Tag: Morality

Steven Pinker On Morality

Steven Pinker on Morality

Posted on by jabittan
According to Steven Pinker, in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature, morality comes from our ability to reason and our need to cooperate together. Without interactions and dependence on other human beings, we wouldn’t have a sense of morals. We would only have our individual self-interest. However, humans live in complex social groups within complex social communities and we have to live and work together for survival and general life satisfaction. As Robin Hanson and Kevin Simler argue in The Elephant in the Brain, social and political tribes drove the evolution and need for large rational brains, which Pinker argues allow us to reason from a point of mutual unselfishness, ultimately creating our ideas of morality.
 
 
To demonstrate, Pinker writes, “if I appeal to you to do something that affects me – to get off my foot, or not stab me for the fun of it, or to save my child from drowning – then I can’t do it in a way that privileges my interests over yours.” All humans are self-interested, which conflicts with our social lives. We all want to act in our own self-interested ways, but we have to cooperate with others and work with others to get what we desire or need for survival. Therefore, you must demonstrate that your interests go beyond simply your own self-interest in order to get people to respect you, respect your interests, and to cooperate with you. Pinker continues, “I have to state my case in a way that would force me to treat you in kind. I can’t act as if my interests are special just because I’m me and you’re not.” To work together we have to find ways in which our interests align. I may have to pay you to do some physical effort that I don’t want to do. I may have to agree to respect your property if I want you to respect my property. I may have to give up some level of individual rights if I don’t want you to abridge liberties of mine. “Mutual unselfishness is the only way we can simultaneously pursue our interests,” Pinker writes.
 
 
What Pinker argues, flowing from this discussion of mutual unselfishness, self-interests, and social cooperation, is that our morals are not given to us by a supernatural power and that our morals do not exist separate from humans. Morals are created through human rationality and through our ability to recognize that we have individual feelings and preferences, and therefore other people who are like us probably have the same capacity for all the feelings, emotions, preferences, and desires that we have. Our morals exist because we have to work together, to interact in social groups and organizations, and to rely upon institutions to order our relationships and collective efforts.
 
 
Pinker writes, “Morality, then, is not a set of arbitrary regulations dictated by a vengeful deity and written down in a book; nor is it the custom of a particular culture or tribe. It is a consequence of the interchangeability of perspectives and the opportunity the world provides for positive-sum games.” By interchangeability of perspectives Pinker is referring to the human ability to consider that other people have thoughts and feelings and the human ability to imagine or adopt other perspectives. Positive-sum games are situations where everyone is made better through cooperation. By all working together and combining inert pieces of material, we can create a house which which shelter us, keep us warm in the winter and shaded in the summer, and will give us a place to meet and hang out. The total value of the house is greater than the individual value of each component piece. Much of our world is structured around positive-sum interactions that occur when we cooperate through mutual unselfishness. Our morals derive from our ability to reason and help us harness these positive-sum moments. But it all comes back to our desire to pursue our own self interests while having to compromise as part of a larger social group.
Ignoring Old Testament Violence

Ignoring Old Testament Violence

Posted on by jabittan
I am by no means a biblical scholar and I am not a religious person in general, but my understanding is that the Christian god in the Old Testament is a wrathful and vengeful god. I understand that there are examples of genocide perpetuated by said deity, that there are murders ordered and condoned by the god, and that the text is quite violent in general. But much of that violence seems to be ignored, referenced as not being literal but symbolic and metaphoric, and generally less of a focus among religions that view the Bible as a sacred text.
 
 
Steven Pinker writes about this phenomenon in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature to demonstrate how people and societies have become less violent over time. “In recent millennia and centuries,” he writes, “the Bible has been spin-doctored, allegorized, superseded by less violent texts …, or discreetly ignored. And that is the point. Sensibilities toward violence have changed so much that religious people today compartmentalize their attitude to the bible. They pay it lip service as a symbol of morality, while getting their actual morality from more modern principles.”
 
 
Pinker references the violence of the Old Testament and the lack of violence in subsequent religious texts while demonstrating that the world has become a less violent place. Religious violence and violence condoned by a deity is simply less common. Texts which followed the Old Testament became less violent as the people writing those texts also became less violent. Today, violent sections of religious texts are almost entirely ignored or explained in a way that deemphasizes their violence. The modern world is less violence and accepts less violence in policing, maintaining authority, and organizing society. This is a huge change for humanity, and can be observed in our cultural products such as our religious documents and attitudes.
Moral Vices Versus Epistemic Vices

Moral Vices Versus Epistemic Vices

Posted on by jabittan
Before reading Vices of the Mind by Quassim Cassam I had never given vices much thought. I had not considered what made a vice a vice, why vices are so bad, and I certainly had not thought about differences between different kinds of vices. Cassam specifically looks at epistemic vices, which are vices that obstruct knowledge. He spends a lot of time at the outset of his book diving deep into all the questions about vices that I had never considered, and for the purposes of his book he differentiates moral vices versus epistemic vices.
Cassam writes, “some epistemic vices might be moral as well as epistemic failings, and be morally as well as epistemically blameworthy, but being morally blameworthy isn’t what makes them epistemic vices.”
Vices, Cassam explains, systematically lead to bad outcomes. Epistemic vices can be understood as systematically obstructing knowledge in one way or another. Moral vices, on the other hand, systematically lead to negative outcomes for an individual or society. The examples that Cassam uses to differentiate between moral vices versus epistemic vices are moral vices like cruelty and mundane epistemic vices like gullibility.
Being cruel is a moral vice. It doesn’t necessarily obstruct knowledge, but being cruel will systematically harm other people, damage relationships, and hinder human progress. Being gullible will systematically prevent someone from accurately understanding the world, but it won’t systematically harm anyone. A cruel person is likely to hurt others either physically or emotionally, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they won’t be able to obtain knowledge and information to accurately understand the world. A gullible person may not hurt anyone, but is likely to misunderstand the world and make poor decisions based on inaccurate understandings.
Diving into the intricacies of vices and distinguishing between moral vices versus epistemic vices may feel like a tedious and unnecessary endeavor, but I think that diving into these differences is important and helpful for us. It helps us better understand how our behaviors, attitudes, and personality traits may contribute to negative outcomes in the world. Taking such a careful look at vices helps us get better at thinking about what we like and dislike in the world, and helps us better disentangle what is good, what is bad, and how we understand what leads to the positive things we like and what contributes to the negativities we wish to avoid. It is helpful to pull things apart, to study their component parts, and to see how they come back together to form a whole so that we can better understand ourselves and the contexts of the lives that we find ourselves within.

The Time for Being Moral

Posted on by jabittan
Morality and our behavior is one of the spaces that I think demonstrates how little our actions and behaviors seem to actually align with the way we think about ourselves and the level of control we have in our lives. We believe that we are the masters of our own sails and that we are in control of what we do in the way that a CEO is in control of a company. We blame people when they make mistakes, hide our own shortcomings, and are pretty tough on ourselves when we don’t do the things we said we would do.

 

We hold ourselves and others to high moral standards and approach morality as if there is one fixed standard that is set in stone, but in our lives we don’t actually live that out. However, small factors that we likely ignore or completely fail to recognize play a huge role in our actual behaviors, and shape how we think about morality and whether we behave in a way that is consistent with the moral values we claim to have. One example is time.

 

In his book When, author Dan Pink looks at the ways that humans behave and interact with the world at different times of the day. Most people start their day out with a generally positive affect that peaks somewhere around 4 to 6 hours after waking up. Their mood then plummets and they experience a trough in the middle of the day and afternoon where their affect is more negative, their patience is shorter, and their attention is dulled. But, luckily for us all, people generally show a tendency to rebound in the late afternoon and early evening and their mood and affect improve. Night owls show the same pattern, but generally reversed starting out in more of a rebound phase, running through a trough in the middle of the day, and peaking in the evening.

 

Studies seem to show that this cycle holds for our attentiveness, our mood, and also our morality. Pink writes, “synchrony even affects our ethical behavior. In 2014 two scholars identified what they dubbed the morning morality effect, which showed that people are less likely to lie and cheat on tasks in the morning than they are later in the day.” Pink continues to explain that subsequent research seems to indicate that we are more moral during our peak. Most people are morning people and are most moral in the mornings. Night owls seem to be more moral in the evening when they hit their peak.

 

It seems strange that we would have certain times when we behave more moral. For the standard story we tell ourselves, we are rational agents who are not influenced by cheesy commercials, by insignificant details, or by the random time at which something takes place. We are the masters of our own destiny and we are in control of our own behavior and thoughts. This story, however, doesn’t seem to be an accurate reflection of our lives. If simply changing the time of day during which we have to make a morality decision changes the outcome of our decision, then we should ask if we really are in control of our thoughts and actions. It seems that we are greatly influenced by things that really shouldn’t matter when it comes to crucial decisions about morality and our behavior.

An Ethical Dilemma

Posted on by jabittan
In The Elephant in the Brain authors Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson consider human ethics in a framework laid out by Peter Singer. Singer suggested that if we saw someone dying right in front of us, we would have a moral obligation (in instances that did not put us in moral danger ourselves) to try to assist them, even if it came at an expense to ourselves. A common example is that you are wearing brand new very expensive clothing and see someone dying in a situation where you could save them without risk to yourself, but in a way that would certainly ruin your brand new clothes. The loss of our expensive new clothes is almost certainly not a reason to put off helping the person dying in front of us.

 

The question becomes, are we obligated to help people who are not dying in front of us at the expense of the cost of the brand new clothes that we would sacrifice if the person were dying in front of us? Are we obligated to save a life thousands of miles away in a different country and culture for the price of some goods that we might frivolously buy for ourselves?

 

Simler and Hanson lay out this argument in their book and write, “What Singer has highlighted with this argument is nothing more than simple, everyday human hypocrisy – the gap between our stated ideals (wanting to help those who need it most) and our actual behavior (spending money on ourselves). By doing this, he’s hoping to change his readers’ minds about what’s considered ethical behavior. In other words, he’s trying to moralize.”

 

In their book, the authors use the argument of singer and the fact that many of us do not sacrifice the money we would otherwise spend on meaningless things to save the lives of children across the globe as evidence for the elephant in the brain. We say things and signal things that we don’t follow through on, and we are strategically ignorant of the fact that we ignore these aspects of who we are. The authors don’t attempt to criticize us for this behavior, but instead make an effort to point it out and acknowledge that it is a huge driver of human behavior.

 

“Our goal, in contrast,” Write Simler and Hanson, “is simply to investigate what makes human beings tick. But we still find it useful to document this kind of hypocrisy, if only to call attention to the elephant. In particular, what we’ll see in this chapter is that even when we’re trying to be charitable, we betray some of our uglier, less altruistic motives.” Very often we do not escape our own self-interest completely, even when we are doing charitable things for other people. Our ethics and moral philosophies can be trampled by our self-interest, and with our big brains we are able to justify our selfish behaviors.

Interactions

Posted on by jabittan
Fred Kiel lays out his ideas and definitions of morality in his book Return on Character, his business book where he lays out the idea that in order to be truly successful in todays world companies must find leaders with strong moral character.  Much of his book focuses on relationships and the types of benefits that a leader and leadership team with strong moral character can bring to the relationships of everyone working within an organization, and the benefits that brings to a company as a whole. As part of this idea, Kiel dives into morality, and what it means to develop morality within a corporation or company today.

 

One of Kiel’s interpretations on morality relates to the way we see other people and interact with them, “Each of us constantly makes decisions about how to interact with other people, and each of those decisions has the potential to either harm or enhance the other person’s well-being.” This is a simple idea about how we can interpret and see the world and Kiel explains that what we are more moral when our actions help the well-being of others, and we are immoral when our behaviors detract from the well-being of others. This is a good starting point for describing the importance of character in relationships and business, because on an individual level it is easy to asses whether or not we are acting with the motivation of helping ourselves at the expense of others, or if we are acting in a way that is meant to help everyone as much as ourselves.

 

I recently listened to a podcast from the Transistor Podcast from PRX in which they discussed Theory of Mind which states that we are constantly interpreting what others are thinking and feeling, and we are able to recognize that others outside of ourselves have their own emotions and thoughts about any given situation.  I think that Kiel would argue that it is important for us to work on our Theory of Mind to build our ability to recognize the thoughts and feelings of others so that we can have better interactions with those around us.  The idea laid out by both the Transistor podcast and by Fred Kiel aligns with Colin Wright’s ideas presented in his book Considerations. In Considerations Wright posits the idea that we move through the world without being present in the moment as much as we should be, and he writes that we do not take the time to truly be considerate of other people, our good fortune, and of the world around us which shapes our interactions with people and our environment.  By being aware of our Theory of Mind and working to be more considerate of those around us, we can improve our character.  With our improved character and better relationships and interactions  we can begin to be a more rewarding person to be around, and in a business sense, our character generates a return that can be felt and measured within a company.

Character

Posted on by jabittan
Fred Kiel’s book Return on Character focuses on the importance of strong moral character traits in the leaders of today. Kiel’s book is about business, but many of the ideas he expresses go well beyond business and can manifest in our every day life.  The central idea to Kiel’s book is that those who are truly successful in life are individuals with high moral character. He continues with a business focus to say that those companies who are the most successful and provide the most value to their customers, employees, communities, and societies are lead by truly virtuous leaders with strong moral characters.

In looking at character and what it means to have a strong character Kiel quotes E. O. Wilson from his book Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge:

“True character rises from a deeper well than religion.  It is the internalization of the moral principles of a society, augmented by those tenets personally chosen by the individual, strong enough to endure through trials of solitude and diversity.  The principles are fitted together into what we call … the integrated self, wherein personal decisions feel good and true.  Character is in turn the enduring source of virtue.  It stands by itself and excites admiration in others.  It is not obedience to authority, and while it is often consistent with and reinforced by religious belief, it is not piety.”

Kiel explains this quote by examining the way that an individual with high character is able to recognize the behaviors expected and accepted as morally correct in a society. The quote also shows that the individual has a choice to accept these behaviors, and then choose how to incorporate those behaviors into their life.  Kiel shows that those with the strongest moral character are able to do this in a way that will best amplify those positive traits beyond what is simply expected.

I like this quote because it shows the dynamic nature of morals and character, and it reflects on the ways in which we can use self awareness and reflection to boost our character. Through our power of reason we are able to recognize the behaviors and characteristics we find to be helpful or harmful to ourselves, those around us, or those in society who are affected by our decisions. Through reason, we are able to consider our actions and reactions, and develop a practice that allows us to move toward developing a better character.

Effective Altruism

Posted on by jabittan
Peter Singer’s book, The Most Good You Can Do, is all about what he has termed effective altruism. He writes about individuals who seek ways in which they can have the greatest possible positive impact in the world because they feel compelled to help others.  These effective altruists, as he has named them, are secular individuals driven by compassion and a true understanding of themselves and the assistance they have received to live a comfortable life. The self awareness required to become an effective altruist helps individuals see the challenges that others face on a global scale, and drives effective altruists to aid those who are the least fortunate on our globe.

 

Singer describes effective altruists as being individuals who donate large amounts of money to charities that they have researched as being the most influential and impactful in the lives of those the charity is established to assist.  Singer explains that a common thread is the idea of living quite modestly to focus the most of ones resources towards the most effective charity possible. Many effective altruists will seek high paying positions and salaries because they understand that by earning more, they will be able to funnel more resources back towards those who are in the most need.  Combining these traits, Singer explains effective altruism with the following definition, “a philosophy and social movement which applies evidence and reason to working out the most effective ways to improve the world.”

 

The effective altruists that Singer explains are not limiting their impact to local causes and efforts and they are not donating to charities just because they have a good campaign video.  A system has been established around effective altruists to guide them in the best direction to do the most good possible with their money. The charities that they often support are well researched and spend most, if not all, of the money and resources they receive on the programs they implement. Often times the charities are in poorer countries where one dollar can go further, and where simple measures can be taken to actually save a life.  One of the charities that Singer mentions in his book is a charity that provides bed nets to people in Africa. Since a single bed net can protect from mosquitos and malaria, a small donation can save the lives of multiple people and help keep farmers and families healthy. It is hard to find a comparable charity in the United States or elsewhere where a donation of roughly $100 can help save an actual life.

 

For me the main glue that holds effective altruists together is the idea of moral secularism that requires individuals to be self aware enough to see that they have a responsibility to assist those less fortunate than themselves.  I believe that any effective altruist would be able to explain that they relied on the luck of being born into a good family or the luck of having people to support them on their journey to arrive at a place where they have some wealth and can live modestly.  They are called to action because moral decisions are socially derived, and by changing their perspective they can chose not to compete with others to acquire the most goods, but rather to do the most good.