If there is no such thing as “moral character,” is there any point in trying to make ourselves more ethical by tweaking our personalities?
A couple of months ago on the way to a Templeton lecture on transhumanism and religion the woman in the plane seat next to me ignored my headphones and loudly enquired what I was doing with all those pictures of Buddhas on my laptop. I explained about my upcoming talk, and then had to endure a lecture on how cell phone radiation was the cause of so many of our contemporary problems, from ADHD to cancer, and how I had to buy one of her crystal pendants to ward off bad cellphone juju. My insistence that I didn’t find the scientific studies of cellphone radiation convincing led to a change of topic to the pop spirituality phenomenon of The Secret. Although I consider myself a generally patient and compassionate person, when asked my opinion of The Secret’s “teaching” that we all control our own reality I loudly and angrily harangued back that I didn’t think that that New Age message was really useful for people in concentration camps or sweatshops. An embarrassed silence ensued till landing.
I was reminded of the argument, and my own lack of self-control, when I recently spoke at Lawrence University in Wisconsin at the invitation of the philosopher Patrick Boleyn-Fitzgerald. Patrick turns out to be a scholar of Buddhism as well as Western philosophy, interested in (one of) the questions we ponder on the Trans-Spirit list and in the Cyborg Buddha project, i.e. the enhancement of moral character. Patrick has written on justice, equality, compassion, pity, forgiveness and so on.
We talked about the Cyborg Buddha project, and he turned me on to the 2002 book by “situationist” ethics writer John Doris, Lack of Character: Personality and Moral Behavior.
John Doris draws on an array of social scientific research, especially experimental social psychology, to argue that people often grossly overestimate the behavioral impact of character and grossly underestimate the behaviorial impact of situations. Circumstance, Doris concludes, often has extraordinary influence on what people do, whatever sort of character they may appear to have. He then considers the implications of this observation for a range of issues in ethics, arguing that with more realistic picture effect, cognition, and motivation, moral psychology can support more compelling ethical theories and more humane ethical practices.
I call Doris situationist not because of the European Situationists, but the moral-psychology situationists with whom Doris and Philip Zimbardo are associated. (Check out The Situationist blog for very accessible stuff on this perspective.)
In one sense moral situationism is a challenge to the Cyborg Buddha project. If there is no such thing as a “compassionate” person, a specific character trait that manifests in all situations, then trying to help people change themselves to become “more compassionate” wouldn’t help much. On the other hand, one could still try to determine the environmental triggers that make us less compassionate, and work not only on changing those triggers but also on getting our brains to respond to them differently. In fact, that is already the essence of the metta meditation approach; we love some people and hate others. By examining the feelings of hate certain people engender, and exploring whether we can replace them with feelings of love, we gain more control over our response to situations. Presumably future neurotech will help us with this channeling of our moral-emotional responses, just as they currently help people with affective disorders today.
So, although I still need to read Doris and other situationist critiques of characterological approaches to moral behavior, I don’t really see situationism as a fundamental challenge to the project of improving our moral behavior with neurotechnology. I suspect the evidence generally supports a model in which both personality traits and learned responses to specific situations predict moral behavior. But I’m excited about weaving in the situationist perspective since it helps balance the individualist tendency of the “positive psychology”.approach that lefties like Barbara Ehrenreich and I have such an allergic reaction to. We need to make a moral society while we help people tweak their own brains to become more moral if we want a truly attractive future.
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