Morality Pills

Peter Singer and Agata Sagan, from the New York Times, with my commentary:

Are We Ready for a ‘Morality Pill’?

By PETER SINGER and AGATA SAGAN

Last October, in Foshan, China, a 2-year-old girl was run over by a van. The driver did not stop. Over the next seven minutes, more than a dozen people walked or bicycled past the injured child. A second truck ran over her. Eventually, a woman pulled her to the side, and her mother arrived. The child died in a hospital. The entire scene was captured on video and caused an uproar when it was shown by a television station and posted online. A similar event occurred in London in 2004, as have others, far from the lens of a video camera.

There was widespread soul-searching in China about that incident.

Yet people can, and often do, behave in very different ways.

A news search for the words “hero saves” will routinely turn up stories of bystanders braving oncoming trains, swift currents and raging fires to save strangers from harm. Acts of extreme kindness, responsibility and compassion are, like their opposites, nearly universal.

Why are some people prepared to risk their lives to help a stranger when others won’t even stop to dial an emergency number?

Scientists have been exploring questions like this for decades.

Scientists are very late to the conversation. Philosophers and theologians and playwrights and poets and people in every imaginable walk of life have been exploring that question for millennia.

Scientists just began to wonder about it a few decades ago.

In the 1960s and early ’70s, famous experiments by Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo suggested that most of us would, under specific circumstances, voluntarily do great harm to innocent people.

Military commanders have known that since pre-history. Control of armies among civilian populations and vanquished enemies has always been a difficult problem. Atrocities, rape, and pillage are often the fruits of hard-fought victories, even among otherwise well-disciplined soldiers.

The same situational depravity has been noted during plagues and famines since antiquity.

Milgram showed us nothing new about human nature, but he reminded us of what we, in our modern conceit, had forgotten.

Singer needs to read more widely.

During the same period, John Darley and C. Daniel Batson showed that even some seminary students on their way to give a lecture about the parable of the Good Samaritan would, if told that they were running late, walk past a stranger lying moaning beside the path. More recent research has told us a lot about what happens in the brain when people make moral decisions.

"What happens in the brain" when people make moral decisions? Interesting, but not the crux of the matter. 'What happens in the soul' seems to me a more important question.

But are we getting any closer to understanding what drives our moral behavior?

Closer to understanding morality with science? I doubt it.

Here’s what much of the discussion of all these experiments missed: Some people did the right thing.

Most people who knew about the experiments didn't "miss it". The fact that some people acted morally, and some did not, was the published conclusion of the studies. That fact has been widely discussed.

Singer seems to have missed it.

A recent experiment (about which we have some ethical reservations) at the University of Chicago seems to shed new light on why.

Singer mentions no ethical reservations about the human subjects in Milgram's experiments, who were probably emotionally devastated knowing afterward that they cooperated with torture. Would you want to live with the knowledge that you were someone who has been cited for decades as a classic example of human depravity?

Singer's concern is, however, for the rats.

Researchers there took two rats who shared a cage and trapped one of them in a tube that could be opened only from the outside. The free rat usually tried to open the door, eventually succeeding. Even when the free rats could eat up all of a quantity of chocolate before freeing the trapped rat, they mostly preferred to free their cage-mate. The experimenters interpret their findings as demonstrating empathy in rats. But if that is the case, they have also demonstrated that individual rats vary, for only 23 of 30 rats freed their trapped companions.

I'm not acquainted with the details of the study. It would seem to me that there could be all sorts of reasons for one rat opening the cage of another (a desire for warmth or sex, an instinct to form a colony, etc), and "moral" considerations are only applicable to a few of them.

For an act to be moral, it must be, in classical terms, an act of the intellect. It must involve abstracting the universal aspects of a sense-datum-- it must involve some kind of abstract thinking. "It is sad to be stuck behind a door" (an act of the intellect) is a different mental act than the perception of a door (a sense-datum) and wanting to open the door (an act of the appetite-- which is the animal analogue of the human will).

The notion that an animal's mental act of sensation and appetite sheds light on the human mental act of the intellect and the will is dubious. Singer makes no mention of this limitation, and shows no awareness of it.

The causes of the difference in their behavior must lie in the rats themselves.

Of course. Where else would it lie?

It seems plausible that humans, like rats, are spread along a continuum of readiness to help others.

Some people are by nature helpful to others. Others not. This is news to Singer.

There has been considerable research on abnormal people, like psychopaths, but we need to know more about relatively stable differences (perhaps rooted in our genes) in the great majority of people as well.

Has Singer ever heard of psychology, sociology, theology, ethics, literature, and history? Much of human inquiry since the dawn of civilization has concerned itself with understanding the spectrum of normal human behavior.

Undoubtedly, situational factors can make a huge difference, and perhaps moral beliefs do as well, but if humans are just different in their predispositions to act morally, we also need to know more about these differences.

It's been studied since the dawn of man.

Only then will we gain a proper understanding of our moral behavior, including why it varies so much from person to person and whether there is anything we can do about it.

There is much to learn, but probably not from rats.

If continuing brain research does in fact show biochemical differences between the brains of those who help others and the brains of those who do not, could this lead to a “morality pill” — a drug that makes us more likely to help? Given the many other studies linking biochemical conditions to mood and behavior, and the proliferation of drugs to modify them that have followed, the idea is not far-fetched.

All sorts of things we ingest and perceive influence our mood and likely influence our moral acts. I'm certainly more disposed to courtesy when I'm well fed, haven't had too much coffee, haven't read Pharyngula recently, etc.

If so, would people choose to take it?

It seems immoral not to take the pill. If it were immoral not to take it, then the moral decision to take the morality pill could be influenced by a proto-morality pill. If the decision to take the proto-morality pill were a moral decision, then then the moral decision to take the proto-morality pill could be influenced by a proto-proto-morality pill. If... you see where this is going.

At some point you still have to make the moral decision, cold turkey, unless they put the pill in your drinking water.

But if they put the pill in your drinking water, then the decision to put the pill in your drinking water would be influenced by a pill...

It's morality pills, all the way down.

Could criminals be given the option, as an alternative to prison, of a drug-releasing implant that would make them less likely to harm others?

That's already done with chemical castration for sex offenders.

Might governments begin screening people to discover those most likely to commit crimes? Those who are at much greater risk of committing a crime might be offered the morality pill; if they refused, they might be required to wear a tracking device that would show where they had been at any given time, so that they would know that if they did commit a crime, they would be detected.

See where materialism leads us? If we accept the inference that we're evolved rats, we implicitly ask to be treated like rats.

Fifty years ago, Anthony Burgess wrote “A Clockwork Orange,” a futuristic novel about a vicious gang leader who undergoes a procedure that makes him incapable of violence.

Quadriplegia can do that, as can amputation of hands and feet. Capital punishment tends to reduce recidivism as well.

The effectiveness of such measures is not debatable. The morality of such measures is of course debatable. But before we decide on the morality, we all have to take our morality pill. Not to do so would be immoral, which would mean that we should take our proto-morality pill first...

Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 movie version sparked a discussion in which many argued that we could never be justified in depriving someone of his free will, no matter how gruesome the violence that would thereby be prevented. No doubt any proposal to develop a morality pill would encounter the same objection.

The morality of morality pills would be influenced by ingestion of morality pills...

But if our brain’s chemistry does affect our moral behavior, the question of whether that balance is set in a natural way or by medical intervention will make no difference in how freely we act.

Is Singer seriously asserting that whether an act is influenced by our nature, or is influenced by a pill we are forced to take, has no impact on the free nature of the act that results? Acts born of nature and acts born of slavery are equally free? Diligently harvesting cotton on your own farm and diligently harvesting cotton on your slave-master's plantation are equally free acts?

If Singer made this assertion without understanding it, he'd be a fool. But Singer is no fool. He understands. What we see in such sophistry is an effort to degrade man to the ethical status of a rat in a cage. Pure evil.

You've been introduced to Peter Singer.

If there are already biochemical differences between us that can be used to predict how ethically we will act, then either such differences are compatible with free will, or they are evidence that at least as far as some of our ethical actions are concerned, none of us have ever had free will anyway.

Of course we have free will. The assertion that "we don't have free will" has no truth value if it is not made with some degree of freedom. The mere assertion of a proposition presupposes free will. Chemical processes alone can't be true or false, and thus can't be propositions.

In any case, whether or not we have free will, we may soon face new choices about the ways in which we are willing to influence behavior for the better.

The ethics does get sticky, but primarily because we accept implicitly Singer's odious materialistic view of man.

Human beings are composites of matter, soul, and spirit and are created by God in His image. We have free will, because He has free will.

Our free will is tainted by our propensity to sin and by our nature as composite creatures. We are not meat and we are not rats, but we are influenced by chemistry, because we are in one aspect material. Yet we are more than matter. We are soul and spirit as well. We can choose.

Moral culpability for our choices is complex question. We are influenced by material and immaterial things, and the influence can be very strong. Our acts are the outcome of a material and spiritual tug-of-war that each of knows intimately. To what extent are we morally culpable for a particular act? We can speculate, but we are not our own judges. Our moral culpability is finally a judgement that will be made by Another. He understands us, in part because He created us and He is one of us and He knows what we face. 

In the final analysis, mere chemical analysis of human neurotransmitters has little more to teach us about human moral decisions than chemical analysis of the ink on a page of a Shakespearian play has to teach us about Hamlet. We are not meat. We are not rats. We are embodied spiritual creatures.

Science predicated on the fallacy that we are rats and meat is pseudoscience, no less. The 21st century has its own phrenology, more technological but no less foolish than the phrenology of the 19th century. 

But that is not to say that there are no morality pills. One pill in particular has proven quite effective, when taken regularly. It is venerable, and has shaped civilizations. It has powers that transcend morality. Powers that seem miraculous. For millions of people it has transformed whiskey into furniture, and opiates into children's clothing, and promiscuity into fidelity. It's very expensive, but it's free for you. It was paid for already. 

And you don't need a prescription, just a desire.