The Moral Self Transcript.pdf

8/15/2019 The Moral Self Transcript.pdf

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“The Moral Self”

Jesse Prinz, City University of New YorkPhilosophy Today Speaker Series

www.philosopy.ua.eduwww.as.ua.edu

So, it is an extreme pleasure to be here, and it’s extremely gratifying. Watching Professor Wrenn’sdevelopment has been one of the most enjoyable, gratifying, stimulating experiences of my career.

We all knew he was a star when he was a student at Washington University. And really, to talk aboutthe progression of somebody who was already so good then may sound absurd, but there has beenprogression, and it's just marvelous to be able to see him here today. And there are many others inthis department whose work I follow closely and admire. I had the great pleasure of spending muchof the day with the Professor Torin Alter, which was both enjoyable and very philosophicallystimulating, as always, and I’m grateful for that and for the many others here. Seth Bordner wasmentioned, another person whose development has been very gratifying to watch. So I'm gratefulfor the opportunity to speak to you.

The project that I'm going to share with you today is really an effort to bring together two strands ofphilosophy that have been hardly marginal. They’re among the most mainstream things thatphilosophers have worked on in the history of our field, but they've too infrequently been broughttogether. So, it’s a project that's about a kind of synthesis in philosophy, and one question is aquestion of personal identity, and stated most simply, is the question “who am I?” or, for thatmatter, “who are you?” – questions of what makes me the person that I am, what makes you thepeople that you are, and that problem has been addressed by some of the most distinguished figuresin the history of our field. This is the problem of how should I act, a problem of morality. So, allquestions of morality and questions of identity are among the defining issues in the field ofphilosophy, but they're too seldom brought together. And we can see that by considering some ofthe most distinguished positions on these fields. This is John Locke, John Locke wearing a veryridiculous and foppish wig, which hopefully, with the cycles of fashion, will return to our wardrobein the not-too-distant future. But John Locke really brought the question of personal identity intoconversation in philosophy in 1690 when he published his An Essay Concerning Human Understanding ,and he was interested in what makes a person the person that they are. Locke developed the seriesof thought experiments, this is a still from the magnificent film called The Atomic Brain , and the older

woman on your left decides that, given the ailing condition of her body, she better relocate herselfinto another younger body, so she hires some young chambermaids, and after selecting the mostbeautiful of the 3, organizes a brain transplant so her brain can be put into the body of another. Andin order to follow this plot, we need to adopt the view that she's going to sort of be the sameperson, that still getting her we can talk of the post transplant youth as the older woman in a newbody her identity has remained the same. And that kind of thought experiment which is very centralto Locke's argumentation suggests that one of the central aspects of our notion of personalidentity—what makes me—is that having the body that I have might not be as crucial as having themind I have, that preservation of the mind is crucial to who we are on.

But this raises a question: which traits of mind, which of our various psychological traits areessential? I mean, could some of them go, for example, each day you form fleeting beliefs thatchange, that shift, that you lose. Your memory of what you had for breakfast this morning mightremain vivid today, but it's lost tomorrow. Is that part of who you? And so we have to ask if thepsychological traits that we have are some more important to identity, and that central question

which Locke poses will be central for us tonight. Just by way of a little history, Locke himself weighsin on this question, and while there is scholarly debate about exactly what he claims, one of viewsthat has been attributed to him, which we’ll come back to, is that memory is key. So, one of the ways


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in which you preserve identity over time, which he cares a great deal about, is through linkages orchains of memory. We’ll come back to that in just a moment, but they just give you a flavor of the

issues that Locke is interested in raising when he talks about personal identity. Now, quiteindependent of that are issues of morality, questions about how we should act, what kind of acharacter we should have. Many major philosophers have weighed in on this debate, includingLocke. On the screen you see Immanuel Kant, who is a monolithic figure in the history of moralphilosophy, and Kant has views that are distinctive to Kant but are also in many ways representative,so in asking the questions, “how should we be moral?” “What is it to be moral? We’re really askingquestions about what kinds of conduct should we engage in, or maybe what rules of conduct, whatprinciples should I apply, what procedures should I follow in order to decide how I should actmorally. And this raises a question about whose rules matter here. Whose rules are the ones I shouldfollow, and for Kant, and in this respect he is quite typical of philosophers in the Western tradition,the rules that we should follow are universal.

So the project of moral philosophy is often to deliver a set of rules for conduct, or procedures forarriving at right action, that anyone in virtue of their human nature or rational capacities couldrecognize and consent to. So morality is about universals and personal identity is about the traits thatare distinctive of individual persons. And if you if you review the philosophical views about thesetwo domains, what you the find is a disconnect. So if you focus on the universal in your approach tomorality, you are thereby neglecting, or intentionally bracketing off, the personal. There’s a moralitythat’s not about our distinctive identity as persons. They are about something that is generic thatcould be shared by any person, regardless of their identity, and conversely, identity is aboutparticularity. Theories of identity tend to be highly individualistic. John Locke, here pictured withouthis wig, is advocating of you that really a very individual feature, memory, is constitutive of being theperson that you are so you and you alone have these memories.

What makes you is this biographical feature that's unique to you. So the theory of identity isindividualistic, and importantly if not more it's not anything about your value. So there is a kind ofdisconnect between theory of identity and theories of morality, but if you ask somebody in the real

world who are you, what makes you, then I think you tend to see identity and morality coalesce. They come together in various ways. So want to illustrate that pictorially. The various politicalchoices, our advocacy positions, become central to our lives, and those who engage in various kindsadvocacy end up strongly identifying with certain causes. And so you might be pro-life, you might bepro-choice, maybe you're your issue is the environment, maybe its global poverty. Whatever it is,some issue that you care about might become part of who you take yourself to be. So when youproject, when you present to somebody something about your identity your values are often put in

the foreground. It’s very important to who you are.

Values are not just things we have. They’re part of our identity, so the goal of this project is really totake theories of identity and theories of morality and try and bring them together in somesubstantive way, to capture that bit of that folk wisdom. To try to make this case, what I want to dois first talk a little bit about what morality is. It’s a contentious topic, but I'll give you my ownperspective, and after saying a little bit about what morality is, I want to suggest that, if morality islike that, if our best theory of reality goes a certain direction, then it may turn out to be a very, veryimportant construct for thinking about identity.


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Now, as Chase mentioned in the introduction, my own views tend to be very parasitic on various

views in the history of philosophy, and to put it little less gingerly, I am a philosophical plagiarist. Iam someone who believes that, despite socialization in our field, which encourages kind of killingthe father or inventing entirely new theories and ideas with each generation, we should alwaysrecognize that in any healthy field true and good views are likely to occur in our historical past. Andif we survey the history and look for views that continue to find robust support, we could endorsethose rather than feeling compelled to constantly invent the new. And the particular class of views

which had been most drawn are from the empiricist tradition. This is a picture of David Hume, whoChase Wrenn mentioned in the introduction, and with respect morality, humans use it very clear. Hethinks that morality is fundamentally about the heart, about the passions. So when you talk aboutmoral values, what you're really talking about is something about our feelings. And in plagiarizingHume, there is a kind of expectation that you don't simply do a cut-and-paste job. There are certainprinciples of academic conduct that would make that somewhat awkward, so we have to do someupdating in the form of updating that I have been partial to. To try and find evidence from thesocial sciences, typically from neuroscience and especially from experimental psychology. Tosupport the claims that Hume was defending at the beginning of his a Treatise in Human Nature,Hume endorses a kind of naturalistic methodology. He says we really need to ground our theories ofmorality and other things in the scientific study of who we are as human beings. So making good onthat requires looking to our best social science and trying to test the various theories that Hume andothers put forward. The claim that morality is about passions leads to various predictions, and oneof them is that when we make a moral judgment, if I decided something is morally good or morallybad, I'm doing that by consulting my heart. I’m introspecting on my feelings, so when somebodysays, “well, what you think about inheritance tax? Is that good or bad? Should we should we taxpeople on money they've inherited because, after all, they didn't work for it. Or is that an injusticesince it belongs to their family and the government doesn't have the right to take that away?”

So, you’re presented with a question like that one thing you might do is sort of look inside and say,“how do I feel about that?” And your gut reaction, your immediate emotional response, becomescentral to the delivery of your answer. So if that’s the theory, then one way to test the theory is tosee whether people consult their emotions when making moral judgments, and psychologists woulddo that by manipulating or altering people's emotions and seeing if it affects what judgment theyreport. So Kendall Eskin, who was a graduate student in psychology some years ago at myinstitution at the City University of New York, developed a study that I was a co-author on, together

with the Natalie Kasnik, another psychologist in the department, where I administered differentbeverages, a neutral beverage like water and a very disgusting beverage Swedish bitters. So Swedish

bitters are apparently the popular in Sweden, but if you're not from Sweden are actually repellent. They’re the kind of beverage that you wonder why anyone would ever bottle and drink. There is a very, you have this horrible puckering sensation when you drink it. So he gave people samples ofthese beverages, and then, in what was presented as an entirely independent and separate study, heasked them to answer some questions about morality. So, for example, if you find a wallet on thestreet, is it okay to take the money from the wallet before returning the credit cards to their owner,or if you're writing a job resume, is it okay to the lie or distort your educational background or someother aspect of your experience on the resume? He gave people a scale of 1 to 100 and said, “Howbad is this behavior, lying on your resume, taking money from a wallet,” and after drinking the


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water, the average response for these items was about 60%, somewhere in that neighborhood. Solittle bit bad, not genocide, not horrific but not exactly upstanding behavior. But after drinking the

bitters, the number moved up to somewhere near 80%. So we’re talking that a pretty big jump in wrongness just because of the taste in your mouth.

So disgust can have a pretty dramatic impact on how wrong something seems and with my wonderful collaborator Angelika Seidel, we have expanded this research trying to look at othernegative emotions to see their impact and morality, and to give you just one example of thatresearch, we were interested in the idea that anger, like disgust, might be an important emotion formaking moral decisions. And Angelika developed, we developed a technique for inducing angerusing sound, and I don’t know if any of you have heard of Japanese noise music, but this issomething that many people listen to recreationally. But the rest of us mere mortals respond a littlebit differently. Rather than finding it pleasurable, we find it aversive and, more specifically, irritating,so it's a great way to induce anger and irritation by simple sensory stimulation. And just so you'reable to share the pleasure that our participant’s experience, we give them headphone, so you have toreally imagine an intense exposure to this. I'm going to play for you a few seconds of a band calledMasonna that we use in the studies.

Great, we recommend you go out and buy it. Apparently not everyone agrees, and after listening tothat, people report being very irritated. And then we asked them questions about the resume, the

wallet. Also, is it okay to cut in front of somebody aggressively with your car on the highway? And what you're seeing is a data graph, so the red bars are the response of wrongness for people who justyour heard this this very irritating music. The control condition with no music is the yellow bars, and

what you can see, for everything we gave them in this particular study, it looked more wrong afterhearing these obnoxious sounds.

You can also do this with positive emotions, so we asked people, “is it a good thing, in fact, is itobligation to give money to people who are homeless” and various other scenarios involving helpingbehavior. In this case we play pleasant music, this is the “Morning Mood” from Edvard Grieg’s PeerGynt Suite , and it’s this uplifting, fearful, saccharine music. How many of you would rather listen tothis than the noise music? How many of you would rather listen to the noise music? So, there areindividual differences, but we found that after listening to the uplifting music, people generallythought the upstanding behavior, the pro-social behavior, was more good than they would leave ifthey had been a listening to know music in the control condition. So, people are consulting how theyfeel in making these kinds of decisions. So this is just a couple of examples from really what'sbecome a very, very large literature linking emotion to moral judgment, and I think this would this

would make Hume very happy, make him smile.

Moral judgments in this view involve our emotions and our moral values. If a moral judgment is anemotional state, an emotional response to a situation that you're considering, a moral value need bedefined as an emotional disposition. It’s the emotion you would have if you were confronted withthat situation. A judgment is something we have here and now. A value something we have at alltimes. But suppose I say I'm against inheritance. I'm not thinking about inheritance tax all the time,unless I’m kind of obsessive about that cause, but if I say I have the value being against inheritancetax, then that means that, should you raise this issue, you should expect me to get emotionally upset


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about it. So moral values can be thought of in terms of emotions as well, and this raises a question: which values are mine? So the reason why this is an important question is many of us have

emotional dispositions that we disown, that we no longer recognized as reflective of who we are,and one way to think about this distinction is when asked about your responses, your emotionalresponses in the moral domain, there are certain things that were totally willing to outwardlyendorse. We’ll explicitly say, “Yes, I feel this way, and I'm glad I feel this way. It's important to me.It’s something that I identify with.” So, for example, if you are pure member of a political party andyou have a strong emotional response when you hear a member of the opposition party giving aspeech, and somebody says, “why you getting worked up over that speech,” you might say, “becauseI really am against that set of values.” So political party association is something we tend to endorse.

If you have a set of moral values associated with a religious view that you endorse, that might beanother example. Some of us have various personal causes that we take to be important to ourselves,so you might find yourself having strong views about, say, that maybe you're a vegetarian, and whenyou see things that involve exploitation of animals, this might upset you. And you might say, “Well,I really care about this cause. It’s a personal cause for me.” I mention things like this to contrastthem with things we outwardly disown. So sometimes, for example, we have biases that have beeninculcated through our socialization that we've come to distance ourselves from. So, you might beraised in a community that has a certain set of values, some of which you’re happy to endorse, butothers of which you now consider antiquated. So, for example, there have been very, I think, quiteradically changing attitudes towards things like gay marriage, and there's a generation gap here. Soyou might find that people, who are, say 25 and younger, now are more open to this idea than theirparents. But if you are raised in the a cultural setting where this was considered very taboo, youmight still have the negative knee-jerk response to it, but you disown that: “Yeah, I know I don’t,you know, that creeps me out in some way, but I recognize that that response is biased, so I'm goingto reject it.”

Or another example of the various selfish behaviors. Sometimes we do things that are self-interestedat the expense of others, but when we step back and look at them, we think, “I shouldn't have actedso selfishly.” There are fleeting fads. There might be a trend that arises very briefly in issues of valuethat then goes out of style, and those things also we might say, “yeah, I temporarily entertained the

view, but I don't consider that very important or central to me.”

Now, I want to define the term “the moral self” as just, this is a technical term, stipulating as a set of values I endorse, the set of values that you endorse, as opposed to the values that you reject,excluding some of the emotional dispositions you might have But the ones that you endorse are

your moral self. The ones that you reject are not part of the moral self, so that's just what I mean bythe term. So what I want to now do is take this idea of the moral self, the set of values you endorse,and suggest that notion is very important to our identity. So by calling it the moral self, I'm kind ofjust inviting this idea, the thinking of values as part of the self is going to be illuminating. Now I

want to say at the outset is that, when it comes to theories of identity, theories of who we are, thereare many, many things that make up an identity. It’s a very social concept. It's something we use tocommunicate to other humans about who we are. It’s something we organize our lives around, andthere may be many facets. And I don't think is a fact of the matter, which of these psychologicalfacets are really the true self and which ones are not; rather, I think what we should do is look for all


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the things that contribute to making us who we are. And with respect to the philosophical traditionsthat have asked this question, I would say this is where the controversy would lie: that morality has

been ignored, and it is important to the self so that it is already a somewhat a controversial claim.But a bit more controversially, I think it's actually more important than the things that have beenemphasized in mainstream discussions of this issue.

Now, philosophers raise two kinds of questions about identity. One of them is called a synchronicquestion of identity. So right now there are many, many things that are going on inside your mind;there are many psychological dispositions. You have many psychological traits. You have some ofthose things might really seem like they're essential to know you, and some of them might not. So, ifyou have an allergy or an aversion to peanut butter, in somebody says, “Is that really essential to

whom you are?” Well, maybe not. There might be other things, like, I don’t know, you might not be wild about a certain kind of music, but maybe through exposure you could come to develop a tastefor that kind of music. Would that be a radical change in your identity, in whom you are? Maybe not.So of the various psychological features of a person at a given time, some of them are part of theiridentity to greater extent than others. So that’s the question of synchronic identity. It’s a question of

which psychological traits are more important to who we are.

There’s also question of diachronic identity. If a person changes all the time—we all do—some ofour traits will come and go. Which of these transformations really matters to identity? So if youdevelop a dislike for peanut butter after liking it for many years, are you now fundamentally adifferent person. I think most of us would agree that no, that shift in case is not such a dramaticchange that we call it a change in personal identity. But other things might be a change in personalidentity. So a diachronic account of identity is going to be the account of which changes are really athreat to who we are as individuals.

I want to begin with the synchronic issue, and my strategy here is going be very straightforward. What I want to do is catalog the number of mentions of synchronic identity that have beenemphasized by various philosophers that, I think, have in a very commonsensical way might beassociated with identity. And I want to suggest that if we list, we could just brainstorm together forthis, the kinds of things that we might think are important to our synchronic identity, that areimportant to who we are right here and now, they all turn out to have a link to morality.

So I want to begin with a dimension of identity that’s called embodiment. The idea is that even if insome fundamental way the mind is more important than the body when it comes to identity, thefeeling of our body, the sense of having the physical body that we do, the feelings that occur inside

of our body, we feel as belonging to us in some basic sense. So if somebody does something tophysically hurt you, you're going to feel that. It's happening to you. This event is happening to me.So we feel a kind of ownership of our bodies that relates it to self. And what I want to suggest hereis that morality has a link to the body, and because of that, when we experience our moral responses,

we’re also experiencing this kind of bodily state.

So this is William James, and William James had a particular theory of the emotions that linkemotions to the body. He said that when the emotion is induced, suppose you see a scary animal likethis ferocious, dangerous, horrible life-threatening bear, what's going to happen is you’re going to


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have a perception of it. There is a typo on the slide. For the perception of the bear-snake— slimy,slithering bear—and then you have a real response, a bodily response, to this creature, to this threat,

now when your body responds to a threat you perceive a change in the body. And here the emotionis the experience of the body responding to the stimulus. So the feeling of your body freezing is thefear that you experience towards the bear-snake, and so I think James is basically right about this. I

won’t review the evidence. I’ll make James smile. But the thought here is there is a program rightnow in psychology and cognitive neuroscience that tries to make good on the claim that theemotions we experience are connected to bodily feelings. Now, if morality is connected to emotionsand emotions are connected to bodily feelings, then morality is connected to experience of the body.So, if we experience the body as part of ourselves, that means we experience morals as part ofourselves. And there’s various evidence in support of this.

So, for example, to take up a slide from the paper by Harenski, she and her collaborators found that when people see images that have moral significance. There is a strong response in the brain centersassociated with the body. So seeing a burning crosses, opposed to a burning car, generates responsesthat are felt in this very embodied way. There's also evidence that when you ask people moralquestions about themselves, you again see brain activation that’s associated with bodily response. Soconsider a series of questions where some the questions have to do the self, other questions have todo with these facts about the world. So, a question about the self is “do forget important things,”“do you have a quick temper,” “do your good friend you think you can be trusted?” Facts about the

world would be things like, “you need water in order to live,” and what's found in this particularstudy by Johnson and collaborators is that the questions about the self that have his moral characteragain engage brain areas that are associated with bodily response, like posterior cingulate and othermedial structures in the front of the brain.

Another thing that people think is important to synchronic identity is action. Those things that arereally part of me are going to especially include things that I use in deciding how to act, questionsabout how I should behave. So what are the things that factor into my practical deliberation about

what I should do? And here again I think morality is going to be a major factor in choosing how toact, and you can show this again by talking about the moral emotions. So if morality is grounded inthe emotions, there’s a lot of evidence suggesting that emotions have a huge impact on behavior.

Arguably we would not behave. We would do nothing if we didn't experience emotion.

There’s this disorder that’s caused by brain surgery in a structure called interior singular, the majoremotional hub, and if you do damage to this part of brain, people sometimes have a syndrome calledakinetic mutism where they don't act. They just sit completely indifferently to the world, and they do

nothing. They’re completely conscious; they can remember later on when they recover things that were said to them, but they've no motivation to act. Why? Well, you’ve temporarily disrupted theiremotions. If you induce emotions, you can show dramatic impacts on behavior. Happiness makes usact pro-socially. We do good things for others when we’re happy. Guilt makes us give to charity.Disgust leads to avoidance behavior. Anger leads to punishment behavior. So the emotions that arecentrally involved in moral response are also very linked to action. You could also show that actioncan be affected by how people conceive of themselves. In moral terms, “what kind of person areyou?” If you come up with an adjective to describe yourself, the mere introduction of that adjectivehas a dramatic impact on behavior.


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So, in a classic study by Miller Brickman and Bolin, kids in an inner-city school were trained in

various ways to be tidier. These kids were lie typical kids, quite messy in the classroom. And theytried various methods. The character: reward them for being tidy. The stick: punish them for theirslovenly behavior. None of these things worked, but then they tried a method of social labeling,

where they simply came the classroom and they said, “You children are very tidy. You're so tidy. What tidy children you are.” A bald-faced lie. It wasn't true, complete misinformation, but tellingkids that they’re tidy makes them tidier. So the conceptual categories under which we think aboutourselves can have a dramatic impact on our behavior. And, don’t worry about reading this, but youcan see that it's a long-standing impact. Even weeks after being told that they’re tidy, these kidscontinue to be tidier, and kids in comparison conditions. And I think when we label ourselves,suppose you tell the world that your environmentalist, so on your Facebook page you, like, have apost like, “I really care about the environment,” and the next day or the next week somebody says,you're in the store, “a paper or plastic.” You have that here. So that you might be asked if you wanta paper bag or a plastic bag for your groceries, and now you're like “oh, I’m on record as beingenvironmentalist. I better take the paper bag because plastic is going to end up at a landfill for sevengenerations.” So that’s the case where the labels under which we put ourselves in the moral categoryhave a huge impact on determining how we act.

Another very dramatic example of this, people who choose to sacrifice their own lives for something very often do this, in fact, I would say almost always, do this for causes that have a moral character.So would you kill yourself, suppose you love music? I really love music. My favorite thing in life iscountry music. And somebody says, “oh, really? Do you really love country music? Would you diefor it?” That's a stupid question, but if somebody says, “I really care about social justice” or, youknow, “I really am against the you know told how a Terry and is a in some of these is lovesomebody tried to impose a totalitarian regime in the United States,” would you die, would you riskyour life to try and prevent that from happening? Now, people might be more willing to say yes, andphenomena like suicide-terrorism are a reflection of people who are really willing to lay down theirlives for a cause, not for a musical cause, but for a moral cause.

You can look at wartime behavior. There's some wonderful on work suggesting that when peopleengage in decisions that involve life-and-death, their personality, their selves their moral values, playa central role in this. So there's work, for example, by Kristin Monroe, who’s a political psychologiston Holocaust perpetrators, bystanders, and rescuers. During the Holocaust some people didnothing, some people engaged in genocide, and others helped victims of genocide, and they all had

very different conceptions of the self. So rescuers tend to focus on this notion that everyone is a

human being and our shared common human nature. Bystanders tend to focus on the construct aself, construal of powerlessness. They said there was really nothing I could do, and people who areperpetrators tended to view themselves as victims. So, if you see yourself as having been unjustlytrespassed against by the people that you are trying to aggress against, that your government is tryingto aggress against, you’re more likely to be a participant in that aggression. So the way you construeyourself as a human being, as a person, has a big impact on your moral behavior.

Another factor of synchronic identity is attitude strengths. Some things we feel more strongly aboutthan others. So if I say, you know, what's your view about, I don’t know, potatoes, is it well I, you


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know, “I care about potatoes. I like potatoes alright.” How strongly do you care about potatoes, andnot that strongly? If you’re a potato farmer, this might matter a lot to you, but for the rest of us, you

can like potatoes great deal, but they're not that important to you.

So psychologists have gotten into the idea of attitude strength, in a lot of different measures ofattitude strength, and the thought is identity, personal identity, might relate to the attitudes we holdmost strongly. So it turns out that in the psychological literature on attitude strength, the constructof attitude strength has been measured in a number of different ways.

One is in terms of intensity, how strongly do you feel something. Another is in terms of importance,how important is it to you? And a third is in terms of centrality. Now these turn out to bedissociable. In fact, there's very little correlation between them, so suppose you say, “yeah, I reallylove music,” and Tony says, “well, okay, how intensely do you experience music when you listen toit,” and you're like, “really, when I hear disco, baby, I got to dance.” It’s just like that. If somebodysays, “How important is this to you in your life, that you know what he really gotta dance,” but it'snot all that important to me, like it's the high priority in my life. How central is it to you? Would yousay disco is at the core of your identity, and unless you’re in the business, you’re like, “no, it's just arecreational activity that I occasionally partake in.”

Linda Skitka, who’s a terrific psychologist in this area, has shown that these come apart with oneexception. Moral values correlate in all these dimensions. They’re intensely felt. They’re important tous, and we consider them central to who we are. So moral values on attitude strength are the onlyone of our values and preferences that seem to be strong in all three ways. Another aspect ofsynchronic identity is self-expression. So here’s something I call the “Facebook fact.” So in socialmedia we’re asked to say things about ourselves. They could ask you anything. They could ask youfor biographical information, like where were you born, what was the first ocean you saw, butinstead what did they ask you? They ask you who you have sex with. They ask you what God you

worship. And they ask you something about your political orientation. And all of these are veryrevelatory about your moral self, and so why should it be that political orientation is among the fewthings that you present to others in social media? Clearly, this is important to what we want toexpress about ourselves, and in the interest of time I’m going to just skip this slide, but I want tosuggest that there are other interests. Facebook also asks you things like what music you like and

what films you like, and I want to suggest that these other things that may look very far removedfrom morality are actually all ways of signaling values to others. So if you look at these two guys andyou have to say which one is more liberal than the other and which is more conservative, how many

would guess that that this guy on your left is the liberal? And how many would guess that this is the

more liberal guy, the hippie on the right? Of course, we can make these kind of guesses based onstereotypes, and the stereotypes can be wrong, but the fact that we have the stereotype is importantbecause we can exploit what we can communicate to others, what we care about morally, in waysthat look like a far removed from morality, like what music we listen to or how we dress. So I did astudy where I'd asked people a bunch of questions, like “guess whether somebody’s liberal orconservative based on the following features” that have nothing overtly to do with politics.Somebody listens the country music or watches Fox news or reads military history or is an army

veteran or enjoys hunting or driving American cars or wears cowboy boots with khaki pants or wants a big family or watches college football or drives a pickup truck or does not drink alcohol or


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reads very little or loves eating meat or reads the Bible or enjoys NASCAR races. What the heck doNASCAR races have to do with morality? The answer is if you’re a NASCAR fan, you’ve just

communicated to everyone who knows that that it’s more likely that you’re conservative.

Then there is a liberal personality. They listen to other music, like hip-hop. They listen to NPRradio. They read poetry. They enjoy foreign travel. They drink Starbucks. They buy organic produce.

They can be openly gay. They listen to jazz. They ride skateboards. They wear tie-dye T-shirts. Theyenjoy museums. They dye their hair unnatural colors. They're interested in Eastern religion. Theylove sushi. They ride bicycles, and they read fashion magazines. They look different. We signal toeach other constantly in many ways what our values are. I was just on an airplane this morning, andI took pictures from the airplane magazine. This is totally fresh. This is new for you. I want you toguess based on appearance alone whether somebody is a liberal or conservative. How many say thisperson is a liberal more likely let's put it is a more likely to be liberal and conservative more likely beliberal and conservative? How many say more likely to be conservative and liberal? Okay, so themajority goes for conservative in this case. More likely liberal or conservative? More likelyconservative and liberal? More conservative and liberal? More likely to be liberal and conservative?More likely to be conservative or liberal? Okay, they’re liberal. More likely to be conservative, morelikely to be liberal? Okay, slight split vote, but I think the guy looks conservative. More likely to beliberal, more likely to conservative? Clearly, liberals they like foreign travel. More likely toconservative, more like the liberal. Golf, the guy’s clearly Republican. More likely to be conservative?More likely be liberal? Right, so this little bowl cut, why should we, we should not, you people,should not answer my questions. Jesse, you are crazy. There is no way we should be able to guesssomebody's politics from these pictures of them. We don’t know anything about them. We signal itall the time. Making your hair look like that tells people you’re liberal. Why should that be? They’rearbitrary associations that we develop, the cultural code where we project our moral identity and, ofcourse, they all look American, and because of that, we can guess as opposed to people who don'tlook American, that they’re pro-democracy. We can guess that they favor education for women. Wecan guess that they’re against public executions. There are lots of things we guess about looking

American. It says something about shared values.

Here, another aspect of synchronic identity is like that, distance from people who are different fromus. I’m going to be very fast with this. We don't like to have friends in other parties. Linda Skitka didanother cool study where she put a backpack on the chair in her lab, and she either put a pro-choicebutton on it or pro-life button, and then she brought another participant in the lab. And she said,“You’re going to be in an experiment with that other student. Would you just pull over chair next totheir chair?” And she just measured where people placed the chair, and if it was a pro-choice button

and the person to the subject next to them was pro-choice, they would put the chair pretty close. Ifit was a pro-life button they put the chair further away. So we’ve been looking at this. I'll justmention this in passing, but I have a study that’s still unpublished but with a collaborator namedHelming. We did a study basically asking, “who would you want to go to work with, who would you

want to have sex with, who would you want have as a friend?” And we showed that you can chooseyour friends, your work partners, your romantic partners. As a function of politics, people don't

want to be in bed with somebody whose values differ too far from our own, and I won't go throughthe data on that But the picture that emerges here is that we’re very tribal about our morality.


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Morality develops a certain group to which we belong, and that group becomes very important foridentity.

We’re almost out of time, and we’ve been talking almost entirely about synchronic identity. And I'mjust going to skip ahead for a moment to give you one more issue that has to do with diachronicidentity. So, suppose your values change. Will you still be the same person, or will you become a newperson? Now this is a picture of an individual who was brainwashed, Patty Hearst, who was adaughter of a very, very, very wealthy publishing magnate who got involved in radical politics with agroup that turned her into a kind of bank robbing, radical terrorist. And people often described thisas being a new person. I watched a film from Morocco the other day called Horses of God, which isabout a drug dealer living in the suburbs of a Moroccan city who gets converted in prison to radicalIslam and becomes a suicide terrorist, and his whole personality changes dramatically. It’s evenembodied when he's the street drug dealer. He’s kind of moving around almost like a predatoryanimal, and when he is the Islamic radical, he becomes very poised, very gentle. His entire physicaldemeanor, his being in the world, has changed. I think our intuitions are that if you undergo such amoral transformation you become a new person. So what I want to leave you with is someexperiments that we’ve been doing to examine this. With Shaun Nichols, we conducted a study

where you ask, “what happens if you get hit on the head and lose your moral values? Are you thesame person or not?” And so the vignette said you accidentally fall while walking in the mountains.

The accident causes a head injury. It has a profound effect of your values. The memory and generalintelligence that you had before remain the same, but the injury causes you to stop behaving morally.For example, before the accident you used to do helpful things for people in your community, andafter the accident you stop caring about any of that, and you only have to fulfill your own. Are youthe same person? And we found that on a scale of 1 to 7, people tended to say, “No, you're not thesame person.” The average score was 2.2. Then we gave people a memory version: you lose all yourmemories. Are you the same person? Here, the average score was 4.4 on our scale, which is thatyou’re in some sense not the same person, but it’s over the midline of the scale, far with midline ofthe scale. People consider you pretty much the same person if you lose your memory but a differentperson if you lose your morals. So, as compared to the preservation of memories, the preservationof morals matters more.

We looked at loss of agency capacity we looked at loss of your ability to construct narratives aboutyour life they didn't matter as much for personal identity. We looked at moral change. We looked atit in the first person, in the third person. Your values change. Are you the same person? No.Someone else's change. Are they the same person? No. We looked at positive change and negativechange. Your values become much better are you the same person? No. Your values become worse.

Are you the same person? No. Moral change changes who we take ourselves to be. The overallimplication of this research is that, when we think about who we are, when we ask fundamentalquestions about personal identity, it turns out that who we are is very central to what we care aboutmorally speaking, and I think that this issue matters a great deal. It matters because, when we try toform alliances with other people, when we form social bonds, we very often take people who aremorally like us, and that is an indication that human group formation is tracking moral identity. Andif we don't think about morality as constitutive of identity in this way, we’ll lose purchase on thatphenomenon. Why do we want to affiliate with some people and not others, and part of the answer,at least, is if you affiliate with people who are morally different from you, it's not only unpleasant to


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listen to somebody who’s espousing values you disagree with; it’s threat your identity. Andcorrelatively, that’s sort of the negative side, why do we form such polarizing groups? Why do

Republicans hate Democrats and Democrats hate Republicans? It's not as they disagree that thedisagreement is at the core of who they are as people, who they are they as individuals. But anotherthing is that if we want to get along with each other, we need to recognize that we have thesedifferent values, and these values are expressions of different ways of being in the world, differentmoral identities. We should respect them. If we didn't have variation in values, and everybodybelieved the same thing, identities would become very homogenous. If we stopped thinking of

values as based on universal truths, that we need to settle and arrive at consensus for, and insteadstart thinking that you that values about different ways of expressing ourselves, different forms ofidentity in the world, different tribes that can coexist as a form of celebration of human plurality,then the conflicts that once drove us completely nuts can start to be celebrated as aspects ofindividual expression. Off you go back to John Locke, the problem with John Locke is he is anindividualist. He defines identity in terms of memory. Each of us has our own memory. Individualityis not the key to identity. Group membership is. Who I am is partially a function of what moral tribeI belong to. The problem with moral philosophy, the problem with Kant, is that moral philosopherstend to search for moral universals, but morality is not universal. The fundamental function of reallyin human life forget that philosophy is that human life is to form again a tribe, a human group, aparticular constellation of human beings who found ways of getting along with each other. Sophilosophers have erred in making it really big, and they've erred in making identity too small. Bothidentity and morality converge at the level of group. Who I am functions as a part of the groups Ibelong to, and if you recognize that, then the confrontations with other groups should not be seenas aversive, as threatening. We should see it as a fundamental celebration of who we are.

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