ethics meets cognitive science ny times version - Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community

roachboy · 04-08-2009, 03:15 AM

this edtiorial appeared in yesterday's ny times.
it is a kind of pop cult version of arguments that run well beyond it, in which to some extent the article does not state correctly, but it nonetheless poses some interesting questions. i wonder what you make of it.

Quote:

The End of Philosophy
By DAVID BROOKS

Socrates talked. The assumption behind his approach to philosophy, and the approaches of millions of people since, is that moral thinking is mostly a matter of reason and deliberation: Think through moral problems. Find a just principle. Apply it.

One problem with this kind of approach to morality, as Michael Gazzaniga writes in his 2008 book, “Human,” is that “it has been hard to find any correlation between moral reasoning and proactive moral behavior, such as helping other people. In fact, in most studies, none has been found.”

Today, many psychologists, cognitive scientists and even philosophers embrace a different view of morality. In this view, moral thinking is more like aesthetics. As we look around the world, we are constantly evaluating what we see. Seeing and evaluating are not two separate processes. They are linked and basically simultaneous.

As Steven Quartz of the California Institute of Technology said during a recent discussion of ethics sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation, “Our brain is computing value at every fraction of a second. Everything that we look at, we form an implicit preference. Some of those make it into our awareness; some of them remain at the level of our unconscious, but ... what our brain is for, what our brain has evolved for, is to find what is of value in our environment.”

Think of what happens when you put a new food into your mouth. You don’t have to decide if it’s disgusting. You just know. You don’t have to decide if a landscape is beautiful. You just know.

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.”

The question then becomes: What shapes moral emotions in the first place? The answer has long been evolution, but in recent years there’s an increasing appreciation that evolution isn’t just about competition. It’s also about cooperation within groups. Like bees, humans have long lived or died based on their ability to divide labor, help each other and stand together in the face of common threats. Many of our moral emotions and intuitions reflect that history. We don’t just care about our individual rights, or even the rights of other individuals. We also care about loyalty, respect, traditions, religions. We are all the descendents of successful cooperators.

The first nice thing about this evolutionary approach to morality is that it emphasizes the social nature of moral intuition. People are not discrete units coolly formulating moral arguments. They link themselves together into communities and networks of mutual influence.

The second nice thing is that it entails a warmer view of human nature. Evolution is always about competition, but for humans, as Darwin speculated, competition among groups has turned us into pretty cooperative, empathetic and altruistic creatures — at least within our families, groups and sometimes nations.

The third nice thing is that it explains the haphazard way most of us lead our lives without destroying dignity and choice. Moral intuitions have primacy, Haidt argues, but they are not dictators. There are times, often the most important moments in our lives, when in fact we do use reason to override moral intuitions, and often those reasons — along with new intuitions — come from our friends.

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.

Finally, it should also challenge the very scientists who study morality. They’re good at explaining how people make judgments about harm and fairness, but they still struggle to explain the feelings of awe, transcendence, patriotism, joy and self-sacrifice, which are not ancillary to most people’s moral experiences, but central. 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.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/07/op...s.html?_r=1&em

first, with the understanding that we're dealing with a plot summary version...
there are several interconnected claims here.

first, what brooks is talking about are some of the implications of seeing human being as embedded in its environments, so as a living system that processes contexts by generating patterns that enable information to be limited. it skips over the ways pattern generation is understood to operate (there's a ton of literature out there on this, as you can imagine maybe)...and shifts straight into a space of judgment, which is staged as second-order pattern generation---direction of attention, individuation of phenomena, evaluation, imagining action, so the blur of present into subjunctive tenses.

what brooks is interested in is the position of ethics or morality in this general conception of judgment.

he follows this question in three main directions: if human beings are living systems that like any other continually interact with their environments, and so are shaped by these environments, and if this overall relation--which is not some revelation in itself--is taken as the starting point for philosophical work, it follows that

(a) you cannot think of the self or ego as other than social and historical
(b) you cannot presuppose any separation between areas like aesthetics and morality--brooks says that within this overall view of things, the two are variants of the same thing, which he characterizes as an ëmotional viewpoint.

these two premises open onto the problem of what exactly ethical or moral thinking is.

brooks is locked in a traditional schema---there is the space of thinking, or reflection, which involves an abstract individual which interacts by directing its attention to one or another variant of a world, which is external to it; or there is immediacy, in which the separations between types of thinking does not happen, just as the separation between the idea of the subject and the idea of world does not.

it is from this that he sets up the conclusion that thinking through embeddedness--thinking through the obvious fact that you and i are social and historical institutions (if you like) and not objects, not meat puppets endowed with souls that function as essences which enable the separation of subject from world---thinking through these assumptions spells the end of philosophy.

what do you make of that?

the other set of claims has to do with outlining some of the attributes of being human that thinking through embeddedness opens up that traditional philo tended to foreclose.

within this, brooks centers on the problem of ethical or moral thinking and action.

what do you make of this editorial?

asaris · 04-08-2009, 03:55 AM

When I first read the article, I thought Brooks was giving judgment short shrift; see the sixth paragraph. It seems to describe the human as being merely a product of evolution/the environment. Our emotional moral judgments come from somewhere we know not where, and we're largely helpless in the face of them. I didn't notice the third from last paragraph, in which he notes the possibility of judgment overcoming our emotional reactions. The difficulty is that the source of our judgment is also external -- our reasons for overcoming our intuitions come from society, largely in the form of our friends. But for moral action to be moral, it has to in some sense come from us, and I'm not sure that this sort of account leaves room for that.

I think one problem might be this dichotomy between embeddedness and reflection. Our reflection is itself always already embedded, but that does not mean it is determined by that embeddedness. It is a false dichotomy. I also have no idea why he would think that any of this would mean the end of philosophy. Perhaps he's right (though I think he's not; cf. Blackburn, for example), and philosophy has historically given too short a shrift to moral emotions. But that just mean Philosophy needs to change its course, right?

roachboy · 04-08-2009, 04:43 AM

i think what this cog-sci does really is simply pushes the notion of judgment out of its transcendent position and into the process of pattern generation, interaction with afforances, information limitation (all more or less synonyms). the other thing that contemporary cog-sci (complex dynamical systems in particular) does is forces one to link this judgement process back to broader patterns of socialization. what it doesn't do is explore some of the implications of this move---for that you need to move into social ontology and wade through some of the more psychoanalytically influenced work--particularly that which comes out of melanie klein---which opens onto the ego as a matter of affective investment, and the modalities of ego activity as well. i don't have time to go into this too much right now (maybe later)--but one point of bringing this up is that when you make the move into the social-historical, you really aren't talking about the subject as traditionally understood plus a network of friends--you're pushed into an account of the formation of the ego itself, so into a developmental space, in order to begin talking about basic grids (this is too quick, it's shorthand) which are transposable from region or region and which come together in that general network of orientations toward the world that pierre bourdieu talks about as habitus.

so these dispositions that enable an affective investment in ethical action are in a sense aesthetically oriented--if by aesthetic you simply point to a preference for, say, certain kinds of symmetry (i desire for whatever reason that my actions conform to model x, say)...but it doesn't necessarily follow that therefore these investments ARE aesthetic---it just implies that the basis for the sense of fit between a way of thinking the self, action and outcomes is not based on the detached reflection that a traditional moral or ethical philosophy (which is to some extent a straw man, but whatever) would have you think.

there's nothing particularly radical in this---in a sense it's simply includes something like--you're reading an account of ethics, but something keeps you reading it that's not included in the arguments themselves, but that's in a sense presupposed by them, that is by the fact of the text itself, which is that you feel a sense of resonance, you feel a sense of correctness or its absence---this is separate from (but conditions) your interactions with the formal argumentation itself...

i don't know if i'm explaining myself well because i have to leave for work in a minute and am trying to jam this in before i go...
maybe i'll come back to it later.

Hektore · 04-08-2009, 10:12 AM

So, emotions influence personal ethics at the time of the ethical decision...most of the time. Ok, fine with me, I don't understand how this would override or destroy philosophy. He doesn't quite say it destoys philosophy, but describes what will happen in philosophy as an epochal shift. I assume that he is trying to say that it is no longer possible to philosophize about the ethics without considering a personal and 'other' emotional filter that controls ethics, or simply to arrive at a purely reasoned ethics(reasoned in this sense meaning chiefly non-emotional). Especially, when reading his next to last paragraph:

Quote:

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.

This isn't really news, I thought philosophers have always recognized this, and admitted they were taking a step back away from the decision time to reason something they could bring to the table and apply at decision time. Unless he is trying to say we can never escape our emotional filter, but that isn't what he said, he says very clearly:

Quote:

The third nice thing is that it explains the haphazard way most of us lead our lives without destroying dignity and choice. Moral intuitions have primacy, Haidt argues, but they are not dictators. There are times, often the most important moments in our lives, when in fact we do use reason to override moral intuitions, and often those reasons — along with new intuitions — come from our friends.

...that we can override our filter with reason. So, I'm not really sure what he's driving at, since he seems to be contradicting himself.

Quote:

Originally Posted by roachboy

there's nothing particularly radical in this---in a sense it's simply includes something like--you're reading an account of ethics, but something keeps you reading it that's not included in the arguments themselves, but that's in a sense presupposed by them, that is by the fact of the text itself, which is that you feel a sense of resonance, you feel a sense of correctness or its absence---this is separate from (but conditions) your interactions with the formal argumentation itself...

What you state here doesn't help me clarify, either the conditioning is escapable, or it is inescapable, and he seems to say both.

roachboy · 04-08-2009, 10:34 AM

well, hektore---first off you somehow or another confused what i was talking about with something else, so when you bit that sentence you decided it was talking about something it wasn't. the point there was that ethical action--and thinking about ethical action--is an aesthetic matter, and always has been. the point isn't that complicated, and is not particularly about the question you decided it doesn't answer.

if you frame socialization as conditioning, you run into problems, yes? socialization is the production of a coherent ego, and to be coherent it has to be able to engage in certain baseline operations---for example your patterns of desire have to be delimited so as to fall within certain social limits---your modes of organizing information have to be adaptable within the constraints placed on you by your social situation. and so forth. so socialization is unavoidable--the question is not yes/no but what kind of socialization and what relation is possible/desirable with respect to socialization (including one's own)--and what types of argument can be fashioned that would make a political question of this.

your actions are constrained, whether you're aware of it or not. if you imagine yourself to be "free" and do not understand at least something of the constraints that shape you--including your ability to say that you're free--then you aren't, in fact, saying anything at all.

and nothing is changed by calling socialization "conditioning" except that it introduces some fantasy that it's possible to be outside it. it isn't. so you're in this game whether you like it or not. the variable really is the extent to which you think it important to know you're in it. there's no outside, and you're dreaming with your eyes open if you imagine there is.

so you could say that placing emphasis on embededness is simply placing emphasis on where it ought to be in any event, on social agents acting in particular social-historical environments, who possess various modes of processing information as well as modes of making statements about processing information.

04-08-2009, 03:55 AM	#2 (permalink)
asaris Mad Philosopher Location: Washington, DC	When I first read the article, I thought Brooks was giving judgment short shrift; see the sixth paragraph. It seems to describe the human as being merely a product of evolution/the environment. Our emotional moral judgments come from somewhere we know not where, and we're largely helpless in the face of them. I didn't notice the third from last paragraph, in which he notes the possibility of judgment overcoming our emotional reactions. The difficulty is that the source of our judgment is also external -- our reasons for overcoming our intuitions come from society, largely in the form of our friends. But for moral action to be moral, it has to in some sense come from us, and I'm not sure that this sort of account leaves room for that. I think one problem might be this dichotomy between embeddedness and reflection. Our reflection is itself always already embedded, but that does not mean it is determined by that embeddedness. It is a false dichotomy. I also have no idea why he would think that any of this would mean the end of philosophy. Perhaps he's right (though I think he's not; cf. Blackburn, for example), and philosophy has historically given too short a shrift to moral emotions. But that just mean Philosophy needs to change its course, right? __________________ "Die Deutschen meinen, daß die Kraft sich in Härte und Grausamkeit offenbaren müsse, sie unterwerfen sich dann gerne und mit Bewunderung:[...]. Daß es Kraft giebt in der Milde und Stille, das glauben sie nicht leicht." "The Germans believe that power must reveal itself in hardness and cruelty and then submit themselves gladly and with admiration[...]. They do not believe readily that there is power in meekness and calm." -- Friedrich Nietzsche

04-08-2009, 04:43 AM	#3 (permalink)
roachboy Super Moderator Location: essex ma	i think what this cog-sci does really is simply pushes the notion of judgment out of its transcendent position and into the process of pattern generation, interaction with afforances, information limitation (all more or less synonyms). the other thing that contemporary cog-sci (complex dynamical systems in particular) does is forces one to link this judgement process back to broader patterns of socialization. what it doesn't do is explore some of the implications of this move---for that you need to move into social ontology and wade through some of the more psychoanalytically influenced work--particularly that which comes out of melanie klein---which opens onto the ego as a matter of affective investment, and the modalities of ego activity as well. i don't have time to go into this too much right now (maybe later)--but one point of bringing this up is that when you make the move into the social-historical, you really aren't talking about the subject as traditionally understood plus a network of friends--you're pushed into an account of the formation of the ego itself, so into a developmental space, in order to begin talking about basic grids (this is too quick, it's shorthand) which are transposable from region or region and which come together in that general network of orientations toward the world that pierre bourdieu talks about as habitus. so these dispositions that enable an affective investment in ethical action are in a sense aesthetically oriented--if by aesthetic you simply point to a preference for, say, certain kinds of symmetry (i desire for whatever reason that my actions conform to model x, say)...but it doesn't necessarily follow that therefore these investments ARE aesthetic---it just implies that the basis for the sense of fit between a way of thinking the self, action and outcomes is not based on the detached reflection that a traditional moral or ethical philosophy (which is to some extent a straw man, but whatever) would have you think. there's nothing particularly radical in this---in a sense it's simply includes something like--you're reading an account of ethics, but something keeps you reading it that's not included in the arguments themselves, but that's in a sense presupposed by them, that is by the fact of the text itself, which is that you feel a sense of resonance, you feel a sense of correctness or its absence---this is separate from (but conditions) your interactions with the formal argumentation itself... i don't know if i'm explaining myself well because i have to leave for work in a minute and am trying to jam this in before i go... maybe i'll come back to it later. __________________ a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear it make you sick. -kamau brathwaite

04-08-2009, 10:34 AM	#5 (permalink)
roachboy Super Moderator Location: essex ma	well, hektore---first off you somehow or another confused what i was talking about with something else, so when you bit that sentence you decided it was talking about something it wasn't. the point there was that ethical action--and thinking about ethical action--is an aesthetic matter, and always has been. the point isn't that complicated, and is not particularly about the question you decided it doesn't answer. if you frame socialization as conditioning, you run into problems, yes? socialization is the production of a coherent ego, and to be coherent it has to be able to engage in certain baseline operations---for example your patterns of desire have to be delimited so as to fall within certain social limits---your modes of organizing information have to be adaptable within the constraints placed on you by your social situation. and so forth. so socialization is unavoidable--the question is not yes/no but what kind of socialization and what relation is possible/desirable with respect to socialization (including one's own)--and what types of argument can be fashioned that would make a political question of this. your actions are constrained, whether you're aware of it or not. if you imagine yourself to be "free" and do not understand at least something of the constraints that shape you--including your ability to say that you're free--then you aren't, in fact, saying anything at all. and nothing is changed by calling socialization "conditioning" except that it introduces some fantasy that it's possible to be outside it. it isn't. so you're in this game whether you like it or not. the variable really is the extent to which you think it important to know you're in it. there's no outside, and you're dreaming with your eyes open if you imagine there is. so you could say that placing emphasis on embededness is simply placing emphasis on where it ought to be in any event, on social agents acting in particular social-historical environments, who possess various modes of processing information as well as modes of making statements about processing information. __________________ a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear it make you sick. -kamau brathwaite