Norms-like Patterns

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Norms-like Patterns

step 1

change the question

Greene et al’s question:

‘We developed this theory in response to a long-standing philosophical puzzle known as the trolley problem’

(Greene, 2015, p. 203; see Greene, 2023)

Which factors influence responses to dilemmas?

Waldmann, Nagel, & Wiegmann (2012, p. 288) offers a brief summary of some factors which have been considered to influence including:

- whether an agent is part of the danger or a bystander;

- whether an action involves forceful contact with a victim;

- whether an action targets an object or the victim;

- how the victim is described (Waldmann et al., 2012).

- whether there are irrelevant alternatives (Wiegmann, Horvath, & Meyer, 2020);

- order of presentation (Schwitzgebel & Cushman, 2015);

Wiegmann et al. (2020) show that they are subject to irrelevant additional options: like lay people, philosophers will more readily endorsing killing one person to save nine when given five alternatives than when given six alternatives. (These authors also demonstrate order-of-presentation effects.) This is not mentioned in Waldmann et al. (2012, p. 288)

‘almost all these confounding factors influence judgments, along with a number of others’

(Waldmann et al., 2012, pp. 288–90).

Given this, it is hard to make predictions about how time pressure might skew judgements.

‘almost all these confounding factors influence judgments, along with a number of others [...] The research suggests that various moral and nonmoral factors interact in the generation of moral judgments about dilemmas’

(Waldmann et al., 2012, pp. 288–90).

I might be wrong about this. Greene offers a spirited defense in his 2023 paper (Greene, 2023), although this does not mention Waldmann et al. (2012) and I don’t recall there being a discussion of confounds.

My sense is that trolley dilemmas might be useful in many ways, but I also think we should not stake so much on them

ASIDE: Interesting to think about cases where these dilemmas may have arisen.

They are supposed to show side effects of general ethical principles.

But Waldman’s conclusion indicates that they are not doing this.

How would such a dilemma have arisen in evolutionary history? Plausible cases are (i) filial infanticide (Hrdy, 1979), and (ii) killing for the purposes of nutritional cannibalism in times of famine. (I am assuming nutritional cannibalism is linked to famine because humans are not a great source of nutrition (Garn & Block, 1970). There also seems to be evidence (∞todo: where do I see this) that hominins could mostly have found more nutritional sources that were easier to kill, so nutritional canibalism would have been unmotivated (but see Rodríguez, Guillermo, & Ana (2019) who argue that nutritional cannibalism was significant because (i) hominins mostly ate already dead hominins, and (ii) these were relatively were easy to get hold of as they were your mates).) (on evidence that we may have experienced famine, see fig2 of Foerster et al. (2022) on climate stability to ~300kya then instability at Chew Bahir in Ethiopia).

On (i), filial infanticide. Seems like there is a clear yes, do it.

On (ii), nutritional cannibalism, do you think that we have ethical abilities which guide you on when to eat someone?

Think about ethical concerns with purity. Stress the body enough and my guess is that these go out of the window. Ethical abilities are designed to operate when things are going well, and to stop when your body is under extreme pressure.

Think about starvation for a moment. Your body will reduce the calories it burns, prioritizing essential things like your heart, brain and kidneys over optional extras like your muscles, skin and hair. (O’Keefe, 2015, pp. 9–10). And your sex drive will all but disappear (Benedict, 1919, p. 639ff). It would be a bit odd to keep the ethical functions operating in these circumstances. (The obvious one to think about here is purity: do you want to be concerned with purity while starving?)

Objection: participants given the dilemma are not starving, and they do have an evolutionary ability not to kill conspecifics. This is all Greene et al are banking on: the prohibition on killing will shine through.

Reply: prohibition on killing probably only applies to in-group members.

step 2

distinguish ethical abilities

Greene et al offer a theory of ethical cognition quite generally. My suggestion is that we probably need to think about the problem in smaller chunks.

Thus the fast processes which explain cooperation, say, might not have a lot in common with those that explain impurity, say.

Greene et al’s assumption:

‘morality is a suite of cognitive mechanisms that enable otherwise selfish individuals to reap the benefits of cooperation.’

(Greene, 2015, p. 198)

[see also Kitcher (2011, p. 255): ‘The problem background consists in social instability and conflict caused by altruism failures. The original function of ethics is to promote social harmony through the remedying of altruism failures.’ (But note that Kitcher’s view is subtle: ‘In the evolution of ethics there is an original function that grounds the concept of ethical progress, but there are also secondary functions, generated from the ways in which that original function is discharged." and "A function for ethics is anything resulting from the original function (the remedying of altruism failures) by a finite number of steps of functional generation.") ]

I think ethical abilities have a variety of different functions. For example, abilities linked to purity are clearly related to avoiding pathogens, as we will see in a moment. This does all not boil down to cooperation.

(I’m also not persuaded that ethical abilities make us less selfish.)

These abilties include care, cooperation, inequality aversion, and more.

ethical abilities

- care

- cooperation (Boyd & Richerson, 2022)

- inequality aversion (Brosnan & Waal, 2014)

- balance authority vs autonomy (Wengrow & Graeber, 2018)

Wengrow & Graeber (2018) describe two groups, one of which eschewed slavery, the other of which used it in a complex hierarchical society.

‘If the ethics of their Californian neighbors bore comparison with mercantile values in early modern Europe, those of the Northwest Coast more closely resembled the aristocratic values of high feudalism. Societies comprised household estates divided into hereditary ranks of nobles, commoners, and slaves. Slaveholding was a defining attribute of nobility , and from Alaska south to W ashington state, intergroup slave raids were endemic. Nobles alone enjoyed the ritual prerogative of engaging with guardian spirits who conferred access to prestigious titles, which defined the legal contents of an estate. Commoners voluntarily provided labor and services to noble kin, who vied for their allegiance by offering spectacular feasts, entertainment, and the pleasure of vicarious participation in heroic exploits.’ (Wengrow & Graeber, 2018, p. 239)

- discern impurity (Chakroff, Russell, Piazza, & Young, 2017)

Also (Atari et al., 2022) on impurity (but that comes later)

- ...

For today, I am going to focus just on impurity. (Of course this is a major limit—it’s unlikely that any theory we construct here will generalise to other ethical abilities.)

Many people here are likely to think of ethics in terms of harm and fairness only. But in many cultures purity is an important area of concern.

Impure acts come in many kinds: there are sexually impure acts (using a chicken carcas for sexual pleasure, say); there is the scatological domain; there are acts of cannibalism, and much more.

I started with the example of vommiting oversomeone and then eating your own vomit partly because this is a paradigm impure act.

If not principles, then what?

‘When it comes to morality, the most basic issue concerns our capacity for normative guidance: our ability to be motivated by norms of behavior ...’

(FitzPatrick, 2021)

normative attitudes?

‘norms are characterized by general acceptance of particular normative principles within the group in question.’

(Brennan, Eriksson, Goodin, & Southwood, 2013, p. 94)

This does not help us because we are looking to explain why people have the normative (ethical) attitudes they do.

This goes back to Hart’s distinction between rules and habits.

‘How does a habit differ from a rule? ... A social rule has an ‘internal’ aspect ...

there should be a critical reflective attitude to certain patterns of behaviour as a common standard ...

this should display itself in criticism (including self-criticism), demands for conformity, and in acknowledgements ..., all of which find their characteristic expression in the normative terminology of ‘ought’’

(Hart, 1994, pp. 55–7)

1. Where there are discourse referents there are norms.

There is getting it right and getting it wrong about which object is being referred to.

2. Infants don’t have normative attitudes about reference.

∴

3. There is normative guidance without normative attitudes.

Ok, but this is not an ethical example.

It feels wrong but isn’t.

dog pooh stone

also eating while reading on phone or typing is ok, but not while sitting on the toilet. (Isabel’s example.)

(This is a speculation (conjecture?) that goes a tiny bit beyond the data. Existing data shows that there is dumbfounding. But in dumbfounding people maintain that it is wrong. I’m speculating that we can still feel it is wrong while knowing it is not wrong.)

Dumbfounding produces some examples like these. (Strictly in dumbfounding people maintain that it is wrong. Interesting effect: you can feel that something is wrong (eg incest) even while thinking it is not wrong.)

Why do I mention these examples? Because they are hard to accommodate on the Hart-inspired idea that normative guidance invariable involves normative attitudes. (Not impossible, but anomalous.)

a form of normative guidance without normative attitudes?

between habits and rules

norm-like pattern

a pattern which exists because

(i) there are behaviours which uphold the pattern; and

(ii) some or all of these behaviours have the collective goal of upholding the pattern.

Referential communication involves norm-like patterns. (I’m not suggesting this illuminates referential communication; rather than we can better understand norm-like patterns by thinking of them as an abstraction from a familiar feature of referential communication.)

Before I explain the idea, I want to give you a simple illustration. This is a case that almost, but does not quite, meet the condition. [because there is no collective goal.]

Simplified: I am a plant that would benefit from having ants carry my seeds around.

I produce seeds that have a little sugary reward for the ants on them.

The pattern is: ants carry my seeds around.

The behaviours that uphold the pattern are my adding the sugary reward, which I do with the purpose of upholding the pattern.

I owe you an explanation of what collective goals are. But that will take some effort. So first, why do we need them? In fact, why do we need goals at all?

Why do we need goals at all? Because sometimes we uphold patterns accidentally. Example: the great Hannoi rat massacre.

Why do we need collective goals here rather than simple purposes? See **unresolved xref to note:fIF6sp2g6eGnvYcctsRGb** on the two worker-policing modes for egg destruction (just non-related-to-me; all non-alpha).

Ok, so we need them. Shall I tell you what they are? (Maybe I should skip this—you can see from the example clearly enough what sort of thing is involved.)

goal != intention

goal is an outcome ...

So an intention is a state that represents or otherwise specifies a goal. A goal is an outcome to which an action is directed.

Usually when people are trying to characterise action, they focus intentions. But I suggested earlier there's an alternative that involves focusing on the notion of goal, and that allows you to avoid many of the objections that the standard theory faces.

So what we're after now is a counterpart of that notion of goal, an outcome to which an action is directed that's suitable for thinking about joint action. How do we get a kind of counterpart of this for the joint case?

distributive vs collective

We approach that by thinking about a distinction between two forms of predication, distributive or collective. The injection saved her life. Two possible ways to interpret this.

[Interpretation 1] Distributive. She is a diabetic and also a little bit careless about it. And so, you know, blood sugar level super low injection received. And that injection saved her life. And not a week later there she was again in a similar situation injection. So it's true that the injection saved her life. And what makes that true is that this injection saved her life, and that injection saved her life as well.

[Interpretation 2] But there's also a collective interpretation of this sentence. So it may be that she's not a careless diabetic at all, but she has been overdoing the sort of substance misuse problem that she has, and that's caused her both to forget her diabetic needs. And she also need some kind of injection to get the heart going again as well. So Billy is there one side and stabs the Insulin in Daisy on the other side with the Naloxone pen. And those injections saved her life because. You know, had the Naloxone pen not been there. The substance misuse would have been fatal. Had the insulin not been there, the diabetic, the diabetes would have been fatal. But the important thing here is that the injections collectively saved her life. It's not a matter of one injection saving her life and another injection saving her life. After all, her life was saved just once. And those injections collectively saved her life.

‘The injections prolonged her life.’

Consider the statement, ‘The injections prolonged her life.’ This could be true in virtue of her receiving several injections on different occasions, each of which saved her life. In this case, the injections saving her life is just a matter of each injection individually saving her life; this is the distributive interpretation. But the statement is also true if she was given two injections on a single occasion where each injection was necessary but not sufficient to save her life. In this case the injections saving her life is not, or not just, a matter of each injection individually saving her life; this is the collective interpretation.

The difference between distributive and collective interpretations is clearly substantial, for on the distributive interpretation the statement can only be true if her life has been saved more than once, whereas the truth of the collective interpretation requires only one life-threatening situation.

[repeat of last point as spoken] So there's a difference between distributive and collective interpretations of the sentence. And that distinction is really not a kind of mere, mere superficial thing. So if you think about it, in order for this sentence to be true on the distributive reading, her life has to be have been at risk and saved at least twice. Otherwise it can't be true. Whereas on the collective reasoning, reading her life only ever has to have been at risk once. So after this terrible event, things changed. There was a dramatic turnaround and it never happened again. It would still be true that the injection saved her life. Whereas on the distributive reading you need to. So the distinction between distributive and collective is substantial. The two readings have really different truth conditions. There are different ways the world has to be on the collective versus the distributive reading.

Just as some injections can be collectively life-saving, so some actions can be collectively directed to a goal. For example, consider this sentence:

‘The goal of their actions is to prolong her life.’

This can be interpreted distributively: each of their actions is separately directed to saving her life. But it can also be interpreted collectively: saving her life is an outcome to which their actions are directed and this is not, or not just, a matter of each of their actions being individually directed to finding a home.

Let me switch to another example ...

No mechanisms! Separate the thing to be explained from the thing which explains it.

Bees prolong life of the queen.

Note that collective goals do not plausibly require any kind of intentions or commitments. After all, there is a sense in which some of the actions of swarming bees are directed to finding a nest and this is not, or not just, a matter of each bee’s actions being individually directed to finding a nest. So finding a nest is a collective goal of the bees’ actions.

[as spoken] What you notice is that in characterising collective goal, we've made no assumptions at all about states of intention or processes or anything else. So when you say the goal of their actions is to find a new home, that can be true of well and who are capable of quite sophisticated forms of coordinated planning. And it can also be true, of course, of some bees as well. Do bees have intentions? Who knows about bee psychology? (Apparently they can learn to play a form of football.) Maybe bees do have intentions—I honestly don’t know. But here’s what matters: we're not making any assumptions about whether they have intentions in saying that the goal of their actions is to find a new home. That sentence is true. And we know that now. We do not first need to wait and check whether or not bees have intentions and shared intentions in order to establish whether it's true. So this notion of a collective goal is neutral about the notion, the kinds of processes and representations that are involved.

To say that an outcome is a \emph{collective goal} of some actions is just to say that it is an outcome to which the actions are directed and this is not, or not just, a matter of each action being individually directed to that outcome.

collective goal — each of their actions is directed to this goal, and that is true in the collective (not distributive sense)

So here's a really simple thought. To say that an outcome is a collective goal of someone's actions, of some people's actions, is to say two things. First of all, that their actions are directed to that outcome, and secondly. That if we wrote a sentence about their actions being directed to that outcome, it would be true on the collective interpretation. So it follows that their actions being directed to that goal isn't or isn't only just a matter of each of the actions separately being directed to that outcome. Their actions are collectively directed to the outcome. So now we have the notion of a collective goal.

How could some agents’ actions have a collective goal?

Step 2: how could our actions have a collective goal?

there is a single outcome, G, such that

(a) our actions are coordinated; and

(b) coordination of this type would normally increase the probability that G occurs.

[This implies that the actions of strangers on a crowded street have the collective goal of not colliding (since they are coordinated and their coordination increases the probability of not coordinating).]

[Do I need this?]

between habits and rules

norm-like pattern

a pattern which exists because

(i) there are behaviours which uphold the pattern; and

(ii) some or all of these behaviours have the collective goal of upholding the pattern.

How could upholding a pattern
be a collective goal of our actions
other than through
natural selection,
explicit intentions
or normative attitudes?

1. upholding behaviours ...

- moving closer/away

- smiling/frowning

- fluently/disfluently interacting

- ostensive complicance/covert violation

- selecting/deselecting

- ...

2. ... are caused by feelings ...

Chapman et al establish three things.

1. responses to bitterness are marked by activation of the levator labii muscle ‘which raises the upper lip and wrinkles the nose’

2. bitter responses are made not just to bitter tastes but also to ‘photographs of uncleanliness and contamination-related disgust stimuli, including feces, injuries, insects, etc.’

Chapman et al. (2009, p. fig 1,3 (part))

3. in a dictator game, ‘objective (facial motor) signs of disgust that were proportional to the degree of unfairness they experienced.’

Chapman et al. (2009, p. fig 1,3 (part))

If a limited but useful range of moral violations can produce bitter sensations, general-purpose learning mechanisms can produce averstion to actions that generate these moral violations.

Two things (i) bitter response to unfairness; (ii) bitter response linked to behaviour

On (ii): ‘we found that self-reported disgust was strongly correlated with the decision to reject unfair offers: The more disgust a participant reported, the more likely he or she was to reject a given unfair offer (Pearson r = 0.70, P < 0.05).’ (Chapman et al., 2009, p. 1225). Also mention Eskine, Kacinik, & Prinz (2011).

Violations cause feelings; feelings influence behaviours.

bitterness

(Chapman et al., 2009; Eskine et al., 2011).

disgust

(Tracy, Steckler, & Heltzel, 2019; Vanaman & Chapman, 2020; Chapman & Anderson, 2013; Lai, Haidt, & Nosek, 2014; Giner-Sorolla & Chapman, 2017)

(Giner-Sorolla & Chapman (2017) is important on disgust because they show that you get disgust for non-impure moral violations (their idea is that disgust is linked to violations that demonstrate bad moral character))

happiness

(Gawronski, Conway, Armstrong, Friesdorf, & Hütter, 2018)

∞todo can also think about social pain; see MacDonald & Leary (2005)

Why not follow Prinz and others in supposing that emotions do all the work?

limits

effects of violations on moral judgements are

- complex

(Tracy et al., 2019)

- small in size

(Landy & Goodwin, 2015; Chapman, 2018; Piazza, Landy, Chakroff, Young, & Wasserman, 2018; Giner-Sorolla, Kupfer, & Sabo, 2018)

effects of feelings on behaviour are

- culturally mediated

(Terrizzi, Shook, & Ventis, 2010)

Terrizzi et al. (2010, p. 591): ‘In Study 2, the moderating role of social conservatism in the ef- fect of a disgust manipulation on prejudice toward homosexuals was explored. For conservatives, inducing disgust resulted in in- creased prejudice toward contact with homosexuals, while for liberals the disgust induction resulted in a reduction in prejudice.’

1. upholding behaviours ...

- moving closer/away

- smiling/frowning

- fluently/disfluently interacting

- ostensive complicance/covert violation

- selecting/deselecting

- ...

2. ... are caused by feelings ...

3. ... which are modulated by joint action ...

4. ... because the feelings enable us to create norm-like patterns.

conjecture: minimal normative guidance

Disgust, bitterness, social pain and other feelings
function to enable us to create patterns of behaviour,
which are thereby norm-like.

Not specific norm-like patterns; the link between the feedlings and the patterns is complex and depends on us settling on what feels disgusting, bitter, etc.

This is the simplest form of normative guidance.

It feels wrong but isn’t.

How could violating a norm-like pattern feel wrong?

It doesn’t, as such.

At most it creates a metacognitive feeling of disfluency.

But if I am a catalyst as well as a subject,

I may anticipate feelings of disgust, bitterness or pain

or I may anticipate behaviours that function as sanctions;

Note that these feelings, by themselves, cannot account for a feeling of wrongness. Lots of things are bitter or disgusting or painful but not wrong. (Socks with sandles.)

and these may bias me to interpret a feeling of disfluency as indicating wrongness.

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Norms-like Patterns

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