People have moral reactions to the situations they observe around themselves -- within the work environment, in the family, on the street, or in international affairs. This is a psychological fact that is prior to moral philosophy. How should we understand this feature of ordinary human consciousness and cognition?
Jonathan Haidt is a moral psychologist who has some fairly original ideas on this subject. His most recent book, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, attempts to lay out a theory of moral psychology that puts moral intuition and judgment ahead of conscious moral reasoning, and independent from the content of what we refer to as moral philosophy.Understanding Society
Moral intuitions as evolutionary modules
Daniel Little | Chancellor, University of Michigan at Dearborn
Ethics as a branch of philosophy is usually understood as moral reasoning. Reasoning is reflection on experience. Socrates: "An unexamined life not is not worth living" (Plato, Apology 38a). Social and political philosophy are closely connected with ethics through the study of action.
Experience is not merely of factual occurrences, based on perception of events "objectively," but also involves subjective appreciation that is bound up in the experience. Understanding is gained from reflection on experience. Knowledge is the confluence of experience and understanding through a process of reasoning that yields conclusions. Wisdom is the ability to use knowledge practically.
Recent investigation in cognitive science, by Antonio Damasio in particular, shows that the reason cannot be divorced from feeling in that they are inextricably conjoined in brain functioning. There are no "facts" that are not subjectively appreciated, although some matters more appreciated than others, such as routines hardly noticed. Moral intuition and aesthetic intuition applies to those matters that are more subjectively appreciated than others.
In The Feeling of What Happens, Damasio laid the foundations of the "enchainment of precedences": the nonconscious neural signaling of an individual organism begets the protoself which permits core selfand core consciousness, which allow for an autobiographical self, which permits extended consciousness. At the end of the chain, extended consciousness permits conscience. [Wikipedia]
Conscience is the basis of moral intuition. This is captured in the creation myth: God forbids Adam and Eve eating "the fruit of the tree knowledge of good and evil" (Gen. 2:17). When they eat the forbidden fruit, their eyes are opened, and realizing they are naked, they are ashamed (Gen. 3:7). Here in the ancient narrative lies a teaching story that contemporary study of the brain also reveals scientifically. Moral intuition is somatic in addition to mental. In intuition feeling predominates over mind and in reasoning, mind predominates over feeling.
The explains why there are different moral types. People feel differently, and apparently early learning plays a crucial role in this. Those with a more visceral response relate to events more somatically than those accustomed to taking a more reasoned mental approach.
George Lakoff has observed that conservative morality is more visceral and impassioned than liberal, which is more reasoned and more aloof. This is why conservatives are not swayed by liberal reasoning, and why liberals resist what they consider to be the "raw" reactions of conservatives.
In addition, some people are more empathetic than others, and those with a deficiency of feeling enabling them to mirror others feelings are sociopathic — not so much immoral as amoral. This seems to be the result of both endowment of mirror neurons and conditioning.
In addition, some people are more empathetic than others, and those with a deficiency of feeling enabling them to mirror others feelings are sociopathic — not so much immoral as amoral. This seems to be the result of both endowment of mirror neurons and conditioning.
However important this somatic factor is, it is not the whole story of morality. But to ignore it as the foundation of morality in biology and evolutionary science is fatal to any moral theorizing.
6 comments:
Tom, this is OT, but have you had the chance to read Nagel's book? What do you think of all the controversy?
@ vimothy
I have only having read Nagel superficially so far. Being someone who thinks that Wittgenstein basically got it right methodologically, I am sympathetic to Nagel's basic stance but do not think that it is possible to state it other than by pointing.
I don't think Nagel's criticism of Wittgenstein understands Wittgenstein's work correctly, since it is logical rather than philosophical. Wittgenstein is not arguing philosophically either explicitly or implicitly because he thinks he has shown it to be a waste of time.
In other words, Wittgenstein is saying to just look and see how language operates as the carrier of a signal and you will see what information is being conveyed and how it is being carried. Wittgenstein is a thinker who is dealing from the level of the information age, and philosophers still relying on reasoning have not yet performed the necessary logical critique wrt information. I am not saying that Wittgenstein is the last word but rather the first word, and most other philosophers are still running up against the limits of language. Which, btw, Socrates famously did, too, and was condemned to death for his trouble.
I think that the direction Nagel is pointing is correct, based on my experience, but I don't think that reason will ever get there in a way that is compelling without an expansion of the general level of consciousness that expands awareness, hence, experience, and makes other criteria publicly available.
As Wittgenstein observes, wrt expression everything comes down to criteria of meaning and truth. Limiting the criteria to math and empirical observation as science does is methodologically convenient but it deals with information to a form that reduces the content and shapes it subjectively through the chosen criteria — math and experiment.
What Wittgenstein suggests is that what is most interesting and important in life cannot be stated with the degree of objectivity that reductionists demand. They therefore exclude it and even claim that it does not and cannot exist, which is silly. This was his objection to the reading of the Tractatus by positivists like Ayer in England and the Vienna Circle, Carnap in particular.
What I gather the importance of Nagel to be lies in debunking such over-restrictiveness on the part of materialistic reductionists and also cultural relativists, among whom he would include Wittgenstein due to LW's concept of "forms of life."
What Nagel seems to be doing from what I can tell from limited exposure is reiterating the significance of the grand issues of philosophy that have been dismissed by 1) reductionists that focus overly on the objective and 2) deconstructionists and other subjectivists that focus overly on the subjective. Nagel seeks a to find a balance point between the two views.
As a philosophical rationalist, Nagel believes that a proper understanding of the place of mental properties in nature will involve a revolution in our understanding of both the physical and the mental, and that this is a reasonable prospect that people can anticipate in the near future. A plausible science of the mind will give an account of the stuff that underpins mental and physical properties in such a way that people will simply be able to see that it necessitates both of these aspects. At present, it seems to people that the mental and the physical are irreducibly distinct but that is not a metaphysical insight, or an acknowledgment of an irreducible explanatory gap, but simply where people are at their present stage of understanding.
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I agree with the thrust but I don't think that philosophical rationalism can get there. Philosophy is about the transcendental, which is why Wittgenstein indicates that from the logical point of view it is ineffable other than by pointing. One has to come to see it for oneself. But this doesn't mean it is subjective in the sense of being relative to individuals.
Certainly logic is not that. It is the transcendental condition for information, although different kinds of logic are appropriate for different kinds of information., Euclidian, Lobachevskian and Riemannian geometry delineate the logical structure of different structures of space useful in describing the world in physics, i.e, classical, general relativity and quantum. See Tractatus, 6.341. What is the "real" space?
Recall that even Einstein had trouble with accepting quantum mechanics as being probabilistic, even though he had undermined the classical concept of space as a universal with the discovery of relativity.
Why I not rushing to read Nagel is that he is a philosophical rationalist and is mostly opposed to physicalism, which is the bane of Anglo-American philosophy and the relativism that characterizes contemporary throughout. I agree with that but think will leave to others to refute. But he is essentially a philosophical realist, and I think that this is the fundamental problem. So, in my view, Nagel will run into a dead end going down that tunnel in the labyrinth of reason.
I am convinced that integration of transcendental, romantic, pragmatic, rationalist, phenomenological, empiricist,etc. views are required in that different methods are suitable to different subject matters. Mathematical truth is written in equations. poetic truth in verse. Perennial wisdom teaches that there is an absolute truth, but to know it one must realize the absolute nature of consciousness, which is the goal of evolution and involution. See Meher Baba, God Speaks.
Thanks Tom, that was very interesting.
What I take from Nagel is that materialist evolutionary naturalism cannot be true. I'm less sold on the panpsychism, however.
What I take from Nagel is that materialist evolutionary naturalism cannot be true. I'm less sold on the panpsychism, however.
Philosophically, panpsychism is the most satisfactory explanation of which I am aware that accounts for everything without major issues other than a compelling criterion, largely because most people, being naive realists, find it counterintuitive. However, the claim is that criteria are available in non-ordinary states of consciousness, either if one develops them naturally or through applying tested methods.
Many people have held this view in various forms over the millennia, and many do now. In fact, the number is growing with increasing interest in spirituality as opposed to normative and institutional religions, which used to provide ultimate answers based on faith. Now people are looking for experience rather than being satisfied with belief. The trend in enquiry now is either toward spirituality or reason ("humanism"). This view doesn't contradict normative religions but interprets them differently, and it doesn't contradict reason either, only shows it to be one of many tools in the toolbox.
Panpsychists would say that criteria become available at more expanded levels of awareness through practice. Think of a population that is mostly blind and only a very few can see, but the blindness is possible to overcome by following tested methods.
In my view perennial wisdom provides the conceptual model and the methodology (methods) to verify it for oneself. Those reporting above normal experience worldwide from time immemorial testify to it. As one adopts this methodology, or, better, one of the methods, one may find that the landmarks of the way that have been laid out begin to be experienced as one persists.
This is not an uncommon experience now, and enough willing subjects are available now to enable research on the phenomena. Scientific investigation is bearing out that corresponding physiological, psychological, and sociological changes can be measured that correlate with length of practice of self-cultivation and verbal testimony. In fact this is at the cutting edge of consciousness studies as an interdisciplinary field.
Here is Meher Baba's short summary conceptual model, which he claimed to be a report of his experience rather than the result of philosophical speculation. What he calls "Truth" is realization of the nature of consciousness as infinite and the only reality. This means that solipsism is correct, but realization of Truth is the solipsism of the absolute — infinite consciousness rather than finite consciousness that takes itself to be separate.
According to perennial wisdom, dualism is the basis of spiritual ignorance — not knowing one's true nature. Spiritual wisdom — "gnosis" — is the realization of unity.
Bob, take a look at Ronald Coase's Nobel lecture, The Institutional Structure of Production in which he trashed the market-based supply and demand centric approach to price theory in favor of looking at what firms actually do and why they do it (transaction costs). He cites Hayek and implies he is building out from Uses of Knowledge in Society.
I argued in The Nature of the Firm that the existence of transaction costs leads to the emergence of the firm. But the effects are pervasive in the economy. Businessmen in deciding on their ways of doing business and on what to produce have to take into account transaction costs. If the costs of making an exchange are greater than the gains which that exchange would bring, that exchange would not take place and the greater production that would flow from specialisation would not be realised. In this way, transaction costs affect not only contractual arrangements but also what goods and services are produced. Not to include transaction costs in the theory leaves many aspects of the working of the economic system unexplained, including the emergence of the firm, but much else besides. In fact, a large part of what we think of as economic activity is designed to accomplish what high transaction costs would otherwise prevent or to reduce transaction costs so that individuals can freely negotiate and we can take advantage of that diffused knowledge of which Hayek has told us.
Business is inefficient due to friction like transaction cost, which is a reason that firms often use quantity adjustment in preference to price adjustment. For example, restaurants don't like to increase prices but prefer to either decrease portion size or substitute less expensive ingredients for more expensive. This is an integral aspect of restaurant management.
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