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On 2016-08-20 15:14, William Flynn Wallace wrote:<br>
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<div class="gmail_default">Did I act morally? Questionable,
certainly. But given the situation beforehand I don't think
that I would have predicted that I'd act like I did. Far
from it. He really got me angry. Being angry and
combative, or fearful like in combat, can veto all the
ethics you learned from Aristotle or just by thinking for
year and years.</div>
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<br>
Aristotle would point out that a courageous man is a man that does
not let the fear (or anger) get the better of him: whether he
consciously remember ethics lectures is not interesting, what
matters is what he does and that he does it well. And that he learns
from the experience.<br>
<br>
Now, one reason virtue ethics is not super-popular is that it
actually doesn't give much advice on what you ought to be doing
while being courageous. The courageous gang member or soldier in the
evil overlord's army may be just as courageous as the knight or
policeman, yet do very different things (there are various saves in
the virtue ethics literature, of course).<br>
<br>
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<div class="gmail_default">You remember the Kitty Genovese
story? It's about a woman who was killed on a city street
while others watched and did nothing, not even call the
police. Psych students told that story said that they would
have done something, but many repetitions of that done in
experiments on city streets with hidden cameras show that
extremely few people do anything to help.</div>
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<div class="gmail_default">If a man was sprawled on a street
would you assume he was drunk and pass on by? Just about
everybody does.</div>
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<br>
I remember the lecture about the bystander effect in Psych 101. It
brought up the Genovese case (which incidentally has been retold so
often that it no longer looks like the original event - your version
is more extreme than most). The professor also pointed out that we
were now all thinking that we would resist the effect since we knew
about it, but he explained how he - an expert on this effect - had
been equally paralyzed when a guy got a heart attack at a bus stop.
I think he cited some of the psych student studies too.<br>
<br>
Then he did something useful: he explained how to avoid the effect.
If you are the victim, point at somebody and say "You in the green
shirt. Help me/call 911/..." This breaks the symmetry and not only
gets the appointed one to act, but tends to get the rest of the
bystanders to help. (There are also other symmetry breakers, like
being part of a caring profession - they also find that they "must"
help). <br>
<br>
Note that this is all about applied psychology, which is really what
you want to use to do applied ethics. Theoretical ethics is more
interesting to philosophers, but real ethics is more of a branch of
psychology and sociology. Which is actually the main point of
Aristotle!<br>
<br>
(Yup, I am totally an Aristotle fanboy. Despite the guy being wrong
about 90% of everything :-)<br>
<br>
<br>
<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
Dr Anders Sandberg
Future of Humanity Institute
Oxford Martin School
Oxford University</pre>
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