by Dan Sperber
While this experiment reports a real improvement of argument quality, its scope is limited. Arguing about capital punishment made people better at arguing about capital punishment. To make people argue better in a more general way, researchers and educators have had more often recourse to other tools, such as teaching critical thinking. This typically involves lessons about the many (supposed) argumentative fallacies—the ad hominem, the slippery slope, and so on—and cognitive biases—such as the myside bias. Overall, such programs have had weak effects.51 If people are very good at spotting fallacies and biases in others, they find it much harder to turn the same critical eye on themselves.52
If learning to reason is, to a large extent, learning to anticipate counterarguments, then the best solution might be to expose people to more counterarguments—to make people argue more. When someone’s first argument is easily shot down and when that person encounters strong resistance in the form of valid arguments for the other side, he or she might learn not only about the content of these specific arguments but about the challenge presented by counterarguments more generally. That person might also learn that some anticipation might be a good thing in order to avoid putting forward indefensible points of view or arguments that are so easily shot down that they hurt their credibility.
Deanna Kuhn and Amanda Crowell set out to test whether making students argue in groups would make the students better reasoners even on topics they had no experience arguing about.53 The researchers compared the effects of two interventions, both heavy-handed: twice-weekly meetings of fifty minutes over three school years. One intervention consisted of philosophy classes covering a range of social issues. It included a lot of essay writing as well as some whole-class discussions. In the other intervention, the students had to exchange arguments on topics such as home schooling or China’s one-child policy. This intervention let the students spend time honing their arguments before sparring with their peers in several argumentation sessions.
At the end of each year, the students had to defend their position on a novel issue in writing. The students who had followed the more standard philosophy classes had had more extensive experience in essay writing, yet they developed simpler arguments. The students trained in argumentation offered more complex arguments that often incorporated both sides of the issue.
Arguing, it seems, makes one a better reasoner across the board. By being confronted with counterarguments on a specific topic, one learns to anticipate their presence in other contexts. While the argumentative theory of reasoning does not predict the exact scope with which people generalize their anticipation of counterarguments, it is in a better position to account for these findings than the intellectualist theory. In the experiment of Kuhn and her colleagues, the students receiving the standard philosophy classes showed very little improvement in spite of intensive training in individual reasoning. By contrast, those asked to argue with each other interiorized the dynamic of argumentation and wrote better essays. By learning to argue together, they had learned to reason better on their own.
17
Reasoning about Moral and Political Topics
You are taking part in a psychology experiment about moral judgment. The experimenter makes you sit in a small room and fill in a questionnaire containing several short stories. One of them tells of a documentary film that used dubiously acquired footage: some of the people in the movie claim they didn’t realize they were being filmed when they were interviewed. Asked whether you approve of the decision of the studio to release the movie anyway, you voice a rather strong disapproval. Why are you so severe? Perhaps it’s because the complaints came from Mexican immigrants to the United States, a population that doesn’t need to be portrayed in a bad light, or perhaps because you worry about recent assaults on privacy, or perhaps it’s because of a terrible smell in the room.1
Psychologists can be creative when it comes to surreptitiously manipulating people’s behavior. To study the impact of disgust on moral judgments, they have had recourse to hypnosis, video clips of nauseating toilets, and trashcans overflowing with old pizza boxes and dirty tissues. In this case, they used fart spray: some of the participants filled in their questionnaires after the foul smell had been sprayed around. Those smelling the unpleasant odor were more severe in their moral judgments than those breathing a cleaner air. Reason wasn’t driving moral judgment. Fart spray was.
Other unwanted influences are even more unsettling, as Israeli prisoners might discover if they read the scientific literature. In 2011, three researchers reported a strange pattern in the decisions of Israeli judges sitting on parole commissions.2 The judges would start the day relatively lenient, granting about two-thirds of the parole requests. Then the rate would drop to zero by 10:00 AM. At 10:30 AM a strong rebound brought the rate of parole back to 65 percent, only to see it plunge back after a couple of hours. There was another shot back to over 60 percent of requests granted at 2:00 PM and then a quick decline back to very low rates for the end of the day.
No rational factor could explain this pattern. What was happening? Breaks were happening. The judges were served a snack around 10:00 AM and took lunch at 1:00 PM. Those breaks brought them back to the same good mood and energy they had started the day with. But their motivation quickly waned, and since more paperwork is required to accept a parole request than to deny it, so did the prisoners’ hopes of getting out. We do not know if prisoners’ associations have bought a snack vending machine for the courtroom. What we do know is that the judges never gave as a reason to deny parole that they were getting tired.
So far we have mostly looked at issues that admit of a more or less right answer, whether it is a logical task, making predictions, or even delivering a verdict. However, reasoning is also used in domains in which what is the right answer or even whether there is one is much less clear, such as esthetics or morality.
Moral reason has often been treated quite independently from other types of reason. We can still discern, though, the equivalent in the moral realm of the intellectualist approach to reason. This intellectualist view of moral reason—a simplistic version of Kant’s position, for instance—suggests that reason can be and should be the ultimate arbiter in moral matters. Through reason, people should reach sound moral principles and act or judge in line with these principles. For most of the twentieth century, moral psychologists such as Jean Piaget and Lawrence Kohlberg have adopted a version of the intellectualist view, postulating that better use of reason is what makes people behave more morally.
However, reflections on morality have also led some thinkers—from Paul to Kierkegaard—to view morality as being rightfully dominated by emotions and intuitions. They, too, have found allies among psychologists—such as the experimenters who conducted the ingenious studies described in the preceding paragraphs.
While we have built a solid case against the individualist approach in Chapters 11 through 15, the moral domain offers a fresh challenge. Perhaps in this domain solitary reason is in fact able to overcome intuitions and guide the lone reasoner toward more enlightened decisions. Or, on the contrary, perhaps reason is so impotent in the moral realm that even sound arguments fail to change people’s minds.
How Reasoning Lets Us Behave Immorally
In 2001 Jonathan Haidt published a groundbreaking article called “The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail.”3 For Haidt, reasoning is here only to “wag the dog,” to create post-hoc justifications that cover the tracks of the intuitions and emotions secretly running the show. The studies mentioned earlier in this chapter fit well with Haidt’s theory, as they show moral judgments being driven by irrelevant factors—a bad smell or tiredness-induced bad mood—rather than reason. But Haidt went further, suggesting that instead of making us do the right thing, reason may give us excuses not to do the right thing.
In the 1970s, Melvin Snyder and his colleagues performed a clever experiment showing that students are ready to jump on the flimsiest excuse to avoid sitting next to someone
with a disability.4 Participants were told they would have to evaluate old comedies. The movies were showing on two TV screens, in a single room separated by a partition. In front of each TV screen were two chairs, an empty one and one occupied by a confederate—an experimenter pretending to be just another participant. While one of the confederates had no distinguishable signs, the other confederate’s heavy metal braces signaled a motor handicap.
Participants were told that each TV would play a different type of movie—a slapstick comedy or a sad clown comedy. Which movie did the participants prefer? It turned out that they consistently wanted to see the movie that would make them sit close to the confederate without a disability—whichever movie that was. They were making up on the fly preferences for old comedies in order to avoid sitting next to someone with a disability.
Similar demonstrations have piled up since. For instance, male participants adjust their preferences in order to pick the sports magazine with the swimsuit issue: if it’s the one that has more sports cover, then sports cover is the decisive factor; if it’s the one that has more feature articles, then feature articles become the decisive factor. As the old excuse goes, “I read Playboy for the articles.”5
The philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel took this logic to the extreme and looked at the behavior of expert moral reasoners, people whose job it is to read about, think about, and talk about moral reason: ethics professors. It turns out that for all their moral reflection, the ethicists are not more likely to vote, to pay conference registration fees, to reply to students’ emails, or to abstain from rude behavior than other philosophy professors.6
These examples support Haidt’s model and demonstrate the pettiness of moral reason, whether it helps undergrads avoid people who make them feel uncomfortable, lets men look at scantily clad models, or allows ethics professors to skip voting.7 In none of these cases are the rationalizations produced likely to cause any further harm. The undergrads’ newfound passion for slapstick comedies will hurt neither them nor people with disabilities. But for moral violations of a different scale, more powerful rationalizations are needed, and these can take on a ghastly life of their own.
Great Reasoner, Awful Rationalizations
A few years ago, one of us, Hugo, was invited by Jon Haidt to share our ideas at the University of Virginia. No trip to Charlottesville is complete without a tour of Monticello, the home of Thomas Jefferson. There is much to be learned about the founding father in this “little mountain.” His love of books, which used to fill two big rooms. His admiration for the thinkers of the French enlightenment, immortalized in marble busts. His ingenuity, on display with a giant clock of his making. His architectural acumen, which gave birth to this neoclassical marvel.
Yet none of this house’s wonders should make us forget who built it and who operated the five-thousand-acre plantation it dominated. Slaves. Nearly two hundred of them.8 Slaves who were sold like chattel when Jefferson needed to pay for these fancy busts and other frivolous expenses.9 Slaves who were whipped into submission.10 Slaves who were sold away to distant quarters “to make an example … in terrorem to others.”11
As many of Jefferson’s biographers have pointed out,12 there is nothing extraordinary about this behavior for a Virginia planter of the revolutionary era. Jefferson, however, was anything but a typical Virginia planter of the revolutionary era. He was a proponent of universal education, the founder of a major university, a fighter of cruel punishment, the architect of religious toleration in Virginia, and the writer of these words: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Talk about cognitive dissonance.
Because he was such a brilliant reasoner, Jefferson offers one the most dramatic illustrations of Haidt’s model. When Jefferson reflects on what is to be done about slavery, he has no trouble finding reasons to oppose emancipation.
In his Notes on the State of Virginia,13 Jefferson laid down his fear that emancipation would only lead to “the extermination of the one or the other race.” He could have stopped there, but he really wanted to bolster his point, and so “to these objections, which are political,” he “added others, which are physical and moral.” Blacks and whites can’t live in harmony together because of the many defects in black people’s physique and spirit. “Are not the fine mixtures of red and white, the expressions of every passion by greater or less suffusions of colour in the one, preferable to that eternal monotony, which reigns in the countenances, that immoveable veil of black which covers all the emotions of the other race?” The blacks may be “more adventuresome” but only “from a want of forethought.” Their love is but “an eager desire.” “Their griefs are transient.” “Their existence appears to participate more of sensation than reflection.” To conclude, “this unfortunate difference of colour, and perhaps of faculty, is a powerful obstacle to the emancipation of these people.”
This is reason at its worst. Patently biased, it turns the most subjective evaluation—“a more elegant symmetry of form”—into an objective assessment—“the real distinctions which nature has made.” It makes of a scientific mind a dunce ready to accept that the orangutan has a preference “for the black women over those of his own species.” It pushes a sharp intellect to say that blacks both “seem to require less sleep”—when it comes to “sit up till midnight” for the “slightest amusements”—and have a “disposition to sleep”—after all, “an animal whose body is at rest, and who does not reflect, must be disposed to sleep of course.” It lets a master rhetorician argue, in effect, that there’s nothing to be done right now about blacks being reduced to the most abject submission, because they don’t have flowing hair.14
One cannot tell whether Jefferson’s fear of a race war or his racist beliefs drove his rejection of immediate emancipation.15 Instead of emancipation, he favored long-term and far-fetched plans for educating young blacks, separating them from their parents and sending them back to Africa.16 But it can only be his views on the inferiority of the black race that made him so fearful of interracial encounters (except when it came to sleeping with his mistress, his slave Sally Hemings). Why send emancipated slaves as far away as Africa? Because “when freed, [they are] to be removed beyond the reach of mixture.”17 After all “their amalgamation with the other color produces a degradation to which no lover of his country, no lover of excellence in the human character can innocently consent.”18
It is already difficult to figure out why people hold such and such beliefs when they can be asked; reconstructing the thought process of a dead man is an even more speculative business. Yet we know that Jefferson didn’t become a slave owner because of his racist beliefs. Rather, he inherited a plantation along with its slaves and, presumably, the attitude of ordinary slave owners at the time. Later he also adopted the enlightenment ideals of his intellectual peers. This massive contradiction could be reconciled only by a creative reasoner, and the sad way Jefferson rose to the challenge is also part of his legacy.
Clearly, reason is not behaving as we would like it to, helping people pass more enlightened judgments and make fairer decisions. Jefferson, armed with a brilliant intellect, all the knowledge of his time, and the noblest ideals, should have reasoned his way to the right creed and the just behavior. Instead, reason provided him with convenient rationalizations, allowing him to keep his slaves and his wealth. Sadly, these rationalizations proved far from inert, turning him into the “intellectual godfather of the racist pseudo-science of the American school of anthropology.”19
Such examples might prompt us to safely lock up moral reason and throw away the key. Yet we should also consider that if reason’s power of rationalization is immense, it is not limitless. Sometimes no excuse is to be found, and people have the choice of either behaving immorally without any justification or behaving morally after all. We have described how students invented a taste for on
e kind of movies to avoid sitting next to someone with a disability. In the same study, another group of participants was denied that opportunity: the two TV screens showed the same movie. These participants could not use even a bogus preference to justify sitting away from someone with a disability—as a result, they were much less likely to do so. Likewise, some of Jefferson’s contemporaries found it beyond their ability to justify owning people. George Washington freed his slaves and provided for them in his will. Benjamin Franklin freed his slaves in his lifetime. It seems that one cannot, in fact, “find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do”20—unless perhaps one is as smart as Thomas Jefferson.21
Can Reasoning Change People’s Moral Opinions?
The picture of moral reasoning painted so far, the one stressed by Haidt, fits one side of the interactionist approach to reason perfectly. Instead of proceeding to a careful assessment of the moral value of a judgment or a decision, reason looks for justifications that may be mere excuses for what people wanted to do all along, moral or not—the myside bias at work. Being content with shallow reasons and flimsy rationalizations reflects another pitfall of solitary reason: the lack of critical examination of one’s own justifications and arguments.
But Haidt’s theory has another component, the “wag-the-other-dog’s-tail illusion.” As the argumentative theory of reasoning might predict, “in a moral argument, we expect the successful rebuttal of an opponent’s arguments to change the opponent’s mind.” For Haidt, “such a belief is like thinking that forcing a dog’s tail to wag by moving it with your hand will make the dog happy.”22 In other words, however strong your arguments might seem, they won’t change other people’s position on moral issues. People will keep being driven by their intuitions and emotions instead.23