A recurring topic in this blog has been the question of
morality, especially morality associated with civic behavior. Some general statements this blog has
reported include the following: there
are no universal set of moral standards, but there is a universal concern over
morality; all people deal with moral questions using both their emotions and
their reason; and both cultural/nurturing factors and biological/natural
“faculties” are involved in making moral judgments.
Based on the writings of Jonathan
Haidt[1] and
Robert Sapolski,[2]
one can trace a lot of this thinking to areas of the brain found necessary to
making moral decisions or in having moral concerns. What is interesting, if those parts of the
brain are damaged, for example the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), the
individual can identify cognitively an immoral situation, but not claim his/her
moral concern over the situation.
That is, they don’t sense related
emotions like sympathy, anger, fear, and/or affection one usually associates
with those immoral conditions. As a
previous posting states, “… one needs emotions to think reasonably.” And that includes many moral questions. But to fully appreciate this, one needs an
understanding of how these elements compare in their relative strength when
moral judgments and decisions are made.
Along with
this previous reporting, this current posting further shares information on
Haidt’s view of this dual mental mix of a person’s reason and his/her emotions. The factor of timing turns out to be
important; that is, how do these faculties function over time. By time, here the reference is short-term
time. How does a person react, mentally,
when confronted by a stimulus, particularly a morally related stimulus? One is likely to be surprised to realize how many
times, to varying degrees of importance, a day that happens.
Every time one
reacts to a “thing” that elicits a “I like that” or “I don’t like that” response
and the “that” has a social consequence of any substance, it probably includes a
morality aspect. Most of the time the
consequence barely registers as being important, but many times it does. “I don’t like how he raises his kids,” for
example, probably has a moral aspect to such a judgment. Yet, the person thinking or saying that statement
gives little to no reasoned analysis for that evaluation.
Along these
lines,
… two very different kinds of
cognitive processes at work when we make judgments and solve problems: “seeing-that”
and “reasoning-why.” “Seeing-that” is the pattern matching that brains have
been doing for hundreds of millions of years.
Even the simplest animals are wired to respond to certain patterns of
input (such as light, or sugar) with specific behaviors (such as turning away
from the light, or stopping and eating the sugary food). Animals easily learn new patterns and connect
them up to their existing behaviors, which can be reconfigured
into new patterns as well (as when an animal trainer teaches an elephant a new
trick).[3]
Seeing-that, therefore, elicits an intuitive reaction – “I
like, I go for it; I dislike, I avoid.” Most
of the time, there is no reasoning involved.
But “reasoning-why” response, as the title indicates, does demand
thinking about or reasoning about the item under concern. This is not automatic. It even might entail some discomfort; it
feels like work.
Many “seeing-that”
situations, with its attraction or avoidance reactions, call for subjective
preferences. It’s up to that person
solely and a lot of this has to do with aesthetic biases of little or no
consequences to others. But if the situation
does have consequences of any importance, then the question tends to be: is
this condition right or wrong?
Yet moral judgments are not subjective statements; they are
claims that somebody did something wrong.
I can’t call for the community to punish you simply because I don’t like
what you’re doing. I have to point to
something outside of my own preferences, and that pointing is our moral
reasoning. We do moral reasoning not to
reconstruct the actual reasons why we
ourselves came to a judgment; we reason to find the best possible reasons why somebody else ought to join us in
our judgment.[4]
So one question this blog should ask
is: if people do this more or less
naturally, does this thinking pattern indicate, what a former posting
described, the moral sense Francis Hutcheson wrote about and influenced Thomas
Jefferson back in the eighteenth century?[5]
This blog, in the next posting, will
pick up on these concerns. It utilizes a
Haidt analogy that offers a colorful image:
“the rider and the elephant.” This
analogy was previously referred to in this blog; see the posting, “The
Elephant.”[6] The analogy points to the strength emotions
have when compared to reason.
[1] Jonathan Haidt, The
Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided
by Politics and Religion (New York, NY:
Pantheon Books, 2012).
[2] Robert M. Sapolsky, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst
(New York, NY: Penguin Press, 2017).
[3] Jonathan Haidt, The
Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided
by Politics and Religion, 42-43.
[4] Ibid., 44 (Emphasis in the original).
[5] Garry Wills, Inventing America: Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence
(New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1978/2018).
[6] Robert Gutierrez, “The Elephant,” Gravitas:
A Voice for Civics – a blog, July 21, 2015, accessed February 18,
2019, https://gravitascivics.blogspot.com/2015/07/the-elephant.html
.
No comments:
Post a Comment