Rethinking Moral Thinking?

Should we rethink moral thinking? That's the question Op-Ed Columnist David Brooks asks readers in his recent New York Times article "The End of Philosophy." I was linked to this piece by a good friend of mine who knows me well.

In the article, Brooks contemplates the nature of our moralistic thinking. I had just a few specific responses to it, and I thought I'd post them here.

My thoughts:

"Moral judgments are like that. They are rapid intuitive decisions and involve the emotion-processing parts of the brain. Most of us make snap moral judgments about what feels fair or not, or what feels good or not. We start doing this when we are babies, before we have language. And even as adults, we often can’t explain to ourselves why something feels wrong."

Just because they appear instantaneous, doesn't mean there isn't a logical, rule-based mechanism (akin to rationality) that can deconstruct the desire.

"In other words, reasoning comes later and is often guided by the emotions that preceded it. Or as Jonathan Haidt of the University of Virginia memorably wrote, “The emotions are, in fact, in charge of the temple of morality, and ... moral reasoning is really just a servant masquerading as a high priest.”"

This is called emotivism, the idea that all moral decisions are just the reflection of preferences. I wonder if it's really true; I think we're more complex than that. It's entirely possible for us to want something that is bad for us and vice-versa. I don't think that preference has any "moral" content. For instance "Red chairs make me angry" might mean "I don't like red chairs" (of course that's a really big jump, it might mean the opposite), but that statement doesn't necessarily mean the normative statement "No one should own red chairs." Morality requires that last part; if it doesn't describe or prescribe behavior, it's really not a moral thought, feeling, or statement.

"The rise and now dominance of this emotional approach to morality is an epochal change. It challenges all sorts of traditions. It challenges the bookish way philosophy is conceived by most people. It challenges the Talmudic tradition, with its hyper-rational scrutiny of texts. It challenges the new atheists, who see themselves involved in a war of reason against faith and who have an unwarranted faith in the power of pure reason and in the purity of their own reasoning."

What? How does this follow, from the age-old view that morality is emotivist? I don't think it challenges "bookish" philosophy (see my last point as an example of bookish philosophy). If anything, philosophy is still necessary as a system of thinking to even realize that these statements are silly. And don't get me started on that jab at atheists in the last sentence. It really has nothing to do with the article as a whole.

"Finally, it should also challenge the very scientists who study morality. They’re good at explaining how people make judgments about harm and fairness, but they still struggle to explain the feelings of awe, transcendence, patriotism, joy and self-sacrifice, which are not ancillary to most people’s moral experiences, but central. The evolutionary approach also leads many scientists to neglect the concept of individual responsibility and makes it hard for them to appreciate that most people struggle toward goodness, not as a means, but as an end in itself."

If anything, this article is very much what G.E.M Anscombe's 1958 "Modern Moral Philosophy" essay, particularly her first point. We don't understand ourselves well enough to construct what it means to "live the good life." Without that, we have no real grounds to say what one "ought" to do with his or her life. Morality is a hollow term until we can really see what humans need, how their minds work, and how we are or are not responsible for our own actions. It's a large part of what I subscribe to.