Lesson 7, Part 4. Can 'ick' imply Ought? It's going to be a long one, kids. So strap in for the ride. Jonathan Haidt, The Emotional Dog And Its Rational Tail: A social intuitionist approach to moral judgement. Let's get back to the dog. In the previous video I think I explained the dogginess of moral judgement according to Haidt pretty well. Passions rule, reasons serves. That is the tail, reason. Doesn't wag the dog. Tails don't wag dogs. At most the tail gives some indication of how the dog is feeling: good or bad. I think probably I should have been a bit more explicit about how this is supposed to work in practice with some examples. So now I'm going to do that. Suppose I say that same sex marriage is bad because it is unnatural. Or suppose I say that genetically modified crops are bad. Because they are unnatural. Hey, you know what, better still, let's pick an example that doesn't have an obvious left, right, partisan vibe relative to U.S. politics. Not that what I am about to say can't explain U.S. pol, partisan politics, maybe it can explain it a lot. But I don't want to make that leap right at the start. Let's sort of slide into it by means of a, a less clearly partisan example. Let's just stick with Miley Cyrus. Some people say that it's bad for Western civilization that Miley Cyrus did that twerking routine at the 2013 VMAs. It's caused our society as a whole to become less virtuous. Some people also think that it's bad maybe bad for western civilization, but at least it's bad for the state of our culture, but she's always sticking her tongue out. Some people just don't like that. Some other people disagree to varying degrees. You can get into an argument about Miley Cyrus with people if you want. What? You say I can? Where can I do this? There's a place called the internet, and if you go there, you can argue with people about Miley Cyrus and other such pop cultural issues. Now, if you choose to do this how does it go? Well, on the Haidt model, which works really well in this case I think, you have an immediate, rather visceral, reaction to Ms. Cyrus. You respond emotionally, one way or another, and then you make up a bunch of stuff about why you're right. About why it's so bad that she did that. Or not so bad, to support how ever you feel. It's kind of a waste of time that argue about this stuff. But it's fun. Okay, it gets a bit more serious when people argue about say whether Obama is a great President or the worst President ever, or somewhere in between. Unlike the people who are just having fun in the internet, expressing themselves about Miley Cyrus, analysis of Barack Obama's presidency, it's the sort of thing a serious political theorist or political scientist or historian might engage in. At this point, I think it's safe to say, we would like to think there is a bit more to it. Then our dog just taking a liking to the guy or not, and then you invent a bunch of reasons why you like him or you don't. What would Plato say about all this? He would say, well obviously people are often very dog-like, if that's what Jonathan Haidt wants to call it. They just have a feeling, and then they invent some rather transparent nonsense to justify it. In my lectures, I emphasize that Socrates' interlocutor don't just make bad arguments. They make obviously bad arguments. Some readers of Plato find this annoying, like Plato just wants to watch an uneven fight in which one poor sap just can't block a single punch the champ is throwing. Is Plato some kind of sadist, that he wants to watch these poor guys get crushed over and over? Eh, maybe. You can believe what you like. I think it shows that Plato is shrewd about psychology. That people, not only make rationally bad arguments about things like virtue, justice, holiness, but that they make obviously bad arguments about it. Without noticing this, says a lot about human nature. But this is precisely why, I'm getting back to my slide here, Plato doesn't really want to admit that the gods fight when Euthyphro comes up with that bright idea. It isn't right, I think Socrates would say in Plato, it isn't right to imply that the gods, unlike us humans, are at heart these ridiculous doggy creatures. They get all emotionally invested in stuff. A stupid beauty contest, for example. And then to compound their emotional error, they cheat to win. They fabricate reasons why they should be the fairest, just for example. People do that sort of thing all the time. But not the God's, not ideally. Here's another example, remember what we concluded about Euthyphro that whole annoying chicken and egg do the gods love it because it's good or vice versa problem, we concluded with Plato well, anyway I, I encouraged you conclude that it's very absurd to say that the reason murder is wrong is because Zeus doesn't like blood. It disgusts him. Miasma, remember, all the stuff about Miasma and pollution. Rather, it should disgust him because murder is wrong. Saying murder is wrong because it's messy, rather than the mess is especially disgusting because it's so wrong. That's some crazy, tail-wagging-the-dog arrangement. Surely, that can't be morally right. To have Miasma doing all the pushing, as it were. If there is a Zeus who hates murder, he doesn't just hate it because he thinks it's icky. That wouldn't be the right thing for Zeus to do. Well what about people? Are they sometimes able to transcend their doggyness? Becoming godlike or at least undog like when it comes to moral judgement? That's kind of the question. Let's hold off. We aren't even done reading the subtitle of Haidt's paper yet, are we? A social intuitionist approach to moral judgment. Intuition, Haidt says, is perception not like. That is, it's a kind of cognition. It's not a kind of reasoning, the reasoning in so far as it gets involved is post facto confabulation. Well, confabulation is sort of by definition post fact and let me tell you what confabulation means if it's not a word that you happen to know yet. An intuition, this is what we mean by saying it's perception like. An intuition is the sort of thing that is immediately caused by seeling, seeing Miley Cyrus. It's a reaction, usually either attractive or repulsive. You like, or you don't like. But it's not even right to say that it's like a like button you choose to push in your mind. You choose to click like on someone's Miley Cyrus hate page, if you hate Miley Cyrus, but you don't choose to hate Miley Cyrus. You just do. Or you don't. In your mind a button goes down but you didn't rationally push. Confabulation. Did anyone out there in Coursera land see Up? Pretty funny movie. There's this dog, Dug. He's been given this special technological attachment, which causes him to be able to speak, and so, being a dog and being able to speak, he says a lot of hilarious doggy things. Like, I just met you but I love you! That's such a dog thing to say. Now, what they didn't give him was a special extra human attachment, which not only allowed him to speak, but, like a proper human, allowed him to confabulate. Now, what would that have meant? If Dug the dog in Up had had a special confabulation thing around his brain, not his neck, he would have said. I just met you, but I love you and then he would've invented a bogus rational reason, why it was rationally appropriate to love this person that he just met. Of course it would have been a ridiculous argument, but that would have made him more human, and now you know what confabulation means. Okay, let's do the whole thing a bit more technically. Let me say it all again more technically, or at least diagrammatically. Here we see a lot of circles, and arrows, explaining in circle-arrow terms what Haidt's social intuitionist model comes to. Incidentally this is Haidt's diagram, not mine. I simply copied it to make it more visually clear for the PowerPoint presentation. We have a situation of some sort, we respond to morally. That's the little blue situation, circle. We first have an intuition. That is a perception like feeling, and then we form a judgment caused by our intuition in support of that feeling. And then we reason in support of that judgement and that feeling. In a sense, the grey arrows at the top ought to be black, to indicate that reason comes in to support our judgement and intuition. In fact, it's greyed out to indicate Haidt's conviction that reason seldom challenges critically, our own judgement. The seldom. It seldom operates to change our judgments or intuitions, although it may reinforce them. We engage in motivated reasoning. That is, we're in the market for arguments, rational arguments, why we are right. Not in the market for rational arguments, generally. And definitely we don't like arguments that we're wrong about virtue or justice or any of that. Socrates, we hate that guy. Except that's not quite right. There are black arrows leading from A's reasoning to B's intuition, and from A's judgement to B's intuition. A and B are supposed to be different people in this model. Isn't it weird? We're willing to buy critical arguments from other people, to some degree. That is, they can affect how we feel. But we are willing to buy critical arguments from ourselves. It's more like we just don't sell critical arguments to ourselves, although admittedly that seems to be because there isn't much of a market for it. In general the reason some arrows are grey, pointing to intuitions, and others are black pointing to intuitions, is that we don't like being wrong, but we're very social creatures. We are not very self critical, morally, but we're highly subject to peer pressure morally. Let's illustrate this with some simple examples. How about sushi? Is sushi a moral problem? well, no, I wouldn't say that. But sushi is a good example because it's the kind of thing that may call forth feelings of disgust if you don't happen to be from a culture where you're used to people eating raw fish. Haidt emphasizes that disgust is a major engine of moral judgement and we'll go with that for clarity purposes. Raw fish, you see it. Ick, that's your reaction. Then you come up with a judgement. Eating raw fish, bad. Then you invent some reason why it's bad? It's probably, totally, unhealthy. Now, suppose you have a neighbor. In most situations, socially, people tend to have similar intuition, so you could easily reinforce yourselves. That is, you say ick to sushi and that makes you think it's unhealthy, he says ick, you say him saying ick and that makes you even more likely to say ick and around the circle goes. So here we have a little mini model of how social coherence and reinforcement may tend to work. We can also imagine a model according to where there is social challenge. Suppose you think it's icky, but then you see some guy eating it and saying yum. I probably should have put an exclamation point after the" yum" to indicate the yum is just as powerful as the ick. Well, now we're have a, a bit of attention, what might resolve it? Which will effect us more, our neighbor's yum or the ickiness of the, our own immediate reaction to the raw fish. Well, it could go either way, but I think we can imagine that suppose you've never really eaten sushi before and you think it's gross. But then you go and spend a year abroad in Japan, and you see all these people saying, yum, yum, yum! Well, eventually, that sort of peer pressure would probably overwhelm your own initial negative reaction, and this is how moral change goes. What's going to change your ick is nothing, no argument that you give yourself, but rather the weight of social pressure around you, which will include arguments from other people. But it's not really right to say that this is a rational process. This is a social peer pressure process. Haidt says this doesn't happen or actually, he just says this doesn't happen. You see sushi. You have no reaction. You have no intuition. Raw fish, I don't have any feelings about that. So you come up with a rational argument against raw fish. Let's say it's dangerous, unhealthy. And then, you form a judgement. Sushi bad. Your moral judgement is based on pure reason. Haidt says, this basically just never ever happens. Certainly, it doesn't happen with sushi. He wants to say and sushi's a pretty good paradigm. That is, moral judgement generally doesn't go like this. But this happens all the time, suppose I know, I hope this doesn't happen to you. Suppose you're taking a math class, math can be hard. You're being tested on whether something is a correct expansion of pi. Well you look at all those digits and you just gotta crunch the numbers and figure out whether that is a correct expansion or not. Either it is or it isn't. You got no feeling about it. That's what makes math class so darned hard. You just have to reason about it. Okay. Let me tell you a story about an unusual gentleman named Daniel Tammet, who's written a book called Born on a Blue Day, which I highly recommend. And this individual is so interesting that you can also find videos about him. online, on youtube, there have been BBC specials, and I believe he's given his own TED talk, so if what I say about him sounds interesting, you might want to check that out. He is an interesting case, because he is autistic. He suffers from Asperger's syndrome, which means he has cognitive deficients along a certain range of, of phenomenon. He's not very good at dealing with faces, he's not very good with social situations, but he's a brilliant savant when it comes to things like math. He experiences mathematics in a incredible sort of synesthetic fashion, he, to him numbers are unusual shapes and colors. As a result to which he can do tremendously difficult things intuitively and immediately. For example, he was being tested by scientists, at Oxford or Cambridge, I can't remember which. And some of them were understandably a bit skeptical about his reports on his experience of mathematical colors and shapes. So, they tested him. They gave him a long expansion of pi running out diit after digits. 30, 60 digits, I don't know how far it was. It was far. And out. Way out along the lines they took some sixes and they turned them into nines. That is they made settle little changes to pi which were not just mathematically settle but typographically settle. It would be hard to spot that sort of thing. And they were curious if, if what he said was true, he would be able to spot it, and indeed, not only was he able to spot it, but when he scanned out that number line and encountered a six that should have been nine, or maybe it was a nine that should have been six, the hairs on his arm literally stood up on end. That is he, for him, it was like fingernails on a chalk board. And at that point, the scientists cheerfully dropped their skepticism because this was clearly something that he could not have faked. He had a visceral reaction to pi. Okay. Neat. Why am I telling you about this unique guy? Well, let me connect it to what I was saying before. This happens to Daniel Tammet all the time. And to no one else. He sees a wrong expansion of pi and he just says, ick!, internally. And, on the basis of his ick!, he immediately judges that it's not pi. And, later he could go back and recheck the numbers. But, frankly, he doesn't even need to. So, he works differently than the rest of us do. Okay, why is this significant that there's this? First let's expand on the difference. All though that, I mentioned that he not only has these abilities to perform tremendous feats of mental mathematics, but he has unusual deficits. For example, if you showed him Miley Cyrus and her funny face, he probably wouldn't react very much, because as a sufferer from Asperger's, suffering sort of autism he does. He doesn't really react to faces very strongly. His social situations confuse him and concerning all that stuff, he has to do what the rest of us have to do in math class. Namely, reason about this stuff very elaborately. If to get to an answer. Society is exhausting to Daniel Tammet, in just the way that math is exhausting to most of the rest of us. Same for Barack Obama. I imagine that Daniel Tammet doesn't have very strong feelings about politics, because the sorts of things that cause the rest of us to have strong feelings, he's rather immune to. When he sees Barack Obama's face he may not have a very strong reaction to it, unusually so. What does the case of Daniel Tammet prove, about how the human brain does math? I'll bet it proves something. I don't know what it is, but there's a lot of brain scientists who are very interested in him and they want to give him scans and so forth, and I'll bet, they'll come up with something neat. I'll leave it at that, since I am completely professionally unqualified to say what that neat thing might be. But, let's move onto what does the case of Daniel Tammet prove about math? Not math thinking, but math itself? Nothing. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that nothing, it proves nothing. Is that right? Well let's think about it. Mathematically we aren't prepared to change our mind about what pi is, if it were to turn out that Daniel Tammet felt pi were something else. That is suppose we keep going out that number line, and he turns out to have very strong reactions in bizarre ways that don't correspond to our mathematical notion of pi, the hairs on his arm stand on end and he says this is pi or not. It if didn't correspond to what we think pi is, we wouldn't accept it as a novel form of proof that pi is something different. It wouldn't count as a mathematical discovery. In general brain scans, hair standing up on your arm, don't count as proofs in math. Getting more metaphysical about it, we are certainly not going to decide that numbers really are or have been all along distinctively colored or shaped things, just because for whatever mysterious synesthetic brain reason, Daniel Tammet finds him to be so. Now we comes to it. But we are all Daniel Tammet, when it comes to virtue as oppose to man. We're all idiots savants about virtue. In the sense that we have this tremendous capacity to respond immediately to questions about virtue. Just as he has a tremendous capacity to respond immediately to questions about math. He has this powerful disgust response which helps him know whether something is pi or not. Just as we have a powerful disgust response that talks a, helps us know what virtue is. So, what do we prove about ethics? I just said that Daniel Tammet proves nothing about math, do we prove something about ethics with our emotional dogs that tell us so much about it? Let's go back to a slide we saw a couple videos back. Remember Hume's argument I'll read the quote again. It is not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger. It is as little contrary to reason to prefer even my own acknowledged lesser good to my greater. There is a metaphysical question here which is can and is some fact about the word imply in ought, that is a value judgment or a norm, something like that. Hume is saying strongly No is never implies an ought. No is implies an ought. Fact and values are separate. This isn't really an empirical judgment. It may be something like a metaphysics of the world, that we live in a world of facts, and from that it follows that any value judgments are strictly just as rational as any others. Let's move from is implies ought to the the title of this video, Can' ick!' imply ought? Or, ought not, as the case may be. I already pointed out that in math, ick implies ought is not a valid proof procedure. The fact that Daniel Tammet finds wrong expressions of pi to be not just wrong, but immediately, viscerally disgusting, like fingers on a chalkboard, that's very psychologically interesting, but mathematically it is non-dispositive. It doesn't, prove anything, mathematically. Again if Daniel Tammet's visual reactions number ceased to track pi as we know it we wouldn't change our mind about pi. We would change our mind about, Tammet being a math savant. We would just think he was a really weird synesthetic guy that associated numbers with colors, and so forth. Getting back to the present slide. Here, we see the goddess, Athena, watching the 2013 VMA Awards. She hates Miley Cyrus. I can tell that just by looking at the expression on her divine face. Which raises the question. Sure disgust guides us. Probably it has value as some kind of heuristic guide. You shouldn't eat rotten stuff. But what does disgust really prove about the object of disgust particularly where ethics is concerned? Okay, if this is what moral judgement is, essentially. That is, if this isn't just some cut rate, doggy version of a thing that can be done much better by humans or by the gods. Then ick can imply ought, kind of by definition. The metaphysics of morals is such that the dog in us is built right in, and built to last.
