The Science of Language

by Noam Chomsky

  JM: What about human moral systems?

  NC: There is now for the first time some serious research into it. A lot of it grew out of John Mikhail's dissertation; now Marc Hauser is doing work, Elizabeth Spelke, and others. And they're finding some quite interesting things. There are these kinds of paradoxical situations that have been worked on by ethical philosophers for some time – trolley problems, for example – conditions under which you have a choice to make. A typical case is a doctor in a hospital who has five patients who each have different diseased organs, and they're all going to die. And a healthy person comes in and you could kill him and take the appropriate organs and transplant them and save five patients. So, should you kill one person and save five patients? Almost everybody says no, although on any utilitarian grounds, or any other principle you can think of, the answer ought to be “yes.” And that turns out to be cross-culturally valid. It's true of young children. It's an extremely strong principle. And there are many different variants of it. On the other hand, you make slight modifications of it, and it turns out that people say “yes.” If you're driving a trolley and you go this way you kill five people, and go the other and you'll kill one person, you've got to kill the one person. Well, why is it different? These are very sturdy principles. They hold up cross-culturally, children, and so on. And in investigating them, you're investigating our fundamental moral nature, which has deep properties that have paradoxical outcomes.

  You can think of this – in fact, Mikhail in his thesis did think of it – as a way of pursuing remarks of Hume's on the nature of moral systems. The remarks do point out the basic problem, although he didn't carry it anywhere. The basic problem that he pointed out is that we have an infinite number of duties, responsibilities, moral commitments, and we can determine how they work in new situations; we're constantly facing new circumstances and applying these moral principles. They can't be stored in our minds. So they must arise from some much smaller set of fixed moral principles that are a part of our fundamental nature and thought of by some generative procedure – now this is not Hume's term, but that's what it amounts to.

  JM: You pointed out when we spoke earlier that it's not really a moral competence [he had in mind]; rather, it's some kind of generative procedure for the generation of use, or the generation of action, or . . .

  NC: or the generation of judgments also . . .

  JM: the generation of judgments, yes.

  NC: We can somehow generate judgments and you can't expect that . . .

  JM: But he had nothing like the notion of a recursive procedure . . .

  NC: No, not at that time. But he did recognize that there must be certain principles from which the others derive. He maybe had in mind something like Euclidean geometry, although it's hard to know. I don't think that there's any development of this anywhere among moral philosophers. But the point is clearly there. And it's correct. That's the core principle of generative grammar, and of any unbounded cognitive system.

  JM: I suspect that had he taken it seriously, he wouldn't have worried about the missing shade of blue.[C]

  NC: The missing shade of blue is the same problem, and it's got to somehow follow from whatever principles we have that organize colors for us. And it shows – and I suspect that Hume was aware of this; he left it as a paradox – that the idea that we're picking them up by sensation and association can't possibly be right. The missing shade of blue shows that.

  JM: If moral reasoning and judgment has this kind of character, is there any suggestion . . . What I'm trying to get clear about is the relationship, if any, between the conceptual domain and a specialized form of it, such as our moral judgment and our moral evaluations. Is that even a part of our conceptual scheme, or is it . . .

  NC: Well, the notion of a conceptual scheme is loose enough that it can include anything we want to think of as ‘thought.' So, yes, it's all a part of our thought. What the components are, how they are related, whether they have similar origins, and so on . . . who knows?

  Certain aspects of our moral judgments probably can be accounted for in terms of notions like kin selection, and the like. It's no surprise that you pay more attention to your children than to someone you've never seen before. And maybe you can account for that on evolutionary grounds – kin selection, gene survival, and so on. On the other hand, it's very unclear how far that can go. For example, people spend a lot more emotion and time and energy in saving a stranded dolphin than in saving a million children dying in Africa; and the evolutionary distance between humans and dolphins is hundreds of millions of years.

  JM: Kin selection – it's by definition restricted. It can't be universalized. Is there an argument to the effect that virtually rules it out of [explaining] the moral domain?

  NC: Well, there may be some elements that enter into our moral theories, but it's a good question how far it can go. There are so many obvious counterexamples – like, say, an adopted child. You don't care for the adopted child less than the natural child. And you care for it a lot more than for a cousin, say – or an animal, or a dolphin. Our moral judgments are far more intricate than anything that can be reduced to those realms – which isn't, though, to say that they aren't a part of it. It's possible that there's something to the earliest theories of evolutionary psychology – Kropotkin's. He held that mutual aid is a factor in evolution. But whatever the answer turns out to be, it's still going to be necessary to carry out the task of characterizing the moral faculty. And you can by now begin to understand some aspects of it experimentally.

  JM: There was a Canadian provincial premier of oil-rich Alberta, Ralph Klein, who said that Canada ought to get involved in Iraq – Canada ought to commit troops, etc. – because the US is our friend. It strikes me that his is a prudential claim based on interest, and not a moral judgment. The ‘ought’ there is offered to indicate that it is in ‘our’ interests to . . .

  NC: Well, it depends on what's in his mind, of course; it might have been a judgment of interest or a moral judgment. But I'd guess it is the former . . .

  JM: I think that it was. . . . But, continuing, it certainly seems to be possible, in principle, to make distinctions between prudential or project-related ‘oughts’ and moral ones. Is universalizability a way of characterizing and distinguishing the moral ones?

  NC: Well, it might be – by picking out the moral ones from the prudential ones. The prudential ones aren't moral; they're immoral, in fact. We recognize them to be immoral.

  JM: . . . as Kant pointed out . . .

  NC: So they tell us something about our moral faculty; namely, that these are acts that we regard as immoral.

  JM: Is there any hope of systematicity in the conceptual sphere?

  NC: I'm sure that there is some. Take the kind of work that has come out of Davidson's ideas on event structure; that's been very productive. It's internal computation, but it's the internal computation that's due to thought systems.

  JM: . . . syntactic . . .

  NC: Yes, and if there's going to be any systematicity to conceptual systems, it's also going to be syntactic. It'll have something to do with the internal computations that go on – systems of judgment and perception.

  JM: . . . in some broad sense of syntactic . . .

  NC: Well, if by ‘syntax’ we just mean internal computation of symbols – like, say, Peirce would have meant – then, yes, it's all syntax. It's in the head; it's syntax. There are some parts of it that will relate to motion of molecules; we call that “phonology.” There's another part that will relate to truth-indications. We call that “semantics.”[C]

  18 Morality and universalization

  JM: You’ve pointed out in your moral/political work that one of the most elemental truths is that you ought to universalize your moral principles. What about people who deny that?

  NC: Does anyone actually, literally, deny that?

  JM: . . . Not, I suppose, without shifting out of the moral domain.

  NC: What people would say, I th
ink, is that yes, we keep to universal principles, but the special circumstances are such that . . .

  JM: . . . Wait a minute; the people we’re dealing with are not real people?

  NC: . . . No, they are – like Henry Kissinger or somebody. There are people who say that it can’t be universalized. But if you asked Kissinger, who does have the honesty to say it rather than just accept it when it is convenient, he would say that of course, really, at some other level, it is universalized. But it's a deeper principle that is universalized, one that exempts us from the restriction against, say, aggressive war. So the deeper universal principle is, say, that you have to act to make the world the best possible world, but a special case of that is that we have to be exempt from every moral principle. So it's still universalized: immoral, of course, but universalized.[C]

  Actually, there's an interesting paper that I don’t understand, but it's interesting. You might want to read it. It's by Akeel Bilgrami. Ask him to send it to you; it's a draft. In it he distinguishes universality from universalizability in a way that is interesting, but I can’t reproduce it, because I don’t quite understand it. It's a paper on Gandhi. He's arguing that Gandhi was in some deep sense an intuitive moral philosopher who had something important to say, and the standard interpretations are wrong. Part of it is a distinction between universality and universalizability. Universalizability means that it's a principle that we have a way to make universal – or something like that. And that's different from a principle that's universal. He does make a distinction, and he has cases that make sense, but I don’t understand it well enough to repeat it. But that might be something relevant; it's an interesting approach. It's a thoughtful paper; I’m sure of that.

  JM: Akeel's work is . . .

  NC: . . . He compares Gandhi to Mill and others. He also has all sorts of things to say about truth that are interesting – and the search for truth as an objective, which it wasn’t for Gandhi. He argues also that Gandhi wasn’t really interested in persuasion, because he regarded that as violence, and that the meaning of his true non-violence is just to present a model, which others will then decide to follow, or not. Which sounds to me vaguely confusing, from what I’ve read.

  JM: To help me get a grip on this, let me get back to that Canadian premier of Alberta who argued that Canada ought to go in with Bush into Iraq. He argued the following way: we have a moral obligation to do so because the US is our friend, and he meant by friend, effectively, that we scratch their back if they scratch our back.

  NC: That's a universal principle, presumably. I wouldn’t call it a very moral principle. Here we’re running into questions of conflicting moral systems, and you have the usual problem of trying to work your way through them by seeing if there's some deeper ground from which you can derive something you can agree on. So did he agree that Germany should have declared war on the United States because it was allied with Japan, and Japan had declared war on the US?

  JM: Unsurprisingly, no.

  NC: Well, why not? That's a case of scratch your back if you scratch mine . . . That's the way to decide whether he really means it.

  August 17, 2004 session

  JM: When we were together last time, we spoke briefly about Akeel Bilgrami's piece on Gandhi, and the distinction between universals and universalizability. You mentioned that Gandhi had held the principle that you should not persuade, because that was a form of violence. I was interested in that in part because . . .

  NC: You can only exemplify . . .

  JM: Ok, right. A colleague, now retired, Harry Bracken, used to hold a related view.

  NC: Really?

  JM: It appeared in his view that rational argument is not a form of persuasion; rather it's a form of display, or a form of deduction from accepted principles, principles on which the participants agree, or can on consideration accept. Persuasion typically involves the use of force, power, authority . . . It is not rational argument. Is that the kind of distinction that you had in mind?

  NC: I’d put it differently, but I essentially agree with the position. So, say, you’re with children, or teaching, or involved in a discussion, or talking to an audience . . . Ideally, you should not be trying to persuade them – that is, get them to accept your position. You should be trying to encourage them to think the issue through and arrive at their conclusion, and rational argument presents materials that they can use. So, for example, they may decide that they don’t like the premises, or they may find that there's a flaw in the argument, or something else. It's presenting a framework that people may not have thought of and that they can use for their own purposes. It's a pretty hard distinction to make and observe. When you’re talking to people, it's hard not to try to persuade them. But at least as an ideal, that's what one ought to strive for.

  It should be true of teaching. There's no point in persuading people. If you’re teaching, say, physics, there's no point in persuading a student that you’re right. You want to encourage them to find out what the truth is, which is probably that you’re wrong.

  JM: Is this policy driven partially prudentially, that people can’t effectively develop any kind of conviction unless they make the decision themselves, basing it on their own grounds?

  NC: I think that's probably a fact; you’re not going to arrive at a true understanding unless you somehow reach it yourself. But, quite apart from that, it's [really] just a moral issue. It depends on what your attitude is towards other people: should they obey you, or should they think things through for themselves?

  JM: Harry used to put it in terms of Plato's distinction between rhetoric on the one hand and philosophy – by which he meant rational argument – on the other. I think that's plausible, although it does suggest that there's a clear distinction there . . .

  NC: I know I’m always put off by people who are called good speakers, by those who can rouse an audience. That's just what you do not want. If you have the capacity to do it, you should suppress it.

  JM: But you are a good speaker, you know.

  NC: I think I’m a rather boring speaker. But if I had the capacity to be a speaker who could rouse an audience to passion and excitement, I would try, at least, not to use that capacity. Because I think it's wrong.

  JM: That's characteristic of your argument style in politics: you just present the facts. It seems to me it's an excellent technique. Even when you use irony, it works because those who hear it know what the facts are . . .

  NC: Well, by now quite the opposite is refined into almost a point of principle. A political figure is not supposed to present materials and ask you to make your own judgment. It's also enshrined in one of the greatest tributes to human irrationality that exists, namely, formal debates – you know, debating societies like those found at Oxford, Yale . . . They’re based on a principle of profound irrationality, namely, that you can’t change your mind. The rules of debate are that you must take a position and keep to it, even if you’re convinced that your opponent has a good argument, you’re not allowed to say so. You have to show in some way that it's not right, even though you think it is. There cannot be anything more irrational. That's why I usually refuse when I’m invited to take part in these debating societies, and so on – or even to take part in debates; it's ridiculous.

  Suppose it's an area in which people at least try to be reasonable, say, the sciences, where it's a goal to be reasonable. You don’t have debates with people; you interact with them and you see if their arguments are correct. If a student comes in with a paper, we don’t have a debate – or we shouldn’t. What we should have is a discussion to see which parts are right, which parts are wrong, where we change our ideas, and so on. But the very concept of a debate – it's just a tribute to human irrationality.

  It's a part of the same thing. Somehow, the point is to persuade, not to find out what is right, or to work out your own ideas, and so on.

  JM: Obviously, you’re not in training to be a lawyer.

  NC: Lawyers have to do it; they’re p
aid for it. A lawyer's job is to defend the client, no matter how rotten the case is. You can understand why a legal system should have such a role. It provides a person with some kind of defense. But to regard that as anything that people would enter into voluntarily, without having a role in a system of defending a person's rights, is just totally irrational. All these debating societies should go out of existence, in my opinion.

  The one argument you can give for them is that they’re kind of like chess – that they sharpen people's modes of thinking, and so on. I doubt that. But I can’t think of any other argument in their favor. In fact, you can see it in debating societies. A debating team is trained to take both sides, and you don’t know until you get there which side you’re going to take.

  JM: And it helps to know who the judges are, and what would convince them too . . .

  NC: What convinces them is usually rhetoric, trickery . . . I don’t know if you’ve ever watched or participated in these elite debating societies, like, say, Yale's. I do it occasionally, but I really feel like walking out. It's mostly trickery, or rhetoric, or deviousness . . . and that's considered the ideal. You somehow have to trip up your opponent, even if he's right and you know he's right.

  19 Optimism and grounds for it

  JM: It's remarkable that, given the evidence of the ease with which people manage to deceive themselves with regard to their social and political motivations, to bond by exclusion, to succumb to racism and tribalism, and to cede their decision-making to leaders, to authority, and to power, you continue to maintain the optimistic view that a democracy in which people make decisions on the full range of issues that concern them – especially economic issues – is still a live vital option. Are there reasons to maintain this or is it perhaps a matter of hope, or even of faith?[C]