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.

“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.

Atheism _is_ a (stealth) religion, after all!

And this time it is not little me but David Sloan Wilson (of Unto Others and Darwin’s Cathedral fame) at the Beyond Belief conference. From the Atheist Ethicist (who is doing, once again, a great job blogging the conference):

In [David] Sloan Wilson’s presentation at Beyond Belief 2, he made the argument that the “new atheism” is a stealth religion. It is a stealth religion because, like all religions, its major proponents and its followers buy into a set of propositions that they hold, not on the basis of evidence, but on the basis of . . . well, something less solid than ‘good science’. Yet, they are not willing to concede the fact that they lack good evidence for their beliefs.

Once we take the concept of stealth religions seriously then we can entertain the prospect that there are belief systems that have nothing to do with God . . . not that particular departure from reality . . . but that depart from reality in other ways.

…

Wilson’s claim now is that the New Atheism, like Objectivism, is another ‘stealth religion’.

More specifically, he is concerned with four propositions that (partially) define the New Atheism.

(1) Is there any scientific evidence for the existence of supernatural agents?

(2) If not, then how can we explain the phenomenon of religion in naturalistic terms?

(3) Are the impacts of religion good or bad on human welfare?

(4) How can we use our understanding of religion to ameliorate its negative effects?

On these issues, what he says about the new atheism is, “

My complaint about the New Atheism is that, in the first place, for all of us the answer to question 1 is a no-brainer, so we don’t need to go on and on about it, and that they just get the answer wrong to the other three questions.

(The rest of the post is a good summary of Wilson’s view that religion is evolutionarily beneficial when viewed from the perspective of group selection. )

Alonzo Fyfe rightly objects in his post that Wilson’s concept of a “stealth religion” is so vague that Wilson himself probably could be accused of it. In effect Wilson is calling a set of unjustified beliefs a religion. The New Atheists (as far as i know) have no (public?) rituals, holy books or other religious paraphernalia.

However, the point of Wilson’s objection is perfectly understandable, and in my opinion, correct: he is calling the New Atheists religious so as to warn them that they are themselves doing exactly what they accuse the religious people of doing (harboring false beliefs). Moreover, what makes Wilson’s claim so egregiously laughable is precisely the same unacceptable reduction that the New Atheists are applying to the old religions: the New Atheists reduce religion to a set of false beliefs, minimizing or disregarding all the positive aspects of the rituals, communities, and even beliefs; Wilson is then simply applying their definition to themselves!

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.

science meets religion (quantum physics edition)

Some physicist is claiming the universe might be a virtual reality simulation (this is an offshoot of the universe-as-high-school-project-from-alternate-dimension theory). Of course, being a scientist, he thinks this theory can be experimentally verified (read falsified). Not only are the scientists doing Genesis-theorizing, but they’re coming up with even weirder ideas than moses and mohammed ever dreamed up.

from slashdot:

“A New Zealand physicist has written a paper saying that physicists should seriously explore the possibility the universe is a giant virtual reality simulation. He says that the existence of quantum phenomena could be due to the underlying digital nature of the simulation and also claims his VR hypothesis can explain relativity, the big bang and more. It should be possible to perform experiments to prove the hypothesis too. He reasons that if reality was to do something that information processing cannot, then it cannot be virtual.”

the numinously divine mystery … of the laws of physics

The NYT is at it again, wondering about the origins of the laws of physics. They don’t have an answer, or rather offer a whole slew of them, ranging from platonism, firey mathematics (i kid you not), russian doll universes (my favourite), random dynamics, etc.

The basic problem all these solutions are trying (rather unconvincingly) to solve is basically:

that the traditional view of transcendent laws is just 17th-century monotheism without God. “Then God got killed off and the laws just free-floated in a conceptual vacuum but retained their theological properties,”

The theological question of who made the universe, the philosophical question of why is there something instead of nothing, is, in physics, that of why are there laws at all. It seems that physics is getting closer to answering the theological and philosophical questions with a good, solid scientific fact. Indeed, if they can explain to us why the laws of gravity etc. hold, how they appeared, etc. then we will be very close to “god”. And they might be able to modify our view of the world enough that we no longer need to thing in god-terms any longer. But, as any good scientific explanation, this will at best open up an entire new slew of problems.

As we are already seeing with Quantum explanations of the world, the ultimate answer the physicists are going to give us to this question might not help much to solve our more banal curiosity: it is unlikely that they, let alone we, understand the answer, however mathematically sound it will prove to be.

no, i will not post on the scientology story!

I might well be living in Germany where anything approaching unconventional or authoritarian is forcefully frowned upon for historical reasons that go back beyond the middle of the twentieth century no matter what you might have heard; and i might even have been to Berlin, though that was a long time ago. I might even be writing a thesis on the philosophy of religion. I might be running an ethics cum religion blog that even dabbles in science and, more importantly, has too often stooped to posting the least worthwhile junk out there on the internets. And i have never really liked Tom Cruise as an actor (except in Magnolia; his wonderful erstwhile wife, the splendiferous Nicole Kidman, is however an entirely different matter, if only for her most gigantuous performance in The Hours, though Dogville shouldn’t be left unmentioned, of course, however depressing the movie might be) and don’t really care about his religious proclivities. But i don’t know the first thing about scientology, so i’ll put an end to this post that is not about scientology, germany or the latter banning the former, or trying to, or even thinking about it.