More on Empirical Research into Morality

WebMD has an article which leads with "A new study reveals insights into the ancient roots of our modern-day sense of moral disgust."

Morality has been widely considered to be a somewhat recent phenomenon, evolutionarily speaking, that is closely tied to our ability to reason. Disgust, on the other hand, is considered an ancient and primitive emotion, which helped to keep early humans from eating foods that would kill them.

[Adam K] Anderson, lead study author Hanah Chapman, and colleagues conducted a series of experiments designed to determine if morality and disgust are more closely related than experts have thought.

In one experiment conducted to evoke the most basic, primordial form of disgust, participants drank a bad-tasting bitter liquid. In another, they looked at pictures of things generally recognized as disgusting, like dirty toilets.

In the final test, which measured moral disgust, participants were treated unfairly in a classic psychological experiment.

In all three situations, the participants showed activation of the levator labii muscle, indicating that reactions to tasting something bad, looking at something disgusting, and experiencing unfairness all involved similar disgust.

Those are some interesting excerpts. But go read the whole thing.

The Moral Rights of Neanderthals

Many have thought the most exciting ethical dilemma on the horizon would be the problem of moral rights for artificial intelligences. But at Reason Magazine online Ronald Bailey suggests that sooner than that we may have to decide what rights a cloned Neanderthal has.

A team of researchers led by geneticist Svante Pääbo at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, Germany announced last week that they had completed a draft sequence of the genome of Neanderthal humans.

Bailey writes that a scientist who suggests cloning of a Neanderthal is possible...

would modify a modern human genome so that its DNA matches the Neanderthal version. To avoid ethical problems, [...] this Neanderthal genome would not be inserted into a human cell but instead into a chimpanzee cell. This chimp cell would be reprogrammed to an embryonic state, and then introduced into a chimpanzee's womb where it would develop into a Neanderthal infant.

Assuming that cloning is safe, would it be ethical to clone a human being? The short answer is yes. Clones are basically delayed twins—and there is nothing inherently immoral about twins.

Yet, public opinion polling suggests most Americans oppose cloning of humans.

So I suspect [Bailey writes] that the proposal to use chimpanzee cells to clone a Neanderthal is an attempt to do a kind of ethical end-run around this "yuck factor" reaction to human cloning. In this case, researchers could argue that they are cloning a different species, not a human being.

But a problem there is that Neanderthals are human beings!

I fear that using chimpanzee cells to clone Neanderthals would likely be taken as an indication from the outset that they are in some sense subhuman, and thus less worthy of moral respect.

But let's set that worry aside and assume that scientists are able to produce healthy Neanderthal clones. What rights would they have?

Read the article and post a comment regarding what you think.

Morals Surrounding Food and Sex

The New York Times "Ideas" blog links today to a paper authored by someone at the Hoover institution. The paper argues, according to the Times, that we are getting

... a “transvaluation” of values in which food is freighted with taboos, but sex much less so.

I guess the idea is that at one time sex had lots of rules about it and food was a matter of taste (forgive the pun), now sex is a matter of taste (do whatever you want) and food has all sorts of rules about it.

For me, though, an interesting part of the article is the account of how some vegetarians have adopted some of the moralizing language of the past to stigmatize non-vegetarians. In the question of moral progress, it's important to have an account of how conceptual change occurs in moral schemas. It can be a counterexample to a theory of moral judgment, if that theory cannot allow for moral progress, or if it is too conservative, or conserving, of existing morays. In the future, a account of how a conceptual change was achieved in relation to vegetarianism will make an interesting ethnography.

Morality and the Economic Downturn, Part 3

At pbs.org a fellow at the Brookings Institution discussed the moral aspects of the market with a PBS producer. Here is the video.

The World Financial Crisis

In his recent talk, Gary Parr, Deputy Chairman of Lazard and a much sought after financial adviser in the current credit crunch, addressed the world financial crisis. It is a rare but welcome opportunity to meet someone who has first hand experience with multinational corporations and governments and who is involved in high profile decision-making processes that affect so many people worldwide. And it is even rarer to meet such a person and realize that he is not only a calculating businessman, but actually quite human and ethically concerned. Mr. Parr’s talk was stimulating and, apart from facts and numbers, he touched on many complex ethical issues that have no simple answers. I will discuss some of them, in particular corporate social responsibility, government intervention, and institutional design.

How did it happen?
In his talk, Mr. Parr identified human nature as one of the key causes of the current financial crisis. The problem is not, however, egoistic behavior, as one might have thought. Instead, inductive reasoning is the main culprit. Inductive reasoning, based on the assumption that the future will be like the past, is essential for human beings to survive in this world, but it may also drive them into an existential or financial crisis. If everyone believes that prices will go up, as in our case housing prices, because housing prices always went up in the past, and the issued credit volume by lenders is not fully backed by real assets, then we may face a vicious problem of collective action when prices actually fall.

The problem of collective action that arises in this case is, quite refreshingly, not that no action takes place, as in the Prisoner’s Dilemma game where everybody defects. Instead, the problem is that too much action takes place because everyone tries to sell, and the run on the banks effectively shuts them down. To illustrate this point, Mr. Parr used the metaphor of a ship in danger to capsize because too many people lean on one side of the boat. Coordinated action, then, if everyone runs from the one side of the boat to the other, will surely do the trick and sink the ship. How can we avoid such unwelcome collective disaster?

Possible solutions
Back to human nature. I think that a good starting point to solve this problem is David Hume’s insight that human beings cannot change their nature, but they can change their environment. Human beings can, by intelligent institutional design, artificially create institutions that guard themselves against collective failure such as we currently experience.

One such institutional coordination device is free markets. If everything goes fine, the invisible hand optimally allocates our scarce resources. That is a start. But markets alone do not always produce socially optimal outcomes. Indeed, as the last couple of months have shown, markets may not even produce stable suboptimal outcomes, but instead falter altogether. But what should we do if the invisible hand gets out of hand? The most obvious answer to this question is government intervention. There are two options. We can either follow a piecemeal strategy or call for systematic government regulations.

The general strategy in the US has been, in particular over the last eight years during which the Bush administration reduced regulations for banks, insurers, lenders, and credit raters, to interfere with the market only in emergency cases and otherwise to let the market work as freely as possible. But this strategy is extremely short-sighted because it does not allow us to prevent unfavorable situations such as that which we currently face. It allows only for rescue plans and ad hoc modifications to the current system, as Mr. Parr discussed.

It seems that in order to prevent collective failure, more systematic institutional design is necessary. The government must tame the market by legislating more rigorous rules for the ‘banking game’ that actually produce socially desirable outcomes, or at least avoid collective disaster. But is this sufficient? Does changing the rules of the game prevent corporations from following extremely risky strategies that, if they should go wrong, must be absorbed by taxpayers because a collapse of these enterprises would be even worse for the public?

It seems that there is still a missing link that forces corporations and their managements to be more responsible for their actions. One possible solution to this problem is partial state ownership. The idea is straightforward. If the government bails out ailing companies, then it should receive a share in the company’s ownership in return, and when stock market prices recover, the government should sell the shares to private investors to the benefit of the taxpayers. This ties private interests to the public interest, at least partially, and thus forces all actors to pull in the same direction. No collective action problem here. Paul Krugman’s recent article on this topic is insightful.