Morality: A Kludge of Kludges

Will,
I think the conclusions you draw from this lecture are quite right--the "fill-in-the-blanks slates" is a great way of describing innate parameters. But I have two minor quibbles: one, Stich's evidence that comes from questioning different cultures about moral intuitions is pretty dubious. I remember Georges Rey had a great critique of it that he might or might not have written up (but whose details unfortunately elude me now).

Secondly, how do you reconcile the notion posited here that "'natural' norms...lead to relatively terrible societies" with your recent claim that "Darwinian liberals, understanding the benefits and artificiality of civilization, are its best defenders." It seems to me, at least from Gould's interpretation of this Darwinian insight in The Mismeasure of Man that humans have evolved social capacities such that we will create liberal societies. Evolved cognitive skills are precisely what allow us to overcome the "survival of the fittest" of nature (which is why Darwin hated Spencer's work).

In general, though, I love your promotions of the work of Stich, Cherniak and others into the blogosphere.

-Jeremy

Jeremy, If you can point me to Georges' critique, if it is indeed written up, I'd love to see it.

"how do you reconcile the notion posited here that "'natural' norms...lead to relatively terrible societies" with your recent claim that "Darwinian liberals, understanding the benefits and artificiality of civilization, are its best defenders." "

I think I'm saying the same thing in both cases. Default "morality" sucks. The study of evolution helps us to see that, and helps us to see the value resisting default morality. We obviously can't do anything it is impossible for us to do, so if we've managed to develop a more civilized morality, then it is possible for us to do it. But the fact that we can play tennis doesn't mean that it is somehow in our evolved nature to play tennis.

Darwin hated Spencer's work because Spencer had a competing (and wrong) theory of biological evolution. Darwin and Spencer had roughly the same politics -- neither was a survival-of-the-fittest = good "social Darwinist" -- except that Spencer was a much more sophisticated political theorist.

I should say, I don't really know much about Darwin hating Spencer. I just assumed he'd have more of a beef on the science than the politics, since they were both fairly progressive liberal types.

"One thing I think some ev psych fans have a hard time getting their heads around is that morality–the system of norms that regulates individual behavior and enables social coordination–is variable by “design,” and that our evolved moral capacities are largely norm-acquisition devices which must wait to be calibrated by enculturation. We’re “fill-in-the-blanks slates” not blank slates"

Ok, I accept that. I think most of us in fact do.

Many things do appear to have a common basis - the variation is just due to the particularities of the culture. Monkeys may have an in-built system of "fairness," yet girl monkeys everywhere also have lower social status to boy monkeys and belong to them in the name of the tribe.

It's just the social features of the particular tribe that differ. The Woodabe/Bororo say as a new husband you can't ever speak to your mother-in-law; the traditional Pashtun say you shouldn't even be able to see her face. Here in the West we tell "mother-in-law" jokes, which have the same effect of tabooing the wife's mother - as the father's property, yes?

Isn't that suggestive that an ancient monkey law is still in force underneath the cultural expression?

Will,

What do you think of Nichols and Stich's "mindreading?" I'm not sure if they were entirely fair to Dennett's rationality theory, but then again Dennett is (intentionally?) vague on a lot of the underlying aspects. That said, I still hold that the "Linda the feminist bank teller" experiment is more of an example of psychological trickery and agent ignorance than a refutation of Dennett's "hard line." But I will give N&S a lot more credit than those who say they just dumped yet another boxology on us.

Will,
Sadly, I can't find Georges's critique on his site. I thought he'd written it out but it might have been one of those things that stays in his head until a beer or two and the mention of Stich and moral intuitions. I'll try to re-create it but I'm sure I'll mess it up (as I often did when paraphrasing Georges, at least according to Georges).

The focus of his critique was around the legitimacy of asking various people about their 'moral intuitions' to learn about their moral intuitions. The latter, non-scare quoted type, I think Georges felt, was actually entokened somehow (like everything in his CRTT), and the mental representation was the thing in question, not the (not necessarily related) linguistic expression of "I approve" or something of the like by a participant in a study. Furthermore, I think he had a related problem with the asking of such questions in different languages based on Quine's Indeterminacy of Translation.

I'll defer to your understanding of the relationship between Darwin and Spencer since I've essentially studied only the former. My understanding was that Darwin felt that Spencer's work was too encouraging of eugenics and Social Darwinism even if Spencer himself wasn't, but I don't know how well that relates to Spencer, i.e. whether Darwin was just misinterpreting him or not.

I'm familiar with Georges' stuff on semantic access. His critique is related to that? I worry he and the whole Fodor/Chomsky contingent have a big problem handling emotion, and I think it is increasingly clear that moral judgment is just saturated with emotion. So I'm skeptical of the relevance of CRTT-based lines of attack. Yet of course self-reports have lots of problems, since our access to our emotions can be pretty unreliable, too. The first half of my Cato paper on happiness research is largely about that. But it's also better than nothing. And a lot of work is getting more directly biological, and doesn't all depend on self-reports. My friend Paul Zak measures oxytocin levels before and after trust games, for example.

LS,
Since the publication of Mindreading in 2003, they've gone back on a lot of the "Theory theory" stuff to acknowledge more of a "hybrid Theory-Simulation" model more like Alvin Goldman's in Simulating Minds. I think both theories are quite right to disregard Dennett's stance of imputing beliefs with ideal rationality, although Goldman's explains how and why we do so more effectively. There are several problems with Dennett's theory, and the enumeration of them has arguably been the key project of the University of Maryland Philosophy Department over the last 20 years. To cite a few things (I won't link as that'd turn on Will's spammer) among them are Chris Cherniak's Minimal Rationality which outlines a more reasonable model of rationality that might actually be computationally efficient to execute; the aforementioned Steve Stich's The Fragmentation of Reason which challenges the idea that evolution would create anything like ideal rationality, the also aforementioned Georges Rey's article "Dennett's Unrealistic Psychology" in Philosophical Topics vol 22 (1994), and, finally a recent piece by Peter Carruthers, "How We Know Our Own Minds: The Relationship Between Mindreading and Metacognition" which argues that we don't even attribute beliefs to ourselves along a model of ideal rationality.

Just FYI, For those who don't know, and think this sounds like inside baseball, that's because it is. Like Jeremy now, I was a grad student philosophy at the U of MD, and during my first stint there (before dropping out, and then coming back to do political philosophy, and then dropping out again) I focused on mind and language. I was a Michael Devitt advisee before he left, and tend to find Devitt persuasive, so my views are a bit out of step with the more nativist approaches of Rey, Pietroski, and Carruthers, but these are the guys I learned mind and language from (in addition to Kapitan and Buller at NIU). As my views in general become more sociological, I am increasingly convinced that intellectual genealogy matters a lot. But not everyone rubs off on you equally. Buller's David Hull-style naturalism stuck with me, as does his way of thinking about ev psych. And Devitt's combination of Australian and Kripkean realism with severe Quinean nominalism is in my blood. And though I never took a class with Cherniak, I did have weird conversations with him late at night in Skinner Hall, and Minimal Rationality is I think basically the best book in naturalistic epistemology ever. It stuck. I've ended up being very influenced by the Stich and his students, as well as by Jesse Prinz, Josh Knobe and others, like Jon Haidt. But since I spent so much time with Maryland rationalists, the nouveau sentimentalism seems pretty transgressive to me, though I'm feeling pretty sure of it.

Well, that was self-indulgent.

A couple of points:

Yes, I think Georges's semantic access stuff is related, but I'm not as familiar with that as I am about his work about rationality and intentionality, so I don't want to speak to said relationships.

Secondly, there are indeed eerily substantive similarities between philosophy geek-talk and baseball geek-talk.

Finally, to set the record straight, I'm also "away" from Maryland at the time being (trying to work something like full time on my site).

As for how it pertains to my "intellectual genealogy:" I got to Maryland after Devitt left, but had a friend from college who studied with him at CUNY (and now blogs as Akhbar at The Enlightened Despot) who was willing to engage me in more than a few arguments by proxy. I liked his ideas, but ultimately sided with the nativists. However, I felt like my nativism was pretty tantamount to what you aptly called 'fill-in-the-blank-slates" so I'm not sure if I'm as far to one side of the debate as are Carruthers and Rey. I agree about Cherniak and my relationship with him was similar--he indulged me in a few discussions about epistemology and pragmatism because I got to TA for him (which ended up being one of my best experiences in grad school), but never took a class with him. I actually got into Steve Stich as an undergraduate taking classes from a recent Rutgers graduate, and never really got into Prinz (though who knows what the future holds; I'm currently trying to get through Owen Flanagan's The Really Hard Problem and so far it seems he's more Prinz-influenced than what I'm used to).

That was no less self-indulgent...I'll try to keep most of what I say to be in more normal English. Starting now.

<<The norms that undergird the peaceful liberal order of impersonal, extended, massively positive-sum exchange are the result of generations of often self-conscious resistance to the “factory defaults.” >>
I'm not too sure about the "often self-conscious" part of that statement. There is an interesting difference between the views of Hayek and Nozick on this question.

There are what you might consider “factory default” settings. (Which involves a lot of out-group slaughter, I’m afraid.) So, yes, certain configurations of moral sentiments, certain systems of norms, are more “natural” than others.

Your certainty about both the scope and the content of the "factory defaults" is completely unjustified. The behavior of complex adaptive systems is highly sensitive to initial conditions and you're dealing with at least three doozies here: sensitivity of gene expression to environmental inputs (genetic determinism is not in good odor these days), development of synaptic pathways in the human brain, and human cultural development. Approaching the study of such complex interacting systems with strongly held preconceived notions about what is "natural" seems unhelpful.

First, all observed outcomes, which will cover a large range due to the sensitivity to initial conditions and the large number of points of interaction, will be equally "natural". Second, there is likely to be a large universe of unobserved possible outcomes that are also "natural", but have thus far remained unexplored by the system. Third, the development of new forms with surprising characteristics (like for instance, a "liberal order of impersonal, extended, massively positive-sum exchange") is an entirely predictable product of the behavior of complex adaptive systems, and in the case at issue here is not necessarily the result of "self-conscious resistance to the 'factory defaults'". And finally, strongly held preconceived notions increase the likelihood of selection bias, cherry picking, etc.

The idea that man is "naturally" a savage brute who needs rules to separate him from his base instincts is one of the most important assumptions underlying arguments for strongly authoritarian control. Frankly, it seems to me that much of what passes for "self-conscious resistance to the 'factory defaults'" is little more than self serving panegyrics to the status quo. I'm still a little confused as to why a self identifying libertarian is carrying water so enthusiastically for such an agenda.

will, this is a great lecture. for the first 30 minutes or so all i could think about was leon kass. i am glad stich brought him up, and then gave him as much time as he deserves. anyway, you should totally get dan kelly on bhtv, for realz.