Navel gazing

With all the talk about "democratic socialism", these days, including attempts to define the term that make it essentially indistinguishable from "New Deal Democrat", I've spent some time thinking about how I would describe my own political/philosophical leanings to an interested stranger. Every day is different, but today I am thinking "radical democratic socialist" because I do NOT think that capitalism with a human face is sufficient. Private ownership of capital is essentially incompatible with democracy (which is why I've sometimes argued that "democratic socialism" is a tautology). Further, paying people, let alone paying them generously, just for owning stuff, let alone just because they already own a lot more stuff than anybody else, is morally indefensible.

On the other hand, I need to add something like "pragmatic radical", because I know that wishing don't make it so, and I do not believe in letting the best be the enemy of the good (or even of the "better than now"). Morally, it is better to do something to make things better, for at least some people, than to do nothing. Pretending to a high moral stance from "keeping your hands clean" is not actually better, morally, than being "compromised" by accepting, and working for, limited reforms. Life is short and (to quote a prominent liberal), in the long run we are all dead.

This leaves out a lot. Feminism, anti-racism... or, better, pro-POC... "embracing" LGBTQ (a phrase I learned recently from a friend, and like so much better than "ally"). I like to think of socialism as not limited to the economic realm. Socialism is democracy, taken to its ultimate conclusion. Socialism is the end of all exploitation, all preferential advantage or privilege of one group over another, for whatever reason, from whatever source.

Rationality, morals and Jonathan Haidt

Rationality, as it turns out, far from being the defining quality of humans, is very often used by humans only post hoc, to justify decisions we have already made based on unconscious, irrational processes.  In fact, rationality may actually have evolved, not so much to help us make effective plans in the physical world, as to help us out socially, by “explaining” our decisions to our peers.  This, at any rate, is one of the key lessons from Jonathan Haidt’s book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion.  At least, that is a main “take-away” for me, which fits in well with some of the other reading I’ve been doing over the past couple of years, including Gerd Gigerenzer’s Rationality for Mortals: How People Cope with Uncertainty, and Hilary Kornblith, et al, Naturalizing Epistemology.  Although, as a person who makes my living as an engineer, I may have more respect than psychologist Haidt for the role of rationality in helping us deal with our non-social reality. 

This particular argument about rationality, Haidt documents well with experimental data (although the  Gigerenzer book offers a caution in its chapter specifically on how statistical analysis is misused in most published psychology research).  Some of Haidt’s other themes are also very interesting, but raise more issues for me; at least, I have more questions about them. 

Haidt’s main interest, in the book is with moral psychology, including how moral systems actually function in our (conscious and unconscious minds), and how and why we evolved moral systems in the first place.  (The evolution of moral systems by natural selection is counter-intuitive to a naïve, “red in tooth and claw” view of nature and “survival of the fittest”.)  Haidt’s scientific work is mostly descriptive; i.e., he is trying to find out how moral psychology actually works, not how it ought to work.  His main foray into the prescriptive, in this part of the book, is to advise us that we should try to understand how our minds (including our moral systems) actually work, and not shrink away from the knowledge, even if it makes us uncomfortable.  This is a prescription I heartily endorse.  Later, he veers into some prescriptions I think less of, as I discuss below.

A main element in his taxonomy of moral systems is that they center around a number of separate “modules”, which function unconsciously, and provide the automatic moral reactions that our reason later tries to justify.  He identifies six of these: Care/harm, Liberty/oppression, Fairness/cheating, Loyalty/betrayal, Authority/subversion, and Sanctity/degradation.  He defines them all, and suggests reasons why it might have been beneficial for our ancestors, long ago, to evolve such centers.  He and his colleagues identified these modules experimentally (by questionnaires, interviews, and laboratory experiments).  When he gets around to discussing politics, he says liberals care mostly about the care/harm module, a little less about liberty/oppression and fairness/cheating, and not much at all about the other three.  Conservatives, on the other hand, care equally about all six, although they interpret some of them (care/harm and liberty/oppression) somewhat differently.  This makes it possible for conservatives to appeal to more people than liberals*, since they can reach them on more levels.  It can also make it very hard for one group to understand the other.  For instance, in interpreting some family law situation, liberals may focus strictly on the wellbeing of the child (care/harm), which conservatives care about, too, but conservatives also care about parental rights (authority/subversion), state interference (liberty/oppression), and perhaps others; liberals tend to think these other things are irrelevant.  He also says that his research has found that conservatives are better at predicting what liberals will think about a situation than the other way around, because the conservatives share the liberals’ concerns, but add to them, while the liberals don’t see the conservatives’ other concerns, at all.

Haidt’s assumption of six discrete modules bugs me.  For instance, it is pretty well established that people tend to accept traditional authority as long as it is associated with responsibility, i.e., as long as the authority figure carries out a traditionally determined social role seen as having benefits for the community as a whole.  It is not necessary for there to be any particular proportionality (let alone equality) in the distribution of benefits between the authority and the people.  But if the traditional responsibilities are seen as being ignored, then people are more willing to rebel against the authority.  (See, for example, Barrington-Moore, Injustice: The Social Bases of Obedience and Revolt.)  So, is there a seventh module, responsibility/irresponsibility?  Or is this subsumed under loyalty/betrayal, or fairness/cheating?  Or both?  Or all three?  For that matter, couldn’t loyalty/betrayal just be a special case of fairness/cheating?  And are liberty/oppression and authority/subversion really cognitively independent?  At the very best, there seems to be a lot of overlap between these categories.

Ultimately answering these questions may require a detailed mapping of the moral modules on the brain/somatic structures that implement or create them.  If this were done, then (for no particular reason but my gut feeling), I conjecture that:

1. There would be more than six modules, and,
2. Boundaries between modules would be fuzzy.  There would be physical overlap between the structures implementing different modules, with some sub-structures involved in two, three, many different modules.

I suspect that it is difficult to structure the type of research Haidt was doing so as to be free of question-begging.  You have to make decisions, consciously or unconsciously, as to what types of traits you are going to look for, and you are more likely to find the traits you identified than to stumble across ones you never thought of (although Haidt does describe how discrepancies in early results led him to expand his taxonomy from an original five modules to the final six).

A significant amount of Haidt’s book is spent discussing group selection and its role in evolution.  Many of his observations on this topic I have come across, elsewhere.  One that I have not is his belief that there can be, and has been, significant pro-social genetic evolution in historic times (or at least from late prehistoric, but definitely human, times).  Essentially, he believes that culturally determined group behaviors (such as religious practices) can create selective pressures that weed out individuals less willing to conform to group norms.  This he sees as a form of actual group selection, because groups whose members were selected to make them cohere more closely,  passed on more genes than groups who did not. 

I have no doubt that some kind of group selection for moral, cooperative behavior did occur (see previous blog posts, linked to at the end of this one).  I’m inclined to be dubious about Haidt’s very late time frame, though. He justifies it by comparison with intentional selection (by breeders) of domestic species, which can cause significant genetic change in a small number of generations.  But I think selective pressures in a rich, cultural environment are much more diffuse than in a controlled breeding situation.  He does give a nod to the time-frame difference, and admits that the genetic response he envisions would happen much more slowly than in domestic breeding.  But if the cultural pressures are sufficiently diffuse, they will not outweigh chance, and selection will not occur, at all.  I think there are just too many ways to escape conforming, in most social situations.  I think the level of late, culturally induced genetic change that Haidt envisions is unlikely.

Haidt’s ideas on group selection are intimately connected with his ideas on religion, social organization, generally, and politics.  It seemed to me that once he entered these areas, his scientist’s insistence on evidence tended to weaken.  He becomes much more willing to assert things without offering any (or at least, much) proof.

Haidt clear wants to believe that religion is a good thing.  He is critical of the so-called New Atheists and their tendency to see religious belief as the root of all evil.  I tend to be critical of the New Atheists, also, but I think the social utility of religion is much less than Haidt thinks it is.  Haidt makes a strong case for the utility of religion early in human history (or prehistory) as something that helped improve the coherence of groups.  I think group cohesion, partly helped by shared religion, almost certainly helped human groups to survive in early times, and to outperform (and perhaps out-breed) groups that were less cohesive.  (Dennet, Dawkins, and other New Atheist use these facts in constructing a theory of meme-level selection, which Haidt thinks feeds back into genetic-level change.)

Haidt makes a much less compelling case for the value of close group bonding in modern times, in a globalized world, with awesome weaponry of mass destruction.  He makes a claim that having a vast network of small, closely bonded groups (including religious ones), makes, in-and-of-itself, for a safer and more stable overall society.  He offers essentially no evidence for this claim.  In the interest of convincing us, he over-emphasizes the positives, and downplays the negatives.  By implication, we should think of groups like U.U. Social Action Committees, or the League of Women Voters, and not Daesh, Westboro Baptist Church, or the KKK.

He discusses some research on the survival of small insular groups, which he believes supports his position.  Groups like communes and religious communities are found to survive longer (as groups) if, (1) they demand costly sacrifices of their members, and (2) they “sacralize” the sacrifices (i.e., refer them to God’s will).  Surely, it is not obvious that this is a net good, at least for the members of the group.  What actual benefits does their membership in the group provide that outweigh what they are asked to give up?  Haidt doesn’t even raise that question, let alone try to answer it.  He seems to take for granted that survival of the group is a sufficient value, in-and-of itself.  It seems to me, on the other hand, that the members might well be better off if the group dissolved, and they were re-absorbed back into the mainstream.  (Survival of the group is not a precondition for survival of the members, after all.)  The study Haidt cites seems to support Dawkins’s idea of religion as a parasitic meme at least as well, if not better, than Haidt’s idea of religion as a positive force.  Another comparison that comes to mind is with drug addiction (i.e., a community of willing addicts).

Thinking of group survival as a “good” makes me think, re. morality, in general:  is survival, pure and simple, a sufficient justificatory basis for morality?  Or do other things matter?  How about knowledge and truth for their own sakes, and not just instrumentally?

Because, when it comes to religion, Haidt does not seem to be a believer.  The impression I got is that he is an atheist.  But religion, as a social phenomenon, appeals to him deeply, and he wants to believe it is good, and should be promoted.  But if religious beliefs are all wrong about matters of fact, does its appeal (to some people), and its (supposed) social utility justify our supporting and encouraging it?  This seems to skirt perilously close to Plato’s Noble Lie.  There is something elitist (and ignoble), it seems to me, about promoting beliefs you personally think are false, because of their social utility.  (Tolerating them may be another matter.)

When Haidt turns to political analysis, he leaves the scientific method even further in the dust.  He wants to prove that each of the different political constellations (which he identifies as “liberal”, “libertarian”, and “conservative”) has its own share of truth; therefore, we should learn to broaden our moral views, so that we can effectively listen to each other.  He gives examples.  For libertarianism, he gives a story entitled “Markets Are Miraculous”.  And a “story” is exactly what it is:  an entirely fictional, made-up scenario about an imaginary insurance scheme that proves exactly nothing.

Haidt’s approach to politics invites comparison with George Lakoff.  Lakoff has also been very concerned that people improve their understanding of the latest scientific theories of how cognition functions, and apply them to political work, and, like Haidt, he believes that conservatives tend to do a better job of this, here and now, than liberals do, and this concerns him.  But Lakoff unabashedly sides with liberals, and his interest is clearly that liberals should learn to better apply science in support of liberal moral views (although I know a lot of people who fail to understand that this is what he is saying).  Haidt, on the other hand, strikes me as a former liberal who has become more conservative with age.  He wants liberals to compromise on their principles, and he offers some fairly lame arguments for why they should do so.

Grains of salt are required.  But the insights into the psychological structure or rationality and morality that Haidt’s work provides make his book worth the reading.

*I use the word “liberal” in this essay in the conventional, modern American way, because that is the way Haidt uses it, and not in the classical way still more in favor, I think, in Europe, which is closer to what Americans call “libertarian”.

Related posts:

http://persistentwondering.blogspot.com/2009/08/natural-history-of-morals.html

http://persistentwondering.blogspot.com/2009/12/altruism-and-human-evolution.html

http://persistentwondering.blogspot.com/2012/09/irrational-atheists.html 

Elections and myth

I write on the eve of a Massachusetts election which may, unfortunately, be an historic one. After winning the primary, the Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate, Martha Coakley, seems to have taken the general election for granted; now, surprisingly, she finds herself in a neck-and-neck horserace with Republican Scott Brown. If Brown wins, the Senate Democrats will immediately lose any hope of breaking a filibuster; health care reform (even in its current, deformed state) will be finished, and so will any future initiative that President Obama is likely to make. It will also probably foreshadow further Democratic losses in the midterms, and likely a one-term presidency for Barack Obama. (Brown will be a one-termer, too. The progressive machine in Massachusetts will gear up belatedly, and almost certainly oust him in the next election; but a lot of damage will be done, by then.)

If Brown wins this election, it will be a wake-up call to the Democrats, but one which, like a den of opium addicts trapped in a fevered, collective dream, they probably won’t hear. The message they will hear, the message they always hear in their deluded dream state, is that when the other side wins, the Democrats need to become more like them. What the people will really be saying is: they need to be different.

Obama rode in like a hero, in the election of 2008, like a knight in shining armor for many Americans. We have two kinds of folk-tales about heroes. A hero can storm the palace gates, free the imprisoned damsel, and all will live happily ever after. Or a hero can make a vain last stand, selflessly sacrificing everything in the struggle for righteousness, fighting to the bitter end for the people, never giving up while life remains. Either type of hero wins our loyalty, our admiration, and our love. What a hero cannot do is make nice with the forces of evil. A hero cannot give in, give away everything, even in a spirit of compromise, while winning only crumbs, or nothing, for the people in return. We have a word for that kind of behavior, and it is not “heroism”. It is “betrayal”.

Unfortunately, when we feel betrayed, we don’t always act in the most rational manner. When we are jilted by our lover (to switch my metaphor), we may not choose to be cautiously celibate until a more trustworthy candidate comes along. We may, instead, troll the bars to find some even less reliable lover “on the rebound”. This is especially true if our last lover acted in a way which has made us feel of potential partners that in some sad sense “they are all the same”. Thus, the American voter. If Brown wins, it will not be because the majority of voters who jump ship to vote for him have really understood and agree with his positions; most people in Massachusetts do not. It will be because they are feeling hurt, betrayed and jilted by the Democrats, and they want to show them a thing or two.

I may be accused of elitism for analyzing the electorate on the level of fairy tale and romance novel, instead of a hard calculus of interest and agency. Perhaps the charge is just; it is true that I think most people think politically on a level of myth and passion, and not by a rational consideration of costs and benefits. Of course the forces of interest and agency are always there; but between them is interposed an analysis, and the analysis is not always sound.

This is often as true of self-conscious, politically active, over-intellectualizing “lefties” as it is of the man or woman in the street. We are as likely as anyone else to want politicians to act, out of principle, as if they were our knights in silvered armor. We want politicians who refuse ever to compromise; but of course, we also want these finely principled men and women to prevail.

The trouble is, this assumes that there IS a principled choice – that absolute victory is possible. In politics, absolute victories are likely to be the victories of a Stalin, or a Pol Pot, and even then, they don’t last forever. (I rather suspect that if any politician managed to kill off all the people who disagreed with him, he would find himself all alone – and then start arguing with himself.) People are, and always will be, contrary and cooperative, greedy and selfless, stupid and smart. Differences of opinion, conflict, error are eternally and necessarily the stuff of politics, and compromise and back room deals are part of any political solution.

So should we just wash our hands of it? Refuse to have anything to do with such a dirty business? As Howard Zinn said, in the line that went into the title of his memoirs, “You can’t be neutral on a moving train,” a deliciously mixed metaphor by which he meant that you cannot NOT make a moral choice in politics; abstention has consequences as surely as a vote, a failure to act, when action is called for, leaves us as guilty as those who acted, yet made the wrong choice. There is no redemption in taking the moral high ground, if ceding the ACTUAL ground leaves people really worse off than if you had compromised. The great irony of politics is that unshakably holding the principled position is NOT the principled position.

The problem is one of strategy, and strategy is a problem of analysis of probable outcomes. Did you compromise too soon, and therefore give away too much? Did you compromise with the wrong people, when some other compromise might have won you a better ally, and a coalition strong enough to force a breakthrough? If you had refused to engage, and spent more time building your power, would you have eventually have been able to win a better resolution? Or would you only have given your enemy, also, more time to regroup? How many people would have been hurt while you waited, and would it have been worth the cost?

History can look at the outcomes, and decide if they were good or bad. It is much harder to decide if they were good or bad relative to the actual possibilities of the moment.

Nevertheless, I fear that President Obama did the wrong thing by starting his backpedalling, his compromising, his search for bipartisan solutions, so early in his term of office. He would have been better off (I think) to draw a line in the sand, and fight, vocally and aggressively, for whatever was best for the people. If he made compromises, he should have done so from a position of strength, and made certain that he really got some quid pro quo.

Obama should have done that not because compromise is an evil to be rejected on principle, but because, in this case, compromise was bad strategy. He might have lost these battles, but if he had played a bold role, struggling against the unrelenting Republicans, he might have stayed a hero. He might have convinced people that what was needed in Washington was MORE progressive Democrats, to break the gridlock, and not that it made no difference either way, because all politicians in both parties were after all the same. He might have been our Zapata, our Leonidas at Thermopylae, our Roland at Roncesvalles sounding his horn; instead, I fear he has come to be seen as our Benedict Arnold.

The political pundits do not agree with me. To them, losing is always bad, and anything you can call a victory, no matter how Pyrrhic, is always good. Perhaps they are right. In particular, they might be right as regards the career of the particular politician seen to be losing. But then, self-sacrifice is part of the nature of being a Roland – of being a hero. I’m pretty sure we won’t make a meaningful change for the better in this country, until we manage to elect some politicians who have more faith in the power of myth than does the typical Washington insider. And who knows? If they hold out courageously in the pass, they might be pleasantly surprised and find out that the grateful people call up the cavalry just in time.

Postscript, footnote, or what-have-you. I write the above, of course, as if Obama really wants to be a progressive President, but is constrained by circumstances, which (also) he may or may not have misjudged. This is one of the accounts currently being told to explain Obama’s behavior in office. Another is that he is in fact merely another pro-business neoliberal, who pretended to believe in community empowerment (which perhaps he really believed in, in his younger days), in order to win his own place in history. I make no pretense to knowing enough about the man, Obama, to know which of these accounts is true – possibly some mixture of the two.

Altruism and human evolution

The song "Easy to Be Hard" from the 1967 musical "Hair" posed the question: "How can people be so heartless?" Ever since Darwin, though, biologists have struggled with the opposite question: "How can people be so nice?" If traits arise through intense competition between living organisms in a war of all against all, how does a tendency to altruism arise in a population? What benefit does altruist behavior have that it contributes to the survival and reproductive success of the altruist?

How we define "altruism" is crucial to the form that the explanation will take, although the underlying facts, of course, are not changed by the definition. There is no question but that a heritable, genetic trait, in order to be selected for by natural selection, must provide some differential reproductive advantage to the gene complex coding for that trait. So if we define "altruism" as describing traits that benefit ONLY others, and confer NO adaptive advantage on either the organism bearing or the gene complex, then necessarily genes are selfish, and altruism cannot arise by natural selection. If such "altruistic" behavior in fact is not only neutral, but places the bearer at a selective disadvantage, then it cannot long survive, even if it arises by chance.

But this is a trivial result of the nature of selection, and a particular definition of "altruistic", and leaves a lot of real-life facts unexplained. Nature is full of examples of behavior that SEEMS altruistic, in the sense that it seems to be for the benefit of others, and of immediate cost to the organism exhibiting the behavior. Simply stating that there must be some hidden benefit to the organism, or at least to some of the gene complexes which code for the nature of the organism, does not explain how each particular behavior could develop.

So, rather than sacrifice a perfectly good word to preserve a trivial result (and make do, in consequence, with cumbersome phrases like "seemingly altruistic"), I prefer to define "altruistic behavior" simply as behavior that seems to benefit primarily others, at an immediate net cost to the altruistic individual. This definition of altruistic defines "fuzzier" classes of behaviors and organisms than the alternate definition, but classes that have the decided advantage that the constituent behaviors and organisms actually exist.

Elliot Sober’s book The Nature of Selection makes a strong connection between the evolution of altruistic behavior, and the process of "group selection". Group selection is a controversial concept among biologists, part of what Sober refers to as the "unit of selection" debate. The question is on what entities or "units" does natural selection work? The oldest tradition, starting with Darwin, focus on the organism (or phenotype). Individual organisms vary in traits, and have different rates of survival and reproduction deriving from those traits, causing certain types of organisms, with certain combinations of traits, to be "selected" as being better adapted to their environment, and others to die out.

Other candidates for the unit of selection exist. Many biologists have strongly argued for the individual gene as the only proper unit to be considered. Others extend this to complexes of genes. More lately, some theorists have argued for selection at the level of the group or "deme", or even at the species level. I won’t go into detail on all this. Sober argues strongly for a multi-level view; i.e., that all of these may be, from time to time, the level at which selection operates, and the particulars must be carefully examined in each case. In particular, he argues that the "genes only" school arises as a trivial result of the fact that the mathematics in each case can be reduced to calculations based on the averaged relative fitness of each gene. But to really understand the process, he believes you have to look at causality – at what level are the actual natural forces shaping evolution being applied?

The way Sober defines "group selection", there must be a trait or property definable only at the group level which confers a selective advantage on individual organisms. There is actually some flexibility in whether the "benchmark" of selection is the individual organism, a particular gene or gene complex, or the group, but focusing on the organism will do for now. The crucial feature is that the property that confers the selective advantage must be definable only at the group level. For instance, predators may avoid large individuals, but show even more aversion to groups of large animals; in that case, being a member of group of organisms with a large average size will confer a selective advantage to each organism in the group, irrespective of its own, individual size. There may be other selective effects in operation. For example, if smaller size happens to confer some selective advantage on organisms competing with other organisms within the group, then there will be two countervailing evolutionary forces at work, and the result is indeterminate (in the mathematical sense that one must look to other factors for a resolution), but this does not alter the fact that there is a group selective force at work.

Altruism seems, at least in many cases, to be a situation where group selection and individual selection act at cross purposes. Since altruists help other group members, there is a significant selective advantage to being a member of a group containing a large number of altruists. But this advantage accrues to selfish individuals, as well as to altruistic ones. Since selfish individuals gain the selective advantages of group membership without the personal costs, they may have a higher "fitness" value for intra-group competition. Which one wins out – whether selfish organisms or altruistic ones will predominate or "go to fixation" (one trait driving the other into extinction) – will depend on the relative strength of the two forces. The existence of individual (organism-level) selection as a countervailing force leads to an inherent instability in the fitness of altruism based on group selection, absent other forces.

I am mostly concerned with the evolution of altruistic behavior within primate species, and in particular within our own. I think group selection, as Sober defines it, is a large factor in this, but I think other factors can be identified, reinforcing what otherwise might seem to be an inadequately strong effect. One such factor is kin selection. Kin selection is a more powerful force than group selection, because an individual’s genes benefit more directly from the individual’s actions. This effect is most strong when I act for the benefit of my (biological) offspring. Even if I sacrifice my life for my children, this may well preserve my genotype much more effectively than had I failed to take the risk. The force of kin selection is somewhat less strong when I act for the benefit of siblings, who generally share most of my genetic material, and so on with decreasing force through first cousins, second cousins etc. I suspect that altruistic behavior may have originated, very early in the evolution of primate lineages, as a generalization of kin-selective behavior. Once it evolved, the group-selection advantages – the increase in fitness experienced by each individual member of a cooperative group – would have exercised at least a weak selective effect.

I think sex selection (selection by females of certain preferred traits in sexual partners) may also have played a part in the evolution of certain types of altruistic behavior, particularly in hominid lineages. Humans are unique in that our infants require a great deal of care – more care, and for a longer period than other primates, possibly more than any other animal. Stephen J. Gould has connected this to the neotenous nature of our species – we retain as adults, features that are infantile in other apes – for instance we continue to learn at a higher rate through much of our lives. But also we are born at a less developed stage. This may be in part because of our large brain size – a more fully developed brain and skull would be too large to pass through the birth canal.

For whatever reason, the result has been that human infants require much care, over a long period. This has led to other evolutionary changes; for example, it very likely led to the "always on" nature of human female sexuality. Other primate females, unlike human women, are interested in sex, and sexually interesting to males, only during the period in which they are fertile. By making sexuality a constant, hominid females could attract males to serve as ongoing helpmates, if not actually helping much with child rearing tasks (then or now), at least supplementing the female’s efforts in other areas, such as providing food and protection when the female was engaged with the child. This would have led to a tendency on the part of females to select for at least certain types of altruistic behavior, those that could fall under the rubric of being a "good provider". Constant sexuality, and the resulting pair-bonding, also led to another revolution – awareness of paternity, thereby extending the possible scope of kin selection.

Another factor I think played a big effect in the evolution of altruistic behavior, not only in human lineages but in other primates as well, at least those most closely related to us, such as gorillas and chimpanzees, is something we might call police action. Part of primate altruism involves cooperation and sharing – but it is not strictly necessary that these benefits be equally distributed between altruists and selfish individuals. Groups of individuals can choose NOT to share with individuals they don’t feel to be deserving. Groups can also band together to limit the power of otherwise dominant individuals who are perceived as abusing their power, and in extreme cases can even drive a selfish individual from the overall group. Evolution of policing behaviors would strongly support the group-selective benefits deriving from the evolution of altruistic forces, by lessening the selective advantage enjoyed by selfish individuals within the group, and the combination of traits would thus tend to be much more stable than altruism alone.

I’m no population geneticist, and I’m not going to be able to put together mathematical models to demonstrate all this, but it seems to me that these factors: kin selection, group selection, sex selection and evolution of cooperating behavior complexes (policing) together make up a sufficiently powerful set of forces to be adequate to ensure the evolution by natural selection of human altruism. The details I’ve laid out may not be quite right, but something like this history must be have occurred – because, indisputably, human altruism exists.

The lyric from "Hair" teaches us one important lesson: how natural all this seems to us. Because (saving a few who have imbibed too much Libertarian philosophy), we all tend to respond in the way the lyric suggests – we are surprised and startled by "heartlessness". By and large, in our day-to-day activities, we humans are more likely to go out of our way to be nice to each other than to be mean. Granted, exemplary occurrences of altruism are remarkable, and inspire awe and admiration, but it is meanness that shocks us, nags at our consciousness, and leaves us with the conviction that something must be done.

Moral knowledge and moral choice

Last week, I discussed a parallel I see between counterfactuals and moral argument that goes against using the empirical improvability of moral argument as proof for an extreme relativistic moral stance. I ended with the question, “What could be a basis for making non-arbitrary decisions in moral arguments?”

I wish I had a firm answer for this. Maybe someday I will. One valiant attempt to wrestle with this problem is by Alasdair MacIntyre in his book, “After Virtue”. MacIntyre is concerned with this problem in a form similar to that identified by Jean Grimshaw in Chapter 8 of “Philosophy and Feminist Thinking” (see my 8/30 post) – the problem between morality as knowledge and morality as choice. Classical Greek philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle believed that the answer to the question “What is the right way for a person to live?” could be found by reason – they in essence believed that morality was a matter of knowledge about the world. Modern philosophers, however, have tended to emphasize the role of “choice” in moral behavior, and to question the degree to which reason can answer fundamental moral questions at all. (See nice, brief, discussion in Grimshaw.) Absolute relativism is an extreme form of morality as choice. MacIntyre comes down squarely in the “classical” camp of morality as knowledge.

MacIntyre is concerned with an analysis of the virtues, taken as acquired human qualities which tend to enable us to achieve the “good” in our lives. He defines the virtues through a three stage process. First, he places them in the context of what he calls a “practice”, a cooperative activity which has “goods” internal to the activity. For instance, the game of chess has internal “goods” defined in terms of strategy and skill and other attributes of good play, which are fully knowable, and can be experienced, only by people who have committed themselves in a certain way to the playing of the game. Chess may also bring a player external goods – for instance, winning at chess may bring social praise, prize money, etc. – but, whereas the external goods may perhaps be achieved by cheating in some way (violating the virtues inherent in the practice of chess), the internal goods cannot. So “the virtues” are tentatively defined as qualities which help sustain practices.

In the second phase of his account of the virtues, MacIntyre places them in what he calls “the unity of a narrative embodied in a single life”. He starts with an interesting and compelling argument for the centrality of narrative to our understanding of our lives. He argues that, rather than the life of a person being conceivable as a series of actions or events, which we may choose to assemble into a narrative as a sort of literary exercise (or concerning which we may deny the veracity or authenticity of constructing any such narratives), in fact we can understand the concepts of “action” and even “person” only as abstracted elements of some narrative. From this, he claims it follows that a single life has a sort of narrative unity, and that to ask “what is good for me?” is the same as asking what sorts of things will lead to developing or discovering that unity. This leads him to define the virtues as, in part, those qualities which will help us in our quest for the answer to that question, and in part those qualities (whether the same or a more inclusive list) which will help us realize them once identified.

Finally, MacIntyre argues that the narrative unity of a life is comprehendible only in the context of a tradition, which he defines flexibly as “an historically extended, socially embodied argument, and an argument in part precisely about the goods which constitute that tradition.” Note in particular that a tradition so defined is not an inflexible body of practices that must be conservatively defended against change from any source.

After the third stage in the analysis, then, the virtues stand defined as those acquired qualities which (1) sustain us in practices, (2) help us find the narrative unity in our own lives, and (3) sustain the vital tradition in which we live.

Well, I can’t do justice to a complex book, especially one which, after one full and one partial reading, I still only imperfectly understand. There is much that rings true (or at least partially, or potentially true...) Other parts fail to convince. The concept of a practice, and the partial definition of virtues therein seems useful. Also, I find myself agreeing with MacIntyre in so far as placing narrative at the center of our understanding of (at least) our own lives and our social world; however, it seems to me that every person, rather than being something abstracted from a single narrative, is something at the nexus of an interlocking web of narratives, not just subjectively (because I am aware of things that you are not), but essentially, in that any narrative, as an act of analysis, necessarily abstracts from reality, and any abstraction necessarily leaves some things out. Like the abstraction inherent in ostension, discussed in my 9/5 post, the abstraction inherent in narrative is by no means arbitrary. It is constrained by what is “really there” in experience, but also by our immediate goals in analysis. To understand certain things (why I play guitar) we abstract certain things from experience. To understand others (why my sister likes red) we abstract others. I may have a role in each narrative – but to include every possible fact in experience in which I might conceivably play a role would be an “account”, if you could call it that, far too incoherent to be called a narrative, or, probably, comprehended at all. (Would it stop short of the entirety of the universe?) It certainly would be a poor candidate for “the narrative unity of a life”. So how do we decide WHICH narrative the virtues are supposed to support the development of? (To use the sort of language with which Churchill might not have put up.)

Similarly for tradition. The definition of a tradition as an ongoing argument is one I like, which frees tradition, at least in principle, from being a cage. But if a tradition is an argument, then which side of the argument should the virtues support? Why do we speak of “tradition”, at all? Would it be better to use the plural, “traditions”?

So I am not sure that MacIntyre has removed the arbitrary from his account of the virtues, and placed them on the plane of the knowable, rather than as objects of choice. I’m not sure he hasn’t, either. Maybe the virtues can be defined exactly as those qualities that allow us to navigate the choice of narratives, and decide which of the available candidates is the most central or important for our lives. (Maybe there really is one, and only one, that is best, and not many different but equally good.) Maybe the virtues are exactly those qualities which keep the central argument of a tradition alive and vital, allow it to adapt to changing circumstances, and keep it from degrading into arbitrary authoritarianism, or dying out all together. Maybe it is possible to determine which virtues would facilitate these processes, without begging the question of what the outcome of the process ought to be. Maybe this is even exactly what MacIntyre meant.

At any rate, as I said, a valiant attempt, and a book well worth reading.

Another possible basis for making non-relativistic arguments for moral principles, which is not incompatible with MacIntyre’s (I think) is by appealing to arguments about the evolutionary basis of what we call moral behavior, as I discussed a few weeks ago. Of course, any such argument runs into Hume’s predicament of deriving “ought” from “is”. The fact that certain traits have evolved in us by natural selection does not necessarily mean that we “ought” to give expression to them, or culturally reinforce them. In fact, the idea that we “ought not” formed a large part of moral thinking, when evolved traits were understood exclusively under earlier, “tooth-and-claw” understandings of natural selection. However, if humans have evolved traits by natural selection which tend to produce behaviors which, if practiced, tend to promote the adaptive success and posterity of the human species (both in the past and in the future), then there is a strong argument that those behaviors constitute a part of what is “good for a man” (in MacIntyre’s non-P.C. language. I will continue to try to use “human” or “human being” or other non-gendered language in similar contexts.)

Any argument for morality by natural selection must depend on the idea that society – the social group – is the Number One weapon in homo sapiens arsenal of adaptive strategies. So moral behavior is that which enhances the well-being and stability of the group, and its ability to provide nurturance, support and safety to the men, women and children therein. This does not exclude egoistic as well as altruistic behavior – de Waal, in “Good Natured” points out that without sustaining our own lives, we cannot lend succor to anyone else. But it does call for a balancing act between self- and other-directed behavior, as too much of either can be destructive of the whole. De Waal offers convincing examples and arguments that the rudiments of this balance are clearly discernable in apes and monkeys, and possibly in other social species.

In fact, my “natural historical” conception of morality (8/30 post) is exactly that of a constant, and irreducibly contextual, balance between divergent and possibly even contradictory claims.

Maybe morality, like MacIntyre’s traditions, must be seen as an ongoing argument – an argument amongst ourselves, on matters of general principles, and an argument within ourselves, in every case of practical application. Maybe the best we can hope to do is to clarify what are and are not the proper terms of debate.

References: The books that I referred to in this post are Jean Grimshaw, “Philosophy and Feminist Thinking”, Alasdair MacIntyre, “After Virtue”, and Frans de Waal, “Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals”. (See also de Waal’s earlier “Chimpanzee Politics”.)

A natural history of morals

I’ve been reading a great book, “Philosophy and Feminist Thinking”, by Jean Grimshaw, which I picked up serendipitously at Back Pages Books, in Waltham MA (http://www.backpagesbooks.com/).

As is appropriate for such a broad title, Ms. Grimshaw covers a lot of area, especially for such a short book. She hooked me in an initial section in which, in the course of discussing what it might mean to think of philosophy as “gendered”, she showed, by a very original argument, that, for instance, Kant held views on the nature of women which, to a sexism-aware reader, seem in the context of his general theory of moral behavior, to relegate women to second-class humanity; however, the views of on women, in Kant’s case, could be thrown away, and the general theory would not need to be changed. On the other hand, Aristotle’s teleological theory of natural history led him to see rational thinking as the most characteristic quality, and therefore the most appropriate end or goal, of human beings, because rational thinking derives from language, which is the one quality he saw as being uniquely human. The fact that women have language, but that he believes women not to be rational in the same way as men, thus creates a contradiction in his philosophy; but to eliminate the contradiction by admitting women (or for that matter, slaves) to be fully rational, would undermine parts of his moral and political philosophy which required the good life to be supported by the labor of women and slaves, in order for the full rational nature of humanity to find expression. Thus, Aristotle’s misogyny is integral to his philosophy, and his philosophy is more clearly “gendered” than Kant’s.

In another question she raises in the book, the question of what it might (or might not) mean to speak of women as having a “nature” distinct from men, or of “women’s ethics or values” as being distinct from “men’s”, she brings up some ideas I wish she had developed more fully. She mentions that many of the values which are often seen as being particularly women’s values – caring, attentiveness to relationships, alertness to the feelings of others – are actually behaviors that may be quite practical for survival to a person living powerlessly under the domination of others. A hyper-keen alertness to the feelings and moods of others, for example, is often a characteristic of people who grew up in an abusive environment (my example, not hers). I wish she had explored the political implications of this observation a little more – in particular, does this mean that some of these virtues might eventually dissolve, if we won a more egalitarian world? I hope not!

But what I really want to talk about in this essay, because it gibes in interesting ways with some thinking I’ve been doing, is a little theory of moral behavior that she just sort of casually tosses out in Chapter 7. She is discussing the question of “abstract” vs. “concrete” reasoning, and ideas that “men’s morality” is based on rules and principles, while “women’s morality” is contextual and specific. She points out that, besides being pretty imprecise as to what “women’s moral reasoning” really is, this argument dissolves rather readily into vague mysticism about women’s “intuitive” mental processes. She proposes as an alternative a way of looking at moral behavior that is based on distinguishing between “rules” and “principles”. The definition she uses is that “rules” simply direct behavior: “Do not kill.” “Principles”, on the other hand, direct you to take certain things into consideration: “Consider whether your actions will harm another.” Then, to use an example from her book, a person might hold one rule: “Do not sleep with someone to whom you are not married,” and two principles: “Consider whether your actions will condone immoral behavior,”, and “Consider whether your behavior will stand in the way of maintaining caring and relationships.” A person who chooses to maintain a close relationship to a daughter who was breaking the rule about sex and marriage is thus not seen as behaving in an unprincipled way, but as prioritizing one principle over the other, in a case in which the two led to contradictory behavior.

I think this is a fascinating, and quite compelling analysis. It is also quite close to a theory of moral behavior I’ve been kicking around, which I tend to refer to as my “natural historic” view of morality. (The name implies that this is a theory or hypothesis about what moral behavior in humans is “naturally like”, and not a normative or prescriptive theory, per se.) My natural historical view argues that human morality naturally takes the form of a collection of simple “rules” for behavior, which are not necessarily mutually consistent. (These “rules” in my theory thus play the role of both “rules” and “principles” in Grimshaw’s.) Social or other environmental circumstances have the effect of stimulating or reinforcing some rules, while suppressing others. Different aspects of the particular environmental context may stimulate contradictory rules. The rules, themselves, become part of the stimulus in a feedback mechanism: a rule, once stimulated or “fired”, may serve to have a suppressing or stimulating effect on others. Eventually, some rule (or some reasonably consistent set of rules) wins out, and the person takes moral action. (Of course, gridlock in the form of an inability to come to a decision may also win out.)

This view is consistent with a view of mind that I’ve been developing, under the influence of books like Kosslyn/Koenig “Wet Mind”, Patricia Churchland’s “Neurophilosophy” and George Lakoff’s “Women, Fire and Dangerous Things.” It is also consistent with a growing sense that I have that logical consistency, while certainly important, is grossly over-rated in most traditional philosophy, especially where it bears on the actual behavior of real human beings. (Lakoff’s book is particularly helpful, in this.) Another contributing factor in my thinking about this has come from primate ethological studies such as Jane Goodall’s “In the Shadow of Man”, and Frans de Waal’s “Chimpanzee Politics”. (De Waal’s “Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals” is right at the top of my “to be read” pile.)

Since I’m billing this as a “natural historical” theory, I should provide some ideas on how my hypotheses might be empirically tested. I have, in fact, had some thoughts about this, and about the original source(s) of the rules (in our genes, and/or imbued by socialization), but I think this is a long enough post for now...