A brother and a sister are on holiday in a cottage by an isolated beach
and decide it would be intriguing to make love. The location is so
remote there is no chance they will be discovered. The sister already
takes birth control pills but, to make absolutely sure she will not
become pregnant, the brother uses a condom. They enjoy the sex but
decide never to do it again and agree not to tell anyone. It will be
their secret, one that will draw them closer together.
Was it OK for them to do it?
That was the question posed to an audience at a public seminar, Why Moral Philosophers Need Lots of Help from Psychologists, Anthropologists and Other Social Scientists, at the University of Hong Kong last week.
The speaker, Dr Stephen Stich, professor of philosophy at Rutgers University, New Jersey, US, was surprised when only a couple of people raised their hands to show they thought the siblings were wrong. The reaction to the scenario, devised as an experiment by Dr Jonathan Haidt, a professor in social psychology at the University of Virginia, is normally unequivocal, such is our taboo against incest.
He cited the scenario in answer to a question, following his seminar, about whether reasoning could resolve moral disagreement. Professor Stich said Professor Haidt's scenario - put to a group as part of an experiment - was cleverly constructed so that all possible arguments for the justification of the usual moral arguments against incest were answered in advance.
The claim that incest is morally unacceptable because it can cause regressive deformity was covered by the fact that the couple used two forms of contraception.
Similar arguments, such as, "it could become a habit" or, "it could ruin their lives or reputations if other people found out" had also been covered. They had enjoyed the sex and there was no shame or guilt.
With a devil's advocate in the group, who suggested that the behaviour was acceptable, reasoning in this case failed to reach a consensus with some participants in the experiment ending up saying things like, "Dammit, well, I don't know why it's wrong. It just is."
Professor Stich said: "What Haidt concludes is that a lot of the explicit reasoning that goes on in moral discourse is really post hoc justification for judgments that have already been made. Maybe extensive reasoning would have an effect...but then again maybe it wouldn't, and sitting in our armchairs trying to figure whether it would or not isn't the way to answer the question."
This was Professor Stich's "take-home message" from the seminar. Too many armchair philosophers, he argued, were content to analyse the nature of moral discourse from an a priori (purely theoretical) standpoint.
"It's an empirical question of what people will do when confronted with a moral argument. If we want to play this game seriously we've got to construct the models and then look for real empirical evidence."
But if that was the take-home message, Professor Stich had another: a theory about the way people acquire information about "norms". Before progressing to that, though, he led the seminar through a quick run-down of the positions held by currently prevailing theories.
Moral realists, he reminded his audience, claimed moral agreement was possible if you took away arguments about non-moral issues and discounted other non-moral factors such as self-interest or partiality, irrationality or insanity to create idealised circumstances. The persistence of moral disagreement once these adjustments had been made would be a major problem for them.
The realists' opponents maintained moral disagreement was "fundamental" and did not depend upon objective or factual matters "in a sense that moral realism seems to require".
There had been a lot of empirical work suggesting that moral diversity did in fact persist, even under idealised circumstances.
He cited the work of the late Richard Brandt, who studied the Hopi Indians in the south-west of the US in the 1950s. Brandt found that Hopi elders had no qualms about their children "playing" with animals in a way that bordered on torture. It was a position at moral odds with that of the white Americans around them, not least Brandt himself.
"Did this turn on some factual disagreement? Did the Hopi think animals felt no pain? No. They believed non-human animals felt it somewhat more intensely than humans," Professor Stich said.
"So maybe they thought the animals were martyrs in some way, achieving a reward in the afterlife. No, they said they didn't. In fact," Professor Stich said, "Brandt couldn't find any non-moral disagreement that explained the moral one and concluded, tentatively, that this was a fundamental disagreement."
He also outlined the work of Richard Nisbett, professor of philosophy at the University of Michigan, on cultures of honour, societies "where males are prepared to protect their reputation for strength and probity by resorting to violence". Research showed they arose where resources were liable to be stolen and "where the state's coercive apparatus cannot be relied upon to deal with it".
Cultures of honour exhibited a high degree of inertia, maintaining their characteristics long after the reliance on at-risk resources had died out.
The white southern US, settled by immigrant Irish herders, was an example of a culture of honour and featured in an experiment carried out at the University of Michigan.
This involved a group of students from the north and south being required to give saliva samples and, having given them, being made to walk down a long narrow hall where a large fellow was working at a file cabinet. As each student passed, the worker bumped into them and snarled an insult under his breath.
Second saliva samples were then taken to reveal the students' levels of cortisol (indicating stress) and testosterone (dominant behaviour). The levels were low in the northerners, while they spiked in the southerners. This showed southerners were more likely to resort to violence as an appropriate response to a challenge of the kind in the experiment.
"Conflicting moral attitudes about the appropriateness of violence in response to insults won't converge under idealised circumstances of the kind moral realists have in mind," Professor Stich said. He then introduced his hypothesis about the way people acquired norms, defined as "a rule or principle that specifies actions which are required, permissible or forbidden independently of any legal or social institution" in the paper A Framework for the Psychology of Norms, written with Dr Chandra Sripada, also of Rutgers University.
The hypothesis was that people had an innate capacity to acquire information about norms, which could not then be erased. "Painting with a broad brush, we believe evidence suggests the existence of an innate psychology subserving the acquisition and implementation of norms," he said.
"If the psychological architecture is on the right track...then what is likely is an innate norm acquisition mechanism that turns on fairly early and acquires the norms from the local environment. It turns on automatically and you can't decide to turn it off."
Professor Stich outlined a model of the theoretical relationships between the norm "acquisition mechanism" and "execution mechanism", consisting of emotions and their triggers, judgment, explicit reasoning, beliefs and post hoc justification, among other features.
"It seems to me, this hypothesis makes it quite likely that much moral disagreement is fundamental. That is to say, won't disappear under the idealised conditions imagined by the moral realist," he said.
To illustrate the way norms differed from culture to culture and as evidence of apparent fundamental moral disagreement, Professor Stich cited research he had carried out in collaboration with professors Kaiping Peng of Berkeley University, Shaun Nichols at the University of Utah, and John Doris of the University of California.
He said the following scenario, which he called "the magistrate and the mob", was put in English to students from the east and west studying in the US, and in Chinese to students in Beijing, to seek their intuitive responses.
"An unidentified member of an ethnic group is known to be responsible for a murder that occurred in a town. Because the town has a history of severe ethnic conflict and rioting, the town's police chief and judge know that if they do not immediately identify and punish a culprit, the townspeople will start anti-ethnic rioting that will cause great damage to property owned by members of the ethnic group and a considerable number of serious injuries and deaths to the ethnic population.
"The police chief and judge are faced with a dilemma. They can falsely accuse, convict and imprison Mr Smith, an innocent member of the ethnic group in order to prevent the riots, or, they can continue hunting for the guilty man, thereby allowing the anti-ethnic riots to occur and do the best they can to combat them until the guilty man is apprehended. They decide to falsely accuse, convict and imprison Mr Smith, preventing the riots."
The students were then asked whether the judge and police chief were justified in their action.
The western philosophical consensus on the issue was very clearly that their action had been wrong, said Professor Stich. A sizable proportion of students from the east disagreed.
Professor Stich said the results of the experiment showed "a big difference in western and eastern perspectives" on the matter.
The experiment, he said, was an example of empirical research demonstrating the way culturally different perspectives - through acquired norms - were brought to bear on moral questions.
"To move the philosophical debates forward we need a multi-disciplinary research programme that includes well-designed experiments and empirically-informed theoretical work...and the best way to get this work done is for philosophers to get out of their armchairs and collaborate with their colleagues in psychology, anthropology, economics and evolutionary biology," he said.
Or, to put it another way, it's time for the couch Platos to knock back a dose of the Karl Poppers and go get empirical.
A Framework for the Psychology of Norms by Stephen Stich and Chandra Sripaa can be found at www.rci.rutgers.edu/~stich/Publications/Papers/FrameworkForPsychOfNorms.pdf