How should the state regulate reproductive technologies?

The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) was created in order to deal with the moral issues surrounding embryonic selection. It was based on the assumption that the embryo was said to have a “special moral status” that exists over and above the interests of the parents.

Embryologists make some basic kinds of evaluation when they inspect in vitro fertilisation (IVF) embryos. They not only select those that are most likely to survive but in accordance with clause 14 of the new Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill they are required to avoid selecting embryos known to be at risk of developing ‘serious physical or mental disability’ or ‘serious illness’ where there are other embryos available that show no such risk. Because embryologists select and discard embryos that carry disease or disabling traits and such disease or disabling traits may have a genetic basis the practice has been termed “the little sister of eugenics” by Catholic bishops who want the practice banned.

However, for this discussion, I am going to focus on the fact that the current HFE bill prevents selection on the basis of non-disabling, and non-disease traits, such as sex, intelligence, or personality. Further, selection for what are considered minor disabilities, such as deafness, are not permitted, even if deaf parents wish to have a deaf child.

This has angered two groups both of whom think the bill is too conservative and places unwarranted restrictions on parental choice.[1]

The first group contains liberals such as Julian Savelescu who thinks that the embryo has no special moral status above the interests of its parents and that the only criteria that limit the selection of embryos should be the harm that might be accrued either to the individual or others. On this view couples liberty to select embryos on the basis of sex, personality, intelligence, and other non-disease states should not be thwarted by bodies such as the HFEA unless there is a serious risk of harm to others.

The second group contain lobbyists from disabled groups who similarly think that the interests of the parent are tantamount and have priority over any moral status that the embryo has. This group claims that it is immoral to prohibit selection against embryos on the basis of traits such as deafness. These groups have claimed that deafness is not a disability, but instead should be seen as being part of a ‘linguistic minority’, and that if deaf people have equal rights to non deaf people then they should be able to select against embryos that have the trait for hearing. < The National Institute for the Blind does not endorse selection for deafness but it is a controversial issue>

Julian Savelescu has written most extensively on this topic and has presented reasons for thinking that we have a moral obligation to engage in both positive and negative eugenics and that the current legislation is too restrictive. Hence I will outline my interpretaton of his views as a basis for discussion.

Julian Savelescu

1: Savulescu claims that the human embryo does not have a moral status, above that which is derived from the interests of a couple or individual to have a child.

This is not to deny the claim that the embryo does have some moral status, perhaps in terms of its potential, although how much moral status this is worth is never clear, what is clear according to Savulescu is that the moral status that it has does not rise above the interests of a couple or individuals desire to have a child.

Writing in the Guardian, in support of this claim he asks us to consider that:

There are about 100,000 abortions in this country every year, more than 95% of which are for social reasons. More than 300,000 “excess” embryos have been destroyed in 10 years. Legislation requires that embryos are destroyed after 10 years. Many forms of contraception destroy early embryos.

If the embryo did have a special moral status, such as that on a par with an adult human, then we would all be complicit in a ‘reproductive holocaust’.

Even in conservative countries there is a widespread difference in our attitudes towards the destruction of embryos and the destruction of infants, or fetuses. We can explain this difference in attitudes as reflecting a difference in what is of value.

In particular we can explain the difference in our attitudes towards the practices by assuming that the embryo does not have any special moral status over and above the interests of the parents whereas the fetus or infant does.

This is an argument based on our current social practices and the values that such practice presupposes.

A charitable reconstruction of the argument here is that:

A: Our current social practices presuppose the falsity of the claim that the embryo has a special moral status above the interests of parents who want to have children.

B:    ………………………….……………………

C: We are warranted in believing that the embryo does not have a special moral status above the interests of parents who want to have children.

Clearly there is a missing premise in the argument. The missing premise must be one that takes our current social practices as evidence for what is of value so perhaps we can boldly plug in the gap with the following?

B: The presuppositions of our current social practices are evidence for what is of value

Or

B2: The best explanation for our current social practices are that they reflect what is of value.

2: Secondly he claims that restrictions on liberty that are not based on considerations of harm violate a central tenet of liberalism. As J S Mill put it:

That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not sufficient warrant.

Hence his position is that where reproductive choices do not cause significant harm to others we should have the procreative liberty to decide with whom we have children, when to have children, how many to have, and what kind of children we have. However, this does not permit parents to select for traits that would be harmful to others e.g., psychopathy, excessive aggressiveness.

3: Savulescu argues given that the only legitimate right the state can have to restrict parents liberty is harm to the individual that will develop or harm to others and that there are many non-disease and non-disabling traits such as sex, that do not cause harm to the individual person who will develop or others then the law is too conservative. Parents should be allowed to select the sex of their child if, for sake of argument, they want another male to balance their female child.

In addition he argues for the positive thesis that we have a moral obligation to select embryos on their prospects for having the best life possible. A position he calls ‘Procreative Beneficence’.

Procreative beneficience includes not only selecting against genes that cause disease, even minor disease, but also selecting against those genes which dispose, even weakly, to significant impediments to wellbeing, like poor impulse control or lack of empathy.

Couples (or single reproducers) should select the child, of the possible children that they could have, who is expected to have the best life[2] as the others, based on the relevant available information.

Savulesco ‘Procreative Beneficence’ (2001)

In support of the position in favor of selecting against genes that cause disability where other options are available he quotes a famous thought experiment by D. Parfit:

Consider a woman who has rubella. If she conceives now, she will have a blind and deaf child (child A). If she waits 3 months, she will     conceive another different but healthy child (child B).

If we ask whether the woman does something wrong in conceiving now as opposed to in three months time we are comparing situations in which the same number of people being brought into the world (1) and comparing which of the two people it is best to bring about. Faced with two possible outcomes involving the same number of people:  a blind and deaf child, or a child that is not blind and death, it seems that the latter option is clearly the best outcome. Similarly the reason to prefer embryos with abilities rather than disabilities is the same as the reason to prefer genes without dispositions to heart disease, or cancer – it is because of the badness of these things where they occur as part of a person’s life.

In contrast the following situation:

Sally has a genetic condition that she knows will cause any child she conceives to be born with moderate retardation. Despite knowing this fact, Sally deliberately conceives and gives birth to a moderately retarded child (child A).

If we ask whether Sally did something wrong in giving birth to child A we are comparing outcomes with different numbers of people. A case in which there is a child and a case in which there is not. Hence it is not inconsistent to think that there is a wrong done in conceiving child A in the first scenario but not in the latter.  (Of course depending on how bad the retardation is, some will think that both cases involve a wrong).

So we can represent Savalescu’s reasoning as being that it is better for someone to exist than not exist (providing existence is of a worthwhile life) and it is better for someone to exist without disabling or disease traits than it is for someone to exist with disabling or disease traits. Finally, that it is better to exist with positive traits such as empathy, courage, good impulse control, intelligence, good memory recall than without these traits. Hence, Savalescu is represented as defending what is termed ‘designer babies’.

Savelescu asks us to imagine that there is a gene for ‘a violent, explosive, uncontrollable temper’ that gene is likely to cause suffering for both that person when it leads to the collapse of important social relations and conflict with the law, and to others. With regards to positive traits he asks us to consider  memory (such as the ability to remember important dates, people, items of interest) and a host of other traits, including intelligence which form an essential part of many people conception of the good life stretching back to Plato.[3]

Without the power of calculation you could not even calculate that you will get enjoyment in the future; your life would be that not of a man, but of a sea-lung or one of those marine creatures whose bodies are confined to a shell.

Plato, Philebus 21

Savelescu asks us to acknowledge that many of our social practices are best explained on the basis of thinking that certain conditions or traits are better to have than others. Hence we have hospitals because disease and injury are bad, not because people are indifferent to them, and we praise people’s characters because we think that they have virtuous traits that are better to have than to lack. However, our current embryonic legislation does not allow us to select embryos on the increased probability of such character traits emerging in individuals. Instead it lets a genetic lottery take place where the possibility of such traits emerging in individuals is left to chance. But if we value these things then we should not only allow for parents to load the genetic dice in the favor of them occurring, but we may also be morally obliged to do so.

Objections Raised.

1: The ‘I would not exist’ objection.

The objection raised was that if embryonic selection had taken place I would not exist. <Imagine your parents having the option of selecting an embryo other than the one that was you – or the one that you emerged from and that other embryo having a greater likliehood of developing better traits than your current ones>

However, whilst the above would then be true, it would also be true to say that not only would you not exist, another individual that was more likely to have better traits, more intelligent, greater capacity for self-control, empathy, would have been here. If these traits are truly more valuable to have than to lack then from an impartial view not only would there have been no loss in value, but there would also have been an increase in value.

What we have to remember for embryonic selection is that for every individual that comes to exist a score of others have failed to exist.

2: Designer babies will generate greater inequality

IVF is only available to those who pay, hence if only those who pay are allowed to choose embryo’s with advantageous traits then this will create an even more divided society than we have now.

Good point – this is clearly an important consideration – especially given the impact inequality has on most people. Although it is difficult to see how it can be avoided given that there are already private institutions in other countries that allow for embryonic selection on such lines e.g. The Abrahamic[4] institute claim to offer embryonic selection for personality traits.

3: Some of the negative traits mentioned are really virtues

Saveluscu mentions lack of impulse control as a negative trait to select against, but isn’t such a trait really useful?

Lack of impulse control gets mentioned because it is the most reliable predictor of teenage delinquency in later life. The Standford Marshmallow Experiment (1972) also indicated that good impulse control might be important for academic achievement and success in adult life.

4: We don’t know what knock on effects embryonic selection will bring

True, and we don’t know what knock on effects leaving it to chance will bring either. But we have an option of trying to load the dice and select for positive traits or leave it to chance.

Disability objections

1 Deaf parent’s want to select deaf children, and other disabled parents may want to select for disabilities that they have too.

My understanding of Saveluscu’s views selecting for disabilities would count as selecting against better traits, since he treats abilities as better than disabilities. However regarding deafness, he argues that since the numbers are so small, and deafness is not a major disabling condition, then it might be better to allow deaf parents to make the wrong choice, and select for deafness, rather than impose regulation on them and restrict their liberties. In order to challenge the claim that it is wrong to select for a child with a disability over an ability some argument to the effect that disabilities are not disadvantageous for the individual or others would be required.

2 Some disabilities are not really disabilities.

The objection raised was that being blind is not a disability because some blind people do not know what it is like to see, in not knowing what it is like to see they do not miss the ability to see. So for them they are not disabled or lacking in any ability.

However, the standard usage of the term ‘disability’ refers to a physical or mental condition that limits a person’s movements, senses, or activities. Since sight – being able to see objects is clearly an ability – the lack of this ability is a disability. This definition does not depend on the person being able to recognize that they are disabled in any way. Hence infants might be recognised as disabled without reliance on the infant’s ability to conceptualise this.

Like most terms that refer to abilities, disabilities and their impairments such as being drunk whilst driving, the standard for someone possessing an ability is independent of their recognizing such a standard. For instance the standard for whether someone’s driving ability is impaired is not whether they recognize such impairment for often the impairment prevents them from recognizing their impairment.

This even applies to whole communities, for instance if I lived in a rural village where everybody drove after drinking, there may be no one sober enough in the community might recognize that the driving was impaired through drinking, but this would not entail the relativistic statement that in such a community drink driving was not an impairment on people’s driving ability.

Disabilities and impairments are defined functionally not through subjective experience.

However there are many people who are willing to deny that deafness, blindness, or other disabilities like being wheel chair bound, are not really disabilities (even when they claim ‘disability allowance’) and so some explanation of why people say this would be desirable.

I think that at least part of the story would involve noting that the term ‘disability’ carried negative connotations, and that people’s identities are often wrapped up in the term, hence we talk about a ‘disabled person’, but no one wants to think of themselves or their friends/family in negative ways, and it is not healthy to do so, hence there is a desire to avoid attributing the term ‘disabled’ to people who are disabled.

The other part of the story is that if you can compensate for a mobility disability, perhaps by wheelchair use, then the disability (like an impairment that is compensated for by wearing glasses etc) is no longer disabling because the natural disability or impairment has been masked or overcome by technology

So, this may lead one to think that paradoxically, there can be a sense in which disabled people are, with assistance, no longer disabled because they are able to carry out the same function as able bodied people, albeit in different ways.

3: Some disabilities such as deafness are not disadvantageous.

Deafness is clearly not as restricting a disability as being blind (compare driving abilities) for mobility issues and speech can be translated into sign language for communication, and many deaf people learn to lip read.

However, in selecting for deafness over hearing, there is clearly a restriction on the abilities and options available to that child, for instance they will never have the option of being able to listen to and enjoy the pleasures of great music, at least not to the same extent as fully hearing people. Conversely it is not clear that there are any advantages to being deaf that a hearing child would lack – for instance both could learn sign language.

Further, if a mid wife deliberately caused a child to be deaf, we would hold such a person morally culpable for doing a wrong to the child. We would not treat the action on a par with some neutral act, like changing the child’s clothes. In contrast restoring a child’s hearing is not considered an act of moral culpability.

In addition most hearing people would not want to be made deaf, and those hard of hearing seek hearing aids to restore hearing, rather than spend years trying to compensate for this impairment or disability in other ways.

Those that are caused to go death during their lives, even those who compensate for such a loss of hearing, express regret and not being able to enjoy the pleasure that hearing can bring <perhaps which most of us take for granted>. Such people have experienced both sides of the ability/disability and yet express regret at the disability.

If deafness was a disability that was not disadvantageous in any way the above practices would be hard to make sense of, but we could make sense of the above practices if the disability was disadvantageous in some sense for the person involved.

We can explain all of the above by holding that having our senses operational is something of value – either it is of value in itself and/or as a means to the pleasures that those senses afford.

So perhaps a better way to put it would be to say that deafness is both a disability and a disadvantage. It is the loss of something valuable, but through a lot of work deaf people can learn to overcome that disadvantage until it is hardly noticeable?

However the important question that remains, which is most relevant for the above discussion, is whether it is better to have to overcome disadvantages that others lack or whether it is better not to have to overcome such disadvantages.

 

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[1] The groups that think that the bill is too liberal hold that the embryo does have a special moral status akin to that of an individual human and so not only embryonic selection but the destruction of (any) embryos is of serious moral concern. This latter group tends to be religious in nature.

[2] Best life is taken to be the life that has the most well-being (whether this is measured in terms of hedonism or desire satisfaction or some other way).

[3] Other positive traits include Intelligence, memory, self-discipline, impulse control, foresight, patience, sense of humour, sunny temperament, empathy, imagination, sympathy, fairness, honesty, capacity to live peaceably and socially with others.

[4] Abraham was of course famous for thinking that the slaughter of his son was morally justified if God so wished it. Hopefully IVF parents won’t have such lapses.

Folk Moral Relativism Study

Folk Moral Relativism

Hagop Sarkissian, John Park, David Tien, Jennifer Cole Wright and Joshua Knobe (2011) in their forthcoming paper “Folk Moral Relativism” claim that philosophers have been guilty of making sweeping claims about the nature of folk intuitions about morality, in particular the assumption that the folk are committed to moral objectivism. The primary target of Sarkissian et al’s claims are the moral philosophers such as David Brink, Michael Smith, who attempt to defend some form of moral realism based on commonsense folk practice or intuitions that they claim presuppose the existence of objective moral facts.

Whilst the folk are not likely to be able to spell out the difference between moral realism and anti-realism in a way that would satisfy philosophers they can be tested on a consequence of moral realism. Hence Sarkissian et al set out to test whether the folk have moral realist or relativist intuitions by seeing if the folk accept a consequence of moral realism; whether parties to moral disagreement that (apparently) contradict each other cannot both be right, but at least one speaker must be mistaken; or, whether they accept a consequence of moral relativism whereby two people can disagree over whether the same action is wrong or not, and both be correct.

If there are objective moral facts then two subjects who disagree over what the fact are at most one of the disputants can be correct. In the same way that if there are objective natural or social facts such as whether Napoleon rode to battle on a horse then two subjects who disagree over whether Napoleon rode to battle on a horse cannot both be correct. At least one must be mistaken.

Sarkissian et al’s hypothesis is that moral statements are analogous to statements about the relationship between the seasons and the months. We may initially think that statements such as January is a Winter month are universally true, but on encounters with people from other cultures we may see our initial claim as being true only relative to a hemisphere.

In particular their hypothesis is that, when we consider apparently contradictory statements like:

January is a winter month.

January is not a winter month.

And we are then asked to consider that people making the statements are from different hemispheres, we revise our view of the statements such that they contain an indexical (January is a winter month ‘here’) or some kind of implicit reference to different hemispheres (January is a winter month in America). In so doing we no longer treat the statements as contradictory because the two statements in the mouths of different speakers refer to different hemispheres and as such both can be true without contradiction. It is the encounters with others that make us change our views and accept the relativity of our statements.

Sarkissian et al claim that “a similar effect arises in the domain of morality.”

In order to test this hypothesis they present students with the following scenarios and then that one of their classmates and an anonymous person called ‘Sam’ disagree about whether the following transgressions are wrong or not:

A: Horace finds his youngest child extremely unattractive and therefore kills him.

B: Dylan buys an expensive new knife and tests its sharpness by randomly stabbing a passerby on the street.

Subjects were then asked the following

Given that these individuals have different judgments about this case, we would like to know whether you think at least one of them must be wrong, or whether you think both of them could actually be correct. In other words, to what extent would you agree or disagree with the following statement concerning such a case

Since your classmate and Sam have different judgments about this case, at least one of them must be wrong.

The responses were then measured on a scale of 1 – 7 to see how much they agreed or disagreed with the above statement.

Sarkissian et al then alter some of the conditions for some students by telling them that the individual who disagrees with his classmate regarding the above transgressions comes from another culture (an Amazonian warrior culture called ‘Mamilons’) or an alien culture (‘Pentars’ who are not interested in love or friendship but only in increasing the number of equilateral pentagons in the universe). Sarkissian et al record the results as follows:

Participants in the same-culture condition tended to agree that at least one person had to be wrong …, those in the other-culture condition were approximately at the midpoint …, and those in the extraterrestrial condition tended to say that both could actually be right….

Sarkissian et al (forthcoming) 2011

This result was replicated with both American and Singapore undergraduates.

In order to disambiguate the difference between thinking that the same type of act was performed in different locations and so being subject to different standards that would be fitting for those locations (a claim consistent with moral realism) Sarkissian et al switched the identity of the agent committing the transgression to one belonging to their own culture (American) and a different culture (Algerian), as well as alternating the identity of the judge.

However, no significant effect was found by varying the identity of the agent who committed the act, but only who judged the act to be wrong/not wrong. This suggests that subjects think that it is the moral framework of the appraiser that at determines whether an act is morally wrong or not rather than the agent committing the transgression.

Subjects were also presented with two other transgressions

C: Jason robs his employer, the Red Cross, in order to pay for a second holiday for himself.

D: Emily promises to take Molly’s sick child to the hospital for an important surgical procedure, but instead decides she’d rather go shopping

And asked whether they thought “Given the particular beliefs that your classmate and the Mamilon have, at least one of them must not have good reason to believe as he or she does.” Here, whilst subjects rejected the claim that at least one of the disputants must be mistaken, they tended to agree that at least one of them must not have good reason to believe as he or she does. So subjects are distinguishing between being correct or mistaken and having good reasons to believe.

Sarkissian et al’s conclusions

1: Sarkissian et al claim that the folk have no deep commitment to moral objectivism. Instead the more they are encouraged to engage with people from other perspectives the more they are drawn to moral relativism. In conversation people may give little thought to the notion that January is only a winter month relative to a given hemisphere until they encounter people from other hemispheres, similarly people may give little thought to the notion that infanticide is only wrong relative to a particular moral code until encountering people from different cultures with different moral codes.

Whilst there are many different psychological variables[1] underlying moral relativism the one factor that is always the same is that “The more people engage with radically different perspectives, the more they are drawn to moral relativism.”

2: Moral realists have claimed that they have an advantage over moral anti-realists in being able to more easily make sense of the assumptions within our moral practice than rival theories. Sarkissian et al do not question whether philosophical theories should try to make sense of ordinary moral practice, only that they have been mistaken in what they took ordinary moral practice to consist in.

Philosophers are undoubtedly correct in their commitment to make sense of ordinary moral practice; the one mistake was to suppose that people’s ordinary moral practice is a straightforwardly objectivist one. So perhaps the real philosophical task here is to make sense of a different sort of practice: one in which people’s views differ depending on the extent to which they explore alternative perspectives.

Sarkissian et al (forthcoming) 2011

Sarkissian et al conclude that the answers to philosophical questions such as whether there are objective moral facts or not, are not obvious, and we might add, if they appear obvious, it is only because we have not looked into the matter with any depth.  Conflicts in moral philosophy can be traced back to tensions within ordinary people’s intuitions and whilst it correct to say that philosophy starts with the examination of tensions within our intuitions it does not end there but proceeds to try and find a way out of that tension. [2]

All of this looks very interesting but does it really tell us anything informative. So people tend to adopt a relatvistic framework when they encounter those from different cultures with different moral beliefs from our own, but why do they do this? Sarkissian et al don’t begin to answer this question.

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[1] Sarkissian et al also put together an impressive array of traits associated with relativism including “Relativists were higher in the personality trait of openness to experience (Cokely & Feltz, 2010). They scored higher on a measure of ‘disjunctive thinking,’ which is the ability to unpack alternative possibilities when problem solving (Goodwin & Darley, 2010). They were more likely to fall in a particular age range – namely, in their twenties (Beebe & Sackris, 2010). They were more able to explain alternative views (Goodwin & Darley 2010) and to be tolerant of people with opposite opinions (Wright, Cullum & Schwab, 2008; Wright, McWhite & Grandjean, 2010).

[2] It is also worth reminding ourselves that at least 50% of the subjects did not share the relativist intuition in the scenarios that were presented, and so unlike the case of the seasons and their relativity to the hemispheres, what sort of facts make moral judgments true or false is unlike what makes statements about the months and their relationship to the seasons in being something that is essentially contested and something that is not decided by folk moral discourse.

Folk Moral Relativism

Folk Moral Intutions and Moral Philosophy

Introduction

An increasing number of philosophers, who both defend and criticise moral realism, are recognising that meta-ethical debates are constrained and can be informed by empirical work in the domain of the natural sciences, such as those of neuroscience, psychology, and evolution.

However, a large number of philosophers are still content to make empirically loaded assumptions independently of such empirical work. For instance both moral realists and their anit-realist opponents have been content to make empirically loaded assumptions about the nature of moral discourse (moral intuitions, moral language, moral phenomenology) by armchair intuition without recourse to empirical studies. For instance moral realists such as Peter Railton (1986) and David Brink (1984) and their anti-realist opponents such as J.L.Mackie (1977), Michael Smith (1995), and Simon Blackburn (1994) have asserted that ordinary moral discourse presupposes that moral realism is true i.e. that there are objective moral facts just as there are objective natural facts in the natural sciences.  Hence a moral realist like Geoffrey Sayre-Mcord (2009) can write in the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy entry on Moral Realism: “By all accounts, moral realism can fairly claim to have common sense and initial appearances on its side.”

Whether moral realism has common sense on its side is one thing, whether having common sense on its side is a virtue or a vice of a moral theory is another. As Anthony Appiah (2008) notes, from our present perspective, it is a merit of past moral reformers, such as Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and others, that they criticised prevailing common intuitions about slavery, the subjection of women, homosexuality, and showed them to be in need of revision. On the other hand it is a point in criticism of Bentham’s fellow utilitarian William Goodwin’s claim that if faced between a choice of saving the archbishop or one’s own father from the flames that we should let our father perish and save the archbishop because more utility would accrue that way. Moral theory can both make us revise our intuitions and be the basis on which to reject moral theory and it is no easy matter to say what the relationship between common sense intuitions and moral theory is.

David Brink has claimed that the meta-ethical theory known as ‘moral realism’ can be defended by recourse to common sense moral intuitions but his view has come under recent criticism by experimental philosophers for assuming that common sense is on the side of moral realism. It is to Brink’s views and the criticism of his views that I now turn to.

David Brink’s Burden of Proof Argument for Moral Realism

David Brink’s polemic ‘Moral Realism and the Foundation of Ethics’ is an attempt vindicate the meta-ethical position known as ‘moral realism’ on our common sense moral practice.

Moral realism which is ‘roughly the view that there are moral facts and true moral claims whose existence and nature are independent of our beliefs about what is right and wrong’ [P.7] according to Brink forms part of our commonsense moral view. This view of the moral world is taken to be analogous to our view of the natural world. So, just as the natural and social sciences are taken to study ‘real objects and events whose existence and nature is largely independent of our theorizing about them, that they exhibit progress and convergence over time, and they contain at least some approximate knowledge…’ [P.6] so to our common sense view of morality is that it is about real objects and events whose existence and nature is largely independent of our theorising about them.

Brink tells us that his primary concern is “with the parity of ethics and the sciences” [P11]. He argues that moral facts are on a par with scientific facts in providing the best explanations for our beliefs. Hence just as the physical fact that a proton passed through a cloud chamber is the best explanation for why scientists see a vapour trail in the cloud chamber, so to does the moral fact that torturing kittens is wrong provide us with ‘the best explanation of the non-moral fact that appraisers almost unanimously agree that pouring gasoline over a kitten and igniting it is wrong’ [p169]. So for Brink moral facts are on a par epistemologically and metaphysically with the facts of the natural and social sciences.[1] In both cases they have exhibited progress and convergence over time e.g., most societies have converged in the recognition that torturing infants is morally wrong, that enslaving others is morally wrong, and that such views constitute at least approximate moral knowledge and in both cases this is best explained by our having a better understanding of the natural and moral facts.

Brink then claims that just as we should be realists about the natural and social sciences so to we should be realists with regards to morality and this position should only be given up if there are serious arguments to the contrary. “Moral realism should be our metaphysical starting point, and we should give it up only if it does involve unacceptable metaphysical and epistemological commitments.” [P.24]. This puts the onus on the moral anti-realist to come up with serious metaphysical and epistemological objections to moral realism and the failure to do so leave us vindicated in believing that moral realism is true.

Interestingly, Brink is well aware that moral realism is the ‘black sheep within the realist metaphysical family.’ [P11] He accepts that doubts about moral realism remain even amongst those who accept a realist view of the sciences and must surely be aware that it is widely rejected amongst the folk. Yet, Brink still maintains that moral realism is the metaphysical starting point because it is reflected in our features of commonsense moral discourse and because this theory provides the best explanation and justification of such discourse.

We can offer a reconstruction of Brink’s burden of proof argument in the following terms:

1: Certain features of our common sense moral discourse presuppose the existence of objective moral facts, such as the phenomena of being under a moral obligation, the declarative form of moral statements, the acceptance of some moral beliefs as true, the refusal to accept two apparently contradictory judgments as true, and the existence of false moral beliefs.

2: The best explanation of these features of our common sense moral discourse, such as our belief that torturing animals is morally wrong, is that there really are moral facts that make torturing animals morally wrong.

3: Since the best explanation of certain features of our common sense moral discourse is the theory that there really are objective moral facts which make our moral judgments true or false then we are justified in holding that there really are objective moral facts until evidence to the contrary is provided.

In making this claim Brink must be holding that the presumptions of common sense discourse constitute evidence for those presumptions being true. Positing objective moral facts then explains how these other facts about our moral psychology could be correct. So what explains why the person believes that setting fire to cats for fun is wrong is best explained by the fact that setting fire to cats is actually wrong – not just wrong for me, but objectively wrong for anyone in my situation. If the best explanation is the one that fits with our common sense intuitions, then absent serious metaphysical or epistemological reasons to doubt the existence of objective moral facts, we are warranted in believing in such facts.

A Problem with Brink’s Argument

The claim that moral realism is a theory that is reflected in commonsense moral discourse coupled with the recognition that many people have intuitions that are anti-realist ultimately results in a fissure between the intuitions of common sense and the discourse of common sense that is take to support moral realism.

Brink lists a number of considerations from common sense morality to defend this claim that moral realism is our natural metaphysical starting point. One of the claims that is most salient in his work is a claim concerning the form and content of our moral judgments which he takes to be reflected in commonsense discourse.

The Form and Content of Moral Judgment.

Brink writes that moral judgments are expressed in the declarative mood or as assertions, and they have as their subject, people, institutions, policies without including relativising clauses. They refer to moral properties, facts, and knowledge. For instance we say the following sorts of things and assume that they are true [T]:

A: The laws pertaining to how women are treated in Afghanistan are unfair. [T]

B: Torturing cats for fun is morally wrong.  [T]

C: One should not be held responsible for actions one could not have known were wrong. [T]

D: The turpitude of a crime should determine the severity of punishment. [T]

The above judgements have the form of being assertions that are truth apt. They have no relativising clauses, and so appear to make statements that are if true, true for everyone regardless of what their beliefs are. [2] Further, Brink holds that where there is moral disagreement even when all the non-moral facts are agreed on, we would regard at least one party to the dispute as being morally mistaken

[p.29].

Brink’s claim about the form and content of moral discourse, and what people mean when they engage in relativising discourse rests uneasily with is acknowledgement that moral realism is the ‘black sheep’ in the metaphysical family and that many people reject moral realism. For we might naturally assume that if many people reject moral realism then this rejection would display itself in the way that they talked about moral issues and what they intended to convey i.e., we should expect that they do really mean that the truth or falsity of moral issues is really relative to what people believe.

In contrast to Brink’s analysis we might think that if people were moral relativists then we would expect them to treat the truth or falsity of moral judgments as relative to what people believed. Moral statements if expressed properly to reveal their underlying form should contain a relativising clause (Cook 1999). The implication being that were this relativising clause to change then the truth value of the moral statement would also change. Hence according to relativism moral judgments should look something like:

R: For Westerners, the laws pertaining to how women are treated in Afghanistan are unfair. [T]

S: For the Taliban, the laws pertaining to how women are treated in Afghanistan are fair. [T]

T: For Europeans, one should not be held responsible for actions one could not have known were wrong. [T]

U: For Amazonians, one should be held responsible for actions one could not have known were wrong. [T]

There may be structures of morality that are common to different cultures. For instance all cultures may embrace (D) the claim that the turpitude of a crime should determine the severity of punishment for that crime but disagree on what counts as a crime and how severe the punishment should be for the same act. For instance the Taliban may agree with D but think that same sex relationships are a crime and should be punished by beheading.

Whether universal structures that are common to all cultures are in conflict with the spirit of relativism depends on how we think of the truth conditions for claims like D. The realist thinks of these claims as discoveries that are independent of our believing, hence were someone to disagree with D they would be mistaken. However the relativist thinks of these universals as human creations that are not independent of our beliefs, such that were a group of people to refuse to endorse D they would not be mistaken.

It is important to note that Brink does not deny that there is such relativistic talk amongst the folk or that the folk may have relativistic intuitions. However, he boldly claims that when we talk in such relativised ways, we do not actually mean that the moral statement is made true or false depending on who is uttering it, but instead we only mean to say that this is what certain people believe “We do not say that murder is wrong for Spike, unless by this we mean to imply only the non-relativistic claim that Spike believes murder is wrong…” [Brink (1989) P 26]

In order for Brink’s view to be correct then there would have to be a cleavage between people’s moral intuitions and the presumptions about the way they use language. In addition we would have to take their use of language to be more revealing about what they ‘really’ believed than the folk’s explicit claims about what they believe. It is unlikely this could be supported by an appeal to commonsense beliefs.[3]

Sarkissian et al (forthcoming 2011) have recently given empirical support that reveals that there is this cleavage in common sense intuitions about morality. They found that, in certain conditions, such as when someone from their own college class was imagined to be disagreeing with another that the folk treat apparently contradictory moral judgments as not allowing for both statements to be true. However in other conditions, such as when the person imagined to be disagreeing with them was from another culture, the folk do not treat moral judgments as if there were objective moral facts but instead approximately 50% will treat moral judgments as if they were made true by facts relative to a subject’s moral framework and hence allow for two apparently contradictory moral judgments to be correct. What explains the behaviour in both cases is a commitment to some kind of moral cultural relativism whereby the moral framework within a culture makes moral judgments true or false.

So it looks like Brink’s first assertion is false – the folk are not really moral realists in any deep sense and their use of moral language reflects this.

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[1] Whilst the facts of the natural and social sciences are unified epistemologically by not being constituted by our beliefs about such facts, they are not unified metaphysically given that the facts of psychology are obviously mind dependent (although not dependent on the mind of any single speaker) whereas physical

facts are mind independent.

[2] The commitment to objective  moral facts does not conflict with the claim that in different societies, which place moral agents in different circumstances, different moral rules may apply so that the same action might be permissible in one society and impermissible in another. It does commit one to holding that in cases of moral disagreement there can be at most one correct answer and that the moral facts do not change with a change in people’s moral beliefs whereas relativism denies these claims.

[3] Brink’s argument against non-cognitivism  might be stronger than his argument against relativism here. This is because the non-cognitivist has to treat putative assertions that are declarative in form as disguised imperatives, or just expressions of approval or recommendations to an appraiser’s audience and this claim is likely to go against both commonsense intuitions and the surface structure of moral discourse.

Cardiff Postgraduate Philosophy

There are a number of philosophy events that are available to postgraduates at Cardiff university.

Perhaps the most easily accessible is the Postgraduate reading group. This meets weekly on Thursday at 5.30pm in the room opposite C Norris’s office and is open to all postgraduates and 3rd year undergraduates who want to find out more about postgraduate study. It is a friendly group and usually very well attended by people who just like to talk philosophy with others.

There are also Philosophy Research Seminars that are part funded by the Royal Institute of Philosophy. This means that they are also open to the general public and therefore should be as jargon free as possible in order to be accessible to the intelligent lay person <cough>. This occur fortnightly, Wednesdays at 4.15, in room 0.01 on the ground floor next to the porters lodge in the humanities building.

You can find a list of talks by clicking on the following link

http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/encap/philosophy/seminar/index.html

Finally there is a moral psychology reading group that is open to staff and postgraduates. This meets weekly on Wednesdays at 12pm. However, access to this group is rumoured to be through a masonic hand shake and a wink in the right direction. As befits many secret societies the location of the group is kept secret until last minute, although Jon Webber may know the whereabouts. Make sure to wink when enquiring.

There is also a moral psychology reading group that is open to postgraduates although entrance to this group seems to require a masonic hand gesture with a wink and a nod to the right person. It meets on Wednesdays at about 12pm. As befits such secret societies the location is kept secret until the last moment but Jon Webber is likely to have more details.  Don’t forget the wink when enquiring and feel free to blog about the topics here 

The qualitative nature of the commodity in Marx’s Capital

In the opening chapter of Capital, Marx promptly postulates the commodity as the essential constituent of capitalist society then first treats of it in the following way.[i] The commodity is Janus-faced.  It may be considered from either of two exclusive but nonetheless indissociable perspectives, one qualitative the other quantitative. This brief entry critically considers the qualitative nature of the commodity as elaborated in the first page and a half of Marx’s Capital. It is intended as a first, much shorter half of a discourse on Marx’s theory of commodification and its relationship to ideology. The second will focus on the quantitative nature of the commodity. Here I continue a critique of materialism as initiated in the blog entry on Althusser, above.

            To begin with, the commodity is an ‘external object, a thing’ that possesses a variety of perceptual properties that together or individually determine its character in terms of use (125). To be a commodity is to embody some potential for satisfying human needs. (Marx will later explain, when outlining its quantitative nature, that the commodity is any thing transferred through exchange to operate as a use-value (131).) The manner in which each promises to satisfy such needs will determine its particular qualitative nature. It is in this regard that commodities will differ. They may be physical or intellectual. But such difference is not relevant. It ‘makes no difference’ when constituting the commodity, in so far as it is a thing of use (125).

            Although Marx portrays his approach and domain of reference as materialist, it should be noted that he nonetheless registers here non-empirical phenomena, at least at the level at which they are introduced and assumed to exist within and amongst essential postulates. At this initial point, there is no attempt to reduce objects of intellectual use-value to material or instrumental needs. It would seem that, here at least, there is no corporeal base for this ideal form. It will be granted that a thing will have first to tangibly exist so as to possess qualities considered useful for thought. But nonetheless, for some commodities they exist as commodities because they are determined by the very fact that they are intellectually useful, even when useful in this sense alone. It would on Marx’s summation make no difference if the commodity served to sate the rumbling of the stomach.

            A physicalist would clearly object to this observation by remarking that intellectual stimulation by external things is first produced by the sensible qualities of those things, perceived by the sensations and transmitted into neurophysiological impulses. None of these are immaterial. One would nonetheless reply that, first of all, even if one granted the materiality of cognitive activity, at this stage of Marx’s discourse intellectual operations are not reduced to functional operations. In which case, the notion of materiality would have to be significantly broad enough to include that which in quotidian thought is considered immaterial: abstract thought, ideas, concepts, values, etc. 

            Furthermore, the intellect must play a not slight role amongst such postulates. Even when prior to so-called intellectual wants but beyond the most basic animalistic needs, proactive (conscious or unconscious) cognition determines a thing as an item of use, selecting its mode of use from a variety of properties and possibilities. It is thus that we can say that the ‘the discovery of these ways and hence of the manifold uses of things is the work of history’ (125). The commodity must certainly be ‘an external object, a thing’ but nonetheless, to some ineradicable degree, necessarily confirmed as useful by the inside (an inside yet to be defined). Marx practically admits this himself when he denies, against Nicholas Barbon, that all things possess intrinsic use-value, irrespective of time or place:

 ‘Things have an intrinsick vertue’ (this is Barbon’s special term for use-value) ‘which in all places have the same vertue; as the loadstone to attract iron’… The magnet’s property of attracting iron only became useful once it had led to the discovery of magnetic polarity. (125, n. 3; the parentheses are Marx’s)

Later, the qualitative aspect of the commodity will be described as the material recto, to which the quantitative aspect, the exchange-value, will be its formal, immaterial verso. Marx insists, this time in agreement with Barbon, that to conceive exchange-value as inherent to the physical constitution of a thing appears contradictory (126). But if this is the case because of the fundamentality of the determining influences of culture and trend, this must also be the case, to some significant degree, for use-value. 

            This is quite evident if we consider certain operations of thought and language; a point well brought out by way of modal expressions. Consider the lucid illustration of Hegel on this point by Slavoj Žizek in The Sublime Object of Ideology.[ii] For example a table – a simple manufactured object of utility – is conceived and utilised by way of the possibilities and necessities it is believed to contain. A correct understanding of the table – in calling and thinking of it as ‘table’ – is a product of possibilities concentrated upon the properties perceived. One can sit at it, sit on it, stand at it, stand on it, lie on it; it can be moved, turned; it is susceptible to pressure, affected by elements; it stands in relations of possibility with other objects etc. Tables must, furthermore, be a product of early human observation and experimentation, culminating in discoveries that yielded knowledge of potential combinations – of possibilities and necessities – of elements and activities.[iii] And this is an inviting (though incomplete) first characterisation for non-abstract thought: the instantaneous delimitation of raw sense data within and by way of pre-established nexuses of possibilities (where possibility becomes actualised in a physical thing).[iv]

            One must therefore interpret the following critically:

The usefulness of a thing makes it a use-value. But this usefulness does not dangle in mid-air. It is conditioned by the physical properties of the commodity, and has no existence apart from the latter. It is therefore the physical body of the commodity itself, for instance iron, corn, a diamond, which is the use-value or useful thing. (126)

The physical properties of iron do not alone teach us how and why it is to be wrought, let alone discovered and mined – even if those properties will necessarily delimit the manner in which it is to be mined and wrought etc. Nor does the diamond tell us that it should be valued. But such physical properties are the stimulus and locus from and for which the possible configurations of valuation are set and constrained. Thus one cannot deny the existence of a world of things as the precondition for (qualitative) commodification, but they cannot be commodities alone without the activity of a thought (admittedly yet to be defined) which – in some definite but particular sense prior – determines them as such.  At the stage of the capitalist mode of production at least (for that is where Capital begins), cognition is fundamental.

 

 

            Notes 

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[i] Marx, Karl, trans. Fowkes, Ben, ‘The Commodity’ in Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume One (Penguin Classics, 1990), 125-178; hereafter referred to by page number in the text.

[ii] Žizek, Slavoj, The Sublime Object of Ideology, second edition (Verso, 2008), pp.x-xi; the notion of horizons of possibilities occurs in various writers, notably Husserl, Lewis, Kripke, etc.

[iii] See especially the discussion of the ‘Neolithic paradox’ in Lévi-Strauss, Claude, trans. Weidenfeld, George, The Savage Mind (Oxford University Press, 1966), p. 13ff 

[iv]  Žizek, Slavoj, The Sublime Object of Ideology (op cit.), p. xi

Althusser’s materialist theory of ideology

This entry takes issue with a thesis central to Louis Althusser’s theory of ideology.[i] In brief, it shall be argued that, if the least to be said about ‘ideology’ is that it denotes a pre-established set of ideas, notions or beliefs that determine in advance an individual’s manifest thought, judgements or attitudes, then Althusser’s theory of ideology can be claimed itself, to a high degree, ideological constrained, and this to the detriment of his theory. The latter deploys his own interpretation of Marx, grounded on the contention that Marx acceded to scientificity by critically overturning certain commonplace philosophical and anthropocentric concepts.[ii] A central target is the concept of ideality, the vigorous opposition to which, in the name of materiality, occupies an important place in Althusser’s theory of ideology. It will be argued that Althusser’s particular insistence upon this staunch opposition frustrates his theory, the problematisation of which gestures toward a significant advance. This does not entail mere submission to certain idealist themes but their intimate examination beyond mere rejection as a matter of principle.

            To economise on space, it has been necessary to sharply foreground what are in effect only few aspects of a whole. To begin, few brief initial comments will provide passing indications of the surrounding context (§I). Althusser’s materialist argument follows (§II). This I seek to evaluate so dedicate most attention. A couple of Althusser’s subsequent considerations will be summarised thereafter (§III) before deploying an argument contrary to his materialist thesis (§IV).  The surrounding theses have not been so analysed but are accepted and explained as given so as to illustrate the context and assess their consistency with the views examined.

 

§I

            Ideology has no history

Althusser’s belief that Marx became acutely aware of the real preconditions for social existence only after he evacuated universalising idealist principles may be found in various places in his work and determines many of his conclusions. For centuries these principles – including the very closely associated championship of human subjectivity as the bedrock ground for all speculation – dominated philosophical debate. In time, many considered these responsible for the insoluble, now stale, difficulties for which philosophy had become synonymous.

            It is with similar conviction that some writers – Terry Eagleton amongst them – conclude there to exist just too many definitions, uses and concepts for ideology to allow reducing all to some ‘Grand Global’ definition, in the style of some overbearing but vacuous ‘Universal’ philosophy.[iii] The best we can do is maintain the differences so as to appreciate the diversity of signifieds that have nonetheless found expression in that one signifier. Quite contrary to this trend, however, Althusser believes ideology articulable as a universal form, once ideology in general is isolated from ideologies in particular.[iv] At first sight this would appear refractory to the initial standpoint because Althusser employs a typically structuralist distinction, privileging here structure over event, repeating the classic philosophical oppositions form/content, form/matter, general/particular, necessary/contingent, essence/accident, constant/temporal etc.

            Ideologies in particular are products of the empirically observable and statistical historical-material constituents of society. But Althusser wishes to generalise within this domain without raising himself out of it. Ideology does not exclude history, because an ideology will always contain some theory or description of history. Ideology in general therefore always has ‘history’ within it. What’s more, there is something general about ideology such that is ‘present in the same form throughout what we can call history’ (35). This does not place ideology in a transcendent position over above history, but rather a constant position within and throughout history.  This permits, in Althusser’s opinion, a formalization of the topic without snatching at some will-o’-the-wisp philosophical ‘Idea.’ 

            Before approaching our central area of concern, it will be worth briefly noting two contributory theses (while admitting that any near-adequate analysis of the overall theory should take these much better into account).

 

            1. Ideology is unconscious

First, ideology is unconscious, intimately akin to the unconscious of psychoanalytic theory (35). In both, latent languages engender manifest languages, products of social complexes that pre-exist and predetermine every individual’s entrance upon the scene. One is allocated a place before birth as a ‘subject’ always already subjected to the process of acculturation: ‘the long forced march which makes mammiferous larvae into human children, masculine or feminine subjects’ (158).

            It should be worth pointing out that some version of unconscious determination exists in every theory of ideology. One need only consider that an accusation of ideological presupposition always entails some identification of a tacit system of premises working behind the scenes. Althusser’s version has a distinctly semiological character. That this unconscious is for Althusser a signification-engendering social phenomenon recalls Saussure’s claim that the participation of interlocutors within a wider linguistic community generates the identification of sound patterns with approximately corresponding concepts: a community crystallized by an unconscious and involuntary contract between each of its members.[v] That, crucial to this position, the human ‘subject’ is posited as a point of arrival (not departure) is consistent with Althusser’s anti-humanist interpretation of Marx.[vi]

 

            2. Ideology is imaginary 

Second, ideology is imaginary. The relations in which people are connected to their real relations of existence (i.e. relations of production, relations of class) are provided an imaginary explanation. One certainly always exists in some way related to the material world and in some way related to the social world (itself in some way or ways related to the material world). The precise nature of the ‘in some way’ in which one relates to them is supplied by the imagination. If such an explanation were itself epistemically accurate one would surely possess an immediate and transparent understanding of things. This would therefore seriously downplay the need for (or existence of) science as well as going no way toward explaining the very many interpretations that have and are made of the world. This is easily explained by the fact that descriptions of humankind’s relationship(s) to its environment far outdate the emergence and development of science. Ideology is therefore illusory because it is not real, even though it always alludes to reality (36). Note that the structuralist theme of relationality and ‘difference without positive terms’ (Saussure) is here rehearsed.[vii] As Lévi-Strauss succinctly puts the point, apropos the transferable value of structural linguistic method, ‘it does not treat terms as independent entities, taking instead as its basis of analysis the relations between entities.’[viii]

 

§II

            3. Ideology is material

This is, Althusser claims, a thesis vital to his theory. It also constitutes our main point of contention. As he admits, it appears rather counter-intuitive against the background of an argument emphasising the imaginary and unconscious nature of ideology. These words commonly invoke reference to cognitive processes characterisable either as psychical or ideal. But this only derives, for Althusser, from an (‘Idealist’) ideology of ideology and of thought. Ever since the emergence of science ideas have been consistently represented as free-floating ‘ideals’ possessing a somewhat ‘spiritual existence’, but this is incorrect (39-40). To elaborate a contrary thesis he first lays down the following caveat:

[P]resented in affirmative form, this thesis is unproven. I simply ask that the reader be favourably disposed towards it, say, in the name of materialism. A long series of arguments would be necessary to prove it. This hypothetical thesis of the not spiritual but material existence of ‘ideas’ or other ‘representations’ is indeed necessary if we are to advance in our analysis of the nature of ideology. Or rather, it is merely useful to us in order the better to reveal what every at all serious analysis of any ideology will immediately and empirically show to every observer, however critical. (40)

 So Althusser produces an ipse dixit to bolster his surrounding arguments. We shall have cause to examine this later.

            To begin with, ideologies are always fostered and disseminated by, in Althusser’s formulation, ‘Ideological State Apparatuses’: superstructural state institutions that promulgate religious, ethical, legal, political, aesthetic etc. belief-systems (ideologies) (40). Note that Althusser refers here to aspects of the superstructure, even though ideologies in particular have already been characterised as causally determined by the historical-material constitution of society: the socio-economic infrastructure. Althusser would certainly reply that the infrastructure nonetheless determines in the last instance, but it should be worth recognising the emphasis it appears important to place at this moment on superstructural factors – most especially because such considerations are intended to contribute to an argument for the materiality of ideology.    

            Taken together, such ideologies are largely heterogeneous in character and somewhat contradictory. However, a uniform state ideology lies behind, unites and finds expression through these institutions in a variety of only apparently disparate forms (40). These institutions are, first and last, material entities; they consist of churches, statutes, legal firms, political organisations, schools, media organisations, even sports teams and organisations etc. This assertion once again employs distinctions between general/particular, essential/contingent etc. Not only are ideologies said to agree on certain like matters but that very point of agreement supposedly enables and supports them, creates and give them meaning as such, and a fortiori their heterogeneity. The locus and origin of this unity amongst difference (a unity, to underscore the point, which generates meaning through such difference) is not explained. The least that can be said here is that a case for the very existence of ideology is made – implicitly but not intentionally – over against the individuality and particularity of material entities (ideologies). 

            Althusser is keen to mark out a distinction between the materiality constitutive of such entities and that of concrete objects, say, tables or rocks. There are, he claims, different modalities of materiality. The relations imagined by an individual towards their relations of existence are lived through material processes and effects. For an individual to be possessed of an ideology is for that individual to behave in a particular manner, to adopt certain practices and perform certain rituals. Althusser:

 If [s]he believes in God, [s]he goes to Church to attend Mass, kneels, prays, confesses, does penance… and naturally repents and so on. If [s]he believes in Duty, [s]he will have the corresponding attitudes, inscribed in ritual practices ‘according to the correct principles’. If [s]he believes in Justice, [s]he will submit unconditionally to the rules of the Law, and may even protest when they are violated, sign, petitions, take part in a demonstration, etc. (41)

The possession of ‘ideas’ is always already an acting out or practical ‘inscription’ of those ‘ideas.’

            Thus, ideologies are material activities lived out in material practices determined by material rituals defined, buttressed and communicated to individuals by the material ideological state apparatuses (43). Althusser notes that each instance of the expression ‘materiality’ in the foregoing sentence differs in modality from the others.

            One wonders in what such a difference must consist. Surely the above examples are imbued with meaning only because of some abstract determination. If, when we talk of the materiality of a rock or chair, we intend to say, after Frege, the referents not senses of those objects,[ix] the materiality of the above examples appears different in so far as it consists of various material phenomena (in the everyday sense) united only through some meaningful support. They exist as activities combined through and for the sake of signification or symbolization. Rituals, practices and institutions are referents only in so far as they have a prior sense given to them. But they also appear sources of such sense. If the ideological state apparatuses disseminate ideology then practices and rites supply and enforce the ideological state apparatuses. Thus materiality (in our mundane sense) may crucially feed in to and out of ideology.  However, this does not explain the form that holds these materialities together and is held together by them.

            Again, there is an implicit but not intentional similarity here with the earlier emphasis placed upon superstructural factors. Althusser will say that ideology ensures the reproduction of the conditions of production. If this is the case then such ideology will indissolubly contribute to the reproduction of the socio-economic basis that founds the state apparatuses, the ideological facets of which reproduce in turn its foundational basis, ad infinitum. A circle may therefore be identified in Althusser’s theory. This is not a fallacious circularity in so far as it seeks to describe a fact of social perpetuation. We might nonetheless claim, abusing a Marxist phrase, that the conceptual kernel remains hidden within the material shell.[x] An interesting hypothetical analogy here would be to imagine de Saussure, had he followed Althusser, resting content with the physical – i.e. physiological, phonetic and acoustic – aspects of linguistic phenomena simply because they are indissociable from the spoken sign without enquiring as to the meaningful essence that engenders them as elements of the speech circuit at all.    

            It should be noted that the most that is said about the form of ideology in general here is that it is practical and material. Althusser nonetheless believes that he has drawn important consequences from it. We have evacuated all need for use of the term ‘idea(s),’ while successfully maintaining and explaining the terms ‘subject,’ ‘consciousness,’ ‘belief,’ and ‘action’ by way of introduction of the terms ‘practices,’ ‘rituals,’ and ‘ideological state apparatus’ (43). (Presumably, the difference of ‘ideas’ from ‘consciousness’ and ‘belief’ is psychologistic, if practices and rituals are to confer materiality and exclude ideality.)

            These points will be returned to in time. For now, it shall be sufficient to protest that, to insist upon a term (here materiality) as fundamental, especially because it has primacy and causal power over its opposite (there ideality), then to inflate its meaning to incorporate aspects of that opposite is a very curious gesture indeed.

 

§III

            4. Ideology determines individuals as subjects

So, for Althusser, ideology equates always therefore with practice, and practice by and for subjects (44). We may say that ideology is therefore the material interpellation of individuals by way of the definition and introduction of the category of the subject. The category of subjectivity is thus, for Althusser, constitutive of all ideology. If this is the case, one’s entire being is lived out as a subject, and lived out, therefore, within ideology. This category is so deeply embedded that it assumes the status of ‘a primary “obviousness”’ (45). Subjectivity is always already imposed without appearing to have been so.

            Central to this notion is that of recognition. We are interpellated as subjects, by others as well as by ourselves. This is lived out by a number of rituals. One responds to the call of their name. The reply is of the kind, ‘yes, it is me.’ We are recognised and recognise ourselves as such. This name is conferred either before or at birth. Although the selection is seemingly arbitrary, the name derives from a given stock of acceptable names. Within our culture, human beings are rarely named, for e.g., ‘Pooch’ or ‘Fool’ or ‘Obstreperous.’ One may reply that there is nothing in place to prevent this. But such an act would nonetheless present a marked departure from the norm. Within our culture too, children tend to inherit patrilineal surnames. A title and other variously conferred genitives (widow of, father of) will also serve to circumscribe individuality but always within a context of subjectification. Any divergence from rules such as these will often provide information about different ideological values, i.e. of ‘undesirable’ variations, different cultural backgrounds or different social statuses (e.g. a matrilineal surname as a result of some form of paternal absence or as a product of a different culture; a strikingly different kind of name bestowed by a celebrity parent; a name which has a given ‘meaning’, etc.).

            Birth is received by a number of rituals. It is thereafter celebrated annually, a ritual that is gradually inculcated and exercised by the person to which it refers. One is cultivated by a system of ‘correct’ behaviour through self-recognition, e.g. to ‘be a lady’ or ‘be a man’ – with all the many meanings packed into those expressions.

            It would intuitively seem that, as an ‘individual,’ one exists outside ideology. But, as a ‘subject’, an individual-cum-subject, as we have seen, this is merely an appearance. The outside is the inside, and this is an indissociable effect of the ‘primary “obviousness”’ with which ideology constitutes us as subjects. The denigration of one’s position within an ideology is therefore a necessary element of all ideologies (49).

 

            5. The Christian world-view is archetypical of ideology in general

Althusser selects for an example the Christian religious ideology. Because they are formally the same, what will be said about this instance holds for all ideologies (51). One might remark here that, nonetheless, Christian religious ideology appears to have been chosen for a distinct peculiarity of content – or­ to possess a form which is for Althusser the form of ideology par excellence. There will be occasion to reflect upon the implications of this later.

            Christianity promotes a particular subject, one possessing predicates such as ‘creator,’ ‘absolute,’ ‘total,’ ‘perfect,’ ‘universal,’ etc., i.e. it is the subject, the Subject: God. As ‘creator,’ ‘last judge,’ etc, God summons (interpellates) the human individual.  He hails the individual by name so as to reveal their created, secondary, subordinated nature. The individual is a subject conceived and created by the Subject, subjected to Him, and shall return to Him on condition they obey his Laws and Commandments, believes and acknowledges Him etc. Thus, for Althusser, a ‘speculary’ ‘mirror-structure’ enables a multitude of individuals to recognise one, central, unique and divine Subject, who calls upon and interpellates them as subjects. (In Jesus Christ, God manifests himself materially, as Subject amongst subjects – both as Himself, incarnated, and from Himself, begotten, therefore created, secondary, etc. – but as a supernal and superlative instance of which. The mirror- structure is therefore redoubled and enhanced.)   

            Thus, subjects recognise themselves as subjects, as subjects themselves, ‘free’ to obey or disobey the Law – instantiated here as God’s Love (52) – but always as a law eternally inscribed, ineradicable whether ‘chosen’ or not. In their ‘freedom,’ subjects therefore submit and work all by themselves. They become who they are, ‘free,’ assimilated to a system through which they recognise themselves and so doing their own-most duties and responsibilities.

            One might say here that theses 4 and 5 metaphorically illustrate the operations of an instituted master signifier the effect of which produces social cohesion in and through a form of self-recognition. The elaboration of these points is here very far from complete. Sufficient to remark as an aside that an interesting point of contact may be opened between Foucault’s discourse on panopticism, Heidegger’s reflections on the determination of being as presence and Derrida’s elaboration of which in terms of the transcendental signified.

Thus, for Althusser, relations of production are continually reproduced. As ‘subjects,’ individuals submit to the demands and procedures of economic life. They acknowledge through recognition of themselves their determined and circumscribed locations within the functioning of the socio-economic order, as an instrument utilising an aspect of some given force of production.

             

§IV

            The argument

In framing the distinction between ideology in general and ideologies in particular, Althusser has surely deployed a prior distinction between form and content (‘…the formal structure of ideology is always the same’ (51)), a distinction determined by certain traditional predicates. That Althusser insists this ‘form’ to be omni-historical and not transcendent to history goes no distance toward attributing materiality. Materiality in all its ‘modalities’ surely always denotes something contingent, spatio-temporal, and causal – unless the notion of ‘materiality’ is here to be considerably revised. Such revision would prove circumspect precisely because the word (‘material,’ ‘materiality’) would clearly be upheld by some overriding intention in spite of the fact that it is utilised to signify that which it is intended to oppose and dominate. A generalisation of historical factors in terms of ‘omni-history’ must nonetheless bracket off (we may say ‘transcend’) contingent, spatio-temporal, causal factors. In some sense alike the Husserlian procedure, paranthesising such phenomena should not involve their deletion. One must admit that, of course, empirical reality is certainly indispensable for our investigation. To talk of ideology in general we must, and do, begin and end with ideologies in particular.  But to state the case in Kantian terms: ideology in general may very well rely for its existence upon support and concrete expression in and through the material world, but it does not necessarily follow that it arises out of the material world. Otherwise it is very unclear how something entirely material and not at all ideal may be both imaginary and ‘omni-historical’. Certainly psychological misrepresentations are themselves material (i.e. neuro-physiological), but such phenomena are not themselves eternal realities. They are private and internal, easily discredited in the face of ‘objective’ counter-evidences. Ideologies, on the other hand, are, as Althusser has argued, shared, socially cohesive phenomena, not to be reduced to the level of the individual precisely because they function in spite of the contingent differences of particularity – which, when they are to count as ideological phenomena, instances or events are as such only because of some unifying level of significance through which they cohere. If it is fundamentally intersubjective, the unconscious of ideology cannot therefore reside in the deep recesses of the subject (alone). Althusser effectively admits this point himself when he refuses, with Lacan, to locate the unconscious within the field of psychology (153-4, 158). Althusser’s vigorous opposition to the ‘bourgeois’ ‘humanism’ of idealism and transcendentalism appears therefore to constitute something of a dogma.[xi] This entire discussion appears to turn on an obstinate refusal to admit the existence of ideal objectivity.

            Althusser’s logic appears to run thus:

 

[P1]:   There exist many different particular ideologies

[P2]:  Every particular ideology shares a general form with all the others

[C]:    One may distinguish ideologies in particular from ideology in general.

 

And from this Althusser appears to draw the further conclusion that whatever is the same for every ideology in particular is true of the formal structure of ideology in general. So,

 

[P1]:  Whatever is the same for every ideology in particular is true of the formal structure of ideology in general.

[P2]:  Every ideology in particular is (in four modes) material.

[C]:    The formal structure of ideology in general is (in four modes) material.

 

However, to begin with, it would appear that materiality in general is a concept, that is formal, ideal, not itself material. This agrees with the oft-cited criticism against Plato’s doctrine of the self-predication of Forms. The concept of liquid in general, is, for example, not itself liquid. If we say of every instance of x that it possesses certain properties, it does not necessarily follow that there exists a real all-x that possesses such properties. One only claims the existence of a formal structure which endows or selects those properties at every instance of x. Such a formal structure exists only insofar as it is formalised, which is also therefore idealised, that is, not simply one amongst the manifestations to which it refers. To talk of properties in general is to constitute those properties generally on the strict condition that such generality occurs only at the level of formality and ideality. Generality is itself formal and ideal. To be material is therefore never to be ideal. To generalise is always to ascend to the level of formal ideality, and this is true even when we invoke the concept of materiality in general, which cannot therefore be itself material.

            Althusser has claimed that the notion of a Subject, observable in Christian religious ideology but true for all, interpellating subjects as subjects through which certain values are assimilated, is the fundamental operation of every ideology in general. The concept of God, that is, an absolute centre which grasps diverse materialities by multiplying around its universalising mirror-structure the form of a derived but secondary and imperfect image of itself, is the concept of ideality par excellence.

            The Christian God (archetypical of ideology in general) is not corporeal, spatio-temporally constrained; not manifest in the fallen here below but divine, spiritual, ideal. It is this fact that permits its application across a multiplicity of material contexts: its absolute generality and therefore its universal scope of application. And if this is formally the case for every ideology – including the ‘regulative ideals’, one surmises, of ethical, religious, juridical and philosophical ideologies-in-particular – it would seem even less the case that recognised predicates, whatever they are, should belong in any way to the structure itself unless they are to be thought of as formal and ideal. Ideality is the very condition of possibility for the formal identification of particular qualities within a general system.

            An obvious objection here would be to state that general principles may still refer to the material world. The principles are ideal, their referents material, and one can of course generalise, without absurdity, about the material world. However, Althusser’s discussion appears to claim (without saying it) either that ideology is the very source of identification and generalisation, over against the differences, particularities, contingencies of empirical, transient matter or that it shares something profoundly intimate with some other faculty which produces them. (In which case ideology and science would be species of the same genus, even if they differ in epistemic value.) I would like to suggest that this faculty shares remit with thought and language themselves, as unconscious products and manufacturers of social interaction. After all, as Althusser says, we interpellate others as subjects; we refer, speak to ourselves as selves, etc. 

            It should therefore come as no surprise that similar problems have been dealt with by philosophers and theorists of language. As Derrida asks, apropos Husserl, ‘is it not language itself that might seem to unify life and ideality?’[xii] And it is precisely the problem with Husserl that an objectivity of socially-synthetic intersubjective meanings may persist in a word despite the sensible (thus material) and psychic differences it undergoes through repetition.[xiii] It is only through recognition of the same despite theoretically infinite repetitions that language can carry meaning at all, that language can exist as such. Language precedes and enables subjectivity – the self-presence of the speaking subject in silent soliloquy. In speaking silently to ourselves we believe we escape the trappings of ideological ‘illusion’ but in fact receive the words, significations, laws of grammar and logic, accepted customs of combination, criteria for verification and justification etc. from the society in which we find ourselves and in so doing, as Althusser so well explains, constitute ourselves in the ‘obviousness’ (the ‘common sense,’ the ‘of course’) of subjectivity. Prior to ideology, the conditions of such factors must begin with those already animating language. 

            Take also as an example the difficulties tackled by Saussure[xiv] (even though he ultimately failed, in Derrida’s summation, to recognise the phenomenological problem of language).[xv] A single phoneme is notoriously difficult to analyse. It will, to begin with, sound different in the mouths of different speakers. The concepts associated with that phoneme will be different for each speaker. What’s more, that phoneme is the product of a long history of development, and it will continue to develop. (Althusser has attached predicates of very similar kind to ideologies in particular.) The trick is to not conceive the phoneme as occurring in an empirical context at all, where it is enmeshed within a multitude of psychological, physiological, and physical processes and will change with time, context and use. (All of these are material.) The value it has as signifying sound – ensuring that it is recognisable and repeatable by different speakers, across a variety of different contexts and situations – is generated at a formal level, by the relation of difference that holds between it and the other phonemes within the language. A signifying term is to be conceived as a point within a particular system of differences. To understand such a language, or ‘system of signs’ is to conceive it in isolation from its process of development. It is thus, the structural linguist will claim, that we understand and use languages at all, be they modern Russian, Old Dutch, Sanskrit, Begriffsschrift, or whatever.  A very similar process, it appears, produces the different ideologies.

A conclusion here must therefore be very open-ended. This discussion merely indicates the beginning of an examination of ideology in terms of language and meaning. Analyses of language will therefore be for us more than just borrowed methodologies or heuristic metaphors. For ideology produces and sustains meaning, as does language. It is certain that the material processes and effects of ideology (as also language) are important contributory factors. But we risk sliding into the ‘sterile empiricism’[xvi] of common sense if we fail to deny that such processes and effects are all there is.

            In light of this, the foregoing discussion leaves open to examination that which it has taken for granted: the unconscious, the social (the relation between these), relationality, possibility and necessity, transcendentality, ideality, Althusser’s ‘speculary’ mirror-structure as a metaphor for ideality, and the locus of thought with relation to all of these notions as also to language itself.

 

 

 

 

Notes

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[i] Althusser, Louis, trans. Ben Brewster, For Marx (Verso, 2005); On Ideology (Verso, 2008)

[ii] See ‘Marxism and Humanism’ in For Marx (op. cit.), pp. 219-48; for example, p. 227: ‘This rupture with every philosophical anthropology or humanism is no secondary detail; it is Marx’s scientific discovery.’

[iii] Eagleton, Terry, Ideology: An Introduction (Verso, 1991), p.1

[iv] Althusser, Louis, On Ideology (op. cit.), p. 35; hereafter referred to by page number in the text.

[v] Saussure, Ferdinand de, trans. Harris, Roy, Course in General Linguistics  (Open Court, 1983), p. 13ff

[vi] See Althusser, Louis, ‘Marxism and Humanism’ in For Marx (op. cit.), pp. 219-48, and ‘Reply to John Lewis’ in On Ideology (op. cit.) (61-140), pp. 82-5

[vii] Saussure, Ferdinand de, Course in General Linguistics (op. cit.), p. 118

[viii] Lévi-Strauss, Claude, trans. Jacobson, Claire and Schoepf, Brooke Grundfest, Structural Anthropology (Basic Books, 1963), p. 33

[ix] Frege, Gottlob, trans. Geach, Peter and Black, Max, ‘On Sense and Reference’, in Analytic Philosophy: An Anthology, Martinich, A.P. and Sosa, David (eds.) (Blackwell Publishers, 2001), pp. 7-18

[x]Cf. the very well known, oft-cited declaration in Marx’s ‘Postface to the Second Edition’ of Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume One (Penguin Classics, 1990), p. 103: ‘With him [i.e. Hegel] it is standing on its head. It must be inverted, in order to discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell.’

[xi] See especially Althusser, ‘Marx and Humanism’ in For Marx (ibid), 219-248 and ‘Reply to John Lewis’ in On Ideology  (ibid), 61-140

[xii] Derrida, Jacques, trans. Allison, David B., Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs (Northwestern University Press, 1973), p. 10

[xiii] Ibid., p. 9-10

[xiv] Saussure, Ferdinand de, Course in General Linguistics (op. cit.)

[xv] Derrida, Jacques, Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs (op. cit), p. 47

[xvi] Lévi-Strauss, Claude, Structural Anthropology (op. cit.), p. 51

Assumptions

There are many definitions for ‘ideology.’ Each agree at least (but not necessarily only) in so far as all denote a pre-established set of ideas, notions or beliefs that determine in advance an individual’s manifest thought, judgements or attitudes. But this is rarely all that is said about ideology, nor is it said about ideology alone. So, to assess any given theory of ideology should include an attempt to reveal premises undisclosed but governing the theorist’s discourse, lest that theory be later revealed itself ideologically informed. Once such prior thought were disclosed, the conclusions of the theory could be shown to have been guaranteed or secured by the functioning of such thought and would therefore have been predictable had the thought and all relevant conditions already been known. The hypothesis arises that were this approach applied, together with analysis of consistency and accuracy, to every definition and theory of ideology one of two potential results would obtain: (one) arrival at a comprehensive definition to which all other definitions and examples are reducible, or (two) the conclusion that sets of ideas, notions or beliefs will always predetermine any definition (the entire area of discourse thus a revolving door where reflection is continually caught in pursuit of that which, propelled by the chase, must inevitably escape). Either case would nonetheless yield conclusive knowledge. This hypothesis shall not be tested here. Suffice it to admit that these assumptions underpin the forthcoming discussions.

The Social Intuitionist Model of Moral Judgement SIM

The Social Intuitionist Model of Model of Moral Judgment

The Socialist Intuitionist Model of Moral Judgment [SIM] proposed by J Haidt and F Bjorklund et al aims to give a descriptive account of where our moral beliefs come from and the process that enter into their formation. They then claim that this descriptive information not only imposes constrains on the sorts of meta-ethical theories that are on offer but in some cases that the descriptive facts entail normative facts.

1: The foundations of Morality

Haidt argues that moral intuitions are founded on a small set of moral modules or domains. The evidence for these domains stems from what is common to moral codes from the studies of cultural anthropologists and the literature related to the ‘building blocks of morality’ in other primates.  The first four show some continuity with other species whilst the last category is both distinctively human and learned relatively late in childhood compared to the previous domains.

1.Harm/care: concerns for the suffering of others, including virtues of caring and compassion.

2.Fairness/reciprocity: concerns about unfair treatment, inequality, and more abstract notions of justice.

3.Ingroup/loyalty: concerns related to obligations of group membership, such as loyalty, self sacrifice and vigilance against betrayal.

4.Authority/respect: concerns related to social order and the obligations of hierarchical relationships, such as obedience, respect, and proper role fulfillment.

5.Purity/sanctity: concerns about physical and spiritual contagion, including virtues of chastity, wholesomeness, and control of desires.

Haidt treats these foundations as modular. Modular architectures are standardly held to indicate systems that are functionally specialized and are encapsulated with regards to certain kinds of information e.g. information from the visual system that generates the muller-lyle illusion whereby two lines seem to be of different lengths does not change when information from our store of propositional knowledge tells us that the two lines are the same length.  As evidence of encapsulation Haidt points to people whose moral judgments stem from one domain e.g. the purity sanctity domain, or the authority respect domain such as judging incest, eating ones pet dog, or cleaning the toilet with the national flag as being wrong and these judgments being retained despite there being no harm committed to anyone through such acts.  Information from each module has a relative autonomy from information from another module but the separation is not rigid as the moral modules are modifiable by culture in order to generate virtues/vices.

These modules are innate in the sense that they come prepared to forge certain responses from certain inputs for instance seeing another suffer especially if vulnerable will tend to produce sympathy or compassion and the observation of this will generate praise (or blame for those who are causing suffering] in others cultivating these traits into virtues/vices.  ‘The virtue of kindness is a social construction that a great many cultures have created to recognize, talk about, and reward people who act to relieve suffering.’ Haidt 2008.  A plausible evolutionary story can be told for each of the moral domains – for instance compassion in response to others suffering would have been beneficial if not essential for mothers in order that they can detect instances of suffering in their offspring and respond appropriately.  A similar account can be offered with regards to fairness and reciprocity that would motivate us to take revenge on those perceived as cheating in order that we can reap the benefits of future non-zero sum games with others. A purity module that prepared humans to regulate their conduct with regards to concerns over menstruating, eating, bathing, handling of corpses, and so forth would have been likely to have been beneficial in dealing with the challenges of life in a world of dangerous microbes and parasites.[1]

Thus the mildest version of our theory is that the human mind has been shaped by evolution so that children can very easily be taught or made to care about harm, fairness, in groups, authority, and purity; however, children have no innate knowledge-just a preparedness to acquire certain kinds of moral knowledge and a resistance to acquiring other kinds (e.g. that all people should be loved and valued equally).

Haidt 2008 p.204

However other virtues are more complex and permit of greater variation such as the virtue of honor (an honourable man pays his debts and avenges insults) which can be quite different for women being more connected with chastity and purity. Further there can be cultural differences within cultures due to emphasising different aspects of the foundations (which Haidt compares to tuning different aspects of a graphics equaliser).

Haidt goes on to argue that these foundations may generate different sets of moral codes depending on which domains are stressed and as such the moral codes need not be commensurable. Haidt offers an example of such differences the culture war between liberals and conservatives which he describes as an attempt to build different moral systems from over-lapping moral foundations. Liberals are described as having a slimmer set of moral foundations emphasizing the first two components above whereas conservatives are more prone to emphasize the whole set. Liberals are described as trying to build an open and diverse cosmopolitan place with the moral domain limited to harms, rights and justice – on such a conception moral regulation does not concern sexual matters or gender roles where these do not harm others.  Conservatives by contrast are described as trying to build less diverse more homogenous communities that respect authority and tradition.

Haid’t argues that since moral truths are created from the fabric of our internal sentiments then moral truths should be seen as anthropocentric truths rather than objective truths that exist independently of ourselves. Further Haidt explicitly denies that there are any objective moral truths, true for all rational creatures that can be acquired through reasoning given the variation in the ways our moral modules are set either at birth or through cultural training.  Instead he writes that moral facts are only so with respect to particular moral communities. Hence ‘Judgments about morality have the same status as judgments about humor beauty and good writing’. We expect to find more agreement with people in our own culture than different cultures and were there to be intelligent life on other planets we would expect to find even greater divergence (except to the extent their evolutionary history was similar to ours and required care giving to young).  Yet,  though moral facts are described as being relative to human nature and particular cultures a culture can legitimately criticise its own moral codes if large sections of its population feel their values and needs are being ignored.

If moral truths are anthropocentric truths, then moral systems can be judged on the degree to which they violate important moral truths held by members of that society. For example, the moral system of Southern White slave holders radically violated the values and wants of a large proportion of the people involved. The system was imposed by force, against the victims’ will. In contrast, many Muslim societies place women in roles that outrage some egalitarian Westerners, but that the great majority within the culture – including the majority of women – endorse. A well-formed moral system is one that is endorsed by the great majority of its members, even those who appear, from the outside, to be its victims. An additional test would be to see how robust the endorsement is. If Muslim women quickly reject their society when they learn of alternatives, the system is not well-formed. If they pity women in America or think that American ways are immoral, then their system is robust against the presentation of alternatives.

As a consequence Haidt claims that we should accept pluralism in our moral theory.

An adequate normative ethical theory should be pluralistic, even if that introduces endless difficulties in reconciling conflicting sources of value.

Haidt 2008 p.215

2: How moral judgment works.

The Social Intuitionist Model [SIM] of moral judgment as its name suggests holds that moral judgment is chiefly a matter of intuitions that are most influenced by social factors.  The model is chiefly opposed to the rationalist model of moral judgment. Haidt et al propose the following model as an outline of moral judgment with the unbroken lines representing the most common pathways and broken lines representing less frequent occurrences:

1: The Intuitive Judgment Link

Haidt et al describe intuitions as fast, automated processes that occur without conscious reflection and give rise to moral judgments or more generally evaluations of situations. The affective elements of experience (like-dislike, good-bad) reach consciousness so quickly and automatically that we can be aware of liking something prior to knowing what it is. In stressing the primacy of affect Haidt holds that the human mind is always evaluating regardless of whether it is men’s faces, a menu, or people’s names and much of the information that goes into such evaluations occurs non-consciously. Hence Haidt defines moal intuition as:

[T]he sudden appearance in consciousness, or at the fringe of consciousness, of an evaluative feeling (like-dislike, good-bad) about the character or actions of a person, without any conscious awareness of having gone through steps of search, weighing evidence, or inferring a conclusion

Haidt & Bjorklund, 2008, p. 188

The evaluative feeling that arises automatically then typically gives rise to a moral judgment that is consciously endorsed by the agent. However there are cases whereby the moral intuition and the moral judgment come apart so that one has a negative or positive evaluation of something without consciously endorsing that attitude:

[T]ight connection between flashes of intuition and conscious moral judgments…is not inevitable: Often a person has a flash of negative feeling, for example, towards stigmatized groups…yet because of one’s other values, one resists or blocks the normal tendency to progress from intuition to consciously endorsed judgment.

Haidt & Bjorkland 2008

Link2 The Post Hoc Reasoning Link.

Perhaps the most important link in SIM is the link between moral judgment and reasoning. Reasoning is defined in opposition to intuition and is ‘conscious mental activity that consists in transforming information about people in order to reach a moral judgment.’ Such reasoning is effortful and controllable and the reasoner is aware that it is occurring.  We often feel a need to justify our moral intuitions (especially when questioned by others) much more that we do with judgments of aesthetics or taste. However according to SIM whilst we like to imagine ourselves reasoning like ideal scientists looking for truth in an unbiased manner we actually search for reasons in a highly biased way to support our existing beliefs rather that our reasoning being used to transform our existing beliefs. Haidt describes this as:

Moral reasoning is usually an ex post facto process used to influence the intuitions (and hence judgments) of other people. In the social intuitionist model, one feels a quick flash of revulsion at the thought of incest and one knows intuitively that something is wrong. Then when faced with a social demand for a verbal justification, one becomes a lawyer trying to build a case rather than a judge searching for the truth.

Haidt 2001, p.18

Haidt illustrates when moral reasoning is taking place in the post hoc lawyer mode by the use of moral vignettes that invoke harmless taboo violations. For instance in a scenario involving incest subjects quickly express that incest is wrong but can only cite reasons that have already been ruled out by the vignette. In this they appear to be relying on heuristics from their cultural background i,e, reasons typically given for thinking that the action is wrong such as possible harm to offspring or social stigma. Their lack of responsiveness to change their initial moral judgment when these reasons are defeated could be construed as evidence of modularisation of moral domains or more general phenomena of a reluctance to revise moral judgments that are driven by a strong affective response.

In stressing the primacy of affect laded intuitions over reason Haidt also cites studies whereby peoples level of disgust (via hypnotic subjects that have disgust associated with some otherwise neutral term, or by having subjects sat at a dirty desk) has been manipulated and as a consequence the severity of moral judgment is increased and in some cases people will make a moral judgment about a situation that would otherwise appear morally neutral. Finally Haidt cites a great deal of neuro-scientific evidence supports the view that flashes of affect are “essential for moral judgment” in that damage to the areas that regulate emotion such as the ventromedial prefrontal cortex can render a person morally incompetent. [Greene & Haidt 2002, Damasio 1994].

The conclusion that Haidt draws from this research is that fast automatic intuitions guided by affect have a primary role in moral judgment making rather than slow conscious reason. Further when gut feelings guide our moral judgments moral reasoning is likely to be a post hoc affair used to justify our initial moral judgment rather than seek out whether our initial moral judgment is true or not. As Haidt says:

These obviously post-hoc rationalizations illustrate the philosopher David Hume’s dictum that reason is “the slave of the passions, and can pretend to no other office than to serve and obey them.” This is the first rule of moral psychology: feelings come first and tilt the mental playing field on which reasons and arguments compete. If people want to reach a conclusion, they can usually find a way to do so.

Haidt, J. (2008) What makes people vote Republican?

Link 3 The Reasoned Persuasion Link.

Haidt holds that moral reasoning that is used to justify our actions to others can sometimes affect other people, although moral discussions are noted for the rarity for which persuasion takes place. Further, reasoned persuasion works not by logical reasoning but by triggering affect laden intuitions in the listener and the rhetorical use of language often takes primacy over logical argument. They give an example of arguments concerning the altering of male and female genitalia at birth or during initiation rites which is common practice in different cultures noting that the language of persuasion is aimed at triggering our emotions.

This is a clear case of child abuse. It’s a form of reverse racism not to protect these girls from barbarous practices that rob them for a lifetime of their God-given right to an intact body (Burstyn, 1995).

Haidt 2008

Link 4 The Social Persuasion Link

Ppeople are highly attuned to the emergence of norms and influenced by friends and acquaintances even when no reason is given.   Haidt cites with approval Chaiken’s (1987) heuristic –systematic model of persuasion whereby people are guided by the ‘principle of least effort’.  A useful heuristic that guides people’s judgments is the ‘agree with people I like heuristic’.  For instance if your friend tells you how they have been mistreated by a stranger it will make sense to agree to this without asking whether the stranger had good reasons to mistreat them. However Haidt notes that whilst people are poor at examining their own assumptions, when engaged in moral discourse with others (so long as they differ in opinion) there is the possibility of revising ones judgment.

The core of the model gives moral reasoning a causal role in moral judgment but only when reasoning runs through other people. It is hypothesised that people rarely override their initial intuitive judgments just by reasoning privately to themselves because reasoning is rarely used to question one’s own attitudes or beliefs.

Haidt 2001, p819

These four links are the core of SIM. There are 2 others that occur less frequently. These are:

Link 5 The Reasoned Judgment Link.

Haidt notes that people may reason their way to a conclusion through sheer force of logic but such reasoning is rare and occurs where the intuition is weak. Where a firmly held intuition is held a ‘dual attitude’ may be held where the intuition continues to exist under the surface that still influences behaviour. Haidt cites Peter Singer’s view that a healthy chimpanzee deserves greater protection than a severely disabled human infant.

Link 6 The Private Reflection Link

Haidt holds that the best way to trigger new intuitions is to put one self in the shoes of another, or to emerge oneself in the same practices as another so as to understand the other side. When a person comes to experience both sides of an issue they may be faced with competing intuitions. Here Haidt cites with approval William James:

Reason per se, can inhibit no impulses; the only thing that can neutralise an impulse is an impulse the other way. Reason may, however, make an inference which will excite the imagination so as to set loose the impulse the other way..

Haidt 2008 p.194

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[1] It is important to note that there is a distinction between the proper and actual domain that a module functions in. For instance the proper domain is used to indicate the environment in which the module would have evolved e.g. compassion triggered in response to suffering would have been to one’s own offspring but over time and with cultural modification this gets extended to the actual domain where others children, other animals (baby seals or pet dogs that whine when you leave them) trigger compassion.

Bibliography

Haidt, J . (2001). The emotional dog and its rational tail: A social intuitionist approach to moral judgement. Psychological Review. 108, 814-834.

Haidt, J., & Bjorklund, F. (2008). Social intuitionists answer six questions about moral psychology. In W. Sinnott-Armstrong (Ed.), Moral Psychology, Volume 2: The Cognitive Science of Morality: Intuition and Diversity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (pp. 181-217)

Haidt, J., & Bjorklund, F. (2008). Social intuitionists reason, as a normal part of conversation. In W. Sinnott-Armstrong (Ed.), Moral Psychology, Volume 2: The Cognitive Science of Morality: Intuition and Diversity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press

Haidt, J. (2008) What makes people vote Republican? Published on www.edge.org, 9/9/08

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Philosophy Seminars in Cardiff Autumn 2009

The following Seminars take place in Cardiff at the Graduate Centre on  Park Place in the Vaughan Room from 4.15pm to 6pm.  They are open to the public so please feel free to attend.

 

Monday 9th November 2009 The dialectic of the dialectic of Sex by Stella Sandford

 

Monday 23rd November 2009 Projection and Pretence in Ethics by Ed Dain

 

Monday December 7th The Metaphysics of Richard Rorty by James Tartaglia

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Evolution of Morality Book Review part 1

The Evolution of Morality by Richard Joyce part 1

Joyce’s book is in two parts. The first part argues for the thesis that humans have an innate disposition to make moral judgements and that the present day existence of such a trait is because it passed on a reproductive advantage to our ancestors who had the trait. Joyce compares the disposition to acquire and make moral judgements with the disposition to acquire and speak a language. There are many different moralities that have been and are in existence but they have a common concern in being to guide inter-personal relations and concern themselves with negative appraisals of hurting others, values relating to reciprocity and fairness, behavioural requirements surrounding hierarchies and status, as well as regulations regarding bodily matters dominated by concepts such as purity and pollution. They have a common structure in consisting of categorical reasons for action. Just as there are many different languages in existence they share commonalities by which they all count as language and require the existence of innate learning mechanisms.

Joyce argues that an evolutionary explanation of morality has something to do with the benefit that someone who acts out of concerns for justice, virtue or respects the rights of others is likely to be a more useful member of society than someone who does not. However, Joyce warns that it is a mistake to think that an evolutionary explanation of pro-social traits that other animals might be said to have also explains the existence of morality. This is because:

To do something because you want to do it, is very different from doing it because you judge that you ought to do it. We can easily imagine a community of people who all have the same desires: They all want to live in peace and harmony, and violence is unheard of. Everywhere you look there are friendly, loving people, oozing prosocial emotions. However there is no reason to think that there is a moral judgement in sight.

Joyce p.50

Joyce then distinguishes doing something from pro-social emotions such as concern for your family or love of your spouse from doing something because you judge that you ought to do it. As such if we have an explanation of why humans have altruistic tendencies we do not as yet have an explanation of why humans have moral attitudes. The difference is in terms of understanding the concept of prohibition: that some things ought not to be done regardless of whether you desire to do them or not.

This raises the question ‘What is a moral Judgement?’ to which Joyce responds by noting that there are numerous grey areas whereby philosophers and all concerned are unsure about whether a moral judgement has occurred for instance when a psychopath claims that murder is wrong but has no motivation to comply. Also there is a dispute about what sort of things people are doing when they express moral judgements such murder is wrong. Are they reporting facts, expressing commands, or simply expressing their feelings?

Joyce’s answer to these questions is to say that when we make linguistic utterances such as ‘murder is wrong’ we are not asking what sort of mental state causes me to express this because people can quite easily express the same sort of linguistic utterances from a variety of different motivational factors. For instance in promising to repay a debt I may be motivated out of fear of the consequences, concern to do my duty, love of another but what I do which is promise to repay my debt is still the same. Joyce illustrates the distinction between the type of speech act performed and its cause with the example of an apology. When someone gives an apology for something they have done they express regret but it is perfectly possible that they did not feel any regret at all. What they are doing is following a range of linguistic conventions for the expression “I’m sorry”.  As such someone can admit to having regret without thereby apologising and apologise without having regret (for which we might call them insincere but we cannot deny that they have in fact apologised)

However Joyce also subscribes to the following principle:

If a type of sentence S, uttered in circumstances C, functions to express mental state M, we would expect that someone in C who utters a token of S should prompt confusion in her audience if she immediately added “but I don’t have M”. If, then, we observe such confusion for some particular instantiations of S, C, and M, and no other obvious explanation of this confusion is forthcoming, we should take it as evidence that S functions to express M in C.

Joyce p.54.

Now if we consider sentences such as “Sorry. But I don’t regret it for a moment” Joyce claims that such statements would cause bafflement because “Sorry” is the term used to express regret and the following statement makes it clear that the person has no regret. The latter statement appears to nullify what is expressed in the first one. On this model the following moral judgements should strike us as odd for the same reasons:

1 The Elgin marbles morally ought to be returned to Greece. But I do not believe that they ought to be returned to Greece.

2 Hitler was despicably evil. But I don’t believe that he was despicable evil.

3 The Elgin marbles morally ought to be returned to Greece. But I subscribe to no moral standard that commends their return to Greece.

4 Hitler was despicably evil. But I subscribe to no moral standard that condemns his character or actions.

In each case the first statement is part of a linguistic convention that expresses what a person believes and expresses acceptance of a convention that commends or condemns the activity in question where as the latter statement says that the person does not have any such commendation/condemnation.

In addition and more controversially Joyce also takes moral statements to express standards or general principles. Do we express general principles when making moral judgements? If we think of how moral judgements supervene on non-moral facts then this might seem plausible. For instance if we judge Tom to be a morally good person because he helps old ladies with their shopping then we should also judge Judy to be a morally good person if she also carries out the same action and likewise for anyone else in a similar situation. On such a view there might be said to be a general principle that is underpinning our moral judgments but that this is so is far from clear and needs further argument.

So for Joyce moral judgements are assertions and express beliefs about moral facts about peoples characters and what they have reason to do (regardless of whether they in fact desire to do what is morally required). However Joyce also takes moral judgements to express our sentiments, our feelings of approval and disapproval. The term ‘express’ here is not meant to denote a causal relation but what type of linguistic act is expressed when making a moral judgement.

In addition to expressing beliefs and attitudes moral judgements are also seen as expressing or giving reasons for action. The sorts of reasons that moral judgements have are categorical imperatives. Joyce holds that this requirement seems to be central to any system of morality. A categorical imperative is contrasted with a hypothetical imperative – a recommendation that you take certain means to achieve your end such as ‘if you want to be home by tea time then you had better start walking now’ the force of such advice is entirely dependent on the person having the relevant desire of wanting to be home by tea time. By contrast categorical imperatives such as ‘Do not kill innocent people’ are said to have a force or be binding regardless of what desires the person has. In other words a person cannot excuse themselves from the requirement not to kill innocent people by citing their lack of care for innocent people’s lives.

All cultures recognise certain acts of harming others as wrong, but no culture thinks that the wrongness of all such acts depends upon a primary harm that the perpetrator does by frustrating his own ends…Moral Inescapability is the quality had by categorical imperatives (including institutional rules, such as etiquette): of being legitimately applied to a person irrespective of her ends.

Joyce 61-62

However Joyce expresses some sympathy with the Kantian idea that there is something additional required by morality that is not captured within norms of etiquette or other forms of non-categorical imperatives. For instance an institution that required its followers to die their hair purple, or to engage in certain ceremonies might be insisted upon and a dissenter might meet with the reply that there is nothing in the rules about whether they care about complying or not. Here it seems that people who do not care about such rules are free to ignore them if they wish. However the price of accepting this is that if the authority of morality is nothing other than a convention then people may be legitimately free to ignore it just as we are free to ignore cult members telling us to die our hair purple. If we are motivated to avoid this conclusion then we need to be motivated to find some additional source of the clout of morality other than convention. Whilst Joyce is adamant that the extra clout of morality does not come from fear of punishment (although punishment is an important component of any moral system in that we should hold transgressors as deserving of punishment) he claims that the question of where the additional clout of morality stems from can be accommodated in naturalistic terms which I will explain in part 2.