Quiz #2

Quiz #2 is worth 7.5% of your overall grade, and will be held at the beginning of class on Monday, December 10th. You'll have about 25 minutes to complete it. It will consist of about 5 or 6 short answer questions, and will be on everything we've covered since the midterm:

• abortion (Warren and Marquis)
• animal ethics (Norcross)
• death penalty (Primoratz, Nathanson)

Your Inner Bigot

There's an insightful article called "Finding Your Inner Bigot" on racism and sexism that relates to our discussion in class this week: does prejudice have to be conscious, or can we unintentionally do something sexist or racist?

Psychological evidence suggests that unconscious prejudice is real, and often a bigger problem today than intentionally discriminatory behavior. As the article puts it,

"If you ask physicians whether all patients should be treated equally regardless of race, everyone says yes. But if you ask doctors how they will treat patients with chest pains who are named Michael Smith and Tyrone Smith, the doctors tend to be less aggressive in treating the patient with the black-sounding name. Such disparities in treatment are not predicted by the conscious attitudes that doctors profess, but by their unconscious attitudes—their hidden brains."

Counteracting these unintentional, hidden prejudices is pretty tough. They require a long-term approach of the kind discussed in Aristotle's virtue ethics: noticing your bad habits, then consciously trying to break them and replace them with better habits. The hardest part about unconscious biases, though, is how difficult they are to notice in the first place.

Do You Remember? Prolly Not

Here's a video on the unreliability of eyewitness identification and the tragedy of misidentifying a suspect:


Unfortunately, many jurors seem to prefer eyewitness testimony over forensic evidence.  Given how unreliable our memories are, that's pretty scary.  Here's a quote:

"Despite all our scientific know-how, jurors weighing life and death decisions still crave what Leone calls the 'human element:' the act of watching another person testify and deciding if they’re telling the truth.

"As these witnesses enter the courtroom, a hush often falls on the gallery. Jurors — bored by days of dry testimony given by well-rehearsed experts — lean forward in their seats, pens at the ready to take notes about what the eyewitness has to say. They have seen this moment on television, too, and it’s usually really, really interesting."

Finally, here's an excellent, short video explanation of the unreliability of memory that ends with a dog licking peanut butter off a guy's face:

Unfair and Arbitrary

Here are some links related to Nathanson's article outlining the problems in the U.S. legal system:

• Here's a decent overview article on measuring the reliability of the justice system. How often do courts convict the wrong person? 
• Brandon Garrett researched 250 cases in which DNA evidence overturned wrongful convictions.  His book is Convicting the Innocent.  One of his big points is just how unreliable eyewitness memory can be. 
• Most of us don't realize just how much of our memories are complete fabrications. In other words, our memory doesn't work the way we think it does.
• Studies show that arbitrary factors often influence verdicts, such as a defendant's attractiveness, or accent, or willingness to smile, or display of emotion in the courtroom.  
• And judges aren't above such biases: judges' verdicts are influenced by all sorts of weird factors, like the time of the day the verdict is made.
• Another big problem is the two-tiered court system: we seem to have one set of rules for the wealthy and powerful, and another set of rules for the rest of us.

Crime and Punishment

While we're on the subject of capital punishment, here's some stuff on new research into punishment:

• Mark Kleiman, professor of public policy at UCLA, has a new book called When Brute Force Fails: How to Have Less Crime and Less Punishment. He argues that smaller, swifter punishments can greatly increase deterrence.
• Here's a review of When Brute Force Fails.
• Kleiman runs a blog called Same Facts.
  
• Here's a video dialogue about Kleiman's book:
  

Death Penalty Box

Here are some links related to our discussion of the death penalty:

• An encyclopedia of philosophy article on the death penalty.
• A large collection of resources on the ethics of capital punishment. I mean, wow.
• What's up with punishment in general? That's a big ethical issue.
• What about the financial cost of the death penalty? Although it's common sense to think that keeping a criminal in prison for life would cost more than putting her to death, studies suggest that the opposite is true. The additional legal battles in death penalty cases may cost more than a life sentence.
• Of course, for some death penalty opponents, it's not about whether innocent people are sentenced to death.