Chapter 12. Moral Progress

It is human nature to tinker with nature to see if we can do better. We have been repurposing

natural resources and changing the course of rivers for about as long as we have been keeping

records. Many drugs are now synthesized. Human eugenics is generally off limits, but making

plants and animals that are better for us is a massive undertaking of long standing. Self-help

book continue to be good sellers. We may argue with each other over which improvements are

needed most and how to distribute the costs, but the prevailing mindset is progress rather than

perfection of the status quo (Diamond 1997; Morris 2012).

But making things better can be tricky business. Consider the story of the Polypay sheep.

1 Some breeds, such as the Dorset, have a high rate of twinning. Columbias and Merinos are

renowned for the quality of their wool. Cheviots are hardy keepers in rough terrain. Suffolks

have large frames, although they do not put on meat as efficiently as the Southdown. In the late

1960s several shepherds decided they would pool the genes of these and other breeds and put

Darwin on steroids to produce a superbreed combining the best characteristics of each. Many

goods = Polypay.

Within a few generations, the dream had faded to a few herds. The genetics of the project

were successful in the sense that a hybrid with the desired characteristics was created. We really

can manipulate biology to an amazing extent. But the project collapsed on practical grounds.

Those who intended to help nature along forgot one thing. The reason there are so many different

breeds of sheep is that there are so many environments, and market demands drift. The ideal

environment for the ideal sheep does not exist. Thus there is no “ideal” sheep. The Polypay was

an antinomy: a combination of individual good ideas that makes no sense when put together.

Ethical perfection on a single ideal is also an antinomy.

Morality as an Emergent Process

The various parts of the book can now be brought together. Morality is the name of the actions

we take to build common better futures. The basic unit of analysis is an engagement involving

two or more moral agents, individuals nested within communities or communities themselves,

facing a range of circumstances. The possible futures depend on a combination of the constraints

of the facts on the ground, the way these are framed or negotiated by the agents, and the decision

rules used by both agents. This is a complex process, but, except for the framing process, there

are a finite number of combinations to consider. Given such engagements, any solution that

leaves a better mutual alternative on the table is immoral. No other decision rule has a better

prospect of advancing moral community than does RECIPROCAL MORAL AGENCY, where agents

accord each other the same moral standing and capacity for identifying and acting to promote

mutually preferred futures they expect for themselves. This is the only guaranteed stable

approach to solving moral conflict. Neither agent has reason to act differently under the

circumstances. This means no external enforcement is required. We have an imperative to

continuous, personal, small-scale moral improvement.

Although we often bring in theoretical justifications, such as the Golden Rule, charity,

utilitarianism, revealed religion, or the categorical imperative, these are primarily convenient

summaries that aid discussion. They may all be appropriate elements in a framing matrix, even to

the point that conflicting principles can be included in the same matrix. In the end however, we

pick principles only as they are thought to influence us and in their relative rank order in real

contexts. The principles do not dictate behavior. 2 Every-day moral incontinence demonstrates

that. The individual has yet to be found whose actions are perfectly consistent with his or her

principles or whose principles do not wander. Making it a precondition that others should shift

their ethical principles to at least an overlap with ours before common moral action is possible is

largely an all-purpose justification for wanting to have things our own way. Morality is a “push”

process to be evaluated based on whether the course of action in hand would produce a better

outcome than any available previously. It is not a “pull” process where we judge success against

a fixed future standard. After all, ideal standards do not exist in the future: they are our current,

personal projections.

Morality is also an emergent process. This means that the results of individual moral

actions feed back to change the context for future moral engagements. Trust and suspicion are

created or modified in the very acts of moral engagement. They then influence future framing.

Communities are mass moral agents that provide more general and stable contexts. But

communities are not “given” or created arbitrarily or by those who write political philosophy or

sociology. They take multiple and evolving forms; they overlap; they have varying and perhaps

conflicting influences on individuals. Communities are emergent characteristics of individual

moral engagements repeatedly reiterated over roughly common circumstances. When

communities fail to enhance the moral fitness of their participants, they adjust or go out of

business. Moral communities are the vehicle for continuous moral progress.

I defend the position that the world is becoming more moral. More of us are achieving

the futures we favor. Depending on which date in history we went back to we would experience

more slavery; famine, war, plague, and genocide on massive scales; oppression of women;

pedestry; absence of property rights; caste systems and serfdom; corruption so obvious that it

need not be excused; nearly universal illiteracy; tribal anarchy; no monetary exchange system;

and multiple other degradations. Naturally, the mind runs quickly to some current-day abuses

that still need to be addressed. That is a sound argument for wanting to improve what we have,

but not a good justification for going backwards. I have asked many people to tell me what

historical period they would like to live in as a randomly selected individual in a randomly

selected condition. There is often a half-hearted attempt to negotiate a better choice: “I have

always imagined myself as a famous Renaissance painter or a personal follower of Jesus of

Nazareth.” When forced to drop the pretense that we select rather than make our role in life, the

answer is always “I am happy to be living today.” And for everyone other than privileged

Western, white, males the response is immediate and vigorous. 3

The technical name for believing that the world is getting better as a result of human

activity is meliorism. This is not the “best of all possible worlds” tautology of Gottfreid Wilhelm

Freiherr von Leibniz, who got such a wonderful send up in Voltaire’s Candide. Meliorism is a

continuous and potentially emergent process, not a state. It is most obvious in the American

philosophical tradition of pragmatism and was something like national policy in the Progressive

Era at the beginning of the nineteenth century in the United States (Buenker 1973; Ekirch 1974;

Gould 1974). This needs to be distinguished from the various forms of ideology and religious

eschatology with their visions of soon-to-appear perfect worlds that have so far been revealed to

only the chosen few.

New understanding in social psychology and the psychology of social perception,

neurobiology, quantum mechanics and related indeterminacy theories, and agent-based computer

modeling all point in this direction. Without these relatively recent theoretical developments,

morality as an emergent community process could not be clearly seen.

The Wisdom of Weak Systems

A perfectly effective system of universal ethical principles would stifle moral progress. A

slightly sloppy one would tend to work better. 4 Fortunately, human nature is appropriately

flawed. Imagine would civilization had one of the Roman emperors or any other historical leader

been able to enforce perfect conformity to the ethical standards at some time in the past in such a

way that no one every deviated. Imagine that we never changed the rules.

As evidence I present the lowly gold fish. 5 Like the lab rat that enjoys more notoriety,

these animals can be trained to play a game where making the right choice between two

alternatives improves their futures. A typical test of lab learning involves finding where the food

is hidden. In one version, the prize is stashed randomly, perhaps 70% of the time behind Door A

and 30% of the time behind Door B. Even gold fish can learn an effective rule such as “I should

always go with Door A.” Animals other than humans invariably adopt the strategy of choosing

the alternative with the best general record 100% of the time. If Door A is even just a little better

in the long run, always choose Door A. This would be comparable to the theory of moral choice

advanced in this book. Use the RMA moral choice rule, even if it does not always work. It will do

the job more often than any other choice, so it is the best policy. 6

Children are somewhat like the gold fish, but adults are more complex. We like to

exercise our higher rational powers and, although we match the split in the long run (say 70:30),

we tend to vary our choices because we think we have detected a hidden pattern. We might

reason, “It has been Door A four times in a row so it must be Door B this time.” 7 We also seem

to have a sense of entitlement about beating the odds. Humans do not believe in luck – we

believe in “good luck.” We divide our choices 70:30 rather than 100:0. To excuse ourselves from

blindly following the path to the most likely payoff, we like to add a little something to the

framing matrix. Some people have special insight; and that certainly includes us. This logic is

common among those who play the stock market, hire employees, or sit on committees that

choose policy (Taleb 2004). Humans seem to believe they have a rational capacity for analyzing

choice situations that exceeds that of both lower animals and the most rational of all beings

(Makridakis, Hogarth, and Gaba 2009).

Throughout this book, I have been defending a system with holes in it. I know there are

individuals and committees working as you read this trying to find more to them. But the gaps

will not sink the ship. In fact being incomplete is an advantage. America’s Cup contenders are all

catamarans, with more hole than boat. Incompleteness is a necessary condition for continuous,

self-generating improvement. We are Homo sapiens – the wise ones. Sapience is the Latin

equivalent of the Greek word sophia, as in philosophy or love of wisdom. But sophia or

sapience mean wisdom, not rationality, and certainly not strict adherence to principle. We are the

creatures that can collectively make a better world, not the ones who spin theories about worlds

that always work. No one outside of a small circle of philosophers and economists believes that

we are Homo rationalis. Neither are we Asinus callidus – know-it-alls.

Irrationality

Let’s do the arithmetic to see which is smarter, gold fish or humans. Gold fish will get

feed 70% of the time based on their fixed strategy and a 70:30 randomization. This is the product

of choice probabilities multiplied by outcomes -- 1.00 * .70 + 0.00 * .30 = .70. Humans, who use

their superior cognitive capacity, will match the distribution of choice to the distribution of

outcomes resulting in a .70 * .70 + .30 * .30 distribution of rewards. Now who is smarter? .49

+ .09 = .58.

I still vote for humans on two grounds. First, we are the only species capable of offering

an excuse such as “That was a trick question; let me tell you how smart I would have appeared if

you had asked a question for which I knew the answer!” Related to this is the second point that

we want good policy as well as good choice behavior. When the question is which species is

more likely to score in a one-off contrived game, it might be good to think like a rat. When the

question is which species has the capacity for flourishing in the long run, I am enthusiastically

human. Our sometimes and usually unpredictable fallibility, in fact our natural goofing around in

hope of scoring big time or just for the fun of it, is not a deficiency in our moral nature. As long

as everyone does not act this way most of the time, this is necessary to our higher functioning

and our more rapid evolution as a species. 8

It might be appropriate to rethink the many examples of apparent irrationality introduced

in Chapter 8 regarding the challenges of framing. We are systematically overly optimistic about

our chances for success. We also tend strongly toward being oversensitive to losses relative to

gains. If engineers set about designing a machine to profit maximally from the potential in its

environment, they would certainly not want to use a rule that said, “After your first success, keep

doing the same thing” (a version of tit-for-tat). “Dabble around the best outcome, but be careful”

would be a wiser design standard. Epileptic fits are not caused by random or erratic neural

fringing. They happen when there is near synchrony. Texture in the context is necessary for

fitness. We could make money betting on gold fish and against humans, but only a human could

make it meaningful to set up such a game.

Ants are an interesting case in point (Beekman et al. 2010). They can find food better that

humans can, given an ant understanding of what constitutes a good meal. When a forager is

successful and returns to the nest, it leaves a chemical, pheromone trail. It leaves the same trail

when unsuccessful, but the aggregate strength of the good trail is greater because more ants come

back the same way after having found food than from the random destinations in which nothing

was found. Outbound ants follow the strongest trail, but are allowed to make a few random

mistakes. It turns out that these mistakes are critical to the survival of the colony. If ants only

went with the previous trail because it had been strong in the past, everyone would starve.

Sooner or later there is more food at the end of one of the randomly chosen new trails than the

one with the exhausted food supply. Most ants switch, but random probing still takes place. This

system does not protect the occasional ant that starves when exploring, but it does protect the

colony.

From the perspective of the moral community, some balance between conformity to

traditional patterns and probing, even random probing, contributes to long-range and overall

fitness better than does either strategy pursued exclusively. The moral community may regret the

victim of a moral misadventure, but it seldom provides a place of privilege to members who

claim to be ethically superior.

Adult humans have another advantage over all other animals (Vonk and Shackelford

2012). We can plan as a group to change our behavior – independent of our instincts. Ants can

only search for food using the pheromone network. They cannot search using solar, geomagnetic,

MapQuest, or language mechanisms. Further, they cannot use the pheromone system to search

for safer environments, better mates, or good recordings of Bach masses. Both means and ends

are fixed for the ant by instinct. Only the human group has the neurological capacity to

hypothetically vary both the process and the goal and to agree on this as a group before taking

action. 9 Subhumans extend the past into the future. But each individual organism is locked into a

species-determined and unalterable goal and method match. Humans are the only species that

can collectively decide not to do something. That is a requirement for group decision making. It

is also the foundation for morality. We can collectively agree that it is not appropriate to arrest

and detain individuals without formally announcing charges consistent with published law

(habeas corpus). We can decide not to use chemical weapons. We can even decide to change

such rules. Only adult humans have the capacity to form moral communities (Giedd et al 1999).

That does not mean we do it consistently or brilliantly. But no other living thing can do it at all.

In a fundamental sense, immorality is a denial of what makes us uniquely human.

Now we have found two naturalistic foundations for morality. First, humans are

quintessentially social. We would suffer extinction within a century if we did not help each

other. The basis of morality is in the relationships among individuals, not in the relationship

between an individual and a norm. Second, humans have a unique neurological capacity related

to how we interact with each other. We can understand how others, acting as agents, can affect

us in ways that resemble how we affect them. No other species is capable of RECIPROCAL MORAL

AGENCY.

Short-Sightedness

The fact that the 2 x 2 moral engagements based on RMA can be used to analyze every

possible instance of moral engagement, including engagements across levels of social

organization from individuals to nations, is both a strength and a potential shortcoming. Over-

steering is a distinct possibility. So is getting trapped in local maxima. Incrementalism runs the

risk of sitting down where no nearby switch is more attractive, while if we were to start over we

might reach a greater peak of perfection that is in a different region. And of course, if we had a

God’s-eye view we would be able to escape being trapped in petty preferences altogether. How

can we ever be certain that we are going in the right direction without seeing the overall picture?

Certainly there are any number of examples of communities -- such as the Nazis, the KKK, and

the “other” political party -- that are coherently moral by their own standards and are both bad

masters and bad neighbors by ours. The RMA model cannot claim to be superior just because it is

consistent.

This is not a straw man argument, and I need to defend some form of response that moral

progress as RMA does not require a closed and consistent world. Fortunately, this is no longer the

biting criticism it would have been 150 years ago in the Modern era. On an emergent account,

we are learning to make progress in an open system that no longer demands theories that are

simultaneously consistent and complete. There seems to be no view of everything, even though

there is an itch for always wanting to make the world better beginning here and now.

The more important question is how to reduce the odds of getting stuck in a personal

relative sweet spot when a better alternative is just out of sight. We cannot look over every hill

before settling down. Fortunately the system proposed in this book is self-correcting in a very

large sense. Critical to constant adjustment toward a better fit is allowing enough flexibility in

the process and enough interlocking levels to minimize local minima. We have to build in

randomness, irrationality, relativity, and shortsightedness enough so the system wobbles. There

is ample formal research demonstrating that the healthiest systems have a balance of stiffness

and slop. The optimal balance shifts based on circumstances and in response to previous efforts,

but, within normal bounds, systems that are complex enough correct themselves. The fields of

artificial intelligence, complex adaptive systems, and even chaos theory and economics are

devoted to discovering such dynamic balance (Gleick 1987; Waldrop 1992; Holland 1995;

Kauffman 1995). All such disciplines are quick to point out that communities cannot grow

beyond a certain size and that they become vulnerable when they approach “perfection.” The

Nazis and the KKK were not self-contained systems, and they failed. “

Framing can include as much context as one wants. The limits to far-sightedness are

merely practical. Validity is not a feature of the world; it is a characteristic of decisions that are

made based on our interpretation of the world. A decision is valid when it would not be changed

based on plausible additional information. 10 Validity is not a justification: it is a “stopping rule.”

Nothing is perfectly valid, but there always comes a point where to act based on what is known

is better than doing nothing or continuing to search and deliberate. Each of us senses that point in

a personal way in the immediate present. It is only damagingly short-sighted to act on our current

understanding of the available futures if we have done a slipshod job of framing up to that point.

Working Alone

A central feature of the Western ethical tradition is that the individual is the unit of analysis. If

we can fully characterize the ethical quality of a single person, so the argument goes, we will

know all we need to about both individual and collective morality. I have previously labeled this

view Plato’s Fallacy. Philosophers debate the nature of individual identity and try to establish

where its boundaries are, in part, because ethics is believed to be individually denominated.

Developmental psychologists tell us that personal identity is a learned designation

(Csikszentmihalyi 1993). Newborns cannot tell where they end and the world begins. They are

hungry and food appears or not, distressed and comfort and touch appear or not, and so forth.

Around the age of two, this system begins to break down. The relationship between volition and

action on the child’s part and responses in the world becomes contingent. The concept of “no”

plays a vital role in this process. Think about it, if the world were only “yes,” how could we have

any sense of who we are as distinct from the world? Autonomous identity is a function of

coming to terms with external constraints (Deacon 2012). Those who live with different

constraints become different people. Certain drugs, such as peyote and LSD, suppress the neural

centers that were formed in the early years to distinguish the self and other. They are drugs of

infantile regression that erase the boundary between the self and the world.

The third stage in the neural development of the child begins around age nine and extends

through puberty or perhaps a little beyond (Bogdan 2010). This is the stage where the external

world, which we now know is something other than “us,” is further divided into objects and

agents. This means that we recognize that some “things” in the world, the agents, share the

ability we have for volitionally making their worlds and ours better or worse. Other “things,” the

objects, are just part of the landscape with which we have to work. Accompanying this

realization is a rise in the cognitive capacity to weigh alternatives, make conditional “if-then”

connections, and work through counterfactuals and hypotheticals. The seven-year old believes

that making Daddy angry will lead to punishment. The seventeen-year old tries to figure out how

to do something without getting Pop upset. Sociopaths make only a partial transition to the third,

counterfactual, world populated by agents who are like them in most essential respects (Tancredi

2005).

Communities develop in much the same way individuals do. They are not simply

collections of numerous individuals. The expression “primitive societies live at one with nature”

is apt and reflects the early development of animals and humans. More complex societies treat

the environment and other communities as objects. Eventually, complex networks of

communities recognize their own members and other communities as agents who are both

affected by and may influence each other. Racism, ethnic and imperial ambitions, class abuse,

and other wholesale immorality are community analogues to the arrested development of

sociopaths who are incapable of recognizing agency in others.

Neurobiological Foundation for Morality

There is a rapidly growing field of research discovering neurobiological correlates of behavior,

including moral behavior (LaDoux 2003; Gazzaniga 2005; Churchland 2011). If finding and

doing the right and the good involve perception and cognition – as they obviously do – the brain

is fully involved in morality. If bringing about the best future world is a value-based activity – as

it obviously is – the fact that values are registered in the brain also matters.

There are now regular reports in scientific journals regarding correlations between this or

that region of the brain and of behavior that has moral consequences. The usual method of study

includes functional magnetic resonance imaging, fMRI, work that reports increased activity in

certain locations at the same time as behavior of interest or even in response to prompts to “think

about” moral behavior. There are also more rapidly response recording systems for electrical

potentials. Additional data are provided by extensive case studies of individuals with lesions in

certain brain regions. Finally, there are studies of experimenter-induced, non-harmful, and

reversible electrical interference or stimulation in specific regions.

Before sketching one plausible view of the neurobiological foundations of morality, three

cautions must be registered. First, enough work of this sort has already been conducted to make

it clear that there is no “ethics center” in the brain as there is for hunger or short-term memory.

Multiple regions have a part to play and moral behavior or impairment will eventually emerge as

a complex coordination of multiple functions in multiple sites. This is going to take a lot of

work. It is extremely unlikely that there is an “ethics” gene or a “seat of conscience.”

A second caution is that correlations or regular associations between structural readings

and events or reports are especially difficult to interpret. The association between household

income expressed in dollars and caloric intake can be tested fairly rigorously because both

factors have clear metrics. “Poverty causes malnutrition” would be a much more treacherous

claim because of vague definitions. There are difficulties in measuring brain activity, but larger

problems remain in reaching agreement on the ethics side of the equation. The same patterned

reactions in parts of the prefrontal lobes have been variously interpreted as “caring,” “empathy,”

“sympathy,” “planning,” “nurturing,” “impulse inhibition,” “altruism,” “cooperation,”

“intention,” “fellow sentiment,” or “association instinct.” Currently the primary source of

ambiguity is coming from difficulties in interpretation, not measurement. Perhaps, if we could do

brain scans of a number of philosophers who were all meditating on the concept of “ethics,” we

would discover that multiple brain sites are activated by the idea.

The third caution centers on the difference between correlation and causation. It would be

good to avoid the Cartesian trap of trying to answer the question about how physical events

cause mental ones. There is some big-time question-begging going on there. Normativists do not

worry about brain research because their program is to analysis stuff that is, by definition, not

reducible to physical properties. Physical brain activity does not, on their view, cause ethical

reflection and ethical reflection does not cause physical behavior. A middle ground is called

supervienence. The idea here is that useful correlations do exist, but they relate parallel worlds.

Brain changes are associated with ethics, but they do not cause moral behavior. But there is an

unwarranted assumption that there actually are two domains that need to be correlated, if

possible. Naturalism, at least the kind being advanced in this book, minimizes the supernatural

component as being unnecessary and attempts to provide explanations in terms of changes in

brain patterns and changes in patterns of behavior. These are both natural phenomena occurring

in time and space. There are no unmeasurable operations in the system. Calling these “ethical

thoughts” or something of the sort is terminological shorthand. It is like saying that the median

of a set of numbers is X. That is a nice handle for transporting a set of numbers, even when the

median for an even number of cases may not actually exist as a score that any member of the set

possesses. We continue to say it, but we do not literally mean what we say.

Neurobiology of Framing

The oldest parts of the brain, the areas that sit atop the spinal cord, are known as the

amygdala or more broadly, the limbic system. Primary responsibility resides there for regulation

of autonomic functions such as breathing, for attaching emotional reactions to stimuli, and for

subconscious emergency responding. It is perhaps too fine a meaning to say that the emotions of

the amygdala involve patriotism, appreciation of fine wine, or shame. This region is more

concerned with the classification of stimuli as opportunities or especially as threats, without

getting into the details. Hearing a loud, unexpected sound; recognizing that one is about to reveal

a secret that would compromise a friend; or wanting to lash out in a domestic violence situation

are all controlled at this level, all without the benefit of understanding or even the ability to name

what is happening. In a strange sense, there are ethically reprehensible acts that function without

the benefit of comparison with principles. Not being able to evaluate the act before committing it

is part of the legal definition of manslaughter.

The newest part of the brain is the frontal region. That is where volition, hypothetical

alternatives, and the evaluation of opportunities take place. Judgment has its seat there, but in the

abstract sense. This is the part of the brain jurors use to reach a verdict regarding manslaughter.

These regions would be involved in both the swindler’s calculations about rigging. It is the

theater of alternative future worlds. Individuals with damage to various parts of this region are

capable of animal functioning and many human activities such as reading, speech, and problem

solving. It is just that they often lack any interest in doing those things. This part of the human

brain does not become fully activated until adolescence. That is one of the reasons that a young

child is not capable of counterfactual reasoning. A seven-year-old would not normally be able to

work through a problem such as this: Because Jane is the smartest girl in the class by a certain

margin, how tall would Jim have to be to be as tall as Jane is smart? The youth would also have

difficulty with most problems that contain the term “if.” Normally, societies do not recognize the

age of moral responsibility until the mid-teens – an age when the prefrontal cortex can be

expected to be ready for use. Subhuman animals either lack these areas completely or have

underdeveloped analogues.

There has been some recent excitement about moral evolution and the frontal brain.

Beginning in 1992, an Italian team started reporting on “mirror neurons” in monkeys (Rizzolatti

and Craighero 2004). When test monkeys imitated the behavior of their cage mates, such as

putting food in their mouths, regions in the premotor cortex and in the inferior parietal cortex

showed increased activity. A school of thought has grown up around this finding. It has been

argued that the imitating monkey mimics because of activity in the premotor cortex caused by

empathetic perception. The imitator somehow “understands” what its mate must be feeling and it

mirrors or feels with its mate. Because this is an evolutionary late brain region in both primates

and humans, some have speculated that humans and advanced primates evolved a

neurobiological capacity for empathy that is the basis for morality through altruism. 11 This is a

long and thin chain of reasoning that has failed to attract many adherents or generate

confirmatory research.

The cerebral cortex covers most of the top, back, and sides of the brain and is midway

between the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex developmentally. This is the region that controls

motor activity, sight, sounds, smells, and thinking. External stimuli are registered there.

Perceptions such as vision are conducted in both separate primary and secondary cortices. The

first part of perception is to recognize that an object is in fact present; the secondary part,

consisting of five layers, assigns names and meanings. 12 It is possible that the fourth level in the

perceptual cortex serves to differentiate between things that are objects and things that are

agents. In dreaming, the secondary visual cortex is consulted extensively but not the primary

one. Hence the “crazy" nature of dreams where images are present without there being any

record of their having been perceived. With certain brain lesions individuals cannot say what an

object is but they know perfectly well how to use it.

But there is no place in the brain where simple objects like my mother’s maiden name,

the snake that is about to strike Kipling’s Gunga Din, or Kant’s categorical imperative are

located. What we call concepts are spread out over the cortices – they are patterns, not items in

specific locations. Parts of them are pulled together during judgment like a cartoon or click-and-

drag computer graphics. They are assembled (often in slightly different configurations each time)

when needed to serve as objects in reasoning. The reconstructed nature of mental entities is

obvious from the example of watching people read a phrase from a piece of paper and then

report on it. We know from placing a camera in a position to record eye movements during

reading that virtually no normal adult actually sees every word, let alone every letter while

reading. 13 They report reading words they did not see. But it is a routine matter to convert these

fragments into a meaningful thought and then assemble them into a speech pattern. Bits and

pieces of brain resources are pulled into service in milliseconds to accomplish this task. And

fortunately we have no awareness of any of the many processes involved, most of it being

unrecoverable almost immediately so that the brain is free for new tasks.

I will only briefly note the functions we call memory. There are multiple types – ranging

from short-term in the prefrontal area where multiple patterns are brought in for comparison to

long-term or episodic certifications that something, somewhat specific took place in the past or is

a true sentence to eidetic images that permit pattern matching and facial recognition (Russell

1979). Memory is continuously self-organizing and, like conceptualization, distributed across

many areas of the brain, principally in the interfaces between the perceptual cortices, the frontal

lobes, and the midbrain. The hippocampus plays an active role in organizing memories (LaDoux

2003). Memory is a poster child for the naturalist conception of mind as it is generally well

established that memory is a pattern rather than content. 14

What happens during framing? 15 Fragmentary sketches of stimuli from the world are

registered in the cerebral cortex. This information is filtered and reconstructed through layers of

cortex with the help of interactive inputs from other regions of the brain. We are talking fractions

of a second for these functions. Meanwhile part of the stimulus is broken off for fast-tracking

(without interpretation) by the amygdala based on threat potential. 16 The slower path is now

chatting with the frontal lobes where the potential value for alternative actual and hypothetical

actions are being compared. The frontal region then pulls in information from the entire cortex

and builds various models in working memory. New models replace the old ones because the

brain can only be in one configuration at a time. It “overwrites” previous thoughts with better

ones. This is almost instantaneous. 17 On the game show Jeopardy, host Alex Trebek uses about

four seconds to present a clue; the fastest an individual can operate the buzzer is in the order of

175 milliseconds. During just the period between the end of the question and activating the

buzzer, contestants are capable of as many as half a dozen distinct “thoughts,” some of them

contradictory, most of them successively better because they are inclusive of previous ones.

They also make a decision whether the best response they have is apt to be right. During the

interval before they voice their answer, they may modify it several more times. The process of

replacing old ideas about a topic with new ones continues until something else that is more

important takes over the machinery. 18

The result of such processes might be an action or it might be a stored change in the

brain. Sometimes it is both, but most of the time is it nothing at all. Mostly, previous brain

configurations are simply the background for subsequent configurations. 19 In those rare cases

called consciousness, a record is stored in the brain saying that a certain process took place a few

milliseconds ago. Consciousness is not awareness that specific neural functions are taking place.

It is awareness that certain classes of neural activity must have happened a nano-moment ago. 20

In that way we can think “about” what we have formerly thought about. Such temporally nested

thinking is natural. 21 Elevating this to a high level is called philosophizing.

Neurobiology of Moral Decision Making

Although the frontal region is active in comparison and judgment, as well as directing

attention, it does not initiate action. The frontal cortex can “know” what is ethical to do without

there being any overt action that others could take as evidence for moral behavior. It takes aim,

but it does not pull the trigger.

A region in the forward midbrain composed of the caudate and basal ganglia and related

structures have the final say on what we do. The orbital frontal cortex functions like a fact

checker. 22 It is located between the frontal lobes and the caudate and acts as a gate for

“thoughts” on their way to the part of the brain that initiates actions. Because of its location, it

receives rich input from the frontal region, the cerebral cortices, and the amygdala, as well as

other areas, and passes these along with a verdict attached to the caudate structures. If everything

is good to go, the basal ganglia fire and we achieve motor action. Such action may be an entire

episode of moral action such as volunteering for the Peace Corps or simply nodding in answer to

the question whether what we just said is true (when it is a lie) or giving a speech about income

inequality.

Some moral action takes place instantaneously, under 200 milliseconds, via the amygdala

path. We have committed ourselves before it is humanly possible to know what we are actually

doing. Some moral decisions take about a second. These are the straightforward ones where it is

pretty obvious what should happen once we see clearly what is at stake. But we should not be

fooled into thinking that this is a simple process of matching a perception to a principle. Simple

decisions involve the integration of dozens of brain regions. They ripple through patterns that

bounce off each other with counter eddies until they either exhaust themselves in nullity or arrive

at the caudate complex as an executive summary for implementation. Real posers may take a

little longer, perhaps spreading over several episodes and calling for searches and new input

from the environment. When this is done, interim reports are stored in the brain as thought or

memory patterns that are later taken up and reworked. 23 Some may never lead to action, but we

will have done some prethinking that may come in handy in the future. Major cases, such as

doctoral dissertations or Supreme Court decisions require multiple exchanges between internally

stored patterns of information and information packages that are stored externally. Eventually

they create discursive structures or products that communities use to guide their moral behavior.

Regardless of the extent of prior processing that may go into a moral decision, the result

is always of the same sort. The caudate region makes a binary choice: do this or do that (where

“that” may mean do nothing at all or it may mean send the report back for more work). This is

what I called in Chapter 7 Point-blank Thinking. A moral decision is not a list of pros and cons

or a nuanced argument in favor of a position. Those can be infinitely multidimensional. Moral

action either happens or something else happens. We can spend a fair amount of time completing

a framing matrix in detail because it reflects the infinite multiplicity of the world as we are

capable of interpreting it. Once we have completed the preference rankings, either by means of

RMA or some other decision rule, however, the action path should be uniquely determined in a

go/no-go fashion. We move from the name calling of ethical adjectives to building the moral

community using verbs.

Brain Structures with High Moral Importance

The role of the prefrontal cortex in moral decision making has been richly documented.

Neuropsychologist Antonio Damasio, for example, describes a number of historical cases,

including the famous Phineas Gage who lived for about ten years following an accident that blew

an iron stake through his brain. Gage was able to function at a slightly diminished level, but well

enough to hold down several jobs. He had nearly normal speech, adequate reasoning, and

locomotion and other bodily functions. But he could not act consistently in a purposeful way or

remain long focused on what he knew to be appropriate ways of behaving. Damasio has

identified and studied scores of such patients in his practice. Most are stroke or brain cancer

victims with lesions in specific parts of their brains.

A patient called Elliott is typical. Having higher than average intelligence and verbal

skills both before and after cancer, the patient was unable to maintain a job or social

relationships. Tests revealed that there was no damage to any brain areas that controlled

socializing (as far as anyone knows there is no such “center”). Elliott performed at the average or

superior level on every scale of the Wechler Adult Intelligence Scale. Language comprehension,

memory, and perception were unimpaired by all standard measures. The Minnesota Multiphasic

Personality Inventory, the standard diagnostic test for social adjustment, was also normal. Elliot

described his circumstances as an astute but disinterested observer might.

Elliot was given a battery of conventional and special ethics tests. He was asked to

generate ethically acceptable alternative ethical courses of action that might be taken in

situations such as accidentally breaking a spouse’s flower pot. He performed well. Next he was

asked to identify consequences of social transgressions such as receiving too much money in

change. He outperformed the control group. Elliot functioned impeccably on a test where he was

requested to connect ends and means in ethical scenarios. Finally, he was given the famous

Heinz case from the Standard Issue Moral Judgment Interview, a classical case in both Lawrence

Kohlberg’s theory of moral development and the Defining Issues Test which is the most

commonly used standardized instrument for measuring ethical reasoning. (Heinz was introduced

in Chapter 7.) His score of 4/5 placed him in the top 90th percentile on ethical reasoning. Elliot

was ethically impressive and morally a failure. He could reason very clearly about what ought to

be done; he just could not do it.

Elliot has received a lot of detailed attention here because he is illustrative of the

distinction introduced in the first paragraph of this book. It is possible to function well on an

ethical level and still not be part of the moral community.

Researchers have localized the trouble converting good thinking into good behavior in

several areas of the brain. One important connection takes place in the ventromedial prefrontal

cortex, a small area on the middle and underside of the front part of the brain just above and

behind the nose. Damage here results in behavior patterns such as Elliot exhibited, leaving

individuals apparently normal and certainly capable of ethical reasoning, but incapable of

consistent behavior motivated by or oriented toward bringing about a better world. More general

damage to the frontal lobes, say above the eyes, was intentionally inflicted on psychiatric

patients in the period from 1930 through 1950 in procedures called frontal lobotomies. Such

patients were relieved from the torments of severe forms of schizophrenia but exhibited a loss of

sustained action to promote their own or others’ good. They probably also lost some rational

capacity, although this is difficult to judge in such cases. The procedure is no longer performed

and drugs are used instead.

Another cortical region associated with diminished attention to purposeful behavior while

rational processes remain intact is the right primary somatosensory cortex at the temporoparietal

junction (on the top and nearer the back of the brain). The function of this region in moral

reasoning, especially in working through mutuality engagements was discussed at the beginning

of Chapter 5. A plausible case can be made that this area is vital for being able to perform the

calculations of “cognitive empathy,” awareness of how others will act as moral agents. This

capacity would be vital to RMA. There is experimental evidence that subhumans and children,

who do not have function in the right temporoparietal junctions lack the capacity for imagining

what other moral agents will do. The region does not myelinate in humans until adolescence, so,

although it is present it is not fully functioning in children. It has been demonstrated that

experimentally induced electrical interference in this region in human adults causes degradation

of moral functioning. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas very publically suffered from

this condition as a result of a stroke in 1975.

Moral Evolution

One of the great all-time debates in philosophy is the tussle between normativity and naturalism.

Very roughly, proponents of normativity use terms such as “should,” “theoretically,” and

“universally.” Naturalists are more apt to say “is,” “particularly,” and “probably or generally.”

Both sides believe they honor the border where it is posted that one cannot get an “ought” from

an “is” or the other way around. The fact that smoking is detrimental to one’s health does not

prove that one should stop smoking. Both sides try on occasion to sneak around the no man’s

land. Some say there is ethical objectivity even if only a few are blessed to see it. Others have

programs to reduce all mental expressions to sentences about the brain. The normativists lob this

grenade over from time to time: “Is your belief that science should seek the truth a scientific fact

or a value judgment?” Naturalists toss it back with the retort, “First tell me who cares?”

In ethics, advocates of normativity outnumber naturalists by a very large margin. Ethical

theory will be endlessly debated because each new theorist sees the landscape anew and rightly

realizes that the new view is unique and should have a paper written about it. Morality keeps

changing because the outcomes of our joint efforts to build a better world create conditions that

have not existed before. Cosmologists tell us that the universe is expanding, and at an

accelerating pace. Probably half the literature in academic philosophy has been published during

my lifetime. I for one certainly have no intention of waiting until it is clear how everything will

settle out before I do anything to make the world better. The ever-expanding moral universe can

be seen individually and in community. Ontology does recapitulate philology: the development

of the individual tracks the development of the community.

Development of Personal Capacity for Morality

We are not born with functioning moral capacity (Bogden 2010). Children acquire

sympathy (feeling what others feel) early, but empathy (knowing what others feel) comes later,

and hypothetical and conditional reasoning about it are largely absent until puberty – and even

then there is a set up and calibration period. A two-year-old can see that others are in pain or that

someone has changed mood. A child of four or five is just beginning to figure out how the world

might look to others. They are capable of ALTRUISM. When several children are shown a candy

bar that is then covered by a cloth, all will say that a candy bar is under the cloth even when they

cannot see it. If one child is taken out of the room and the candy bar is replaced by a pencil, the

children remaining in the room will answer the “What is under the cloth?” question by saying

“pencil.” Children will also often say that the child who is out of the room will think there is a

candy bar under the cloth.

But this is not the same as granting agency to others. That would further require that the

children be able to understand that the absent child might lie about what is there if there were

something to be gained by doing so or the child who has left the room must be capable of

imagining that an intentional switch might have been made. For humans, this capacity begins to

develop around age nine to 13, and is intimately associated with activation of neurological

networks in the frontal and prefrontal regions of the brain and somewhat later with the right

temporoperiatal junction. Although the nerves that do the work there are for the most part in

place, they are not operational earlier. The nerve sheath must grow a whitish coat called myelin

24 that supercharges the neural transmissions and gives parts of the brain the characteristic color

that we call “white matter.”

Until this happens in the frontal cortex, the right temporoperiatal junction, and a number

of other areas, moral engagements can only follow decision rules such as self-interest,

CONTEMPT, or cheating that are less effective than RMA. It is clear that higher mammals are

capable of ALTRUISM and that there are other decision rules for moral engagements. But there is

no evidence that they can use RMA or that the corresponding brain regions involved in reciprocal

agency exist in any functional sense. 25

Development of Civilization’s Capacity for Morality

Saying that civilization, the community of communities, is growing morally would be

something like claiming that Darwinian evolution is afoot in the moral realm. The late nineteenth

century German biologist August Weissman (1893) in fact proposed such an idea. 26 It is not as

implausible as it might sound (Dennett 2003). An evolutionary model of morality would be

possible if these features exist in the world: (a) a preference for one outcome over others

(Darwin’s “fitness” criterion), (b) chance or some mechanism that permits limited amounts of

random variation, and (c) a means for passing the pairings of chance responses and outcomes on

to the future. This final requirement is often equated with genes in biology and more recently

with memes in general evolutional theory (Dawkins, 1989). Memes permit evolution of social

artifacts such as pet rocks, political parties, dance steps, and witch hunts. All that is needed is a

stable increase in future likelihood associated with some reproducible change in the world.

Memes satisfy the three criteria for Darwinian evolution. Of course we have to allow for false

starts, we have to keep after it for a very long time, and we have to accept the idea that it might

be “better” if we end up some place other than where we thought we were going.

At the beginning of this chapter, all three of the required conditions for Darwinian

evolution in morality were enumerated: occasional irrational missteps, relevant relativism, and

short-sightedness that corrects itself over time were described as necessary features in morality,

not defects. The moral engagement is the mechanism by which fitness is determined. The

community serves nicely as a carrier of useful innovations. Building the moral community means

enriching the context where moral engagements are tested, and outcomes that are useful to the

community are given a slightly better chance of actually becoming the future.

Preference for future worlds is a suitable standard for fitness. It may be objected that this

is both too individual and too subject to fluctuation to work as the guiding code for the morality

of mankind. That is certainly an effective criticism for those who conceive morality as adherence

to an external ethical ideal that is revealed divinely or rationally or by personal preference among

one’s friends. The challenge facing this old view is that some demonstration must be given that

the individual has interpreted the signs aright. The devil and our egos are great deceivers. In the

end, those who hold a privileged outside view must come into the camp with the rest of us and

make their case.

Darwinian science concerns species, not individuals. Evolution can be cruel to some on

its way to improvements for the community. Every act intended to be moral does not guarantee

sublimity. What was golden yesterday may not be so today because of change or because

yesterday was fluky. The combination of chance and a criterion for what is “better” is self-

correcting. Given time, the community will move. It is unwise to extend this sentence to say “the

community will move to a place we currently imagine to be better.” That is one of the difficult

concepts in the Darwinian view: the point toward which a community evolves is not “perfection”

against some predetermined standard. It is an immediate “best” given the collective hoped-for

futures and given the circumstances of those involved. It is human nature to reflect on where we

think the trend is leading and to wrap that vision in a warm and welcoming package that we keep

in our pocket like a talisman as a cherished representation of human hope.

A replicator structure is also required for a Darwinian mechanism to work. In the case of

morality, this is provided by individual memory and community expectations. Personal sense of

the world is stitched together by short and long-term memory and a sense of individual identity.

We expect that others will have features in their framing of our engagements with them that

sound something like this: “She usually keeps her word,” “The company is on the verge of

bankruptcy, so they may not be able to do everything they promise,” or “He seems to be

insensitive to what I am trying to get across.” Such framing elements bind the immediate and

personal with the general (Grim 2011).

The community also has standards that guide the alternative actions and their rank

ordering. It is best to think of specific moral choices as the evolutionary units (not individuals)

much as genes and memes are the units in biological and social evolution. A moral act

potentially alters both agents and the community, each time an engagement takes place. As a

result of self-corrective outcomes, propensities for some actions become more likely and some

less likely.

Several predictions flow from this Darwinian conception of morality. First, human nature

can evolve. It is natural that people will become more moral during their lifetime, at least to the

extent that they do not shirk from engagement in community. Recall the discussion in Chapter 4

showing that the outcomes of any moral decision rule, except for CONTEMPT, produced a better

world than social isolation. RECIPROCAL MORAL AGENCY is best, but almost any engagement

builds moral community. The more we engage, the more moral we become. Most obviously,

engagement will involve compound growth, where the pace of meliorism feeds on past successes

and picks up speed. If we had a way of doing it, the smart folks would choose to live at some

point in the future when we will be a little kinder to each other.

But I have also shown how morality is emergent. As a result of engagement in

community we can expect to acquire new capacities. It happened with language, tool use, and

lactose tolerance. Human brains are more complex than subhuman brains in the sense of more

integration and cross-wiring that permits the blending of sensing (with its instant value and

future orientation) with rational capacity that allows choice across hypotheticals. The Great

Encephalization that gave humans the neural structures that make RECIPROCAL MORAL AGENCY

possible occurred about 100,000 years ago, much later than when humans started living and

interaction in social groups. Humans are simply better biologically equipped for moral activity

than are other species or than they have been in the past. It is natural to believe that we have

evolved to have larger moral capacity and that this evolution augers a better future for mankind,

if not for every individual at every moment. It is also to be expected that further biological

evolution is coming.

Point of View: Radical Naturalism

Naturalism is the position that everything occurs in time and space. Beauty, caring,

justice, jokes, impossible results, nonsense, and all ethical principles are abstractions. They

present a problem for philosophers who occasionally wonder whether these things exist in the

same sense that a TV remote control or Lincoln’s assassination exist. Certainly, there are caring

people, but if there were no such folks, it is difficult to say whether caring would also cease to

exist. 27 To put a finer point on it, naturalists believe there are only caring acts, and those we

think of as being caring individuals are not caring 100% of the time. Naturalists take their view

of the world neat and are constantly vigilant to guard against reification – the endowment of

abstractions with powers normally reserved for things that exist in time and space. “He was able

to recall many of the details because he has a great memory” is a reification much like the

statement “We were outnumbered because they had more men.” 28 What do we know about a

person how has a great memory that we do not know about a person who is capable of recalling

much?

Naturalism is not as scary as some fear. It is not a campaign to rub out all general terms

or make people talk funny to avoid using abstract nouns. Radical naturalists are prepared to

accept the existence of concepts. Perhaps unicorns do not exist, but the concept of unicorns

certainly does. A concept is a neural pattern in the brains of those who are considering it. These

neural patterns are as anchored in time and space as one would want and they are also helpful in

conversation. 29 As far as we know only humans have neurological equipment that can be

configured this way. But the equipment must be turned on to be of any interest. The notion of

couvade (a practice where aboriginal village men fain labor to draw the evil spirits away from

the woman who is really giving birth) only exists in the United States in freshman cultural

anthropology classes. Ethical principles are real – as long as there are any people who hold those

conceptions as brain patterns. Principlism, as a social meme, may be especially fashionable today

because of the huge increase in the number of philosophers on university salaries. But

conventions evolve in what we talk about as being real. Megaloprepeia was all over ancient

Greek ethics, but it is virtually undefinable nowadays; the idea of feminist ethics would have

been vacuous to the Greeks.

Traditional philosophers would say that a politician who voted to defund food stamps on

Monday and gave a speech about the need to strengthen the social safety net on Wednesday was

guilty of acting against his or her principles. The naturalist would say that the politician was

engaged in two publicly observable actions that were inconsistent. Thus principles drop out of

the analysis, except as a convenient way of taking about it. The inconsistent behavior matters to

those who note it since they will naturally add an item in the framing matrix that the politician is

“expedient” or “careless regarding inconsistencies.” Traditional philosophers might go further to

say the politician acted contrary to his or her principles even if nothing was said in public. There

is no way to make sense of this claim. Unless beliefs make some sort of appearance in time and

space, there is nothing much to talk about, except in a hypothetical way.

It might be objected that I am sneaking disguised universal principles into the house

when I say that we all act so as to bring about the best possible future world. But that is not a rule

that can be honored or breached. It is just the way human nature works. Those who are annoyed

with naturalism might try to poke a stick in the spokes of the wheel that asserts it is immoral to

act other than by pursuing the best common future. This certainly has, on the face of it, a

normative cast. The cut is not fatal, however. All a naturalist is advancing is that suboptimal

behavior patterns occur regularly in the real world. But because of emergence over iterations and

the nesting of individual behavior in moral communities, there is a melioristic pressure for nature

to work toward moral shortcoming being less common as we build a better future. This is not an

urgent call to reform human nature; it is caution against misdirected overreaction and a

suggestion that we celebrate our progress as we patiently anticipate a better future world.

It has been the burden of this book to demonstrate how very simple models of moral

engagements based on natural, incomplete, value-laden frames of the world can lead to general

moral progress for the human community. The trick is to take the broad view. There is no

requirement that progress is dependent on every act being right. Neither is it appropriate to

regard the individual as the unit of analysis when all moral behavior, per definition, affects more

than one person. But especially, we should be cautious about mistaking theory of ethics

composed on statements about what is good and right for actual moral behavior that moves

broadly and inevitably toward a better world.

We have always been looking where we should have been looking, but we may not have

seen what we should have seen. Most of us have always suspected that meaning is in the pattern

not the elements. I argue that the same is the case for morality. In the Point of View section in

the first chapter, I quoted an ancient poem from the Tao Te Ching. I was trying to show that

patterns are as real as the elements they are composed of. Both exist in time and space. We have

come a long way together. I hope these patterns are more meaningful now, not because the

patterns have changed, but because we have.

Thirty spokes share the wheel’s hub, but it is the space among them that makes them

useful.

Shape clay into a vessel; it is the emptiness within that is sought.

Cut doors and windows for a room; adapt the nothingness to the purpose at hand.

Benefit comes from what is there: usefulness from what is not there.

1 I grew up on a sheep farm in Oregon. One of the largest programs for developing the Polypay was

located a few decades ago on a farm in Sonoma, California, about a mile from where I am now

writing.

2 In fact, J. M. Balkin (1998) notes that we fear what he calls “imperialist universalism” in our

views of how societies interpret the norms of justice and human rights.

3 The fifth century BCE Greek story teller, Herodotus (1972, 7; 152), offers this oft-retold bit of

common wisdom: “If all mankind agreed to meet, and everyone brought his own sufferings along

with him for the purpose of exchanging them for somebody else’s there is not a man who, after

taking a good look at his neighbor’s sufferings, would not be only too happy to return home with

his own.”

4 Stuart Kauffman (1995), in At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-

organization and Complexity, presents evidence that continuous progress only occurs in multiple,

imperfect communities. His example of the failure of a comprehensive monoculture is the Stalinist

totalitarian state.

5 There is a long and rich literature on probability matching versus probability maximization. See

Commons et al. (1982) and Logue et al. (1990) for an overview. Stevenson and Weir (1959) and

Weir (1964) are the basic studies showing that infants, along with subhuman animals, naturally

maximize and only switch to matching as their brains mature. Maximizing appears to be a “glance

and judge” phenomenon activated in the ganglia of the basal cortex which mediates value

perceptions: Schultz (1998) and Tanaka et al (1994). Sugrue et al. (2004) make an intriguing

argument to explain this as an example of neurologically matching elements in a mental pattern

with elements in a perceived or remembered pattern of events, a function of the parietal cortex, the

brain region associated with integrating sensory information.

6 It will become apparent in this chapter that the “always use RMA” rule is an idealization. There

needs to be some wobble for the system to work, but the probability matching strategy adds way too

much wobble. I am under no apprehension that any human will be 100% RMA.

7 The so-called gambler’s fallacy (Barron and Leider 2010).

8 There is continuing debate about where to draw the line between humans and other animals in

terms of mental capacity (Dennett 1971; 1983; 1987). Some say language is the distinguishing

characteristics, others, symbol use, complex problem solving, or social coordination. There are no

comparative neurologists, however, who claim that any animal other than humans are capable of

group planning. Only humans can decide together not to do something that has formerly been the

customary way we coordinate behavior. See the 2010 Strüngmann Forum Report (Menzel and

Fischer 2011).

9 Comparative neurobiology can be studied in Jensen et al. (2007); Suddendorf and Corballis

(2007); Call and Tomasello (2007); Schacter et al. (2008); Melis et al. (2009); Menzel and Fischer

(2011); Penn and Povinelli (2011); and Silk and House (2011).

10 Psychometrics is the field of measuring and classifying human performance in areas such as tests

of knowledge in school, high-stakes examinations such as the Graduate Record Exam used for

admissions to higher education, normal and abnormal personality traits, public opinions surveys,

political polls, etc. The standard for validity in psychometrics is not probable consistency between

scores and some “real and objectives” standard (if any existed, they would be used instead of the

tests). The standard for validity in psychometrics is probable inconsistency between actions taken

based on psychometric results and anticipated outcomes.

11 Other than Robert Trivers (1971; Cummings and Trivers 1985) and guarded remarks by Edward

O. Wilson (1975; 1998; Lumsden and Wilson 1981) it is difficult to find authors who proclaim that

there is a gene or specific structure associated with altruism. Thomas (1989), Dawkins (1989), and

Field (2004) appear to suggest that there is a neurological complex associated with ALTRUISM.

Gazzaniga (2005) and Churchland (2011) make a prominent place for ALTRUISM in their ethical

systems but are more skeptical that it has a specific neurological location.

12 The translation between classical philosophy and the neurobiology of perception could be as

follows: the primary perceptual cortices establish “being” and the secondary ones establish

“essence,” with various classes of predicates emerging at different levels.

13 The approximations of visual perception are nicely presented in Chapter 14 of Peter Russell’s

(1979) The Brian Book.

14 Platt and Glimcher (1999) argue that memory is Markovian in the sense that we need not

reconstruct all elements in a history, we need only retrieve the immediate past one – in fact we

cannot think our way back to recreate a past configuration of the brain. They have already been

subsumed. Daniel Dennett (1991) provides a broader discussion of this interpretation of memory.

15 For a few years there was confusion over whether the brain knows what it intends to do before it

initiates action. There is good evidence that researchers can predict from brain images what subjects

will do before subjects themselves were aware of their intentions. These facts remain, but many

scientists now accept that the brain divides such tasks into parallel processes. There is reason to

doubt one of the fundamental assumptions of philosophy, that we act because we decide to and then

intend to, and then act. See Benjamin Libet’s classical work in this area (1979 and 1999) and his

book-length summary (2004); also see Platt and Glimcher (1999).

16 Charles Osgood (1957) proposed a theory that every noun is stored in memory with bidirectional

tags that aid in retrieval. For example, “flowers” are small, colorful, and pretty while “corruption” is

bad, dark, and mysterious. Decades of research have generally confirmed this notion and the central

finding that virtually all nouns are tagged on a “Good-Bad” axis.

17 Malcolm Gladwell (2005), Blink, popularized the notion that things happen in the brain more

quickly than we realize and thus we invent stories to account for the process that are a tad more

rational than justified.

18 We are discovering that the brain is orders of magnitude faster than we thought previously and

that it is highly fragmented and situationally expedient. If these facts of basic everyday cognition

are taken seriously, classical philosophy will have to rethink what it means to think. Most

philosophers make a basic assumption that thought happens slowly enough to be clearly identified

and characterized by the critical mind. We are going to have to work out whether philosophers

really do think more slowly than the rest of us do.

19 In emergence thinking, systems evolve as both the cause of change and the effects of change. It is

continuous self-redefinition, with individuals and communities taking turns as agent and context

simultaneously. Each moral agent defines the moral agency of others. Research over the past 40

years shows that this does not lead to anarchy. New, superordinate patterns emerge. These patterns

are what philosophers call “meaning.” See Nicolis and Prigogine (1989), Kauffman (1995), the

(1995) and (1998) books by John Holland, and Axelrod and Cohen (2000).

20 Johnson-Laird (1987) argues that we want abstract principles for exactly the reason that they are

vague and more subject to ego-protecting interpretation than are our concrete interactions with

others.

21 Modern brain physiology confirms that Descartes was confused about the cogito. The brain

pattern of what is being thought does not contain the part that is doing the thinking.

22 There has been scattered but interesting work on the neural interface between “thought” and

action: De Paulo et al. (1996), Bechara et al. (1997), Adolphas (2001), Knutson et al. (2001),

Richardson et al. (2001), Taylor et al. (2003), Forrest et al. (2004), Hawking and Mlodiow (2010),

McGonigal (2011), Chen (2014), Dane and George (2014), and Ross (2014).

23 The strongest current voices for thought as a pattern of brain process are Daniel Dennett (1991)

and Douglas Hofstadter (1989). Their jointly edited (1981) anthology with commentary on the

strange and marvelous things the brain can do when it masquerades as a mind, The Mind’s I, is a

delight.

24 Myelin is a sheath that coats neural axons and greatly promotes their electrical conductivity.

Regions of the brain may have neural structure that function poorly until myelination occurs

(Hartline and Colman 2007). Although myelination begins in the fetus, there is little present at birth.

The first spurt in myelination occurs at approximately age two (the developmental period associated

with emerging self-awareness and perspective taking ability, with a second spurt at about age 10 to

12, coinciding with greatly increased functional capacity in the frontal lobes.

25 Hanna Arendt (1963, 49) covered the Israeli trial of Adolph Eichmann. He was hanged, she said,

not because of his criminal treatment of the Jews in Germany, but because he was unaware of what

he was doing. “His inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely, to

think from the standpoint of somebody else.”

26 More modern versions of the connection between evolutional biology and morality are found in

von Neumann (1956/1963), Maryanski and Turner (1992), and Weibull (1995).

27 We can frame the question the other way around. Literary critic Arnold Weinstein is fond of

pointing out that artists are careless of the relationship between the person and what they represent.

Writers, for effect, often collapse the distinction between an individual as a carrier of certain

qualities, and just make the character stand for the quality. The term is metonym. Several poets

have used lines such as “I am the scream,” or the nation, or the tragedy. Walt Whitman sustains this

posture through his Leaves of Grass. My favorite is the description C. S. Lewis gives of a tormented

woman who does not realize she is actually in heaven. “But the whole question is whether she is

now a grumbler.” “Aye, but ye misunderstand me. The question is whether she is a grumbler, or

only a grumble.” (Lewis 1946, 74).

28 Among naturalists’ favorite writers are the philosophers Gilbert Ryle (1949), the early Ludwig

Wittgenstein (1922/2001), Willard Van Orman Quine (1961), and the psychologist B. F. Skinner

(1953). The latter two were teachers of mine.

29 Quine (1960) famously pointed out in his doctrine of indeterminacy of translations that the

capacity to hold meaningful conversations does not prove both parties are using a common

reference.