Zimbardo, Zarathustra and the Devil

A critique of Zimbardo

Category:

Education

Tags:

• social
• construction
• relativity
• moral
• ethics
• institution

[patternsinchaos]

Hey Kyle, interesting video. You didn't mention Zarathustra at all, was their an implied relation to the general notion of a God?  or was Zarathustra treated a particular way by Zimbardo?

[LordImmolation]

Thanks - the implied relation was more to Zarathustra's dichotomy between "good" and "evil" as he was the first to draw this up (according to Nietzsche anyway!). I had the title in mind before I made the video and did intend to draw up this parallel a little more, but felt that I couldn't really fit it in...but I thought the title I had in mind was quite catchy so I decided to keep it!

[ballyboneman]

Moral relativism makes me extremely nervous and for most ordinary people I would suspect is demonstrably false. If one is asked 'Is it wrong for an adult to have sex with a 7 year old child?' the answer for the vast majority of people is of course emphatically 'yes'. Anyone who would answer that it was not objectively true that yes was the correct answer, that there would be some fuzziness, that it was relative would be rightly IMHO regarded as insane

[LordImmolation]

Tell that to the ancient Greeks!

[DefenceSpeech]

What is the name of the particular series you mentioned earlier on in the video? I got the channel 4 and dispatches part.

The way I see it is that we all think that our theories are correct and that our own personal political/philosophical belief structures are the most logical, or least we pretend they are. Even Zimbardo could likely be found guilty of this. How does philosophy address this though, when it seems that even skepticism could be considered as a conviction that falls under this.

[rochet75]

dude he never said anything about good vs. evil through the video.

[Rybot9000]

it is not a truth about morality from a realists perspective, but that it is a truth about what one person believes or feels is moral. Which is in itself a truth about morality. These thought experiments demonstrate a need for a more precise system than moral intuition. There is a "morality" determined by a "dual process" in Greene's work, this dual process is the interaction of two brain systems limbic and DLPFC. So we may gather a kind of moral commonality but not strictly objective morality.

[Rybot9000]

Exactly though experiments like the "crying baby" and the "trolley dillema" produce conflicting moral decisions. To some the mother in the "crying baby" scenario would be a hero for smothering her child and saving everyone else, but to others she would be a criminal if no excuse is granted for the smothering of a child. Joshua D. Greene writes excellently on moral anti-realism. Greene admits there are moral "truths", that is if what a person believes is a moral truth. In other words...