Tag: daniel kahneman

« Je pense, donc j’ai raison ! »

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3–4 minutes

The Enlightenment promised a universal Reason; what we got was a carnival mirror that flatters philosophers and fools the rest of us. MacIntyre and Anscombe diagnosed the corpse with precision, but then tried to resurrect it with Aristotelian or theological magic tricks. I’m less charitable: you can’t will petrol into an empty tank. In my latest essay, I put ‘Reason’ on the slab, call in Kahneman, Hume, Nietzsche, and others as expert witnesses, and deliver the verdict: morality is a house rule, not a cosmic law. This piece is part of a larger project that includes my Language Insufficiency Hypothesis and Against Dumocracy. The Enlightenment isn’t dying – it’s already dead. We’re just cataloguing the remains.

The Enlightenment was many things: a bonfire of superstition, a hymn to autonomy, a fever dream of “Reason” enthroned. Its philosophers fancied themselves heirs to Aristotle and midwives to a new humanity. And to be fair, they were clever enough to trick even themselves. Too clever by half.

Alasdair MacIntyre, in After Virtue, plays the role of forensic pathologist with admirable precision. He shows us how the Enlightenment dynamited the teleological scaffolding of Aristotle, then tried to keep the vocabulary of virtue, duty, and rights standing in mid-air. The result: what he calls a “moral Babel,” a chorus of shrill assertions dressed up as rational law. Elizabeth Anscombe had already filed the death certificate back in 1958 with Modern Moral Philosophy, where she pointed out that our talk of “moral obligation” is just a Christian relic without a deity to enforce it. And Nietzsche, that perennial party-crasher, cheerfully declared the whole project bankrupt: once the gods are dead, “ought” is nothing but resentment pretending to be metaphysics.

And yet, when MacIntyre reaches the heart of the matter, he can’t quite let the body stay buried. He wants to reattach a soul by importing an Aristotelian telos, even summoning a “new St Benedict” to shepherd us through the ruins. It plays beautifully with those still tethered by a golden string to Aquinas and the premodern, but let’s be honest: this is just hypnosis with a Latin chorus. Descartes told us je pense, donc je suis; MacIntyre updates it to je pense, donc j’ai raison. The trouble is that thinking doesn’t guarantee rightness any more than an empty petrol tank guarantees motion. You can will fuel into existence all you like; the car still isn’t going anywhere.

The behavioral economists – Kahneman, Tversky, Ariely, Gigerenzer – have already demonstrated that human reason is less compass than carnival mirror. Jonathan Haidt has shown that our “moral reasoning” usually lags behind our gut feelings like a PR department scrambling after a scandal. Meanwhile, political practice reduces “just war” to a matter of who gets to publish the rule book. Progressℱ is declared, rights are invoked, but the verdict is always written by the most powerful litigant in the room.

So yes, MacIntyre and Anscombe diagnose the corpse with impressive clarity. But then they can’t resist playing resurrectionist, insisting that if we only chant the right metaphysical formula, the Enlightenment’s heart will start beating again. My own wager is bleaker – or maybe just more honest. There is no golden thread back to Aristotle, no metaphysical petrol station in the desert. Morality is not a universal constant; it’s a set of rules as contingent as the offside law. Killing becomes “murder” only when the tribe – or the state – says so. “Life is sacred” is not a discovery but a spell, a linguistic sleight of hand that lets us kill in one context while weeping in another.

The Enlightenment wanted to enthrone Reason as our common oracle. Instead, it handed us a corpse and told us to pretend it was still breathing. My contribution is simply to keep the coroner’s mask on and say: The magic tricks aren’t working anymore. Stop looking for a metaphysical anchor that isn’t there. If there’s to be an “after,” it won’t come from another Saint Benedict. It will come from admitting that the Enlightenment died of believing its own hype – and that language itself was never built to carry the weight of gods.

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Outrage! Chapter Six

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Kurt Gray’s Outraged! attempts to boil morality down to a single principle: harm. This, in his view, is the bedrock of all moral considerations. In doing so, he takes a swing at Jonathan Haidt’s Moral Foundations Theory, trying to reduce its multi-faceted framework to a mere footnote in moral psychology. Amusingly, he even highlights how Haidt quietly modified his own theory after Gray and his colleagues published an earlier work—an intellectual game of cat-and-mouse, if ever there was one.

Audio: Podcast of this topic

Chapter 6: The Intuition Overdose

By the time we reach Chapter 6, Gray is charging full steam into reductio ad absurdum territory. He leans so hard on intuition that I lost count of how many times he invokes it. The problem? He gives it too much weight while conveniently ignoring acculturation.

Yes, intuition plays a role, but it doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Enter Kahneman’s dual-system model: Gray eagerly adopts the System 1 vs. System 2 distinction, forcing his test subjects into snap moral judgments under time pressure to bypass rationalisation. Fair enough. But what he neglects is how even complex tasks can migrate from System 2 (slow, deliberate) to System 1 (fast, automatic) through repeated exposure. Kahneman’s example? Basic arithmetic. A child grappling with 1 + 1 relies on System 2, but an adult answers without effort.

And morality? The same mechanism applies. What starts as deliberation morphs into automatic response through cultural conditioning. But instead of acknowledging this, Gray behaves as if moral intuition is some mystical, spontaneous phenomenon untethered from socialization.

Morality: Subjective, Yes—But Culturally Engineered

Let’s lay cards on the table. I’m a moral subjectivist—actually, a moral non-cognitivist, but for simplicity’s sake, let’s not frighten the children. My stance is that morality, at its core, is subjective. However, no one develops their moral compass in isolation. Culture, upbringing, and societal narratives shape our moral instincts, even if those instincts ultimately reduce to personal sentiment.

Gray does concede that the definition of “harm” is subjective, which allows him to argue that practically any belief or action can be framed as harmful. And sure, if you redefine “harm” broadly enough, you can claim that someone’s mere existence constitutes an existential threat. Religious believers, for example, claim to be “harmed” by the idea that someone else’s non-compliance with their theological fairy tale could lead to eternal damnation.

I don’t disagree with his observation. The problem is that the underlying belief is fundamentally pathological. This doesn’t necessarily refute Gray’s argument—after all, people do experience psychological distress over imaginary scenarios—but it does mean we’re dealing with a shaky foundation. If harm is entirely perception-based, then moral arguments become arbitrary power plays, subject to the whims of whoever is best at manufacturing grievance.

And this brings us to another crucial flaw in Gray’s framework: the way it enables ideological self-perpetuation. If morality is reduced to perceived harm, then groups with wildly different definitions of harm will inevitably weaponize their beliefs. Take the religious fundamentalist who believes gay marriage is a sin that dooms others to eternal suffering. From their perspective, fighting against LGBTQ+ rights isn’t just bigotry—it’s moral duty, a battle to save souls from metaphysical harm. This, of course, leads to moral contagion, where adherents tirelessly indoctrinate others, especially their own children, ensuring the pathology replicates itself like a virus.

The Problem with Mono-Causal Explanations

More broadly, Gray’s attempt to reduce morality to a single principle—harm—feels suspiciously tidy. Morality is messy, contradictory, and riddled with historical baggage. Any theory that purports to explain it all in one neat little package should immediately raise eyebrows.

So, sorry, Kurt. You can do better. Moral psychology is a tangled beast, and trying to hack through it with a single conceptual machete does more harm than good.

VIDEO: Response to Response on Sapolsky v. Dennett Debate

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It’s been a minute since I’ve posted a video. Restart the clock. In this video, I critique Outside Philosopher’s critique of the debate between Robert Sapolsky and Daniel Dennett on Free Will and Determinism. He attempts to leverage Gödel’s Uncertainty Principle in his defence.

Feel free to leave comments on YouTube or below. Cheers.

Intuition and Reason

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I’ve been cycling through The Righteous Mind and Moral Tribes, respectively by Jonathan Haidt and Joshua Greene. These blokes are social psychologists and moral philosophers. I started each of these books with the conception that I would neither like nor agree with the content. As for like, I suppose that’s a silly preconception better captured by whether or not I agree; that with which I don’t agree, I don’t like.

This said, I like the style of both of the authors, and I am finding the material to be less contentious than I first thought. I can already envisage myself agreeing with much of the substance but waiting to disagree with the conclusions.

Although I committed myself to document The Righteous Mind in situ, I am finding that I am listening to the audiobook whilst driving and so getting ahead of myself, so I’ll have to rewind and retread in order to do this. In fact, the reason I switched back to Greene’s Moral Tribes is so I wouldn’t progress even further in Haidt’s work.

I am writing this post to acknowledge this. I’d also like to document that I don’t believe that humans are good reasoners, a situation both Haidt and Greene cite to be generally true. Humans are post hoc rationalisers, which is to say that they make up their minds and then create a narrative to justify that position. Haidt uses an analogy of an elephant and a rider, and he asserts that humans might more accurately be described as groupish than selfish. Certainly not shellfish. Greene notes that people have been shown to concede self-interest to political party interest, which helps to explain how people continually and predictably vote against their own self-interests. This also supports my position that democracy is a horrible form of government. Of course, Haidt would argue that this proves his point that people tend to adopt facts that support their perspective and diminish or disregard those that don’t.

it doesn’t follow that intuition is (1) better, (2) significantly better, or (3) good enough for (a) long term viability or (b) grasping complexity.

Haidt suggests that reason is overvalued, but then he proposes intuition as a better alternative. I agree with him that reason is overvalued and for the same reasons (no pun intended) that he does. But it doesn’t follow that intuition is (1) better, (2) significantly better, or (3) good enough for (a) long term viability or (b) grasping complexity.

Whilst I am not immune to this any more than someone else. I recall Kahneman writing in Thinking Fast and Slow that even though he is well aware of cognitive biases and fallacies, he himself can’t escape them either. When I used to teach undergraduate economics, I’d give some sort of policy assignment. As a preamble, I’d instruct the students that without exception, all policy decisions have pros and cons. In their submissions, they’d need to gather both supporting and detracting arguments and then articulate why one should be adopted over another. Minimally, I’d expect at least three pros and cons.

The students would almost invariably complain about how difficult it was to imagine a counter-position. Even when they’d include some, they were usually weak tea fodder. Oftentimes, the students already shared the same perspective, so they couldn’t usually even get the opposing side until we debriefed after the assignments had been graded. Although I do recall instances where students would admit that they hadn’t considered this or that opposing view, I can’t recall a case where a position was flipped after hearing new evidence—not that this was my intention. People do engage in escalating commitment, doubling down on existing beliefs and generating defensive—sometimes tortuous—arguments to support their positions.

Happiness and how to defeat it (part 1)

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Some Utilitarians claim that humans are happiness maximisers or at least a large component of utility is happiness. Besides happiness (nor pleasure) is not everyone’s goal. Utility maximisation has a near-term bias, and preference theory leaves a lot to be desired.

Utilitarians are not hedonists, per se, but perhaps this is only moderated by the downsides attributed to excess.

Happiness is not a goal
it’s a by-product of a life well lived.

Eleanor Roosevelt

Some people defer happiness in their engagements of so-called labours of love. Stereotypical entrepreneurs, forego near-term happiness in the hope of some future benefit. Given the low probability of even a remotely positive outcome, this is taking a lottery mentality. In the US, much entrepreneurship is reserved for the children of the affluent. This is a hobby, and they typically have several safety nets for the almost inevitable ensuing failure.

In any case, if happiness is a goal, rational choice and homo economicus have surely gone missing.

Four Nobel Truths

Buddhism has its Four Noble Truths:

  • Life is suffering
  • Suffering is due to attachment
  • There is a way to overcome attachment
  • Follow the Eightfold Path

Happiness-seeking is precisely what will ensure unhappiness. One might even argue that this is the general malaise evident in Western society. As Daniel Kahneman, Richard Thaler, and others have pointed out, people rather satisfice, a strategy of getting to good enough. Perhaps this is not letting perfection be enemy of the good, or perhaps this is somehow realising the asymptotic path of diminishing returns ahead.

Happiness should not be a goal; it’s a side-effect, a result of pursuing one’s interests. And happiness is ephemeral. We’re likely all aware of the person who was asking for just one thing to achieve happiness is quickly seeking the next thing because happiness comes with an expiration date.