Feb 19, 2016 04:55 AM
Quest for a good social scientific theory of ethical life
http://www.publicbooks.org//nonfiction/w...-come-from
EXCERPT: The social sciences have an ethics problem. No, I am not referring to the recent scandals about flawed and fudged data in psychology and political science. I’m talking about the failure of the social sciences to develop a satisfactory theory of ethical life. A theory that could explain why humans are constantly judging and evaluating, and why we care about other people and what they think of us. A theory that could explain something so trivial as the fact that social scientists care about data fudging.
This is not to say that we have no theories. It’s just that they’re bad theories. Consider evolutionary game theory. [...] This theory is morally satisfying. Nice guys don’t finish last after all! But it is not intellectually satisfying. Human evolution didn’t really work this way. Early homo sapiens was not modern homo economicus. Our ancestors were not isolated monads. They lived in small groups. They were social animals. A good theory would start with good assumptions—realistic ones. Ethical life just doesn’t feel like game theory. Often, it’s hot emotion, not cool calculation. It’s filled with anger and sorrow, love and joy, not minimizing and maximizing. Finally, a good theory would have to account for why we have moral emotions in the first place.
[...] A good social scientific theory of ethical life would need to be compatible with both our current understanding of human evolution and the brute fact of cultural diversity. It would need to show how natural selection could give rise to human ethics. And it would need to show how human history could lead to variation and change in ethical life. It would somehow have to square universalism and historicism. That is a tall order, but that is the aim of Webb Keane’s "Ethical Life".
[...] Now, let’s take a step back and look at the theoretical machinery that undergirds Keane’s analysis. Keane tacitly distinguishes at least four levels of social reality. Let’s call them the physiological, the psychological, the sociological, and the anthropological. Each emerges out of the other. Human culture emerges out of human interactions; human interactions depend on psychic capacities; psychodynamics are rooted in our bodily makeup. Contra the current rage for reduction, in which all the action is bottom-up, Keane assumes that higher levels can exert “downward causation” on lower ones. Cultural change (e.g., the success of feminism) can lead to interactive change (e.g., nonsexist styles of interaction), which can lead to emotional change (anger about “patriarchy” replaces resignation to “male superiority”) and even physiological change (gender goes from binary to fluid). In technical terms, Keane’s framework is “ontologically stratified.” It presumes that there really are different levels of social reality, not just in the analyst’s mind, but out in the world....
The Psychologists Take Power: Psychologists set out to provide moral guidance for society, but they have proven morally suspect themselves. It’s not easy to outsource ethical reflection.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/02/...ake-power/
EXCERPT: [...] No psychologist has yet developed a method that can be substituted for moral reflection and reasoning, for employing our own intuitions and principles, weighing them against one another and judging as best we can. This is necessary labor for all of us. We cannot delegate it to higher authorities or replace it with handbooks. Humanly created suffering will continue to demand of us not simply new “technologies of behavior” but genuine moral understanding. We will certainly not find it in the recent books claiming the superior wisdom of psychology....
http://www.publicbooks.org//nonfiction/w...-come-from
EXCERPT: The social sciences have an ethics problem. No, I am not referring to the recent scandals about flawed and fudged data in psychology and political science. I’m talking about the failure of the social sciences to develop a satisfactory theory of ethical life. A theory that could explain why humans are constantly judging and evaluating, and why we care about other people and what they think of us. A theory that could explain something so trivial as the fact that social scientists care about data fudging.
This is not to say that we have no theories. It’s just that they’re bad theories. Consider evolutionary game theory. [...] This theory is morally satisfying. Nice guys don’t finish last after all! But it is not intellectually satisfying. Human evolution didn’t really work this way. Early homo sapiens was not modern homo economicus. Our ancestors were not isolated monads. They lived in small groups. They were social animals. A good theory would start with good assumptions—realistic ones. Ethical life just doesn’t feel like game theory. Often, it’s hot emotion, not cool calculation. It’s filled with anger and sorrow, love and joy, not minimizing and maximizing. Finally, a good theory would have to account for why we have moral emotions in the first place.
[...] A good social scientific theory of ethical life would need to be compatible with both our current understanding of human evolution and the brute fact of cultural diversity. It would need to show how natural selection could give rise to human ethics. And it would need to show how human history could lead to variation and change in ethical life. It would somehow have to square universalism and historicism. That is a tall order, but that is the aim of Webb Keane’s "Ethical Life".
[...] Now, let’s take a step back and look at the theoretical machinery that undergirds Keane’s analysis. Keane tacitly distinguishes at least four levels of social reality. Let’s call them the physiological, the psychological, the sociological, and the anthropological. Each emerges out of the other. Human culture emerges out of human interactions; human interactions depend on psychic capacities; psychodynamics are rooted in our bodily makeup. Contra the current rage for reduction, in which all the action is bottom-up, Keane assumes that higher levels can exert “downward causation” on lower ones. Cultural change (e.g., the success of feminism) can lead to interactive change (e.g., nonsexist styles of interaction), which can lead to emotional change (anger about “patriarchy” replaces resignation to “male superiority”) and even physiological change (gender goes from binary to fluid). In technical terms, Keane’s framework is “ontologically stratified.” It presumes that there really are different levels of social reality, not just in the analyst’s mind, but out in the world....
The Psychologists Take Power: Psychologists set out to provide moral guidance for society, but they have proven morally suspect themselves. It’s not easy to outsource ethical reflection.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/02/...ake-power/
EXCERPT: [...] No psychologist has yet developed a method that can be substituted for moral reflection and reasoning, for employing our own intuitions and principles, weighing them against one another and judging as best we can. This is necessary labor for all of us. We cannot delegate it to higher authorities or replace it with handbooks. Humanly created suffering will continue to demand of us not simply new “technologies of behavior” but genuine moral understanding. We will certainly not find it in the recent books claiming the superior wisdom of psychology....