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Ethical Life
Its Natural and Social Histories
By Webb Keane PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2016 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4008-7359-3
CHAPTER 1
Psychologies of Ethics
SEEKING ETHICAL FOUNDATIONS
One response to the question "Why should one be ethical?" is the turn to naturalism. A version of naturalism would say that being ethical, in the sense of being oriented one way or another to ethical evaluations (which is quite different from being good!), is just part of basic human equipment. This approach may not make ethics obligatory, in the classic philosophical or religious sense, but it seems to grant it the authority of being something fundamental about what people are. The appeal of this position has been summed up by one proponent of "moral realism," the philosopher Peter Railton: "We are natural and social creatures, and I know of nowhere else to look for ethics than in this rich conjunction of facts" (1986: 207). Although naturalism is unlikely to settle the hardest questions, for its proponents it has the virtue of fulfilling the demand that anything we would want to call ethics must be universal and should not be arbitrary. Because some of the strongest claims about human universals have been put forward in psychology, naturalists often turn there for evidence to support moral or ethical realism. Current psychological research on ethics often seeks to demonstrate that it is not contingent but is grounded in innate human capacities. Much of the most well-developed research seeks evidence for the sources of ethics in child development, which will occupy much of what follows, although we will also look at evidence from the moral reasoning and decision making of adults.
Research on the child's development of morality itself has historically been divided between two major approaches. One stresses the learning and internalization of moral concepts and values impressed on the child by the surrounding social world. This has been an especially important approach for scholars interested in cultural differences among morality systems (Shweder 1990). But contemporary researchers on child development tend to reject any strong claim that morality is directly imparted to the child from his or her social surroundings. Instead, much of this work investigates the innate capacities of infants and the child's active role in the emergence of morality. Within this broad area of agreement, child development researchers differ over how much weight to give, respectively, to cognition or to affect, a question that had already divided philosophers such as Kant and Hume. Some developmental models tended to emphasize the emergence of generalized and principled moral concepts out of earlier, egocentric starting points (Kohlberg 1981; Piaget 1965). Others propose that concepts are post hoc rationalizations of more fundamental emotional responses (Haidt 2001).
In the chapters that follow, I will suggest that aspects of both positions are compatible with one another, but neither is complete without putting the individual's ethical capacities into the context of social interaction. But first, let us see where the major findings seem to be heading. Let me be clear, at this point, that most of the research described in this chapter aims at discovering something about human beings in general. Anthropologists and historians will be quick to note that the vast bulk of that research has been with our contemporaries, living in European, American, and a handful of other industrialized and urbanized societies. For purposes of economy, while the reader should bear these limits in mind, I will not qualify every generalization that follows. In subsequent chapters we will take a closer look at some of the historical and cultural complications that general claims about human nature face.
HOW PSYCHOLOGISTS DEFINE ETHICS AND MORALITY
What will count as evidence for the psychological foundations of morality and ethics depends, of course, on how the researcher defines them. Some researchers try to identify a set of components that any moral system will have. For example, some psychological anthropologists have proposed that keeping promises, respect for property, fair allocation, protecting the vulnerable, reciprocity, and the taboo on incest are likely to be universal (Shweder, Mahapatra, and Miller 1990). But there is little agreement among writers at this level of detail. In order to get to a more basic level of understanding, it may be more illuminating to see what the various researchers are defining ethics and morality against. Several pit their findings against the idea that the theory of natural selection must lead us to conclude that humans are driven entirely by self-interested competition (Bloom 2004; Haidt 2001, 2003; Hoffman 2000; Tomasello 1999; Tomasello et al. 2005). None of them reject natural selection. Rather, they propose that the "Machiavellian account" of human evolution must be supplemented one way or another (Tomasello et al. 2005: 688).
From this perspective, the first thing to look for in seeking evidence of ethics in early childhood is unselfish behavior. That means we should be looking for actions that are oriented away from the individual self or that seem to lack any immediate utility. The research tends to accept a distinction between means – ends rationality and those ultimate values that are not means to some further end, a distinction rooted in Western philosophy (e.g., Hume 1975; Kant 1996). Regarding the lack of utility, Michael Tomasello (2009: 64), who has worked with both human children and primates, observes that, although many primates will cooperate to get something that each individual cannot get on its own, only humans enter into cooperative play. In this context, play, like art (Bloom 2004), is defined by the absence of gain beyond the satisfaction inherent to the activity itself. It is something that is done for its own sake. It follows that you cannot fully feel that satisfaction unless you are a player or are in some other way committed to the game, like a sports fan. Although this does not mean play itself is ethical, it does show that people can act without purposes beyond the action itself, which we might consider a precondition for morality.
A perspective on utility and ethics is provided by the well-known "ultimatum game" (Güth, Schmittberger, and Schwarze 1982). In this experiment, one person is given a sum of money and told to split it with someone else. The second person can either accept the offer or reject it, in which case both individuals get nothing. It turns out that if you offer a sum that falls below a certain threshold, around one-third of the total, the recipient will tend to reject it. This flies in the face of the rational calculation of utility, according to which one should accept even a very small sum, since it is still better than nothing at all. One interpretation of this result is that people value fairness for its own sake enough that they would rather forgo monetary gain than be treated unfairly.
One feature of ethics, as commonly understood, is orientation away from the self. For example, Jonathan Haidt defines the specifically moral emotions as those "that are linked to the interests of welfare either of society as a whole or at least of persons other than the judge or agent" (2003: 853). Although this is not the only way to define the moral emotions, as we will see, it informs much of the research we are looking at. Even when someone's actions do involve calculations of gain, they count as ethical if that gain is for some- one other than the self. In theory, however, one may be immersed in play or in helping someone else without having any particular notion about whether one is doing so for gain or not. This is something an outside observer might be able to decide on objective grounds, with no reference at all to an actor's conscious thoughts or feelings. (Many of the adaptive strategies proposed in evolutionary and game theory have this quality of working behind people's backs.) But most of the psychologists discussed here define full-fledged morality as requiring some degree of awareness. For example, Martin Hoffman writes that "a person's prosocial moral structure is internalized when he or she accepts and feels obligated to abide by it without regard to external sanctions" (2000: 9). This definition, which has aspects of the learning approaches mentioned above, shares with innatist approaches the basic idea that ethics is grounded in an orientation away from the self (one is thus "prosocial" rather than egocentric). It identifies that orientation away from the self with the subjective experience of adhering inwardly to something that one feels is objective and external.
That experience of obligation is often discussed in terms of norms and rules. Like play and art, norms and rules can be treated as values in themselves. According to Tomasello, for instance, children treat even the rules of a game "as supra-individual entities that carry social force independent of ... instrumental considerations" such as being punished or rewarded (2009: 38). In this view, there are three reasons why a norm might be treated as moral rather than merely conventional. First, its force does not derive from someone perceiving it as instrumental; a rule is a rule even if it does not appear to produce an immediate gain for the person who follows it. Second, the source of the rule lies somewhere beyond the self — while at the same time, one is prompted to adhere to it all on one's own. Finally, one applies it both to oneself and to other people.
So far we have a very rudimentary definition of the domain of the ethical, as that aspect of human activity that cannot be explained either with reference to some further goal or by the force of sanctions. It can be an orientation to other persons or to an activity or a norm treated as a value in its own right, rather than as a means to an end whose value lies beyond the activity. Moreover it has a subjective quality to it: a purely automatic response might not count as ethical (but this becomes complicated, as we will see). Some of these activities are oriented to other persons; others are simply disinterested. All involve some displacement or distance from the self.
There is a second set of features of ethics and morality that is somewhat different. This is a propensity for judgment or discrimination. Research seems to show that from an early age infants sort people out by accent and skin color, favoring some over others (Hirschfeld and Gelman 1997; Kelly et al. 2005; Slater et al. 1998). This discrimination can be a basis for both loyalty and bigotry. Preschoolers, for instance, seem to assume that moral obligations do not apply equally to members of their own allegiance group and outsiders (Rhodes and Chalik 2013). In either case, the impulse to evaluate acts and actors, and to discriminate, seems to work independently of any other function. Other evaluative responses seem to express moral emotions based in reactions of disgust. Like some of the phenomena mentioned above, these responses have most attracted the attention of psychologists when they cannot be explained in terms of immediate utility: to register disgust at rotting food is not likely to be ethical, but to react against an unfamiliar accent is another matter. What Haidt (2001) calls "moral dumbfounding" refers to a person's inability to explain why he or she finds, say, the idea of eating one's pet to be revolting. He takes this to be evidence of underlying moral emotions that are independent of moral reasoning, a point to which we return below. But it is precisely their lack of a clear functional explanation that throws them into the domain of the ethical. Or at least, this is what makes them ethical affordances, that is, candidates for being treated as ethical.
Some philosophers might say that immediate emotional reactions like these lack the full sense of obligation and rightness that defines morality, that they don't give reasons to endorse an ethical stance. Even philosophers who grant an important role to moral emotions, such as Allan Gibbard (1990), limit them to feelings that "it makes sense" to have — anger at injustice, for example, rather than at losing a game. But these responses can develop in ways that afford further moral or ethical elaboration. For example, one set of experiments exposed young children to scenes in which one person either helped or hindered someone else. In one case, infants between six and ten months old watched an animated character either block or assist another's at- tempt to climb a hill (Hamlin, Wynn, and Bloom 2007). In another, a child who saw an adult grab and tear up another child's drawing looked at the victim with concern (Tomasello 2009: 12). In both in- stances, the children showed concern for the victim, a clear aversion to the "bad" characters, and a preference for the "good" ones, even when the actions only affected someone else. These responses seem to be the basis for subsequent judgments, among more mature children, about harm or benefit (Haidt 2001: 817; Hauser et al. 2007). To the extent that those judgments concern harm to someone other than the self, it is reasonable to treat them as at least a foundation for ethics. But this does not mean that a full-fledged ethics is where they will necessarily end up. Rather, we can see them as having the potential to be taken up as children mature and develop ideas of fairness, rights, and justice. They also enter into the child's motivation to engage in third-party enforcement, that is, to chastise or punish people who break a rule, even when it has no effect on the self. What both outcomes depend on is some process by which a gut-level response comes to be tied to cognitions that may have quite different sources and functions.
To summarize: underlying much of the research on the developmental psychology of ethics and morality is a basic idea that a core diagnostic of morality is the relative lack of means – ends calculation directed by self-interest. The evidence may include such things as empathic responses to another person's pain, or cooperation, or play. But recall that Shweder's list of possibly universal ethical principles includes a prohibition on incest. How does this fit in? To take this into account, we need to include the second diagnostic, judgment, a basic propensity to evaluate people and their actions as good or bad. Conjoined with the orientation toward social norms (thus, away from the self), the propensity to evaluate can be taken up by particular practices of child socialization to local cultural values. Norms, such as those of kinship, have a social history that involves cognitive processes of quite a different sort from the neurophysiology of the moral emotions. But those emotions can be recruited in ways that give more punch to what might otherwise be a fairly dry set of rules.
The revulsion against incest is an example of Haidt's moral emotions, which might be innate but which take their particular content by being linked to a specific set of learned norms. In short, two basic orientations to others emerge out of the psychological research. One is empathy and cooperation; the other is evaluation and judgment. What these have in common is that the child experiences them as not coming from him- or herself.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Ethical Life by Webb Keane. Copyright © 2016 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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