Morality Inside-out
Most moral enquiry – particularly metaethical enquiry – is conducted in an arse-backwards way. Most philosophers appear to look at morality from the inside-out. And I’d suggest this inside-out view of morality is hampering our ability to understand the nature of morality in all its glorious messy complexity.
What we need to do is turn this perspective around and look at morality outside-in. This is a crucial step in my overall argument in my thesis, as it explains why I choose to depart from the metaethical canon and draw on a range of empirical tools in an attempt to explain what morality is all about.
So, what do I mean by inside-out?
Most metaethical enquiry takes as its starting point our moral discourse. We talk about good and bad, right and wrong. We engage in moral argumentation. We look for the reasons to certain ways. And we attempt to persuade others of the truth of our position and the falsehood of theirs.
When we reflect on our moral discourse, much of it appears to be implicitly objectivist. We don’t talk about our disapproval of torture in the same way we talk about our disapproval of ABBA or of pistachio ice cream. The latter are subjective attitudes, but we seem to think attitudes concerning torture are not a matter of subjective preference but are grounded in some objective fact. Torture isn’t just distasteful, torture is objectively wrong, and we can prove that to be true.
We talk as if moral assertions are categorical imperatives in the Kantian sense: if torture is wrong, you ought not torture regardless of your beliefs, desires or ends. If morality really was just like our subjective feelings of approval or disapproval, it would lose this categorical nature. Moral imperatives would only hold with the strength of an appeal to your subjective whims or by virtue of your stated ends or desires.
Hence does metaethics typically begin: how can we make sense of our moral discourse? What do we mean by “the good”? How can we establish the foundations for the categorical nature of moral statements? What kinds of facts are these objective moral facts? How could these moral facts motivate our behaviour? And so on for the last century or so.
Inside-out and backwards
This view is inside-out precisely because it starts with our discourse, our attitudes, our reasons, and the implicit objectivity and categorical nature of our discourse, and attempts to establish a firm foundation for morality from there. Only then does it attempt to build upwards and outwards into the world, talking about how morality affects our behaviour and the behaviour of others.
This is the Platonic view, the Kantian view, the Moorean view. It leans on reason, on a search for ethical truth, on the binding authority that morality appears to have according to our ethical discourse. It is often cashed out in terms of moral realism, objectivism, rationalism, non-naturalism and so on. Yet it is a deeply problematic programme.
First of all, our moral discourse is not necessarily that clear or uniform, as Michael Gill and Walter Sinnott-Armstrong have recently argued. We use objectivist language, but we also use expressivist language – as if moral utterances were expressions of emotion rather than just statements of fact.
Moral beliefs appear to be motivating – it seems somehow inconsistent for someone to say sincerely that “torture is wrong” and then have no compunction against torturing someone themselves – yet they also appear to be stating something about the world.
We give reasons for our moral beliefs, yet often those reasons appear to be causally inefficatious, even emerging as dubious post-hoc rationalisations, as Jon Haidt has famously argued.
The brute fact of moral diversity in the world – between cultures, within cultures and throughout history – also challenges the notion that there is ‘one true morality’ that is founded on objective fact.
The inside-out view lends itself to non-naturalism because there doesn’t appear to be anything in our arsenal of natural features of the world that could possibly provide the bindingly prescriptive ‘oomph’ of categorical imperatives.
Yet non-naturalism it not only troublingly incompatible with the broadly naturalistic worldview that is ratified by most other philosophical and scientific disciplines, but it raises problems of its own, such as how we have access to the non-natural facts.
The bizarre and deeply problematic notion of intuitionism, which has been eradicated in many other fields, continues to raise its absurd head in metaethics, from Moore to Shafer-Landau.
Finally, the inside-out view of morality reinforces the spurious notion of the ‘ethical point of view’, as Philip Kitcher puts it. This is the idea that “people give themselves commands – commands that are no external but somehow their own, the ‘moral law within’ – and have regarded this point of view as requiring the subordination, if not the elimination, of emotion” (Kitcher, 2011, p. 80). This, states Kitcher, is a “psychological myth devised by philosophers,” (p. 81), and I tend to agree.
I propose a different perspective on morality. Or, at least, a different starting point for ethical enquiry. I call it the outside-in view.
Outside-in
This view begins not with our moral discourse or an attempt to ratify the ‘ethical point of view’, but instead starts with moral behaviour. This is a broad category of behaviour that emerges when you observe a bunch of organisms wandering around and bumping into each other (literally or figuratively) and then saying sorry.
When an organism acts in a way that contravenes its interests or immediate desires (or its beliefs about what will advance its interests or satisfy its desires), you have an interesting phenomenon. If you were to observe such behaviour – helping, caring, apologising, inhibiting etc – you would very likely say that something moral just happened.
The other aspect of moral behaviour is the creation, spreading an enforcing of behavioural rules. But not just any behavioural rules, but rules that guide behaviour in a social context, often (but not always) attempting to encourage prosocial behaviour and dissuade self-interested or socially disruptive behaviour.
These are moral phenomena. And they’re terribly interesting and worthy of an explanation. And, being observable phenomena, they’re amenable to the tools of the empirical sciences.
Thus the outside-in perspective looks at moral behaviour and attempts to concoct an explanation for why it exists. This view is not mutually exclusive with the inside-out view. In fact, it might turn out they converge on a similar answer (although I find that unlikely), or the outside-in might describe the reasons why we behave why we do and the inside-out might show how those reasons are in error.
More likely, my suspicion is that a completed outside-in view would actually make much of the inside-out view redundant – to twist Laplace, a full explanation of moral behaviour from the outside-in perspective would make the objective moral facts that often spring from an inside-out view a redundant hypothesis.
The outside-in view might not only explain why we behave the way we do, but also why we talk about morality the way we do. It might turn out that moral discourse is not actually a truth-seeking endeavour, but rather a tool for persuasion and spreading of moral norms, as Haidt argues. This would mean that we ought not take moral discourse at face value, but rather look at it as just another facet of our moral behaviour.
Furthermore, the outside-in view does not lean towards any form of non-naturalism. It doesn’t presume or require the existence of any metaphysically dubious moral facts. It doesn’t suffer from any crippling naturalistic fallacies. Because it dispenses with categorical imperatives, and lets everything be hypothetical, there is no metaphysical leap required between the descriptive and the magically normative.
As Joshua Greene might put it, it talks about moral2 (caring about and being nice to other people) rather than moral1 (making statements of fact about what is right and wrong).
My belief is that the outside-in view of morality is drastically underrated and largely overlooked by moral philosophers and metaethicists. It is not, however, overlooked by many other disciplines, including moral psychology, behavioural ecology, game theory and the philosophy of biology.
It is for this reason that I draw on these tools in my thesis to attempt to give the beginnings of an outside-in view of morality that can not only explain why we behave the way we do in social contexts, but how our minds have evolved to encourage such behaviour, why moral norms vary throughout the world and how we can understand all this from a thoroughly naturalistic perspective.
That is morality from the outside-in.
16 Comments
Paul · 30th November 2012 at 3:02 pm
I wonder if the outside-in view is somewhat self-defeating, at least from a certain perspective. Certainly talk about morality is largely about persuading people what they should do. However, I think there are at least some people who view morality as an attempt to answer the question “what should I do?” That is to say, the view from the street is that morality is precisely the inquiry into what is magically normative? Would that mean that your inquiry wasn’t moral inquiry?
I guess I am just pushing back against the idea that a naturalistic understanding of morality would make an inside out view redundant. Or maybe just hypothesizing that a naturalistic understanding of morality will just illustrate that most of us will instinctively yearn for a magically normative morality no matter how well we understand the origins mutability of our moral yearnings.
Tim Dean · 30th November 2012 at 5:06 pm
If it was true that there did exist magical moral facts that compelled right action, then the outside-in view would amount to what Kant derisively called “moral anthropology”, which would detail how people often get their moral judgements wrong.
Or, as some metaethicists have told me, while they are trying to figure out what morality really is, I’m just talking about cooperation.
However, all theories I’ve seen so far that have defended the existence of a special class of moral facts have been deeply problematic – Richard Joyce has the strongest account of why I’ve seen so far.
It might well be that our moral discourse presumes the existence of moral facts, but systematising that presumption doesn’t necessarily amount to good philosophy if that presumption is false. It’d be like systematising our naive notions of free will or space and time and saying that’s how free will or spacetime actually are.
And I would fully expect an outside-in story to say that we do yearn for objective moral facts. But in the absence of those facts, the question becomes: what now? That’s a very interesting ethical and metaethical question, with a few answers around already, like Richard Joyce’s fictionalism, Joshua Green’s revisionism or other brands of constructivist ethics, such as David Wong’s relativism.
Mark Sloan · 30th November 2012 at 5:10 pm
Tim,
In addition to explaining “why moral norms vary”, the naturalistic perspective makes it clear that moral biologies (moral hardware) should be expected to vary also. So our emotional experiences of empathy, loyalty, shame, guilt, indignation, and moral disgust and the remarkable biology underlying our moral intuitions are just one biological implementation of morality’s strategies.
Trying my hand at your “inside-out” and “outside-in” nomenclature, I get:
The inside-out view of morality starts with human perceptions of morality and attempts to reason, from them, about what is moral. The naturalistic, outside-in view of morality studies moral behaviors to reveal what morality ‘is’ and thus why human perceptions about morality are what they are. The outside-in view shows human perceptions about morality, such as the objectivity and imperative aspects of common moral claims, have been highly misleading regarding the true nature of morality.
Mark Sloan · 30th November 2012 at 5:17 pm
Paul,
In my comment to Tim, I point out that the inside-out view is misleading concerning the nature of morality and, by implication, thus worse than redundant. Tim’s comparison with our naive (not science based) perceptions of free will or space and time sounds right on to me and a good way to explain the problem.
On the other hand, I share your concern about the importance to cultural utility of deriving a normative moral code. Surprisingly to me, Gert’s (SEP) definition of normative morality appears to offers a way forward:
“The term morality can be used … normatively to refer to a code of conduct that, given specified conditions, would be put forward by all rational persons.”
If the “specified conditions” specify an over-riding goal for enforcing a moral code, then the science of morality may be fully capable of revealing the basis of “a code of conduct that, given (an over-riding goal for enforcing a moral code), would be put forward by all rational persons”.
What over-riding goal for enforcing a moral code would be accepted by almost everyone? I expect some version of either individual or group well-being. So the science of morality and general agreement in a group about the over-riding goal for enforcing a moral code may be fully sufficient for a normative moral code of at least this sort.
Note that all that is needed is an “over-riding goal for enforcing a moral code” that is acceptable to most people in a society. This is incredibly less challenging than perhaps unanswerable questions such as “What is good?” and “How should I live?” that bedevil traditional moral philosophy.
GTChristie · 5th December 2012 at 12:21 pm
I like your observations here, Mark. You’ve been commenting here for a long time (and more often than I have), and very often you “get” Tim’s points more quickly than I do. I take several passes at Tim’s meta-ethics posts before they sink in — LOL — but they always do. Your commentary usually expands the discussion beyond what Tim is saying, in a good way, and that in itself gives a nice gloss to things around here.
“Well being” is something of a theme in this decade. Many current moral thinkers and critics arrive at (or sometimes begin from) eudaimonia as a goal of ethics (or alternately, as a justification strategy for moral statements, as found in utilitarian ethics) “Happiness” is not enough, “benefit” is not enough; the Greeks who treated “the good life” as a goal wanted genuinely virtuous happiness (whatever that might be). And “well being” (for all) seems to capture that spirit in a more nuanced idea — :”well being” is not just a happy life, it’s the result of a good life. And it’s hard to argue against “well-being” as a goal — provided that everyone agrees on what it means.
But as “an over-riding goal for enforcing a moral code,” well-being” and “happiness” (attractive as they are) are rather weak. Yes, I want happiness or a happy life, and much of what I do is aimed at my own well-being and the well-being of significant others (sometimes even strangers, neighbors, community members, etc.).
You say: What over-riding goal for enforcing a moral code would be accepted by almost everyone? I expect some version of either individual or group well-being.
As I read these words, it hit me. Perhaps the overriding goal of morality (inspected either inside-out or outside-in) is actually conflict amelioration and avoidance. We consider a given issue or behavior to present a moral question wherever we perceive conflict, disagreement, dissention, anxiety, confrontation, pain. Moral beliefs, moral discourse, moral “intuitions” etc are quite possibly a complex set of psychological defenses against conflict in the social animal that is us.
GTChristie · 5th December 2012 at 12:36 pm
p.s. what causes conflict in one society might not cause conflict in another. and there is a significant part of the cultural dimension of ethics.
JW Gray · 30th November 2012 at 8:13 pm
Philosophers enter “debates.” We debate about things and do not argue for every single premise. We think we know many things and agree to premises to find agreement and to persuade others. The so-called backwards way we do it is just the way debate functions in general.
You want to deny that we know many things we want to know and you don’t want to allow certain premises into the debate.
What you call “natural” seems to include a sort of skepticism. It’s not entirely clear how incompatible intuitionism is with naturalism. There is an intuitive character to science. That’s especially the case with psychology.
Epistemology and mathematics also has a lot of intuition involved. Perhaps everything in philosophy does. Otherwise it’s not clear how you get off the ground. If you don’t think we can assume any of our premises are true (that we ordinarily think we know somehow) then we will be arguing forever endlessly. That’s why debate requires us to find premises to agree on.
Think about what you want exactly and how it applies to everything, such as epistemology and psychology. Do we have thoughts? I think so, but are they natural? Should we just consider psychological behavior?
What about epistmemology? Should we just consider epistemic behavior? Or do we know something about how to justify beliefs well?
JW Gray · 30th November 2012 at 8:23 pm
Should we stop reasoning about morality? I think not. Do you?
If not, then do you admit that Plato was right? If not, then perhaps it’s not “the Platonic view” after all.
We can use language that way, and perhaps people do use language that way, but that is not inconsistent with “objectivity” or “ethical rationality.” A person can be irrational, manipulative, or expressive without being committed to the view that morality is subjective or irrealist.
We give post-hoc rationalizations for just about any belief we find intuitive. The arguments for such beliefs are less important to us than the conclusions. This is not unique to ethics. It certainly doesn’t suggest that ethics is subjective or that science is subjective, just because people often use these sorts of rationalizations for their scientific beliefs. (Consider how pseudoscientists rationalize their views all day long.)
And there’s scientific diversity, and there’s epistemic diversity, and so on. How does such diversity challenge such a notion? We can think there is one true mathematics, logic, or reality, even though we endlessly disagree about how to understand these things. Since when did philosophers agree about much of anything?
You want to say that we should expect more agreement than exists if there were at least one moral fact? Please explain why you would think that.
Mark Sloan · 1st December 2012 at 7:34 am
John,
Your comments to Tim suggested to me a way that had not previously occurred to me to compare traditional moral philosophy’s and science’s approach to a culturally useful understanding of moral truth.
The wrongheadedness I see in traditional philosophy’s inside-out perspective is not in its methods of discourse, but the subject of its study and debate: the ‘truth’ of every-day “moral judgments” or “evaluative attitudes”, such as “causing pain is wrong”.
Science’s outside-in perspective reveals the source of this wrongheadedness is a category error. Our “moral judgments” are the end products of fallible biological and cultural heuristics for fulfilling the universal function of morality, which I argue to be increasing the benefits of altruistic cooperation in groups. “Moral judgments” and “evaluative attitudes” must then also be only fallible heuristics. Trying to establish the truth of fallible heuristics is making a category error.
In comparison, demonstrating the truth of the universal function of morality is easy using the normal criteria of science such as explanatory power and so forth. So there is at least one moral fact, but it is about the universal function of morality, not every-day moral judgments which, at bottom, are only fallible heuristics selected for by the benefits of altruistic cooperation in groups that they produce.
Mark Sloan · 6th December 2012 at 9:48 am
GTChristie Said
“Perhaps the overriding goal of morality (inspected either inside-out or outside-in) is actually conflict amelioration and avoidance. We consider a given issue or behavior to present a moral question wherever we perceive conflict, disagreement, dissention, anxiety, confrontation, pain. Moral beliefs, moral discourse, moral “intuitions” etc are quite possibly a complex set of psychological defenses against conflict in the social animal that is us.”
GT, I am gratified to hear you have found my comments here worthwhile.
To response to your comment on what the over-riding goals for enforced moral codes ought to be, it may be useful to provide some background.
It is important to separate discussions of “What is the function of morality?” (the primary reason morality exists in all societies) from “What moral code ought groups enforce?”.
The first category can be understood as “what morality is” as a biological and cultural adaptation (as a matter of science). This is interesting on its own, but may or may not be “what morality ought to be”. Therefore, it is important to keep the categories separate.
Proposed primary reasons morality exists in all societies (what morality functionally ‘is’) include 1) overcoming altruism failures (Phillip Kitcher 2011), 2) increasing pro-social behavior (DS Wilson and Tim?), 3) conflict amelioration and avoidance, and 4) increasing the benefits of altruistic cooperation in groups (my proposal).
Since this category is what morality ‘is’ as a matter of science, one of these option may objectively better meet relevant criteria for provisional truth in science. These criteria include explanatory power, no contradiction with known facts, integration with the rest of science, and so forth. I argue that 4) “increasing the benefits of altruistic cooperation in groups” meets such criteria remarkably better than any other and therefore is the ‘true’ function of morality as a matter of science.
But I understand you to be talking about a very different topic, the goals that define what morality ‘ought’ to be.
Proposed goals that define what moral codes ‘ought’ to be enforced include 1) maximize well-being of all people from all sources (Utilitarianism), 2) maximize personal eudemonia from all sources (virtue ethics), 3) maximize pro-social behavior of all kinds (DS Wilson? and Tim?), 4) ameliorate and avoid conflict, 5) maximize for all people the well-being benefits of altruistic cooperation in groups, and 6) maximize personal well-being benefits of altruistic cooperation in groups with rules defined behind a John Rawls veil of ignorance as to your role in society (my proposal).
Now we have moved away from an objective (descriptive) discussion about what morality ‘is’ to a normative discussion, what morality ‘ought’ to be, or as Bernard Gerts described it “The moral code that would be put forward, given specified conditions, by all rational people”. Since rational people may have different ultimate goals (which constitute different specified conditions), there is likely no objective, universal moral code that ought to be enforced.
However, I can argue that the most common over-riding goal of rational people for an enforced moral code is likely something like “6) maximize personal well-being benefits of altruistic cooperation in groups with rules defined behind a John Rawls veil of ignorance as to your role in society”.
There might be groups of rational people whose over-riding goal for their moral code is to “ameliorate and avoid conflict” or something else entirely, but I would argue they will be better pleased in the long term with an over-riding goal closer to the roots of our social psychology and experience of well-being that made us social animals, the benefits of altruistic cooperation in groups.
Reviewing the above, it is not as clear as I would like. I can see it may change your mind about my comments being useful.
In any event, it was useful for my own understanding to work through it.
Until today, I had never written down all the specifics as to what I think the over-riding goal of moral codes ought to be: “to maximize personal well-being benefits of altruistic cooperation in groups with rules defined behind a John Rawls veil of ignorance as to your role in society”.
Robert Hess · 13th December 2012 at 7:35 am
I am glad to see, Tim, that you’re making good progress on your thesis. I very much like, and agree with all, that you wrote.
You seem to have a very good handle on the current state of the metaethical debate, and, in my opinion, you put your finger on exactly the right problems with the “inside-out view.”
To understand and explain to others what is so fundamentally wrong with this view of morality, I find the analogy of religion useful.
Like morality, religion starts out as subjective experience. We have a strong natural tendency to believe in some sort of omnipotent/omniscient deity, in some form of life after death, and in some sort of divine punishment-reward mechanism that rewards “good” believers and punishes the “bad.” And so on.
To explain and understand these phenomena, religious scholars, like moral scholars, have taken almost exclusively the “inside-out view.” They take our unexamined beliefs at face value and try to build a metaphysics that makes these beliefs true. The statement “God loves us” is seen as something for which there are truth conditions. Those who have a hard time seeing what those conditions might be, are encouraged to take a leap of faith.
At least among secular philosophers, I think it’s safe to say that no one thinks that the “inside-out view” tells us anything about the nature of religion, except that humans have a tendency to have religious experiences, beliefs, etc. To understand the nature of religion, we have to step outside the circle, so to speak, and look at it from the outside. Through the lens of science.
This is, of course, exactly what Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins have done in recent years. Both basically argue that like any other form of human behavior, religion is just another evolutionary adaptation. At strategy for survival, if you will. And while religious-minded people may not be persuaded (I would not expect them to be), secular philosophers certainly should whole-heartedly embrace this conclusion. It perfectly explains the phenomena in question, is the simplest explanation available, and fits perfectly into our existing scientific – biological – framework.
Yet, these same secular philosophers balk at the “outside-in view” when it is trained at another form of human behavior – morality. Like their religious counterparts, they twist and turn to salvage their moral intuitions from being exposed for what they are, throw up metaphysical roadblocks, and dismiss any arguments to the contrary as “heretical”. Most would describe Tim’s moral functionalism as not even being a theory of morality at all, and purely on definitional grounds. Only moral philosophers do moral philosophy, evolutionary biologists and such only do science. And science will never be able to tell us what is right and wrong, how we ought to live, and so on.
This is, of course, extremely broad-brushed. But I really think that the analogy, if fleshed out in more detail, is quite powerful. There is just no principled reason to accept the “outside-in view” to explain the nature of religion, but not to explain the nature of morality.
And that is all that metaethics is trying to do: Explain the nature of morality. Normative questions such as “What is right and wrong?” or “How ought we live?” are simply not part of the inquiry. While I think that moral functionalism could certainly be quite useful at a normative level, as well, I think it’s main strength is to explain scientifically what the nature of moral behavior, including moral beliefs and statements, really is, how human morality came to be what it is, where it may be headed, etc.
If those scientific explanations leave some moral philosophers unsatisfied, this says more about their personal limitations than about the limitations of moral functionalism. After all, an important part of the story moral functionalism has to tell is that our entire moral apparatus is built on a powerful, almost inescapable illusion: The illusion that there are real moral facts out there, that some actions are “really” morally wrong, that some moral agents “really” deserve to be punished, etc.
Another way to look at it is to say that the moral realist begs the question. In response to the moral functionalist claim that we can’t rely on our intuitions to build a moral theory, the moral realist basically says: “But what about our moral intuitions?”
Either way we look at it, moral realists are, in mind, no different than religious realists. This is not a nice thing to say, I realize, but I think the point needs to be made, lest moral philosophy keeps going around in circles for another 2000 years.
Robert
Paul · 19th December 2012 at 1:30 pm
I am not quite sure what to make of this, but Mr. Dean’s hypothesis seems to rely heavily on the premise that we, as human beings (not philosophers) do rely on our intuitions to build a moral theory and to understand the moral worlds we do inhabit (our communities, our cultures, etc.) At the very least, I assume that is implied when Mr. Dean says that he believes we evolved moral sensibilities. I just find it funny that the truth of the outside in view depends on the assumption that the man on the street is a moral realist.
Tim Dean · 13th December 2012 at 8:35 am
Just want to say thanks for all your comments – supportive and critical – folks. It all goes into the mill to, hopefully, one day come out full baked in my thesis.
Tim Dean · 20th December 2012 at 12:30 pm
Hi Paul. Indeed we do tend to concoct objectivist realist explanations for our moral intuitions, even if they are in error. However, I would stress that the outside in view doesn’t “depend” on the existence of naive moral realism. Rather, the outside in view explains the existence of naive moral realism.
Morality Inside-out « Ockham’s Beard | Hippocampus · 3rd December 2012 at 3:03 am
[…] Morality Inside-out « Ockham’s Beard. […]
Moral Ecology Updated | Ockham's Beard · 8th January 2014 at 11:22 am
[…] the (outside-in) moral ecology perspective, morality serves the function of solving the problems of social living […]