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The Emotional Construction of Morals

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The first thing to understand about moral rules is that they are made by people, in the same sense that art, music, and theatre are made by people. People also are responsible for mathematics and science, but here there is a crucial difference: we discover mathematical truths and the laws of the Universe, we do not make them. This distinction is blurred by the fact that we attach truth value to moral rules, but not to art or music, thus giving the impression that a moral rule has something in common with a mathematical or scientific truth. The reason for attaching truth-values to moral rules is that there is a kind of moral modus ponens: if p implies q and p is morally valid/obligatory/permissible, then q is morally valid/obligatory/permissible. Despite the pragmatic value of this sort of modal reasoning, it does have the drawback of appearing to place moral rules in an ethereal sphere with the axioms of arithmetic and the theory of relativity---truths that are independent of our will. The greatest offender in this regard was probably Kant, for whom moral behavior was obligatory and impersonal, and for whom deriving pleasure from doing good was a detraction from the pure morality of the act.

Jesse Prinz is a latterday defender of the sort of naturalist approach to morality expressed in the previous paragraph, taking up where Hume and the English empiricists left off. "morality derives from us." Prinz asserts (p. 1) "The good is that which we regard as good. The obligatory is that which we regard as obligatory....Thus, normative ethics can be approached as social science." Much of this volume is a defense of this position in face of the voluminous criticism of philosophers with other views. I am very grateful for this defense, although I found it more than a little wearying to go through Prinz's critique one incorrect argument after another. I am just glad he is on my side, so I can forget about the philosophical details. But, if you love philosophical details, you will certainly not be disappointed in this book.

How does morality derive from us? Prinz's answer is that we are emotionally predisposed to assert certain rules as moral and others as immoral. This predisposition is not intellectual or deeply cognitive; rather, to assert a moral rule is akin to asserting a taste for a particular color or food---it is our personal emotional, sentimental, inclination, although we may share it with many others, and we may delight in sharing moral rules in a way that we do not delight in sharing musical or artistic tastes.

This position makes Prinz a thorough-going relativist, and indeed, he does not shy away from this position. Prinz recognizes that there are moral rules that are virtually universal, but this is because we have biological predispositions towards some rules, and cultures that promote prosocial norms tend to drive out other cultural forms. Prinz correctly notes that the fact that a certain practice is virtually universal among humans does not mean that it is absolute, that it is genetically determined, or that it is immutable. Moreover, Prinz stresses that in fact almost any imaginable principle has be elevated to the position of a moral obligation in one society or another.

Prinz's moral relativism brings him into opposition with some versions of evolutionary psychology that denigrate culture and privilege genetically determined brain modularity as the mechanism accounting for human morality. For Prinz, culture is the original fount of morality, and moral relativism is an aspect of cultural diversity. Like many philosophers, Prinz objects to a form of evolutionary psychology, biological determinism, that is not supported by any serious sociobiologist. "I will concede that we are biologically prone to have certain kinds of values, but I will deny that there is an innate morality." (p. 245) But, who ever spoke of an "innate morality?" The very idea is contradicted by gene-culture coevolutionary theory or even gene-culture developmental biology. Prinz says he is happy with a scientific approach to ethics, but the principle that we have an evolved genetic predisposition to embraces some moral principles and to reject others is about as scientific a principle as I can imagine.

Prinz would do well to rethink his rejection of morality as an adaptation, and to actively embrace the sort of gene-culture coevolutionary theory that is the foundation of scientific approaches to social theory, as developed by Marcus Feldman, Luca Cavalli-Sforza, Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson. He should accept this approach because it is correct, and no amount of philosophical hair-splitting can alter this fact.

The final chapter of this fine book is not fine. It is simply unsophisticated and uninformed. Prinz argues that morality is not a human adaptation, but a side-effect of other human capacities. His arguments are weak and not worth repeating. Moreover, Prinz fails to come to terms with the several well-known models of the evolution of morality.

Indicative of this immaturity, one of Prinz's arguments is that because humans prefer to behave prosocially, there is no need for morality. "If we are naturally prone to share, help, and to reciprocate, why do we ever moralize these behaviors?" (p. 273) His answer is that there is no need until we have large-scale societies. This astonishing answer implies that there was no such thing as human morality prior to the rise of settled agriculture and urbanization in the past 10,000 years. Yet, we know that the secondary emotions associated with morality---shame, remorse, guilt, self-esteem, honor, empathy, etc.---are intimately bound up with morality, yet evolved over tens of thousands of years, involving changes in brain structure and hormonal balance. Moreover, there is no dearth of morality in hunter-gatherer societies around the world.

One reason we need a moral sense is that punishment of moral transgression on the part of an individual must be accompanied by a sense of shame and guilt, or else the punishment will be seen by the punished individual as an unprovoked attack, and will generally be met with a counter-attack, rather than a resolve to make amends and behave better in the future. Indeed, in laboratory experiments, some individuals do react to being punished by punishing back, rather than reforming. This behavior was recently the object of a fifteen society study of "anti-social punishment" by Herrmann, Thoeni, and Gaechter, in Science. I am certain there are other benefits of morality even in small-scale societies, where the threat of violence is constant and the need for adjudication of differences and regulation of the proceeds of the division of labor are ever-present.

Humans are the source of morality, and are biologically predisposed to honor the moral rules of the societies in which they live. This is an evolved predisposition that accounts for our evolutionary success as a species.