Reason's Role

Moral Psychology, part 3

Our moral intuitions and emotions are vital -- we can barely function without them. They, more than our rationality, provide us with the basic sense of right and wrong we draw upon at dozens, if not hundreds, of decision points every day. Important as they are, they are limited and sometimes wrong. One problem is that these feelings are highly resistant to reason. Thought experiments like the trolley conundrum illustrate that a feeling of the wrongness of an action is hard to shake, even for a hypothetical scenario in which you are repeatedly reminded that one of the conditions is that you know that the counter-intuitive action would have the better results.

While reason won't sway moral intuitions much, nonrational factors do so with worrisome ease. In Rob Drummond's show “The Majority,”

“The votes are interspersed with Drummond’s narrative, . . . about how he got involved with the anti-fascism movement and ended up being arrested for punching a white supremacist.” (Sophie Gilbert, Atlantic)

Later, Drummond shares his “disgust with himself for, as he puts it, ‘punching a man for having an opinion.’” He asks again whether it’s okay to abuse someone for something they personally believe, and this time 87.6 percent say no. He has, essentially, converted the audience. And the ease with which he’s done it is, muses Sophie Gilbert,

“yet another unnerving element to bolster his argument — that few of us really know or deeply consider what we’re voting for.”

Our moral decisions -- sometimes even life or death decisions -- aren’t very carefully considered. Studies have revealed:

• People shown a comedy clip, and then asked whether they’d push the large man to his death, were more likely to approve killing the large man than those in another group that was shown a “tedious documentary about a Spanish village.” (Sarah Bakewell, New York Times)
• We are more generous toward a stranger if we have just found a dime.
• A judge’s decision to grant parole depends on how long it has been since he or she had lunch.
• Subjects asked to make judgments about controversial moral questions -- for example, marriage between first cousins or the making of a documentary in which people were tricked into being interviewed -- make harsher moral judgments if they are standing next to a smelly trash can than if they are not. The brain more easily finds behavior morally disgusting if the disgust reaction is already given a little jump start.

Even what feels like a deep-rooted moral instinct can be pretty fickle and easily manipulated. And that has huge consequences.

If moral assessment is so easily manipulated, that means voting behavior is too. What candidates actually say in the course of a campaign has little impact on voters. Most voters just take in the vibe and let their unconscious biases pull them toward trust or distrust. Completely irrelevant factors can shift how a voter feels about the world, and a good feeling about the world benefits the incumbent.

• In areas with a strong college football fan base, it was found that if their team won its most recent game before the November election, the incumbent candidate got a big boost.

The citizenry is not competent to make electoral decisions, as the last election so vividly demonstrates. I’m not saying throw out democracy, because any other form of picking leaders would also be fraught with irrational biases.

In the end, reason is our only hope. It’s slow, and its plodding, and it’s pretty useless for day-to-day moral decision-making, where our emotional habits of right and wrong guide us, and our biases are just consistent enough to lend us an appearance of integrity. In fact, reason often takes generations to successfully call into question an unquestioned moral habit.

Firm moral habits widely held 150 years ago upheld slavery, those of 100 years ago denied women the right to vote, those of 50 years ago denied marriage equality to same-sex couples. Pressing questions that asked for rational justification of these habits gradually shifted them. Are darker skinned humans really so different that enslaving them is reasonable? Why shouldn’t women vote? Why shouldn’t gay people marry and have family lives? Repeatedly pressing such questions eventually pushes human brains to draw on parts other then the ventromedial prefrontal cortex in the quest to articulate defensible reasons.

A question now beginning to be pressed in public discourse is: Why exactly do we still have Confederate monuments?

I’m not keen to question all of our moral shortcuts. I want a life that feels sacredness, even if there is no good reason for it – so I have some empathy for those who find sacredness in a statue of Robert E. Lee. I want a life where at least some of my loyalty can be taken for granted without being subject to a need to rationally justify it. I want a life where I trust authorities, like scientists who tell me about climate change when I can’t make the calculations myself. We need our moral shortcuts. For all their irrationality, fickleness, and manipulability, we’d be uprooted, adrift, and lost without them.

The spiritual lesson of this is, first, humility. What feel like our strongest convictions aren’t so strong in a different set of circumstances, and what seems like ironclad logic is probably an illusion of rationalization. So let us hold our own opinions with humility.

Second, relatedly, let us try to have empathy for those with whom we disagree. Yes, their brains have built-in biases. Our brains were built the same way and are just as biased. Where we have no certain access to truth, let us seek to replace the urge to be right with the call to love.

And let us try – not all the time, but sometimes – to take the time to take the slow road of entertaining hard questions of whether our own most precious moral intuitions really are justified.

And one other thing: maybe visit the Against Malaria Foundation website, and send them a donation. I now have.

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This is part 3 of 3 of "Moral Psychology"
See also
Part 1: Do We Want Our Moral Intuitions to Be Rational?
Part 2: Care, Loyalty, Authority, Fairness, Liberty, and Sacredness

Care, Loyalty, Authority, Fairness, Liberty, and Sacredness

Moral Psychology, part 2

For many people, it just feels wrong to push a person to his death, even if doing so will save five other people, and it doesn't feel wrong to pull a lever to consign one person to death instead of five – even though the results in both cases are the same. But most of us have a hard time articulating a rational basis for that feeling.

The two points I want to make are:

1. Moral intuitions are crucial. We need them. Rationality is too slow and plodding to the do the job alone.
2. Moral intuitions are also problematic: on the one hand, they are stubbornly resistant to evidence that they are misguided, yet on the other hand they can often be easily manipulated to our detriment. Bringing in reason, plodding as it is, can, over the long haul, slowly tend to correct for the limitations of our moral intuitions.

First: our unreasoning feelings are very important for making moral decisions. Our moral intuitions are there to guide us in real-life situations where we don’t have the sort of certainty that the trolley scenario asks us to assume. No matter how much you’re told that you know pulling the lever will save five and kill one person on the side-track forty yards away, and that you know pushing the large man onto the track will likewise save five, the damage of pulling a lever just doesn’t feel as certain as the harm of pushing somebody right next to you off a platform into the trolley’s path. Thus, we can’t help but recoil from the near harm more than from the distant harm – which is also surely a factor in why we haven’t sent $50 to the Against Malaria Foundation: it’s so far away.

Consider what life would be like without the moral emotions. Patients who suffer damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex lose their emotionality.

“They could look at the most joyous or gruesome photographs and feel nothing. They retained full knowledge of what was right and wrong, and they showed no deficits in IQ. They score well on tests of moral reasoning. Yet when it came to making decisions in their personal lives and at work, they made foolish decisions or no decisions at all. They alienated their families and their employers, and their lives fell apart.” (Haidt 39)

You need your gut instincts, your moral intuitions, even if you can’t rationally justify or explain them.

Here’s something reasoning is good for: You need to buy a new washing machine, and you have to choose from among ten options. Assuming you have no brand loyalty, you list your criteria and you do some research on how each machine rates on each of your criteria: price, energy efficiency, water use, load capacity, cleaning efficacy, durability and repair record. You work out some way of balancing strengths in some areas with weaknesses in others, and you make your selection. Now

“imagine what your life would be like if at every moment, in every social situation, picking the right thing to do or say became like picking the best washing machine among ten options, minute after minute, day after day. You’d make foolish decisions, too.” (Haidt 40)

That’s what life is like for people with ventromedial prefrontal cortex damage.

Moral intuitions, tied to our emotional reactivity, give us our shortcuts. Reasoning it all out is just too slow and tedious. We have certain moral circuitry that allows for the quicker judgment we need.

Psychologist Jonathan Haidt has identified six moral foundations that, he says, have a genetic basis because they helped our ancestors survive, and also require learning and training to take particular shape. The six moral foundations are: care, loyalty, authority, fairness, liberty, and sacredness. In each of these areas, our brains develop shortcuts of moral reactivity that guide us in negotiating the complex moral landscape that we face every day.

Liberals tend to emphasize care. Caring for people is good, harming them is bad. (Cf. Judith Shklar's definition of a liberal as someone for whom cruelty is the worst thing we do.) Conservatives tend to emphasize loyalty and authority. Betrayal and subversion are bad. Conservatives also value caring for people – their children and families; liberals also value certain contexts of loyalty and respecting authorities, like teachers and doctors who can help us. So it’s a matter of emphasis.

Additionally, all of us value fairness and liberty, but these play out in different ways. For liberals, fairness is a matter of extending universal human rights. Everyone deserves education, health care, a chance at a decent living, nondiscrimination – denying these things to anyone is unfair. For conservatives, fairness is a matter of people getting what they deserve: hard-workers deserve their income, criminals deserve their punishment – anything less is unfair. For liberals, fairness is about equality. For conservatives, fairness is about differentiation.

Liberty also plays out differently. Liberals are more attuned to the threats to liberty that come from the oppressive working conditions and labor practices purveyed by corporations, or oppressive policing. Conservatives are more attuned to threats to liberty from oppressive taxes or government regulation, because that violates their fairness foundation – that people deserve what they work for, and ought to be rewarded, not hampered, in doing that work. They are less concerned about oppressive police, because their stronger authority foundation identifies police as necessary authority.

The sixth moral foundation is sacredness. Certain objects are sacred: flags, crosses. Certain places are sacred: Mecca, or a battlefield related to the birth of your nation. Certain people are sacred: saints and heroes. Certain principles are sacred: liberté, egalité, fraternité – or, for Unitarian Universalists, our seven principles. Our bodies are sacred – which is why desecrating (de-sacred-ing) bodies of the dead feels so wrong even if it doesn’t do any objective harm.

The psychology of the sacred – and of the disgusting (the opposite of sacred) – offers a clue toward understanding how one animal, humans, managed to form such large, complex cooperative societies. A shared sense of what is sacred and what is disgusting helps bind individuals into moral communities.

The sacred and the disgusting are a bit more prominent in conservative than in liberal minds. Several studies have shown that conservatives are more easily disgusted than liberals – and that holds in cultures all over the world. Conservatives talk about the sanctity of life, the sanctity of marriage, and of the body, seeing the body as a temple. Liberals are more likely to have the sentiment expressed on this bumper sticker:

Liberals, though, also have a sense of the sacred. Often, it is evoked by nature, which helps energize concern for the environment. Rationally, yes, we pay attention to the science, but it’s hard to keep track of all the factual details about what consequences will result when from what environmental practices. A sense that forests are sacred, that ocean and desert ecosystems are sacred, is a very helpful moral shortcut.

We all value care, loyalty, authority, fairness, liberty, and sacredness. Some of these are in tension: liberty, for instance, is in direct tension with authority; loyalty to your own group can be in tension with care for people outside your group. We balance and prioritize these value foundations in different ways.

We have emotional feelings for these values, and for some of the balances we’ve worked out between them, and that’s a good thing. Without the intuitive, quick-reaction moral feelings -- the feelings lost when the ventromedial prefrontal cortex is damaged -- we only have our plodding rationality, and we can’t function very well.

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This is part 2 of 3 of "Moral Psychology"
See also
Part 1: Do We Want Our Moral Intuitions to Be Rational?
Part 3: Reason's Role

Do We Want Our Moral Intuitions to be Rational?

Moral Psychology, part 1

There’s a one-man show now playing in London, called “The Majority.” The writer and performer, Rob Drummond, asks the audience to vote on a variety of ethical questions. The audience members on the way in are issued an electronic keypad and are invited to vote “yes” or “no” on the series of propositions prompted by the narrative. The tally is instantly displayed. The show itself, or so we are told, can go in different directions depending on how the audience votes.

I haven’t seen the show – because, it’s in London. I read about it in an article by Sophie Gilbert (HERE). The night she was there, when the question was, "Do you believe in absolute freedom of speech?" 61.7 percent said no. "Is violence sometimes the answer?" 51.2 percent no.

Then Drummond presents the Trolley problem, a scenario familiar to me from my years of trying to engage undergraduates to think about morality. Suppose you are standing on a platform and you see below you a runaway trolley headed for five people who have no chance of getting out of the way. They’ll all be killed! However, you just happen to be standing next to a lever which, due to your familiarity with that trolley station, you know will redirect the trolley onto a side track. Just as you reach for the lever, you notice that the side track has one person there who likewise has no chance to get out of the way. If you pull the lever, he’ll be killed. Do you pull the lever to kill one person, or let fate take its course, killing five?

The night Sophie Gilbert attended “The Majority,” 70.9 percent of the audience said they would pull the lever to sidetrack the trolley to kill one person rather than not act and let five people die. Then Rob Drummond asked his audience: suppose there were no lever, but a very large man was standing next to you peering over the edge of the platform. You could push him off, onto the path of the trolley. He’d be killed, but his large body would stop the trolley or slow it enough for the five to get to safety. Morally, isn’t it that the same? Kill one to save five? And yet 71.1 percent said they would not push the large man off – almost exactly the same percentage that would pull the lever the first time.

More scientific surveys of the US population show an even wider gulf between willingness to pull the lever and willingness to push someone to their death. About 90 percent of us say we would pull the lever, while about 90 percent of us say we would not push the large man. (Sarah Bakewell, New York Times)

I get where people are coming from – my moral intuitions were shaped by a socialization very similar to theirs. But are our intuitions rational and reasonable? Do we want our moral intuitions to be rational?

Sometimes our moral intuitions seem hard to justify. First, is it really OK to kill one to save five? Second, if killing one to save five is OK, then why is doing it by pulling a lever different from doing it by pushing someone to their death?

On the first question: people who say they would not pull the lever say they can’t play God, deciding who lives and who dies. They couldn’t live with the fact that their direct action killed a person – though they can live with their inaction killing five. (Interestingly, studies show a gender difference here – women are less likely to pull the lever.) By doing nothing, the responsibility is on whoever let that trolley get out of control, but by pulling the lever, you take direct responsibility for killing the one person. But aren’t you just as responsible for your decisions not to act as you are for a decision to act?

Let's look at that question: are you just as responsible for your voluntary inaction as you are for your voluntary action? Consider this: for $5.00 donated to the Against Malaria Foundation, one mosquito net could have been provided to areas of Africa at highest risk of malaria. A million people a year die of malaria, mostly children under age 5, and 90 percent of the malaria cases occur in sub-saharan Africa. For five bucks, you could have saved one of them. Well, maybe: some people with the nets get malaria anyway, and some people without the nets manage not to get it, or they do get it but recover, so there’s not a one-to-one relationship between nets provided and lives saved. But if you buy, say, ten nets, there’s a really good chance that one of the ten recipients will be a person who otherwise would have died of malaria, but thanks to the mosquito net you provided, doesn’t. So, call it 50 bucks to save one life. But you didn’t send the Against Malaria Foundation $50, did you? I didn’t either. And even if you did, you could have sent $50 more, but you didn’t. And that inaction cost a life.

Compare that to a different case. You get an email from Africa, but instead of saying that they need your assistance to get $20 million dollars out of Senegalese bank account, it says:

“I’m a farmer and I really hate my neighbor. I want to kill him. I went to our local shaman, and he said, it’s OK for me to kill my neighbor but only if I could get an American Unitarian Universalist to say it was OK. If I send you $50, will you send me an email that simply says, ‘You may kill your neighbor.’”

You would probably say, “that’s really weird,” hit delete, and go on with your day. But what would you think of someone -- let's call her Sue -- who replied, “let’s see the $50”? Suppose the check arrives; Sue deposits it; it clears. And Sue then keeps her end of the bargain: she sends an email saying, “You may kill your neighbor” -- and suppose the guy in Africa kills his neighbor. How does that compare with the malaria situation? Do we not find Sue's action more appalling than the inaction of someone who did not contribute to the Against Malaria Foundation? Yet in both cases, there’s $50 more than there would be in the American’s pocket and there’s a death in a faraway place as a result. So maybe we aren’t as responsible for a decision not to act as we are for a decision to act. Or maybe you'd still want to say that we are.

As these are cases illustrate, our moral intuitions can get stymied. What do -- or should -- we do about that?

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This is part 1 of 3 of "Moral Psychology"
See also
Part 2: Care, Loyalty, Authority, Fairness, Liberty, and Sacredness
Part 3: Reason's Role