The Scientific is the Political
I answered nearly all of the example questions from Steve Pinker’s New York Times Magazine essay, “The Moral Instinct” the “wrong” way (example: Right or wrong? “A woman is cleaning out her closet and she finds her old American flag. She doesn’t want the flag anymore, so she cuts it up into pieces and uses the rags to clean her bathroom.”), so perhaps I lack the requisite nose for sniffing out moral truths, but the piece’s closing paragraphs still irritate me.
After several thousand words of genuinely curious, thoughtful investigation into the idea that humans may have some innate moral sense, he closes with the thought that what’s really important is… implementing a carbon tax.
Now, differing opinions about the usefulness of such a policy aside, the effect is rather like what one might expect if you let Oliver Stone and Robert Redford collaborate on the finale to a Stanley Kubrick film. Surely a conclusion could have been found that was not so quick to reach for easy political relevance. Wouldn’t it have been possible, and indeed more interesting, to write this essay without dragging global climate change into the room? Can we not simply investigate human nature without drifting into the territory of contemporary politics? Is all science journalism for the next decade doomed to this fate?
That it only appears in the final paragraphs makes it all the more annoying. If that were the primary subject of the essay, I would be far more forgiving — possibly even interested. But its placement feels forced and flat, intrusive and incurious, and just tired, like a brilliant grad student who clips his essay’s conclusion in favor of appeasing a small-minded adviser. Surely there’s more than this?
<i>I lack the requisite nose for sniffing out moral truths, but the piece’s closing paragraphs still irritate me.</i>
His policy conclusions aside, I think you, like Matt Frost, are missing the point. Moral truths are subject to environmental and psychological variance. You experience an emotional reaction when you think about cutting up the flag. Thus, for you the “flag” remains a moral issue (if I guess right). Others experience no emotional reaction, so the “flag” is no longer a moral issue for them. For these people the “flag” has jumped into the less burdened conceptual category of “preference.”
The sensation of moral judgment depends on emotion, and concepts can be released from the correlate emotions they engender. Pinker calls this moralization and de-moralization, where both processes are relatively immune to reason.
— JA · Jan 15, 07:15 PM · #
No — I was perhaps unclear. I don’t respond at all like Pinker suggests is common or normal. The flag doesn’t bother me a bit one way or the other. There are, I think, genuinely good reasons explicitly having to do with social stigma that cutting up a flag and using it as a dust rag is a bad idea — I don’t think I’d do it myself — but I don’t experience that spark of outrage that he suggests is normal in that instance or most of the other examples he gives.
— Peter Suderman · Jan 15, 07:25 PM · #
Ah. I see, and I apologize for the assumption.
I think Pinker is disadvantaged by the venue in which he writes. Two sayings come to mind: “But vain to popularize truth, and all truth is profound”, by Melville, and “Brevis esse laboro, obscurus fio”, by Horace. Of course, another possibility is that he’s confused himself.
Either way, the lesson remains: humans make moral judgments by instinct, and this instinct manifests itself according to a universal “moral grammar.”
The upshot: there are no Moral Truths independent of the human mind and its algorithmic output — a very difficult thing for a human mind to accept, by the way, since the concept of moral truth activates the moral instinct. Furthermore, instances of moral judgment are largely independent of subsequent justifications/rationalizations.
From Marc Hauser (papers available at Harvard’s Cognitive Evolution Laboratory):
Drawing on an analogy to language, I argue that a suite of novel questions emerge when we consider our moral faculty in a similar light. In particular, I suggest the possibility that our moral judgments are derived from unconscious, intuitive processes that operate over the causal-intentional structure of actions and their consequences. On this model, we are endowed with a moral faculty that generates judgments about permissible and forbidden actions prior to the involvement of our emotions and systems of conscious, rational deliberation.
Another:
While it has long been understood that whether an action is performed intentionally or not informs our moral judgment of that action (e.g., embarrassing one’s friend intentionally is morally worse than doing so accidentally), there are certain circumstances in which an action is more likely to be thought of as intentional when the action is morally bad than when it is morally good.
Another:
Each moral dilemma presented a choice between action and inaction, both resulting in lives saved and lives lost. Results showed that: [1]patterns of moral judgments were consistent with the principle of double effect and showed little variation across differences in gender, age, educational level, ethnicity, religion or national affiliation [within the limited range of our sample population] and [2] a majority of subjects failed to provide justifications that could account for their judgments. These results indicate that the principle of the double effect may be operative in our moral judgments but not open to conscious introspection. We discuss these results in light of current psychological theories of moral cognition, emphasizing the need to consider the unconscious appraisal system that mentally represents the causal and intentional properties of human action.
And lastly:
_
— JA · Jan 15, 07:55 PM · #
Sorry, there is no lastly, except to say, as I did in Matt’s post, that this is an “is” rather than an “ought” claim — moral psychology seeks to describe the process, not validate or invalidate any particular outcome.
— JA · Jan 15, 08:05 PM · #
“My mother? Let me tell you about my mother…”
— Moose · Jan 16, 05:39 AM · #
Moose — yes! Awesome!
— Peter Suderman · Jan 16, 05:46 AM · #
I was also very ittitated by Pinkers careless interweaving of “apolitical” neurosciencific “discoveries” with all too pointed partisan policy proposals.
I think that this is an example of two common problems with popular science articles in general and eveolutionary psychology in particular.
1. The openeing comparison, as well as the tedious jabs at sore points on the left and right, are inevitably dmographicly targeted titilation, meant to drag some “otherwise uninterested” reader into the article. While I suppose it is laudable to bring enlightenment to the masses and all, this creates a baseline assumption throughout the rest of the article that he is talking to a generally uninformed audience, which means that his references are often blithe, or to material like Chomsky that is hardly unproblematic.
The second point is that Evolutionary Psychology is only as useful as it is carefully employed. It’s a form that can be followed all too easily. Gee, people do X, so if I can come up with a good explanation for why X mught have helped our ancestors, that naturalizes and depoliticizes X. While responisble EP practicioners can do the qualification dance around this problem, it is a slippery slope, and in this way EP’s injection into popular discourse through articles like this one rarely has a positive effect.
On the other hand, the consequence that I see from this is the opposite of the objections usually raised. While most objectors wail and moan at the prospect of some unrushing nihlism, where we all start shooting each other and having sex with our siblings because its no longer “objectively wrong,” I see vulgar EP as a tool of reactionary antiproggressive cultural forces. Gender issues, predatory sexuality, and repressive communiity politics are often defended using vulger EP narratives. Appeals to the “primal” are a reentrenchment for an American Masculinity under seige.
— Josh · Jan 18, 08:26 PM · #