I see, so ‘ethics’ can’t be observed directly by behavior.
Whenever you have a choice of action, we label some possible actions ‘ethical’ and some ‘unethical’. We might have a preference for ethical behavior, but it is not the single deciding factor, which is why we can’t look at our choices to determine ethics.
So describing ethics is trying to describe why some actions are labeled ‘ethical’ and you do this by observing which actions you internally label ethical and which you don’t. (Sounds perfect for armchair theorizing to me, because all you’ve got to do is interrogate your intuition… )
Perhaps ‘ethics’ is still behavior, but behavior that occurs before the action. What do you think about using MRI patterning to identify particular forms of guilt, anxiety, etc? Would this come closer to “observing ethics” or still somehow would be measuring something different?
So I read that Alonzo Fyfe thinks this is measuring something different, but I guess he is not defining ethics as what you or I internally label ethical. He calls this ‘beliefs and other attitudes on morality’. (Is there any kind of evidence possible for his view of ethics?)
What do you think about using MRI patterning to identify particular forms of guilt, anxiety, etc?
That might work. There might also be parts of the brain that are used for ethical decisions, so that you can look at the output from an fMRI scan and see if the person made an ethical decision or not, without knowing what the issue was.
I see, so ‘ethics’ can’t be observed directly by behavior.
Whenever you have a choice of action, we label some possible actions ‘ethical’ and some ‘unethical’. We might have a preference for ethical behavior, but it is not the single deciding factor, which is why we can’t look at our choices to determine ethics.
So describing ethics is trying to describe why some actions are labeled ‘ethical’ and you do this by observing which actions you internally label ethical and which you don’t. (Sounds perfect for armchair theorizing to me, because all you’ve got to do is interrogate your intuition… )
Perhaps ‘ethics’ is still behavior, but behavior that occurs before the action. What do you think about using MRI patterning to identify particular forms of guilt, anxiety, etc? Would this come closer to “observing ethics” or still somehow would be measuring something different?
So I read that Alonzo Fyfe thinks this is measuring something different, but I guess he is not defining ethics as what you or I internally label ethical. He calls this ‘beliefs and other attitudes on morality’. (Is there any kind of evidence possible for his view of ethics?)
That might work. There might also be parts of the brain that are used for ethical decisions, so that you can look at the output from an fMRI scan and see if the person made an ethical decision or not, without knowing what the issue was.