I'm very interested in Jonathan Haidt's work. For anyone interested, he gave a TED talk a few months back.


The Moral Naturalists

By DAVID BROOKS
Published: July 22, 2010, The New York Times

Where does our sense of right and wrong come from? Most people think it is a gift from God, who revealed His laws and elevates us with His love. A smaller number think that we figure the rules out for ourselves, using our capacity to reason and choosing a philosophical system to live by.

Moral naturalists, on the other hand, believe that we have moral sentiments that have emerged from a long history of relationships. To learn about morality, you don’t rely upon revelation or metaphysics; you observe people as they live.

This week a group of moral naturalists gathered in Connecticut at a conference organized by the Edge Foundation. One of the participants, Marc Hauser of Harvard, began his career studying primates, and for moral naturalists the story of our morality begins back in the evolutionary past. It begins with the way insects, rats and monkeys learned to cooperate.

By the time humans came around, evolution had forged a pretty firm foundation for a moral sense. Jonathan Haidt of the University of Virginia argues that this moral sense is like our sense of taste. We have natural receptors that help us pick up sweetness and saltiness. In the same way, we have natural receptors that help us recognize fairness and cruelty. Just as a few universal tastes can grow into many different cuisines, a few moral senses can grow into many different moral cultures.

Paul Bloom of Yale noted that this moral sense can be observed early in life. Bloom and his colleagues conducted an experiment in which they showed babies a scene featuring one figure struggling to climb a hill, another figure trying to help it, and a third trying to hinder it.

At as early as six months, the babies showed a preference for the helper over the hinderer. In some plays, there is a second act. The hindering figure is either punished or rewarded. In this case, 8-month-olds preferred a character who was punishing the hinderer over ones being nice to it.

This illustrates, Bloom says, that people have a rudimentary sense of justice from a very early age. This doesn’t make people naturally good. If you give a 3-year-old two pieces of candy and ask him if he wants to share one of them, he will almost certainly say no. It’s not until age 7 or 8 that even half the children are willing to share. But it does mean that social norms fall upon prepared ground. We come equipped to learn fairness and other virtues.

These moral faculties structure the way we perceive and respond to the world. If you ask for donations with the photo and name of one sick child, you are likely to get twice as much money than if you had asked for donations with a photo and the names of eight children. Our minds respond more powerfully to the plight of an individual than the plight of a group.

These moral faculties rely upon emotional, intuitive processes, for good and ill. If you are in a bad mood you will make harsher moral judgments than if you’re in a good mood or have just seen a comedy. As Elizabeth Phelps of New York University points out, feelings of disgust will evoke a desire to expel things, even those things unrelated to your original mood. General fear makes people risk-averse. Anger makes them risk-seeking.

People who behave morally don’t generally do it because they have greater knowledge; they do it because they have a greater sensitivity to other people’s points of view. Hauser reported on research showing that bullies are surprisingly sophisticated at reading other people’s intentions, but they’re not good at anticipating and feeling other people’s pain.

The moral naturalists differ over what role reason plays in moral judgments. Some, like Haidt, believe that we make moral judgments intuitively and then construct justifications after the fact. Others, like Joshua Greene of Harvard, liken moral thinking to a camera. Most of the time we rely on the automatic point-and-shoot process, but occasionally we use deliberation to override the quick and easy method. We certainly tell stories and have conversations to spread and refine moral beliefs.

For people wary of abstract theorizing, it’s nice to see people investigating morality in ways that are concrete and empirical. But their approach does have certain implicit tendencies.

They emphasize group cohesion over individual dissent. They emphasize the cooperative virtues, like empathy, over the competitive virtues, like the thirst for recognition and superiority. At this conference, they barely mentioned the yearning for transcendence and the sacred, which plays such a major role in every human society.

Their implied description of the moral life is gentle, fair and grounded. But it is all lower case. So far, at least, it might not satisfy those who want their morality to be awesome, formidable, transcendent or great.

Geo where the hell have you been man?

Hey Geo, what do you think about a son who kills his mother? He does this because his mother killed his father. The mother had been cheating on her husband for some time. The mother kills the husband because he killed her daughter... but after the husband is dead she treats the other daughter she had by him like a slave. lol, confused yet?

Thanks for posting the article, geo. I've always liked what I've seen and heard of David Brooks. He's supposed to be the token conservative on the NY times op-ed staff, but I find him to be just a clear thinker without a hidden ideological bias. His book Bobos in Paradise was an entertaining look at what became of the counter-culture idealists.

The part I quoted illustrates Brooks' strength as an analyst. He tries to define the larger context of this discussion among academics. I don't think we see enough of this disinterested probing. Instead, we see pundits spouting off their opinions, revealing only their own biases.

What I get from Brooks' remarks is that the very milieu of a conversation affects the treatment of the topic decisively. Academics talking to each other, with every intent of being impartial and objective, will still produce an intellectual product of a distinctive character. Their view, Brooks implies, will then necessarily be a partial, restricted one. In this case, Brooks tells us that the "implicit tendencies" of their approach results in an overall view that ignores in large part how people really are. It becomes a kind of cloistered outlook, however intelligently formed.

That just sounds messed up, man. Maybe he kills his mother out of self preservation?

Always an interesting dilemma is if a you come home and your house is burning and everyone is out except for two people. Your 5-year-old daughter and your 65-year-old mother. Whom do you rescue first? It's actually no dilemma at all, is it? But why? I predict we can easily rationalize that you should save your daughter first because she's younger and has her whole life ahead of her. But instinctively you would save your daughter first without even thinking about it. Why?

I've heard Brooks called a conservative, but I agree that you would be hard pressed to see any kind of ideological slant in his writing. He's a very good critical thinker.

Brooks has written several pieces lately that show how our limitations, both in science and in our general makeup, will always fall short of our being able to completely understand human nature. In one of his columns he calls this elusive part of human nature the "Big Shaggy." In Brooks' own words:

"Over the past century or so, people have built various systems to help them understand human behavior: economics, political science, game theory and evolutionary psychology. These systems are useful in many circumstances. But none completely explain behavior because deep down people have passions and drives that don’t lend themselves to systemic modeling."

Just a note to all of those who may be interested in Brooks topic, the Moral Naturalists. Edge is presenting videos of all the major presenters in this conference on their website. Most presentations are now available and discussions are gradually being added. I find them fascinating since I have an interest and some background in neuroscience and evolutionary psychology.