science on ethics

Well, the scientists have already solved the Kant/Hume divide in ethics – at least they’ve made an honorable start. Comparing people with and without certain types of brain damage, Marc Hauser and others have found that a certain part of the brain controls emotions that in turn control the sort of empathy that moderates utilitarian thinking.

These results suggest that emotions play a crucial role in moral decisions involving personal contact – but not in moral judgments involving distant, indirect impacts on other people. “What’s beautiful to me is how subtly different the situations are,” says Marc Hauser at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, US, one of the researchers involved.

The finding that some moral judgments involve emotions while others do not supports the supposedly diametrically opposed thinking of philosophers Immanuel Kant and David Hume.

“It means both Kant and Hume are right. Philosophers will have a fit because they like to choose sides,” says Frans de Waal at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, US. Hume believed that people could be motivated to make proper moral decisions based on their sympathy for others. Kant, meanwhile, warned that moral judgments might be corrupted by emotions.

It is hight time philosophers gave up on the specifics of ethical theories and started finding a higher perch from which to do their thinking.

the nation on european multiculturalism

An article in The Nation reviewing recent books on islam and europe and ending in a long discussion of the french example.

These facts strongly suggest that converts to Islamic fundamentalism are made and not born. In most cases, Islamism is a conscious choice embraced by frustrated second-generation immigrants who feel they are growing up in an ethnic and cultural no man’s land. In French Hospitality (1984), Tahar Ben Jelloun, a Moroccan writer based in Paris, accurately describes them as “a generation doomed to cultural orphanhood and ontological fragility.” Thus, Islam and Islamism are two different things–a point that “clash of civilization” theorists like Samuel Huntington have failed to register.

The author thankfully does not attempt yet another grand evaluation of the situation but sticks to closely examining specific areas. No solution is proposed, but that is at this point, probably a good thing.

As regards france, i will certainly agree that their is hope in the persons of a good number of fully-integrated north africans. However, i must confess that of all those whom i have met, none had retained much of any religious ties to islam: they had integrated so well because they were good french atheists or agnostics. Nevertheless, they are good and prominent examples of what can and perhaps should be accomplished: from them we can learn (by asking) how they integrated and how they think others could be brought round. Or better we could ask them to help – but they are now so well integrated that they don’t want to have much to do with the racaille…

the biological takeover of ethics

From the NTY:

Some animals are surprisingly sensitive to the plight of others. Chimpanzees, who cannot swim, have drowned in zoo moats trying to save others. Given the chance to get food by pulling a chain that would also deliver an electric shock to a companion, rhesus monkeys will starve themselves for several days.

Biologists argue that these and other social behaviors are the precursors of human morality. They further believe that if morality grew out of behavioral rules shaped by evolution, it is for biologists, not philosophers or theologians, to say what these rules are.

The article primarily discusses Franz de Waal and Marc Hauser. Philosophers will obviously object to biology’s imperialistic claims, but it cannot be doubted that an area that previously was the sole purview of the human sciences is now accessible to the natural ones – and their much more accurate and rigorous methodologies. This does not however mean, as an E. O. Wilson would have it, that philosophical ethics has become unnecessary – only that it must change.

Ethics must accept the new knowledge offered by biology and attendant sciences. It is very possible that ethics will have to abandon its own search for specific ethical theories – and let the psychologists and neuroscientists do that. Indeed the plethora of ethical systems (kantian deontology, utilitarianism, emotivism, virtue ethics, etc.) will begin to strike us hopelessly flawed attempts to come up with the one single principle for all of morality – just like the early greeks spent their time arguing whether the universe was fundamentally constituted of fire, earth, water or air. As it turns out, it is made of of all and none the above – that the answer is much more complicated and that we might never reach a most fundamental level.

As with pre-socratic philosophies, it is perhaps time that ethics gave up its search for fundamental principles and outsourced that work to the natural sciences who will begin in media res, finding little pieces they will puzzle together instead of looking straightaway for and ethical Grand Unified Theory.

What is the role then for philosphy and ethics in particular? I think the primatologist de Waal offers us the beginnings of an answer:

As Dr. de Waal sees it, human morality may be severely limited by having evolved as a way of banding together against adversaries, with moral restraints being observed only toward the in group, not toward outsiders. “The profound irony is that our noblest achievement — morality — has evolutionary ties to our basest behavior — warfare,” he writes. “The sense of community required by the former was provided by the latter.”

The answer lies not in the substance of this paragraph but in the thinking that underlies it. The distinctive feature of homo sapiens is that it reasons, that it can abstract from its situation and therefore change itself. Biology and psychology will tell us how we behave and why, it will even explain our oughts – it will tell us why be think like kantians in certain situations and why we reason like utilitarians in others. Ethicists will no longer be able to preach their own pet ethical theories; they must move one rung up the ladder and begin to concentrate of the more difficult question of what we want to want. Science will explain the mechanism of our ethical reasoning; it will, however, be up to ethics to pull all the diverse pieces of scientific explanations together and use them to figure out not what we are but what we want to become. This is one area in which philosophy is (still) the best equipped contestant.

on friendship

i am decades behind what someone my age should know about friendship and social relationships in general, so much of this will not be new to most of you. Nevertheless, we often forget and need a good reminding now and then. I’ve recently learned two things about friendship:

First, friends have to push their friendships along instead of waiting for them to happen. I’ve too often tried to be as neutral as possible with everyone and let my friends decide what they wanted to do. I now realize that it is healthier to sometimes just say what you want and try to get your friend to do it (“do please come”) – especially if that friend is not opposed to your suggestion, but only double-minded about it. The principle behind this is probably nothing more than: “do not try to be what you are not”. Just letting things happen often results in no one being very enthused about the end result; at least one person should be excited to start out with. Pretending not to care when you really do is not only unhealthy but, in some sense, a little lie.

Second, friendships across large cultural divides are very dangerous because they are very difficult to interpret. I have thought people here in india were my friends (and they probably were) but suddenly lost that friendship because of what appeared to be a trifle. The problem is that neither of us knows how the other person views the relationship; we assume the other person is in line with our own thinking when the relationship is in fact asymmetrical. I know of no other solution to this problem than to be very very careful and avoid assuming anything beyond what you can know for sure (sounds like the scientific method). Sadly, this implies remaining emotionally aloof from all new types of relationship. Is there another solution?

hanging confederate flags the wrong way

There’s a museum down in florida that has hung a confederate flag … but from a gallows – not a flag pole. This is an art installation that has (of course) proven controversial. The museum claims it wants to foster good, healthy discussion of the difficult topic:

“There’s a balance between the nature of the art that we show and the outcome that we seek, which is to promote dialogue and conversation, and have you maybe think of something in a slightly different way,”

Others were highly offended:

Hurst, commander of the local Sons of Confederate Veterans chapter, said Friday he has lost respect for the museum, calling the display of Sims’ work “offensive, objectionable and tasteless.”

“They’re alienating a large portion of the population around here,” Hurst said. “Maybe they just wanted to cause some controversy.”

He called Sims an “irrelevant individual” with no artistic talent.

“There are some people who have great talent, and they rely on that talent to be successful. There are others who don’t have great talent, and they have to rely on a gimmick,” Hurst said.

Now i do not wish to discuss the quality of this piece of art. What is much more interesting is the offended response. What is objected? (1) that the work of art is alienating certain people (2) that it is causing controversy and (3) that it is not good art. The third is obviously ad hominem, the first two are what we’ve heared coming from europe’s minorities over the last few years.

What does this mean? (1) it means that the west is just as sensitive about certain issues as the (middle-)east is: Germany is known to ban all swastikas, France to make it a crime to deny the Holocaust or the massacre of the Kurds by the Turcs, etc… We are all (more or less unreasonnably) difficult about something or other. (2) The offended parties are usually take a matter personally (hence the retaliation with insults here) that other parties take as a matter that requires social discussion. Is there any reason to not dismiss the remarks of a Hurst simply because they are impolite?

Update to the previous post on Churchland and Fyfe

Alonzo Fyfe from Atheist Ethicist was kind enough to pen a clarifying post about the comment i left on his earlier post attacking Churchland (i was not defending her). If i can summarize all this in a three sentences paragraphs, i’ll be doing well:

Alonzo described Churchland’s claim that since the degree of monogamy in voles “(fuzzy little mole-like mammals)” appears to be dependant upon certain biological features it cannot be considered a moral issue. This Alonzo rightly countered with the objection that even if tendencies to violent behavior are linked to biology, we will still continue to deem them wrong. He then suggested a solution to Churchland’s mix up along the lines that we can come up with good reasons to influence the oxytocin levels in other people/voles in order to get them to do what we think they ought to do.

In my comment i countered that it seemed like Alonzo was simply pushing the moral dillema one step back and not solving the problem. I suggested we follow Hilary Putnam and admit that facts and values are fundamentally intertwined. However, i didn’t explain what i thought were the consequences of such a position.

In his comment to my comment and in his new post, Alonzo clarifies what he meant, shows that i was wrong in worrying that he was falling into an infinite regress of oughts and states his position – a coherence theory of the good and a harmony theory of desires – which is not far at all from my Putnam suggestion.

And now a little more meat. I like Alonzo’s coherence theory of the good because it doesn’t try to base all of morality on one single fundamental or transcendental principle, but is content to take all our oughts and simply try to fit them together. That is an eminently practical and useful approach that avoids the eerie and rather unnatural properties some ascribe to notions of the good. However, i am not so sure about how he links his desires with his oughts.

In this web of all desires, the more a desire comes into conflict (destroys harmony with) other desires, the more and the stronger the reasons that exist to act so as to inhibit that desire. At the same time, the more a desire tends to fulfill other desires, the more and the stronger the end-reasons are for promoting that desire.

There is no mystery as to why a person with a desire that P has an end-reason to influence the desires of others in this way. It is a part of the desire that P, where desires are the only reasons for action that exist, that it gives him an end-reason to seek harmonious desires in others.

(Now a standard objection to desire-ethics (‘emotivism’ is the terminus technicus) is that some desires are just plain wrong. Of course, Alonzo’s coherence theory disposes of this objection effortlessly: wrong desires are possible, but can also be shown to be so inasmuch as they cause too much disharmony/incoherence in the rest of our oughts/desires.)

Alonzo’s reduction of oughts to end-reasons that follow from desires seems fundamentalistic in another sense (perhaps a higher one?). Even if we are not looking for a foundational principle upon which to erect our ethics, we nevertheless have found a foundational concept with which to construct it. I have myself toyed with the idea of reducing ethics to a theory of ‘what we want’, which is not very different from what i am objecting to here – except that it doesn’t sound as emotional as the desire version. So i am in effect here also objecting to myself.

Could we not perhaps expand the coherence theory and make it a coherence theory of ethical theories? We could then claim that all the ethical theories (the deontological, utilitarian, emotivist, virtue, etc.) are simply rules of thumb that apply in different situations and from differing perspectives, but that should all in the end be coherent with one another. This way we would have a theory that eschews both principal and conceptual foundations but remains robust thanks to the coherence structure.

Churchland, biology and morality

The Atheist Ethicist doesn’t like Churchland’s particular mix of biology and morality. (Nor do i.)

dennett defending memes

This is an article i’ve had sitting on my waiting list for about a week. It’s Dennett trying to do his friend Dawkins and favor and lend some philosophical credibility to the (academically) failed concept of a meme (“cultural replicators propagated through imitation” ie catchy ideas).

The article is short and to the point. Dennett grants Sperber most of his objections to the evolutionary soundness of the concept of a meme, especially the contention that memes require intentional reproduction on the part of humans, something that ‘blind’ natural selection cannot admit of. But in the end, he interestingly switches sides by explaining that the intentional beings that go about replicating memes are themselves products of natural selection so that their intentional abilities can themselves be interpreted as simply the latest and best evolutionary strategy. Homo sapiens has thus developed norms (like the alphabet) that allow people to carefully reproduce ideas, that is, memes.

Remains the problem of defining the size of a meme, but this does not seem to bother Dennett too much, as he thinks we always manage somehow, if only to define what size of information constitutes copyright infringement (one bit according to the MPAA). So memes can be rehabilitated as products of (a higher) evolutionary selection, or so the philosopher would have us believe.

Myself, i am not so sure that all this philosophical bending over backwards really helps to make the meme a useful scientific concept. The size problem is actually a gigantic hurdle to quantification. And a book like the S. Blackmore’s The Meme Machine never quite says anything interesting or falsifiable. Nevertheless, Dennett’s paper is in itself very interesting, though probably more for the attempt to expand the reach of evolution to the realm of human culture than for the particular tools he wants to use to accomplish this feat.

pinker on why we are becoming less violent

From WorldChanging on an (unidentified) presentation by Steven Pinker:

So why is violence becoming less common? He offers four explanations:

1) Hobbes got it right. “Life in the state of nature is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” In anarchy, there’s a temptation towards preemptive violence, hurting the other guy before he hurts you. But with the rise of the Leviathan – the State – there’s a monopoly on violence. This helps explain why we still see violence in the absence of the state – zones of anarchy, failed states, street gangs.

2) In the past, we had a widespread sentiment that life was cheap. As we’ve gotten better at prolonging life, we take life more seriously and are more reluctant to take life.

3) We’re seeing more non-zero sum games, as people discover forms of cooperation that can benefit both parties, like trade and shared peace dividends. These zero-sum games come with technology, because it allows us to trade with more people. People become more valuable live than dead – “We shouldn’t bomb the japanese because they built my minivan.”

4) Finally, Pinker leans on Peter Singer to speculate about “the expanding circle”. By default, we empathize with a small group of people, our friends and family. Everyone else is subhuman. But over time, we’ve seen this circle expand, from village to clan to tribe to nation to other races, both sexes and eventually other species. As we learn to expand our circles wider and wider, perhaps violence becomes increasingly unacceptable.

I would add a fifth reason: we are becoming more and more socially organized, learning to ever better regulate our own behavior. We are forcing ourselves to be less violent, because this seems to foster inherently better (more comfortable) living situations.

mercenaries in iraq

Via 3QD, from the Nation, Jeremy Scahill offers a YouTube version of his new book on US military contractors, primarily Blackwater. The most disturbing bit was the very last segment about these mercenaries showing up in american cities – though objectively that is just as bad as them killing people in Irak. Filed under Ethics.

The main problem, as i see it, is not so much the privatisation of the war, but the fact that these private companies are not (at all) accountable to congress for what they do. If the administration had to report on them too to lawmakers, then much of the moral laxity of the situation would be alieviated. After all, mercenaries are people who do war (ie kill people) for money – and that is what normal american soldiers do too; or am i missing a gigantic distinction here? I guess all i want is for mercenaries to be regulated…