Interesting related study


Eric Schwitzgebel (UC-Riverside) and Josh Rust (Stetson)

"If philosophical moral reflection tends to improve moral behaviour, one might expect that professional ethicists will, on average, behave morally better than non-ethicists. One potential source of insight into the moral behaviour of ethicists is philosophers’ opinions about ethicists’ behaviour. At the 2007 Pacific Division meeting of the American Philosophical Association, we used chocolate to entice 277 passers by to complete anonymous questionnaires without their knowing the topic of those questionnaires in advance. Version I of the questionnaire asked respondents to compare, in general, the moral behaviour of ethicists to that of philosophers not specializing in ethics and to non-academics of similar social background. Version II asked respondents similar questions about the moral behaviour of the ethics specialist in their department whose name comes next in alphabetical order after their own. Both versions asked control questions about specialists in metaphysics and epistemology. The majority of respondents expressed the view that ethicists do not, on average, behave better than non-ethicists. While ethicists tended to avoid saying that ethicists behave worse than non-ethicists, non-ethicists expressed that pessimistic view about as often as they expressed the view that ethicists behave better."

de Waal wrote:But nature's pressure cooker does not work that way. It favors organisms that survive and reproduce, pure and simple. How the accomplish this is left open. Any organism that can do better by becoming either more or less aggressive than the rest, more or less cooperative, or more or less caring, will spread its genes. ... The same process may not have specified our moral rules and values, but it has provided us with the psychological makeup, tendencies, and abilities to develop a compass for life's choices that takes the interests of the entire community into account, which is the essence of human morality.

I believe that de Waal has a point that our genetic roots have led up to our morality. Perhaps, the arguement can be made that an absolute Truth or an absolute morality is passed on genetically, but the capacity to learn truths and be moral are passed on genetically.

Humans have these genes because they helped us learn to work together to survive in this world. We needed community, like primates. However, our community evolved much further than theirs did/has. We have evolved into speaking beings with intentionality which qualifies us for morality.

However, in the end, this capacity for morality came from the evolution of genes in the human make up.

Interbane wrote:Interesting related study


Eric Schwitzgebel (UC-Riverside) and Josh Rust (Stetson)

Moral behavior is used here in a completely different context. It is practically unrelated to what you were suggesting. First and foremost the article presupposes an already established ethics!! Not just an ethic the professional ethic!! I don't believe we have yet, in our current discussion, covered ethical thought.

Grim, go respond to all the questions I posed to you before that you conveniently ignored. And support your claims for once! You make so many unsupported claims, thinking that a related quote by some past philosopher counts. All the Neitzsche quotes you provided were related, but only one had even a hint of support toward your claim.

Krys: "However, in the end, this capacity for morality came from the evolution of genes in the human make up."

I'd be hesitant to call it a capacity, like the capacity for language. It's more of a mechanism that influences us to behave morally. The difference is minor in any case.

There's a lot of emphasis on empathy, but I think guilt has a lot to do with moral behavior and has been overlooked. Shermer goes into this a bit in "The Science of Good and Evil", but I've forgotten a lot of it. With all these posts on morality, perhaps we should break open some of the older booktalk selections that had to do with morality. Discussing multiple books on the same topic would be helpful.

Interbane wrote:Grim, go respond to all the questions I posed to you before that you conveniently ignored.

Now why in the world would I want to do that?

Interbane wrote:Interesting related study
Eric Schwitzgebel (UC-Riverside) and Josh Rust (Stetson)

Just suggestive, of course, but interesting. From a common sense standpoint, it's about what most people would expect, I think. I would also expect that if a similar study could be done on members of the clergy, they would not be found to be any more morally upright than the general population.

It might have occurred to people reading the book that an alternative title could be "The Primatologist Vs. the Philosophers." The book is essentially a contrast between the newer, biological approach to defining human nature and the older, philosophical one. De Waal doesn’t propose throwing the philosophers out of the discussion, but it's clear throughout that he feels strongly that when it comes to morality, philosophy hasn’t absorbed even the full implications of Darwin, much less the discoveries of ethnologists like himself, and the neuroscientists.

I hope we’ll be moving on soon to the philosophers’ responses to de Waal and de Waal’s rebuttal of them. This is an interesting format for a book, by the way, offering multiple points of view in a single, brief volume. Before we do that, I want to take inventory of some of the topics de Waal covers and the points he has made, some of which we’ve already discussed and some we haven’t yet mentioned. These are not listed in any order of importance. Please tell me if you disagree with anything about this summary, or add anything to it.

1. Emotion and cognition. De Waal thinks that a full appreciation of the relevance of primate studies leads to placing emotion—including emotionally-triggered automatic cognitions—ahead of conscious reasoning as the driver of our behavior.

2. The continuity/discontinuity of our morality vis-à-vis the apes. De Waal appears to think that what we share with the apes is more significant than the differences, and that we have inherited from ape-like ancestors the “building blocks” of morality we see in them.

3. When we observe people being kind, generous, empathetic, cooperative, that is not the result of our strenuous efforts to overcome innate selfishness and asociality. That is thanks to our natural endowment and our nature as social beings.

4. Where people—especially those de Waal labels “Veneer Theorists”—go wrong in their thinking about natural selection is to anthropomorphize it as a cruel and pitiless process, by which only organisms the best adapted to propagate succeeding generations can survive. From such a process, we would expect to get creatures that care about only their own survival, as we see in human beings. Or so goes the fallacious thinking of the VT people.

5. The impulse to help others has clear survival value for the helper. But de Waal importantly says that “the impulse became divorced from the consequences that shaped its evolution. This permitted its expression even when payoffs were unlikely, such as when strangers were beneficiaries.”

6. What makes an emotion moral is, after Westermarck, its quality of “disinterestedness, apparent impartiality, and flavour of generality.” Empathy and reciprocity are not necessarily moral emotions, but they are necessary prerequisites to moral emotions.

7. Top-down vs. bottom-up. Biologists prefer bottom-up accounts, which “assume continuity between past and present, child and adult, human and animal, even between humans and the most primitive animal.” De Waal is certain that empathy & sympathy is “the original, pre-linguistic from of inter-individual linkage that only secondarily has come under the influence of language and culture.”

8. Until just recently, discussion of animal emotion was taboo.

9. Perception-action mechanisms are at the basic level of empathy (or innermost Russian Doll. Higher levels of empathy build on PAMs . Empathy is not all-or-nothing, but includes a range of responses from nearly automatic to cognitively mediated.

10. Morality (doing to others as you would like them to do to you) is still very much an in-group phenomenon. In fact, “out-group hostility enhanced in-group solidarity to the point that morality emerged...so, the profound irony is that our noblest achievement—morality—has evolutionary ties to our basest behavior—warfare.”

11. Community concern is seen only in humans, but its beginnings are evident in the great apes.

12. “We celebrate rationality, but when push comes to shove, we assign it little weight….This is because human morality is firmly anchored in the social emotions, with empathy at its core.”

I have some responses I'll add tomorrow or the next day to your previous post. But first, have you read "On Being Certain" by Burton?

Interbane wrote:

have you read "On Being Certain" by Burton?

This is the second time you have mentioned this, sounds like it has made an impact, I'm going to check it out. Do you think it would make for a good non fiction discussion read?