First Drafts - The Prospect magazine blog

The June 2007 issue of Prospect is now out. Our cover story is Shiv Malik’s detailed account of the radicalisation of Mohammad Sidique Khan, ringleader of the 7/7 bombers. Malik spent several months in the Leeds suburb of Beeston—home to three of the four bombers—and conducted interviews with Khan’s brother, Gultasab. His account refutes the claim that Khan was a well-integrated British-Pakistani Muslim driven to violent despair by the war in Iraq. In fact, he had been a Wahhabi fundamentalist since the mid-1990s, and began contemplating jihadist violence as early as 1999.

Khan’s radicalisation, Malik suggests, emerged from frictions within Britain’s Pakistani community, and followed the “lost second generation” pattern – children of immigrants who reject their parents’ ways but fail to find a place in secular Britain and fall victim to the temptations of extreme identity politics. Malik shows how extreme Islam can act as a kind of “liberation theology” for young Muslims, allowing them to claim western freedoms, such as marrying for love, without rejecting their Islamic heritage.

The Sunday Times and Telegraph have already run news stories on Malik’s article, and we’re expecting more coverage over the coming days. Over the next couple of weeks, we’ll be publishing a series of replies to the piece on our website, and we’re very interested in readers’ responses to the piece, either in the form of letters, or in the comments box here.

“Philosophy,” Ludwig Wittgenstein once observed, “is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.” It is a battle, he might have added, that we are both unsure we can win and unsure we want to win. To call something “specious” is to say it has a false look of truth – from the Latin speciosus, meaning beautiful. It is, in a way, a complement. As poets and tyrants have long known, beauty has a way of making things look true; while there is in all of us the suspicion that it may matter more to appear honorable, kind and intelligent than it does actually to be these things. Despite and because of this, I will in this occasional column be looking at some of the species of speciousness that throng our media. These anatomies will, I hope, be hotly disputed and/or derided by Prospect readers, that most discerning brand of truth-seekers.

While unconditionally equating faith with bad thinking is one of today’s most common God-bashes, equating atheism with blind faith is one of its most elegant ripostes – and is equally inadmissible as argument. Yet almost every critic of the God-haters has succumbed. Here’s a perfect example. According to former philosophy tutor Barney Zwartz, writing for The Age back in November 2006, Richard Dawkins “is on a relentless crusade against religion in any form, but cannot see that his own scientistic materialism is as much a dogmatic form of fundamentalist faith as those he despises.” As Prospect’s philosophical campaigner in residence, AC Grayling, would doubtless point out, this is a false dichotomy. Atheism is not the opposite of religious belief, because nothing is not the opposite of something, and believing in the absence of something is not at all the same as believing in something. Declaring, for example, that the world was not created by a dwarf called Boris does not make you a dogmatic, fundamentalist anti-Boris-ist.

Dawkins may well be a gross oversimplifier of facts – and even a practitioner of the straw man fallacy – but this does not make him a fundamentalist. Especially as his thesis is that “God” is an absurd and unlikely concept, rather than that “non-God” is an absolute truth which has been imparted to him by unassailable texts. And how many fundamentalists make believing in the possibility that God does not exist a cornerstone of their faith?

[This is the first in an ongoing series on First Drafts, in which authors are given space to reply to reviews of their books. Here, Marc Hauser, professor of psychology at Harvard, responds to Jonathan Derbyshire's Guardian review of his Moral Minds.

The argument in Moral Minds is that we have evolved a moral instinct, a dedicated set of neural circuits designed to deliver moral verdicts of right and wrong. The foundation of this moral capacity is a universal moral grammar, a set of principles that assess the beliefs, desires and goals of an agent with respect to his or her actions, and the consequences for the welfare of others. What this thesis suggests is that much of our moral reasoning may be illusory, mediated instead by intuitive and unconscious processes that are, to some extent, immune to cultural influences.]

Though much of Jonathan Derbyshire’s review captures much of my book Moral Minds quite accurately, there are some egregious errors that I would like to flag. I will quote directly from Derbyshire so that there is no misunderstanding.

Problem one. My moral sense test aims to probe moral intuitions by asking respondents how they imagine they would act in various hypothetical moral dilemmas. One such dilemma asked respondents to imagine themselves standing on a bridge from which they can see a tram hurtling towards five people stranded on the track. The only way to save their lives is to drop a heavy weight in front of the tram. A fat man also happens to be standing on the bridge. Should you push him to his death in order to stop the tram, or leave him, in which case those on the track will die?

Derbyshire writes that, “Hauser reports that only 10 per cent of respondents said it was morally permissible to push the fat man from the bridge. From this and similar results, he deduces a universal ‘intention principle,’ according to which intended harm is morally worse than harm that is foreseen but not directly intended. What is unclear, however, is why Hauser thinks data like these also license claims about the existence of a discrete moral faculty or ‘organ.’ It is one thing to articulate principles that help to make sense of our intuitive responses to moral dilemmas, but quite another to conclude from this that such principles must belong to a particular region of the brain.”

I did not claim that an understanding of the principles that guide moral judgement licences inferences about neural localisation. What I did say was that an understanding of the principles that guide our judgements enables us to move into detailed studies of the brain, attempting to both localise such psychological processes, chart their development and explore what happens when they break down. This is precisely what my students and I have done. For example, using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we recently published a paper that shows that the right temporo-parietal junction is critically involved in dilemmas that entail information about a person’s beliefs. More importantly, the level of activation in this area is modulated by the outcome of an action. Thus, if a person believes he will do harm and his actions cause harm, then the pattern of activation in this region is different than if the person believes he will do harm, but fails to do so. We explored this area in part because of our interest in how beliefs, intentions, goals and action figure into our moral judgements. Thus the theoretical and behavioral work motivates an exploration at the neural level.

Problem two. “Moral Minds is full of fascinating reports on psychological experiments, few of which offer any obvious support for Hauser’s ambitious claims about moral grammar.”

Moral Minds provides a novel way of looking at our moral psychology, building on the general insights of Chomsky, the more specific ideas expressed by Rawls, and most recently, the work of the philosophers John Mikhail and Sue Dwyer. Unlike Pinker’s The Language Instinct, which eloquently summarised not only Chomsky’s arguments about language but the mountain of evidence that had accumulated over the 40 years since his initial account, Moral Minds was exploratory. But half the battle in science is to ask new questions that are, we hope, sufficiently interesting for people to attempt to answer. When I began working on this problem three to four years ago, there were several questions that had never really been asked. For example, to this day we still have no evidence about critical periods for acquiring a moral system, whether the first moral system is acquired in a fundamentally different way from a second system acquired later in life, of whether people can be “bi-moral,” and whether the neural representation of one moral system is different from the representation of two. Once the linguistic analogy is invoked, these become the obvious questions. Moral Minds has already set off a host of experiments, some of these from my own lab; interested readers may wish to download some of our recent papers.

Problem three. “And there is nothing here to suggest that this nascent discipline will conquer the ‘proprietary province of the humanities’ any time soon.”

I did not claim that a biology of morality will conquer the humanities. In fact, Derbyshire fails to quote the complete sentence, which reads: “Inquiry into our moral nature will no longer be the proprietary province of the humanities, but a shared journey with the natural sciences.” The natural sciences are coming into increasing contact with the social sciences and humanities. For me, and many of my colleagues, there is an appreciation that the best work will come from a collaboration, one that recognises both that different disciplines have different strengths, and that each discipline brings some proprietary issues, some of which are open to inter-disciplinary fertilisation. In the case of morality, the biological sciences can provide rich descriptions of how people judge moral dilemmas and how they act in such cases, but it can not dictate what we ought to do. The field is abuzz, and the results are emerging quickly. I am glad to be alive to witness this renaissance, an inquiry into one of the most interesting aspects of human life.

LINKS

Marc Hauser’s website

Buy Moral Minds at the Prospect bookshop

Participate in the moral sense test

Welcome to First Drafts, the Prospect magazine editorial blog. We are maybe a bit late in the game, but Prospect readers and others will find here a distinctive offering connected to, but independent from, the magazine itself and the rest of the website. We are not attempting to provide a rolling commentary on the news cycle—thousands of other places do that better than we could. Nor are we trying to replicate the particular worldview of an individual’s blog.

So why have we jumped on the blogging bandwagon? Someone once said that Prospect should aim to help people read and understand the news, and that is at least part of what First Drafts will be doing—directing readers to articles or commentary we think valuable, providing guides to the most incisive writers and bloggers, mining our own archive for pieces that shed light on current events, providing a one-stop reference library of useful documents and so on. There will also, of course, be original blog-style comment—taking advantage of the medium’s special combination of immediacy and brevity—as well as overspill and follow-up from the magazine, whether pointing people towards new articles, allowing them to debate particular pieces (like our June issue cover story by Shiv Malik) or providing the background to the genesis of an article.

Other regular features will include an academic spat watch and Tom Chatfield’s “Species of speciousness,” which will mercilessly take writers to task for egregious errors of logic. “Did you actually read the book?” will allow writers to reply to reviews of their books that have appeared in Prospect or elsewhere. Marc Hauser’s reply to Jonathan Derbyshire’s Guardian review of his Moral Minds is our first entry.

Entries will be written by Prospect staffers and some regular outsiders. We welcome and encourage comment, of course, but we are not interested in the name-calling that some blogs seem to specialise in. We remain, after all, Britain’s intelligent conversation—even in the blogosphere.