Lying is prima facie morally wrong. But most people are willing to acknowledge that it is sometimes OK to lie.

Cognitive Daily has an interesting post concerning a study designed to assess when teenagers think it's OK to lie. You might be amazed at what teenagers regard as permissible defeating circumstances. Here is the link to the article.

Why should philosopher professors be interested in this? First, the data is interesting. Second, it may come in handy if you ever talk about lying as a case of wrongness in intro or ethics. Third, it may tell us some interesting things about student/teacher relationships. Fourth, it should motivate us to be careful about how we argue with students when we argue that plagiarism is wrong.

Plagiarism
When most students are told about the evils of plagiarism, it's usually cashed out in terms of lying. We often do give students other reasons, but I bet that these other reasons don't always sink in. If the student has an overly permissive attitude as to when it's OK to lie - they will not be terribly moved by plagiarism-is-lying-arguments for the wrongness of plagiarism.

I've always suspected that this was true, which is why I like to stress other reasons for thinking that plagiarism is wrong. These reasons have little to do with lying, and I think these are more compelling reasons for why plagiarism is wrong.

One of the primary reasons I give for thinking that plagiarism is wrong is that it harms (or risks harm) to the other students. Word gets travels fast - particularly in the local area about how easy it is to get through the local college with a degree. The more plagiarism that happens, the more it devalues other student's degrees.

I like to give my students the following analogy. Imagine all of your classmates bought a $20,000 plot of land and you poured salt all over it. Plagiarism is like doing that. It pours salt over a degree and makes it worthless in the eyes of some potential employers.

So, an interesting result of the study is that perhaps it should move us to emphasize the wrongness of plagiarism that does not merely reduce the wrongness of plagiarism to the wrongness of lying.

(Aside: The other reason I like to emphasize the Harm-To-Other-Students argument over other reasons is it gives non-plagiarizing students a very reason to be angry about plagiarism at their school.)

Joshua Thurow is here for our second set of lectures in the Young Philosophers Lecture Series. He gave a great talk yesterday developing and defending BonJour's Generality Argument for the conclusion that we have some a priori knowledge.

Today he is giving an introductory level talk titled "Is Morality Real, or Do We Make it Up?" Both talks will be available at the website sometime next week.

A couple of really interesting issues came up in his research talk last night. I'll post about those soon.

ANNOUNCEMENT: Our call for papers for the Fall 2008 Young Philosophers Lecture Series is out! Deadline is August 15th. If you'd be interested in presenting in the Young Philosophers Lecture Series - check out the call for papers at www.youngphilosophers.org

I'm off to Chicago today for the Central APA. Assuming I have access to the internet, I'll post about some of the philosophy going on there.

I'm commenting on a paper by Matthew Pianalto called "Moral Realism and Ways of Life." He discusses an issue that Walter Sinnott-Armstrong raises for moral realism that's fun to think about. Here's the abstract for Matthew's Paper.

Moral Realism and Ways of Life (IV-K)
Matthew Pianalto (University of Arkansas)

This paper examines Walter Sinnott-Armstrong’s claim that a person’s commitment to a way of life is a relevant factor in deciding what it is true that the agent ought to do in a moral dilemma. Sinnott-Armstrong argues that his view shows that extreme universal moral realism, which claims that facts about the agent make no contribution to the truth of what an agent ought to do, is false. I use Sinnott-Armstrong’s as a starting point to consider how a different kind of moral realism can account for the relevance of ways of life, and argue that they can be regarded as “realistic factors” in moral deliberation because they are grounded in morally permissible commitments which serve to shape the agent’s perspective on his or her situation, rather then serving as additional reasons the agent weighs in his or her decision.

About a month ago, I posted about an article that presents some interesting experiments involving perception. You don't have to click that link...here's the relevant bit.

It turns out that there are many cases in which what people expect to see tricks them into thinking they saw it. For example, they had people watch someone throw two balls. The thrower then pretended to throw a third ball. Most people think they see a third ball that suddenly disappears in mid-air. They don't even realize that a third ball wasn't thrown. Their first thought is usually that the person somehow made the third ball disappear.

I started having some vague concerns about how these findings might impact recent attempts from in experimental philosophy to undermine the claim that intuitions can yield justified beliefs.

I decided that I need to start looking more closely at some of the experimental philosophy literature. In my search, I just discovered that Ethics Etc is doing a review of a new book out called Experiments in Ethics. Here's the review of chapter one, chapter two, and chapter three. This book has just been added to my to do list. (My summer is going to be great!)

I'm want to look into this more before I really start mouthing off, but here's my vague worry.

In the case of the experiment involving perception it seems that some mechanism stepped in and yielded a false perception. The existence of this mechanism isn't enough to show that perceptions are generally unreliable. I bet there are other experiments out there involving perception. I think they're going to be worth tracking down. They're going to be relevant to fleshing out precisely what experiments involving intuitions should tell us about the general reliability of intuitions.

Many of the experiments (that I've come across) attempting to show that intuitions are unreliable seem to involve certain kinds of priming. If you prime people with certain kinds of questions or set up the cases in which they have certain expectations or assumptions about the cases, they'll intuitions will vary. Set up the cases one way - they'll have an intuition that an action is wrong. Set it up another way - they'll have an intuition that an action is permissible.

The conclusion that some philosophers draw from these experiments is that intuitions are generally unreliable and cannot justify moral beliefs.

My suspicion (and it is merely that - a suspicion) is that it will be tricky to explain why these experiments involving intuition cut against the general reliability of intuitions, but the perception experiments do not cut against the general reliability of perception. That said - I think I should wait until I've looked into both sets of experiments in more detail before I say more.

(For those of you who know more about the literature, feel free to mouth-off in the comments.)

In the last few hours, I've stumbled on quite a few cool bits of philosophy...

1. Mike Almeida has a pretty interesting post on Multiverse responses to a variety of versions of the Problem of Evil here.

2. Carrie Jenkins just suggested that we might be able to handle Kripkenstein Undetermination Worries in a (roughly) analogous way that epistemologists might handle Drestke Cleverly Disguised Mule cases.

3. Lewis Powell just pointed out some very cool papers by Mark Schroeder. The one I've been reading through argues that a common argument against Divine Command Theory generalizes to just about any moral theory. We then get a diagnosis of where the original argument goes wrong. I'm only about half-way through the paper, but it's a good read so far. Here's the link.

Ralph Wedgewood over at PEA Soup presents an interesting puzzle that David Velleman recently discussed at a conference.

Here is the puzzle...

Suppose that Karen, a 14-year old girl, decides to conceive a child. Having a child at such a young age will make life very hard for Karen, and for her child as well: in general, Karen will have a much better life if she delays having a child for another 10 years or so; and the child whom she would have 10 years later would also have a much better life than any child whom she conceives today. So we might accept the statement that she ought not to have a child at her age.

But then Karen's child is born; she names him Max. Max is now a member of the community, and we are committed to treating him with concern and respect. So we are now most reluctant to accept the statement that Max ought not to have been brought into existence. But we know that if Karen had not had a child at the age of 14, Max would not have been brought into existence.

If you accept all of the ought-judgements above, it seems like you're committed to a contradiction. Ralph has an interesting (and complex) solution to the problem, but I wonder why we shouldn't just give up on the principle of necessity of origin. That's the principle being assumed in the last sentence of the the passage above.