Lesson 7 Part 2: Emotional Dogs, Rational Tails

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Do curso por National University of Singapore

Reason and Persuasion: Thinking Through Three Dialogues By Plato

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National University of Singapore

Reason and Persuasion: Thinking Through Three Dialogues By Plato

159 ratings

In this course we study the ancient, Socratic art of blowing up your beliefs as you go, to make sure they're built to last. We spend six weeks studying three Platonic dialogues - "Euthyphro", "Meno", "Republic" Book I - then two weeks pondering a pair of footnotes to Plato: contemporary moral theory and moral psychology. Platonic? Socratic? Socrates was the teacher, but he said he never did. Plato was the student who put words in his teacher's mouth. You'll get a feel for it. We have a book: the new 4th edition of "Reason and Persuasion", by the instructor (and his wife, Belle Waring, the translator.) It contains the Plato you need, plus introductory material and in-depth, chapter-length commentaries. (Don't worry! John Holbo knows better than to read his book to the camera. The videos cover the same material, but the presentation is different.) The book is offered free in PDF form - the whole thing, and individual chapter slices. It is also available in print and other e-editions. See the course content for links and information. The course is suitable for beginning students of Plato and philosophy, but is intended to offer something to more advanced students as well. We seek new, odd angles on old, basic angles. Tricky! The strategy is to make a wide-ranging, interdisciplinary approach. Lots of contemporary connections, to make the weird bits intuitive; plus plenty of ancient color, still bright after all these years. So: arguments and ideas, new possibilities, old stories, fun facts. Plus cartoons. The results can get elaborate (some book chapters and some lesson videos run long.) But each video comes with a brief summary of its contents. The lessons progress. I put them in this order for reasons. But there's no reason you can't skip over and around to find whatever seems most interesting. There are any number of self-contained mini-courses contained in this 8-week course. You are welcome to them. Plato has meant different things to different people. He's got his own ideas, no doubt. (Also, his own Ideas.) But these have, over the centuries, been worn into crossing paths for other feet; been built up into new platforms for projecting other voices. (Plato did it to Socrates, so fair is fair.) So your learning outcome should be: arrival somewhere interesting, in your head, where you haven't been before. I wouldn't presume to dictate more exactly.

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Moral Psychology

We're done with Plato! Well, not really. The point is to prove we'll never be done with him! But we're moving on to contemporary moral psychology. This lesson is on moral psychology. How does the moral mind think – work, function? The moral brain. (Psychologists are natural scientists. They figure your mind is your brain although that identification can get puzzling, we shall see.) I discuss one figure in particular: Jonathan Haidt. A popular writer, with good ideas. Also, some bad ones (I say) so that makes it livelier. He knocks Plato. I try to knock back, sometimes on Plato’s behalf. Plato is obviously very concerned with moral psychology. So many colorful, mythic images of all that! Haidt ventures more than a short distance into philosophy, when he sallies forth to correct philosophers, ancient and modern, for doing bad psychology. All very interesting. And I hope, like me, you find having a bit of Plato under your belt, at this point, helps you to organize your thoughts, see positions and patterns. In the first lesson I compared studying Plato to learning chess gambits. No one knows how to win, outright. But some strategies are more ... winning. (But there are always standard defenses.) l A lot of scientific progress has been made in the study of the human mind. But there are a lot of deep, stubbornly un-dissolved conceptual mysteries hereabouts. That means a lot of ancient debate patterns – same old lines, same old counters to the old lines - stay relevant. It’s important to be able to say: hey, we learned something new today! But also: ah, this debate is a version of that old thing we’ve been batting back and forth for centuries! (Even though it’s got new stuff stuck on – fMRI data, or what have you.) Being able to see the old and the new isn’t everything, but it’s a start. Let’s get started.

Lesson 7 Part 1: Why Read Ancient Philosophy?10:57

Lesson 7 Part 2: Emotional Dogs, Rational Tails14:57

Lesson 7 Part 3: Many Masters, One Slave?8:38

Lesson 7 Part 4: Can 'Ick' Imply Ought?23:06

Lesson 7 Part 5: Systems & Platforms19:02

Lesson 7 Part 6: Snakes On A Brain20:33

Lesson 7 Part 7: Tree Falls16:19

Lesson 7 Part 8: The Epimethean Script?26:04

Conheça os instrutores

John Holbo, Associate Professor

DEPARTMENT of PHILOSOPHY

Lesson seven, part two.

Emotional Dogs, Rational Tails.

I'm trying to be more informal, but I just like to draw cartoons.

Let's judge a book by its cover.

The cover is of the book, The Happiness Hypothesis, by Jonathan Haidt.

This is the book we're going to be focusing on in this lesson.

A book should have something new to say, and it's nice if the

cover can give us an image or metaphor, icon of that new thing.

And in this case, I think this really nice image really fits the bill.

This image is at once ancient and modern.

We see an elephant and a rider on the elephant, an ancient mode of transport.

And yet, we have this strange counter

intuitive modern shock from below angle on it.

Thing has gotta be Photoshopped.

I can't believe anyone shot that for real.

Anyway, I want you to think about this image of a creature rising from darkness

into light, and how incongruous it is to have the creature be so heavy.

Think how natural it would be to have an image in which

the light rider transcends or leaves the heavy elephant behind in the darkness.

Well, that's not the image that Jonathan Haidt gives you.

He is really giving you a portrait of man as a

transcendent animal, like an elephant, defying

gravity, rising up towards the light.

Also, let me say a word about my ideal reader.

Well, technically you don't need to be a reader at all.

You're just listening to my voice.

But, for purposes of making this lesson, I had a

decision to make about how to approach the Haidt material.

Was I going to give a really introductory introduction to Haidt or was

I going to presume a little knowledge on the part of the reader?

I don't actually have any reasonable presumption

that lots of you will have done the

reading, but on the other hand, Jonathan

Haidt is a extremely clear popular, approachable reader.

Furthermore, there's plenty of videos of the man

explaining his own philosophy and psychology very admirably.

If I were to attempt to, to give the, the level one introduction to Haidt I would

feel like I was presumptuously saying that I

was better at that introductory stuff than Haidt himself.

I want to approach it at a slightly higher level, not so high

that if you are a smart person who hasn't read Haidt, you won't be

able to understand me, but high enough that maybe this would be a

good time to pause the video and do a little bit preliminary Haidt reading.

Read the first chapter of The Happiness Hypothesis.

Maybe watch some Ted Talks, by the man himself, or

if you want something a little more ambitious, you might try

reading, an academic paper he wrote called The Emotional Dog

and Its Rational Tail: A Social Intuitionist Approach to Moral Judgment.

It's in Psychological Review.

There's the reference for you.

I didn't include it in the Coursera recommended readings, because

I thought it's an academic paper, it's probably behind a paywall.

But when I actually went to look for it, I found that Google Scholar will give it

to you for free, presumably Professor Haidt himself

is aware of that and is okay with it.

So if you'd like to read the paper Google it on the web, and you'll find it.

now, let me tell you just a few things about the

title, which I hope were fairly obvious from the title itself.

It's a nice metaphor, The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail.

We don't know what a social intitutionist is yet, but

we know what moral judgement is roughly, and it's kind

of funny to think that this thing on the right

here could be a picture of IT of moral judgment.

What's odd about the picture?

Well, let's just note first that tails don't wag dogs.

This is a well-known feature of dog tails.

That's science fact.

They don't wag dogs.

That means, if reason is the tail, it's not really moving the animal as a whole.

Furthermore, what are tails good for?

Well, if you ever had a dog,

you know, mostly they're good as emotional indicators.

So all in all I'd say what we're getting here is

a fairly slighting account of the role of reason in moral judgment.

Haidt is clearly suggesting that somehow, some way, reason plays a much

smaller, merely ornamental, if you like, role in our moral life.

Let's go back to the ancient Greeks.

Here we see a picture of the Porch of the Maidens.

Those columns are called caryatids, if you want a new word for the day.

This is a glorious testament to to human nature, holding

up the moral roof, you might say, in ancient Athens.

Here's a crazier way to hold up the roof.

Imagine this being the temple of moral judgement.

We have all these dog columns holding it up, and reason.

All those little wagging tails, those are just

like little ornaments on the facade of moral judgement.

Little acanthus leaves, there's another word for the day.

You can look that one up.

Okay.

Rather than following the ancient Greeks in worshiping

reason, Plato would be a good example of that.

We should instead look for the roots of human

intelligence, rationality, and virtue in what the mind does best.

It's not going to be reason.

What's it going to be?

What does Haidt think the mind does best?

Perception, intuition, and other mental operations that

are quick, effortless, and generally quite accurate.

There's a fundamentally reliable dogginess to us human beings.

And Haidt wants to emphasize its secret importance

to our reason, to our moral life, to a

lot of other things that we might want to think are separate from the dog in us.

Scarcely a, a Jonathan Haidt book or publication

goes by when he does not quote the 18th Century Scottish Philosopher David Hume.

Quote: Reason is and, ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can

never pretend to any office, other office than to serve and obey them, unquote.

For passions, you can read emotions, feelings.

So we get a picture on the left of passions king, yay!

Emotions, reason must serve.

Why should that be the case?

Here's a conceptual argument for that conclusion, quoting

David Hume, this is not a quote that

we often get from Jonathan Haidt, not that

I think that he's keeping it secret or anything.

Here's Hume's reason, quote: It is not contrary to reason to prefer

the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger.

That's why I've got a super villain there.

It is a little contrary to reason to prefer

even my own acknowledged lesser good to my greater, unquote.

So here's the wisdom of David Humes.

Super villains fail basic ethics, but not basic logic.

There's nothing illogical per say, about preferring the whole world

to be uh,destroyed rather than the scratching of your little finger.

That is, there's no contradiction in the thought, I would prefer this to that.

Another way to put it, is that you can imagine

the world as a kind of a field of facts.

There's the world, the universe, all the things that exists,

rocks, trees, so forth, none of that implies an ought.

There are no oughts in nature, there is only the way it is, hence any preferences

you may have about that world are equally

rational with regard to the, the realm of facts.

Maybe that's right.

Maybe that's a proper picture of Hume's thought

and maybe an argument in its own right.

Then again, let's move onto the second thing that Hume says, it's not

irrational to prefer even my own

acknowledged lesser good to my greater good.

Plato, who probably didn't like that first assumption,

that the world is just a bare field of

facts, no values, is really going to get off the

bus here and say, didn't you read the Meno?

Do you really think that anyone wants what is bad, as such?

Isn't it the case that if you provide me with any

example of someone apparently preferring a lesser good to a greater

good, by their own lights, there's some story to tell about

how, it at least appears more good to them to the time.

Or else some part them wants it more, perhaps weakness of the will, their

animal nature wants it more even if

they're rational part knows better, something like that.

Who's going to win this argument?

Do we ever actually prefer things that we

ourselves think are worse than other things or not?

I would say as a conceptual point.

That's kind of undecided.

I can't decide it either, so we'll score that as

a tie, between Hume and Plato, in a preliminary sense.

Okay but Hume, actually I think maybe primarily

has more of an empirical argument for his claim.

Here, I'll read another bit from his book, the Treaties, as it was called.

Now it is certain, that there are certain calm

desires and tendencies, which, though they be real passions, produce

little emotion in the mind, and are more known

by their effects than by the immediate feeling or sensation.

Calm passions?

Isn't that kind of a contradiction in terms?

I think arguably within the terms of Hume's own philosophy, it kind of is.

Nevertheless what he's getting at is very plausible.

Namely, we have instincts.

We have general appetites, as he calls them.

We don't often feel these as feelings, and yet they empellus along and that

the sheer blandness of the feeling of them may cause us to mistake them for reason.

What we do by instinct doesn't feel like anything

to us and so if someone will ask us

why we did it, we will say why we reasoned that that was the proper thing to do.

It's a form of illusion.

Empirical conclusion, reason according to Hume

may be over powered by unconscious feelings,

instincts, or general appetites that we mistake

for the operation of our own reasoning.

Or by playing old really strong feelings.

Hume of course admits that, too.

We may get really angry or really

overjoyed and our feelings drive us to act.

So this is Hume's picture and Haidt says, rather than

going with those reason worshipping Greeks, let's go with David Hume.

And the response to that would be two questions.

First, let's grant that it is so, as Hume

says, that our reason is easily overcome by our passions.

Why would it follow the reason ought to be slave to the passions, rather

than that being an unfortunate but common

circumstance; which leads us into question two.

Which actually isn't a question, but I'll ask, state it rather aggressively.

Surely this isn't a critique of Plato, is it?

By which I mean, if there is one thing that we can hardly get Plato

to shut up about it, it's that

people aren't rational enough in their ordinary life.

That is, the typical soul is all, consists

of all these appetites and perhaps a sense of

honor, all of them overcoming that poor little rational

guy who can barely get a word in edgewise.

So,

so what is Jonathan Haidt agreeing with David Hume about?

That he thinks Plato, that

reason-worshiping Greek, would disagree with?

Where's the point of difference between them?

Maybe the news for Plato is this,

mathematical reasoning isn't quite like moral reasoning.

Moral reasoning is more doggie sort of business.

Virtue and geometry might work differently whatever you

think you may have learned from reading Plato's Meno.

Moral reasoning might be distinctive in its operations.

Has Plato ever thought of that?

Actually, he pretty clearly has thought of that.

Remember back in the Euthyphro, Euthyphro is telling us

all these wonderful stories about how the gods fight.

And Socrates is maybe a bit skeptical

about that, but he's humoring the poor kid.

He's alight, let's suppose they fight.

What are the gods going to fight about?

The same things we fight about, right?

Not math, not measuring rather, justice and

injustice, beauty and ugliness, good and bad.

Won't those be the sort of things that the gods fight about just like mortals.

If they fight about anything.

And what would be the difference between math and justice and injustice?

Or say a beauty contest where everyone's fighting over who gets to be the fairest.

Well, it seems reasonable to hypothesize that it has something

to do with how emotionally invested everyone gets in it.

So, in short, it seems reasonable to suppose that

Socrates will say, yes, on the face of it,

it's obvious that the way we reason about ethics

is different than the way we reason about math.

What remains to be seen is that it should be that way.

And furthermore, that the difference goes all the way to the bottom.

That is reason itself is different in the two cases, rather than it just being the

case that there is a great deal of

emotional interference when anyone is holding a beauty contest.

Or something like that.

Let's take stock and keep score.

On the one hand we have Johnathan Haidt slash David Hume.

These we may call the intuitionist psychologists.

We don't really know what intuitionist means yet but that's okay.

We understand what the picture says.

There's reason, there's there's emotion and there's reason and if

you're on the Haidt side, passion rules and reason must serve.

On the Plato or the reason worshiping

Greek side, reason rules and passions must serve.

Now who wins this argument?

Well, as I already said, so far as I can tell

the conceptual argument is rather, undecided if the basis of it

is simply that Hume point that, I can imagine any possible,

array of emotional preferences and all of them are equally reasonable.

That is none of them imply contradictions.

I'm not sure whether that's true, maybe it depends on a

particular strong assumption about the world containing facts but no values.

Hm, we'll put a pin in that one, come back to it later.

The empirical argument on the other hand, is relatively undisputed on both sides.

Namely, yeah, we humans are very emotional and our emotions have

a tendency to run away with us and overcome our reason.

What is undecided is whether that's a good thing.

Plato will certainly agree with Hume that it happens an awful

lot and that that's important and that we should study it.

But what really follows from that, such that there can

be a point of maybe descriptive difference between Plato and

Haidt and normative difference between them about the proper, about

the actual relation and the proper relation between passion and reason.

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