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Naturalising Morality: Evolution, Ethics and Meaning

ESSAY 1 Tom Barnes a1077142
Question 3


Jonathan Haidts picture of moral nativism asserts that most of the decisions we make,
including moral ones are far more automatic operations than we might intuitively expect
them to be. This is presented as a neat solution as to how one might reconcile morality
into an evolutionary picture. If certain behaviours that we consider to have moral
implications, i.e. decisions that affect the happiness or survival an individual can be
found to have evolutionary advantages, it might be suggested that moral behaviour might
be the result of innate mental processes that have flourished via the process of evolution
rather than the controlled and rational cognitive processes we often attribute to them. One
of Haidts largest weapons in trying to convince us of this fact is that under careful
scrutiny it might seem that a large amount of human decision-making is in fact happening
automatically. Haidt would have it that most of the time humans behave in accordance
with an irrational set of rules and that our explanations of why we might have behaved
the way we did are largely post hoc justification coming after the fact. The rational
explanation for our behaviour is actually an explanation of why it might have been good
or bad to do something rather than the motivational force to do it in the first place. The
large part of Haidts picture looks compelling in that there is significant experimental
evidence to suggest that much of our behaviour is indeed automated, however
philosophers such as Cordelia Fine show that our automated functions are indeed
malleable and are not set in stone and that it is in fact possible to show that controlled and
rational thought processes may be able to author our automatic responses leaving more
room for a rationalist account or moral behaviour than Haidt would permit.

Haidts first move is to show that emotions or intuitions are crucial for making all sorts of
decisions, even decisions that might appear to have very little emotional content. He sites
experiments performed by neuro scientist Antonio Damasio who noticed a specific
pattern of behaviour expressed by patients who had damage to a particular part of the
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brain, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, (vmPFC). (Haidt pp.37) Patients with
significant damage expressed little to no emotional response to things they would have
reacted to before the brain damage. Photographs of loved ones would not elicit the joy
they once did nor would pictures of gruesome scenes inspire disgust. These patients had
emotionally flat lined. When asked questions about the moral nature of things they would
give answers that you might expect such as killing is bad or sharing is good but it
seemed no emotional content was present or attached to these statements. The rational
mind of these patients seemed to be in clear working order but the emotional responses to
things were missing. The surprising result of the loss of emotional content however
seemed to have a drastic affect on the patients ability to make any kind of decision at all.
Patients either made obviously poor decisions or failed entirely to make them. Haidt cites
Demasios interpretation that gut feelings and bodily reactions were necessary to
rational thinking, and that one job of the vm(PFC) was to integrate those gut feelings into
a persons conscious deliberations. When you weigh the advantages and disadvantages of
murdering your parentsyou cant even do it, because feelings of horror come rushing in
through the vmPFC. (Haidt pp.37) The real weight as I see it in this part of Haidts
argument is the effect emotions must have on trivial decisions. If one is relegated to only
the rational powers of decision making where does one decide to stop making a tally of
the pros and cons of any given decision? It would simply take to long. Rationalising takes
time whilst emotional or intuitive responses are very fast. The upshot of all of this
according to Haidt is that pure reasoning all on its own is actually not a very good
method of making even small and trivial decisions. The rational parts of the brain require
the emotional parts of the brain as part of the decision making process, or as Haidt
poetically describes it The head cant even do head stuff without the heart

Haidt expands on this idea and starts to introduce the concept of morals in an experiment
he conducted that involved telling a story to test subjects about a brother and sister who
whilst away on holiday decide it might be fun to try having sex. The girl is already taking
contraceptive pills but just to be doubly sure that they dont fall pregnant, her brother
wears a condom also. (Haidt pp.41) When test subjects were asked weather or not it was
wrong for the couples to have sex only 20% said it was o.k. leaving 80% saying it was
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not O.k. When asked to give a rational explanation for their answer test subjects seemed
to struggle. The most obvious objection is that in breeding can result in immediate
genetic defects in offspring as well as being restrictive to the genetic pool which is
disadvantageous from a Darwinian evolutionary point of view. Once it had been made
explicit to the test subjects that the chance of a child being born was close to none, the
test subjects held on to their belief that incest was plainly wrong, and began searching for
other reasons to back up their decision even if these further reasons were shown to be
irrational. The test subjects stubbornly held onto their belief that incest was simply
wrong. This subject matter in this experiment can be seen to speak hold a direct
consequence in the context of evolution. If there is an evolutionary disadvantage to
breeding with ones blood relatives, it would seem likely that those who did not have
natural inhibitions against doing so might have died off and left behind the survivors who
do have a natural intuition against inbreeding. This is the basic idea behind what Haidt
calls the Social Intuitionist model (SIM) that moral judgements are largely based on gut
feelings (Fine pp.83)

Peter singer lends a significant amount of support to this model and presents a case for
the development of altruistic behaviours in the context of evolution. Singer brings
attention to the fact that if humans or the ancestors of humans have lived in groups longer
than they have been highly rational beings. This would suggest that humans have been
behaving for the most part favourably toward other members of the groups they live in
without rational motivation for some time. (Singer pp.4) In the same way, animals with
far less rational capacities than our own should display instances of altruistic behaviour
and it turns out, they do. In order to drive the point home singer uses a strong definition
of altruistic behaviour. If we define altruistic behaviour as behaviour which benefits
others at some cost to oneself, altruism in non human animals is well documented
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(Singer pp.5) Singer gives an example of altruism displayed by blackbirds. Blackbirds
naturally develop an ability (it does not need to be taught) to give warning calls to other

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This is a stronger definition than describing altruism as selfless behavior to benefit
others. It is important for Singers definition that the benefit to others comes at a
disadvantage to the animal performing the altruistic act.
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blackbirds when a predator is near (Singer pp.4) The calls alert the rest of the flock that
danger is around so that the other members of the flock may fly away or find cover from
the predator. In performing this action, the blackbird increases the risk of giving away its
own position to the predator. Even if in most cases the bird issuing the warning escapes,
there will be instances in which it is caught. The basic idea of survival of the fittest would
suggest that the altruistic act of warning a flock would over time lead to a decline in the
expression of the altruistic gene that holds what Haidt would call the intuitive module
for warning other birds about predators. Singer explains that the reason for this is that the
focus of survival of the fittest is pointed not at the individual, or even in the species as a
whole but at the genetics. A parent will donate roughly 50% of its DNA to any given
member of its offspring. If we are genetically predisposed to take care of our offspring
via altruistic behaviour to increase their chances of survival, we are making an
investment in propagation of half of our genetic code. If a blackbird sacrifices its own
safety in order to protect its offspring then it dramatically increases the chances of its
own genetics surviving the predator even if it is itself killed. The same is true of other
blood relationships with similar genetics. Siblings may shares roughly 50% of their DNA,
nieces and nephews share 25% and between first cousins 12.5%. (Singer pp.14) The more
immediate the family member, the higher chance that any particular instance of your
genes will propagate into future generations if you take measures to increase their
chances of survival.

So far so good, we have a bunch of automated responses to stimulus resulting in
behaviour that would seem to benefit genetic propagation. Cordelia Fine challenges the
idea that this is how a majority of moral behaviour arises by giving examples of how
rational cognitive processes may override intuitions or where rational thinking may
become the author of new automatic rules of behaviour. Fine gives examples of how a
desire to be accurate can override our intuitive tendencies to accept or be influenced by
stereotypes. In the first instance Fine cites an experiment also cited by Haidt (performed
by Monteith, Sheman, and Divine) that shows that stereotypes are indeed often used for
fast intuitive judgement making. The experiment consisted of two groups who were
shown a list words. One of the groups was stereotypically primed with a list of words,
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80% of which were words associating to a negative stereotype of African Americans 20%
of which were neutral. The second group received much weaker priming with the ratio of
words reversed. After the priming both groups were told a story about a man named
Donald who behaved in a series of mildly hostile ways ie refusing to pay rent until his
flat had been repainted etc etc. The strongly primed group applied the negative
stereotypes to Donald in their appraisal of his behaviour describing him as a considerably
more hostile person than the group that had been weakly primed. (Fine pp.86) Haidts
argument is that the stereotypical priming is an example where perception leads directly
to moral judgement without any conscious rational thought. Although Fine does not
dispute that this can sometimes be the case she gives an example of how fragile this link
is and that it may easily be broken by something as simple as a desire to form accurate
judgements. Fine refers to another experiment involving priming (Thompson et al in Fine
pp.87) Test subjects were primed with either positive or negative personality traits and
later asked to perform a seemingly unrelated personality impression formation task. Some
of the participants were motivated to perform the task to a high degree of accuracy and
others were not. The low accuracy group gave answers that seemed to correlate to there
priming but the group that had been asked to perform the same task with a high degree of
accuracy did not seem to apply the traits of their priming in their evaluation. Thompson et
al, took the experiment a step further and performed another experiment in which
participants were asked to listen to an elderly woman, Hilda give a description of herself.
Some of the participants were told that they would be working with Hilda on a problem-
solving task and that there would be a significant cash prise for the winner. Whilst
listening to Hilda all participants were asked to press a switch in order to turn a light bulb
off every time it came on and to do it as fast as they could. When asked for a description
of Hilda participants that were motivated to win a prize gave a far less stereotypical
account of an elderly woman and also performed significantly slower on the light bulb
test. The idea behind the second task of turning a light off was to show that defeating the
intuitive nature of stereotypical descriptions requires attentional resources. Seeing
automatic processes dont need attention recourses, only rational processes do, the fact
that participants motivated to win the cash prize performed slower on the light bulb test
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suggests that rational controlled processes were being employed in forming an opinion
about Hilda.

Fine cites further work by Monteith et al. that suggests over time if a controlled response
that supresses an automatic one is repeated or simply re-enforced enough by self
reflection, the behaviour that results may become automatic and take the place of the
original automated response. (in Fine pp.91) an individuals conscious reflection on
their automatic responses may eventually lead to the successful automatization of
prejudice control: at first, stereotype application is controlled, and eventually, stereotype
activation itself. (Fine pp.91) This seems to sensibly reflect a common feature of the
human brain. Repetition and re-enforcement lead to the behaviours they exert becoming
automatic. This is clearly on a basic level how most skill acquisition works. (Timothy D
Lee et al pp.) When your just starting to learn a task such as driving a car, you have to put
a lot of conscious effort into learning exactly how to control the vehicle, and indeed
sometimes this feeling returns ever so slightly when you are driving a car your not used
to. But after a while it becomes easy to control the car with very little to no conscious
effort as to how hard you need to step on the accelerator or the breaks for the appropriate
response. It becomes automatic. If this is true also of how we monitor our behaviour in
regards to the moral results we achieve, and the moral results we desire then there would
seem to be a pretty serious fracture between evolution and our moral intuitions.
Automatic fast results may in fact be the result of considered rational thinking.

Haidts version of moral nativism is indeed compelling in that it does do a lot of work to
explain a lot of moral behaviour in an evolutionary context. It is just perhaps just a little
too short sited. It does not seem to leave scope for people to challenge or change their
own moral intuitions which is something that we seem to spend a significant amount of
time doing. Enough time in any case that it should seem strange to hand as much of the
weight to the native stance as Haidt would like us to. It should be noted that Haidts
position fits neatly into Fines picture, its just that it is incomplete. Fines addition is that
of adding the ability of the brain to adjust its own behaviour. It seems to me that this
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addition increases the models explanatory power and that it should be an accepted feature
of Haidts otherwise sound thesis.


REFERENCES
Fine, C. (2006) Is the emotional dog wagging its rational tail, or chasing it? Philosophical
Explorations

Haidt, J. (2012) The Righteous Mind, Pantheon Books, New York

Singer, P. (1981) The Expanding, Circle Princeton University Press
Timothy D Lee, Laurie R Swanson and Anne L Hall. (1991) What is Repeated in a
Repetition? Effect of Practice Conditions on Motor Skill Acquisition in Journal of
American Physical Therapy Vol. 71