Lesson 8 part 4, Fro Glaucus to Glaucon. Last lesson was kind of tough wasn't it? I made this little four square diagram to illustrate that rationalism and intuitionism in Haidt's sense aren't as opposed as Haidt thinks. I don't suppose it completely solved the problem when I took the. The names out and put in the little cartoons. Quick review the main different between Plato and Haidt is that Plato doesn't believe in elevated elephants and Heidt does. That is Haidt believes ethical value comes from our lower selves in Plato's sense. But apart from that Haidt and Plato agree that the main puzzle, the main trick is to harmonize the lower left quadrant. In the upper right. How to relate people to the rational form of the good when they just aren't cutout by nature to know the form of the good? Even though it would do them good. In Plato this is obvious, read any dialog. Mostly people are confused, mostly they stayed confused. Socrates gives them arguments, including some quite good ones. Are they buying? Mostly not. Have you ever tried getting a rational, you know, in a rational argument with a dog? No, because dogs don't do that. Haidt's the same. He's written two books, The Happiness Hypothesis and The Righteous Mind. The first starts with a good question. Why do people keep doing such stupid things? And it concludes with a blueprint for what makes for true happiness in human life. Based on what psychology has learned about how people generally work. Some of it's obvious, but even the obvious points get some rational refinement in the lab. And there are some surprises. It's not a Utopian blueprint, because it's modest and the level of improvement it Projects as reasonable to expect. But it's a highly rationalistic blue print. Ultimately, what reason teaches that we humans should go for that lower right thing. We should be happy, elevated animals. But that's a rational confu, conclusion. Haidt's plan for getting the lower left in touch with the upper right is. Trade up platonic at the individual level. Cognitive therapy, socrates does that too. At the institutional level, laconian design. Plato does that in republic. In so far you can't get people to aim at the good directly? Train them, little by little. Habituate them to walk in that direction. Take advantage of their heuristic animal nature. We'll get to that. The is ought distinction is pretty conceptually basic. We understand that the following two claims don't mean the same. Smith is going to save the drowning child. Smith ought to save the drowning child. The second claim, we understand, isn't refuted if the first turns out to be false. If Smith ought to save the drowning child, and isn't going to, what follows is that he's a bad person or something. We all get this. Small children get the distinction is and ought. But my critique of Haidt in the last video and in. And just a few slides ago really comes down to distinguishing is and ought. I turned the two square rationalism versus intuitionism opposition into a four square affair by adding an is ought, descriptive normative dimension. And so the question naturally arises, am I saying that Haidt is? Kind of a dummy for having missed this. Also, if it's really just is or not which are kind of easy, couldn't Hite have found some less confusing way to put it that last video was that a headache waiting to happen? Shouldn't a four square diagram be easier to understand although? The answer I think is no and no. Haidt isn't a dummy for folding this is our business and I'm sure I could've done a better job explaining the four square thing. Sorry about that, but it's genuinely confusing. Why? This is going to take a bit of explaining. So far in this book I have been entirely descriptive. That's Jonathan Haidt, more than halfway through The Righteous Mind. This is, not to put too fine a point on it. False. There's been tons of normativity. Plenty of odds to go with the is by this point in the book. But now we get to the confusing part, Haidt is right, and a lot of the normative statements he has been indulging in to this point are also descriptive. How can that be? The question, I say it again, how is it possible to fill a book with lots of normative statements, and then later in the game. Claim. So far I'm just being descriptive. There's two basic ways. First you can offer descriptive accounts of normatively of actual norms. All humans agree don't kill people. Sounds pretty good. I just made a descriptive claim about norms. I'm just saying what everyone thinks. Things. I'm not committing myself normatively. My statement's a little sloppy. It needs some qualification because of course, pretty much all societies acknowledge situations in which killing things may be justified. And some individual people don't follow these norms, there are psychopaths and so forth. But if you and I get in an argument. About my sloppy over generalization, we aren't doing ethnics, we are doing anthropology or psychology or statistics or something of the sort, something properly descriptive. What about that illustration, do you remember that this was the title graphic for the very first video of the lesson one? I'm a genius. I was planning for this all along. I'm illustrating murder, but I'm not showing you murder, I'm showing you a disgusting scene that might be associated with murder. Why is there a dog in this picture? The answer is because there's two dogs in this picture. One drinking a pool of human blood horribly, apparently. The other in that guy's head, freaking out emotionally about this horrible scene. The very Haidtian point I am making is this, one of the main engines by which all human societies arrive at and maintain norms against killing is that humans are disgusted by this sort of scene, normally. Be it noted this mechanism plausibly get things morally, gets things morally backwards. Murder isn't wrong because it results in disgusting scenes of dogs drinking blood. But it is a descriptive truth of morality that it implies ought not and that does a lot of intuitive moral pushing. Here is another way a normative and descriptive wires can get crossed and subtle or confusing risk. Consider biology as normativity. Haidt often emphasizes that he's thinking about moral psychology biologically. That is adoptively, that is functionally, but function is a normative notion. Function says what something suppose to do. Wings are for flying, birds are suppose to fly. That seems like a fairly unobjectable generalization. Lets get more social about it. Did you find this slide confusing last time? Yeah. I didn't really explain it nearly well enough. Sorry about that. Let me fix it. As I said, removing on from wings which are for flying, I hope you agree, the social stuff which is for various stuff. Jonathan Haidt says, Human beings are 90% chimp and 10% bee. So the next slides are going to be rather relevant to us. Moreso than bird wings, which we humans don't really have. Biology is normativity. Chimps are supposed to groom each other. It keeps your fur and skin healthy. And it's a great way to make friends and influence people. That's kind of the short version. It's even more complicated with bees. Even though bees are, in a sense, simpler creatures, individually. Attendants to the queen are supposed to groom and feed her. Other workers are supposed to defend her with their lives. It all sounds so Marie Antoinette. Here is a passage from the happiness hypothesis. These ultra-social species like bees display levels of cooperation and self-sacrifice. Sacrifice that still astonish and inspire those who study them. Some ants, for example, spend their lives hanging from the top of a tunnel, offering their abdomens for use as food storage bags by the rest of the nest. Haidt is quite right, as human observers find sociality in non human animals to be inspiring. But in this case, I think he's chosen a kind of funny example. It's more horrifying really. That's the worst dead end service sector job I've ever heard of. Yikes. The protestant revolution is generally accepted to have started in 15. 1517 when Martin Luther nailed 95 Theses to a church door in Wittenburg, a very important moment in history both socially and ethically, look it up on Wikipedia if you don't know. But I digress perhaps the protest ant revolution will start with ants stuck in these dead end jobs. They're going to get it together and start standing up for themselves, rather than hanging down for everyone else. No storing food in our abdomens unless we get a break now and then. No storing food in our abdomens unless we get a break now and then. I know what you are thinking hold on, you are just telling jokes again it supposed to be teaching us philosophy yeah, but jokes are very philosophical this point, this picture is absurd. Not just because hands are not smart enough relatively because feeling sorry for ants that are basically glorified stomachs. Makes about as much sense as feeling sorry for your stomach, for having to be a stomach. Yeah, but stomachs don't have feelings, you say. Well actually they do. Well, but they don't have brains. Oh, you think that, do you? Let me take you to school. The average ant has a quarter of a million neurons in its brain, so Wikipedia tells me. I actually counted them myself, but fun fact, you have a brain in your gut. That's right. There's a knot of 100 million neurons down there. You can read about it in chapter one of The Happiness Hypothesis. It's pretty interesting stuff. Anyway, like I was saying, just as it doesn't make sense to feel sorry for your stomach, because it has to be the stomach, it. Makes no sense to feel sorry for an ant that has to be a stomach for the whole colony. It makes no sense to think that the queen bee is like Marie Antoinette. This is sort of inevitable but confusing ethical projection on our part when we look at these social animals. Getting back to my slides. Why don't science fiction films ever show us a gut brain in a vat? Wouldn't that be a great touch? We humans have two brains. shouldn't it be a split-level vat? I think my modifier villain on the right is pretty clever, but I digressed. Lets get back to the wings. Simple cases, wings are for flying. That is. They're supposed to work so the bird can fly. This seems like flat biological description, but it's function talk. And function talk is normative talk. How is it that Darwinists like Haidt who don't believe in any designer for birds or bees or chimps or humans can use a verb like supposed to n these connections? Who is supposed to be doing the supposing here? That is, who or what is doing the making? It be the case that there are odds not just isses when it comes to facts. If there is not a god who loves for birds to fly, in what sense are they. Suppose to fly, is that good in some sense? Some critics think this is actually a fatal flaw in Darwinism. I'm here to tell you those critics are wrong. This sort of suppose to statement is descriptively a okay. It's kind of shorthand for describing facts about what's normal for organism, normal and statistical. Okay, it's a bit more complicated. There really are some deep conceptual puzzles revolving around the fact that biology is descriptive science yet it revolves around the notion of a function which is a normative notion. I don't think there's any threats to the Darwinist consensus but it is confusing. Let's push on by pulling it together so we can get to Glaucon. Alright. This is going to be a long video. People aren't supposed to kill each other what kind of statement is that? Well, it's ethical it sounds like I'm disapproving a murder people aren't supposed to kill each other, it's also a descriptive truth I could be just teaching you some anthropology. It's also biological. That would make it normative but in a descriptively okay way. That is, it's a, an adaptive trait of human beings that normally they don't kill each other. And that's one of the many things that have allowed us to prosper as a species. This is very tricky, because you say a sentence like that, and you might mean it in. Several descriptive and normative sense that wants and height being a biology guy it's going to be staying right on the line where this confusion is naturally going to rise. He is not always going to be sure which card he picked from the deck. He might trick us, he might trick himself. Human beings are 90% chimp and 10% bee. That is a bit of a rhetorical flourish but in so far as he's serious about it. It's important to note that this is both a descriptive and a normative truth. In a couple senses, strictly biologically he's telling us something about our adaptive traits, our natural biological functions as a species. But it's also both an is and an oath in a sense or senses that go beyond biology. Where ethicists looking at our combined chimp and bee natures and trying to decide what we should do about if any thing. At that point we're not thinking like either a champ or a bee we're thinking like a human. One page before telling us he's just giving us description. Haidt gives us a very explicit, social functional definition of morality for him. Here we have lots of room for descriptive is, lots of room for functional ought, but also room for drawing positive moral conclusions if you're so inclined. Lets read the quote. Moral systems are interlocking sets of values, virtues, norms, practices, identities, institutions, technologies, and evolved psychological mechanisms that work together to suppress or regulate self-interest and make cooperative societies possible. Is that an is or an oath or both and is it a strictly biological claim or. Does it have ethical implications which might not strictly follow from biology? I want now to do two things. Sketch what Haidt wants to do with that thing that was on the previous slid. The functional definition of morality. And then try to indicate how he confused himself a bit about what he's doing with it. As he does it. Let's go back to Plato. How not. Plato, we know, thinks there are three parts of the soul. And three cognitive types in the city, gold, silver and bronze. Of course, after reading that Glacous bit, maybe we are starting to wonder about the tri part, tri-part type decision. Maybe the true soul is even simpler. But let's stick with the three part model for now. Here's this interlocking system of virtues, identities, etcetera etcetera. You could take Height's decision and understand what Plato is talking about. About in terms of it. I remember thinking, after I first read Haidt's, The Happiness Hypothesis, all this guy needs for the full republic monty is color coded cognitive types, and that theory of their ideal harmony, which in fact turned out to be his next book. The Righteous Mind. Haidt doesn't have silver and bronze needing to be ordered by some wise gold type but he does have red and blue needing enlightenment courtesy of wise moral psychology. That is, Haidt writes about conservatives and liberals. And their discontents. If you aren't an American, maybe you don't know. By convention, the conservatives, the Republicans, are the red guys. The Democrats, the liberals, are blue, red state blue state. They have trouble living together in harmony. By the way, if you don't want to read Haidt's book,The Righteous Mind, watch his TED talk, The Moral Roots of Liberals and Conservatives. Google it. If I'm not going, I'm not going to go into all the details of the conflict as he sees it. I'm interested in thumbnailing the form of his. Solution, my way of drawing a parallel with Plato. Liberals and conservatives allegedly have different cognitive styles, different moral minds. And this leads to conflict, bad feelings, polarization. Unhealthy self righteousness on both sides. Hence The Righteous Mind, our title. Righteousness is good but it's not good. What is needed is not some gold psychologist. Hide doesn't think he's fit to rule these biased fools, but he does present them as trapped in the matrix of their moral minds, that's his own explicit analogy. He's got the truth pill to free your mind. He's prepared to lead you out of the cave, but like Plato he doesn't expect many takers. Like Plato he doesn't expect that everyone will just buy his rational arguments, even if they are good ones. What we need are institutional designs that speak to the animal in us, whether it's a Republican elephant or a democratic donkey or what. This is glauconian wisdom. What is that exactly? It's realism about what you can expect from people, reasoning about [UNKNOWN]. Of course you remember Glaucon from lesson six. He's the guy who suggest that justice of all there's a kind socially strategic second best. Everyone who could be unjust would be. That's the point of The Ring Of Gyges thought experiment. Anyone with that Ring would turn unjust. Because people. Only worry about appearing unjust, not being unjust. Also, everyone is ultimately a learner a team player on team me. There is no I in team, but there's an m and a me. Okay. Let me just read the quote. Does moral reasoning seem to have been shaped, tuned, and crafted to help us pursue socially strategic goals, such as guarding our reputations and convincing other people to support us, or our team, in disputes? If you believe that, then you're a Glauconian. Makes sense to me, I've read Plato. Okay, it might seem that being a Glauconian means being anti-Platonist. Since Republic is one long attempt to refute Glaucon's argument that if you have to pick between being just, between being just and appearing just while being unjust, well. Everyone would rather be the happy supervillain, the tyrant that everyone thinks is the hero rather than the dead unsung hero. We've been over this before. But rather obviously Plato's Institutional Designs all hinge crucially on glauconian devices. In Hites' sense. Philosophers must arrange it so for example the honor loving types. By pursuing honor also pursue the good reliably. Also everyone will be taught that they're brothers so that they'll think they're all on the same team sprung from the same earth. Their impulses towards team loyalty, which are strictly irrational, will be channeled in positive rather than negative directions. Thanks to the rational wisdom of the philosopher kings or psychologist kings. Or at least the psychologist that wrote a good rational book telling us how to do it properly. So now we've done it. We've gotten the animal in the lower left quadrant in touch with the rational ideal in the upper right. Courtesy of glaconian training, nudges, tricks. We've determined on a path of making people pursue what is actually good for them, by rigging things so that by pursuing what is inevitably. Seem good to them, their reputations, a victory for the team. Go, team! Their a bit accidentally, but more or less reliably, aimed at the true good. But what is the true good, according to Haidt, for example? Let's go back to this passage. But I won't read it fully again. Does our moral reasoning seem to have been crafted for socially strategic goals, that is, are we natural born Glauconians? In a biological sense, yes. As animals are we suppose to do that? Is that the heuristic that we have been adapted to employ? Yes, but is Haidt telling us. We ought to be concerned only with our reputations and that we should be self righteous partisans because that comes to us so naturally. Ultimately, he is telling us approximately the opposite. Our biological natures are limitations but also flexible tools that we may use ingenuously. But how ought we to employ our natures? As tools within those limitations. Do our natures teach us that as well? Back to the ants hanging from the ceiling. In a functional sense, some ants should hang from the ceiling and feed everyone out of their abdomens. I didn't know that before I read Haidt's book. But, now I do. That's apparently what they're for. That sort of ant. There's no sense in encouraging them to seek critical distance or pursue social justice. But unless we think of ourselves. As a bit less constrained by the ises and the oughts of our biology, that is by what we're like and our proper biological functions as ev, as evolved beings. Then what's the point of books like Haidt's unless we're looking to correct ourselves a little bit. There is a sense in which we both are and ought to be. 90% chimp an 10% bee again this is somewhat rhetorically [UNKNOWN] sheep glass on our natures but let that pass. We are and ought to be that way, because it's a biological is and odd it's our nature and it's our evolutionary function it's the way we get around in the world, but let it be that height is basically right about. About that, but the only point of getting clear about that, is that so we can then coordinate it critically with a different is and ought. What is good for us ethically? What would the good life be and how ought we to approximate our. Chimp=ish, bee-ish natures. To that good. And by the way, there's no reason to think that portrait of good is a chimp or a bee. So what's the right normative answer, if it doesn't. Have to like either a chimp or a bee. We've scraped back the biology now we just want to know what's good for us. Jonathan Haidt from the Righteous Mind. I don't know what the best normative ethical theory is for individuals in their private lives. But when we talk about making laws and implementing public policies in Western democracies that contain some degree of ethnic and moral diversity, then I think there is no compelling alternative to utilitarianism. Unquote. If I were a passive aggressive person. Which I clearly am. I could note that in light of this forthright declaration of utilitarian commitment, Haidt really could've spared us some rather lengthy complaining, earlier in the book, about how utilitarianism is a grave symptom of rationalist error. It's a philosophy fit for sufferers from Asperger's. It's like a restaurant, where they only serve sugar. In all my days, I have never seen anyone heap so much abuse. On utilitarianism only to spin on a dime and advocate utilitarianism. Utilitarianism wins. It's not a bad fit for Haidt in the end. But coming late like this with no warning and no argument? I just gave you the argument such as it is. It's really quite the bolt from the blue. Why this particular brand of rationalism? It's unclear. That's what comes of being a rationalist and not admitting it. Fortunately, Johshua Green fixed that by writing the book that Haidt would have written, were he clear and more upfront. Front about his utilitarian commitments. The right book to read is called Moral Tribes, not that you shouldn't read Haidt's book. It's good too. But Jonathan, but Joshua Green, I'm telling you now, gets clearer about the status of utilitarianism as a piece in this puzzle. Now I'm going to move on to Green, from Haidt. But in between, fair is fair. Having used Plato as a bit of a cudgel to beat Haidt for maybe a longer time than is really friendly, I'm going to use Haidt as a bit of a cudgel to beat Plato. An eye for an eye feels like just but more seriously. The reason Haidt thinks he's an [UNKNOWN] is that there's a lot in Plato not to love. Particularly if your a sensible sort of empirically naturalistically minded moral physiologist who basically thinks were living in a modern ethnically and morally diverse western style democracy.
