The Emotional Construction of Morals (Hardcover)

~ Jesse Prinz (Author) "Judging that something is right or wrong is not like judging that 3 is a prime number or that trees photosynthesize..." (more)
Key Phrases: agent relativism, hidden indexical view, moral nativism, Constructing Morals, Sensibility Saved, The Limits of Evolutionary Ethics (more...)

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"Prinz's intellectual enterprise is of truly classical proportions...[his] work is certainly original and deserves all praise for bridging so many gaps between intellectual communities."--Metapsychology Online Review

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Jesse Prinz argues that recent work in philosophy, neuroscience, and anthropology supports two radical hypotheses about the nature of morality: moral values are based on emotional responses, and these emotional responses are inculcated by culture, not hard-wired through natural selection.
In the first half of the book, Jesse Prinz defends the hypothesis that morality has an emotional foundation. Evidence from brain imaging, social psychology, and psychopathology suggest that, when we judge something to be right or wrong, we are merely expressing our emotions. Prinz argues that these emotions do not track objective features of reality; rather, the rightness and wrongness of an act consists in the fact that people are disposed to have certain emotions towards it. In the second half of the book, he turns to a defense of moral relativism. Moral facts depend on emotional responses, and emotional responses vary from culture to culture. Prinz surveys the anthropological record to establish moral variation, and he draws on cultural history to show how attitudes toward practices such as cannibalism and marriage change over time. He also criticizes evidence from animal behavior and child development that has been taken to support the claim that moral attitudes are hard-wired by natural selection. Prinz concludes that there is no single true morality, but he also argues that some moral values are better than others; moral progress is possible.
Throughout the book, Prinz relates his views to contemporary and historical work in philosophical ethics. His views echo themes in the writings of David Hume and Friedrich Nietzsche, but Prinz supports, extends, and revises these classic theories using the resources of cutting-edge cognitive science. The Emotional Construction of Morals will stimulate and challenge anyone who is curious about the nature and origin of moral values.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (January 10, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 019928301X
• ISBN-13: 978-0199283019
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.3 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #448,875 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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31 of 38 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Philosophy of Morality, Questionable Sociobiology, April 20, 2008

By	Herbert Gintis (Northampton, MA USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)

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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.