Critical Moral Thinking in a Machine Age

R. M. Hare has argued for and defended a ‘two-level’, view of moral agency. He argues that moral agents ought to rely on the rules of ‘intuitive moral thinking’ for their ‘everyday’ moral judgments. When these rules conflict or when we do not have a rule at hand, we ought to ascend to the act-utilitarian,‘critical’ level of moral thinking. I argue that since the rules at the intuitive level of moral thinking necessarily conflict much more often than Hare supposes, and since we often do not have ready-made rules for our moral judgments, we must necessarily use critical moral thinking very frequently. However, act-utilitarian judgements at this level will sharply conflict with our strongly held ‘intuitive’ moral convictions. I show that Hare’s attempt to balance these two aspects of moral judgment requires us to simultaneously adopt two conflicting sets of moral standards, and thus an attempt to inculcate such standards constitutes a ‘schizophrenic’ moral education. Finally, I briefly outline an alternative conception of moral education, based on Aristotelian phronesis.

Critical and Ethical Thinking in Sport Management: Philosophical Rationales and Examples of Methods

In order to minimize various social risks, including situations such as COVID-19, each person needs to make decisions and act calmly with morals. To do that, it is insufficient to merely aim for children to receive basic acquaintance and information literacy. The future will require more to be gained from education, including the provision of human-specific skills such as creativity and emotional intelligence. It is essential to teach concepts such as empathy and harmonious coexistence, preparing children for the future and leading to further benefits for society. There is a particular emphasis on moral education in Japan, where a policy of 'Moral Education through Thinking and Discussion' is being pursued. Professor Masami Ikeda, Jumonji University, and Associate Professor Koji Miyamoto, Tokyo Kasei University, are collaborating to create a moral critical thinking workbook. The goal is to address Japan's policy aims, as well as the current lack of critical thinking teaching in schools. The researchers are emphasising the importance of moral thinking centred on critical thinking to build a rich symbiotic relationship. With the Japanese state's drive for the 'Moral Education of Thinking and Discussion', this is now being taught as a new class in schools, which prompted Ikeda and Miyamoto to look at how morality is, and can be further, linked to critical thinking. The researchers are also interested in cognitive bias and are seeking to make people more aware of their personal biases. Ikeda and Miyamoto have conducted trial classes and large-scale questionnaires in order to acquire evidence for their novel moral thinking approach. They have created a new moral thinking scale comprising four cornerstone moral thinking factors: contributing individuals; impartial individuals; responsible individuals; and family-minded individuals.

In order to minimize various social risks, including situations such as COVID-19, each person needs to make decisions and act calmly with morals. To do that, it is insufficient to merely aim for children to receive basic acquaintance and information literacy. The future will require more to be gained from education, including the provision of human-specific skills such as creativity and emotional intelligence. It is essential to teach concepts such as empathy and harmonious coexistence, preparing children for the future and leading to further benefits for society. There is a particular emphasis on moral education in Japan, where a policy of 'Moral Education through Thinking and Discussion' is being pursued. Professor Masami Ikeda, Jumonji University, and Associate Professor Koji Miyamoto, Tokyo Kasei University, are collaborating to create a moral critical thinking workbook. The goal is to address Japan's policy aims, as well as the current lack of critical thinking teaching in schools. The researchers are emphasising the importance of moral thinking centred on critical thinking to build a rich symbiotic relationship. With the Japanese state's drive for the 'Moral Education of Thinking and Discussion', this is now being taught as a new class in schools, which prompted Ikeda and Miyamoto to look at how morality is, and can be further, linked to critical thinking. The researchers are also interested in cognitive bias and are seeking to make people more aware of their personal biases. Ikeda and Miyamoto have conducted trial classes and large-scale questionnaires in order to acquire evidence for their novel moral thinking approach. They have created a new moral thinking scale comprising four cornerstone moral thinking factors: contributing individuals; impartial individuals; responsible individuals; and family-minded individuals.

In Two Minds: A Casebook of Psychiatric Ethics

The purpose of this study is to resolve ‘moral conflict’ in sport and to present a better approach with respect to right actions for sports participants. While acknowledging that there are many positive values or principles (e.g. Olympism) in sport, some ‘moral conflict’ in sport might still arise and therefore cannot be easily resolved. By introducing Hare's two levels of moral thinking (i.e. intuitive level and critical level), I first clarify the question ‘Why do moral conflicts appear?’ That moral conflicts may arise normally is because people or philosophers tend to think that moral principles ought to be simple and general. In the general situation, it would be fine to follow these kinds of principles when there is no conflicting situation. But in a particular context, there might be a problem. It would be impossible to resolve a conflicting problem if we do not think critically. Second, I suggest that ‘keep the rules’ can be seen as a prima facie principle or duty for sports participants. However, this prima facie principle may not be sufficient or appropriate to resolve the problem of conflict by using the intuitive thinking, since one might face a conflict between ‘keep the rules’ and ‘not to keep the rules’ and s/he cannot select in between. Thus, critical thinking is needed. Third, I try to differentiate critical thinking from intuitive thinking. Critical thinking aims not only to select the best set of prima facie principles for use in intuitive thinking, but also to resolve conflicts between them. So, if we are able to think critically, a prima facie duty sometimes can be overridden by other more important duties (sound and ethical) in a particular situation. However, as not all sports participants are capable enough to think critically, moral education regarding how to develop athletes' ‘critical thinking’ in sport is needed. It may be recommended that virtue ethics play an important role in sport not just through initiating participants into rule‐following but also in cultivating certain dispositions and educating their desires. As it is, what we also need is a good sports education system which can enlighten people toward a better understanding of sport and its values.

In recent research, dual-process theories of cognition have been the primary model for explaining moral judgment and reasoning. These theories understand moral thinking in terms of two separate domains: one deliberate and analytic, the other quick and instinctive. This book presents a new theory of the philosophy and cognitive science of moral judgment. Hanno Sauer develops and defends an account of triple-process moral psychology, arguing that moral thinking and reasoning are only insufficiently understood when described in terms of a quick but intuitive and a slow but rational type of cognition. This approach severely underestimates the importance and impact of dispositions to initiate and engage in critical thinking – the cognitive resource in charge of counteracting my-side bias, closed-mindedness, dogmatism, and breakdowns of self-control. Moral cognition is based, not on emotion and reason, but on an integrated network of intuitive, algorithmic and reflective thinking. Moral Thinking, Fast and Slow will be of great interest to philosophers and students of ethics, philosophy of psychology and cognitive science.

Assessing development in critical thinking: One institution’s experience

RESEARCH OBJECTIVE: The following article aims to identify the main reasons that make it impossible to reconcile the modern notion of sovereignty or autonomy of the moral agent with the notion of the really existing sovereign good. THE RESEARCH PROBLEM AND METHODS: The main emerging research problem is to identify the sources of motivation behind the limitation of modern ethical thinking. For this purpose the author implements the interpretive stance inspired by Charles Taylor. It consists in exploring the moral motivation underpinning particular views on moral philosophy. THE PROCESS OF ARGUMENTATION: It begins by indicating the motivations that fuel the twofold limitation of the good part of modern ethical thinking. The first restriction consists in reducing moral philosophy to questions of making any serious reference in ethical considerations to an objective moral source which exists independently from the human agent, be it Good, value or God. Following Taylor, who draws on Iris Murdoch, there are listed two reasons for the first limitation: the affirmations of ordinary life and the disengaged reason. As for the second restriction the influence of the “Enlightenment myth” and the “metaphysics of the modern world” which is implied by it are indicated as its determinants. RESEARCH RESULTS: The analysis brings the author to conclusion that that the main reasons for the impossibility of a reconciliation between the sovereignty of the moral agent and the notion of a really existing sovereign good are the “Enlightenment myth” and the “metaphysics of the modern world”. CONCLUSIONS, INNOVATIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS: The article concludes with the observation that either the “Enlightenment myth” or the “metaphysics of the modern world” are vastly uncritically assumed in contemporary ethical thinking. It is necessary to articulate and verify them, to which this article is a modest contribution and exhortation.

Pictures, Quotations, and Distinctions: Fourteen Essays in Phenomenology, RobertSokolowski, Catholic University of America Press, 2022 (ISBN 978‐0‐8132‐3518‐9), xiv + 326 pp., pb $34.95

Developments in neurobiology are providing new insights into the biological and physical features of human thinking, and brain-activation imaging methods such as functional magnetic resonance imaging have become the most dominant research techniques to approach the biological part of thinking. With the aid of neurobiology, there also have been several studies on the biological processes of human moral thinking in moral psychology. For instance, some researchers have tried to discover patterns of brain activation when a person copes with moral dilemmas. In this paper, the authors suggest the level-structure of moral thinking from the most abstract level to the most biological-physical level and reductionism in the philosophy of science is introduced as a framework for analysis. Moreover, with the level-based structural approach and framework of reductionism, this paper tries to discover the practical value of our model for moral development and education.

Business Philosophy Education is a discipline that aims to assist individuals in understanding the meaning and values of business, as well as helping them to develop critical thinking skills. Critical thinking ability is very important in the business world because it allows individuals to make the right decisions that are beneficial to the company. However, there are still many business students who lack adequate critical thinking skills. This study aims to explore the influence of Business Philosophy Education on improving the critical thinking skills of business students. This research is qualitative in nature. Data collection techniques include listening and recording important information to conduct data analysis through data reduction, data display, and conclusion drawing. The study concluded that Business Philosophy Education has an important role in improving business students' critical and ethical thinking skills in dealing with complex and ambiguous business situations. Through this education, business students can gain a deeper understanding of the philosophical principles underlying business practices, so that they can make more socially and environmentally responsible decisions.

Intercultural information ethics (IIE), a field which draws on the limits and richness of human morality and moral thinking in different societies, epochs and philosophic traditions as well as on their impact on today’s social appropriation of information and communication technology, has been argued to lack an adequate theoretical understanding of culture. In this paper, we take a non-essentialist view of culture as a point of departure and discuss not what culture is, but what we (both in our everyday lives, and as researchers) do when we use the concept of culture. To do so, we look for inspiration in the concept of suture, a concept which means the thread which stitches, or the act of stitching, a wound, but has had a long and intricate journey within psychoanalysis and film studies concerning the issue of identification. Three understandings of the use of culture emerge: suture as cultural misidentification, the evil in the cultural suture, and multiple, repeated cultural sutures. We use these categories to diagnose the use of culture in IIE and beyond, and suggest that the use of culture as multiple, repeated sutures—in other words, a recognition that we constantly fail in describing culture or cultural differences, and that each suture is coloured by its conditions of production, and that we cannot but suture with culture anyway—might be a way forward for cross-cultural research.

In this paper I wish to discuss two sorts of things that can easily go wrong in the transition from intuitive to critical thinking—that is, from the everyday moral thinking that suffices, and should suffice, for most of our moral thought, to the higher-level thinking that we have to do if we need to scrutinize the principles we are using at the intuitive level. This is a transition which in the course of our moral education we all have to learn to make if we are ever to get beyond intuitive moral thinking. I shall give to these two pitfalls in moral education the perhaps rather too dramatic names ‘Satanism’ and ‘Nihilism’. They both have some kinship with the amoralism that I discussed in MT, chs. 10 and 11; but they are different from it and from each other, though all three can be combined in various more or less confused mixtures. The discussion of these pitfalls will enable me both to clear up a theoretical difficulty which has often been raised against my views, and to shed some light on a pressing social problem.

Psychopaths have long been of interest to moral philosophers, since a careful examination of their peculiar deficiencies may reveal what features are normally critical to the development of moral agency. What underlies the psychopath’s amoralism? A common and plausible answer to this question is that the psychopath lacks empathy. Lack of empathy is also claimed to be a critical impairment in autism, yet it is not at all clear that autistic individuals share the psychopath’s amoralism. How is empathy characterized in the literature, and how crucial is empathy, so described, to moral understanding and agency? I argue that an examination of moral thinking in high-functioning autistic people supports a Kantian rather than a Humean account of moral agency.