David Brooks Pens Column on Empirical Moral Psychology

Brooks' column is the 'most emailed' article today at the New York Times online and another in a growing series, as the popular press gets wind of what's been going in philosophically informed psychology labs and psychologically informed philosophy departments. I'm going to ignore the headline which is "The End of Philosophy." Such an end is not advanced in the article and in any case not supported in it. I'll chalk it to wanting an eye-catching hook.

Brooks does, however, more than suggest that moral philosophy, which Brooks calls 'bookish', will be surprised by these empirical results which show that emotion plays a large part in morality. Lots of comments at the New York Times online reference David Hume as a counterexample to Brooks' notion.

I think that Parr Center for Ethics original reporting indicates that Brooks' interest came from his participation a month ago in Darwin's 200 birthday celebratory activities. Brooks chaired a panel discussion (see here and here) at the John Templeton Foundation that included Michael Gazzaniga (UC-Santa Barbara), Jonathan Haidt (University of Virginia), and Steven Quartz (Caltech). Those are the three people he quotes in the column. Here's a bit cut-and-pasted from the transcript of the panel discussion:

Steven Quartz: Well, certainly, philosophers are rightly, I think, accused of emphasizing the frontal part of the brain to the exclusion of all else, historically, although, there are certain important historical counter-examples to that. For example, much of what contemporary moral psychology emphasizes with the role of emotion is what David Hume emphasized in his theory of ethics as well.

So Brooks knows about Hume, we must assume. I guess, here too, Brooks has 'augmented' his content so as to make it more catchy.

Late Update:

Brooks certainly tries to suggest that philosophy is surprised by the role of emotions psychology has discovered. But let's look to a text many philosophers have engaged with for a long time, Hume's Enquiry into the Principles of Morals from 1751, whose third paragraph begins like this:

There has been a controversy started of late, much better worth examination, concerning the general foundation of Morals; whether they be derived from Reason, or from Sentiment; whether we attain the knowledge of them by a chain of argument and induction, or by an immediate feeling and finer internal sense; whether, like all sound judgement of truth and falsehood, they should be the same to every rational intelligent being; or whether, like the perception of beauty and deformity, they be founded entirely on the particular fabric and constitution of the human species.

Later update:
Philosophers are discussing here and here.

Still later update:
A letter to the editor of the Salt Lake Tribune.




Photo from Language Log.