Stiffen the Sinews, Summon Up the Blood
We (a couple of us anyway) agreed in comments yesterday that motivation is an interesting subject. That’s a big part of what has kept me chipping away at this discussion – the subject of what motivates us to do things, good things and bad things, interests me a lot. It’s important, and it’s hard to figure out – it matters and it’s inevitably somewhat obscure. It matters because it (obviously) influences what we do – without it we wouldn’t do anything. (Which is also another reason it’s interesting – it hooks up with why the mind is adaptive, with what role it plays that makes it worth all the calories it burns.) And it’s obscure because we don’t fully understand even our own motivations (I think), let alone other people’s. And we don’t fully understand them (I think) because they are so complex – they rely on so many different threads, some of which stretch back into childhood – but we’re not aware of all of them when we think about why we do things. I don’t mean warmed-over Freud, I just mean items like things people say when we are eight or ten or thirteen that help to form our beliefs, attitudes, prejudices, likes and dislikes – and then become more or less lost to view.
Oh get on with it. Sorry. The point is, that’s why I resisted Norm’s example of our Polish Catholic friend (she does seem like a friend now) who risks her life to save an endangered Jew because she was taught from childhood that we’re all God’s children. I resisted it not because I resist on principle admitting that there is any good in religion, but because I was unconvinced, and I was unconvinced because it seems to me there are myriad potential and likely reasons one would strongly believe it’s wrong to murder people. It seems to me terribly unlikely that religion would be the only source of such a belief – though it could be the strongest. But I don’t have any trouble believing that religion could operate to motivate our Polish Catholic at another level. I think at the primary level, of beliefs about basic moral commitments, there is a big ol’ web, but at the secondary level, of willingness and determination to act on those beliefs, I can believe things are simpler. When things get difficult, when the Nazis start publicly executing people who save Jews, when the rescuer is called in for questioning – then it becomes a matter of will, courage, determination, resistance to fear – it becomes overpoweringly difficult. That is, perhaps, when the irrational comes into its own. And not necessarily in a bad or contemptible way – not necessarily through fear of hell or the like. No, not at all. It can be through belief that God wants people to be good and will be pained if you fail – irrational belief, if you like, that your tiny (comparatively) and understandable failure to sacrifice yourself will pain God just as much as the outright monstrousness of the Nazis. That kind of belief is a good thing. That’s what people are gesturing at when they talk about abolitionists, and in that way they have a point. Abolitionism was damn dangerous, it got people killed, it took courage to be one; and religion can be a source of courage when more rational reasons don’t quite do the job.
It worries me to admit that, of course, because it plays into the whole ‘religion is the source of morality and without it we’re all shits’ line that we hear so much of. But I think there’s some truth to it, so there you go.
This was touched on in a TPM forum last year – it’s in the archive, but I give the link in case any of you have archive access. Anthony O’Hear said something that I wanted to disagree with but couldn’t; it’s stuck in my mind ever since. (That’s worth noting since hardly anything ever does stick in my sieve-like mind.)
Is that what morality is? Deciding what it means to treat other people well? Why does that give me a reason for treating you well? It’s not a very profound point. I might know what you, Anthony Grayling, tell me it is to treat other people well. But I want to know why I should treat others well.
Simon Blackburn says he would appeal to moral sympathies, O’Hear says that’s a long way from the Kantian moral law, Blackburn says that’s fine, and O’Hear says –
I don’t agree, actually. I do think that people who stand out against tyrants with no hope of reward, the sort of people that Phillipa Foot discusses in Natural Goodness, are admirable people, and I don’t think their actions are necessarily supererogatory. If morality can’t encompass that or tell people that’s what they should do, then it’s rather weak. You’ve said that the only reason for morality is to produce accommodations, but you’re also telling people that you’ve got to produce more than accommodations. What worries me about the language in which you put it is that anybody who reads you is going to think, “Well I don’t aspire to be a hero. I’ll leave that to other people.”
Yes. We leave being a hero to other people. I know I do! Which is why it struck me. I think that’s an interesting and pretty undeniable point.
On the other hand, of course, the outcome of that is only as good as the initial judgment is. All too often the initial judgment is all wrong, is monstrous, is cruel and oppressive and tyrannical. The Vatican goes on obstinately telling ‘the faithful’ not to use condoms, thus condemning tens (hundreds?) of thousands of people to a horrible early death, a great many of them sexually faithful spouses and asexual infants, and more tens or hundreds of thousands of children to orphanhood and destitution – all to uphold a ridiculous and trivial piece of pseudo-morality. What a price for what a reason! So commitment and will are not enough. But – sometimes they are needed, and religion does seem to be one thing that can shore them up, or supply them entirely.
So, as long as I get to alter the wording of Norm’s example slightly, I agree with him. And that’s that.
So commitment and will are not enough. But – sometimes they are needed, and religion does seem to be one thing that can shore them up, or supply them entirely.
Yes. How does it do that? Is its power to motivate wholly dependent upon its grounding of human existence in a mysterious supernatural setting?
Or is it at least as dependent upon the connectedness that people get from coming together around that grounding myth?
In other words, does the motivation come primarily from the other people? I would like to think it does because then we could look into ways of getting the connectedness other than bringing people together around a myth. Or at least without the supernatural part. E.O. Wilson, in On Human Nature, says we need a myth – an inspirational, explanatory story – but it doesn’t have to be supernatural, it can actually be true.
Well, I think it probably does it in various ways. But I think – this is basically speculation: it’s just what I’ve come up with when I try to think about this, and it strikes me as plausible – one way is that people use the idea of God/Jesus to personify and externalize the idea of goodness, and then once they’ve done that, they want to be loyal to it. I think that may be one place real heroes (as opposed to the kind of people who run around beating up other people for not wearing the right clothes or for running in races) get their motivation. I think the idea of loyalty is really crucial. Loyalty is a powerful motivator.
I have to agree that morality has many diverse causes – in fact I think I said so many posts ago and was totally ignored – but a reasoned morality has to be justifiable, not just what I want. If you think a reasoned morality is important or useful or even possible, then pleasure maximising utilitarianism does it for me.
Yes, OB, I see that. Loyalty would strengthen motivation on its own, it would strengthen the belief system and stregthen the social ties at the same time. Interesting. I wonder what research has been done on that. One of the more convincing ideas I’ve seen about religious glue analyses through the lens of game theory the commitment that people make when they join a religion. By taking the daring step of saying something as ridiculous as “I believe in the father, the son and the holy ghost” they are really putting themselves out on a limb. This attracts other people because they can feel confident that someone who has invested that much in the religion will stick with it, so they will be more likely to join, and a growing group coheres that way.
I went to a conference at LSE a couple of years ago organised by Nicholas Humphrey where a professor William Irons of Northwestern set out that idea. Unfortunately Irons doesn’t appear to have written a word since then, though he teaches courses like The Evolutionary Foundations of Morality. I’m looking forward to Dennett’s new book in that area.
As long as we are thinking about the example of someone resisting Nazis, we mustn’t forget that many Communists/Marxists were just as heroic and determined as our Polish nun, and perished in the camps for their actions.
Certainly they were not motivated by religion in any useable sense of the word. (I know people argue that Marxism is a religion, too, in the sense that the idea of the inevitable overthrow of capitalism by the workers is not an empirically verifiable concept, but I don’t think that’s enough to make a religion.) But they were certainly motivated by a strong conviction that the Nazis had to be resisted if there was ever to be a world free of exploitation, and they were also motivated by comradeship and solidarity.
So this is at least one example of a non-religious motivation for heroism. One must also keep in mind that a lot of Marxists were also Stalinists, etc., and committed plenty of evil deeds themselves. So one can’t rely on any belief system or philosophy or religion to give good results all the time — one has to rely on the goodness and humanity of individuals.
That’s an especially interesting thought about some of them being both heroes and bad guys.
Allow me to make clear – I certainly don’t mean to say that there is no such thing as a non-religious motivation for heroism – only that I think there is such a thing as a religious one, and that it can stiffen people’s wills (as can non-religious motivations). I think I said yesterday that the irrational element may actually help – and I think that may be true. But then hope can work the same way, as in Marxism and other kinds of utopianism.
Stalinists as both heroes and bad guys – absolutely. That’s what made lefty politics so insanely confusing in the 30s. Stalinists fought in Spain, Stalinists helped to organize labour. Stalinists purged anarchists and Trotskyists in Spain, Stalinists purged unreliable elements from labour unions.
The problem with Norm’s example isn’t the rescuing of the Jew by the Polish nun — it is that the nun goes on and does a lot of other actions, too. It might be that Mother Theresa rescued an impoverished beggar in Calcutta, but Mother Theresa went on to found hospices where care was traded for belief, and more than that, she blessed crooks and dictators on her merry way around the world, while trying to inflict a barbarous code of sexual subordination on the poor women of India. Similarly, the nun who did her heroic act is very likely the same nun who, as a superannuated fanatic, is trying to ban abortion (it turns out successfully) in Poland.
There is something very suspicious, to my mind, in making morality some cut and edit film of heroic choices.
I can grant the positive effects of religion operating in people’s lives who claim that religion has given them a certain identity, an inner warmth, provided them with a moral vocabulary, etc. Why not? On that topic, believe the first-person narrative. But I don’t know if it actually subjects people to a morality that they would otherwise not recognize. It isn’t like the nun, taking another choice in her life, wouldn’t have found a reason to rescue jews while living a more secular lifestyle.
Maybe 4,000 years ago, religion enforced certain moral norms. But the education of mankind in those moral norms has long been complete, and there are other vocabularies that justify rescuing people from murderers.
The very nature of this question of motivation is why I think virtue theory needs to make an even bigger comeback than it already has: Aristotle had more of substance to say about the nature and origins of courage (and other widely recognized virtues) than the entire subsequent history of ethical thought.
Motivation isn’t so much about moral beliefs as it’s about moral character. Character doesn’t spring from knowledge, but from praxis: One becomes courageous by forcing one’s fear under control and taking action in the face of threats. I doubt beliefs or education (religious or otherwise) have as much to do with that as individual experiences, but that’s just an off-hand thought and not a developed position.
G’night, all.
Ol’ Tingey has a point. I read a while ago a piece via ALdaily [can’t find it now, dam’], which I didn’t entirely agree with, but made a similar point, in boasting how clever economists were, ‘cos they focused on consequences and not motivations [“c-thinking not m-thinking”], and that m-thinking just gets us into hot water, blaming people for stuff, whereas good ol’ c-thinking lets us debate things in a clear-eyed rationalist fashion.
Personally, I think most economics is [insert epithet of choice], but there’s a point there. Cost-benefit analysis anyone?
Ol’ Tingey has a point. I read a while ago a piece via ALdaily [can’t find it now, dam’], which I didn’t entirely agree with, but made a similar point, in boasting how clever economists were, ‘cos they focused on consequences and not motivations [“c-thinking not m-thinking”], and that m-thinking just gets us into hot water, blaming people for stuff, whereas good ol’ c-thinking lets us debate things in a clear-eyed rationalist fashion.
Personally, I think most economics is [insert epithet of choice], but there’s a point there. Cost-benefit analysis anyone?
Shit! How’d that happen?
Anyway, OTOH as so often, I also think that G has a big point — without fear of Hellfire, what powers exist to turn us aside from feckless hedonism? Of course, you have to start from the viewpoint that feckless hedonism is a bad thing, which is tricky, as without it most of our consumer economy would collapse in a cloud of lifestyle marketing campaigns, but it is an issue debates like this inevitably circle around. It’s all very well talking about what some hypothetical nun did 60 years ago, but what about real people now? What ‘moral’ [or not] forces impinge on their consciousness, how do their individual decision-making processes function?
Personally, I’m really attracted to the idea of a civic virtue, some kind of call to arms against feckless hedonism that didn’t rely on either religion or the pointless political name-calling that passes for debate in both the real world and the blogosphere. But would anyone buy it? There’s a telling phrase…
No, Tingey does not have a point – how do you measure the effects? Many ‘good’ actions (or well-motivated actions) have ‘bad’ effects, and vice versa – not to mention that in human interactions the ramifications of a single act may get lost in the noise of million of other acts, or result in unforseen consequences, or have both good and bad effects, and so on.
You can judge an action by its effects, perhaps, but for a person motivation is critical – and morality is about people (exclusively). You certainly can’t judge the morality of an action by its effects.
“without fear of Hellfire, what powers exist to turn us aside from feckless hedonism?”
I’d point to two things: in the first place, empathy, and in the second the negotiated constraints of social living. (Both are essential; without the former the latter can become a monster, but without the latter the former is inadequate to our practical needs as highly social animals.)
“You certainly can’t judge the morality of an action by its effects”
Eh? I mean, really, eh?
I *suppose* that if one’s definition of morality is ‘conformity to a pre-existing rule of conduct’, then that statement makes sense, but I guess I assumed that in talking about morality we were engaged in some sense in thinking of ethics, and the effect of actions on others.
What have we got to measure about people but their actions? We may listen to what they say about themselves, I suppose, but if their actions speak differently, we will judge them hypocrites, I suspect, and take the actions as the true measure.
The only other context in which I can make that assertion make sense is one favoured long ago by Rousseau, in that it doesn’t matter what happens, it only matters that you felt it was the right thing to do — thus he excused putting his children in a foundling hospital.
Regarding the other thing, ’empathy and negotiated restraints’, I’m thinking the problem is that there’s not a whole lot of either around, beyond a threadbare minimum. The question is, how you get more, and whether some structured approach to fostering them is possible.
I phrased that so bluntly in part to be contentious:) However, I find it hard to see how you can be so dismissive of the sentiment… You argue:
What have we got to measure about people but their actions?
…but here you’re talking about the problem of judgement, not of morality. Yes, we must (largely) judge people by their behaviour (ie ‘actions’) but surely we do not base morality upon that? Do we maintain that a bad driver who kills somone on the roads is as ‘immoral’ as one who commits murder? We may judge them for their actions (hence manslaughter charges) but surely we draw a distinction in terms of what we assume about their morality?
Consideration of morality is critical in that it is one way we can decide how to act ourselves.
Oh, and the Jyllands-Posten has just caved in to threats of violence and apologised for the Muhammad cartoons thing….
http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,,1698469,00.html
Hooray for religious motives!
Volly of oaths. Isn’t that just disgusting? I was just reading it before looking at comments.
And, in fact…since I think G’s argument is right – I think we’d all be better off without that motivation, because it seems to motivate people to do horrible things far more often than it motivates them to do good things. Hence the need for the peculiar test-tube isolation in order to call it a good thing at all. In the real world it’s far more a matter of persecuting women at every opportunity or blowing up buses or telling lies about condoms than it is of saving Jews.
Sorry to post on an unrelated topic but these were absolute corkers in the Guardian today:
PhDiva Dorothy King and Steve Fuller:
http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/columnist/story/0,,1698214,00.html
“However, supporters ignore the fact that “cheap” drugs are often not really cheaper than branded ones because the latter work far better.”
http://education.guardian.co.uk/academicexperts/story/0,,1698365,00.html
“”I don’t see that there is a point at which one needs to make some radical decision between being a Christian or a secularist,” he says.”
I was actually so annoyed by that D.King piece that I emailed the address at the end, probably fruitlessly, to say to. The tone of it was ‘Hi, some of the people I meet at parties are morons, so…’ And I’m not sure what the ‘so’ was…. Basically, it sounded like she should get out less…
Yeah, the Dorothy King piece was pretty bad.
Fuller piece useful though! It’s exactly what he said at Dover and in the TLS piece, but more compact.
“the need for the peculiar test-tube isolation in order to call it a good thing at all”
I was also starting to feel this was getting a little strange, though I didn’t have time to follow properly in the last couple of days. Taking a couple of steps back, I think “Hang on, what’s going on here? Neither OB nor Norm think it’s true, both concede it has oodles of utterly catastrophic effects and there’s a whole discussion going on about whether some of the good people attribute to it can really be attributed only to it.”
It’s not as if what goes on between Norm’s and B&W will determine if religion gets shut down or not. Nor is it as if religion is a minority voice in danger of extinction if OB doesn’t make some concessions about it. Parts of the discussion were riveting, while others seemed to lose touch. Surely it isn’t difficult to concede that religion is a huge motivator that can be used for what on the surface looks like altruism (I qualify thus because if the motivator for a “good” deed is religious, one must also concede that one’s ultimate well-being in Paradise or Hell might play a part). We’re never going to be able to separate out with complete certainty what elements of our civilisation are there because of religion or there in spite of it. Is there maybe a bit of a guilt trip going on here? “Don’t knock religion too hard because it may have motivated an act of rescue in Poland.” “But if it had been knocked much harder earlier, the rescue might not have been necessary.” It may not be true in serious philosophical terms that every cloud has a silver lining, but don’t we judge things other than religion by completely different standards? Why make the concession of “peculiar test-tube isolation” for religion? Would we do it for a medication with a small benefit and massive detrimental side effects? Would we do it for a very fast aeroplane with a one in ten chance of crashing (they did ground the Concorde, didn’t they?)? Does it boil down to calculating risks? Can we calculate religion’s risks in ways comparable to other calculated risks? The difficulty with analogies here is the truth element. If there were no doubt about religion’s truth claims, surely OB and Norm couldn’t have had the discussion they did. One could say “it’s terrible what wrongdoing there has been in the name of god,” without ever suggesting we dispense with the whole belief system. And there are, indeed, plenty of what we call “necessary evils” around, negotiated compromises between things we don’t like that may ward off things we like even less. Can the claimants for the good done by a religion in which they don’t believe define which unfounded beliefs that can have certain benefits ought to be “hands off” and which stepped on as hard as possible? Is there a difference between what are usually called “religions” and what are usually called “cults” (is it a cult when the benefits to those other than the leader aren’t obvious enough?)? Can any lie with a beneficial side effect qualify for this defence, or need one have a minimum number of centuries under one’s belt or a minimum number of adherents? Or is the criterion “the ones that feel right”?
A little OT, but it made me laugh. Turned up in monitoring reactions to Dawkins [“It’s not that scientists deny the existence of God. (Actually many of them do, from Oxford’s vituperative Richard Dawkins to 90 percent of the membership of the National Academy of Sciences, who obviously favor agnostics and atheists in choosing their colleagues.)”]. The lines that made me laugh were: “God is not a thing. He’s a person, an all-powerful person, and He can do what He jolly well pleases when He jolly well pleases.” (From http://www.sbcbaptistpress.org/bpnews.asp?ID=22548)
Actually He’s three persons, of course, in one, which must make it interesting when one wants to take a shower and another wants a brisk walk [or short flight, in the case of the Holy Spirit]…
Thanks for the laugh, after just posting in anguish to next thread up…
“Is there maybe a bit of a guilt trip going on here?”
Hmmmm. Possibly, partly. Although actually – in my case I mostly wanted to figure out if Norm was right about the bias – the bias of thinking religion could motivate bad actions but couldn’t motivate good ones – or of being more skeptical about the latter than about the former. So it was a kind of cognitive guilt. It seemed to me he might be right, and I wanted to figure out if I had any rational reasons for that.
So true, about the three in one. Exactly why I’ve always refused to be a conjoined twin.
FWIW, Dorothy King did answer my email, though not very fruitfully.
OTOH today’s Private Eye has a report indicating the problem with malaria is not ‘cheap drugs’ but rather counterfeit ones produced by criminal racketeers, connived at by multinationals who dislike any publicity over drug effectiveness…
So DK was talking crap, but maybe only because she misheard [so hard to keep up at these parties…]
“counterfeit ones produced by criminal racketeers”
Jeez. Shades of Harry Lime. What a charming way to make a living.
These are the fruits of globalisation brought to Africa.. once they only had to worry about guys with machetes, now they have international mafias to contend with…
Anyway, this is probably the definition of OT, so see you soon in another thread…
Why can’t people understand that we need to respect a person’s right to their beliefs – but we do NOT have to respect their beliefs – get it??? I totally respect my parents’ right to believe their religion (my dad’s a minister), but I have NO RESPECT for their RELIGION whatsoever. When non-believers make jokes about religion, the believers should allow it to be water off a duck’s back. It’s only when THEIR OWN KIND take jabs at their religion, that religious people should become concerned. Freedom of speech includes making fun of anyone’s religion (that’s not your own) because that hurts NO ONE. Trampling on someone’s RIGHT TO THEIR BELIEF is what must be protected – not the belief itself. GET IT??? THANKS