The language of evolutionary biology and psychology is built on concepts applicable in the first instance to individual strategic rationality but extended to the level of genetic explanation. Current discussions of mental disorders as evolutionary adaptations would apply that extended language back to the individual level, with potentially problematic moral/political implications as well as possibilities of confusion. This paper focuses on one particularly problematic area: the explanation of women's greater tendency to depression. The suggestion that there are "good evolutionary reasons" (...) for depression makes sense, and might be helpful to note in therapy, as implying that the tendency is not a defect. However, evolutionary adaptiveness should not be confused with individual or psychological adaptiveness. Besides making reference to an earlier environment, it presupposes a strategic standpoint that may not accord with the legitimate interests of the individual, as this example makes vivid. (shrink)
• But this rests on the debatable view that understanding a moral reason implies being motivated to conform to it. Psychopaths do seem to have at least a “rote” or emotionally shallow understanding that their acts are wrong.
Current treatments of practical rationality understand reasons as considerations counting in favor of or against some practical option, treating the positive and the negative case as symmetrical. Typically the focus is on examples of positive reasons. However, I want to shift the spotlight to negative reasons, as making a tighter or more direct link to rationality — and ultimately to morality, which is what much of the current interest in reasons is meant to clarify. Recognizing a positive/negative asymmetry in normative (...) force will let us reconcile the view of moral or other requirements as based on reasons with the denial that reasons as such, even all-thingsconsidered reasons, yield requirements — or as I like to put it, rationally compel. (shrink)
My discussion below is an highly abbreviated version of a paper in preparation for a conference on innateness . I allow for both types of influence but suggest that more attention should be paid to mechanisms of social transfer of emotions, as a possible innate source of plasticity in moral learning via emotions - and hence of cultural variation in moral codes.
I was led to this clarificatory job initially by some puzzlement from a philosopher's standpoint about just why free will questions should come up particularly in connection with the genome project, as opposed to the many other scientific research programs that presuppose determinism. The philosophic concept of determinism involves explanation of all events, including human action, by prior causal factors--so that whether or not human behavior has a genetic basis, it ultimately gets traced back to _something_ true of the world (...) before our birth. The philosophic problem of free will and determinism arises because this seems to undercut moral responsibility: How can we reasonably be held responsible for something whose causes we couldn't control? (shrink)
I first began working on emotions as a project in philosophy of action, without particular reference to moral philosophy. My thought was that emotions have a distinctive role to play in rationality that tends to be underappreciated by philosophers. Bringing this out was meant to counter a widespread tendency to treat emotions as “blind” causes of action (for the general picture, see Greenspan 2009.) Instead, I thought that emotions could be seen as providing reasons. I took their significance as moral (...) motivators to be hard to miss. Of course, philosophers and others sometimes rightly insist that we need to put emotions aside in order to formulate satisfying moral principles, but I would have been surprised to hear anyone deny that moral motivation typically rests on emotion and that we need that basis in early life in order to get to the stage of acting on moral principles. However, I have since come to think that none of the main philosophical approaches to ethics fully appreciates the significance of emotion, in part because of a misconception of practical reasons. Reasons for action are commonly taken as prima facie requirements, so that moral reasons would yield requirements just insofar as they outweigh competing reasons such as reasons of simple self-interest. Someone who recognizes a moral reason as holding “all things considered” would be irrational not to act on it. But I argue in recent work (starting with Greenspan 2005) that even all-things-considered reasons may in one sense be optional: a rational agent can legitimately “discount” them, cancelling their deliberative weight and their force for motivation. What keeps us from setting aside reasons of the sort that underlie moral.. (shrink)
Innate emotional bases of ethics have been proposed by authors in evolutionary psychology, following Darwin and his sources in eighteenth-century moral philosophy. Philosophers often tend to view such theories as irrelevant to, or even as tending to undermine, the project of moral philosophy. But the importance of emotions to early moral learning gives them a role to play in determining the content of morality. I argue, first, that research on neural circuits indicates that the basic elements or components of emotions (...) need not be limited to what psychologists think of as basic emotions. But in that case, innate mechanisms of social transfer of emotion, such as infants’ tendency to facial imitation, gaze-following, and emotional contagion or empathy, provide a source of plasticity in developing the basic elements that lets emotions incorporate cultural influence from early on. This leaves room later for cognitive components of adult human emotions and hence for the further role of language in conveying cultural influence. We can thus see how moral judgment might depend on innate emotional capacities that are both modifiable by culture and capable of registering objective values. I use Rawls’s treatment of the development of moral sentiments to illustrate the kind of supportive role that emotions can play in a principle-based account – though my own account involves modifications I go on to indicate. (shrink)
The notion of an imperfect obligation or duty, which contemporary moral philosophy takes from Kantian ethics, affords a way of mitigating morality’s demands while recognizing moral obligation as “binding” or inescapable, in Kant’s terms: something an agent cannot get out of just by appealing to ends or priorities of her own. A perfect duty, as Kant puts it, allows no exception in the interest of inclination.1 It tells us precisely what we must do, with no option of putting it off (...) until some other occasion. By contrast, an imperfect duty leaves open crucial features of the required act. Understood in this way, as duties of indeterminate content, imperfect duties such as the charitable duty to aid those in need leave leeway for personal choice. We get to choose whom to aid and when and how much. We may be obligated to meet a certain threshold, but we will be exceeding what is required of us if we go beyond that. Imperfect duties therefore allow us authority to shape our own lives, balancing concern for others with our own particular projects and concerns. But imperfect duties interest me, in the first instance, in connection with practical reasons. The term “practical” here just means “having to do with action.” Reasons are understood as facts, not as mental states, and practical reasons are facts that count for or against action, in contrast to theoretical reasons, which concern belief. Similarly, “practical rationality” entails action in accordance with one’s overall structure of practical reasons, as distinct from believing what one has reason to believe. The term “practical rationality” can be used for a property of agents, in which case it implies awareness of the relevant reasons, but it also sometimes refers to a system of norms for assessing action in light of reasons, analogous to morality but also including logical and instrumental considerations. On this latter.. (shrink)
The notion of an “imperfect” obligation or duty, which most of us associate with Kantian ethics, affords a way of mitigating morality’s demands, while recognizing moral obligation as “binding” or inescapable, in Kant’s terms – something an agent cannot get out of just by appealing to ends or priorities of her own.2 Understood as duties of indeterminate content, imperfect duties such as the charitable duty to aid those in need leave leeway for personal choice – of whom to aid and (...) when and how much, at any rate past a certain threshold. They therefore allow us authority to shape our own lives, balancing concern for others with our own nonmoral projects and concerns. But they interest me in the first instance in connection with practical reasons, taken as the basis of moral “ought.” On what I take to be the common account of practical reasons, they are essentially prima facie act-requirements, able to be overridden or undermined by opposing reasons, but otherwise constraining rational choice.3 If we have a reason to aid a particular famine victim, say, it is only the fact that we have just as weighty reasons to aid others instead, or to do something else with the same resources, that keeps us from being required to aid him in particular. A moral reason counts as binding on this account insofar as it outweighs competitors – the result being a moral obligation, “imperfect” where its content leaves significant room for choice. However, in a case where there happens to be some best or most effective way of fulfilling an imperfect obligation, and our reason for a certain option counts as our strongest 1 reason, what happens to our leeway for choice? I mean to be working from an objective notion of obligation and of reasons, as independent of what the agent knows or has reason to know, but in that case, when we supplement morality with rationality, there might seem to be particular victims we are required to aid, whether or not we can tell who they are. For surely we have a moral reason to aid any given victim, not just victims generally.. (shrink)
Suppose I am now making plans for next summer’s vacation. I can spend a week in Rome or on the Riviera, but not both. Either choice would be excellent, but after weighing various pros and cons, I decide that for my purposes Rome would be better. If I am rational, then, I must choose Rome. It is an assumption of standard decision theory that rationality requires maximizing: trying to get the maximum amount of whatever form of value we are after (...) (usually construed as “utility”). An alternative has been proposed, under the heading of “satisficing” – being satisfied with what suffices, as it were, or settling for an option that is “good enough” – but this may seem rational only when there are costs to determining which option is best that diminish the value of choosing it, to the point where the choice of a less good option really amounts to maximizing. Where there is no serious cost, even in time and effort, to getting hold of something better – a vacation in Rome rather than the Riviera – how could it be rational to turn it down? If we pay attention to the temporal standpoint from which a choice is made, though, satisficing makes good sense. It accords with our common appeal to thresholds: adequate levels of satisfaction or value, such that getting above them is not necessary, though it might be nice. Once we have reached a threshold, it is rational – meaning rationally permissible – to stop. Pushing further toward the best may also be permissible but is not rationally required, where we already have a good enough option in hand. So if offered a chance to move to Rome while already settled happily on the Riviera, I would not be irrational to turn the offer down, even if I grant that accepting it would make my vacation even better. (shrink)
Morality is a source of reasons for action, what philosophers call practical reasons. Kantians say that it ‘gives’ reasons to everyone. We can even think of moral requirements as amounting to particularly strong or stringent reasons, in an effort to demystify deontological views like Kant’s, with its insistence on inescapable or ‘binding’ moral requirements or ‘oughts.’¹ When we say that someone morally ought not to harm others, perhaps all we are saying is that he has a certain kind of reason (...) not to, one that wins out against any opposing reasons such as those touting benefits to him of ignoring others’ concerns. (shrink)
This paper attempts to connect recent cross-disciplinary treatments of the cognitive or rational significance of emotions with work in contemporary philosophy identifying an evaluative propositional content of emotions. An emphasis on the perspectival nature of emotional evaluations allows for a notion of emotional rationality that does not seem to be available on alternative accounts.
The category of emotions covers a disputed territory, but clear examples include fear, anger, joy, pride, sadness, disgust, shame, contempt and the like. Such states are commonly thought of as antithetical to reason, disorienting and distorting practical thought. However, there is also a sense in which emotions are factors in practical reasoning, understood broadly as reasoning that issues in action. At the very least emotions can function as "enabling" causes of rational decision-making (despite the many cases in which they are (...) disabling) insofar as they direct attention toward certain objects of thought and away from others. They serve to heighten memory and to limit the set of salient practical options to a manageable set, suitable for "quick-and-dirty" decision-making. (shrink)
There is a well-known scene from The Adventures of Tom Sawyer that illustrates what might be considered benign manipulation: Tom has the job of whitewashing a fence but would rather spend the time with friends. By feigning enthusiasm for the job he manages to get his friends to hang around and do it for him. They even pay to do it - with various little items that he later trades for..
Psychopaths are agents who lack the normal capacity to feel moral emotions (e.g. guilt based on empathy with the victims of their actions). Evidence for attributing psychopathy at least in some cases to genetic or early childhood causes suggests that psychopaths lack free will. However, the paper defends a sense in which psychopaths still may be construed as responsible for their actions, even if their degree of responsibility is less than that of normal agents. Responsibility is understood in Strawsonian terms, (...) as a question of our appropriate reactive attitudes toward an agent for what she does, and as distinct from the question of the agent's own motivating attitudes, which lead him to do what he does. The latter is the question more directly relevant to free will, though moral motivation normally depends on the capacity in early childhood to pick up motivating attitudes from others' reactive attitudes. Reactive attitudes based on hatred rather than anger (e.g. disgust or contempt) count as alternative forms of blame that may be appropriately directed toward agents manifesting bad qualities of will, even as a matter of motivational impairment. So psychopaths may still be said to deserve blame, even if they are incapable of modifying their behavior in response to blame. (shrink)
The language of evolutionary biology and psychology is built on concepts applicable in the first instance to individual strategic rationality but extended to the level of genetic explanation. Current discussions of mental disorders as evolutionary adaptations would apply that extended language back to the individual level, with potentially problematic moral/political implications as well as possibilities of confusion. This paper focuses on one particularly problematic area: the explanation of women's greater tendency to depression. The suggestion that there are "good evolutionary reasons" (...) for depression makes sense, and might be helpful to note in therapy, as implying that the tendency is not a defect. However, evolutionary adaptiveness should not be confused with individual or psychological adaptiveness. Besides making reference to an earlier environment, it presupposes a strategic standpoint that may not accord with the legitimate interests of the individual, as this example makes vivid. (shrink)
There seems to be evidence of a genetic component in criminal behavior. It is widely agreed not to be "deterministic"--by which discussions outside philosophy seem to mean that by itself it is not sufficient to determine behavior. Environmental factors make a decisive difference--for that matter, there are nongenetic biological factors--in whether and how genetic.
Like many people, I was initially attracted to free will issues – at first embracing hard determinism, as part of a general rejection of doctrines associated with religion, though exposure to Kant’s views in my first philosophy course made me begin to consider nonreligious grounds for an indeterminist conception of free action. Of course, Kant also takes belief in God and immortality as presupposed by moral agency, but I was never much moved by those arguments. On free will, though, I (...) thought seeing my acts as determined would give me a reason to expend less effort on them. (shrink)
In its treatment of the role of emotion in ethics the argument of the book outlines a new way of packing motivational force into moral meaning that allows for a ...
P.S. Greenspan uses the treatment of moral dilemmas as the basis for an alternative view of the structure of ethics and its relation to human psychology. In its treatment of the role of emotion in ethics the argument of the book outlines a new way of packing motivational force into moral meaning that allows for a socially based version of moral realism.
Popular and scientific accounts of the U.S. Human Genome Project often express concern about the implications of the project for the philosophic question of free will and responsibility. However, on its standard construal within philosophy, the question of free will versus determinism poses no special problems in relation to genetic research. The paper identifies a variant version of the free will question, free will versus internal constraint, that might well pose a threat to notions of individual autonomy and virtue in (...) connection with genetic research. Whether it does depends on the extent to which the genetic basis for behavior turns on behavioral incapacities. (shrink)
Philosophers have traditionally tried to understand the emotions and their bearing on rationality and moral motivation by assimilating emotion to other categories such as sensation, judgment, and desire. In recent years, moving away from the Cartesian identification of emotions with particular sensations, many philosophers have embraced "judgmentalism," the view that emotions are essentially evaluative judgments or beliefs, with only an accidental connection to the feelings and impulses we intuitively take as "emotional." Anger, for instance, either is or entails the belief (...) that one has been wronged and that the source of injury or offense deserves punishment. (shrink)
