The Science of Morality
This is a group that I believe will appreciate this latest discussion over at the Edge.
snippet 1:
“Behavioral scientists routinely publish broad claims about human psychology and behavior based on samples drawn entirely from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic societies.” The acronym there being WEIRD. “Our findings suggest that members of WEIRD societies are among the least representative populations one could find for generalizing about humans. 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 this particularly thin and rather unusual slice of humanity.”
snippet 2:
“The evidence reviewed here shows not only that reasoning falls quite short of reliably delivering rational beliefs and rational decisions. It may even be, in a variety of cases, detrimental to rationality. Reasoning can lead to poor outcomes, not because humans are bad at it, but because they systematically strive for arguments that justify their beliefs or their actions. This explains the confirmation bias, motivated reasoning, and reason-based choice, among other things.”
here’s the link
At first blush, I think it is worth noting that, while the samples are generally WEIRD, so too are the venues of application. Most of the people actually using this information are speculating about (or actually engaged in) management of organizations or relationships in the industrialized West. The ethnocentric bias of this work is largely mitigated by the ethnocentric bias of its utilization.
Also, campuses where the best behavioral science work is done often are legitimately diverse places. Because participation in these studies is typically motivated with small sums of money, there is a slight skew away from the trust fund frat boys and toward the underfinanced students, including the less privileged segment of foreign students.
In fairness, the original observation remains basically true — most of the participants in such studies are middle or upper class young people whose idea of “hunger” amounts to skipping lunch and whose concept of “poverty” involves an inability to afford spring break travel. All that said, my gut tells me on this subject that the role of reason correlates directly (if loosely) with material security. Though reason is never truly a luxury, those afflicted with fear and hate tend to look upon rational thought as a sign of weakness. We need only look at the link between an uptick of fear and hate here in our own society to see reason made less popular by the trend.
There is a lighter side to all this though. Were we to evolve our policies into something vaguely Danish (or Swiss, or Finnish, or Dutch, etc.) we could put more of our own barbarity behind us. Likewise, bring education, infrastructure, work opportunities, and eventual social justice to parts of the world so lacking will make those parts of the world less receptive to warlords and terrorists. If this had been clearly understood as the mission in Afghanistan after the Taliban’s central government was toppled, I believe better results would be clear today. Our most progressive civilizations would do well to get much better at exporting affluence, though here we come full circle, running headlong into the problem of human behavioral science chiefly informed by the behavior of secure and well fed students.
Comment on July 29, 2010 @ 1:57 pm
Cat-eyes: Yes… it IS true that we (inadvertently or not) often hobble ourselves with our mispreapprehensions! (THERE! I made up another one ;-})
But I tend toward Demonweed’s viewpoint here. America (as we’ve agreed elsewhere) is a bit of an ‘outlier’ when it comes to judging ‘rational’ and/or ‘altruistic’ behaviours. To be blunt, America is still largely a land of savages. Northern Europe has already BEEN through all of this… again and AGAIN… and seem to have largely and (hopefully) FINALLY to have learnt their lessons.
When I think of ’sane’ societies, I do NOT think of America! I do NOT think of China (or pathological North Korea!) or Botswana or even England or Japan. I think of Denmark and Sweden, of the Netherlands and Finland.
So I see nothing wrong with using sane people as yardsticks to measure SANITY.
Comment on July 29, 2010 @ 3:06 pm
did either of you read the entire story from the link?
Comment on July 29, 2010 @ 3:33 pm
Cat-eyes: Yes, actually, I did.
There is much that I CAN agree with there, but I have issues with its foundation. F’rinstance, they stipulate that a child has a built-in sense of ‘good and evil’…
I disagree. ‘Good’ and ‘Evil’ are far more plastic terms than you may imagine… and thus also easily MOULDED.
What a child IS born with is a sense of JUSTICE and FAIRNESS. Thus the eagle-eye perception of HYPOCRISY that all kids can make us sheepishly shake our heads at!
But I’m just an observer, not a researcher. So what do I know?
Comment on July 29, 2010 @ 3:46 pm
I think you are extrapolating from one researcher to all the others. As far as I can tell only Bloom uses such terminology and in a context where he assumes familiarity with his research for a sense of his definition of terms.
This is just the first segment of the discussion. All ten of the researchers contribute to the whole. And interestingly and importantly they are people with a pretty good spread of backgrounds and specialties.
Haidt specifically points out that Americans are outliers in many ways. I found it interesting. But then as a philosophically bent cat, names like Kant, Bentham, and Hume almost always catch my attention. I was intrigued by his analysis of philosophy’s role in ethics especially the decline of virtue ethics. It is not surprising that utilitarianism and deontology have done so well here. The religious and economic focus in America clearly forms frameworks for those two schools of thought.
Also the WEIRD data set does not even represent a good set for America, but represents a small subset within Americans as well. I thought that the speculation that different sets likely required different relative normatives and that attempting to extrapolate an average for a base normative is confused and confounding in understanding morality.
AND. Sky, much research is based on observation, so what Do you Know?
Comment on July 29, 2010 @ 4:17 pm
Cat-eyes: What do I know? Well, not MUCH apparently! ;-}
And yes, it was a hasty scan (I’m all into my ‘opera groove’ at the moment, but didn’t want to ignore your post! ;-})… So I’ll freely ‘fess up!
But it’s worth pointing out (I think) that the philosophers you mention were all Englishmen (except for the German Jewish Kant who might as well have been ;-})… and much of American culture/thought is a descendent of these belief sets.
“I think, therefore I am CONFUSED!”
Comment on July 29, 2010 @ 4:40 pm
I CONFUDIATE that statement!
Comment on July 29, 2010 @ 4:56 pm
Uh, I once et a bug.
Comment on July 29, 2010 @ 5:24 pm
byronius: Yeah well, courtesy of ‘Playland’, we ALL know now that you’re from Texas! ’nuff SAID! ;-}
Comment on July 29, 2010 @ 5:33 pm
Yeah, yeah… OK, I ALSO know that Cat-eyes hails from the same nether regions… What the hell ya gonna do?… y’all.
Comment on July 29, 2010 @ 5:35 pm
Postscriptum: I does not escape my attention that neither of you happen to still LIVE there! Hope springs eternal!
Comment on July 29, 2010 @ 6:34 pm
Sky- I meant to imply that you must know things because you are observant, therefore your observations can serve as a shared knowledge.
byronius - good to et a bug every once in a while, ’cause in the end they et us.
sky - granted those three sock heads are all white euros, but pretty dern good ones, but Hume is my personal fave, whenever thinking got to be too much he heartily suggested downing a few pints and that’s pretty hard to disagree with.
Comment on July 29, 2010 @ 7:03 pm
I’m pouring through the content now, previously having been so hasty that I thought it was only available in video form. (A couple of mangled sentences in that last paragraph of my comment are testimony to the overlap of my rush to get with the original response.) With a still incomplete read of the actual seminar, it seems to me that this is a mix of incredibly constructive and incredibly dangerous ideas. How many national leaders have endorsed militaristic policies and outright aggression in part because “war is a part of human nature?”
However cleverly much more refined and empirically sound approaches explain human nature, the method of collecting data only leads to constructive outcomes if the method of applying conclusions also undergoes major refinement. Take some of the most general knowledge we have on the nature of life — the origin of species. Western social Darwinists use science as a springboard to justify ridiculous beliefs about cutthroat economic competition between individuals. Soviet social Darwinists used science as a springboard to justify ridiculous beliefs about economic cooperation and central planning. Both approaches incorporate an unsubstantiated “my idea is the best idea,” but they also incorporate real science. Below a certain levels of astuteness and scrutiny (levels precious few people ever attain in the context of social and political contemplation,) excellent empirical analysis of human nature may be like splitting the atom — as readily used to make bombs as medicine or useful energy.
Also, what I wrote originally about shifting contexts will prove crucial. Human behavior in distant prehistory surely differed from human behavior in the Bronze Age. One hopes the future of humanity involves clean energy, sustainable agriculture, and a progression of social minima that almost never leave a generation less secure than the previous generation. Keeping the focus on reality means hedging even the best picture of today’s humanity so that it does not prevent tomorrow’s humanity from recognizing important changes.
Reality also demands the effective denunciation of any ideological movements that appropriate behavior science to infuse self-serving tautologies with popular credibility. Knowing how loud, and effective, the voices of ideologues can be, this challenge may prove greater than the hurdles between the status quo and a highly specific empirically derived explanation of human nature. It may be hard to overestimate the value Darwin’s actual science contributed to humanity; but it is no less difficult to overestimate the harm two ideologies, made more extreme yet also more popular for their “Darwinian” infusion, have done to humanity.
Anyway, this stuff is very much my cup of tea. Many thanks, Cat-eyes, for sharing it. No doubt I’ll opine more once a quieter time enables a complete reading.
Comment on July 29, 2010 @ 7:08 pm
Cat-eyes: Thanks for your merciful treatment… as I (in true philosophic tradition!) heartily ingest a pint or three myself…
(Lord) David Hume was indubitably a brilliant guy (in OR out of ‘his cups’ as they would say)… but he DID make one crucial if understandable error. Hume invented the ‘pocket watch’ model in a reasoned attempt to ‘disprove’ the wider implications of evolution. Hence later it fell to Richard Dawkins to overwhelmingly rebut the Hume argument in his groundbreaking “The Blind Watchmaker”.
But as with the best of the aristicratic polymaths of his age, Lord Hume was RIGHT about a great MANY things, particularly (to me) in his grasp of what would come to be called ‘political science’.
That’s my lame way of holding out to you an olive leaf in one hand, and a gloriously lukewarm pint of Guinness stout in the other.
- Sky
Comment on July 29, 2010 @ 7:39 pm
Did I say ‘leaf’? I meant ‘branch’! Bottoms up!
Comment on July 29, 2010 @ 7:41 pm
God DAMN It! I got it wrong again! A quick check shows it was actually William Paley who came up with the watch argument! And Hume attempted to refute it. Once AGAIN, I got it BASSACKWARDS!
Ah well… So much for my ‘polymath’ status…
And I don’t want to hear a single WORD about my leaf/branch fig/olive Freudian implications!
Just let me drink me fuckin’ beer!
Comment on July 29, 2010 @ 8:18 pm
Demonweed: comment #13… One does NOT ‘pour’ through material, one ‘pores’ through it… which also makes almost no sense at all… I LOVE our mad language, don’t you?
Just clumsily trying to change the subject…
Comment on July 29, 2010 @ 8:27 pm
OK. This is actually kinda FUN!… (two pints in)…
Can we just agree on THIS?: Tautological empiricism has no FUTURE in the epistemological ontology of the evolutionary prognosticism of the vertebrate hominid’s eventual imaginary superiority. Period. I rest my case.
These obvious facts should be transparently clear to ALL! Don’t you think?
Well *I* for one, sure think so!
I think I’ve now sufficiently dashed any chance of satisfying Cat-eyes’ hope of engaging us in actual psychological consideration of reality-based video games!
LAST CALL!
ummm…. check please?
Comment on July 29, 2010 @ 9:04 pm
(proceeding from quick breath of fresh air)
Wow! I can smell the sea!… the moon is on the rise!
Demonweed: Please do NOT take offence at my comic jest!
I mean no insult… in fact rather a kindred admiration!
From one who tends toward over-verbiage to another, I DIG it! I think that we simply enjoy the WORDS themselves almost as much as we like their meaning!
So we’re on the SAME page… (Well, maybe two or three pages in our case! ;-})
I ALSO wonder deeply about when and where the ‘light came on’ in our species… and also why that ‘light’ seems to NEVER come on in many others of our very same species!… perhaps that’s unkind.
We well know of the glories of the cave art of the Dordogne valley! The astounding art of Lascaux!
Fully, FULLY modern humans! These were people who lived by, around and FOR SYMBOLS!
The earliest modern humans are now believed to have arrived in western Europe no sooner than around 35-40,000 years ago.
Were they compassionate? Did they CARE?
I say, LOOK IN THE MIRROR! They ARE US!
Your turn!
Comment on July 29, 2010 @ 10:06 pm
Thanks Sky and Demonweed. I was hoping for your take Demonweed as you strike me as very astute.
D: Knowledge does have that quality of being a double edged sword.
S: David Hume 1711-1776. Charles Darwin 1809 -1882.
I’ll take that pint but I’d prefer the entire olive tree - I’d love one in the garden.
Comment on July 30, 2010 @ 7:51 am
I et a bug once too. Nevertheless, carry on. Will peruse more diligently when able. Then may comment, or et another bug.
Comment on July 30, 2010 @ 9:48 am
Cat-Eyes: OK… I think I’ve sufficiently humiliated myself now… I once thought I was a stute, but it turned out I was only a stoat…
When I was in New Orleans the damn bugs almost et ME!
(we’re talkin’ the B-52’s of the mosquito world here… damn things even flew in formation! ;-})
Comment on July 30, 2010 @ 3:12 pm
Now that I have given the article a proper reading, I have much to say on this subject. While still practically a child, I recognized that much of human behavior is no more worthy of respect than the behavior of animals clearly lacking self-awareness. Even the best of us are not above engaging in cruel and destructive behaviors. Gradually, over the course of my final years of education and my few years of full time professional life, I made an effort to purge myself of ego in the hope that I would also purge myself of malice.
I have lived more years than the number of nights I have spent entwined with a lover. In the last ten years, I doubt I’ve done more than six months of real work for non-trivial compensation (and even that was driven by the desire to be helpful to someone else.) I spent less than $200 in 2009, that income mostly the result of gifts (and largely spent buying gifts for others.) This year looks to be no different. I try to keep myself sane and well chiefly because I know the alternatives would be distressing to my friends and family (though admittedly, I do enjoy their company, and then there was that one romance . . .)
Anyway, the point is that my commitment to a thought process free of the nonsense that social and economic struggles impose on nearly all of humanity has been extreme. I saw in that article the beginnings of a good faith effort to seek truth through a scientific approach to morality, but I also saw an enormous and disappointing shrug offered in response to the epic tangle that is the modern human condition. The first/primary speaker seemed convinced that truth will follow from quantifying what people, already socialized, do and desire.
This line of inquiry may ultimately tell us that giant SUVs are the ideal conveyance and cheating in academic life is fine as long as you are prepared to continue stealing work product during the career to follow. A broader cultural/contextual reach may yield different answers, but it still only informs us about what is. What could be and what should be remain distinct from what is.
To be fair, philosophers are often guilty of oversimplification by means of grand schemes and lofty principles. Philosophical educators typically compound this problem because it is so much easier to teach (and test regurgitation of) the grand scheme than it is to become immersed in the nuances of any particular thinker’s outlook on life. I suppose the talk was not dedicated to dispensing with systematic approaches altogether, but I worry about a lack of caution when it comes to the embrace of shiny new findings pouring out of modern neurological and psychological studies. Empirical data must be tempered with principled thinking every bit as much as principled thinking must not stand in contradiction to relevant and substantial empirical data.
Where I would diverge from Jonathan Haidt’s core assertions begins where he accepts the idea that reason itself is a capacity developed for purposes of asserting social dominance. As I see it, argument which is both genuine and reasonable is something much more useful than a technique of self-promotion. It is fair to observe that nearly all of human communication either lacks any significant moral dimension or is crafted for self-serving purposes. Yet forms of reason, most especially logic, are not tricks developed by our inner snake oil salesmen. I believe they are legitimate avenues of transcendence, carrying genuine thinkers over the pitfalls of ethical egoism.
This goes back to my use of the term “genuine.” Confidence games often involve communication that sounds reasonable, but disingenuous argument is no more an exercise of reason than an invalid syllogism is an exercise of logic. If we do not confuse duplicitous mimicry with earnest efforts to synthesize new understandings by sharing information, reason and logic retain their status as avenues toward real progress. Perhaps 90% of respondents fail at the Wason card selection task, but the correct answer would still be the correct answer even if no human possessed the faculties to comprehend it.
Deep abstract truth does not yield to fashion or fancy. Yet we can only understand what we understand. The tautology serves as a reminder of our myriad cognitive imperfections. Quantifying both innate and culturally imposed traits of human behavior may provide us with useful guidance in the quest for eudaimonia, but systematic principled thought also has a role to play. Thinkers past and present have already achieved this integration. Alas, recognizing those achievements is tricky when those thinkers are themselves often presented as caricatures of the men and women they actually were.
For example, John Stuart Mill is often lumped in with other utilitarian thinkers. “He taught that the best course is the course that produces the most happiness, yet he also wrote a book libertarians really like,” seems to be the blurb on him in entry level philosophy text books. In truth all of his work reflects a balance between the foundations of utilitarianism (after all, happiness seems to beat both unhappiness and the absence of happiness) and the value of freewill. Without speaking directly to the question of whether or not freewill is an illusion, Mill correctly points out that compulsory participation in many utilitarian schemes would produce much less happiness than predicted, because freedom itself often results in happiness.
The man who wrote On Liberty did also write On Socialism. In matters of governance, I believe his views and my own are largely aligned. In some areas (like taxing wealthy individuals to provide medicine to poor individuals) utilitarianism’s Robin Hood values are soundly applicable. “My right to swing my fist ends at the tip of your nose” is entirely consistent with “my right to accumulate personal wealth ends at the point my neighbor dies for want of a pill.” In other areas (like compulsory participation in state-sponsored calisthenics) the intrusiveness of the mandate may be more significant than the resulting happiness (a healthier population and more tightly-knit communities in this example.)
Always there is a balance to be struck. The right of refusal in an area like giving up 33% rather than 30% of income after the first $250,000 earned is not terribly valuable. The right of refusal in an area like waking early and joining a public outdoor meeting every day of one’s life is enormous by comparison. This sort of understanding gave Mill the ability to synthesize something more advanced from contemporary notions of personal liberty and social justice. Yet many scholars even today insist those two principles allow for no reconciliation. Empirical study of human behavior may improve these understandings and accelerate this consilience, but it is misleading to contend such thinking was never before possible.
I suppose I’m pushing the limit on comment size, so I’ll have to abridge my ramblings here. I did want to slip in though that I do not believe my personal extremism is advisable for others — my path is full of mixed blessings and completely impractical for anyone intent on raising children, traveling the world, or fitting in with 90% of humanity (including 99% of America.) What clarity I have tells me that an ideal culture would forbid only punishment and condemn only hatred. We have the means to segregate the most violent and larcenous of our kind without being cruel, and we should continue to pursue remedies for the most severe sorts of mental illness. Yet I also suspect getting from here to anything resembling there will prove a longer journey than the trip we’ve already taken from stone age tribalism to bipartisan oligarchy.
Comment on August 5, 2010 @ 2:57 pm
As an addendum, I realize the meat of the talk was about reconciling everything — a wide range of principles, the best bits of traditional behavioral science, and the mountains of data being produced by new techniques like fMRI studies. I just felt that the critique of philosophical traditions as excessively limiting and one-dimensional was at least as much a critique of casual understandings of philosophy as anything that spoke directly to the limitations of the wisest scribes from generations past. After all, even if today’s avant-garde pulls together a comprehensive and useful explanation of human morality, that would still lose much in the teaching and even more in the dilettantes’ casual explorations.
Comment on August 5, 2010 @ 3:31 pm
Thank you demonweed. I need some time to properly digest this and do not have that time at the moment.
Comment on August 5, 2010 @ 3:49 pm
IOW, you et a bug once.
Comment on August 5, 2010 @ 4:10 pm
Demonweed: Whoa! I ALSO require time to digest your comments… this is the crux of the HUMAN DILEMMA we’re discussing here… so I EXPECT things to get a bit ‘hairy’… especially with such bright humans!
Please TRUST, however that you are amongst FRIENDS as we TOGETHER attempt investigations of our daily DEEP.
I am a bit distressed by your fatalism, but alas, can not in good conscience fault it. I also live in sad quarters and will never realise much of what I had hoped for… But I shall PERSIST. My genes will not allow otherwise! (bossy bastards that they are) ;-}
Keep writing!
Comment on August 5, 2010 @ 7:32 pm
Cat-Eyes, Sluggo, Max, and Byronius are in the Music, totemized by a copper dog, weaving tainty.
Sky, high-fly from the top of the stairs and BE HERE NOW.
Comment on August 5, 2010 @ 8:51 pm
byronius, Max, Sluggo, Cat-eyes:
I wil ALWAYS be “At the top of your stairs”!… a-stumblin’ and a-crumblin’… I think I read it once in my JS job desciption!… In the meantime, I do my damnedest to shake it up… EVEN if it may be ‘retro’… It’s ALL about what WORKS…
Just sayin’…
Comment on August 5, 2010 @ 9:35 pm