Monday, May 7, 2012

Moral expertise

Linking to a paper on the moral intuitions of philosophers, Brian Leiter asks whether there are expert moral intuitions and answers "probably not." I agree with what I think he means, that philosophers cannot be relied upon to have better intuitions than other people. In that sense there are no moral experts. But I think there are such experts in two other senses.

There is, I believe, such a thing as wisdom, and this is often concentrated in religious traditions. So I would expect the Dalai Lama and the Pope to have better moral intuitions than people picked at random. Perhaps I'm wrong about that, and perhaps it would be easy to find religious leaders who are bad people. But my point is really just that not everyone is equal when it comes to wisdom, and that this is relevant with regard to mortal intuitions. The wise are likely to have better intuitions than the rest of us. In that sense there are expert moral intuitions.

Possibly related to this is the fear I feel when I find out that courses on ethics are being taught by people with no philosophical training. Philosophers can certainly develop and encourage bad ways of thinking about ethics, but there are at least some pits that they are unlikely to fall into, and that can be hard for others to avoid, e.g. crude forms of relativism and subjectivism. In that sense I think philosophers do have a kind of expertise.

Following the link Leiter provided led me to this paper on human rights, which looks misguided in a way that I think most philosophers would avoid. The abstract, in part, reads:

A striking feature of contemporary human rights scholarship is the extent to which it has turned its back on the idea that human rights can grounded in a theory of human nature. Philosophers, social scientists, and political and legal theorists thus frequently assert that the classical Enlightenment project of supplying a naturalistic foundation for human rights is dead. The main purpose of this contribution to a new book of essays on human rights is to rebut this pervasive skepticism. Drawing on recent work in the cognitive science of moral judgment, I defend one of the critical premises of ancient philosophy, Enlightenment Rationalism and the modern human rights movement alike: that human beings are moral and political animals, who are endowed with a moral faculty or sense of justice. The chapter thereby seeks to offer a new perspective on an old and venerable argument about the naturalistic foundation of human rights.
This new perspective begins from the observation that whether human beings possess a common moral faculty is not primarily a philosophical, political, or theological question, but an empirical question that belongs in principle in the cognitive and brain sciences, broadly construed. The confident assertions of skeptics such as Michael Ignatieff, Richard Rorty, Gilbert Ryle, Alasdair MacIntyre, Sigmund Freud, Ruth Benedict, Richard Posner, Robert Bork, and many other writers notwithstanding, one cannot therefore simply decide the matter from the armchair. On the contrary, probative evidence and sound scientific argument must be brought to bear. [...]
... classical accounts typically rest on the claim that an innate moral faculty and with it principles of justice, fairness, empathy, and solidarity are written into the very frame of human nature. These themes were particularly influential during the Enlightenment, when the modern human rights movement first emerged. It is precisely this set of ideas that modern cognitive science, liberated from the crippling methodological restrictions of positivism, behaviorism, historicism, and other discredited theoretical frameworks, has recently begun to explicate and to a substantial extent verify. This new trend in the science of human nature, I suggest, has potentially profound implications for the theory and practice of universal human rights.    
One mistake that might be here (I'd have to read the whole paper to tell) is that of thinking that a common faculty of moral judgment would give human beings a special moral status. But surely having the ability to discern moral value is not the same thing as having moral value itself. So if human beings have rights it can't (simply and straightforwardly) be because we have a moral faculty.

Another apparent mistake is the idea that anything about ethics, anything normative, would follow from a discovery about human brains, such as a discovery that they have an innate sense of fairness. From "human beings have an innate tendency to x" it does not follow that x is good. What we naturally consider fair or just might not be fair or just. Mill points this out, I think, in Utilitarianism. Familiarity with that kind of insight is the kind of expertise that moral philosophers have, and that others often appear to lack.

This point might seem to be the same as the point in the paragraph before it, but it's not. Even if we have the ability to tell what really is just I don't think it follows immediately that we have any moral value ourselves. The ability to tell what is right is a good thing, of course, so we might have value just as possessors of this ability. But this value might not be very great, for instance if we never use our ability for good, or if telling what is right and what is wrong is supremely easy for every being, so that beings that have the ability to do so are nothing special. Perhaps more to the point, from the fact that a being can tell what is just it does not follow that one must not, say, beat or enslave that being.

Well, that's probably enough for a critique of a paper that I haven't read. The key mistake I think is here:
whether human beings possess a common moral faculty is not primarily a philosophical, political, or theological question, but an empirical question that belongs in principle in the cognitive and brain sciences, broadly construed
The empirical question is whether human beings possess a "moral faculty," i.e. something that scientists call a moral faculty.  Whether they possess a moral faculty (i.e. whether this faculty, if it exists, actually identifies what is right) is a question for ethicists, i.e. moral philosophers, i.e. philosophers. These philosophers might well include scientists. Indeed, they include everyone who thinks about what is right and what is wrong. But doing that is not "an empirical question that belongs in principle in the cognitive and brain sciences, broadly construed." 


The author of the article wants to bring together work in several disciplines, "including experimental philosophy, developmental and social psychology, cognitive neuroscience, primatology, anthropology, comparative criminal law, and other fields." Good reason to be suspicious of experimental philosophy is given by Lars Hertzberg here. 

6 comments:

  1. One reason it could be easy to find bad examples in the religious case is attention bias: the bad examples stick out. But then I suppose we could do some experimental philosophy on the clergy and find out the truth. ;)

    Perhaps one reason to be suspicious of the search for a "moral faculty" would turn on what kind of conception of morality is being presupposed. My "intuition" is that if "the moral" is broad in the sense articulated by Murdoch--or more recently, by Crary--then it would be surprising if there is a special faculty dedicated to moral thought...

    ReplyDelete
  2. Yes, bad examples of religious leaders are likely to stick out. And some religions allow almost anyone to set themselves up as a leader, and bad people are likely to be attracted to that kind of power (which doesn't mean good people aren't, or that only bad people will take up these positions). We could indeed do some empirical work on this, which would be fine with me. From time to time I probably need reminding of the value that empirical work can have. But it wouldn't involve brain scans, and wouldn't pretend to be independent of some judgment about who counts as moral or wise in the first place.

    I hadn't thought about the point about Murdoch and Crary, but it's a good one. Thanks.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Religious leaders and those trained in philosophy might have a better grasp of the field of than the average person. But perversely, this better grasp itself might put at their disposal more ingenious and inconspicuous excuses for disregarding uncomfortable considerations than are available to the average person.

    If you already know at least something about X, this makes it easier to have beliefs about X, regardless of what those beliefs are. In a famous experiment - in social psychology, not philosophy - in the 1970s, Israeli students were asked if West Germany and East Germany were more similar to each other than Sri Lanka and Nepal; 67% said yes. Then another group of Israeli students were asked if West Germany and East Germany were more different from each other than Sri Lanka and Nepal; 70% said yes.

    This was because the subjects knew at least something about the two Germanies, while they knew very little about Nepal and Sri Lanka. They could bring to mind both similarities between the two Germanies (both were inhabited by Germans) and differences (one was in the Western and one in the Eastern bloc). And the mere fact that the subjects came up with quantitatively more similarities in the case of the two Germanies "proved" that they were more similar, while the fact that the subjects also came up with quantitatively more differences "proved" in turn that they were more different.

    And there seems to be no reason to suppose that philosophy is any different. Knowing both the pros and cons of (say) Kantian ethics inside out might not make you more fairly disposed towards Kantian ethics at all. If you have external reasons for wanting to dislike Kantian ethics, the cons offer themselves spontaneously from the back of your mind, and if the opposite, the pros offer themselves.

    From time to time I probably need reminding of the value that empirical work can have.

    I'm pleased to be able to offer you the above reminder.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Thanks, Tommi.

    I don't know whether philosophy can make people either more moral or better at thinking about moral issues (and as I type this I wonder whether there are really such things as moral issues at all). Some moral philosophy seems almost designed to make people worse, as Timothy Chappell and Anscombe have pointed out (although Anscombe thinks it doesn't actually make them any worse than they already are). But there is a certain kind of mistake that philosophy should make less likely. This mistake includes believing in crude forms of relativism and getting easily confused about is/ought relations. So philosophy might do some good as well as some harm.

    Knowing the pros and cons of Kantianism might help here, I think. You still might be a dreadful person, but if you really know the literature on Kant's ethics well then there are certain kinds of mistakes you will be much less likely to make. You probably won't think, for instance, "What could reason possibly have to do with ethics?" Some people take it for granted that ethics is all about feelings, and since your feelings are just as valid as mine, we cannot say who is right or wrong. Philosophy can help with this. But can it also hurt? Yes. And might the cons of learning about Kant outweigh or balance the pros? Yes, they might.

    Religion, I think, is different. It seems to me that, for example, the teachings of the Buddha and of the Catholic Church have appealed to people for so many years at least partly because they have been found to have some wisdom in them. Anyone who rises in the ranks of these communities is likely to have absorbed some of this wisdom. This is a different kind of thing from philosophical knowledge (e.g. knowledge of arguments for and against this or that theory), and more likely to have good results, morally speaking. Or so I am inclined to believe.

    ReplyDelete
  5. We don't have any deep disagreement here. But I feel like adding, to your remark about the longevity of religious doctrines being caused by their wisdom: it's either that or the doctrines are so vague and ambiguous that every different culture and every historical period can project onto them what it likes.

    (I'm not suggesting that you do, but) I certainly don't usually place ethical doctrines which I think are wrong in order of profundity, or even if I do sometimes, the ethico-religious doctrines do not come before the merely ethical doctrines. I think that Kant is wrong, and that the Pope is wrong, and that they're wrong in qualitatively quite similar, equally straightforward ways.

    One of my favourite short stories - I was so impressed by it that when the university's magazine once asked me to write an essay on anything I liked, I wrote on it - is "Nixon in Hell", the introductory chapter to Richard Ned Lebow's The Tragic Vision of Politics. In it, Richard Nixon dies and goes to Hell - where he meets Pope Pius XII, who has been condemned to Hell for failing to uphold the virtues which, due to pride and cowardice, he had managed to convince both himself and others that he was in fact upholding while serving as the Pope.

    The message of the story - or the message I take away from it at any rate - is that no amount of earthly esteem enjoyed by the actors can guarantee the moral acceptability of a given course of action; and that, if the actors are in fact widely esteemed, that is on the contrary an aggravating circumstance, as it is exceptionally irresponsible to put to good ends the esteem that would have guaranteed good ends a hearing if put to their use instead. So not only can the Pope sin, but he can sin in ways that are foreclosed for most others.

    ReplyDelete
  6. I feel like adding, to your remark about the longevity of religious doctrines being caused by their wisdom: it's either that or the doctrines are so vague and ambiguous that every different culture and every historical period can project onto them what it likes.

    Yes, there is that. Longevity alone certainly does not prove wisdom.

    not only can the Pope sin, but he can sin in ways that are foreclosed for most others.

    I agree with this too.

    ReplyDelete