political animals (dolphins, elephants and primates)

Short article at the NYT on current research on animal sociability and politics (surprisingly, DeWaal is never mentioned):

Dario Maestripieri, a primatologist at the University of Chicago, has observed a similar dilemma in humans and the rhesus monkeys he studies.

“The paradox of a highly social species like rhesus monkeys and humans is that our complex sociality is the reason for our success, but it’s also the source of our greatest troubles,” he said. “Throughout human history, you see that the worst problems for people almost always come from other people, and it’s the same for the monkeys. You can put them anywhere, but their main problem is always going to be other rhesus monkeys.”

Moral Minds

I just finished Marc Hauser’s book Moral Minds (2006) on “the science of morality”. It’s a good overview of the current state of the science and quite readable. He is trying to encourage scientists to look for innate, evolutionarily developed moral rules, somewhat like the gennerative grammar rules described by Chomsky. Hauser posits three moral creatures: a humean one that only relies on moral intuition and emotions; a kantian who relies exclusively on reason (Hauser sometimes lops the utilitarians into this category…) and a rawlsian who uses reason to assess a situation before using moral intuitions and emotion to evaluate it. Hauser prefers the latter.

There is, however, one big problem with the entire premise of the book, or rather with its conclusion: Nowhere to my knowledge does Hauser address the question of the moral bindingness of the evolutionary moral rules. Of course, this is not 19th century social darwinism where the laws of evolution were supposed to permit all sorts of inhumane societies. These are rules particular to our species, rules that fit and work, that have evolved alongside (actually ‘in’) living beings. These are therefore ‘good’ rules in the sense that they usually get us to do what is in our interest.

However, the meta-question is never raised as to how we can assess the goodness of the moral rules themselves.  There is no reason why we should go with them all the time. For one, our environment has changed and is rapidly changing, probably rendering some of the rules obsolete. For another, though some of the rules might have gotten us thus far, we might no longer find them very acceptable, i.e. they might conflict with other moral rules/intuitions or with our reason.

The last point bears a tad bit more explaining. In economics, it is well known that we humans have some intuitions that do not serve us well. We discount the future too much (exponentially), which causes us to buy into dangerous schemes, like, say, sub-prime housing loans. This is an innate, evolutionary intuition that has served us in the past when the future was indeed very uncertain. Now it simply gets us into trouble. It is very likely that we now have similar problems with our moral intuitions. What is important is that if enough people think through the situations they can explain to us why such and such a moral intuition is wrong so that once we understand what thy mean, we can work against, or perhaps even shed, the offending moral intuition.

Of course, I expect Hauser wouldn’t disagree. After all, this is just a different part of human brains taking over some of the moral workload. There is nothing un-evolutionary about it. However, not pointing this out makes the text sound like it is equating innate moral intuitions with THE GOOD. And that is just wrong.

Kant, Hume and the evolution of morality

There is a long post on the Illusive Mind blog defending an evolutionary morality against Kant. I do not particularly want to defend Kant, but i do want to raise a very sizable caveat: whatever “morality” evolution has given us isn’t by any means necessarily the “right” one!

Here is the synopsis of the article/post:

In this essay I will outline what I regard as the most successful attempt to explain the evolution of altruism. I will then illustrate some of the effects that an evolutionary account of moral behaviour has on cognitivist and noncognitivist theories of ethics. I will argue that evolutionary theory does not undermine Hume’s noncognitivism but supports it and casts doubt on Kantianism.

Where things go horribly wrong is when morality is reduced to “a question of desire” because we then have nothing to ‘get behind desires’ and assess them morally (unless you posit some kind of coherence theory, but that is no the case in this article):

The question of retaining moral judgements then is reduced to a question of desire. Do we want to utilise judgements whose agenda is the ongoing survival of the species (at the level of the gene) through a system of rewarding co-operation and punishing cheating?

In effect the morality we have inherited through evolution is taken to be ‘valid’ – except when we don’t like it. The exception is, in my opinion, befuddled; the first part of the above sentence is, however, very dangerous, committing something akin to an is/ought or natural fallacy.

The only alternative on offer is a purely rational ethics à la Kant, but even this is undercut by more primary evolutionary forces:

The only way to be objectively moral and avoid ‘evolutionary baggage’ from tainting our moral judgements seems to be to devote oneself completely to reason in a Kantian fashion. However, it is not a forgone conclusion that reason is above evolutionary pressures. In The Evolution of Reason, William Cooper argues, “the laws of logic emerge naturally as corollaries of the evolutionary laws” (2003, p.5).

In the end, one gets the impression that we are enslaved to the morality evolution thought up for us and are incapable of stepping out of it to evaluate our own moral intuitions.

Admittedly, evaluating our moral intuitions is no easy task. But what is often forgotten is that we are not alone working at that task. It might be impossibly solipsistic for me to want to morally evaluate my own moral intuitions (where would i stand in order to do so?); but it certainly is not very difficult for someone else, actually many other people, to do so.

The solution will likely be neither Humean nor Kantian. We must both use some moral intuitions to assess other ones but also reason through our moral intuitions and find instances where the intuitions clearly go wrong.

Atheist Ethicist on Jonathan Haidt

The Atheist Ethicist is critiquing Haidt. From what i can tell, i like this Haidt guy.

Basically, his claims were these:

Liberal morality can be understood as being grounded on two fundamental sets of principles – each of which can be related to some biological (evolutionary) trait. These are a prohibition on harm (founded on the evolutionary quality of kin selection), and the other is fairness or justice (founded on the evolutionary quality of reciprocal altruism). These values are premised on the idea that societies are made up of distinct individuals and the individual is the fundamental entity that makes up communities.

However, if we look at morality around the world, we find three more fundamental sets of values that liberals tend to ignore. These additional three foundations come from recognition that groups, not just individuals, have moral importance. In order to have a functioning group, we need more than principles concerning harm and justice. We need principles concerning loyalty, respect, and purity or sanctity.

Haidt also charged the liberal community with being opposed to diversity (or, at best, as lacking diversity). He pointed out that there was almost universal agreement in the room about certain (liberal) moral values, and that this has been obtained effectively by driving anybody who would hold a conflicting view out of the community. He pointed out how, at psychology conventions, the attendees make jokes about conservatives and create an atmosphere where somebody holding conservative values would feel very uncomfortable – would feel unwelcome.

being friendly to yourself

From Godwin Samararatne, Talks on Buddhist Meditation:

I think it is difficult to be friendly to others unless you are friendly to yourself.

For one, its good practice. For another, though its a state of mind, which must be acquired and its easiest to start at home.

“the evolutionary aspects of non-reproducing humans”

standing on E. O. Wilson’s broad shoulders, Brandon Keim wonders if, like the bees and the ants, humans aren’t a eusocial species, with homosexuality being the pinnacle of our other-oriented (ie non-reproducing) evolution:

So with all necessary caveats against reductionism and misappropriation, we can ask: should human societies conceive of themselves in terms of  group-level selection? Have we already developed aspects of eusociality? And — just to make matters really interesting — could non-reproducing humans, such as (most) gays and lesbians, as well as heterosexuals who choose not to have kids, actually be a manifestation of this emergent eusociality?

from wired.

books i’m reading on ethics and emotions

Marc D. Hauser, Moral Minds. Looks to be an attempt to apply Chomskyan methods from language analysis to morality with an emphasis on emotions. Lots of Hume and Rawls and criticizing of Kant.

Martha Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought. A good philosophical investigation of emotions as ways of assessing the world morally. Too long, but it is easy to pick and choose your chapters once you get through the first four ones with the indispensable theoretical foundation. Proust carries through the entire text as a first-rate thinker on the emotions (he supplied Nussbaum with her book title).

Godwin Samararatne, Talks on Buddhist Meditation. Teaches us to monitor our emotions though meditation and mindfulness, not in order to repress or destroy, but to understand and embrace them. This is ethical method.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations. The second half of the first part is largely devoted to a study of the relationship of self and other to expressions of pain. This is not exactly emotions, but the analyses are very easily translated, if any translation is even necessary.

Stendhal, La Chartreuse de Parme. A grandiose novel written by a frenchman about italians and peppered with comments about how the french and italians differ in their emotional make up. The italians apparently love the book, so Stendhal can’t be that horribly wrong/unfair in his comparisons.

Steven Pinker on environmentalism, vegetarianism and moralizing

 In a NYT’s article about the science of morality, Steven Pinker points out that vegetarianism and environmentalism can sound very moralizing. In fact, what he is pointing out here is probably why many religious people sometimes say that vegetarianism and the ecological movement are religions. Of course, they are not, though they can take on a number of religious or moral aspects and become surrogates for religion.

We all know what it feels like when the moralization switch flips inside us — the righteous glow, the burning dudgeon, the drive to recruit others to the cause. The psychologist Paul Rozin has studied the toggle switch by comparing two kinds of people who engage in the same behavior but with different switch settings. Health vegetarians avoid meat for practical reasons, like lowering cholesterol and avoiding toxins. Moral vegetarians avoid meat for ethical reasons: to avoid complicity in the suffering of animals. By investigating their feelings about meat-eating, Rozin showed that the moral motive sets off a cascade of opinions. Moral vegetarians are more likely to treat meat as a contaminant — they refuse, for example, to eat a bowl of soup into which a drop of beef broth has fallen. They are more likely to think that other people ought to be vegetarians, and are more likely to imbue their dietary habits with other virtues, like believing that meat avoidance makes people less aggressive and bestial.

towards the end:

And nowhere is moralization more of a hazard than in our greatest global challenge. The threat of human-induced climate change has become the occasion for a moralistic revival meeting. In many discussions, the cause of climate change is overindulgence (too many S.U.V.’s) and defilement (sullying the atmosphere), and the solution is temperance (conservation) and expiation (buying carbon offset coupons). Yet the experts agree that these numbers don’t add up: even if every last American became conscientious about his or her carbon emissions, the effects on climate change would be trifling, if for no other reason than that two billion Indians and Chinese are unlikely to copy our born-again abstemiousness. Though voluntary conservation may be one wedge in an effective carbon-reduction pie, the other wedges will have to be morally boring, like a carbon tax and new energy technologies, or even taboo, like nuclear power and deliberate manipulation of the ocean and atmosphere. Our habit of moralizing problems, merging them with intuitions of purity and contamination, and resting content when we feel the right feelings, can get in the way of doing the right thing.

Steven Pinker on the science of morality

Steven Pinker has 8 pages of a very good, accessible and, as far as i can tell, rather comprehensive overview of the “new science of the moral sense” over at the NYT. He covers much too much ground for me to summarize here, though his final conclusion is noteworthy: we don’t need to be afraid of the new science. The best morality will only come from getting to know ourselves better as humans. As socrates was fond of saying: know thyself.

Fyfe on Dennett on Religion

Alonzo Fyfe approvingly quotes Dennett at Beyond Belief 2: Enlightenment 2.0 telling the religious how stupid they are (This is Dennett speaking to a religious person):

With all due respect, sir, have you considered the possibility that you have blighted your whole life with a fantasy and are polluting the minds of defenseless children with dangerous nonsense?

the solution Dennett and Fyfe propose is to teach children about ALL religions. Dennett hopes that the children will abandon their own after they find out that its not more likely to be true than any other (Fyfe has other reasons for liking the same solution):

Dennett['s] hope is that, when children are presented with the variety of religions and the fact that each has a set of adherents who say that theirs is true and all others is false, that they will realize there is nothing ‘special’ about any one religion. There is no reason to pick one and say, “This contains the absolute truth,” because “that religion over there” is being defended in exactly the same way.

Dennett is assuming that all religions are more or less alike, all concerned with proffering true statements about the world. Oftentimes he seems to be assuming that all religions look like Christianity and Islam. In fact it is only those two that care much about claiming their religion is absolutely true. Jews and Hindus don’t evangelize because their religions are only meant for people of their ethnic groups.  Buddhists are about as “post modern” about religious belief as you can get. They accept ALL religions as true!

For many religious people, the scientific “truth value” of their beliefs is very much secondary. The primary aspect is the social and personal benefits of their religion. They are glad to smudge their religion’s “truth claims” because they are not important. It makes no sense to say that they have “blighted their whole lives with a fantasy”. The fantasy is only a means to the end of a better life, which is, almost by definition, not “blighted”.

Dennett is making the gigantic mistake of taking the definition of religion that fundamentalist christians and muslims give of their own religions and applying it to all religions. It is no wonder that so very few people recognize themselves in his attacks.