loss, and death.

scholarly journals Inferring Emotion Tags from Object Images Using Convolutional Neural Network

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (15) ◽  
pp. 5333
Author(s):  
Anam Manzoor ◽  
Waqar Ahmad ◽  
Muhammad Ehatisham-ul-Haq ◽  
Abdul Hannan ◽  
Muhammad Asif Khan ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Neural Network ◽  
Convolutional Neural Network ◽  
Human Behavior ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Vital Role ◽  
Object Categories ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Gender Based ◽  
High Level ◽  
Human Behavior Analysis

Emotions are a fundamental part of human behavior and can be stimulated in numerous ways. In real-life, we come across different types of objects such as cake, crab, television, trees, etc., in our routine life, which may excite certain emotions. Likewise, object images that we see and share on different platforms are also capable of expressing or inducing human emotions. Inferring emotion tags from these object images has great significance as it can play a vital role in recommendation systems, image retrieval, human behavior analysis and, advertisement applications. The existing schemes for emotion tag perception are based on the visual features, like color and texture of an image, which are poorly affected by lightning conditions. The main objective of our proposed study is to address this problem by introducing a novel idea of inferring emotion tags from the images based on object-related features. In this aspect, we first created an emotion-tagged dataset from the publicly available object detection dataset (i.e., “Caltech-256”) using subject evaluation from 212 users. Next, we used a convolutional neural network-based model to automatically extract the high-level features from object images for recognizing nine (09) emotion categories, such as amusement, awe, anger, boredom, contentment, disgust, excitement, fear, and sadness. Experimental results on our emotion-tagged dataset endorse the success of our proposed idea in terms of accuracy, precision, recall, specificity, and F1-score. Overall, the proposed scheme achieved an accuracy rate of approximately 85% and 79% using top-level and bottom-level emotion tagging, respectively. We also performed a gender-based analysis for inferring emotion tags and observed that male and female subjects have discernment in emotions perception concerning different object categories.

scholarly journals Concept, Possibilities and Pilot-Testing of a New Smartphone Application for the Social and Life Sciences to Study Human Behavior Including Validation Data from Personality Psychology

J ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 102-115 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian Montag ◽  
Harald Baumeister ◽  
Christopher Kannen ◽  
Rayna Sariyska ◽  
Eva-Maria Meßner ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Internet Of Things ◽  
Human Behavior ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Smartphone Application ◽  
Self Report ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Validation Data ◽  
Personality Psychology ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Internet Of Things

With the advent of the World Wide Web, the smartphone and the Internet of Things, not only society but also the sciences are rapidly changing. In particular, the social sciences can profit from these digital developments, because now scientists have the power to study real-life human behavior via smartphones and other devices connected to the Internet of Things on a large-scale level. Although this sounds easy, scientists often face the problem that no practicable solution exists to participate in such a new scientific movement, due to a lack of an interdisciplinary network. If so, the development time of a new product, such as a smartphone application to get insights into human behavior takes an enormous amount of time and resources. Given this problem, the present work presents an easy way to use a smartphone application, which can be applied by social scientists to study a large range of scientific questions. The application provides measurements of variables via tracking smartphone–use patterns, such as call behavior, application use (e.g., social media), GPS and many others. In addition, the presented Android-based smartphone application, called Insights, can also be used to administer self-report questionnaires for conducting experience sampling and to search for co-variations between smartphone usage/smartphone data and self-report data. Of importance, the present work gives a detailed overview on how to conduct a study using an application such as Insights, starting from designing the study, installing the application to analyzing the data. In the present work, server requirements and privacy issues are also discussed. Furthermore, first validation data from personality psychology are presented. Such validation data are important in establishing trust in the applied technology to track behavior. In sum, the aim of the present work is (i) to provide interested scientists a short overview on how to conduct a study with smartphone app tracking technology, (ii) to present the features of the designed smartphone application and (iii) to demonstrate its validity with a proof of concept study, hence correlating smartphone usage with personality measures.

Women, Morality, and Fiction

Hypatia ◽  
1990 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 76-90
Author(s):  
Jenefer Robinson ◽  
Stephanie Ross
Keyword(s):  
Moral Reasoning ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Martha Nussbaum ◽  
Moral Concern

We apply Carol Gilligaris distinction between a “male” mode of moral reasoning, focussed on justice, and a “female” mode, focussed on caring, to the reading of literature. Martha Nussbaum suggests that certain novels are works of moral philosophy. We argue that what Nussbaum sees as the special ethical contribution of such novels is in fact training in the stereotypically female mode of moral concern. We show this kind of training is appropriate to all readers of these novels, not just to women. Finally, we explore what else is involved in distinctively feminist readings of traditional novels.

Beyond Caring: The De-Moralization of Gender

1987 ◽  
Vol 13 ◽  
pp. 87-110 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marilyn Friedman
Keyword(s):  
Moral Reasoning ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Moral Language ◽  
Carol Gilligan

Carol Gilligan heard a ‘distinct moral language’ in the voices of women who were subjects in her studies of moral reasoning. Though herself a developmental psychologist, Gilligan has put her mark on contemporary feminist moral philosophy by daring to claim the competence of this voice and the worth of its message. Her book, In a Different Voice, which one theorist has aptly described as a best-seller, explored the concern with care and relationships which Gilligan discerned in the moral reasoning of women and contrasted it with the orientation toward justice and rights which she found to typify the moral reasoning of men.

scholarly journals Between Real World and Thought Experiment: Framing Moral Decision-Making in Self-Driving Car Dilemmas

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vanessa Schäffner
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Thought Experiment ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Moral Decision ◽  
Moral Decision Making ◽  
Business World ◽  
Autonomous Cars ◽  
On The Road ◽  
Self Driving Cars ◽  
Trolley Cases

AbstractHow should driverless vehicles respond to situations of unavoidable personal harm? This paper takes up the case of self-driving cars as a prominent example of algorithmic moral decision-making, an emergent type of morality that is evolving at a high pace in a digitised business world. As its main contribution, it juxtaposes dilemma decision situations relating to ethical crash algorithms for autonomous cars to two edge cases: the case of manually driven cars facing real-life, mundane accidents, on the one hand, and the dilemmatic situation in theoretically constructed trolley cases, on the other. The paper identifies analogies and disanalogies between the three cases with regard to decision makers, decision design, and decision outcomes. The findings are discussed from the angle of three perspectives: aspects where analogies could be found, those where the case of self-driving cars has turned out to lie in between both edge cases, and those where it entirely departs from either edge case. As a main result, the paper argues that manual driving as well as trolley cases are suitable points of reference for the issue of designing ethical crash algorithms only to a limited extent. Instead, a fundamental epistemic and conceptual divergence of dilemma decision situations in the context of self-driving cars and the used edge cases is substantiated. Finally, the areas of specific need for regulation on the road to introducing autonomous cars are pointed out and related thoughts are sketched through the lens of the humanistic paradigm.

Digital Footprints of Sensation Seeking

2018 ◽  
Vol 226 (4) ◽  
pp. 232-245 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ramona Schoedel ◽  
Quay Au ◽  
Sarah Theres Völkel ◽  
Florian Lehmann ◽  
Daniela Becker ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Human Behavior ◽  
Sensation Seeking ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Digital Data ◽  
Data Logging ◽  
Behavioral Correlates ◽  
Personality Research ◽  
Conventional Behavior ◽  
Digital Footprints

Abstract. The increasing usage of new technologies implies changes for personality research. First, human behavior becomes measurable by digital data, and second, digital manifestations to some extent replace conventional behavior in the analog world. This offers the opportunity to investigate personality traits by means of digital footprints. In this context, the investigation of the personality trait sensation seeking attracted our attention as objective behavioral correlates have been missing so far. By collecting behavioral markers (e.g., communication or app usage) via Android smartphones, we examined whether self-reported sensation seeking scores can be reliably predicted. Overall, 260 subjects participated in our 30-day real-life data logging study. Using a machine learning approach, we evaluated cross-validated model fit based on how accurate sensation seeking scores can be predicted in unseen samples. Our findings highlight the potential of mobile sensing techniques in personality research and show exemplarily how prediction approaches can help to foster an increased understanding of human behavior.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document