by Dan Sperber
Haidt’s famous “Emotional Dog” article begins with an example of reasoning’s powerlessness to affect moral judgments:
Julie and Mark are brother and sister. They are traveling together in France on summer vacation from college. One night they are staying alone in a cabin near the beach. They decide that it would be interesting and fun if they tried making love. At the very least it would be a new experience for each of them. Julie was already taking birth control pills, but Mark uses a condom too, just to be safe. They both enjoy making love, but they decide not to do it again. They keep that night as a special secret, which makes them feel even closer to each other. What do you think about that? Was it OK for them to make love?24
Among the participants Haidt and his colleagues interviewed, most said it was not acceptable for Julie and Mark to make love. When the experimenter asked them why, they had many reasons. Nine reasons each, on average. All of them were shot down by the experimenter. “They might have children with problems.” No, they used two forms of contraception, so there will be no children. “They’ll be screwed up psychologically.” On the contrary, they grow closer after the experience. “They’ll be shunned when people find out.” They keep it a secret; no one finds out. And so forth. But the participants didn’t say, “I cannot articulate a rational basis for my moral condemnation, and therefore I retract it.” Most held fast to a judgment they could not support anymore.
The interactionist approach, however, predicts that good reasons should carry some weight. Why, then, don’t some of the people who find themselves unable to answer Haidt’s argument change their minds?25 More generally, if it is true that people don’t change their minds in response to moral arguments, why the reluctance?
While it can be infuriating and depressing to fail to change people’s minds, especially on important moral matters, that doesn’t mean that those who won’t budge are being irrational. According to the interactionist approach to reason, people should be sensitive to strong reasons, but even seemingly strong reasons shouldn’t overwhelm every other concern. For instance, we might have a strong intuitive reluctance to accept a given conclusion. Some intuitions are difficult to make explicit, so that we can be at a loss when explaining why we reject an apparently strong argument. That doesn’t mean that the intuitions are irrational—although failing to defend our point of view in the face of strong arguments might make us look so. Some of the most important intuitions that stop us from accepting even arguments we cannot effectively counter have to do with deference to experts.
For instance, when Moana tries to convince Teiki, his more liberal friend, that climate change is a hoax, they both defer to experts—but not the same experts. Deferring to experts is rational. If we didn’t, we would be clueless about a wide variety of important issues about which we have no personal experience and no competent reflection. Once we defer to some experts, it makes sense to put relatively little weight on challenging arguments from third parties. Even though we might not be able to come up with counterarguments, we believe that the experts we defer to would. For instance, Moana could give Teiki many arguments that he cannot refute on the spot, since he does not know exactly why the experts he trusts believe in climate change. Still, Teiki would likely not change his mind, thinking that his experts would be able to counter Moana’s arguments.
When beliefs are not readily testable, it is quite rational to accept them on the basis of trust, and it is quite rational for people who trust different authorities to stubbornly disagree. We don’t mean that these are the most rational attitudes possible. An intellectually more demanding approach asks for clarity and for a willingness to revise one’s idea in the light of evidence and dissenting arguments. This approach, which has become more common with the development of the sciences, is epistemically preferable—but no one has the time and resources to apply it to every topic.
How Argumentation Helps Get Moral Problems Right
Should we keep reasoning about moral issues? Solitary reasoning has dubious effects, and even argumentation faces many obstacles. Yet our answer is a resounding yes. In fact, we suspect that most moral beliefs are more amenable to arguments than, say, gut feelings about incest. Beliefs about what the police can do to fix the crime problem in the neighborhood or beliefs about how wrong Ross was to cheat on Rachel don’t have a preset consensual answer in one’s community; they don’t have the same power to signify whether we are a friend or a foe. When the overriding concern of people who disagree is to get things right, argumentation should not only make them change their mind, it should make them change their mind for the best.
An obvious problem for testing this prediction is the lack of a clear moral benchmark to tell whether argumentation leads to better moral beliefs—by definition, if there is a clear moral benchmark, then there should be no reason to argue. However, it is possible to look at cases in which adults agree and see what happens during child development. If children of a certain age differ or are confused about a given issue, it is possible to see which children are more convincing: those who share the adults’ judgment or those who defend less mature points of view.
Jean Piaget made an art of confusing children. For instance, he would give children—for example, nine-year-olds—the following two stories:
Story 1
Once there was a little boy called John. He was in his room and his mother called him to dinner. He opened the door to the dining room, but behind the door there was a tray with six cups on it. John couldn’t have known that the tray was behind the door. He opened the door, knocked the tray and all six cups were smashed.
Story 2
Once there was a little boy called David. One day when his mother was out he tried to get some sweets from the cupboard. He climbed on a chair and stretched out his arm. But the sweets were too high and he couldn’t reach, and while he was trying to reach [them] he knocked over a cup and it fell and broke.26
Piaget would ask the children: Which of the two boys, John or David, is naughtier? When Patrick Leman and Gerard Duveen replicated Piaget’s experiment, they found that most nine-year-olds thought John was naughtier.27 Now, as adults, we can presumably all agree that this answer is wrong. Exactly how naughty David was is a matter for discussion, but clearly John did nothing wrong. His breaking the cups was purely accidental, not even the result of negligence. Reassuringly, when pairs of children who had different views on the matter were left to discuss with one another, they were five times more likely to end up thinking that David was naughtier. Thanks to argumentation, their moral judgments had gotten more accurate.
The Surprising Efficacy of Political Debates among Citizens
Among adults, some moral debates become political debates—debates not only about what is right or wrong but also about what the community should do to fix the problem. It is tempting to have a dim view of political debates. In some democratic countries, the most publicized of those debates occur between contenders for the presidency. These are somewhat unnatural spectacles in which the debaters know they have no chance of convincing each other and mostly seek to strengthen the support of their base. Fortunately, debates about political matters don’t only occur between presidential contenders; they also occur between citizens.
Samuel Huntington expressed a common opinion when he argued that “elections, open, free and fair, are the essence of democracy.”28 But voting is not the only way to aggregate opinions in a (potentially) fair manner. Indeed, it is neither the oldest nor the most common.29 As we noted in Chapter 16, bands of hunter-gatherers make group decisions based on public deliberation. To the extent that life in these bands bears a resemblance to that of our Paleolithic ancestors, this suggests that deliberation has a far greater antiquity than voting. In Democracy and Its Global Roots, Amartya Sen takes the reader on a brief tour of non-Western democratic traditions—many of which were deliberative.30 From the great interreligious debates sponsored by the emperor Akbar in sixteenth-century India to the Thembu’s open meetings tha
t left a young Nelson Mandela with the impression of “democracy in its purest form,”31 deliberation throughout the world carries the hope of reaching better beliefs and making better decisions.
In the early 1980s, political scientists started paying more attention to the role played by deliberation in a healthy democracy.32 At first, the new field of deliberative democracy focused on lofty ideals, on the potential of deliberation to promote rational discourse, civility, public engagement, and mutual respect. Then political scientists confronted these lofty ideals to the reality of deliberation between divided, misinformed, sometimes irate citizens. To the surprise of many, the lofty ideals won. When a sample of citizens is brought together, divided in small groups, and, with the soft prodding of a moderator, made to discuss policy, good things happen.33 The participants in these discussions end up better informed, with more articulate positions but also a deeper understanding of other people’s point of view. Their opinions tend to converge toward a reasonable compromise. They are more likely to participate in public life in the future. Deliberation among citizens works.
One of the most successful deliberative democracy experiments was launched by Robert Luskin and James Fishkin. In dozens of cities, they conducted deliberative polls in which citizens discussing among themselves reached more informed positions on various policy matters. One of these cities was Omagh, Northern Ireland.
On August 15, 1998, a bomb had exploded in Omagh, killing twenty-nine people and injuring more than two hundred. Claimed by a splinter group of the Irish Republican Army—creatively called the Real Irish Republican Army—the attack is remembered as one of the worst atrocities in the long and bloody conflict over the control of Northern Ireland. In Omagh, Catholics and Protestants have plenty of reasons to distrust each other and to stick to their group’s beliefs—not the best place for deliberation to work.
Yet when Luskin, Fishkin, and two colleagues asked a sample of the local population that included both Catholics and Protestants to discuss education policy, the debates proved constructive, even on highly loaded topics.34 When questions related to mixed religious schools emerged in the debate, the participants didn’t fight and polarize. After the discussions, participants had changed their minds on several points, and they were much more knowledgeable about education policy. They also found that their interlocutors were more trustworthy and open to reason than they expected.
Critics of deliberative democracy have pointed out its scaling-up problem: debates work well with a handful of people, not so well with several millions. Fishkin, joined by the American constitutional scholar Bruce Ackerman, has proposed a Deliberation Day, a national holiday in which citizens would be invited to debate upcoming elections. While such institutions would further boost the role of discussion in public life, argumentation has already proven its ability to effect large-scale moral and political change.
Abolitionism: Not Such an Easy Argument to Make
By the end of the eighteenth century, the British dominated the transatlantic slave trade,35 and they had just acquired huge swaths of territory in the Americas, bearing the promise of untold wealth. Economic logic dictated that they capture and ship hundreds of thousands of slaves to exploit these lands.36 Instead they chose to abolish the slave trade. How did the abolitionists manage such a complete reversal?
From our modern vantage point, it seems like an easy argument to make. Why would it be necessary to convince someone that slavery is so wrong that it should be banished? Unfortunately, the evil of slavery hasn’t always been a moral truism. Indeed, for most of history slavery was part of the fabric of life. Practiced by the Greeks and the Romans, sanctioned by Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, slavery hadn’t been an issue for most of European history. The tide turned when the Enlightenment’s heralds, such as Diderot, staunchly denounced the practice. At the same time, new religious movements—most notably the Quakers—offered a new reading of the Bible that made of slavery a very un-Christian institution. At long last slavers and slave owners had to offer justifications for their practice.
Apologists of slavery obliged and, for a while, even tried to take the moral high ground. They argued that life in Africa was so tough as to be practically unbearable. By comparison, during the Middle Passage, the slaves were treated as VIPs, provided with “Cordial … Pipes and Tobacco,” and “amused with Instruments of Music.” The contrast was such that “Nine out of Ten [slaves] rejoice at falling into our Hands,” the slavers claimed.37 Moreover, the whole slave trade was only necessary because slaves, having reached their destination, failed to have enough children to maintain the population. That was due to female slaves’ being “prostitutes” who must have frequent “abortions, in order that they may continue their trade without loss of time.” “Such promiscuous embraces,” continues Edward Long in his History of Jamaica, “must necessarily hinder, or destroy, conception.”38 Slaves should be thankful for the slave trade yet also blamed for it.
These arguments sound not just abominable but also preposterous. At the time, though, British citizens lacked reliable information about what was going on in Africa, the West Indies, or America. And British lives weren’t exactly cushy, either. The industrial revolution generated great wealth but also its share of misery. In ports across Britain, thousands of men were “impressed,” kidnapped and brought onboard navy ships for “several years of floggings, scurvy, and malaria.”39 Given the picture painted by the slavers, common people might have thought the slaves weren’t much worse off.
Still, the anti-abolitionists’ strongest arguments weren’t moral, but economic. Entire cities, such as Liverpool, relied on the slave trade. Even inland cities like Manchester were dependent on a constant supply of raw material gathered by slaves in the colonies to employ textile workers. Slavers’ mouthpieces never tired of mentioning the “widows and orphans” that abolition would leave in its trail all over Great Britain.40 The anti-abolitionists didn’t hesitate to make up numbers—seventy million pounds were at stake!41—or to invoke the British’s favorite beverage—the lack of “Sugar and Rum[!]” would “render the Use of Tea insupportable.”
Yet by the mid-1780s, the Quakers and other early abolitionists had managed to reclaim the moral high ground. They had done so by using an essential argumentative tool: displaying inconsistencies in the audience’s position. In this case, the inconsistencies were glaring enough: Christianity and the English spirit on the one hand, slavery on the other. “The very idea of trading the persons of men should kindle detestations in the breasts of MEN—especially of BRITONS—and above all of CHRISTIANS,” pleaded James Dore in a 1788 sermon.42 Historian Seymour Drescher pointed out that the strength of this inconsistency was the main propeller of popular abolitionism: “How could the world’s most secure, free, religious, just, prosperous, and moral nation allow itself to remain the premier perpetrator of the world’s most deadly, brutal, unjust, immoral offenses to humanity?”43 Still, the economic considerations put forward by the slavers held fast. The moral arguments were too abstract, the immensity of the suffering wrought by slavery not plain enough. The abolitionists needed more evidence for their arguments to carry their full weight.
Convincing a Country
For years, the abolitionist Thomas Clarkson crisscrossed England, accumulating the greatest wealth of evidence ever gathered on the slave trade. The fruits of his labors—An Abstract of the Evidence Delivered before a Select Committee of the House of Commons in the Years 1790, and 1791; on the Part of the Petitioners for the Abolition of the Slave-Trade—became the main weapon in the abolitionists’ growing arsenal. This arsenal was completed by the men and women who developed a “rhetoric of sensitivity,” composing poems meant to restore the slaves’ full humanity;44 by the freed slaves who wrote widely successful autobiographies, putting a face on the numbers of the Abstract; by the former slavers who attested to the horrors they had witnessed, lending credibility to the cause. Yet it was the Abstract that remained “the central document of British mass m
obilization.”45 But the abolitionists needed something more than popular clamor outside the walls of Parliament. They needed an insider’s voice.
William Wilberforce, member of Parliament, was conservative on many issues, but by the mid-1780s he had become an evangelical, a conversion that seemingly made him more responsive to the abolitionists’ arguments. Wilberforce was lobbied by the movement and finally convinced to lend his voice to the cause. Like other abolitionists, Wilberforce pointed out the inconsistency between slavery and belonging to a nation “which besides the unequalled degree of true civil liberty, had been favored with an unprecedented measure of religious light, with its long train of attendant blessings.”46 But Wilberforce didn’t simply rehearse the standard arguments. He mastered the evidence, familiarized himself with the anti-abolitionists’ arguments, and fought them on their own ground. Slavers claimed it would make no economic sense to mistreat their most precious cargo. Wilberforce pointed out that on the contrary, “the Merchants profit depends upon the number that can be crouded together, and upon the shortness of their allowance.”47 The anti-abolitionists relied on Long’s supposedly well-informed History of Jamaica for many of their arguments, so Wilberforce decided to use Long’s own assertions as premises. “Those Negroes breed the best, whose labour is least, or easiest,”48 claimed Long. Well, added Wilberforce, if only slave owners exerted a less brutal dominion, the slave population would be self-sustaining, and trade unnecessary.
