Have we arrived at the end of philosophy?

Has neuroscience really proved that morality is just a matter of feelings?

The first very important person is Jonathan Haidt. Associate Professor in Department of Psychology at the University of Virginia, Haidt lectures on the human experience of reason and emotion using the simile of elephant-riding. The rider is conscious, controlled thought and the elephant represents the emotions. By pulling on the reins you can tell an elephant where to go, unless of course the elephant wants to do something else. In the same way we can suppress or direct our emotions except when we really feel like doing something else.

Citing Antonio Damasio’s work on patients with frontal cortex problems, Haidt states that “Reason and emotion must both work together to create intelligent behavior, but emotion (a major part of the elephant) does most of the work.” Emotionally intelligent people learn to distract the elephant in order to get what they want rather than take the bulging animal head on. Focusing on happy thoughts is a better strategy than lamenting bad ones.

Another important result from the research is that reasoning comes after the fact and is usually nothing but an exercise in confabulation ie, rationalizing a decision that was already made. It’s hard to win a moral argument because the explicit justification that people often give for their stance is post hoc and not the real reason that motivates them.

The second very important person is David Brooks himself. He is the resident conservative on the New York Times op-ed page. David has read some of Jonathan Haidt’s work and tried to tease out its consequences for society – that morals are a matter of taste, that we should forget about the rationalizations of the ‘New Atheists’, that (moral) philosophy is too bookish, etc. In short, “The rise and now dominance of this emotional approach to morality is an epochal change. It challenges all sorts of traditions.” There may be some truth in this: something is afoot when a "conservative" thinks (whatever he thinks "thinks" means) that morality is just a matter of feelings. 

The third and forth very important people go unnamed but their presence is all the more keenly felt through their absence. Aristotle and David Hume are, so to speak, the elephants in the room. Both are well known philosophers with widely circulated works on the role of emotions in moral reasoning. That a major newspaper should tell us that ‘we have just discovered how important emotions are in morality’ serves as a primer on why we should all study long dead philosophers.

What could Aristotle tell us about the dominant role of emotion in our everyday practical reasoning? For starters, we form habits. On the basis of those habits we can be held responsible for our actions – most especially when there’s no time to think. A kind person instinctively comes to the aid of another person in need. A selfish person ‘walks on by’ without a second thought. The formal study of these reactions tells us much about the kinds of habits we should be looking to acquire in the pursuit of happiness. Needless to say, the gut responses of the kind and practically wise person are a more reliable path to the flourishing life than the snap judgments of a man steeped in vice. These and like insights in the Nicomachean Ethics have served as a blue-print for philosophers from ages as different as Thomas Aquinas and Elizabeth Anscombe.

David Hume is the foremost English philosopher of sentiment and passion-enslaved reason. He also happened to state the following three centuries ago in his Treatise on Human Nature: “Morals excite passions, and produce or prevent actions. Reason of itself is utterly impotent in this particular. The rules of morality, therefore, are not conclusions of our reason.” Epochal change anyone? Hume is also famous for the argument that “ought” does not automatically follow an “is”.

Brooks's article should really have been a plea for more philosophy! If you are near-sighted, start wearing spectacles. The true ‘end of philosophy’ is to acquire wisdom. (If you are a philosophy student you will have spotted my ambivalent use of the word ‘end’ straight away). Brooks is not on the path to wisdom if he remains ignorant of the contents of a Philosophy 101 course. I invite him to sit in on a few lectures. He would soon learn that you can’t readily use reason to dismiss reason. Neurologists can furnish us with ever-more accurate understandings of how the brain works and how we actually arrive at many of our judgements on, say, an issue like torture. Neurologists are not equipped to tell us whether torture is actually ‘wrong’. For that we need reasons and thus philosophy.

Dr Richard Umbers is a Catholic priest. He lectures in philosophy in Sydney.

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