Draft: Comments most welcome, but please do not quote without permission.
Archived at Website for the Rutgers University Research Group on Evolution and Higher Cognition.
Shaun Nichols
Department of Philosophy
College of Charleston
Charleston, SC 29424
and
Center for Cognitive Science
Rutgers University
Piscataway, NJ 08854
nichols@cofc.edu
1. Introduction 2. Cognitive mechanisms in altruistic motivation 3. Cognitive mechanisms in moral judgment 4. Conclusion
Throughout
this century, philosophers and psychologists have tried to explain features of
our moral psychology by appealing to features of our capacity for understanding
other minds or “mindreading”. Perhaps the most widely
known treatment goes back to Piaget’s early work in developmental moral
psychology (Piaget 1932). Piaget and his followers placed
enormous weight on the ability for perspective taking, of imagining oneself to
have the mental states of another (e.g., Kohlberg 1984, Selman 1980, Damon 1977;
see also Rawls 1971, chapter 8). Over the last two decades,
there has been considerable empirical and conceptual progress in work on moral
psychology and in work on mindreading. The moral psychology
tradition has looked at the nature and development of two basic moral
capacities: the capacity for altruistic motivation (e.g.
Batson 1991, Blum 1994, Eisenberg 1992, Hoffman 1991, Sober & Wilson 1998,
Zahn-Waxler & Radke-Yarrow 1982), and the capacity for moral judgement
(e.g., Blair 1995, Goldman 1993, Nucci 1986, Smetana & Braeges 1990, Turiel
et al. 1987). The mindreading tradition has explored the capacity for
attributing mental states to others and predicting others’ behavior (e.g.,
Baron-Cohen et al. 1985, Bartsch & Wellman 1995, Currie & Ravenscroft
forthcoming, Goldman 1989, Gopnik & Wellman 1994, Gordon 1986, Harris 1992,
Leslie 1994, Nichols & Stich forthcoming, Stich & Nichols 1992).
Although each tradition has flourished, work on moral psychology and work
on mindreading has been pursued largely independently. Advances
in both fields put us in an excellent position to begin charting the relations
between these two capacities and to develop a more detailed picture of the core
architecture of moral psychology.
Within
the last decade, several philosophers and cognitive psychologists have begun to
suggest cognitive accounts of altruism and moral judgement (e.g., Batson 1991,
Blair 1995, Blum 1994, Currie 1995, Darwall 1998, Deigh 1995, Goldman 1993,
Gordon 1995, Sober & Wilson 1998). The role of
mindreading is a central issue in all these accounts. Roughly,
the proposals about mindreading and moral psychology fall into two camps.
Some (e.g., Blair 1995, Sober & Wilson 1998) maintain that basic
capacities of moral psychology do not require any mindreading ability at all.
Others (e.g., Batson 1991, Goldman 1993) maintain that basic capacities
of moral psychology depend on the capacity for perspective taking.
In
this paper, I’ll consider the recent cognitive accounts of altruistic
motivation and moral judgement. In section two, I’ll review
the recent work on altruistic motivation. I’ll argue that,
contrary to the prevailing views, altruistic motivation depends on a minimal
capacity for mindreading and also on an affective system, a “Concern
Mechanism” that generates the motivation. The third section
will focus on recent cognitive accounts of the capacity for moral judgement.
I’ll argue that the capacity for moral judgement, like the capacity for
altruistic motivation, depends on a minimal capacity for mindreading.
Furthermore, recent evidence suggests that moral judgement also depends
on the affective mechanism underlying altruistic motivation. Thus,
I’ll maintain that at the core of moral psychology is a Concern Mechanism,
which is crucial both to altruistic motivation and to the capacity for basic
moral judgement.
The
literature on altruism is simply enormous, and it spans several disciplines
including philosophy, social psychology, developmental psychology, and
evolutionary biology. Although I’ll draw on work from all
of these areas, the goal of the present section is restricted to the project of
determining the cognitive mechanisms underlying basic altruistic motivation.
I’ll consider in some detail recent proposals about the mechanisms
underlying altruistic motivation. I’ll argue against the
radical view that mindreading capacities are unnecessary for altruistic
motivation. Then I’ll sketch the more prevalent proposal,
that altruistic motivation depends on the capacity for perspective taking.
I’ll maintain that none of the arguments for the perspective taking
account is convincing and that there is considerable evidence that altruistic
motivation does not depend on such sophisticated mindreading capacities.
Rather, I’ll suggest that altruistic motivation depends on a Concern
Mechanism that requires only minimal mindreading capacities, e.g., the capacity
to attribute distress to another. But before we get to that,
I need to get clearer about the operative notion of altruistic motivation.
2.1. Core
cases of altruistic motivation
To
begin a discussion of altruism, it will be useful to set out some core cases of
altruistic behavior. In science in general, it’s not always clear at the
outset what the core cases are, and new evidence and arguments might alter our
conception of what should be included as core cases. The
situation is no different in studying altruism, and we may want to revise our
view about what the core cases are. Philosophical discussions
in this area tend to rely on hypothetical cases of altruism. But
since the present goal is to give an account of the cognitive mechanisms
implicated in actual cases of altruistic behavior, it is important to begin with
real cases.
[1]
To his credit, philosopher Lawrence
Blum takes this strategy and offers real examples of helping behaviors that he
suggests need to be accommodated by an adequate theory of altruism (Blum 1994).
Blum’s cases all come from young children. For
present purposes, it will suffice to recount just a few of the examples:
1.
Sarah at 12 months retrieves a cup for a crying friend (Blum 1994, p. 186).
2.
Michael at 15 months brings his teddy bear and security blanket to a crying
friend (Blum 1994, p. 187).
3.
A two-year old accidentally harms his friend (another two-year old) who begins
to cry. The first child looks concerned and offers the other
child a toy (Blum 1994, p. 187).
The clearest real-life examples of altruistic behavior in adults come
from work on helping behavior in social psychology. Perhaps
the best known research on adults’ helping behavior is the work on the
‘bystander effect’ by Latane & Darley (1968). They
found that when there are numerous bystanders, subjects are relatively unlikely
to offer assistance to those in need. This finding is often
used to draw a rather bleak picture of human altruism. However,
focusing on these studies obscures the pervasiveness of human altruism.
For it turns out that if subjects perceive unambiguous distress cues and
there are no bystanders, virtually everyone helps. For
instance, in one study, Clark & Wood (1974) had each subject engage in a
distracter task and as the subject left the experiment, he passed a room in
which a man (the experimenter’s accomplice) made a sharp cry of pain and then
feigned unconsciousness apparently as a result of being shocked by an electronic
probe. The researchers found that when the accomplice was no
longer touching any of the electronic equipment, all of the subjects
offered help. And even when the accomplice was still touching
electronic equipment (thus presenting potential danger to the helper), over 90%
of the subjects offered help (Clark & Wood 1974, p. 282). An
adequate account of altruistic motivation should explain these kinds of helping
behaviors.
This
list of core cases is, admittedly, rather short. It excludes
possible cases of altruistic motivation that do not involve helping others in
need. Sometimes people are generous to strangers who aren’t
in need, and I don’t mean to suggest that such behaviors can’t be
altruistic. However, I think that by focusing on a more
limited range of cases, we are more likely to make progress on cognitive
theories of altruism. The cases of comforting or helping
others in distress form a plausible core because such cases emerge so early in
children and they appear to be pervasive among adults. Furthermore,
although I’m focusing on a very short list of core cases, these cases already
present a fairly daunting task. Devising an account of
altruistic motivation that would capture both the child cases and the adult
cases would be a considerable advance. Of course, it’s
possible that the examples from children and the examples from adults cannot be
captured by a single motivational system. But all else being
equal, an account of altruistic behavior that can capture both of these cases
would be preferable to an account that captures only one. I’ll
argue that a close look at the role of mindreading in these cases will provide
us with a unified account.
2.2. Altruism without
mindreading?
One
account of the role of mindreading in altruistic behavior is to deny that
mindreading plays any essential role in altruistic motivation.
There are two versions of the view that are discussed in the recent
literature. In this section, I’ll argue that neither
account is at all plausible.
Emotional contagion
Perhaps
the most common explanation of the basis for altruistic behavior is empathy. For
instance, Goldman writes, “empathy . . . seems to be a
prime mechanism that disposes us toward altruistic behavior” (1993, p. 358).
However, it is important to distinguish between two different capacities that
get labeled as “empathy”. Most generally, empathy is
regarded as a “vicarious sharing of affect” or an emotional response in
which the emotion is “congruent with the other’s emotional state or
situation” (Eisenberg & Strayer 1987, pp. 3,5). There are two rather
different ways that one might arrive at a “vicarious sharing of affect”.
One way is by perspective taking, i.e., imagining oneself to have the
other person’s mental states. I will consider an
empathy-based account of altruism along these lines in section 2.3. A
quite different way that we arrive at the same affect is by emotional contagion,
when we “catch” another’s affect. Some capacity for
emotional contagion is present at birth as shown by the fact that infants will
cry when they hear the cries of another infant (Simner 1971). The capacity for
emotional contagion thus does not require the capacity for perspective taking.
Indeed, since the capacity for emotional contagion is present at birth,
this capacity is presumably completely independent of mindreading capacities.
There is some dispute about when mindreading capacities become available,
but all sides agree that newborn babies cannot engage in mindreading.
The
capacity for emotional contagion suggests a natural and simple account of
altruistic motivation. If the distress of another causes oneself to feel
distress, this may provide a motivation to relieve the distress of the other –
it will thereby relieve one’s own distress. This view has a
certain elegance, but it is not easy to find a prominent advocate for the view.
Although Goldman maintains that altruistic behavior is generated by
empathy, Goldman also maintains that emotional contagion is not genuine empathy
(1993). Indeed Goldman’s simulation account of empathy is
quite implausible as an account of emotional contagion (see Nichols et al.
1996), so it’s unlikely that Goldman thinks that altruism derives from
emotional contagion. Martin Hoffman, one of the most
influential figures in empathy research, has been read as proposing something
like the simple emotional contagion view in the following passage: “Empathic
distress is unpleasant and helping the victim is usually the best way to get rid
of the source. One can also accomplish this by directing
one’s attention elsewhere and avoiding the expressive and situational cues
from the victim” (Hoffman 1981, p. 52, quoted in Batson 1991, p. 48). It’s
not clear that Hoffman is really committed to this view, but it is instructive
to consider the account in any case.
Notice
that on the emotional contagion account of altruistic motivation, mindreading
isn't essential to altruistic motivation. As noted above, emotional contagion
needn’t implicate mindreading processes at all. The
distress cues are like bad music that you try to turn off. It
requires no knowledge of electronics to be motivated to figure out how to stop
the offensive stimuli coming from a stereo – one simply experiments with the
various knobs and switches. Failing that, one can just leave
the room. Similarly, then, one might find the cries of an
infant offensive, so one might try to figure out how to stop the stimuli. To be
sure, mindreading can provide useful tools for stopping the unpleasant stimuli.
But on this account, mindreading needn’t be essential to the motivation
to stop the crying.
This
story has a prima facie virtue – we know that this capacity is well within the
abilities of young children who provide some of our core cases of altruistic
motivation. So, the emotional contagion account provides an extremely simple
explanation of altruistic motivation, and we know that children have the
capacity for emotional contagion. Hence, it would seem that
our problem is solved. Altruistic motivation doesn’t depend
on mindreading at all. Rather, it depends on the rather
primitive capacity for emotional contagion.
Things
are not so simple, however. For consider that, at least in
the core cases of altruism from adults, one way to rid oneself of the unpleasant
cues is to leave the situation. But this is not what
happened in the core cases noted above. Although the subjects
could have eliminated contagious distress by fleeing the situation, almost none
of them did so (Clark & Word 1974). The fact that
adults often help when they could perfectly well escape has now been extensively
explored in the work of C. Daniel Batson and his colleagues (Batson et al. 1981;
Batson et al. 1983; Batson 1990, 1991). This research
provides powerful evidence that some core cases of altruistic motivation cannot
be accommodated by the simple emotional contagion account.
[2]
Batson has the broader agenda of defending a perspective-taking account
of altruism, which we will consider in section 2.3, but for present purposes, it
will suffice to see how his data undermine the emotional contagion account.
In classic social psychological fashion, Batson and his colleagues set up
a mock shock methodology. Subjects were told that they would
be in a study with another person and that one of them would be picked at random
to be the worker and the other would be the observer. The
worker would perform tasks while being given electric shock at irregular
intervals, and the observer would watch the person performing the task under
these aversive conditions. Of course, the real subjects
always ended up in the observer condition, and the “worker” was really a
confederate. The subjects were then told that they would view
the “worker” via closed-circuit television (though it was really a
videotape). The experiment manipulated the ease of escape
for the subjects. In the easy-escape condition, subjects read
“Although the worker will be completing between two and ten trials, it will be
necessary for you to observe only the first two”; in the difficult escape
condition, subjects read “The worker will be completing between two and ten
trials, all of which you will observe” (Batson 1991, p. 114). The
subjects subsequently viewed the worker endure two trials (of the ten trials
that the worker had agreed to) in which the worker exhibited considerable
discomfort. Subjects were given the opportunity to help out
the worker by taking over some of her trials. Using this framework, Batson and
colleagues also manipulated the degree of “empathy” in the subjects (see
section 2.5 for details). Across a wide range of studies,
they found that subjects in low empathy conditions were much less likely to help
when escape was easy. By contrast, subjects in the high
empathy condition were equally likely to help whether it was easy to escape or
not.
[3]
For
our purposes, the crucial point is the following. On the
emotional contagion model, one should only help when it’s easier to help than
it is to escape. However, evidence from Batson and his
colleagues suggests that there is an important kind of altruistic motivation
that can't be satisfied by escaping the situation. Hence, this kind of
motivation can’t be captured by the emotional contagion model (see also Batson
et al 1981; Batson et al. 1983; Miller, Eisenberg, Fabes, & Shell 1996,
Eisenberg & Fabes 1990). More generally, largely as a result of Batson’s
work, it is now clear that an adequate account of altruistic motivation needs to
accommodate the fact that in core cases of altruism, people often prefer to help
even when it’s easy to escape.
[4]
Sober
& Wilson on altruistic ‘sympathy’
In Sober & Wilson’s recent book
(1998), they propose an alternative path to altruism that doesn’t rely on
mindreading or emotional contagion, but rather on a certain kind of sympathy.
They suggest that both sympathy and empathy may motivate altruistic
behavior (e.g., 1998, p. 232). They then try to distinguish
sympathy from empathy in two ways.
First, Sober & Wilson maintain that there is a crucial difference
between empathy and sympathy because in sympathy,
your
heart can go out to someone without your experiencing anything like a similar
emotion. This is clearest when people react to the situations
of individuals who are not experiencing emotions at all. Suppose
Walter discovers that Wendy is being deceived by her sexually promiscuous
husband. Walter may sympathize with Wendy, but this is not
because Wendy feels hurt and betrayed. Wendy feels nothing of
the kind, because she is not aware of her husband’s behavior. It
might be replied that Walter’s sympathy is based on his imaginative rehearsal
of how Wendy would feel if she were to discover her husband’s infidelity.
Perhaps so – but the fact remains that Walter and Wendy do not feel the
same (or similar) emotions. Walter sympathizes; he does not
empathize (1998, pp. 234-5).
But of
course, this example does not really distinguish sympathy from empathy.
As Sober & Wilson seem to anticipate, a sophisticated empathy account
can easily accommodate their case by claiming that we use our imagination to
empathize with what Wendy would feel if she were to discover the infidelity.
Hence, as far as this example is concerned, ‘sympathy’ is merely a
special form of empathy.
The second, and more important, feature of
their account is their claim that ‘sympathy’ doesn’t require mindreading.
Sober & Wilson maintain that empathy requires that one be a
psychologist, but that sympathy does not:
Empathy
entails a belief about the emotions experienced by another person. Empathic
individuals are “psychologists”…; they have beliefs about the mental
states of others. Sympathy does not require this.
You can sympathize with someone just by being moved by their objective
situation; you need not consider their subjective state. Sympathetic
individuals have minds, of course; but it is not part of our definition that
sympathetic individuals must be psychologists (1998, p. 236).
Thus,
Sober & Wilson apparently maintain that ‘sympathy’ does not require any
capacity for mindreading.
Taken as an empirical claim, there is no
reason to believe that Sober & Wilson’s ‘sympathy’
exists. On the contrary, children only begin to exhibit
characteristic signs of sympathy after the first birthday (see section 2.7) and
at this age, children probably have some rudimentary mindreading skills (see,
e.g., Gergely et al. 1995; Woodward 1998). So, it may well turn out that the
capacity for sympathy exists only in creatures that have mindreading capacities
and that the capacity for sympathy depends crucially on the capacity for
mindreading. Furthermore, even if Sober &
Wilson’s ‘sympathy’ exists, they provide no reason to think that it
explains anything like the core cases of altruism with which we began.
Indeed, as we’ll see, children only begin exhibiting comforting
behaviors after the first birthday, by which time they probably have some
rudimentary mindreading skills.
So, if we take Sober & Wilson’s
suggestion as an empirical claim, it is distinctly unpromising. However,
since Sober & Wilson offer no evidence that ‘sympathy’ exists without
mindreading, perhaps it’s better to read their claim as a conceptual claim.
Of course, on this reading, Sober & Wilson’s treatment of sympathy
simply does not engage the issue of what the cognitive mechanisms are that
underlie altruistic motivation. Furthermore, if we approach
the issue on these kinds of conceptual grounds, it’s not clear that we would
count ‘sympathy’-induced helping behaviors as altruistic. That is, Sober
& Wilson’s kind of sympathy could motivate “pro-social behavior”,
which in fact benefits others. However, many cases of
pro-social behaviors are not regarded as altruistically motivated (see, e.g.,
Eisenberg 1992, p. 52). For instance, if John saves a
drowning child in order to impress the bystanders, then his action benefits
another, but one would hardly consider it altruistically motivated. Similarly,
prosocial behavior that is motivated by Sober & Wilson’s sympathy would be
a poor candidate for altruism. Consider, for instance, the
following thought experiment. Imagine that aliens landed on
this planet and didn't think that earthlings had mental states, but the cries
and moans of earthlings made the aliens have negative affect analogous to Sober
& Wilson’s sympathy. This might motivate the aliens to
engage in prosocial behavior, but, if the aliens really don’t recognize that
earthlings have minds, it's hard to regard the aliens’ prosocial behavior as
altruistically motivated.
In
sum, then, neither emotional contagion nor Sober & Wilson’s sympathy
provides an acceptable explanation of altruistic motivation. It’s
particularly clear that neither proposal offers a unified account of the core
cases of altruistic motivation with which we began. Hence, if
we are to have a model of altruistic motivation that can accommodate our core
cases, it cannot be one of these models that rejects outright the role of
mindreading.
2.3. Perspective taking
accounts of altruistic motivation
In the Piaget-Kohlberg tradition, the capacity for perspective taking is
thought to be essential to a wide range of moral capacities, including
altruistic behavior. Unlike the no-mindreading accounts of altruistic
motivation, there is no shortage of advocates for the perspective taking account
of mindreading and altruism. In the recent literature, the most prevalent
account of mindreading and altruism continues to be that altruistic motivation
depends on perspective taking. This view is suggested by
several figures including Batson (1991), Blum (1994), Darwall (1998) and Goldman
(1993).
Goldman (1992, 1993) is by far the most explicit about the cognitive
architecture of perspective taking, so his work provides a useful starting
point. As we’ve seen, Goldman maintains that empathy is
central to altruism, and he maintains that genuine cases of empathy depend on
perspective taking. His account of perspective taking draws
on his earlier work on the off-line simulation account of folk psychology
(Goldman 1989, see also Gordon 1986). Goldman maintains that
the process of perspective taking is subserved by off-line simulation in the
following way:
Paradigm cases of empathy... consist first of taking the perspective of another person, that is, imaginatively assuming one or more of the other person's mental states.... The initial 'pretend' states are then operated upon (automatically) by psychological processes, which generate further states that (in favorable cases) are similar to, or homologous to, the target person's states. In central cases of empathy the output states are affective or emotional states (1993, p. 351).
Now, if we try to incorporate this account of empathy into an account of altruistic motivation, we get the following account of the processes underlying altruistic motivation when the agent sees another in distress. First, the agent determines the beliefs and desires of the person in distress. Then the agent pretends to have those beliefs and desires. These pretend-states are then operated on automatically, leading to affective states that are similar to the target’s state, i.e., distress. These unpleasant affective states then motivate the agent to eliminate the problem at its source, viz., the other person’s distress.
Batson’s picture is less architecturally explicit, but is still clearly
dependent on perspective taking. Batson claims that
altruistic motivation derives from “empathy” (1991, p. 83), and as Batson
defines it, empathy requires perspective taking. He writes,
“Perception of the other as in need and perspective taking are both necessary
for empathy to occur at all” (1991, p. 85). The empathic
response to perceived need “is a result of the perceiver adopting the
perspective of the person in need” (1991, p. 83) and this
involves “imagining how that person is affected by his or her situation”
(1991, p. 83).
Blum’s
(1994) view is somewhat more difficult to interpret. He maintains that
altruistic behavior, or “responsiveness” requires “that the child
understand the other child’s state” (1994, p. 197). He
rejects the idea that this understanding is limited to cases in which the
subject infers “the other’s state of mind from a feeling the subject herself
has, or has had, in similar circumstances” (1994, p. 192). Blum
rejects this account because it is too “egocentered” (1994, p. 193), and he
argues that this can’t be the sole cognitive process because “such inference
would not account for understanding states of mind different from those one is
experiencing or has experienced oneself” (1994, p. 192). Rather, Blum
maintains that “understanding others means understanding them precisely as
other than oneself – as having feelings and thoughts that might be
different from what oneself would feel in the same situation” (1994, p. 193).
So Blum apparently maintains that altruistic motivation depends on the
understanding of others as potentially having different beliefs, desires, and
emotions. But he doesn’t offer an explicit explanation
about how this understanding is achieved.
Although
these accounts have important differences, they all share an assumption that
altruistic motivation depends on some fairly sophisticated mindreading
capacities. First, on Blum’s account, and possibly Batson
and Goldman’s as well, the subject must be able to recognize that the other
person might have different mental states than the subject herself would have in
a similar situation. Second, for Goldman and Batson,
perspective taking requires using the imagination to figure out someone else’s
mental states and then using the imagination to generate the other person’s
emotion. As a result, in sharp contrast to the emotional
contagion account, the perspective taking accounts of altruistic motivation
invoke quite complex mindreading capacities.
2.4. A minimal
mindreading account of altruistic motivation
The
accounts of altruistic motivation that make no appeal to mindreading run afoul
of social psychological findings and commonsense intuitions. However,
I think that we can accommodate the data and the intuitions with a much more
austere proposal about the role of mindreading than the perspective taking
accounts. I want to begin to sketch an account of altruistic
motivation that draws on as little mindreading as necessary to accommodate the
core cases of altruism, then in the next several sections, we’ll consider the
relative merits of the minimalist account and the perspective taking account.
The
crucial feature in the core cases of altruism from social psychology is the fact
that people often help even when it would be easy to escape. If
the motivation is caused strictly by immediate situational cues, as in simple
emotional contagion, then escape is a good alternative. However,
escape is not an adequate alternative if the motivation comes from an enduring internal
cause. The motivation seems to be relieved when the subject comes to think that
the distress has been alleviated (Batson 1991), so a plausible candidate for the
internal cause is a representation of distress. If
altruistic motivation is triggered by a representation of distress, escape isn't
an effective solution to the motivational problem since merely escaping the
perceptual cues of distress won’t eliminate the consequences of the enduring
representation that another is in distress.
I
suggest, then, that altruistic motivation depends on the minimal mindreading
capacity to attribute distress to others.
[5]
On this view, a
person can have the capacity for altruistic motivation even if the person
doesn’t have or doesn’t exploit the capacity for imagining himself in the
other’s place and having different beliefs, desires or emotions than he
himself would have in that situation. However, a person
cannot have the capacity for altruistic motivation without the capacity to
attribute distress to another.
[6]
2.5. Arguments for
perspective taking: Batson’s evidence
Now
that the two proposals are on the table, we can consider the arguments for each
account. Although it’s widely thought that altruistic
motivation depends on perspective taking, it’s not easy to find an argument
for the view. The only systematic argument comes from
Batson’s data. Batson used various methods to manipulate
the “empathy” of subjects, creating conditions in which subjects would have
either high empathy or low empathy. According to Batson, his
evidence indicates that perspective taking is required for altruistic motivation
since they found that high empathy subjects were much more likely than low
empathy subjects to help in easy-escape conditions (e.g., Batson 1991, p. 87;
see also Darwall 1998, p. 273). Batson’s data do, I think, provide an
important source of evidence against emotional contagion accounts, but they fall
far short of establishing that perspective taking is required for altruistic
motivation.
To
begin, it’s important to note that Batson’s experiments cannot be decisive
evidence for the perspective taking account. For the evidence
does not show that altruistic motivation is absent among those with low empathy.
A substantial minority of subjects in the low empathy conditions do help
– averaging across studies, nearly a third of the low empathy subjects helped
(Batson 1991, chap. 8). And it’s quite possible that most
of the other low empathy subjects had some altruistic motivation, but not enough
to outweigh the competing motivation to avoid the pain of electric shock.
Submitting to painful electric shock to relieve a stranger is a rather
high cost action, and it seems likely that if the altruistic option were low
cost (e.g., returning an elderly person’s books to the campus library), then
the difference between high empathy and low empathy subjects might largely
disappear.
Although
Batson’s evidence hardly counts as a decisive argument for the perspective
taking account, it does seem that the perspective taking account provides a
natural explanation for why high empathy would lead to higher altruistic
motivation. For if altruistic motivation depends on taking
the perspective of others, then increased perspective taking might increase the
motivation. However, I think that the minimalist account
provides equally good explanations for Batson’s findings. To see why, we need
to consider in a bit more detail Batson’s two central empathy manipulations:
the perspective-taking manipulation (Batson 1991, p. 120) and the similarity
manipulation (Batson 1991, p. 114). In the perspective-taking
manipulation, subjects watched a videotape of a student with broken legs.
The subjects were either told to “attend carefully to the information
presented on the tape” or to “imagine how the person interviewed felt about
what happened”. Subjects who were told to imagine the
other’s feelings were more likely than subjects in the other group to help in
the easy-escape condition. Although the perspective taking
account can explain these results, the minimalist account can explain these
results equally well. For in the high perspective-taking
conditions, subjects are more likely to focus on the other’s distress, and
they are more likely to develop elaborate representations of the other’s
distress. Thus, on the minimalist account, it is hardly
surprising that the perspective-taking manipulation facilitates altruistic
motivation, since perspective taking implicates representations of the other’s
distress. In principle, it will be hard to tease apart these
two theories using this kind of manipulation since if you increase a subject’s
perspective taking of a distressed target, you will also increase the
subject’s representations of the target’s distress.
In
Batson’s other important “empathy” manipulation, subjects were shown a
questionnaire putatively filled out by the person who would later need help.
One group of subjects saw questionnaires that expressed similar views to
those expressed on the subject’s own questionnaires. The
other group saw questionnaires that expressed dissimilar views. Batson and
colleagues found that subjects in their high-similarity group were more likely
than subjects in the low-similarity group to help in the easy-escape condition.
Batson notes that previous research by Stotland (1969) and Krebs (1975)
shows that subjects in high-similarity conditions show increased empathy.
But there is a crucial hedge on “empathy” here. What
Stotland (1969) and Krebs (1975) found was that subjects in high-similarity
conditions showed heightened physiological response and expressed more concern
for the other person. The level of perspective taking
in these tasks was not measured. Nor do the researchers
suggest that perspective taking is the crucial mechanism underlying the
response of subjects in high-similarity conditions. There is,
in fact, a large literature in social psychology suggesting that subjects are
more attracted to people they think have similar attitudes (e.g.,
Newcombe 1961; Byrne 1971), and even that people are repulsed by those
that they think have different attitudes (Rosenbaum 1986). In
light of this, it’s hard to see how Batson’s similarity manipulation could
support the perspective taking account. What his findings do
show is that we are more likely to help people who we think have similar
attitudes (for a disturbing variation on this, see Tajfel 1981). Coupled
with the data on similarity and attraction, we might conclude from this that we
are more prone to help people that we like. That’s hardly
surprising. More importantly, though, it is quite irrelevant
to whether altruistic motivation requires perspective taking.
2.6. Arguments against
perspective taking
Thus
far, we have no reason to think that altruistic motivation depends on the kind
of sophisticated mindreading suggested by perspective taking accounts.
In this section, I’ll argue that the empirical evidence actually weighs
against the perspective taking account. In trying to
determine the core architecture of a capacity, contemporary cognitive scientists
pay close attention to two sources of evidence: evidence from
development and evidence from psychopathologies. These
sources give us a glimpse into which capacities might be independent from one
another and which capacities seem to be inextricably linked. I
will argue that evidence from development and evidence from psychopathologies
both lead to the same conclusion: altruistic motivation is
independent of sophisticated mindreading abilities like perspective taking.
2.6.1. Developmental
evidence
The
discussion of altruism began with Blum’s cases of altruism in young children.
Nor are his examples atypical. Blum draws some of his
examples from a large body of literature in developmental psychology.
This research claims that we start seeing the kind of behavior
exemplified in Blum’s cases early in the second year. Radke-Yarrow,
Zahn-Waxler, & Chapman (1983) found that at 10-12 months, children didn’t
respond like the kids in Blum’s examples, but “Over the next six to eight
months the behavior changed. General agitation began to wane,
concerned attention remained prominent, and positive initiations to others in
distress began to appear” (Radke-Yarrow, Zahn-Waxler, & Chapman 1983, p.
481). In a more recent study, Zahn-Waxler & colleagues
traced the development of concern and comforting behaviors in one-year old
children. They trained mothers to record their child’s
emotional and behavioral responses to distress in others. Mothers
were also trained to simulate various distress situations. Between
13-15 months, children were reported to respond with concern to 9% of the
natural distress situations and 8% of the simulated distress situations.
Between 18-20 months, children responded with sad facial expressions or
concerned attention to 10% and 23% of natural and simulated distress situations.
And by 23-25 months, children responded this way to 25% and 27% of
natural and simulated distress situations (Zahn-Waxler et al. 1992, p. 131). So
it certainly appears that the capacity for concern or sympathy emerges before
the age of 2. Furthermore, between 18-20 months, there is a
marginally significant correlation between concern and comforting behavior, and
by 23-25 months, there is a very significant correlation between concern and
comforting behavior.
Despite
this impressive capacity for altruistic motivation, children under the age of
two have severely limited mindreading abilities. In
particular, they show deficits in the two crucial features of perspective taking
accounts. Before the age of 3 years, children are apparently
incapable of recognizing that someone else might have a different belief than
they do. The most famous result here is the young child’s
failure on the false belief task. In the classic version of
this task, Wimmer & Perner (1983) had children watch a puppet show in which
the puppet protagonist, Maxi, puts chocolate in a box and goes out to play.
While Maxi is out, his puppet mother moves the chocolate to the cupboard.
The children are asked where Maxi will look for the chocolate.
Children under the age of 4 fail this and similar tasks (see also Wellman
1990; Bartsch & Wellman 1995). And, although children
begin to pretend by around 18 months, they seem unable to use the imagination to
understand other minds until much later (see, e.g., Nichols & Stich 2000,
forthcoming). Thus, since toddlers provide core cases of altruistic motivation
and they lack the requisite perspective taking capacities, this provides a
serious prima facie argument against the perspective taking accounts.
[7]
In
fact, young children’s comforting behaviors offer a striking picture of both
altruistic motivation and limited perspective taking. The
comforting behaviors of young children tend to be “egocentric”. Hoffman
notes that young children's helping behaviors “consist chiefly of giving the
other person what they themselves find most comforting” (1982, 287).
For example, young children will offer their own blanket to a person in
distress. Hoffman offers an example of a 13-month old who
“responded with a distressed look to an adult who looked sad and then offered
the adult his beloved doll” (1982, p. 287; see also Zahn-Waxler &
Radke-Yarrow 1982, Dunn 1988, p. 97). Thus, toddlers’
comforting behavior seems to be simultaneously altruistic in motivation and
egocentric in perspective.
Although
much early altruistic behavior is guided by “egocentric” considerations,
this is perfectly compatible with the minimalist account. A common
interpretation of the fact that toddlers offer their own comfort objects is that
it shows that children don’t really understand that it is the other person who
is in distress. For instance, Hoffman (1982) claims that the
fact that children tend to give their own comfort objects to help others
indicates that “Children cannot yet fully distinguish between their own and
the other person’s inner states... and are apt to confuse them with their
own” (1982, p. 287). However, the examples of
“egocentric” comforting responses provide no reason to think that the child
fails to distinguish its own states from the states of others. On the contrary,
these responses provide evidence that the child recognizes that the other is in
distress. After all, the child is offering the comfort object
to the other person. Further, the fact that the child offers a comfort
object suggests that the child does understand that distress is involved.
Children don't try to relieve the other's distress by completely bizarre
behavior, e.g., pretending that the banana is a telephone. And there's no reason
to think that before 18 months, the child experimented with various means of
eliminating crying in others (as one might experiment with an unfamiliar piece
of electronics). However, the young child has limited mindreading resources at
hand and thus relies on egocentric mindreading strategies (Nichols & Stich
forthcoming). As a result, the child’s knowledge of how his
distress is relieved guides his thinking about how to relieve the other
person’s distress. Thus, the toddler’s egocentric comforting cases are not
only consistent with the minimalist account, the cases provide evidence
that the child in fact attributes distress to the other person.
2.6.2. Psychopathological
evidence: autism and psychopathy
In
the mindreading literature, there has been a great deal of research on the
mindreading capacities of people with autism (e.g., Baron-Cohen 1995; Frith
1989). On a wide range of mindreading tasks, autistic
children tend to perform much worse than their mental aged peers. For
instance, most autistic children fail false belief tasks long after their mental
age peers can pass such tasks (e.g., Baron-Cohen et al. 1985). In addition to
their difficulties with false belief, autistic children fail classic
perspective-taking tasks, e.g., determining which gifts would be appropriate for
which person (Dawson & Fernald 1987). Further, one of the
central characteristics of autism is lack of imaginative activities and
spontaneous pretend play (Wing & Gould 1979).
Despite
their difficulties with perspective taking and imagination, recent studies show
that autistic children are responsive to distress in others (Blair 1999;
Yirmiya et al. 1992). For instance, in one recent experiment,
autistic children were shown pictures of threatening faces and distressed faces,
and the autistic children showed the normal pattern of heightened physiological
response to both sets of stimuli (Blair 1999). Thus, although autistic children
have a deficit in perspective taking, they do respond to the distress of others.
More importantly for our purposes, a recent study suggests that autistic
individuals will engage in comforting behaviors. Sigman and colleagues (1992)
explored responses to distress in autistic, Downs Syndrome and normally
developing children. In one task, the distress was made as
salient as possible. The parent was seated next to her child
at a small table, and while showing the child how to use a hammer with a
pounding toy, the parent pretended to hurt her finger by hitting it with the
hammer. The parent then made facial and vocal expressions of
distress but didn’t utter any words (Sigman et al. 1992, 798). Researchers
found that autistic children were much less likely than other children to attend
to the distress. This fits with a broader pattern of
inattentiveness to social cues in autism. For instance, autistic children are
much less likely than Down Syndrome children to orient to someone clapping or
calling their name (Dawson et al. 1998). Despite the fact
that autistic children were less likely to notice or attend to the distress,
several autistic children provided comfort to the parent in this experiment.
Overall, few children helped, but autistic children helped as often as
the children in the other groups.
[8]
The fact that autistic children show normal physiological response to
distress in others and the finding that autistic children do engage in
comforting behaviors suggests that the core architecture for altruistic
motivation is intact in autism. This poses a serious problem for the perspective
taking account since that account predicts that individuals with serious
deficits to imagination and perspective taking would show corollary deficits to
altruistic motivation.
So, even though autistic children have a profound deficit in perspective
taking, the available evidence indicates that they have no correspondingly
serious deficit to altruistic motivation. The complementary
question is whether there are individuals who show a deficit in altruistic
motivation but no deficit to perspective taking. In fact,
it’s quite plausible that psychopaths fit this description. The
DSM IV claims that individuals with Antisocial Personality Disorder (i.e.,
psychopaths) “frequently … tend to be callous, cynical, and contemptuous of
the feelings, rights, and sufferings of others” (p. 647). “Persons
with this disorder disregard the wishes, rights, or feelings of others.
They are frequently deceitful and manipulative in order to gain personal
profit or pleasure (e.g., to obtain money, sex, or power)…. They may believe
that everyone is out to ‘help number one’ and that one should stop at
nothing to avoid being pushed around” (p. 646). Thus, the
DSM characterization of psychopathy certainly suggests that psychopaths are
significantly less likely than non-psychopaths to exhibit altruistic behavior.
Recent evidence provides an explanation for this – unlike autistic and
normal children and adults, psychopaths show little or no physiological response
to the distress of others (Blair et al. forthcoming). Blair and colleagues
(forthcoming) found that non-psychopathic criminals show about the same amount
of Skin Conductance Response to another’s distress cues as they do to
threatening stimuli. Psychopaths, on the other hand, show
significantly greater response to threatening stimuli than they do to the
distress cues of another. Further, if we look at the
standardized scores (corrected for the outliers), Blair’s results suggest
that “the psychopaths were treating the distress cue stimuli as
affectively neutral” (Blair et al. forthcoming, p. 11). Nonetheless,
evidence indicates that psychopaths are perfectly capable of perspective taking,
and that they perform as well as normal adults on standard perspective taking
tasks (Blair 1993).
Hence,
there seems to be a double dissociation between perspective taking and
altruistic motivation. Young children and autistic children
have immature or impaired perspective taking abilities, yet they seem to have
the capacity for altruistic motivation. Psychopaths, by
contrast seem to have a normal capacity for perspective taking but a severely
impaired capacity for altruistic motivation. The evidence
from development and psychopathologies thus counts heavily against the
perspective taking account. It seems that altruistic
motivation does not require sophisticated mindreading or perspective taking
abilities. And it doesn’t take any imagination to be an
altruist.
Although
there is strong evidence against the perspective-taking model, it would be
derelict to claim a quick victory for the minimalist account that I’ve
proposed. For there is a less austere alternative that is not
excluded by the evidence. By the time toddlers exhibit
comforting behaviors, they probably have the capacity to attribute desires that
they don’t have (see, e.g., Repacholi & Gopnik 1997). So
one might maintain that it is this mindreading capacity, the capacity to
attribute discrepant desires, that is essential for altruistic motivation.
This view has not been elaborated and defended in the literature, but
it’s possible that the view is close to Blum’s (1994) account. Recall
that Blum maintains that the understanding of others required for altruistic
motivation depends on understanding that others might have thoughts and feelings
that are “different from what oneself would feel in the same situation” (p.
193). He rejects more austere accounts as too
“egocentered” (p. 193).
While
this moderate “discrepant desire” position doesn’t contravene any of the
data, it’s unclear why the capacity to attribute discrepant desires (or any
other discrepant mental states) should be essential to altruistic motivation. To
see this, it’s important to distinguish between three different kinds of
egocentrism. One kind of egocentrism is just the view that an
individual’s basic motivations derive solely from that individual’s own
affective or hedonic states. We might call this view psychological
egoism. Psychological egoism might be wrong, but the
issue belongs to the foundations of cognitive science, not to moral psychology.
On the second kind of egocentrism, let’s call it ethical egocentrism,
a person is egocentric if none of the individual’s desires are directed at
another person’s needs, except insofar as the individual thinks that
addressing the other person’s needs will help him. What’s
crucial about ethical egocentrism (and what distinguishes it from simple
psychological egoism) is that if a person is ethically egocentric, he must go
through a process of instrumental reasoning before arriving at a motivation to
help another. For he must think that helping another
will benefit himself. Both of these kinds of egocentrism need
to be distinguished from a third kind of egocentrism – mindreading
egocentrism. To say that someone is egocentric in this
sense is to claim that the individual either can’t or tends not to grasp that
others have different likes and dislikes, different judgements, and different
feelings than the individual himself. Notice that ethical
egocentrism and mindreading egocentrism make quite independent claims.
A person can perfectly well be ethically egocentric without being an
egocentric mindreader. That is, a person might know that
others have different interests and beliefs than he does, but at the same time,
he might not care in the least about the interests of others, except insofar as
he thinks it will affect him. Psychopaths seem to fit this
characterization fairly well. Conversely, a person could be an egocentric
mindreader without being ethically egocentric. That is, a
person might be oblivious to the fact that others have different desires and
thoughts than she does, but she might care about trying to help others in need,
even if she doesn’t think that doing so will serve her own interests. Of
course, if she is an egocentric mindreader, she may not be very effective at
helping others, because she won’t be sensitive to the variation in desires,
feelings and thoughts that actually exist among those she tries to help.
Now, finally, we can get to the point of drawing these distinctions –
if someone is an egocentric mindreader, that provides no reason to conclude that
she lacks altruistic motivation. The kind of egocentrism that
undermines the claim for altruistic motivation is ethical egocentrism,
not mindreading egocentrism. As we’ve seen, when
toddlers offer comfort, they often offer their own comfort objects to others.
The fact that these children are using egocentric mindreading strategies
does not undermine the claim that these children are altruistically motivated.
Even if children turned out to be completely egocentric mindreaders, I
see no reason to conclude that their attempts to comfort adults with their dolls
and blankets would not be the product of altruistic motivation. Thus, although
the discrepant desire view fits with the available evidence, it’s not at all
clear why we should prefer this account to the simpler minimalist theory.
2.7. Affect and
altruistic motivation
I’ve argued that altruistic
motivation depends only on the minimal mindreading capacity for distress
attribution, but I’ve said nothing about how attributing distress to another
leads to altruistic motivation. In keeping with most other
accounts, I will assume that altruistic motivation is mediated by an affective
response (see e.g., Eisenberg 1992, Goldman 1993, Hoffman 1991). So,
on the account I’m suggesting, the attribution of distress triggers an
affective response that generates the motivation to help the person in distress.
However, there are a couple of importantly different possibilities for
the character of the affective response. One possibility is
that the representation of the other’s distress produces a distinctive emotion
of sympathy or concern for the other person and this emotion is not homologous
to the emotion of the person in need. The sympathy view has
some support from an emerging body of research which ties altruistic behavior to
a distinctive facial expression labeled “concern” (Roberts & Strayer
1996, 456; Eisenberg et al 1989, p. 58; Miller et al 1996, 213) There is also a
bit of evidence that sympathy might have distinctive physiological
characteristics (Eisenberg & Fabes 1990, p. 140; Miller et al. 1996).
Facial expression and physiological signs are the kind of features that
have been used to delineate “basic emotions” (e.g., Ekman 1992). The
exciting possibility here is that sympathy is a genuine, distinctive basic
emotion with a distinctive facial expression and physiological profile and that
this emotion is the motivation behind altruistic behavior. Darwin himself
actually made a similar suggestion: “Sympathy with the
distresses of others, even with the imaginary distresses of a heroine in a
pathetic story, for whom we feel no affection, readily excites tears….
Sympathy appears to constitute a separate or distinct emotion” (Darwin 1872,
p. 215). But Darwin seems to have had a somewhat different
notion of sympathy in mind since he thinks that we can sympathize with the
happiness of others.
The
possibility that altruistic motivation derives from a distinctive basic emotion
of sympathy is exciting, but it has turned out to be difficult to get
unequivocal data correlating the postulated features of sympathy with altruistic
behavior. There are several different measures – e.g.,
self-report, facial expressions, physiological measures. The
findings suggest that some of these features are correlated with altruistic
behavior some of the time. For example, Eisenberg & Fabes
(1990) showed preschoolers a film of children who were injured and in the
hospital, and the preschoolers were “given the opportunity to assist the needy
others by packing crayons in boxes for the hospitalized children rather than
playing with attractive toys.” (Eisenberg & Fabes 1990, p. 140).
Although children’s self-reports were unrelated to their helping
behavior, the physiological measure of sympathy (heart-rate deceleration) was
positively correlated with higher levels of helping (Eisenberg & Fabes 1990,
pp. 140-1). Further, facial expressions of concerned
attention have been significantly correlated with greater helping in boys, but
the findings are much weaker for girls (Eisenberg & Fabes 1990, p. 141).
And there is a bit of evidence that there is a correlation between these
emotions and the conditions set up in Batson-style experiments (Eisenberg et al.
1989).
Notice
that if the above account of the affect is right, sympathetic motivation for
altruism doesn’t count as empathy at all. Rather,
altruistic behavior is motivated by a distinctive emotion that is not homologous
to the emotion felt by the person in need, or indeed homologous to any other
emotion.
[9]
This would entail
that a certain class of empathy-based accounts is thoroughly mistaken.
If empathy is a vicarious feeling of the emotion that the target is
feeling (caused by perspective taking or emotional contagion), then the empathy
account is wrong not just about the mindreading involved in altruistic
motivation but also about the affect. For on the sympathy
account, the emotion driving altruistic behavior does not parallel any other
emotion. So, except in the iterative case of empathizing with
someone feeling sympathy, empathy will not produce the emotion that generates
altruistic behavior.
Although
the idea that a distinctive emotion of sympathy underlies altruism is
theoretically appealing, there is another possibility. The
distress attribution might produce a kind of second order empathic distress in
the subject. For example, representing the sorrow of the
target might lead one to feel sorrow. This would provide a
kind of empathic motivation for helping. And the motivation
would be effective even when escape is easy. For the cause of
the emotion is still the representation of the other’s mental state and as a
result, one is motivated not simply to escape the situation since that would not
rid one of the representation. As a result, this story would
provide an equally effective explanation of Batson’s data. And
some of the above research on sympathy actually provides support for this
alternative story. For instance, Eisenberg and colleagues
(1989) found that the strongest predictor of helping in adults was not facial
sympathy, but facial sadness (Eisenberg et al. 1989, 61). The available evidence
doesn’t really decide between these two accounts of the affect underlying
altruistic motivation. Indeed, perhaps both affective mechanisms are operative.
[10]
2.8. The Concern
Mechanism
For
present purposes, what is really crucial is not the character of altruistic
affect (whether it’s a distinctive emotion or homologous to some other
emotion) but the broader characterization of the cognitive mechanisms implicated
in altruistic motivation. We are now in a position to state the proposal about
the core architecture a bit more precisely. Altruistic motivation depends on a
mechanism that takes as input representations that attribute distress, e.g., John
is experiencing painful shock, and produces as output affect that inter
alia motivates altruistic behavior. To avoid the
terminological difficulties with ‘sympathy’ I’ll use a slightly less
problematic term and call this system the Concern Mechanism.
Given
this account, it’s likely that the Concern Mechanism is a “module”, on at
least some construals of modularity. To be sure, the Concern
Mechanism has many of the features of modules as set out by Fodor (1983).
It’s plausible that the mechanism is fast and that its operation is
largely mandatory. The evidence on development and psychopathology indicates
that it has a characteristic ontogeny and a characteristic pattern of breakdown.
And, on certain conceptions of modules (e.g., Baron-Cohen 1995), that
suffices for modularity. However, one additional feature that
is regarded as crucial for Fodorian modules is “encapsulation” (Fodor
1983, forthcoming), and the relationship between affective systems and
encapsulation is far from clear in the current literature. A
cognitive mechanism is encapsulated if it has little or no access to information
outside of its own proprietary database. The currently
preferred experimental methodology for demonstrating that a mechanism is
encapsulated is to show that there is information that is obviously relevant and
available in the cognitive system as a whole, but the mechanism ignores it and
thus gets the wrong answer on certain tasks (see, e.g., Hermer & Spelke
1996). This approach to arguing for encapsulation does not convert unaltered to
the study of affective systems, since it’s less clear what it is for an
affective system to make a mistake (see, e.g., D’Arms & Jacobson
forthcoming). In arguing for encapsulation, the most relevant
instances of “mistakes” of affective systems are
plausibly cases in which the affective response is resistant to practical
reason. For one of the hallmark debits of an encapsulated
system is that such systems resist our preferences: You
can’t make the Muller-Lyer illusion disappear by wanting it to go away. It’s
likely that the Concern Mechanism is similarly resistant to our preferences and
to the dictates of practical reason. We might think that it
would be best, all things considered, not to feel concern in some circumstances
when we know about another’s distress, but it’s likely that wanting not to
feel concern in these situations is often not sufficient to stop the system from
producing the affect. For instance, I might think it’s
best, all things considered, not to feel concern when my daughter gets
inoculated because any show of concern on my part might intensify her anxiety
about inoculations. Nonetheless, it might be extremely
difficult to suppress concern in these circumstances. Of
course, I don’t have any non-anecdotal evidence that the Concern Mechanism
resists preferences in this way. But if, as seems likely, the
Concern Mechanism does resist preferences and practical reason, then that
suggests that the mechanism is encapsulated to some non-trivial extent.
If
the basic story about mindreading and the Concern Mechanism is right, it has a
particularly interesting implication for the possibility of altruism in
non-human animals. For if human altruism requires so little
mindreading, it becomes quite possible that the mechanisms underlying
helping-behavior in some non-human animals are analogous to the mechanisms
underlying altruistic motivation in humans. Although it’s
hotly debated at present, some non-human animals may well have the mindreading
capacity to attribute distress to another. There is some
evidence, for instance, that chimpanzees can attribute goals (Premack &
Woodruff 1978; Uller & Nichols forthcoming). Research
also suggests that non-human primates are sensitive to a conspecific’s
distress signals (e.g., Miller et al. 1963).
Apart
from its intrinsic interest, the possibility that altruistic motivation might be
present in non-humans is of some importance to an evolutionary approach to
altruism. If altruistic motivation in humans is an adaptation that depends on
sophisticated mindreading abilities like perspective taking, then altruistic
motivation must have been shaped after the evolution of our sophisticated
mindreading abilities. If so, the mechanisms for altruistic
motivation must have emerged relatively recently in evolutionary time since, by
most accounts, humans are the only species with sophisticated mindreading
abilities. The Concern Mechanism account of altruistic
motivation, on the other hand, needn’t be committed to the view that
altruistic motivation is a recent adaptation since on this view the requisite
mindreading mechanisms are minimal and may well have been present in our more
distant phylogenetic ancestors.
In
addition to altruistic motivation, the other basic capacity of moral psychology
that has been intensively studied recently is the capacity for moral judgement.
Moral judgement has been at the center of research in moral psychology
for both philosophers and psychologists for decades. Within
psychology, this capacity has perhaps been most directly approached empirically
by exploring the basic capacity to distinguish moral violations (e.g., hitting
another person) from conventional violations (e.g., playing with your food).
This tradition in psychology began with the work of Elliott Turiel and
has flourished over the last two decades (see, e.g., Turiel 1983, Nucci 1986,
Turiel et al. 1987, Dunn & Munn 1987, Smetana & Braeges 1990, Blair
1993). However, only recently have there been attempts to
characterize the cognitive mechanisms underlying moral judgement (e.g., Blair
1995, Goldman 1993). One central question is the
extent to which moral judgement depends on the capacity for mindreading.
Blair (1995) maintains that moral judgement is independent of the
capacity for mindreading and depends on a Violence Inhibition Mechanism.
Several others (e.g., Goldman 1993, Gordon 1995, Deigh 1995) suggest that
moral judgement depends on the capacity for perspective taking. In this section,
I’ll argue that none of these theories is adequate. Rather,
I maintain that some capacity for mindreading is essential to moral judgement,
but not the sophisticated capacity for perspective taking. However,
recent evidence indicates that this can only be part of the story about moral
judgement. I maintain that moral judgement also depends on
the Concern Mechanism that is central to altruistic motivation. So,
on the account I’ll develop, moral judgement depends both on some capacity for
understanding other minds and on a certain affective mechanism.
In his influential work on moral judgement, Turiel explicitly draws on the
writings of several philosophers, including Searle, Brandt and Rawls to draw the
moral/conventional distinction. Turiel characterizes the
distinction as follows: “Conventions are part of constitutive systems and are
shared behaviors (uniformities, rules) whose meanings are defined by the
constituted system in which they are embedded” (Turiel et al 1987, p. 169).
For example, the prohibition against chewing gum in class is a conventional
rule. Moral rules, on the other hand, are “unconditionally
obligatory, generalizable, and impersonal insofar as they stem from concepts of
welfare, justice, and rights” (Turiel et al 1987, pp. 169-170). The
prohibition against pulling hair in class is an example of a moral rule.
The
research program generated by Turiel’s work indicates that people distinguish
moral violations from conventional violations along several dimensions.
One might question whether the data really show that people adhere to
Turiel’s characterization of the moral and conventional domains, but there is
no doubt that people do distinguish central examples of moral violations from
conventional violations in several ways. This is the
basic capacity that I want to explore.
3.1. Core cases of moral
judgement
Rather
than embark on an attempt to define the moral and conventional domains, the
easiest way to see the import of the data on moral judgement is to consider how
subjects distinguish between prototypical examples of moral violations and
prototypical examples of conventional violations. Hitting
another person is a prototypical example of a moral violation used in these
studies. For instance, in Smetana & Braeges, subjects are
shown a colored drawing and told “This child is hitting this child” (Smetana
& Braeges 1990, p. 334). Other frequently used examples
of moral violations are pulling hair, stealing, and pushing another child.
The examples of conventional violations that have been studied are much
more varied. Some of the examples are violations of school
rules, e.g., not paying attention during storytime or talking out of turn.
Some of the examples are violations of etiquette, e.g., drinking soup out
of a bowl. Other examples are violations of family rules,
e.g., not clearing one’s dishes. What is striking about
this literature is that, from a young age, children distinguish the cases of
moral violations from the conventional violations on a number of dimensions. For
instance, children tend to think that moral transgressions are generally less
permissible and more serious than conventional transgressions. And
the explanations for why moral transgressions are wrong are given in terms of
fairness and harm to victims, whereas the explanation for why conventional
transgressions are wrong is given in terms of social acceptability. Further,
conventional rules, unlike moral rules, are viewed as dependent on authority.
For instance, if at another school the teacher has no rule against
chewing gum, children will judge that it’s not wrong to chew gum at that
school; but even if the teacher at another school has no rule against hitting,
children claim that it’s still wrong to hit. Indeed, a
fascinating study on Amish teenagers indicates that moral judgements are not
even regarded as dependent on God’s authority. Nucci (1986) found that
100% of a group of Amish teenagers said that if God had made no rule against
working on Sunday, it would not be wrong to work on Sunday. However,
more than 80% of these subjects said that even if God had made no rule about
hitting, it would still be wrong to hit. These findings on the
moral/conventional distinction have turned out to be quite robust. They
have been replicated numerous times using a wide variety of stimuli (see Turiel
et al. 1987 and Smetana 1993 for reviews). Thus, it seems
that, like the capacity for altruistic motivation, the capacity for drawing the
moral/conventional distinction is part of basic moral psychology.
Most
of the above research on the moral/conventional distinction has focused on moral
violations that involve harming others, and that will be my main focus as well.
However, it’s clear that harm-centered violations do not exhaust the
moral domain. To take one obvious example, adults in our
society make moral judgements about distributive justice that have little direct
bearing on harm. Furthermore, recent evidence indicates that the moral domain
may not even be cross-culturally stable (e.g., Miller et al. 1990; Haidt et al.
1993). In a clever study by John Haidt and colleagues, they found that on
several different dimensions, low-SES subjects treated disgusting actions (e.g.,
eating your dog or having sex with a dead chicken) as they did moral violations,
whereas high-SES subjects did not treat disgusting actions in this way (Haidt et
al. 1993). Thus, Haidt and colleagues suggest that it is parochial to think that
harm is central to drawing the moral/conventional distinction (e.g., Haidt et
al. 1993, p. 625). However, although there may be some
relativity in the moral domain, the cross-cultural work also indicates that in
all cultures, canonical examples of moral violations involve harming others
(see, e.g., Hollos et al. 1983; Nucci et al. 1983; Song et al. 1987). Indeed,
even Haidt and colleagues found that the different SES groups did not show a
difference in their judgements about violations involving harm – e.g., they
thought that a girl who pushes a boy off a swing should be punished or stopped.
Thus,
even though the moral/conventional distinction seems to show up in violations
that do not involve harm, it’s quite plausible that judgements about
harm-based violations constitute an important core of moral judgement. For the
appreciation of harm-based violations shows up early ontogenetically (as we will
see in section 3.3), and it seems to be cross-culturally universal. Brian Scholl
and Alan Leslie make a related point about theory of mind (Scholl & Leslie
1999). They note that, although there are cross-cultural
differences in theory of mind, all cultures seem to share a core theory of mind
which emerges early ontogenetically, what they call “early theory of mind”
(p. 14 [ms]). Something similar might be said about the
findings on moral judgement – although there may be cross-cultural differences
in moral judgement, the evidence indicates that all cultures share an important
core, what we might call “early moral judgement”. The
capacity to distinguish harm-based moral violations from conventional violations
seems to be an important part of this early moral judgement, and this will be
the sense of “moral judgement” that is intended throughout this paper.
3.2. Blair’s
VIM-account
Armed with a dazzling series of experiments, James Blair has developed
the most detailed cognitive account of moral judgement in the recent literature.
Blair maintains that moral judgement derives from the activation of a
Violence Inhibition Mechanism (VIM). The idea for VIM comes
from Lorenz’ (1966) suggestion that social animals like canines have evolved
mechanisms to inhibit intra-species aggression. When a
conspecific displays submission cues, the attacker stops. Blair
suggests that there's something analogous in our cognitive systems, the VIM, and
that this mechanism is the basis for our capacity to distinguish moral from
conventional violations. On Blair’s account the process seems to go as
follows. The VIM is triggered by distress cues or by
associations to distress cues; this VIM activation is experienced as aversive;
and events that activate VIM are accordingly judged as bad (Blair 1993, 83, 88;
Blair 1995, 7).
[11]
One important feature of Blair’s account is that it proposes that moral judgement is independent of other capacities including, crucially, the capacity for mindreading. According to Blair, since VIM is independent of mindreading capacities, one can draw the moral/conventional distinction even if one lacks the ability to represent mental states. Blair tries to support this claim by appealing to his data on autism. As noted earlier Blair (1999; see also Yirmiya et al. 1992) found that autistic children do show normal physiological responses to distress cues. Blair also found that autistic children were able to make the moral/conventional distinction. For instance, autistic children judged that conventional rules are more modifiable than moral rules (Blair 1996, p. 577). Further, although some autistic children do pass the false belief task, Blair notes that in his experiment, “level of ability on false belief tasks is not associated with the tendency to distinguish moral and conventional transgressions” (Blair 1996, p. 577). Blair suggests that this evidence shows that the capacity for mindreading or ‘mentalizing’ is entirely dissociated from the capacity to draw the moral/conventional distinction: “Children with autism have been demonstrated to be incapable of ‘mentalizing’ (e.g., Baron-Cohen, Leslie & Frith 1985)” and so, they are incapable of “forming a representation of the mental state of the other” (Blair 1995, 22). He maintains that his VIM theory explains how autistic children can make the moral/conventional distinction even though they can’t mentalize: “While children with autism may not be able to represent a mental state of another's distress, this distress, as a visual or aural cue, will activate their VIM” (Blair 1995, 22).
Blair’s
VIM proposal has several shortcomings. First, Blair's attack on the role of
mindreading is unconvincing. Claiming that autistic children can’t
“mentalize” or that they can’t represent the mental states of others
overstates their deficit. There is reason to think that
autistic children can represent some mental states. Autistic
children can attribute perceptual states to others, e.g., they can specify which
object another person will identify as “in front” (Tan & Harris 1991).
Further, autistic children are capable of attributing simple desires and
emotions (e.g., Tan & Harris 1991; Yirmiya et al. 1992). They understand
that people can have different desires and “that someone who gets what he
wants will feel happy, and someone else who does not get what he wants will feel
sad” (Baron-Cohen 1995, 63). Furthermore, studies of
spontaneous language use in autistic children indicate that these children use
the term ‘want’ appropriately and often (Tager-Flusberg 1993). Thus
there is good reason to think that the capacity for attributing desires is
largely intact in autistic children (see also Nichols & Stich forthcoming).
As a result, the fact that these children can distinguish moral from
conventional violations does not provide evidence that the capacity for making
this distinction is entirely independent from mindreading.
Not
only is Blair’s rejection of mindreading in moral judgement unsupported,
Blair’s no-mindreading account faces serious problems. First, it’s not clear
how VIM-activation is related to moral judgement. On the most
obvious reading of the proposal, the idea is that distress cues activate VIM and
when VIM is activated, it produces aversive experience that leads to the
judgement that the event which caused VIM-activation is morally bad.
But if this is the proposal, it seems obviously wrong. For
the class of moral violations is clearly not the same as the class of events
that trigger the Blair’s VIM. On Blair’s theory, the VIM
is triggered by distress cues. But in many cases, we see
distress cues and have aversive experience without drawing moral judgements.
For instance, when we witness victims of a natural disaster or when we
see people accidentally hurt themselves or others, we often have an aversive
response to the distress cues. But in at least many of these
cases, we do not draw moral judgements. We don’t, for
instance, judge that the person committed a moral violation by tripping on a
rock. In addition, we often have aversive experience on
perceiving obviously superficial signs of distress. Blair’s
own method for testing for VIM is to show subjects a photograph of a crying
child, and if subjects show heightened physiological response, that indicates
VIM-activation (Blair 1999). This strategy would presumably
work just as well if paintings were used rather than photographs. So,
VIM can be activated whether or not one believes that the other person is in
distress. Indeed, this is crucial for Blair’s view on
autism and moral judgement. According to Blair, even though
autistic children cannot represent distress, they have an intact VIM, and this
is the basis for their capacity for moral judgement. However,
the production of artificial distress cues (e.g., by playing a tape of simulated
crying) is not commonly taken to be a moral violation. Even
though artificial distress cues can lead to aversive experience, such
experiences will not lead us to make moral judgements if we don’t think that
someone has actually been caused distress.
So,
VIM can’t do all the work of picking out the class of moral violations.
For in cases of natural disasters, accidents, and artificial distress
cues, the VIM will be activated but we will not draw a moral judgement.
Perhaps the most plausible way to remedy this problem is to maintain that
there is a body of information about which events count as moral transgressions,
and this body of information excludes the non-moral cases. However,
the most obvious way to exclude the problematic cases would appeal to facts
about whether someone is really being caused distress and whether the distress
is caused intentionally. But, of course, Blair can’t appeal
to these sorts of strategies since they clearly implicate the capacity for
mindreading. As a result, it’s quite unclear how the VIM
account could explain moral judgement without appealing to the capacity for
mindreading. And since Blair’s argument from autism is unconvincing, there’s
no reason to adopt that problematic position.
In
addition to the difficulty of explaining how VIM can subserve moral judgement
without mindreading, there’s a further problem with the VIM part of Blair’s
proposal. For it’s not at all clear that VIM, as Blair
characterizes it, exists. Blair adopts Lorenz’s view that animals in some
social species have a mechanism designed to inhibit aggression in response to
submission cues, and Blair maintains that an analogous mechanism is present in
humans. However, Lorenz’ account of the
aggression-inhibition mechanism is now widely rejected on evolutionary grounds.
According to Lorenz, the mechanism for inhibiting aggression evolved
because having such a mechanism would benefit the species, which would otherwise
lose many of its members (Lorenz 1966). Thus the view is
committed to an untenably strong form of group selection (see, e.g., Williams
1966). A more widely accepted view of submission cues and the
responses they elicit is that such cues play a crucial role in establishing rank
within a group (e.g., Tomasello & Call 1997). For
example, even in the absence of an attack, a submission cue from a rival male
chimpanzee will lead to reconciliation between the chimpanzees (see, e.g., de
Waal 1996). But of course, if this work in comparative
psychology is right, the mechanism that happens to cause violence inhibition
does not have violence inhibition in response to distress cues as its special
purpose or core function. Indeed, there well may be no
special purpose mechanism for aggression inhibition in any animal.
So,
Blair’s VIM account of moral judgement has some serious flaws. His claim that
mindreading isn’t required for moral judgement is unsupported, and it’s
quite unclear how VIM is supposed to underwrite moral judgement without recourse
to mindreading. Indeed, there’s reason to doubt that VIM
even exists.
3.3. Perspective-taking
accounts of moral judgement
Since Blair’s no-mindreading account
of moral judgement is pretty clearly inadequate, we need to explore which
mindreading capacities might be required for moral judgement. Unfortunately,
the positive proposals about mindreading in moral judgement have not been nearly
so crisp as Blair’s account. But there are some hints in
the literature that perspective taking is required for moral judgement.
After sketching empathy as perspective taking, Goldman cites Schopenhauer
as an advocate of the view that empathy is “the source of moral principles”
(1993, p. 355). One plausible interpretation of this is that
perspective taking is essential for moral judgement, at least if we construe
“moral judgement” broadly. Certainly, the view that perspective taking is
vital to moral judgement (broadly construed) has deep roots in developmental
psychology stretching back to Piaget. More recently, the view
has been elaborated in philosophy by John Deigh (1995). Deigh
claims that in order to grasp right and wrong in the deeper sense, one needs
mature empathy, which involves inter alia, “taking this other
person’s perspective and imagining the feelings of frustration or anger”
(Deigh 1995, p. 758). Robert Gordon offers a more
sophisticated strategy for determining whether an action is wrong, suggesting
that we “imagine being in X’s situation, once with the further adjustments
required to imagine being X in that X’s situation and once without these
adjustments. If your response is the same in each case,
approve X’s conduct; if not, disapprove” (Gordon 1995, p. 741).
Now,
surely people sometimes use perspective taking in making moral evaluations.
And the above authors aren’t sufficiently precise about which kinds of
moral judgements depend on perspective taking to allow us to determine whether
they would maintain that the basic capacity to make the moral/conventional
distinction depends on perspective taking. But the work on
the moral/conventional distinction currently provides the clearest way to
explore the basic capacity for moral judgement, so it will be of interest to see
how a perspective taking account of this capacity fares against the evidence in
any case.
3.4. Arguments against
perspective taking
As
noted, it’s not at all clear whether Goldman (1993), Gordon (1995) or Deigh
(1995) are committed to the view that drawing the moral/conventional distinction
depends on the capacity for perspective taking. There is
certainly no systematic argument in the recent literature for the view that
perspective taking is required for drawing the moral/conventional distinction.
[12]
But it is much
clearer that any attempt to defend that position will face some serious
obstacles.
3.4.1. Developmental
evidence
Not
surprisingly, we don’t find a full-blown moral/conventional distinction at the
age when children begin engaging in altruistic behavior. On
everyone’s account (except, perhaps, Blair’s), the capacity to draw the
moral/conventional distinction is more cognitively demanding than the capacity
to be concerned about another. Nonetheless, children begin to appreciate
features of the moral/conventional distinction surprisingly early. Smetana
& Braeges (1990) found that at 2 years and 10 months, children already
tended to think that moral violations (but not conventional violations)
generalized across contexts when asked, “At another school, is it OK (or not
OK) to X?” (p. 336). Further, according to Smetana and
Braeges, after factoring in corrections for language, the results suggest that
children generalize moral violations in this way shortly after the 2nd
birthday, and they recognize that conventional violations but not moral
violations are contingent on authority at 2 years and 10 months (Smetana &
Braeges 1990, p. 342). So, there are some pretty impressive
indications that young children can make these distinctions in controlled
experimental settings. In addition, studies of children in
their normal interactions suggest that from a young age, they respond
differentially to moral violations and social violations (e.g., Dunn & Munn
1987; Smetana 1989). The developmental evidence thus provides
some reason to be skeptical of the perspective taking account. Although
at 2 years and 10 months, children have some mindreading capacities, their
perspective taking abilities are still quite limited. It’s
especially unlikely that they are able to determine the other’s beliefs and
desires and then pretend to have those beliefs and desires.
3.4.2. Psychopathological
evidence: autism and psychopathy
The
evidence on children is hardly conclusive, but Blair’s evidence on autism and
moral judgement is rather more compelling against perspective taking accounts.
Although Blair overstates the deficits found in autism, he is right to
note that the data on autism pose a significant problem for perspective taking
proposals (Blair 1993). For there is no doubt that autistic
children have deficits in perspective-taking and other sophisticated mindreading
capacities. Hence, Blair’s data on autistic children suggest that
sophisticated mindreading abilities are not required to draw the
moral/conventional distinction. Since imagination is impaired in autism, the
data also indicate that the capacity to draw the moral/conventional distinction
does not depend on imagining oneself to be in the other’s situation.
Again,
we might wonder whether there are individuals who can engage in perspective
taking but fail to distinguish moral from conventional violations. Blair’s
work suggests that this is the case in psychopathy. Blair
tested psychopaths’ capacity to make the moral/conventional distinction by
exploring their understanding of a variety of violations (e.g., one child
hitting another child; two children talking in class) (Blair 1995, pp. 16-17).
Since the pool of psychopaths was drawn from a prison population, Blair
used non-psychopathic prison inmates as a control. Blair used found that control
criminals made a significant moral/conventional distinction on permissibility,
seriousness and authority dependence; psychopaths, on the other hand, didn't
make a significant moral/conventional distinction on any of these dimensions.
Further, the psychopaths were much less likely than the control criminals
to justify rules with reference to the victim's welfare. Rather,
psychopaths typically gave conventional-type justifications for all
transgressions.
[13]
Although psychopaths have difficulty
with the moral/conventional distinction, as we saw above, psychopaths seem to
have no serious deficiency in perspective taking (Blair 1993).
Thus,
the empirical evidence suggests that the capacity to distinguish moral from
conventional violations does not depend on the capacity to engage in perspective
taking. Furthermore, as with altruistic motivation,
it’s unclear why the basic capacity for moral judgement should depend on the
capacity to understand that others might have beliefs and desires that are
different from those oneself would have in the same situation. One of the ways
that children distinguish moral violations from conventional violations is by
claiming that moral violations are universally wrong. It’s
always wrong to pull hair; it’s always wrong to steal from another; and it’s
always wrong to hit. Of course, as adults, we know that these
particular claims are oversimplified -- for example, perhaps it’s not wrong to
hit a masochist under certain conditions. Most children don’t know about
masochists; they assume that everyone has the desire not to be hit. But
it would be perverse to think that, because the child doesn’t appreciate that
others might have different desires in this domain, the child isn’t really
drawing the moral/conventional distinction.
Thus,
the empirical evidence suggests that the capacity to distinguish moral from
conventional violations does not depend on the capacity to engage in perspective
taking. Leaning on the earlier proposal about
altruistic motivation, I suggest that the capacity for drawing the
moral/conventional distinction in these tasks depends on only minimal
mindreading including, crucially, the capacity to attribute distress to others.
So, the idea is that a subject must have the capacity to attribute
distress in order to have the capacity to distinguish conventional violations
from moral violations in the classic tasks. However, on the
minimalist account, drawing the moral/conventional distinction does not require
the capacity for perspective taking.
I
hasten to add that I’m not claiming that the capacity to attribute distress is
sufficient for the capacity to draw the moral/conventional distinction.
On the contrary, it’s likely that young children have a considerable
body of information guiding their judgements about moral violations, a normative
“theory”. One crucial feature of this body of information about moral
violations is that it probably can’t be captured by a simple rule like an
action is wrong if it causes distress. Clearly sometimes
a person can cause distress without eliciting negative moral judgements.
For example, some actions of dentists probably fit this description.
Pre-school children do understand that causing distress isn’t always
wrong. So it’s likely that there is a body of information
that provides the basis for distinguishing wrongful harm from acceptable harm,
and this may be present quite early in development. The
important point for our purposes is that this body of information, this
normative theory, depends on a minimal capacity for mindreading. Hence,
the capacity for minimal mindreading is necessary for the capacity for
early moral judgement.
Although
the evidence on development and autism poses a serious problem for the
perspective taking account, that evidence fits comfortably with the
minimal-mindreading account. By the time children distinguish
moral and conventional violations, they are certainly capable of distress
attribution. And as noted earlier, it’s likely that,
despite their deficits in perspective taking, autistic children are capable of
distress attribution. Further, appealing to minimal
mindreading capacities will suffice to avoid the problems that arose for
Blair’s outright rejection of the role of mindreading in moral judgement. For
it only requires minimal mindreading to have the capacity to distinguish
accidents from intentional actions and to distinguish superficial distress cues
from real distress cues.
3.6. The Concern
Mechanism and moral judgement
Although
the minimalist account captures much of the data better than the alternative
proposals, the minimalist account alone, like the perspective taking account,
provides no explanation for Blair’s finding that psychopaths fail to draw the
moral/conventional distinction. Clearly, psychopaths have the
capacity for minimal mindreading, so their apparent inability to draw the
moral/conventional distinction requires some other explanation. Blair’s own
explanation is that psychopaths lack VIM. He found that
psychopaths showed significantly less physiological response to distress in
others than autistic children and normal adults (Blair et al. forthcoming), and
he uses this as evidence that VIM is absent in psychopaths. However,
it’s not clear how the absence of VIM in psychopaths would explain their
performance on the moral judgement task. Furthermore as
argued above, it’s not clear that VIM exists in anyone.
A
more plausible interpretation of these data, as argued in section 2, is that the
Concern Mechanism is defective in psychopathy. On this
interpretation, Blair’s findings suggest that there is a correlation between
lacking the Concern Mechanism and failing to draw the moral/conventional
distinction. Hence, a prima facie plausible hypothesis is
that the Concern Mechanism plays a crucial role in the capacity to draw the
moral/conventional distinction on these tasks. But, of
course, this does not address how the Concern Mechanism might be
implicated in drawing the moral/conventional distinction. I’ll
offer a tentative and speculative suggestion in what follows.
To
give a detailed account of the relation between affective mechanisms and moral
judgement would require a serious consideration of the philosophical treatments
of moral discourse. There is a huge body of literature in
metaethics on this topic (see, e.g., the essays in Darwall et al. 1997), and I
couldn’t possibly do justice to the issue in the present context. Rather,
I want to try to explain the crucial difference between the responses of
psychopaths and control criminals in Blair’s moral judgement experiments
(1995). Notice that the difference between psychopaths and
control criminals is not that psychopaths don’t grasp normative
judgements at all. In some sense, psychopaths know the
difference between right and wrong. They correctly note that
the child shouldn’t talk out of turn or hit another child. What
they fail to do is distinguish between these two kinds of normative judgements.
That is, what Blair’s findings indicate is that, while psychopaths know
the difference between right and wrong, they don’t appreciate the difference
between (conventional) wrong and (moral) wrong.
By
Blair’s reckoning, the telling feature about the psychopaths’ performance is
that they offer conventional-type justifications for moral violations rather
than justifications in terms of harm to the victim (Blair 1995, 24).
But presumably psychopaths are well aware of the fact that hitting
another falls under the general category of harm-based violations. For
instance, if you presented psychopaths with a novel case of causing harm to
another, they would likely be able to generalize and say that it’s wrong.
Similarly, control criminals are well aware that hurting others is
socially discouraged. So both control criminals and
psychopaths presumably have available to them both social-convention
explanations and harm-based explanations of the moral violations. Yet
when asked why it’s wrong to hit another child, control criminals and
psychopaths offer different explanations. Why is that?
To answer this question, I think we need to appeal to a bit of
pragmatics. For Gricean reasons (the first maxim of Quantity,
to be precise [Grice 1975, 45]), we can expect subjects to try to give the most
informative answer appropriate to the question. For the
control criminals (and other non-psychopaths), the Concern Mechanism gives a
special salience and priority to distress in others. As a
result, when control criminals are asked why it’s wrong to hit another child,
the fact that distress in others activates the Concern Mechanism leads them to
explain the wrongness in terms of the victim’s distress. Again,
the control criminals know perfectly well that hitting others is socially
discouraged, but their emotional response to distress leads them to appeal to
the victim’s distress as a more informative or deeper explanation for their
judgement. For psychopaths, on the other hand, since they don’t have an intact
Concern Mechanism, the distress of others does not have the special salience it
does for the control criminals; so for the psychopaths, the most informative
explanation that is appropriate to the question is the social-convention
explanation. Again, this does not mean that the psychopaths
are unaware of the fact that the general category that is discouraged is the
category of harming others. However, lacking an intact
Concern Mechanism for processing distress attributions, they presumably regard
the social-convention explanation as more informative than the fact that the
transgression involves harming. Thus, I suggest that the
Concern Mechanism plays an essential role in distinguishing conventional
violations from moral violations.
[14]
This
account has an important parallel with part of Blair’s account. Blair
argues that his data on moral judgement show that there is a double dissociation
between VIM and Theory of Mind tout court (e.g., Blair 1995).
I think that this is almost right – his data do suggest an important
double dissociation. But it’s not between VIM and Theory of
Mind tout court. Rather, the apparent double
dissociation is between the Concern Mechanism and a certain class of mindreading
abilities that includes perspective taking. Psychopaths seem
to have sophisticated mindreading capacities, including the capacity for
perspective taking, but they apparently lack the Concern Mechanism. Autistic
children, by contrast, lack the requisite mechanisms to solve a wide range of
theory of mind and perspective taking tasks. However, they
apparently have an intact Concern Mechanism.
Appealing
to the Concern Mechanism here has some significant advantages over Blair’s
appeal to VIM. For it is doubtful that humans actually have a
VIM. As noted above, recent work in comparative psychology
makes it unclear whether any species actually has a special purpose
mechanism for aggression inhibition. By contrast, the evidence from altruism
indicates that Concern Mechanism is present in humans. Further,
since the Concern Mechanism is tied to altruistic motivation rather than
violence inhibition, the Concern Mechanism account need not be connected to the
implausible group selection story associated with VIM. Rather,
to determine the evolutionary function of the Concern Mechanism, we can rely on
the much more promising work on the evolutionary function of altruistic
motivation (e.g., Frank 1988).
On
the model of moral judgement that I’ve suggested, then, there are two quite
different mechanisms underlying moral judgement. First, there
is a body of information, a normative “theory” that underlies moral
judgement, and this theory depends on minimal mindreading capacities, including
the capacity to attribute distress. Second, there is a
Concern Mechanism, which takes attributions of distress as input and produces as
output an affective response that, inter alia, motivates altruistic
behavior. In order to make the kinds of moral judgements that
are explored via the moral/conventional task, both mechanisms must be intact.
My
focus in this section has been to give an empirically adequate account of the
cognitive mechanisms underlying moral judgement. But it’s
important to note that the account of moral judgement I’ve offered, if right,
would have significant ramifications for meta-ethics. Although
the issues are subtle and complex, one of the abiding concerns in moral
philosophy is the extent to which moral judgement depends on desire or emotions
(See, e.g., Smith 1995; Darwall et al. 1997). If the account
I’ve developed here is close to right, it suggests that there is a
surprisingly direct relationship between the emotions and a basic form of moral
judgement. Individuals who lack certain kinds of emotional
responses fail to make certain basic kinds of moral judgements. Hence,
if the account I’ve offered is right, the empirical evidence provides a new
argument for the Humean view that moral judgement depends on the passions.
At this point, the research on mindreading and moral psychology suggests a strikingly simple model of the core architecture underlying basic moral psychology. The evidence on altruistic motivation and the evidence on moral judgement converge, I’ve argued, suggesting that there is a single mechanism, the Concern Mechanism, that is implicated in both capacities. Further, I’ve maintained that altruistic motivation and moral judgement depend on only minimal mindreading capacities. Of course, the account I’ve offered in this paper is hardly a full account of the cognitive mechanisms implicated in moral psychology. The network of capacities underlying mature moral psychology is no doubt magnificently complex, and I have only tried to sketch one piece of this puzzle. These are early days for the study of moral psychology in philosophy of mind and cognitive science, but the growing body of work gives us every reason to be optimistic that this approach will deeply enrich our understanding of our moral capacities and their origins.
Acknowledgements:
I would
like to thank Trisha Folds-Bennett, James Blair, Justin D'Arms, Dan Jacobson,
Chris Knapp, Jaime Leiser, Ron Mallon, Elizabeth Ronquillo, and Steve Stich for
discussion and comments on earlier versions of this paper. This research was
supported by NIH grant PHST32MH19975.
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[1]
Of course, some might claim that
this begs the question since there may be no genuine cases of altruism. For
instance, Sober & Wilson (1998) suggest that ‘altruistic’ desires
driven by empathy or sympathy might not be truly altruistic since the
desires may be instrumental rather than “ultimate”: “Perhaps empathy
and sympathy are able to evoke altruistic desires because people don’t
like experiencing these emotions and therefore wish to do what they can to
extinguish them” (232). However, since the present goal is to outline
actual cognitive architecture, we must look at actual cases of human
motivation, and if no actual cases meet with Sober & Wilson’s notion
of altruism, that just means that Sober & Wilson’s notion is not
useful for charting the cognitive architecture.
[2]
Actually, Batson addresses a
somewhat broader category, the “aversive-arousal reduction” model of
altruism, according to which “becoming empathically aroused by witnessing
someone in need is aversive and evokes motivation to reduce this aversive
arousal” (Batson 1991, 109). Emotional contagion
provides perhaps the most obvious mechanism for producing
aversive arousal, and the emotional contagion model outlined here is a
version of the aversive-arousal model.
[3]
Although Batson’s work has been
widely known and discussed in psychology for over a decade, philosophers
have only recently come to appreciate its significance (Darwall 1998; Sober
& Wilson 1998).
[4]
Darwall (1998) uses Batson’s
evidence to shore up the view that sympathy presents a categorical
justification for preventing another’s woe. Sympathy,
according to Darwall, connects us to ‘person-neutral value’:
sympathetic
concern presents itself as of, not just some harm or disvalue to
another person, but also the neutral disvalue of this personal harm
owing to the value of the person himself. In feeling sympathy for the child,
we perceive the impending disaster as not just terrible for him, but as
neutrally bad in a way that gives anyone a reason to prevent it.
We experience the child’s plight as mattering categorically because
we experience the child as mattering... sympathy’s emotional presentation
is as of the neutral disvalue of another’s woe, and hence, as of a
categorical justification for preventing it (p. 275).
However,
whether sympathy presents itself this way is not shown by any of Batson’s
data. What the social psychological evidence (and
commonsense) suggests is that our emotional response to a child’s plight
prompts us to help the child rather than flee. So the
person in need does play a crucial role here. But one
would need quite different evidence to show that people think that a
child’s plight gives anyone reason to help the child. It’s
important to distinguish here between what people expect others to do
and what people think is categorically justified. It’s
probably true that most people expect others to be moved by the
plight of children (as we tend to expect others to share many of our
attitudes [Nichols & Stich forthcoming]); however, it’s not clear that
most people think that a child’s suffering matters categorically.
As far as I know, there is simply no evidence on this issue, and
it’s quite possible that there is considerable variance on the issue
across individuals and across cultures.
[5]
I’m focusing on distress, but
this is merely for ease of exposition. I don’t mean to exclude the
possibility that representations of other negative affective states (e.g.,
grief, fear, sorrow) will produce altruistic motivation.
[6]
Of course, like the
perspective-taking account, this is only a partial account of altruistic
motivation, since it doesn’t explain the process that goes from
mindreading to motivation. As will be discussed below
(2.7), on both the perspective-taking account and the minimalist account, a
natural assumption is that the representations generated by mindreading
produce an affective response that produces the motivation.
[7]
Of course, one might deny that
toddler comforting behaviors count as core cases of altruism. Rather,
one might claim that such cases should be construed as ersatz altruism.
However, one would need an argument for excluding these cases.
For if we focus on the underlying motivation, the evidence suggests
that altruistic concern in toddlers is continuous with altruistic concern in
later childhood and adulthood (e.g., Zahn-Waxler et al. 1992; Eisenberg
& Fabes 1990; Eisenberg et al. 1989).
[8]
6 out of 29 autistic children
helped; 7 out of 30 mentally retarded children helped; and 3 out of 30
normally developing children helped (Sigman et al. 1992, 800).
[9]
As we saw in section 1.2, Sober
& Wilson (1998, pp. 234-5) maintain that sympathy doesn’t require that
the sympathizer and the target feel the same emotion simultaneously.
But that doesn’t really distinguish sympathy from sophisticated
accounts of empathy. The psychological work, however,
really does raise the possibility of a profound distinction. Feelings
of sympathy may not parallel any other feeling.
[10]
Another possibility is that affect
plays no role in altruistic motivation. Rather, perhaps
altruistic motivation follows directly from an attribution of distress.
Something like this might be Sober & Wilson’s view (1998, pp.
312 ff.). They suggest that evolution built a mechanism
for altruistic motivation that does not rely on hedonic or affective states.
However, they do not explain how that mechanism might have evolved in
the existing motivational systems of our ancestors. The
standard models of motivation in psychology are ‘hot’ models, on which
affect plays the central role in basic motivation (see, e.g., Kunda 1999).
To make a ‘tepid’ model of altruistic motivation plausible would
require a broader defense of the idea of tepid basic motivation.
Furthermore, there is some evidence suggesting important correlations
between affect and altruistic behavior. As we’ve seen,
the developmental data suggest a correlation between affective response and
helping behavior in children, and the social psychological data suggest a
similar correlation in adults. In addition, the evidence
on psychopaths indicates that their lack of helping behavior might be
correlated with a deficit to the capacity for responding to others’
distress.
[11]
Blair writes that the activation
of VIM produces an aversive experience and that it is “this sense of
aversion to the moral transgression” that results in the act being
“judged as bad” (1995, p. 7; see also 1993, p. 83).
[12]
There are arguments about
perspective taking and moral judgement (broadly construed) in the older
developmental literature. This tradition developed
detailed models and collected extensive data on perspective taking and moral
reasoning (e.g., Piaget 1932, Kohlberg 1984, Selman 1980, Damon 1977; for a
useful review of this tradition, see Flanagan 1991). But
the arguments are for the somewhat different claim that as perspective
taking abilities improve, so do moral reasoning abilities. That
does not, of course, show that perspective-taking abilities are required for
drawing the moral/conventional distinction. In addition,
even in this tradition it is not clear that perspective taking drives moral
reasoning capacities. For example, Kurdek (1980) was surprised when his
results suggested the opposite: “The present results indicate that the
preponderance of causation was in the direction of children’s early moral
judgement abilities operating as a cause of their latter cognitive
perspective taking ability.... the preponderance of causality seemed to be
in the direction of moral judgement causing later developments in cognitive
perspective taking” (1980, p. 116, 118).
[13]
Although psychopaths failed to
draw the moral/conventional distinction, they did so in a surprising way.
Contrary to Blair’s predictions, psychopaths rated both moral and
conventional transgressions as impermissible, serious and not dependent on
authority. Thus, it may seem that psychopaths regard all
transgressions as moral. However, Blair notes, with some
plausibility, that the important feature is that the justifications offered
for why the moral transgressions are wrong were consonant with
conventional-type justifications (Blair 1995, 24). According to Blair, whose
subjects were British, a typical justification was “it’s not the done
thing” (personal communication).
[14] It’s important to note that I am not making a conceptual claim here. A great deal of work in ethics focuses on the idea that it’s conceptually possible that someone might have mastery of moral concepts without having any concomitant motivation to act morally or any concern for others. I think this is perfectly right and of some significance for evaluating certain moral rationalist claims (Nichols MS). However, the issue in the present paper is the empirical question – what mechanisms are in fact involved in moral judgement. My claim is that the Concern Mechanism is in fact implicated in normal moral judgement. The fact that it’s conceptually possible for an amoralist to be fluent with moral discourse (or to be trained to be so