Neuromorality

‘In 1989 I was invited to go to Los Angeles in response to a request from the Dalai Lama, who wished to learn some basic facts about the brain.’

Besides being my own selection for ‘name drop of the year’, this remark from Patricia Churchland’s new book Conscience perhaps tells us that we are not dealing with someone who suffers much doubt about their own ability to explain things. That’s fair enough; if we weren’t radically overconfident about our ability to answer difficult questions better than anyone else, it’s probable no philosophy would ever get done. And Churchland modestly goes on to admit to asking the Buddhists some dumb questions (‘What’s your equivalent of the Ten Commandments?’). Alas, I think some of her views on moral philosophy might benefit from further reflection.

Her basic proposition is that human morality is a more complex version of the co-operative and empathetic behaviour shown by various animals. There are some interesting remarks in her account, such as a passage about human scrupulosity, but she doesn’t seem to me to offer anything distinctively new in the way of a bridge between mere co-operation and actual ethics. There is, surely, a gulf between the two which needs bridging if we are to explain one in terms of the other. No doubt it’s true that some of the customs and practices of human beings may have an inherited, instinctive root; and those practices in turn may provide a relevant backdrop to moral behaviour. Not morality itself, though. It’s interesting that a monkey fobbed off with a reward of cucumber instead of a grape displays indignation, but we don’t get into morality until we ask whether the monkey was right to complain – and why.

Churchland never accepts that. She suggests that morality is a vaguely defined business; really a matter of a collection of rules and behaviours that a species or a community has cobbled together from pragmatic adaptations, whether through evolution or culture (quite a gulf there, too). She denies that there are any deep principles involved; we simply come to feel, through reinforcement learning and imitation, that the practices of our own group have a special moral quality. She groups moral philosophers into two groups; people she sees as flexible pragmatists (Aristotle, for some reason, and Hume) and rule-lovers (Kant and Jeremy Bentham). Unfortunately she treats moral rules and moral principles as the same, so advocates of moral codes like the Ten Commandments are regarded as equivalent to those who seek a fundamental grounding for morality, like Kant. Failure to observe this distinction perhaps causes her to give the seekers of principles unnecessarily short shrift. She rightly notes that there are severe problems with applying pure Utilitarianism or pure Kantianism directly to real life; but that doesn’t mean that either theory fails to capture important ethical truths. A car needs wheels as well as an engine, but that doesn’t mean the principle of internal combustion is invalid.

Another grouping which strikes me as odd is the way Churchland puts rationalists with religious believers (they must be puzzled to find themselves together) with neurobiology alone on the other side. I wouldn’t be so keen to declare myself the enemy of rational argument; but the rationalists are really the junior partners, it seems, people who hanker after the old religious certainties and deludedly suppose they can run up their own equivalents. Just as people who deny personhood sometimes seem to be motivated mainly by a desire to denounce the soul, I suspect Churchland mainly wants to reject Christian morality, with the baby of reasoned ethics getting thrown out along with the theological bathwater.

She seems to me particularly hard on Kant. She points out, quite rightly, that his principle of acting on rules you would be prepared to have made universal, requires the rules to be stated correctly; a Nazi, she suggests, could claim to be acting according to consistent rules if those rules were drawn up in a particular way. We require the moral act to be given its correct description in order for the principle to apply. Yes; but much the same is true of Aristotle’s Golden Mean, which she approves. ‘Nothing to excess’ is fine if we talk about eating or the pursuit of wealth, but it also, taken literally, means we should commit just the right amount of theft and murder; not too much, but not too little, either. Churchland is prepared to cut Aristotle the slack required to see the truth behind the defective formulation, but Kant doesn’t get the same accommodation. Nor does she address the Categorical Imperative, which is a shame because it might have revealed that Kant understands the kind of practical decision-making she makes central, even though he says there’s more to life than that.

Here’s an analogy. Churchland could have set out to debunk physics in much the way she tackles ethics. She might have noted that beavers build dams and ants create sophisticated nests that embody excellent use of physics. Our human understanding of physics, she might have said, is the same sort of collection of rules of thumb and useful tips; it’s just that we have so many more neurons, our version is more complex. Now some people claim that there are spooky abstract ‘laws’ of physics, like something handed down by God on tablets; invisible entities and forces that underlie the behaviour of material things. But if we look at each of the supposed laws we find that they break down in particular cases. Planes sail through the air, the Earth consistently fails to plummet into the Sun; so much for the ‘law’ of gravity! It’s simply that the physics practices of our own culture come to seem almost magical to us; there’s no underlying truth of physics. And worse, after centuries of experiment and argument, there’s still bitter disagreement about the answers. One prominent physicist not so long ago said his enemies were ‘not even wrong’!

No-one, of course, would be convinced by that, and we really shouldn’t be convinced by a similar case against ethical theory.

That implicit absence of moral truth is perhaps the most troubling thing about Churchland’s outlook. She suggests Kant has nothing to say to a consistent Nazi, but I’m not sure what she can come up with, either, except that her moral feelings are different. Churchland wraps up with a reference to the treatment of asylum seekers at the American border, saying that her conscientious feelings are fired up. But so what? She’s barely finished explaining why these are just feelings generated by training and imitation of her peer group. Surely we want to be able to say that mistreatment of children is really wrong?

19 thoughts on “Neuromorality

  1. Do we always want to say that mistreatment of children is wrong? I may be missing your point, but I’ll venture this comment, believing it addresses part of the issue.

    It totally depends on the semantic level at which you choose to analyze the problem. If I choose to look at myself as a set of atoms, there is no reason to do so, there are no “children” at the atomic level. And certainly human “good” and “bad” do not exist either. The problem is when you try to hold on to the detail, you have to choose lower level levels of analysis that are harder to understand, and in that sense explain less (because you understand the explanation less). They actually explain more perfectly, just beyond our level of understanding. The discussion is also poisoned by the particular level you like to think is the “right” level. For someone focused on the human level, losing the concept of morality may seem a tremendous loss, but another might think morality is just an illusion, like ego is an illusion, if he think the “right” level is the atomic level.

    So, answering your question, I don’t think we always want to say that mistreatment of children is wrong. Just when addressing human matters at the human level.

  2. Reproductive attitudes, ‘after centuries of experiment and argument, underlies truth in physics and ethics’…

    …either we are here, in-between, or we are not here…

    Philosophy today, maybe can now finally begin to represent the whole planet earth…

  3. Is she really absenting moral truth? I think it’s unclear. There might be a kind of constructivism that is compatible with Churchland’s approach and that also recognizes moral truths. Specifically, the kind of view that Jason Alexander outlines here.

  4. Yes, we do want to say that the mistreatment of children is really wrong – and then someone comes along and says that vaccinating children is mistreatment. That is the sort of situation where the significant discussion of ethics begins.

    I think your physics analogy makes a point, but not the one you intended – it’s that ethics is not like physics. While there are, in theory, religious certainties, we know that, in practice, their application has been anything but consistent, and they have repeatedly been used to condone or even justify acts that most of us today would consider to be immoral.

    Nevertheless, ethics does have something approximating to a grand unifying theory that has been repeatedly discovered and which is widely accepted – the golden rule – and a lot of the discussion of ethics takes it as a starting point.

    From a practical point of view, the rule has a built-in resistance to self-serving rationalization. More than that, however, it seems to capture the essence of what most people want to find in an ethical principle.

  5. The perspective that “morality is a more complex version of the co-operative and empathetic behaviour shown by various animals” has some truth to it, but is not particularly revealing.

    Churchland’s focus on the biology of our moral sense provides little help in understanding important questions about morality’s strange quality of innate bindingness (usually at the heart of “is X really wrong?” questions) and what behaviors, if any, are universally moral.

    However, since the topic here is what evolution can tell us about morality, mention of another morality as cooperation perspective that could be much more useful may be appropriate.

    As Oliver Curry and others point out, morality as cooperation can focus on the cooperation strategies that make up our moral sense. For example, empathy and loyalty motivate initiating kin altruism and indirect reciprocity. And punishment of moral norm violators (which is a necessary part of reciprocity strategies) is encoded as anger toward others who violate moral norms and as guilt for ourselves when we violate moral norms.

    So what can this cooperation strategy perspective tell us about what “is X really wrong?” questions refer to?

    As a biology-based intuition, feeling that whatever morality we have internalized is what everyone imperatively ought to do (the intuition that X is really wrong) is a cooperation strategy selected for by the benefits of cooperation it produced in our ancestors. As Michael Ruse likes to say, our experience of morality’s innate bindingness is “an illusion foisted on us by our genes”.

    Moral philosophers continue to seek convincing rational arguments as to why this intuition is true for at least some behaviors, but no such arguments have become generally accepted.

    The morality as cooperation strategies perspective offers us a different approach to identifying what is universally moral than “what everyone is somehow obligated to do”. This approach is to identify what is universal among cooperation strategies. Since descriptively moral behaviors are all arguably elements of cooperation strategies, what is universal to all cooperation strategies is a universal component of descriptively moral behaviors.

    One candidate for such universally moral behaviors (within the category of descriptively moral behaviors) is “behaviors that increase the benefits of cooperation without exploiting others”.

    It may seem an odd thought that behaviors could be cross-species universally moral based merely on being universal to all cooperation strategies, but that may be the way our universe works.

  6. “No-one, of course, would be convinced by that, and we really shouldn’t be convinced by a similar case against ethical theory.”

    The difficulty is that physical theories have a reality check, a way to settle disputes, empirical observation. Theoretical physicists can debate for years, but if their theories ultimately disagree with experiments, they’re eventually forced to forsake them. (Or be left behind.) The physicist who said “not even wrong” was talking about string theories, and the fact that they can’t be tested, and so are speculation that can’t be demonstrated to be right or wrong.

    It would make things so much easier if moral theories had those reality checks. But the only ones they have are in relation to our emotions, emotions which aren’t consistent from person to person, and can be heavily influenced by culture and overall experiences.

    Unfortunately, there’s no shortcut to hammering out a consensus on how we want to live together, a consensus that will inevitably change over time. Appeals to an objective morality are usually attempts to privilege someone’s preferences over others.

  7. There is a difference (I’m not one of those people who say science is just another cultural artefact), but I think it’s less absolute than you suggest. Perhaps the main thing is that physicists don’t, for example, separate themselves into adherents of relativity and adherents of quantum theory whereas moral philosophers tend to think they have to be either Kantians or consequentialists (other theories are available).

    You must have noticed that you moved directly from saying that physics was empirically testable to pointing out that string theory isn’t. There was a time when physics seemed finished and secure, but not lately.

    The test for ethical theories is whether they reproduce our real-world understanding and practice of ethics, just as for physics it’s whether the theories reproduce our real-world understanding and use of physical stuff. (In both cases a better understanding can lead to improvements in practice.) Of course ethical theories can’t be tested by physical experiments, but isn’t that criterion too evidently skewed towards physics being the arbiter of everything? In the end it’s all about getting most people to agree, whatever subject we’re pursuing.

    Anyway, I mustn’t back myself into a sillier position than even I want to take up. I will say, though, that if there’s no objective morality, there’s no morality at all.

  8. I think the ideal would be reconciling objective morality with some kind of moral impetus rather than a set of rules dictated to us by some invisible deity.

    Of course it’s hard to see this sort of thing fitting into any kind of physicalism…

  9. …but isn’t this post…
    -about experimenting with the experience of ethics and physics together…
    …in what one finds in deep deep search neurology and philosophy today…

  10. Mike said: “Appeals to an objective morality are usually attempts to privilege someone’s preferences over others.” ( To reflect greater accuracy, I would replace usually with “always”)

    Peter said: “I will say, though, that if there’s no objective morality, there’s no morality at all.”

    I agree with both of these statements; and if both of these assessments are correct, the greater question becomes: Why are they correct? That is the riddle that has to be solved, and the resolution to the dilemma of morality will not be discovered by debating everyone else’s opinions.

  11. There might be some fruit in comparing our sense that certain moral claims are true with our sense that certain mathematical/logical statements are true.

    The challenge is that the latter concerns specific statements while the former ideally has more than certain universal rules. We can probably find moral rules sane people agree on, but it feels like morality requires a kind of amorphous sense that can allow for the incredible variation of context.

  12. Neurontology…

    When a neural system becomes a being an entity…
    … able to affirm what and who it is…

    The morality of I am would be first in line…

  13. …and for appearances of I am in mathontology we have “Principle of locality”……

    Seeing ourselves as field workers…

    Here on planet earth…

    Thankyou

  14. That’s a snarky-ass piece on an other-wise worthy philosopher. Nothing much merits more comment—except, ofcourse, Linda’s.

  15. So what would it be like with no morality at all? As a thought experiment.

    If we can speed along, maybe we could skip the ‘everyone would murder everyone else!’ visualisations. Perhaps if we could look at it in Darwinistic terms first? Ie, in groups who murder each other the group disappears and does not pass on its genes. So groups who actually kind of interact (sans morality) in such a way that babies are made and raised to adulthood, their genes pass on and they continue to exist rather than go extinct.

    How many complicated and perhaps one might even describe as mutually supportive situations could branch out from such a Darwinistic (and no morality) set up?

  16. August 2019 National Geographic magazine, page 104…

    The whole article speaks to understanding more about our evolution in morality via historic migrations and DNA research…

    And that it is ongoing today…

  17. Pingback: Five Questions for Patricia S. Churchland – Your Mileage May Vary

  18. Evolution is hardly a gulf away from culture seriously nature nurture still?
    And sure I’ll bite how are nazis objectively evil? No one thinks they’re evil they did what they thought survival of the German people required. They unlike you understood their lives were objectively the most important of all life how so because from both their unique self interest and the interest of the continuation of all life it was their duty to survive by any means anybfucking means their is no such thing as cheating in evolution even the parasitical creatures as Omar says “it’s all in the game yo”

    Further unlike you they understood their German culture indispensable to their existence having cow evolved in a feedback loop with their specific race. And that a people and it’s culture needed a land within which to nurture and preference the Volk and culture as much as any animal species needs it’s group it’s instincts and culture and it’s habitat. This meant allowing the German diaspora scattered in previous wars by its enemies needed to be regathered.
    No I’m not German. Not a new nazi I’ll make the same argument for the Jews and the Palestinian may the stronger people win the only objective good is life but by design all life competes with all other life even within groups you better game in your culture to expect defect of individual. Sure shoot deserters but remember sometimes that deserter might be the only carrier if the group forward.

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