Kinds of Philosophical Moral Psychologies

Usually, moral philosophy oscillate between Hume and Kant; emotional utilitarism and rational deontologism. Hauser, in Moral Minds, add another perspective, a "rawlsian" one. I found a nice graphical depiction of these models:




"event perception triggers an analysis of the causal and intentional properties underlying the relevant actions and their consequences. This analysis triggers, in turn, a moral judgment that will, most likely, trigger the systems of emotion and conscious reasoning. The single most important difference between the Rawlsian model and the other two is that emotions and conscious reasoning follow from the moral judgment as opposed to being causally responsible for them."

- Hauser, M. D. (2006). The liver and the moral organ. Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci, 1(3), 214-220.

Also, in "The Case for Nietzschean Moral Psychology", Knobe et Leiter constrast Arisotle, Kant and Nietzsche on moral psychology. It turns out that human are more Nietzschean than we thought!

Anyone knows another great philosopher who gave his/her name to a moral psychology?

The selective impairment of prosocial sentiments and the moral brain

Philosophers often describes the history of philosophy as a dispute between Plato (read: idealism/rationalism) and Aristotle (read:materialism/empiricism). It is of course extremely reductionist since many conceptual and empirical issues where not addressed in Ancient Greece, but there is a non-trivial interpretation of the history of thought according to which controversies often involves these two positions. In moral philosophy and moral psychology, however, the big figures are Hume and Kant. Is morality based on passions (Hume) or reasons (Kant)? This is another simplification, but again it frames the debate. In the last issue of Trends in Cognitive Science(TICS), three papers discusses the reason/emotions debate but provides more acute models.

Recently (see this previous post), Koenig and other collaborators (2007b) explored the consequences of ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPC) lesions in moral reasoning and showed that they tend to rely a little more on a 'utilitarian' scheme (cost/benefit), and less on a deontological scheme (moral do's and don'ts ), thus suggesting that emotions are involved in moral deontological judgement. These patients, however, were also more emotional in the Ultimatum game, and rejected more offers than normal subjects. So are they emotional or not? In the first TICS paper, Moll and de Oliveira-Souza review the Koenig et al. (2007a) experiment and argue that neither somatic markers nor dual-process theory explains these findings. They propose that a selective impairment of prosocial sentiments explains why the same patient are both less emotional in moral dilemma but more emotional in economic bargaining. These patients can feel less compassion but still feel anger. In a second paper, Greene (author of the research on the trolley problems, see his homepage) challenge this interpretation and put forward his dual-process view (reason-emotion interaction). Moll and de Oliveira-Souza reply in the third paper. As you can see, there is still a debate between Kant and Hume, but cognitive neuroscience provides new tools for both sides of the debates, and maybe even a blurring of these opposites.


References

• Moll, J., & de Oliveira-Souza, R. (2007). Moral judgments, emotions and the utilitarian brain. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 11(8), 319-321.
• Greene, J. D. (2007). Why are VMPFC patients more utilitarian? A dual-process theory of moral judgment explains. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 11(8), 322-323.
• Moll, J., & de Oliveira-Souza, R. (2007). Response to Greene: Moral sentiments and reason: friends or foes? Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 11(8), 323-324.
• Koenigs, M., & Tranel, D. (2007a). Irrational Economic Decision-Making after Ventromedial Prefrontal Damage: Evidence from the Ultimatum Game. Journal of Neuroscience, 27(4), 951-956.
• Koenigs, M., Young, L., Adolphs, R., Tranel, D., Cushman, F., Hauser, M., et al. (2007b). Damage to the prefrontal cortex increases utilitarian moral judgements. Nature, 446(7138), 908-911.
  
  
  

The psychopath, the prisoner's dilemma and the invisible hand of morality

In the prisoner’s dilemma the police holds, in separate cells, two individuals accused of robbing a bank. The suspects (let’s call them Bob and Alice) are unable to communicate with each others. The police offers them the following options: confess or remain silent. If one confesses – implicating his or her partner – and the other remains silent, the former goes free while the other gets a 10 years sentence. If they both confess, they will serve a 5-years sentence. If they both remain silent, the sentence will be reduced to 2 years. The situation can be represented as the following payoff matrix:



Assuming that Bob and Alice have common knowledge – everybody knows that everybody knows that everybody knows, etc., ad infinitum – of each other’s rationality and the rules of the game, they should confess. Indeed, they will expect each other to make the best move, which is confessing, since confessing gives you either freedom or a 5-years sentence, while remaining silent entails either a 2-years or a 10-years sentence. The best reply to this move is also confessing, thus we expect Bob and Alice to confess. Even if they would be better-off in remaining silent, this choice is suboptimal: they risk a 10-years sentence if the other does not remain silent. In other words, they should not choose the cooperative move.

Experimental game theory indicates that subjects cooperate massively in prisoner’s dilemma. Recently, neuroeconomics showed that players enjoy cooperating, what economists refer to as the “warm glow of giving”. In the prisoner’s dilemma, players who initiate and players who experience mutual cooperation display activation in nucleus accumbens and other reward-related areas (Rilling et al. 2002).

In a new paper, Rilling and its collaborators (2007) now investigate how psychopathy influences cooperation in the prisoner's dilemma. Their subjects were not psychopaths per se: instead, they used normal individuals and--with a questionnaire--rated their attitudes on a "psychopathy scale". While in a scanner, they were then asked to play a prisoner's dilemma with nonscanned subjects. They were in fact playing against a computer following the "forgiving tit-for-tat" strategy", analogous to tit-for-tat excepts that it reciprocates previous defection only 67% of the time.

Behavioral results indicate that psychopathy is correlated with defection, even after mutual cooperation. One explanation could be that psychopaths have impaired amygdala, and hence are less sensible to aversive conditioning. This is coherent with fMRI data that suggests that the Cooperate-Defect outcome (I cooperate, you defect) elicit less aversive reaction in individual who score higher in psychopathy. Moreover, choosing to defect elicited more activity in the ACC and DLPFC (areas classically involved in emotional modulation and cognitive control), suggesting that defecting is effortful. Psychopathy, however, is correlated with less activity in these areas: it thus seems easier for psychopathic personalities to be non-cooperative. "Regular" people need more cognitive effort to override their cooperative biases.

fMRI suggest also that low-psychopathy and high-psychopathy subjects differs on how their brain implements cooperative behavior: while the formers rely on emotional biases (strong activation in the OFC, weak activation in DLPFC), the latters rely on cognitive control (weak activation in the OFC, strong activation in DLPFC). High-psychopathy subjects would be, according to Rilling et al., weakly emotionally biased toward defection: they exhibit a stronger OFC activation and a weaker DLPFC for defection. Thus, it seems that normal subjects tend to experiments the immediate gratification of cooperation, independently of the monetary payoff. Psychopaths do not feel the "warm glow" of cooperation, and thus do not cooperate.

Philosophically, there is an interesting lessons here: both low-psychopathy and high-psychopathy subjects follow their own, selfish biases: low-psychopathy ones enjoy cooperating, and high-psychopathy prefer defecting. This is consistent with a thesis I will one day describe more thoroughly another day, the "Invisible Hand of Morality": like markets, morality emerges out of the interaction of selfish agents. Luckily, thanks to evolution, culture, education, norms, etc., normal people selfishness tends to be geared toward cooperation. Psychopaths are not more selfish than normal people: their selfishness do not value cooperation, or other social virtues. Thus morality is not (only) "in the head": it is partly distributed is sensorimotor/somatovisceral mechanisms, cultural habits, external cues, institutions, etc. The other lesson is that morality is multi-realizable: it can be realized through emotional biases or cognitive control.

• Rilling, J. K., Glenn, A. L., Jairam, M. R., Pagnoni, G., Goldsmith, D. R., Elfenbein, H. A., et al. (2007). Neural correlates of social cooperation and non-cooperation as a function of psychopathy. Biological Psychiatry, 61(11), 1260-1271.
• Rilling, J., Gutman, D., Zeh, T., Pagnoni, G., Berns, G., & Kilts, C. (2002). A neural basis for social cooperation. Neuron, 35(2), 395-405.

Equality preference and inequality aversions

In a letter to Nature , a group of political scientist and anthropologist report an experiment designed to test equality preference and inequality aversions. the design was simple:

Subjects are divided into groups having four anonymous members each. Each player receives a sum of money randomly generated by a computer. Subjects are shown the payoffs of other group members for that round and are then provided an opportunity to give 'negative' or 'positive' tokens to other players. Each negative token reduces the purchaser's payoff by one monetary unit (MU) and decreases the payoff of a targeted individual by three MUs; positive tokens decrease the purchaser's payoff by one monetary unit (MU) and increase the targeted individual's payoff by three MUs. Groups are randomized after each round to prevent reputation from influencing decisions; interactions between players are strictly anonymous and subjects know this. Also, by allowing participants more than one behavioural alternative, the experiment eliminates possible experimenter demand effects—if subjects were only permitted to punish, they might engage in this behaviour because they believe it is what the experimenters want.

The results support what is often referred to as the "Robin Hood effect": richer individuals were heavily penalized, while poorer received more gift. This would support the hypothesis of Strong Reciprocity (SR), put forth by Fehr, Camerer, Gintins, and many other scholar in behavioral economics. SR implies that individuals will cooperate with cooperator (reciprocal altruism), will not cooperate with cheaters, and are even ready to punish those who cheat others (altruistic punishment):

“people tend to behave prosocially and punish antisocial behavior at cost to themselves, even when the probability of future interactions is low or zero. We call this strong reciprocity." (Gintis, H. (2000). Strong reciprocity and human sociality. Journal of Theoretical Biology, 206(2), p. 177)

And of course, SR implies that individual will be inequity-averse. SR proponent go further, and state that we an innate propensity for altruistic punishment. That’s all well and good, but why so much moral optimism? Couldn't it be that we are selfish agents and that our mechanisms of decision-making aims primarily at maximizing positive outcomes and minimizing negative ones? We feel good when we punish bad guys, we feel bad when someone make unfair offers to us in the ultimatum game (neuroeconomics studies showed that). I agree with SRers that we are not cold logical egoists, but would favor another approach I call "Hot Logic": (from an abstract of a forthcoming talk):

human agents are selfish agents adapted to trade, exchange and partner selection in biological markets (Noë et al., 2001). Cognitive mechanisms of decision-making aims primarily at maximizing positive outcomes and minimizing negative ones. This initial hedonism is gradually modulated by social norms, by which agents learn how to maximise their utility given the norms. The ‘hot logic’ approach provide a simpler explanation of cooperation and fairness: subjects make ‘fair’ offers in the ultimatum game because they know their offer would be rejected otherwise. Responders affective reaction to ‘unfair offers’ is in fact a reaction to the loss of an expected monetary gain: they anticipated that the proposer would comply with social norms. This claim is supported by other imaging studies showing that loss of money can be aversive, and that actual and counterfactual utility recruit the same neural resources (Delgado et al., 2006; Montague et al., 2006). This approach explains why subjects make lower offers in the dictator game (an ultimatum game in which the responder make an offer and the responder's role is entirely passive) than in the ultimatum, why, when using a computer displaying eyespots, almost twice as many participants transfer money in the dictator (Haley & Fessler, 2005), and why attractive people are offered more in the ultimatum (Solnick & Schweitzer, 1999). In every case, agents seek to maximize a complex hedonic utility function, where the reward and the losses can be monetary, emotional or social (reputation, acceptance, etc.). SR is thus seen as cooperative habits that are not repaid (Burnham & Johnson, 2005)