Pragmatic Naturalism In Short

Kitcher has a nice, short article about his ethical theory - he calls it pragmatic naturalism - here. I'm going to try an even shorter version here, starting with this caricature:

There are two pieces of cake, and Alphie and Beth both want the larger piece. Their argument gets more and more heated, until finally Beth takes a deep breath and says, "Wait, let's think about this. What would be a good way to divide the cake?"

Alphie answers, "We should each get the same amount of cake."

Beth says, "Yes, that would be fair."

They proceed to divide the pieces of cake so that each gets an equal amount, and both are content.

For Kitcher, the ethical project begins in social conflict: specifically, altruism failures. Alphie and Beth both have desires. Altruism would lead them to satisfy the other's desire. Without sufficient altruism, they come into conflict.

The conflict can be resolved if they can find a rule that they both agree to. Kitcher sees ethics as a social technology for resolving conflicts. There can be progress in ethics, but it's not progress towards some abstract Good (which he doesn't think exists). Rather, it's progress away: away from social conflict.

He compares it to other kinds of technology: there's no "ideal airplane" that engineers are working toward. There are only technical problems - how to go faster, carry more, be more reliable - that can be solved bit by bit. The solutions to the current set of problems reveals, or creates, new problems that must be solved in turn. And so technology progresses.

Without the social technology afforded by ethical principles, hominids would never have gotten beyond small roving bands, Kitcher suggests. Ethics allowed us to live in larger groups, more peaceably. Greater cooperation led to greater evolutionary success. And so ethics progressed.

Ethics is our invention. Human beings do not discover ethical truths....

We create them.

Woo-hooo!

Last night, Maryland's House of Delegates passed a bill allowing same-sex couples to marry. The state senate is expected to pass the bill (they passed a similar bill last year that died in the House), and our wonderful governor, Martin O'Malley, has already said he will sign it. Maryland is now poised to become the eighth state to grant marriage rights regardless of gender.

Opponents will undoubtedly put a referendum on the ballot in November. The most recent polls show 50% of the state is in favor of allowing same-sex marriage, with 44% opposed. Let's hope folks come out and vote in the fall!

The Ethical Project

I'm reading Philip Kitcher's book, The Ethical Project. Tim Dean has an extensive review of it at Ockham's Beard (starts here and goes on for several posts), so I'm not going to try to "blog the book." But I do want to make a few remarks.

Kitcher is quite the polymath, having written on everything from Finnegan's Wake to the philosophy of mathematics. Unfortunately, he isn't a very good writer - the book isn't one of those that grab you and pull you in. (And that's not just my opinion, several commenters at Tim's blog also found it to be a slog.) It is, however, worth the effort. Kitcher's approach is grounded in evolutionary theory, game theory (Kitcher has himself published papers on game theoretical simulations), anthropological and primate studies, and archaeological evidence.

The first surprise for me was that Kitcher sees ethics as a cultural phenomenon - not an instinct. The reason for its existence is to remedy "failures of altruism." For humans to live in large groups - and gain the benefits of division of labor, etc, that come with such groups - they needed to invent mechanisms that led them to be more altruistic than (for example) chimpanzees are. The goal of the first part of the book is to show how this could possibly have happened. He emphasizes that we will likely never know how it actually did happen; he only intends to refute the claim that "you can't get there from here", i.e., there's no way to derive ethics from evolution.

The second surprise was that Kitcher sees the invention of religion as a crucial step in this process. As rules for behavior developed it became necessary to invent some sort of supernatural enforcement for those rules. Most societies believe in a supernatural enforcer: not necessarily a god, though (he mentions one group that believes breaking the rules brings bad luck).

If he's right, then those who say "no morality without God" may, in fact, be correct - just not in the way they think!

Dumbfounded by Morality

Jon Haidt on the reasons people give justifying their moral judgements:

So what’s really clear, you can see it in the videotapes of the experiment, is: people give a reason. When that reason is stripped from them, they give another reason. When the new reason is stripped from them, they reach for another reason. And it’s only when they reach deep into their pocket for another reason, and come up empty-handed, that they enter the state we call “moral dumbfounding.” Because they fully expect to find reasons. They’re surprised when they don’t find reasons. And so in some of the videotapes you can see, they start laughing. But it’s not an “it’s so funny” laugh. It’s more of a nervous-embarrassment puzzled laugh. So it’s a cognitive state where you “know” that something is morally wrong, but you can’t find reasons to justify your belief. Instead of changing your mind about what’s wrong, you just say: “I don’t know, I can’t explain it. I just know it’s wrong.”

So the fact that this state exists indicates that people hold beliefs separate from, or with no need of support from, the justifications that they give. Or another way of saying it is that the knowing that something is wrong and the explaining why are completely separate processes.

Child Sacrifice in Ancient Israel?

I have occasionally come across the claim that ancient Israelites practiced child sacrifice. This is a popular idea on atheist websites - not surprisingly - but I have also encountered it in the scholarly literature. I've been skeptical about about it, but haven't taken the time to look into the evidence in detail. There is at least some evidence of it in the Bible: Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac can be interpreted as a story explaining why child sacrifice is no longer to be practiced.

Apparently the idea is still controversial among scholars and archaeologists. Here's a summary of a recent article that overviews the evidence (via Edward T. Babinski) and comes to a positive conclusion:

DANIEL VAINSTUB, "Human Sacrifices in Canaan and Israel," Beer-sheva 19 (2010), 117-204 (in Hebrew).
"The existence of infant sacrifices in biblical times both in the Canaanite culture and in Israel has been a matter of intense controversy in the scholarship of the last eight decades. Paradoxically, the more relevant data emerges, the wider the scholarly discensus grows. Some hold that the practice never existed among the Canaanites or the Israelites, while others aver that it was a deeply rooted practice both in the Canaanite homeland and the Punic cities of the West. Vainstub's comprehensive, interdisciplinary study of the issue includes an up-to-date survey of the divergent opinions concerning it and offers new insights based on an array of evidence, epigraphic, linguistic, artistic, and literary. The study highlights the significant degree of parallelism among the various sources, and comes to the conclusion that infant sacrifices to Baal by parents were indeed a strongly rooted custom in Bronze and Iron Age Canaan. The practice was taken over by the Israelites, and persisted until its abolition by Josiah. Later on, the practice was limited to the Phoenician coastal area until it was completely eradicated by the Persians there during the 5th century. B.C. Such sacrifices continued in the Phoenician colonies in the West for another 400 years."

And on the seventh day....

Check out Andrew Bernardin's Culinary Commanments:

And finally, the Lord said, For six days shalt thou toil at thy sink and at thy stove. But on the seventh day, thou may use thy cell phone to cry out for pizza. And though that prayer will be answered, thou shalt be charged for it.

Best laugh all week - thanks, Andrew!

To Slurp Or Not To Slurp? That Is The Question....

I want to look at one more argument, this time against moral relativism. It comes from a very nice article by Paul Boghossian. I like this article because it lays out its argument very clearly and is well-written, and because it brings in the parallel between morality and etiquette, which seems to me a very useful one that doesn't get enough attention.

Boghossian starts by noting that people today are relativists about motion (as in Einstein's theory of special relativity) but eliminativists about witches. That is, we think those who condemned and executed the "Salem witches" were just wrong about the existence of people with supernatural powers.

So, is morality more like relative motion, or more like witchcraft? If we give up on absolute morality, can we hang onto a relativistic version of morality, or should we just eliminate moral concepts and language? Boghossian claims that there's no coherent way to retain a relativistic view of morality.

The trouble is that while “Eating beef is wrong” is clearly a normative statement, “Eating beef is wrong relative to the moral code of the Hindus” is just a descriptive remark that carries no normative import whatsoever.  It’s just a way of characterizing what is claimed by a particular moral code, that of the Hindus.  We can see this from the fact that anyone, regardless of their views about eating beef, can agree that eating beef is wrong relative to the moral code of the Hindus.

I think there's a flaw in the argument here. “Eating beef is wrong relative to the moral code of the Hindus” is merely a descriptive statement if made by a sociologist writing a journal article, but if made by a Hindu father to his Hindu son, it might mean much more than that. You can't just take a phrase like that and abstract it from its context: with moral claims, context is crucial. In the context of a father giving his son a chewing-out, the same phrase might carry a heavy non-cognitive burden: "This is the way we do things and you had better act in accordance with it!"

(It carries the further implication, "If you eat beef, you are not a Hindu." Which is to say, "If you eat beef, you are no longer one of us." This shows the implied threat behind moral rules: disobey, and you will be ostracized.)

Basically, I don't think we can make a sharp distinction between moral claims that are absolute, and therefore normative, and those that are relative, and therefore merely descriptive. Relative claims can carry normative weight, too.

We can see this at work in the objection Boghossian considers: what about etiquette? Aren't we all relativists about etiquette? Don't we all accept that it's OK to slurp one's soup in China, but not OK to do so in Buckingham Palace?

The reason is that our relativism about etiquette does not actually dispense with all absolute moral facts.  Rather, we are relativists about etiquette in the sense that, with respect to a restricted range of issues (such as table manners and greetings), we take the correct absolute norm to be “we ought not, other things being equal, offend our hosts.”

This norm is absolute and applies to everyone and at all times.

But there's a problem with this response. Why should we take “we ought not, other things being equal, offend our hosts” as an absolute norm? Why not take it, instead, as the goal in an end-relational sense? "In order not to offend your hosts (at Buckingham Palace) you ought not to slurp your soup."

Again, it all comes down to context. If I am visiting Buckingham Palace I will likely want to avoid personal embarrassment and want to avoid offending my hosts. On the other hand, if a UK political dissident is visiting Buckingham Palace and wants to create an embarrassing situation, he will follow a different dictate, "In order  to offend your hosts (at Buckingham Palace) you ought to slurp your soup."

To my mind, this is a much more satisfactory solution. Etiquette is anchored to the social context, and purely practical questions arising from that context, rather than to some free-floating absolute morality that remains unexplained. 

So why not morality, as well?