Going on a Moral Diet

It’s a well established fact that there is no such thing as a free lunch. This is particularly the case when that lunch consists of deep fried chicken followed by a couple of glazed doughnuts and a Coke.

We love sweet and fatty foods (although, as Dan Dennett points out, we don’t desire them because they taste good, they taste good because we desire them). And even though they’re contributing to an epidemic of obesity today, it’s a damn good thing that we do love the sweets and the fats. Because had we not vigorously pursued such energy-rich sources of nutrition throughout our evolutionary past we may not have made it to the point where today’s obesity epidemic was even an option.

hamburgerSimply put, an evolved taste for sweet and fatty stuffs – in the form of a strongly reinforcing sensation of pleasure in response to exposure to sweet and/or fatty foods – was adaptive because our highly active endothermic bodies with their calorie-burning brains required vast amounts of fuel to keep them hunting and gathering and surviving and reproducing, etc.

And up until the last few moments of our evolutionary history, we were far more likely to be undernourished rather than overnourished. That being the case, the cost of getting it wrong and consuming too much energy was lower than the cost of getting it wrong and not consuming enough. Hence a selective pressure in favour of our sweet/fatty tooth.

Yet today we can see all this. We can acknowledge that allowing our evolved sweet-and-fat-seeking psychological impulses take over can lead us to unhealthy ends. The heuristic is now pointing in the wrong direction. We understand that we need to inhibit our evolved impulses and steer our behaviour towards more appropriate ends in today’s environment. We understand that sometimes we need to consciously manage our diet.

Maybe we need to do the same when it comes to some of our evolved moral impulses.

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Morality Inside-out

Most moral enquiry ā€“ particularly metaethical enquiry ā€“ is conducted in an arse-backwards way. Most philosophers appear to look at morality from the inside-out. And Iā€™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 Read more…

The Nature of Morality: A Thesis Primer

Below is a short preface to my thesis on evolution and moral ecology that gives the broad brush outline of my argument and how it’ll likely flow from chapter to chapter. Much is in flux, even at this stage (when is it supposed to settle down, I wonder), but I thought this might be a useful primer for those who have expressed interest in my work.

It also introduces the notion of morality ‘inside-out’ and morality ‘outside-in’. This one way I characterise my approach to looking at morality and doing ethics, and one I’ll elaborate in more detail with a full post soon. In fact, I’m considering turning the chapter on moral naturalism, where I talk about morality inside-out, into a paper suggesting an outside-in approach to ethics is complementary to the conventional metaethical approach, and is something philosophers should take more seriously.

But, for now, here’s the preface:

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Raising the Bar

To argue or not to argue. That is the question that underpins my latest missive on The Drum about the state of political and public discourse in Australia (and translatable to most other modern liberal democracies), as motivated by Malcolm Turbull’s latest speech. And when it comes to those who Read more…

Moral Ecology Defined (At Last)

I recently found myself confused about the meaning of the term ‘moral ecology.’ This proved to be an unsettling experience, namely because I’m the one who coined the term (with a little help from John S. Wilkins). Given that moral ecology features centrally in my thesis, it’s probably important that Read more…

The Old as a Barrier to the New

Techdirt has an interesting piece on the follies of the publishing industry in shifting its business model over to ebooks and digital publishing, focusing on the utter and infuriating pointlessness of DRM, or digital rights management. It makes the salient point that DRM fails because it makes a legitimate product Read more…

Linking Psychology, Politics and Climate Scepticism

Conservatives are from Mars, Liberals are from Venus. So says Chris Mooney in his new book, The Republican Brain.

I tend to agree. I’ve written as much on this blog back in 2010, and on the ABC’s Drum website again in 2011.

The thesis is that liberals and conservatives tend towards very different psychological make-ups. Political psychology studies have shown that liberals and conservatives are measurably different along a number of different axes.

For example, liberals tend to have higher scores than conservatives in Openness in personality tests. This means liberals tend to be more curious, inquisitive and exploratory when it comes to information and opinions. Conversely, conservatives tend to be less experimental, more rigid in their thinking and more dogmatic.

Liberals also tend to exhibit greater integrative complexity – which is a metric that measures the tendency to incorporate many different pieces of information into forming an attitude or making a judgement. It’s kinda ‘shades of grey’ thinking. Conservatives, on the other hand, tend towards more black and white thinking.

None of these things are rock solid. There’s no determinism at the root of this. But there are clear leanings amongst those who self-identify or vote one way or the other.

Do these psychological differences contribute to the differences of opinion among liberals and conservatives? Could they help explain why a majority of conservatives reject anthropogenic climate change, for example?

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Evolution and Moral Ecology Abstract

There’s a conference coming up later this year in Sicily on the evolution of morality, appropriately called: The Evolution of Morality: The Biology and Philosophy of Human Conscience. Looks like a cracker. Speakers include Frans de Waal, Phillip Kitcher, Patricia Churchland, Richard Joyce, Owen Flanagan and Simon Blackburn, among others. Read more…

The Two Types of Mental Disorder

Here’s a hypothesis: there are two broad types of mental disorder, and distinguishing between them might aid in understanding their causes as well as in diagnosis and treatment. The idea springs from my thoughts on the evolutionary forces that have shaped our psychology, particularly in selecting for a diversity of personality types and cognitive styles.

First up, I define mental disorder along pretty broad functional lines as being any lasting psychological condition that hampers an individual’s ability to pursue their interests. I prefer the functional approach (as I do in many cases) rather than trying to dig around to find some essential core or set of features that characterises all mental disorders, but that doesn’t preclude other modes of defining mental disorder.

The benefit of the functional approach is in seeing the mind as an evolved tool, the function of which is to produce behaviours that serve to satisfy our interests (defining what these interests are is another important issue, but I’ll leave that to one side for now).

So, in this light, I propose that there are two broad types of mental disorder:

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