08AR13-06

Apologia Report 13:6

February 14, 2008

Subject: The new "science of the moral sense"

In this issue:

PHILOSOPHY - The attempt of evolutionary psychology to navigate moral relativism

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PHILOSOPHY

"The Moral Instinct" -- Steven Pinker, Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, has written this provocative essay for the New York Times Magazine (Jan 13 '08, pp32-37, 52-57) to promote the "new field" of evolutionary psychology. He introduces the concept of "moral illusions, the ethical equivalent of the bending lines that trick the eye on cereal boxes and in psychology textbooks" and explains that this new science "is using illusions to unmask a sixth sense, the moral sense."

For Pinker, "The human moral sense turns out to be an organ of considerable complexity, with quirks that reflect its evolutionary history and its neurobiological foundations." In our ignorance we "justify [morality] with our religions. ...

"Much of our recent social history, including the culture wars between liberals and conservatives, consists of the moralization or amoralization of particular kinds of behavior."

Pinker lays the groundwork for his argument by describing the ambiguity of our culture's moral relativism. His new "science of the moral sense" helps eliminate this confusion by "clarifying what morality is and how it should steer our actions."

How does this work? Pinker describes many situational dilemmas, drawing conclusions and explaining that "The gap between people's convictions and their justifications is ... on display in the favorite new sandbox for moral psychologists." This exploration of conditional right and wrong is reduced down to five "moral spheres:" harm avoidance, fairness, communal loyalty, authority, and purity. Pinker concludes that these are "good candidates for a periodic table of the moral sense" and then speculates on their "deep evolutionary roots." He also finds that some of these spheres "match up with the classic examples of how altruism can evolve that were worked out by sociobiologists in the 1960s and 1970s and made famous by Richard Dawkins in his book The Selfish Gene [1]. ...

"All this brings us to a theory of how the moral sense can be universal and variable at the same time. The five moral spheres are universal, a legacy of evolution. But how they are ranked in importance, and which is brought in to moralize which area of social life - sex, government, commerce, religion, diet and so on - depends on the culture. ...

"The ranking and placement of moral spheres also divides the cultures of liberals and conservatives in the United States. Many bones of contention, like homosexuality, atheism and one-parent families from the right, or racial imbalances, sweatshops and executive pay from the left, reflect different weightings of the spheres. In a large Web survey, [psychologist Jonathan] Haidt found that liberals put a lopsided moral weight on harm and fairness while playing down group loyalty, authority and purity. Conservatives instead place a moderately high weight on all five. It's not surprising that each side thinks it is driven by lofty ethical values and that the other side is base and unprincipled. ...

"The institutions of modernity often question and experiment with the way activities are assigned to moral spheres. Market economies tend to put everything up for sale. Science amoralizes the world by seeking to understand phenomena rather than pass judgment on them. Secular philosophy is in the business of scrutinizing all beliefs, including those entrenched by authority and tradition. It's not surprising that these institutions are often seen to be morally corrosive.

"And 'morally corrosive' is exactly the term that some critics would apply to the new science of the moral sense. The attempt to dissect our moral intuitions can look like an attempt to debunk them. ... [T]he whole enterprise seems to be dragging us to an amoral nihilism....

"In reality, none of these fears are warranted, and it's important to see why not. The first misunderstanding involves the logic of evolutionary explanations." While discussing this, Pinker alleges that "the meme of the selfish gene escaped from popular biology books and mutated into the idea that organisms (including people) are ruthlessly self-serving. And this doesn't follow. ...

"Nor does reciprocal altruism - the evolutionary rationale behind fairness - imply that people do good deeds in the cynical expectation of repayment down the line. ...

"At least some agents evolve to be genuinely high-minded and self-sacrificing - they are moral not because of what it brings them but because that's the kind of people they are. ...

"So a biological understanding of the moral sense does not entail that people are calculating maximizers of their genes or self-interest. But where does it leave the concept of morality itself?

"Here is the worry. The scientific outlook has taught us that some parts of our subjective experience are products of our biological makeup and have no objective counterpart in the world. ...

"Putting God in charge of morality is one way to solve the problem, of course, but Plato made short work of it 2,400 years ago. Does God have a good reason for designating certain acts as moral and others as immoral? If not - if his dictates are divine whims - why should we take them seriously? ...

"The only other option is that moral truths exist in some abstract Platonic realm, there for us to discover, perhaps in the same way that mathematical truths (according to most mathematicians) are there for us to discover. ... Perhaps we are born with a rudimentary moral sense, and as soon as we build on it with moral reasoning, the nature of moral reality forces us to some conclusions but not others.

"Moral realism, as this idea is called, is too rich for many philosophers' blood. Yet a diluted version of the idea - if not a list of cosmically inscribed Thou-Shalts, then at least a few If-Thens - is not crazy."

Here Pinker identifies a core idea, "the interchangeability of perspectives," which is seen "In many arenas of life, [where] two parties are objectively better off if they both act in a nonselfish way than if each of them acts selfishly." And most significantly, he evokes the Golden Rule as one of "history's best-thought-through moral philosophies" - which is, for him, an eclectic roster that even includes the views of today's far-left celebrity philosopher, Peter Singer of Princeton.

"Morality, then, is still something larger than our inherited moral sense, and the new science of the moral sense does not make moral reasoning and conviction obsolete. At the same time, its implications for our moral universe are profound. ...

"[I]n any conflict in which a meeting of the minds is not completely hopeless, a recognition that the other guy is acting from moral rather than venal reasons can be a first patch of common ground. ...

"The science of the moral sense also alerts us to ways in which our psychological makeup can get in the way of our arriving at the most defensible moral conclusions." The examples of gay marriage and cloning are described. Pinker justifies this by saying that "if our ancestors' repugnance had carried the day, we never would have had autopsies, vaccinations, blood transfusions, artificial insemination, organ transplants and in vitro fertilization, all of which were denounced as immoral when they were new.

"There are many other issues for which we are too quick to hit the moralization button and look for villains rather than bug fixes." He concludes: "Far from debunking morality, then, the science of the moral sense can advance it, by allowing us to see through the illusions that evolution and culture have saddled us with and to focus on goals we can share and defend. As Anton Chekhov wrote, 'Man will become better when you show him what he is like.'" <http://tinyurl.com/24owzr>

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Sources, Monographs:

1 - The Selfish Gene, by Richard Dawkins (Oxford Univ Prs, 3rd ed, 2006, paperback, 384 pages)

<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0199291152/apologiareport>

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