Julian Baggini interviews Patricia Churchland, in The Philosophers' Magazine (for Abbas):
[Y]ou can understand the trepidation felt by many at the thought of Patricia [Chruchland] tackling the issue of morality head-on. But her recent book, Braintrust: What Neuroscience Tells Us about Morality defies such expectations, due largely to the fact that the answer to the question implied by the subtitle is very far from everything. This contrasts starkly with what many see as the scientific hubris of Sam Harris in his recent The Moral Landscape.
“Sam Harris has this vision that once neuroscience is much more developed then neuroscientists will be able to tell us what things are right or wrong, or at least what things are conducive to well-being and not. But even if you cast it in that way, that’s pretty optimistic – or pessimistic, depending on your point of view. Different people even within a culture, even within a family, have different views about what constitutes their own well-being. Some people like to live out in the bush like hermits and dig in the ground and shoot deer for resources, and other people can’t countenance a life that isn’t in the city, in the mix of cultural wonderfulness. So people have fundamentally different ideas about what constitutes well-being.
“I think Sam is just a child when it comes addressing morality. I think he hasn’t got a clue. And I think part of the reason that he kind of ran amuck on all this is that, as you and I well know, trashing religion is like shooting fish in a barrel. If Chris Hitchens can just sort of slap it off in an afternoon then any moderately sensible person can do the same. He wrote that book in a very clear way although there were lots of very disturbing things in it. I think he thought that, heck, it’s not that hard to i gure these things out. Morality: how hard can that be? Religion was dead easy. And it’s just many orders of magnitude more difficult.”
What Churchland believes science can do is describe the “neural platform” for ethics. What does she mean by this?
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What Churchland believes science can do is describe the “neural platform” for ethics.
This “neural platform” is “the basis for sociality, it’s the circuitry in place that makes us want to be with others, that makes us sometimes sacrifice our own interests because we want to be with others, and feel pain when
we’re excluded or when we’re ostracised, enjoy the company of others, enjoy the feelings of satisfaction when we co-operate. All those things are the platform. And out of the platform emerges
very different social practices, and they’re influenced by many things. History is of course one,
but there’s also the ecological conditions. So we can see that certain social practices amongst the Inuit are different from social practices amongst
people who are living in Polynesia,and that’s at least partly owing to the fact that life is really, really, really hard in the Arctic.
. Moral problems, says Churchland, are essentially “constraint satisfaction problems”.
“For many of the social problems that people have toaddress,problems of scarcity of resources or what have you, they have to come together, and negotiate, and i gure out an amicable solution so that they can carry on. And sometimes
those solutions work out fairly well in the short run, and then they have to modify them so they
can work out in the longer run. I conceive of that as problem-solving, aka reasoning. And I don’t
think neuroscience has anything to say about those things.”
I’ll give you a real life example. I was quite thrilled when I ran across this in the Wall Street
Journal. So the question was, how does the Security and Exchange Commission arrive at a decision about how much to fine a company
that engaged in fraudulent behaviour? And they have all these constraints, like how much were the investors hurt, how much will they be hurt if
you fine that company? How deceptive was the company? So there are about six constraints, and
they colour them different colours and then they
kind of say, ‘somehow a decision gets made’. And the interesting thing about this, I think, is that
when people share a culture they often come to very similar decisions.”
So these are judgements which are intended to solve particular problems by inferential means
that are not deductive?
“And they’re not inductive in any interesting sense. They’re constraint satisfaction problems.
Almost all of life is a constraint satisfaction problem.”
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