Value Competition

Stich on Morality and Cognitive Science, part 2

Stich's argument in his Nicod lecture 2 http://www.institutnicod.org/lectures2007_outline.htm :  Whether moral disagreement is fundamental rather than dependent on lack of rationality, impartiality, or information by one or more parties to disagreement is an important philosophical issue.  A body of research (Richard Brandt on Hopi acceptance of children playing with small animals in a way that causes them extreme pain and American aversion to such play; Richard Nisbett on different attitudes and physiological responses to honor-related scenarios in "honor cultures" such as the US South and non-honor cultures such as the US North; Doris et al on more honor-oriented and individual-sacrificing responses among Chinese than among American respondents; Henrich et al on different levels of sharing in economic games in different cultures) suggests that moral disagreements are in fact fundamental.  In any case, whether that empirical evidence is persuasive or not, a plausible evolutionary theory of norm acquisition (Sripada and Stich) relies on the idea that people who grow up in environments in which different norms prevail will make different judgments even under ideal conditions; Saunders' criticism of Sripada and Stich for failing to acknowledge how their model of norm acquisition can support rationally-generated moral judgments is fair enough, but such rationally-generated moral judgments are themselves subject to fundamental disagreement, given different socially-acquired norms.    

I find Stich's affirmative empirical case for fundamental moral disagreement in this lecture considerably less compelling than his critical empirical case for blurring the moral rule-conventional rule distinction in his first lecture.  Apart from that secondary point, my main value competition reaction to his espousal of fundamental moral disagreement is to urge that the empirical and theoretical focus be broadened from cross-cultural fundamental disagreement to intra-cultural and intra-individual fundamental disagreement.  If VC is right, we would expect the latter kinds of fundamental disagreement; in fact useful variation across individuals and groups within a culture, especially a complex one like that of the contemporary US, is likely to be considerably greater than variation across cultures.  That is, the "Americans think it's disgusting to eat dogs and Koreans don't" kind of across-the-board cross-cultural variation, real as it is, likely pertains to matters less significant than topics like adultery as to which we should per VC expect even greater differences in attitudes (referring to actual attitudes, not necessarily to expressed ones) within cultures than across cultures, and should also expect fundamental moral disagreement (likely repressed) within a given individual.

Value Consilience

Value competition = analysis of the utility or disutility of competition in values.  The perspective is utilitarian; value competition is economic science in the spirit of Jeremy Bentham and Milton Friedman.

Value contradiction = examination of the contradictions within people and among people that are associated with value competition.  The perspective is humanistic; value contradiction is critical philosophy in the spirit of Friedrich Nietzsche and Alasdair MacIntyre.

Value consilience = combining and mediating value competition and value contradiction in the construction of normative theory and practice.   The perspective is virtue-oriented; value consilience is moral philosophy in the spirit of Aristotle and E.O. Wilson.

Business Ethics and the Brain

...is the title of a review article by Rommel Salvador and Robert G. Folger in BEQ 19(1), 1-31 (2009) that summarizes recent work in neuroethics.  

A value contradiction observation: Although the article highlights the role of emotion in morality, it has comparatively little to say about potential contradictions between such emotions--for instance, between those that push us to help ourselves and those that push us to help others.  It has more to say about the difference between utilitarian judgments and other kinds of judgments, and in particular on the idea that utilitarian moral judgments appear to be neurologically associated with cognition more broadly, unlike other kinds of moral judgments that lack such a tight connection with cognition.

A value competition observation: Although the article as one would expect is favorable toward the idea that scientific knowledge can inform business ethics, it does not show the proclivity toward understanding neuroscience in adaptationist, evolutionary terms that marks the work of, for example, Haidt.  The authors do not show opposition to adaptationism on the basis that it usurps what should properly belong to normative ethical theory with economics--they make a respectful passing reference to Michael Jensen, an avatar of economic method--but neither do they embrace it.

John Updike

Literature is a land of value contradiction, not value competition.  But Updike was tacit value competition, with the calculative craft of his beautiful sentences and the cultural ends of his art pushing one another forward in a cycle of productivity that climbed the alpine heights as few have ever done for so long and so well.  Because Updike was a sensible man who was not contradiction-haunted, he can be judged lacking compared to other artists thus haunted.  But I disagree; Freud remains the exemplary psychologist of the twentieth century, notwithstanding his out-of-place espousal of value contradiction in a domain that has turned to the practical, ameliorative spirit of value competition, and John Updike strikes me as the exemplary American writer of the twentieth century notwithstanding his sunny, sexy, satisfiedly suburban soul.

The Contradictions of Utility

Suppose that what I argue in "Building Better Agents" is true: The cultural and economic accomplishments of the past few hundred years depend in considerable part on the heightening of internal and external tensions between different value poles, such as individual betterment and universal moral principles, utilitarianism and deontology, and the left and the right.  One can take a basically optimistic, value competition perspective on those heightened tensions, as I do in the paper.  Or one can take a "limits of reason," value contradiction perspective, which aims to uncover irrationality and incoherence in the heightened value tensions attendant upon modernity.   That contradictionist perspective, though, does not go as far as philosophical anti-foundationalists like Nietzsche and Rorty have often wanted to go.  Value contradiction is about the contradictions embodied in utility, not in all forms of reason.  Value competition is utilitarian, at least when it builds efficiency models; value contradiction uses the same models for anti-utilitarian purposes.

Polarization Everywhere?

Contra MacIntyre's claim that Aristotle offers a way out of the contradictions of modern ethics, one could make a claim that Aristotelianism itself is a polar position in multiple ways: originally as a practical alternative to the idealism of Plato; over time as a teleological alternative to theories that deny a path of development for human beings and human crafts; over time as an approach that has now become traditional or traditionalist; and over time as a normative alternative to empirical work in ethics. 

I think that "contradiction everywehere" argument is wrong, though, or at least insufficiently attentive to differences between Aristotelianism and ethical approaches like Kantianism, utilitarianism, shareholder value maximization, and stakeholder theory.  The latter approaches are constituted in large part by their rivalries with opposing approaches.   Bentham's pungent assertion that human rights are nonsense on stilts is a core proposition of utilitarianism, toned down as modern utilitarianism may be from its founder's sweeping, sometimes crass style; Kant's claim that it is wrong to lie no matter what the consequences is a core proposition of deontology, even if modern deontologists are often less rigorous than the sage of Konigsberg.  Aristotelianism, on the other hand, does not stand in a parallel relationship of opposition to another ethical system.  Not does it simply attempt to mediate between two opposed systems. 

Though a traditionalist Aristotelianism of the kind MacIntyre appears to advocate falls prey to the modern dichotomy between modernity and tradition, that is a fixable difficulty; just as the Thomists and other groups updated Aristotelianism for their purposes, so too can modern ethicists.  MacIntyre thus seems to me right about the basic difference between Aristotelianism and the competing ideologies of ethical modernity, even though the particular brand of Aristotelianism he seems to espouse may slide into traditionalist ideology.

Whether MacIntyre is right, though, about Aristotelianism being unique in its ability to rise above the polarizations of modernity is another matter.  I am inclined to think he is wrong, and that certain other approaches to ethics share the above-the-fray quality of Aristotelianism.   For these approaches to be plausible rivals to Aristotelianism, though, entails their being associated with substantial, high quality bodies of work, not simply being nonpartisan.

Alasdair MacIntyre

Rereading After Virtue with the thought of using it to frame a business ethics paper for SBE...

The outline of a paper: a) M's basic line: modernity and the loss of shared morality in favor of interminable argument; Aristotle as the way out of emotivisim/Nietzschean nihilism; b) an empirical test of M in the form of content analysis of current business ethics abstracts: how many are partisan in one way or another?; how many are positive rather than normative?; how many are Aristotelian?; is there non-Aristotelian work that is nonpartisan?; c) a translation of M's argument into a value contradiction argument that utility, in the form of modern economic productivity and democratic governance, depends on heightened contradictions in a number of respects; d) a claim that the choice is not between Aristotle and Nietzsche; a semi-modernized Aristotelianism is a good candidate for a nonpartisan business ethics theory, but so is Donaldson & Dunfee's Integrative Social Contracts Theory, especially if that theory is cast in a Madisonian, checks and balances form.