Outstripping Even Itself

Boy, the New York Times is outdoing itself today. It has two asinine articles on ethics. Here’s one, by Paul Bloom, on the amazing inclinations toward justice and morality of infant babies. (Yes, you read that correctly.) See? Fuck it. Reflection be damned, even babies are moral!

And here’s another, by Robert Wright, on the amazing application of justice and morality to invading space aliens. (Yes, you read that correctly.) See? Fuck it. Normative ethics be damned, if space aliens figure out how to get here, they will have needed to develop a sufficiently self-preservationist ethic to survive, which will ipso facto translate into respect for humans.

All ethics hacks must know, instinctively, that the end of the semester is upon those of us who are actually serious about ethics — at least, those of us who basically read and study ethics all day long. Exam week is like amnesty for the promulgation of stupid ideas. (What is it about these guys that gives them the impression that they don’t need to know anything about ethics to write about it?)

Sigh.

Let’s take these one at a time, shall we? (Quickly. And then, back to grading and writing.) Bloom first, and our tip to his mistake comes in his opening sentence:

Not long ago, a team of researchers watched a 1-year-old boy take justice into his own hands.

No. No, they did not watch that, unless you think of justice as the kind of thing captured in a Charles Bronson movie.

But the current work I’m involved in, on baby morality, might seem like a perverse and misguided next step.

Yes. Yes, it is a perverse and misguided step, because babies are not moral agents, unless you don’t take moral guidance and reflection seriously, in which case they’re moral in the same way that my computer is moral.

A reason this view has persisted is that, for many years, scientists weren’t sure how to go about studying the mental life of babies.

No. That’s probably not the reason that this view has persisted. The reason that this view has persisted is because ethical action is generally contrasted with instinctive or brute action, and as any parent will tell you, babies are friggin’ brutes.

Look, that babies may be involved in doing “rudimentary math,” or that they may speak in rudimentary grunts and monosyllabic words, or maybe even that they know that some grown-ups have false beliefs, doesn’t at all suggest that somehow they’re engaged in the moral community, or that, god forbid, they’re morally responsible for their actions. They’re just trying to figure it all out. Aristotle said as much several thousand years ago. It’s interesting, but it’s a misapprehension of the highest order to suggest that somehow this is morality. At the very best, it’s a nascent morality, prone to completely fucking things up.

To be fair, Bloom redeems himself partway through his article. It’s pretty interesting research he’s conducting — it’s just that his conclusions are cockamamie. He’s not actually studying the roots of ethics or morality. He’s just watching what babies do, much like I could watch what grown-ups do. I don’t even think it’s right to refer to it as the “moral life of babies.” That’s like talking about the “aesthetic, the literary, or the mathematical life of babies” and suggesting somehow that babies are aesthetically, literarily, or mathematically plugged in. They’re just not.

Now onto Wright. He has this to say:

A slightly less hopeful argument has been made by — well, by me. In my book “Nonzero” I argue that the moral progress Singer rightly celebrates has been driven less by pure reason than by pragmatic self-interest. Technology has drawn groups of people into more and more far-flung “non-zero-sum” relations — relations of interdependence; increasingly it has been in the interest of one group to acknowledge the humanity of another group, if only so the groups can play win-win games. In this view, the decline of American prejudice toward Japanese after World War II was driven less by purely rational enlightenment than by the Japanese transition from mortal enemies to trade partners and Cold War allies. (In this TED conference talk, Steven Pinker, who is writing a book on the decline of violence, contrasts my view with Singer’s.)

If I’m right, and we generally grant the moral significance of other beings to the extent that it’s in our interest to do so, then whywouldn’t we, in 100 or 200 years, do what Hawking imagines aliens doing — happen upon a planet, extract its resources through whatever brutality is most efficient and then move on to the next target? Absent cause to be nice, why would we be nice?

Wait, you have a book? Is it for sale? Too bad you don’t have a internationally distributed column in which to mention something about it. You might sell a lot of copies.

Okay, first things first: this “slightly less hopeful argument” is made by — well, not just you, but every fracking undergraduate in my introduction to ethics class, most of whom are sophomores. I’ll leave you to find the appropriate adjective to describe your idea.

If you’re right, you may have just tipped your hand that you, too, do not understand the first thing about normative ethics, because as a matter of empirical fact it may be true that — generalizing here — we maybe do extend moral significance to other beings to the extent that it’s in our interest, but the fundamental ethical question isn’t what do we do, it’s what we ought to do. Since you don’t understand that, you fail.

It gets worse:

I argue in the penultimate chapter that if we don’t radically develop our “moral imagination” — get much better at putting ourselves in the shoes of people very different from ourselves, even the shoes of our enemies — then the planet could be in big trouble.

How original. Are you suggesting that we should think about how things ought to be? Curious… because that’s exactly what ethicists do. And we don’t do it by strengthening our “moral imagination” or by putting ourselves in the shoes of others. That kind of thinking died a violent death in the 1700s, if not before that, once we recognized that our imagination is itself shaped by our animalistic predilections toward our own friggin’ self-interests, which can’t be what ethics is based on, despite the facile and confused scribblings of the world’s most unjustifiably renowned Russian emigrant.

Sorry. I’m cranky. I’ve read too many undergraduate exams in the past 72 hours. It pains me to read similar such drivel in the New York Friggin Times.

To put a cap on this, I was talking about these articles with one of my philosophy colleagues today and he said the following:

Just once, I’d like to see one of these articles go: “Can they really tell right from wrong? No. The end.”

Couldn’t’ve put it better myself.