Imagining Yourself in Another's Shoes vs. Extending Your Concern: Empirical and Ethical Differences

[new paper in draft]

The Golden Rule (do unto others as you would have others do unto you) isn't bad, exactly -- it can serve a valuable role -- but I think there's something more empirically and ethically attractive about the relatively underappreciated idea of "extension" found in the ancient Chinese philosopher Mengzi.

The fundamental idea of extension, as I interpret it, is to notice the concern one naturally has for nearby others -- whether they are relationally near (like close family members) or spatially near (like Mengzi's child about to fall into a well or Peter Singer's child you see drowning in a shallow pond) -- and, attending to relevant similarities between those nearby cases and more distant cases, to extend your concern to the more distant cases.

I see three primary advantages to extension over the Golden Rule (not that these constitute an exhaustive list of means of moral expansion!).

(1.) Developmentally and cognitively, extension is less complex. The Golden Rule, properly implemented, involves imagining yourself in another's shoes, then considering what you would want if you were them. This involves a non-trivial amount of "theory of mind" and hypothetical reasoning. You must notice how others' beliefs, desires, and other mental states relevantly differ from yours, then you must imagine yourself hypothetically having those different mental states, and then you must assess what you would want in that hypothetical case. In some cases, there might not even be a fact of the matter about what you would want. (As an extreme example, imagine applying the Golden Rule to an award-winning show poodle. Is there a fact of the matter about what you would want if you were an award winning show poodle?) Mengzian extension seems cognitively simpler: Notice that you are concerned about nearby person X and want W for them, notice that more distant person Y is relevantly similar, and come to want W for them also. This resembles ordinary generalization between relevant cases: This wine should be treated this way, therefore other similar wines should be treated similarly; such-and-such is a good way to treat this person, so such-and-such is probably also a good way to treat this other similar person.

(2.) Empirically, extension is a more promising method for expanding one's moral concern. Plausibly, it's more of a motivational leap to go from concern about self to concern about distant others (Golden Rule) than to go from concern from nearby others to similar more distant others (Mengzian Extension). When aid agencies appeal for charitable donations, they don't typically ask people to imagine what they would want if they were living in poverty. Instead, they tend to show pictures of children, drawing upon our natural concern for children and inviting us to extend that concern to the target group. Also -- as I plan to discuss in more detail in a post next month -- in the "argument contest" Fiery Cushman and I ran back in 2020, the arguments most successful in inspiring charitable donation employed Mengzian extension techniques, while appeals to "other's shoes" style reasoning did not tend to predict higher levels of donation than did the average argument.

(3.) Ethically, it's more attractive to ground concern for distant others in the extension of concern for nearby others than in hypothetical self-interest. Although there's something attractive about caring for others because you can imagine what you would want if you were them, there's also something a bit... self-centered? egoistic? ... about grounding other-concern in hypothetical self-concern. Rousseau writes: "love of men derived from love of self is the principle of human justice" (Emile, Bloom trans., p. 235). Mengzi or Confucius would never say this! In Mengzian extension, it is ethically admirable concern for nearby others that is the root of concern for more distant others. Appealingly, I think, the focus is on broadening one's admirable ethical impulses, rather than hypothetical self-interest.

[ChatGPT4's rendering of Mengzi's example of a child about to fall into a well, with a concerned onlooker; I prefer Helen De Cruz's version]

My new paper on this -- forthcoming in Daedalus -- is circulating today. As always, comments, objections, corrections, connections welcome, either as comments on this post, on social media, or by email.

Abstract:

According to the Golden Rule, you should do unto others as you would have others do unto you. Similarly, people are often exhorted to "imagine themselves in another's shoes." A related but contrasting approach to moral expansion traces back to the ancient Chinese philosopher Mengzi, who urges us to "extend" our concern for those nearby to more distant people. Other approaches to moral expansion involve: attending to the good consequences for oneself of caring for others, expanding one's sense of self, expanding one's sense of community, attending to others' morally relevant properties, and learning by doing. About all such approaches, we can ask three types of question: To what extent do people in fact (e.g., developmentally) broaden and deepen their care for others by these different methods? To what extent do these different methods differ in ethical merit? And how effectively do these different methods produce appropriate care?

Wisdom and Chaos

I. The Puzzle: Why Aren't Academic Philosophers Wise?

Etymologically, philosophy is the study of wisdom. In the popular imagination, philosophers sit cross-legged, uttering cryptic profundities through long white beards. Real philosophy professors spend considerable time reading texts from the "wisdom traditions", and on ethics, the meaning of life, and the fundamental nature of reality. So you might think that the average philosopher would be at least a little bit wiser than the average non-philosopher.

Since the wisdom-o-meter is still in early development, we don't yet have solid scientific evidence on this question. But my impression is that academic philosophers in the United States, as a group, are no wiser than others of their social class -- no wiser on average than chemistry professors, high school teachers, lawyers, or city administrators.

In other words, we don't seem to profit much, in terms of personal wisdom, from our philosophical reading and extended reflection on big-picture questions. Why is this?

One easy answer that will suggest itself to many professional philosophers is this. Most of our reading and reflection doesn't concern the kinds of issues central to wisdom. A philosopher of language might spend much of their professional time reading about the reference of proper names and donkey anaphora. An ethicist might focus on textual puzzles in Kant interpretation. Wisdom might no more tend to follow from those activities than from grading high school history homework or studying sulfates.

However, I think that answer is at best partial. Although one's philosophical research might mostly concern donkey anaphora, most philosophers spend most of their professional time teaching. We teach classes like "introduction to philosophy" and "contemporary moral issues" and "meaning, truth, and value" -- and in prepping and teaching these classes, as well as sometimes apart from class, most of us do engage questions about the meaning of life and what matters most in the big picture. Substantially more than the average chemistry professor, we read and teach classic texts that ordinary people turn to as sources of wisdom. It seems that we ought to learn some wisdom from doing so. The fact that we don't, or don't seem to, thus remains a puzzle.

II. The Nature of Wisdom.

To address the puzzle, we need to think about wisdom and its sources. What is wisdom?

Here's my proposal: Wisdom is the disposition to make decent choices in a wide range of circumstances. If you tend to make poor choices, you're not wise. If you tend to make good choices but only in a narrow range of familiar circumstances and any perturbance would throw you into bewildered disarray, you're also not wise. Wisdom involves stability of good practical judgment even when circumstances turn strange.

A decent choice isn't necessarily the best choice. Only someone with inhumanly heroic insight could be disposed generally to make the best choices in a wide range of circumstances. Decency is more about avoiding blunders -- bad decisions due to panic, short-term thinking, seriously misweighing one's values, overlooking obvious considerations, or grossly misjudging people's character and intentions.

A wide range of circumstances needn't mean all circumstances. How wide a range and what belongs in the range remains an open parameter in this account. If you're a man in a culture where it's not unusual for men to be called to battle, then wisdom probably requires that you be disposed to make decent choices if called to battle. If you're not in such a culture, maybe how you'd react in battle doesn't matter so much. We can also define subclasses of wisdom by considering narrower ranges of circumstances or narrower classes of decisions: wise in matters of child-rearing or in choosing friends or in financial matters.

Being calm and giving good advice, classically associated with wisdom, aren't part of my definition, but they flow naturally from it. Panic leads to bad decisions, so if you're prone to panic, you're probably not wise. Good hypothetical thinking is crucial to good decision making, so the wise will tend to have good judgment about circumstances they aren't in; and since giving bad advice is itself a type of bad decision, it's a failure of wisdom not to know one's limits well enough to stay silent rather than misdirect others.

III. Chaos and Wisdom.

It's an unfortunate feature of the human condition that we rarely learn from other people's mistakes. We insist on making the mistakes ourselves. (This seems to be especially true of teenagers and nations.) So unless you've personally lived through a wide range of circumstances and made a wide range of corresponding mistakes, you're unlikely to have acquired the knowledge necessary to navigate a diversity of situations without blundering. Narrow, stable lives will thus tend to generate less wisdom than chaotic lives with radical changes of circumstance.

This explains your grandmother's wisdom -- grandma who grew up in Hungary, fled the Nazis, built a new life in an unfamiliar country speaking an unfamiliar language, raised five children each with their own chaos, lost her husband, almost died of cancer, knew poverty and comfort, security and uncertainty, love and betrayal.

What is pretty much the least chaotic path through our culture? The academic path. Do what your teachers tell you. Get good grades. Go to graduate school and do it some more. Get a job. Get tenure. It's extremely competitive, but the path is orderly and laid out clearly in advance. Each thing flows neatly from the next. (I set aside the increasingly common chaos of the academic job market.) The set of skills and the range of challenges doesn't change radically over the course of one's life, and there normally are few disruptive conflicts with authority. You wrote decent essays in high school. You wrote better essays in college, then in grad school, and then as a faculty member. Philosophy, literature, and math are perhaps especially narrow, even among academic disciplines. In the laboratory sciences, one at least needs also to learn to manage people and equipment. [ETA: See Marcus Arvan's interesting comment below about whether this description of the academic career path is dated.]

The solution to the puzzle, then, is this. Although one can of course learn some wisdom from reading great philosophy and thinking about profound questions, that's not a particularly good or efficient way to acquire wisdom, compared to actually living through ups and downs and weirdness and chaos. Academic philosophers with narrow, orderly life paths won't fully catch up with grandma, despite some possible modest benefits from thinking hard about Kant, Buddhism, and Montaigne.

You'll be unsurprised to learn that this post was inspired by noting my own and others' reactions to the chaos of the pandemic.

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PS: Maybe reading personal essays like Montaigne's or engaging historical or fictional narratives is more effective in simulating alternative experiences than reading abstract arguments? My student Chris McVey has been working on this issue. See some of his data here. Martha Nussbaum's Poetic Justice is also relevant.

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Related:

Cheeseburger ethics (Aeon Magazine, 2015).

The moral behavior of ethicists (in J. Sytsma and W. Buckwalters, eds., A Companion to Experimental Philosophy, 2016)

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If you enjoy my blog, check out my recent book: A Theory of Jerks and Other Philosophical Misadventures.

Lynching, the Milgram Experiments, and the Question of Whether "Human Nature Is Good"

At The Deviant Philosopher Wayne Riggs, Amy Olberding, Kelly Epley, and Seth Robertson are collecting suggestions for teaching units, exercises, and primers that incorporate philosophical approaches and philosophers that are not currently well-represented in the formal institutional structures of the discipline. The idea is to help philosophers who want suggestions for diversifying their curriculum. It looks like a useful resource!

I contributed the following to their site, and I hope that others who are interested in diversifying the philosophical curriculum will also contribute something to their project.

Lynching, the Milgram Experiments, and the Question of Whether "Human Nature Is Good"

Primary Texts

• Allen, James, Hilton Als, John Lewis, and Leon F. Litwack (2000). Without sanctuary: Lynching photography in America. Santa Fe: Twin Palms. Pp. 8-16, 173-176, 178-180, 184-185, 187-190, 194-196, 198, 201 (text only), and plates #20, 25, 31, 37-38, 54, 57, 62-65, 74, and 97.
• Wells-Barnett, Ida B. (1892/2002). On lynchings. Ed. P.H. Collins. Amherst, NY: Humanity. Pp. 42-46.
• Mengzi (3rd c. BCE/1970). Trans. B.W. Van Norden. Indianapolis: Hackett. 1A7, 1B5, 1B11, 2A2 (p. 35-41 only), 2A6, 2B9, 3A5, 4B12, 6A1 through 6A15, 6B1, 7A7, 7A15, 7A21, 7B24, 7B31.
• Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1755/1995). Discourse on the origin of inequality. Trans. F Philip. Ed. P. Coleman. Oxford: Oxford. Pp. 45-48.
• Xunzi (3rd c. BCE/2014). Xunzi: The complete text. Trans. E. Hutton. Princeton, NJ: Princeton. Pp. 1-8, 248-257.
• Hobbes, Thomas (1651/1996). Leviathan. Ed. R. Tuck. Cambridge: Cambridge. Pp. 86-90.
• Doris, John M. (2002). Lack of character. Cambridge: Cambridge. Pp. 28-61.
• The Milgram video on Obedience to Authority.

Secondary Texts for Instructor

• Dray, Philip (2002). At the hands of persons unknown. New York: Modern Library.
• Ivanhoe, Philip J. (2000). Confucian moral self cultivation, 2nd ed. Indianapolis: Hackett. 
• Schwitzgebel, Eric (2007). Human nature and moral education in Mencius, Xunzi, Hobbes, and Rousseau. History of Philosophy Quarterly, 24, 147-168.

Suggested Courses

• Introduction to Ethics
• Ethics
• Introduction to Philosophy
• Evil
• Philosophy of Psychology
• Political Philosophy

Overview

This is a two-week unit. Day one is on the history of lynching in the United States, featuring lynching photography and Ida B. Wells. Day two is Mengzi on human nature (with Rousseau as secondary reading). Day three is Xunzi on human nature (with Hobbes as secondary reading). Days four and five are the Milgram video and John Doris on situationism.

The central question concerns the psychology of lynching perpetrators and Milgram participants. On a “human nature is good” view, we all have some natural sympathies or an innate moral compass that would be revolted by our participation in such activities, if we were not somehow swept along by bad influences (Mengzi, Rousseau). On a “human nature is bad” view, our natural inclinations are mostly self-serving and morality is an artificial human construction; so if one’s culture says “this is the thing to do” there is no inner source of resistance unless you have already been properly trained (Xunzi, Hobbes). Situationism (which is not inconsistent with either of these alternatives) suggests that most people can commit great evil or good depending on what seem to be fairly moderate situational pressures (Doris, Milgram).

Students should be alerted in advance about the possibly upsetting photographs, and they must be encouraged to look closely at the faces of the perpetrators rather than being too focused on the bodies of the victims (which may be edited out if desired for classroom presentation). You might even consider giving the students possible alternative readings if they find the lynching material too difficult (such as an uplifting chapter from Colby & Damon 1992).

On Day One, a point of emphasis should be that most of the victims were not even accused of capital crimes, and focus can be both on the history of lynching in general and on the emotional reactions of the perpetrators as revealed by their behavior described in the texts and by their faces in the photos.

On Day Two, the main emphasis should be on Mengzi’s view that human nature is good. King Xuan and the ox (1A7), the child at the well (2A6), and the beggar refusing food insultingly given (6A10) are the most vivid examples. The metaphor of cultivating sprouts is well worth extended attention (as discussed in the Ivanhoe and Schwitzgebel readings for the instructor). If the lynchers had paused to reflect in the right way, would they have found in themselves a natural revulsion against what they were doing, as Mengzi would predict? Rousseau’s view is similar (especially as developed in Emile) but puts more emphasis on the capacity of philosophical thinking to produce rationalizations of bad behavior.

On Day Three, the main emphasis should be on Xunzi’s view that human nature is bad. His metaphor of straightening a board is fruitfully contrasted with Mengzi’s of cultivating sprouts. For example, in straightening a board, the shape (the moral structure) is imposed by force from outside. In cultivating a sprout, the shape grows naturally from within, given a supportive, nutritive, non-damaging environment. Students can be invited to consider cartoon versions of “conservative” moral education (“here are the rules, like it or not, follow them or you’ll be punished!”) versus “liberal” moral education (“don’t you feel bad that you hurt Ana’s feelings?”).

Day Four you might just show the Milgram video.

Day Five the focus should be on articulating situationism vs dispositionism (or whatever you want to call the view that broad, stable, enduring character traits explain most of our moral behavior). I recommend highlighting the elements of truth in both views, and then showing how there are both situationist and dispositionist elements in both Mengzi and Xunzi (e.g., Mengzi says that young men are mostly cruel in times of famine, but he also recommends cultivating stable dispositions). Students can be encouraged to discuss how well or poorly the three different types of approach explain the lynchings and the Milgram results

If desired, Day Six and beyond can cover material on the Holocaust. Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem and Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners make a good contrast (with Mengzian elements in Arendt and Xunzian elements in Goldhagen). (If you do use Goldhagen, be sure you are aware of the legitimate criticisms of some aspects of his view by Browning and others.)

Discussion Questions

• What emotions are the lynchers feeling in the photographs?
• If the lynchers had stopped to reflect on their actions, would they have been able to realize that what they were doing was morally wrong?
• Mengzi lived in a time of great chaos and evil. Although he thought human nature was good, he never denied that people actually commit great evil. What resources are available in his view to explain actions like those of the lynch mobs, or other types of evil actions?
• Is morality an artificial cultural invention? Or do we all have natural moral tendencies that only need to be cultivated in a nurturing environment?
• In elementary school moral education, is it better to focus on enforcing rules that might not initially make sense to the children, or is it better to try to appeal to their sympathies and concerns for other people?
• How effectively do you think people can predict what they themselves would do in a situation like the Milgram experiment or a lynch mob?
• Are there people who are morally steadfast enough to resist even strong situational pressures? If so, how do they become like that?

Activities (optional)

On the first day, an in class assignment might be for them to spend 5-7 minutes writing down their opinion on whether human nature is good or evil (or in-between, or alternatively that the question doesn’t even make sense as formulated). Then can then trade their written notes with a neighbor or two and compare answers. On the last day, they can review what they wrote on the first day and discuss whether their opinions have changed.
[Greetings from Graz, Austria, by the way!]

Human Nature Is Good: A Sketch of the Argument

The ancient Chinese philosopher Mengzi and the early modern French philosopher Rousseau both argued that human nature is good. The ancient Chinese philosopher Xunzi and the early modern English philosopher Hobbes argued that human nature is not good.

I interpret this as an empirical disagreement about human moral psychology. We can ask, who is closer to right?

1. Clarifying the Question.

First we need to clarify the question. What do Mengzi and Rousseau mean by the slogan that is normally translated into English as "human nature is good"? There are, I think, two main claims.

One is a claim about ordinary moral reactions: Normal people, if they haven't been too corrupted by a bad environment, will tend to be revolted by clear cases of morally bad behavior and pleased by clear cases of morally good behavior.

The other is a claim about moral development: If people reflect carefully on those reactions, their moral understanding will mature, and they will find themselves increasingly wanting to do what's morally right.

The contrasting view -- the Xunzi/Hobbes view -- is that morality is an artificial human construction. Unless the right moral system has specifically been inculcated in them, ordinary people will not normally find themselves revolved by evil and pleased by the good. At least to start, people need to be told what is right and wrong by others who are wiser than them. There is no innate moral compass to get you started in the right developmental direction.

2. Mixed Evidence?

One might think the truth is somewhere in the middle.

On the side of good: Anyone who suddenly sees a child crawling toward a well, about to fall in, would have an impulse to save the child, suggesting that everyone has some basic, non-selfish concern for the welfare of others, even without specific training (Mengzi 2A6). This concern appears to be present early in development. For example, even very young children show spontaneous compassion toward those who are hurt. Also, people of different origins and upbringings admire moral heroes who make sacrifices for the greater good, even when they aren't themselves directly benefited. Non-human primates show sympathy for each other and seem to understand the basics of reciprocity, exchange, and rule-following, suggesting that such norms aren't entirely a human invention. (On non-human primates, see especially Frans de Waal's 1996 book Good Natured.)

On the other hand: Toddlers (and adults!) can of course be selfish and greedy; they don't like to share or to wait their turn. In the southern U.S. about a century ago, crowds of ordinary White people frequently lynched Blacks for minor or invented offenses, proudly taking pictures and inviting their children along, without apparently seeing anything wrong in it. (See especially James Allen et al., Without Sanctuary.) The great "heroes" of the past include not only those who sacrificed for the greater good but also people famous mainly for conquest and genocide. We still barely seem to notice the horribleness of naming our boys "Alexander" and "Joshua".

3. Human Nature Is Nonetheless Good.

Some cases can be handled by emphasizing that only "normal" people who haven't been too corrupted by a bad environment will be attracted to good and revolted by evil. But a better general defense of the goodness of human nature involves adopting an idea that runs through both the Confucian and Buddhist traditions and, in the West, from Socrates through the Enlightenment to Habermas and Scanlon. It's this: If you stop and think, in an epistemically responsible way (perhaps especially in dialogue with others), you will tend to find yourself drawn toward what's morally good and repelled by what's evil.

Example A. Extreme ingroup bias. For example, one of the primary sources of evil that doesn't feel like evil -- and can in fact feel like doing something morally good -- is ingroup/outgroup thinking. Early 20th century Southern Whites saw Blacks as an outgroup, a "them" that needed to be controlled; the Nazis similarly viewed the Jews as alien; in celebrating wars of conquest, the suffering of the conquered group is either disregarded or treated as much less important that the benefits to the conquering group. Ingroup/outgroup thinking of this sort typically requires either ignoring others' suffering or accepting dubious theories that can't withstand objective scrutiny. (This is one function of propaganda.) The type of extreme ingroup bias that promotes evil behavior tends to be undermined by epistemically responsible reflection.

Example B. Selfishness and jerkitude. Similarly, selfish or jerkish behavior tends to be supported by rationalizations and excuses that prove flimsy when carefully examined. ("It's fine for me to cheat on the test because of X", "Our interns ought to expect to be hassled and harrassed; it's just part of their job", etc.) If you were simply comfortable being selfish, you wouldn't need to concoct those poor justifications. If and when critical reflection finally reveals the flimsiness of those justifications, that normally creates some psychological pressure for you to change.

It's crucial not to overstate this point. We can be unshakable in our biases and rationalizations despite overwhelming evidence. And even when we do come to realize that something we eagerly want for ourselves or our group is immoral, we can still choose that thing. Evil might still be commonplace: Just as most plants don't survive to maturity, many people fall far short of their moral potential, often due to hard circumstances or negative outside influences.

Still, if we think well enough, we all can see the basic outlines of moral right and wrong; and something in us doesn't like to choose the wrong. This is true of pretty much everyone who isn't seriously socially deprived, regardless of the specifics of their cultural training. Furthermore, this inclination toward what's good -- I hope and believe -- is powerful enough to place at the center of moral education.

That is the empirical content of the claim that human nature is good.

I do have some qualms and hesitations, and I think it only works to a certain extent and within certain limits.

Perhaps oddly, the strikingly poor quality of the reasoning in recent U.S. politics has actually firmed up my opinion that careful reflection can indeed fairly easily reveal the lies behind evil.

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Related: Human Nature and Moral Education in Mencius, Xunzi, Hobbes, and Rousseau (History of Philosophy Quarterly 2007).

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The Moral Compass and the Liberal Ideal in Moral Education

Here are two very different approaches to moral education:

The outward-in approach. Inform the child what the rules are. Do not expect the child to like the rules or regard them as wise. Instead, enforce compliance through punishment and reward. Secondarily, explain the rules, with the hope that eventually the child will come to appreciate their wisdom, internalize them, and be willing to abide by them without threat of punishment.

The inward-out approach. When the child does something wrong, help the child see for herself what makes it wrong. Invite the child to reflect on what constitutes a good system of rules and what are good and bad ways to treat people, and collaborate in developing guidelines and ideals that make sense to the child. Trust that even young children can come to see the wisdom of moral guidelines and ideals. Punish only as a fallback when more collaborative approaches fail.

Though there need be no neat mapping, I conjecture that preference for the outward-in approach correlates with what we ordinarily regard as political conservativism and preference for the inward-out approach with what we ordinarily regard as political liberalism. The crucial difference between the two approaches is this: The outward-in approach trusts children's judgment less. On the outward-in approach, children should be taught to defer to established rules, even if those rules don't make sense to them. This resembles Burkean political conservativism among adults, which prioritizes respect for the functioning of our historically established traditions and institutions, mistrusting our current judgments about how to those institutions might be improved or replaced.

In contrast, the liberal ideal in moral education depends on the thought that most or all people -- including most or all children -- have something like an inner moral compass, which can be relied on as at least a partial, imperfect guide toward what's morally good. If you take four-year-old Pooja aside after she has punched Lauren (names randomly chosen) and patiently ask her to explain herself and to think about the ethics of punching, you will get something sensible in reply. For the liberal ideal to work, it must be true that Pooja can be brought to understand the importance of treating others kindly and fairly. It must be true that after reflection, she will usually find that she wants to be kind and fair to others, even without outer reward.

This is a lot to expect from children. And yet I do think that most children, when approached patiently, can find their moral compass. In my experience watching parents and educators, it strikes me that when they are at their best -- not overloaded with stress or too many students -- they can successfully use the inward-out approach. Empirical psychology also suggests that the (imperfect, undeveloped) seeds of morality are present early in development and shared among primates.

It is I think foundational to the liberal conception of the human condition -- "liberal" in rejecting the top-down imposition of values and celebrating instead people's discovery of their own values -- that when they are given a chance to reflect, in conditions of peace, with broad access to relevant information, people will tend to find themselves revolted by evil and attracted to good. Hatred and evil wither under thoughtful critical examination. So we liberals must believe. Despite complexities, bumps, regressions, and contrary forces, reflection and broad exposure to facts and arguments will bend us toward freedom, egalitarianism, and respect.

If this is so, here's something you can always do: Invite people to think alongside you. Share the knowledge you have. If there is light and insight in your thinking, people will slowly walk toward it.

Related essay: Human Nature and Moral Education in Mencius, Xunzi, Hobbes, and Rousseau (History of Philosophy Quarterly, 2007)

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The Moral World of Dreidel

I used to think dreidel was a poorly designed game of luck. Now I realize that its "bugs" are really features! Dreidel is the moral world in minature.

Primer for goys: You sit in a circle with friends or relatives and take turns spinning a wobbly top (the dreidel). In the center of the circle is a pot of several foil-wrapped chocolate coins. If the four-sided top lands on the Hebrew letter gimmel, you take the whole pot and everyone needs to contribute to the pot again. If it lands on hey, you take half the pot. If it lands on nun, nothing happens. If it lands on shin, you put a coin in. Then the next player takes a turn.

It all sounds very straightforward, until you actually start to play the game.

First off: Some coins are big, others little. If the game were fair, all the coins would be the same size, or at least there would be clear rules about tradeoffs or about when you're supposed to contribute your big coins and little coins. Also, there's never just one driedel, and the dreidels all seem to be uneven and biased. (This past Hannukah, my daughter Kate and I spun a sample of dreidels 40 times each. One in particular landed on shin an incredible 27/40 spins. [Yes, p < .001, highly significant, even with a Bonferroni correction.]) No one agrees whether you should round up or round down with hey; no one agrees when the game should end or how low the pot should be before you all have to contribute again. (You could look at various alleged authorities on the internet, but people prefer to argue and employ varying house rules.) No one agrees whether you should let someone borrow coins if they run out, or how many coins to start with. Some people hoard their coins; others slowly unwrap and eat them while playing, then beg and borrow from their wealthy neighbors.

You can, if you want, always push things to your advantage: Always contribute the smallest coins you can, always withdraw the biggest coins you can, insist on using what seems to be the "best" dreidel, always argue for rule-interpretations in your favor, eat your big coins and use that as a further excuse to only contribute little ones, etc. You could do all this without ever once breaking the rules, and you'd probably end up with the most chocolate as a result.

But here's the brilliant part: The chocolate isn't very good. After eating a few coins, the pleasure gained from further coins is pretty minimal. As a result, almost all the children learn that they would rather enjoy being kind and generous than they would enjoy hoarding up more coins. The pleasure of the chocolate doesn't outweigh the yucky feeling of being a stingy, argumentative jerk. After a few turns of maybe pushing only small coins into the pot, you decide you should put a big coin in next time, even though the rules don't demand it -- just to be fair to others, and to be perceived as fair by them.

Of course, it also feels bad always to be the most generous one -- always to put in big, take out small, always to let others win the rules-arguments, etc., to play the sucker or self-sacrificing saint. Dreidel is a practical lesson in discovering the value of fairness both to oneself and others, in a context where proper interpretation of the rules is unclear, and where there are norm violations that aren't rule violations, and where both norms and rules are negotiable, varying from occasion to occasion -- just like life itself, but with only mediocre chocolate at stake.

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The Bait-and-Switch Blurring of Moral and Prudential in the World of Chutes and Ladders

Chutes and Ladders, if you didn't know, isn't just a game of chance. It's a game of virtue. At the bottom of each ladder a virtuous action is depicted, and at the top we see its reward. Above each chute is a vice, at the bottom natural punishment. The world of Chutes and Ladders is the world of perfect immanent justice! Virtue always pays and vice is always punished, and always through natural mechanisms rather than by the action of any outside authority, much less divine authority.

Here's a picture of my board at home:

One striking thing: What 21st-century Anglophone philosophers would normally call "prudential" virtues and what 21st-century Anglophone philosophers would normally call "moral" virtues are treated exactly on par, as though they were entirely the same sort of thing.

In square 1, Elmo plants seeds. (Prudential!) Laddering to square 38, he reaps his bouquet. In square 9, Ernie helps Bert carry Bert's books. (Moral!) Laddering to square 31, we see Ernie and Bert enjoying soccer together. In square 64 Bert is running without looking (prudential) and he slips on a banana peel, chuting down to square 60. In square 16, Zoe teasingly hides Elmo's alphabet block from him (moral), and she chutes down to square 6, losing the pleasure of Elmo's company.

It's my first-grade daughter's favorite game right now (though she seems to like it even more when we play it upside down, celebrating vice).

Consider the Boy Scout code: trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent. Wait, "clean"? Or the seven deadly sins: lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy, and pride. My sense is that cross-culturally and historically long term prudential self-interest and short- and long-term moral duty tend to be lumped together into the category of virtues, not sharply distinguished, all primarily opposed to short-term self-interest.

It's a nice fantasy, the fantasy of mainstream moral educators across history -- that we live in a Chutes-and-Ladders world. And in tales and games you don't even need to do the long-term waiting bit: just ladder right up! I see why my daughter enjoys it. But does it make for a good moral education? Maybe so. One would hope there's wisdom embodied in the Chutes-and-Ladders moral tradition.

One possibility is that it's a bait-and-switch. That's how I'm inclined to read the early Confucian tradition (Mencius, Xunzi, though if so it's below the surface of the texts). The Chutes-and-Ladders world is offered as a kind of hopeful lie, to lure people onto the path of valuing morality as a means to attain long-term self-interest. But once one goes far enough down this path, though the lie becomes obvious, simultaneously the means starts to become an end valued for its own sake, even overriding the long-term selfish goals that originally motivated it. We come, eventually, to help Bert with his books even when it chutes us down rather than ladders us up.

After all, we see the same thing with pursuit of money, don't we?

Update 6:38: As my 14-year-old son points out, one other feature of Chutes and Ladders is that there's no free will. It's all chance whether you end up being virtuous. So in that sense, justice is absent (note March 21: though maybe though it's chance relative to the player, that chance represents the free will of the pawn).

Update March 21: As several people at New APPS have pointed out, Chutes and Ladders originated in ancient India as Snakes and Ladders. According to this site, the original virtues were faith, reliability, generosity, knowledge, asceticism; the original vices disobedience, vanity, vulgarity, theft, lying, drunkenness, debt, rage, greed, pride, murder, and lust. (A lot more snakes than ladders in India than on Sesame Street!)

Ethics in the Second Person

Still in China, so just a brief recollection.

When my son Davy was about six or seven, I asked him what the point is in thinking about right and wrong, good and bad, fair and unfair. He said that most of the kids who talked a lot about things like sharing and fairness seemed to want you to share with them.

We might think of this as "ethics in the second person" -- ethics that focuses on telling the people around you what they are morally required do, with no particular concern about applying the same norms to one's own actions. Of course, ethics in the second person needn't always arise from the motives that drive it in envious six-year-olds! And yet I'm inclined to think that one advantage of hanging around with children is that they reveal to us our vices purer, simpler, and less well disguised.

Adolf Eichmann, Hannah Arendt, Stanley Milgram, and King Xuan of Qi

Perhaps my favorite Mencius passage is 1A7.  At its core is a story of a king's mercy on an ox.

While the king was sitting up in his hall, an ox was led past below. The king saw it and said, "Where is the ox going?" Hu He replied, "We are about to ritually anoint a bell with its blood." The king said, "Spare it. I cannot bear its frightened appearance, like an innocent going to the execution ground." Hu He replied, "So should we dispense with the anointing of the bell?" The king said, "How can that be dispensed with? Exchange it for a sheep." (Van Norden, trans.)

Mencius asks the king (King Xuan of Qi):

If Your Majesty was pained at its being innocent and going to the execution ground, then was is there to choose between an ox and a sheep?... You saw the ox but had not seen the sheep.  Gentlemen cannot bear to see animals die if they have seen them living. If they hear the cries of their suffering, they cannot bear to eat their flesh. Hence, gentlemen keep their distance from the kitchen.

(Note that Mencius does not conclude that gentlemen should become vegetarians.  Interesting possibilities for reflection arise regarding butchers, executioners, soldiers, etc., but let's not dally.)  To understand the next part of the passage, you need to know what kind of person this king was.  Skip forward to passage 1B11 where Mencius says to King Xuan:

Yan was ferocious to its people. Your Majesty went out and attacked it. The people thought that You were going to deliver them as from flood and fire. They welcomed Your Majesty with baskets and food and pots of soup. But if You kill their fathers and older brothers, put burdens on [enslave? capture? take hostage?] their sons and younger brothers, destroy their shrines and temples, plundering their valuable goods -- how could that be acceptable?

The invasion of Yan probably occurred after his sparing of the ox, but it reveals King Xuan's character: He has mercy on an ox because the ox looks like an innocent person, but at the same time he is perfectly willing to kill innocent people.  Now back to 1A7.  Mencius says to the king:

Suppose there were someone who reported to Your Majesty, 'My strength is sufficient to life five hundred pounds, but not sufficient to lift one feather. My eyesight is sufficient to examine the tip of an autumn hair, but I cannot see a wagon of firewood.... In the present case your kindness is sufficient to reach animals, but the effects do not reach the commoners.... Measure it, and then you will distinguish the long and the short. Things are all like this, the heart most of all. Let Your Majesty measure it.

I can't read Hannah Arendt's famous portrayal of Adolf Eichmann without thinking of this passage from Mencius.  Eichmann (at least in Arendt's portrayal) respects and values his Jewish acquaintances, friends, and relatives -- even at one point has a Jewish lover.  When he goes east to see the killing operations, he finds it morally horrible and can't bear to look.  Yet he masterfully shipped hundreds of thousands of Jews to their deaths in the Holocaust.  Near the end, Eichmann even defied Himmler's order to stop having Jews killed, since he knew Himmler's order would be contrary to Hitler's wish.  Like King Xuan of Qi, Eichmann is merciful and soft (perhaps too soft) to those he sees, while indifferent to those outside his field of view, failing to note the similarity between the cases -- failing to "measure his heart".

You have probably heard of the Milgram experiment.  What most people remember about it is that it was amazingly easy for Stanley Milgram to convince research subjects to deliver high-voltage, maybe even fatal, shocks to another research subject.  (All shocks were actually faked.)  What some people forget, but what Milgram himself emphasizes, is that people's obedience to instructions to deliver high-voltage shocks was very much contingent on the relative distances of the victim and of the authority issuing the instructions.  If the victim was near at hand and the authority far away, almost no one complied.  If the authority was nearby and the victim neither visible nor audible, almost everyone complied.

King Xuan and Eichmann would presumably be the perfect Milgram subjects.

Think and you will get it, Mencius says.  Take the heart that is over here and apply it over there.  Note how you react in the nearby, vivid cases; then note, intellectually, the lack of relevant difference between those cases and more distant, less vivid cases. For Mencius, this attention to the natural impulses of the heart, and the rational extension of those impulses, is the key to moral development.

Worth noting in conclusion: It's not all about extending impulses of sympathy or pity, as in 1A7 (and in some recent accounts of moral development).  Mencius holds that one can also notice and intellectually extend respect, ritual propriety, and uprightness (3A5, 6A10, 7A15, 7B31).

John Stuart Mill on the Value of Moral Disagreement

I have been thinking lately about the value (or disvalue) of philosophical moral reflection, and I find myself reading, yet again, Mill's On Liberty. I love the prose in that book. Here is what Mill says about the value of moral disagreement:

We often hear the teachers of all creeds lamenting the difficulty of keeping up in the minds of believers a lively apprehension of the truth which they normally recognise, so that it may penetrate the feelings, and acquire a real mastery over the conduct. No such difficulty is complained of while the creed is fighting for its existence: even the weaker combatants then know and feel what they are fighting for, and the difference between it and other doctrines; and in that period of every creed's existence, not a few persons may be found, who have realised its fundamental principles in all the forms of thought, have weighed and considered them in all their important bearings, and have experienced the full effect on the character which belief in that creed ought to produce in a mind thoroughly imbued with it. But when it has come to be an hereditary creed, and to be received passively, not actively -- when the mind is no longer compelled, in the same degree as at first, to exercise its vital powers on the questions which its belief presents to it, there is a progressive tendency to forget all of the belief except the formularies, or to give it a dull and torpid assent, as if accepting it on trust dispensed with the necessity of realising it in consciousness, or testing it by personal experience, until it almost ceases to connect itself at all with the inner life of the human being. Then are seen the cases, so frequent in this age of the world as almost to form the majority, in which the creed remains as it were outside the mind, incrusting and petrifying it against all other influences addressed to the higher parts of our nature; manifesting its power by not suffering any fresh and living conviction to get in, but itself doing nothing for the mind or heart, except standing sentinel over them to keep them vacant.

You go, baby!

Podcast of "An Empirical Perspective on the Mencius-Xunzi Debate about Human Nature"

given to the Confucius Institute of Scotland on Jan. 19,
here.

The podcast is audio-only, so you won't see the overheads. I don't think you need to see the overheads to understand the talk. But for completeness here they are (as MS PowerPoint 2003).

You may also be interested to see this article, which was part of the basis for the talk.

On Encouraging Children to Reflect about Morality

Consider these two views of moral education:

(1.) The "liberal", inward-out model: Moral education should stress moral reflection, with rules and punishment playing a secondary role. If six-year-old Sally hits her friend Hank, you have to enforce the rules and punish her (probably), but what's really going to help her improve morally is encouraging her to think about things like: Hank's perspective on the situation, how she feels about having hurt Hank, and the best overall norms for behavior. Adults, likewise, make moral progress by thinking carefully about their own standards of right and wrong and whether their behavior lives up to those standards. Thus, mature morality grows from within: It's a natural development of the values people, upon reflection, discover to be already nascent in themselves.

(2.) The "conservative", outward-in model: Moral education should stress rules and punishment, with moral reflection playing a secondary role. You can't understand and apply the rules, of course, without some sort of reflection on them, but reflection should be in the context of received norms. Otherwise, it's likely just to become rationalization of self-serving impulses. Until people are morally well developed, the values that emerge from their independent and free reflection will almost inevitably be inferior to time-tested traditional cultural values. Thus, mature morality is imposed from without: People are forced to obey certain norms until obedience to those norms becomes habitual. Perhaps eventually those norms will be understood and embraced, but that's near the end of the developmental trajectory, not the beginning.

Now academically affiliated researchers on moral development almost universally prefer the first model to the second (examples include rationalists like Piaget and Kohlberg, most their opponents who stress the importance of sympathy and perspective-taking, as well as people like Damon who endorse a hybrid view). The common idea is that children (and the morally undeveloped in general) improve morally when they are encouraged to think for themselves and given space to discover their own reactions and values.

Now I'm sympathetic to this idea, but here's my thought: Suppose Sally hits Hank and a liberally-minded teacher comes up and asks her how it made her feel to hurt Hank. What child, realistically, would say, "Well, I know he didn't deserve it, but it just felt good pounding him to a pulp!"? The reality is that the child is being asked to reflect in a situation where she knows that the teacher will approve of one answer and condemn another. This isn't free reflection; and the answer the child gives may not reflect her real feelings and values. Instead, it seems, it is a kind of imposition -- and one perhaps all the more effective if the child mistakes the resulting judgment for one that is genuinely her own.

Therefore, maybe, a liberal-seeming style of moral education is effective not because we have in us all an inclination toward the good that only needs encouragement to flower, but rather because reflection in teacher-child, parent-child, and similar social contexts is really an insidious form of imposition -- and thus, perhaps, the conservative's best secret tool.

Do Atheists Commit Less Vicious Sexual Crimes?

This article suggests so. From the abstract:

This article examines associations between self-reported religious affiliations and official offense histories among 111 incarcerated adult male sexual offenders. Four categories of religiosity were devised according to self-reported continuities and discontinuities in life-course religious affiliations: atheists, dropouts, converts, and stayers. ANCOVAs indicated that stayers (those who maintained religious involvement from childhood to adulthood) had more sexual offense convictions, more victims, and younger victims, than other groups. Results challenge assumptions that religious involvement should, as with other crimes, serve to deter sexual offending behavior....

One is reminded, of course, of the Catholic church's troubles over the last several years. The average age of the youngest victim of the "stayers" was 9.5 years.

A few caveats: (1.) "Atheists" just means comparatively low reported religiosity, both childhood and present, and may not correspond to full-blown atheism. (2.) One cannot draw the conclusion that atheists are less likely, in general, to commit sex crimes, since rates of atheism and religiosity were not measured in the general population. (3.) The researchers (Donna Eshuys and Stephen Smallbone) seem to overlook the possibility that the "stayers" may come from a sub-population in which sex crimes are less likely to be detected and/or lead to jail time, in which case one might expect only the worst offenders to be incarcerated; or that maybe the more vicious sexual offenders are more likely to exaggerate their religiosity.

The general literature on the relationship between religiosity and crime is mixed and difficult to interpret. If only we could randomly assign religiosity! ;) Unfortunately, the social factors affecting religiosity are entangled with those affecting criminality. Furthermore, the literature may be distorted by the fact that null results are hard to publish and by the prior commitments of the researchers (many are from religiously affiliated institutions, for example).

Why do I care about this issue? Well, if academic moral philosophy has no great positive effect on one's moral character (as I'm inclined to think), then one might hope for religion as a better source. I'm not especially optimistic about that either (though I have some hope that there may be particular religious practices with positive moral effect), but I haven't yet explored the empirical literature as much as I'd like.

Evil and Failure to Reflect

Today I'd like to consider a view somewhat in tension with my series of posts on what I call the "problem of the ethics professors" -- the problem being that they don't seem to be any more virtuous than the rest of us. (Empirical data here and here.)

It's tempting, perhaps, to suppose in light of ethicists' remarkably ordinary blend of virtue and vice, that philosophical moral reflection is of no use to moral development. But that conclusion is troublingly cynical. If philosophical reflection about ethics -- which is, really, often nothing more than just thoughtful consideration of what's right and wrong -- yields no moral benefit, what's the point? Just to know better our wickedness? It's pretty darkly pessimistic to suppose that reflection, and consideration of the best historical and contemporary writing on virtue, duty, and justice, is powerless to produce moral improvement.

It's appealingly worldly, perhaps, to think poorly of the morality of ethicists; but then, I think, you owe yourself a story about how and why philosophical reflection fails. And I doubt the easiest stories here ("the problem with ethicists is that they ignore the Bible" or "philosophical ethics suppresses moral emotion") will work, at least not without considerable supplementation.

Here are two further thoughts that incline me not to dismiss the value of moral reflection so lightly.

First, there's the remarkable lack of moral reflection common among the perpetrators of great crimes. I'm struck by this, especially, in reading Holocaust literature. It's a famous theme, of course, in Hannah Arendt's portrayal of Eichmann, an expert in the logistics of shipping Jews to death. Albert Speer's well-known book Inside the Third Reich -- conceived while serving prison time for his role as an architect in Hitler's inner circle -- is to my mind amazingly unreflective about the moral dimensions of his activity, focusing instead on such issues as Hitler's movie-watching habits and how the Allies should have attacked ball-bearing factories. I can't help but wonder whether more morally reflective people would be less likely to be swept up in such evil. (Of course, there's the case of Heidegger....)

And second: In the famous Milgram experiment, subjects are persuaded to shock (they think) a screaming, protesting (and eventually eerily silent) man in an adjoining room for the sake of an experiment on learning. They begin by giving a mild shock as "punishment" for a wrong answer, with instructions to increase the level of shock with each wrong answer. Eventually, they believe they are delivering shocks of 300 and even 450 volts (marked "danger" and "xxx" on the instrumentation) to the victim. When subjects protest, they are placidly told, by a man in a lab coat, that they are to continue and that the shocks cause no permanent tissue damage. It's hard to know for sure, but I suspect that most subjects who paused for a while to genuinely reflect, in a philosophical way (why am I shocking this man? do we have any right to keep him here despite his protests? might there be some real risk to his life or health that his experiment doesn't justify?), would refuse to continue to shock the victim. No?

Philosophical moral reflection, powerless to improve behavior? We should not adopt that view lightly. But then we're left again with the problem of the ethics professors.

"Habituation" and Moral Development

On Wednesday, Gavin Lawrence spoke here at UC Riverside on Aristotle's conception of moral development. Lawrence argued that Aristotle stood something like "habituation" -- the acquisition of habits -- near the center of moral development, especially early moral development. Unfortunately, Lawrence left the concept of "habituation" relatively undeveloped.

One issue I find intriguing is the proper method of encouraging the acquisition of moral habits early in development.

Consider first a non-moral example: If you want a child to learn to like broccoli, is it better to force him to eat it again and again, expecting he'll learn to tolerate it more and eventually develop a taste for it? Or is forcing it counterproductive, leading the child increasingly to dislike it?

Correspondingly, if you want a child to learn to share, is it better to force her to share, or does forcing moral actions, contrary to the inclinations of the child's heart, only poison morality for her and impair her moral development?

In asking this question, I had the ancient Chinese philosophers Xunzi and Mencius in mind. Xunzi seems to adopt the first perspective as a general policy, and Mencius may endore the latter (if P.J. Ivanhoe's interpretation is right, though I worry that Ivanhoe depends too much on a dubious interpretation of Mengzi 2A2). Ivanhoe's Mencius suggests that the best spur to moral development is encouraging people to reflect and discover their joy at behaving morally in certain situations; and as you act morally and reflect on this joy, the moral inclinations grow in breadth and strength.

I posed this question to Lawrence in the discussion period after his talk. He suggested that he doubted Aristotle would have thought there was one universally best way to encourage moral development. Maybe sometimes it's better to force, at other times to lay off. Surely that must be right (if a bit cagey). I wonder if we can't lay moral educators on a spectrum depending on the extent to which they see habituation by coercion as an important and non-damaging tool in moral education, and then dispute about how far to one end or the other of this spectrum it's best to go.

I posed the same question to my seven-year-old son Davy that evening, and here's what he said:
If you want a child to learn to like broccoli, put tasty sauce on it. If you want a child to learn to like to share, start with his sharing something he doesn't like anyway and make sure the other child has something really cool to share back.

Ah, the wisdom of those on whom moral education (and broccoli) is inflicted!