Morality and the Economic Downturn, Part 2

To what extent has the recent failure of our global economic system been a moral failure?

The BBC asks that question in an article here.

It is noted that if you think at first glance that capitalism itself is immoral, you need to remember that the "invisible hand" idea is meant to show that in capitalism there is reward made to those who satisfy the interests of others.

"Wall Street is always motivated by profit, but unfortunately everybody thinks that capitalism is the problem," he says, pointing to how the essential root of capitalism is to reward those who do something that will help others.

But what actually happened in the credit crisis? And was what went wrong a matter of immoral decisions and actions?

Joe Saluzzi says the cause of the current crisis was giving loans to people who didn't qualify, who had no documentation, and no income that could support a mortgage.

"And the reason banks did lend was because they were packing up the risks and selling them off to Wall Street," he says.

"If people become too dependent on loans or are unqualified, the system is wrong and is not going to work," adds Dr Rishi Das.

I'm still not seeing a moral violation. At least not as the BBC reporter is presenting it.

"Everybody is guilty here of trying to make an extra dime and squeeze an extra bit of profit," he says.

Again, that just sounds like the profit motive essential to capitalism. What we are looking for is a moral violation in the pursuit of that profit. Some act of unfairness or harm.

Now, on the other hand, maybe there is more to morality than violations of autonomy (harm) and violations of fairness. The people the BBC interviewed seem to think so. In an earlier post, we discussed the work of Jonathan Haidt, a psychologist who has studied the psychology of moral judgment. He finds that a small population of the world thinks that only violations of autonomy and fairness count as moral violations, and the rest of the world agrees with that while also finding violations of Community, Purity, and Authority to be moral violations.

Globalisation has given us insight into the lives of different people, but it has failed to make us appreciate that we are all connected, she believes.

"The culture of greed has created an individualism, selfishness - a society looking for compensation - a society we don't want to live in."

These seem to be violations of Community, as the psychologist Jonathan Haidt would categorize them.

Does is make sense that capitalism (and the individualism inherent in the profit motive postulation) would work well for cultures with only the Harm and Fairness moral pillars and work not so well in cultures will all five pillars?

Part of the mission of the Parr Center's Ethics in the News blog is to educate interested members of the Parr & UNC community about ethics and everyday life. There are other ways to do that, to be sure, than merely foregrounding news stories that have an ethical aspect to them. 

So today, I wanted to share some resources for understanding some of the recent empirical moral psychology which is playing such a big part in recent discussions in philosophical ethics.




Above is a video of a lecture by psychologist Jonathan Haidt on the evolutionary origins of morality and on what he calls the five main pillars of morality: Harm, Fairness, In-group, Authority, Purity. He says that Blue State Liberals consider only Harm and Fairness violations to be moral violations. Red State Conservatives (and most of non-Western peoples) consider violations of any of the five to be moral violations.

Additionally, here's a video of Haidt speaking at a New Yorker conference. He claims that diversity and mobility (which is what you encounter when you live on water routes) shrink the moral domain to just Harm and Fairness.

And, here is an important paper by Haidt, for those who are interested and want to dig deeper. 

The idea of the power of moral emotions and the post-hoc rationalizations that people do to defend their emotional judgments is an important Haidt-idea. It is discussed more in the paper than in the video, although he mentions it in the interview portion of the New Yorker video.

He says, and I'm paraphrasing:

"People's reasoning is not the source of their judgments. We make our moral judgments with our gut. It's like aesthetic judgment. You see something and you have an instant reaction. You can't stop yourself. 'That's beautiful' is your judgment. And then you think of reasons why the artwork is beautiful but that reason may not necessarily be the feature of the painting the caused your reaction/judgment. And analogously in morality, we see something and we just have an immediate reaction. Then we are so good at reasoning... but we don't reason in order to find the truth... moral reasoning developed, I believe, in order to help us persuade others to see things our way. Moral reasoning is practiced very strategically in order just to defend what you already believe because of your emotional response."

By the way, I don't know if I necessarily endorse his view, if it's his view that there may be something irrefutably valuable in the other three moral pillars. Perhaps I think it's better to be committed to a society with high mobility, high diversity and lots and lots of tolerance. The reason Authority and In-Group and Purity go away in modern cultures on trading routes is because they tend to favor unfairness to some group that is trying to live with the other groups.

Enjoy the videos!

Morality and the Economic Downturn

Some public comments and certainly personal conversations have couched interpretations of the credit crisis on Wall Street in moral terms. 

But the New York Times reports today that "Thursday night at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in Manhattan...the Ivy League professors Simon Schama and Michael Walzer and the Wall Street powerbrokers Mort Zuckerman, Michael Steinhardt and William Ackman gathered to discuss 'Madoff: A Jewish Reckoning.'"

As for moral issues, Mr. Walzer, of Princeton, said, “I’m a moral philosopher, but I don’t think morality is all that important in the way we think about Wall Street and the economy.” The drive to make money is at the root of the business world, he noted: “We have to assume human behavior is what it is, and that’s what you need government for."

Is a moral analysis of the credit crisis appropriate?

Moral Relativism

A columnist at the BBC News Magazine online has addressed moral relativism. Much of the article is filler and anecdotes. The meat, such as it is, is here:

I'd begin with some token reassurance and then go on to discuss some of the parameters of moral relativism, the ways in which such a position derived at least in part from the anthropological insistence upon the uniqueness of separate cultures, from the alleged impossibility of being able to declare one way of living and believing as superior to any other.

I'd also suggest that a thoroughgoing subscription to moral relativism meant that it was no longer valid or appropriate to pass judgement on such practises as wife beating or euthanasia.

But in order not to be too downbeat I'd also point out to my earnest enquirer that there was small consolation to be found in their children's readiness to construct their own ideas of what was right and wrong.

Children who devised their own moral code were far more likely to adhere to it than to one which had been handed down by authoritarian figures such as popes and priests and headmasters and patriarchal fathers. Then I'd say "that'll be ten pounds please", hop back in the van, drive home and count the day's takings.

But then perhaps even more interesting are the comments in which his readers take him to task:

One of my first-day-of-the semester ploys is to have my students say something about themselves by way of introduction. One semester, during this process one boy said, "My name is Aaron and I don't believe in anything."

"Not in ANYTHING?" I asked.

He said, "I don't believe in religion or morality or anything."

I stared for a second and then asked, "'Thou Shalt Not Kill.' I am sure we all would like to know where you stand on that one."

"Oh. I agree with that one."

I waited a heartbeat, then said, "Well, then I can let you stay. If you had expressed ambiguity, I would have felt morally bound to insist you leave."

And this:

Finally the public seem to be catching up with what philosophers have been saying for years; it isn't possible to know anything. Soon we will discount all morality and decide we can no longer pass judgement on anything. Then the law will go. After that we'll decide we aren't sure about science and technology and then we can scrap that. Then we just need to take apart language and we can all be back in caves in no time, getting some damn peace.

What do the readers of the Ethics in the News Blog think? 

Designer Babies: Science and Morality in the Magazine New Scientist

At New Scientist, Dan Jones writes that moral heuristics may be leading us astray in our moral judgments.

Heuristics can be thought of as tools in our mental toolbox that have evolved over millennia to help us make fast decisions in complex situations or where information may be limited, such as when choosing between various options or making everyday predictions. A particularly pervasive example in the moral domain is the injunction "Do not play God" or, in more secular terms, "Do not tamper with nature".

The problem with using moral heuristics to judge science is even starker in some popular perceptions of reproductive technologies. "Designer" babies are a case in point. IVF combined with genetic testing makes it possible to screen the cells of an embryo for specific gene variants before it is implanted into the womb. This pre-implantation genetic diagnosis is primarily used to filter out embryos with genes for heritable diseases, but in future it could be used to choose babies with desired traits, such as tallness or a particular eye colour, and perhaps even physical prowess, intelligence and aspects of personality.

The article then cites Lewis Wolpert, a developmental biologist:

Wolpert believes that knowledge, not a moral heuristic, is the best guide to thinking about the desirability of scientific or technological progress. So while he doesn't oppose "designer" babies on ethical grounds, he doesn't think there should be a genetic free-for-all either... "You might think you know what you're doing when you put in new genes, but it's very tricky, and you're likely to produce abnormalities," he says. "I think it's a safety issue, not an ethical issue."

Is it just a safety issue? If there is an ethical quandary here what is it? What do you think the right thing to do is?

Making babies 'cancer-free'?

The first baby born in the UK to have been screened as an embryo for a cancer gene is raising again a hornets nest of ethical issues. There is more to discuss with this than can be handled in less than a book, so I won't even attempt it here. It is worth pointing out, though, how even more complicated this issue is than the over-wrought debates about abortion. On top of the question of whether an embryo or fetus has moral status, the issue of designer babies involves serious questions about what duties mothers have to their children, and whether embryonic screening is impermissibly discriminatory or even a form of eugenics. Moreover, there is the considerable cost of genetic screening and in vitro fertilization. As a result, those families who are least able financially to cope with having a child genetically predisposed to disease would be the ones least able to do anything about it. Suffice it to say that bioethicists are going to be busy with this for quite a while. 

Comments welcome.