Patricia Churchland's science of morality

> It all began with a very adorable vole...

I've got a new post up at Rationally Speaking about what neuroscience can tell us about morality. I'll have more to say when I make it to the final chapter of Churchland's book (where she talks about religion). Here's the beginning:

A few weeks ago I went to a talk by philosopher-turned-neuroscientist Patricia Churchland about her new book Braintrust. The talk begins with the moderator turning to a packed audience in Columbia’s Havemeyer Hall and asking quite pointedly: “With a show of hands, can science tell us right from wrong?” 

Only about four hands go up. 

“All right,” he says, beckoning Churchland to the stage, “let’s see what you all think afterwards.” 

Presumably Churchland is about to change a few hundred minds on the science of morality. But as she proceeds through her lecture, it becomes increasingly clear that even she wouldn’t answer the moderator’s question wholeheartedly in the affirmative. She is providing the “yes” to another question, something more like “Can science tell us about right and wrong?” While the question is slightly less interesting (because it seems so obvious) her answer is fascinating. 

It all begins with me. Ok, not me, but the self. Each one of us is equipped with a neural circuitry that ensures our own self-caring and well-being — values in the most fundamental sense. As Churchland likes to say “we’re all born with systems that are very deep in the values business.” Neurons in the brainstem and hypothalamus monitor the inner state of our bodies to keep us alive; they also cause us to run from predators or eat when we’re hungry. Without these life-relevant feelings we wouldn't survive very long, let alone reproduce. 

The next step is to move from self-caring to other-caring. In mammals, this shift occurs not by some radical new engineering plan, but by slight adjustments to the neural mechanisms that are already in place. Modifications to the emotional, endocrine, stress and reward/punishment systems motivate new values, namely, the well-being of certain others. It’s as if the “golden circle of me” expands to include offspring, mates, friends and eventually even strangers.

The rest of the post is here.

Image: manual crank, flickr. com 

Less or equal to?

I love love love this. A huge, controversial, political, philosophical, racial, social and legal topic captured in three single marks. 

Less or equal to?

Amazing.

Unequally Free? The Social Limits of Liberty

Apr 19, 2011 6:00 PM - 8:00 PM

20 Cooper Square, New York, NY

NYU Journalism 7th Floor Commons

What Wittgenstein can tell us about happiness

Here's my recent story on happiness and its many dimensions. 

Ludwig Wittgenstein, a famous 20th century philosopher, was miserable all his life. Depressed and anxious, he once wrote in his diary, “There is no happiness for me; no joy ever.” Yet minutes before he died, he muttered: “Tell them I’ve had a wonderful life.” 

The concept of happiness is universally understood, yet escapes all comprehension. Can someone really be both unhappy everyday and happy over a lifetime? Does the notion of happiness change throughout the world, between communities, between people? Most importantly, do we have any choice in the matter?

Recent research in psychology, economics and public policy may help unravel this tangled knot of questions. 

“Objective choices make a difference to happiness over and above genetics and personality,” said Bruce Headey, a psychologist at Melbourne University in Australia. Headey and his colleagues analyzed annual self-reports of life satisfaction from over 20,000 Germans who have been interviewed every year since 1984. He compared five-year averages of people’s reported life satisfaction, and plotted their relative happiness on a percentile scale from 1 to 100. Heady found that as time went on, more and more people recorded substantial changes in their life satisfaction. By 2008, more than a third had moved up or down on the happiness scale by at least 25 percent, compared to where they had started in 1984. 

Headey’s findings, published in the October 19th issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, run contrary to what is known as the happiness set-point theory — the idea that even if you win the lottery or become a paraplegic, you’ll revert back to the same fixed level of happiness within a year or two. This psychological theory was widely accepted in the 1990s because it explained why happiness levels seemed to remain stable over the long term: They were mainly determined early in life by genetic factors including personality traits. 

Instead of existing as a stable equilibrium, Headey suggests that happiness is much more dynamic, and that individual choices — about one’s partner, working hours, social participation and lifestyle — make substantial and permanent changes to reported happiness levels. For example, doing more or fewer paid hours of work than you want, or exercising regularly, can have just as much impact on life satisfaction as having an extroverted personality.

The full story is here.

Image: Christiaan Tonnis, flickr.com

Just Say No to Christmas Displays?

If you tend to like any and all things celebrating the Christmas spirit, this study may be a bit of a downer. Apparently, Christmas displays reduce feelings of well-being and positive mood in people who don't celebrate the holiday. (I know, I know, if your first reaction is anything like mine, it's – they actually did a study on this?! Seriously?) But I kid you not, here's the abstract: 

In two experiments we examined the differential psychological consequences of being in the presence of a Christmas display on participants who did or did not celebrate Christmas (Study 1), or who identified as Christian, Buddhist, or Sikh (Study 2). Participants completed measures of psychological well-being in a cubicle that either did or did not contain a small Christmas display. Across several indicators of well-being, the display harmed non-celebrators and non-Christians, but enhanced well-being for celebrators and Christians. In Study 2, we found that the negative effect of the display on non-Christians was mediated by reduced feelings of inclusion. The results raise concerns about the ubiquitous presence of dominant cultural symbols (such as Christmas displays) in culturally diverse societies. 

No, I don't think we need to go out and immediately eradicate all Christmas displays. But the study does challenge a few assumptions about the harmlessness of certain symbols in public spaces.

But, since Happy Holidays has a kind of empty ring to it, I'm still going to go ahead and say – all positive feelings and good cheer intended – Merry Christmas! 

Monkeying Around in Science

The Economist calls it "ironic." In the midst of working a book called Evilicious: Why We Evolved a Taste for Being Bad, evolutionary psychologist Marc Hauser has been accused of some wrongdoing of his own. Specifically, scientific misconduct and cheating. What exactly did he do? The Chronicle of Higher Education provides an overview:

It was one experiment in particular that led members of Mr. Hauser's lab to become suspicious of his research and, in the end, to report their concerns about the professor to Harvard administrators. The experiment tested the ability of rhesus monkeys to recognize sound patterns. Researchers played a series of three tones (in a pattern like A-B-A) over a sound system. After establishing the pattern, they would vary it (for instance, A-B-B) and see whether the monkeys were aware of the change. If a monkey looked at the speaker, this was taken as an indication that a difference was noticed. The method has been used in experiments on primates and human infants. Mr. Hauser has long worked on studies that seemed to show that primates, like rhesus monkeys or cotton-top tamarins, can recognize patterns as well as human infants do. Such pattern recognition is thought to be a component of language acquisition.

Researchers watched videotapes of the experiments and "coded" the results, meaning that they wrote down how the monkeys reacted. As was common practice, two researchers independently coded the results so that their findings could later be compared to eliminate errors or bias. According to the document that was provided to The Chronicle, the experiment in question was coded by Mr. Hauser and a research assistant in his laboratory. A second research assistant was asked by Mr. Hauser to analyze the results. When the second research assistant analyzed the first research assistant's codes, he found that the monkeys didn't seem to notice the change in pattern. In fact, they looked at the speaker more often when the pattern was the same. In other words, the experiment was a bust. But Mr. Hauser's coding showed something else entirely: He found that the monkeys did notice the change in pattern—and, according to his numbers, the results were statistically significant. If his coding was right, the experiment was a big success.

The second research assistant was bothered by the discrepancy. How could two researchers watching the same videotapes arrive at such different conclusions? He suggested to Mr. Hauser that a third researcher should code the results. In an e-mail message to Mr. Hauser, a copy of which was provided to The Chronicle, the research assistant who analyzed the numbers explained his concern. "I don't feel comfortable analyzing results/publishing data with that kind of skew until we can verify that with a third coder," he wrote. A graduate student agreed with the research assistant and joined him in pressing Mr. Hauser to allow the results to be checked, the document given to The Chronicle indicates. But Mr. Hauser resisted, repeatedly arguing against having a third researcher code the videotapes and writing that they should simply go with the data as he had already coded it. After several back-and-forths, it became plain that the professor was annoyed.

"i am getting a bit pissed here," Mr. Hauser wrote in an e-mail to one research assistant. "there were no inconsistencies! let me repeat what happened. i coded everything. then [a research assistant] coded all the trials highlighted in yellow. we only had one trial that didn't agree. i then mistakenly told [another research assistant] to look at column B when he should have looked at column D. ... we need to resolve this because i am not sure why we are going in circles."

The research assistant who analyzed the data and the graduate student decided to review the tapes themselves, without Mr. Hauser's permission, the document says. They each coded the results independently. Their findings concurred with the conclusion that the experiment had failed: The monkeys didn't appear to react to the change in patterns. They then reviewed Mr. Hauser's coding and, according to the research assistant's statement, discovered that what he had written down bore little relation to what they had actually observed on the videotapes. He would, for instance, mark that a monkey had turned its head when the monkey didn't so much as flinch. It wasn't simply a case of differing interpretations, they believed: His data were just completely wrong.

The reaction to the Hauser investigation has been a mix of outcry against academic dishonesty, frustration at a lack of research standards, and distress over the terrible blow to the scientific community. But a refreshingly optimistic angle comes from JL Vernon, who sees "Hausergate" as an opportunity to demonstrate the integrity of the scientific process. Here are some of his ideas:

My reaction to this story may surprise readers of my blog, because I believe there is a silver lining to this story.  If handled properly, this tragedy can do great things for science.  What we have here is a ripe opportunity to showcase the integrity of the scientific process.  As I mentioned in my recent article  on creating science brand loyalists, I think scientists need to be more transparent about the scientific process from experimental design through peer-reviewed publication.  By emphasizing the mechanisms built into the scientific process that brought this deception to an end, science communicators and journalists can make the public aware that science is a self-regulating system in which fraud will not endure.  While there were failures in the system, science ultimately prevailed.

In this particular case, the misconduct that led to the investigation of Dr. Hauser occurred at the earliest stage of the scientific process, the experimental design.  David Dobbs does a great job describing the weaknesses of Hauser’s experimental protocols. The experiments involved observation of video recordings of monkeys responding to certain stimuli that were varied over time in order to induce a response from the monkeys.  The monkeys’ reactions to the stimulus were recorded by the observer.  Based on a letter written by the whistleblower researchers, professor Hauser’s observations conflicted with those of his lab assistants.  After the researchers realized that Dr. Hauser was trying to force them to accept and publish shoddy data, they acted properly by approaching the Harvard University administration to address these issues of scientific misconduct.

For their bravery, the whistleblowers should be recognized as “loyal defenders” of science.  Not only did they end Dr. Hauser’s dangerous practices, they also fulfilled the unofficial oath for science.

Thankfully, once these individuals brought this issue to the attention of the Harvard University ombudsman and the Dean of Arts and Sciences, the appropriate investigation was undertaken.  As far as we know, Dean Smith did not delay the investigation and subsequent to the completion of the investigation Dr. Hauser was properly sanctioned.

Related Links: A letter from the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences describes the findings against Hauser in more detail. 

Building Peace Conference

Yesterday (Saturday May 15th) was the Building Peace Conference organized by the Oxford Network for Peace Studies, or OxPeace. OxPeace is a "a multi-disciplinary initiative to promote the focused study of the nature of peace, peacemaking, peacebuilding and peacekeeping, in Oxford. It aims to promote relevant research and teaching, and the inter-disciplinary cross-fertilisation of ideas, and to enable the sharing of research between Oxford academics and graduate students and those from other institutions in Britain and abroad, and with scholar-practitioners in the field." Keynote speakers were Professor of Peace Research Johan Galtung and Ugandan human rights lawyer Barney Afako. 

I'll be adding my notes from the conference over the next few days. Highlights from last year's conference, The Serious Study of Peace, can be found here.

Background (from the program):
There is growing interest in academic circles in the questions surrounding the nature of peace. This includes the making, keeping, and building of peace. Peace as a site for academic study raises unique questions and provides a distinctive shape to interdisciplinary endeavour, drawing on politics and international relations, economics, development, environmental studies, war and conflict, anthropology, psychology, law, ethics and theology to name only a few.

The focus on peace adds a fresh dimension to established disciplines and engenders a distinctive interdisciplinary synergy. It has produced an extensive, rapidly growing body of academic literature, and shows potential as a discipline in its own right, embracing all levels from senior research to undergraduate teaching. Much relevant research and teaching  is being done in Oxford. This Conference taps into some of this work, as well as providing a forum for sharing with colleagues from across the world.

Introduction:
Dr Liz Carmichael (St John's College, Theology)
Carmichael began with some introductory remarks about the history and purpose of OxPeace. She described OxPeace as held together by the idea of peace as a worthy academic focus. Its goal is to promote new centers, new institutes, and a new chair of Peace Studies at Oxford (for which they need funding). Carmichael emphasized the need to raise the profile and the study of peace at an elite institution like Oxford, which would lend credibility to peace studies as an academic field in its own right.

First Talk:
Professor Johan Galtung
After the Abolition of Slavery and Colonialism, War as a Social Institution: The Role of England.  An example of Applied Peace Studies

Johan Galtung is currently based near Geneva as co-Director of the Transcend Research Institute,  which he co-founded in 1993. A Norwegian sociologist and ‘father’ of academic peace studies, Johan Galtung founded the International Peace Research Institute in Oslo (PRIO) in 1959 and was its first Director 1959-69. He then became Professor of Peace and Conflict Research at Oslo University 1969-78. He is a peace practitioner and prolific researcher, who has held numerous visiting professorships in Europe and the USA.

Galtung began his talk by urging Oxford University to become a “facilitator of solutions.” He described his role as “father of peace studies” in the 1950’s, where he worked to advocate peacebuilding, peacekeeping and peaceguiding. Over the years his work as led him to 10 findings, which he believes can help in the project of de-institutionalizing war:
1. The top will never abolish anything on its own – the top will never degrade itself.
2. Abolition never comes from bottom alone, it needs an enlightened element (often women play a pivotal role here).
3. Consciousness formation is crucial. Consciousness raising is often well performed by churches.
 4. There must be a vision of change, and spirituality can be used as a bridging concept, crossing divisions between religions of east and west. There must be emphasis on the linking of something out there to something in here. Heart and brain go hand in hand.
5. Need unlimited perseverance.
6. Cannot demand synchronicity, or implement change in all places at the same time. We need leading countries to provide the example.
7. Multilateralism (summit meetings) will generally lead to nothing. Galtung gives the example of the recent climate change summit as a failed attempt to implement change. Countries need to show the lead, especially now on the issue of nuclear weapons.
8 and 9. Sometimes heavy politics is necessary. “When someone has new idea, the first reaction is laughter, then suspicion, then a heavy politician who says ‘its been my idea all along’” There is a dialectic of success and failure.
10. There is a heavy price to any change. There will always be resistance from those who claim that if we don’t do this then someone else will. And every action will have often unforeseen consequences.

Galtung turned next to a “middle” position on what we would need to abolish war. After again emphasizing the role played by women, he says change will come from a variety of “middles”. The middle-aged – when they still have physical energy and have not yet solidified their ideas, although he acknowledges it is possible to be middle aged well into one’s 80s. The middle-sexed – who are not lost in narcissistic beauty concerns that take up too much time and effort in our modern society. The middle class – because the upper class is oblivious to problems, and the lower class is too concerned with its own.  The middle-towns – big cities have too many monuments celebrating the grandeur of their city, and growing up in this sort of environment seeps into a certain (righteous) view of world.  The middle-religious – somewhere between a hard religious outlook that is too uncompromising, and a soft religious outlook exemplified by groups like the Quakers. The Anglican church may be intermediary between these two extremes. Finally, middle-politics – that celebrates coalitions and seeks to find ideas that accommodate both sides. The idea of social capitalism or social democracy was itself such a coalition.

Galtung’s concluding remarks reflected on war as a tenacious structure, as opposed to solely dependent on particular actors. There is cooperation between countries in maintaining the war system, and history has shown that we tend to stop war just in time to avoid putting an end to the entire war system. Righteousness makes all players think their views are universal, but it is time for an "intellectual helicopter sweep" to view countries from above and see the larger picture.


Second Talk:
Barney Afako
Grappling with Peace: Reflections on some efforts to deal with violent conflict in Africa

Barney Afako, a scholar-practitioner of peacebuilding, is a leading Ugandan human rights lawyer and transitional justice expert. Currently based in London, he is an adviser to the peace process in northern Uganda and other peace processes in Africa. He is a leading scholar in transitional justice specifically.

Afako began by describing some of his experience in Uganda  working with  local people in small communities. He noted that these people are mainly interested in their futures and those of their children, not in punishing rebels and bringing them to trial. They bring into sharp focus the idea that justice is a much bigger concept than criminality and criminal justice. Therefore it is possible to have a primary focus on bringing an end to violent conflict without giving up the need for accountability. Afako described how he would constantly run into arguments to pursue and nurture the idea of international criminal justice, but this is a far too limited view. In approaching peacebuilding, one cannot escape hard dilemma’s, and one cannot always resolve these dilemmas. But we can try to be prepared to handle these dilemmas. Mediators and peacebuilding practitioners step into the space between law and the local (bridging the gap between international criminal justice and ordinary people). This is a no mans zone, but people who want to make peace need to stand here.

Afako also emphasized the dual role of the state and civil society in the peace process. The state’s influence is both inescapable and utterly crucial. Yes, the state exerts control over any part of peace-building, but it is important to understand that there is no space in which conflict takes place that is not under some aspect of control. Therefore mediators need to keep having conversation with many actors of the state, and this involves going to the top. They need to help states organize themselves to respond to conflict, as well as keep the state cohesive. On the other side, civil society is increasingly mobilized on issues of justice, and lots of people are engaged with peace process. Civil society needs to have a part in the peace process; it needs to be at the table. People in civil society will bring perspective to those around the table. So while it is critical to focus on state, it is important to also focus on people. People without the state will not work, and the state without people will not have support. A mediator needs to carry everyone.

Finally, Afako addressed the importance of looking deeper into any conflict to identify the structural concerns. He says we can’t take our eyes off the parties involved, but we also cannot afford to forget the structural issues. The process of peace goes beyond the signatures on a peace agreement. He advises mediators to keep abreast of social changes so that new conflicts don’t take them by surprise.

Godthink

In Córdoba, Spain you'll find a roman catholic cathedral called the Mezquita (Spanish for "mosque"). The mosque-turned-cathedral was once a roman temple; that is, before it was a Visigoth church. After a few double takes at the minaret-bell tower, you may be inclined, as I was, to mutter something like: "oh, religions...aren't they all essentially the same thing?" And it would be exactly this sentiment that BU professor Stephen Prothero condemns as wholly mistaken (and quite dangerous). 

In his recent article, Prothero describes what he sees as a pervasive notion of religion that "resounds in the echo chamber of popular culture." It's the notion that, when you get down to it, religions are just different paths to the same truth. But he warns that this is false (there are significant differences between religions that can't be glossed over), condescending (denying these differences is just like saying they don't matter) and a threat (only by taking religious differences seriously can we understand the religious conflicts that plague the world).

This naive theological groupthink — call it Godthink — is motivated in part by a laudable rejection of the exclusivist missionary view that only you and your kind will make it to heaven or nirvana or paradise. For most of world history, human beings have seen religious rivals as inferior to themselves — practitioners of empty rituals, perpetrators of bogus miracles, and purveyors of fanciful myths. This way of seeing has given us religious violence from the Crusades and the Holocaust to Rwanda and Nigeria. In response to such violence, the 18th-century Age of Enlightenment popularized the ideal of religious tolerance, and we are doubtless better for it.

I understand what these people are doing. They are not describing the world but reimagining it. They are hoping that their hope will call up in us feelings of brotherhood and sisterhood. In the face of religious bigotry and bloodshed, past and present, we cannot help but be drawn to such hope, and such vision. Yet we must not mistake either for clear-eyed analysis.

When it comes to safeguarding the world from the evils of religion, including violence by proxy from the hand of God, the claim that all religions are one is no more effective than the claim that all religions are poison. As the New Atheists (another species of religious lumpers) observe, we live in a world where religion seems as likely to detonate a bomb as to defuse one. So while we need idealism, we need realism even more. We need to understand religious people as they are — not just at their best but also their worst. We need to look at not only their awe-inspiring architecture and gentle mystics but also their bigots and suicide bombers.

I think Prothero raises a good point – denial of religious differences may be comforting, but it moves from naive to pernicious when it leads to overlooking real problems or incorrectly analyzing a situation. More importantly, any kind of religious "lumping" (favorable or otherwise) skims right over the real complexities and nuances of the various beliefs, doctrines, rituals, social interactions, and institutions that we already lump together in the term "religion."  

Nevertheless, I still think there is a value in emphasizing religious similarities – call me guilty of being drawn to that "reimagination" of the world. Maybe it's possible to reimagine, un-naively...

Facts, Values, and the Moral Landscape

 Say I told you a story. A story chock full of facts, evidence, and detailed descriptions of human beings – everything you’d want to know about this species of ours. I could even throw in a brain scan or two. But despite my bundle of empirical, scientific data, I still could not tell you how we should be. There is a fundamental gap between facts and values, and it's here to stay. Period.

Or maybe not. The ought/is distinction - namely, the idea that I cannot make any claim about what ought to be based simply on what is - may not be as chasm-like as previously thought in philosophical circles. At least, Sam Harris would like to think so. Best known for his book "The End of Faith" and his vocal criticisms of religion, Harris has now moved into the domain of morality and neuroscience. In his TED talk and subsequent article, Harris argues that it is possible to make objective, scientific statements about what is morally good. In other words, is possible to be right about right and wrong. So how exactly does Harris manage to resolve centuries of ethical inquiry and debate? By brushing past the fact/value distinction altogether and basing morality entirely in the notion of human well-being - which he claims is ultimately rooted in human consciousness.

“science can, in principle, help us understand what we should do and should want – and, perforce, what other people should do and want in order to live the best lives possible. My claim is that there are right and wrong answers to moral questions, just as there are right and wrong answers to questions of physics, and such answers may one day fall within reach of the maturing sciences of the mind… there are facts about human and animal well-being that we can, in principle, know – simply because well-being (and states of consciousness altogether) must lawfully relate to states of the brain and to states of the world.”

Harris is fully aware of the controversial claim he is making, but he chastises philosophers and scientists for elevating the ought/is distinction (what he calls Hume’s “lazy analysis of facts and values”) to the status of mathematical truth and thereby hindering all critical thought on the matter. Most of all he worries that the philosophical skepticism that divides facts and values leads to a moral relativism with dire consequences: 

“Many of my critics piously cite Hume's is/ought distinction as though it were well known to be the last word on the subject of morality until the end of time… There are very practical, moral concerns that follow from the glib idea that anyone is free to value anything – the most consequential being that it is precisely what allows highly educated, secular, and otherwise well-intentioned people to pause thoughtfully, and often interminably, before condemning practices like compulsory veiling, genital excision, bride-burning, forced marriage, and the other cheerful products of alternative “morality” found elsewhere in the world. Fanciers of Hume’s is/ought distinction never seem to realize what the stakes are, and they do not see what an abject failure of compassion their intellectual “tolerance” of moral difference amounts to.”

Harris admits that science is not guaranteed to map the entire realm of morality, or that it will produce answers to every conceivable moral question. He also acknowledges that there may not be a single "good" for everyone or every society. He draws the analogy to food. There is no one single best food to achieve optimal health – good nutrition can be achieved in a whole multitude of ways. Nevertheless, there is still an objective difference between food and poison.

“there may be many different ways for individuals and communities to thrive – many peaks on the moral landscape – so if there is real diversity in how people can be deeply fulfilled in life, this diversity can be accounted for and honored in the context of science…the concept of "well-being," like the concept of "health," is truly open for revision and discovery.”

Much depends on this concept of “well-being." At times Harris uses the word “happiness,” or invokes the Aristotelian notion of “flourishing,” but in general he leaves the term extremely vague on purpose. By doing so, he tries to avoid the objection that there are some moral values (say, equality), that are not encapsulated in “well-being” and therefore cannot be established with his scientific approach. But Harris declares that every bit of morality (and all notions of value) are related to the experiences of conscious beings, and furthermore “those philosophical efforts that seek to put morality in terms of duty, fairness, justice, or some other principle that is not explicitly tied to the well-being of conscious creatures – are, nevertheless, parasitic on some notion of well-being in the end.”

I am still rather skeptical about the details, but no doubt Harris will elaborate on these arguments in his forthcoming book, The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values. Given the heated discussion he has provoked in the past few weeks, it’s sure to get quite a response.  

Who's Sitting in the Armchair?

Do intuitions from the armchair depend on who's sitting in it? In a new paper called "Gender and Epistemic Intuition," Wesley Buckwalter presents some interesting findings on exactly this question. Philosphy has traditionally taken for granted the notion that intuitions are unanimous. Turns out, women may beg to differ. 

To explore this novel idea, we'll start with a two-part thought experiment (this one was first constructed by Joshua Knobe, but Buckwalter uses a version of it in his study). 

1. A chairman of a board is asked to approve a certain policy. He is told that it will harm the environment. He replies: " I don't care at all about the environment. I just want to make a profit." He approves the policy, it goes forward, and sure enough, the enviroment is harmed. Does the chairman intentionally harm the environment?

2. Same scenario, only the chairman is told that the policy will help the environment. He responds the same way -- he doesn't care, he only wants the profit. Policy is approved, and environment is helped. Does the chairman intentionally help the environment?

In the original experiment, Knobe wanted to find out what people thought about the chairman’s intentions. Surprisingly, although the two scenarios are identical except for harm/help outcome, participants overwhelmingly (82%) agreed that the chairman intentionally harmed the environment, but only 33% said that he had intentionally helped the environment. This odd asymmetry has since been dubbed the “side-effect effect.” It seems that when the side-effect of an action is bad (in this case, the effect on the environment), people are more likely to say that it was performed intentionally.

In his study, Buckwalter predicted that a similar effect would appear for questions about the chairman's knowledge. He asked people whether the chairman knew that his actions would harm/help the environment. As he expected, more people attributed knowledge to the chairman in the harm case – the asymmetry appeared again. How come? One possibility is that people make a (moral) judgment about the chairman based on the outcome (good or bad), and then attribute knowledge afterwards. In the case of a bad outcome, people will try harder to make the chairman "responsible," by saying that he really did know the outcome. In the case of a good outcome, the chairman’s lack of care about the environment means that he should not get “credit” for really knowing the outcome.

But here’s the twist: women showed this asymmetry to a much greater extent than men. Women were more likely than men to say the chairman knew he would harm but didn’t know he would help. Why? Buckwalter puts forth a theory – what he calls the Normative Evaluation Hypothesis – to explain the gender difference. Essentially, it says that women are more likely to consult their moral judgments (or “normative evaluations”) about a situation before making their decision regarding knowledge. The moral significance of an action, therefore, plays a greater role in shaping women's decisions about knowledge than men's.

Buckwalter then predicts that his theory will also explain women's intuitions about the Gettier cases (see last post for a summary). There doesn’t seem to be an immediate moral dimension to this case (no good or bad outcome), but consider the evaluation of Smith himself. Since he was totally justified in his belief, he seems to have done everything "right,” and is therefore a praiseworthy person. To say he doesn’t really know is to deny him knowledge that seems rightfully his! If women are more likely to consult this moral evaluation of Smith, then they should also be more likely to attribute knowledge. And sure enough, women are much more likely than men to say that in the Gettier case, Smith really knows.

These findings raise several interesting questions. First, does this mean that, in general, women are more influenced by their moral judgments than men are? Second, if confronted with rival intuitions, how should we decide which one to follow? Finally, has much of traditional philosophy to this day been biased toward male intuitions? Clearly, the implications of a gender difference in intuitions are significant. Buckwalter suggests that it may also partly explain the scarcity of women in philosophy departments. After all, if a women's intuitions don't seem to match those of her male counterpart (and tend to go against the traditional "correct" intuition), they may simply be dismissed. And how long would you tolerate being repeatedly told your deeply felt intuitions were “wrong”? It is possible, Buckwalter says, that many women have been discouraged from entering the field of philosophy simply because they do not share the relevant intuitions of the (male) majority.

Buckwalter leaves us with a striking quote from Stephen Stich:  “For 2500 years, philosophers have been relying on appeals to intuition. But the plausibility of this entire tradition rests on an unsubstantiated, and until recently unacknowledged, empirical hypothesis – the hypothesis that the philosophical intuitions of people in different…groups do not disagree.” More and more evidence shows that in fact, they do disagree. This, of course, doesn’t necessarily mean we should throw out all traditional intuitions for being discriminatory or skewed in some way (for one, what would we replace them with?). It does mean, however, that these intuitions may have profound effects on how we go about (and who goes into) philosophy, and these effects should be taken seriously. As the research comes in, my guess is that it will probably challenge more of the philosophical tradition. Let’s just say I’ve got an intuition about it.*

*sorry, couldn't resist ;)

Swapping Armchairs for Clipboards

Attention! The philosopher has left the armchair and is now… conducting tests? Welcome to the world of experimental philosophy (or x-phi), a growing movement to combine pure-thought traditional philosophy with the empirical sciences. Putting the experiment back in “thought experiment,” members of the x-phi community are taking out their clipboards, asking people questions, and collecting information on a whole range of topics. How do people think about moral dilemmas? Do their intuitions about traditional thought experiments match up to those of the philosophers? What do they count as real knowledge? Answers to these questions may shed some light on traditional philosophical questions and claims – at least, the experimentalists hope so.

How could experimental philosophy tell us anything useful? Consider one tool out of the philosopher’s toolbox: the Thought Experiment. This is an imaginary scenario often used to test our intuitions about certain cases, and then demonstrate how those intuitions support a particular philosophical claim. One series of famous thought experiments called Gettier cases involve intuitions about knowledge. In 1963 Edmund Gettier published an article challenging the notion of knowledge as "justified true belief,” which until that point had been the standard definition. He proposed the following scenario: Smith is a job candidate who believes justifiably that "Jones will get the job." Smith also believes justifiably that "Jones has a dime in his pocket." Smith concludes that "The man who will get the job has a dime in his pocket." But Jones ends up not getting the job -- Smith does instead. Smith also, as it turns out, had a dime in his pocket. So Smith was correct when he concluded that "The man who will get the job has a dime in his pocket." But Gettier argued that it does not seem correct to say that Smith had real knowledge, rather, it seems like a lucky coincidence. Gettier’s intuition (that Smith did not really know) was taken as evidence to show that knowledge is not simply justified true belief.

What really constitutes knowledge is an enormous question that I won't even begin to get into here. The point is that whenever we are trying to answer such philosophical questions, appeals to intuition about thought experiments play a rather important role in the conclusions we draw. But whose intuitions should count? Does everyone have the same intuitions? Could age, gender, religion, culture, class, ethnicity, or any other unforeseen variable, have an effect? Sounds like a problem for experimental philosophy. Next post I’ll elaborate on some surprising results about intuitions from the armchair. Turns out, they may be misrepresenting a rather large portion of the population (hint: roughly half).

Persons of the Sea... continued

I wasn’t able to get to all the different angles I wanted to in my last blog post, so I’m going to try to do that here. Quick summary: Thomas White wants dolphins to have the status of “nonhuman persons”. Humans are not unique in their complex intellectual and emotional abilities – science is showing that dolphins (and perhaps other animals like chimps and elephants) have these abilities too. "Personhood" is used as a shorthand way of referring to this combination of abilities, and generally the status of "personhood" gives an individual a place in the moral community. Therefore, White argues, dolphins should be considered persons, complete with moral standing as individuals.

The significance of all this becomes apparent when you start looking into current practices involving dolphins. Dolphins are injured and killed by the thousands every year in connection with the fishing industry, and are often kept in small concrete tanks in captive facilities for entertainment or scientific research. Inflicting unnecessary pain and suffering on dolphins is objectionable on its own, but capturing, selling, buying and breeding persons is seriously disturbing. This is not to say that an animal must be a “person” to merit appropriate treatment – pain and suffering are very real to all sentient beings. White acknowledges that fighting for “personhood” status is just one strategy out of many. But it's a strategy that is clear cut and easy to understand – under no circumstances do we treat persons this way. Period.

In his arguments for dolphin personhood, White spends a lot of time outlining dolphin “intelligence.” He admits from the beginning that any time we talk about something as vague and multifaceted as intelligence in animals, we run the risk of anthropocentrism – that is, measuring other beings with a human yardstick. With chimps, this approach seems reasonable enough; after all they’re our animal cousins and we share with them much of our evolutionary history and DNA. But dolphins pose an interesting problem. Humans and dolphins have been on two very distinct evolutionary paths for the past 100 million years (that was the last time we had a common ancestor). The complex intelligences that we (and they) possess may be fundamentally different, in ways we can’t even comprehend. For example, dolphins interpret the outside world primarily through echolocation (biosonar), which can be thought of as either an entirely different sense or a highly sophisticated hearing ability. But the intelligence “tests” we give dolphins are mainly based on the primary human sense, that of sight. So when we put a dolphin in front of a mirror and call it “self-aware” because it seems to recognize its reflection, is this an even more remarkable feat? Dolphins are operating in a foreign cognitive environment, and they still pass with flying colors! What should we do in this sort of situation? Is it even feasible to measure intelligence without using some human standards? Professor of psychology Diana Reiss has suggested that we understand dolphins as a form of “alien intelligence”, emphasizing the real difficulty in drawing comparisons with our own intelligence. But the question remains – how do we deal with something so different it's alien?

Another question that comes up in this discussion of moral status and persons is the whole notion of drawing boundaries to moral obligations, of setting criteria in the first place. A brief look at history makes it clear how problematic this attempt has been. I came across this quote by philosopher Thomas Birch that seems to capture the precarious business of setting moral criteria: “we see that whenever we have closed off the question with the institution of some practical criterion, we have later found ourselves in error, and have had to open the question up again to reform our practices in a further attempt to make them ethical.” So what can we do? I don’t think the process of negotiating boundaries and criteria is useless; in fact a great deal of good can come out of just such deliberation. But as Birch makes clear, the problem arises when we settle upon a set of criteria and move on, acting as if the case is closed. White wants to re-draw the moral lines to include animals, and I think his efforts will get a lot of people thinking. I suppose we should just be open to these lines changing again.

Day 2 & 3: Evolution & Ethics – They Come in Twos

It seems that often in the attempt to explain an idea, people will set up dualisms to more clearly define the terms and concepts in question. This two-sided approach seems to come up time and time again in the discussion of the origins of human morality – pitting moral reasoning against moral emotions, intellect vs. passion, nurture vs. nature, culture vs. genes, etc. I’ve been wondering about the usefulness of dividing controversial issues into these extreme dichotomies, especially when the subject matter seems either A) too complex to even formulate sides that are truly distinct, or B) more realistically involving a place somewhere in the middle. Granted, dualisms may be useful to illustrate a point – after all, it is helpful to define what something is by illustrating what it is not – but there is a tendency to paint caricatures instead of real positions.

This seemed to happen in the debate between Darwin and one of his critics, St. George Jackson Mivart. Mivart actually agreed with much of what Darwin had proposed in the Origin of Species and was a supporter of natural selection, but the two scientists had a falling out after Mivart wrote a scathing review of The Descent of Man. Their main point of disagreement was the difference between humans and other animals – particularly that difference which leads to morality. Whereas Darwin argued it was a difference in degree, Mivart was adamant that it was a difference in kind.

Mivart's argument goes like this: no one denies that man is an animal, but the mistake is to conclude that man is no more than an animal.  There is plenty of evidence to show that we share with other primates the capacity for sensations, passions, desires, etc. But sensational knowledge of the world is fundamentally different from intellectual understanding. What sets humans apart is their intellectual faculty and ability to reflect upon their experiences. Morality, which is uniquely human, requires some sort of judgment to evaluate competing emotions and desires. And this ability to judge is not simply an outgrowth of the evolved capacity to feel emotion – it is another thing altogether. Darwin's mistake is getting so caught up in man's similarities to animals that he obscures the crucial dissimilarity: a moral sense that we do not share with any other creature.

In this argument we see the two sides shaping up quite nicely: Darwin's morality as a continuous evolving capacity that developed from lower animals to humans (it only differs in degree) vs Mivart's morality as an discontinuous jump (it differs fundamentally in kind). But was Darwin really advocating this definition of morality? Is there any room for him to accept some sort of difference in kind? There just may be. Reading through The Descent of Man, one finds seemingly contradictory statements about the human moral capacity that suggest Darwin may not have had the view Mivart charged him with. On the one hand, Darwin says that:

"...the mental faculties of man and the lower animals do not differ in kind, although immensely in degree. A difference in degree, however great, does not justify us in placing man in a distinct kingdom..." 

That seems like a rather straightforward statement. But Darwin also acknowledges that:

"A moral being is one who is capable of reflecting on his past actions and their motives- of approving of some and disapproving of others; and the fact that man is the one being who certainly deserves this designation, is the greatest of all distinctions between him and the lower animals." 

Even later he admits that articulate language is "peculiar to man." This sounds inconsistent, but only if we are using Mivart's two-sided notion of morality, one that pits "degree" against "kind". We could see Darwin as viewing the human moral sense as less of a radical break and more of an emergent property (this is an interpretation Larry Arnhart proposes in his book Darwinian Natural Right). If Darwin is describing a novel trait that appeared at a high level of complexity, producing an intellectual capacity that could not have been predicted at lower levels, then he is not contradicting himself. He really can say that man is distinct from other animals in a fundamental way (given the size and complexity of the human brain), without giving up the claim that man evolved his morality in a continuous way. This does not imply a break in the laws of nature, but rather an underlying uniqueness of human morality that depends on emergent traits. Novelty, therefore, can arise in a way that is compatible with Darwin’s theory.

I'll most likely have more to say on the dualisms that reappear in this evolutionary story, but so far it seems like breaking out of a two-sided world can be quite helpful.

Day 1: Evolution & Ethics – Darwin Was Here

The past decade has seen an explosion of research in the biology of human nature as related to morality. Systematic studies in genetics, neuroscience, cultural anthropology and animal behavior are supplying more data than ever before about the role of emotions in our moral judgments, similarities between human and non-human primate social behavior, and the evolutionary roots of our sense of right and wrong. Spanning both the sciences and humanities, this emerging field of the biology of morality seems to fulfill what E.O. Wilson had in mind over 30 years ago when he called for "ethics to be temporarily removed from the hands of the philosophers and biologicized." Philosophers may still cling tightly, but they're having to share their grip of ethics with a growing number of scientists.

Given all the increased attention – from an assortment of disciplines ranging from molecular biology to law – the concept of "biologicized" ethics may seem new, but in many ways it reflects an earlier trend in human inquiry that goes back to the ancient Greeks. When Aristotle called man a "political animal", he was not simply speaking in metaphor. His comparison was rooted in his own studies of biological sciences, which included detailed observations of a variety of plants and animals (and apparently the first dissection of a chimpanzee). He also compared humans to the other social animals – ants, bees, wasps and cranes. The moral and political nature of humans in biological terms was not an unfamiliar notion to Aristotle, but it would be transformed and solidified by another intellectual heavyweight millennia later: Charles Darwin. In his work The Descent of Man, Darwin laid out the basics for almost all subsequent discussion of evolution and ethics, and he did it without any knowledge of genetics or neuroscience. In fact, it can be quite a challenge to find a new idea in the field today that does not have its roots in Darwin's writings over 150 years ago. Consider the following quotes:

"any animal whatever, endowed with well-marked social instincts, the parental and filial affections being here included, would inevitably acquire a moral sense or conscience, as soon as its intellectual powers had become as well, or nearly as well developed, as in man."

"The moral nature of man has reached its present standard, partly through the advancement of his reasoning powers and consequently of a just public opinion, but especially from his sympathies having been rendered more tender and widely diffused through the effects of habit, example, instruction, and reflection... nevertheless the first foundation or origin of the moral sense lies in the social instincts, including sympathy; and these instincts no doubt were primarily gained, as in the case of the lower animals, through natural selection."

The continuity of morality from lower animals to humans, the additional element of reason, the emphasis on social instincts and emotions like sympathy; all of these insights are coming into the forefront right now. Of course, some of the terminology has changed and there is vastly more data to work with, but the discussion still echoes Darwin to a surprising degree. As we face a new decade, I can only speculate about the potential advances in science, how their implications will ripple out into other disciplines, and how they'll change our views of human nature and morality. But if the past is any indicator, they'll probably stem from something Darwin said.

Oxford

I made it to Oxford. It's beautiful, tiny, intriguing. If cities were subject to Photoshop tools, you'd have to slide the time scale back a few centuries and set the color saturation to 50%. Oh, and then slosh on some sort of melting-snow filter. Although it's neither possible or meaningful, I can't help but compare Oxford to the last foreign city I spent time in. Barcelona is still so much in my mind that it makes for some rather extreme comparisons (size-scale, weather, language).  Let's just say that even if I wasn't exactly looking for a contrast, I sure got one!

Monday I officially start my "short-term student visit" at the Center for Practical Ethics. This involves a visitor card, some desk space, and free reign to the plethora of events, lectures, and seminars at Oxford. First on the list is a seminar called "Evolution and Ethics", which lands smack in the middle of that very interesting cross section of science, morality, and religion:

"Can we, drawing upon our evolutionary history, find within our pre-human ancestors the basic ingredients of human morality? This seminar will examine the prospects and promise of evolutionary theory and some of its implications for religious belief. The participants will first consider the nature of morality and then various ways that evolutionary ethicists have sought to explain human morality." 

Amazing. If I can just manage to get a library card to the Bodleian Library, I can start delving into titles like Darwinian Natural Right and Primates and Philosophers. So much to do – I can barely wait to start! My goal is to post something each day of the seminar, and I'll try to continue that pattern for the rest of my visit (perhaps a bit ambitious, but it's 2010 and I'm aiming high). I'll try to explore some of the ideas I'm reading/learning about – mostly as a way to explain them to myself and work through questions. Of course, I'll also be making some comments on this funny little town where the friendly cashiers call you "love", the coin-sizing system is an utter mystery, and my sense of left and right is called into question every time I cross the street. Cheers.

Matters of Value

 The House passage of a health care bill means we're a little bit closer to getting some real health care reform in the United States. But the health care debate will undoubtedly continue even after a final vote on the matter (whenever that happens... fingers crossed for this year!) Health encompasses so much more than insurance and medical care – income, education, and other background social conditions all play a crucial role in improving health. And all of these conditions, which provide the structure and support for a healthy society, are informed by our deeper values: liberty, efficiency, responsibility, and fairness, to name a few. Exploring these values in more detail is a collection of essays by the Hastings Center, Connecting American Values with Health Reform. It's worth a read, as it both grounds the current discussion about reform to greater ideals, and also points to constructive ways to continue the conversation, regardless of the final legislation.

Liberals and Conservatives – A Moral Difference?

I tend to like debate. I see discourse as fundamentally human and critical to any functioning society. Which is why I am so disappointed with debates in which two sides seem to be talking right past each other – each trying desperately to engage with a brick wall. Aspects of the current debate on health care seem to exemplify this type of standstill, particularly surrounding issues that deal with the boundaries of human life. Jonathan Haidt addresses this problem in a recent TED interview, where he explains that liberals tend to take a more materialist and utilitarian view of life, seeing nothing inherently wrong with abortion, voluntary euthanasia, and stem cell research. Many conservatives, on the other hand, tend to place a higher value on the sacredness of life, and will see these practices as abhorrent and profoundly immoral. Because of the different emphasis placed on sanctity, liberals and conservatives each see the other side as making outrageous claims or just missing the point. But Haidt doesn’t stop at health care – he has an entire theory about the differences between liberal and conservative thinking, and relates it back to fundamental differences in moral sentiments.

(Side note: I acknowledge that I’m using broad terms that by no means accurately represent all conservatives or liberals. Haidt certainly does this as well. I do think, however, that at the risk of simplification, such generalizations can be useful in understanding some dimensions of political debate.)

Intrigued by anyone claiming to have a grand theory of morality, I read more about Haidt’s work in moral psychology. His “Moral Foundations Theory” is as follows: there are five psychological foundations (or intutions) that provide the basis of human morality. He labels them harm/care, fairness/reciprocity, ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity. These foundations are not rigid determinants of morality, but they do place constraints on the range of human virtues that can be easily learned and cultivated. The extent to which they are valued and taught can vary greatly between different cultures – likened to tastebuds, these moral foundations are universal, but each society can have different “tastes”. Therefore, some societies may place much greater emphasis on virtues that protect the group, like subordination, obedience, and duty.  In these societies the loyalty and authority intuitions are much stronger. Other societies may build up a morality based more heavily on protecting individuals; in these societies the care and fairness intuitions are stronger.

Haidt takes this five-dimensional view of morality and uses it to explain many political disagreements in the US, mapping political liberals and political conservatives onto his system. In a series of surveys he asked participants to answer a set of moral judgment questions and identify which concerns were the most relevant to their decision. After matching up their responses with their self-rated political orientation (from extremely conservative to extremely liberal), Haidt observed an emerging pattern. Liberals in general rated care and fairness as their two main concerns, while conservatives tended to see all five moral foundations as highly relevant. The more extreme the political orientation, the more acute this difference.  In essence, liberals have a narrower focus to their morality than that of conservatives – individual rights and social justice take up most of their moral domain. Conservatives place additional value on the moral foundations that maintain order, provide stability, and bind the community together, and so their morality is more expansive.

Thus, as Haidt goes on to say:

“Conservatives have many moral concerns that liberals simply do not recognize as moral concerns. When conservatives talk about virtues and policies based on the ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity foundations, liberals hear talk about theta waves. For this reason, liberals often find it hard to understand why so many of their fellow citizens do not rally around the cause of social justice, and why many Western nations have elected conservative governments in recent years.”

He uses this theory to explain the reaction of so many liberals after the 2004 election – shocked at how the majority of voters who regarded “moral values” as the most important issue ended up voting for George W. Bush. Seen through a liberal care and justice morality, a president who cuts taxes for the wealthy and has no regard for the environment is hardly “moral.” For conservatives, however, morality doesn’t stop there – it includes values like allegiance, authority, and tradition. So showing support for an ongoing war (solidarity and loyalty) or opposing same-sex marriage (authority of traditional institutions) may follow as moral positions. It is not hard to see why this leads to disagreement.

So, is there anything that can be done? Haidt argues that a better understanding of the five moral foundations and how they are valued in different societies (or different political ideologies) is crucial. Dismissing values like loyalty, authority, and purity as “backwards” or  “ignorant”, as many liberals do, fails to acknowledge the moral concerns that drive many people’s decisions. And it’s hard to persuade people when you don’t understand their motivations. Haidt says that “recognizing these latter foundations as moral (instead of amoral, or immoral, or just plain stupid) can open up a door in the wall that separates liberals and conservatives when they try to discuss moral issues.” I do hope so.

Further links:

Morals Authority, a more detailed article on Jonathan Haidt and his ideas on morality and current American politics.

What's the Frequency Lakoff?, an article that discusses the ideas of both Haidt and George Lakoff, who also tries to identify mental frameworks that can help explain political ideology. Lakoff  traces many differences between liberals and conservatives to their conceptual metaphors of government as family – either a “nurturant parent” or a “strict father”. The article is pretty critical of Lakoff's ideas about political language, and sees Haidt as more accurately addressing the problem.

In Combination

Somehow this article in Seed Magazine manages to combine almost every single one of my interests – remarkable. I can’t wait for more from Seed's design column.  As I try to write my personal statement for grad school and form a coherent narrative about my interests and my life, it’s a nice reminder that philosophy, science and design can all be connected!

More links:
Design and the Elastic Mind, 2008 MoMA exhibit
Core Principles, an earlier Seed article about the interface of science and design

A Science of Morality

This post is a continuation of my thoughts from a few weeks ago, on the Collins nomination and the scope of science. I’m finding myself coming back to this issue of what science can tell us about morality–and the sort of knowledge we can expect to get from science about human nature. To start, we know the type of knowledge we are likely not going to get from science: Alongside the electron and proton, scientists have discovered a new “moral” particle: the moron!* Instead, science will most likely describe our moral practices and possibly hint at how we came to acquire them. For example, a growing body of data shows that people with vastly different cultural practices will still show similarities in their moral judgments. Some scientists (I’ve mentioned Marc Hauser before) are attempting to give an evolutionary account of how we got this way; essentially trying to explain a moral universality through biology. With this and other scientific work we may begin to learn more about the evolution of pro-social or moral intuitions; perhaps we’ll discover that a sense of spirituality was evolutionarily beneficial, or we’ll uncover an underlying universal moral grammar (similar to Chomsky’s theory of language). Animal studies may reveal shared biological mechanisms that drive moral judgments. Brain damage studies may give us more information on how our moral capacities are affected by different parts of the brain and emotional processing. Surveys may tell us more about the types of principles we use to decide whether an act is morally permissible or not. In the past few years, in fact, there has been an explosion of empirical work in exactly these directions. From game theory to neurobiology, science can tell us a lot about morality.

What science cannot tell us is specifically what that morality ought to look like. Science is descriptive (it can tell us how we are) but not prescriptive (it can’t tell us how we should be). So just because our moral intuitions incline us to act a certain way, it doesn’t make it right to act this way. But I don’t think the discussion ends here. It doesn’t make it right, but can a greater knowledge of the science of morality have any implications for what shape that morality should take? I think so. A scientific theory of morality may give us some guidance as to what we, as humans in society, can achieve easily or even reasonably strive for. It could provide some information about to what sort of legal policies will be easier or harder to change, depending on whether they are in accord with our evolutionary intuitions or run counter to them. It may inform how we think about personal responsibility and how we carry out punishment. A notion of a shared morality may even ease some of the conflict between groups of people, who may be able to appreciate underlying similarities rather than differences (optimistic, I admit).

A scientific theory of morality could also help explain why our initial intuitions about particular moral scenarios are so strong, despite the fact that, upon reflection, the morality seems weak. An example from Peter Singer: most people would agree that walking past a child drowning in a pond and doing nothing, when you could easily reach in and save the child, is morally wrong. However, doing nothing to save a starving child in another country, when you could easily donate a few dollars, is arguably the moral equivalent. Yet intuitively these cases seem very different. The evolutionary reason for our making this distinction is not hard to imagine–we evolved in small, isolated groups and had no means of knowing about people hundreds of miles away, let alone helping them. But in our modern, global society, the distinction virtually disappears. If I reflect on these two cases and decide that, in fact, I am morally obligated to send aid to other countries, I will have proven my initial intuition wrong. In other words, moral intuitions might be explained through science, but there is no reason to think that they will necessarily point us in the right moral direction. The fact that we can revise our moral judgments means that we are able to use other human capacities, like reason and empathy, to guide our morality. A scientific understanding of morality cannot dictate how we ought to act, but it can tell us how we are likely to respond to certain moral arguments. Ultimately, it will take careful thinking and a concern for others to provide us with the reasons and motives to change our behavior.

*taken from an essay by Austin Dacey

Francis Collins, the New Atheists, and God

Obama’s recent nomination of Dr. Francis Collins as director of the National Institutes of Health has spurred a bit of apprehension in the scientific community. Not for any lack of credentials–he has quite a lot of those. He is a distinguished geneticist with a PhD in physical chemistry. He has been a major contributor to genetic research for the last twenty years. He discovered the genetic markers for several diseases. He led the effort to map the human genome.

He is also an evangelical Christian.

While there are notable scientists and intellectuals who advocate the compatibility of science and religion (Brown University’s Ken Miller, for example), others scoff at the idea. They see religion and science as fundamentally contradictory, faith as something akin to a bad habit or superstition that will disappear with enough scientific training. Richard Dawkins, a biologist and outspoken atheist, claims that “science is corrosive to religion”. He is among a growing number of vocal critics of religion called the New Atheists (Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens are some others), who regard religion as pervasive, obnoxious, and downright dangerous to society. So it comes as no surprise that they should have strong reservations about the Collins nomination.

Harris makes his doubts clear in this recent op-ed in the New York Times. While Harris has the habit of hastily dismissing any argument for religion–and in doing so often overlooking the complexities of the issue–he does raise several good points here. The first is about the scope of scientific inquiry. Collins has said “science offers no answers to the most pressing questions of human existence.” This is a surprisingly decisive statement for a scientist who has been pushing the bounds of knowledge about the very thing that makes us human: our DNA. And many scientists would argue that while it may not be able to answer all our questions about human nature, science can surely inform the discussion. Marc Hauser, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard, would certainly think so. In the past few years he has been investigating the origins and evolution of moral intuitions, and is one of many scientists in the fields of evolutionary biology, cognitive science, psychology and neuroscience that have been trying to accomplish exactly what Collins seems to say they can’t.

The second and perhaps more troubling notion is Collins’ complete dismissal of a morality without God. He has said:

“After evolution had prepared a sufficiently advanced ‘house’ (the human brain), God gifted humanity with the knowledge of good and evil (the moral law), with free will, and with an immortal soul…If the moral law is just a side effect of evolution, then there is no such thing as good or evil. It’s all an illusion. We’ve been hoodwinked. Are any of us, especially the strong atheists, really prepared to live our lives within that worldview?”

The idea that morality becomes an illusion if it is the result of evolution is, in my view, just plain wrong. We have evolved faculties of perception, emotion, desires–none of which become less “real” when we discover that they were selected for over time. My instinctual fear in reaction to a loud noise may have evolved because it helped my ancestors escape predators, but that does not imply that I am not scared! In fact, it is precisely because of the reality of these evolved faculties that they have made a difference, and thus are still around today. Morality, if it has evolved, does not suddenly disappear.

Furthermore, the notion that God is the source of our “moral law” is troubling because it can quickly turn into (and historically has been used to support) a deeper implication: that without God we can have no morality, and by definition one must believe in God to be a good person. Frankly, this is absurd. You don’t need to look very far to find plenty of counterexamples–history provides an abundance. Empirical tests also provide support: when asked to make judgments about a series of hypothetical moral dilemmas, religious people and atheists tend to answer the same way. Religion just doesn’t seem to have any sort of monopoly on good behavior. While I doubt that Collins actually holds this extreme view, his statements could be used to support it.

So, do Collins’ beliefs matter? Given his history of scientific excellence and leadership, there is little reason to think that Collins will use his appointment to promote his beliefs, or that his religion will interfere with his ability to be an effective director. However, he is in a profoundly influential position as policymaker and spokesperson for science, and will undoubtedly face some decisions with real ethical implications. Some of the most heated bioethical debates are found particularly in his own field of biomedicine: stem cell research, genetic engineering and testing, human enhancement. He will very likely have to confront these issues in the first few years (if not months) of his appointment, and I don’t think I’m the only one uncomfortable with him letting his religious beliefs determine the morally correct course of action. It seems appropriate, then, for the scientific community to press him on how his religion will effect his decision making for the NIH.

Some further links:

A 2006 debate between Richard Dawkins and Francis Collins.
Godless Morality, a paper by Marc Hauser and Peter Singer