The End of Philosophy?

Brainster

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David Brooks has an interesting column today that may actually unite atheists and the religious in their condemnation.

Moral judgments are like that. They are rapid intuitive decisions and involve the emotion-processing parts of the brain. Most of us make snap moral judgments about what feels fair or not, or what feels good or not. We start doing this when we are babies, before we have language. And even as adults, we often can’t explain to ourselves why something feels wrong.

In other words, reasoning comes later and is often guided by the emotions that preceded it. Or as Jonathan Haidt of the University of Virginia memorably wrote, “The emotions are, in fact, in charge of the temple of morality, and ... moral reasoning is really just a servant masquerading as a high priest.”
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This is bound to be perceived as an attack on the "morality" police of the Right, and Robert Stacy McCain rises to the bait:

As always, Brooks approaches his subject with the general idea, "What do the 'experts' say? What is the prestigious, fashionable, high-status thing to say about this?" He is merely a mirror of the attitudinal dispositions of the elite, a sort of living sociological treatise on the current mood of our decadent intelligentsia.
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But the decadent intelligentsia found something else to groan about in Brooks' column:

The rise and now dominance of this emotional approach to morality is an epochal change. It challenges all sorts of traditions. It challenges the bookish way philosophy is conceived by most people. It challenges the Talmudic tradition, with its hyper-rational scrutiny of texts. It challenges the new atheists, who see themselves involved in a war of reason against faith and who have an unwarranted faith in the power of pure reason and in the purity of their own reasoning.
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PZ Myers responded:

There's that cartoon again. The atheists are not convinced of the purity of their reasoning — we know the human mind is flawed and easily twisted askew from reality. That's precisely why we demand verifiable, empirical evidence for truth claims. It is not enough to simply say you know the answer and it is right, we expect you to show your work, and we're going to reject claims, like those of faith, that insist on an unwarranted certainty of the possession of knowledge.
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Of course, Myers is so caught up in the offense to atheists everywhere that he doesn't seem to notice that the column is generally a repudiation of "moral reasoning".

It's not a terrific column; personally I thought the closing paragraph was embarrassing. But I did find it thought-provoking.
 
As we learned from "The End of History", any piece of writing that declares the "end" of something is probably full of crap.
 
I've just read both articles. Myers was straightfoward, but I had to reread Brooks a couple times because the implications were bizarre.

I think I've broken down the claims in the article:


  • Reasoning does not lead to good moral behavior.
  • People make snap moral judgments based on preconceptions as they do with artwork and food choices.
  • Humans have a tendency towards cooperative snap judgements due to our evolutionary history.
  • It is not just more accurate but better to view morality as the result of social influence than individual reason.
  • This makes human nature seem 'warme.r'
  • Choice is not excluded since sometimes we reason anyway.
  • Thus 'bookish' philosophers, Talmudic scholars, and athiests (because they'd rather reason than trust faith) are wrong.
  • Also, this explains why science can't explain awe, transcendence, patriotism, joy, self-sacrifice, and the desire to do good.
The first three points are ok, but then he goes off the rails, IMO.
 
quixotecoyote said:
I've just read both articles. Myers was straightfoward, but I had to reread Brooks a couple times because the implications were bizarre.
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I think he's trying to seed something with this column and being intentionally opaque. Where Brooks has broken sharply with most conservatives is that he's arguing against the idea that conservatives/Republicans base their stand on the issues on "principles" of applied moral reasoning.

Many conservatives would say, for example, that "Abortion is wrong because murder is wrong and killing a fetus amounts to killing a human being." In other words, it's not some position of convenience, it's carefully thought out and logical. Brooks is saying that no, on a gut level some conservatives opposed abortion and then working out the moral reasoning to support that claim. Note: Just using that as an example, not saying that Brooks specifically is referring to abortion or other moral issues.

Anyway, that's the undertone I got from the piece.
 
I was fine with most of the article, up until the last sentence:

Brooks said:
The evolutionary approach also leads many scientists to neglect the concept of individual responsibility and makes it hard for them to appreciate that most people struggle toward goodness, not as a means, but as an end in itself.
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I think he is making two unfounded assumptions here, and linking them for no apparent reason. I would want to see evidence for both statements, particularly that people "struggle towards goodness, not as a means, but as an end in itself." Is this really true, or is this one of the after the fact rationalizations he is complaining about in the first half of the article? In other words, are people really seeing goodness (altruism, kindness, whatever else he might mean) as an end, or are they convincing themselves that they are as it sounds so much nicer than believing goodness is simply a means to a more selfish end?
 
Actually I'll bite and say that it sounds like he's on to something, but he doesn't know why.

My reason is: mirror neurons. There are neurons that fire just the same when you are harmed, as when you observe another member of the same species being harmed. We, like many other species (and doubly so the social ones) have empathy built in.

As an example: I remember reading a wisecrack somewhere that when you see a football or soccer game and some guy is kicked in the nuts, a woman will go "gee, that's got to hurt", but most men will actually wince. And I actually went scientific and tried empyrically testing that hypothesis. I showed that All Your Base video to several co-workers (it wasn't a big phenomenon here, so the majority had never seen it before), and when they get to the photo of the soccer player being lifted off the ground by a kick between the legs, yep, most of them actually winced.

There are snap moral judgments which, basically, boil down to that empathy. They boil down to "ouch, I wouldn't like that done to me."

Are we moral due to logical reason? I don't think so. Even theories like enlightened self-interest invariably include a step that's just wishful thinking rather than solid logic proof. E.g., that surely everyone else will respond in kind.

Maybe we should just accept what those mirror neurons try to tell us, and move on.
 
Why not emphasize that the sympathetic response of injury to others is built into the human system and isn't something that must taught.
Refined through teaching, but not taught ab initio, because deep inside, we KNOW what is right.
 
It would be nice if Brooks actually understood this issue.

There is the foundation of moral thinking, which dates to Socrates and before. Socrates' mother probably smacked his behind when he fell of out line.

Moral thinking differs, however, from the foundation on which morality is even possible (the genealogy of morals). The latter dates to Nietzsche, not Jonathan Haidt.

Evolutionary investigation into morality does not concern the foundations of moral thinking but the ground on which moral thinking is possible, locating that ground in the physical structure of humans and in our evolutionary heritage. Moral thinking is prescriptive. Evolutionary thinking about the ground making possible moral thinking is descriptive.

Confusing the two, as Brooks does, makes him look foolish.
 
HansMustermann said:
Are we moral due to logical reason? I don't think so. Even theories like enlightened self-interest invariably include a step that's just wishful thinking rather than solid logic proof. E.g., that surely everyone else will respond in kind.

Maybe we should just accept what those mirror neurons try to tell us, and move on.
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I buy that, but it's hardly a new idea. I realize it may be new to David Brooks. If so, that says a lot about his education.
 
From Brook's:
"The evolutionary approach also leads many scientists to neglect the concept of individual responsibility and makes it hard for them to appreciate that most people struggle toward goodness, not as a means, but as an end in itself."

WTF.
This is wrong. He doesn't know what fitness is. Fitness is what evolution is about when it tries to explain behaviour. Lets see what evolution really tells you about this:

"While organisms which behave in a way that increases the number of their descendants in future generations can be considered to have higher fitness, this does not mean that the actual goal of that behaviour is the maximization of fitness. The goal of an Ache hunter from Patagonia may be, on one occasion, to hunt and kill a tapir, or on another to marry off one of his children and dance at the wedding. The link to fitness can occur very far down the line and there is no reason to expect people, any more than other animals, to show behaviours that are overtly design to increase their fitness (the number of descendents they leave), even though that is their eventual consequence."
From "Evolutionary Psichology", Robin Dunbar



In other words our proximal goals are so far away from the "interest" of the gene, in the causal chain, because the genes delegate so much of our behaviour to our brain,
that it's ridiculous to say our personal goals are the responsability of something else rather than the brain we have. Even if at the end fitness matters, it doesn't say anything against the notions of responsability.
In fact, the long distance of the genes in the causal link makes it almost certain that something like an emotional moral response is at the basis of all moral thinking. We probably have a moral organ, and we notice it because we have moral feelings. Only evolution can give an idea of why we have this organ...
 
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This all sounds vaguely familiar...ah yes, it's the Downs Syndrome version of Kant vs. Hume.

Edit: by the way, that was directed at Brooks and McCain, not the people posting in the thread.
 
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I Ratant said:
Why not emphasize that the sympathetic response of injury to others is built into the human system and isn't something that must taught.
Refined through teaching, but not taught ab initio, because deep inside, we KNOW what is right.
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In that particular case (someone taking a shot in the nuts) I would argue strongly for the opposite case. The reaction of most kids to seeing something like that is to laugh. Women are sympathetic, and men wince. What's the difference between those reactions? Experience.
 
So basically the article is saying that morals are essentially an illusion and therefore are irrelevant to logical thinking?

That's kind of the gist that I got out of this.


INRM
 
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