"If I say that it is impossible for me to keep quiet because that means disobeying the god, you will not believe me and will think I am being ironical. On the other hand, if I say that it is the greatest good for a man to discuss virute every day and those other things about which you hear me conversing and testing myself and others, for the unexamined life is not worth living for men, you will believe me even less."
-Socrates as recorded by Plato in the Apology
In his book, How We Decide (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company 2009), Jonah Lehrer uses recent evidence from neuroscience to argue that morality is not a matter of reason, but rather a matter of emotion. Like Hume, who argued that reason was the slave of the passions and argued morality to be but feelings of approval and disapproval, Lehrer finds moral judgments as less a conscious deduction and more an emotivistic response. In his argument, Lehrer primarily takes Kant, and the Enlightenment tradition as his opponents, but he argues that the ethical consensus for thousands of years from the Ten Commandments to the categorical imperative are based upon a the erroneous assumption that “our moral decisions are based on rational thought” (How We Decide, pg. 173).
According to Lehrer, when we make a moral judgment, the motivation for the decision is not a rational deliberation, but rather a unconscious emotional reaction. Within his vision of morality, our reason serves not as a guiding light, but rather as a post-hoc apologist which serves to make our emotional reactions seem reasonable. The thrust of Lehrer's argument is thus that it is a mistake to find the source of morality in reason because people's actual moral judgments are actually based on emotional reactions.
However, all of this in turn misses the thrust of the Socratic maxim that a life unreflected is a life not worth living. What Plato is emphasizing in the Apology through Socrates is not that at every single point in our moral lives we make moral decisions based on deductive reasoning taking all of the evidence into account, but rather that we can reflect on previous moral decisions in order to shape our character to make better decisions in the future. This perspective is echoed in Charles Darwin's description of a moral being in The Descent of Man as something that can reflect back on past actions with either approval or disapproval.
Furthermore, in the Nichomachean Ethics (trans. Terence Irwin, 2nd edition), Aristotle finds virtue not in singular acts and feelings but a habit of action that causes the person in question to perform her functions well. Leaving aside the question of what the proper functions of a human being are, this is a much different vision of morality from the vision that is tacit within Lehrer's account in How We Choose. To suggest, as Lehrer does, that the essential use of reason in a moral agent's life comes at the moment of decision making thus ignores a large strand of ethical inquiry, from Aristotle to Darwin, that places more emphasis on reflection and the cultivation of proper habits.
Rather than morality being about singular judgments of the rectitude of an action, morality within Plato and Aristotle's tradition of virtue ethics is about the formation of a character able to habitually make the right decisions. In a classic article in the American Journal of Psychology, “Habit,” B.R. Andrews defined “Habit” as “a habit, from the standpoint of psychology, is a more or less fixed way of thinking, willing, or feeling acquired through previous repetition of a mental experience." (American Journal of Psychology,Vol. 14. No. 2. (1908) pp 121-149). Today, “Habit” is first defined in the Oxford American English Dictionary as “A settled or regular tendency or practice.” The point of a reflected life was not we would be able to make deductive judgment for the propriety of each action. Instead, it was that, by proper reflection, we would be able to form a character that could reflexively make such decision based on our habits.
The virtue-ethical tradition does not reject that moral decisions are often made by emotional responses within the moment; instead, it teaches that we need to grow a virtuous character that can make proper emotional responses informed by our previous reflections. Rather than denying how moral decisions are made, as does the Enlightenment tradition, it harnesses and improves upon it. By living a life well reflected upon, we are able to train our moral intuitions and shape our emotions to react in the ways that reason determines to be right. The virtuous person then doesn't need to deliberate on most moral decisions; rather, she has trained herself to be able to react almost automatically in a proper manner. It is not for no reason that Charles Darwin wrote, again in The Descent of Man, that the perfect moral being is able to act in the most noble manner possible purely by reflex.
Explaining this vision of the moral life in terms of neuroscience would have been interesting, especially considering that Lehrer has an earlier chapter about how in decision making ("The Predictions of Dopamine," pp. 28-56). When someone has consistently repeated a pattern of behavior, he can rely on emotion in making that decision because of how dopamine in the brain created expectations we are often only partially to. This echoes the process that Aristotle wrote virtue is required in the opening of the Nichomachean Ethics' second book when he wrote:
Virtue, then, is of two sorts, virtue of thought and virtue of character. Virtue of thought arises and grows mostly from teching; that is why it needs experience and time [i.e., of ēthos] results from habits [ethos]; hence its name 'ethical', slightly varried from 'ethos'. (1103a15-18)
The similarities between the two are striking. Striking enough that I doubt Lehrer became familiar with the Aristotelean literature before opening up a broad-side assault on all of Western moral philosophy.
He misses a great opportunity, though. Since Aristotle relies on a metaphysical understanding of the human person, much of it rooted in his biological thought, within his writings that could be critiqued and improved upon with a modern understanding of the cognitive sciences. Lehrer could have helped provide that; instead, he simply launches on an attack of an entire tradition of inquiry he is not familiar with.
Moving backto the main topic, that each moral judgment may rely more on an aesthetic sense of the world than a rational deduction does not mean that moral decision making is fundamentally divorced from reason. What commentators like Lehrer, even though it may be working off of the correct neuroscientific perspective, fail to take into account are the lessons of the Classical virtue-ethical tradition. As taught by Plato and Aristotle, the use of reason within moral decision making is not a matter of on-the-spot decisions, but reflecting upon previous decisions in order to make possible the gradual growth of a habitual character that can make such on-the-spot decisions properly. By ignoring both the role of habits and reason's reflective capacity, not as simply something able to calculate but to look back on actions, Lehrer's critique of reason in morality falls short by his ignorance of virtue ethics.