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.
I thought this passage was especially significant (bold-faced emphasis is mine):
This view goes counter to the glass-half-empty gloom of orthodox Christianity, which wrings its hands about the wretched depravity of human nature and the alleged brokenness of the world. It suggests that we’re not inherently evil, merely imperfect; and that the world isn’t broken, merely unfinished. (And if that’s Pelagianism, so be it.)
1. D.C. Toedt,
[blockquote](And if that’s Pelagianism, so be it.)[/blockquote]
You are correct. That is Pelagianism.
[blockquote]This view goes counter to the glass-half-empty gloom of orthodox Christianity[/blockquote]
Is it a “glass-half-empty gloom” or is it an accurate perception?
[blockquote]IX. Of Original or Birth Sin.
Original sin standeth not in the following of Adam, (as the Pelagians do vainly talk;) but it
is the fault and corruption of the Nature of every man, that naturally is engendered of the
offspring of Adam; whereby man is very far gone from original righteousness, and is of his
own nature inclined to evil, so that the flesh lusteth always contrary to the Spirit; and
therefore in every person born into this world, it deserveth God’s wrath and damnation.
And this infection of nature doth remain, yea in them that are regenerated; whereby the lust
of the flesh, (which some do expound the wisdom, some
sensuality, some the affection, some the desire, of the flesh), is not subject to the Law of
God. And although there is no condemnation for them that believe and are baptized; yet the
Apostle doth confess, that concupiscence and lust hath of itself the nature of sin.[/blockquote]
D.C. How many of the 39 Articles could you actually agree with?
“…emotional approach to morality is an epochal change.”
Not really. Didn’t Eve use that approach to determine that it was good to try the fruit that Satan said was good but God said was bad? Christianity ushered in an era of virtues, law, and grace but there are always Anarchists or rebellious people whose law is there own good feelings.
I am reminded of one of those rebellious ones who ruled her morality by her own feelings of right and wrong. After she died, the phrase, “Somebody, somewhere, love me” was found many times. It was Madalyn Murray O’Hair. We find our love in He who offers us new life and a purpose for living. Like a broken horse is useful while a wild one is not, so a man or woman broken for the good use of our Creator is useful and much loved.
We can either be broken to the Truth or broken by our own emotional approach to morality.
Don
In the last several years, Haidt and his colleagues have received a lot of play in the press for their study of moral psychology. What they don’t tell you in such stories is how their experiments’ assumptions are deeply indebted to moral philosophers such as David Hume. If they did inform you properly about the backdrop to their “social intuitionist” moral psychology, then their argument would cease to have the stamp of ‘Science says so’. They would be perceived, as they indeed are, as contributors to one among many respectable but disputed traditions in moral philosophy.
See pages 5-6 where Haidt (with his colleague Bjorklund) explicitly references Hume after explaining how their social intuitionist project is a response to the apparently Kantian work of the famous Lawrence Kohlberg. [url=http://faculty.virginia.edu/haidtlab/articles/haidt.bjorklund.social-intuitionists-answer-6-questions.doc] J. Haidt and F. Bjorklund (2008). Social intuitionists answer six questions about moral psychology. In vol. 3, [i]Moral Psychology: The Neuroscience of Morality: Emotion, Brain Disorders, and Development, edited by Walter Sinnott-Armstrong. Cambridge: MIT Press[/i].[/url]
If you read their papers, the questions they ask their subjects are framed in ways that favor a Hume vs Kant debate (“Rationalists say the real action is in reasoning; intuitionists say it’s in quick intuitions, gut feelings and moral emotions.”) but entirely exclude other traditions such as Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas.
#4.newcollegegrad,
This sounds to me like a blend of Lawrence Kohlberg and Carol Gilligan. His idea of morality was questioned by Gilligan (a feminist) because it was a “male” morality. The idea of community and cooperation was her Feminine contribution to understanding moral development. Kohlberg’s morality was essentially cognitive and posited that when exposed to a higher level of morality individuals would chose that path. At least he gave Christ credit for operating on the highest level of morality. I would grant that the developmental model helps us understand the moral development of an individual but I am less certain that humankind has made much moral progress in an evolutionary sense.
[i]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.â€[/i]
I do think that one is the line worth exploring.
Correct Doctrine with lousy behavior is not winning many converts.
#6. Albany,
Cognitive ability is a necessary but not sufficient condition for moral behavior. Ask the late Ted Bundy about this one. That is also why severely cognitively impaired individuals are not held to the same standard of legal or moral behavior.
[blockquote]Correct Doctrine with lousy behavior is not winning many converts[/blockquote] I assume you are not arguing against correct doctrine.
I assume you aren’t arguing for lousy behavior.
The issue, of course, isn’t “cognitive ability” but “moral reasoning” not correlating to moral behavior. You cannot substitute the one term for the other and do justice to Brook’s point.
As the article says, “…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.â€
That’s the interesting point worth discussing.
What counts as moral reasoning and moral behavior in a given experiment is critical to conclusions about their correlation. Moreover, people who stress the importance of moral reasoning, often disagree on the form and content of those teachings. Giving a person a book of categorical imperatives to memorize is a very different than participating in two decades of formation as a Missionary of Charity in Calcutta. Does the work of Haidt et al really generalize over all significant moral traditions past and present? I doubt it.
The kinds of studies Haidt and colleagues such as Joshua Greene have conducted involve asking questions about a ‘series of personal and impersonal moral dilemmas as well as non-moral dilemmas, all of which involved complex narratives’ (Vendantam, WashPost, 2007). For instance: should the subject divert a runaway trolley that would kill five people to another set of tracks though it would kill one person; or should the subject push a person in to block the trolley and save the lives of five persons? Despite the dilemmas’ similarities, most subjects affirmed the first proposition but declined the second. Greene et al., relying on double effect, labeled the first dilemma impersonal because killing the person is a consequence of diverting the trolley whereas the second dilemma was personal because killing the person is the act that diverts the trolley.
If the world is merely imperfect and can be corrected then why has it not done so? There is always a scientific reason why it is not done so and they ring hollow. However, the best reason is from Geneses. Humanity is fallen and it naturally sins. That is why we have Easter.
Oh blimey – an intro. philosophy class would have helped the argument. Naturalistic fallacy anyone? Here it’s nicely critiqued in a webcomic
http://chaospet.com/2009/04/07/126-the-end-of-philosophy/
Here a less diagrammatic take:
http://branemrys.blogspot.com/2009/04/end-of-philosophy.html
Two further points are worth making:
1. A Christian theology of Creation views all reality simultaneously as essentially good and yet fundamentally flawed – with emphasis upon the etymology of “essential†and “fundamentalâ€, since [i]esse[/i] does not equate with [i]fundus[/i]. And so, we may conclude that human nature from the perspective of Christian theology is basically ambivalent, from which state we do indeed need external and internal rescuing.
2. Ethics is a modern invention. The tradition of Christian moral formation (as per driver8’s second link, #12) is something else again. A true Christian baptismal theology would know this to issue in what some scholars would term the NT Catechetical form, and thereafter the cultivation of a certain [i]habitus[/i] via crucial forms of pedagogy.
In other words, we need not even debate this matter in the world’s terms at all …
re #13 – For Augustine that human nature is corrupt does not lead to the conclusion that human nature is ambivalent if that means of neutral value. The nature is good. Anything that has [i]esse[/i] is good. Even the sheer failure of refusing what befits human nature cannot change that.
re #10 – The experiment does not work if the subjects insist that there are alternatives, as you rightly do, and that is one important reason that such experiments are not generalizable over all moral traditions. Another reason to doubt whether the results are generalizable is that very little of human life resembles a dilemma such as the trolley problem. For more traditional communities, what so-and-so deserves from me is not analyzable in terms of mere sympathy or categorical obligations: the sort of candor that I owe my wife is not the same as I owe my children or my neighbor or my cousin or my pastor or my employer. But such understandings of love and desert make for poor experiments.
Whenever a person trumpets the End of Philosophy or suchlike, you can be pretty sure it is because he or she artificially limits the range of acceptable questions and answers. Like the prewar logical positivists respecting metaphysics and theology. In the case of Brooks, he accepts such limits without scrutinizing his sources adequately.
Thanks new college grad; ambivalent >adj. having mixed feelings or contradictory ideas about something or someone. Enough said …
True; the bad/evil is parasitic upon ‘being’ for St Augustine, since it has no ontological ‘reality’. But that’s the point: thereafter false desire corrupts the original good nature.
As for matters of change: frankly ouch! Since the entire point of the Incarnation for St Aug is to radically alter fallen human nature, by enabling once again for us to know both the Good and Desire for the Good. Enough said …
Br. Michael [#__] asks: “If the world is merely imperfect and can be corrected then why has it not done so?”
First, in #1, I didn’t say the world could be “corrected” (which presupposes a known state of “correctness”). I said the world was “unfinished.”
I don’t know when the world will be “finished” (if ever), nor what that state will look like. But the overall trend over the past 13.7 billion years is unmistakably (although not monotonically) ‘positive’ — viz., more to our liking.
If you don’t believe that, ask yourself the thought-experiment question posed by Gregg Easterbrook in his book The Progress Paradox: Would you agree to permanently trade places with a random person who lived X centuries ago? Almost certainly not — at least not if you devoted even a moment’s consideration to how much shorter and less pleasant the remainder of your life would likely be, in any number of respects.
And my own variation on that question: Is it likely that a random ‘Andrew,’ living at any given time in history, would agree to permanently switch lives with a random ‘Bob’ living XÂ centuries in Andrew’s past? Once again, probably not, for much the same reason (although there’s much more room for variation here).
This suggests that overall, things have been persistently getting better. The improvement hasn’t been steady, nor has it been consistent, but it’s definitely been persistent.
That’s one of the key underpinnings of my own sense that — in the very, very long term — things will turn out unimaginably well. I tend to think of that sense as a kind of trust in the Creator.
I’m not troubled that this ongoing evolution of the Creation hasn’t yet resulted in a ‘perfect’ universe. The Creation is immense, its component parts iimmensely complicated. You might as well ask, if cancer is curable, why hasn’t it been? Cf. also Hamlet, Act 1 scene 5: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
Y’all need to read the whole Brooks column, especially this passage:
Our “friends,” of course, can be both present and past. In his biography of Isaac Newton, James Gleick recounts how the young Newton, in his notebook, extended something attributed to Aristotle: Amicus Plato amicus Aristoteles magis amica veritas: Plato is my friend, Aristotle is my friend — but truth is my greater friend.
And in the end, truth has to be discerned from what we can confirm by observation of the Creation (cf. Rom. 1.20), not by over-exalting the fruits of our not-always-reliable imaginations.
re #17, I agree with much of your sentiments in your first post D.C. Toedt, but I don’t see that as compromising my affection for historic Christianity. Wretched depravity, gloom, brokenness? Even Augustine acknowledges in [i]The City of God[/i] that “no vice is so entirely contrary to [human] nature as to destroy even the last vestiges of that nature” and a “man [is] drawn by the laws of his nature, so to speak, to enter into a … peaceful association with his fellow men” (19.12). The teaching of original sin does not entail that humans are not often kindly towards their families and communities.
That being said, take a different block quote from Brooks:
[blockquote] 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.â€[/blockquote]
What foods we enjoy is partly a function of personal taste but just as importantly it is a function of culture. That someone raised on white sauces does not find Vindaloo her cup of tea does not have a very useful evolutionary explanation. That she was born in 1910 and has lived her whole life on a farm in Norway, a socio-historical explanation, is a better explanation. True, people’s palates can be educated to enjoy a wider range of foods. But even this is a function of a particular culture, and usually such cosmopolitan approaches repackages the culinary traditions they present to diners. How often have you seen goat on the menu at an Indian restaurant in the U.S.?
Brooks does not delve into the background and assumptions for the project of Haidt et al. If Brooks did, it might be clearer that their project is theory-laden and not just a matter of observation. That is my judgment from having read several of their papers while writing a section of my Ph.D. Certainly, my judgment is disputable, but I am not basing it on Brook’s secondhand account.
newcollegegrad [#18], on Sundays I hear a steady stream of sermons emphasizing (to various degrees) how broken we humans are, how only Jesus can restore us to the blissful status quo ante that supposedly existed in Eden before the Fall. I don’t think it’s an accident that a couple of our priests seem to be quite taken with the phrase from the old BCP, “and there is no health in us.” It’s hard to give much credence to those sermon passages when the evidence weighs so heavily against such an extremist view. (I’ve said pretty much the same thing to the preachers.)
D.C. Toedt [#19] It’s a strong tradition, preaching and penitential, to which you refer. It is important to balance those Christian rhetorical traditions with others that exist within the tradition; Augustine illustrates both sides of this. There is a lot of brokenness in human beings–stupidity, cruelty, hubris. The phrase “and there is no health in us” recognizes that fact and functions in a way similar to the phrase “we are but dust”. If a priest gets too caught up with those phrases, we should not conclude that the best representatives of the tradition really thought humans were piles of dust (albeit loquacious). Likewise, a closing phrase that an Orthodox friend uses sometimes in his letters is “the least of monks”, although he is an archbishop and a Ph.D. from a prestigious university. This is in keeping with Mark 9.35 where Jesus teaches his disciples, who had been arguing about who was the greatest, that “Whoever wants to be first must take last place and be the servant of everyone else.” The spiritual value of such language is lost if its champions or detractors interpret it too woodenly.
If your priests are not doing an adequate job of balancing such rhetoric, and you call them out, then I think we owe you thanks.
#4, Glad to you see you new college grads are up on your Hume.
I respect Brooks’ erudition, so I will assume his editor was responsible for the wildly exaggerated claim made in this article’s headline. Far from being the “end of philosophy” this article provides empirical support for David Hume’s idea that valuation is, if not non-cognitive, non-rational insofar as the process of moral decision making relies on sentiment rather than cognition:
[blockquote][Morality] “implies some sentiment common to all mankind, which recommends the same object to general approbation, and makes every man, or most men, agree in the same opinion or decision concerning it. It also implies some sentiment, so universal and comprehensive as to extend to all mankind, and render the actions and conduct, even of the persons the most remote, an object of applause or censure, according as they agree or disagree with that rule of right which is established. These two requisite circumstances belong alone to the sentiment of humanity here insisted on†[/blockquote]
Hume also discussed the role that cooperation plays in morality, and provided good arguments against finding the basis of moral thinking in self interest. If you find the approach discussed in Brooks’ article congenial and want to learn more about, I recommend starting with Hume rather than Haidt. You might even want to look at G. E. Moore next. This qoute from Brooks’ article could’ve come straight from Moore:
[blockquote] 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. [/blockquote]
It’s hardly the time to proclaim “the end of philosophy” just as it’s proving so prescient and useful.
Tis already Holy Saturday with us, and so helpful to ponder with von Balthasar the Living Word’s Stillness and Silence in the Grave …
Pondering too the significance of the Ridley Draft of the Covenant at this ever so late stage …
That said, apart from my citing the COD’s definition of “ambivalentâ€, we are in heated agreement, I see – notably re matters of taste. And [i]City of God[/i] Book 19’s referencing that even robbers have their sense of justice is an important reminder when we are in solidarity at the foot of Jesus’ Cross. I guess thereafter much depends upon how one construes the language of ‘resurrection’ and its consequences for a transformation of morality. In the context of this discussion, frankly, I have found Neil B MacDonald, [i]Karl Barth and the Strange New World within the Bible: Barth, Wittgenstein, and the Metadilemmas of the Enlightenment[/i] (Paternoster, rev ed 2001) most helpful. Naturally Hume sets us off running … Enjoy!