14.2. What's morality for?—Integrity versus conformity

Previous in series: 14.1. A habit theory of civic morality

This series’ topic has been the biological function of moral principles, in the sense that the circulation of blood is the biological function of the heart. (See Ruth G. Millikan (1984) Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories.) I claim moral principles function to create habits that minimize decision fatigue by making automatic the otherwise effort-consuming subordination of short- to long-term interests. Automatization comes at the cost of choices that from a self-interested perspective are less than best—when you omit considering the usefulness of the moral habit itself. Although automatization is costly, it’s worth its price, as proven by the harsh consequences psychopaths face due to their disability for adopting moral principles to form habits of integrity.

I introduced the habit theory of morality to explain—without supposing that moral judgments are objectively true—why we do what we ought, but most moralists with naturalistic world views see moral principles differently. Their view—as will be seen—doesn’t successfully explain why we ought to act in accord with any moral principles, and it loses on general merits as an explanation .

According to my habit theory, the only incentives for conforming to moral principles are avoiding effortful decision-making, for your present benefit, and (much more importantly) strengthening or at least not weakening the habits constituting moral character traits, for your future benefit. The moral sentiment, guilt, is anxiety about your moral integrity, so the incentive to avoid guilt is only strong to the same degree that the prudential need to maintain integrity is threatened.

The dominant conception, on the other hand, is that ultimately we conform to moral principles to avert guilt, conceived as an automatic reaction to our moral transgressions. Moral principles, on the dominant conception, are installed during the process of childhood socialization as an internal policeman serving the greater society. Freud’s theory of the super-ego is often taken as a prototype of this conception, although the super-ego is a mostly unconscious structure responsible for neurotic guilt, whereas the principles of explicit morality reside in Freud’s less-discussed ego-ideal. The role of moral affects as prime movers of explicit morality can be seen more clearly in neobehaviorist theories about learning moral values. John Dollard and Neal E. Miller explained moral values as classically conditioned responses, which the culture can arrange because they’re formed by the mere temporal contiguity of stimuli. (Dollard & Miller (1963) Personality and Psychotherapy: An Analysis in Terms of Learning, Thinking, and Culture.) Philosopher John S. Wilkins incidentally expresses this conception of conscience, “If you ever contemplated a murder, you would dread the horrible memory of your victim’s last moments or lifeless corpse.”

A theory of moral principles as society’s beachhead within the individual might explain how moral principles influence behavior, but it doesn’t explain why we should conform to them, since they impede their bearers. The theory unwittingly implies you should try to escape the grip of any moral principles, which offer only guilt pangs. It doesn’t counsel cultivating your moral character.

The dominant theory defies evolutionary considerations, where today’s moralistic tenets purport to benefit humanity rather than kin. Society’s beachhead prevails as the leading conception of morality much as the evolutionary selection of entire species for complex adaptive traits persists in the popular mind.

14.1 A habit theory of civic morality

Previous in series: 14.0 Why do what you ought?—A habit theory of explicit morality

The morality that primarily concerns legal theory is civic morality, the morality used to ground political argument. Even the possibility of politics can seem hard to understand without the existence of objective moral judgments. How can we agree on or even argue about fundamental policies without an external standard of correctness? The answer is twofold. First, we don’t necessarily agree or even argue. We assemble majorities or effective pluralities not necessarily underwritten by fundamental agreement. Second, when many citizens agree on the applicable morality, their convergence—much as judicial agreement obtains despite the absence of any theory of constitutional interpretation—is due to influences other than correspondence with an external standard. This essay will propose a mechanism responsible for a limited moral convergence.

The contrary view—that morality is real, moral facts true—probably arose with the universalistic religions. When religion began to wash up and its natural moral laws became uncompelling, the movement for legal codification partly filled the breach. A universalistic written law supported the illusion that political disagreement would be resolved under common moral premises.

The illusory need for a true political morality survives, in some small part because of the absence of challenge from an alternative theory of political morality. The main candidate explanation is common moral indoctrination within a culture, but indoctrination fails as a candidate for the source of moral agreement in politics because people do not automatically apply the morals they are taught, even if they believe them true. Consider Biblical morality and the extent to which people choose those teachings they find convenient and disregard the rest. Self-interest isn’t adequately explanatory, either, since false consciousness is widespread, and the ways are limitless for a person to slice his self-interest in moral terms A third explanation, depth psychology, may explain why moral precepts are sometimes applied inaccurately, say, why a truth teller is thought a liar; but it doesn’t explain the terms on which moral judgments are made—why truth telling is or isn’t the criterion in the first place.

Since most of the time few lead lives centered on politics, the habit theory of explicit morality must use the moral habits important in citizens’ ordinary lives to explain the moralizing they apply to politics. Per 14.0, personal morality is a tool for creating and strengthening habits of forgoing narrow, short-term self-interest. Political morality usually favors those same habits useful in personal (nonpolitical) life. This practice doesn’t make for intelligent politics, since personal morals—being habits that serve quotidian needs—are often ill-adapted for politics. Some examples will be considered, but note that the direction of influence can reverse at those rare historical junctures where masses of people become deeply involved in politics.

Recently, social psychologists have studied the differing political morals of liberals and conservatives. Five bases for political reasoning have emerged: liberals focus on values of welfare (or harm avoidance) and fairness; conservatives weight those factors less and include values of loyalty, purity, and respect. Some clues about how these values emerge from ordinary life are provided by societies where the dominant values belong to the conservative cluster. In these traditional agrarian societies, respect and subordination figure large in most people’s lives. Although the demographic correlates of liberal and conservative political thinking haven’t been mapped out in modern societies, the habit theory predicts that political moralities are bolstered by different styles of life, which make one moral system or another personally adaptive. Geographical mobility, for instance, may make habits of loyalty less advantageous. The fact that conservatives tend to deride liberals and radicals as “rootless cosmopolitans” bears this out. Another possible connection is that rural areas require more concern with personal cleanliness; hence, habits of purity are stronger.

One of the weird developments in contemporary politics is the huge Tea Party movement within the middle class to reduce the federal deficit, a movement that hates President Obama, more than any reason, simply because he spent a lot of federal money trying to provide an economic stimulus and remove an economic obstacle. Although polls report that citizens are more concerned about jobs and the economy than the deficit, the sheer degree of concern with this technical question of macroeconomics remains staggering and bewildering in that austerity undercuts recovery. This isn’t a classic tax revolt: taxes haven’t been unusually high. What’s weird about caring so much about the deficit is that most economists think austerity will worsen the struggling economy. The concern with frugality is a reflex, a moral habit forged in the personal battle to control the family budget, extended to politics as a means of strengthening the personal moral habit by rehearsing it. According to my habit theory, you shouldn’t expect that the habit is suitable for government. It arises in personal life and extends to politics as another way, outside the personal realm, to practice the personal moral habit of frugality.

Another movement, Occupy Wall Street, espouses a morality emphasizing principles of fairness, which conflicts with today’s welfarist morality that’s dominant across the political spectrum—the total good of all, lacking regard for distribution. The Occupy Movement contends that the wealth and income distributions are unfair. A certain kind of middle class sector seems drawn to this movement; some have termed it the lower echelon of the elite. Many supporters are members of guild-like professional associations (but not trade unions). Guild membership fashions daily moral habits whose purpose is avoiding transgression of norms proscribing unfair competition. This contrasts with the habits useful to the business executive, whose life creates different ethical sensibilities. Functioning as a team and hierarchy at the same time, executives must show loyalty to superiors. They must resist appetites to sabotage their boss, and they must even take the rap for him. Steve Jobs is called a genius; John Ives, the real designer of popular Apple products, was only able to prosper because he suppressed his resentment that Jobs stole the credit. This businessman’s morality demands intensely loyal partisanship.

Citizens practice their personal moralities in the public sphere because practicing habits useful in their personal lives benefits them personally. But personal moral habits are maladaptive for politics, a reality most obvious when intelligent politics is most necessary. At some point, if the economy fails to recover, moralities adapted to politics will become ascendant—despite the maladaptiveness of political morality for personal life. Then, personal morality will necessarily suffer, as in the case of an intensely political British communist sect, where it is said, “You can trust a comrade with your money or your life, but you can’t trust a comrade with your books or your wife.”

Next in series: What's morality for?—Integrity versus conformity

14.0 Why do what you "ought"?—A habit theory of explicit morality

Moral judgments are always false

Ultimate moral judgments are always false—not like “Santa Claus exists” is false, but like “Green grows” is: it is false because it is illogical, due to using words outside their range of application. As to “Green grows,” only particular things, not properties of things, can grow; and, analogously, something is “good” only with respect to some purpose. A good hammer is good for hammering; a good move in a game is good for winning; but nothing is simply “good.” What is a good man or a good deed? Good for what?

At the turn of the 20th century, G. E. Moore developed Hume’s conclusion: what’s good or what's obligatory—ought to be done—can’t be derived from is. Moore made the reasoning behind Hume’s discovery intuitive and showed that moral claimants commit a logical confusion, although Moore didn’t regard his argument as refuting moral realism, the objective existence of moral facts. Moore argued that moral judgments, claims about what one ought to do, can’t be restated as factual. Take any moral platitude—you ought not kill, you ought to treat others as you want them to treat you—you can always ask the further question: why is it true, but the question has no meaningful answer. No facts can ground moral ultimates, since, if they did, the moral platitude wouldn’t be ultimate: it would surrender to the supremacy of whatever moral principle links the platitude to factual truth.

The higher reaches of ethical philosophy (meta-ethics) preoccupies itself with finding a naturalistic response to Moore’s demonstration. One proposed solution is to identify morality with a purportedly innate moral orientation, but this answer doesn’t rebut Moore; you can still ask why ought we to do what our instinctual impulses demand? This goes regardless of whether the innate morality is conceived as sparse—for example, starvation is bad; all-encompassing—human flourishing is good; or abstract—whatever complex function our brains “compute” in moral judgments. What we tend to do is no moral argument for what we ought to do; what we inevitably do is even more obviously irrelevant to the moral question.

Explicit morality is a tool for forming habits

An unrecognized problem in rejecting the existence of moral facts conduces to the overwhelming intellectual resistance to Moore’s almost-obvious conclusion. If moral judgments are unnatural, are false just in that they can neither imply nor be implied by facts, how can moral beliefs play any role in directing behavior? People seem to accept moral realism because they think that morality plays a role in their natural lives— they donate to charity because they ought to—but why would someone do something merely because they think though ought to do it? The apparent answer is that they’re hypnotized by language; having learned they should do B to get A, they do B when they ought to, failing to notice they have misused “ought” by omitting any context for B’s efficacy, previously set by A, an error that would leave them without any way to decide how hard they’ll strive for B. If you do B because you should, due to its being a means to A, the effort you devote to B and the sacrifices you endure for it depend on how much you want A. If you do B simply because you ought to, how hard do you work at B? How much do you donate to charity because it’s what you simply ought to do? Their making these decisions suggests that people have some way to decide how much weight to give morality. A paradox then arises when the moral judgment gains its force from seeming like an instrumental judgment, but is lacking in just what makes effort apportionment possible. Moral judgments must serve some natural function, some directive function; even moral hypocrisy works only because morality can have some directive effect, which, therefore, must be reconciled with rejecting moral facts.

The perplexity is rooted in a bias favoring belief and desire over habit in explaining behavior. In its basic function, explicit morality is a tool for using force of habit to resist the temptation of narrow self-interest. Consider a typical temptation: students in a packed room taking a multiple choice test, one student peeks at the answers of his neighbor, another doesn’t. Or friends tell one another “true” stories, where one embellishes the facts, another doesn’t. Much ethical behavior is automatic: often, people will avoid cheating or will tell the truth without any thought as to the options. If you want to be a person whose practical morality excludes cheating or telling false stories, you are best off forming the habit. Deciding to take a short-term loss is hard, energy consuming, and unpleasant, and it becomes harder, more energy consuming, and more unpleasant the more often you must decide. Honest people, whatever the lengths and limits of their honesty, are people who have made a habit of honesty. Their honesty is the habit of honesty. The terms of your explicit morality define the kind of person you want to become—the choice itself without moral foundation. (Which is not to say it is “freely” chosen.)

Different moral strokes for different moral folks

Regardless of its content, morality takes different forms. Explicit morality can consist of specific commands, usually negative, such as the Ten Commandments (deontology); it can consist of general goals, such as create the greatest happiness or welfare (consequentialism); or it can consist of virtue prescriptions, such as wisdom, honesty, and generosity (virtue ethics). Given that explicit morality is a species-specific self-control method, not in any sense a set of truths, we can ask what form of morality most effectively serves that purpose. Most people’s explicit morality contains a mixture of these forms. Someone might apply deontology to serious criminal acts, consequentialism to resolving conflicts, and virtue ethics to personal decisions. The advantage of a unitary system is avoiding uncertainty around the edges, from which the agent may suffer both longer decision time and more numerous opportunistic, rationalized judgments.

Which form of explicit morality should dominate to best realize morality’s function depends on one’s central life ambitions. One surrounded with self-endangering temptations to break the law might benefit from deontology; one whose life is involved in balancing the conflicting demands of others—say, a politician, at least of the conventional sort—may benefit from strengthening his consequentialist tendencies; one oriented toward a largely internalized standard of excellence—an academic or, even more so, an artist—may be served best by virtue ethics.

The personal cost of moral realism is inflexibility in choice of moral framework. The inculcation of deontology often accompanies social oppression, one of the reasons religion can serve as the “opium of the people.” Pressures stifling intellectuals may be imbued with consequentialism. Wage earners indoctrinated in virtue ethics may seek to become model employees, despite better serving their greater interest with a morality focused on consequences. Since explicit morality is a tool, as with other tools, form follows function.

Next in series: A habit theory of civic morality

13.0 Worse than college football itself: The oppressive fallout from the Paterno scandal—AGAINST mandatory-reporting laws

"Political correctness" drives fake astonishment

The aftermath of Penn State’s cover-up of the locker-room statutory rapes will prove that the adage “hard cases make bad law” applies to legislation, not just common law. A Pennsylvania legislator has already proposed tightening the mandatory-reporting laws, imposing on ordinary citizens a punishment-enforced legal duty to report hearsay knowledge on which they might base a suspicion.

Most everyone evinces amazement at the Penn cover-up, but the amazement is itself what’s most amazing. When the Catholic Church would be implicated in a cover-up of childhood rape, it is truly amazing that people are startled that such should transpire within a university football team. “Political correctness” evidently drives the expression of unbelief, and the odor of political correctness is pervasive, as when Warren Olney on public radio felt compelled to issue the caveat that pedophilia and homosexuality bear no mutual relationship—when, in fact, four of five convicted pedophiles choose a same-sex victim.

The issue’s saturation with political correctness is responsible for the absence of any outcry—even a word of criticism—of mandatory-reporting laws. For liberal social engineers, mandatory-reporting laws support using the state to reform the family. But these laws also support the rightist view that authoritarian means are acceptable if they protect the sexual innocence of children and comport with the general proposition that victims lack sufficient “rights.” So, approbation of such laws intersects the Stalinist political correctness wielded by liberals and the fascist "moral majoritarianism," by reactionaries. Is it surprising that this intersection has fostered the incipience of an institution common to Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia—state-compelled snitching?

Although forced snitching against family and neighbors is repugnant to most Americans—or at least used to be—I haven’t found any explicit arguments against it. Let’s get out of the way one reason for condemning totalitarian snitching, a reason which doesn’t apply to reporting child rapists: they don’t come close to being political dissidents. But mandatory snitching is odious, even when used for a good cause, such a protecting children from predation. Here are the reasons why.

Mandatory reporting violates the reporter's free-speech rights

The first reason concerns freedom of speech, which includes not only the right to speak, but also the right to remain silent. (Wooley v. Maynard (1977) 430 U.S. 705, 715.) While American constitutional law recognizes that freedom of speech includes the freedom not to speak, it hasn’t compiled any considerable law on the subject, a failing that expresses some disregard for freedom-of-speech’s omissive side. While the advantages of affirmative free speech have been enshrined in the “marketplace of ideas” metaphor, as regarding silence, the political poets have been, well, silent; but one clue about how the right not to speak fits into the total free-speech picture is a concept the Supreme Court has used to assess the protection given to religious practices that involve freedom of speech in addition to freedom of religion. The criterion concerns whether the compelled speech compromises the believer’s conscience. (See Christopher R. Pudelski, Comment: The Constitutional Fate of Mandatory Reporting Statutes and the Clergy-Communicant Privilege in a Post-Smith World (2004) 98 Nw. U.L. Rev. 703.)

This concept suggests that what should produce heightened protection of refusal to speak is the same factor—viewpoint discrimination—that is pivotal for affirmative speech. While religious believers are protected when their unique beliefs are implicated, secular people deserve protection against edicts that encroach ordinary viewpoints.

Millions comply with mandatory reporting laws each year, but many more fail to comply. One reason is that reporting clashes with their personal views. I’ll start with an extreme instance, which doesn’t represent the main reason for most people’s noncompliance. The protection deserved by people having extreme reasons should help show why those with moderate reasons deserve it.

A person is entitled to believe that child statutory rape should not be punished. This endorsement of statutory rape is a crackpot view, but the principle that you can think freely is inviolable, no matter how crazy the thought. As long as a person doesn’t act on his wicked beliefs, he is entitled to them. Since the right to think what you like is a widely accepted democratic absolute, it is a unique starting point for bright-line rules—its trespass, a slippery slope. We should not compel people to speak what they don’t believe: we shouldn’t compel people to express a viewpoint or express it in a way that conflicts with their viewpoint. This prohibition applies to cases from pledging allegiance to a flag the pledger doesn’t revere to reporting people for crimes the mandated private reporter doesn’t believe should be crimes. (See West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette (1943) 319 U.S. 624 [compulsory flag salute; see, especially, concurrence of Justices Black and Douglas, "laws must, to be consistent with the First Amendment, permit the widest toleration of conflicting viewpoints consistent with a society of free men"].)

Thinking that the sexual exploitation of children is OK is, fortunately, a rare viewpoint, but other perspectives more commonly oppose reporting. Some may believe their duty of loyalty to their friends is higher that their duty to unknown children. Compelling them to report crimes compels articulate transgression of their values. Some may hate the cops or social workers more than they hate child exploitation, and many might be revolted by all snitching. Again, compelled reporting is a viewpoint-discriminatory abridgement of dissenters' free speech because you're demanding expression of something contrary to their perspective, although not in virtue of what they say, but to whom they say it.

Mandatory reporting violates the accused's due-process rights

With the second reason for rejecting mandatory reporting laws, we move from the free speech of the mandated reporter to the due process rights of the accused. Mandatory reporting laws weaken citizens’ protection against police investigation, the initiation of which requires that the police have probable cause to breach citizens’ privacy rights. A mandatory report provides the supposed probable cause, even though it lacks serious evidentiary weight because the biases favoring a decision to report the crime degrade the reports as evidence. There is no penalty for good faith false reports, but there is a criminal penalty for failure to report. Citizens are urged to report any suspicion, and even reports based on hearsay are increasingly mandated. Although more citizens don’t report what the law requires than do report it, those who do often report unreliably. Ordinary civil protections—such as recourse to malicious-prosecution lawsuits—should govern reporting crime; good faith alone doesn't justify inviting the authorities into others’ lives.

Mandated reporting selects against the virtue of courage

But satisfying the requirement that negligent reports be subject to the customary procedural protections deepens the bite of the third argument against mandatory-reporting laws: people ought not to be forced by law to express a viewpoint they’re afraid to articulate, and often, one must be courageous to come forward. The law ought not demand speech in fear’s face, not to protect the cowards, but the courageous. If only the courageous obey the law, due to others’ succumbing to fear of retribution, then (except in the rare, high-profile case), only the courageous suffer the imposed risks. The law shouldn’t transmogrify virtue into disability: when, as here, it does so, it selects for cowardice; and its regime, correspondingly, eventuates in a nation of cowards.