20 January 2008

The catalyst for my examination of morality stems immediately from books and essays recently published on the topic, as if morality should be a topic 'in vogue' again. Particularly, I refer to Professor Steven Pinker's latest article, "The Moral Instinct" (The New York Times, 13 January 2008), in which he begins by invoking Mother Teresa, Bill Gates, and Norman Borlaug before going on to explain morality as a sixth sense. As he discusses it, morality is a topic "close to our conception of the meaning of life" and is what "gives each of us the sense that we are worthy human beings". Rather than being a "trick of the brain", Pinker declares that morality as "the science of the moral sense" can be a means to strengthen our "grounds for being moral".

In his section "The Moralization Switch", Pinker likens moralization to a "mind-set" and "psychological state that can be turned on and off like a switch". He names two 'hallmarks' of moralization that really come from two great minds before him: Immanuel Kant and Bertrand Russell, respectively. The first hallmark is the application or litmus test of universality - that a moral act would be deemed so and agreed upon universally. The second hallmark is that of retribution - "divine retribution" - for immoral acts.

Of course, there is a fatal flaw in the science of morals approach and in the universality approach in moralization, as Nietzsche points out:

"In all 'science of morals' so far one thing was lacking, strange as it may sound: the problem of morality itself; what was lacking was any suspicion that there was something problematic here. [...] indeed, in the last analysis a kind of denial that this morality might ever be considered problematic - certainly the very opposite of an examination, analysis, questioning, and vivisection of this very faith" (Beyond Good and Evil, "Natural History of Morals," 186).

"All these moralities that address themselves to the individual, for the sake of his 'happiness', as...recipes against his passions, his good and bad inclinations insofar as they have the will to power and want to play the master...all of them baroque and unreasonable in form - because they address themselves to 'all', because they generalize where one must not generalize" (ibid, 198).

...and by this measure, one would be wise to heed Descartes dictum: de omnibus dubitandum (of everything, is to be doubted)...

Nietzsche not withstanding, Pinker makes a good point that through the science of morals, we can track the shifting of perspectives of erstwhile moralizations to amoralization and vice-versa. In particular, he discusses the switch to moralization of smoking when findings concluded its possible harm to others. Likewise, he discusses the switch to amoralization of divorce, sexuality, and some diseases, categorizing them with lifestyles of the present. Here, there is a sense that when the act harms others, it is immoral, but when the harm is contained to the individual only, it is not immoral - or not for us to deem immoral.

There is a suspicion of slippery contingencies here...

Indeed, we learn of another contingency in his section "Reasoning nd Rationalizing" - where he cites Philippa Foot's and Judith Jarvis Thomson's "Trolley Problem" to add the 'hands-on/hands-off' factor as another category in determining (im)moral behavior:

"On your morning walk, you see a trolley car hurtling down the track, the conductor slumped over the controls. In the path of the trolley are five men working on the track, oblivious to the danger. You are standing at a fork in the track and can pull a lever that will divert the trolley onto a spur, saving the five men. Unfortunately, the trolley would then run over a single worker who is laboring on the spur. Is it permissable to throw the switch, killing one man to save five?"

"Consider now a different scene. You are on a bridge overlooking the tracks and have spotted the runaway trolley bearing down on the five workers. Now the only way to stop the trolley is to throw a heavy object in its path. And the only heavy object within reach is a fat man standing next to you. Should you throw the man off the bridge?"

Foot and Jarvis found that most people answered 'yes' to the first scene and 'no' to the second scene and explained this to a difference "between the acceptability of switch-pulling and man-heaving" as a basis of justification.

Although many would find no problem with the first scene being moral and the second immoral, I vehemently disagree. In both situations, the decision of (im)morality rests in its science and its claims to universality as Nietzsche points out. And the correction to this univesality is a direction Pinker seems to be headed on - perhaps in coincidence with Nietzsche:

"...our moral philosophers...never laid eyes on the real problems of morality; for these emerge only when we compare many moralities" (Beyond Good and Evil, "Natural History of Morals," 186).

As if understanding the critical need to approach morality through a multiplicity of pivotal themas, Pinker cites psychologist Jonathan Haidt's five moral concerns: harm, fairness, community, authority, and purity. Pinker explains that it is how these themes are ranked as a cultural determinant that allows moral sense to be simultaneously universal and variable. Here is where he contributes some interesting insight:

In his section "Is Morality a Figment?", he offers two benchmarks for determining when judgments of our moral sense are aligned with morality:

1) the prevalence of nonzero-sum games where both sides are unselfish, and

2) the interchangeability of perspectives where the rationality for the act cannot depend on the egocentric vantage point of the reasoner (this also happens to be a point identified by Spinoza, Rousseau, Hobbes, Locke, Kant, Rawls, and Singer).

Finally, in his last section "Doing Better by Knowing Ourselves", Pinker comes to some veritable points of morality:

1) the science of moral sense alerts us to ways in which our psychological makeup factor in our (illusions) of moral ground, that we can be blinded by our own sanctimony, and

2) in keeping with Leon Kass, former chair of the President's Council on Bioethics, there are times when we should go with our gut and disregard reason. Indeed, there is something resounding in his statement:

"Shallow are the souls that have forgotten how to shudder" ("The Wisdom of Repugnance")

Ultimately, Pinker sees in his science of the moral sense an advancement of morality "by allowing us to see through the illusions that evolution and culture have saddled us with and to focus on goals we can share and defend". In his estimataion, rather than look for the moral villain, we should look to 'fix the bug'...