book review: The Moral Landscape

ever since Harris’ TED talk, there has been a lot of buzz and a fair amount of debate about this project, and for good reason. Harris’ thesis is that, despite the liberal, educated consensus in the West that science can only tell us how things are, not how they ought to be, there are certain things that we can know absolutely about human well-being and flourishing. in fact, there are many things that we already know.

to this end, Harris succeeds very well. The Moral Landscape is bound to be a game changer in many ways, at least insofar as it presents a great challenge to the consensus of moral relativism that prevents so many intelligent and well-meaning people from speaking out against systems that do a terrible job at promoting human well-being. this reluctance is perfectly understandable as a reaction to the chauvinism and colonialism of the past, against which academic disciplines had to emerge to demonstrate the complexity and value of other societies. but has Harris argues (and many others previously have argued), this is an overreaction.

one of Harris’ goals in the book is to demonstrate that even if we never arrive at a complete science of morality, it doesn’t matter–just acknowledging that answers are to be found in principle is enough to allow us to begin the process of evaluating what conditions move us higher up “the moral landscape” and which ones drag us farther down.

another goal of TML is to demonstrate that even if there are many ways to arrive at peaks in human well-being, there are many more ways that will not–and this is something that we can know objectively. as he asked in his TED talk, who are we to pretend that we know so little about human flourishing?

to illustrate these two goals, Harris draws on the example of economics at the end of his book. is economics a genuine, complete science? hardly. however, admitting this fact does not amount to a denial that we can’t know anything at all (in principle or in practice) about the necessary conditions for a successful economy. and it certainly doesn’t mean that we can’t know which ideas do not deserve to be taken seriously. not every idea, about economics or physics or morality, needs to be entertained.

where Harris is most successful in this book is in setting the stage for a new discussion about human morality, and of course in his comments on religion. however, I felt that even though the book is relatively short (190 pages plus notes and bibliography), he wandered a bit in a few of the chapters when discussing free will or Francis Collins, without pulling back and driving home his thesis effectively enough. nevertheless, I understand the importance of his discussions and am excited about the effect this book will have on widespread discussions of morality and well-being.

overall, I highly recommend this book. even disagreeing with it (intelligently and thoroughly) will do us all a service insofar as many of the assumptions that we make about the relationship between science and morality, or between facts and values, can be seriously challenged–and that is exactly what Harris has done.

biology=morality

over at the Edge, Marc D. Hauser, a Harvard psychologist, has written a short article about the evolutionary origins of morality.  not much of this is new when compared to articles he’s published elsewhere, along with the few books he’s written on the subject, but this is a very nice summary and worth mulling over.  here are a few of his key points:

• when considering moral situations for which they do not have a pre-scripted, emotionally charged response (e.g., for abortion of euthanasia), people — regardless of sex, age, race, demographic, religion, or cultural background — show remarkable similarities in moral reasoning.
• there is a universal moral grammar — an impartial, unemotional code — that “provides us with an unconscious suite of principles for judging what is morally right and wrong”
• people tend to see action as worse (or more weighted, positively or negatively) than inaction (e.g., pushing someone in front of a train vs. letting someone fall in in order to save more lives)
• what transforms (or betrays) this impartial, universal code into moral atrocities that we all repudiate are our emotions, specifically or innate tendency (so also dealing with biology) to prefer members of our “group,” whether those who resemble us or whose language or ideologies we share (there is a particularly fascinating study about the preferences of babies regarding people of same “race” or language, and combinations thereof)
• what makes a psychopath is not an inability to understand moral issues or the consequences of actions, but rather an emotional numbness to those issues or consequences: “Here lies the answer to understanding the dangers of nurture, of education and partiality. When we fuel in-group biases by elevating and praising members of the group, we often unconsciously, and sometimes consciously, denigrate the “other” by feeding the most nefarious of all emotions, the dragon of disgust.”
• this psychology of preference (and Hauser considers this “good news”) is not fixed but flexible — something that has been known and widely disgusted in fields related to race and ethnicity for decades now; it is as abstract and “content free” as universal grammar.  when it comes to matters of culture and race, then, “Exposure to diversity is perhaps our best option for reducing, if not eradicating, strong out-group biases.”

Hauser then offers a (two-point) caveat regarding whether or not this innate moral reasoning is sufficient:

For one, some of our moral instincts evolved during a period of human history that looked nothing like the situation today. In our distant past, we lived in small groups consisting of highly familiar and often familial individuals, with no formal laws. Today we live in a large and diffuse society, where our decisions have little-to-no impact on most people in our community but with laws to enforce those who deviate from expected norms. Further, we are confronted with moral decisions that are unfamiliar, including stem cells, abortion, organ transplants and life support. When we confront these novel situations, our evolved system is ill-equipped.

The second reason is that living a moral life requires us to be restless with our present moral norms, always challenging us to discover what might and ought to be. And here is where nurture can re-enter the conversation. We need education because we need a world in which people listen to the universal voice of their species, while stopping to wonder whether there are alternatives. And if there are alternatives, we need rational and reasonable people who will be vigilant of partiality and champions of plurality.

I have written on numerous occasions about how I think our discussions about ethics, morality, social policy, etc., need to be rooted in a firmer understanding of the way our mind works, along with the manifold ways in which it doesn’t work so well (see Gary Marcus’s excellent book Kluge).  an essential step in that dialogue — if we ever get there on a broader scale — is ridding ourselves of the absurd notion that appealing to our natural, biologically founded moral “code” — along with our ability (also natural) to empathize and reason — is akin to throwing all guidelines and principles out of the window.

an understanding of evolution — particularly our evolution — does not mean we live and die by “survival of the fittest,” because that same process has provided us with the ability to love and show compassion and invest in the well-being of those around us.  the problem, of course, as Hauser points out, is that our “natural” reasoning falls short in many ways.  is this were religion steps in?  maybe — but it’s quite clear that religions can and most often have failed to provide the best corrective; in fact, religions (along with many overlapping cultural features) have helped entrench a number of beliefs that violate our ability to see others as fully human and thus to show them the appropriate compassion (think race, sex, and sexuality).  we need concerted efforts to break us of our eagerness to form and feed our in-group biases and out-gr0up prejudices.  it’s not us vs. them, it’s all of us together.

yet another reason to hate the Red Sox in New England. 

being good without god: Francis Fukuyama

the third installment of the “being good without god” conversation series is the somewhat-menacing-looking (in this photo) Francis Fukuyama, a professor of political economy at the School of Advanced International Studies.  Wright queries him about previous claims that he’s made about having an “Aristotelian” basis for his everyday life and moral conduct.  Wright wants to know what that means in an everyday, concrete sense, such as in facing a decision and deciding between right and wrong for more than just the fear of being caught.

Fukuyama admits the complexity of the question, saying that most of what you do in everyday life is the product of your culture, which may be different from your more basic instincts — so your behavior is an interplay between environment and nature.  so for instance, whether or not someone informs on a relative who’s broken the law is different in one culture to the next.  so Aristotle has nothing to do with that kind of decision, he claims.

a lot depends on whether one thinks that moral rules are more universal or more culturally determined.  he says he is not a relativist and believes in less flexibility in terms of universal moral standards than others.  so he feels that certain decisions people make today are ones they will come to regret because they violate this universal standard.  a major issue here, he says, is human rights, and along with this comes problematic issues like whether one believes that human-rights issues can be enforced in places like China.  so what he’s getting at here is a denial of the idea that what people have done in any age, no matter how civilized they claimed to be, can be judged by this more universal standard.  so, for instance, it’s not OK for one culture — in any period — to practice slavery just because they may have different values.

Wright then asks whether Fukuyama has a sense of absolute right and wrong with appealing to religion.  Fukuyama laughs a bit and qualifies his answer by saying that it’s hard to find anything that is so neatly categorical (and so wouldn’t frame the issue like this himself), but he does believe that there are universal rights and that one can make an argument for them without an appeal to religion.  religion is very helpful, he says, in getting people to agree with you, but he thinks the case can be made for some universal standard.  and this is the Aristotelian project, he says.

Aristotle never really spoke about religion, Fukuyama explains — it was adopted by Aquinas and medieval Catholicism and put into those categories.  but he stands on his own in beliefs about nature that do not require religion.

my thoughts: Fukuyama doesn’t do the best job explaining what he means by “Aristotelian” — perhaps this means a more applicable and pragmatic philosophy, one based on rational inquiry and focused on understanding the natural world without any immediate divine intervention?  though, of course, there wasn’t a total absence of divinity in Aristotle’s thought.  I doubt Fukuyama refers to the teleological orientation of Aristotle… Perhaps it has something to do with contemporary philosophy based around Aristotle, which, according to A. MacIntyre (via Wikipedia), holds that “the highest temporal goods, which are internal to human beings, are actualized through participation in social practices.”

anyway, the question of relativism regarding what we hold to be universal standards of human rights is tricky.  the first problem is acknowledging the failure to realize some of these rights in previous generations, not to mention centuries and millennia.  if these are so universal to human morality, why have they been so neglected over time?  perhaps one could argue that localized factors like tradition and tribalism (of whatever sort) were significant obstacles to developing a more universal mindset.  and any time you get an all-too human limited viewpoint (e.g., racism) solidified in the form of revealed tradition (cultural or religious), you now have a major obstacle to creating the necessary human (humane) consciousness.  more than that, you get a system that actively creates these artificial divides and perpetuates bigotry.

but even a cursory view of history would lead us to admit that the interaction of cultures, esp. where there is widespread exchange of goods and information, has provided fodder for thinking in more universal terms — or at least breaking out of strictly tribal interests and worldviews (despite constant resistance from some).

but a sad aspect of this history, which may have contributed to our burgeoning sense of a shared humanity and human rights, is how that humane perspective has always followed in the wake of destruction and economic greed, accompanied by systems of marginalization and exploitation (I’m thinking here of the very recent histories of colonialism and nationalism-based racism in past centuries).

so whatever we think about relativism v. universalism in terms of human rights, and whatever pride we take in progress and the ways in which our worldview is morally superior (so we think) to those of previous centuries or millennia, we need to keep a sobering view of history — even, perhaps especially, modern history — before us to keep us from getting too proud of “ourselves.”  and we need to always be on the lookout for the systems of power — whether economic or political — and misinformation that would numb our sensitivity to moral concerns in the world.

being good without god: Steven Pinker

the next is Steven Pinker, a Psychology professor at Harvard and famous linguist.  not to mention the owner of a world-renowned head of hair.

Wright first brings up the idea that if certain aspects of humanity (or at least humans) are “natural” — for instance, the “natural” desire or tendency to cheat on one’s spouse or friends — why not do it?  this is fitting for someone like Pinker who is a proponent of evolutionary psychology, a much-disputed but overall insightful crossover area between psychology and evolutionary anthropology.

Pinker responds that he is always trying to emphasize in writing and teaching that just because it may be “natural,” it doesn’t make it OK to exploit your children, cheat on your spouse, and so on.  the reason we have realistic moral standards, he says, is because there is some “corner” of the brain (probably frontal lobe) that is capable of moral reasoning, perhaps an evolutionary feature necessary for social beings in building trust and cooperating.

logically, Pinker reminds us, an evolutionary basis for what we are prone to do or capable of doing, on the one hand, and what we ought to do, on the other, aren’t necessarily the same things.  and it’s certainly not a matter of some strict dualism (e.g. brain/body vs. soul).

my thoughts: this last point is certainly true — who really wants to argue that aren’t capable of acting against our “nature” or some of our instincts when we plainly are?  but what’s more, we have to remember that our ability to create relationships and alliances, to trust one another, is also part of our “nature” as social beings.  that doesn’t mean we aren’t capable of breaking or violating those bonds, but who’s to say doing so would automatically be for selfish reasons as opposed to acting in the interst of another relationship or establishing a new bond?

we are fully capable of calculating benefits and risks of certain behaviors, esp. regarding how these behaviors might affect our relationships.  I don’t mean to make this sound cold and calculating, or always about the one’s own interests — indeed, we are “wired” for empathy and emotions that create “natural” desires in us to look out for the ones we love, as well as disdain for those who violate trust and relationships.

being good without god: Daniel Dennett

Slate has a series called meaningoflife.tv, which features interviews by Robert Wright of scientists, philosophers, and other thinkers on issues of morality, religion, life and death, and so on.  I’ll occasionally be commenting on some of them.  the first is a series of brief interviews (or brief topics of longer interviews) on the question of being good without god.  that is, the idea of morality without appeal to an absolute, revealed standard of right and wrong.

the first up is Daniel Dennett, a philosopher and head of cognitive studies at Tufts.  (he’s also known as being one of the “four horsemen.”)  when asked about whether he thinks it’s necessary to believe in God or any sort of transcendence for us to be good or moral, Dennett brings up arithmetic, which, he says, we didn’t invent but discovered.  it would be true whether we knew of it or not, and it is true anywhere you go in the universe.  it is transcendent and true in a Platonic sense (though maybe not base-10 arithmetic, he qualifies).  but what about a universal, Platonic-ish principle for morality for intelligent beings?  on this subject, he claims to be agnostic.

he imagines that if the search of extraterrestrial intelligent life pays off and we are able to have a conversation with aliens, we could possibly share, along with arithmetic, some understanding of morality or ethics that is not “might makes right,” “this is what our grandparents did so it’s what we’re gonna do,” or “historical accident.”  overall, he believes there could be a basis for a universal ethics that is transcendent.  or at least he doesn’t really see why there couldn’t be one.

to explain this, he moves to an idea he presented in his book Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, that of “forced moves” or a “Good Trick” — those things or aspects of culture that would (or will) repeatedly be discovered or that will be “happened upon” by evolution when it’s in the vicinity because of their “truth.”  this is related to the idea of convergent evolution — traits that appear in disparate species due to their functional benefits, such as wings or certain body shapes.

Wright then queries about whether this could be added as proof to the idea that evolution has a direction, that “there’s some point to the whole exercise.”  Dennett thinks no.  he thinks it just happens.

my thoughts: the idea of a “Good Trick” is a very intersting one, in evolutionary biology as well in issues of human morality.  but any discussion of this idea would have to be based on a complex understanding of our biology and human nature in the true natural sense.  evolutionary convergence happens because of the genuine physical restrictions on biological beings and within this world — on a different planet, under different conditions, and working with different elements or DNA, I imagine there would be an entirely different bag of “tricks.”  so to use this idea, we have to continue to understand our biology and our ever-complex brains in order to understand how our minds work and how/why we behave as we do.  then we’ll be closer to understanding any potential universal code of human morality, or at least the range of behaviors and beliefs we tend to share.

as for the extraterrestrial part, I’m not sure how to even begin thinking about that…