DISQUS

My kind too. Stich has written some of my favorite papers in contemporary analytic philosophy.

I don't actually read Sullivan, and I can't stand Sam Harris, so I haven't really paid any attention to this debate. Clearly, Sullivan's retort to the letter was, well, stupid. But I did want to say one thing about your response. The role of religion in suicide bombings (including, presumably, the suicide attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon) is a bit more complex than Harris would have us believe, than Sullivan's reply implies, and than your reply to Sullivan takes for granted. Specifically, according to the work of Scott Atran and others (see, e.g., this paper), religion plays a much less causal role in determining who becomes a suicide bomber than most of us would (understandably) believe.

I'll be looking forward to the piece on Haidt's work. I've actually been developing some experiments on moral psychology that were influenced by Haidt's work (and that of others doing similar stuff), so I've been really into the literature lately. It's nice to see people outside of the field taking it seriously.

p.s., the reason I made a big deal out of disliking Pinker is to stress the fact that I wasn't disagreeing with Lakoff just because I dislike him (it's widely known among the people who read the blog that I dislike him). I wanted to make it clear that I disliked both the participants (professionally, not personally, though in my one meeting with Lakoff, he was an ass -- Mark Johnson, his partner in crime, is a really nice guy, though), and so the only reason I had for siding with one was because he was right, and the other was wrong. Sometimes that's not clear to everyone, in the blogworld.

I hate you! I hate you all!

OK, just kidding. No, I don't hate Will at all, and I read his blog regularly. Not being one of those people who likes to read things just to get all riled up, my reading it must mean that I find something interesting and/or insightful in it. It's true that he and I are probably pretty far apart politically (just as Razib and I are), but I don't see any reason to hate someone just because they differ politically.

Now, I do not like Pinker's work (I've only met him a couple times in person, and so I couldn't say what I think of him personally), but it's not really because of his politics. I've got cog sci friends who are libertarians and republicans, and I like them just fine. I dislike his work because I think that he, like Lakoff, has a nasty habit of misrepresenting the state of research and debate on cognitive science, particularly when it comes to his adaptationism (which is, it should always be noted, not the mainstream view in cognitive science).

Of course, you, like everyone else, have other biases that will affect your reasoning in the same way that partisan reasoning is affected. Still, every description I've seen of this work (including Westin's in this post) is an exaggeration. The research on motivated cognition has a long history, and it's consistently shown that we don't always arrive at the conclusion we want to, because sometimes evidence and argumentation overwhelm our ability to bias the reasoning process, and sometimes we're actually motivated to come to the true conclusion, rather than a prejudiced one.

"The agenda of the pomo crowd..."

Wow, with that phrase, you lose pretty much all credibility. Seriously, that's just silly. Kasser's research is flawed, and like many scientists, he draws unwarranted conclusions from it. Furthermore, it's not unlikely that his conclusions were ideologically motivated, but it has nothing to do with a "pomo crowd" attacking reason and truth. Jesus.

I suspect that Kasser (and perhaps Sullivan, though I never know how well Sullivan is at actually thinking things out) argues in his paper that there is a connection between testosterone and aggression, so that increased levels of testosterone while handling a gun will lead to increased violence. However, the relationship between testosterone levels and aggression in humans (at least adult humans) is far from clear. There are worrisome implications. Increased testosterone levels tend to make people work harder to acheive or maintain higher social status, which can lead to conflict and violence, but even here the relationship between testosterone and aggression is indirect. So you're right, the study doesn't say much, and further research would be needed to understand the relationship between gun violence and testosterone levels.

"You should do it if you think you won't get caught." - Washington D.C.

Larry, first: my ideological stance has nothing to do with the fact that, as has been well documented (including in subsequent issues of Forum), there are clear methodological problems with that study, which make it difficult, if not impossible, to explain the disparity with their data. It's also not a fact, which has nothing to do with my ideology, that they refuse to give out their data, which should make anyone think twice before citing a study for which they gave a very bare-bones description.

Second, you're right about the study you cited. In my notes, I had all of those correlations as positive. My notes were clearly wrong. Sorry about that.

Larry, it's problematic to cite the Rothman et al. study, because there are some clear flaws in their methodology, and they refuse to let others see their data. In my experience, as a psychologist, psychology departments are more liberal than engineering departments, but less liberal than anthropology departments. But my experience is pretty limited (I am only very familiar with about 15 departments, and within those departments, only with the cognitive people -- I suspect social psychologists skew more to the left than cognitive psychologists). However, I'm not sure their political ideology is really relevant to what they'd expect to find in relation to happiness and personality traits, since there's actually a substantial amount of research on that sort of thing from which they could draw.

For example a meta-analysis conducted a few years ago correlated subjective well-being with 137 different personality traits, and found that the traits most positively associated with positive affect and happiness were:
repressive-defensiveness
trust
emotional stability (duh!)
locus of control-chance
desire for control
hardiness
positive affectivity (duh again)
private collective self-esteem
and tension

Repressive-defensiveness, desire for control, and trust just happen to be traits associated with lower tolerance for ambiguity and dogmaticism, two of the traits associated with conservativism in the papers I linked before.

Oh, the citation is:
DeNeve, K.M., & Cooper, H. (1998). The happy personality: a meta-analysis of 137 personality traits and subjective well-being. Psychological Bulletin, 124(2), 197-229.

Will, it'd be interesting to do the research, anyway. Are people with lower openness to experience (and so on) happier? Like I said, I don't think psychologists would be surprised to find that they are.

Will, I read about this poll earlier, and immediately began wondering about the connection between self-reported happiness and some of the psychological traits associated with conservativism. I was thinking, in particular, of this study, of which I'm sure you're aware. There have been some objections to the research described in that paper, in the literature, but the research has stood up to further tests designed to handle those objections (e.g., the studies in this paper). The question would then be: do lower tolerance for ambiguity, uncertainty avoidance, and lower openness to experience, along with the other traits associated with the "rigidity of the right" hypothesis, somehow lead to greater happiness? I honestly don't think psychologists would be surprised to find that, in most cases, they do.

I'm no ethicist, and I'm certainly not qualified to judge between different ethical theories, so I can't really say how vulgar and absurd utilitarianism really is. However, the fact that we generally don't think in a way consistent with utilitarianism (or as Greene's data actually shows, only think that way under certain circumstances) really is irrelevant. To see why, consider your two points:

1. Ought implies can. Certainly, but nothing about the neurological or behavioral data implies "can't" about anything with regard to utilitarianism. We can reason like utilitarians, and we can even act on that reasoning (that reasoning can influence our behavior). Perhaps in certain contexts we don't automatically do so, but then again our automatic judgements/behaviors in many contexts are downright unacceptable (consider racism and other forms of discrimination as examples). What is automatic, and what is possible (and even internalizable) are not coextensive. Nothing about the data implies that utilitarianism is impossible, or even all that difficult.

2. Authority. Your second point loses its force when the first one does. It is true that, at least for American psych/neuro experimental subjects, utilitarianism isn't the default way of thinking in impersonal situations. However, neither are many of the rules of various religious, social, and civil institutions, which many see as authoritative without any difficulty. The point is, inconsistency with our innate dispositions doesn't necessarily make some trait or behavior pattern difficult to acquire, or difficult to see as authoritative. Just ask vegetarians.

It appears that the primary reason that broad utilitarian ethical arguments don't fit with our intuitive moral reasoning has to do with the fact that we reason quite differently about "personal" and "impersonal" ethical dilemmas. This, at least, is what the work of Joshua Greene has shown. In his experiments, he presents people with dilemmas that involve some personal contact with a victim (e.g., you're driving down the road and you come upon a severely injured person) or no personal contact (e.g., you receive a letter from a charity about starving children in South America). The dilemmas with which you're faced in the personal and impersonal situations are otherwise highly similar, and from a utilitarian perspective, they are identical. Yet people will all say they should help in the personal situation, but that helping is optional in the impersonal situation.

While this does show that we don't think like good utilitarians, it certainly doesn't argue against utilitarian ethical theories. I certainly wouldn't want to make any theoretical decisions about how we ought to act in those situations based on people's intuitions. Greene himself argues that the argument from the science of moral reasoning to ethical theory is a non sequitur, and I agree.

I suspect that Miller is using a definition of luck that is similar to Nagel's in his work on moral luck. Under that definition, any factors that influence an outcome, but which are not under your direct control, are luck. And there's something to be said for that definition. While it is certainly true that you are where you are now do to the quite deliberate actions of many people (you, your parents, your teachers, friends, etc.), the fact that you are where you are instead of dead and buried, or in rehab, is also influenced by semi-random factors that are beyond your control, or the control of anyone who's purposefuly stearing you in a certain direction.

To run with your analogy, consider a bridge built in an area that is highly flood-prone. The bridge was built to stand (and perhaps even to withstand large amounts of fast-moving water), but it is luck that there so far has not been a flood of sufficient strength to knock it over (or that in the last flood, some of the debris that could have knocked it over missed it or was snagged up river). The fact that the bridge is still standing, or that you are where you are today, is contingent on a lot of things, many of which are related to the effort to arrive at that place, but many of which are not.

A thorough account of why certain people are in certain positions would include luck and effort/design. Is it luck that you were born into the family that you were? In a certain sense yes, because it was an extremely improbably event, but in another sense no, because you couldn't have been born to any other family. Is it luck that your parents, teachers, etc. worked hard to get you where you are? To a certain extent yes, in that events beyond their control could have conceivably made it difficult or impossible for them to do so, but also no, because they were designed to do exactly that.

Perhaps if the word "luck" is so bothersome, you might just call it "contingency," and recognize that some contingencies are out of the control of you and those who want to build you in a certain way.

You might find interesting, and I guarantee you will find educational, some of the recent work on goal systems and valuation. While it doesn't really speak to modularity (most of the work assumes a domain-general goal system with learned domain-specific representations), it certainly speaks to how we reason about values, and how context and domain may effect that reasoning. Two papers in particular may serve as good starting points, as they present fairly extensive literature reviews along with theoretical discussion. They are:
Kruglanski, A. W., Shah, J. Y., Fishbach, A., Friedman, R., Chun, W. Y., & Sleeth-Keppler, D. (2002). A theory of goal systems. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 34, 331-378.

Markman, A.B., & Brendl, C.M. (in press). Goals, policies, preferences, and actions. To appear in F.R. Kardes, P.M. Herr, & J. Nantel (Eds.) Applying Social Cognition to Consumer-focused Strategy. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

You might also find the now fairly extensive literature on protected values informative. It speaks more directly to the differences in the types of reasoning used for what we consider fungible and what we do not. The best place to start is with this paper:
Baron, J., & Spranca, M. (1997). Protected values. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 70(1), 1-16.

However, this paper is much more recent and has conclusions that may be more relevant to certain philosophical issues concerning moral reasoning:
Tanner, C. & Medin, D.L. (In Press). Protected values: No omission bias and no framing effects. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review.