And the Kantian commitment to viewing people as ends in themselves, while a very useful moral principle, is difficult to map onto the world with precision. Not only are the boundaries between self and world hard to define, one's individuality with respect to one's own past and future is somewhat mysterious. For instance, we are each heirs to our actions and to our failures of action. Does this have any moral implications? If I am currently disinclined to do some necessary and profitable work, to eat well, to make regular visits to doctor and dentist, to avoid dangerous sports, to wear my seat belt, to save money, etc.—have I committed a series of crimes against the future self who will suffer the consequences of my negligence? Why not? And if I do live prudently, despite the pain it causes me, out of concern for the interests of my future self, is this an instance of my being used as a means to someone else's end? Am I merely a resource for the person I will be in the future?
46. Rawls's notion of "primary goods," access to which must be fairly allocated in any just society, seems parasitic upon a general notion of human well-being. Why are "basic rights and liberties," "freedom of movement and free choice of occupation," "the powers and prerogatives of offices and positions of authority," "income and wealth," and "the social bases of self-respect" of any interest to us at all if not as constituents of happy human lives? Of course, Rawls is at pains to say that his conception of the "good" is partial and merely political—but to the degree that it is good at all, it seems beholden to a larger conception of human well-being. See Rawls, 2001, pp. 58-60.
47. Cf. Pinker, 2008b.
48. Kant, [1785] 1995, p. 30.
49. As Patricia Churchland notes:
Kant's conviction that detachment from emotions is essential in characterizing moral obligation is strikingly at odds with what we know about our biological nature. From a biological point of view, basic emotions are Mother Nature's way of getting us to do what we prudentially ought. The social emotions are a way of getting us to do what we socially ought, and the reward system is a way of learning to use past experiences to improve one's performance in both domains (Churchland, 2008b).
50. However, one problem that people often have with consequentialism is that it entails moral hierarchy: certain spheres of well-being (i.e., minds) will be more important than others. The philosopher Robert Nozick famously observed that this opens the door to "utility monsters": hypothetical creatures who could get enormously greater life satisfaction from devouring us than we would lose (Nozick 1974, p. 41). But, as Nozick observes, we are just such utility monsters. Leaving aside the fact that economic inequality allows many of us to profit from the drudgery of others, most of us pay others to raise and kill animals so that we can eat them. This arrangement works out rather badly for the animals. How much do these creatures actually suffer? How different is the happiest cow, pig, or chicken from those who languish on our factory farms? We seem to have decided, all things considered, that it is proper that the well-being of certain species be entirely sacrificed to our own. We might be right about this. Or we might not. For many people, eating meat is simply an unhealthy source of fleeting pleasure. It is very difficult to believe, therefore, that all of the suffering and death we impose on our fellow creatures is ethically defensible. For the sake of argument, however, let's assume that allowing some people to eat some animals yields a net increase in well-being on planet earth.
In this context, would it be ethical for cows being led to slaughter to defend themselves if they saw an opportunity—perhaps by stampeding their captors and breaking free? Would it be ethical for a fish to fight against the hook in light of the fisherman's justified desire to eat it? Having judged some consumption of animals to be ethically desirable (or at least ethically acceptable), we appear to rule out the possibility of warranted resistance on their parts. We are their utility monsters.
Nozick draws the obvious analogy and asks if it would be ethical for our species to be sacrificed for the unimaginably vast happiness of some superbeings. Provided that we take the time to really imagine the details (which is not easy), I think the answer is clearly "yes." There seems no reason to suppose that we must occupy the highest peak on the moral landscape. If there are beings who stand in relation to us as we do to bacteria, it should be easy to admit that their interests must trump our own, and to a degree that we cannot possibly conceive. I do not think that the existence of such a moral hierarchy poses any problems for our ethics. And there is no compelling reason to believe that such superbeings exist, much less ones that want to eat us.
51. Traditional utility theory has been unable to explain why people so often behave in ways that they know they will later regret. If human beings were simply inclined to choose the path leading to their most satisfying option, then willpower would be unnecessary, and self-defeating behavior would be unheard of. In his fascinating book, Breakdown of Will, the psychiatrist George Ainslie examines the dynamics of human decision making in the face of competing preferences. To account for both the necessity of human will, along with its predictable failures, Ainslie presents a model of decision making in which each person is viewed as a community of present and future "selves" in competition, and each "self" discounts future rewards more steeply than seems strictly rational.
The multiplicity of competing interests in the human mind causes us each to function as a loose coalition of interests that may be unified only by resource limitations—like the fact that we have only one body with which to express our desires, moment to moment. This obvious constraint upon our fulfilling mutually incompatible ends keeps us bargaining with our "self" across time: "Ulysses planning for the Sirens must treat Ulysses hearing them as a separate person, to be influenced if possible and forestalled if not" (Ainslie, 2001, p. 40).
Hyperbolic discounting of future rewards leads to curiosities like "preference reversal": for example, most people prefer $10,000 today to $15,000 three years from now, but prefer $15,000 in thirteen years to $10,000 in ten years. Given that the latter scenario is simply the first seen at a distance of ten years, it seems clear that people's preferences reverse depending on the length of the delay. The deferral of a reward is less acceptable the closer one gets to the possibility of enjoying it.
52. I am also not as healthy or as well educated as I could be. I believe that such statements are objectively true (even where they relate to subjective facts about me).
53. Haidt, 2001, p. 821.
54. The wisdom of switching doors is seen more easily if you imagine having made your initial selection among a thousand doors, rather than three. Imagine you picked Door #17, and Monty Hall then opens every door except for #562, revealing goats as far as the eye can see. What should you do next? Stick with Door #17 or switch to Door #562? It should be obvious that your initial choice was made in a condition of great uncertainty, with a 1-in-l ,000 chance of success and a 999-in-1,000 chance of failure. The opening of 998 doors has given you an extraordinary amount of information—collapsing the remaining odds of 999-in-1,000 on door #562.
55. Haidt, 2008.
56. Haidt, 2001, p. 823.
57. http://newspolls.org/question.php?question_id=716. Incidentally, the same research found that 16 percent of Americans also believe that it is "very likely" that the "federal government is withholding proof of the existence of intelligent life from other planets" (http://newspolls.org/question.php? question_id=715).
58. This is especially obvious in split-brain research, when language areas in the left hemisphere routinely confabulate explanations for right-hemisphere behavior (Gazzaniga, 1998; M. S. Gazzaniga, 2005; Gazzaniga, 2008; Gazzaniga, Bogen, & Sperry, 1962).
59. Blow, 2009.
60. "Multiculturalism drives young Muslims to shun British values.'" The Daily Mail (January 29, 2007).
61. Moll, de Oliveira-Souza, & Zahn, 2008; 2005.
62. Moll et al., 2008, p. 162.
63. Including the nucleus accumbens, the caudate nucleus, the ventromedial and orbitofrontal cortex, and the rostral
anterior cingulate (Rilling et al., 2002).
64. Though, as is often the case with neuroimaging work, the results do not divide as neatly as all that. In fact, one of Moll's earlier studies on disgust and moral indignation found medial regions also involved in these negative states (Moll, de Oliveira-Souza et al., 2005).
65. Koenigs et al., 2007.
66. J.D. Greene etal., 2001.
67. This thought experiment was first introduced by Foot (1967) and later elaborated by Thompson (1976).
68. J. D.Greene etal., 2001.
69. Valdesolo & DeSteno, 2006.
70. J. D. Greene, 2007.
71. Moll et al., 2008, p. 168. There is the additional concern, which bedevils much neuroimaging research: the regions that Greene et al. label as "emotional" have been implicated in other types of processing—memory and language, for instance (G. Miller, 2008b). This is an instance of the "reverse inference" problem raised by Poldrack (2006), discussed below in the context of my own research on belief.
72. While some researchers have sought to differentiate these terms, most use them interchangeably.
73. Salter, 2003, pp. 98-99. See also Stone, 2009.
74. www.missingkids.com.
75. Twenty percent of male and female prison inmates are psychopaths, and they are responsible for more than 50 percent of serious crimes (Hare, 1999, p. 87).
The recidivism rate of psychopaths is three times higher than that of other offenders (and the violent recidivism rate is three to five times higher) (Blair, Mitchell, & Blair, 2005, p. 16).
76. Nunez, Casey, Egner, Hare, & Hirsch, 2005. For reasons that may have something to do with the sensationalism just mentioned, psychopathy does not exist as a diagnostic category, or even as an index entry, in 71?e Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV). The two DSM-IV diagnoses that seek to address the behavioral correlates of psychopathy—antisocial personality disorder (ASPD) and conduct disorder—do not capture its interpersonal and emotional components at all. Antisocial behavior is common to several disorders, and people with ASPD may not score high on the PCL-R (de Oliveira-Souza et al., 2008; Narayan et al., 2007). The inadequacies of the DSM-IV's treatment of the syndrome are very well brought out in Blair et al., 2005. There are many motives for antisocial behavior and many routes to becoming a violent felon. The hallmark of psychopathy isn't bad behavior per se, but an underlying spectrum of emotional and interpersonal impairments. And psychopathy, as a construct, is far more predictive of specific behaviors (e.g., recidivism) than the DSM-IV criteria are.
77. It would appear, however, that the same could be said of the great Erwin Schrodinger (Teresi, 2010).
78. Frontal lobe injury can result in a condition known as "acquired sociopathy," which shares some of the features of developmental psychopathy. While they are often mentioned in the same context, acquired sociopathy and psychopathy differ, especially with regard to the type of aggression they produce. Reactive aggression is triggered by an annoying or threatening stimuli and is often associated with anger. Instrumental aggression is purposed toward a goal. The man who lashes out after being jostled on the street has expressed reactive aggression; the man who attacks another man to steal his wallet or to impress his fellow gang members has displayed instrumental aggression. Subjects suffering from acquired sociopathy, who have generally sustained injuries to their orbitofrontal lobes, display poor impulse control and tend to exhibit increased levels of reactive aggression. However, they do not show a heightened tendency toward instrumental aggression. Psychopaths are prone to aggression of both types. Most important, instrumental aggression seems most closely linked to the callousness/unemotional (CU) trait that is the hallmark of the disorder. Studies of same-sex twins suggest that the CU trait is also most associated with heritable causes of antisocial behavior (Viding, Jones, Frick, Moffitt, & Plomin, 2008).
Moll, de Oliveira-Souza, and colleagues found that the correlation between gray matter reductions and psychopathy extends beyond the frontal cortex, and this would explain why acquired sociopathy and psychopathy are distinct disorders. Psychopathy was correlated with gray matter reductions in a wide network of structures: including the bilateral insula, the superior temporal sulci, the supra-marginal/angular gyri, the caudate (head), the fusiform cortex, the middle frontal gyri, among others. It would be exceedingly unlikely to injure such a wide network selectively.
79. Kiehl et al., 2001; Glenn, Raine, & Schug, 2009. However, when given personal vs. impersonal moral dilemmas to solve, unlike MPFC patients, psycho paths tend to produce the same answers as normal controls, albeit without the same emotional response (Glenn, Raine, Schug, Young, & Hauser, 2009).
80. Hare, 1999, p. 76.
81. Ibid., p. 132.
82. Blair etal., 2005.
83. Buckholtzetal., 2010.
84. Richelletal., 2003.
85. Dolan & Fullam, 2004.
86. Dolan & Fullam, 2006; Blair et al., 2005.
87. Blair et al., 2005. The first book-length treatment of psychopathy appears to be Cleckley's The Mask of Sanity. While it is currently out of print, this book is still widely referenced and much revered. It is worth reading, if only for the author's highly (and often inadvertently) amusing prose. Hare, 1999, Blair et al., 2005, and Babiak & Hare, 2006, provide more recent book-length discussions of the disorder.
88. Blair et al., 2005. The developmental literature suggests that, because punishment (the unconditioned stimulus) rarely follows a specific transgression (the conditioned stimulus) closely in time, the aversive conditioning brought on by corporal punishment tends to get associated with the person who metes it out, rather than with the behavior in need of correction. Blait also obsetves that if punishment were the primary source of moral instruction, children would be unable to observe the difference between conventional transgressions (e.g., talking in class) and moral ones (e.g., hitting another student), as breaches of either sort tend to elicit punishment. And yet healthy children can readily distinguish between these forms of misbehavior. Thus, it would seem that they receive their correction directly from the distress that others exhibit when true moral boundaries have been crossed. Other mammals also find the suffering of their conspecifics highly aversive. We know this from work in monkeys (Masserman, Wechkin, & Terris, 1964) and rats (Church, 1959) that would seem scarcely ethical to perform today. For instance, the conclusion of the former study reads: "A majority of rhesus monkeys will consistently suffer hunger rather than secure food at the expense of electro-shock to a conspecific."
89. Subsequent reviews of the neuroimaging literature have produced a somewhat muddled view of the underlying neurology of psychopathy (Raine & Yaling, 2006). While individual studies have found anatomical and functional abnormalities in a wide variety of brain regions—including the amygdala, hippocampus, corpus callosum, and putamen—the only result common to all studies is that psychopaths tend to show reduced gray matter in the prefrontal cortex (PFC). Reductions in gray matter in three regions of the PFC—the medial and lateral orbital areas and the frontal poles—correlate with psychopathy scores, and these regions have been shown in other work to be directly involved in the regulation of social conduct (de Oliveira-Souza et al., 2008). Recent findings suggest that the correlation between cortical thinning and psychopathy may be significant only for the right hemisphere (Yang, Raine, Colletti, Toga, & Narr, 2009). The brains of psychopaths also show reduced white matter connections between orbital frontal regions and the amygdala (M. C. Craig et al., 2009). In fact, the difference in the average volume of gray matter in orbitofrontal regions seems to account for half of the variation in antisocial behavior between the sexes: men and women don't seem to differ in their experience of anger, but women tend to be both more fearful and more empathetic—and are thus better able to control their antisocial impulses (Jones, 2008).
90. Blair et al. hypothesize that the orbitofrontal deficits of psychopathy underlie the propensity for reactive aggression, while the amygdala
dysfunction leads to "impairments in aversive conditioning, instrumental learning, and the processing of fearful and sad expressions" that allow for learned, instrumental aggression and make normal socialization impossible. Kent Kiehl, author of the first fMRI study on psychopathy, now believes that the functional neuroanatomy of the disorder includes a network of structures including the orbital frontal cortex, insula, anterior and posterior cingulate, amygdala, parahippocampal gyrus, and anterior superior temporal gyrus (Kiehl et al., 2001). He refers to this network as the "the paralimbic system" (Kiehl, 2006). Kiehl is currently engaged in a massive and ongoing fMRI study of incarcerated psychopaths, using a 1.5 Tesla scanner housed in a tractor-trailer that can be moved from prison to prison. He hopes to build a neuroimaging database of 10,000 subjects (G. Miller, 2008a; Seabrook, 2008).
91. Trivers, 2002, p. 53. For an extensive discussion of the details here, see Dawkins, [1976] 2006, pp. 202-233.
92. Jones, 2008.
93. Diamond, 2008. Pinker, 2007, makes the same point: "If the wars of the twentieth century had killed the same proportion of the population that die in the wars of a typical tribal society, there would have been two billion deaths, not 100 million."
It is easy to conclude that life is cheap in an honor culture, ruled by vengeance and the law of talion ("eye for an eye"), but, as William Ian Miller observes, by at least one measure these societies value life even more than we do. Our modern economies thrive because we tend to limit personal liability. If I sell you a defective ladder, and you fall and break your neck, I may have to pay you some compensation. But I will not have to pay you nearly as much as I would be willing to pay to avoid having my own neck broken. In our society we are constrained by the value a court places on the other guy's neck; in a culture ruled by talion law, we are constrained by the value we place on our own (W. I. Miller, 2006).