Brooks on Morality: Stop Thinking, Start Feeling

You want to know the problem with morality today? It’s all head and no heart. Instead of thinking about the difference between right and wrong, we should just trust the instincts given to us through evolution and do what feels right.

After attending a Templeton Foundation event last month entitled “Evolution and the Ethical Brain,” that’s the message a group of us from the office walked away with. David Brooks, who led the Templeton discussion last month, repeated that same sentiment earlier this week in his article “The End of Philosophy”:

Today, many psychologists, cognitive scientists, and even philosophers embrace a different view of morality. In this view, moral thinking is more like aesthetics. As we look around the world, we are constantly evaluating what we see. Seeing and evaluating are not two separate processes. They are linked and basically simultaneous . . . .

Think of what happens when you put a new food into your mouth. You don’t have to decide if it’s disgusting. You just know. You don’t have to decide if a landscape is beautiful. You just know.

Moral judgments are like that. They are rapid intuitive decisions and involve the emotion-processing parts of the brain. Most of us make snap moral judgments about what feels fair or not, or what feels good or not. We start doing this when we are babies, before we have language. And even as adults, we often can’t explain to ourselves why something feels wrong.

Mark Shea wastes no time:

Ah! So the world is basically run on the “Ick! Yum!” principle. Hitler said “Jews! Ick! Ovens! Yum!” but the rest of us had different tastebuds. Moral ambiguity? That’s just when things taste sweet and sour at the same time and you feel conflicted, I guess. You just know. After all, what could be more self-evident that “Love your enemy.”

God? Well, he’s just an artifact of morality. Think of him as a traffic cop conjured by your hypothalamus to make you play well with others. The real God is evolution and progress is whatever comes next.

Yeah. A civilization that buys that bridge has indeed come to the end of philosophy. But the civilization after that—the one that will be picking through its ruins—will perhaps go back through its history and see where it made the wrong turn, then resume the sane Catholic philosophical tradition that does not imagine wisdom begins, much less ends, with us.