Right Reason

Neuroscience, Rationality, and Virtue

 

 

"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.

 

There Are No Such Things as Facts

The maximum extent of the ice sheets during the Pleistocene period.

 

In The Foundations of Scientific Inference and in other places throughout his writings, the philosopher of science, Wesley Salmon, provides a narrative about how scientific induction can make sense out of a varying amount of facts to explain the existence of ice sheets across much of North America. In this narrative, it is the scientific capability to make imaginative inferences from the facts to a theory about glaciers that made the human mind capable of coming to the knowledge about about them. jm

Salmon is wrong, though, in his narrative of why we know that glaciers once covered much of North America. As a defender of induction in science, Salmon gives a story about how we can see pieces of evidence that point to the events of the Ice Ages and that from those pieces of evidence, our confidence becomes greater that a continental ice sheet once extended as far as Illinois. This all fits within his probabilistic explanation of induction and within his thought, it certainly makes sense how more evidence of that event would increase the scientific robustness of a theory. However, that does not change that Salmon fundamentally got the process backwards.

 

Physical objects in the world did not explain themselves to us and people did not gather all of the evidence of the extent of the Laurentide ice sheet and then come to create a theory about Ice Ages from them. Instead, what happened is that the human idea that there was such a thing as Ice Ages came to guide scientists into finding more evidence to corroborate that theory. Facts did not lead to theory; rather theory led to facts.

There are simply no such things as physical entities independent of the ideas held by people that can be labeled “facts.” Indeed, the common-place notion that there are such entities in the world and that all someone has to do to discover the truth is to gather all of these “facts” completely misconstrues the process by which human knowledge grows. That human beings can even look at the world and say there are such things as facts is a product of them holding theories that allow them to categorize the world in such a way as to be able to point towards otherwise epistemologically inert objects and to say that they are “facts.” Thus facts occupy World Two of Karl Popper’s ontology: facts only exist where the mind interacts with the physical world and classifies it according to purely mental objects (i.e. theories) that exist independent of the physical world*.

 

Thus that we are able to see evidence everywhere we look that point towards the existence of the Laurentide ice sheet cannot be understood as simply facts guiding the mind towards adopting a theory. Rather, we are able to see all of that evidence because the human mind holds a certain theory and that theory makes possible the mind to see those physical objects as pointing towards the existence of primordial ice sheets tens of thousands of years ago. 

Facts independent of theory thus don’t exist. All that exist are physical objects that fit well into the classification schemes of theories and some theories that have classification schemes that can be seen as better capturing the real phenomena of the world. Some classification schemes prove to be very capable at predicting how future events can be classified, at which point we can say that they have proved their mettle. And other schemes prove to be incapable of predicting how future events can be classified, at which point we can say that they have been classified. As a result, science is not fitting theories to facts; rather it is the competition of many different systems of classification that bring along with them different understandings of the physical objects out in the world.

 

 

* “In this pluralistic philosophy consists of at least three ontological worlds: the first is the physical world or the world of physical states; the second is the mental world or the world of mental states; and the third is the world of intelligibles, or of ideas in the objective sense; it is the world of possible objects of thought: the world of theories in themselves, and their logical relations; of arguments in themselves and their logical relations; and of problem situations in themselves.” - Karl Popper in “On the Theory of Objective Mind” as published in Objective Knowledge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), pg. 154. 

On The Power of Familiarity and the Wane of Wonder

 

 

A panoramic of Angel Falls.

 

 

From essay I:23, “On Habit: and on never easily changing a local law” by Michel Montaingne as translated by M.A. Screech in Penguin Classic's The Complete Essays:

Miraculous wonders depend on our ignorance of Nature on the essence of nature, Our judgment's power to see things is lulled to sleep once we grow accustomed to anythings.

Similarly, Montaigne argued earlier in I:23 that the reason that no one ever heart the music of the spheres speculated by astronomers since the Greeks was that each person had grown so accustomed to the sound that no one could consciously discern it from the other sounds around them:

There is no need to go in search of what is said about those who dwell near the cataracts of the Nile; nor what the philosophers deduce about the music of the spheres: so that those solid material circles rub and lightly play against each other and so cannot fail to produce a wondrous harmony (by the modulations and mutations of which are conducted the revolutions and variations of the dance of the stars) yet none of the creatures in the whole Universe can hear it, loud though it is, since (as in the case of those Egyptians) our sense of hearing has been dulled by the continuity of the sound.

The parallel with the Egyptians near the banks of the cataracts not being able to hear the sound of the roaring rapids was borrowed from Cicero's The Dream of Scipio where Cicero also argues that the only reason no one hears the music of the spheres is because no one has never not heard it so we have all become dull to it.

 

Perhaps there is something tragic in the power of familiarity. Whether it be Angel Falls in Venezuela, the Grand Canyon, the red wood forests of California, or the Great Barrier Reef, much of the wonder comes to just how unaccustomed the onlooker is to what he sees. Everything in life is compared to something else, this tree is taller than that tree, this hole is deeper than that hole, and thus that something is even considered a wonder implies that it is so much greater in some quality than anything else in the world.

Angel Falls is the highest uninterrupted fall, by the time that the water reaches the bottom it has dispersed into a fine mist. The Great Barrier Reef is the largest system of coral reefs in the world and the largest single biological structure made by a single organism. The onlooker is thus faced with something that they have never seen before, a sight that breaks them from the habitual experiences they are used to and that refuses to be ignored in the background. However, as the onlooker grows accustomed to even the greatest sights even they can fade into the background. Thus he can be lulled by the force of habit to take things for granted and to not realize the magnificent qualities of that which has waned into the mundane

 

There is much lament in this human propensity, but to dwell too long on the tragedy alone would be myopic. After all, even though the power of familiarity may make us numb to the greatness around us, it also serves to make human life bearable in even the most terrible of circumstances. The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune may be shocking to a man accustomed to better, but before long they become lost in the background.  Habit then becomes something to be grateful for, something that enables us to focus on what is good in life rather than being lost in a sea of what we would like to change. 

Is a Sentence Just Moving Particles?

Saint Augustine in His Cell by Sandro Botticelli

 

What is there to these letters now written upon this screen? They can certainly be described in terms of the characteristics of the particles that form them. They have a certain mathematical shape because of them and they take certain color due to the light that they reflect. If all we are going to do is to describe them by their physical traits based on the movement of particles, then that is where we must end. The letters now written would then be lines that happen to have certain physical properties. However, this does not get us anywhere close to what the letters really are.

The letters are not just lines. They are parts of words, clauses, sentences and even larger paragraphs all of which are organized in an order that cannot be expressed in the reductionist terms of moving particles. This order is not simply the motion of particles because such movement cannot have purpose and so we cannot speak of purpose in such terms.

Yet, the order that the letters form cannot be understood without purpose. Whether it be in the objects that the subject takes within each clause or even the purpose we presume that a similar entity like ourselves created by writing it. These cannot be understood in terms of moving particles and they point to substance in the world that cannot be reduced to moving particles: mind.

Every  time we read a piece of writing, whether it be an article, book or even a humble blog post, we accept that there is more to the world than can simply be expressed in terms of moving particles. We accept that there is more to the writing than the mathematical properties of the lines they form. We accept that the lines express a conscious purpose that can only be expressed in terms of a mental substance and the traits only such substances can take.

There is more to a sentence than just moving particles: there is the non-reductionist order created by a mind within it that it cannot be understood without.