3. WARNING SIGNS OF PSEUDO-GALILEANISM

     The last bit of preface I should introduce before delving into a synopsis of Gibbard's book is a sort of list of problems, to which a pseudo-Galilean would be susceptible, that are pertinent to my critique. I will mention them briefly, along with some theoretical context, and save for later most of my allegations as to how Gibbard succumbs to them.

3.1 Outmoded Theory: the Brain and Judgment

     Gibbard makes note (135-136) of some very important neuropsychological specializations in the human brain -- exactly the sort of thing a Galilean should do. There are important functional roles played by parts⁴ of the brain, each of which a Galilean will expect to explain some aspect of behavior. Gibbard mentions how the limbic system is implicated in the production of such animal emotions as fear. He speculates that the right hemisphere of the human neocortex is implicated in the production of peculiarly human emotions (arguing specifically for humor, but implying that guilt and shame are also in its domain).

     This is a narrow miss, I will contend, but a miss nonetheless.

     Gibbard also discusses conflicting control systems for humans -- an animal control system and a human one. This distinction, too, is flawed (showing signs of essentialist bias). The conflict is real -- and it involves more functionally separate systems than Gibbard imagines -- but that fact leads to conclusions vastly different from his.

     A result of misapprehending the actual functional divisions in the human brain is that Gibbard treats (as most other people do) the concepts of self and judgment as monolithic or unitary: if neuropsychological mechanisms produce them, it naturally seems, it will be a single mechanism (perhaps with various subprocesses) responsible for each. This is an important and useful element of folk psychology that I'll argue happens to be mistaken.

     The most important result of this misapprehension is that we imagine our judgments all come from a single source -- what we might call an "executive control center". If I judge x, then it's natural to say that x is my judgment -- not the deliverance of some relatively independent module in my brain. Gibbard (187) provides an illustration of this: "True, my judgments of what is outrageous are guided by feelings." But these judgments consist in feelings attached to or associated with his conceptual representation of some state of affairs.

     It turns out that we have a number of functionally separate brain modules making judgments, and at least three of these make normative judgments in dramatically differing ways. Only one of them deserves to be called 'rational' (in a functional sense that differs profoundly from the meaning Gibbard imparts to the term) and there is no ready way to distinguish, experientially, one from another. Only by examining the nature of the judgment can we guess which mechanism probably produced it.

     We'll examine the likely origins and functions of these modes of judgment later on; for now, I want to introduce them briefly to provide context for (and contrast to) Gibbard's speculative psychology.

     The first, most primitive, mode of normative judgment is produced by the limbic system, and consists of evaluation or feeling. It tells us how (by way of qualia we experience as positive or negative) some circumstance is. Our judgments that this food is good, or that this [cheating] person is bad, or that this child should be protected are produced this way. They are direct, affective responses to situations rather than cognitive appraisals of concepts -- a job handled by another more recently evolved part of the brain.

     The second mode of normative judgment simply attaches an emotional weight (from the limbic system) to a concept (probably produced in the right hemisphere of the neocortex). This mode required the evolution of an ability to abstract concepts before it could differentiate from the first mode of evaluating concrete situations. Judgments such as murder is bad and generosity is good are generated by this mechanism.

     This second mode is actually the primary mode of judgment employed by adult humans -- a fact that probably can't be changed in the (evolutionarily) near future. It produces heuristic and intuitive judgments -- what Dennett (1995, p. 441) calls 'Darwinian algorithms', attributing the term to Leda Cosmides and John Tooby. Heuristics (including schemata -- general beliefs about common roles or situations) are simple, rule-of-thumb judgments about common situations. Do plane crashes occur frequently or infrequently? Does a merchant normally dominate or defer to a customer? Are politicians trustworthy? Each alternative will elicit a positive or negative response from this functional unit of the brain (composed of elements from the concept-housing neocortex -- primarily, it appears, the right hemisphere -- and from the emotion/evaluation-generating limbic system).

     This mechanism is what generates the feeling that something "makes sense" -- that it is what Gibbard says we call 'rational'. Similarly, this is how we decide that something is "self-evident", "plausible", "egregious", or "monstrous": we somehow attach a positive or negative assessment to the object, event, or proposition in question, without first developing a detailed argument to support the conclusion. (That may be constructed after the fact -- rationalized -- or there may be an argument to support the claim that the conclusion is true, as with self-evident logical truths. Such an argument -- appealing, say, to unacceptable contradiction -- supports the claim of truth, though; self-evidence is a matter of evaluation rather than of analysis.)

     The third mode of normative judgment is reason (including logic), a systematic, analytic, dispassionate process capable of implementing and assessing algorithms and arguments. Unlike the brain as a whole, or the other functional parts of the brain (each specialized for a particular task), the cortical region responsible for this mode of judgment can be a general-purpose calculating mechanism: one functional unit capable of implementing a variety of "programs". It is housed exclusively in the left hemisphere of the neocortex -- which, Gazzaniga (1992, p. 103) notes, is the only part capable of making causal inferences and "apprehending complex linguistic constructions", making it the only part "clearly specialized for cognitive operations in the normal brain."

     If these three modes of judgment are functionally separate, why don't we experience them that way? We all recognize emotional influences on our judgments, and we admit to "sloppy thinking" in heuristic ways -- but ultimately, whatever the influences on it, our judgment is our judgment, not the judgment of some subordinate mechanism that sneaks past us somehow. There must be some sort of high-level integration of whatever sub-systems influence our judgments. Or so it seems.

     Michael Gazzaniga (1992, pp. 113, 121-137) describes the experimental discovery of a left-hemisphere module he calls "the interpreter", whose job is to produce a coherent story of one's current experience from the deliverances of a multitude of specialized brain modules. Deferring a detailed account of this theory to Gazzaniga's book, I'll just offer several illustrations here of the interpreter in action.

     The most compelling illustrations are those in which it is clear that a subject is unwittingly making up an explanation on the spot. Gazzaniga (1992) offers many examples of this from split-brain studies. Much the same thing happens with post-hypnotic suggestion -- say, when a subject is told that upon awakening she will feel very hot. Awakened, she turns down the thermostat in her therapist's office, explaining when questioned that he looked uncomfortable and she just wanted to give him some relief.

     Everyday exploits of the interpreter are less obvious, but I'll offer one from personal experience. Recently my wife caught me watching a rerun of "The Simpsons", and asked if I didn't have work to do on my thesis. A bit irked, I told her I would be working on the thesis later; right now I wanted to watch what I remembered was a very entertaining episode.

     Though I had been sincere at the time, upon later reflection I decided I had been mistaken. Part of my mind had been nervous about the scope and importance of my thesis, and was lobbying mightily to put off having to deal with it. The TV program was a convenient excuse for procrastinating. I would not, in any sober and mature frame of mind, have listed watching it among my priorities -- yet, at the time, I earnestly claimed it as one. Part of me had judged watching the program to be important, while another part (one for which I have greater respect) has since judged that it wasn't. At both times I experienced the judgment as my own -- coming from me, and not just uncritically accepted by me from a subordinate judging mechanism.

     The source of an individual judgment is important for ethics, because we want to use the most reliable methods at our disposal. I contend that reason is our most reliable method for careful normative judgment, but we systematically misrepresent to ourselves that judgments produced otherwise are reasoned judgments after all. This is because our various mechanisms for judgment are quite capable of making judgments about themselves and each other.

     Social psychologists use the term 'beneficience' for a fundamental psychological tendency of humans: when pressed for an explanation of his own mysterious behavior, an individual usually produces one that reflects well on his character and motives. Unlike a conscious, self-serving rationalization, a beneficient explanation is sincere and not consciously contrived. It's someone's interpreter at work, creating the explanation as much for himself as for anyone else. The interpreter reconciles the need for a positive self-image with behavior that, on the surface (and perhaps in actuality), may be discrepant.

     Beneficience probably comes into play as we account for most of our judgments. Our culture has (correctly) determined that the standards for good judgment are sound deductive and cogent inductive (reasoned) arguments. Even absent formal training in logic, these standards are acknowledged as providing either proof of, or compelling reason to believe, a conclusion. Now, being the competent and reasonable people we naturally and automatically tend to believe we are, we will habitually employ reliable methods for making our judgments. Our judgments, we believe, are reasoned (though we don't recall at the moment the specific arguments that produced them).

     The problem is that reason is too difficult to be the method of choice for most of our judgments. Gibbard might (rightly) say that it's not always rational to reason. Just as walking works better when unreflectively undertaken than when deliberated, muscular action by muscular action, judgment for humans is most naturally an intuitive/heuristic process; reasoning is a skill one must develop over many years, and even after much practice it remains very difficult compared to the snap judgments our ancestors bequeathed us.

     One might accept the functional subdivisions I discuss here without abandoning the compelling common sense view that they are all somehow integrated by some high-level mechanism that produces "our" judgments from all the competing inputs. I will deal with this claim when I consider the evolution of motivation and judgment in Section 5.7.

3.2 Overlooking Straightforward Evolutionary Explanations

     There's another way in which adherence to outmoded theory indicates a pseudo-Galilean attitude: one misses rather obvious philosophical moves in deriving an explanation of human behaviors from evolutionary theory. Consider the following (rather tame, I think) extrapolations from standard evolutionary foundations.

     Life and reproduction are treated as values by organisms. Maybe they really are -- as a matter of material fact -- intrinsic values. If so, it makes sense that organisms would evolve evaluative mechanisms in response to those things in their environment that were instrumentally valuable in promoting life and reproduction. Indeed, it seems that the entire history of biology is a story of how Life has managed to exploit value in its various environments. For any organism, it would appear that acquiring value is good, and losing it is bad. A philosopher, capable of a more detached perspective, may first realize that value exists even if it isn't appreciated by a beneficiary, and second, generalize that there's a reasonable claim for an Aristotelian final value: the maximal accumulation of intrinsic value, over all time, in the universe. Might this not be a basis for morality?

     Social species develop relationships of mutual aid and dependence, though there's constant pressure for any individual to expropriate all available resources for his own benefit. We would expect strong emotional, moralistic responses to emerge in response to selfish and cheating behaviors, along with new skills for both cheating and detecting cheaters.

     It seems to me that these speculations would hardly be unexpected of a Galilean philosopher naturally disposed to seek explanations of human behavior in our evolutionary history. How, I wonder, could any serious Galilean in search of an evolutionary account of human normativity miss (or dismiss without discussion) them all?

3.3 Subjective Value Regarded as Intrinsic

     We have already claimed to be mistaken the standard view that purpose, design, and intentionality are strictly human (or mental) qualities that happen to bear interesting metaphorical relationships to attributes of the evolutionary process. Though much support for this large claim will emerge as we proceed, this isn't the place to defend it fully -- especially when the job has been done well by others. Our best theory, ably summarized in Dennett (1995), explains how these human qualities are derived from actual (if rudimentary) biological purpose, design, and intentionality. As I claimed in my Introduction, human values are likewise derived from genuine value found in nature.

     This notion is so simple and obvious to me that I'm often amazed anew at my failure (over nearly a decade) to find it proffered by anyone in the Galilean literature. In a nutshell, it goes like this: Before Life emerged in the universe, there was nothing other than the existence of the universe itself that might reasonably be called 'a value'. But Life is a value, as is each life it begets. Other things turned out to have value for living organisms. Human valuing mechanisms are evolved responses to those kinds of things that are of value to creatures like us; these primitive values are justified as values by their evolutionary origin and functions.

     But we have no Galilean reason to claim that what we experience as value (subjective value) is anything other than either (i) the sort of evolved response to some kind of objective value I've just discussed, or (ii) the response of our valuing mechanisms to novel situations in which the putative values attributed by them lack Galilean justification and therefore require some other justification before we can rationally accept them as values.

     In other words, even rather abstract, modern "human values" apparently unrelated to our biological concerns must owe their origins, via evolved human valuing mechanisms (the only valuing mechanisms to which we have a Galilean claim), to the evolutionary process. Some of these may serve no biological function, contributing in no way to survival or reproduction -- yet, even if they are badly mistaken, persist for want of selection pressures that could weed them out. Should we continue to call these exaptations 'values'? If so, it would seem the onus is on us to explain why!

     Ultimately, it would seem that evolutionary theory quite handily explains all value we know either as existing in nature or as derived somehow from it. It also explains that where our valuing mechanisms have been exapted to value novel things, resultant claims of value (if they are to be taken seriously by philosophers) require a novel form of justification. Selection pressures may have been inadequate either to eliminate the exaptation as mistaken valuing or acquit it as an adaptive response to genuine value. We can't claim our modern human values to be justified in the same way (the only way) that Galileans can justify primitive values: with a proven biological payoff.

     In responding to our largely man-made environment -- grossly different from the ones to which our ancestors evolved apt valuing responses -- we lack good reason to accept the modern deliverances of our valuing mechanisms as values. Pounding a wood screw in with a hammer doesn't justify calling it 'a nail'.

     The opening premises of the argument with which I began this section may, for some readers, require additional support, which is forthcoming. For now, I need to contrast the kind of objective value I claim exists in the world with the subjective value of our experience.

     First, though, in addition to objective and subjective value, these other (Aristotelian) uses of the term 'value' will need to be involved in our discussion: intrinsic value (value that inheres in the object itself), instrumental value (value that serves to promote some intrinsic value), and intermediate value (value that, though instrumental in nature, is perceived to be, or is treated as, intrinsic value). A fourth use, final value -- the end or purpose of life, for which I've just proposed a Galilean candidate -- will be explained directly in terms of intrinsic value. All four of these I'll treat as varieties of objective value.

     A Galilean explanation of value will naturally seek to place intrinsic value in nature -- specifically, I argue, in (i) the perpetuation of Life as a process, and (ii) the functional integrity of individual organisms -- while instrumental and intermediate values will apply to behaviors, preferences, desires, purposes, and goals that promote those intrinsic values.

     Objective value, then, inheres in the essential nature of some kind of state of affairs -- independent of any preference or judgment of importance held by a living organism. Life, as the example we are most concerned with here, has an essential property (reflexive functionality) without which it cannot be the kind of thing it is -- and that property is an objective value for Life. I have already suggested (and will explain in more detail as we proceed) why it is appropriate to treat this property as a value rather than as a mere fact (more precisely, why value is a fact); it should also be apparent (or become so presently) how our ordinary speech acknowledges objective value.

     This notion stands in stark contrast to the prevailing conception of value, in which a value is subjective -- the object (a thing, ideal, goal, purpose, etc.) of some preference or judgment of importance. There is a presumption among many (perhaps most) philosophers, and among virtually all laymen, that intrinsic value inheres in human experience. Positive values include happiness, pleasure, love, contentment, self-esteem, and fulfillment. Negative values include needless pain, anger, frustration, grief, and despair. We typically say we have an interest in obtaining positive values and avoiding negative ones, and those values are the objects of intentional states such as desires and purposes. Even when one's concerns go beyond the worldly to the theological (as, famously, did Locke's and Pascal's), the quality of personal experience throughout eternity (ranging from unalloyed bliss to abject suffering) is what many philosophers and theologians seek to optimize.

     Part of my task here will be to explain that subjective value has worked well for our forebears precisely because it was mistaken to be intrinsic value, and to explore some pertinent implications of that revelation.

     Let's pause for a moment to review the extensive preamble I've just completed. I have suggested what a Galilean project in metaethics might profitably accomplish, what standards Galilean projects in general should be held to, and what lingering anti-Galilean biases might interfere with these aims. I've even smuggled in a quick sketch of metaethical functionalism, an alternative to the view Gibbard advances. Thus forearmed, the reader may be able to anticipate much of the criticism I will offer. It is now time, at long last, for us to examine the target of that criticism.