Kant's "categorical imperative," perhaps the most famous prescription in all of moral philosophy, captures some of these same concerns:
Hence there is only one categorical imperative and it is this: "Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law." 48
While Kant believed that this criterion of universal applicability was the product of pure reason, it appeals to us because it relies on basic intuitions about fairness and justification. 49 One cannot claim to be "right" about anything—whether as a matter of reason or a matter of ethics— unless one's views can be generalized to others. 50
Is Being Good Just Too Difficult?
Most of us spend some time over the course of our lives deciding how (or whether) to respond to the fact that other people on earth needlessly starve to death. Most of us also spend some time deciding which delightful foods we want to consume at home and in our favorite restaurants. Which of these projects absorbs more of your time and material resources on a yearly basis? If you are like most people living in the developed world, such a comparison will not recommend you for sainthood. Can the disparity between our commitment to fulfilling our selfish desires and our commitment to alleviating the unnecessary misery and death of millions be morally justified? Of course not. These failures of ethical consistency are often considered a strike against consequentialism. They shouldn't be. Who ever said that being truly good, or even ethically consistent, must be easy?
I have no doubt that I am less good than I could be. Which is to say, I am not living in a way that truly maximizes the well-being of others. I am nearly as sure, however, that I am also failing to live in a way that maximizes my own well-being. This is one of the paradoxes of human psychology: we often fail to do what we ostensibly want to do and what is most in our self-interest to do. We often fail to do what we most want to do—or, at the very least, we fail to do what, at the end of the day (or year, or lifetime) we will most wish we had done.
Just think of the heroic struggles many people must endure simply to quit smoking or lose weight. The right course of action is generally obvious: if you are smoking two packs of cigarettes a day or are fifty pounds overweight, you are surely not maximizing your well-being. Perhaps this isn't so clear to you now, but imagine: if you could successfully stop smoking or lose weight, what are the chances that you would regret this decision a year hence? Probably zero. And yet, if you are like most people, you will find it extraordinarily difficult to make the simple behavioral changes required to get what you want. 51
Most of us are in this predicament in moral terms. I know that helping people who are starving is far more important than most of what I do. I also have no doubt that doing what is most important would give me more pleasure and emotional satisfaction than I get from most of what I do by way of seeking pleasure and emotional satisfaction. But this knowledge does not change me. I still want to do what I do for pleasure more than I want to help the starving. I strongly believe that I would be happier if I wanted to help the starving more—and I have no doubt that they would be happier if I spent more time and money helping them—but these beliefs are not sufficient to change me. I know that I would be happier and the world would be a (marginally) better place if I were different in these respects. I am, therefore, virtually certain that I am neither as moral, nor as happy, as I could be. 52 1 know all of these things, and I want to maximize my happiness, but I am generally not moved to do what I believe will make me happier than I now am.
At bottom, these are claims both about the architecture of my mind and about the social architecture of our world. It is quite clear to me that given the current state of my mind—that is, given how my actions and uses of attention affect my life—I would be happier if I were less selfish. This means I would be more wisely and effectively selfish if I were less selfish. This is not a paradox.
What if I could change the architecture of my mind? On some level, this has always been possible, as everything we devote attention to, every discipline we adopt, or piece of knowledge we acquire changes our minds. Each of us also now has access to a swelling armamentarium of drugs that regulate mood, attention, and wakefulness. And the possibility of far more sweeping (as well as more precise) changes to our mental capacities may be within reach. Would it be good to make changes to our minds that affect our sense of right and wrong? And would our ability to alter our moral sense undercut the case I am making for moral realism? What if, for instance, I could rewire my brain so that eating ice cream was not only extremely pleasurable, but also felt like the most important thing I could do?
Despite the ready availability of ice cream, it seems that my new disposition would present certain challenges to self-actualization. I would gain weight. I would ignore social obligations and intellectual pursuits. No doubt, I would soon scandalize others with my skewed priorities. But what if advances in neuroscience eventually allow us to change the way every brain responds to morally relevant experiences? What if we could program the entire species to hate fairness, to admire cheating, to love cruelty, to despise compassion, etc. Would this be morally good? Again, the devil is in the details. Is this really a world of equivalent and genuine well-being, where the concept of "well-being" is susceptible to ongoing examination and refinement as it is in our world? If so, so be it. What could be more important than genuine well-being? But, given all that the concept of "well-being" entails in our world, it is very difficult to imagine that its properties could be entirely fungible as we move across the moral landscape.
A miniature version of this dilemma is surely on the horizon: increasingly, we will need to consider the ethics of using medications to mitigate mental suffering. For instance, would it be good for a person to take a drug that made her indifferent to the death of her child? Surely not while she still had responsibilities as a parent. But what if a mother lost her only child and was thereafter inconsolable? How much better than inconsolable should her doctor make her feel? How much better should she want to feel? Would any of us want to feel perfectly happy in this circumstance? Given a choice—and this choice, in some form, is surely coming—I think that most of us will want our mental states to be coupled, however loosely, to the reality of our lives. How else could our bonds with one another be maintained? How, for instance, can we love our children and yet be totally indifferent to their suffering and death? I suspect we cannot. But what will we do once our pharmacies begin stocking a genuine antidote to grief?
If we cannot always resolve such conundrums, how should we proceed? We cannot perfectly measure or reconcile the competing needs of billions of creatures. We often cannot effectively prioritize our own competing needs. What we can do is try, within practical limits, to follow a path that seems likely to maximize both our own well-being and the well-being of others. This is what it means to live wisely and ethically. As we will see, we have already begun to discover which regions of the brain allow us to do this. A fuller understanding of what moral life entails, however, would require a science of morality.
Bewildered by Diversity
The psychologist Jonathan Haidt has put forward a very influential thesis about moral judgment known as the "social-intuitionist model." In a widely referenced article entitled "The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail," Haidt summarizes our predicament this way:
Our moral life is plagued by two illusions. The first illusion can be called the "wag-the-dog" illusion: We believe that our own moral judgment (the dog) is driven by our own moral reasoning (the tail). The second illusion can be called the "wag-the-other-dog's-tail" illusion: In a moral argument, we expect the successful rebuttal of our opponents' arguments to change our opponents' minds. Such a belief is analogous to believing that forcing a dog's tail to wag by moving it with your hand should make the dog happy. 53
Haidt does not go so far as to say that reasoning never produces moral judgments; he simply argues that this happens far less often than people think. Haidt is pessimistic about our ev
er making realistic claims about right and wrong, or good and evil, because he has observed that human beings tend to make moral decisions on the basis of emotion, justify these decisions with post hoc reasoning, and stick to their guns even when their reasoning demonstrably fails. He notes that when asked to justify their responses to specific moral (and pseudo-moral) dilemmas, people are often "morally dumbfounded." His experimental subjects would "stutter, laugh, and express surprise at their inability to find supporting reasons, yet they would not change their initial judgments ..."
The same can be said, however, about our failures to reason effectively. Consider the Monty Hall Problem (based on the television game show Let's Make a Deal). Imagine that you are a contestant on a game show and presented with three closed doors: behind one sits a new car; the other two conceal goats. Pick the correct door, and the car is yours.
The game proceeds this way: Assume that you have chosen Door #1. Your host then opens Door #2, revealing a goat. He now gives you a chance to switch your bet from Door #1 to the remaining Door #3. Should you switch? The correct answer is "yes." But most people find this answer very perplexing, as it violates the common intuition that, with two unopened doors remaining, the odds must be 1 in 2 that the car will be behind either one of them. If you stick with your initial choice, however, your odds of winning are actually 1 in 3. If you switch, your odds increase to 2 in 3. 54
It would be fair to say that the Monty Hall problem leaves many of its victims "logically dumbfounded." Even when people understand conceptually why they should switch doors, they can't shake their initial intuition that each door represents a 1/2 chance of success. This reliable failure of human reasoning is just that—a failure of reasoning. It does not suggest that there is no correct answer to the Monty Hall problem.
And yet scientists like Joshua Greene and Jonathan Haidt seem to think that the very existence of moral controversy nullifies the possibility of moral truth. In their opinion, all we can do is study what human beings do in the name of "morality." Thus, if religious conservatives find the prospect of gay marriage abhorrent, and secular liberals find it perfectly acceptable, we are confronted by a mere difference of moral preference—not a difference that relates to any deeper truths about human life.
In opposition to the liberal notion of morality as being a system of
"prescriptive judgments of justice, rights, and welfare pertaining to how people ought to relate to each other," Haidt asks us to ponder mysteries of the following sort:
If morality is about how we treat each other, then why did so many ancient texts devote so much space to rules about menstruation, who can eat what, and who can have sex with whom? 55
Interesting question. Are these the same ancient texts that view slavery as morally unproblematic? Perhaps slavery has no moral implications after all—otherwise, surely these ancient texts would have something of substance to say against it. Could abolition have been the ultimate instance of liberal bias? Or, following Haidt's logic, why not ask, "if physics is just a system of laws that explains the structure of the universe in terms of mass and energy, why do so many ancient texts devote so much space to immaterial influences and miraculous acts of God?" Why indeed.
Haidt appears to consider it an intellectual virtue to accept, uncritically, the moral categories of his subjects. But where is it written that everything that people do or decide in the name of "morality" deserves to be considered part of its subject matter? A majority of Americans believe that the Bible provides an accurate account of the ancient world. Many millions of Americans also believe that a principal cause of cancer is "repressed anger." Happily, we do not allow these opinions to anchor us when it comes time to have serious discussions about history and oncology. It seems abundantly clear that many people are simply wrong about morality—just as many people are wrong about physics, biology, history, and everything else worth understanding. What scientific purpose is served by averting our eyes from this fact? If morality is a system of thinking about (and maximizing) the well-being of conscious creatures like ourselves, many people's moral concerns must be immoral.
Moral skeptics like Haidt generally emphasize the intractability of moral disagreements:
The bitterness, futility, and self-righteousness of most moral arguments can now be explicated. In a debate about abortion, politics, consensual incest, or what my friend did to your friend, both sides believe that their positions are based on reasoning about the facts and issues involved (the wag-the-dog illusion). Both sides present what they take to be excellent arguments in support of their positions. Both sides expect the other side to be responsive to such reasons (the wag-the-other-dog's-tail illusion). When the other side fails to be affected by such good reasons, each side concludes that the other side must be closed minded or insincere. In this way the culture wars over issues such as homosexuality and abortion can generate morally motivated players on both sides who believe that their opponents are not morally motivated. 56
But the dynamic Haidt describes will be familiar to anyone who has ever entered into a debate on any subject. Such failures of persuasion do not suggest that both sides of every controversy are equally credible. For instance, the above passage perfectly captures my occasional collisions with 9/11 conspiracy theorists. A nationwide poll conducted by the Scripps Survey Research Center at Ohio University found that more than a third of Americans suspect that the federal government "assisted in the 9/11 terrorist attacks or took no action to stop them so the United States could go to war in the Middle East" and 16 percent believe that this proposition is "very likely" to be true. 57 Many of these people believe that the Twin Towers collapsed not because fully fueled passenger jets smashed into them but because agents of the Bush administration had secretly rigged these buildings to explode (6 percent of all respondents judged this "very likely," 10 percent judged it "somewhat likely"). Whenever I encounter people harboring these convictions, the impasse that Haidt describes is well in place: both sides "present what they take to be excellent arguments in support of their positions. Both sides expect the other side to be responsive to such reasons (the wag-the-other-dog's-tail illusion). When the other side fails to be affected by such good reasons, each side concludes that the other side must be closed minded or insincere." It is undeniable, however, that if one side in this debate is right about what actually happened on September 11, 2001, the other side must be absolutely wrong.
Of course, it is now well known that our feeling of reasoning objectively is often illusory. 58 This does not mean, however, that we cannot learn to reason more effectively, pay greater attention to evidence, and grow more mindful of the ever-present possibility of error. Haidt is right to notice that the brain's emotional circuitry often governs our moral intuitions, and the way in which feeling drives judgment is surely worthy of study. But it does not follow that there are no right and wrong answers to questions of morality. Just as people are often less than rational when claiming to be rational, they can be less than moral when claiming to be moral.
In describing the different forms of morality available to us, Haidt offers a choice between "contractual" and "beehive" approaches: the first is said to be the province of liberals, who care mainly about harm and fairness; the second represents the conservative (generally religious) social order, which incorporates further concerns about group loyalty, respect for authority, and religious purity. The opposition between these two conceptions of the good life may be worth discussing, and Haidt's data on the differences between liberals and conservatives is interesting, but is his interpretation correct? It seems possible, for instance, that his five foundations of morality are simply facets of a more general concern about harm.
What, after all, is the problem with desecrating a copy of the Qur'an? There would be no problem but for the fact that people believe that the Qur'an is a divinely authored text. Such people almost surely believe that some harm could come to them or to their tribe as a result of such sacrileges—if not in this world, then
in the next. A more esoteric view might be that any person who desecrates scripture will have harmed himself directly: a lack of reverence might be its own punishment, dimming the eyes of faith. Whatever interpretation one favors, sacredness and respect for religious authority seem to reduce to a concern about harm just the same.
The same point can be made in the opposite direction: even a liberal like myself, enamored as I am of thinking in terms of harm and fairness, can readily see that my vision of the good life must be safeguarded from the aggressive tribalism of others. When I search my heart, I discover that I want to keep the barbarians beyond the city walls just as much as my conservative neighbors do, and I recognize that sacrifices of my own freedom may be warranted for this purpose. I expect that epiphanies of this sort could well multiply in the coming years. Just imagine, for instance, how liberals might be disposed to think about the threat of Islam after an incident of nuclear terrorism. Liberal hankering for happiness and freedom might one day produce some very strident calls for stricter laws and tribal loyalty. Will this mean that liberals have become religious conservatives pining for the beehive? Or is the liberal notion of avoiding harm flexible enough to encompass the need for order and differences between in-group and out-group?
There is also the question of whether conservatism contains an extra measure of cognitive bias—or outright hypocrisy—as the moral convictions of social conservatives are so regularly belied by their louche behavior. The most conservative regions of the United States tend to have the highest rates of divorce and teenage pregnancy, as well as the greatest appetite for pornography. 59 Of course, it could be argued that social conservatism is the consequence of so much ambient sinning. But this seems an unlikely explanation—especially in those cases where a high level of conservative moralism and a predilection for sin can be found in a single person. If one wants examples of such hypocrisy, Evangelical ministers and conservative politicians seem to rarely disappoint.