The Importance of Moral Reasoning

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I think that the role of these philosophical papers might just be to exploit more like the motivated reasoning angle where, look, I show you images of animals being tortured, and then I give you the singer argument. You can actually get people to feel things about a whole variety of actions that may or may not be reasonable to feel. So there is this, it's a wrong view of human nature to think that we can just give some sort of cogent reasons and expect that people are going to be changed. And so you need that second part like that. They're not just having sex. They eat the shit. They pour it out like ice cream. And they have to take drugs.

Dave and Tamler try their best to do a show without guests--we talk about moral persuasion, motivated reasoning, and whether it's legitimate to use emotionally charged rhetoric in a philosophical argument. Plus, we describe how students proceed through the "Stages-of-Singer," and Tamler finally defends himself against Dave's slanderous accusation of hypocrisy about animal welfare.

Links

Thomson, J. J. (1971). A defense of abortion. Philosophy & Public Affairs,1, 47-66.

Marquis, D. (1989). Why abortion is immoral. The Journal of Philosophy, 86(4), 183-202.

Ditto, P. H., & Lopez, D. F. (1992). Motivated skepticism: Use of differential decision criteria for preferred and nonpreferred conclusions. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 63 (4), 568.

Ditto, P.H., Pizarro, D.A., & Tannenbaum, D. (2009). Motivated Moral Reasoning. In B. H. Ross (Series Ed.) & D. M. Bartels, C. W. Bauman, L. J. Skitka, & D. L. Medin (Eds.), Psychology of Learning and Motivation, Vol. 50: Moral Judgment and Decision Making. San Diego, CA: Academic Press.

Dawson, E., Gilovich, T., & Regan, D. T. (2002). Motivated Reasoning and Performance on the Wason Selection Task. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 28, 1379-1387.

Sam's House, an orphanage in Nepal [sams-house.org]

The identifiable victim effect [wikipedia.org]

Tamler's mediocre TEDx talk on Moral Persuasion [youtube.com]

10 Classic South Park Impressions (including Sally Struthers) [youtube.com]

*musical breaks in this episode stolen from DJ Premier and Jay Electronica. Please don't sue.

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