Ethics
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Among the initial distinctions that underlie the field of ethics is that between normative disciplines (the study of what should be done, of duties, rights, and obli- gations) and empirical disciplines (the study of what is in fact true about the world, as shown by observations on many levels). All the physical and social sciences are empirical disciplines. Can there be a “science” of morality? Apparently not; there are no facts at all which can tell us what should be done, without a normative premise. That is a logical truth; to deny it is to contradict oneself. But there can be sciences that surround and explain the manifestations of moral behavior (or lack of it) in the world, and some of these studies have been of interest to ethicists. It may be enlightening to tie together some reflections on the moral thought and behavior of human beings, if only to lay the groundwork for efforts to improve that moral thinking and acting in an increasingly disordered world.
4.1 Evolutionary Psychology: What Darwin Tells Us About How We Think
First of all, what do humans do naturally, prior to any teaching? Evolutionary biology is one of the few disciplines that can contribute to our understanding of the “natural” (unschooled) human. We know that in a world where a constant ten- dency to overpopulation (of all species) exists, some will survive and some will not, and those creatures whose genetic composition gives rise to traits that are best adapted to the environmental demands—say, longer necks on hoofed creatures like giraffes who live on the leaves of trees—will survive and pass those genes to the next generation. Shorter-necked giraffes may not. Over the generations, we will find giraffes with longer and longer necks (up to a point). But it is not enough to survive: the giraffe must also mate, produce offspring and raise those offspring to sexual maturity if the genes are to persevere for more than a generation. Giraffes disinclined to mate, or unable to raise offspring, will not supply genes to future generations. On the hypothesis, or assumption, that the survival of one’s gene pool
Chapter 4 Some Considerations from Moral Psychology
L. Newton, Ethical Decision Making: Introduction to Cases and Concepts in Ethics, SpringerBriefs in Ethics, DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-00167-8_4, © The Author(s) 2013
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is a good thing, we are in a position to say that behavior that results in survival and successful propagation and rearing of offspring is “right” for any member of a species. As we sometimes put it, evolution favors behavior that is conducive to survival.; most behavior, and dispositions to behavior, have a genetic compo- nent, so survival-oriented behavior favors and preserves the genes of the group that engages in it. Just what is important to survival varies with the species and the circumstances.
Let’s take a simple example. Observation: When an adult healthy male lion comes upon a pride of lions not
related to himself (a pride consists of a dominant male, several lionesses and their cubs), he tends to challenge the dominant male for possession of the pride. If he wins, he drives off the once-dominant male and proceeds to kill all the cubs. That brings all the lionesses into heat, so he mates them and thereafter protects them and their cubs from other male lions. Now, why does he do all that?
Simple explanation (say, for older children): The new lion wants to run the pride so that he can have cubs of his own, so he fights and beats the former lion, then kills the former lion’s cubs and mates with the lionesses so they can bear his cubs. Simple, but of course it’s a fairy tale; lions have no such plans, projects, or desires, let alone a concept of “cubs sired by another lion.”
Better explanation: The male lion has a behavioral disposition, undoubtedly innate (how would he have learned it?), to do all those things; the objective result, no matter what he wants or intends, is that the cubs of that pride will have his genes rather than the former lion’s. Since innate dispositions are encoded in the genes, there’s a strong probability that his male cubs will have the same dispositions, and that gene pool will slowly come to dominate the lion population in that region.
None of this is “intentional”: the lion has no conception of his own gene pool in competition with the pool represented by the cubs he found when he took over the pride. But that murderous behavior in fact, independently of all intention, favors his genes over those of other local lions. Then from an evolutionary perspective, killing the cubs is the right thing for the lion to do. (We know that all mammals are closely related on the evolutionary tree; does that mean that human stepfa- thers, and possibly stepmothers, whether or not they act on them, will have incli- nations to abuse or get rid of their adopted children? Yes; our fairy tales are full of “wicked stepfathers” and “wicked stepmothers” who do just that.)
How can we tease out what of the behavioral dispositions of lions, or of our- selves, are the products of our evolution? The method by which such determina- tions are normally made and argued is the “thought experiment.” Imagine two individuals in the “ancestral environment,” that natural environment that prevailed during the period in which the species evolution actually took place (for humans, Robert Wright suggests, the environment was that of the small tribe, or clan, living as foragers, at some distance from other clans).1 Imagine two lions, we begin. One
1 The term, and its specification, are taken from Robert Wright, The Moral Animal; Why We Are the Way We Are—The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology, New York: Random House, 1994. This work is the general source for the rest of this section.
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of them has no interest in mating with lionesses, the other has a lively interest in doing just that. Which one’s genes will show up in the next generation? Then imagine two others, who have just taken over prides. One of them is a gentle and loving stepfather to all the cubs he finds in the pride, the other kills all those cubs and mates with the lionesses to sire his own. Which one’s genes will predominate in the next generation?
But what of the lionesses? If it’s all about preserving one’s genes, i.e. preserv- ing one’s offspring, how do the lionesses take to the idea of having their cubs killed? Not very well; they try to prevent it. Interestingly, if most of the lionesses in the pride have small cubs at the time the pride is taken over, they may collec- tively oppose the lion, and delay the killing. Even more interestingly, if most of them don’t have cubs, these will oppose the lionesses that do, so that the cub- killing may proceed and the lion can get them pregnant. (During the killing, the mother lionesses watch impassively; when it is over, they go to the bodies of their cubs, and eat them. Try that thought experiment: if there are two lionesses with dead cubs, and one buries her cubs and grieves for weeks while the other eats her cubs, which one will be in better physical shape to bear the next litter?) It works for humans, too. One person has the sense to come in out of the snow, the other doesn’t. One mother takes conscientious care of her children, the other does not. We ask the same questions. (The game becomes more interesting when we get to survival of groups, below.)
Is human morality similarly evolved? This is a subject bursting with controver- sies; for our purposes here, we may ignore them and continue applying the same method.2 Morality in its original understanding has to do with duties to others; the arrival of “duties to oneself” is late in the game. So to talk about morality is to talk about human groups, starting with the foraging clan wandering the savannahs and mountains of Africa, as presupposed by Wright. Does a willingness to sacrifice one’s own interests for the welfare of the group have any evolutionary credentials? Start out with two humans (young men, we may assume), each of which is approached by a hungry bear. One of them departs the area quickly and climbs a tree, the other elects to wrestle with the bear. Clearly the genes of the tree-climber have a better chance of reaching the next generation. But now transfer the problem to the group and the village. Approached by a bear, or an enemy, if the young men will stand their ground and fight, the chances of keeping their genes or what is the same thing, the genes of their families, in the next generation are vastly improved. Even if the fight is against a much larger group of the enemy and there- fore not to be won, the work of the warriors may delay the enemy long enough for the women and children, the actual bearers of the genes, to get to a place of safety. At least, the probabilities lean in that direction. We may add to this calculation the possibility that young men (and the young males of related primates) are by nature
2 The classic work in the field is E. O. Wilson’s Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975. The book aroused so much controversy that the term prac- tically disappeared from the language in the years that followed.
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quite irrationally brave at this age, unable, as long as they are in company with other young men of the village, to see any real danger to themselves. Can such irrational bravery also proceed from a genetic disposition? Yes.
Self-sacrifice for the preservation of the group has many precedents in pre-human nature; the earliest anthropologists noted the behavior of bees, where a designated group of guards or warriors will instantly attack any invader to the hive, even though a bee cannot sting without sacrificing her life. That tendency, to attack and sting regardless of the cost to the individual, is clearly innate (that’s one of the advantages of drawing conclusions from work with insects, who simply do not have time in their short lives to learn anything), which means that the mecha- nisms for altruistic behavior exist in natural genomes, which means that there is no reason why they cannot exist in us.
The existence of a group linked closely by kinship also explains the origins of the most basic norms of morality. Within the bosom of the family, an ethic of avoiding harm and beneficence must prevail, or the family will go out of existence. (As we shall see, Aristotle identified the “Household,” his original form of human association, as the group whose guiding ethic was the nurturing of every individ- ual member.) No human being can live apart from all others; humans need social support just to survive, whatever the situation of physical resources might be. The ethic of self-sacrifice begins here, as all the family’s resources are dedicated to the one most in need—the child with leukemia, or the start of a family enterprise. The fact that it is the group most closely linked by genetics that exemplifies the strongest ethic of mutual support explains—or is explained by—the evolved dedi- cation to the preservation of the group’s genes. Aristotle treated the Tribe, or tribal Village, as essentially an extension of the family, which in historical fact it usually is. The Village level adds levels of symbolic identification, including a narrative of origin, mission and destiny, to the extended family, increasing its hold on the loy- alty and sacrifice of the individual members.
Robert Wright’s major thesis in The Moral Animal is that at the point we feel most free and in control of our choices—in the choosing of sexual partners—we exemplify the power of inherited preferences based on the establishment of the future of the gene pool. Why do we choose the sexual partners that we do, and prefer the kinds of sexual activity that we prefer? The answers turn out to be very different for men and for women. In humans, the male is the aggressor, desiring and obtaining sexual intercourse with as many females as possible. The female is reserved, “coy,” choosy about sexual partners. The male prefers partners who are younger, “beautiful,” “sexy,” “would be fun in bed.” Female pornography sells well to men. The female prefers partners who are older, masters of their domains, rich and powerful. Male pornography does not sell to women, only to other men. Our cultural norms permit, indeed establish, a “double standard” for the sexes: men may seek multiple unions, while women must stick to one man alone. (A corollary of the double standard: a man who succeeds in having inter- course with many women is praiseworthy, a real man, while a woman who has intercourse with many men is a whore, despised by men and women both, unfit for any committed union.) A further corollary calls attention to an odd feature of
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cultural life, here or more especially in less developed nations: the more powerful the man—through wealth, office, or popular acclaim (think basketball players)— the more attractive he will be to women, so the more women he will accumulate, and (like that lion) will endeavor to make sure that other men do not have access to them. Hence the institution of polygamy in many societies; we remember that Osama bin Laden, chief perpetrator of the 09/11/01 attack on the World Trade Center in Manhattan, was the 17th child of his father, who had 22 wives. Where monogamy is the law, powerful men engage in serial polygamy, divorcing their wives as they age and marrying much younger, sexier, women.
These variant standards, condemned by anyone who has thought about them as hypocritical in the extreme, are easy to explain in the light of evolutionary driv- ers. Men’s desires have evolved along with the rest of their genetic endowment, to favor as many sexual partners as possible: the more partners, the greater the pos- sibility of offspring bearing their genes. In tandem, men’s desires specifically exclude from any long-term union women who may be carrying offspring of other men (“whores”); human men are no more happy than male lions about raising other males’ cubs. Women, on the other hand, can have only so many children, and each child requires an enormous investment of physical effort and resources to bring to maturity, a project that in most cases will require protection and the support of a male. Every child she bears will have her genes, so she has no need to expand the number of men in her bed. Further, she has discovered the male propensity to resent the sexual activity of other men where she is concerned, and will prudently refrain from activities which risk losing support and protection for the growing children.
Reasoning backwards from the choices that establish the parental genes in the next generation, more sexual choices become clear. What, after all, is a “sexy” woman? She is young, just entering onto reproductive age, she is healthy, indi- cated by a thousand attractive clues—complexion, hair, teeth, physical grace— she will be able to bear many healthy children. What about the powerful man, to whom the woman is attracted? He is older but very “fit,” indicated by success in the world, he is strong and can repel other men, ensuring that the woman will not be forced into a union with another man who might destroy her offspring (remem- ber that lion), his success will ensure continued support for her growing children, who will not be independent for the length of human childhood and adolescence, extraordinarily long by mammalian standards.
So sexual attraction, the psychological (dispositional) component of human sex- uality, is as much evolved, determined by natural selection millions of years ago, as our opposable thumbs and lockable knees. We are what we have to be, and we want what we have to want, to ensure the best possible position on this earth for our own children, grandchildren, on to the seventh generation. Moral psychology may as well begin here, with inborn evolved tendencies which can lead to much virtue (in a life dedicated to supporting a spouse and lovingly raising children), and also much sin, both built into the human genome by the struggle for survival.
Why do we need to know this? Because before we start preaching the gos- pel of hope, faith, charity and the Belmont Principles, we need to know what we’re up against. If we want people to be altruistic, we are going to have to set
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up the community mechanisms and institutions that will encourage and reward this virtue. If we want men to be monogamous, and forbear from attempting to have sex with every attractive woman they see, we have our work cut out for us. (As we are beginning to learn in our national life, the more powerful the man, the greater the temptations, and high visibility and universal condemnation will not prevent succumbing to them.) The next section will consider how we work toward the edu- cation of people who will practice virtue and abstain from vice.
4.2 Acquiring Morals: The Track of Education
How do we become moral people, adults who can be trusted with their own lives and the lives of other people? This is a question that has fascinated legions of scholars; we find a useful start toward an answer in a combination of the struc- tures suggested by Aristotle (in the Nicomachean Ethics and the first book of the Politics), Lawrence Kohlberg, a 20th century psychologist, with contributions as appropriate from evolutionary biology, anthropology, and the reflections of con- temporary moral psychologists and neurophysiologists.
The most primitive reactions we can find are taught. Even under the micro- scope of contemporary neuropsychology (of which more in the next section), focused on the portions of the brain that light up brainscans in response to certain sorts of stimulus, we find learned reactions. Consider that the amygdala, an almond-shaped set of neurons located deep in the brain’s medial temporal lobe, part of the brain’s limbic system (shown to play a key role in the processing of emotions, linked to fear and pleasure), “reliably responds to threatening visual stimuli such as snakes and faces of outgroup members.”3 We doubt that fear of snakes is genetic or inborn. But fear of an outgroup, recognizable by face, cannot possibly be inborn—how would the amygdala know what counts as an “outgroup” for any given person? So our primitive visual recognition of “bad” and “good” is learned, and at a very early age. The best explanation of such learning is that some emotions—fear is one of them—are communicated physically, non-verbally: the mother holding the child is frightened by something she sees, and that fear is instantaneously communicated to the child, who learns to react the same way.
3 The passage is concerned with “alarm-bell emotions,” emotional reactions that reject some object or action as morally unacceptable or disgusting (like eating feces); these emotions have been identified with “the amygdala, which has been implicated in responses to personal moral dilemmas, [and which] reliably responds to threatening visual stimuli such as snakes and faces of outgroup members.” John Doris, ed., The Moral Psychology Handbook, Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2012, p. 62; in Chap. 2, Fiery Cushman, Liane Young, and Joshua D. Greene, “Multi-System Moral Psychology.” These authors in turn cite Le Doux, 1996 [Le Doux, J., The Emotional Brain, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996] 166; and Phelps et al., 2000 [Phelps, E.A., O’Connor, K.J., Cunningham, W.A., Funayama, E.S., Gatenby, J.C., Gore, J.C., et al. “Performance on indirect measures of race evaluation predicts amygdala activation,” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 12(5):729–738 (2000)].
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(That kind of learning may continue for some time; where members of the outgroup inhabit the same streets as the ingroup, adult ingroup members report mothers suddenly tightening the grip on the child’s hand and pulling him away from an outgroup member, teaching fear and hatred by the gesture.) The emotion that accompanies that reaction is known to the moral psychologists as an “alarm- bell” emotion: it stops action in its tracks, and does not permit discussion.
Then racism (essentially) is one of the first things the child is taught? Yes, and the moral psychologist’s favorite explanation accounts for it: our primitive reac- tions persist because during most of the human being’s time on this earth, the 100,000 years preceding sedentism (settling in permanent communities), humans were as much prey as predators, and their worst enemies were those of their own species from competing groups. Survival advantage went to those groups who could recognize enemies quickly, and immediately arrange to fight or to make themselves scarce. By the laws of evolution, then, over the long run, the group that is acutely conscious of the distinction between those who are members and those who are not will persist into the future, and the group that is not will not. That conclusion, of course, is based on probabilities; but over the course of several mil- lennia, probabilities work out.
We’re just getting started on the subject of moral psychology, and already its conclusions cry out for ethical evaluation. Are we being told, not only that all humans “naturally” want to kill stepchildren, and that men are naturally unfaith- ful to wives who have been promised faithfulness, but also that our first lesson in morals is racism? Yes. Nowhere in the human genome is there an impulse to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with God, except insofar as variations of these can be derived from evolutionary advantage, which, we recall, has noth- ing to do with intentions or even consciousness. One of the aims of this chapter is to build the explanatory structures that will bridge the human nature we find and the human person we want to bring into being and help to flourish. In the mean- time, we should shed any illusions we may have had that humans are “naturally” good, or innocent, and need only protection from evil influences to live good moral lives in complete freedom—a view that Jean-Jacques Rousseau might have espoused. The evident requirement for human society is that it encourage praise- worthy behavior and firmly discourage blameworthy behavior; philosophers have labored to define “praiseworthy,” the moral psychologists are now teaching us where to look for the “blameworthy,” and the rest of us are passionately trying to find out how to encourage the one and discourage the other.
We begin, as in the first sections, with Socrates. In the course of his trial for disbelief in the city’s gods and corruption of the youth of the city, Socrates describes his “daimon,” or divine voice, generally identified with his conscience, that opposes wrong action; he mentions it because it is significant to him that the daimon has not opposed his conduct in Athens or during his trial:
In the past the prophetic voice to which I have become accustomed has always been my constant companion, opposing me even in quite trivial things if I was going to take the wrong course. Now something has happened to me [the death penalty] which might be thought and is commonly considered to be a supreme calamity; yet neither when I left
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home this morning, nor when I was taking my place here in the court, nor at any point in any part of my speech, did the divine sign oppose me… What do I suppose to be the expla- nation? I will tell you. I suspect that this thing that has happened to me is a blessing, and we are quite mistaken in supposing death to be an evil. I have good grounds for thinking this, because my accustomed sign could not have failed to oppose me if what I was doing had not been sure to bring some good result (Apology, 40a–c, trans Hugh Tredennick).
We note the limitations on the daimon: (1) It issues commands only to Socrates, not to all the world; (2) its commands apply to single acts or courses of action only, not to rules or general ethical orientations; and (3) it only operates negatively; it opposes acts, it does not command them. In short, it operates like the “alarm bell” emotions of the moral psychologists—fundamental and non-negotia- ble. We may take this as the original moral learning, on which all others are built.
Aristotle carries on the explanation of moral learning. In the Politics he divides human associations into three stages—the Household, encompassing the nuclear family and whatever others live with them (grandmothers, servants, slaves and the like), the Village, an extended family with a long history, defined by the narra- tive of its history, origins, and the gods that created it (we would recognize it as a Tribe), and the Polis, or state, brought into being late in the development of civi- lization, defined by law and justice. The moral learning with which we are con- cerned at present happens in the Household, and Aristotle takes up its description in the Nicomachean Ethics. To raise a virtuous man (Aristotle had a great deal of respect for women, but had them operating under a different description of virtue), you must begin by making sure that he knows that he must do what he is told. (Already certain kinds of handicap can put a halt to the process.) Then translate commands into standing orders, from “don’t do that!” to “Never do that!” (Do not, for instance, play with snakes, chase bears, or associate with members of the out- group—whatever that group might be to you.) Contemplation of actions so forbid- den should set off the “alarm bell” emotion. With the most important prohibitions firmly in place, the next step in upbringing is negotiation—teaching the child that certain kinds of behavior will be reliably rewarded. With this step, the emergence of reactions called “currency emotions” by the moral psychologists, it becomes possible to establish patterns of productive behavior without worrying that the new possibilities will re-open the option of the strong taboos.
Psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg (1927–1987) modeled his “levels of moral development” on the stages of cognitive development in children expounded by Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget (1896–1980). Kohlberg hypothesized that “moral development” proceeded in three major stages from childhood to adulthood, each stage divided into two parts as moral development proceeded. The first major stage centered on the infant’s and toddler’s aversion to pain and desire for pleasure, resulting in a primitive sort of act-utilitarianism: whatever invites punishment is “wrong,” (first part), whatever brings sweets and smiles is “right” (second part). These two stages combined Kohlberg called the “pre-conventional” stage. They map neatly on Aristotle’s first stages, to the point where settled habits guide right behavior in the child. Note that the child is not asked to articulate or understand the prescriptions and prohibitions.
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The extent to which the child exhibits moral (approved) behavior at this point depends upon the consistency of the environment’s reward-punishment implemen- tation; in an orderly universe, the same behavior is always demanded, rewards are invariant, and failure to perform appropriately is always punished. In this stage the rules become internalized and are followed automatically, as a matter of habit. At the end of this stage of development, if it goes well, the child has a firm grasp of “morality,” the pattern of expected acts and omissions that matches the template set by the environment. If it does not go well—if the home environment is cha- otic, if the expectations are absent, unclear or unpredictably changing—the child may emerge on the social stage of development simply amoral, considering every demand to be merely the current preference of the adult making the demand, and open to negotiation.
Only if good habits are well established would Aristotle invite the youngster to consider the reasons for the rules. (The provision of reasons prior to the successful formation of habits he took to be merely an invitation to argument: if the child is given to understand that this behavior is desirable only because of the reasons supplied, then as soon as the child can think up better reasons not to do what the rules require, or why the reasons do not apply in this case, he is, or should be, as he thinks, excused from the demand for that behavior.) Accepting the reasons, and continuing to act as the rules require, gives the youngster a method to expand the range of the rule. If our family provides food for the local Food Bank every week because it is the “compassionate” thing to do, then the next time he sees an instance of human need that invites a compassionate response, he will be willing to provide that response. Further, since he can now explain to himself why he does what he does, he can make these choices his own, voluntarily, when before under- standing the reasons, he had to take the worth of this behavior on faith. He now has the foundation of a moral character. If this step fails, he will have no way to answer challenges to his ingrained behavior as his life continues.
It is important to Aristotle that the growing child has models of virtue to emu- late. These are provided by the level of association that supersedes and incorpo- rates the household—the tribe, or village (what we might call “the community.”) The tribe is united around a narrative, a story of how they came to be, and why (usually a story of creator gods who remain with the tribe to protect it). These sto- ries explain the rituals that are part of the life of the village, the demands that are placed on the member of the village to serve and protect it, and the ultimate des- tiny of the tribal group. Usually the creation stories include the designation of the land the tribe is to occupy, and often how the members are to make their living. The stories of heroes that populate the tribal history, which the child learns from his family and tribal group, give him moral models to follow, people to imitate. It is worth noting that the content of moral obligation changes in the transition from Household to Village: the only obligation within the Household is the nurturing and protection of all its members, while the Village may demand sacrifices from the individual as part of his membership.
Kohlberg’s account of this transition is more attuned to the Western experi- ence of childhood and education. In ancient Athens, all education beyond the
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immediate family was arranged privately between the child’s father and a private tutor, who may or may not have other students in his classes. In Western Europe and America, children “go to school,” with other children the same age, and these “peers” become the reference group for correct behavior. As the child becomes socialized into groups of peers and playmates, “right” and “wrong” take on new meanings: whatever the group approves is “right,” and all the child wants is to be praised and accepted as a “good boy” or “good girl.” The peer group (under some form of adult guidance) has simply taken the place of the immediate fam- ily. Kohlberg assumes that all the playmates come from similar families, with similar sets of rules internalized, obedience to which is now habitual. If this is not the case—if the members of the “peer group” come from very different fam- ily (Village) backgrounds—socialization will have some very difficult times, for which Kohlberg is in no position to account. We must remember that the adults of the household in which the child was born and raised to this point are not operat- ing on their own, in isolation from the rest of the community. Until very recent times, households were always part of an extended family, clan or tribe, and the ancient laws of the tribe governed what the child was taught. Neither Kohlberg, nor Aristotle, nor our evolutionary history, posited a time when children of differ- ent tribes, communities, or races, would be thrown together when still very young, to attempt to negotiate with each other some way to go along with the group while retaining the rules and traditions that they were raised to revere. No society has figured out a good way to handle this situation.
As the developing intellect is gradually brought to bear on the child’s activi- ties, the child absorbs “the rules” of his or her present arrangements; these rules govern the actions of the group and each individual in it, and create conflict when the group does not want to go along with the rules. The child’s first experience of moral dilemmas may arise at this point—to go along with the group, or insist on adherence to the rule, on following “law and order”? In this stage, the idea of questioning the worth of a rule does not occur to the child. This stage Kohlberg called the “conventional” stage. Until the chaotic mixture of traditions that charac- terize contemporary society, there was no reason to go beyond it.
As the child advances into adolescence and approaches adulthood, he begins to think for himself, or rather, to begin to apply the concepts underlying the rules he has been following to a much wider range of circumstances. Kohlberg notes the possibility at this point of advancing to theoretical positions in which the entire rule system of the society can be questioned. What makes those rules “right,” after all? If the virtue of “justice” has been learned to apply to dealings within the group at the “conventional” stage, then it becomes possible to envision a “better” set of rules—rules governed by greater fairness to all members of the community and possibly beyond. If the value of “liberty” has become part of the spectrum of social values—which in Aristotle’s time, it would not have—then we can envision a society improved by removal of “useless” restrictions, making everyone hap- pier. Still committed to the group, the adolescent may propose that the group sit down and decide on a “constitution,” a framework of rules to which they all agree. Kohlberg characterized this fifth stage of moral development as “social contract”
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(where the basis of the rules is the agreement of those who will be bound by them) or “utilitarianism” (where the basis is the greater harmony of the rules with happi- ness, fairness and individual freedom). For Aristotle, the achievement of the ability to incorporate moral concepts into the character of the person—from adherence to just rules and performance of just actions to becoming a person of justice—was the desirable end product of moral education.
Kohlberg asserts the existence of yet a higher stage, the sixth and final level of moral development, which he identifies with “justice.” On his understanding, the individual will proceed through the phases, from infancy to adulthood, pretty much in the order given. Of course we may find people, including many adults, in fact making decisions purely on the basis of pleasure or pain to themselves (for instance); Kohlberg recognized this, but these instances he characterized as “regression” to infantile thinking. On the whole, he assumed, methods of decision- making will follow growth to intellectual and moral adulthood.
Many writers have found it difficult to make sense of this last stage, in con- trast to the stage preceding it, but Kohlberg’s theory was in so much trouble with his own field of developmental psychology by this point that the controversy here probably made little difference. Developmental psychologists were simply unable to find any evidence that people in fact move regularly from one of his decision processes to the next, while there is abundant evidence that most adults make deci- sions according to all six of Kohlberg’s stages of moral development, depending on their circumstances. (If I am slowing my automobile in an area known to hide traffic police looking for speeders, or choosing my breakfast cereal according to my tastes this morning, I am staying in the “pre-conventional” stage of moral thinking, and quite appropriately so.)
Other social scientists also challenged Kohlberg’s conclusions. Carol Gilligan, who had done extensive work with the moral orientations of women, found in her research that women did not “advance” from concern with agreement among the group to a “principled” stand that asserted rules and universal laws and encour- aged individuals to stand against the group where it seemed to be violating prin- ciples. In several surveys based on the cases Kohlberg used, many women felt the greater importance of nurturing and protecting the group, in an ethic more devoted to “caring” for each other than to any “universal laws.” (Aristotle recognized this orientation, but confined it to the Household.) The ethics of communally oriented societies, like the Chinese, also strongly disagreed with Kohlberg’s conclusions, holding such individual adherence to self-chosen “principles” to be no more than an extension of infantile selfishness. Philosophers also may object to Kohlberg’s stages, pointing out the puzzling inconsistencies within them. (For instance, if any group, or nation, has ever heartily agreed to adopt rules that are contrary to human happiness in the long run and just plain wrong—and history provides us with many examples of that happening—the conflation of “social contract” justifi- cation for rules and “utilitarian” justification must fail. The two schemes are logi- cally independent, and can easily conflict.)
For Aristotle, the third and final stage of human association, the Polis, provided the opportunity for the completion of progress toward the complete human life,
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56 4 Some Considerations from Moral Psychology
the life of deliberation and choice. The Polis is formed, in its founding theory, not by biology (like the Household) nor yet by the gods and tradition (like the Village), but by human decision. The assumption is that the several tribal Villages of a region find a common purpose—usually defense against some larger entity, bolstered by a desire for a permanent common marketplace—so they agree to form a larger association, a Polis or State, whose members (Citizens) are bound not by blood, religion, history or any real loyalty to each other, but only by the rec- ognition that the association is best for all of them. Since they come from a vari- ety of tribal hierarchies, and distrust one another too much to accept each other’s hierarchies, they insist that all their members shall be treated as kings—that is, they shall be treated as equals. Since they come from a variety of religions and moral codes, and are unwilling to accept the moral code of any single tribe, they must make laws for themselves, and agree to be governed by those laws. They must select their laws on the basis of “the just and the useful,” i.e. by utilitarian reckoning, taking into account the claims of all the groups. All laws apply equally to all (the condition called isonomia), without regard to the privileged positions held by some members in their own tribes. The citizen must therefore live by rea- soning—deliberating the benefits and costs of each proposed law—and by free choice, agreeing to the law by which he will be bound. The necessity of living by deliberation and choice in the public sphere reflects back upon the individual life and teaches the Citizen to live this way in his private life; human flourishing is defined by this achievement.
4.3 Failing to Acquire Morals: What Can Go Wrong
The excuses we present for a variety of human ills and failings often appeal to the inappropriateness of evolution. We have back pain because those spinal columns evolved for quadripedal ambulation. Boys (at least) love games of running around and throwing stones because that’s how we hunted, when we had to make our liv- ing hunting without guns. Carpal tunnels are vulnerable to repetitive motion stress because we did not, in our formative period, ever have to make our living with computers. Now we see that the same excuses apply to our social dysfunctions. We evolved in small clans in villages; we did not evolve in cities; the Athenian invention of the law-governed Polis was an adaptation to an urban reality that emerged only in historical time, when all human evolution had come to an end. No wonder cities seem to be ungovernable; we’re only just learning how to deal with them. We did not evolve in pluralistic societies. We certainly always recognized that there were tribes other than our own, and our usual relationship to those others (the “outgroups”) was one of unremitting hostility and contempt, often erupting in warfare. Friendship with members of the outgroups was highly suspect, coopera- tion discouraged, and marriage out of the question. If that sounds a lot like rela- tionships between certain groups today, well, that’s the way it was meant to be. The notion that all humans are equally worthy, that we ought to be good neighbors
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regardless of race, creed, or color, that we ought not only to tolerate differences but celebrate them—UN days in the fourth grade classroom, hands across the water, learn to appreciate each other as individuals—that idea is radically new, and likely to be unstable in times of stress and scarce resources. We have always known how to make war on the outgroups; making peace is difficult, we’re not sure we know how to do it, and given our suspicions about the outgroups attitudes and behavior, we’re not really sure that we should. Individuals can cross freely into the territory and company of another group, at least when there is no war—to trade, to visit, to reinforce whatever bonds of peace may have been forged. But the villages as a whole must retain separation and distinction, or risk annihilation and the loss of all traditional identity. (The threat of loss of identity is sufficiently severe to start a war by itself if such assimilation is threatened.)
We may draw some tentative political conclusions from all of the above. The first forms of human association, the ones extant in the ancestral period, are the family and the tribal village, strongly connected by history and by genes. These we may call “natural,” as having been on the scene before we were in any posi- tion to modify our associations. The state, or polis, is not natural, in this sense. It came about by human decision, as creating the possibility of a better life for humans, more peaceful and more prosperous. Without the threat of catastrophic destruction from some combination of the neighboring tribes, states could afford to build cities, bridges, international ports, even machines whose only purpose was to explore the surface of Mars. But human nature is not abolished, or significantly altered, by these possibilities. Ultimately we will trust no organization larger than the tribe, and will fight to protect the tribe (manifest especially in its religious tra- ditions) any time it seems seriously threatened by the state or any other trans-tribal organization. (What else can explain the pervasive right-wing fear of the black hel- icopters of the United Nations, descending upon us to disarm us and force us into collectives?)
We know that it is not impossible to modify human behavior to conform with current objectives and political orientations; we just need to calibrate state- enforced incentives to ensure the behavior that is needed. But if we want to modify the nature itself—the instant recognition of outgroups as hostile (and con- temptible and not worthy of moral consideration), the desire of the male to make as many women as possible objects of his sexual activity—we are going to find these tasks very difficult indeed. That’s why we have to know what we are up against when we make the attempt.
4.4 The Work of the Moral Psychologists: The Trolley Dilemma
The empirical discipline, or science, of Moral Psychology, seems to be an inven- tion of the late 20th century, starting to come into its own only in the first decade of the 21st. It took on directly the question, how in fact do people make moral
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58 4 Some Considerations from Moral Psychology
decisions—decisions on matters that affected the lives and interests of others? Until this time, there had been a general assumption in the field that some sort of cognition, “thinking,” that had brought such decisions into being, and that if the decisions often seemed to be bad ones, we had to teach better thinking. Hence the centuries-long effort, condensed into Chap. 1 of this work, to teach better think- ing, through the understanding of the logic of ethical systems. But what if these systems, or any others we might think of, had nothing at all to do with moral deci- sion making? Empirical studies in this century4 reached the disconcerting conclu- sion that faced with a moral quandary (the most famous of which will occupy the next section), most people reach their decisions immediately, without thought, intuitively. The primary role of “intuition,” emotion, suggested that the affective (emotional, feeling-oriented) aspects of any situation were the most important in any decision. (Philosophers had suspected this from Plato onwards, but now we had proof.) Reason comes into play after the decision has been made, in the effort to justify the decision to others (or to oneself).5 Then what triggers the emotional reaction? Neuroscientists cite the amygdala, above, and “mirror neurons” that “lead us to feel pain when we see others suffering.”6 As we saw above, these structures tend to be very selective, producing positive vibrations for altruism when we see members of the ingroup suffering, most likely vibrations of glee when we see members of the outgroup suffering. Neurons will not give us morality.
One way to do empirical research in moral psychology is by the thought experi- ment, suggested above as the most accessible way to determine the behavioral products of biological evolution. A group of subjects is assembled and, in one form or another, presented with a hypothetical situation. The subjects’ reactions to that situation are documented, summed and expounded, and then the investigator is at liberty to explore the reasons for the results, either with the subjects or on his own. The dilemma most discussed in the moral psychology literature is the “Trolley Problem,” first presented by Philippa Foot in 1967, and elaborated in its most familiar form by Judith Jarvis Thomson in the succeeding decades.7
4 We will not review the empirical studies on this point, certainly not in any quantitative treat- ment, as beyond the primary scope of this work. They are all available in recent scientific litera- ture; check out the sources in the Bibliography for this chapter. 5 There is a particularly good source for this conclusion: Jonathan Haidt, “The emotional dog and its rational tail: A social intuitionist approach to moral judgment,” Psychological Review, Vol 108(4), Oct 2001, 814–834. 6 This statement is from Jonathan Sacks, chief rabbi of the United Hebrew congregations of the Commonwealth and a member of the House of Lords, in a NY Times Op-Ed, “The Moral Animal,” Monday, December 24, 2012. The writer goes on to say, “We are hard-wired for empa- thy. We are moral animals.” 7 Philippa Foot, “The Problem of Abortion and the Doctrine of the Double Effect,” Virtues and Vices (Oxford: Basil Blaxkwell, 1978; originally appeared in Oxford Review, #5, 1967. Judith Jarvis Thomson, “Killing, Letting Die, and the Trolley Problem,” 59 The Monist 204–217 (1976); “The Trolley Problem,” 94 Yale Law Journal 1395–1415 (1985).
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The problem generally follows this plot: (Originally) you are the driver of a trolley that has lost its brakes. You see that ahead of you is a crew of five men working on the tracks, all of whom will surely be killed if the trolley hits them. You have time to switch the trolley to another track on which one man is working. Should you elect to hit the one rather than the five? (In later presentations) you are a switchman, controlling which track the trolley will take. You see the runaway trolley headed for the five-man crew; you see the one person on the side track to which you can switch the trolley, if you choose. Should you? (In yet later presen- tations) you are a spectator standing on a bridge beneath which the runaway trol- ley must pass. You can’t switch the trolley, and the only way you can stop it is by dropping a very heavy weight in front of it. Beside you on the bridge is a very fat man. (You are a slim little thing, of no use as an obstacle.) That fat man, if toppled over the rail of the bridge, would stop the trolley, but of course he would be killed. Should you push him in front of the trolley?
One interesting result from the numerous studies that have used this problem to test normal human reactions to ethical dilemmas is that most people will agree that if the action required to sacrifice the one to save the five is merely throwing a switch in some control center, then it should surely be done. But if it involves actually seizing a person and throwing him over the bridge, then it should not be done, or at least, many fewer of the subjects think that it should be done. Now, why? In the setup of the problem, you must choose to sacrifice one to save five, either way, and there cannot be any moral distinction between them. Yet the sub- jects insist that there is a moral difference. What is it?
The subjects are not articulate on the case, but researchers speculate that the subjects are distinguishing between a case where the intention is to save five crew members, and the death of the one is merely a side effect (collateral damage?), and a case where you must actively do harm, even kill a man by pushing him in front of the trolley, in order to accomplish a good end, the saving of the five. In order to make sense of this distinction, some writers appeal to the “Doctrine of Double Effect,” a philosophical monstrosity which holds that if an action aimed at a good result has the unfortunate consequence of accomplishing unintended harm at the same time, it may still be justified as long as the ill effect is really unintended.8 This doctrine is apparently the result of speculations in moral theology (calculat- ing the weight the action puts on the conscience of the agent, given that it is for- bidden to cause harm), and does nothing but mischief in ethics, completely subverting the duties of prudence and foresight, and making nonsense of the con- cept of culpable negligence. Consider, after all, that no teenage driver intends to
8 The Trolley Problem, and this speculation to explain it, have unfortunately become almost accepted in the field, and are mentioned in several articles in Doris, The Moral Psychology Handbook, op.cit., occasionally including diagrams of trolley tracks, showing where the crews are standing. See Gilbert Harman, Kelby Mason, & Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, “Moral Reasoning,” p. 206ff, esp pp. 223–225; the DDE, as they call it, also shows up in Erica Roedder and Gilbert Harman, “Linguistics and Moral Theory,” pp. 286–287, described there as a “non- obvious” moral rule. It certainly is that.
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60 4 Some Considerations from Moral Psychology
run down pedestrians in his praiseworthy efforts to get to work on time—it just happens, unless he takes care that it should not.
An alternative speculation to explain this experimental result is that subjects have a built-in, hard-wired, aversion to doing harm, i.e. a strong avoidance reac- tion to hurting anyone, so they find it morally repugnant to push a man to his death, while not finding it morally repugnant to throw a switch that results in the death of that man.9 I find this speculation as dubious as the first; we have already become acquainted with a human being who has no problems at all doing harm to any individual in the outgroup—as a matter of fact participates enthusiastically in such harm. Let’s take the thought experiment a little further: suppose you are a committed Nazi (or a violent Islamist, to bring us up to date), and the fat man beside you on the bridge is a corpulent Jew. Would you have any hesitation in throwing him off the bridge? Not necessarily.
I would doubt that the subjects are implicitly, or unconsciously, appealing to the Doctrine of Double Effect, or reacting in accordance with some primary obli- gation to “do no harm.” It seems more likely that the two scenarios elicit very dif- ferent mental portrayals of the act of sacrificing-one-to-save-five: In the first, we have only to deal with an inanimate switch, which we can do; in the second we have to assault a very heavy man, struggle with him (he may be tempted to assault back), and the whole episode of flesh on struggling flesh is highly disagreeable. Most soldiers, for instance, would rather kill the enemy with drones than with bay- onets, although the death is just the same.
What is the role of Ethical Theory, covered in Chap. 1? The role is not initially extensive. For starters, any theory must accord with our moral intuitions, an asser- tion proved as far as it may be in William Gass’s (1957) essay, “The Case of the Obliging Stranger.” In this essay, Gass invites us to
imagine I approach a stranger on the street and say to him. “If you please sir, I desire to perform an experiment with your aid.” The stranger is obliging, and I lead him away. In a dark place conveniently by, I strike his head with the broad of an axe and cart him home. I place him, buttered and trussed, in an ample electric oven. The thermostat reads 450 F. Thereupon I go off forget all about the obliging stranger in the stove. When I return, I realize that I have overbaked my specimen, and the experiment, alas, is ruined. Something has been done wrong. Or something wrong has been done. Any ethic that does not roundly condemn my action is vicious. It is interesting that none is vicious for this reason. It is also interesting that no more convincing refutation of any ethic could be given than by showing that it approved of my baking the obliging stranger.10
In the end, we are all intuitionists, at least in this basic sense. The major role of ethical theory is to provide a corrective to unbridled intuition, by insisting that any decision taken must be justified to the world in logical terms—“this is just how I feel” is not a justification, even if you feel that way very strongly indeed.
9 Cushman, Young and Greene, op.cit. pp. 62, 63. 10 William H. Gass, “The Case of the Obliging Stranger,” Philosophical Review 66 (1957) 193–204.
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4.5 Conclusion
Then how can we help people become more moral? Note that the task includes several impossibilities. One of my favorite daydreams is the re-establishment of tribal communities, in which children grow up following the rules of the tribal group and learn how to be noble self-sacrificing persons of firm character before they are ever required to participate in the larger multi-racial, multi-religious, world of UN Days. (And those who find such multi-ethnic and multi-ethic worlds disagreeable may elect to stay in that restricted community all their lives, assured that it will never be uprooted or forced to change; there would have to be physical boundaries to protect their land, like Indian reservations.) That’s not going to hap- pen. We live in a cosmopolitan world and we must adapt to it, and it does not seem that evolution is going to be any help on this point.
Another impossibility is a successful project to change human nature, by care- ful instructed child-rearing (inspired, possibly by monastic life?), reinforced with psychotherapy for those who find it impossible to stop thinking about the violent destruction of those who annoy them or future sexual conquests apart from mar- riage. This is not going to work either. Evolution has had millennia to imprint our nature, and no feeble efforts on our part now are going to change it. (Besides, we’d have to exterminate prior to sexual maturity all those who showed no progress toward the peaceful and self-controlled people we want, and that would be disagreeable.)11
On the other hand, we could certainly set up our education and laws to forbid the carrying out of anti-social fantasies, where the acts involved are harmful to the commonweal. Of course we already have laws against murder and mayhem, and they do not seem to be universally effective, even with the aid of psychotherapy. Further, there are limits on any measures we adopt. We have decided, for reasons that I know and respect, that protecting privacy and freedom of speech, even when the speech is hateful and borders on incitement to riot, is more important than rooting out the evil in men’s minds. We have carefully limited our own ability to shape society and all the people in it according to our understanding of the best way for people to live, and given the extravagant errors made in the past by peo- ples with no such restraints, that is probably a good thing.
What can we do to help people better themselves and their world? The most effective education seems to be in stories. We have always told stories to chil- dren—as above, stories of the heroes who created or defended our people, stories of the dragons they slew and the helpless people (usually maidens) that they res- cued, stories of their tireless labors to create a better world, all accompanied by stern injunctions to go and do likewise. Stories and plays, dramatic enactments of the kinds of virtues we want to inspire and preserve, and sympathetic portrayals
11 But appropriate institutions have been imagined. See Sheri Tepper, The Gate to Women’s Country, Victor Gollancz Ltd 2013 (1988).
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of the members of the outgroup, whatever group that may presently be to us, are indeed effective in changing us.
One of the most surprising and gratifying qualities of the human animal is our continuing effort, noted by many of the philosophers, to become better, more moral, than we are. No other animal does this. It is a gift worth celebrating and a project worth encouraging.