Thrasymachus's Blush: The Science and Politics of Motivated Reasoning and 'Principled Rhetoric'

1 "Thrasymachus conceded all these points, but not in the easygoing way I have just described. He had to be dragged every step of the way, sweating profusely, as you might expect in summer. This was the occasion when I saw something I had never seen before-Thrasymachus blushing." Plato, Republic 350d For almost two millennia, philosophers were typically also the best social scientists of their day. For these thinkers, their descriptive psychology was designed from the beginning to serve as a logical base for their moral psychology, which served, in turn, to underwrite their ethical theory, and on to their political theory. And moving in the other direction, the descriptive psychology had to be compatible with, and preferably entailed by their epistemology and, in turn, their metaphysics and ontology. In short, these were often systematic thinkers whose work spanned the practical, the scientific, and the philosophical. Hobbes, for example, develops his psychology of the fear of violent death in the context of claiming that its burden makes anarchy intolerable and its universality makes sovereignty possible . The rise of modern social science has created a necessary, and in many ways salutary, division of labor between philosophers and social scientists, driven primarily by the need for specialization in the face of technical advances. In addition, there has been an increasing sense that the different fields properly deal with fundamentally different phenomena. More specifically, since Max Weber, the distinction between intellectual inquiry regarding facts and values has loomed more salient. This is not to say that the two have proceeded in pristine isolation from each other. Many social scientists aspire to be practically relevant and regard their research as having important implications for normative theory and practice -"giving hands and feet to morality" in the words of one (Lasswell, 1941). Similarly, many philosophers question the sharpness of the divide, or at least believe that their conceptual apparatus should help nudge the social scientific research agenda, just like the normative category of "disease" guides medical research without compromising its scientific status. 2 And yet, because the division of labor has only intensified, the ability to manage good integration of normative philosophy and social science has become fraught with dead ends and positively harmful missteps in translation and transposition. In response, some social scientists fully embrace the fact-value dichotomy and disclaim any competence in the translation, leaving that job to whomever might want to run with their findings. Others, however, make a go at explicitly building the bridge, perhaps relying on colleagues in other fields or attempts to read work out of their domain of professional expertise. Perhaps the most interesting and important contemporary example of such an attempt at mutual influence and integration is Jonathan Haidt's ambitious research agenda on moral psychology. Haidt's research purports to show that so-called "rationalist" moral and political theories rest on untenable empirical premises. His work has been published in the best general science and psychology journals, he has written a best-selling book, given three TED talks, and taken to the pages of the New York Times to advance the potentially revolutionary implications of his research for our moral and political self-understanding (and hence practices). His ideas have been discussed and deployed in a wide range of fields including psychology, philosophy, political science, communications, anthropology, sociology, among others. In the present paper, however, we aim to show that his work stands as a remarkable case study of how the translation process between philosophy and social science can go fundamentally awry. In the end, his empirical results are either incoherent with the purposes to which he wishes to put them, or they are better interpreted as supporting and elucidating certain rationalist theories, rather than undermining them. The point, however, is not merely to correct some of the mistakes for their own sake (though there is certainly merit in doing so). Rather, we show that the way the translation process goes wrong in this case exemplifies a recurring theme 3 in such attempts, one rooted in the disciplinary divide over facts and values. So, in this light, we sketch an inferentialist model of judgment, arguing that it can help to overcome the difficulties in translating between the normative and social scientific domains. I. Reason, Realism, & Normative Judgment Plato's Thrasymachus is the first great "realist" in the history of western political thought. He famously defines justice as the advantage of the stronger. Less famously, though just as importantly, he goes on to argue that as an empirical matter, the rhetoric of reason and justice actually tends to further the interests of the powerful. Versions of Thrasymachus's claims have morphed and echoed down through the history of political thought, all the way to contemporary discussions about the efficacy of public reason and rational deliberation. Empirical research on motivated reasoning appears to support such pessimism by demonstrating the ways in which people's desires and ideological commitments affect the way that they present, assimilate, and process arguments and information. Recent influential research has radicalized these results, arguing that such motivational "noise" is so predominant as to leave notions of public reason unmoored in practice. For example, Jonathan Haidt argues that reason evolved as a tool of rhetoric rather than the other way around, and that its original character is destiny when it comes to applications in modern politics. Indeed, he goes so far to call his theory "Glauconian," after Thrasymachus's ally in the dialectical jousting with Socrates: "In fact, I'll praise Glaucon for the rest of the book as the guy who got it right" (Haidt, 2013: 86). In the Republic though, Thrasymachus, the cynical sophist, blushes when Socrates unmasks his arguments as cynical and sophistic. This detail is curious and striking. As Allan Bloom has noted, "The apparently shameless Thrasymachus, willing to say anything, is revealed 4 in all his vanity, for he blushes" (Bloom, 1968: 336). Such reactions make little sense, though, on the reason-as-rationalization account, in either its ancient sophistic or modern scientific varieties. Indeed contemporary empirical research also supports the existence of cross-cutting forces that hem in and alter our tendencies to behave as cynical sophists -a kind of photonegative of motivated reasoning that we might term 'principled rhetoric.' In addition to the evolutionary traits that Haidt discusses (which we agree are well established), our common ancestry has made it so that very few of us -namely sociopaths -are immune to shame and able to behave as cynical sophists through and through. We are disposed to track and respond to reasons in ways that are not purely strategic (Tomasello, 2009). It turns out that even Thrasymachus is what we might call a "theoretical" not a congenital sociopath: whatever his professed views about justice, power, and the sophist's vocation, he blushes and feels the force of accountability to good reasoning. Haidt's social intuitionist model (SIM) posits a pivotal role for the automatic process of intuition in making normative judgments. When one encounters a situation that elicits a moral judgment, the immediate reaction is a gut feeling that manifests in a quick evaluation. This immediate, intuitive reaction is an analogue and close cousin of, for example, human disgust reactions (Haidt, 1993). For Haidt, the slower, more deliberative process of reasoning plays only an ancillary role as a consequence of intuition and judgment rather than its source. Reasoning in the SIM is typically just ex post rationalization in justifying one's own positions, and an attempt to win other people to one's position by any means, not on the basis of "good" or "better" reasons, whatever, if anything, those might be. In the model, the primary causal effects of reasoning are social; reasons may shape the intuitions of others. The capacity for reason to tutor one's own intuitions and judgments is accorded a much lesser role, although some provisions are 5 made for variation across individuals and situations, and for this capacity to be cultivated and marginally strengthened with practice. Haidt explicitly calls reasons the "junior partner" to intuition (e.g., Haidt 2010). The SIM is based on a considerable body of experimental research, and it dovetails neatly with many of the other empirical regularities and theories that comprise modern psychology, such as the dual-process model of cognition (Kahneman, 2011) and motivated reasoning (Kunda, 1990). The evidence that forms the core of Haidt's argument for the SIM is exemplified by the reactions of experimental subjects to stylized stories that invite moral judgments. Perhaps the most famous story involves a brother and sister who, while traveling together, decide to have sex. The two use several forms of birth control, never tell anyone their secret, never have sex again, and find the experience to have deepened their relationship; the point of these stipulated details is to eliminate the chance that their action caused harm. When this sort of story is presented to experimental subjects, the experimenters often observe what they call moral dumbfounding, the "stubborn and puzzled maintenance of a moral judgment without supporting reasons" (Haidt, Bjorklund, and Murphy, 2000, 6). For example, a subject might say that it is not OK for the brother and sister to have sex, not for any identifiable reasons (in the face of various stipulations and follow up questions by the investigators), but because "it's just wrong." The thrust of Haidt's critique is that Kohlberg's model cannot account for moral dumbfounding. If Kohlberg were right, the moral judgments that people offer when they hear this story would have to have been caused by reasons. But Haidt reports that very frequently, subjects cannot identify the reasons why they judge some actions to be "just wrong." Interestingly, Haidt and his colleagues also offer an account of how Kohlberg could have been so wrong. Kohlberg based his theory on a series of experiments in which children were presented with moral dilemmas and asked a series of questions. Perhaps the most famous dilemma involves Heinz, who, unable to afford a potentially life-saving drug, must decide whether to break into a pharmacy to steal it for his dying wife. Follow up queries featured hypothetical questions of right and wrong, e.g., "What if Heinz didn't love his wife? Would it still be OK for him to steal the drug?" According to Haidt, Kohlberg perceives the behaviors he observed his subjects engage in as a process of cognition that is "conscious and used ordinary moral language" (Kohlberg, Levine, and Hewer, 1983: 69, as cited in Haidt, 2001). But elsewhere, Haidt and his coauthors allege that this perception is mistakenly predicated on an odd sort of data, generated by a strange process: 1 For a discussion of the role of emotion in deliberative theory generally, see 7 "Kohlberg may have concluded that moral judgment was based on moral reasoning because the dilemmas he used, such as Heinz, had very salient fodder for post hoc "reasoning-why." In his dilemmas there were always questions of rights and harm (cf. Kohlberg, 1969). Had he used a broader sample of moral judgment tasks he might have come up with a different theory, one that gave greater prominence to moral emotions and the "seeing-that" of moral intuitions. (The tendency for psychologists to confuse a psychological phenomenon with the way they have chosen to study the phenomenon was called "the psychologist's fallacy" by William James, 1890/1950.)" (Haidt, Bjorklund, and Murphy, 2000, 11). The underlying assumptions here are that Haidt's stories have more verisimilitude than Kohlberg's dilemmas, and that the process of moral dumbfounding is less strange than questioning via hypotheticals. Building on the framework of the SIM, Haidt has articulated a moral foundations theory According to the MFT, people base their moral judgments on intuitive reactions that cluster into several foundations, which include care (roughly utilitarian beneficence), fairness (roughly notions of right), in-group loyalty, hierarchical authority, and notions of "purity" (failures of which elicit disgust reactions). There is variation in the degree to which different individuals identify these foundations as important, and that variation correlates highly with well-understood categories from politics (i.e., liberal/conservative) and religion (i.e., believing/atheist). Based on the SIM and the MFT, Haidt appears to encourage us to collapse descriptive ethics and normative ethics -i.e., how, as an empirical matter, we in fact do tend to make judgments with how, as a normative matter, we should make those judgments. If (1) moral judgments are primarily caused by intuitions, (2) intuitions are analogous to disgust reactions, and (3) different people are affected by different subsets of those moral intuitions, then differences in moral judgments cannot be resolved by saying that one side is right and the other is wrong. For example, the act of denying the moral judgment "homosexuality is immoral" is 8 similar to denying that having a disgust reaction to eating insects is reasonable. Thus, political foes do not properly have access to claims of moral superiority. Instead, they merely have different tastes (Haidt actually uses an analogy to taste buds), different intuitive reactions to eliciting situations. So it would appear that Haidt embraces a particularly strong version of moral non-cognitivism. Reason plays a negligible role in forming our moral judgments, and only gets deployed to figure out effective ways to bring others around to our pre-existing views. Reason is merely a rhetorical tool to convince others by any means available, and justice becomes the right of the stronger in wielding those and other more avowedly manipulative tools. And yet, at other points, Haidt deploys his empirical findings and theoretical apparatus for highly prescriptive purposes, arguing that his findings encourage a kind of moral leveling in which we should respect our political opponents and attend to differing moral, whatever their contents. His account of moral foundations almost sounds like an updated and socialized versio