"So I want to ask you, if moral outrage isn't the trigger that — it's true, we really, really think of moral outrage — I mean, we are a society of advocates, right?
"DR. MCCULLOUGH: Right.
"MS. TIPPETT: Then what? What activates — what has the power to activate the instincts to moral repair, to care for the stranger, that are at the heart of our religious traditions, that actually do manifest again and again in human society and that lead to this kind of moral progress that you talk about?"
From On Being, a conversation on the materialities of ethics and justice...
http://onbeing.org/program/arthur-zajonc-michael-mccullough-mind-and-morality-a-dialogue/transcript/7373#main_content
"DR. MCCULLOUGH: Yeah, I think the ability to take risks is really encouraged when people are not worried about their safety or where their next meal is going to come from. I mean, there's a sort of basic — I think, a basic ability to take risks that is encouraged when we know that not everything is on the line. So scarcity seems to be a real problem. So a lot of these things have vicious sorts of feedback loops to them. When we begin to take some of these affordances away or threaten them, some systems may not be resilient enough to have too many of these affordances peeled away before the system becomes fragile.
"So, I don't think there's anything inevitable about things getting better and better, actually. I think we need to safeguard and sort of buttress what we've got and try to not take it for granted, not allow those — these rights we've discovered that people have. Well, how strange is that? People have rights. That was a moral discovery."
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"DR. ZAJONC: Oh man. No. All this kind of soft language of mine, it's all hazardous — or raising the question of materialism. Oh man, this is a dogma. I think of it as an assertion. It's proof by assertion as opposed to by reason. And I want to — nowadays, I'm old enough, I want to call it into question. I never felt that it was adequate with the last 40 years of being in science. But for most of those 40 years I felt like, step out of line at your risk, at your peril. I've done it occasionally and more consistently recently, late in life.
"But we shouldn't have illusions about science, even today, welcoming the full discourse. There are certain general commitments. And one has to be — sort of pluck up one's courage at least to step into the fray. And then, more often than not, I think there's a positive response. You can get hit a few times. But basically, that's fine. So, I think we should practice this kind of work more and more, allow for that difference, explore it with real respect and civility and have it be the — what Hannah Arendt might like as our public place of discourse where really the most important ideas can be debated openly. And it doesn't — we don't have to come to a single conclusion at the end."
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"DR. ZAJONC: Well for me, I think there are two ways it can be interpreted, right? One is a way in which, in some sense, it's the biology of evolution, evolutionary psychology, the neurosciences that underlie, you might say, any of our actions. OK? So what you're discovering is just a fact about history and biology. So it's like the law of science or the law of physics. But now, in this case, it's more in your realm, Michael, than my realm. But I think of it differently. See, I think of it as all of that evolution, all that neuroscience, all of that gives biological support to the possibility of ethics. Doesn't predict ethics. It just gives — it's, like, necessary but not sufficient. Sure, I need a hand in order to write. Chop off my hand, I'm not going to write very well.
"OK. So I need a biological support to hold the pencil. But writing is not explained by that biological support. It's necessary, but not sufficient. I think the same thing is true for morality and most of what we talk about in terms of evolutionary psychology, neuroscience, and all the rest. Sure, there's an infrastructure. There's a support for it. But that's not it. That's not enough.
"DR. MCCULLOUGH: I agree with that. I mean, when I talk about ethical discoveries, I would not want to be getting my ethics from my biology. That's a — don't go there. That is not the place to get it from. It's to be gotten somewhere else. But I think — all I wanted to say when using — and maybe I was being playful in using the term discovery — but I do think that some of what makes those ethical advances possible are recognitions of similarity or universality, which are not always easy to see. They may not even come to the untutored eye without the benefits of science. The universals of human nature may be difficult to see with the naked eye."
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