Secure Morality For Humans: Ethical Understanding From The Perspective Of Cognitive Science Produced By Mark Johnson Accessible In Copy

Johnson argues that moral deliberation is a form of problemsolving, in which possible courses of action are imagined and evaluated using all information we currently have available to us.
It is not a matter of applying preexisting moral axioms either godgiven or rationally derived à la Kant but rather a creative exercise in inventing new solutions to new problems.
He calls this approach ethical naturalism, Johnson relies heavily in John Dewey and argues against Immanuel Kant, whose ethics he considers to be actually very similar to the religious fundamentalist's idea of morals as given by a commanding god, but minus the god.
He says that in the same way that Kant tried to detheologize JudeoChristian ethics, so Rawls tries to detranscendentalize Kant, removing Kant's claims of absolute foundations in pure practical reason, while keeping most of the rest of Kant's moral vision.
He defends Dewey's idea of the "qualitative unity of the situation", but I fail to see what that position actually does, It seems to me that this particular line of argument makes the theory more prone to relativism than it needs to be,

Basically, Johnson considers the quest for ethical certainty in a small set of moral axioms to be fundamentally mistaken, Moral problemsolving is an empirical inquiry, He maintains that this does not lead inevitably to relativism, Criticism of moral ideals is possible, and we are not prisoners of our inherited moral frameworks, Progress is possible. In my mind, his approach fits very well with the evolutionary wave of thinking that is currently under way in the science and philosophy of human nature, Although he does not refer to Karl Popper or Michael Tomasello, I think there are clear points of contact in the approach,

I can recommend this text, It is well written, clear and forceful, Its provokative ideas made me think about ethics in a new way, What is the difference between right and wrong This is no easy question to answer, yet we constantly try to make it so, frequently appealing to some hidden cache of cutanddried absolutes, whether drawn from God, universal reason, or societal authority.
Combining cognitive science with a pragmatist philosophical framework in  Morality for Humans:   Ethical Understanding from the Perspective of Cognitive Science , Mark Johnson argues that appealing solely to absolute principles and values is not only scientifically unsound but even morally suspect.
He shows that the standards for the kinds of people we should be and how we should treat one anotherwhich we often think of as universalare in fact frequently subject to change.
And we should be okay with that, Taking context into consideration, he offers a remarkably nuanced, naturalistic view of ethics that sees us creatively adapt our standards according to given needs, emerging problems, and social interactions.

           
Ethical naturalism is not just a revamped form of relativism, Indeed, Johnson attempts to overcome the absolutistversusrelativist impasse that has been one of the most intractable problems in the history of philosophy, He does so through a careful and inclusive look at the many ways we reason about right and wrong, Much of our moral thought, he shows, is automatic and intuitive, gut feelings that we follow up and attempt to justify with rational analysis and argument, However, good moral deliberation is not limited merely to intuitive judgments supported after the fact by reasoning, Johnson points out a crucial third element: we  imagine  how our decisions will play out, how we or the world would change with each action we might take, Plumbing this imaginative dimension of moral reasoning, he provides a psychologically sophisticated view of moral problem solving, one perfectly suited for the embodied, culturally embedded, and everdeveloping human creatures that we are.
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Mark Johnsons Morality for Humans: Ethical Understanding from the Perspective of Cognitive Science is another book, like Fesmires sitelinkJohn Dewey and Moral Imagination: Pragmatism in Ethics, that I am hoping to use as a background for sitelinkScience and Moral Imagination.
In the book, Johnson provides a broadly naturalistic, Deweyan pragmatist account of morality centered on moral deliberation and the role of imagination in moral deliberation, Johnsons book complements Fesmires in much the way that I was hoping, i, e. , it makes good use of Deweys distinction between “valuing” and “valuation” though I thought Dewey called the latter “evaluation” something Ill have to check, and it discusses at length the relationship between science and ethics, not only the influence of science on ethics, which is a central part of Johnsons story, but also the sense in which moral deliberation is a kind of empirical inquiry.


Johnson is probably most wellknown for his longterm collaboration with cognitive linguist George Lakoff, and their work on embodied metaphor theory in cognitive semantics and its philosophical implications.
It is no surprise that Johnson so adeptly reviews the empirical literature and draws implications for our understanding of morality, Johnson does not limit himself to embodied metaphor theory, but draws on the affective neuroscience of Damasio, the moral psychology of Haidt, the neurophilosophy of the Churchlands, the feminist developmental psychology of Carol Gilligan, and many other scientific sources as well as philosophers insights from a variety of traditions, in a way that is satisfying and provocative without becoming reductionistic or scientistic.


Chapter, “Moral ProblemSolving as an Empirical Inquiry,” provides a powerful argument against the idea that there is a special realm of “moral experience” and against the Kantian idea that there is a peculiar kind of “moral judgment” distinct from our ordinary repertoire of problemsolving strategies.
Chaptercanvasses the various sources of our values, including biology, kinship, social institutions, and cultural sources, Johnson points out that some values will be universal or nearuniversal simply due to the necessities biological functioning and the requirements of any functioning social interaction or institution, though there will also be a lot of cultural variation.
In this chapter, Johnson builds on and critically assesses Damasios affective neuroscience and Haidts moral foundations theory,

Chapterreviews the popular twoprocess account of moral psychology, which posits an intuitivelevel, affectdriven process of moral evaluation that rules most of our moral lives, and a process of moral reasoning whose main function is posthoc justification of intuition.
Johnson argues for either a third process, or another version of the second process of moral reasoning, which he calls moral deliberation, and the theory of moral deliberation occupies Chapters.
Johnson does not dispute dualprocess theory per se, but argues that there is another important process in our moral lives that it ignores,

Johnsons account of moral deliberation is fully Deweyan, Moral deliberation is problemsolving inquiry that addresses a particular situation in which our habits, desires, and values are inadequate to the conditions of the particular situation, It involves gathering information about the situation and dramatic rehearsal in imagination of various possible courses of action, Johnson adopts whole hog Deweys view that this process is regulated by qualitative considerations, and that the goal of inquiry is to transform a situation characterized by an indeterminate, perplexing, problematic quality to one that is determinate, stable, allowing us to move forward in a satisfactory way.
The process of moral deliberation as inquiry is “reasonable” if it actually transforms the situation in a way that resolves the problem or perplexity that occasioned deliberation, This process changes not only our values and our perception of the world, but the world itself and ourselves via a new structure of activities and interactions, If anything from Deweys view of inquiry is missing here, it is his emphasis on “experimental testing” prior to judgment, but I must admit I am also unclear

how this would work in the case of moral deliberation.


The last three chapters held relatively less interest for me, partly because I didnt need to be convinced of most of these things, partly because it doesnt serve my needs as much.
Chaptertakes to task those moral psychologists who have been tempted to revive talk of a separate “moral faculty, ” Chapter, “Moral Fundamentalism is Immoral,” takes on both religious and rationalistic forms of moral fundamentalism, taken as the idea that there are either universally binding moral laws or absolute and foundational moral facts.
These views are both incompatible with our cognitive machinery and detrimental to the needs of genuine moral deliberation, and so both impossible for humans to use and immoral insofar as we try.
Moral realism is treated as an absolutist, foundationalist belief in moral facts independent of the natural picture of the world, While this is certainly a common view under the heading of “Moral Realism,” I think Johnson is mistaken to treat this as the only way one could be a moral realist.


Chapterdiscusses the nature of moral experience and the moral self, Continuing the metaphysical discussion from the previous chapter, Johnson posits a pragmatist process metaphysics, in contrast to both the objectivist metaphysics according to which values or principles are discovered, and a relativist metaphysics according to which they are arbitrarily made up.
According to the pragmatist process view the metaphor of “creative transformation of our experience” and the moral deliberator as artist are much more apt, Johnson also defends Deweys view, which I have always found puzzling, that the ultimate end of moral deliberation is growth, on the grounds that moral deliberation requires a willingness to revise the values and habits that constitute the self to deal with ever new situations.
This chapter also includes a detailed, and fairly satisfying, example of moral deliberation, about the ethics of gay marriage,

I think there is one major missed connection in Johnsons account that connects very closely with my own interests, On the one hand, Johnson appears to hold a basically realist if critical and fallibilist attitude towards the science he relies on in his account, On the other hand, he denies moral realism because it is supposedly absolutist and foundationalist in untenable ways, However, Johnson himself denies that there are distinctive types of experience and inquiry, It is the first major argument of the book, Presumably, this would require us to reject the dichotomy between scientific and moral experience and inquiry, and to see his pragmatist process metaphysics as applying broadly to human knowledge, not just to values and norms.
If this still permits a realist attitude about science, which I think it does, why can it not permit a realist attitude about the valuations that result from reasonable processes of moral deliberation



: Picked up to help me prepare to write my book on "Scientific Inquiry and Moral Imagination.
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