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http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/23/opinion/23brooks.html
Teaching Notes
You must become the flame on the candle. - Thich Nhat Hanh
Monday, August 27, 2012
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Is Media Ethics Education DOA?
It sounds like a joke Jay Leno would tell during his opening monologue on The Tonight Show. Hear about the graduate students at the prestigious journalism school? They got caught cheating on an ethics exam. Ha ha ha. Except that’s actually what happened at Columbia University
No one admitted cheating despite pressure from the school’s administrators and pleas from classmates, who feared the scandal would damage the market value of their degrees. Meanwhile, the teacher of the course, New York Times columnist Samuel G. Freedman, refused to comment. But if the disgruntled posts on RateMyProfessors.com are any indication, his students hadn’t exactly been soaking up knowledge. “Maybe he could e-mail his ‘speeches’ to the students instead of making everyone suffer through the most wasted class in j-school. . . ,” one read.
There’s an old cowboy saying that goes, “When your horse dies, get off.” Journalism ethics education is a dead horse. Or else those aren’t vultures circling in the sky.
No one admitted cheating despite pressure from the school’s administrators and pleas from classmates, who feared the scandal would damage the market value of their degrees. Meanwhile, the teacher of the course, New York Times columnist Samuel G. Freedman, refused to comment. But if the disgruntled posts on RateMyProfessors.com are any indication, his students hadn’t exactly been soaking up knowledge. “Maybe he could e-mail his ‘speeches’ to the students instead of making everyone suffer through the most wasted class in j-school. . . ,” one read.
There’s an old cowboy saying that goes, “When your horse dies, get off.” Journalism ethics education is a dead horse. Or else those aren’t vultures circling in the sky.
A Question for Socrates
The question of how ethics is learned, or even if it can be, is as old as Western philosophy. In Plato’s dialog Meno the title character asks, “Can you tell me, Socrates, whether virtue is acquired by teaching or by practice; or if neither by teaching nor practice, then whether it comes to man by nature, or in what other way?” Of course, Socrates, being Socrates, resists giving a definite answer. But we can’t. The sad fact is, students had better get an effective ethics education now or they may never.
Last summer I conducted an ethics workshop for some reporters and editors at the Poughkeepsie Journal, a small daily in upstate
But what I remember most is the air of defeat that clung to the staff as we sat on hard plastic chairs in the break room discussing the cases. I could hear in their voices the bitterness and cynicism of employees forced to follow corporate policies they despised. Recently, for example, the paper had started running display ads on the front page and section fronts, a much more grievous ethical lapse, their mumbled asides suggested, than anything the case studies might have to offer.
I don’t want my students to ever wear the gray, defeated expression I saw that day on the faces at the Journal. But given the downward direction in which the media are moving, and fast, how in the world can I prevent it from happening?
Teaching Media Ethics by Telling Stories
A friend of mine who teaches at a big Midwestern university recounts in class the events of her first week as a reporter for the Minneapolis Tribune. She was sent to Duluth to cover Democratic presidential candidate Hubert Humphrey on the campaign trail. When they were introduced, Humphrey vigorously shook her hand. “Oh yes, Susan,” he said, “I read your stuff all the time.” He couldn’t have read her stuff, though; she hadn’t written anything yet. “Just a few words,” she explains to her students, “but words that taught this fledging reporter a great lesson about pols and the little lies they tell.”
I usually find occasion during the semester to quote I. F. Stone’s dictum, “Every government is run by liars and thieves, and nothing they say should be believed,” to make the same point. But Susan’s story makes the point better. That’s because it has existential force. Her story vividly captures in a way a secondhand quote can’t the realities of a reporter’s life.
Some might think telling “war stories” is a waste of precious class time. I’ve a colleague who didn’t want to fall into the “trap” of regaling students with stories ad nauseam (“which, let’s face it, is easier than teaching or grading,” he said). So one semester he kept track. When he toted it all up at the end, he was surprised that he’d used less than an hour - out of 45 – talking about his newspaper experiences. And yet, he admitted, it was his stories that students seemed to remember most.
“Stories teach us how to live,” Daniel Taylor said in his essay, “The Ethical Implications of Storytelling.” What he meant was that stories preserve our experience for contemplation and evaluation. Although not all stories carry a heavy message, there’s an entire category of stories, so-called “exemplary tales,” that are told to convey a moral.
Our war stories are potentially just such tales. They can provide evidence, in ethicist John Barton’s words, of “how real human beings live through various crises and trials and remain human.” My colleague who kept tabs on his storytelling has described his stories as cautionary. Most, he said, deal with “screwups I learned from.”
But sometimes the storyteller and the audience can’t agree on what exactly the moral of a story is.
When Susan was a cub reporter on the Tribune, she interviewed the Beatles, who were on their second tour of the States. She got into their hotel room by dressing up as a waitress in an ugly, mustard-colored uniform and accompanying an actual room service waiter upstairs. Ringo took one look at her little plastic name tag – it read “Donna Brown” – and snorted, “What kind of name is that?” The waiter nudged her in the side. “Tell them what you real name is,” he urged. She did, as well as her reason for being there. Rather than throw her out, the Beatles politely answered her questions. They even let her phone for a photographer. The next day her story ran on the front page, with a photo of John sitting at a table and looking up at her and laughing as she poured coffee in his cup. She still has a glossy print of that photo somewhere.
Many of Susan’s students think she’s nuts for not having the photo hanging up in her office. They also think she’s nuts for saying she’d never participate in the same kind of stunt today. To her celebrity-struck students, disguising herself as a hotel waitress to get an interview with the Beatles seems soooo cool. They lose all sight of the fact that it wasn’t a story of vital public interest that demanded undercover methods.
Susan intends one lesson when she talks about her hard day’s night, but her students, living in a paparazzi-saturated culture, draw another. “It may be a lost cause,” she remarked to me.
Or maybe not. Negotiations over what the point of a story is can be part of the point of the story. In the process of negotiating, we test different interpretations, try out different themes. This is helpful. This is educational. Lawrence Kohlberg, the Harvard psychologist famous for his research on the stages of moral development, contended that “the teaching of virtue is the asking of questions. . . not the giving of answers.” Stories don’t necessarily have to yield clear moral rules to be of value. It’s enough sometimes if they just give us something to think about.
26 comments:
I found this article to be informative and interesting; while agreeing with many of the things that were said. The point that I found myself agreeing with the most was Jonathan Haidt's comparison of ethics to taste buds. Humans can all taste the difference between sweet and salty, just as we all have a generally similar idea of cruelty and kindness. However, not every person enjoys the taste of Hershey's chocolate, and not every human will feel guilty for stealing a chocolate bar from a convenient store. Every person has a slightly different set of ideals and morals. As David Brooks states in the article, "moral naturalists believe that we have moral sentiments that have emerged from a long history of relationships." I agree with Brooks; people learn morals from what they're exposed to. A child growing up without strong parental guidance in the slums of inner cities will have a different idea of what's right and wrong than a child raised in the suburbs, attending Catholic church.
I agree with this article because I believe that morals come from oneself and from others around them. When observing other people you know right away if you are going to like them or not. That is formed by the decisions that person is making. I also believe that people are born with knowing right from wrong. When someone sees something that does not look right that person will remove himself from the situation. I agree that babies can tell right from wrong. Even without being told the child prefers the helper, in the situation the article presented, because the child sees a giver who is happy and that is what babies respond to. The statement, "These moral faculties rely upon emotional, intuitive processes, for good and ill," is true because people are going to help people who can not help themselves. By helping someone in need it shows you have a good character and have good morals. I also agree with the statement, "People who behave morally don't generally do it because they have greater knowledge; they do it because they have a greater sensitivity to other people's point of view." I think that is what morals are. You have to have some feeling toward other people to know if they are going to be harmful or helpful to you.
"Most people" believe our sense of right and wrong comes as "a gift from God"? That statement seems like a huge generalization, even for an op-ed. I don't know if that means literally nature over nurture, as in, you're born good or born bad; or if it means that God taught humans right from wrong and we passed it down to our children. I would say that most people believe our sense of right and wrong comes from nurture, our parents, families, friends and peers teaching us.
In Bloom's experiment I think it would be relevant to know if there was sound or noise shown to the babies. Did they make the choice they did because they naturally chose the calming soothing voice over some sort of aggressive sound?
The person I would tend to agree with is Greene. Most of the time our sense of moral decision making is automatic. Sometimes "we use deliberation to override the quick and easy method." We certainly do spread our beliefs and refine them based on our verbal contact with others.
The first thing that came to mind when I started reading David Brooks' op-ed was the Nietzschean adage: "God is dead."
In the post-modern conception of morality, individuals adopt a moral philosophy by pulling from various sources of thought. However, the sources that shape our moral landscape are limited and inevitably have their roots in traditional religious and cultural practices.
Over the last forty years we've come to learn about the central role that genes seem to play in shaping our behavior in myriad ways.
Brooks makes the case that "naturalists" can determine what human values are and where they come from through observation. I don't quite understand why Brooks hesitates to use the word scientists, rather than naturalists.
Behavioral and evolutionary psychologists have expanded on the advancements in our understanding of genetics to try and explain why we do what we do through the lenses of adaptation and evolution.
Perhaps he fears that labeling these theories as a science of morality will lead to the same criticisms facing evolutionary psychology. Namely that reducing human behavior to genetic outputs is oversimplification of the many processes at work in human culture and politics.
Brooks does acknowledge that "social norms fall upon prepared ground." I think its valuable for science to try and fill the gap in knowledge that tries to explain how the interplay between inherited traits and our learned behaviors and experiences interact to create morals.
This article actually touched upon the readings I encountered in my evolutionary theory class last semester. The article was very interesting in that it reveals a sort of moral agent or characteristic passed down since the beginning of time. Morality has been a significant feature passed down upon generation to generation through natural selection. As Brooks states, “In the same way, we have natural receptors that help us recognize fairness and cruelty.” I also believe that we all have a different moral cultural outlook. An individual from the United States may have different morals than say an individual from China. For example, morally an individual from the United States thinks more individualistically than a Chinese native. I also found it interesting that the research on the 8-month-olds significantly reveals that children show preference towards a helper over a hinderer, indicating that children at a young age recognize moral qualities over non-moral qualities. Brooks is absolutely correct when he reveals that mood shapes decision making. From personal experience I have seen individuals make terrible judgement decisions when they are in bad moods, as opposed to good moods. However, what I disagree with is the statement of Hauser’s research. “Hauser reported on research showing that bullies are surprisingly sophisticated at reading other people’s intentions, but they’re not good at anticipating and feeling other people’s pains.” I would disagree because I would argue that bullies actually feed off another’s pain and continue to inflict harm (emotionally or physically) to another individual, causing more pain. In my perspective, this evidence does not support the argument. However, the article was a good piece and definitely highlighted on a person’s moral naturalist attributes based off of evolutionary theory.
I found this article to be very interesting. The statement, “People who behave morally don’t generally do it because they have greater knowledge; they do it because they have a greater sensitivity to other people’s point of view”, was the most interesting to me. While I agree with this, I believe that how one gets his/her morals comes from the people he/she is surrounded by, particularly at a young age. The way that parents, grandparents, brothers and sisters act and interact, all play an important part in how each person acquires their morals. I am not completely sold on the idea that morals are “natural”. If they were “natural”, then everyone would either be good or bad, and unable to change. However, life doesn’t work that way. Someone who is a bully in middle school may be able to realize how he/she was acting and make a change when it comes time for high school and college.
David Brooks article is a different take on my conventional idea/understanding of morals. Being taught in religion and sunday school about having a good sense of morals it seemed like they were a skill or code to learn. I agree with Haidt that we have natural receptors, similar to tastes buds, that weigh right and wrong. The analysis or theory of the bully and why he acts in such a careless way was particularly interesting. The idea that the bully is adept at judging peoples behaviors or reactions while not being able to feel empathy of those he torments stands out and makes sense. In one sentence you see how much the very fiber of our society relies on our basic moral standards. The study on infants was equally as telling. The fact that infants pick the individual that punishes the hinderer displays an early, instinctual desire for justice, but Bloom says it does not necessarily make us inherently good creatures.
While reading "The Moral Naturalists" I found a number of points very interesting. First, the concept of evolution molding our morality seems to me to be somewhat hard to prove, however I have always personally felt that animals have interesting social interactions. Even when observing my cats interacting with one another there are times of aggression and competition which is considered normal in the animal world, but there are also times where they will comfort and care for one another, particularly when one is injured or ill. There were many comparisons made throughout the article to try and explain the idea of moral thinking in an attainable way. My personal favorite was that of Joshua Greene of Harvard when he compared it to looking through a camera. He said "Most of the time we rely on the automatic point-and-shoot process, but occasionally we use deliberation to override the quick and easy method." This was very clear to me because I do think that most of the time morality is natural to us. Whether by nature of nurture we can morally assess a situation as soon as we come in contact with it. Its like our morality is what we feel in our gut to be right and wrong. However people come into situations that are much more complicated, sometimes due to outside influences, and we need to actually step back and mentally evaluate before we can choose what is fair. Overall I really enjoyed this article. I did find however that the moral naturalists did not incorporate the role of culture and religion, which I find to be intrinsic to molding the specific moral views of individuals. I think that a moral naturalist view is one that has great validity, however there are other factors in human society that mold our moral views.
I'm in agreement with Khynna's statement that for Brooks to say "most" people believe morals come as a gift from God is a huge generalization. Though there does seem to be some inherent morality in ourselves to begin with, as Bloom's experiment proves, I definitely believe we learn our morals by example.
This statement in particular made me think of this class: "To learn about morality, you don’t rely upon revelation or metaphysics; you observe people as they live." Perhaps by looking at case studies, we aren't gaining a concrete answer about what was moral and what wasn't in that particular case. But we are gathering the data we need to make an informed choice of our own should we come up against a decision that difficult in our own lives. I find that I need some information about the pros and cons of either side before I make a decision, and case studies seem to offer illumination on both.
I mentioned in class that I am a book reviewer, and that I had seen authors and fans of books attack other reviewers over criticism, that I had heard about the paid review scandal. When I got home from class, I looked up and read the Slate article about the "niceness" epidemic in reviewing. I already had some convictions of my own about reviewing, but I mentally filed away the examples given in the Slate article as things I could (and could not) do to strengthen my reviews or to avoid watering them down, accordingly. I find that to make moral judgments, we need examples of similar decisions from others; not all morality is inherited or "a gift from God."
There were several good points made in David Brooks' article. One that stuck out to me was the one about a person's mood and their decisions based on that mood. Many people will always "take their anger out" on something or even worse someone, which proves that once someone is in a bad mood, that will affect the rest of their decisions. This can relate to the example of the recent shooting at the Empire State Building. The shooter was angry because he was fired from the job, and so in turn he took his anger out on the company and shot a co-worker. Clearly the shooter's morals were in the wrong and it was because of his unstable emotions. Overall I agree with the article and the points and examples that were used because they made sense and the ideas were explained very well.
After reading this article I was struck by the fact that Brooks never made an attempt to define words such as moral, ethical or fair. He states that we are equipped to learn fairness but, fairness as defined by whom?
Other than that, I agreed with many points Brooks made.
One argument that struck me was the statement, "This illustrates, Bloom says, that people have a rudimentary sense of justice from a very early age. This doesn’t make people naturally good...But it does mean that social norms fall upon prepared ground. We come equipped to learn fairness and other virtues." While intrinsically I have always been aware of the affect that our communal culture has had on my own views, this argument struck me deeply. This study shows that infants are more prone to support the helper than the hinderer, at what point does that change? And at what point do people begin to see the hinderer as the helper? The only example I could think of to illustrate my thought about this is very partisan but it is welfare. There are many people who abuse welfare but it is undeniable that there are people utilizing welfare because it is necessary for their survival. This article made me wonder when in moral development did those against welfare stop supporting the helper.
Another point I found very interesting was Joshua Greene's camera analogy. The world is not always black and white and some moral issues take more careful consideration. Greene's camera metaphor accurately described the moral complications that arise in difficult situations.
In David Brooks’ Op-Ed column for The New York Times, “The Moral Naturalists,” the author presents the theory of moral naturalism through concrete examples of scientific research, which the naturalists believe suggests that “by the time humans came around, evolution had forged a pretty firm foundation for a moral sense.”
Brooks gives examples of research by several scientists suggesting that we have “natural receptors” allowing us to learn the difference between cruelty and fairness; that even at a young age, we seek other’s behavior to be punished if was mean or rewarded if it was nice; and that bullies seem to lack the psychological faculties for empathy.
Without having any prior knowledge of moral naturalism, it’s hard to completely agree or disagree with the theory as a whole, but I can acknowledge and appreciate the basic premise that people have evolved to be able to, at the very least, differentiate between right or wrong, moral or immoral, and fair or unfair in their own definitions, if not to share a common basic understanding of these concepts.
Cross-culturally, as other students have touched upon, we may have different ideas of justice, tolerance, or what is an acceptable or unacceptable action, but overall I think all humans mostly share the same values, such as a love and respect for family, or an apprehension, if not an evasion, to hurt or cause pain to others.
One criticism made by the author about the theory that stuck me was his reference to “cooperative virtues like empathy” versus “competitive virtues, like the thirst for recognition and superiority.” I’m not sure competition is a “virtue,” but I suppose he and I may have different definitions of the word. I personally would not classify acting competitively by striving to be recognized or superior as a virtuous behavior. It’s true that many people have do have a drive to be the best and that’ not a bad thing at all, but I’m not sure that it’s virtuous. Wouldn’t it be more virtuous to act unselfishly and let someone else be the best, in order for them to experience happiness?
On the other hand, I would agree with Brooks that it’s fascinating to see the rational, scientific investigation of human morality in a field previously limited to the abstract, indefensible sphere of philosophy and theology.
Brooks' article gave an interesting take on morality and what it means to be human. Although I think many people take God as their moral compass, I believe it's an overstatement to say that most of us hold this belief. I found the portion about observing children's responses to pictures and what they perceived as wrong interesting, and I'm curious to know how their reactions were judged.
the idea that just because people are equipped with this type of natural knowledge doesn't mean they are inherently good made the nauralist concept easy for me to grasp and lead me to agree to some extent.
it's also an interesting concept that people who are exceedingly perceptive of others' emotions sometimes "use their power for evil" like the bullies described. I was also really struck by the portion that spoke about how people are more likely to donate money to an individual than a group, although I'm not entirely sure I understand why.
Clearly knowing what is right and wrong is completely different than acting "right", but having a sense of empathy seems to play the largest role in how we treat others.
Morality has always been an interesting topic, partly because it isn't something that can be measured exactly. The portion I found the most agreeable was the study with the babies. I was always of the opinion that people are born without any morals and that they are learned from their surroundings. This study, however, demonstrated people are in fact born with at least some sense, not necessarily of "right" and "wrong", but of what positive behavior is. While they may not have morals, they do have, as its stated later on, a basic sensitivity to the plight of others. I'd never considered moral behavior as something people acted upon subconsciously because of an emotional sensitivity. Perhaps some people are just born with less of this sensitivity and that factors into the later moral development.
I thought this article was very informative and an interesting read on how people view and think of morality. I think it was very interesting how it talks about how people base their actions on the mood they are feeling. I necessarily don't disagree or agree with the article because I think our sense of right comes a little from God and a little on how much we can figure out ourselves. I definitely agree with Jonathan Haidt on how he describes peoples receptors of fairness and cruelty. Everyones morals are different just like everyones taste buds are different. They pick up sweetness, sourness, and hotness up differently just like people judge cruelness and fairness differently.I think that the way people judge and act to other people has a lot to do with how they were raised as kids, how their parents brought them up, and how they saw their parents interact and do things.
David Brookes made some valid points and raised some good questions in this article. The section describing the babies preference to the helper over the hinderer was very interesting. I believe, as the article states, that this proves a sense of justice at a young age but not that people are inherently good. I feel a person's experience in life will shape their definition of justice and therefore mold their sense of morality in adulthood. A man stealing to feed his family finds justice in the fact that he is able to take from those who have to feed his family who do not. A man who has never been hungry may only find justice in the poor man's arrest. I feel most people try their best to be good people but their experience's in life shape their sense doing good and being good. Another point of interest in the article is when the author writes, "People who behave morally don’t generally do it because they have greater knowledge; they do it because they have a greater sensitivity to other people’s points of view." The ability to understand other people's points of views is extremely important especially if it is contrary to your own. Unless you have a basic understanding of why people do what they do it may be difficult to see others as moral. It is easy to hold your own morality up as superior but until you understand what others have been through it's difficult to say what is right and wrong in every situation.
I found the article to be interesting because I haven't looked into moral in this way in quite a while. I thought the study conducted by Paul Bloom of Yale with the babies was pretty interesting, more so because while the babies favored the helper over the hinderer, they preferred the character who pushed the hinderer over the one being nice to it.
I agree with Bloom's idea that while humans are not naturally good, "we come equipped to learn fairness and other virtues." I believe that we learn our moral from the things we see, what we are taught, but more so from what we experience. I think that a person who is treated unfairly or struggles in their life, is likely to be compassionate to those dealing with the same things. Or vise-verse. Sometimes there's people who go through things and because of that, chose to make other people's lives miserable.
It's interesting, but not surprising that "God" was mentioned in the introduction. I think that religion plays a huge role in how people feel they should live their lives, but it does not make all people good or do the right thing. In the bible it says that we are born sinners, which I find interesting in relation to the study done by Bloom. That section of the article states that it is not until age 7 or 8 that children are willing to share. I don't believe that not wanting to share makes someone a bad person, but it does, to me, show that we are born with a particular interest in our own needs until we are taught, or learn by seeing that sharing is caring, when someone shares with us and we like how it feels. In this case, I'd say I also agree with Joshua Greene of Harvard, who likens moral thinking to a camera.
I believe that our sense of right and wrong come from the people that we are surrounded by. As well as a natural born instinct within us. I think it would be a difficult argument to make to say that only one of these factors makes up how we view the world around us. There are many illustrations of moral views being influenced by society. Take the Nazi's in Hitler's Germany for example. These men committed genocide because someone told them that it was what was right, they took this to heart, and we all know how that story ends. But it's just too impossible to think that there aren't people who go completely against what the society around them is feeding their brains. Moral views are something that we hold deep down within us, and they are something that are very hard to break. If someone was born with a natural view on something, it probably doesn't matter what anyone says to them, the will feel that way regardless.
I agree that everyone grows up realizing what is moral naturally. Some may go to school and study it through textbooks, some may have parents that teach them what is right and wrong, and some may learn by themselves, but they all grow up knowing what is ethical in the world. The largest influence to learning is observing others, as also stated on the article. I agree that our moral facility structure the way we perceive and respond to the world. however, this responce will differ according to each individual. We all learn from observing others, but how we understand and perceive from others' actions are going to be different. There is an example in the article about people more likely to give donations because of having an individual photo instead of a photo of numerous children. I cannot agree not am I convinced to this point. Some may perceive this photo differently than others.
This article was interesting to know the different ways humans understand "morals"
I just noticed my error. I meant to write "morale" or "morality," not "moral."
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