The secret joke of Kant's soul: emotions and moral reasoning [pdf]
fed.cuhk.edu.hk
fed.cuhk.edu.hk
Namely, that they make their decision based on their own preferences and then later come up with a rationalization, claiming that the decision was based on a strict principled interpretation. The rationalization then provides a convenient excuse, letting judges disclaim responsibility for their decisions or their effects, hide their true reasons, and deflect criticism.
2004 lecture: http://tannerlectures.utah.edu/_documents/a-to-z/b/Breyer_20...
Book version: http://amzn.com/0307274942
Note however that it's not the only academic theory of judicial interpretation, and despite its popularity, it still leaves a few gaps as a predictive theory.
Sure, it explains why justices tend to vote along ideological lines. Unfortunately, they often don't. Having abandoned any acknowledgment of legislative or judicial constraints, the theory has nothing to fall back on to explain those cases.[1]
Justices are most likely operating under multiple constraints in any given opinion. Some of those constraints are dictated by their approach to textual interpretation, just as some are dictated by other ideas about fairness or social norms.
[1] Scalia's liberal opinions are a fun read. They have Scalia defending maternity leave, asylum seekers, armed robbers, and members of the communist youth league. Often he's marshalling the same impatient sarcasm against the right as he more famously deploys against the left.
"How far can the empirical debunking of human moral nature go? If science tells me that I love my children more than other children only because they share my genes (Hamilton, 1964), should I feel uneasy about loving them extra? If science tells me that I’m nice to other people only because a disposition to be nice ultimately helped my ancestors spread their genes (Trivers, 1971), should I stop being nice to people? ... It seems that one who is unwilling to act on human tendencies with amoral evolutionary causes is ultimately unwilling to be human. Where does one draw the line between correcting the near-sightedness of human moral nature and obliterating it completely?"
The more I overthink and let the "cognitive" part take over, the more the question nags me. The kind of cognitive detachment it takes to ask these questions and digest philosophy is why most people avoid philosophy. Its not healthy to be too detached from your emotions. So it seems like by asking that question, empiricism and rationality have already gone too far.
Billions of people discuss and debate morality every week at Churches, Synagogues, Temples, Mosques and Monasteries etc. I don't think its that people don't want to be asked big questions or told how they act is wrong and should be changed.
I would argue they avoid it because 20th century philosophers are either boring/abstract, too political or too preachy.
For example, postmodernism thought, Feminist philosophy and Green Philosophy all tend towards certain political agendas which it offputting to those who don't agree with the agendas. Modern philosophers also tend to be anti-religion, putting off most of the world's population (being lectured on how the concept of a God has been the source of all the world's problem for millennia is tiresome, as tiresome as you would find a charismatic preacher telling you that you will go to hell for being an Atheist)
There are in fact Atheistic movements towards creating moral/church-experiences centered around philosophy, one such example if the London School of Life.
http://www.theschooloflife.com/london/
I think it is very sad Schools of Philosophy, like those of Ancient Greece, no longer exist. Sadly, I don't think they could exist in today's outrage-driven cultural climate where online lynch mobs are on the hunt for someone to say something controversial.
"Why do we do what we do?" or "Why do we believe this to be so?" are frequently asked and debated. There is an assumption that there are logical reasons for beliefs, due to physical, societal or psychological negative|positive consequences, even if those reasons are thousands of years out of date (not eating pork for example). Emotion can have very little to do with it.
On the other hand, there sure are many traditions that only emphasize feelings and emotions. I don't believe any is better than the other (each to his or her own).
Isn't detaching from emotions just what people do when they are in meditation, as taught by e.g. Buddhists? That does not seem unhealthy to me.
If you have a goal you want to achieve, science can often tell you how to achieve that goal, that is, science can tell you what you "should" do, if you have a goal. And sometimes science can help you guess what your goals might be (because people often have similar goals).
This gives us some insight into these questions. We can ask, what's your goal?:
> "If science tells me that I love my children more than other children only because they share my genes (Hamilton, 1964), should I feel uneasy about loving them extra?"
This depends on what your goal is. Evolutionary theory tells us that most people want their offspring to survive and reproduce, and have no such goal for the survival of other people. So if that's your goal, then you should love them extra. If that's not your goal (and for some small percentage of the population it won't be) that doesn't give you any imperative, so there's no basis for saying that you should or shouldn't feel anything about your kids.
> "If science tells me that I’m nice to other people only because a disposition to be nice ultimately helped my ancestors spread their genes (Trivers, 1971), should I stop being nice to people?"
Again, this fact only gives you an imperative if it relates to your goals. If your goal is to spread your genes, then you should be nice to people. If that's not your goal, then Trivers' research doesn't provide any guidance as to what you should or shouldn't do.
It's worth noting that there are plenty of other goals for which science might tell you that you should love your children or be nice to people. Is your goal to have someone take care of you when you're old? Then you should love your children. Is your goal to have a successful career and make lots of money? Then you should be nice to people.
The most interesting part of this, to me, is that it forces us to take responsibility for our ethics. Within this framework, when you tell someone that what they are doing is wrong, you're telling them that it doesn't fit with your goals. When a society makes laws against behaviors, they're declaring that those behaviors don't fit with the shared goals of the members of the society.
That doesn't mean that there is no basis for forcing one's ethics on others--often one's goals require it. For example, it is my goal to live an adequately long, healthy, and productive, so I have no qualms forcing my ethic of "do not murder" on other people. And most people share that goal, which is why murder is illegal everywhere I know of.
There are a lot of different directions to explore this idea. The core, though, is simply that there's no "should" without a goal.
there is certainly a form of validity granted by axiomatic reasoning, but we have rejected things we can't axiomatize and generalize, as if anything uncomputable were not worth thinking of.
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in this article I explain a common (most likely false) assumption in most moral thinking:
http://markpneyer.me/2015/06/25/morality-and-the-subjunctive...
and this is a series of articles explaining a model of emotion and why it works the way it does:
Also, if you were right that morality exists but is not computable, why would that change anything?
because principles as the basis of morality then go away.
making moral decisions becomes about looking at each _specific_ situation, and applying as much context as possible - instead of trying to say "well in general, X is bad".
I don't see why. Why can't I say "uncomputable function X is the basis for morality", and simultaneously believe that X satisfies principle Y? There's nothing about uncomputable functions that says you can never know a value, and principles are useful even if they aren't always correct anyway.
>making moral decisions becomes about looking at each _specific_ situation, and applying as much context as possible - instead of trying to say "well in general, X is bad".
Why can't an uncomputable function have a rule that X is bad? It might not be computable in all cases, that doesn 't mean it can't have rules.
This is a very important observation. Moral language is fundamentally Imperatives: statements about what humans should do. If one begins by insisting that moral claims must be founded on empirical evidence, one subsequently must hold Moral Anti-realism as it is not adequate to simply suggest evidence for morality. This follows from Hume's recognition of the Is-Ought problem between Facts and Values: we cannot bridge the gap between Facts (mere observations of that which Is) to Values (including our statements regarding what Ought to be) because they are qualitatively different things:
~"In suggested approaches to morality, I am surprised to find authors moving from propositions with the usual copula 'is' (or 'is not') to ones that are connected by 'ought' (or 'ought not'). This change is imperceptible; but is however, of the greatest consequence. For as this 'ought' (or 'ought not') expresses some new relation or affirmation, 'tis necessary that it should be pointed out and explained; and at the same time a reason should be given, for how this new relation can be—inconceivably—a deduction from others that are entirely different from it. I am persuaded, that attention to this one small matter will let us see that the definitions of right and wrong are not based on the relations of objects nor can be perceived by reason."
While we are unable to jump the gap by taking an observed Fact to infer a prescribed Value, we can travel from Values to subsequent Values (e.g. if you presuppose human survival--"Humans should survive"--from this Value you can go to another Value: "Humans shouldn't kill"). Of course, starting with any particular presupposed Value is a departure from Empiricism. That is to say, all normative statements are matters of assumptive belief, and one assumed Value is as unempirical as another. The trick of course, unless you become a Nihilist, is what unempirical assumptive Value will you support and proclaim.
A really interesting part regarding all of this is that if morality does not truly exist, it was not morally 'wrong' anytime humans proclaimed it truly did. We remember the realization of the Marquis de Sade that if God does not exist then everything that is, is Right; but further, if the unempirical does not exist, then proclaiming it does is not wrong. In the words of philosopher Thomas Nagel: "If sub specie aeternitatis there is no reason to believe that anything matters, then that does not matter either". Wild.
In the case of this paper, I believe the author is suggesting that they've bridged the is-ought gap by suggesting that moral axioms are only created after the fact as justifications that came from emotional impulses. But I don't really see how that argument follows. If one's moral axioms are arrived at after the fact, then they would vary depending on the whims of the arguer's emotions, but then it's just a matter of pointing out the contradictions and demanding consistency. That would only prove inconsistency, not that moral axioms themselves are invalid. The author's discomfort at the end of the paper strikes me more as the type of discomfort that comes from realizing that one's initial axioms might lead to uncomfortable conclusions, leading to a re-thinking of those axioms/values - that's great in terms of the desire to maintain consistency, but I don't see it as bridging the is-ought gap. Such an examination might lead us to alter our values - or alter the conclusions that come from our values - but I don't see it as necessarily supporting the argument that values themselves are invalid, or that everything should (there's that word again!) be looked at entirely in a consequentialist fashion.
The author makes an interesting critique of Kant's system specifically but the question with regard to realism is if the rule itself is true. The author suggests the Is-Ought gap is true, writing that they do not intend to argue that "one can derive moral truths from scientific truths" (41). Instead they claim "scientific information can undermine factual assumptions on which moral thinking implicitly depends", using this premise to arrive at the formulation on 47 that just because we feel an emotional inclination, this may not correspond to an independent moral truth. This doesn't seem controversial. But the deontologist's thinking does not implicitly depend on the factual assumption 'what evolved is what is True'.
The crux of the paper (47-48) is where the author suggests:
1. humans choose beliefs, often irrationally (no one denies this)
2. our judgments result from our emotional state (sure)
3. our emotions came from evolution (alright)
4. therefore it is unlikely there exists a coherent normative moral theory that can accommodate our moral intuitions (perhaps)
5. therefore "we have somehow crossed the infamous 'is'-'ought' divide" (no...not at all)
In other words, the argument is (A) deontology was adopted because of evolution (B) therefore deontology is not objectively true. But as you observe the author begins to feel discomfort at this (flawed) line of thought likely because it could apply to everything. As they write "If I care about my self only because I am biologically programmed to carry my genes into the future, should I stop caring about myself?". This is the horror of Empiricism. The author concludes that in addition to believing deontology is not true, they also view their own consequentialist principles as "not true" but as "the best", apparently we are to believe due to the reasoning given above.
Ultimately the author appears to not understand what the Is-Ought Facts-Values problem actually implies: we are unable to make an observation about the empirical universe ("Humans have value to humans") and then conclude an objective value statement from it ("Therefore humans should value other humans").