What Kind of Human Should I Be?

Liberal Humanist Virtue Ethics?

(Audio version here)

On X, the Christian writer, Jide Ehizele, wrote,

Folks are so tired of the hypocrisy around equality & diversity that in their clamp down against virtue signalling - they're prepared to rip the virtue part as well. To abide by "all humans are of equal inherent worth" is a good thing. Don't throw it away because of distortions.

to which I responded:

And here we are! Eventually! This piece is somewhat different to my usual style, being more meandering and exploratory than is typical for me, and I would value all your thoughts and comments on it even more than I usually do!

When people speak of “virtue ethics” they are, at root, distinguishing a way of determining what is morally good by character rather than by actions. While consequentialism asks “What kind of actions should I take to produce good consequences?” virtue ethicists ask “What kind of person should I be? Which qualities should I seek to cultivate in myself and which should I seek to overcome in order to be a good person?”

Of course, in practice, these lines blur because when one seeks to act in ways that have positive consequences, one is typically trying to be a good person and when one tries to be a good person, one usually believes that this will produce positive consequences. However, these are different ways of thinking about morality with different weightings and they do produce different moral arguments.

When asking, “What kind of person should I be?,” this question, a secular humanist will typically suggest, is bounded by objective truths that pertain to the question “What kind of person can I be?” This is a question about human nature, which is a question about human brains, which is a question about the evolution of human brains. What kind of organism we can be is, therefore, limited. We could not choose to stop thinking like a human and instead think like a cat or an elephant or a beetle. While human morality may seem so vastly divergent both by culture and by individual that to speak of a human nature seems, to many, to be almost meaningless, this is because we are humans looking at cultural and individual variation from the inside with a very zoomed in lens. Zoom out (as far as you can! Perhaps imagine yourself to be an alien anthropologist trying to understand how humans work) and very distinct patterns of human morality inextricably linked to human sociality emerge and the source of it is to be found in the brain, particularly the prefrontal cortex.

About 25 years ago, I took part in a study into the neuroscience of human morality, specifically, of psychopathy, an abnormality in which normal human moral functioning does not work. I was shown images, most of them neutral - a loaf of bread, a tree - but some of them emotionally affecting - a woman crying, a baby with a bruised face. The purpose, I then learnt, was to see if my brain processed these images differently. In healthy brains, the frontal lobe which directs so much of our higher order thinking and moral reasoning including our empathy, compassion, remorse and sense of justice fires at the emotive images but not at the neutral ones, I was then informed. In those suffering from psychopathy or antisocial personality disorder, all the images are neutral. If you are not a psychopath or suffering from some other neurological or psychological disorder which affects your moral functioning, you will not be able to help processing images of humans experiencing negative emotions or being hurt with a part of your brain that pertains to your sense of morality.

Yet, despite this, humans frequently and repeatedly do the most morally abhorrent things. It has been common, particularly in situations of war or tribal conflict for humans with a strong sense of justice and capable of great depths of empathy, compassion and self-sacrifice to kill, torture, rape and maim other humans and seemingly take pleasure in this. This seeming contradiction is usually explained by a shift in conceptualisation which is often referred to as the “dehumanisation” of another group although it occurs in the other great apes too with chimpanzees being particularly prone to….. dechimpisation(?) of other groups. “Dehumanisation” may not be the best term for the deeply disturbing things humans can do where they cease to see another group of humans as people their sense of morality applies to and start to regard them with a intensity of hostility that can inspire the most horrific cruelty. While humans can enjoy cruelty to other animals, the level of hatred required to do things like slowly torture a man to death & then keep parts of his body as souvenirs, or remove organs from children without anaesthetic & pin their eyes to your wall as keepsakes appears to be something one group of humans reserve for another group of humans. I find Isabel Wilkerson’s identification of ‘caste’ in which she looks at common features of Jim Crow, the Holocaust and the caste system in India most compelling.

A division of humans into castes emerges from developing a belief that another group of humans are perhaps ‘subhuman’ - certainly lesser - but primarily from a belief that they are both ‘not us’ and ‘a threat to us.’ It comes from deeply ingrained tribal and territorial instincts which, given its presence in other great apes, almost certainly predates our humanity and, likely, the diversification of primates. It certainly draws on structures of the brain that predate the prefrontal cortex. The ability to turn off our empathy and compassion or apply it consistently only to one’s own group of humans must certainly have had benefits for our human and prehuman ancestors’ survival when competing for resources, but, I would hope, few humans concerned with what it means to be a good person would consider this an example of it now.

Do we have a choice about this, though? If such instincts are indeed deeply wired into quite primitive structures of our brain, can we just decide not to use them? Not entirely, no. In Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society, Nicholas Christakis, setting out the ‘social suite’ of traits common to all humans and thus human societies, notes, dispiritedly, that we cannot hope to rid ourselves of in-group bias. However, we can act in ways that mitigate the worst manifestations of this and structure social relations in ways that maximise the best of human nature and minimise the worst. Steven Pinker too, in The Better Angels of Our Nature, looks at ways in which we have achieved this and widened our circles of empathy. Jonathan Haidt, drawing on the work of Karen Stenner on what causes people who were not previously authoritarian to become so writes,

[Stenner’s] core finding is that authoritarianism is not a stable personality trait. It is rather a psychological predisposition to become intolerant when the person perceives a certain kind of threat. It’s as though some people have a button on their foreheads, and when the button is pushed, they suddenly become intensely focused on defending their in-group, kicking out foreigners and non-conformists, and stamping out dissent within the group. At those times they are more attracted to strongmen and the use of force. At other times, when they perceive no such threat, they are not unusually intolerant. So the key is to understand what pushes that button.

A sense of existential threat, whether real or imagined, is what appears to press this button. While a sense of security causes humans to move towards what Haidt calls ‘secular rational’ values and also values that emphasise individual rights for everyone, a sense of insecurity causes humans to retreat into what Haidt describes as ‘survival values’ where people seek security in their family, tribe or other parochial group. Traditional conservatives, Stenner tells us, are psychologically distinct from right-wing authoritarians, being, by disposition, careful and cautious conservers and incremental reformers of society (my paraphrasing) but can be drawn into alliance with them when they perceive an existential threat to society coming from progressives.

I think it is clear that this is the way that authoritarian identity politics on the left can spur authoritarian identity politics on the right. This is then perceived by the authoritarians on the identity-focused left as evidence that they were right all along and there really are entrenched systems of white supremacy, patriarchy, cis/heteronormativity etc. buried as unconscious biases in people’s minds which are again surfacing. They do not typically consider that their own tribalistic identity politics might have pressed an authoritarian button causing people who would not otherwise have retreated into tribalistic identity-based survival values to do so. Meanwhile, the new authoritarians on the right are telling them repeatedly that this is exactly what made them do that while taking no responsibility whatsoever for now mirroring precisely the identity politics they had rightly criticised using very sound reasoning before they allowed their authoritarian buttons to be pressed. (See “woke right”)

It is just generally a really bad idea to try to achieve a just society among a species of tribal, territorial apes by dividing everyone into identity-based tribes and presenting them to each other as in conflict for limited resources. Only a radically blank slatist worldview that denied the existence of a human nature could ever have thought this could result in anything other than an increase in hostilities and group conflict.

Throughout the history of human thought about the nature of morality, the idea that we have a higher self and baser animal instincts has been pervasive. In the Christian faith, we are made in the image of God. We have fallen and are all sinners, but in the Great Chain of Being, we are between the angels and the beasts and must strive to mortify the flesh (our baser, sensual nature) with the spirit (the soul, the spark of the divine that connects us to God). However, the concept of a higher nature and lower nature is also found in earlier philosophies and in multiple cultures and religions other than the Abrahamic ones.

I do not think we are made in the image of a God or that we have a soul. I do think we have drives and instincts that come from more primitive parts of our brain like the amygdala, and a powerful prefrontal cortex that is responsible for much of our moral reasoning and impulse control, that is uniquely human. That is straightforwardly true. (Please note, I do not recommend going to any websites that exist and claim to be able to teach you to train your brain to function on its prefrontal cortex rather than its amygdala or anything ridiculous. That is quackery. You need both your prefrontal cortex and your amygdala as well as other parts of the brain to be functioning well to make good moral judgements).

I do think we have more primitive intuitive danger responses that tempt us to respond to a sense of existential threat, whether real or imagined, by, as Stenner describes, taking refuge in the safety of our tribe, enforcing conformity within that in-group and becoming suspicious and hostile of other tribes seen as outgroups. We also have more advanced moral reasoning abilities that we can use to question ourselves when these instincts arise. “Are these other people really my enemy?” “Is it fair or good to treat them as such?” “Is the danger that I sense really coming from people who have a certain skin colour or sexuality or is it coming from an ideology either within a subset of that group or political movement that claims to speak on behalf of them?” “Is it morally better to demonise whole groups of people identified by innate characteristics or oppose advocates of the political ideology and do so alongside members of those groups who also oppose it?”

This is where I think the concept of virtue ethics comes in and the question of “What kind of person should I be?” “Do I want to be a person who acts upon tribal and territorial instincts in a reactive and self-protective way or do I want to be a person who engages my moral reasoning to assess those instincts in the light of what is true and good and just and tries to act accordingly?” This, I think, is what humans have asked themselves repeatedly throughout recorded history when we consistently think in terms of a higher self and baser instincts. Whether we attribute the moral reasoning that requires higher cognitive functioning to an element of the divine that resides within us alongside an animal nature or recognise it as a unique function of human brains that distinguishes us from other animals, we recognise that we can give into our more primal moralistic instincts or we can resist this and engage our moral reasoning to think more deeply about what it means to be a good person. When we do the latter, we are thinking about virtues.

I think we should think in terms of virtues and that this is perfectly compatible with liberalism. This may not seem self-evident to some people because at the core of liberalism is the principle:

Let people believe, speak, live as they see fit provided it does no material harm to anyone else nor denies them the same freedom.

Does this not seem to be a consequentialist rationale? Something is morally acceptable or not depending on whether the consequences of it result in harm or loss of freedom? Well, yes, but on a deeper level, no. Leaving people alone unless they’re hurting anyone is not a moral framework. It is simply the baseline that allows people to think freely. It allows for people to develop moral frameworks without being squashed by whatever dominant moral orthodoxy has power at any time. It enables the Marketplace of Ideas that lets people develop their own ethical arguments about what is virtuous and what is not and express them to others.

I think we should use the freedom still offered by what is currently a highly compromised liberal society to use our brains as we choose by choosing to use its higher cognitive functioning in the realm of moral reasoning as much as we can. Of course, complex moral reasoning is also something that people whose ethics are more consequentialist do! I do not intend to suggest that those who reason more in terms of actions and consequences are inherently more prone to tribalistic identity politics per se. This can, after all, be a consequence one specifically acts to avoid. I do think that thinking introspectively about one’s own moral character and integrity lends itself better to the development of well thought through consistent principles and that these are what are often lacking in culture wars. I believe it is the lack of carefully considered and consistently held first principles that leads to the phenomenon where people who have made very sound arguments against something like Cancel Culture when it is targeting people like them then engage in the same tactics against their opponents and use motivated reasoning to justify this. I don’t think people who do this (and none of us are immune to motivated reasoning) are necessarily being deliberately intellectually dishonest or intentionally ethically inconsistent, but that they are thinking more of desired consequences than of consistent principles and personal integrity and reasoning from there. This causes principles to slide and is also often counterproductive to achieving the desired outcome in the long term because its ethical underpinnings are so unstable and so vulnerable to counterattacks. It thus fails on consequentialist terms.

I often think about the development of well thought through, consistent principles in terms of having “a constitution of oneself” and this way of thinking is that of virtue ethics. The good thing about constitutions is that they can be amended when the need to do so becomes clear but this requires a deliberate adjustment of principles for well-considered reasons that can be articulated, and are intended to be upheld consistently going forward, rather than sliding about ethically depending on the situation and desired outcome.

For those of us who consider ourselves liberals, empiricists and rationalists, at least, virtues typically look like a commitment to caring about what is true; to formulating sound, intellectually honest, reasoned arguments; to challenging our own emotionally-driven instincts, to being self-aware about our tendency to ingroup bias, confirmation bias and motivated reasoning; to thinking through our own principles and trying to uphold them consistently; to endeavouring to be compassionate, empathetic and fair to others; to exercising the principle of charity when considering the views and motivations of others without compromising our own principles or integrity or succumbing to moral relativism. I believe all of these behaviours to be virtues and to try to cultivate them as habits of thinking and behaving - even though we will inevitably sometimes fail to live up to our own standards - is the best way to try to be a good person. In this sense, at least, I am a virtue ethicist.

The best criticisms of virtue ethics are that they are too inward-looking and introspective - narcissistic, even - and that they lack the pragmatism, adaptability and strategic thinking necessary to address the ethical complexity of real world situations we may find ourselves in. Perhaps sometimes we should care less about what is true or reasonable and more about what is useful or works in any given situation? Maybe there are scenarios in which we should go with our instincts, emotions and tribal loyalties rather than trying to be consistently principled and fair and compassionate? Perhaps sometimes the ends really do justify the means and we need to think less about our own moral character and more about what will achieve an immediate urgent and optimal goal?

Maybe. I take these criticisms onboard. I am aware that I have more respect and sympathy for those I believe to be wrong but for good motivations using well-reasoned arguments than for those whom I believe to be right but for bad motivations with poorly-reasoned arguments. This could be potentially hazardous in a situation where immediate right action is required to ensure survival. This would be an argument from survival values, however, and perhaps they can just be justified when our survival really is in immediate jeopardy. Most of the time it is not, however, and we are able to think in the long-term about what it means to be a good person and to cultivate virtues of truth, reason, compassion, fairness, charity and ethical consistency to form our moral character and, by extension, to influence the moral character of our community or country. This process may be messy, slow and never-ending as humans, while usually agreeing that the above qualities are good have never yet formed a consensus on how to go about embodying them. Nevertheless, I would argue that the world is a better place when humans are trying to be good people who exemplify those virtues than when they are not.

Perhaps it always comes down to consequences in the end?