Alex’s Heresies – embracing a physical reality

Christian Today, an on-line Christian newspaper, reports that one in four children in the UK are bullied for faith-based reasons.

A survey published today by a leading bullying prevention charity has found that one in four school students admits to being bullying – often violently – because of their religion.

Beatbullying, which runs interfaith bullying prevention programmes, said its research indicated that that there was little provision for young people to talk about their faith and that almost half of young people do not talk about religious or faith issues at all.

The survey of 819 young people also found a degree of religious segregation, with 20 per cent of the young people surveyed saying that their circle of friends consisted mainly of people from the same religious background. (full article 17 Nov 2008)

It amazes me that religious people continue to believe and promote that strong religious belief leads inexorably to good moral behaviour. There seems to be no evidence supporting this stand. We see so many cases of strong faith being destructive. People’s moral behaviour should be seen as a strictly human affair with strictly human solutions.

Alex McCullie

As soon as you jetison the supernatural, you as a naturalist are forced to see human morality as strictly human affair without divine fear or favour. If unlike most, you want to think about morality and moral decision-making, here are naturalised resources that may help. You’ll need to think about the type of decisions that qualify as moral ones and, as Steven Pinker points out below, the boundaries of moral and non-moral issues shift and change. Also you should look at how how we currently make these decisions and typically they are make at a subconscious level. And, finally, what methods or tools can be used to reflect on moral decisions. Don’t forget that ethics and morality is a big part of philosophy and can provide useful ideas for reflection.

Neuroscience is doing a lot of research today on how we make moral decisions – links below. I’ve also provided links for some interesting research areas about humans in a physical world – (1) Marc Hauser and moral grammar; (2) Lakoff and Johnson “Embodied realism” and (3) evolutionary psychology.

A good place to start is with Steven Picker’s article The Moral Instinct (NYT, 13 Jan 2008).

Alex McCullie

Neuroscience

Scientific American – Mind Matters (see feed on this site) regularly covers recent research. Like the rest of science, neuroscience is about describing how we make moral choices and not the best ones for a good life. Here is some recent research to whet your appetite – Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Thinking about Morality.

Joshua Green, Harvard University, conducts neuroscience research into moral decision-making using iMRI scanning techniques. You can download his PhD thesis and other papers.

Patricia Churchland, Philosophy University of California. To quote her website “I explore the impact of scientific developments on our understanding of consciousness, the self, free will, decision making, ethics, learning, and religion and issues concerning the neurobiological basis of consciousness, the self, and free will, as well as on more technical questions concerning to what degree the nervous system is hierarchically organized, how the difficult issue of co-ordination and timing is managed by nervous systems, and what are the mechanisms for the perceptual phenomenon of filling-in. Also check my links sections for links to YouTube videos.

Moral Minds – Marc Hauser

Marc Hauser, Psychology & Biology Harvard University proposes that we evolved a common moral grammar enabling rapid moral decision-making at a subconscious level.

Radio broadcast              Interview with Discover magazine

Complete an online moral sense test (hosted by Harvard)

Book reviews – (NYT by Richard Rorty) (The Guardian)

Embodied realism – George Lakoff and Mark Johnson

George Lakoff Linguistics, Berkeley and Mark Johnson Philosophy Oregan University with others have developed a theory from neuroscience, linguistics and philosophy that sees the brain, correctly, as an embodied within our bodies and, therefore, brain processing should be seen as a natural consequence of our interactions with our environments. Furthermore our cognitive processing is seen as metaphoric with the higher-level concepts being processed metaphorically by the same responses used by lower level perceptions.

Books:

Lakoff, G and Johnson, M 1980, Metaphors We Live By, University of Chicago

Lakoff, G and Johnson, M 1999, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought, Basic Books

Johnson, M 2007, The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding, University of Chicago

Book reviews: (NYT)  (Steen)

Edge interview with George Lakoff

Evolutionary Psychology/Biology

This applies the implications of evolution on our behaviour including moral decision-making. Even though a controversial area the area of study contributes to our understanding of human moral behaviour.

Steven Pinker Evolutionary psychology, Harvard – many articles available

Other articles

Jon Haidt, Psychology Virginia - Moral Psychology article (The Edge)

I’m collecting interesting links of articles and research showing that moral decisions are strictly a human (brain) affair. Each link is dated as research findings are updated frequently in the fast-moving area of neuroscience. I’ll post this entry under Links so keep checking.

• Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Thinking about Morality – When we are in a pinch, surprising factors can affect our moral judgments, By Adina Roskies and Walter Sinnott-Armstrong (SCIAM – Mind Matters, 29 Jul 2008)
• The Moral Instinct, by Steven Pinker (NYT, 13 Jan 2008) – excellent overview article on morality from an evolutionary perspective.

Alex McCullie

Recent report from Scientific American – Mind Matters describing the effects of cognitive stress on moral decisions:

“Cognitive science and moral philosophy might seem like strange bedfellows, but in the past decade they have become partners. In a recent issue of Cognition, the Harvard University psychologist Joshua Greene and colleagues extend this trend. Their experiment utilizes conventional behavioral methods, but it was designed to test a hypothesis stemming from previous fMRI investigations into the neural bases of moral judgments… (more)”

(Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Thinking about Morality – When we are in a pinch, surprising factors can affect our moral judgments, By Adina Roskies and Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, July 29, 2008)

Also see feed from SCIAM – Mind Matters on this site (bottom right).

Alex McCullie

These are not true…

• A nasty, vicious lion stalks, attacks and murders a poor defenceless antelope on an ‘Animal Planet’ documentary.

• My cat loves me. He knows when I’m upset and will deliberately comfort me.

• Selfish genes behave immorally.

• The Earth is a living thing just like us.

Empathy is one of the great strengths to have evolved in humans. Our ability to see from someone else’s point of view forms the basis of social and moral behaviour. Wonderfully, this is all done subconsciously. Subsequent moral discussions are mostly rationalisations justifying these intuitive responses. (Steven Pinker http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/13/magazine/13Psychology-t.html)

But here’s the rub. We apply this empathy to other things – living and non-living – in unhelpful ways. People believe they can see the world as a non-human would. Recently, a friend told me that he could genuinely imagine the world as seen by a bat. This belief has benefits, of course. We are more likely to respect other living and non-living things (Gaia, for example), if we see them as “like us”. Unfortunately, however, we also can moralise about animal behaviour, seeking to punish as if animals are free moral agents with responsibility. Again, all is done subconsciously. So, lions are not nasty; cute looking dears are not innocent; cats don’t love; genes are not morally selfish and Earth is not alive like us. As an aside, biologists, like Richard Dawkins, often refer to observed behaviour metaphorically. So behaviour can be described a selfish or altruistic without any moral implications.

The bottom line is we should be aware that living things (and non-living for that matter) have no natural or moral purposes. They just evolved to what they are today and will continue to do so. Evolutionary processes are blind and uncaring and putting chance aside, they reward (non-morally) characteristics leading to successful reproduction and punish (again, non-morally) those that don’t. As suggested in Pinker’s article, even our moral attitudes can be seen to have developed in a similar way.

Don’t get me wrong. We shouldn’t use this awareness as an excuse to ignore the problems we create for all livings things and for the planet. Our capacity to see and remedy problems beyond conflicting immediate needs may be our true greatness.

© 2008 Alex McCullie