Posts Tagged ‘ethics’

The Righteous Mind

Friday, July 27th, 2012

Book review: The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, by Jonathan Haidt.

This book carefully describes the evolutionary origins of human moralizing, explains why tribal attitudes toward morality have both good and bad effects, and how people who want to avoid moral hostility can do so.

Parts of the book are arranged to describe the author’s transition from having standard delusions about morality being the result of the narratives we use to justify them and about why other people had alien-sounding ideologies. His description about how his study of psychology led him to overcome his delusions makes it hard for those who agree with him to feel very superior to those who disagree.

He hints at personal benefits from abandoning partisanship (”It felt good to be released from partisan anger.”), so he doesn’t rely on altruistic motives for people to accept his political advice.

One part of the book that surprised me was the comparison between human morality and human taste buds. Some ideologies are influenced a good deal by all 6 types of human moral intuitions. But the ideology that pervades most of academia only respect 3 types (care, liberty, and fairness). That creates a difficult communication gap between them and cultures that employ others such as sanctity in their moral system, much like people who only experience sweet and salty foods would have trouble imagining a desire for sourness in some foods.

He sometimes gives the impression of being more of a moral relativist than I’d like, but a careful reading of the book shows that there are a fair number of contexts in which he believes some moral tastes produce better results than others.

His advice could be interpreted as encouraging us to to replace our existing notions of “the enemy” with Manichaeans. Would his advice polarize societies into Manichaeans and non-Manichaeans? Maybe, but at least the non-Manichaeans would have a decent understanding of why Manichaeans disagreed with them.

The book also includes arguments that group selection played an important role in human evolution, and that an increase in cooperation (group-mindedness, somewhat like the cooperation among bees) had to evolve before language could become valuable enough to evolve. This is an interesting but speculative alternative to the common belief that language was the key development that differentiated humans from other apes.

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The Honor Code

Sunday, May 1st, 2011

Book review: The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen by Kwame Anthony Appiah.

This book argues that moral changes such as the abolition of dueling, slavery, and foot-binding are not the result of new understanding of why they are undesirable. They result from changes in how they affect the honor (or status) of the groups that have the power to create the change.

Dueling was mostly associated with a hereditary class of gentlemen, and feeling a responsibility to duel was a symbol of that status. When the nature of the upper class changed to include a much less well defined class that included successful businessmen, and society became more egalitarian, the distinction associated with demonstrating that one was a member of the hereditary elite lost enough value that the costs of dueling outweighed the prestige.

Slave-owners increasingly portrayed the labor that slaves preformed in a way that also implied the work of British manual laborers deserved low status, and rising resentment and political power of that labor class created a movement to abolish slavery.

The inability of Chinese elites to ignore the opinions of elites in other nations whose military and technological might made it hard for China to dismiss them as inferior altered the class of people whom the Chinese elites wanted respect from.

These are plausible stories, backed by a modest amount of evidence. I don’t know of any strong explanations that compete with this. But I don’t get the impression that the author tried as hard as I would like to find evidence for competing explanations. For instance, he presents some partial evidence to the effect that Britain abolished slavery at a time when slavery was increasingly profitable. But I didn’t see any consideration of the costs of keeping slaves from running away, which I expect were increasing due to improved long-distance transportation such as railroads. He lists references which might constitute authoritative support for his position, but it looks like it would be time-consuming to verify that.

Whether this book can help spark new moral revolutions is unclear, but it should make our efforts to do so more cost-effective, if only by reducing the effort put into ineffective approaches.

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Human Enhancement

Friday, July 10th, 2009

Book review: Human Enhancement, edited by Julian Savulescu and Nick Bostrom.

This book starts out with relatively uninteresting articles and only the last quarter of so of it is worth reading.

Because I agree with most of the arguments for enhancement, I skipped some of the pro-enhancement arguments and tried to read the anti-enhancement arguments carefully. They mostly boil down to the claim that people’s preference for natural things is sufficient to justify broad prohibitions on enhancing human bodies and human nature. That isn’t enough of an argument to deserve as much discussion as it gets.

A few of the concerns discussed by advocates of enhancement are worth more thought. The question of whether unenhanced humans would retain political equality and rights enables us to imagine dystopian results of enhancement. Daniel Walker provides a partly correct analysis of conditions under which enhanced beings ought to paternalistically restrict the choices and political power of the unenhanced. But he’s overly complacent about assuming the paternalists will have the interests of the unenhanced at heart. The biggest problem with paternalism to date is that it’s done by people who are less thoughtful about the interests of the people they’re controlling than they are about finding ways to serve their own self-interest. It is possible that enhanced beings will be perfect altruists, but it is far from being a natural consequence of enhancement.

The final chapter points out the risks of being overconfident of our ability to improve on nature. They describe questions we should ask about why evolution would have produced a result that is different from what we want. One example that they give suggests they remain overconfident – they repeat a standard claim about the human appendix being a result of evolution getting stuck in a local optimum. Recent evidence suggests that the appendix performs a valuable function in recovery from diarrhea (still a major cause of death in places) and harm from appendicitis seems rare outside of industrialized nations (maybe due to differences in dietary fiber?).

The most new and provocative ideas in the book have little to do with the medical enhancements that the title evokes. Robin Hanson’s call for mechanisms to make people more truthful probably won’t gather much support, as people are clever about finding objections to any specific method that would be effective. Still, asking the question the way he does may encourage some people to think more clearly about their goals.

Nick Bostrom and Anders Sandberg describe an interesting (original?) hypothesis about why placebos (sometimes) work. It involves signaling that there is relatively little need to conserve the body’s resources for fighting future injuries and diseases. Could this understanding lead to insights about how to more directly and reliably trigger this effect? More effective placebos have been proposed as jokes. Why is it so unusual to ask about serious research into this subject?

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Good and Real

Tuesday, April 28th, 2009

Book review: Good and Real: Demystifying Paradoxes from Physics to Ethics by Gary Drescher.

This book tries to derive ought from is. The more important steps explain why we should choose the one-box answer to Newcomb’s problem, then argue that the same reasoning should provide better support for Hofstadter’s idea of superrationality than has previously been demonstrated, and that superrationality can be generalized to provide morality. He comes close to the right approach to these problems, and I agree with the conclusions he reaches, but I don’t find his reasoning convincing.

He uses a concept which he calls a subjunctive relation, which is intermediate between a causal relation and a correlation, to explain why a choice that seems to happen after its goal has been achieved can be rational. That is the part of his argument that I find unconvincing. The subjunctive relation behaves a lot like a causal relation, and I can’t figure out why it should be treated as more than a correlation unless it’s equivalent to a causal relation.

I say that the one-box choice in Newcomb’s problem causes money to be placed in the box, and that superrationality and morality should be followed for similar reasons involving counterintuitive types of causality. It looks like Drescher is reluctant to accept this type of causality because he doesn’t think clearly enough about the concept of choice. It often appears that he is using something like a folk-psychology notion of choice that appears incompatible with the assumptions of Newcomb’s problem. I expect that with a sufficiently sophisticated concept of choice, Newcomb’s problem and similar situations cease to seem paradoxical. That concept should reflect a counterintuitive difference between the time at which a choice is made and the time at which it is introspectively observed as being irrevocable. When describing Kavka’s toxin problem, he talks more clearly about the concept of choice, and almost finds a better answer than subjunctive relations, but backs off without adequate analysis.

The book also has a long section explaining why the Everett interpretation of quantum mechanics is better than the Copenhagen interpretation. The beginning and end of this section are good, but there’s a rather dense section in the middle that takes much effort to follow without adding much.

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