Table of Contents
Moral Psychology
Moral psychology is going through a renaissance, and we are living through the new synthesis in ethics that E. O. Wilson called for in 1975. We’re sure to disagree on many points today, but I think that we here all agree on a number of things. We all agree that to understand morality, you’ve got to think about evolution and culture, and that you have to know something about chimpanzees and bonobos and babies and psychopaths.
Morality is so rich and complex, but many authors reduce it to a single principle, which is usually some variant of welfare maximization. But once we expand the moral domain beyond harm, I find that metaphors drawn from perception become more illuminating, more useful. An analogy that Marc Hauser and John Mikhail have developed in recent years is that morality is like language. It illuminates many aspects of morality and is particularly good for sequences of actions with varying aspects of intentionality.
I think taste offers the closest, the richest, source domain for understanding morality. First, the links between taste, affect, and behavior are as clear as could be. The good tastes, sweet and savory, and salt to some extent, these make us feel “I want more”. They say, “This is good,” Whereas sour and bitter tell us, “Whoa, pull back, stop”.
Moral psychology is like the psychology of taste in important ways, for one, it gets at what’s universal, while leaving plenty of room for cultural variation. Second, every culture constructs its own particular cuisine, its own way of pleasing those taste receptors. The metaphor has an excellent pedigree and was used 2,300 years ago in China by Mencius, who wrote, “Moral principles please our minds as beef and mutton and pork please our mouths.”
The Moral Foundations Theory, which specifies a small set of social receptors that are the beginnings of moral judgment. These are like the taste receptors of the moral mind; I’ll mention this theory again near the end of my talk. But before I come back to moral foundations, I want to talk about two articles published in Behavioral and Brain Sciences. The authors begin by noting that psychology as a discipline is an outlier in being the most American of all the scientific fields.
The study also finds that Westerners are different from non-Westerners on some issues that are relevant for moral psychology, such as individualism and the sense of self. And there, too, Americans are the outliers, the most individualistic, the most analytical in their thinking styles.
The more WEIRD you are, the more you use an analytical thinking style, focusing on categories and laws, rather than patterns and contexts, and the more your view of the world is dominated by separate objects rather than relationships. Overall, these empirical patterns suggest that we need to be less cavalier in addressing questions of human nature, on the basis of data drawn from a particularly thin and rather unusual slice of humanity.
Moral psychology is a descriptive enterprise, not a normative one. The chemistry produced by Western, Educated, Industrialized, Democratic societies is our chemistry, and it’s a very good chemistry. And if a Ayurvedic practitioner from India were to come to a chemistry conference and say, “Good sirs and madams, your chemistry has ignored our Indian, you know, our 5,000-year-oldchemistry,” the chemists might laugh at them.
Morality is like the Matrix, from the movie The Matrix, and morality is a consensual hallucination, and when you read the WEIRD people article, it’s like taking the red pill. You see, oh my God, I am in one particular matrix, but there are lots and lots of other matrices out there. And what if the critique was made by an evangelical Christian, or by a conservative? Could we simply say, “We just don’t care about your morality”? I don’t think that we could.
We happen to live in a matrix that places extraordinary value on reason and logic. So, the question is our faith justified? Maybe ours is right and the others are wrong. What if reasoning really is the royal road to truth? If so, then maybe the situation is like chemistry after all. Maybe WEIRD morality, with an emphasis on individual rights and welfare, maybe it’s right.
Reasoning
Reasoning was not designed to pursue the truth, but to help us win arguments, according to Mercier and Sperber. This explains the confirmation bias, motivated reasoning, and reason-based choice, among other things. Nobody’s found a way to teach critical thinking that gets people to automatically reflect on, well, what’s wrong with my position? And why is reasoning so biased and motivated whenever self-interest or self-presentation are at stake?
The authors of a book on the psychology of reasoning point out that we can reuse our argumentative reasoning for other purposes, but it shows the marks of its heritage in our thought processes toward confirmation of our own ideas. Science works very well as a social process when we can come together and find flaws in each other’s reasoning. But the private reasoning of any one scientist is often deeply flawed, because it seeks justification and not truth.
I’ve listed some of the features that I think would characterize a continuation, a continuation of Hume’s project. For example, he was a naturalist, which means that he believed that morality was part of the natural world, that we can understand morality by studying human beings. He didn’t know about Darwin, but he would have embraced Darwin and evolution quite warmly.
The key threads of David Hume’s moral fabric were the many moral sentiments. He says, “Morality is nothing in the abstract nature of things but is entirely relative to the sentiment or mental taste of each particular being”. The proper word for us today is not “sentiment “ or “emotion,” it’s actually “intuition,” a slightly broader term and a more cognitive-sounding term.
Hume was a pluralist because he was to some degree a virtue ethicist. Virtue ethics is the main alternative to deontology and utilitarianism in philosophy. So, I think, if you embrace virtue ethics, at least you put less of a value on parsimony than moral psychologists normally do. The virtues of rural farming culture are not the same as the virtues of an urban commercial or trading culture. So virtues are messy.
I often use the metaphor that the mind is like a rider on an elephant. The rider is conscious, controlled processes, such as reasoning. The elephant is the other 99 percent of what goes on in our minds, things that are unconscious and automatic. Virtue theories are about cultivating habits, not just of behavior but of perception. To develop the virtue of kindness, for example, is to have a keen sensitivity to the needs of other people, and then to offer the right kind of help. Utilitarianism and deontology are not about the elephant at all; they are instruction manuals for riders.
Virtue Ethics
Virtue ethics was the dominant approach in ancient Greece, China, and through the Middle Ages, and all the way up through David Hume and Ben Franklin. What happened to virtue ethics? Simon Baron-Cohen tells us that we should think about it as two dimensions. There’s systemizing and empathizing. Systemizing is the drive to analyze the variables in a system, and to derive the underlying rules that govern the behavior of a system. Empathizing is the drive to identify another person’s emotions and thoughts, and respond to them appropriately.
Jeremy Bentham, the founder of utilitarianism, may have had Asperger’s syndrome, or at least a form of it. John Stuart Mill wrote that Bentham had no sympathy for “the most natural feelings of human nature” and was cut off from “many of its graver experiences” by his deficiency of imagination. The two major ethical systems that define Western philosophy were developed by men who either had Aspers or were pretty darn close to it.
For philosopher Jeremy Bentham, the case is pretty clear that he was about as high as he could possibly be on systemizing and empathizing while still being rather low on empathizing, although not the absolute zero that Bentham was. Immanuel Kant, however, was a loner who loved routine, feared change and focused on his few interests to the exclusion of all else. Fitzgerald thinks that Kant would be diagnosed with Asperger’s.
In the 18th and early 19th centuries, there were two ultra-systemizers in philosophy of morality, one was Kant, the other was Schopenhauer. And so you get this very narrow battle of two different systemized groups, and virtue ethics—which fit very well with the Enlightenment Project; you didn’t need God for virtue ethics at all. But it kind of drops out. And I think personality factors are relevant. We took WEIRD morality to be representative of human morality, and we’ve placed way too much emphasis on reasoning, treating it as something that can independently seek out moral truth.
Moral Foundations Theory, which draws heavily on the anthropological insights of Richard Shweder, argues that care/harm, fairness/cheating, group loyalty and betrayal, authority and subversion, sanctity and degradation are the most important taste receptors of the moral mind. And that moral systems are like cuisines that are constructed from elements to please these receptors. They’re not the only five; there are a lot more. But I think this is a good starting point, and one that Hume would approve of.
I think we should pick up where Hume left off. We know an awful lot more than Hume did about psychology, evolution, and neuroscience. If Hume came back to us today, and we gave him a few years to read up on the literature and get up to speed, I think he would endorse all of these criteria. I’m all in favor of reductionism, as long as it’s paired with emergentism. We’ve got to look at the two-way relations between psychology and the level above us, as well as the reductionist or neural level below us. Morality has to be understood as a largely tribal phenomenon, at least in its origins. By its very nature, morality binds us into groups, in order to compete with other groups. And that means that we’re at a high risk of misunderstanding those moralities that are not our own. That’s what I think the moral sciences should look like in the 21st century.
Source: Thinking: The New Science of Decision-Making, Problem-Solving, and Prediction, John Brockman