Subconscious foundation of moral judgement

Wahrlich, die Menschen gaben sich alles ihr Gutes und B?ses. Wahrlich, sie nahmen es nicht, sie fanden es nicht, nicht fiel es ihnen als Stimme vom Himmel. Werthe legte erst der Mensch in die Dinge, sich zu erhalten, - er schuf erst den Dingen Sinn, einen Menschen-Sinn! Darum nennt er sich "Mensch'', das ist: der Sch?tzende … Wandel der Werthe, - das ist Wandel der Schaffenden. Immer vernichtet, wer ein Sch?pfer sein muss.

Friedrich Nietzsche? “Also sprach Zarathustra”

HABITS OF THE MIND

Suppose for a moment that making a moral judgement is in some way analogous to recognising a face of a person we knew a long time ago. It may seem strange, but please humour me for a moment. It is rather difficult to know the particulars of what makes us recognise a face that we have never seen in exactly this shape before, perhaps because it is 20 years ago that we saw this face last. We are of course presuming that the person in question does not have some very recognisable feature, like a large mole on the tip of his nose. That would give the game away.

We are also able to recognise a whole range of facial expressions, although we may not be able to state the particulars of this process. We just do it.

If routine moral judgements are made in the same way, we may not be able to give a lot of reasons for our judgements; we may just be able to state that we feel that this would be the right or the wrong thing to do. When asked why this would be right or wrong, we are unable to appeal either to universality, utility or any other criterion. To us it might be evident almost in the same way that it would be evident that this is the face of Peter.

A simpler example might involve discerning between a genuine smile and a faked smile. I suppose that almost everyone would know immediately what I mean by a genuine and a faked smile. Not that most people know anything about the muscles of face; we just say that a faked smile would be revealed by the eyes. Damasio has the story of the particulars. A smile of real joy requires the combined involuntary contraction of two muscles, the zygotic major and the orbicularis oculi. We can wilfully control the first while the orbicularis oculi is beyond wilful control. Normally we would not be able to explain that, but we recognise the effect. We see the smile of joy.

In other words, we are able to recognise faces, genuine smiles, faked smiles, chairs, sexual harassment, and make judgements on things and behaviours violating our moral sense.

To argue why this is possible we have to show the plausibility and importance of a tacit and ineffable foundation of our value judgements. We begin with the tentative list of sources for the habits of the mind outlined in this table:

THE INTERNAL CAUTIONER

Some inside cautioner warns me to stay in my place in spite of the urge I feel, like the cautioner in Baudelaire’s poem:

Each man who’s worth the name must know

A yellow Serpent is at home

Within his heart, as on a throne,

Which, if he says: ‘I want!’ says: No!’

Written rules and explicit threats of external sanctions prohibiting or limiting a certain kind of behaviour would never be able to equal the internal tacit cautioner saying “no” to me. Is this perhaps the only place where we can locate our much sought after individual sense of responsibility? We shall see.

Perhaps we may glean some insight on this internal cautioner by employing Damasio’s concept of somatic markers. Instead of committing the mistake of believing that we act as advanced electronic calculators when faced with an ethical dilemma, Damasio almost follows Dennett in believing that our minds rapidly create sketches of multiple scenarios of possible responses and actions.

In the case of an ethical dilemma, a silent patron of our minds may help us produce and evaluate the multiple fleeting sketches of possible decisions and actions, before we reason consciously about what we do. This production and evaluation seem to happen before any conscious reasoning. It comes preselected to our conscious mind. Preselected perhaps with the aid of somatic markers. A somatic marker may force “attention on the negative outcome to which a given action may lead, and functions as an automated alarm signal which says: Beware of danger ahead if you choose the option which leads to this outcome. The signal may lead you to reject, immediately, the negative course of action and thus make you choose among other alternatives.”

The important lesson we can draw is that a somatic marker may kick in, before any conscious reasoning about the problem. This marker represents a more sophisticated version of what we may call gut feeling. The unpleasant feeling that shows that we may not be comfortable with a certain decision or action. This also seems to be the reason for the name ‘somatic marker’. ‘Soma’ for body, or bodily reactions and ‘marker’ because it marks the sketches of the mind. A somatic marker may act more subtly than that, no queasy feeling in the stomach is necessary, the uneasiness may show itself in a bias that we are unaware of. It may reveal itself in no more than the expression: “I feel it would be right.”

This fits well with the way somatic markers are supposed to be created. “When the choice of option X, which leads to bad outcome Y, is followed by punishment and thus painful body states, the somatic marker system acquires the hidden, dispositional representation of this experience-driven, non-inherited, arbitrary connection.” It does not have to be punishment; many diverse experiences such as displeasure, acceptance and praise may of course lead to the creation of somatic markers, which are activated automatically before and during our reasoning process.

Somatic markers represent special feelings generated by emotions, a conditioned feeling that we have somehow learned, and which guide and restrict our judgements. We may think of them as biasing devices; they do not put us on a kind of autopilot, but subtly guide and restrict us in our judgements as well as in our actions. Somatic markers may be felt when we talk about a certain action giving us a bad taste, or a queasy feeling in the stomach. In ways we cannot individually understand and explain they signify a bias of our feelings, and there is not much we can consciously do about that.

Deacon does not talk about somatic markers, but his arguments in relation to the role of emotion in reasoning made us aware of how somatic markers may play a role in reasoning. “Powerful mental images can elicit a vicarious emotional charge that makes them capable of outcompeting current sensory stimuli and intrinsic drives for control of attention and emotion, resulting in a kind of virtual emotional experience.” During our reasoning we may thus be emotionally influenced by the images that are evoked.

It is not just any emotion that is allowed to pass through and influence actions. We are talking about conditioned feelings, feelings like embarrassment, shame and remorse. Feelings “acquired by experience, under the control of an internal preference system and under the influence of an external set of circumstances which include not only entities and events with which the organism must interact, but also social conventions and ethical rules.”

Perhaps these feelings and markers are also what compel us to act, making us feel that we have to, almost without thinking. The internal cautioner may in some cases urge us to act, in other cases put up a warning sign saying: “No way!” Any reference to Kantian principles or any calculation of pros and cons will not be enough to compel us to act.

This may bring us an accusation of subjectivism. ?Not so, there might be a kind of non-subjective common foundation for the biases and somatic markers that we possess, without being able to state explicitly what these biases are.

THE SOCIAL ETHICAL GRAMMAR

We shall argue that moral judgements are made according to what might be seen as a social and ethical grammar. Here we use both terms, social and ethical, because we want to underline the social part of this grammar, realising of course that certain parts of the grammar may be social, but not necessarily have anything to do with ethics. Table manners, dress codes and so on come to mind as something that may belong to a social grammar, but have little relevance for ethics and morals.

Perhaps our concept of grammar may have more in common with Wittgenstein’s “Sprachspiele.” In Philosophischen Untersuchungen he writes “Grammatik sagt nicht, wie die Sprache gebaut sein mu?, um ihre Zwecke zu erfüllen, um so und so auf die Menschen zu wirken. Sie beschreibt nur, aber erkl?rt in keiner Weise, den Gebrauch der Zeichen.”

A small example from Cosmides and Toby may demonstrate how such a grammar might work. We have to consider two sentence samples:

1??? If he’s the victim of an unlucky tragedy, then we should pitch in to help him out.

2??? If he spends his time loafing and living off others, then he doesn’t deserve our help.

Contrast this with:

3??? If he’s the victim of an unlucky tragedy, then he doesn’t deserve our help.

4??? If he spends his time loafing and living off of others, then we should pitch in to help him out.

I suspect that most readers would find nothing wrong with sentences 1 and 2, while sentences 3 and 4 may seem rather odd or disturbing. Why should anyone want to say something like that? In a sense sentences 3 and 4 are as good as the first two sentences. What is wrong is that sentences 3 and 4 state something that seems unjust to our moral senses, perhaps leading to us to blurt out: “This wouldn’t be fair would it?”

Presumably most people intuitively see these sentences as stating something that would be unjust. It would be seen as evident, not as something that had to or could be explained. What is happening may be analogous to what is happening when we recognise a face. We cannot tell what particulars are involved, we just recognise it. It may be in this sense that the two sentences violate an ineffable grammar of ethical and social reasoning. Our biases and somatic markers may be based on a shared social and ethical grammar, which may reveal itself in the feeling that there is something odd about sentences 3 and 4.

This is the kind of grammar that may lead us to nod approvingly at sentences 1 and 2, and to feel that there is something strange about sentences 3 and 4. It is a grammar that consists partly of overt rules and examples and partly of covert norms and predispositions, making us able to judge and act in relation to specific cases, almost in the same sense that we are able to construct sentences, without looking up explicit rules or making prolonged calculations. “In the study of reasoning, a grammar is a finite set of rules that can generate all appropriate inferences while not simultaneously generating inappropriate ones. If it is a grammar of social reasoning, then these inferences are about the domain of social motivation and behaviour; an ‘inappropriate’ inference is defined as one that members of a social community would judge as incomprehensible or nonsensical.” Or, may we add, unethical.

We assume that a social grammar would be characterised by being:

???? layered, and contingent, not derivable from simple principles;

???? shared as a collective conscience, internalised by individuals;

???? generative and non-determinative.

Layered

We presume that parts of the social grammar may be found in the explicit rules regulating and limiting the behaviour of people in a community, all the way from the Declaration of Human Rights, parts of national constitutions, via specific laws against corruption or sexual harassment, to family and personnel policies. These rules would seem to represent a surface layer of explicit ethical norms that either have or can be given a written expression.

The explicit rules of the surface layer would then represent the upper tip of a whole root-like structure of ethical norms, experiences and knowledge. When we discuss the foundations of these norms, we are in a way attempting to follow the reasoning down along the roots, trying to understand the foundation of these rules. On the intermediate level we might find vaguely defined expressions like fairness.

On the next level we argue that ethical judgements apparently involve much more than following written ethical codes and laws regulating behaviour. It involves as we have seen an internalised ethical grammar, or a set of tacit norms, and a certain level of knowledge. At this intermediate level judgements seem to relate to some vaguely defined norms that we can only talk about in a roundabout way. They are not usually written down, but are expressible in a general way, like fairness or justice. They may also be likened to the tacit rules of a moderately skilful chess player, who according to Black is “guided by memories of his own previous successes and failures and, still more importantly, by the sifted experience of whole generations of masters. The accessible tradition supplies defeasible general maxims, standardised routines for accomplishing particular subtasks, detailed models for initial deployment of pieces ... and much else.”

We can think consciously about the norms and values, and they seem to be part of our common sense. Maybe this is the level where we can locate the philosophical discussions of ethics and instances of ethical appeal. Maybe this is the level where we can find expressions like: “It is in the interest of all ... that this kind of behaviour is not condoned.” At this level we are still able to give some kind of reason for the judgements we make, although the arguments may be rather philosophical.

An even deeper level would represent the really unconscious layers of the mind, containing ethical norms and feelings, inclinations and emotions that belong to the collective unconscious.

In our conception we see no need for complete hierarchical consistency, only an overall coherence, anchored in decentralised way in the collective unconscious. There is no single overriding principle either Kantian or utilitarian, only a tacit consistency between a multitude of possible practical judgements on the surface and the deeper layers; like a linguistic grammar a social grammar is in no need of a single overriding principle. What we have instead are mutually supporting decentral elements.

According to our model Kant and Mill may respectively have distilled as it were some of the general elements that seem to belong to reasoning on the basis of these layers, but their ethical principles cannot be used the other way round to determine practical ethical judgement. This would be an attempt to make them into first principles, first principles that would tear up a much more subtle decentralised structure, in effect making them sterile and impotent as principles for judging concrete cases.

Shared and silent

Angell argues that every group of people have to share something in the nature of moral order. “People cannot work together without overt or tacit standards of conduct corresponding to their common values.” He argues that even a family would not be held together solely by mutual affection; there has to be some moral integration, consisting of shared views of what it means to be a family and what is proper conduct for family members. Perhaps this may represent what Durkheim has called the collective conscience of a society.

Here we want to emphasise something else, something we might for want of better expression call the collective unconscious. ?The unconscious part of this consists in “everything of which I know, but of which I am not at the moment thinking; everything of which I was once conscious but have now forgotten; everything perceived by my senses, but not noted by my conscious mind; everything which, involuntarily and without paying attention to it, I feel, think, remember, want, and do; all the future things that are taking shape in me and will sometime come to consciousness: all this is the content of the unconscious.”

The unconscious may partly be personal, partly shared and thus collective. We want to emphasise the collective part of the unconscious, the part that is shared across a community of individuals, and owes its existence not to the single individual but like a linguistic grammar is shared collectively.

A community would expect that the grammar they are using would be shared by everyone else in the community, so that when they act according to the grammar, they can count upon the other members of the community. We must have this implicit faith in judgement and actions of our fellow human beings or we would have no community. “A social organism of any sort whatever, large or small, is what it is because each member proceeds to his own duty with a trust that the other members will simultaneously do theirs.” In fact it is the tacit belief that others will do their part that will help create the fact that will be desired by all. Or as James would have said: “There are, then, cases where a fact cannot come at all unless a preliminary faith exists in its coming. And where faith in a fact can help create the fact …”

To use a grammar is to observe and follow a certain social habit, usage or “rule.” “Ist, was wir ‘einer Regel folgen’ nennen, etwas, was nur ein Mensch, nur einmal im Leben, tun k?nnte? … Es kann nicht ein einziges Mal nur ein Mensch einer Regel gefolgt sein. Es kann nicht ein einziges Mal nur eine Mitteilung gemacht, ein Befehl gegeben, oder verstanden worden sein, etc. – Einer Regel folgen, eine Mitteilung machen, einen Befehl geben, eine Schachpartie spielen sind Gepflogenheiten (Gebrauche, Institutionen).”

There are social limits to the values that individuals and groups can hold if the community in question has to survive as a community. This is a problem of coherence. Different groups and communities may have different grammars, but only to a certain degree, and like Cosmides, Tooby and Aitchison we assume that there are elements of a universal grammar in all the local grammars. We may guess that there has to be a certain universality in every community of people. Examples of widely held grammars or collective consciences might be the protestant ethic described by Weber as characterising a certain period in Western capitalism, while Confucianism might point to some of the basic elements of an Eastern grammar.

Generativity

We do not have to learn a preconceived set of sentences by heart, we form our own sentences. As long they are formed according to more or less tacit demands of the grammar, they may be regarded as instances of well-formed sentences. We can form sentences never heard before, and still they would be recognised as applications of the grammar. In a way it may be like playing according to well-understood general rules of a game. They define the game, but they do not define the individual actions. This shows the general generativity of a linguistic grammar. A generative grammar is thus a set of explicit and tacit rules that can be used to create new sentences, which would be regarded as well-formed and grammatical in a given language. A generative grammar will not allow the generation of sentences that are ungrammatical, meaning that they would be regarded as ill formed in a given language. Practices showing up in social habits, habitus, rituals and so on are all part the imprints left in us of the evolution of man and community.

GROSSVATERS ZOPF

Writing about our virtues, Nietzsche looks to their origin. He asks “What does it mean to believe in one’s virtue?” and whether this “isn't this at bottom the same thing that was formerly called one's "good conscience," that venerable long pigtail of a concept [Begriffs-Zopf] which our grandfathers fastened to the backs of their heads, and often enough also to the backside of their understanding? So, it seems that however little we may seem old-fashioned and grandfatherly-honorable to ourselves in other matters, in one respect we are nevertheless the worthy grandsons of these grandfathers, we last Europeans with a good conscience: we, too, still wear their pigtail.”

We still carry our grandfather’s pigtail of virtue on and especially in our heads. One may wonder whether Nietzsche already had a notion about the importance of amygdala for emotions that we cannot explain and now perhaps even virtues.

We are looking for the origin of the social grammar. Perhaps this pigtail of history and evolution shows where the social grammar originates, in the history of man’s development, in the evolution of man and of community. Parts of our social grammar may consist of remnants of values that evolved in periods during the evolution of communities that we have either no evidence or only very circumstantial evidence of.

The deepest and most durable elements of our social grammar may very well be a result of this evolution, all of it. Some of our fundamental notions of and feelings about morality will have origins hidden so deep in our evolution that we can only transmit them from generation to generation as habits and inclinations we are not even aware of, and if we are, then we cannot give any explanation for them. We may of course guess as to their possible purpose and function, but in fact it might be even more difficult to explain why we should have certain moral dispositions than it would be to explain why we have the morphology that most human beings have today. Why this relation among the different parts of our bodies and not another? Why this number of fingers, this placement of the eyes, the larynx and so on. Such a question might even sound curious, but a similar question with regard to our basic moral dispositions would sound even curiouser.

Might we not be fairly confident in assuming that, although many other configurations might have been possible, the configuration that we have is consistent and important to a degree that we may only begin to comprehend. It is not arbitrary; there is a “reason” but we may never be able to comprehend it. The “reason” has been produced and reproduced during man’s evolution, transmitted from generation to generation, leaving an echo in somatic markers, deeply held convictions and in cultural habits.

This reason is not transcendental, is not given a priori and it does not represent a decree from God. It is located on the earth, in man. Like God and the transcendental this reason has been produced by man, but we can have no recollection of the process; we may only carry the faint imprint in our feelings and reactions. This does mean that this reason is innate; it may be imprinted in other ways, and if it is hardwired in any sense it might be in the neural network of our brain. This reason acts as the field of an invisible magnet on iron particles, orientating us into patterns or into grooves that we cannot comprehend.

These patterns, grooves or imprints are ineffable and tacit, in the same way that a part of our knowledge is. We only experience the feelings, not the reasons, not the explanations. These imprints may be so much part of what it means to be human that we cannot really think about them or question them; they make themselves felt in the way they influence our thoughts. The elements of the grammar we become aware of may likewise be regarded as “natural” intuitions, natural in the sense that we suppose they are shared by other human beings.

Perhaps we assume that we may be able to learn an infinite number of social grammars, but the one we learn is the one characterising our community. In this way social and ethical grammar come to be shared among the members of a community. Like the linguistic grammar it is neither freely chosen nor arbitrary, but the result is that “human thoughts … run along pre-ordained grooves.”

It is in these “natural” imprints we locate the roots of those intuitions that philosophers have grappled with and attempted to anchor in first principles; attempts that we have to regard as rather futile in the light of our theses. If the imprints are not a result of transcendental a priori categories, or God-given commands, or innate dispositions, they have to stem from somewhere else. The imprints we are talking about seem to exist independent of any specific individual, but where do they originate, and what has kept them alive during the evolution, if they are not located in the genes?

The answer is of course the values instilled and transmitted from grandfathers to fathers, to sons and to their sons; the values instilled by a community of grandfathers – and grandmothers.

This points to the importance of symbolic representations, of rituals, of religious convictions and of ideologies This would mean that repetition of rituals, the meaning of which might elude us, would by the sheer repetition lead an individual subject to these repetitions to absorb the general aspects of the social grammar, without being able to explain what they are. This represents once again a parallel to the first acquisition of linguistic grammar. In a sense it can be said that we learn the grammar by repetitive use of a language based upon this grammar. We seem able to generalise from this repetition, but we may never have understood explicitly any of the fundamental rules underlying our use of the language. We do not learn the grammar directly by being taught social grammatical rules; we learn it indirectly from people who use it, by imitating, by approval and disapproval, expectations, praise, and so on.

The importance of ritual is also underlined in Bourdieu’s writings. His concept of habitus represents a set of dispositions that disposes an individual member of a community to judge, act and react in certain way. “Symbols are the instruments par excellence of ‘social integration’: as instruments of knowledge and communication …, they make it possible for there to be a consensus on the meaning of the social world, a consensus which contributes fundamentally to the reproduction of the social order. ‘Logical’ integration is the precondition of ‘moral’ integration.”

Social inculcation through participation in a collective practice produces habitus “that are capable of generating practices regulated without express regulation or any institutionalized call to order.” Practices showing up in social habits, habitus, rituals and so on are all part the imprints left in us of the evolution of man and community.

This essay is? based upon an excerpt? from my book? “Beyond? rules in society and business”? Edward Elgar 2002 & 2204.