Two Arguments Against Libertarianism

Libertarianism – in a coarse telling – is political philosophy that places primacy on individual freedom over all other values. As such, it’s often placed in contrast to traditional political notions that advocate some limits to freedom, such as liberalism (economic regulation, but personal freedom) and conservatism (personal regulation, but economic freedom).

It’s not the most popular political orientation; a 2006 PEW study found only 9% of Americans polled fell in to the libertarian category compared to 18% liberal and 15% conservative. However, libertarianism appears to be particularly popular amongst those who are wealthy and well educated.

It’s also popular amongst economists, for libertarianism is quite compatible with some of the key assumptions that underlie  modern day free market economics: such as that behaviour is driven by self-interested rational agents. For these agents, interference in their behaviour restricts their ability to pursue their own preferences. From this point of view, the only role of the government ought to be to enforce property rights, manage contracts and provide a few true public goods, like defence, roads and basic infrastructure. Everything else is left to individuals to figure out for themselves, according to their free will.

Libertarianism can seem an appealing philosophy from a purely rational perspective. Why have a government interfere with my life, telling me what I should and shouldn’t want – or can and can’t do? As long as I don’t interfere with the ability of others to pursue their personal goals and preferences, I should be free to pursue my own ends unhindered. And, furthermore, in doing so, we can advance the ends of all individuals care of the magic of the invisible hand.

However, there’s a chink in libertarianism’s armour. In fact, there are two.

First is the assumptions it makes about human psychology – such as that we are capable of understanding and articulating our preferences and that we’re able to act upon them rationally, i.e. that we’re Homo economicus.

In fact, the truth is quite different. Preferences are often obscure. There are long term and short term preferences. Imagined and real. Needs and wants. And often the preferences we articulate are not in accordance to the things that actually benefit us or make us happy.

Often our decisions cause us – and others – harm. And in retrospect, we often regret many of our decisions and wish someone had encouraged us to do otherwise. Or our decisions are manipulated, either by other individuals, or by the environment at large. Or, most sinisterly, by those with vested interests, such as politicians or companies trying to encourage you to buy their product, whether you need it or not.

Libertarianism is rather unforgiving of behaviour that leads to self-harm, yet many of us have strong desires to prevent others from causing themselves harm, even if that means limiting their freedom – such as the freedom to gamble away all their money or the freedom for companies to advertise sweet and fatty foods to children.

Then there’s the second chink: libertarianism makes for an unstable society.

Common habits, customs and traditions – as well as common moral values – bind a community together and encourage cooperation. A highly libertarian society, with a vast diversity of values and customs, is a fractured society, without the bonds of common culture except those that emerge in pockets as people of similar preferences gather together (and, I’d suggest, establish rules of behaviour, which limit personal freedom).

Certainly, the market can enable high levels of cooperation in terms of production, but a strongly libertarian market is largely unregulated. That can lead to great inequities emerging, and that can also destabilise the society.

Or take a personal practice like polygany – the taking of multiple wives. Libertarians would hesitate to regulate such a behaviour, yet polygany can also destabilise society. A deficit of potential mates increases levels of male competition for status, often leading to violent conflict.

Consider many of the limits on freedom advocated by liberals and conservatives. They come at the issue from different directions, but they’re both trying to achieve the same end: bind communities together and encourage cooperation.

Liberals do this by limiting the ability of some to gain disproportionate power over the group and exploiting that power for their own ends. They also attempt to lift up the most disadvantaged, bringing more people in to the pool of cooperators rather than letting them drop off the edge. Liberals are less interested in the effort one puts in as the results that come out.

Conservatives, on the other hand, seek to regulate personal freedoms – customs, habits, practices etc. Taboos are common, with behaviours steered towards a common ground. This also binds communities together through like beliefs, traditions and prohibitions.

Food taboos in religion are like this. They might start as health initiatives, but they rapidly become instruments of conformity. And a highly conforming community is more likely to trust each other and cooperate.

Libertarians – at least extreme libertarians – sacrifice the egalitarianism of liberalism and the social binding of conservatism for hyper-individuality.

Libertarianism is an appealing idea if you hold human agency and freedom above all else. However, it has its weaknesses. Freedom is certainly worth having, but at what cost?

Evolution and Politics: Third Time Lucky

The history of the fusion of evolution and politics isn’t one to be terribly proud of, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have an exciting future. And I happen to think it does have an exciting future, hence my concern not to be lumped in with efforts from the past.

Evolution and politics first locked eyes across the room in the company of Herbert Spencer and the Social Darwinism movement. However, the Social Darwinists made a couple of pivotal mistakes.

The first was to assume that evolution had an intrinsic progressive quality. Thus one organism could be called more evolved than another, despite Darwin himself rejecting that very notion. As a result, the Social Darwinists saw evolution as justifying inequality and suffering if it furthered the ends of evolution itself; if it yielded more evolved organisms. And, clearly, the wealthy and powerful were more successful than the poor and powerless. So be it, they said, it’s all for the better. Well, wrong.

The second mistake they made was to derive an ought from an is. They saw evolution as being natural, thus being good, sneakily slipping in the shaky premise that everything that is natural is good. Well, again, wrong.

Round two came in the 1970s with the Sociobiology movement. This was a far more nuanced philosophy, large parts of which are still alive and kicking today under the moniker evolutionary psychology. However, Sociobiology proponents such as E.O. Wilson often – and perhaps unconsciously – made the slip from is to ought all too easily. As a result, descriptive notions – such as those concerning aggression, sexual inequality or nationalism – sometimes sounded an awful lot like apologising for the behaviours that result.

Now… round three.

(Actually, a brief mention of round two-point-five. Peter Singer’s cheeky little book, A Darwinian Left, is a worthwhile read for an alternative perspective on how evolution can inform political thinking from a purely descriptive level. Singer suggests that we cannot draw any prescriptive values from evolution, but we can draw some prescriptive lessons by using evolution to better understand human psychology. Thus you might value happiness, or empathy, or altruism – or if you’re conservative: competition, achievement, stability etc – and then use evolutionary psychology, amongst other things, to figure out the best way to promote those values.  Nice idea, but really only extends the notion of using out best descriptive tools to further our chosen ends. Nothing terribly revolutionary about that.)

Now… round three.

Central to my current research is the idea that, on the descriptive level, evolution might not provide insight in to any one political ideology, but might explain the very diversity of political ideologies we see in the world today and throughout history. That’s a long way from the notion that evolutionary explanations somehow suggest there should be less diversity in human behaviour.

Often an individual’s political views will be influenced by their intuitive and emotional responses to particular issues – and these intuitive and emotional responses are shaped, at least in part, by evolution. And evolution equips us not with just a limited number of consistent intuitions or emotions, but with a vast diversity of intuitions and emotions, often in conflict and tension with each other.

But evolution is canny. It hasn’t just equipped us with any old intuitions and emotions. It’s equipped us with a selection that helped us to solved many of the reoccurring problems that confronted our ancestors. Chief amongst these problems was: how the hell do you get a bunch of non-related individuals to cooperate for mutual benefit without defecting on each others’ arses?

And, crucially, there are multiple answers to that question – no one best, but some better than others in certain situations. Think of it like an Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma. In a population of Nice strategies, it’s beneficial to be Nice. However, in a population of Nasty strategies, it pays to be Nasty. And everything in between. From a descriptive point of view, I think this goes a long way to explaining the robustness of the political spectrum.

But what about the leap from descriptive to prescriptive? Without falling in to the is/ought trap, I think there are some prescriptive lessons we can gain from this.

One is that evolution can help us understand where our values come from in the first place. If your values are based around compassion, or cooperation, or even competition, there might be very good evolutionary reasons why you might hold those values. If you want to avoid the is/ought problem, then it might be worth re-examining your values in the harsh light of biology. It may even be that there is no way to escape the is/ought issue – but that might not be such a bad thing. In fact, that might lead to a kind of moral naturalism – a notion that is not altogether absurd.

If this is the case, then we might be able to – cautiously – draw some norms from evolution. One might be the primacy of survival. Arguably, if you hold a moral or political belief that is inclined to get you killed before you can pass on that belief, or pass on offspring with the genetic predisposition to that belief, then that belief will likely die out. I think that could be a very good reason for not adopting that moral belief.

Should we agree to this, then I would suggest that there is in all probability no one moral or political belief that reigns supreme. In fact, the very diversity of beliefs and norms that we see in the real world might be the optimal strategy. That’s not to say we should accept the diversity we have today in a fatalistic way – for change is another value that’s worth holding. Instead, we should seek to allow a diversity of beliefs, let them be in tension with each other and that way we have the best chance of prosperity.

Sure, there’ll be conflict that arises from this approach. But, as with any decision, one must ask what’s the next best alternative? And if that alternative leads to more conflict, then the answer may be clear. And I’d suggest that any mono-ideological position would either be unstable, and not survive, or would lead to more conflict. That’s a hypothesis that needs testing – and that’s precisely what I’m trying to do.

All in the name of having evolution and politics do more than just eye each other cautiously from across the room, but take hands and engage in vigorous conversation. That’s evolution and politics three-point-oh.

He Said, She Said: Gender and Pronouns in Academic Papers

The Feminist Philosophers blog has an interesting post on gender discrimination in philosophy. It raises some important issues and, helpfully, cites some empirical research to support its points. This kind of stuff is crucial for philosophers – and academics of all stripes – to keep in mind. No-one likes being told they’re biased; better to detect and deal with your own biases on your own terms.

However, one aspect that isn’t mentioned in that piece is the use of personal pronouns in academic papers. It has become the fashion over the past couple of decades to frown on the exclusive use of “he” in academic papers. However, it’s not that “she” has replaced “he” in its entirety. Instead, we now have an interesting, and complex, mix.

To see what that mix might look like, I conducted an entirely unscientific experiment on my own repository of over 200 downloaded academic papers, covering topics including animal behaviour, economics, evolutionary biology, evolutionary psychology, political science, political psychology and a number of disciplines of philosophy, namely ethics and philosophy of mind.

I conducted a comprehensive search within these papers for the words “he” and “she”, and the results are quite surprising, even if you did expect to see an imbalance:

Overall

“he” – 4,413 instances in 163 documents

“she” – 997 instances in 101 documents

Philosophy only

“he” – 252 instances in 18 documents

“she” – 114 instances in 9 documents

So, of the overall number of personal pronouns used in all my saved academic papers (5,410), 81.6% were “he” and only 18.4% were “she”. That’s some bias.

In philosophy it’s a little more balanced. Of the overall personal pronouns (366), 68.9% were “he” and 31.1% were “she”. However, I should add that a few of my stored papers concern the knowledge argument, a thought experiment that heavily involves a fictitious neuroscientist named “Mary”, so frequent references to her might account for the inflated “she” figure.

I should also add that while many of my stored papers were authored in the last decade, I have a fair number authored prior to 1970, and one would imagine there’d be less awareness of personal pronouns in those authors’ minds.

What does all this mean? Well, I’d like to know. One experiment I haven’t seen done is whether a balanced use of personal pronouns has any impact at all on gender perceptions or gender equality in academia.

I suspect the reason that balanced usage of personal pronouns became an issue at all was because of a social constructionist notion that our language shapes the world around us. Thus, usage of the word “he” to the exclusion of “she” actively contributed to making our world more male-dominated.

As it happens, social constructionism is a thesis to which I do not subscribe, and I suspect many others in academia also hold reservations about the theory. However, I’d be very interested to see some experimental results testing the hypothesis that usage of personal pronouns influences the way we perceive gender equality in academia.

In the mean time, I suggest we might hedge our bets: male lead authors could always use “she” where a pronoun is required that isn’t referring to a specific individual; and female lead authors could always use “he”.

Then, we’ll have parity on the day we have the same number of male as female academics publishing papers. And until that day, if social constructionism is correct, we’ll be influencing social reality in such a way as to encourage more women in academia. And if social constructionism isn’t correct, at least we have a simple model that doesn’t rely on our poor randomisation abilities.

The Meaning of ‘Moral’

One of the things I’ve notice while looking at evolution and morality is the vast and unbridled equivocation that goes on when the word ‘moral’ is evoked. Some, such as Franz de Waal, observe cooperation, punishment and concern amongst non-human primates and thus calls them ‘moral’. Others, such as Jonathan Haidt, speak of surges of feeling concerning permissibility or impermissibility and call these intuitions ‘moral’. Others still stress that it takes a special kind of reasoned deliberation about rightness and wrongness to call a judgement truly ‘moral’.

But are they all talking about the same thing? I think not.

In fact, I think the general lack of clarity over what we mean by ‘moral’ is unnecessarily muddying discussion of evolutionary ethics. It’s for this reason that I propose the following basic taxonomy of moral terms:

1) Moral behaviour

Behaviour of an organism that appears to involve concern for the welfare of others besides the acting agent, including cooperation, sharing, helping, punishment, reciprocal exchange etc is ‘moral behaviour’. This behaviour may or may not  be intentional or the result of conscious deliberation. As such, this covers behaviour of  organisms that engage in altruistic behaviour – such as improving the evolutionary fitness of another organism at a cost to one’s own – as well as directed human behaviour driven by moral principles. It’s all moral behaviour.

2) Moral emotion/sentiment

Any emotion that serves to encourage moral behaviour, including empathy, sympathy, gratitude, guilt, outrage etc. These emotions serve as heuristics – rough and ready shortcuts – that direct behaviour without necessarily requiring reasoned deliberation. Humans and non-human primates – and quite likely many other animals as well – possess emotions of this kind, although it appears as though humans possess a particularly broad range of these moral emotions.

3) Moral intuitions

The immediate feeling of permissibility or impermissibility of an action. Moral intuitions, as described by Jonathan Haidt, spring forth rapidly and without conscious deliberation, fuelled by moral emotions, to yield a ‘preliminary’ moral judgement. Arguably, non-human primates can experience moral intuitions, even if they lack the capacity for moral reasoning.

4) Moral reasoning

The conscious process by which abstract moral principles (below) are deliberated upon and applied to a particular situation. Moral reasoning appears to be unique to humans, and involves abstract reasoning, conscious deliberation, imagination and an ability to predict future outcomes of potential behaviours.

5) Moral principles

The abstract propositions – often couched in categorical or universal terms – that concern permissibility and impermissibility (and obligatoriness etc) of actions.

6) Moral judgement/justification

The last term I reserve for ‘considered’ moral judgements, in contrast to the ‘preliminary’ moral judgements yielded by moral intuitions (above). A moral judgement may direct behaviour, if deliberated upon before acting (although the empirical evidence suggests this is rare, or at least only occurs in cases of moral dilemmas where there’s conflict between a moral intuition and an abstract moral principle), or it can be used post hoc as a means of justifying an action via moral reasoning and the weighing up of moral principles.

Why would such a taxonomy as this be helpful? It allows us to talk more clearly about things such as primate morality – i.e. some primates are capable of moral behaviour, even if they don’t engage in moral reasoning using moral principles – as well as provide a more nuanced account of our moral decision making process – i.e. moral emotions lead to moral intuitions, and these sometimes directly lead to behaviour, but at other times we engage in moral reasoning using moral principles to arrive at a moral judgement. Yes, lots of usage of the “moral”, but they all have slightly different meanings. You get the point.

Escaping Moral Relativism Through Evolution

“Without God, anything goes,” or so some say. This claim of moral relativism is often found clinging to the belly of evolutionary theories of morality, like some kind of parasitic lamprey, sucking the blood from the very body that hosts it. Yet evolutionary ethics doesn’t necessarily imply moral relativism. Here’s why:

Say we accept the evolutionary ethics picture that morality is a device used to promote pro-social behaviour and solve the problems of cooperation, because doing so lends its adherents greater reproductive success. And the way evolution promotes moral behaviour is by endowing us with a spectrum of moral sentiments that encourage pro-social behaviour – things like empathy and guilt.

But that’s not the end of morality. We also have our rational capacity, which enables us to predict future outcomes of actions, abstract moral principles away from individual actions and deliberate about the best course of action. Between these two faculties – the moral sentiments and reason – we develop normative codes that are spread amongst our community. However, other communities might settle upon different moral norms, perhaps ones that contradict our own.

Now, some claim this picture endorses moral relativism because there is nowhere a single moral authority that can arbitrate between the various moral norms held in different cultures. But this is not entirely true. For if one accepts the premise of what morality is for – i.e. promoting pro-social behaviour and cooperation – then one can review the various moral norms and assess whether they are better or worse at promoting these ends.

Unphilosophical America (and Unphilosophical World)

America (and, I’d venture to suggest, the rest of the world) is imperilled by growing scientific illiteracy. So says science journalist Chris Mooney and marine biologist Sheril Kirshenbaum in their new book, Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens our Future. (An interesting review and commentary on the book can be found at RealClimate.) I’d tend to agree with their prognosis.

But, while I’m venturing suggestions, I’d also put forward the notion that America (and the rest of the world) is also imperilled by philosophical illiteracy as well.

I’ve spoken before about the conspicuous lack of applied philosophers compared to the default pure philosophers. I’ve also spoken of the importance of philosophy in an endeavour which is yet to be invented, synthesis: the bringing together of insights from disparate disciplines.

But philosophy also has a vitally important role to play in public discourse by applying its rigorous standards to contemporary debate. I suspect you’d agree with me if I said the quality of public discourse, particularly in politics, is appaling. The sheer propensity of logical and argumentative fallacies or outright distortion of definitions or arguments is shameful. Yet most people feel no shame when they utter a banality.

So who’s to hold us all to account? Who’s to tell us that our arguments, our beliefs, our reasoning must be better. That flimsy ad hoc justifications and rampant bias just aren’t good enough? Damn relativism, a poor argument is a poor argument and should not be excused.

Seems philosophers could do this, so why don’t they? It’s simple really: there’s no incentive to. And the world isn’t just going to come knocking on the door of the ivory tower unbidden. Philosophers are going to have to open that door of their own account and get their hands dirty mingling with the masses. We need at least some philosophers who see public outreach as just as important as publishing papers, if not more so. But there are hurdles to overcome to get to this point.

One of Mooney’s and Kirshenbaum’s key points is that the academic community tends to be ill disposed towards scientists who make efforts at public outreach, and thus find themselves on the covers of magazines or hosting popular television programmes. Whether it’s because it’s considered unbecoming of a professional scientist to mix with the unwashed, or whether it’s plain envy, such popular figures tend to become sidelined in academia.

I’ve seen first hand a reluctance on behalf of some scientists to be quoted in the media for fear of being misrepresented in hyperbolic throes that might be poorly received by their peers.

However, at least science has a few individuals who were willing to stoop to explain some of the wondrous discoveries of that endeavour to the world. Not only polymaths like Carl Sagan and Isaac Asimov (whom I can almost single handedly credit with teaching me science), but popularisers like Richard Feynman, Paul Davies, Julius Sumner Miller and Karl Kruszelnicki, amongst others.

Sadly, philosophy has a pitiful honour roll in comparison. Only a few individuals would even be recognised as philosophers by the general public, perhaps Daniel Dennett, Peter Singer, AC Grayling and Alain de Botton – maybe Bertrand Russell, if memories stretch that far back. Even then, a similar resentment exists within the academy towards philosophers who busy themselves with pursuits other than churning out papers on obscure and impenetrable (and often, quite irrelevant) topics.

This cannot continue.

Come on, philosophy. You don’t have to devote all your time to writing papers and teaching other philosophers. It’s time to fling open the doors of the ivory tower and walk in the Sun.

Reconciling Continental and Analytical Philosophy

There are two types of people in this world: cat people and dog people; Beatles or Elvis; tissues or hankie. And there are analytic and continental philosophers.

Why is this? And why do continental and analytic philosophers have such difficulty understanding, let alone appreciating, each others’ work? And why the latent (and sometimes not so latent) animosity between adherents of both traditions?

I’d suggest it’s because the two approaches represent fundamentally opposite approaches to philosophy. However, when taken together, they actually turn out to be complementary, much like Niels Bohr’s motto: “Contraria non contradictoria sed complementa sunt,” (“opposites are not contradictory but complementary”).

See, the world of experience is a strange and chaotic one, and it’s the job of philosophy to make sense of it. The question is: how?

For the continental philosopher, the starting point is the world of experience itself. Continental philosophy takes as its task the mapping of the phenomenal world. It involves itself with perception, language, culture, emotion, history etc. It seeks to make sense of the phenomenal by determining its very contours.

Analytic philosophy, on the other hand, takes as its starting point the desire to describe the smallest number of moving parts – the very cogs that underlie the phenomenal world – that, when working together, produce the seemingly chaotic phenomena of every day life. The analytic philosopher is less interested in the dozens of ways a word might be used than in what all usages of the word have in common. They wish to abstract away the individual phenomena to get at the underlying eddies and currents that reinforce and annhiliate each other to produce the contours of experience.

Yet the continental philosopher is wary of this approach, for it is suspicious of reductionism and the notion of objectivity, and is sceptical about our ability to know when we have actually discovered the underlying moving parts. The analytic philosopher, on the other hand, is irritated by the slippery nature of continental discourse; to them it’s like trying to herd cats.

One thing I’ve noticed is that most philosophers don’t strictly choose which side of the fence they’ll pitch their tent; the discover one day their tent already pitched and simply make home, realising later the fence some way distant.

Personally, I find myself firmly in the analytic camp. I’m interested in systems, although this not not so much from choice as a consequence of my psychology; I’m a high systemiser – to the point of being close to the ASD range. (In fact, I think a fascinating experiment would be to test a sample of analytic and continental philosophers to see where they fall on this scale – I predict they’ll all be higher than average on the systemising scale, but analytic philosophers will top out the systemising scale, while the continental philosophers will be higher on the empathising scale.)

The take home message from this whim and speculation? Continental and analytic philosophy are just two sides of the same coin. And the very fact that they diverged at all is perhaps a sign that both sides have taken their approach to extreme. Regular readers will remember that I’m critical of both sides. As philosophy has been shrunk and become overshadowed by its offspring, it has retreated to the extremes and become less relevant to the real world. As a matter of priority philosophy – of all persuasions – needs to make itself relevant again. And philosophers going head to head at cross purposes doesn’t do anybody any favours.

The Difference Between Animal and Human Morality

Tom Heneghan, the religion editor at Reuters and author of the FaithWorld blog, has posted an insightful review of the recently released book, Wild Justice.

The book, which looks like a worthwhile read, is written by evolutionary biologist and animal behaviourist, Marc Bekoff, and bioethicist, Jessica Pierce, and explores the fascinating evidence for moral behaviour in the animal kingdom. It’s a subject I’ve long been intrigued by – I even commissioned an article on the topic from primate researcher and science writer Vanessa Woods for Cosmos magazine a couple of years ago.

The publisher’s synopsis of Wild Justice suggests that:

Ultimately, Bekoff and Pierce draw the astonishing conclusion that there is no moral gap between humans and other species: morality is an evolved trait that we unquestionably share with other social mammals.

That’s a bold claim. And as Heneghan correctly points out, there’s a big difference between moral behaviour and morality as humans employ it.

To suggest there’s no ‘gap’ between humans and animals in the moral realm is like saying there’s no ‘gap’ between humans and animals in the language realm. After all, animals make utterances that serve to communicate concepts – such as ‘danger’ or ‘I’m here’ – to other animals. The difference with human language is only a difference in degree, not in kind.

But that’s just plain wrong. Human language has the property of recursion, which animal languages lack. And this makes human language not only different in degree, but wholly different in kind. In a similar vein, there’s reason to think of human morality in a similar light.

While I’m sympathetic to the notion that we share a great deal of our moral sentiments and faculties with many animals, particularly other primates, we humans have an additional faculty that is crucial to understanding our moral behaviour: reason. And by this I mean conscious reflection, deliberation, imagination and weighing of various facts and moral beliefs against each other.

We abstract moral principles from past experience and from reflection alone. We then employ these principles when we are confronted with a dilemma or intuition that conflicts with them. We share these moral principles, encouraging others to adopt them. If we didn’t do this, we’d confront every situation wielding only our moral intuitions and emotions – as other animals do.

As Heneghan states:

It’s hard to imagine any of this [debate over public moral standards] would have happened if humans only dealt with moral challenges confronting them directly and couldn’t analyse and debate them abstractly.

I don’t want to overstate the role of reason in moral judgement, but I also don’t think it should be understated. Moral philosophy might have had all its eggs in the reason basket for too long, but let’s not overshoot on our way to a correction.

The Problem of Cardinal Values

‘Cardinal values’ are those values that are fundamental to rest of your moral system, the values from which all other values spring. They’re like axiomatic values, the very ground floor of morality.

Some contemporary moral philosophies state their cardinal values as happiness (hedonism), compassion (Buddhism), altruism (many), the Golden Rule, respect for autonomous rational agents or duty (Kant) – although many moral philosophies simply skip over the question of cardinal values and claim that promoting goodness is good enough (I suspect Rawls suffers from this somewhat tautological approach).

What I’m concerned about is what cardinal values spring from an evolutionary ethics point of view. For evolutionary ethics causes us to question many of the other cardinal values. Let’s take happiness as an example. If happiness truly was a cardinal value, it should be irreducible to other values.

Liberals, Conservatives and Moral Diversity

Nicholas Kristof’s column in the New York Times about the psychology of liberals and conservatives has been getting some attention this past week. Probably because the research on which it’s based resonates so clearly with so many people. It’s research by Jonathan Haidt, whom regular readers of this blog will recognise as being a great influence upon my own research.

However, Haidt’s exploration of the psychology that underpins the political spectrum – fascinating and illuminating though it is – is not the end of the story. For when you combine Haidt’s research with another intriguing finding that our political views are largely influenced by genes (Alford & Funk & Hibbing, 2005), it raises a big fat question: why does our psychology – and biology – vary in the way it does?

I have a theory. It’s called Moral Diversity. It goes a little something like this: