The Evolution of Morality

Here's my quick philosophical review of Richard Joyce's book, 'The Evolution of Morality'

The book can be devided into two sections. The first, longer, section is essentially the exploration of an empirical question, which is can we give an evolutionary account of the origins of the 'moral sense'? The second section is a look at what the consequences for moral theory might be of this empirical work, and is more conspicuously philosophical.

The evolutionary stuff is fascinating and well supported, but I want to actually read some of the empirical stuff he cites myself before I make a full assessment. In general his analysis of what a moral judgment can be taken for (and, hence, what sort of judgment we want to study the psychology of) was quite good and very instructive - although I think he might have made a mistake in focusing on the subject of the judgment (the judge) rather than the object of the judgment (that which is judged to be one way or the other). That might seem an odd criticism to make, given that this was a work on human biology, but I think that some of the conclusions he comes to are made inevitable by not focusing enough on the environment in which natural selection played out, but rather almost exclusively on the agents and their interpersonal reactions.

The philosophical section is of a very high quality. He divides it into two sections, based on two possible responses, called 'The Evolutionary Validation of Morality' and 'The Evolutionary Debunking of Morality'. I will take this opportunity to highlight the fact that he mentions G.E. Moore - as I have just listened to this charming lecture and so am quite enamoured with that great thinker right now. I don't think Joyce's discussion of G.E. Moore was satisfactory, although it was good to see him put paid to that bizarre attribution of the is-ought gap to Moore, which seems to be common purely because Moore made popular the term "naturalistic fallacy". However, his assaults on evolutionary ethics (Dennet is a big name who gets undermined here) in the rest of that first section, given his own empirical support, are very powerful indeed.

Then he goes and spoils it all in the last chapter. He thinks that what follows from his thesis is a sort of epistemological error theory, which he outlines in 'The Evolutionary Debunking of Morality'. Basically, we are never justified in believing any moral proposition is true - given that it is shown how we develop these beliefs with no reference to their truth - and we ought "cultivate an agnosticism" towards them if we are to be rational. However, like all moral skeptics he can't quite bring himself to really accept this and we have a postscript chapter called "Living with an Adapted mind", where he engages in a bit of philosophical doublethink; on the one hand saying we have to live with tough consequences while on the other hand assuring us that there's no practical outcome to "There is no reason to suppose any notion of morality accurate". Apparently having one's cake and eating it too is fitness enhancing. If the proposition 'There is no moral reason to believe you ought not, when the chips are down, murder your neighbour to your own advantage' has no practical importance then it is either because we are fortunate enough never to have our chips that far down, or because we have misunderstood its content.

All in all an excellent work, though, which I heartily recommend. Incidentally, the last chapter is headed with this excellent quote, which I think I will end on

If he does really think there is no distinction between virtue and vice, why, sir, when he leaves our houses let us count our spoons

- Boswell, Life Of Johnson

Irrelevant!

What nonsense my previous post was!

Patterns as Sets

This post was inspired by the essay linked to here entitled "Moral Perception". I have emailed the author with these, and some other, thoughts and - if he gives his permission - I will keep you updated. It *really* helps to read that essay before reading this, because although it's mainly a technical point I want discussed here, it will seem somewhat irrelevant absent the background given there - and it may be harder to see what is driving the "Patterns as Sets" intuition. His essay begins thus:

The problem with moral realism is widely supposed to be its ontological extravagance. So suppose we begin with maximal ontological parsimony: say, with a metaphysics like the one expressed in Democritus’ ‘nothing but atoms and the void’.1 Or even, since Democritus apparently allowed there to be infinitely many atoms, suppose we begin with something more minimal still—the hyper-Democritean thesis that nothing exists except the void, and in it, the following sixteen-dot matrix:

. . . .
. . . .
. . . .
. . . .


What ontology could be more minimal (except, presumably, one with fewer dots)? But even this hyper-Democritean ontological minimalism sustains an indefinite multiplicity and complexity of patterns. If these sixteen dots exist thus arranged, then it is immediately not the case that only these sixteen dots exist. There also exists every pattern that these sixteen dots constitute.

And goes on

There is no limit to the patternsthat we can find in the diagram—beyond those set by our ingenuity, imagination, or mathematical/geometrical aptitude.... [a lot of essay later]... It is evident from my discussion of matrices like the sixteen-dot one of section 1 that I admit the reality of all sorts of patterns. This, together with the claim that properties including moral properties are patterns, gets me the result that moral properties are no less real than all the other patterns that we might perceive in reality. Unfortunately it also gets me the result that indefinitely many other sorts of other patterns are there in reality too.

My basic idea is that the set of all possible patterns in a situation is in fact equal to the power set of the set of all the elements (factors to be taken into consideration) in that situation. Let's return to the 16 dot matrix used in the quote above to make the point clear; each dot can be named a - p, with the top row being a, b, c, d and the first column being a, e, i, m and the total set {a...p}=X. We can now represent any organisational schema using some subset of P(X). For instance, if one saw the matrix as 4 groups of 4 dots each, that could be represented with the set Y = {{a,b, e, f}, {c, d, g, h}, {i, j, m, n}, {k, l, o, p}}, or if one saw a cross brought to the foreground with the corners merely back grounding it one could use the set Z={b, c, e, f, g, h, i, j, k, l, n, o}. Note that Y ⊂P(X) and Z ⊂ P(X). This should generalise to any other pattern one cares to think of in the matrix.

The primary advantage of such a set theoretic analysis is that it allows us to dispute the grim conclusion that Prof. Chappell comes to; namely we have a fairly definite proof that there are not an infinite amount of possible manners of regarding a situation whatever the skeptic may say. For P(X) will be of cardinality 2^16, and even if that is a very large number it is certainly a lot less than infinite! (It occurs to me that, in fact, it might be P[P(X)] which I am interested in, hence giving me a much greater cardinality of possibilities - anybody got any thoughts on this?) The practical importance of this is seen when one considers what it would have been like if the relativist had an infinite amount of patterns to cast upon a situation; it would mean that no matter how many times the absolutist demonstated a particular way of seeing the world a bad way to do so, there would be an infinite amount remaining! If, on the other hand, the possibilities beside the morally upright (or, set of morally upright possibilities for regarding a situation - just because the path of virtue is straight and narrow, we needn't assume it is single file!) are finite then we are at least fighting an - in principle - winnable war against the relativist. And to know this will be good for the troops morale!

God Exists!

If anybody has access to Jstor and some basic ability to read logic or mathematics, I strongly recommend this paper by Robert K Meyer. It is a satirical (and yet rigorous) proof that the statement "God exists" is formally equivalent to the Axiom of Choice, and a demonstration that this provides some support for the traditional cosmological argument. He thoughtfully suggests that perhaps Aquinas has been done a historical injustice when the AoC was credited to Zermelo rather than him.

For the record, I came across the paper while reading David Chalmers' touching tribute to Meyer on his blog.

The Open Question Argument

The open question argument (henceforth OQA) runs as follows: Any attempt to define moral property ‘m’ in terms of natural property ‘n’ would, if successful, render the question “I know x is n, but is it m?” equivalent to the questioning of the tautology “I know x is n, but is it n?” That is to say, if m=n it ought to be a closed question whether something being n implies therefore that it is m. However, in point of fact, any natural property we pick as ‘n’ will always allow for open questions of the form “I know x is n, but is it m?” Therefore, no such attempted definition can ever be successful. An example should make the point utterly plain. Suppose it is argued that ‘goodness’ (m) is in fact identical with ‘that which causes me pleasure’ (n). If this were the case it should be obvious (closed) what the answer to “I know, as a sadist, that torturing kittens causes me pleasure, but is it good?” – Because this should be equivalent to the question “I know… that torturing kittens causes me pleasure, but is it that which causes me pleasure?” However, in fact, it is obvious that the question is not at all trivial (hence, open) and that therefore the analysis has failed. Note that the OQA doesn't require that you say it is false that X is m, given that it is n - only that the question is intelligible and not to be resolved by a lesson in laws of logic and rules of substitution.

The Frankena objection is that such an argument is question begging. For, in order for out intuitions about “I know X is n, but is it m?” to be worth listening to we must suppose they are disposed to lead us to truth. In this case, that means supposing that they accurately tell us m=/=n. But m=/=n is exactly what the OQA sets out to demonstrate, hence the OQA is circular, or question begging.

The Frankena objection has come to be seen as fairly decisive against the OQA, however, I’m not so convinced. Firstly, the Frankena objection seems to rest on bare possibility to get its conclusion through. Yes of course, we might say, it might be the case that otherwise competent concept users are all disposed to reject an analysis despite its correctness, but what of it? To insist that this means we cannot trust their judgement on the matter seems akin to suggesting that since we may all be mistaken with regards to the external world (some Cartesian spirit having fooled us) we must therefore accept we have no basis to believe in the external world. Far more plausible, it would seem, is to suppose that actually the analysis has just failed to capture what we mean by the moral term in question, which is why there seem to be open questions. (It is even worse if one is proposing a reversionary analysis, for then the OQA shows that nobody wants your revision!)

For another thing, despite what I just said about bare possibility, I’m not so sure it is even that. For the opponent of the OQA may supplement the Frankena objection with some story which purports to show why language users are disposed to reject their analysis despite its accuracy. But, we may ask, is there any evidence which could possibly be strong enough to defeat the fact that people just don’t want to use the word that way? When it comes to deciding if something is an acceptable move, what could be more damning than learning that this is not how people play the game? For exactly what the OQA seems to show is that whatever you try and reduce the good (or other moral properties) to, people will be inclined, in some cases, to think that perhaps the two could come apart. If something is to overcome this sort of evidence, it would have to be powerful enough to make one think that actually the initial question is evidently closed, not just that despite its seemingly being open it is in fact closed. And this sort of evidence is exactly what opponents of the OQA are never able to provide.

Explaining Myself

There are a few people (and they know who they are) who I continually nag with my latest ill thought out opinions on whatever has most recently caught my attention. They, of course, do their best to avoid me when something like this has taken my fancy - but I phone them, email them, harass them in the street; generally make their lives miserable until they agree to humour me - at which point their lives are made dull as well as miserable. The whole enterprise is very time consuming for me, and it has recently struck me that if I make a blog then I can bother them in a way which is A) far more efficient and B) far easier for them to ignore, so it seems as if everybody would therefore win. Impressed by this revelation, I created the virtual wonderland you see before you.

As to anybody who is not one of those unfortunate few I harass, I was thinking of making the subheading for this blog "Let no-one enter here who has not studied geometry (or set theory)" - if you get that reference then this might be the place for you. Otherwise there are other parts of the internet which may be more to your tastes.