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Nagel on Greene on Moral Tribes

Thomas Nadelhoffer

Philosopher and neuroscientist Joshua Greene has a new book out called Moral Tribes. Thomas Nagel has written a review for New Republic entitled, "You Can't Learn about Morality from Brain Scans:The Problem with Moral Psychology." The book just came out, so I have yet to read it (so I can't speak to that part of the book review). But Nagel discusses a number of interesting metaphilosophical issues that Greene's work raises at the intersection of empirical moral psychology and first order moral philosophy that I thought it might be fun to discuss here on the blog.  Here is a short video of Greene discussing some aspects of the view he defends in the book. It's prety clear from my work where my metaphilosophical alegiances are when it comes to these and related issues. I am far more interested in hearing what readers think either about Nagel's review (especially if you've already read the book) or about what Greene says more generally about "point and shoot" vs. "manual mode" moral psychology and optimized morality.

p.s.  Signed comments are strongly preferred.  I will be moderating comments, so please be patient.

ADDENDUM: A reader emailed me the following–which I thought it was worth passing along:

"The print version [of Nagel's review] has one title, and the web version has another. The web title especially ("You can't learn about morality from brain scans") not only misrepresents the book (which spends rather little time on functional neuroimaging and makes no essential use of it in its argument), but also misrepresents Nagel's review. Nagel barely talks about "brain scans", and for good reason.

There's a bit of a backstory here.  Leon Wieseltier is the literary editor of TNR, and he recently had a nasty spat with Pinker and Dennett over "Science should stay out of philosophy":

http://www.edge.org/conversation/dennett-on-wieseltier-v-pinker-in-the-new-republic

My strong suspicion is that he assigned the review to Nagel hoping that Nagel would trash the book. Then Nagel wrote a very thoughtful and respectful dissent.  But Wieseltier just gave Nagel's review the title that he had in mind before he even got the review back."

While this is speculation at this point, given that the title of Nagel's review led me to expect the review to be decidely different than it turned out to be, I think it is worth sharing!  I will send an email later on today to TNR and Nagel to see if I can shed any more light on why the title of the review is so discongruent with the content.

SECOND ADDENDUM:  The aforementioned reader's suspicions were correct.  Nagel has kindly clarified to me that he did not select the title.  

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20 responses to “Nagel on Greene on Moral Tribes”

  1. Yao Lin

    Hasn't Greene's argument been nicely rebutted in Selim Berker (2009), "The Normative Insignificance of Neuroscience," Philosophy and Public Affairs 37(4): 293-329?

    Reply
  2. Matt Lister

    The review is quite interesting and, as noted, the on-line title is very misleading as to its content. But, if anyone has read the book, I would be interested in hearing about one thing Nagel says. Nagel suggests that Greene essentially equates utilitarianism and his (Greene's) own view, "deep pragmatism". Nagel doesn't give any real discussion as to how they might differ. A comment on the review suggests that this is a significant distortion on Nagel's part, and that Greene's "deep pragmatism" is an importantly distinct view from utilitarianism as normally understood. If anyone who has read the book (or otherwise knows Greene's view well) and comment on that point, it would be informative.

    Reply
  3. Thomas Noah

    Matt Lister, the comment on the review is totally wrong. Here's a representative quote from Greene (from the chapter "Deep Pragmatism"): "Utilitarianism, properly understood, bears little resemblance to its many caricatures. Properly understood, and wisely applied, utilitarianism is deep pragmatism. It's our second moral compass, and our best guide to life on the new pastures" (292). All the "properly understood" qualification concerns boilerplate Millian responses to objections to classical utilitarianism, objections like "we shouldn't always calculate" or "there's not enough time to calculate" or "what about justice?" and so on. Parts III-V out of V seek to defend classical utilitarianism. The deep pragmatist is trying to solve the "tragedy of common-sense morality," or conflict between competing tribes with different local moralities. Sure, the pragmatist wants results, but he wants utilitarian results. That's why he's "deep," for he has an explicit utilitarian moral philosophy.

    Reply
  4. Matt Lister

    Thanks, Thomas- that's very helpful.

    Reply
  5. Grad Student

    Yao,

    It's correct that Berker wrote a paper; whether it amounts to a "nice rebuttal" is not so clear (I think it doesn't). I think that Greene's take on the Berker paper is worth reading: http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~jgreene/GreeneWJH/Greene-Notes-on-Berker-Nov10.pdf

    Reply
  6. Bence

    While I expected something even worse on the basis of the title and Mind and Cosmos, this review is pretty awful. Nagel completely misinterprets Greene's Muller-Lyer analogy – the point here (and it's a crucial point for explaining the relevance of the System 1/System 2 stuff in this context) is that some of our moral intuitions remain the same even if we have firm rational beliefs otherwise, and not, as Nagel understands, that these moral intuitions are necessarily mistaken.

    And that cheesy closing sentence about "a long road of moral development ahead of" us makes me wonder about Nagel's grip on what this book is trying to do: if moral development is the aim, then it seems to be a very good idea to understand what constraints we are working with – and that's exactly what the book is trying to do.

    Reply
  7. Anonymous

    On the second addendum: What conventient, but sloppy reasoning! Nagel says he didn't select the title; therefore, it was selected with malice aforethought by an editor of whose philosophical views I am not inclined to share.

    Reply
  8. Thomas Nadelhoffer

    On the anonymous comment on the second addendum: For starters, I honestly only meant to be referencing the speculation that Nagel didn't select the title. But thanks for the least charitable interpretation. Second, either the reader's right or the editor did a really piss poor job of selecting a title for Nagel's review. That's why I was inclined to post the first addendum. I thought the same thing once I was done reading the review. The whole time I was expecting something that never came. It was odd. The reader suggested an explanation. I shared it. I then asked Nagel whether it was his title and he kindly responded and said no. For now I am happy to leave everyone to draw their own conclusions about how the review and the title became so oddly discongruent.

    Reply
  9. Jerry Dworkin

    Anonymous: The titles of articles in magazines are completely up to the editor, not the author. Nagel could, of course, make a suggestion and for all we know did so, but after that the matter is out of his hands. No adverse inferences are warranted.

    Reply
  10. Guy Elgat

    I have only read the Nagel piece and watched the youtube video, so I could be missing something here, but it is not clear to me why utilitarianism could allow us to “transcend our evolutionary heritage”. After all, both the ventromedial (emotional reactions) and the dorsolateral (calculation and reasoning) prefrontal cortices are products of evolution.

    Reply
  11. Rob

    Yesterday [http://wny.cc/1gs7sxC%5D, Greene characterized his book as a "moral extension" of Kahneman's work. Wonder how much of Greene's camera analogy is vulnerable to the problems which led Evans and Stanovich [http://bit.ly/1beixym%5D to abandon dual *systems* terminology for that of *process*.

    Reply
  12. Erik Wielenberg

    I’ve read Moral Tribes and it contains multiple strands of argumentation. I have a worry about a possible internal tension in Greene’s argument; I’m curious whether other readers of the book have any thoughts on this worry. There’s a connection between the worry and Nagel’s review. I’ll first explain the worry and the note the connection with Nagel’s review.

    Greene appears to reject certain moral principles on the grounds that we accept them only because we have intuitions with a particular sort of origin. For example, commenting on the Doctrine of Double Effect, Greene writes that “the intuitive judgments come first, and the doctrine is just an (imperfect) organizing summary of those intuitive judgments” (p. 223). Greene later offers a theory about the origin of these DDE-supporting intuitions. According to his “modular myopia hypothesis”, we possess an automatic System 1 action-plan inspector that checks for intended harms but is oblivious to harms that are not intended but merely foreseen side effects. The action-plan inspector works this way because checking for merely foreseen harms would require complex cognitive operations that are likely beyond the capacity of an automatic System 1 module (p. 239). Consequently: “[T]he intuitive moral distinction we draw between harm caused as a means and harm caused as a side effect may be nothing more than a cognitive accident, a by-product. Harms caused as a means push our moral-emotional buttons not because they are objectively worse but because the alarm system that keeps us from being casually violent lacks the cognitive capacity to keep track of side effects” (p. 240).

    Greene also wants to defend utilitarianism/deep pragmatism. He claims that utilitarianism consists of the combination of “the idea that happiness is what matters with the idea that we should try to maximize good consequences” (p. 155). However, Greene’s defense of utilitarianism seems to suggest that we only accept the claim that happiness is what matters – or, as Greene puts it elsewhere, that happiness is intrinsically valuable – because we have certain intuitions. Greene argues that if we keep asking ourselves why we value various things we’ll ultimately “find a concern for the quality of experience – for happiness, broadly construed, whether it’s your happiness or someone else’s” (p. 203). Concern for happiness seems to be an automatically-generated intuition; indeed, Greene appears to acknowledge that our conscious endorsement of the intrinsic value of happiness “begins with automatic settings” (p. 203). Greene doesn’t offer a hypothesis of the nature of the cognitive process that generates our concern but happiness but such a process surely exists; call this process P. It seems that we can construct an argument against the claim that happiness is intrinsically valuable that parallels Greene’s argument against the DDE. The parallel argument goes like this: the intuitive concern for happiness comes first, and the claim that happiness is intrinsically valuable is just an organizing summary of that intuitive concern. That intuitive concern may be nothing more than a cognitive accident, a by-product. We care about happiness not because it’s objectively valuable but because of P.

    Here’s the connection with Nagel’s review. Nagel writes: “When we want to arrive at standards to govern conduct … we have to start somewhere, and that means starting from what seems right.” Though Nagel doesn’t develop the worry sketched above, his remark captures the foundation of that worry: both the utilitarian and deontological aspects of human moral thought ultimately depend on automatic System 1 intuitions that are generated by some cognitive process or other. Therefore, with respect to deontological and utilitarian moral judgments alike, we can plausibly claim that we accept judgment J not because of moral fact/feature F but rather because of cognitive process P. It would seem to follow that either both utilitarian and deontological moral judgments are subject to this style of debunking argument or neither are, but Greene seems to want to deploy this style of argument against deontological moral judgments while at the same time endorsing utilitarianism.

    As I say, I’d be interested to hear other readers’ thoughts on this worry about Greene’s argument.

    Reply
  13. Paul Torek

    Yao and Grad Student, thanks for those references.

    Greene writes that "In the footbridge switch version, the agent drops the victim onto the tracks through a switch-operated trap door." He finds that whereas in the standard footbridge only 31% favor using this victim to stop the trolley, in footbridge-switch, 59% do.

    I'm surprised: I figured only a small increase in approval upon removing the "personal force" aspect. But these results don't help Greene's case against deontology. No deontological theory that I'm aware of would separate the two cases in the way 28% of Greene's subjects did. These subjects are indeed responding to morally irrelevant factors. But since they're not responding as deontology says they should, their error cannot be used against the theory.

    Reply
  14. Seth Edenbaum

    Has anyone here ever thought to consider the possible intuitions of the victims in trolley problem scenarios?
    I really doubt the "doctrine of double effect" would be more than a laugh from the dying.

    Reply
  15. Thomas Noah

    Erik Wielenberg, your concern about Greene works on the condition that Greene accepts the idea of mind-independent moral truth, but he doesn't. I think the chapter "In Search of Common Currency," especially the section "Plan B: In Search of Shared Values," is illustrative here. There's a Plan B because Plan A (direct access — through whichever means — to the moral truth) is unavailable. Still, what Greene needs is shared value. And he canvasses shared values and thinks that he shows that only utilitarianism is based on shared values. The other systems aren't. So the other systems aren't appropriate metamoralities.

    That said, he does endorse one sense of objective value (some views are objectively better than other views). He denies or seems to deny that there is anything that is objectively right. [This is all in the footnote or asterisk-note from page 188 of the text.] You reasonably might wonder how he endorses that conjunction.

    "Therefore, with respect to deontological and utilitarian moral judgments alike, we can plausibly claim that we accept judgment J not because of moral fact/feature F but rather because of cognitive process P."

    But that's not the end of the argument. Greene accepts that that claim can be applied to both utilitarian and deontology judgments. He needs that to be the case for his moral psychology evidence to do any work at all. But, some cognitive processes are objectively better than other cognitive processes, on his view. And the cognitive processes that produce characteristically utilitarian judgment are objectively better than the cognitive processes that produce characteristically deontological judgment (again on his view).

    Reply
  16. Thomas Noah

    Greene's prior work on alarm bell and currency emotions might be more relevant to your particular worry about happiness. If the question is "Isn't utilitarianism also based on intuitions or emotions?," the that distinction is supposed to address that worry. He talks about it in the chapter on multi-system moral psychology that he wrote with Cushman and Young for "The Moral Psychology Handbook." Deontological judgments are supposed to be based in alarm bell emotions, and alarm bell emotions shut off moral reasoning, on his view. Greene seems to allow that utilitarian judgments could begin with alarm bell emotions. But he also thinks that mature consequentialist thought relies on currency emotions. I've had trouble with the distinction myself and may not be giving the best reconstruction of the distinction.

    Reply
  17. Tyle Stelzig

    Erik W. worries above that a 'debunking' argument parallel to the one Greene aims at deontological intuitions should apply also to consequentialist intuitions. In the link Grad Student posted in comment 5, Greene outlines a response to this point:

    "Consequentialist judgments are based on “intuitions” in the philosophers sense,
    but they are not based on intuitions in the psychologist’s sense. For example, the
    perfectly natural, untutored judgment that it’s acceptable to turn the trolley in the switch case is not an intuitive judgment. It is, I claim, a very simple reasoned judgment, the result of explicitly applying a utilitarian decision rule. In contrast, the judgment that it’s wrong to push the man off the footbridge is an intuitive judgment. It’s based on an automatic emotional response. This is not an arbitrary conjecture. There is evidence for it [which he proceeds to outline]."

    Elsewhere Greene is more nuanced, as Thomas Noah alludes to in #16. But basically it looks like Greene's answer is that deontological intuitions are 'automatic emotional responses' in a way that consequentialist intuitions are not.

    Reply
  18. Erik Wielenberg

    Thomas and Tyle, thanks for those comments. Here are some further thoughts; again, I’d be interested in others’ views on all of this:

    In the Moral Psychology Handbook paper, the distinction between alarm-bell emotions and currency emotions is drawn this way: “alarm-bell emotions are designed to circumvent reasoning, providing absolute demands and constraints on behavior, while currency emotions are designed to participate in the process of practical reasoning, providing negotiable motivations for and against different behaviors.” An emotion of the first type “is like an alarm bell because it is designed to make a clear demand that is extremely difficult to ignore” whereas emotions of the second type “rather than issuing resolute commands, say, ‘Add a few points to option A’ or ‘Subtract a few points from Option B.’”

    This paper and Moral Tribes suggest that Greene’s most recent considered view is that both utilitarian and deontological thinking are based on intuitions in the psychologist’s sense but that utilitarian thought is based on currency emotions whereas deontological thought is based on alarm-bell emotions.

    Suppose this is right. The question I’m interested in is: why think that this difference gives us a reason to view utilitarian thought as better than deontological thought?

    One answer to this question suggested by Greene’s writing is that alarm-bell emotions are sensitive to distinctions that are obviously morally irrelevant, such as the presence or absence of what Greene calls “personal force.” In Moral Tribes, Greene proposes explanations of the sensitivity of our moral judgments to (i) the presence or absence of personal force, (ii) harms intended as means vs. harms that are merely foreseen side effects, and (iii) actions vs. omissions. However, only the first of these three is obviously morally irrelevant; as Greene points out, most people are inclined to endorse (ii) and (iii) as morally relevant distinctions. So this line of reasoning by itself won’t take us very far toward Greene’s desired conclusion; a deontological philosopher might use Greene’s work to argue that we should clean up our moral thinking by purging it of (i) while hanging onto (ii) and (iii) (I think this point is in the same vein as Paul’s point in comment #13 above).

    The widespread endorsement of (ii) and (iii) as morally relevant distinctions also seems to make trouble for the “shared values” argument, which I agree is a prominent argument of Moral Tribes. If “we’ve no choice but to capitalize on the values we share and seek our common currency there” (p. 189), then why don’t (ii) and (iii) get to come along for the ride in addition to the ideas that pleasure is good, pain is bad, and we should be impartial? Again, Greene’s own argument seems to point toward a defense of moral thought that is purged of (i) but includes both utilitarian and deontological components rather than toward the pure utilitarianism that Greene favors.

    If we already have good reasons for accepting utilitarianism (or for viewing utilitarian thought as better than deontological thought), then we are likely to see the cognitive mechanism (which Greene calls the “antiviolence gizmo”) that generates deontological thinking as a crude, glitchy, irrationally inflexible evolutionary by-product that we should try to overcome. Deontologist philosophers, however, may be more inclined toward the following view: anti-violence gizmo, thy name is (approximate) truth-tracker.

    Reply
  19. Layla

    I've long admired Greene's work, but found Robert Wright's take on what Greene gets wrong to be quite persuasive. Wright's review is here: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/11/why-we-fightand-can-we-stop/309525/

    Reply
  20. cube

    Here is where I disagree with Greene: he relies too much on arm-chair evolutionary explanations. Too much evolutionary psychology, bordering on "just-so stories". As for both dorso-lateral and ventro-medial prefrontal cortex both being the products of evolution. Yes, of course. But that doesn't mean that their "purpose" was to argue about moral dilemmas. The cognitive apparatus of our brains likely evolved for different reasons; perhaps for effective hunting strategies (Now I'm being an evolutionary psychologist). The application of frontal cortex to deal with moral dilemmas is an consequence, not a cause of the cognition. Its what Stephen J Gould calls a "spandrel".

    Peter Singer makes this argument in a commentary to Frans DeWaals "primates and philosophers". In the back of the book.

    Reply

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