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The Righteous Mind
Chapter Six - Taste Buds of the Righteous Mind
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p114 The Chinese sage Mencius made the analogy between morality and food 2,300 years ago when he wrote that “moral principles please our minds as beef and mutton and pork please our mouths.” ... I’ll develop the analogy that the righteous mind is like a tongue with six taste receptors. In this analogy, morality is like cuisine: it’s a cultural construction, influenced by accidents of environment and history, but it’s not so flexible that anything goes... Cuisines vary, but they all must please tongues equipped with the same five taste receptors. Moral matrices vary, but they all must please righteous minds equipped with the same six social receptors.
The Birth of Moral Science
Nowadays, secular people often see the Enlightenment as a battle between two mortal enemies: on one side was science, with its principal weapon, reason, and on the other was religion, with its ancient shield of superstition. Reason defeated superstition, light replaced darkness. But when David Hume was alive, he was fighting a three-way battle. Enlightenment thinkers were united in rejecting divine revelation as the source of moral knowledge, but they were divided as to whether morality transcended human nature -- that is, it emerged from the very nature of rationality and could therefore be deducted by reasoning, as Plato believed -- or whether morality was a part of human nature, like language or taste, which had to be studied by observation. Given Hume’s concerns about the limits of reasoning, he believed that philosophers who tried to reason their way to moral truth without looking at human nature were no better than theologians who thought they could find moral truth revealed in sacred texts, Both were transcendentalists.
I wish I could claim to have carefully placed this chapter of The Righteous Mind next to the next chapter of Zen Physics, which I've titled "Transcendence," but it was an accident.
p115 Hume’s work on morality was the quintessential Enlightenment project: an exploration of an area previously owned by religion, using the methods and attitudes of the new natural sciences. His first great work, A Treatise of Human Nature, had this subtitle: Being an Attempt to Introduce the Experimental Method of Reasoning into Moral Subjects. Hume believed that “moral science” had to begin with careful inquiry into what humans are really like. And when he examined human nature -- in history, in political affairs, and among his fellow philosophers -- he saw that “sentiment” (intuition) [thus he is considered a “sentimentalist’] is the driving force of our moral lives, whereas reasoning is biased and impotent, fit primarily to be a servant of the passions. He also saw a diversity of virtues, and he rejected attempts by some of his contemporaries to reduce all of morality to a single virtue such as kindness, or to do away with virtues and replace them with a few moral laws.
Because he thought that morality was based in a variety of sentiments, which give us pleasure when we encounter virtue and displeasure when we encounter vice, Hume often relied upon sensory analogies, and particularly the taste analogy:
Morality is nothing in the abstract Nature of Things, but is entirely relative to the Sentiment or mental Taste of each particular Being; in the same Manner as the Distinctions of sweet and bitter, hot and cold, arise from the particular feeling of each Sense or Organ. Moral Perceptions therefore, ought not to be class’d with the Operations of the Understanding, but with the Tastes or Sentiments.
Moral judgement is a kind of perception, and moral science should begin with a careful study of the moral taste receptors. You can’t possibly deduce the list of five taste receptors by pure reasoning, nor should you search for it in scripture. There’s nothing transcendental about them. You’ve got to examine tongues.
p116 Hume got it right. When he died in 1776, he and other sentimentalists had laid a superb foundation for “moral science,” one that has, in my view, been largely vindicated by modern research... [but] In the decades after Hume’s death the rationalists claimed victory over religion and took the moral sciences off on a two-hundred-year tangent.
Note on notes. Unfortunately, this edition of the book places the notes in the back, not at the foot of the page. I say this is unfortunate because many of the notes add to what is expressed in the book. It’s worth taking a look at the notes at least once per chapter when reading this book.
I'm also going to take this opportunity to talk about Hume's contemporary Voltaire. Or, not so much Voltaire himself but Gabrielle Émilie Le Tonnelier de Breteuil, marquise du Châtelet. I've been thinking about her since I wrote about Ada Lovelace. Once again we are struggling through an intellectual world devoid of women. These two are the only ones who come close to touching on our story. And, of course, both are primarily seen as "helpers."
I mention this because I think the lack of a feminine perspective in either of these books is a little worrisome. True, it's hard to see how all this, especially prior to the 20th century, could have been anything else than a sausage fest, but it still gives me reservations.
Attack of the Systemizers
[There’s a discussion of Autism here,] ...At the extreme end of the spectrum, autistic people are “mind-blind” They are missing the social-cognitive software that the rest of us use to guess the intentions and desires of other people.
According to one of the leading autism researchers, Simon Baron-Cohen, there are in fact two spectra, two dimensions on which we can place each person: empathizing and systemizing. Empathizing is “the drive to identify another person’s emotions and thoughts, and to respond to these with an appropriate emotion.” If you prefer fiction to nonfiction, or if you often enjoy conversations about people you don’t know, you are probably above average on empathizing. Systemizing is “the drive to analyse the variables in a system, to derive the underlying rules that govern the behaviour of the system.” If you are good at reading maps and instruction manuals, or if you enjoy figuring out how machines work, you are probably above average on systemizing.
If we cross these two traits, we get a two-dimensional [Cartesian] space... and each person can be placed at a particular spot in that space...
“The Autism Zone” is at the bottom right of the illustration here. My self-analysis would put me in the upper right -- above average in both Empathy and Systemizing. I wonder how well people usually do in self-analysis of this.
p117 ...The two leading ethical theories in Western philosophy were founded by men who were as high as could be on systemizing, and were rather low on empathizing.
The figure places Jeremy Bentham near the extreme end of the Autism Zone while Immanuel Kant is just outside that zone.
Bentham and the Utilitarian Grill
Jeremy Bentham was born in England in 1748... His most important work was titled Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation. In it he proposed that a single principle should govern all reforms, all laws, and even all human actions: the principle of utility, which he defined as “the principle which approves or disapproves of every action whatsoever, according to the tendency which it appears to have to augment or diminish the happiness of the party whose interest is in question.” Each law should aim to maximize the utility of the community, which is defined as the simple arithmetic sum of the expected utilities of each member. Bentham then systematized the parameters needed to calculate utility, including the intensity, duration, and certainty of “hedons” (pleasures) and “dolors” (pains). He offered an algorithm, the “felicific calculus,” for summing the hedons and dolors to reach a moral verdict on any action, for any person, in any country.
Could Ford Madox Ford have had Bentham in mind when writing Christopher Tietjens, I wonder? In defense of Bentham I should mention that he is also considered the father of animal rights. He wasn't perfect even here, but at least it was a start.
p118 [I’m going to skip most of the next entertaining paragraph except to cite the article mentioned, “Asperger’s Syndrome and the Eccentricity and Genius of Jeremy Bentham,” by Philip Lucas and Anne Sheeran; and this final sentence,] One contemporary said of him: “He regards the people about him no more than the flies of a summer.”
A related criterion [of autism] is an impaired imaginative capacity, particularly with respect to the inner lives of other people. In his philosophy and in his personal behavior, Bentham offended many of his contemporaries by his inability to perceive variety and subtlety in human motives. John Stuart Mill -- a decidedly non-autistic utilitarian -- came to despise Bentham. He wrote that Bentham’s personality disqualified him as a philosopher because of the “incompleteness” of his mind:
In many of the most natural and strongest feelings of human nature he had no sympathy; from many of its graver experiences he was altogether cut off; and the faculty by which one mind understands a mind different from itself, and throws itself into the feelings of that other mind, was denied him by his deficiency of Imagination.”
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Kant and the Deontological Diner
p119 Immanuel Kant was born in Prussia in 1724. He was well acquainted with Hume’s work [that’s an understatement] and was favorably disposed toward sentimentalist theories early in his career, particularly when he wrote about aesthetics and the sublime. But although he granted that sentiments such as sympathy are crucial for a description of why people in fact behave morally, he was disturbed by the subjectivity that such an account implied for ethics. If one person has different moral sentiments from another, does she have different moral obligations? And what if people in one culture have different sentiments from people in another?
Kant, like Plato, wanted to discover the timeless, changeless form of the Good. He believed that morality had to be the same for all rational creatures, regardless of their cultural or individual proclivities. To discover this timeless form, it simply would not do to use observational methods -- to look around the world and see what virtues people happened to pursue. Rather, he said that moral law could only be established by the process of a priori (prior to experience) philosophizing. It had to consist of principles that are inherent in and revealed through the operation of reason. And Kant found such a principle: noncontradiction. Rather than offering a concrete rule with some specific content, such as “help the poor” or “honor your parents,” Kant provided an abstract rule from which (he claimed) all other valid moral rules could be derived. He called it the categorical (or unconditional) imperative: “Act only according to the maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.”
p120 Bentham told us to use arithmetic to figure out the right course of action, but Kant told us to use logic. Both men accomplished miracles of systemization, boiling all of morality down to a single sentence, a single formula...
...The safest thing to do [when evaluating Kant's personality] is to... say that Kant was one of the most extraordinary systemizers in human history while being rather low on empathizing, without joining Bentham at the bottom right corner of... [the Cartesian, autism figure.]
Getting Back on Track
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...in psychology our goal is descriptive. We want to discover how the moral mind actually works, not how it ought to work, and that can’t be done by reasoning, math, or logic. It can be done only by observation, and observation is usually keener when informed by empathy... philosophy began retreating from observation and empathy in the nineteenth century, placing ever more emphasis on reasoning and systematic thought. As Western societies became more educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic [WEIRD, again], the minds of its intellectuals changed. They became more analytic and less holistic. Utilitarianism and deontology became far more appealing to ethicists than Hume’s messy, pluralist, sentimentalist approach.
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I have to say that this was one of the best accounts of this ethical debate I’ve ever encountered. None of my philosophy professors did this good a job of putting these positions in context.
Also, I love how these two books are combining to review most of the philosophy I studied at university (and on my own after I graduated).
Broadening the Palate
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p 121 I was convinced that the prevailing view in anthropology [that, “evolution got our species to the point of becoming bipedal, tool-using, large-brained creatures, but once we developed the capacity for culture, biological evolution stopped... [that] Culture is so powerful that it can cause humans to behave in ways that override whatever ancient instincts we share with other primates, was wrong, and that it would never be possible to understand morality without evolution. But Shweder had taught me to be careful about evolutionary explanations, which are sometimes reductionist (because they ignore the shared meanings that are the focus of cultural anthropology) [I've praised Haidt for doing a wonderful job of defining his terms (or at least I hope I have), but I'm not entirely sure what he means here. Referring to the linked Wiki, I think this is "theory reductionsim" but I wish he made this clear.] and naively functionalist (because they are too quick to assume that every behavior evolved to serve a function). [Again, this is a complex, many faceted term and I wish I knew exactly what he meant by it here.] Could I formulate an evolutionary account of moral intuition that was not reductionist, and that was cautious in its claims about the “purpose” or “function” of evolved psychological mechanisms? ... I had to have a careful evolutionary story for each... [feature of morality], and I had to be able to say how these innate intuitions interacted with cultural evolution to produce the variety of moral matrices that now cover the earth.
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Moral Foundations Theory
p123 I teamed up with a friend... Craig Joseph, who had also worked with Shweder...
We borrowed the idea of “modularity” [maybe HERE] from the cognitive anthropologists Dan Sperber and Lawrence Hirschfeld. Modules are like little switches in the brains of all animals. They are switched on by patterns that were important for survival in a particular ecological niche, and when they detect the pattern, they send out a signal that (eventually) changes the animal’s behavior in a way that is (usually) adaptive. For example, many animals react with fear the very first time they see a snake because their brains include neural circuits that function as snake detectors. As Sperber and Hirschfeld put it:
An evolved cognitive module -- for instance a snake detector, a face-recognition device . . . is an adaptation to a range of phenomena that presented problems or opportunities in the ancestral environment of the species. Its function is to process a given type of stimuli or inputs -- for instance snakes {or} human faces.
Tangent alert! Coming so soon after reading On the Move, by and about Oliver Sacks, I am suddenly struck by the implications of his inability to recognize faces. A quick Wiki side trip to Prosopagnosia informs me that Prosopagnosia is indeed sometimes linked with autism spectrum disorders. It also mentions that Sacks did not know he had Prosopagnosia for much of his life. What I can’t find is how not being able to “recognize” faces equates with not being able to read emotions expressed by faces. Can you tell that a person is distraught but not recognize the person as your wife? Conversely, if you can’t read emotions on faces, how could you empathize with people?
There is also a curious note to the fear of snakes bit:
(Note 31. In primates it's a bit more complicated. Primates are born not so much with an innate fear of snakes as with an innate "preparedness" to learn to fear snakes, after just one bad experience with a snake... They don't learn to fear flowers, or other objects... The learning module is specific to snakes.)
By coincidence there is currently a popular cat video on the interwebs that shows cats reacting to a cucumber surreptitiously placed behind them. This is supposedly the cat version of this same fear of snakes.
This is one time when the author doesn't give us the details of the study so I'm having trouble understanding how this differs from other things that animals learn to fear. My personal favorite example of this was a horse named Kimo who was afraid of rocks -- I mean large rocks in the ground that you would have to ride past or between. My "just-so" story to explain this was that she had had an encounter with a rattlesnake sunny on a rock at some point and associated the danger of snakes with rocks. If I'm right, would this be an extension of the same module? Or was this like the fear of anything that an animal (or human) had had a previous bad experience with?
This was a perfect description of what universal moral “taste receptors” would look like... They would draw people’s attention to certain kinds of events (such as cruelty or disrespect), and trigger instant intuitive reactions, perhaps even specific emotions (such as sympathy or anger).
(Note 33. Natural selection is a design process; it is the cause of the design that abounds in the biological world. It is just not an intelligent or conscious design. See Tooby and Cosmides 1992.)
...The current triggers are all the things... including real snakes... toy snakes, curved sticks, and thick ropes... which might give you a scare if you see them in the grass... Modules make mistakes, and many animals have evolved tricks to exploit the mistakes of other animals. For example, the hover fly has evolved yellow and black stripes, making it look like a wasp, which triggers the wasp-avoidance module in some birds....
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p125 Five adaptive challenges stood out most clearly: caring for vulnerable children [Care/harm], forming partnerships with non-kin to reap the benefits of reciprocity [Fairness/cheating (I think this applies to kin groups as well)], forming coalitions to compete with other coalitions [Loyalty/betrayal], negotiating status hierarchies [Authority/subversion], and keeping oneself and one’s kin free from parasites and pathogens [Sanctity/degradation], which spread quickly when people live in close proximity to each other. (I’ll present the sixth foundation -- Liberty/Oppression -- in chapter 8.)
