In
order to understand the modern view on the concepts of morality and ethics we
shall go through the excerpts of some discussion, news item where some of the
leading thinkers in the western world have contributed. Excerpts relevant to
the subject are taken. For the readers who are interested to know the details
the available web sites details are provided
- John Templeton Foundation Darwin
200: Evolution and the Ethical Brain (April 2009)
- Templeton foundation conversation “Does the
free market corrode moral character”?
- World Happiness Report 2013. Restoring
Virtue ethics in the Quest for happiness.
- Experiments in Ethics (Kwame Anthony
Appiah), Book review by Paul Bloom.
- Scientists find Human Nature. (Scientific AmericanNov2012).
1 John
Templeton Foundation Darwin 200: Evolution and the Ethical Brain (April 2009)
http://symposia.templeton.org/darwin200/media/darwin200_transcript.pdf
http://symposia.templeton.org/darwin200/media/darwin200_transcript.pdf
Panal
(1)David Brooks - New York Times columnists. (2) Jonathan Haidt - Associate Professor of
Social Psychology at the Department of Psychology at the University of
Virginia. (3) Michael Gazzaniga - Professor of Psychology and Director of the
Sage Center of the Study of the Mind at the University of California at Santa
Barbara;
Evolution
and ethics and moral decision-making
1A. Morality
is subjective: Darwin thought that morality was crucial to human evolution, but it
was Victorian morality. If you read him,
he is obviously a product of the Victorian age and it is about loyalty and
respect and obedience and all sorts of more of the higher ethical and Victorian
virtues. So, I think we have to start by
realizing whatever we think we mean by morality, most people in the world
actually mean a lot more.
Morality
is really a two edge sword and we often think that morality means being nice or
being fair, but it also means being nice, but also aggressive when you need to,
fair and punitive (imposing punishment)
1B Q: You have talked a great deal about the moral relevance of emotional
issues or the other way around the emotional relevance of moral issues. What about emotional removal from moral
issues like seeing a homeless person on the street or knowing about AIDS in
Africa? How does that really fit
in? Is it a function of, I guess,
conceptual modeling of morality or is exclusion part of our social
development?
Ans. I would start by saying, especially if you are politically liberal;
you tend to think that morality is about caring about everyone, especially
those who are suffering the most. I
think that the way our minds were shaped, we care overwhelmingly about our
children and our kin and it gradually declines beyond that. I think you have to look at the degree to
which people ever care about starving children in other countries, the homeless
people. That is the anomaly that has to
be explained and so I would start from that and say it does not take much to
deaden you against frequent appeals, especially when they are frequent. Most of us have lived in cities where
homeless people were very, very common. The
way that we adapt to our social environment is often completely disconnected
from our values. So, liberals who
care a lot about helping suffering people will end up treating homeless people
very callously (unsympathetically), perhaps.
1C Q Fundamentally, is not capitalism immoral?
A. From my
definition of morality as a way of suppressing certain kinds of selfishness to
allow cooperation to emerge, I think I would have to say mostly no in that
capitalism has made it possible for vast astronomically large and complex
cooperatives to exist. So, it depends
on your definition of morality. If
you definition of morality is that you do not do things for your own interest,
but you do them for others, then yes, I would have to say that capitalism
is immoral. But if you take a definition
of a sort that I advocate, then I would say no; it is not.
B Motives
behind Morality: Now, you are still describing being good, being altruistic as part of
a strategy and a survival strategy, is there nothing else beyond
self-interested, ultimately self-interested strategy to pass down genes?
If you
work up through the fact there is reciprocity. There is the value of taking not
only care of your kin because of an expression of genes, but also people you do
not know because of the possibility that they can help you in a social
situation. All of these are sort of, I
think we should categorize this as a sort of raging debate in evolutionary
biology and psychology and a fascinating one, and I certainly do not know the answer. It is important to know that we have evolved
cheater detectors in order to not let the free-riders go on and so forth and so
on.
It is an approximal (near or adjacent)
mechanism which is a motivation. We
certain need to act in a psychologically selfish way to have these systems
operate. So, there is a difference
between when we are being specifically selfish versus a system that may bias
our behavior in one way or the other.
….One of the things in thinking of
evolution and what kind of mechanisms for motivation, is we are deeply
motivated by reputation, we are deeply motivated to seek esteem and we deeply
fear dis-esteem.
The way
evolution builds something into us is by making something feel good or
attractive by giving us…drawing us to things or away from other things. The
fact that we have incredible passions about traitors and apostates (person who
abandons his religion, cause, party etc.) and the general rule around the world
is for traitors and apostates the only possible penalty is death. I think this tell us something about the way
our ancestors lived in tribal groups that worked really hard to maintain
cohesion. So, if we go down the line and
look at all the various moral intuitions, I think these tell us about the
gradual process by which evolution favored those who had those intuitions by,
either favored them as individuals or as groups, and so here we are today
C Brain
knowledge on (morality) behavior: We still do not
know how a neuron works. Sometimes we
say a neuron is simple or whatever, but, in fact, a neuron is an extraordinary
complicated cell. We do not understand
how it integrates information. We do not
understand really how it represents information or what kind of code it
utilizes and we certainly do not understand how you put a billion together to
generate complex behavior and thought.
So, one of the real challenges is the gap between imaging provides an
opportunity to look non-invasively on the human brain and it provides sort of
an insight, but we still, the gap between understanding brain activation at the
level of imaging and how individual neurons in unison give rise to that, what
are the computations involved in that, what are the ways in which information
is represented, how does it compute that information, what are the algorithms,
what are the processes that give rise to that?
It is still completely unknown.
You go and ask each person "Why
did you do that?" They all have different
stories and interpretations because this thing I call interpreters in the brain
drawing on their own life experience, their own culture to give a reason as to
why they did that, but if you actually just looked at the behavior, everyone in
the world is behaving the same way. They
just have a different theory about it.
So, there you go.
Attachment
mechanisms (truly unconscious process), Well,
think about pets. We also have pets with
the same kinds of systems, for an evolutionary biologist, I think of a pet as
an evolutionary parasite in the sense that your pet is mimicking or we have
bred them to mimic features of our children.
We will die for our pets and frequently many people do. People run into a burning building to save
their pet. Is that a selfish act? Is that an act in the direct line of an
evolutionary mandate? No. It is a mechanism, a general mechanism that
is in the brain that has all these permissive side effects that allow all sorts
of behavior that have nothing to do with direct reproductive advantage that
create a multitude of our activities.
2 Templeton foundation: is putting
noticeable efforts. It is organizing renowned experts, academicians debate on
vital issues of humanity also trying to promote cooperation between science,
religions, philosophy and social thinkers by sponsoring high budget research
projects. In one such project which tries to assess the impact of free economy
on morality “Does the free market corrode moral character”? Let us see
the views expressed by some experts. (excerpts)
John Gray is emeritus professor at the London School of Economics.
He says - No economic system can enhance every aspect of moral character.
All rely to some extent on motives that are morally questionable. Greed and
envy may be vices, but they are also economic stimulants. Different mixes
will be best in different historical contexts. But one thing is clear: a
modern market economy cannot do without a measure of moral corrosion.
Garry Kasparov is former world chess champion, leader of the
pro-democracy coalition The Other Russia. He is the author of some books. He
says – Yes (corrodes) but…other systems are worse. The free
market is a crucible of competition that can bring out the best in human
nature. Competition is fierce, and when survival is at stake, there is no
room for morality. But, to paraphrase Churchill, for all its flaws, the free market
is still superior to all the other economic arrangements that have been tried..... . So, yes, the free market can lead to the
corruption of moral character. It is man’s nature always to want more, and
the free market enables these urges with few protections for those who fail to
thrive.
Michael Walzer is professor emeritus in the School of Social
Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. He says -
Competition in the market puts people under great pressure to break the
ordinary rules of decent conduct and then to produce good reasons for doing so.
It is these rationalizations — the endless self-deception necessary to meet the
bottom line and still feel okay about it — that corrode moral character.
But this isn’t in itself an argument against
the free market. Think about the ways that democratic politics also corrodes
moral character. Competition for political power puts people under great
pressure — to shout lies at public meetings, to make promises they can’t keep,
to take money from shady characters, to compromise principles that shouldn’t be
compromised. -- All this has to be
defended somehow, and moral character doesn’t survive the defense — at least,
it doesn’t survive intact. But these obvious flaws don’t constitute an
argument against democracy.
The conclusion seems that as the democracy
and free market are the best available options in the respective fields but
they definitely corrode Moral character of the society.
3 World
Happiness Report 2013 Chapter
4:Restoring Virtue ethics in the Quest for happiness , Jeffrey D. Sachs.
What makes people happy? Many moral philosophers and religious
leaders have suggested that virtue is the key to happiness, an approach sometimes
called virtue ethics. Out of these factors it is the ethical dimension
that is most often overlooked in current discussions of well-being. It is a
general notion that higher incomes and longevity raise happiness, corruption
perceptions lower happiness, and generosity and freedom raise happiness.
Even though social, psychological, and
ethical factors are crucially important in individual happiness, public
discourse and public policies tend to focus the lion’s share of attention on
economics. The public is told, and generally believes, that the key to greater
happiness is through more economic growth. This emphasis on economic growth as the principal path
to happiness is relatively new, emerging gradually after 1700. Before then,
psychologists and moralists dominated the thinking. Happiness was to be
achieved by living a “good life,” one imbued (soaked/influenced) with the
proper virtues. This was true both for secular philosophies in the
spirit of Aristotle and the stoics, as well as for the religious teachings of
the medieval Roman Church.
With economic growth and the rise of the
modern market economy, a new philosophy of consumerism gradually emerged. Economists, as champions of rising incomes
and consumption, increasingly held sway. Individual economic success rose in
the hierarchy of social and ethical values as offering the key to happiness.
There was certainly something to this, since the new era of economic growth
opened unprecedented opportunities for large parts of humanity to achieve
improved nutrition, healthy lives, education, and material comforts, all of
which do indeed influence happiness and well-being.
Yet the pendulum swung way too far away from
the non-economic factors. More recently, the non-economists have begun
successfully pushing back. Man never did live by bread alone, and we have
learned — painfully— that too focused a pursuit of bread leads not only to
obesity but also to a starvation of other human needs, including social
connections, psychological balance, and virtue. (My Comments: really speaking
it is not a pursuit of bread i.e. basic needs it is the higher needs related to
security, prestige, power and esteem, in short the need of ego and self-centered
gratification, which created the problems.)
We are now returning, step by step, to a broader
conception of happiness. Yet I would argue that the athicists are still mostly
overlooked.
Sociologists have powerfully shown how social ties are fraying (eroding) in
many countries, to the detriment of well-being. Psychologists have successfully
championed a surge of interest in ancient and modern practices of psychological
well-being, including self-help groups, meditation, and various approaches of
positive psychology. Yet modern ethicists, who are generally overshadowed in
the public discourse, have not yet been successful in placing their subject
back on the public agenda. A renewed focus on the role of ethics, and in
particular of virtuous behavior, in happiness could lead us to new and
effective strategies for raising individual, national, and global well-being.
To try to make this case, albeit in a highly preliminary and impressionistic
way, I will briefly trace how virtue ethics were largely abandoned in modern
thinking about happiness, and how virtue ethics might be restored to a proper
place alongside economic, social, and psychological approaches. Let’s briefly
consider three leading examples: Buddhism, Aristotelian ethics, and the
Roman Catholic Church.
Ancient traditions of Virtue ethics and
happiness: Until the modern era, virtue and
happiness were seen as intrinsically intertwined. One achieved happiness by
living the right kind of life. The sages instructed us not to follow our base
instincts for sensual pleasures and material possessions, but rather our higher
potential for compassion and moderation. The better path was acknowledged to be
hard work, to be won through study, training, self-discipline and the emulation
of great people. This philosophy is found in both East and West, and in both
secular and religious traditions.
The Buddha and Aristotle obviously shared
many keen psychological and social insights. Both emphasized the tendency of
human beings to pursue material possessions and sensual pleasures to excess,
undermining their psychological well- being in pursuing of fleeting sensations.
Both emphasized that more material possessions do not lead to happier lives.
Both regarded hedonism and greed as threats to social stability. Both believed
that the tensions between the individual and the community could be moderated
through an ethic of virtue, in which individuals live their lives in accordance
with the dictates of human nature and social realities. And both believed
that the “right path” (for Buddha) and “virtue” (for Aristotle) require
training, education, practice, and cultivation of the mind.
The main difference between them is the attitude towards the passions:
Buddhism favors imperturbability, a subduing of the passions, while Aristotle
believes that emotions should be controlled by reason, but not subdued.
(My Comments: Bhagwat Gita in its
chapter 14, dealing rationally with the hierarchy of emotions and recommends
the enrichment of the emotions to reach the height of self-realization. This comprehensive,
age-old Indian classical philosophy is found missing in the reference for this
essay).
To summarize, the essence of traditional virtue ethics—
whether in Buddhism, Aristotelianism, or Roman Catholicism— is that happiness
is achieved by harnessing the will and the passions to live the right kind of
life. Individuals become virtuous through rational thought, instruction,
mind training, and habits of virtuous behavior. All three traditional
philosophies taught that the unrestrained passions can mislead individuals onto
false paths that result in worldly suffering, and in the case of Christian
doctrine, eternal damnation. While we have reviewed just three traditional
virtue ethics, we would find strong echoes in many other revered traditions,
such as Confucianism and Greek and Roman Stoicism.
From Virtue ethics to consumerism: Over the course of several centuries, virtue
ethics largely disappeared and was replaced by the economist’s doctrine of
utility. The traditional view of material
goods as the source of suffering was turned on its head. The new “worldly
philosophers” of economics came to regard material goods as the very key to
happiness. They developed a “utility theory” in which each individual’s utility
(or well-being) is determined by the possession and consumption of material
goods, mainly through market purchases. By the 20th century, utility theory is
marked by an unrestrained consumerism, where advertising and PR fill the public
space.
Return to Virtue ethics? By now we recognize that economic, social,
and psychological factors are all at play in determining happiness. There has
been considerable recent attention given to the challenges of falling social
capital and psychological instability, even if solutions have not yet been achieved.
But what of the fourth factor: ethics?
Can we foresee a revival of virtue ethics? We continue to shy away from virtue ethics in
our diverse and pluralistic society in part because we believe implicitly that
no ethical consensus is possible. Could there be a meaningful new consensus on
ethics that could help to guide behavior and encourage individuals towards the
pursuit of virtue?
I am cautiously optimistic. Professor Hans
Küng and his colleagues at Tubingen University and the Global Ethic Foundation
have convincingly argued that certain basic ethical principles are shared by
all major religions, and therefore can become the basis for a shared ethical
framework in a diverse and pluralistic society.
Two notable attempts in this direction are
the Declaration toward a Global Ethic (1993) adopted by the Parliament of
the World’s Religions, and more recently the Global Economic Ethic (2009) that
focuses on economic issues. This, I believe, is a course urgently in need
of further exploration, especially as the world searches for a new, shared sustainable
development agenda. In the Global
Economic Ethic, the overarching ethical framework is “the principle of
humanity,” meaning that, “The fundamental principle of a desirable global
ethic is humanity.” This includes ensuring the basic needs of all people
and honoring the Golden Rule of reciprocity (“What you do not wish done to yourself
do not do to others.”). Within the principle of humanity, the Global
Economic Ethic identifies four basic values:
(1) Non-violence and respect for life,
including respect for human life and respect for the natural environment;
(2) Justice and solidarity, including rule of
law, fair competition, distributive justice, and solidarity;
(3) Honesty and tolerance, including
truthfulness, honesty, reliability, toleration of diversity, and rejection of
discrimination because of sex, race, nationality, or beliefs;
(4) Mutual esteem and partnership, including
fairness and sincerity vis-à-vis stakeholders and the rights to pursue personal
and group interests through collective action.
Many other movements worldwide aim at a
revival of virtue ethics.
4 Experiments in
Ethics (Kwame Anthony Appiah), Book review by Paul Bloom. (Professor of
psychology at Yale) Published: February 3, 2008 under title ‘Morality
Studies’ in New York Times. (Excerpts)
Imagine that you are standing next to
a railway track and you see a runaway trolley, with nobody on board, heading
toward a group of five people down the track. The only way to save these people
is to throw a switch that will divert the train to another track. This will
save the five, but unfortunately will kill another person standing on the
second track. Now imagine the same runaway trolley and the same five people,
but this time you are standing on a bridge above the track, next to a very
large stranger. The only way to stop the trolley is to shove the man off the
bridge and into the trolley’s path, killing him but saving the five. (It won’t
help to jump yourself; you’re too small to stop the trolley.) What is
interesting is that both situations present the option of saving five by
killing one, but most people respond to them differently. Most believe that you
would be right to throw the switch yet wrong to push the man. But why do we
think this? And are we right to do so?
Behavioral economics and evolutionary psychology that
attempts to explore the rationale behind our moral thoughts and feelings.
It used to be that the only people who
had even heard of such dilemmas were professional philosophers, but now it
seems as if everyone is doing trolleyology. Neuroscientists have used
brain-imaging techniques to see which parts of the brain light up when people
reason about such problems, and psychologists have conducted Web-based surveys
to monitor the intuitions of hundreds of thousands of people from different
countries and cultures. More generally, scientists around the world are
exploring how we reason about right and wrong, looking not only at the usual
pool of undergraduate volunteers but also at specialized populations like
hunter-gatherers, children and psychopaths. And there is a rich body of
theoretical work in behavioral economics and evolutionary psychology that
attempts to explore the rationale behind our moral thoughts and feelings.
If I were a philosopher, I’d find this
flattering but also a bit worrying, particularly since some of the
scientists see their work as ultimately replacing traditional philosophy. For
them, it is not collaboration; it is a hostile takeover.
To
some extent, we have to trust our gut feelings when determining what
is right and wrong. But sometimes our feelings conflict: a minority feel that
it is perfectly fine, for instance, to push the fat man into the path of the
trolley. And even intuitions that most everyone shares may turn out to
be untrustworthy. “In life, the challenge is not so much to figure
out how best to play the game; the challenge is to figure out what game you’re
playing.” This is bad news for those who hope for a simple and elegant account
of moral life, which includes many of us engaged in experimental philosophy.
But it fits with Appiah’s worldview. Near the end of the book, he says that
when he tells a stranger on a plane that he is a philosopher, he often gets
the question, “So, what’s your philosophy?” He answers, “My philosophy is
that everything is more complicated than you thought.”
5 Scientist
find Human Nature. (Scientific American 20 Nov. 2012).
A new set of
studies provides compelling having powerful effect data allowing us
to analyze human nature not through a philosopher’s kaleidoscope or a TV
producer’s camera, but through the clear lens of science. These studies were
carried out by a diverse group of researchers from Harvard and Yale—a developmental psychologist with a
background in evolutionary game theory, a moral philosopher-turned-psychologist,
and a biologist-cum-mathematician—interested
in the same essential question: whether our automatic impulse—our first
instinct—is to act selfishly or cooperatively. Do we cooperate when we
overcome our intuitive selfishness with rational self-control, or
do we act selfishly when we override our intuitive cooperative impulses
with rational self-interest?
To answer this question, the researchers
first took advantage of a reliable difference between intuition and
reflection: intuitive processes operate quickly, whereas reflective processes
operate relatively slowly. Whichever behavioral tendency—selfishness or
cooperation—predominates when people act quickly is likely to be the intuitive
response; it is the response most likely to be aligned with basic human nature.
Taken together, these studies—7 total experiments, using a whopping
2,068 participants—suggest that we are not intuitively selfish
creatures. But does this mean that we our naturally cooperative? Or
could it be that cooperation is our first instinct simply because it is
rewarded?
After all, we live in a world where it
pays to play well with others: cooperating helps us make friends, gain social
capital, and find social success in a wide range of domains. As one way of
addressing this possibility, the experimenters carried out yet another
study. In this study, they asked 341 participants from a nationwide
sample about their daily interactions—specifically, whether or not these
interactions were mainly cooperative; they found that the relationship between
processing speed (that is, intuition) and cooperation only existed for those
who reported having primarily cooperative interactions in daily life. This
suggests that cooperation is the intuitive response only for those who
routinely engage in interactions where this behavior is rewarded—that
human “goodness” may result from the acquisition of a regularly rewarded trait.
Although no single set of studies can
provide a definitive answer—no matter how many experiments were conducted or
participants were involved—this research suggests that our intuitive responses,
or first instincts, tend to lead to cooperation rather than selfishness.
Although this evidence does not
definitely solve the puzzle of human nature, it does give us evidence we
may use to solve this puzzle for ourselves—and our solutions will likely
vary according to how we define “human nature. If human nature is something
we must be born with, then we may be neither good nor bad, neither cooperative
nor selfish. But if human nature is simply the way we tend to act based on
our intuitive and automatic impulses, then it seems that we are an
overwhelmingly cooperative species, willing to give for the good of the group
even when it comes at our own personal expense.
Conclusion:.
·
We often think that morality means being nice or being fair, but it
also means being nice, but also aggressive when you need to, fair and punitive.
·
We care overwhelmingly about our children and our kin and it gradually
declines beyond that.
·
Morality is subjective. So, it (your action or view) depends on your
definition of morality.
·
We are deeply motivated by reputation, we are deeply motivated to seek
esteem and we deeply fear dis-esteem.
·
We still don't know how neuron works. We don't know how it integrates
information. Neuron working, brain working, formation of thought, behavior - it
is still completely unknown.
·
Every individual behavior has a different theory.
·
Modern market economy cannot do without a measure of moral
corrosion.
·
When survival is at stake, there is no room for morality
·
The endless self-deception necessary to meet the bottom
line and still feel okay about it — that corrode moral character
·
Even though social, psychological, and ethical factors are
crucially important in individual happiness, public discourse and public
policies tend to focus the lion’s share of attention on economics. The public
is told, and generally believes, that the key to greater happiness is through
more economic growth
·
Individuals become virtuous through rational thought, instruction,
mind training, and habits of virtuous behavior
·
Can we foresee a revival of virtue ethics? We continue to
shy away from virtue ethics in our diverse and pluralistic society in part
because we believe implicitly that no ethical consensus is possible. Could
there be a meaningful new consensus on ethics that could help to guide behavior
and encourage individuals towards the pursuit of virtue?
·
Near
the end of the book, he (Kwame Anthony Appiah) says that when he tells a
stranger on a plane that he is a philosopher, he often gets the question, “So,
what’s your philosophy?” He answers, “My philosophy is that everything is more
complicated than you thought.”
It is largely acceptable that morality
and ethics are necessary if we want happier world. But what really morality
means and ethics stand for is not very clear. It is said to be subjective,
time, space and given context relative They want to decide the norms by
measuring impressions in brains first of animals and then human. Knowing fully
well that each individual has separate brain and separate experience background
also unique perception it is not clear how the present methodology is going to
fetch the desired norms. One thing is sure that lot of research projects and
organizations would thrive in deciding the morality norms for business,
politics, families, schools, individuals etc.
When I (age + 60)was discussing
casually with my young nephew (age around 25) on the subject related to free
will, desire, morality, ethics (mind related aspects) and saying that how these
issues are being treated in a complicated manner by the western experts, he
abruptly interrupted and said “ you are totally wrong . They are making these
things very simple. See, India developed the science of Yoga. Sage Patanjali
formulated the Yoga. Meditation is the 7th step of Ashtanga yoga .Before
you reach this step you are supposed to nurture your life style by following
different disciplines including the strict Yamas and Niyamas. There are strict
guidelines to be followed by an individual and as a member of society. Bhagwat
Gita in its chapters 13 to 15 gives crystal clear description of all such
aspects.
But it is so difficult and complicated
for a layman like me. See the westerners! They made it so simple and popular
for everybody. Meditation (the direct seventh step of yoga) coaching is
thriving business. They have more yoga classes in America than coffee shops.
What of human, they have even Yoga coaching for dogs! Spirituality is a thriving
business of tomorrow”!!
I was totally stunned with such conclusion of this intelligent and scholar young lad!
Vijay R. Joshi.
