Chapter 12: How to Disagree with Others

Chapter 12: How to Disagree with Others

Here’s another lesson for you, my hypothetical newborn baby. As you keep eating and pooping, I’m going to keep giving you pointers on how to make sense of this crazy world. These are the sorts of things I wish I had known when I was a lot younger . . .

We’ve already discussed (in Chapter 10) that the brain is overrated as a truth-finding device. It functions well to find truth only in certain specially-tuned environments such as laboratories, where scientists who are well-trained to disagree civilly (using the scientific method) want to know if and when they are wrong so that they can advance the kind of research that allows airplanes to actually fly. Most of the time, human animals are not in that kind of specialized environment. Much of the time, we wander around using our brains to concoct arguments that we are correct, even when we have little or no evidence that we are correct. For instance, we constantly employ these three-pound miracles as tools for making arguments to convince others to give us resources such as food, sex and big screen TVs, but not necessarily in that order.

In a later chapter, we will discuss the topic of social intuitionism, the human animal tendency to make shit up in our head to justify what our bodies want. That tendency probably describes 50% of the utterances that come out of human mouths. But wait? It just now occurred to me that we also call our mouths “pie holes,” which is fascinating. The same orifice we use for making noises at conferences is also used for transporting biomass to our stomachs. Natural Selection is such an innovative tinkerer!  And we are such a strange type of animal! Sometimes I pretend I am an alien anthropologist. At those fanciful moments, I see the human animal as a mobile intestinal tract adjoined to a sophisticated and acutely tribal PR apparatus seeking out ways to make copies of itself. But that is my cynicism showing. Let’s move on, because there is an important topic at hand: We struggle to talk to one another.

We are always tribal, but especially when death or uncertainty is in the air. That is the basic holding of Terror Management Theory. Mortality salience reactivates the high school part of the brain and we flap around seeking acceptance from tribes of humans who seemingly are be best position to provide ample orgasms and iPhones. We glom on to those groups like flies onto shit. It’s really something to behold because the process of ingratiating ourselves to groups rewires the brains of human animals. If the tribe dresses in suits and ties, we dress in suits and ties. If the tribe sings songs that claim that there are more than two biological sexes or that a virgin can have a baby, we join in and sing those songs. If the tribe defines up as down, no problem. If the tribe vociferously asserts that non-stop warmongering is a good thing, we sign up for the military. Again, it’s a surreal spectacle. For reasons unclear, some of us are not wired to be groupish, so we are spared from social contagion and from having these illusions. Independent thinking is an enormous benefit. I hope you are one of the lucky ungroupish humans so that your brain doesn’t become distorted these sorts of bizarre claims that serve as identifying markers to help hold the group together. Here’s the downside. If you aren’t groupish, you’ll feel somewhat nervous when you witness a big tribe engaged in energized chanting in unison. If you aren’t wired to be groupish, you’ll need to form your own social network, person by person, which can sometimes be a lot of work, causing you to feel awkward and isolated. If you are an independent thinker, you will be able to plainly see it with your own eyes that groupish people bask in the glow of the group. It's like a powerful drug and they are willing to through skeptical truth-seeking out the window for a lifetime of basking.

But here’s a problem. When groupish people talk to us, it can be almost impossible to understand each other because we see the world so differently. Even non-groupish people often have trouble understanding each other because each of us is such a complex animal who enter conversations having been tuned for decades with lifetimes of idiosyncratic experiences. What can we do about this struggle?

I am part of an organization called Heterodox Academy, which encourages its members (teachers and professors) to reach out to engage intellectually (and otherwise) with people who don’t think the same way. Why?  Because schools are supposedly places to learn and we won’t learn much of anything if we limit ourselves to hanging out people who think the same. Heterodox Academy’s mission statement is straightforward: “To improve the quality of research and education in universities by increasing open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement.”

The cornerstone of HxA is known as the five-point HxA Way, a set of easily understandable guideposts for talking with people with whom you disagree. In my experience, it works well as a general rule. It works much less well with groupish people, but it's the best tool we've got. Here are the five points:

1. Make your case with evidence. Link to that evidence whenever possible (for online publications, on social media), or describe it when you can’t (such as in talks or conversations). Any specific statistics, quotes, or novel facts should have ready citations from credible sources.

2. Be intellectually charitable Viewpoint diversity is not incompatible with moral or intellectual rigor — in fact it actually enhances moral and intellectual agility. However, one should always try to engage with the strongest form of a position one disagrees with (that is, “steel-man” opponents rather than “straw-manning” them). One should be able to describe their interlocutor’s position in a manner they would, themselves, agree with (see: “Ideological Turing Test”). Try to acknowledge, when possible, the ways in which the actor or idea you are criticizing may be right — be it in part or in full. Look for reasons why the beliefs others hold may be compelling, under the assumption that others are roughly as reasonable, informed, and intelligent as oneself.

3. Be intellectually humble. Take seriously the prospect that you may be wrong. Be genuinely open to changing your mind about an issue if this is what is expected of interlocutors (although the purpose of exchanges across difference need not always be to “convert” someone, as explained here). Acknowledge the limitations to one’s own arguments and data as relevant.

4. Be constructive. The objective of most intellectual exchanges should not be to “win,” but rather to have all parties come away from an encounter with a deeper understanding of our social, aesthetic, and natural worlds. Try to imagine ways of integrating strong parts of an interlocutor’s positions into one’s own. Don’t just criticize, consider viable positive alternatives. Try to work out new possibilities, or practical steps that could be taken to address the problems under consideration. The corollary to this guidance is to avoid sarcasm, contempt, hostility, and snark. Generally target ideas rather than people. Do not attribute negative motives to people you disagree with as an attempt at dismissing or discrediting their views. Avoid hyperbole when describing perceived problems or (especially) one’s adversaries — for instance, do not analogize people to Stalin, Hitler/ the Nazis, Mao, the antagonists of 1984, etc.

5. Be yourself. At Heterodox Academy, we believe that successfully changing unfortunate dynamics in any complex system or institution will require people to stand up — to leverage, and indeed stake, their social capital on holding the line, pushing back against adverse trends and leading by example. This not only has an immediate and local impact, it also helps spread awareness, provides models for others to follow and creates permission for others to stand up as well. This is why Heterodox Academy does not allow for anonymous membership; membership is a meaningful commitment precisely because it is public.

I know you won’t need the HxA Way for awhile. Your main conflicts will first arise when you don’t want to go to sleep. Then your main conflict will be that you won’t want to share your toys and you start to constantly fight with your caretakers for endless streams of candy (I know this is difficult to believe, but your quest for candy will fade as you become an adult). Eventually, you will have more sophisticated conversations with people who will disagree with you. I hope you will have lots of these conversations, because that's the only way for you to intellectually grow. And when you are ready for these conversations, pull out this copy of the HxA way to make disagreeing agreeable.

Continue ReadingChapter 12: How to Disagree with Others

How to be a Human Animal, Chapter 11: The False Dichotomy of Reason versus Emotions

Chapter 11 – The False Dichotomy of Reason versus Emotions

I have returned with another lesson for, you, my hypothetical newborn baby. This is my eleventh lesson and like many of these lessons you will be able to find in this series of what will be 100 lessons, you might find this lesson counter-intuitive. That is why I am going to discuss this topic of emotions in some detail. Let me say, though, that you have been incredibly patient with my long intense lessons and I appreciate your stamina. Then again, after all, you are only a hypothetical baby standing in for my fantasy might time-travel back to warn my younger self some of these things. On second thought, maybe I should leave my younger self alone to figure things out on his own because half the fun is in figuring it all out, right?

There is a long and false history of emotions that continues to this day. It goes like this. There is Reason over here and Emotions over there and they are completely different things even though they are both experienced, sometimes simultaneously, by each human animal. This false dichotomy goes at least as far back as the dualist Rene Descartes, who famously declared that the human mind is separate from the animalistic human body, yet they are somehow yoked together at the specific location of the human pineal gland. Descartes has been highly influential. Although he did not believe that the mind was a divine soul (and religions attacked him for this), many religions have embraced dualism, the entities denominated as the body versus the “soul.”

How is it that so many people are so convinced that the mind is not merely a physical function of the physical body? Historically, they taken educated guesses based upon the scant information that is available. Most of the thinkers weighing in on this topic did not have the benefit of critically important information. Further, most of people convinced of dualism rely on introspection, though cognitive scientists now know that introspection is not a reliable or valid way to determine what is going on "under the hood."

But let’s get back to the false dichotomy of Reason versus Emotion. This dualist approach is confidently and ubiquitously asserted by earnest looking people. This false story seems plausible because emotions do sometimes cause us to lose control. Emotions sometimes do scramble our thoughts. We sometimes need to tamp down emotions, so we can get our head clear. And sometimes, it is only after we set the emotions aside can we seemingly use Reason alone to think clearly. In my work as an attorney I have heard many people claim that it is critically important for judges to be unemotional so that they can make rational legal decisions.

Cognitive scientists almost unanimously disagree. Over the past few decades, old models of cognition that failed to consider the ubiquity of emotions have crumbled. Modern writers and scientists challenging the old models include Daniel Kahneman whose long litany of cognitive fallacies and heuristics have reshaped how we see ourselves. Kahneman’s “prospect theory," for example, has severely crimped economists’ “objective standard” of homo economicus. It turns out that we are much less logical than we’d like to believe. Even our understanding of how words carry meaning is undergoing a sea change. Mark Johnson and George Lakoff, best known for their work on conceptual metaphor, have made a strong case that meaning is thoroughly embodied—we understand meaning with our entire emotion-permeated bodies, not with dispassionate brains. The past few decades have not been kind to the long-held idea that a word can have a singular “objective” word meaning that is universal and independent of the emotion-permeated bodies that use that word.

Consider also the many insights of Daniel Goleman, found in his 1995 best seller, Emotional Intelligence. His five components of “emotional intelligence” (self-awareness, self-regulation, social skill, empathy and motivation) are key to one’s ability to succeed as an attorney.

Moral Psychologist Jonathan Haidt has painted each of us as cohabited by two personas. This moral intuitionist approach posits that our first (and most dominant) persona is a big elephant ("automatic processes, including emotion, intuition"). The second persona is a much less influential lawyer-like elephant rider, who is skilled at fabricating post hoc explanations for whatever the elephant decides, including dishing out reasons to convince others. Haidt’s approach, bolstered by many experiments, is that "Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second." In sum, “The Emotional tail wags the rational dog.” Haidt approvingly quotes philosopher David Hume who, in 1739 wrote: “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them."

Neuroscientist Antonio R. Damasio disagreed, as set forth in Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain (1994). Damasio has delivered substantial evidence demonstrating that emotions must, of necessity, permeate everything we say and do. In Descartes’ Error, Damasio turns Descartes’ model of human beings upside down (p. 128):

The apparatus of rationality, traditionally presumed to be neocortical, does not seem to work without that of biological regulation, traditionally presumed to be subcortical. Nature appears to have built the apparatus of rationality not just on top of the apparatus of biological regulation, but also from it and with it.

Failure to see this extensive integration of thought and emotion, Damasio writes, is “Descartes' error.”

What are emotions? Damasio distinguishes emotions from feelings. 

In everyday language we often use the terms interchangeably. This shows how closely connected emotions are with feelings. But for neuroscience, emotions are more or less the complex reactions the body has to certain stimuli. When we are afraid of something, our hearts begin to race, our mouths become dry, our skin turns pale and our muscles contract. This emotional reaction occurs automatically and unconsciously. Feelings occur after we become aware in our brain of such physical changes; only then do we experience the feeling of fear.”

In Descartes’ Error, Damasio introduced the cases of Phineas Gage (long dead) and “Elliot” (a living patient), who both suffered brain damage to the ventromedial prefrontal area of their brains.

Gage’s brain damage occurred when a metal tamping rod was accidentally shot through his brain during a blasting operation (he recovered and lived many years). Elliot’s damage occurred as a result of a brain tumor. They were both left with high level intellectual functioning but little ability to experience emotion.

[Gage] seemed to be like a child, with no stable sense of what was important and what was not. He was fitful, intemperate, obscene. It was as if he didn’t care about one thing more than another. He seemed bizarrely detached from the reality of his conduct. So he could not make good choices, and he could not sustain good relationships .

Elliot had been a good role model, husband and father before his tumor. After the tumor, he was:

weirdly cool, detached, and ironic, indifferent even to intrusive discussion of personal matters- as if such remarks were not really about him. He had not previously been this way; he had been an affectionate husband and father. He retained lots of cognitive functions: he could perform calculations, had a fine memory for dates and names, and the ability to discuss abstract topics and world affairs.” After surgery, “he was even less able to care about things or to rank priorities. He could stick obsessively to a task and perform it well; but on a whim he might shift attention and do something completely different. Intelligence testing showed him to be a superior intellect. His emotions were askew, though. He could no longer set priorities or make decisions. He had no sense of the relative importance of any situation.

Elliot could think but he couldn’t judge value. “[T]the cold-bloodedness of Elliot’s reasoning prevented him from assigning different values to different options, and made his decision-making landscape hopelessly flat.”

Gage and Elliot each became somewhat like “Mr. Spock.” Many people would think of this as a potentially good thing, because always-under-control Mr. Spock is one of their favorite TV characters. They also believe that emotions inevitably lead to “irrational” behavior. The conventional wisdom is that people lacking emotions would be more clear-headed and therefore capable. What happened, though, is that both Gage and Elliot suffered severe impairments of judgment. Though they both appeared intelligent after their injuries, they were completely incapable of making sensible personal and business decisions in the absence of emotions.

Damasio also studied other patients and found that people with flat affect were incapable of making decisions. He found that pure rationality is helpless to make decisions. Rational thought, devoid of emotion, paralyzes us. He found that emotions are a necessary condition to allow rational decisions to be made, even purely “logical” decisions. “Rationality” describes the way brain-damaged people make decisions. Even “our most refined thoughts . . . use the body as a yardstick.” He was convinced that the traditional views on the nature of rationality were therefore incorrect:

I had been advised early in life that sounds decisions came from a cool head … I had grown up accustomed to thinking that the mechanisms of reason existed in a separate province of the mind, where emotion should not be allowed to intrude, and when I thought of the brain behind that mind, I envisioned separate neural systems for reason and emotion … But now I had before my eyes the coolest, least emotional, intelligent human being one might imagine, and yet his practical reason was so impaired that it produced, in the wanderings of daily life, a succession of mistakes, a perpetual violation of what would be considered socially appropriate and personally advantageous.

Damasio was convinced that reason was “not be as pure as most of us think it is or wish it were, that emotion and feelings may not be intruders in the bastion of reason at all: they may be enmeshed in its networks, for worse and for better.” He found that a reduction in emotion correlates with irrational behavior. This “counterintuitive connection between absent emotion and warped behavior may tell us something about the biological machinery of reason.” The bottom line: pure reason is not sufficient for meaningful decision-making.

It is not only the separation between the mind and brain that is mythical: the separation between mind and body is just as fictional. The mind is embodied in the full sense of the term, not just embrained. The study of the mind is the study of the entire body: the neural processes that are experienced as the mind concern the representation of the body in the brain. Our minds critically depend on our human bodily existences.

Damasio asserts that “Somatic markers” comprise the emotional learning that we have acquired throughout our lives and that we then use for our daily decisions. These markers record emotional reactions to situations. Somatic markers work as emotionally-weighted indicators, steering us away from or toward choices, based on past experience. It’s not that we can necessarily recall the specific past experiences that formed our system of markers, but we feel them and they allow us evaluate some options over others. These emotion-laden markers help us to rank our options.

The brain does not merely record advance in the world but “also records how the body explores the world and reacts to it.” Even though these neurological processes may occur in various portions of the brain, people "experience and act on them in a unified coherent manner: the records that bind together all these fragmented activities "are embodied in ensembles of neurons” Damasio refers to as “convergence zones,” where

The axons of feedforward projecting neurons from one part of the brain converge and join with reciprocally divergent feedback projections from other regions. When a reactivation within the convergence zones stimulates the feedback projections, many anatomically separate and widely distributed neuron ensembles fire simultaneously and reconstruct previous patterns of mental activity.

“Brain and Language,” Scientific American, 89-91 (September 1992).

Far from being a limitation or distraction, then, emotion is an integral part of cognition. Emotion constructs and maintains the somatic markers that allow us to evaluate the desirability of our actions.

In Damasio’s view, our entire experienced world is thus filled with emotional peaks and valleys that constitute our map of what matters to us. There are no purely objective rational thoughts. Every thing on this inner map is infused with an emotional valence that pulls us toward it or pushes us away. Without this all-encompassing emotional map, no amount of analytical intelligence, not even a great intelligence, has the capacity to care about the world enough to employ logic or reasoning abilities. He makes the strong claim that not only does the intellect interweave complexly with our emotions. That is why pure rationality is helpless to make decisions and rational thought, devoid of emotion, paralyzes us.

Since I’m an attorney let’s imagine that Star Trek’s Mr. Spock went to law school, he would make a terrible lawyer because he would be at a loss to care about anything. He would further lack the capacity to know what anyone else cares about or even to care about what anyone else cares about. Even Spock’s great knowledge base and his sense of logic would leave him at a complete standstill. He would not know what to do next without an biologically-based emotion-sculpted landscape to push and pull him in various directions based on (oftentimes subconscious) survival needs.

Continue ReadingHow to be a Human Animal, Chapter 11: The False Dichotomy of Reason versus Emotions

“Race,” “News Media” and Shootings

I often use the word "race" in scare quotes because I don't believe that "race" is a useful phrase. In fact, it has caused nothing but mischief, violence and death ever since people began using the term. My position is that there are definitely some racists out there, but there is no such thing as "race." I have put the term "news media" in quotes because I have lost so much respect for so many of those organizations that claim to be bringing us the news based on numerous recent examples of a course of conduct that is more egregious than the negligence standard one might associate with journalism malpractice.

Political Scientist Wilfred Reilly is not afraid to step into the fray to state unvarnished truth. He is a former corporate executive and freedom rider, as well as author of the 2020 book Taboo: 10 Facts [You Can't Talk About].  In his introduction to that book, he states:

Tackling taboos is difficult, but necessary. Very often— MOST often— they are used not to shield strong and valid ideas from pointless attacks, but rather to protect weak ones from worthwhile criticism.

Reilly's statistics-rich discussion is now featured on FAIR's website: His article is titled, "The Broken Mirror: Media Narrative vs. Reality." The "news media" that leans politically to the Left is forcefully pushing a media is making people on the political Left unnecessarily angry (against police officers), but it should be making all of us angry (about the divisive narrative being pushed). Here is an excerpt:

In the representative year of 2018, inter-racial violent crime involving blacks and whites made up approximately 3 percent of all serious crime: there were only about 600,000 victim-reported incidents involving a black perpetrator and a white victim, or vice-versa, out of more than 20,000,000 total crimes. Further, of the violent inter-racial crime that does occur, more than 80 percent of reported incidents involved a black perpetrator and a white victim. The data tables in the 2018 Bureau of Justice Statistics Report include more than 500,000 black-on-white violent incidents, but well under 100,000 violent crimes that were white-on-black. While this finding is not necessarily surprising—there are far more whites than blacks, and whites, on average, have more money to be stolen—it would likely come as a shock to most upper-middle class Americans. As would another piece of data: according to the Washington Post, the total number of unarmed black men killed by police during the most recent year on record (2020) was not 10,000, or 1,000, but 17. That bears spelling out: in the year where America was supposedly inundated with white supremacist violence, where America was in the grips of a “racial reckoning” that included, in no small part, the acknowledgement of the “state-sanctioned murder” of young black men, only SEVENTEEN unarmed black men died at the hands of police officers.

This data leads us to an obvious question: why do so many smart people believe inter-ethnic violence is so much worse than it is? . . .Basic data about inter-racial violence often seem not merely ignored by mainstream media sources, but actively misrepresented.

In Taboo, I point out that about 75 percent of individuals fatally shot by police in a typical year are Caucasian whites or Hispanics. However, national media outlets devote less than 20 percent of their police violence coverage to these cases. A Google search for “well-known police shooting,” conducted in 2020 in connection with the book, turned up articles which covered two police shootings of Latinos, four police shootings of whites, and 36 police shootings of blacks. This level of over-representation of black victims in coverage (2,400 percent) could hardly be the result of anything but very conscious choice—and respected social scientists like John Lott have argued empirically that media treatment of a range of issues, from political extremism to mass shootings, follows a similar troubling pattern.

I'm not going to pretend that I could add anything to Reilly's detailed analysis, but reading his article did cause me to wonder whether part of the media strategy was to stir up conflict and hate, thereby selling ads and rewarding loyal followers. As I read Reilly's statistics, I can't help but think of Matt Taibbi's book, Hate, Inc., in which he argues "that what most people think of as 'the news' is, in fact, a twisted wing of the entertainment business.

At the conclusion of his article, Reilly argues that it's time for the new outlets to step up and do real journalism:

In order for our country to truly address the vestiges of racism that still exist, it’s essential that the media provide a clear and honest picture of racial relations in contemporary America.

Continue Reading“Race,” “News Media” and Shootings

How to be a Human Animal, Chapter 10: Moral Behavior cannot be Determined by Using Reason or Rules

Chapter 10: Moral Behavior cannot be Determined by Using Reason or Rules

I’m back again with more advice for a hypothetical newborn baby. This is my tenth lesson on how to thrive in the complex world.

You will be surrounded by people who insist that there are clearly defined “right” and “wrong” things. This dichotomy doesn't work very well, of course, because many things are not clearly right or wrong and sometimes they seem both right and wrong or neither right or wrong, depending on who is calling the balls and strikes. Many people will tell you that they have “figured things out” with a formula or a set of holy commandments and they will offer to help you understand what you should or should not do in your life. Your default setting should be to not trust any of these people.

Let’s start with the claim that human animals can use their “reason” to figure our right and wrong. The problem is that the brain was not designed to pursue the truth. Rather, it was designed by evolution to help us win arguments. The evidence is everywhere; reason often fails to deliver rational results—behavioral economist Daniel Kahneman won a Nobel Prize for exposing many of the heuristics, fallacies and biases—you can delve right in (after you learn to read) by picking up a copy of Thinking, Fast and Slow.

Not only is Reason often not helpful. It is often detrimental to rationality. People “systematically strive for arguments that justify their beliefs or their actions.” Reason tends to “seek justification and not truth.” Human reasoning is severely distorted by the confirmation bias, motivated reasoning and reason-based choice. Here is an excerpt from an article by Mercier and Sperber, “Why Humans Reason”:

Reasoning is generally seen as a means to improve knowledge and make better decisions. However, much evidence shows that reasoning often leads to epistemic distortions and poor decisions. This suggests that the function of reasoning should be rethought. Our hypothesis is that the function of reasoning is argumentative. It is to devise and evaluate arguments intended to persuade. Reasoning so conceived is adaptive given the exceptional dependence of humans on communication and their vulnerability to misinformation. A wide range of evidence in the psychology of reasoning and decision making can be reinterpreted and better explained in the light of this hypothesis. Poor performance in standard reasoning tasks is explained by the lack of argumentative context. When the same problems are placed in a proper argumentative setting, people turn out to be skilled arguers. Skilled arguers, however, are not after the truth but after arguments supporting their views. This explains the notorious confirmation bias. This bias is apparent not only when people are actually arguing, but also when they are reasoning proactively from the perspective of having to defend their opinions. Reasoning so motivated can distort evaluations and attitudes

So beware of the claim that reasoning will figure out what is right or wrong.

Also beware of that you can figure out morality by referring to simple principles like the Golden Rule. First of all, no, the Golden Rule wasn’t invented by Jesus (as many people will tell you). It has been around since at least 2000 BC. Please notice that there is something weird about The Golden Rule. Must we really make reference to what we would want in order to understand that we should be nice to others? Why shouldn’t the Golden Rule be shorter, something like “Be Nice” or “Don’t be a dick”?

Watch out for people who tell you that people need the promise of heaven and threat of hell in order to live a worthy life. That is a particularly insane way of looking at humanity. If you are kept in in line only by the threat of hell, you are one fucked-up person. How about just be good to others for the sake of being a good person?

Watch out for people who tell you that rules will guide you with regard to morality. Rules cannot do any such thing. If one can determine morality based on reason or rules, the people who believe in rules should please tell me: How shall I calculate the amount of money it would be appropriate to give to the next homeless person I encounter? What do the Ten Commandments say about whether to give the homeless person any money at all?

More than 2,000 years ago, Aristotle ferociously attacked the idea that rules can form the basis for any moral system. As Aristotle explained in detail, there are simply too many exceptions to even the most basic moral rules; we often kill, steal and covet in ways that are socially applauded. In order to actually apply any rule, we need to invoke (often subconsciously) a set of meta-rules for deciding when and how to apply that rule, and a meta-meta system of rules for knowing how to apply those meta rules, etc. Written sets of rules are intrinsically incomplete; they are always subject to further elaboration and explanation. The application of rules thus amounts to a fuzzy eternal regress, the end result of which is that we are actually self-legislating, though we project the rule onto our conduct as our infallible authority.

There is a modern tangible analogue to illustrate Aristotle’s concerns about the application of rules. It’s the American legal system, which relies upon thousands of common law cases to enable the interpretation of even simple-seeming Constitutional concepts (e.g., “Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech . . .”). The thousands of common law cases end up being the big tail wagging the little First Amendment dog, so much so that no one can legitimately claim to understand the First Amendment without having studied hundreds of pages of case law. In both moral dilemmas and the legal system, it’s often not a matter of simply “invoking” or “applying” a rule; rather, it’s about making sense of the rule in a particular situation after spending substantial energy to understand the rule, and then working hard to achieve an equitable result in the context of the written law.

Thoughtful people know that rules don’t guide moral behavior. Much more often, they are the post-hoc justification. Law Professor Steven Winter has studied rules at length, concluding that " there's a lot more space than we'd think in 'following the rules."'

[T]he real world of human action is too varied and complex to be captured by any set of categorical structures. It is not so much that every rule has a few comers that do not quite fit, as it is that life's diversity and complexity cannot be contained within square comers. Indeed, as long as we treat categories as rigid little boxes, any set of boxes we devise will be either too few to do like justice or too many to be workable.

Winter quotes Stanley Fish, who wrote: "Every rule is a rule of thumb."

Philosopher Andy Clark also points out the significant limitations of moral rules:

The attempt to condense [legal] expertise . . . into a set of rules and principles that can be economically expressed by a few sentences of public language may thus be wildly optimistic, akin to trying to reduce a dog's olfactory skills to a small body of prose.

Clark reconceptualizes rules as "guides and signposts" that enable collaborative exploration "rather than as failed attempts to capture the rich structure of our individual . . . knowledge." Researching prior cases provides a menu of suggestions for discussing and collaborating (through briefing and oral arguments) to attempt to resolve difficult legal issues.

We’ve barely scratched the surface of this topic. We haven’t even discussed Kant’s hopelessly flawed categorical imperative or the equally flawed theory of utilitarianism. That said, I hope I have disabused you of any temptation to explain morality in terms of “reason” or “rules.”

Beware, too, that those people who most often claim to know how to calculate morality are living lives all-too-similar to the rest of us in terms of selfishness versus altruism.

We aren’t done talking about We’ll talk more about morality later, especially Jonathan Haidt’s engaging discussions regarding social intuitionism and the multiple moral foundations.

Continue ReadingHow to be a Human Animal, Chapter 10: Moral Behavior cannot be Determined by Using Reason or Rules