Psychological Humanities and Ethics Series

Our existence is increasingly lived at a distance. As we move from flesh to image, we are in danger of losing touch with each other and ourselves. How can we combine the physical and the psychological with the virtual, our embodied experience with our global connectivity? How can we come back to our senses? This talk will advocate for the cultivation of the basic human need to touch and be touched. 

In this Psychological Humanities and Ethics lecture, Kearney will argue that touch is our most primordial sense, foundational to our individual and common selves. Kearney explores the role of touch, from ancient wisdom traditions to modern therapies to demonstrate that a fundamental aspect of touch is interdependence, its inherently reciprocal nature, which offers a crucial corrective to our fixation with control - and broadens our understanding of psychological life as primarily one of isolation. Making the case for the complementarity of touch and technology, this lecture offers a passionate plea to recover a tangible sense of community and the joys of life with others.

“What makes morality unique is the experience of moral judgment as a flash of intuition - or feeling good vs bad. But… underneath that feeling is a complex psychological structure…”  In this Psychological Humanities and Ethics lecture, Dr. Liane Young will discuss the field of moral psychology, aspects of the theory of mind, and reasoning in moral judgments informed by social contexts.

As social creatures, we spend a lot of time thinking about the mental lives of those around us, both for social interaction and for moral evaluation. Dr. Young will explore the broad question of how social context shapes these processes, from a social neuroscience perspective. First, how is “theory of mind” (i.e., thinking about mental states) deployed for cooperation vs competition, understanding helpful vs harmful actions? Does mental state representation differ across social contexts? Second, how does mental state inference support the processing of social prediction error and moral updating, for helpful vs harmful agents, friends vs strangers? We will look at whether asymmetries in moral updating (e.g., for friends vs strangers) can be diagnosed as motivated or rational inference. Finally, we will turn to the question of how people evaluate others who treat close vs distant targets (e.g., family vs strangers) differently, and the role of obligation in moral character judgments. Overall, we will see that social context shapes how we think about other minds, how we form and update moral impressions, and how we evaluate obligation. Knowing these complex spaces can help us understand where other people are coming from; studying moral psychology may allow us access to other’s perspectives - highlight that others could have different values.

"Stress - in the beginning it saved our lives. It’s what made us run from predators and enabled us to take down prey. Today, humans are turning on that same life-saving stress response to cope with 30-year mortgages, four-dollar-a-gallon gas, difficult bosses and traffic jams…” Stress - particularly psychological distress for humans - is not merely an individual problem; the way we structure our society, politics, and policy have severe implications on our (as well as our neighbors’) psychological distress, embodiment, and well-being.

In this Psychological Humanities and Ethics lecture, Robert Sapolsky will discuss psychological stress (via neuroscience/ neuroendocrinology) and its relationship with ethics and society. Through dialogue with clinicians and questions from the audience, we will hone into particular discussions on poverty, discrimination, and socio-economic factors - as we humbly understand that our social and embodied natures come with implications towards community and responsibility.

The core concern of this lecture involves the logic of technology, and with a focus on the restlessness carried by this logic. Before asking questions about technology, from dialysis machines to cell-phone addiction to nuclear physics, we should be aware of the way our technology influences our relationship to the world. Technology is entangled with modes of production, with capitalistic goals of conquest and security, production and profit. In an effort to think otherwise about techne, Severson turns to the philosophical works of Emmanuel Levinas and Hannah Arendt, both of whom wrestle in helpful ways with the logic of work, tools, power and language. This lecture investigates the way modern technology surreptitiously influences those who use it, and reconfigures the mode by which modern persons relate to one another ethically. In the ancient wisdom of Golem mythology, Severson finds keys for developing an alternative contemporary attitude toward techne that restores rather than undermines the human encounter with the other person.

Why are so many everyday psychological accounts of racism ineffective? Historically, we are accustomed to thinking of racism as the outcome of ignorance or intolerance. Most approaches seem invariably to miss a central feature of everyday racism, namely that it hinges on a type of passionate intensity. This talk introduces the notion that racism entails a type of “enjoyment” (that is, a type of affective arousal) which is present both in the ‘pleasure of hating’ and in attributions of others as somehow excessive, as contravening cultural norms of enjoyment (by virtue of “their” music, food, religion, dress-sense and culture, etc.). A systematic exploration of a core set of ideas (libidinal enjoyment, resentment, the excessive other, and the moralizing dimension of racism) suggests that they might be more workable, indeed, essential, to how we think and act upon racism today.