Are Philosophers and Scientists Studying the Same “Morality”?

“The obvious truth is that the moment any matter has passed through the human mind it is finally and for ever spoilt for all purposes of science.”

G.K. Chesterton (Heretics)

For most of humanity’s intellectual history, ethics, as a field of study in the Western tradition, was solely a philosophical enterprise. Within the first few centuries of the birth of Christianity, ethics acquired and enjoyed a rich theological dimension and audience. Most recently, within the last couple of centuries, ethics has piqued the interest and contributions of scientists—mostly those working in the life sciences: psychology, biology, ecology, primatology, animal behaviorism, and 17^th century French poetry. Actually, that last one is not a life science…even though it’s a “science of life.”

What?

I had someone tell me that at a conference once. And I was just as confused as you are now.

Anyway, this is almost certainly an oversimplification of the history of ethics—but I’m a philosopher and not a historian. So, I guess that makes it okay.

Now that you’re both thoroughly confused and lacking confidence in my ability to speak meaningfully to the subject at hand, here we go:

E.O. Wilson’s notorious charge to the empirical sciences that “the time has come for ethics to be removed temporarily from the hands of the philosophers and biologicized” has been taken up by members of the scientific community. Since Wilson’s exhortation in 1975, we’ve covered a lot of ground. For example, the evolutionary origins of morality is a hot topic now and a lot of progress has been made in our understanding of where, when, how, and why humans acquired a moral sense along with cooperative tendencies.

The “Soft” Problem

However, while it may seem like an interesting project at first glance, Wilson’s vision is misguided, at best. It’s a bit unclear what Wilson (and others like him) have in mind when they say things like this, but, as the philosopher of science Philip Kitcher has pointed out, there are controversial and uncontroversial ways of understanding this sort of “biologicizing” project. Sure, science can shed light on why we have certain tendencies to prefer our family members over strangers or why we feel repulsed at the thought of lighting a cat on fire (philosophers love bizarre, macabre examples). Science can even helpfully point out that humans are prone to judge others more harshly for committing the same bad actions that we ourselves are guilty of and that “clean smells” can incline us to be more generous when asked to give to charitable causes. However, it’s not clear that science can tell us whether we should judge others or give to charity or light cats on fire. Ethics has a unique “ought-ness” quality that puts it outside the realm of scientific inquiry. This feature (among others) throws a massive wrench in the “biologizication” project. In sum, as Kitcher puts it, science can’t tell us “what ethics is all about”.

Let’s call this the “soft” problem of scientific approaches to ethics. What we’re doing when we do science is describing the way the world is, but that doesn’t tell us how the world ought to be. The “ought-ness” we mentioned earlier is not something we discover by doing science, it’s a different project, altogether. For example, there’s really good evidence showing that we have implicit racial biases that incline us to form judgments (both good and bad) about people simply because of how they look or what their names sound like. There are evolutionary and cultural explanations for why and how our brains form these mental shortcuts but notice that this is just a description of a human behavioral tendency. This description is not an endorsement of racial biases, rather it merely illuminates a source of potential injustice–as such, we should try to become aware of our implicit biases and shed them as best as we can. This latter fact, however, is not a scientific fact, rather it’s a fact about what we ought to do–it’s prescriptive. What is and what ought to be are conceptually distinct. Science is really good at the former, but the latter is a philosophical project.

This isn’t new. Philosophers and cultural theorists wary of “scientism” have long warned of this empirical encroachment on ethical territory.

The “Deep” Problem

While the “soft” problem really is a problem for empirical approaches to ethics, there is still a more fundamental worry plaguing the scientific study of morality.

To set the stage, let’s take the following example borrowed from the philosopher Gilbert Ryle:

Imagine two boys, Hilbert and Humboldt, sitting in their boarding school dorm with some friends. Hilbert is sad because he hasn’t seen his mother in a long time and decides to whip out a pencil and paper and begin writing a letter to her. Humboldt sees this as an opportunity to score some social points with the group and, as most terrible teen boys are wont to do, pokes fun at Hilbert by mimicking him behind his back. He also picks up a pencil and paper and begins to “pen a letter to his mother”—much to the other boys’ amusement.

Ryle concludes that “the mimic scribbled with an entirely different intention from that of the letterwriter, with the intention, namely, of diverting the spectators by visibly doing just what the letter-writer was seen doing, who, for his part, intended only to lament to his mother.”

The American anthropologist Clifford Geertz, inspired by Ryle, asks us to imagine a man with an involuntary eye twitch sitting next to a man who is winking sitting next to a man who is imitating the winking man. All three of these men are performing a behavior that may be physiologically indistinguishable from the outside such that a passerby won’t be able to tell which one is intentionally “rapidly contracting his right eyelid” and which is “practicing a burlesque of a friend faking a wink to deceive an innocent into thinking conspiracy is in motion.” All three of these behaviors are identical under a “thin” description—a description that only includes physiological details about eyelids and contractions, however, the wink and the imitation wink, are “thick” in that to recognize them as such requires additional information provided by a cultural context.

Geertz makes this point to show that ethnographers who observe and study foreign cultures can observe and record behavior under both thin and thick descriptions.

I can walk into a Catholic mass and observe the man in the funny robes chanting something Hogwarts-esque as he holds up some bread and wine before the community partakes in some shared act promoting social bonding. Or I can observe the priest standing in the person of Christ as he consecrates the Eucharist and holds up the body and blood of Christ before the members of Christ’s body receive sacramental grace by consuming the transubstantiated host.

The former is a thin description and the latter is a thick description of the same goings on. Good anthropology and ethnography require thick descriptions to get a better sense of what these people are really doing. A thin description, though useful in its own way, tells only one of multiple valid stories.

Now, what does all this have to do with science and morality?

Well, it’s plausible that what the scientific study of morality is really doing is providing us with valid thin descriptions of morality. In other words, cooperation, reciprocity, altruism, etc. are legitimate descriptions of something morality-esque since these phenomena represent integral features of social cohesion. They are evolutionary building blocks of and perhaps even necessary precursors to the kind of morality that rational agents are capable of, however, their descriptive power stops at the level of behavior. Like the passerby who cannot distinguish between the wink and the wink-mimic or the letter-writer and his comedic mimic, so too can the scientist not successfully differentiate moral cooperation from immoral cooperation from the thin perspective.

Imagine a university admissions committee member (not sure what they’re called but I wish they had shorter titles to make writing this section easier) who is secretly a racist but whose outward behavior seems anti-racist in that he treats all student applicants fairly and even loudly applauds the success of minority candidates even though his true character despises their achievement. Contrast his case with the truly anti-racist university admissions committee member (this title is ridiculously long) who is not only anti-racist for show, but who actually cares about justice—that all the student applicants are given a fair evaluation of their application materials. A thin description reports that both individuals operate behaviorally identically, and yet, obviously, a crucial piece is missing from this story.

The moral person in this situation is not merely the one whose behavior accords with justice, but the one who is actually just. The thin and thick descriptions of the scenario yield two different and incompatible assessments of these individuals and it’s clear that the thick description is what we care about when we speak of morality.

So, we can all be good analytic philosophers here and make a distinction between two kinds of morality—one that is thin and amenable to scientific inquiry and one that is thick and not amenable to scientific inquiry (at least, not directly). To be good ethnographers of moral behavior requires us to disambiguate these two distinct phenomena of morality. Perhaps this distinction will help scientists and philosophers not speak past each other in discussions on morality. Or perhaps this blogpost will lie untouched—hidden somewhere in the ether of the interwebs while its author vastly overestimates its importance.