5.7 The Evolution of Motivation and Judgment

     The whole point of morality is to guide our actions. For Gibbard, morality "consists in norms for moral sentiments" (277); the norms exert primarily social pressure to cultivate those moral sentiments that are apt for one's situation, and the sentiments themselves are what guide our actions. In the foregoing section I made a brief case for replacing norms with rules that have intellectual force -- that justify rather than demand the actions prescribed. That argument is pursued further in Appendix A.

     How is it, though, that norms, rules, or sentiments manage to motivate action? Why might we choose to rely on one of these motivators in preference to others? The natural presumption -- the way we experience our judging processes -- is that the inputs from non-cognitive brain functions such as perception and emotion are considered by some high-level process in the neocortex, one that integrates the competing influences into a single judgment that we experience as "ours" and can consciously act upon. This process is fallible, though: we often deceive ourselves, confabulate, or abdicate control to some insistent sub-system. There are problems with this view.

     First of all, a theory of high-level integration is not required to explain the evidence, which is nicely accounted for by Gazzaniga's theory of the interpreter's role in weaving a coherent (and often self-serving) story to account for the behaviors we find ourselves engaged in. This is a high-level process, but it operates after the fact; it is not a control mechanism. Consider that our ancestors' non-cognitive sub-systems must have, prior to the arrival of conscious decision-making capabilities, maintained some sort of modus vivendi among themselves -- perhaps volatile and precarious, but successful enough to account for our ancestors' prosperity. One might theorize that there must have been some executive module to account for this, but why not then posit executive modules for all earlier stages of evolutionary development, as far back in our remote ancestors' history as we find countervailing impulses?

     More likely, the history of behavior control for our forebears was one of establishing a rough, working equilibrium of competing influences such that appropriate sub-systems, each responding to some particular aspect of environmental circumstances, exert greater or lesser control according to the immediate salience of those aspects they are specialized to address. This arrangement offers the conservative advantage just mentioned by Panksepp, whereby older systems can exercise a "veto" over newer, less tested ones -- especially under great stress. It also accounts, sadly, for irrational behavior under difficult circumstances -- something, I might add, that is difficult to explain away under the high-level integration model. After all, why would the putative integration mechanism fails, even under these conditions? Self-deception isn't an adequate reason, for in many cases (such as post-denial phase drug addiction) we are quite aware of destructive influences we nonetheless feel powerless to control. This leads to our next major concern.

     What relations obtain between motivation and various kinds of judgment? For answers, we need to move beyond the vocabulary of folk psychology. We need a Galilean reduction -- this time to neuropsychology.

     MacLean's theory of a three-tier structure for the human brain suggests an evolutionary story of motivation and judgment that may do the job for us. Theory among neuropsychologists is not at all settled in this area, but there is ample support for the speculative view I'll offer here. In this respect my account will resemble Gibbard's.

     The earliest animals, up through simple vertebrates, apparently possessed nothing we could, strictly speaking, call "motivation" or "judgment". Their automatic reflex responses to certain things or situations in their environments were mediated by few internal intermediate states, and followed immediately from external stimuli. Fish, reptiles and amphibians remain close to this level, their behaviors guided by what MacLean called the "reptilian" brain.

     For such animals, even fairly complex species-typical behaviors such as mating rituals owe their complexity to the elaboration of instinctive responses to important stimuli. The evolutionary transition from purely reflex response to, say, an intricately choreographed mating display, can be thought of as an extension of the effect of the initial stimulus -- from generating a single act to generating a sequence of actions. The earliest recognizable motivational states were probably those that sustained a protracted series of actions after the initial stimulus was gone, or kept the sequence on track when the continued presence of the initial stimulus might otherwise have kept initiating the response sequence without ever allowing it to be completed.

     We probably won't want to treat as judgment the de facto "choice" for the strongest of competing motivations at this stage. A better (but still unlikely) candidate would be the hard-wired, automatic filtering of sensory data by the reticular activating system in the reptilian brain, which separates information that might be relevant to an organism's survival or reproduction from "background noise".

     A major evolutionary development introduced the unconscious evaluation of competing motivations, inhibiting responses to stimuli of lesser importance and allowing creatures to respond fully to the stimulus judged most important. The ability to suspend courtship behavior in order to fight a rival, for example, offers a clear advantage over attempting to court and fight at the same time. Such automatic evaluation is handled largely by the hypothalamus, situated at the interface between the brainstem and the limbic system. These evaluations might qualify as judgments about how things are -- judgments with both a qualitative (good, bad, or neutral attitude) and a quantitative (intensity or degree) aspect. Even though humans have evolved both a more complex limbic system, capable of conscious evaluation, and a neocortex capable of cognitive appraisal, we still rely to a remarkable extent on these primitive, automatic and unconscious evaluations in our daily lives.¹⁴

     The next evolutionary leap for motivation introduced conscious evaluation. The increasing complexity of our lives -- particularly as we became social, tribal creatures -- brought with it the need to respond appropriately in the face of many competing and countervailing motivations. Automatic evaluation was not flexible enough to suffice, and our actions came to be determined by whatever emotion (or constellation of emotions) impinged upon consciousness with the greatest intensity. Most emotions are experienced as either positive (joy, pleasure, levity, love, etc.) or negative (fear, anger, jealousy, hatred, etc.); others (suspense, curiosity, etc.) served to heighten awareness in situations of uncertainty. All were available in varying intensities. At this stage of development we (as early mammals) assessed the objects of our experience as good or bad, important or trivial, without any conceptual grasp of what those objects were or of the cause-and-effect relations they might bear to us. We judged how things were, but not yet what they were, and the resulting conscious attitudes might reasonably be called 'opinions'. As yet we could make no comparable judgments of fact.

     Our ancestors at this stage were governed primarily by the limbic system (pre-empted by the reptilian brain where rapid evaluations and responses were called for). They were guided aptly through life by phenomenal states -- feelings of attraction and repulsion, approval or disapproval -- that were associated with classes of sensory experience from their environment (and with memories of past events and the anticipation of potential events). As we have discussed, the limbic system has developed to produce a wide array of social motivations that we still share with modern primates (and more distantly related mammals). The most sophisticated of these motivations required the development of the neocortex for extended memory and the ability to imagine more and more remote counterfactual situations -- functions that for some time operated well without the more advanced conceptual tools language provides. To this point, however, the distinction between motivation and judgment was thoroughly blurred; one mechanism generated evaluations that were motivating judgments.

     The third neuropsychological development for our ancestors was the remarkably rapid growth of the neocortex. Though one might have expected it to introduce a clear distinction between motivation and judgment, the blurring continued -- albeit in a different way. The modern neocortex allowed two functionally distinct forms of judgment to emerge. The simplest of these (and naturally the first to arise) was the prelinguistic result of habitual associations made between common ideas and the emotions experienced while those ideas were active. The idea of berries for our primate ancestors was tinged with the emotions of desire, pleasure, and relief from hunger; those emotions were part of the meaning of the concept, and their psychological contribution to that meaning was in the form of judgments that the properties of being desirable, pleasurable, and satisfying belonged to berries. The idea of a stranger was infused with the emotions of fear, distrust, and rivalry; one could not think about a stranger without including these emotional elements in the thought, or judging that the stranger was fearsome, untrustworthy, and a competitor to some degree.

     The primate neocortex was adept at pattern recognition, finding regularities in experience and attributing to them (by automatic induction) certain relations or properties -- cause-and-effect relations, functional properties, social roles, etc. The type of mechanism here was simple, repeated association -- not the more sophisticated mechanism of functional neural algorithms corresponding to logical operations. These mechanisms generated some familiar types of judgment: intuition, schemata, stereotyping, and heuristics.

     The last functional revolution in this evolutionary process introduced cognitive appraisal of both our goals (both immediate and longer-term) and the cause and effect relations that might promote (or thwart) their attainment. The role of language in this process was so important that parts of it seem now to be "hard-wired". As Chomsky theorizes, we seem to have an innate disposition toward a certain kind of syntax -- at least toward the deep structure of natural language.¹⁵

     Little more needs to be said of this modern stage of neuropsychological development. It seems to us nearly to eclipse the residual influences of the underlying, more ancient, motivational systems. But that appearance is deceptive. As best I can tell, the neocortex, with all its sophistication, fails to motivate us directly in any way -- as I have already mentioned. Motivation appears to come strictly from deeper brain structures. The way the neocortex governs our behavior is indirectly, enlisting limbic motivations in service to its goals -- much as Locke envisioned (1975, p. 262): "And thus, by a due consideration and examining any good proposed, it is in our power, to raise our desires, in a due proportion to the value of that good, whereby in its turn, and place, it may come to work upon the will, and be pursued."

     This story is not new or radical. Jerry Fodor offered an evolutionary theory along these lines to account for the persistence of automatic perceptual phenomena that clearly date back to our distant ancestors, and P.E. Griffiths¹⁶ extended the theory to include automatic emotional responses. The notion is that our brain has a modular structure, and some of the oldest modules function in ways that have been so important to our survival that we benefit more often than not when they override the impulses from more modern modules.

     Gibbard's speculation that the right hemisphere of the neocortex may contribute to generating certain "peculiarly human" emotions such as amusement¹⁷ -- and, apparently, shame and the guilt (136) upon which he thinks normative governance relies -- reveals two problem areas here: first, the evidence is weak that such emotions are peculiarly human instead of generally hominid (or primate, or mammalian); secondly, the right hemisphere appears not to help generate certain emotions, but to "house" certain ideas that become the objects of emotional response in the limbic system.

     In the first instance, researchers have been reluctant to ascribe guilt, for example, to apes -- even though their behavior looks for all the world as though they feel guilty. Perhaps apes fear punishment if their misbehavior is discovered.¹⁸ But guilt requires three cognitive elements that all seem to be available to apes: (i) knowledge of what constitutes acceptable behavior, (ii) knowledge that one's behavior has been unacceptable, and (iii) knowledge of a personal goal: wanting to behave acceptably as a matter of course (though apparently something else is more immediately desired at the time of one's transgression). Only the third of these is in question. Does the observed effect stem from a sense of personal inadequacy or from a fear of discovery?

     The answer may be both. Gibbard notes that guilt and shame "are both possible in secret, and they may each be intensified by exposure" (137). While we probably can't know for sure, there's a good argument in favor of ape guilt: that this hypothesis is simpler than the alternative. On the one hand, an ape conceptualizes relevant norms as applying to everyone, and has emotional responses to violations of those norms by others (outrage, say) and by himself (guilt). On the other, the ape manages to realize that a given norm applies equally to each of his associates, and that it applies to him, but not that it applies to everyone. Without this conceptual universalization, he might have a double standard -- being outraged at violations by others (a troop of baboons condemns with one voice a male who uses his canines in a conflict with a female)¹⁹, but merely cautious or anxious should his own violations be discovered.

     Most likely, the natural cognitive development for apes concerning proscribed behaviors (the simplest association to make) is to learn from experience that stigma attaches to the act, even when committed by oneself. It also seems to me that the advanced traits of ingenuity and political sophistication displayed by apes are inconsistent with the lack of a simple grasp of normative universals. Most importantly, some ape behavior seems most readily explained by just such understanding -- for example, group enforcement of a zoo's rule that no chimps are fed until all of them are in their sleeping quarters, resulting in transgressors being severely disciplined by the remainder of the group.²⁰

     But my point here is not so much to argue for moral agency among apes as to illuminate the psychology of norms. Guilt and shame are emotional responses to concepts -- respectively, that one is temporarily deficient in motivation or behavior, and that one is unalterably (for the present, at least) constitutionally deficient in some fashion (138).²¹ One feels guilt at a particular failure to conform to a norm, and shame at an underlying inability to conform.

     What is the relation between such concepts and the emotions they engender? Are they ingredients of the emotions, or merely their objects? The evidence favors the latter view. As Gibbard notes (136), the left hemisphere seems capable of inhibiting emotions; the right hemisphere seems linked to the generation of the autonomic components of emotion, and thus to emotional arousal -- though theories that it is dominant for the expression and identification of emotions have fallen on hard times.²²

     Here is a speculative model to account for hemispheric specialization with respect to emotions, for cognitively weighted emotions like guilt and shame, and for normative motivation in general.

     As our ancestors developed the ability to imagine counterfactual situations and use them to plan future actions, they applied the same sort of automatic evaluation to the salient images and concepts in their imaginings as they did to the elements of immediate experience. They needed to care about finding the antelope they imagined, and to evaluate the likelihood that the antelope would be found at a remembered nearby watering hole, and to assess the efficacy of plans to kill the creature if an expedition to the watering hole found it there. All of these attitudes were natural responses to ideas, just as were similar attitudes attached to the things and situations of immediate experience.

     The images and ideas involved in this process were unitary Gestalts -- the sort of mental states in which the right hemisphere apparently specializes. These ideas were formed through experience (an encounter with an antelope producing ideas about antelopes), and were associated with the emotional states present at the time (e.g., "Yum!"). This association was not just one of surface experience, but rather a hard-wired neurophysical connection such that neurons jointly responsible for representing the idea of an antelope automatically excited neurons we might call Yum!-generating. The reverse associations were also available, so that a rumbling stomach, spurring recollections of yummy things, might also dredge up the image of an antelope.²³ We should expect ideas of personal significance to the right hemisphere to generate autonomic emotional responses in the limbic system.

     But what of the analytical, logical, linguistic skills we attribute to the left hemisphere? At least one very important function for an analytical mechanism would be to serve as a check on its right-hand counterpart. If the heuristic impulse is to set out for the watering hole, but the analytic mechanism notes a logical discrepancy between the active image of the watering hole surrounded by antelopes and the memory of how the watering hole was dry and desolate last Tuesday (along with the sequential memories of rainless days since then), it's time to put the brakes on the expedition. The role of the analytical mechanism here will be to inhibit the emotions that are pushing for immediate action. We should expect part of the brain (apparently the left hemisphere) to be implicated in emotional control.

     Don't we attach emotional significance to words, which are in the linguistic domain of the left hemisphere? If not, then non-cognitivist views such as Gibbard's norm-expressivism would seem to be dead in the water. Well, we at least attach emotional significance to the concepts those words represent, and that's all one needs for non-cognitivism. Far from supporting non-cognitivism, however, this seems to me to expose the view as favoring intuitive and heuristic functions over analytic ones, which might be a difficult thing to justify.

     With this in mind, we might look out for equivocation between competing meanings of words that are intuitive or analytical (using these terms in lieu of the anthropomorphic sounding 'right-brained' and 'left-brained') in nature. Take the word 'rational' that is so important to Gibbard. While the intuitive mechanism might be drawn to a meaning that is four parts approval and one part intuition ("it makes sense"), its analytical counterpart (in a self-referential way) might insist that something is rational just when it has been arrived at through the sequential, logical, methodical faculty of reason (or when it at least conforms to the standards of reason, so that reason would have produced the same result).²⁴ Each meaning would refer to the processes whereby one mechanism functions in a normal fashion. That illuminates another meaning for 'rational': in possession of one's faculties.

     How might emotions like guilt be explained on this model? One develops and maintains a self-image, incorporating all the properties (self-schemas) that one believes (accurately or not) one possesses.²⁵ One also develops and maintains schemata concerning typical roles that individuals play in society, the personal attributes of others, and recurrent social situations and the behaviors they entail. Ancient developmental and social pressures to imitate the behaviors of role models (which behaviors presumably have already been shaped by social norms) result in the cognitive recognition of norms of behavior. Similar pressures to adopt the emotions displayed by others²⁶ (or to react with complementary emotions -- with fear, say, when confronted with anger), together with the natural association already mentioned between immediate experience and one's current emotional state, guarantee that emotional evaluations are linked to our concepts of self, others, roles, archetypical situations, behaviors, etc.

     We are presumably sensitive, in a more intuitive than logical way, to blatant inconsistencies between self-image and one's behavior, noting that certain concepts of self-as-it-should-be and behaviors-undertaken-now don't "fit". Our limbic system becomes aroused when an unacceptable imbalance (what psychologists call "self-discrepancy") exists, and it then provides the motivation for corrective action.

     This is the sort of function implicated in the famous example of deontic selection tasks. We make accurate judgments about whether a social rule (say, "If one is to drink alcohol, then one must be over 21.") is being obeyed, but fail miserably in judging whether an abstract rule having the same logical form is being obeyed.²⁷ This neuropsychological account (or something substantially like it) explains the puzzle nicely: of two mechanisms of judgment, the easiest, most comfortable to use will produce the most ready results, and it turns out that our schemata for social roles and situations have been honed by evolution enough to make them quite accurate -- when applied to the appropriate sort of social roles and situations. Thinking, on the other hand, is much more difficult, and therefore prone to error.

     The foregoing is perhaps more speculative than Gibbard's account of our competing control systems -- if only because it represents a firmer position, and its greater detail offers more opportunity for error. My speculative psychology of judgment mechanisms differs from any account I have seen from psychologists or philosophers, though its components each have ample support within those circles.

5.8 Mechanisms of Judgment

     While much of the foregoing supports my contention that there are at least three identifiable functional mechanisms for human normative judgment (and refutes Gibbard's contention that normative and factual judgments differ in content alone -- not in their functional origins), there is yet more to be said on this score.

     Let's begin with Gibbard's observation that humans have apparently evolved competing control systems (57). "Biology, after all, offers numerous examples of duplicate systems sharing the same function, with one system evolutionarily more recent than the other. The normative control system and the animal control system might be a case in point." This actually reveals several cases in point, for Gibbard misidentifies the competing control systems in a way that raises suspicions of anthropocentric essentialism. The "animal" motivational system Gibbard mentions here corresponds to the two systems -- reptilian and paleomammalian (limbic) as described by MacLean. Furthermore, what Gibbard treats as the normative control system (rational and linguistic in character) corresponds to two other systems -- a left hemispheric reasoning mechanism in uneasy cooperation with a right hemisphere/limbic conceptual evaluation mechanism.

     It is important to note that Gibbard's phrase "sharing the same function" is misleading. There is no benefit in developing two systems that function identically, except that damage to one of them leaves an organism unimpaired -- such a rare situation that it would provide no significant selection pressure to develop such redundancy. By contrast, there may be tremendous benefit to be had by developing a new system serving the same general role as does an existing system, but in a different way. To illustrate, the reptilian brain was an effective behavioral control system for promoting personal survival and reproduction, but there was much advantage to be had from a new behavioral control system -- a limbic system that introduced judgment in the rudimentary form of emotion, and allowed the development of a vast array of social behaviors.

     For many people, one of the most noxious revelations from evolutionary psychology is that most of our behavior is generically mammalian or primate rather than distinctively human, and is governed by an ancient brain structure that our remote ancestors relied upon for making judgments long before the neocortex developed the capacity for language and rational thought. The key point of our just completed discussion of the origins of normative governance was that this ancient brain structure, the limbic system, produces our emotions and social motivations in much the same way it does for our mammalian cousins (and did, for millions of years, for our primate-through-modern human ancestors). This is underscored by Panksepp (1996, p. 36):

We must also recognize some simple constraints on evolution, such as that it can only build on preexisting solutions. A resultant conclusion is inescapable: Brain operating systems that instigate human emotions cannot be markedly different in principle from the ones that generate emotional states in other mammals.

     Gibbard clearly disagrees with this perspective (136), assigning the limbic system a rather limited role ("The old emotions [including rage, fear, and sexually tinged excitement] operate at least partly in the limbic system...."), and attributing to the right hemisphere a special role for emotionality, saying it "seems capable by itself of emotions that are peculiarly human -- amusement for instance."

     In principle, Gibbard seems prepared to grant relative functional independence to such control systems. He speaks of an emotional mechanism (133 note 5): "The animal counts as being afraid if the mechanism is operating, whether or not there are fearful circumstances, symptoms of fear, and evasive action in that particular instance."

     Let us stop here and ask, then, as pointedly as we can, why Gibbard won't say the same thing about rationality. Doesn't a human (an animal, to remind recalcitrant anthropocentrists) count as being rational just when its reasoning mechanism is operating? Or are the deliverances of emotion and the deliverances of reason different in any respects that would justify denying rationality a functional pedigree?

5.9 A Naturalistic Fallacy for Ordinary Normativity

     If an understanding of the origins of human normativity helps us decide how to direct our future normative endeavors, I'm afraid it won't be in the way Gibbard envisions (recognizing apt practices justified by an evolutionary history). Rather, it will be in recognizing the nature of our normative errors. One of these, apparently, is the routine application of the naturalistic fallacy.

     Gibbard doesn't explain for us what good and bad are, but rather explains why we make normative judgments of the sort we do. If this explanation is supposed to provide moral guidance, it might seem to commit the naturalistic fallacy: how can the fact that we make certain normative judgments mean that we should make those judgments? As noted in the introduction, Gibbard recognizes the gap between facts about our normative practices and questions concerning the normative worth of the content of the judgments those practices produce.

     Gibbard himself doesn't commit the naturalistic fallacy, for he doesn't claim that we should always follow the dictates of normative consensus or, ultimately, normative governance (for he acknowledges normative error). We are simply disposed to believe we should comport with our norms, and that belief has turned out to be adaptive for humans.

     Put another way, while Gibbard doesn't commit the naturalistic fallacy, his account depends on ordinary people doing so as a matter of course. We believe we should follow our normative practices because they are our normative practices. We worry about making errors, and we're not sure why our practices are better than potential alternatives -- but the fact of their existence (their persistence, actually) counts for us as a reason why we ought to follow them.

     Gibbard's portrayal of ordinary normativity is accurate enough. But we must acknowledge that ordinary normativity is philosophically destitute.

     Consider what Gibbard tells us (augmented by points he doesn't dispute): We each begin with tentative judgments about what is right or good (which we treat as objective), but we don't know how they are produced or what justifies them. We also begin with judgments about whom to trust as normative judges, but we don't know what constitutes good normative judgment or what processes produce it. To be sure, we offer rationales for conferring normative authority -- say, that someone has plenty of experience; yet we don't know how experience (perhaps only experience in making normative errors) is supposed to be of benefit.

     It gets worse. We then engage in normative discussion -- a process with no objective standards to speak of, beyond vague (and ultimately disposable, if we choose) commitments to norms such as consistency. Then, to top it all off, we measure the products of normative discussion with the yardstick of intuition: if the conclusions seem plausible, fine; if they are self-evidently monstrous, we reject them.

     Even if Gibbard succeeds in helping us understand the nature of these normative practices, we will lack the tools we need for improvement unless we can learn (probing beneath the surface of evolutionary theory that Gibbard skims) how they have managed to serve us despite their philosophic shortcomings, whether they are at all appropriate for the problems of modern life, and whether there is some superior approach to normative judgment that could serve us even better.