LESSON 6: THE SOCIAL STRUCTURE OF MORAL KNOWING

The Bias Effect

What is a Bias?
● Definition of bias
o An inclination or preference that influences judgement from being balanced or
even-handed. Prejudice is bias in the derogatory sense
● Bias, in itself, is not necessarily wrong or bad. All human being are biased because we
are limited by our moral horizons

The Problem of Bias

● Bias is (1) a limitation of human finitude, (2) the limitations of error, of failing to ask all
the relevant questions in order to make accurate judgements (bias limits us in the
questions we ask about a situation)

Different Types of Bias

● THREE different types of bias that block human flourishing:

1 - Individual Focuses on egoism (key theme Situations are exploited for personal
bias is self-interest) interest.
2 - Group bias Focus on group or team This becomes problematic when we are
brainwashed into our group and blindly
following it without thinking critically
about what actions are being promoted.

Holding onto former ideas that are no

3 - General bias Tends to set common sense
against science and philosophy
longer useful because it is difficult to
change or not adapting to change
because of group cohesiveness.
Insufficient concern for long-term
problems and the ease with which we
conform to current ways of doing
things. The motto here might be: “Short
term gain, long term loss.”

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Overcoming Bias
THREE forms of conversion in overcoming bias
● Introduction
o Moral horizons both enable us to be attentive to situations and events that are
ethically problematic, but also limit our being able to recognize or even notice a
problem
1- Intellectual conversion: overcoming bias
o Realizing that what is true requires ensuring our insights into experience are
accurate (easy to fall back on myths rather than discover the truth)
o Intellectual conversion requires that we remain vigilant to a tendency to not ask
all the relevant questions
2- Moral conversion: choosing value over satisfaction
o Has to do with harmony between knowing and doing. It has to do with changing
the criterion of one’s choices from that of satisfaction to value
3- Religious conversion: a shift in our focus
o A shift from focusing only on the realities of our finite world to attending as well
to matter of ultimate meaning and value
o It is deeper and longer-range perspective on the worth of our world and our
actions in it

Role of Feelings
Feelings
● Feelings have a positive role to play in making moral decisions. It is not always easy to
understand the positive role because our feelings can be ambiguous. Not all feelings have
moral import (some might lead us to the opposite direction to what is truly valuable)
o Example: the feeling an addict experiences cannot always be trusted
o Example: anger in the face of injustice

Scale of Values
How do feelings respond to values?
● Vital Values
o These express the most basic or fundamental values, that is, the value of life itself.
One’s concern here is survival
o Maintaining one’s health is preferred to avoid the effort and cost of maintain them
● Social Values
o Humans desire to order their world. Social values shape the social order, the
political order, etc..
o The concern is with survival of a whole society (result: social value of caring for
the environment conditions the vital values of a whole community)
● Cultural Values

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 o These values are concerned with the meaning of our lives
o Life is more than survival and human beings communicate meaning through art,
drama, education, etc.
o Cultural values are the backdrop through which meanings are discovered and
developed or criticized and corrected
● Personal Values
o Vital values are driven by biological necessity
o Social and cultural values are mostly inherited
o With personal values, the human becomes the originating value within
community. Humans have the capacity for self-transcendence. We have the
capacity to go beyond ourselves to affirm something about our world (note: no
longer mimicking what others have told us)
o With personal values, we either consciously are with what we have learned and
inherited or we critique it and decide for something different. We impact others at
the level of personal values, because our own conviction about what we consider
good promotes others to also realise these values
● Religious Values
o Values that lie at the heart of the meaning and value of our living and our world,
because our desire is unrestricted (satisfaction with ultimate meaning and value)

Scale of Values: How Values Emerge Naturally

● In the movie “Castaway” a person is stranded on a deserted island after a plane crash.
The film portrays the process that the person goes through from meeting his initial needs
of water and food (vital values), to beginning to order things around him (social values)
and creating a meaningful environment through writing and art (cultural values)

Scale of Values as a Guide

● The scale of values guides us in reflecting on the values that are operative at different
levels when considering a difficult ethical issue like genetic testing for late onset
diseases.
o On one side - One is faced with the potential good such as improving the
prediction of diseases, understanding why or how diseases are hereditary, getting
to the root causes of diseases
o On the other side - One is also faced with potential harms in relation to genetic
testing for late onset diseases
● Centrality of feelings in moral consciousness  the heart of moral education is the
discriminating process of enriched/refined feelings

Levels of the Good

Idea that the good operates on different levels.

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 1- Good, something that satisfies an individual desire or personal interest
2- Good, accountability to a wider social order that transcends personal desires (desires
conflict so there needs to be a higher frame of reference to make judgements of values)
3- Good, here it calls for a critical evaluation of the social orders themselves

What is Freedom?
Freedom is…
Two different ways of thinking about freedom:
Freedom from domination  negative idea of freedom
Freedom as Self-determination  a positive act (our freedom grows as our capacity to
understand, judge and decide what the right thing to do is)
This positive meaning of freedom leads us to an important distinction between:
Essential Freedom: the capacity to exercise a determinate control over our actions through
the operations of moral meaning
Effective Freedom: the limits of that capacity

Freedom and Determinism

● Autonomy is possible through individual’s insertion into a community
● Autonomy is realized only through and in a community of others. It is the condition of
freedom for an individual
● There are constraints to an individual’s autonomy because of his/her attachment to a
community of others

Ideas have a Destiny

Consider the following statement from the French poet and novelist, Victor Hugo: “Nothing
else in the world . . . not all the armies . . . is so powerful as an idea whose time has come.”
● This statement has often been paraphrased as: "Nothing is as powerful as an idea whose
time has come.”

Two observations about Hugo's statement:

● There is a sense of destiny about ideas.
● As though ideas have a destiny independent of those who think them.
● Hugo speaks about the power of an idea. An idea is irreducible to the manipulation or

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 control of any individual or group. Yet, there is an enigma here.

On the one hand, an insight (or an idea) appears to have a 'life of its own' independent of a
person who has the insight. It appears this way because a person cannot force an insight to
emerge. Rather, a person can only set up the conditions necessary for the insight to emerge.

On the other hand, insights do not emerge independent of those who think them.

The tensions between faith and reason and between free will and determinism
● We are beginning to see that the two poles work together. It is faith and reason, free will
and determinism. Human beings grow and develop through the tension between
limitation (determinism) and creativity (freedom).

Moral Knowing
What Kind of Knowledge is Moral Knowledge?
● Moral knowledge – it is not a quality of rightness or wrongness as if that existed
independent of actions or independent of persons.
● Moral knowledge is not an add on as if it is something added on to other aspects of
human living.

The Forms of our Living

Melchin describes moral knowledge this way:
1) All human actions initiate a direction of change. Moral knowledge is grasping what
the direction of change is. Moral knowledge does not grasp some facts or features of a
static situation, rather, it grasps a dynamism, a direction of events that unfolds from
human action.

To know something is wrong is to understand how it gets in the way of human progress or
flourishing and, rather, brings some form of decline or deterioration in human living.

2) Every situation in our life involves “relations among events”. It involves the contexts
of the situation, the intentions of those involved, the consequences of the actions of each
person and the goals and objectives of the social structure itself. Moral knowledge grasps
how all these aspects are interrelated.

When Melchin indicates that moral knowledge is relational he means it has to do with
understanding the relations among all the different factors. This is not the same as saying
that moral knowledge is relative.

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 3) Moral knowledge always aims at understanding what enriches our living together
and what destroys it.
"Historically, ethical reflection arose as a response to problems in social living which
could not be resolved with the tools at hand. The great ethical controversies were debates
about problems, which were straining the fabric of social life and threatening social
breakdown...For people from all quarters to live together requires the greatest vigilance,
the closest attention to the forms of our living. This attention is the work of ethics, and its
results are the strategies for the most comprehensive and durable forms of living with
other people." (Melchin, Living with Other People, 42-43)

What is ethical relativism?

● Ethical relativism: the claim that when two people from different perspectives or
cultures try to understand the same moral situation, they will attain different results and
that these differences cannot be reconciled within a common evaluative framework

And what is the difference between ethical relativism and moral knowledge as relational?
● There is moral objectivity and it is to be discovered in the relations among the various
elements of the moral experience

Concrete Living
How does Moral Knowing Work in Our Lives?
● We first have concrete insights into a specific problem or concern and from that,
principles or general theories are developed. This is how we learn ethics in our lives.
● We move from concrete insights into particular experiences to principles and deeper,
more complex insights, etc. which link with other diverse experiences.
o Our concrete insights build on one another and skill at moral deliberation grows
(as our moral knowledge grows/develop, we are growing and developing as
persons)

Aspects of Moral Foundations

FIVE Steps in Exploring Aspects of Moral Foundations
1- The foundation of moral knowledge is the people performing the operations of insight,
judgement and decision
o To truly learn moral knowledge, we must get the insights ourselves
o Theories are heuristic (it means that theories point us in the direct where
discoveries can be found)
o Moral knowledge is only moral when it is linked to a person
2- The two-fold thrust of moral action

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 o As society influences our capacity, our individual actions also influence our
capacity
o Moral action has a double thrust: (1) concrete issue we are dealing with here and
now, (2) shaping of our moral character
3- There is a link between the social and the individual in relation to morality
o Social forces work through our own operations of understanding, decision (my
actions have an impact on others)
4- Freedom
o TWO ways of thinking about freedom (1) freedom from domination – negative,
(2) freedom as Self-determination – positive
o Link between freedom and capacity to perform acts of moral meaning (freedom
grows as capacity to understand
5- Given this understanding, what are our moral obligations?
o THREE components to fundamental moral obligations
a- Obligated to take responsibility for developing ourselves as moral persons
b- Obligate to participate in reinforcing/developing virtuous patters of social
identity

Social Structures are “Linked Stages of Acts of Meaning”

● Melchin indicated that social structures are “linkages among acts of meaning”
o Example: The physical structures of a house: if we think of physical structures
like a house, what is it made of? What holds it together? Houses are made of a lot
of different building materials (e.g., lumber, concrete, drywall…) Houses are
made of these materials plus much more. They are made up of and held together
by all these materials
● The Social Structures of Acts of Meaning
o Social structures are made of “material” (act of meaning) that are held together
through linkages.
o All social structures can be broken down into linked stages of acts of meaning
(e.g., a computer)
o An example they give on the ppt is a University (check slide 29)

Revisiting the THREE Levels of the Good

Meaning of the word “good” Level or horizon of meaning Attitude toward social
structures

Good = satisfaction Personal interest or desire Social structures as means to

personal fulfilment

Good = harmony Interpersonal order or social Social structures are stable.

structure Concerned for personal

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 welfare becomes inseparable
from other social concerns

Good = value The longer dynamic of Social structures have

historical progress and become destructive,
decline therefore requiring social
critic