The Edge Conference on the New Science of Morality, Conclusion

The resistance of orthodoxies, secular as well as religious, to freedom of thought and the advance of human knowledge did not end with the persecution of Galileo and Giordano Bruno. As a species, we are predisposed to react with hate and hostility to the “out-group,” the “others” whom we perceive to be different from and a potential threat to our own “in-group.” Now, however, we live in a radically different world from the one in which the wiring in our brains responsible for such behavioral traits evolved. The boundary between our own “in-group” and the “others” is now as likely to be defined by ideas as by geographical features that separate the next group of hunter-gatherers from our own. As a result, furious hatreds accompanied by violent warfare have been spawned by now long-forgotten differences over such things as the role of images in religious belief, or the details of the ritual associated with the sacrament of Communion. In fact, human history is incomprehensible unless one grasps the significance of this in-group/out-group behavior of ours, sometimes referred to as the Amity/Enmity Complex. It is one of the more interesting phenomena of our own day that recognition of this most obvious and most inconvenient of all truths itself became one of the defining markers of the “out-group,” and a threat to the belief system of an ideological in-group that had gained control of and managed to impose its own orthodoxies in psychology, anthropology, and several other fields of scientific inquiry.

The hypothesis that innate mental traits or “human nature” plays a significant role in mediating human behavior has been around since long before the days of Darwin. However, beginning in the 1960’s with the popular works of thinkers like Robert Ardrey and Konrad Lorenz and continuing with the publication of “Sociobiology” and “Human Nature” by E.O. Wilson in the 1970’s, recognition of the significance of innate behavior gained a much wider acceptance. Such ideas were, however, a direct threat to the ideological orthodoxies then prevailing in the academic and professional communities. Those communities reacted in the time-honored fashion of human “in-groups” in all ages to this challenge from the “others;” with hatred, irrational hostility, and demonization. I will discuss the manifestations thereof in a later post. For now, suffice it to say that, unlike differences of opinion over whether Christ was the real or adopted Son of God, controversies over the factors that impact human behavior can be informed by the observation of repeatable experiments. In a relatively short time, the ideological orthodoxy of the 60’s and 70’s regarding human nature was buried under a mountain of facts. In the resulting paradigm shift, culminating only in the last decade or so, the profound impact of the innate on human behavior has finally gained general acceptance.

In a sense, however, the old defenders of the faith in “nurture, not nature” were right. The hypothesis of innate human behavior was a direct threat to their whole belief system. Then as now, by their own admission, the expert communities in psychology, sociology, anthropology, and related fields occupy ideological ground that is substantially left of center. They are predominantly, if not exclusively, characterized by an implicit or explicit belief in legitimate, objective good, more or less vaguely characterized by terms such as “human flourishing” and “human brotherhood,” and by a perception that they should play an active role in guiding the rest of us towards “the good.” However, once the significance of the innate on human behavior has been accepted, it follows that the evolutionary origins of these aspects of our nature must be accepted as well. It is quite obvious that they did not evolve because they had a “purpose,” and that “purpose” was to promote “human flourishing” in a world radically different from the one in which they evolved. It is also quite obvious that they evolved for reasons that had nothing to do with promoting the ideological goals of self-described “liberals” in the 21st century. Those facts have and will continue to have a highly corrosive effect on the belief system of the academic and professional experts who specialize in the study of human behavior, and particularly those who focus on that aspect of our behavior that comes under the general heading of morality.

In previous posts I have discussed the impact of all this on the thought of nine representatives of this expert community who were the keynote speakers at a recent conference on “The New Science of Morality.” As we have seen, all of them, whether explicitly or not, recognize “the good” as a real, objective, thing in itself, independent of what goes on in the brain of any individual human being. As any good Christian or Moslem could tell them, there is no logical basis for this faith of theirs in “the good.” The fact that they believe in it anyway is a testimony to the power of the emotions associated innate human morality in creating the perception of something real where none exists.

The result has been a kind of remarkable doublethink. The role of the innate on human morality is accepted, but it comes with the chimerical belief that, against all odds, those innate qualities of the human brain can be adjusted at will to achieve the kind of “human flourishing” that is the goal of latter day ideologues. The phenomenon was clearly in evidence at the Edge Conference. The keynote speakers all revealed their perception of “the good” as a real thing, and several of them spoke of morality as an adjustable tool for achieving “the good,” going so far as to speak of this form of toying with innate human behavioral traits as “moral progress.” There was an atheist who based his argument on the real existence of moral good on his own capacity for pious indignation, and a professor of psychology who asserted that morality exists to promote the better working of “the system” in the 21st century. A great deal of attention was paid to experimental evidence of innate human “kindness” and “niceness,” and commensurately little to the possibility that hatred, aggression, and demonization of “others” might also be behavioral traits with innate origins. It will be recalled by those who were around at the time that these were the aspects of human behavior that thinkers like Konrad Lorenz and Robert Ardrey, who were generally recognized by the professional community at the time as the most significant and articulate proponents of the importance of innate factors in human behavior through the 60’s and early 70’s, wanted to draw attention to. It turns out that, as far as innate influences on human behavior are concerned, they were right, and the professional community of experts was wrong. Under the circumstances, it would seem unwise, if not foolhardy, to dismiss their hypotheses about those aspects of human behavior that aren’t “nice” out of hand.

One finds grounds for optimism that the prevailing illusions about “moral progress” will not be supportable for long in the remarks of the three speakers whose remarks we have not yet discussed. For example, psychologist Paul Bloom discussed experiments designed to explore the emergence of innate “niceness” in very young children and even babies, before such behavior can be taught or acquired via culture or environment. Among other things, he described the ability to infants to distinguish “good guys” from “bad guys” as early as six months of age. He notes work by others that points to the conclusion that “kindness” is “part of our hard-wired inheritance.” However, he is not quite so optimistic. As he puts it:

Our minds have evolved through processes such as kin selection and reciprocal altruism. We should therefore be biased in favor of those who share our genes at the expense of those who don’t, and we should be biased in favor of those who we are in continued interaction with at the expense of strangers. Also, there is now a substantial amount of developmental evidence suggesting that this kindness that we see early on is parochial. It is narrow. It is applied to those that a baby is in immediate contact with, and does not extend more generally until quite late in development.

After citing some experimental work in support of this conclusion, he continued:

This shouldn’t surprise us. Maybe it’s even better than we could have expected. The dominant trend of humanity has been to view strangers – non-relatives, those from other tribes – with hatred, fear and disgust. Jared Diamond talks about the groups in Papua New Guinea that he encountered. And he points out, for an individual to leave his or her tribe and just walk into another, strange tribe would be tantamount to suicide.

It is noteworthy that Diamond, who is nothing if not politically correct by the standards of the current time, could have so casually written something like this. If he’d said it 45 or 50 years ago, anathemas would have reigned down from him on all sides, and he would have been dismissed as a heretic. As for Bloom, he continues,

So there’s a puzzle, then, because the niceness we see now in the world today, by at least some people in the world, seems to clash with our natural morality, which is nowhere near as nice. How did we end up bridging the gap? How have we gotten so much nicer? Note that I’ve been focusing here on questions of our kindness to strangers, but this question could be asked about other aspects of morality, such as the origin of new moral ideas, such as that slavery is wrong or that we shouldn’t be sexist or racist. These are deep puzzles.

It seems a great deal less puzzling to me. It can only be puzzling if you ignore the obvious fact that, as human culture and human knowledge have expanded and these new kindnesses have emerged as the ancient, innate and virtually unchanged human emotions associated with moral behavior have found expression in the new environmental context, new hostilities have evolved right along with them. The kindness of the French revolutionary proponents of human rights came with the guillotine, and the kindness of the universal brotherhood of Communism came with the deaths of tens of millions of class enemies. Now we see the kindness Bloom seems to so admire in our own day associated with furious hatred and hostility directed by the political left at the members of the Tea Party movement, representing a substantial proportion of the citizens of the United States and openly expressed desires for the deaths of prominent political opponents like Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity.

Psychologist David Pizzaro discusses the influence of emotions in shaping what may seem at first glance to be judgments based on reason, focusing on the role of disgust. As he put it:

We’ve shown that disgust sensitivity, that is, people who are more likely to be disgusted, over time end up developing certain kinds of moral views. In particular, we’ve shown that not only are people more political conservative if they’re more disgust sensitive, but they specifically are more politically conservative in the following ways: they tend to adhere to a certain kind of moral view that the conservative party in recent years in the United States has endorsed, that’s characterized by being against homosexuality and against abortion.

Pizzaro goes on to consider the emotional component of liberal as well as conservative beliefs, thereby obliquely undermining the notion that they are logically consistent and legitimate. As any medieval churchman could have told him, such thoughts lead to heresy. We must hope they will do so in the future as they have in the past.

Philosopher Joshua Knobe begins his talk as if he’d been asleep for the last half century:

So far we have been talking about questions in moral psychology. So we’ve been talking about the questions: How is it that people make moral judgments? Do they make moral judgments based on emotion or reason? Is it a capacity that’s just learned or is it something that’s innate?

However, he goes on to describe recent work by philosophers that entailed leaving the ivory towers of pure reason and actually conducting experiments. The result:

But what’s really exciting about this new work is not so much just the very idea of philosophers doing experiments but rather the particular things that these people ended up showing. When these people went out and started doing these experimental studies, they didn’t end up finding results that conformed to the traditional picture. They didn’t find that there was a kind of initial stage in which people just figured out, on a factual level, what was going on in a situation, followed by a subsequent stage in which they used that information in order to make a moral judgment. Rather they really seemed to be finding exactly the opposite.

What they seemed to be finding is that people’s moral judgments were influencing the process from the very beginning, so that people’s whole way of making sense of their world seemed to be suffused through and through with moral considerations. In this sense, our ordinary way of making sense of the world really seems to look very, very deeply different from a kind of scientific perspective on the world. It seems to be value-laden in this really fundamental sense.

These, too, are conclusions that are fundamentally at odds with the notions of objective good and “moral progress.”

It would seem, then, that based on the sample we have been considering, while comfortable orthodoxies still prevail in the world of “expert” opinion about morality, general acceptance of the fact that innate, emotional components play a very significant role in moral behavior must inevitably undermine those othodoxies as long as freedom of inquiry prevails. There is room for optimism. Heretics will appear, as they always do, and will start doing experiments and studies of brain function that will demonstrate and establish the less “kind” aspects of human moral behavior. It is to be hoped that this happens sooner rather than later, and when it does, the “experts” will realize that attempts to foster “human flourishing” by manipulating human moral behavior are not only doomed to failure, but will continue to be extremely dangerous, as they always have been in the past.  If we really want to flourish as a species we would do well to finally learn to understand ourselves.  After a long struggle with obscurantist ideologues, we have finally gained general acceptance of the significance of the innate in human nature, but we seem to balking at the next logical step.  We have a marked preference for studying the “nice” and “kind” in human behavior, and ignoring the “not so nice.”  It is time we pulled our heads out of the sand, because unless we thoroughly understand the darker side of our nature, we will have no chance of controlling it.  In a world full of nuclear weapons, the need seems rather obvious.  It’s hard to flourish if you’re dead.

The Edge Conference on the New Science of Morality, V

I have discussed the Edge Conference on the New Science of Morality in previous posts (here, here, here and here). In our last episode, we discussed Sam Harris’ assertion that real good and real evil exist independently of the conscious minds of individuals, citing as proof his own virtuous indignation. We will now consider the impact of the very recent acceptance by the bulk of the expert community of the profound impact on human behavior of innate, hard-wired predispositions and behavioral tendencies, focusing on the general area of morality. In fact, it has been remarkably limited. The field is still dominated by the same WEIRD (from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic societies), primarily (by their own description) leftist academics and professionals who reigned during the heyday of the behaviorists and, once again, their ideology has severely constrained the discussion. In particular, the origins and reasons for the existence of moral behavior continue to be ignored, the implications of innate aspects of human behavior that are not considered “morally nice” are being glossed over, and “moral progress” is being discussed as if innate moral behavior evolved, not because it promoted genetic survival but because it was nature’s “purpose” for mankind to stride forward triumphantly to the current leftist version of a utopia characterized by “human flourishing.” Meanwhile, oddly enough, implicit belief in “real objective good” and “real objective evil” continues, free of any rational basis.

All this should not be too surprising. The people we are talking about have always had a strong conviction of their own moral righteousness, and of the legitimacy of insisting that everyone else on the planet share their notions of good and evil. To give up such beliefs, irrational though they are, would mean abandoning their “in-group” and leaving the comfort of the ideological box they live in. That is not something human beings have an innate inclination to do.

The next speaker at the conference, psychologist Roy Baumeister, provides us with an interesting data point on how the logical implications of innate moral behavior are suppressed in favor of a world view in which “progress” towards the Brave New World favored by the current generation of self-described liberals becomes “natural.”

Of course, there is always the incongruous fact that innate moral predispositions evolved at a time when Baumeister’s Brave New World was unheard of, at a time of social and cultural existence utterly different from the present. Baumeister dispenses with this inconvenience by calling it a bad name; “reductionism.” “Reductionism” is a pejorative term used among scientists and academics, as free of actual meaning as terms like “fascist” or “socialist” in the current world of politics. In this case, it means something like, “One who believes that innate predispositions are a ‘Theory of Everything,’ discounting culture, education, and environmental effects on human behavior.” It is not recorded that any serious thinker ever held such a belief. The first speaker, Jonathan Haidt, put together a whole string of similar jargon to establish his academic gravitas in his introduction:

I just briefly want to say, I think it’s crucial, as long as you’re going to be a nativist and say, “oh, you know, evolution, it’s innate,” you also have to be a constructivist. I’m all in favor of reductionism, as long as it’s paired with emergentism.

It is not recorded that the scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project ever used the terms nativism, constructivism, reductionism, or emergentism. Remarkably, the atom bomb worked on the first try in spite of that.

In any case, having dispensed with the effect of innate predispositions on moral behavior by calling it “reductionist,” Baumeister continues with a talk that sounds as if it was coming straight from the lips of a 1960’s “culture is everything” behaviorist. For example,

I’m convinced that the distinctively human aspects of psychology, the human aspects of evolution were adaptations to enable us to have this new and better kind of social life, namely culture. Culture is our biological strategy. It’s a new and better way of relating to each other, based on shared information and division of labor, interlocking roles and things like that.

Here, as he does repeatedly later in his talk, Baumeister alludes to the same phantom that appears in all the other talks. There can be no “better way” unless there is an objective standard for “better.” The objective good-in-itself has, once again, made its appearance. Meanwhile, Baumeister has replaced evolution in individual animals with a social Darwinist theory of “human evolution” that promotes, not the survival of individuals, but “a better kind of social life,” which can be relevant only to groups. Continuing with his quasi-behaviorist (or should I say “reductionist”) emphasis on culture, he writes,

…morality is the set of rules to enable people to live together. It serves the purpose of making the culture work, as culture depends on cooperating with each other, there’s trust, shared assumptions, things like that.

It’s getting fuzzier all the time, isn’t it? Suddenly, innate moral behavior has been “reduced” to a “set of rules.” It “serves a purpose.” A “purpose?” Who’s “purpose” would that be? In Baumeister’s remarks, as in those of all the other speakers, destructive manifestations of human behavior such as warfare are studiously ignored. Apparently we are to believe, with the behaviorists, that innate behavioral traits haven’t the slightest thing to do with it. It’s a mere cultural aberration, evidently caused by incorrect environmental influences.

Why people have to do moral things in practice is because of concern with their reputation, and it’s based, therefore, on long-term relationships.

Here Baumeister tips his hand, abandoning the very notion of hard-wired morality. We don’t act morally because of any innate predisposition to do so, but “because of concern for our reputations.” Once again, he uses the term “moral” in the sense of “objectively good.”

Continuing with his social Darwinist notion of morality, he introduces the notion of the “moral muscle,” by which we exercise “self-control.”

That is why we’ve called self-control the moral muscle. I’m going to unpack that and comment on both parts. It’s moral: self-control is moral in the sense that it enables you to do these morally good things, sometimes detrimental to self-interest… So that’s the moral part of the ‘moral muscle’, it’s a capacity to enable us to do these moral actions, which are good for the group, even though overcoming this short-term self-interest.
Here, again, we find the “moral good” defined as a valid and legitimate thing in itself, which exists for “the good of the group.”

Baumeister next proceeds to illustrate what he means by “the good of the group” for those too dense to “get it” without being beaten over the head.

And perhaps even more, to get to what’s human, you have to have a third party saying no, you got more than this one and that’s not fair, and intervening to redistribute, as happens all over the world in human societies.

Is it starting to dawn on you where we’re heading here? Let me spoon feed it to you:

Morality is the full-fledged sense, and I’m going with the cultural materialist view that culture is a system that basically has to provide for the material and social needs of the individuals. And so it regulates behavior for that, and morality comes with it, in a full-fledged sense, comes with culture. Tells people what to do to override their self-interest, and at least their short-term, and to follow the system’s rules. The system works, and because of that we all live better, but we all have to cooperate to a significant degree in order for the system to work.

So, you see, if you fight against the “system,” impairing its ability to “redistribute,” you are objectively “immoral.”  From the expression of emotions associated with innate behavioral traits, morality has been transmogrified into a “set of rules,” interpreted rationally with the aid of “self-control,” thereby better adapting us to serve a “system” in which “third parties” take resources from us and give them to those they consider “more deserving,” for what they have decided without consulting us is our own “good” in the interests of “human flourishing.”  Is it really necessary for me to point out that evolved emotional traits that predispose us to behave in certain ways have nothing whatsoever to do with such an arbitrary and artificial “set of rules?”  Those innate traits are what they are and will remain what they are regardless of anyone’s opinion, no matter how enlightened, concerning what they “should” be in order to make the “system” work better.  That is not “reductionism,” nor does it imply in any way, shape or form that our destiny is dictated by our genes.  If morality really is the expression of innate mental traits, it is merely pointing out the obvious.  I have no problem with the possibility and potential advisability of devising and adhering to sets of rules that, by general agreement, promote the common welfare.  Other than recognizing that it exists, and that its effect on human behavior must be taken into account, however, morality should not be conflated with these rules assuming we really want to reach the goals they are devised to promote.

In a word, dear reader, we are far from being out of the woods yet. We have made great progress, finally gaining general acceptance of the reality of hard-wired behavior in human beings, but the academic experts and professionals are still very effective gatekeepers in this field of study so critical to the fate of us all, and they continue to blind themselves (and us) with notions of objective good and morality as a tool for social control to make sure we “progress” towards that objective good. Meanwhile, I see no Konrad Lorenz or Robert Ardrey on the horizon ready to throw a salutary bomb in the mix. Let us hope for the best and press on.

The Edge Conference on the New Science of Morality, IV

Morality is the behavioral expression of innate and fundamentally emotional traits hard-wired in the human brain. The variety and complexity of moral behavior is increasing with extreme rapidity, at least in terms of evolutionary times scales, as the physical characteristics of the brain responsible for the emotions relevant to morality, which have changed little if at all in the last 10,000 years, interact with the vast cultural and environmental changes associated with, among other things, the spread of mass education, instant international communication, and the emergence of modern states and other mass social groups in creatures, such as ourselves, with a sufficiently high intelligence to actually think about moral behavior. This has resulted in the remarkable variety of behaviors and beliefs associated with morality we see today, including the arousal of furious passions over “goods” and “evils” attributed to a variety of social groups, beliefs, and ideologies that didn’t exist and were, therefore, utterly irrelevant at the time that the traits associated with morality evolved.

The fundamental nature of morality, including the fact that evolved, innate traits are responsible for its expression, and that they quite as capable of evoking hatred, rage, and aggression as they are of inspiring empathy, self-sacrifice, and love, has been evident to our best thinkers almost since the days of Darwin. However, it is a testimony to the extreme difficulty we have in reasoning about things as much a part of us as our emotions that the communities of scientific and academic experts in the fields such a psychology, anthropology, and sociology that are most closely associated with the study of questions related to morality have been unable to keep up. For the most part, they subscribe to secular or spiritual religions and ideologies that are defined by pronounced judgments about distinctions of “good” and “evil,” even though those categories can have no real existence as other than subjective mental constructs. As a result, acceptance of a fact as obvious as the association of morality with innate mental traits and predispositions was furiously resisted and successfully repressed for decades by orthodoxies such as behaviorism that better accommodated those ideologies. General acceptance of the fact that morality is the expression of hard-wired mental traits has only occurred in the last decade or so, but only after being forced on the grudging community of “experts” by the rapid accumulation of new evidence from a variety of fields that was too compelling to be ignored.

One would think it rather obvious that, if morality is the expression of mental traits evolved eons ago at a time when our consciousness and social existence were radically different from what they are today, and if those mental traits only exist because they promoted genetic survival in those long bygone days, rational beings would dismiss the idea of “updating” it and applying it willy-nilly to modern realities out of hand as doomed to failure and, in view of disastrous outcomes of applying such “updated” moralities observed in the 20th century in the cases of Nazism and Communism, potentially self-destructive. We are, however, not rational beings, and our faith in our own intelligence is highly exaggerated. As a result, we have not seen the advent of a new Age of Reason. Rather, old moral certainties have merely been superficially updated to accommodate new realities.

The Edge Conference on the New Science of Morality has presented us with a case study of how this has worked out in practice in the case of experts who are members of what have been termed WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) societies. As we have seen in the cases of three of the nine keynote speakers we have looked at so far, none of them are in the least bit dubious about applying morality, touched up here and there around the edges, to deal with modern realities, they believe in the notion of “moral progress,” and they have an implicit belief in good and evil as valid, legitimate things in themselves, somehow existing on their own, independently of the consciousness of individual human beings. In a word, when it comes to morality, we are far from being out of the woods.

In examining the remarks of some of the other speakers, we will see the same phenomenon repeated, including the most explicit attempt by any of the nine to justify faith in “legitimate” versions of good and evil, and an interesting example of how the behavioral traits associated with morality are “adjusted” to fit the Procrustean bed of new “goods” and “evils” required by WEIRD ideology.

First on the list today is fellow atheist Sam Harris. Sam doesn’t limit himself to merely implicit acceptance of WEIRD morality. He positively embraces it, proclaiming a fervent belief in a “moral truth” that he suggests is discoverable using the latest scientific technique. According to Sam, we must “think about moral truth in the context of science,” in order to “maximize human well-being.” He deems it “obvious” that “we need some universal conception of right and wrong.” However, as he sees it, there is an “impediment” in the way of our search for “moral truth.” In his words,

…most right-thinking, well-educated, and well-intentioned people – certainly most scientists and public intellectuals, and I would guess, most journalists – have been convinced that something in the last 200 years of intellectual progress has made it impossible to actually speak about “moral truth.” Not because human experience is so difficult to study or the brain too complex, but because there is thought to be no intellectual basis from which to say that anyone is ever right or wrong about questions of good and evil. My aim is to undermine this assumption, which is now the received opinion in science and philosophy.

It’s hard for me to understand the basis for such a preposterous claim. Consider, for example, the following statement by another speaker, Jonathan Haidt:

The problem is especially serious in moral psychology, where we all care so deeply and personally about what is right and wrong, and where we are almost all politically liberal. I don’t know of any Conservatives.

This, based on my experience, accurately represents the true state of affairs. Whatever their conclusions about the “intellectual basis” for good and evil, almost all of the people Harris is referring to are convinced ideologues, and moralists to the core. Furthermore, they see eye to eye with him about what good and evil “really” are. Read any history of the United States that has come out of these circles in the last 20 years. Does it contain no moral judgments? Can anyone point out one of these “right-thinking, well-educated, and well-intentioned people” whose work isn’t larded with morally loaded “shoulds?” Have the neuroscientists suddenly discovered that no emotional response can be detected in their brains to the names “Sarah Palin” and “Rush Limbaugh?” Journalists? Are you kidding me? Has any one of them of any note recorded in the history of the last 100 years been so much as capable of writing a book not characterized by a determined effort to make sure the reader can distinguish the “good guys” from the “bad guys?” Are not such “public intellectuals” as Harris’ fellow atheists Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens passionately devoted to their own versions of good and evil? I personally would certainly agree that there is no intellectual basis from which to say that anyone is ever right or wrong about questions of good and evil, but, at least in terms of drawing any actual consequences from that conclusion, it seems to me that if I were thrown into a bag with a random assortment of “scientists, public intellectuals, and journalists,” I would be a distinct anomaly in that respect.

Be that as it may, Harris assures us that he is prepared to defend claims to “moral truth in the context of science.” And how are we to recognize “scientific moral truth?” By the fact that it promotes genetic survival, which is, after all, the only reason that morality exists to begin with? No, unsurprisingly, Harris is in full agreement with the other speakers regarding what is “really good.” It is that which “maximizes human well-being,” and “human flourishing,” as understood by self-described political liberals in the early 21st century.

We soon find out what kind of scientific proofs Harris has in mind to establish the verity of his moral truths. They amount to evoking morally linked emotions in a group of ideologically similar individuals and daring any of them to step outside the ideological box they live in by denying they feel those emotions or that they are not elicited by the kinds of evils Harris evokes. Some examples of his scientific technique:

In 1947, when the United Nations was attempting to formulate a universal declaration of human rights, the American Anthropological Association stepped forward and said, it can’t be done. This would be to merely foist one provincial notion of human rights on the rest of humanity. Any notion of human rights is the product of culture, and declaring a universal conception of human rights is an intellectually illegitimate thing to do. This was the best our social sciences could do with the crematory of Auschwitz still smoking.

Just imagine how terrifying it would be if the smartest people around all more or less agreed that we had to be nonjudgmental about everyone’s view of economics and about every possible response to a global economic crisis.

I don’t think you have enjoyed the life of the mind until you have witnessed a philosopher or scientist talking about the “contextual legitimacy” of the burka, or of female genetic excision, or any of these other barbaric practices that we know cause needless human misery.

And so on. In other words, Harris’ “proof” of the legitimacy of “moral truth” amounts to demonstrating that he can elicit similar moral emotions in a group of like-minded individuals. This is less than compelling evidence of what he proposes to prove.

In closing, Harris plays a clever game with the word “value:”

The truth is, science is not value-free. Good science is the product of our valuing evidence, logical consistency, parsimony, and other intellectual virtues. And if you don’t value those things, you can’t participate in the scientific conversation. (not, at least, if Harris is gatekeeper) I’m saying we need not worry about the people who don’t value human flourishing or who say they don’t. We need not listen to people who come to the table saying, “You know, we want to cut the heads off adulterers at half-time at our soccer games because we have a book dictated by the Creator of the universe which says we should.” In response, we are free to say, “Well, you appear to be confused about everything. Your “physics” isn’t physics, and your “morality” isn’t morality.” These are equivalent moves, intellectually speaking. They are borne of the same entanglement with real facts about the way the universe is. In terms of morality, our conversation can proceed with reference to facts about the changing experiences of conscious creatures. It seems to me to be just as legitimate, scientifically, to define “morality” in this way as it is to define “physics” in terms of the behavior of matter and energy. But most people engaged in the scientific study of morality don’t seem to realize this.

Here, Harris evokes emotion as before, in this case in response to the beheading of adulterers, and then conflates two different definitions of the word “value.” In one case, it is the utilitarian value of doing good science to accomplish some desired end. For example, the technique used to create the atomic bomb was “valuable” in that sense, because the goal was achieved; the bomb went off. Emotion had nothing to do with that fact. It would have gone off whether its creators had strong emotional feelings about the utilitarian “values” they used to create it or not. In the second case, the “value” referred to is an emotional value. In its origins, it has not the slightest thing to do with “human flourishing.” Such emotional values, innate in their origins, are not infinitely malleable to promote “human flourishing” or whatever other utilitarian goal Harris might have in mind, and they come inextricably linked to another “value” – hatred directed at those who prefer, or seem to prefer, some other value. In other words, Harris would have us believe there is no difference between the means that are rationally chosen to achieve some goal and innate human emotional responses that have proven time after time after time to be incredibly bad means of achieving the social goals he has in mind. It’s as if Nazism and Communism never happened, as if precisely the same sort of desire for “human flourishing” didn’t give rise to them, and as if all that’s needed in the future to avoid their incredibly destructive outcomes is merely to tweak our method of discovering “moral truth” a bit. I have an alternative suggestion. Next time we want to promote “human flourishing,” let’s leave morality and all its associated passions out of it.

In our next installment, we will examine the remarks of the remaining speakers to see what rather remarkable adjustments to morality are required to promote human flourishing in the 21st century. Earlier posts on the Edge Conference can be found here, here, and here.

The Edge Conference on the New Science of Morality, III

This post is a continuation of my comments on the talks of the nine keynote speakers at the Edge Conference on The New Science of Morality.  In the last episode, I discussed the first of the speakers, psychologist Jonathan Haidt, noting that, while he described morality as a “consensual illusion,” he nevertheless revealed a belief in an objective, transcendental good, legitimate in itself.  That belief was implicit in comments such as the suggestion that we should  

… study moralities that aren’t our own, to consider, to empathize, to think about them as possibly coherent systems of beliefs and values that could be related to coherent, and even humane, human ways of living and flourishing,

Haidt’s attachment to the “true good” of “human ways of living and flourishing” is entirely emotional, is reinforced by the assumption that his listeners feel the same way, and is left to float in logical thin air.  Indeed, of all the speakers, only neuroscientist Sam Harris seems to be aware that he has bought into the notion of “objective good.”  As we shall see, his attempts to establish a rational basis for his belief is itself based on emotional appeals.  However, before moving on to Harris, let’s consider how the same phenomenon manifests itself in the remarks of two of the other speakers, Joshua Greene and Marc Hauser.

Greene opens his comments with the intriguing comment that, “…my real, core interest is in this relationship between the ‘is’ of moral psychology, the ‘is’ of science, and the ‘ought’ of morality.”  Referring to Haidt’s theory of moral “taste receptors,” he remarks,

I think, really, the biggest question is, are we going to rely on our intuitions, on our instincts, on our taste receptors? Or are we going to do something else? Now, some people might deny that there really is a “something else” that we can do. I disagree. I think we can.

This begs the question of what goal, exactly, it is that we are pursuing that we are to rely on either our intuitions or “something else” to achieve, and why should we care to reach that goal.  In any case, Greene then develops his camera analogy of moral behavior, according to which we can sometimes operate in “automatic mode,” allowing our “taste receptors” to do the work, but must sometimes switch to “manual mode,” to achieve a “good” outcome.  Again, if Greene thinks there is any reason to establish exactly why it is that this “good” outcome is really good, he doesn’t reveal it in his talk.  According to Greene, “manual mode” will become increasingly necessary to achieve a “good” outcome.  By “manual mode,” he means “…careful, controlled, moral reasoning,” noting that, “…moving forward, and dealing with the unique modern problems that we face, I think moral reasoning is likely to be very important.” 

An obvious problem here is that “moral reasoning” is an oxymoron.  Morality is the expression of innate behavioral traits that evolved in times completely unlike the present.  Those traits are fundamentally emotional in nature.  As the Communists and many others have discovered to their cost, they can’t be “trained” with “reason” to reach some arbitrary goal.  Their expression can have a significant dependence on culture and experience, but the basic emotional substrate will not change, and is anything but infinitely malleable.  Rationally, there can be no justification for even dragging morality into the mix in solving complex problems regarding how to achieve commonly agreed on goals in the modern world.  The only explanation for the fact that we continue to do so is that we “feel” that we “should.”  Greene has no problem grasping the fact that, “…we’re too quick to use our point-and-shoot morality to deal with complicated problems that it wasn’t designed, in any sense, to handle.”  However, like all the others, he balks at the next logical step.  He can’t bear to detach himself from morality entirely, even to solve “unique modern problems.”  It would shake his entire world view, with its implicit assumption of moral superiority, to its foundations. 

He must hold on to “the good” at all odds.  We know that Greene has grasped some obvious truths about the relevance and legitimacy of morality in the modern world from comments such as,

I think that rights are actually just a cognitive, manual mode front for our automatic settings. And that they have no real independent reality. This is obviously a controversial claim

and,

The way I like to put it is that, it would be a kind of cognitive miracle if our instincts were able to handle these problems.

No matter, in the end, “the good” still beckons.  His final sentence reads,

And a better future may lie in a kind of geeky, detached, non-intuitive moral thinking, that no one finds particularly comfortable, but that we’re all capable of doing, regardless of where we come from.

A “better future?”  By what standard is one future “better” than another?  Greene doesn’t explain.  He assumes his audience “feels” the same way he does about a “better future,” and he is probably right. 

We find the same artifacts of the “true good” in the remarks of evolutionary biologist Marc Hauser.  Like Greene, he cites the significance of the distinction between “is” and “ought”;

I think that a lot of us who have been working in this area are interested in the connection between the is and the ought.

That may be, but almost none of them, including Hauser, dare to touch the subject more than superficially.  Instead, like many of the others, he spends most of his time discussing examples of moral behavior, either anecdotal, or based on his own or others’ research results.  No matter, manifestations of his faith in the “true good” aren’t hard to find.  He tells us that, “Many of us do all sorts of things that are at least somewhat morally wrong.”  (by what standard?)  In a discussion of environmental manipulations for children he says,

But here again, we are uncovering these mechanisms which are, in many ways, pushing us towards very significant ethical/legal issues, where the findings are pushing up on the doorsteps of what we should do, what we ought to do, and how can the information discovered be integrated into these ethical issues?

If there is no “true good,” and no objectively legitimate morality, the above statement is meaningless, because there can be no standard upon which to base such decisions.  Hauser does not claim he knows what the standard is, but, to make such a statement, he must have faith that it exists.

So far, then, all the speakers have revealed an implicit faith in the “true good,” but none of them have seriously attempted to establish why the “true good” is valid and legitimate.  All of them suggest that we must construct some kind of a moral system for making complex decisions affecting large numbers of people, but none of them seriously attempts to explain why, given what we know about morality, it should play any role at all.  As we shall see in our next episode, Sam Harris is the only one who does, in a rather revealing way.

The Edge Conference on the New Science of Morality, II

As mentioned in an earlier post, the recent Edge conference on The New Science of Morality was addressed by nine eminent speakers who together represent a reasonable sample of current thinking on the subject in scientific and academic circles. Their remarks reveal a fact that has been abundantly obvious for some time; that the ideologically driven orthodoxy of the “Not in our Genes” school admirably described by Steven Pinker in his book, “The Blank Slate,” has been largely abandoned in favor of general acceptance of innate or “hard-wired” human nature, including human moral behavior.

By its own account this milieu is primarily to the left of center and “progressive” in its political outlook. Their conservative and religious critics have had no difficulty grasping an obvious implication of these recent adjustments to their world view; these self-described “secular liberals” have abandoned any rational claim to the objective legitimacy of moral distinctions, or on the existence of good and evil as other than subjective constructs of individual human minds. I might add that they have never had a basis for such a claim, even in the heyday of the “blank slate.” Now, however, it’s more obvious than ever. Regardless, as we shall see, in every case their remarks reveal an implicit belief in an objectively valid and legitimate morality. This faith of theirs in something for which there can be no rational justification is a remarkable demonstration of the power of innately driven and fundamentally emotional moral judgments over the human consciousness.

To study the phenomenon in action, let’s begin dissecting the remarks of the nine speakers. The first was University of Virginia psychologist Jonathan Haidt. Like many of the speakers who followed him, Haidt discussed his own scientific work, centered around what he calls Moral Foundations Theory, which “specifies a small set of social receptors that are the beginnings of moral judgment.” He likens these to taste receptors for sweet, sour, bitter, etc., and identifies the five most important of them as “care/harm, fairness/cheating, group loyalty and betrayal, authority and subversion, and sanctity and degradation.” I will leave it to future generations of geneticists to document where, if at all, these “moral receptors” appear in the human genome. In developing his taste metaphor, Haidt cites a variety of famous thinkers and authorities from days gone by. In doing so, he sticks to the most sound and approved remarks of the most sound and approved thinkers, a pattern that will repeat itself with the remaining speakers. It is essential to establish and maintain academic gravitas in this milieu, and novelty or wandering off the reservation in the choice of authorities is therefore assiduously avoided. In Haidt’s case, the list includes Mencius, unlikely to raise any eyebrows outside of China, and David Hume, currently in high fashion as an early proponent of innate human nature.

Haidt goes further than any of the other speakers in explicitly recognizing the consequences of morality understood as the manifestation of evolved, hard-wired behavioral traits. In his words,

So, as I said, morality is like the Matrix. It’s a consensual hallucination. And if we only hang out with people who share our matrix, then we can be quite certain that, together, we will find a lot of evidence to support our matrix, and to condemn members of other matrices… I believe that morality has to be understood as a largely tribal phenomenon, at least in its origins. By its very nature, morality binds us into groups, in order to compete with other groups.

But wait! Before you conclude that Haidt “get’s it,” and has managed to get his mind around the reality that morality is the manifestation of evolved traits that exist because they promoted our survival under conditions that existed in the misty realms of our prehistory, read on. Without missing a beat, Haidt goes on to discuss the possibility that the various types of morality may be “right” or “wrong,” and concludes,

And as I said before, nearly all of us doing this work are secular Liberals. And that means that we’re at very high risk of misunderstanding those moralities that are not our own. If we were judges working on a case, we’d pretty much all have to recuse ourselves. But we’re not going to do that, so we’ve got to just be extra careful to seek out critical views, to study moralities that aren’t our own, to consider, to empathize, to think about them as possibly coherent systems of beliefs and values that could be related to coherent, and even humane, human ways of living and flourishing.

And so Haidt wanders back off into the swamp in search of the “true good,” which, although none of mankind’s greatest thinkers has quite managed to capture it yet, in spite of thousands of years of trying, is apparently “coherent, humane” (whatever that means), and promotes what I suppose we are to understand as the objectively justifiable “goods” of “living and flourishing.” As we shall see, Haidt is not unique in attaching transcendental moral significance to such vague notions as “living and flourishing,” nor is he unique in never cutting to the chase and explaining why we should take his word for it that such things are “legitimately good.” It is just one of those things that are “intuitively obvious to the casual observer.”

In later posts we will examine further artifacts of this implicit belief in the “true good” among the remarks of the remaining speakers, and consider the future ramifications thereof in our quest to better understand ourselves.

Internet Bias and the Amity/Enmity Complex

Articles about the tendency of ideologues to gravitate to like-minded sites on the Internet, creating a bubble around themselves that shuts out alternative points of view, have been popular of late. As noted in this example by educator Gregory Ferenstein, the residents of these bubbles tend to evince a high level of hostility towards outsiders. Recent examples cited in the article include Sarah Palin (no kiddin’?) and Andrew Breitbart. The phenomenon is certainly real, as any habitué of the Internet can attest, and is an excellent example of the Amity/Enmity Complex in action. Unfortunately, to see the connection, you have to be willing to admit the possibility that such a thing as the Amity/Enmity Complex actually exists. It does exist, as all human history demonstrates, but, for all the progress we’ve made recently in demonstrating the innate origins of human morality, that blatantly obvious fact is one that the current generation of scientific and academic experts continues to studiously ignore. By and large, they are believers, either implicitly or explicitly, in the “moral progress” of mankind, hoping against hope that the atavistic behavioral traits associated with the expression of morality in humans can be successfully tricked into guiding us all to a brave new world of “human flourishing.” It ain’t gonna happen, the Amity/Enmity Complex is one of the primary reasons why. They can continue to ignore it, but it isn’t going anywhere.

Let’s assume we all agreed to establish “human flourishing” as a common goal. To achieve that goal, wouldn’t a useful preliminary step be to acquire understanding of ourselves as we really are, and not as we want ourselves to be in an ideal world? The Complex has induced us to fight countless irrational wars in the past. It may induce our self-destruction in the future. Would it not be useful to at least make a serious attempt to study the phenomenon? If it’s not there, what do we have to fear by looking for it?

Sad News from Academia; Harvard Questions Marc Hauser’s Research

Hauser is an eminent and very public expert in evolutionary biology, specializing in the origins of morality. The news that Harvard has opened an inquiry about the credibility of his research is distressing, to say the least, in view of the overriding significance of his field of study, and the remarkable and exciting work and smashing of old orthodoxies that have been going on there lately. Hauser was one of the nine keynote speakers at the recent Edge conference on the Science of Morality that I mentioned in an earlier post, and one can only hope that the inquiry will turn up nothing more serious than a case of confirmation bias.

Affairs like this are saddening, but not surprising. Academics today are under overwhelming pressure to publish, and the quality of their work is bound to suffer as a result. That’s particularly true of the young associate professors who are still fighting for tenure. I don’t want to single any of them out, but the CV’s of most of them who work at top universities are online. Look at a few of them, and you’ll see how unbelievably competitive they have to be to survive. If they don’t include literally scores of publications in research journals and peer-reviewed conferences, not to mention a boatload of awards, honors, and research grants, they’re not even in the running. In view of the amount of time they must spend writing papers and research proposals, not to mention teaching, public service, and all the rest of the stuff they need to pack into a credible resume, it’s a wonder any of them have any time left for serious research. The “publish or perish” thing has been a problem for a long time, and it degrades the quality of scientific work in many fields. It would be nice if we could finally find a solution.

The Edge Conference on “The Science of Morality:” The Nature of Good and Evil

The Edge Foundation recently hosted a conference with the moniker, “The New Science of Morality,” It included addresses by nine eminent biologists, psychologists, and philosophers, all but one of whom were drawn from the ranks of academia. Their remarks, which can be found at the Edge website, were an interesting reflection of current thinking on the subject from a preponderantly left of center ideological perspective. As I share their interest in the subject I will post some comments on their talks on my blog. However, before plunging ahead, I will follow E.O. Wilson’s advice to those who would address the subject of morality, and “lay my cards on the table.”
Before one presumes to speak of morality and the categories good and evil that are associated with it, it is useful to first establish what morality is. As an atheist, I base my opinions on the subject on the following two assumptions:

• Morality depends for its existence on innate predispositions hard-wired in the human brain.
• The features of the brain responsible for morality exist because they evolved.

It follows from the first of these assumptions that morality, with its inherent categories of good and evil, has no objective, independent existence of its own. In other words, good and evil do not exist independently as other than mental constructs, nor would they continue to exist absent a mind capable of giving rise to them. As a consequence of this, good and evil cannot be derived or identified logically or scientifically as things in themselves, nor can they in any way acquire validity or legitimacy in their own right.

These conclusions seem counterintuitive to creatures like ourselves because good and evil seem real. We are wired to perceive them as real, presumably because they are most effective in promoting our survival when they are perceived as real. However, their only reality is as emotional responses derived from innate features of the brain. These emotional responses are present in nascent form even in human infants. They evolved in times utterly unlike the present for the sole reason that they promoted the genetic survival of individuals during those times. They can possess no intrinsic or transcendent validity or legitimacy not based on those origins, and it is questionable whether they even continue to promote our survival in the context of the modern world.

There is no such thing as “moral progress.” There can be no progress unless there is some goal towards which one progresses. In the case of moral progress, that goal can only be to approach the “real” good and move away from “real” evil. For that to happen, “real” good and “real” evil must necessarily have an independent existence and legitimacy of their own, but, as noted above, that is impossible. What we describe as “moral progress” is merely the expression of the evolved mental traits responsible for moral behavior in the context of rapidly changing human social organization, culture, and technological advances. The evolved mental traits in question themselves have changed little if any in the process.

It is interesting that conservative religious believers find it much easier to understand the reasoning behind and accept the above hypotheses than the type of people who attended the Edge conference. They, of course, base the legitimacy of their moral claims on the existence of a God. Remove God, and they have no trouble perceiving the fact that those who continue to claim that there can be such things as real good and real evil are sitting out on a limb with no tree attached to it.

In contrast, none of the academics and scientists at the Edge Conference, or at least none I am aware of, would argue that real good and real evil derive from a Supreme Being. In spite of that, they come from an ideological milieu that is heavily invested in the belief in its own moral superiority. Individuals in that milieu routinely refer to the actions and beliefs of others as “moral” or “immoral,” indicating acceptance of some moral standard that is applicable to everyone, and not just themselves. I am not aware of anyone among them who has explicitly rejected the notion of “moral progress.” However, if morality is the expression of evolved traits hard-wired in the brain, this presumption of moral superiority becomes indefensible. The extreme reticence of those at the conference to face these implications is quite evident in the remarks of the nine keynote speakers.

In later posts I will comment on the remarks of each of those speakers in the context of my own understanding of morality.

Quantum Mechanics and Free Will

Quantum theory is one of the most important and least understood advances in physics over the last 150 years.  Beginning with Max Planck’s supposition in a paper published in 1900 that energy could only be emitted in quantized form, it eventually led to the realization that, particularly at the atomic and sub-atomic level, it was more accurate to represent objects and their interactions, mathematically at least, in terms of wave functions and probability distributions than in terms of the deterministic prescriptions of classical physics.  There has been a great deal of speculation regarding the implication of these discoveries touching the matter of free will (see, for example, here, here, and here, and Google will turn up many more examples).  As often happens in such philosophical speculations (and as some of the authors of the linked articles themselves point out), the various hypotheses occasionally go considerably further than is warranted by what we actually know. 

One can’t really say anything positive about free will unless one understands what it is, and to understand what it is, one must understand consciousness.  Unfortunately, we don’t.  We can be more confident in speaking about what free will is not.  For example, let us assume for the sake of argument that insects are not self-aware or conscious, and they only react to their environment via instinct.  They may seem to make decisions such as whether to fight or flee, admit another insect into the hive or nest or not, etc., but free will is not involved.  Machines could be programmed to react in exactly the same ways.  Proponents of free will believe that, somehow, the human mind can consicously override such programming, and deliberately make choices that are not pre-ordained by physical law or instinct.  These choices, in turn, can alter the outcome of events.  Again, without resorting to supernatural arguments, we cannot state positively that free will exists because we lack sufficient understanding of what goes on in the human mind to do so.  We literally don’t understand what we’re talking about.  We can, however, discuss whether it is even possible for it to exist to begin with.

In that limited sense, the implications of quantum physics are profound.  If everything in the universe obeyed the laws of classical physics, there would be no room for free will.  Given a certain initial state of the universe, everything in the future would be pre-ordained by physical law, or so, at least, it has seemed to many great thinkers in the past.  In principle, we could create mathematical models that would predict the future with absolute certainty, although, at least at the current state of the art, the complexity of the universe is so great as to put such models completely out of the question.  We would just be along for the ride, and free will would be just an illusion.  In a quantum universe, at least we have some wiggle room. 

True, we still don’t know at a fundamental level what all this stuff in the universe around us really is, or why it exists to begin with.  However, we can demonstrate with repeatable experiments that it conforms to mathematical models in which probability plays a significant role.  Now if, once again, we are given a certain initial state of the universe, the claim that the future outcome of events is pre-ordained by the laws of physics is not as plausible in such a probabilistic universe.  The mathematical models may be misleading us about the true nature of things, but, in principle, an infinity of possible outcomes becomes possible.  In such a universe, it is at least possible for free will to exist, although it is hardly certain, and the manner in which it exists, if it does, must remain a mystery to us until we learn a great deal more about the nature of our own minds. 

That is the implication of quantum physics regarding free will.  From a classical universe whose eventual fate was written in stone depending on its state at some point in the past, we have proceeded to one in which many outcomes are possible, and free will is, therefore, not completely excluded.  It seems a rather limited implication on the face of it.  However, it’s comforting that a universe in which what we think or do actually matters is, at least, not out of the question.

On the Legitimacy of Virtuous Indignation

As noted in an earlier post, Mark Shapiro has informed us that he is “outraged” about the publication of the Journolist e-mails. Of course, as I write this, virtuous indignation is as common as dirt on both sides of the political spectrum, but the incident illustrates something I’ve occasionally referred to before; the disconnect between what morality is and how it is perceived.

Morality is a term used to describe certain manifestations of human behavioral predispositions hard-wired in the brain as we evolved. As such, it does not and cannot have any legitimacy in itself. However, when Shapiro tells us that he is outraged, he is not merely describing his emotional response to a given external stimulus. His statement also implies the claim that his outrage is actually legitimate and justified. Rationally, however, this is nonsense.

Since time immemorial, philosophers have been seeking a logical basis for the legitimacy of morality. None of them has ever succeeded in finding one, for the very good reason that the existence of such a basis is impossible. Good and evil are not real objects, things in themselves independent of human emotional traits. Rather, they are the outcome of subjective processes that cause us to perceive them as real objects and things in themselves. We all share this illusion, presumably because the perception of good and evil as real things is effective in promoting our survival, or at least was effective in times very unlike the present. As a result, when Shapiro says he is outraged, we immediately understand what he is talking about. He is referring to moral good and evil, things that we also experience as real, independent objects, and that most of us actually believe are real, independent objects in spite of the fact that they cannot actually exist outside of our imaginations. As a result, our response is not simply to reply “So what? What difference does your current emotional state make to me?” Rather, we wrack our brains for arguments to demonstrate that Shapiro is mistaken in his belief that he has correctly identified the “real” moral good, and to substitute a different, more legitimate version of our own.

In fact, one person’s emotional response can be no more “objectively legitimate” than another’s. As one of the quatrains of the “The Rubaiyat” puts it;

The Revelations of Devout and Learn’d
Who rose before us, and as Prophets burn’d
Are all but Stories, which, awoke from Sleep
They told their comrades, and to Sleep return’d

The “ethics experts” of our own day are just the modern versions of the people the poet Omar was talking about. They are no closer to the truth than the Persian sages and prophets of long ago. In spite of the increasingly common acceptance of recent scientific revelations about what morality actually is, they continue as before, chasing the illusion. Before one announces one’s outrage to the world, it is well to consider the fact that one is declaring allegiance to just such an illusion.