Timothy Chambers "Habits Trump Resolve: Downhill Always Easier"

 

 

Habits Trump Resolve: Downhill Always Easier

By: TIMOTHY CHAMBERS 

January 22, 2012

Just after New Year's, I did a bit of informal research. While the statistics vary by source, one conclusion rang clearly: Before long, most of us who made resolutions for 2012 will lapse back into our old ways, and end up feeling no newer than we did in 2011. It goes to show what a challenge "making a change" can be.

 https://www.scribd.com/document/84191071/Habits-Trump-Resolve-Downhill-Always-Easier

Timothy Chambers, "Ethics and Integrity" [letter] 2010

(Winter 2010)

  ETHICS AND INTEGRITY The issues pursued in Professor Sternberg’s thought-provoking article (“Liars, Cheats, & Scoundrels … and What to Do About Them,” Fall 2009)—how we might sharpen students’ ability to “apply abstract ethical principles in real life”—are both a timely and timeless concern. I was most riveted by Dr. Sternberg’s account of (falsely) telling his students that he’d “double dipped” by billing twice for reimbursement on a single set of expenses. He then “waited for the firestorm … [that] didn’t happen.”

Why didn’t it? The silent students in Sternberg’s seminar fell into two types. The first did not recognize any moral issue. However, the problem isn’t with these students’ ethical reasoning skills but with their bedrock moral endowments.

The students who did recognize the moral problem lacked the conviction to raise their voices in protest. These students’ deficit lies not in their ethical reasoning skills but in their store of courage. Courage isn’t a virtue likely to be enhanced by classroom discussion.

Immanuel Kant declared that two things “fill the mind with ever new and increasing wonder and awe: the starry heavens above and the moral law within.” It required revolutions in physics before we could engineer probes to touch the face of the former. I’m inclined to think that changing the face of the latter might also call for revolutions in psychology—and pedagogy.
TIMOTHY CHAMBERS, G95
ADJUNCT FACULTY IN PHILOSOPHY
UNIVERSITY OF HARTFORD

 

Timothy Chambers Discussion of John Wisdom

"One who has nothing to say except what everybody knows already," philosopher John Wisdom once said, "may yet say something worth saying." This essay probes the truth of Wisdom's claim.

 https://www.scribd.com/document/57086016/Sometimes-the-Obvious-can-work-like-Insight

Timothy Chambers, " A FAIR-DIVISION CONUNDRUM"

Timothy Chambers, "A Fair-Division Conundrum" in Reader Reflections, The Mathematics Teacher (Volume 103.3), October 2009, page 172.

 https://www.scribd.com/document/341427040/Timothy-Chambers-A-Fair-Division-Conundrum-How-To-Fairly-Divide-a-Treat

Love: IT'S A NOTION, NOT A POTION by Timothy Chambers

IT'S A NOTION, NOT A POTION

TIMOTHY CHAMBERS 

Timothy Chambers teaches philosophy at the University of Hartford 

THE HARTFORD COURANT

February 14, 2008

https://www.courant.com/news/connecticut/hc-xpm-2008-02-14-0802130411-story.html

How Doctors Think [Letter] by Timothy Chambers

 

How Doctors Think

Dr. Jerome Groopman ’72, ’76 P&S’ excellent essay, “Flesh-and-Blood Decision-Making” (July/August), highlights a perennial irony: Life is understood backward, but must be lived forward.
Since life is understood backward, classroom lectures overflow with the benefits of hindsight. Thus we peruse case studies that presuppose omniscience, armed with theories presuming omnipotence. But life is lived forward, with all the imperfections that implies. To face a crisis in real time involves limited powers and a shadowy grasp of the facts.
Given such constraints, what else can we do but deploy “heuristics,” which can flexibly adapt as further facts come to light?
While Groopman’s essay focuses on the medical classroom’s inability to impart real-time medical judgment, I wonder whether this might apply more generally — for starters, to ethics, government and business. Even the riverboat pilot, as Mark Twain observed, needs more than mere memory: “There are two higher qualities which [the pilot] must also have. [The pilot] must have good and quick judgment and decision, and a cool, calm courage that no peril can shake (Life on the Mississippi, 1883).”
By illustrating the difference between classroom instruction and real-time decision-making, Groopman offers not just a portrait of medicine but a picture of the human condition.

Timothy Chambers
Department of Philosophy
University of Hartford (Conn.)

Timothy Chambers, "Nature, Nurture? How About Both?" [letter] (2007)

NATURE, NURTURE? HOW ABOUT BOTH?

THE HARTFORD COURANTJune 2, 2007

As one who as co-authored articles in neuroscience, I was fascinated by the front-page story on the brain's role in our abilities to empathize and moralize [May 29, "We Can't Help But Do Good"]. But as one who has also written about ethics, I worry that the philosophical conclusions the article draws are hasty and flawed. Two of these conclusions merit particular attention.

Because "morality arises from basic brain activities," we're told, our values are "not 'handed down' by philosophers and clergy, but 'handed up' [as] an outgrowth of our brain's basic tendencies." But this ignores another, equally scientific, fact: A child who is raised in chaotic, valueless surroundings will, far more often than not, grow up to bear a pathological lack of conscience.

For this reason, it's best to view nature and nurture as partners, not rivals, in crafting the adult moral faculties we take for granted.

Nature indeed "hands up" a brain that is amazingly receptive to learning values. But then it's necessary for the environment -- in the form of conscientious parents and mentors -- to "hand down" the specific values to that receptive brain. Otherwise, like a seeded field that lacks hands to tend it, the brain's ethical potential will fail to achieve fruition.

Another "troubling question," according to the article, is that neuroscience reduces "morality and immorality to brain chemistry -- rather than free will," and that this "might diminish the importance of personal responsibility."

A little reflection shows why this is an overreaction. We've long known that our capacity to use language is ingrained in various brain centers. Does this mean that we use language robotically? Does it mean that I have no choice over the words I'm writing now, or would lack responsibility if my words were libelous? Clearly not. But if brain-based language centers don't threaten our free use of language, it's unclear why brain-based ethical centers should threaten free will, either.

Beneath both of these errors, I imagine, lies a more general worry: that if we can scientifically explain our astonishing human abilities, then this somehow makes those abilities less astonishing. I disagree. After all, embryologists have come a long way toward describing how a zygote becomes a full-term infant. Does that make childbirth any less of a miracle? I think not.

Timothy Chambers

West Hartford

The writer teaches philosophy at the University of Hartford.

https://www.courant.com/news/connecticut/hc-xpm-2007-06-02-0706020587-story.html Timothy Chambers philosophy, Timothy Chambers Hartford