Socrates' biopolitical science

Plato’s Gorgias begins with a scene that could borrow the soundtrack from Westside Story.  Gorgias, a famous orator, has just demonstrated his talents before an audience at the house of a wealthy and powerful Athenian politician named Callicles.  The two are standing with a third trained orator, Polus, as people do after the show is over, when Socrates and his entourage approach.  You can easily imagine Socrates’ student Chaerephon and whoever else is with them‑Plato? Xenophon?‑snapping their fingers in rhythm with the swing of the orchestra.  The first word of the dialogue is Πολέμου, the Greek word for war.

Socrates engages in three dialogues, with Gorgias, Polus, and then Callicles.  A lot of the next two thousand years of the history of philosophy play out before your eyes.  I concentrate here on his conversation with Polus. 

Polus has been trained in the art of persuasion.  He believes that this art can empower him to convince anyone of anything.  That means that he can convince a jury of his or anyone else’s innocence regardless of the evidence.  He has a get out of jail free card. 

Why is such a power valuable?  To Polus, it is obvious: you can abuse, rob, or kill anyone you want to.  He thinks everyone would want such a power and is charmed by the thought that he, unlike almost everyone else, possesses it.  The power to kill without regard to justice is his treasure. 

Socrates destroys Polus with a simple disjunctive syllogism.  He asks Polus which is better: to do injustice without paying a penalty or to do injustice and suffer the penalty?  Polus insist that the first is obviously better than the second.  So far, so good.  Then Socrates asks which is more disgusting?  Polus admits the obvious.  To do injustice and get away with it is disgusting. 

It seems that Polus could hardly deny it.  His name is pronounced almost the same as polis, the Greek word for the political community.  How do we, the people of this polis‑Athens, the United States of America‑see it when we think that someone has done a terrible thing and gotten away with it?  We are disgusted. 

The Greek word for disgusting is αἴσχιον.  It indicates both moral and physical ugliness.  It is frequently translated as “shameful” or “foul.”  Socrates points out that if something is αἴσχιον it is either unpleasant or bad for you or both. 

I offer my own illustrations.  Spoiled meat is unpleasant and bad for you.  Reattaching a severed finger by the application of leaches is disgusting enough, but good for you if it works.  Shooting heroin is the very opposite of unpleasant; it is, however, disgusting because it is very bad for you. 

Since killing with impunity is not unpleasant to the murderer at least, it must be bad for you.  You shouldn’t do it, if you know what you are doing. 

Here is the disjunctive syllogism.  If killing without penalty is disgusting, then either it is unpleasant or it is bad for you.  It isn’t unpleasant to kill without penalty (it’s exquisite! Polus insists).  Therefore; it is bad for you. 

1.       (D É (U Ú B))

2.      D

3.      (U Ú B)

4.      ~U

5.      \ B

If you don’t follow the symbolic logic, take my word for it.  This is a logically valid proof.  If the premises are true, the conclusion is inescapable.

At this point I can introduce a little biosocial science.  The same part of the brain that is engaged when we sense something physically disgusting‑running sores or spoiled meat‑is engaged when we view something morally disgusting‑someone abusing a child or cheating a friend.  If the one clearly functions to help us avoid what is bad for us, it is likely that the latter functions the same way. 

Today I read a study by Tom R. Kupfer and Roger Giner-Sorolla: Communicating Moral Motives: The Social Signaling Function of Disgust, from the journal Social Psychology and Personality Science.  The results of the study indicate that when someone expresses disgust in reaction to some moral violation such as cheating a friend, she is signaling to others that she cares about moral principles and is prepared to join others in enforcing them.  That is good for her because it attracts other similar partners.  It is good for us, because it makes it possible for us to trust one another and so cooperate more effectively.

At some point in our evolutionary history, our biological capacity for disgust was harnessed by our evolved psychological mechanisms for cooperation.  Doing injustice without paying a price may be good for the individual in the short run but it is bad for the political community and therefore bad for its members in the long run. 

Socrates didn’t know about evolution.  He understood the truth about justice and injustice perfectly.  Only now is modern science catching up to him. 

The Moral Instincts of Infants

The Washington Post has an excellent piece with a provocative title.  “The disturbing thing scientists learned when they bribed babies with graham crackers”, by Ana Swanson, does not quite deliver on its title.  If anything, I think, what the scientists learned is the opposite of disturbing.  It does, however, deliver a fine summary of a very interesting study.  Moreover, it is bristling with links to scholarship on the subject, including the study it focuses on. 

The study, “Costly rejection of wrongdoers by infants and children,” by Arber Tasimi and Karen Wynn (Cognition 151 (2016) 76–79), came out last month.  It begins by placing the study’s focus in context. 

From infancy to adulthood, humans exhibit an aversion to individuals who treat others poorly. Even in the first months of life, infants reject agents who behave badly (Hamlin & Wynn, 2011; Hamlin, Wynn, & Bloom, 2007, 2010), and before their first birthday, not only avoid wrongdoers themselves, but expect others to do so as well (Kuhlmeier, Wynn, & Bloom, 2003)…

Here we ask about the strength of this aversion: Is it sufficiently powerful to lead people to resist one of the most alluring aspects of everyday life: profit?.

In a range of studies, children show a tendency to dislike persons who harm other persons.  This aversion emerges very early in life, even before the emergence of linguistic ability.  It is thus unlikely to be learned behavior and it is certainly not taught behavior.  Tasimi and Wynn conducted two experiments to measure whether infants and older children could be bribed to suppress this aversion to wrong doers. 

In the first experiment, one hundred and sixty children ages 5 to 8 were shown photographs of two fictitious benefactors Craig and Max.  Children randomly assigned to the baseline condition were told nothing else about the benefactors.  Then they were invited to accept a prize (stickers) from one of the two.  The offers were unequal.  Some of the children were offered one sticker from one benefactor and two from the other.  Some faced a one to four choice, others a one to eight choice, and others a one to sixteen choice.  The fictitious identities were randomly switched to control for name (or face?) preference. 

Not surprisingly, the children almost always chose the better offer.  Who wouldn’t?  That established a baseline measure: what the children would choose when they knew nothing about Craig and his buddy. 

Children randomly assigned to the character-information condition were presented with the same two fictitious persons but were also told that one of the two benefactors was mean.  He hit someone on the playground.  The other is always nice.  He hugged someone on the playground.  Then the children were divided into groups and faced the same assortment of offers: 1:2, 1:4, 1:8, and 1:16.  The contrast with the baseline condition was striking.  Fewer than 25% of the children accepted the offer of the mean benefactor when the offer was one to two.  Fewer than fifty percent accepted the offer from the mean person when the cost was one to four or one to eight.  Only in the case of a one to sixteen contrast did a majority of children make a deal with the devil.  The results were still slightly lower than the baseline results. 

The children were willing to pay a significant cost to deal with the do-gooder rather than the wrong-doer.  At the very least, this suggests that the children liked the one and disliked the other.  It may suggest that this is a case of altruistic punishment.  The subjects were willing to pay a personal cost to inflict a cost on a transgressor and to reward a helper.  Perhaps this is the same thing.

In the second experiment, the subjects were sixty-four 12 to 13 month old infants.  In this case the competing benefactors were rabbit puppets identified only by their orange or green shirts.  The prizes were graham crackers.  The same controls were instituted, with the rabbits switching shirts.  This time the distribution was either one to two or one to eight.  As in the first experiment, a baseline condition was tested and again the infants preferred more crackers to fewer. 

The children assigned to the character-information condition watched as one rabbit assisted a lamb puppet in opening a box to get at something the lamb wanted.  The other rabbit then slammed the box closed, frustrating the lamb.  The infants preferred the gift of one cracker from the good rabbit when the cost was one to two.  They held their nose and dealt with the bad rabbit when the bribe increased to eight over one. 

As I said earlier, I think that this is the very opposite of disturbing.  It suggests a robust moral instinct that emerges before the infants can talk or engage in “reputation management.”  The older children may have been worried about what the experimenter would think about their choices, but the infants were too young for that.  They just didn’t like what they were seeing when they saw the bad rabbit reveal herself.  To quote the authors:

The current findings show that a willingness to pay personal costs to avoid transactions with wrongdoers is an early-emerging and fundamental aspect of human nature. Our study contributes to a growing literature uncovering the origins and nature of social preferences, and extends this work by highlighting the psychological significance of social assessments to young humans.

This tells against the social science model according to which we are born amoral that morality is simply a social construct.  It appears that in fact we are by nature moral animals.  That is an important finding.  That children can be bribed is not.  They are not little angels any more than adults are. 

I think that there are profound consequences for ethics in this study.  Sacrificing self-interest for the sake of justice is both beautiful and good.  We may admire individuals who cannot be purchased at any price, and such persons frequently emerge as heroes in our literature.  The character of John Proctor in The Crucible comes to mind.  He ultimately sacrifices his life rather than confess to a lie.  That is beautiful.  And yet…

Do we really want our morality to be that inflexible?  Maybe.  Maybe not.  Here I am instructed by that moral authority, my beagle.  Bella knows that when I walk to her bowl with a scrap of food, she has to sit before she gets it.  I suppose I could easily teach her to wait before I say ok to gobble it up.  It’s a good thing that dogs can internalize such rules.  It made the alliance between our canine and human ancestors possible and so richly rewarding for both.  Beagle socialization reveals the primitive form of evolved psychological mechanisms that underwrites human morality. 

It would not do, however, for the beagle to be too good.  I wouldn’t want her to starve to death with food in front of her just because I wasn’t around to bless her meal.  So her evolved social instincts compete with her evolved appetite.  When she gets hungry enough, she will throw caution to the wind. 

By way of analogy, suppose that one of my loved ones is kneeling in a line of hostages.  A gunman is going down the line asking each person “are you an American?”  He shoots anyone who says yes and leaves unharmed anyone who says no.  What would I want my loved one to do?  I say lie.  Despite what John of Patmos says about liars, and despite my view that lying is immoral, I would prefer that self-interest trump righteousness in this case. 

If self-interest seems unimportant to you, then consider this scenario.  An SS officer is at your door asking you if you have seen any Jews in the neighborhood.  The truth is that you have.  There are six of them hiding in your basement.  I would argue that telling a lie in this instance is not only morally permissible, it is morally obligatory. 

We might wish that human beings were incorruptible, but probably we should not.  That would make us like the ants, blindly following rules with the capacity to deliberate.  Our corruptible nature is one of the costs of being genuinely moral beings.  

Lockean Monkeys

Locke was closer to the truth than Hobbes.  That is not a surprising sentiment coming from an American; even less so coming from an American patriot.  The United States is a Lockean regime.  It was founded on principles derived explicitly from Locke’s political thought and more or less explicitly on a rejection of Hobbes’ account of politics.  I would argue, however, that modern biopolitical research is backing up John more than Thomas. 

Both Hobbes and Locke began with the early modern assumption that human beings are by nature individual animals and that human society is largely an historical artifact.  All our instincts, in so far as we have any, are those of a creature as naturally asocial as a bear.  Human social life is as artificial as umbrella: it is something we cobbled together to meet our needs.  This is a mistake.  We were social long before we were genuinely human. 

Hobbes supposed that we were and remain perfectly amoral and selfish in our motivations.  What makes us dangerous to one another, when we come together in social groups, is precisely that selfishness combined with a distrust of one another.  Government is necessary to force us to suppress these selfish mutually hostile inclinations and cooperate with one another.

Locke recognized that we also possessed a sense of justice.  When someone transgresses on my rights I am offended.  I am offended even when I observe some transgressing against a third party in a case where my own interests are not involved.  It is this sense of righteous indignation that makes us most dangerous to one another.  We may pursue retribution beyond any selfish interest and, if the perceived offender believes he is the one who has been wronged, we become locked in a cycle of retribution.  That is what necessitates the formation of governments.  Only by turning over such disputes to an arbitrator can we resolve them without perpetual war. 

This question, whether pure selfishness is the motivation or whether there is a moral or proto-moral motivation has been playing out in primate studies.  I have been digesting a lot of research on capuchin monkeys.  Brown capuchins are “known to engage in rich cooperative behaviors… and more consistently exhibit other-regarding tendencies in donation tasks than chimpanzees.”  That is, in experiments where one individual must cooperate with another to reap a reward (food), capuchins seem more concerned with what the other partner is getting or not getting. 

In experiments modeled on the ultimate game, the capuchin subject must decide whether to pull a lever that will distribute food to herself and a conspecific partner.  When the distribution is unequal-the subject receives less food or a lower value food, the subject will often refuse the distribution.  At first glance, the subject appears to be acting out of sense of fairness.  If I can’t get what’s coming to me, then no one gets anything.  But is this right?

The subject may be motivated by inequity aversion, a distaste for unfair distributions.  Let us call that the Lockean motive.  However, a lot of research indicates that the real motive may be simple frustration.  The subject wants the greater share or the better reward and rejects the distribution because of a frustrated desire.  Let us call that the Hobbesian motive. 

Capuchin researchers have parted along the Lockean/Hobbesian divide.  Franz de Waal and his associates began the argument with a series of studies that pushed the Lockean interpretation.  In response, other researchers made the case for the Hobbesian-frustration interpretation.  I thought that the balance was tilting against the Lockean side until today. 

Kristin L. Leimgruber et. al., have a report in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior [37 (2016) 236-244] that tells for the Lockean view: “Capuchin monkeys punish those who have more.”  Here is the abstract:

Punishment of non-cooperators is important for the maintenance of large-scale cooperation in humans, but relatively little is known about the relationship between punishment and cooperation across phylogeny. The current study examined second-party punishment behavior in a nonhuman primate species known for its cooperative tendencies—the brown capuchin monkey (Cebus apella). We found that capuchins consistently punished a conspecific partner who gained possession of a food resource, regardless of whether the unequal distribution of this resource was intentional on the part of the partner. A non-social comparison confirmed that punishment behavior was not due to frustration, nor did punishment stem from increased emotional arousal. Instead, punishment behavior in capuchins appears to be decidedly social in nature, as monkeys only pursued punitive actions when such actions directly decreased the welfare of a recently endowed conspecific. This pattern of results is consistent with two features central to human cooperation: spite and inequity aversion, suggesting that the evolutionary origins of some human-like punitive tendencies may extend even deeper than previously thought.

These findings present a decidedly Lockean monkey.  It isn’t just that I, capuchin that I am, am not getting what I want.  It’s that the other hairy fellow is getting more, dammit.  

Capuchin monkeys are more distantly related to John Locke than chimpanzees.  Spite and inequity aversion are part of our emotional pallet that go beyond self-interest.  A purely selfish individual doesn’t care what others get; she only cares what she gets.  An animal who is genuinely offended when a distribution is unfair is a moral animal.

I think it is clear that human beings are Lockean animals.  If capuchin monkeys are as well, that suggests that morality is older than we are.  As the trajectory of evolution pushed into primate design space, it opened up the dimension of genuine moral consciousness. 

Biology & Political Ethics

I am writing a chapter in a forthcoming Handbook of Biology & Politics.  My chapter will focus on Biology & Political Ethics.  Here are some first reflections on the topic.  

Political Ethics concerns the field of right and wrong behavior in a political context.  As is common with term ethics, it can indicate both ethical behavior in politics and the study of such behavior.  Modern political ethics as a field tends to focus on the distinction between public and private morality, with the former indicating the actions of any political officer from a chief executive down to a voter or jury member, and the moral evaluation of policies.  Classical political ethics (Plato and Aristotle) tended to gravitate between two perspectives that were presented as complete in themselves: the political community (or polis) as a whole, which consisted of classes, villages, families, and citizens, and the individual as a whole, whose life involved such roles as husband, father, friend, citizen, solider, etc. 

In the light of that distinction, a problematic becomes visible for anyone wanting to write about biology and political ethics.  The classical political philosophers understood human beings to be political animals.  Every actual polis was in some sense artificial‑the work of particular human beings acting at a particular time. Moreover, the life in a polis made affordable more pleasures and leisure than biological necessity required, and so and so taught human beings to desire such things.  Nonetheless, the tendency to form political communities is as much an expression of human nature as the formation of the pack is an expression of lupine nature. 

The early modern political philosophers, by contrast, understood man as a solitary animal by nature.  Political institutions are artificial, the result of human inventiveness applied to the inconveniences of nature.  They allow human beings to conquer both human and non-human nature, but have as much to do with biology as a bear taught to ride a bicycle.  This has been the dominant view of moral and political thought until very recently.

To argue that biology has something to offer political ethics is thus to side with the ancients against the moderns.  I am inclined to think that this is inevitable but it doesn’t mean that it is possible or necessary to reject the history of work in modern political ethics.  It does mean that we must reinterpret it. 

Ethics is about morality.  Morality is an existential dimension of the human being, along which possible choices are arrayed between those that are obligatory, those that are forbidden, and those that are neither.  Because it involves a choice between possible actions, the right is a subspecies of the good.  The good is the choice worthy.  Whenever something‑an objection or action, a state of mind or physical experience, is worth choosing, to that degree it is good.  Thus the healthy is good and the unhealthy bad.  When something is simply good, there is reason to choose it and no reason not to choose it, then morality is not involved.  There is no ethical weight.  Often, however, there are some reasons to choose something and some reasons to avoid choosing it and it is necessary to weigh the one against the other.  Often enough, one is tempted to do what one ought not to do, which is to say that what looks good is not the same as what is really good.  Whenever that happens, morality is involved.  That is what Ethics is about. 

Human beings may be more than animals but we are at least animals.  However marvelous our powers of conscious deliberation may be, they are elaborations of mental schema that are much older than our species.  The dilemmas that other animals face are the result of a tension between distinct evolved inclinations.  The coyote wants the bait but has learned to be wary of the trap.  Human beings are social animals and many of our moral emotions have been fashioned by natural selection to encourage cooperation.  Not all of our evolved psychological mechanisms encourage cooperation and some of them are designed precisely to avoid the costs of cooperation or to allow us to cut and run when cooperation collapses.  We are, as my sainted Grandmother put it, a piece of work. 

When we act politically at any level we are employing the capacities with which our evolutionary history has provided us.  No matter how artificial our political institutions and processes may be, we are still political animals making choices.  Political ethics cannot be understood without rooting it in human biology. 

Genuine Morality 3

I have a paper slowly taking shape in my thoughts, many of which are in these posts.  The paper would argue 1) that Darwinian explanations of cooperative behavior can support a genuine conception of morality and 2) that such a conception will be Aristotelian and perhaps even Platonic in character. 

Here I am thinking a bit more about the question of what constitutes genuine morality.  I can see three approaches to the question that focus entirely on the moral action without regard to moral consciousness. 

One holds that an action is genuinely moral if it accords with a prescribed list of moral actions.  The prescription presumably requires some authority.  The authority may come from tradition or from the fact that it is held sacred by the tribe or is issued from the members of the tribe that speak with authority.  It may come, of course, from some more or less divine legislator.  Thus it is moral to obey my father because “honor your father” is an authoritative prescription and obedience is a necessary form of such honoring. 

In this view, all that matters is the consonance between the action and the prescription.  Thus someone might be considered a perfectly observant Jew if he perfectly keeps the commandments, even if he is an atheist and keeps the commands out of some kind of ethnic pride.  Likewise, Oedipus is in deep trouble because his actions violate proscribed rules even though he himself had no idea that he was doing wrong. 

A second view is that of utilitarianism, which holds that an action is right if its beneficial consequences outweigh any harmful consequences.  Returning a wallet full of money to the proper owner is right if it is better for each of us if people behave that way.  It is largely irrelevant whether the person returning the wallet does so because he has a sense of personal honor or because he hopes to be admired for his display of honorable behavior. 

Third is my argument concerning the moral logic of an action.  In a case where a number of actors will benefit from cooperation but are tempted to cheat, cooperating is the right thing to do.  It doesn’t matter in this account whether the actors are conscious of the moral import of their actions or whether they are conscious at all.  Cleaner fish and the predators whose jaws they clear of parasites are involved in a relationship which is logically moral, though I doubt that they experience anything like guilt or righteous indignation.  Even computer programs can play games which are logically moral. 

I think that all three of these accounts bring something to the table.  We often judge behavior solely by a set of rules, if only for practical reasons.  Morality is surely utilitarian, as much of moral behavior is necessary for the smooth functioning of social interaction and cooperation.  Likewise I regard moral logic as something like one of Socrates’ ideas: a pattern that is written up, if not in heaven, at least in a larger ledger than human law. 

It seems obvious, however, that something is lacking in all three.  If the first were a complete account, then someone who doesn’t eat shellfish because he is allergic to it would be just as moral as someone who declines because of God’s commandment.  The person who saves someone from a burning house solely because he hopes to build a reputation that will serve him in the next election seems scarcely moral in the same way as someone who acts because he cares about other people more than himself.  A computer program can behavior morally only in the most robotic sense. 

Here the notion of genuine morality helps make sense of Divine Command theory and supports the Biblical notion of God.  Why, one might ask, should we do as God or the gods command?  The most obvious answer is that we should do so for the same reason that we ought to drive the speed limit when we are being followed by a state police vehicle: guns and dungeons.  The obvious problem with that answer is that it reduces moral behavior to merely self-interested exchange and all of us to well-policed scoundrels.  If I do the right thing only because I desire heaven and fear hell (even if the right thing involves merely a silent confession of faith) I am simply making a deal with a powerful partner. 

In the Biblical view, God is by definition the perfect lawgiver.  I may win an eternal reward by faith, but I believe and act in accord with that belief because what God commands is necessarily the right thing to do.  Doing what God commands solely because God commanded it, and not for any benefit that may come to me or others thereby, strikes me as a more mature version of the Jewish faith.  St. Paul was willing to sacrifice his own salvation for the salvation of the gentiles, or so he wrote. 

A satisfying account of human morality needs to be consonant with our moral emotions.  These tell us that the motive for an action is key to its moral character.  We want our spouses and parents and children and friends to provide us with attention but we also want them to genuinely love us.  We are more suspicious of apparently moral behavior when it has an ulterior motive than we are of openly immoral behavior. 

Understanding the evolutionary origins of the moral emotions can help us understand why motives are essential to morality.  A partner who is genuinely motived by a sense of justice will be more reliable than one who acts out of mere expediency.  A community of people who nurture and enforce moral rules out of a genuine moral consciousness will inherit the earth. 

While Darwinian theory can explain why we are capable of and admire genuine moral behavior, it cannot quite tell us why such behavior is genuinely admirable.  That will require some consultation with Plato and Aristotle.