Recently someone complained in a comment on this blog that another person was leaving comments under their name. I was asked to do something about it. Problem is, that's hard to do, since my blogging service, unlike Facebook, doesn't have a way for a user to claim a distinct identity.
So if you're concerned about this happening to you, my advice is to always include the same email address when you post a comment. The email address only is visible to me, while your name is visible to everyone. Then if someone has appropriated your name, not innocently but to deceive, I can tell from previous comments associated with your email address which comments come from you, and I'll delete the offending comments because I think it's wrong to impersonate someone like that.
But why do I think that's wrong? Most people feel the same way. We like our individuality and we want others to be able to express their own individuality. Again, why? What makes something seem wrong rather than right, good rather than bad?
That's a meaty subject. However, since I believe that killing animals for food is wrong (I've been a vegetarian since I was nineteen), I'll say that's a tofu'y subject. Yet others love to eat animals. Are they right and I'm wrong? Naturally I think the reverse. But why?
You're not going to find the answer in this blog post. Still, a great article in the September 16, 2024 issue of The New Yorker, "The Post-Moral Age: If conscience is merely a biological artifact, must we give up on goodness?," discusses that question in some interesting ways. The online article has a different title.
Download Are Your Morals Too Good to Be True? | The New Yorker
I think you'd enjoy reading the five-page article. Here's some excerpts that will give you a feel for the gist of what Singh has to say. He starts by talking about his undergraduate research studying burying beetles in Colorado.
Back in college, my classmates had high-minded ambitions like fighting climate change, becoming human-rights lawyers, and starting microfinance firms to alleviate poverty. To spend time with books and beetles in wildflower country seemed the pinnacle of self-indulgence.
Adding to the internal tension was something I’d observed among my beetles: the spectre of evolved selfishness. What looked like coöperation was, I discovered, laced with sexual conflict. The female beetles, when they had a size advantage, ejected their male partners; the males evidently stuck around less to help than to insure future mating opportunities.
Where I first saw biparental collaboration was instead a complicated waltz of organisms seeking to perpetuate their own interests. Was I one of them—another gene machine bent on favoring itself?
I had, to that point, considered myself a mostly decent person, moved by empathy and committed to self-expression. Was all this actually vanity and delusion, selfishness masquerading as morality? The prospect was unsettling.
So I hid away in a one-room library that smelled faintly of old textbooks and the alcohol used to preserve animal specimens, and there I started to work out a response. We’re evolved organisms, I figured, but we’re also an intelligent, cultural species capable of living by ideals that transcend our egoistic origins.
What emerged from my musings was a personal ideology, at the core of which was an appreciation of creation—including artistic and scientific work. Even an awkward scribble, I supposed, expresses an incomprehensibly epic causal history, which includes a maker, the maker’s parents, the quality of the air in the room, and so on, until it expands to encompass the entire universe.
Goodness could be reclaimed, I thought. I would draw and write and do science but as acts of memorialization—the duties of an apostle of being. I called the ideology Celebrationism, and, early in 2012, I started to codify it in a manic, sprawling novel of that name.
I had grown up a good Sikh boy: I wore a turban, didn’t cut my hair, didn’t drink or smoke. The idea of a god that acted in the world had long seemed implausible, yet it wasn’t until I started studying evolution in earnest that the strictures of religion and of everyday conventions began to feel brittle.
By my junior year of college, I thought of myself as a materialist, open-minded but skeptical of anything that smacked of the supernatural. Celebrationism came soon after. It expanded from an ethical road map into a life philosophy, spanning aesthetics, spirituality, and purpose.
By the end of my senior year, I was painting my fingernails, drawing swirling mehndi tattoos on my limbs, and regularly walking without shoes, including during my college graduation. “Why, Manvir?” my mother asked, quietly, and I launched into a riff about the illusory nature of normativity and about how I was merely a fancy organism produced by cosmic mega-forces.
...When, the following year, I started a Ph.D. in human evolutionary biology at Harvard, I saw the decision as in service of my Celebrationist creed. I could devote myself to meditating on the opportune swerves that produced us.
I was mistaken. Celebrationism died soon afterward.
Just as observation and a dose of evolutionary logic revealed male burying beetles not as attentive fathers but as possessive mate guarders, the natural and behavioral sciences deflated my dreamy credo, exposing my lofty aspirations as performance and self-deception. I struggled, unsuccessfully, to construct a new framework for moral behavior which didn’t look like self-interest in disguise. A profound cynicism took hold.
Then Singh provides an outline of skepticism about objective morality, referring to Michel de Montaigne, David Hume, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche.
Nietzsche’s response to a godless world was a moral makeover: individuals were to forge their own precepts and act in accordance with them. More than a century later, such forays have matured into an individualist morality that has become widespread.
We behave morally, we often say, not because of doctrine but because of our higher-order principles, such as resisting cruelty or upholding the equality of all humans. Rather than valuing human life because an omnipotent godhead commands it, or because our houses of worship instruct it, we do so because we believe it is right.
At its core, this view of morality assumes a kind of moral integrity. Although some people may embrace principles for self-interested ends, the story goes, genuine altruism is possible through reasoned reflection and an earnest desire to be ethical. I told myself a version of this story in the Rockies: rummage through your soul and you can find personally resonant principles that inspire good behavior.
Singh uses the views of Peter Singer regarding animal liberation to illustrate how we expect that others will do the right thing by learning about the suffering of others, in this case nonhuman animals. But...
From an evolutionary perspective, this could seem an odd expectation.
Humans have been fashioned by natural selection to pursue sex, status, and material resources. We are adept at looking out for ourselves. We help people, yes, but the decision to give is influenced by innumerable selfish considerations, including how close we are to a recipient, whether they’ve helped us before, how physically attractive they are, whether they seem responsible for their misfortune, and who might be watching.
A Martian observer might, accordingly, have expected Singer’s arguments to focus less on the horrific conditions of overcrowded pig farms and instead to appeal to our hedonic urges—more along the lines of “Veganism makes you sexy” or “People who protest animal experimentation have more friends and nicer houses than their apathetic rivals.”
Singh then talks about how views on morality changed after he started his doctoral work and had conversations with Moshe Hoffman, a postdoctoral researcher fixated on the nature of trust.
We all depend on trust, yet it works in tricky ways. On the one hand, we trust people who are guided by consistent ethical precepts. I’d rather go to dinner with someone deeply opposed to stealing than a jerk who pockets my valuables as soon as I get up to pee.
On the other hand, we’re turned off when people’s commitments seem calculated. The ascent of terms like “slacktivism,” “virtue signalling,” and “moral grandstanding” bespeaks a frustration with do-gooders motivated more by acclaim than by an internal moral compass. The idea is that, if you’re in it for the reputational perks, you can’t be relied on when those perks vanish.
...Moshe argued that humans deal with this dilemma by adopting moral principles. Through learning or natural selection, or some combination, we’ve developed a paradoxical strategy for making friends. We devote ourselves to moral ends in order to garner trust. Which morals we espouse depend on whose trust we are courting.
...His account identifies showmanship, conscious or otherwise, in ostensibly principled acts. We talk about moral principles as if they were inviolate, but we readily consider trade-offs and deviate from those principles when we can get away with it. Philip Tetlock, who works at the intersection of political science and psychology, labels our commitments “pseudo-sacred.”
Sure, some people would die for their principles, yet they often abandon them once they gain power and no longer rely on trust. In "Human Rights in Africa" (2017), the historian Bonny Ibhawoh showed that post-colonial African dictators often started their careers as dissidents devoted to civil liberties.
....Invested as I was in my own goodness, whether achieved or aspirational, I found Moshe’s ideas both alarming and mesmeric. To engage with them was to look in a mirror and find a sinister creature staring back. The more I sought Moshe out—first by taking a course he co-taught, then by meeting up for Indian food after class, then by working as his teaching assistant—the more I felt trapped within my self-interest.
Celebrationism was exposed as a beautiful lie. The search for personally resonant principles was reinterpreted as a tactic not to overcome self-interest but to advance it. Any dignified motivations that had once held sway—making art for art’s sake, acting to minimize suffering—became smoke screens to distract others from my selfishness.
Here were hard truths that I felt compelled to confront. I wanted to escape the performance, to adopt values for reasons other than their social utility, but even that urge, I recognized, reflected the same strategic impulse to appear good and consistent. It was like forcing yourself to wake up from a dream only to realize that you’re still dreaming.
This sounds kind of disheartening, but in the end Singh arrives at a place that preserves both his scientific integrity and humanness.
In recent decades, all sorts of philosophers have added to the pool of adaptive theories about morality. Allan Gibbard argues that moral statements (“Killing is bad”) actually express attitudes (“I don’t like killing”), allowing us to coördinate on shared prescriptions (“No one shall kill”). Philip Kitcher sees ethics as an ever-evolving project invented by our remote ancestors and continually refined to help societies flourish.
Richard Joyce has proposed that moral judgments help keep us out of trouble. Given normal human hedonism, we may struggle to stop ourselves from, say, stealing a brownie; the feeling that it’s morally wrong provides us an emotional bulwark. Non-moral explanations like these, whatever their differences, obviate talk of moral truths, construing them as dreamlike delusions.
...What troubled me was less the notion that morality was our own creation than the implication that our motives were suspect—that evolutionarily ingrained egoism permeated our desires, including the desire to overcome that selfishness. Sincerity, I concluded, was dead. Just as the natural sciences had killed the Christian God, I thought, the social and behavioral sciences had made appeals to virtuous motivations preposterous.
I became skeptical of all moral opinions, but especially of the most impassioned ones, which was a problem, because I was dating someone who had a lot of them. (It didn’t work out.) A close friend, a punk physicist with whom I often went dancing late at night, found my newfound cynicism hard to relate to, and we drifted apart.
Many theorists are skeptical of such skepticism. When I asked people on X how they have dealt with evolutionary debunking, Oliver Scott Curry, a social scientist at Oxford and the research director at Kindlab, which studies the practice of kindness, warned me not to confuse the selfishness of genes with the nature of our motivations, which apparently are more gallant.
He was echoing a distinction often drawn between a behavior’s “ultimate” causes, which concern why it evolved, and its “proximate” causes, which include psychological and physiological mechanisms. The cognition underpinning moral judgment may have evolved to make us look good, these scholars grant, but that doesn’t count against its sincerity.
...Such arguments make sense to some degree. An impulse can exist because of its evolutionary utility but still be heartfelt. The love I feel for my spouse functions to propagate my genes, but that doesn’t lessen the strength of my devotion. Why couldn’t this shift in perspective rescue goodness for me? A major reason is that the proximate-ultimate distinction leaves intact the unsavory aspects of human motivation.
As anyone who has spent more than twenty minutes on social media can attest, humans are remarkably attentive to which moral proclamations garner esteem and attention. We weigh the status implications of claiming different principles. It’s true that we often assure ourselves otherwise and even internalize positions once we espouse them enough. Yet this fact didn’t redeem moral sincerity for me; it corrupted it.
...How does one exist in a post-moral world? What do we do when the desire to be good is exposed as a self-serving performance and moral beliefs are recast as merely brain stuff? I responded by turning to a kind of nihilism, yet this is far from the only reaction. We could follow the Mentawai, favoring the language of transaction over virtue.
Or we can carry on as if nothing has changed. Richard Joyce, in his new book, “Morality: From Error to Fiction,” advocates such an approach. His “moral fictionalism” entails maintaining our current way of talking while recognizing that a major benefit of this language is that it makes you likable, despite referring to nothing real. If you behave the way I did in grad school, going on about the theatre of morality, you will, he suggests, only attract censure and wariness. Better to blend in.
Intellectually, I find the proposal hard to swallow. The idea of cosplaying moral commitment for social acceptance would surely magnify whatever dissonance I already feel. Still, a decade after my first meeting with Moshe, experience forces me to acknowledge Joyce’s larger point. It’s easy to inhabit the fiction.
I still accept that I am a selfish organism produced by a cosmic mega-force, drifting around in a bedlam of energy and matter and, in most respects, not so very different from the beetles I scrutinized during that summer in Colorado. I still see the power in Moshe’s game-theory models. Traces of unease linger. But I no longer feel unmoored. A sense of meaning has reëstablished itself.
Tressed, turbanned, and teetotalling, I am, at least by all appearances, still a good Sikh. I have become a teacher, a husband, and a father to a new baby daughter. When she smiles, a single dimple appears in her left cheek. Her existence feels more ecstatic and celebratory than any ideology I could have conceived, and I hope that she’ll one day grow up to be empathetic and aware of others’ suffering. I have moral intuitions, sometimes impassioned ones. I try to do right by people, and, on most days, I think I do an O.K. job. I dream on.
@ Brain
>> Then if someone has appropriated your name, not innocently but to deceive, I can tell from previous comments associated with your email address which comments come from you, and I'll delete the offending comments because I think it's wrong to impersonate someone like that.<<
To me, it is immaterial what the motive is why others use my [pen] name and you have my email address and also another that might be used occasional.
You could have removed that entrance but You chose not to act upon it.
So be it.
You must have your own reasons for acting as you do.
Posted by: um | September 28, 2024 at 06:14 AM
My initial reaction to his discussion about morality: He seems to be doing two things wrong here:
1. First, his conflating of morality with selflessness. His implied starting point that a morality rooted in self is suspect, and that only selflessness can make for true morality. That's simply not true. I'll go so far as to call it incoherent, nonsensical. A coherent moral framework can only emerge from enlightened self-centeredness.
2. Two, he seems to be making the exact same error that I thought Sapolsky had fallen into. The idea that only (philosophical, and absolute) free will can make for morality. The implicit starting point that deterministic thoughts and actions cannot make for morality; the idea that because both kinds are determined, therefore there is no essential difference, in moral terms, between a Gandhi or a Dalai Lama on one hand, and a Hitler or a Netanyahu on the other. That's completely mistaken; and any system of thought or ethics that takes that as implicit starting point will necessarily end up both misguided and unnecessarily convoluted.
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Those are my first thoughts, basis a quick read of just the main post. Maybe the more detailed PDF might present a more nuanced development of Singh's ideas, that corrects for these. I'll check it out later when I'm free, looks like an interesting read.
Posted by: Appreciative Reader | September 28, 2024 at 05:05 PM
My first impressions here are that morality and goodness are just words that express the same thing. I consider the biological organism (which as far as I’m concerned also includes the mind and self structure, along with the other cognitive processes) has several prime motivations, survival being foremost as it covers food, mating, shelter and for us, clothing. I think that for we humans, survival has evolved to include the self or ego in the sense that we protect, our beliefs, opinions and knowledge – and in some instances put such mind/self contents before physical survival.
Depending on the cultures we are brought up in determines our particular moral outlooks. To survive and function within that culture would entail (either consciously or unconsciously) going along with these cultural norms. The source of such morals may stem from religion, society, science etc. though all have their basis in our biological functioning – which as I mentioned includes cognitive processes.
And yes, it does seem that we have moral choices though with any choice they are all predicated on previous information, information inherent in our physical make-up and/or our conditioned mental processes. In this scenario, free will is redundant.
Whatever stance, project or life course we take, all can be understood as emanating from natural sources, often sources we are unaware of.
Posted by: Ron E. | September 29, 2024 at 04:50 AM
Good lord, who knew growing Sikh was so similar to growing up Baptist.
Posted by: S | September 29, 2024 at 06:29 AM
Went through Manvir Singh’s full article, just now. Enjoyed reading it, absolutely.
I think I stand by what I’d said earlier; with one more small quibble added now, basis this fuller reading.
Like I’d said, I think his overall thesis is fairly straightforward. It only seems complex, and convoluted, because he starts from premises that aren’t valid, and then painstakingly goes on to examine those incorrect premises. I’ve already spelled that out in my earlier comment, but to repeat, briefly: first, his conflation of morality with selflessness; and two, his implicit assumption, which mirrors Sapolsky, that only (perfect, philosophical) free will can make for morality, so that when he sees one’s moral impulses as drawing from evolutionary and social influences, he starts to question whether that morality is actually moral. In as much as the premises are completely unwarranted, then his confusion is completely unnecessary!
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And the further small quibble would be this: He describes moral action as drawn from social influences as necessarily a superficial thing. I disagree.
In his own words, “The motivations that we find so detestable—moral posturing for social rewards—may, in fact, be the hallmark of moral action.” I think he’s completely, entirely mistaken in thinking that. Certainly one of the ways in which societal influences affect us is by getting us to posture; but where I believe he’s mistaken is in concluding, for no good reason that I can see, that that is the only thing that ever happens.
Let me spell this out using the example he himself uses:
Singh was unable to help his Mentawai colleague financially despite his promise; so that, later on, when that particular need is gone, and he meets him, he still hands him a wad of cash; and, on the Mentawai guy’s asking him why, he replies, in effect “Because I don’t want others to think I’m the sort of guy that reneges on his promises.”
Now that unsparing honesty on his part, and that self-awareness, that’s admirable, certainly. But where Singh is mistaken is where he very clearly implies that that is the only kind of morality possible. It is entirely possible to so internalize the idea of always keeping one’s word that, even if one were the only man left in the world and no one could possibly ever see what one is doing, nevertheless one does the right thing, keeps one’s word in this case. And nor is that abstract hypothesis: I submit that many of us do internalize virtue to that extent, it isn’t some kind of wild outlier, at all.
Now certainly, even this deeper, more solid virtue, if I may call it that, is nevertheless a function of one’s genetics and, more relevant to this discussion, of one’s socialization, certainly. But that it is the result of one’s socialization does not, therefore, mean that that virtue is, as implied, necessarily the superficial surface thing that Singh talks about. You can have that virtue penetrate to one’s very being, and despite having started out as socialization, despite having been the effect of socialization, it nevertheless can go beyond subsequent socialization.
Yeah, so Singh’s wrong on that count. But of course, that’s just a detail. Like I said, a minor quibble.
For the rest, I go by what I’d said originally: this is a straightforward moral position, that Singh arrives at very tortuously only because he starts out with faulty premises that he takes a great deal of time and effort to first dislodge. Which, of course, is fair enough, given that this is an account of his own personal journey on to his present moral convictions.
Yep, an interesting read.
Posted by: Appreciative Reader | September 30, 2024 at 10:45 AM