PHLA11H3 Lecture Notes - Lecture 20: Harm Avoidance, Ultimatum Game, Incest
Document Summary
Last lecture: the voice of conscience can represent bad morality (huck finn) conflicting with human feelings of empathy/sympathy, pure emotivism doesn"t work, how to reconcile the subjective and objective aspects of moral judgments: the model of colour. In humans, this is modulated by beliefs about whether the pain is deserved, empathy is impeded by hostile feelings. Reasoning belongs to track 2: the mind"s second track involves language; it is slow, methodical, and precise, but. Motivationally weak": (hume: reason is and ought to be the slave of the passions") Justification" searches for reasons, and sometimes just makes them up: this is confabulation" and affects many sorts of cases: it will likely consist in what people think is a plausible reason. The brain is like a good lawyer: given any set of interests to defend, it sets about convincing the world [and itself]" (h&b, quoting wright) This semester he is in charge of scheduling discussions about academic issues.
