Back when you were my perfesser at Pomona, you were really the only one that made me not think philosophy was dead. Really, the rest of them were like obsessed with skeptical impossibilities so much it made me wonder why we all didn't just burn down Pearsons Hall. uygevalt.

Parenthetical note: what is it with these conservatives and their desire to kill off the humanities?

That is an interesting point, actually. I think I'd chalk it up to their quest for certainty. They simply can't bear anything that remains unresolved; they need a final word on everything.

Mark Liberman, the “self-appointed David Brooks watcher” over at Language Log, after “wearily contemplat[ing Brooks's] latest masterpiece of misunderstanding,” provides some cartoon commentary.

All I know is earlier today I was on the NYT website, and their most visited list said:

David Brooks: The End of Philosophy?

And I was like, huh, I guess he is!

"...The same is true of moral reasoning. It's one thing (and a very interesting thing) to ask: how, exactly, do we make moral decisions on the fly? But while that's useful to moral philosophy in a number of ways, it is not directed at the questions moral philosophy tries to answer. Those questions include: which actions should we perform? What kinds of people should we try to be? What principles should we try to live by?..."

The kind of thinking involved in rote sorts of decisions is different than the kind involved in very deliberate actions, but I'm not sure if "moral decisions made on the fly" could be characterized as instinctive, rote sorts of behaviors. It looks to me that Brooks may not be aware of the distinction. It's been a few years since I studied cognitive anthropology, but it looks to me like he may be struggling with how humans develop cognitive models or schema, which can range from those that are personal to an individual to those shared among a group. Cognitive anthropologists generally do believe that humans constantly modify these cognitive models or schema based upon experiences. That doesn't mean that reason isn't involved. I would say just the opposite, as we have to assimilate new information and experiences into the model or schema and make sense of it.

Brooks pretends like altruism is a cutting edge concept, when libruls were countering conservative social darwinism over 100 years ago. Forget Socrates; apparently Ayn Rand is as deep as most conservatives are willing to tiptoe. What's more interesting is how the left's do-gooderism is a much better fit for the teachings of Dubya's favorite philosopher.

David Brooks is a very silly thinker, really not worth wasting time on.
When the NYTimes tried to charge through Times Select, Brooks brought in so little money that it was embarrassing -- this was easily measured, as during the entire period of Times Select being active, he only made the "most e-mailed list" a couple of times, while other pundits featured regularly, even when they were behind that foolish firewall.

Brooks realized he needed to reach out for a wider audience, while also understanding that his best man Bush and Iraq were both going to hell, and fast -- so he changed his tune for a while, in order to scoop a wider read.

But what's there to read? The man can't think.

Nice article by Ralph Peters:

War’s irrational motivators

The fundamental dictum guiding our diplomats and analysts has been that states and human collectives act in their own rational self-interest. This is utterly wrong, leading us to convoluted analyses that seek to justify our assumption, while guaranteeing diplomatic failure: It’s difficult to defeat an enemy or even negotiate with a partner whose moti¬vation you refuse to understand.

On morality: lots of research on evolutionary games and repeated games shows cooperation emerges from competitive individuals, such as bees and humans. Straight-forward to argue that morality is a key part of that cooperative glue.

The idea that our snap moral decisions don't involve reasoning at the time, or that when we do try to reason things out it usually serves to justify our previous snap decisions, does not rule out an important role for philosophy in helping guide our moral decisions.

To use the Brook's analogy we may have an immediate and instinctive reaction to some foods, but that reaction is frequently a result not of the actual taste but of our previous judgement based on appearance, texture, cultural prejudice, etc. If we persist in eating a particular food, we can sometimes not only learn to like it but to recognize distinctions of flavor that we covered up by the 'yuck' reaction at first.

Similarly, if someone presents a particularly compelling reason why a particular behavior is more ethical or moral, and we agree and make a conscious decision to follow that behaviour when we do have time to think things out, then over time we could find our "aesthetic" of morality changing to match and affecting our snap decisions as well.

I read this while listening to the worst performance of Mozart's Prague Symphony I've ever heard, performed live by the Freiburger Barockorchester, which was, of course utterly irresistable nevertheless.

There is never any point in confronting Brooks's blatherings directly. Most of the more serious pundits are worthless as well*, incapable of thinking their way out of the wet toilet paper enwrapping their daily contribution, but Brooks is merely frivolous.

Nearly anyone who has studied consciousness in any fashion will have noted that how we think and how we experience thinking are not exactly identical. It takes someone as dull as Brooks to note this not very newsworthy observation and conclude somehow that science isn't actually all that valuable, for reasons he no longer needs to provide, since reason itself is now apparently optional.

* thinking invading Iraq was a good idea.

Responding to Red State Mike:

When you continually interact with the same people in a community, whether your workplace, your family, your town, restaurants you frequent, the results of your behavior accumulate and it behooves you to act in such a way that the people you encounter don't try to drive you away.

Experience alone could teach us to avoid such behavior, should we survive that long, but normally our parents drum it into us until empathy kicks in and we start thinking about other people.

Game theory - Rapoport's Tit for Tat - is an exceptionally elegant demonstration of why it's useful to be good, but I doubt that many if any of us animals can entirely attribute our virtuousness to our own ratiocination.

And if you think you aren't virtuous, fuck you!

Just because we do not work out the future path of the ball using equations when we are playing tennis does not mean that those equations are pointless, or that there is no role for physics. It just means something we already knew: that whatever the point of physics is, it is not: being used by Venus Williams while she is playing.

Of course she's using equations. She's just not doing so consciously.

First I would examine the fly. Do its leanings offend my sensibilities? Yes? Then I would judge it. I call it Brooks.

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Also, although Ms. Williams might not consciously use physics equations to hit a given serve, physics is still a good tool to understand why hitting it the way she does produces results she wants -- and can give insight into how she could hit it better. After all, the main reason why world records are shattered at an increasingly high rate is because athletes are training using the output of research and study into how the body functions.

Likewise, even if we make "snap" judgments all the time, our moral responses can be trained. Sure, left alone, we'll develop instincts that we'll use, and they might not be moral. But by pulling about situations before they occur -- that is, by engaging in moral reasoning about past events and future hypothetical -- we can make ourselves more inclined to make moral judgments that are, well, moral.

Mr. Brooks is simply falling for a 21st century, humanities version of what people went through when quantum mechanics hit the scene: "Look, our observations affect the world we're observing. Therefore there is no reality but what we make." And his "conclusions" are as fatuous as those were.

This is the most cogent essay on the nature of cognitive psychology I have ever read in a publication not written for cognitive psychologists. Please please please make this point to any journalist colleagues in your acquaintance who is writing about:

X is like cocaine because it activates the pleasure centers of the brain. (note to journos: everything you like "activates" the pleasure centers of your brain.)

Our "reptilian" brain is always driving us toward food/sex/sleep even when we think we're being high-minded. (note to journos: every vertebrate species has these drives and always has because they are as important for survival today as they were 60mil years ago.)

It is amazing that scientists can wire a monkey to control a computer cursor using only its mind. (note to journos: you use nothing but your mind to control your arms and legs, hands, mouth, and eyes.)

In general, the complexity and rationality of the mind's work is vastly underappreciated by people who have never stopped to think about it. You can walk, see, express yourself, identify the location of sounds, recognize people, and fear harmful things without "thinking" about it. And there is nothing primative, reptilian, or irrational about any of it.

Thanks, Hilzoy!

Thank you so much for answering this confusion on the part of David Brooks. Do you think you can also get word to Jonathan Haidt? My impression is that Haidt is just as confused on this point as Brooks.

What is this John Templeton Foundation? Its home page description is "Science And Religion at John Templeton Foundation. Specializing in free enterprise, character development, science vs religion and free enterprise system."

No wonder the speakers it invites speak of moral philosophy in terms of "calculating value."

Fine essay, but why exactly are you even reading David Brooks, let alone debunking him? It's attention he's after, of course, so I find it best to ignore him. It has the happy side effect of making me less likely to throw things...

I don't see how you even get started here. Someone who remarks about a hyper-rational analyst of religious text is already off the chart. You can't both believe in the supernatural and be hyper-rational. Or even just rational. Brooks is simply not worth the time in general. But in this case, he makes absolutely no sense. It's not surprising that he finds it "hyper rational" to spew out page upon page of "analysis" of scripture. But that doesn't make it or him rational.

Brooks's pompous line about the "End of Philosophy" ignores the fact that moral philosophy (the only type he discusses) never has depended on the view that we can make better moral judgments just by developing a better theory of moral judgments. Certainly Socrates, who stayed up all night discussing how to structure the educational and mythological system of a city in order to produce philosophical rulers, didn't think we make moral judgments by just theorizing about them. And Aristotle's notion of phronesis bears no resemblence to the type of "moral philosophy" that Brooks unintentionally caricatures. The philosopher who came closest to that silly point of view, I think, was Kant, but even Kant eventually wrote the Critique of Judgment.

Is there a real public intellectual these days writing in politics, rather than shams like Brooks? Recommendations?

Rabbit beat me to it, but the inclusion of a Templeton Foundation source should put one on his guard. They were founded to promote the "scientific" bases for religious truisms.

Reading this post, I was in danger of having to say that I agreed with Mr. Brooks more on this subject, but in the final analysis, I'd have to say that you both are mistaken. While we make snap judgments about many things, the tennis analogy breaks down because physical systems are not variable across cultures. The instincts of any two players, regardless of any acquired, or cultural habits, still need to confront the same set of physical laws, et cetera. Many techniques can all be evaluated by the resulting performance on any court, in any country.

On the other hand, acquired "moral" schemata are not "instinctual" in the sense that Mr. Brooks seems to be saying.; they can be relearned. His arguments seem to loose force because it is eminently useful to evaluate a given set of principles for the results they give when they are followed by members of a society, or mixtures of members of different traditions, and other permutations of new and traditional ideas, ad infinitum. Oftentimes such abstract moral principles can be made to sound reasonable, but be shown to have detrimental consequences when put into practice. It is this, which I would call sociology or economics, which is the analog of the ballistics/tennis idea, not philosophy. Neither are the many innate (truly instinctual) factors in human behavior a natural strength of philosophy, as I would term this evolutionary psychology.

My problem with philosophy in general (and I speak not as a philosopher, so I might be mistaken about what exactly the field encompasses), is that it seems to exist outside the realm of testability. This makes it little better than religion in my book, although it certainly is better, in that it usually doesn't insist on divine or immutable truths.

For the Catholics amongst us, Brooks' turn here has a simple name: fideism. The Church, fitfully engaging with rational inquiry and some degree of philosophically grounded theology for centuries, got freaked out by the Enlightenment, the French Revolution and challenges to authority (including its own). For about the last 150 years at minimum, the Church still does some amount of philosophy and theology but relies much more on fideism, the idea that your belief (and your obedience to every last command of the transmontane Roman Church) can't be weighed against any standards of reason. The obvious values sought to be inculcated by this turn are a move from skeptical inquiry to uncritical submission. Instead of asking Why?, we are commanded to believe and obey. Brooks' piece strikes me the same way. Instead of bringing the emotions at issue in this study into the rational light and seeing what to make of them and whether they make sense, we are told that this is the way things are. Such a stance is very convenient if you want to defend an established order and resist any calls for change or moral re-examination, since Brooks attempts here to discredit the very idea of moral re-examination at all.

jhm makes a good point about the analogy between tennis and moral judgment. The way I would put the difference is that tennis is a game, and therefore has an object that is accepted as a matter of convention by all the players, whereas practical life is not a game, and people and cultures disagree about what its objects are. Thus our tennis judgments are instrumental in the sense that they're all directed toward the accepted goal (say, winning), while our practical judgments are not all instrumental -- some of them involve judgments regarding what goal we are or should be seeking to achieve.

However, I didn't think that point undercut what Hilzoy was trying to do with the analogy. I thought the analogy was just meant to point out that the theory of how we make snap judgments on the fly is different from the theory of what actions we should take. If you're a coach, the theory of how the player makes judgments might be important, but you can't put that theory to use in coaching until you also have a theory about what the player should be doing. It's the distinction between the content and the method of education (or rather, the distinction between the theory of educational content and the theory of pedagogy). Brooks assumes that moral philosophy always assumed no theory of education was necessary, and that cognitive science therefore spells the end of moral philosophy. But that's nonsense, for two reasons. One, moral philosophy didn't ignore the theory of moral education, and two, cognitive science doesn't give us a theory about what our goals should be. (Of course, conservatives like Brooks generally are skeptical of any rational theory about that -- they think we should be getting that information from tradition, or faith, or Ayn Rand novels.)

By Brooks stateing philosophy is dead or the end of philosophy i'm sure it fits very well in his limited understanding of reality as a whole. It would seem that it's real easy for him to dismiss that which he doesn't comprehend. I bet it hurts his head to delve into areas that require thinking other than the superficial levels that he lives in.

Mr. Brooks is simply saying that we should all follow our "gut" instincts and using reason and logic is for girlie men.

We had 8 years of that, it didn't work out so well.

David Brooks' philosophy on philosophy seems a bit sophomoric.

Aside from moral philosophy, general philosophy died when the analytical/ordinary-language buffoons took most of it over (Anglo-American world at least.)

tyrannogenius

There is only one moral absolute. In the words of Aleister Crowley:

"Do as thou will shall be the whole of the law."

That's a moral "law" in the sense of a "law of nature." You can no more violate it than you can violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

What we all, in actual fact, really do, is act to realize value. We value whatever it is we value. We act according to our beliefs about what actions will effectively realize value.

Cognitive research has demonstrated that human beings are very bad at applying and following rules, even fairly simple rules. What human beings are very good at is pattern recognition. Approaches to realizing value that rely on pattern recognition are thus likely to be more effective and more rewarding than approaches to realizing value that rely on applying rules -- especially given that in real life, the actual situations to which rules would be applied are always unique and never exactly repeat.

I have never understood the compulsion that requires thinking to become abstract, then reified, and finally alienated -- and alienating. It's just weird.

There is a political truism -- 'there comes a time to set aside principle, and do what's right', that folks use when it becomes obvious that, to pick a couple: bad as Castro is, a 9 year old boy should be with his loving Dad after his crazy-brave mom died trying to get him to America and freedom, or that as much as somebody may believe that an unborn baby IS, must be innocent, it's still up to the mom whether she gives birth.

I can understand parsing decisions like that, in terms OF decisions like that.

What makes no sense to me is confusing ethical algebra with the meanings of the symbols themselves. It's like the old line that facts contradict the theory... so you abandon them, keep the theory and invent more convenient facts.

And why anybody calls that "philosophy" just waterboards language.

I know all the cool kids hate David Brooks but I actually liked this. For one thing, it's usually *conservatives* who think you can fit human morality into a rigid philosophical system. "If you fill college students minds with postmodernist relativism, they'll have no morality whatsoever". Conservatives think they're so superior to us liberals because they care much more about political philosophy, and think if only you applied it consistently everyone would be moral. (the only philosopher liberals have on their side in Rawls and no one really agrees with him). When I was a undergraduate the College Republicans were frustrated with the College Democrats because we wanted have a debate on the issues and they wanted to have a debate on the philosophical basis for big government.

So its refreshing to see a conservative take down such philosophical chauvinism, even if his arguments aren't exactly original.

"One reason to try to answer those questions is if you find yourself wondering: what, exactly, should I make of all those moral judgments I make every day? Are they just expressions of taste, or artifacts of my upbringing? Or could they be right or wrong? If they can, how exactly would one go about showing that they were?"

If there is not some standard of morality independent of human thought and emotion, then yes, moral judgments are just expressions of individual and collective taste.

That doesn't mean philosophy isn't hugely important in organizing, analyzing and expressing thoses tastes. It's just that you'd better recognize that ultimately it's nothing more than saying "I/We like x" or "I/We don't like x".

Mike

SA: Uncle Alice also said, ""Love is the law, love under will" (AL I:57). The core basis of natural, ethical humanism is respect for other beings and for "value" (like, against vandalism) and not a blithe do as you want - isn't that a prescription for rape, murder, or whatever?

Neil B wrote: "The core basis of natural, ethical humanism is respect for other beings and for "value" (like, against vandalism) and not a blithe do as you want - isn't that a prescription for rape, murder, or whatever?"

"Natural, ethical humanism" is a very apt phrase, given that our sense of ethics is based on a naturally occurring capacity for empathy between human beings, and indeed between human beings and non-human animals. This naturally occurring empathy is part of our biological nature, exists in varying degrees in everyone, and is also culturally conditioned.

The vast majority of human beings have no desire to rape and murder. For those who have such desires, some purported "moral law" is probably not much of an obstacle to acting on them, particularly in extreme cases such as so-called "psychopaths" or "sociopaths" who are completely devoid of any natural empathy for others. That's why they have to be prevented from acting on their desire to rape or murder by the rest of us, by force, or the threat of force, e.g. by police, courts and prisons.

You are correct about the complete quote from Crowley: "Do as thou will shall be the whole of the law. Love is the law, love under will."

My understanding is that by "love", Crowley meant "value", i.e. that which you "love" is that which you "value". So he was saying that the "law" that governs volitional action is that we act "as we will" to realize value.

The vast majority of human beings have no desire to rape and murder. For those who have such desires, some purported "moral law" is probably not much of an obstacle to acting on them, particularly in extreme cases such as so-called "psychopaths" or "sociopaths" who are completely devoid of any natural empathy for others.

But that's not the point of ethical philosophy, at least to me. It isn't supposed to take the place of law or education (including upbringing). It's supposed to illuminate basic principles for those who want to guide their own conduct, educate others, make good laws, or just understand.

THIS IS THE END

I think that headline was written by someone, not David Brooks, who did not understand philososphy (not that I do, but at least I make the attempt). If I understand what Brooks and those who wrote about his column said, Brooks seems to be advancing the concept that morality is genetic not trained and because of that all moralistic tomes are irrelivant. (or as Shaw's character Understaft said in "Major Barbara," "Poverty and slavery have stood up for years to your sermons and leading articles...)

Now, not to seem irrevrent but as "Captain Kirk" said "[War] is instinctive. But the instinct can be fought. We're human beings with the blood of a million savage years on our hands! But we can stop it. We can admit that we're killers...but we're not going to kill...today. That's all it takes! Knowing that we're not going to kill...today!" -- A Taste Of Armageddon

It's the same with any "moral choice" we can say we are not going to "%$(^#$" today. How exactly we define "morality" is something our society has to decide on its own and how our society deals with conflicts between defined "morality" and "human nature" (here is where Brooks' thesis comes in) is something we also must discuss.

The people I've seen who write about Haidt's five instinctive roots of morality never seem to understand that civilization and progress, and any society at all, require the suppression of many of them. EG, desire for revenge, possessiveness about women, contempt for inferiors, servility before superiors, blind loyalty to the group and hostility to outsiders, and envy of wealth and power.

Mr. Toad wrote: "But that's not the point of ethical philosophy, at least to me ... It's supposed to illuminate basic principles for those who want to guide their own conduct, educate others, make good laws, or just understand."

There are two basic questions, both of which must be answered empirically, rather than through "reasoning" about "principles":

1. What do you value?

2. What actions will realize what you value?

You answer the first question by actually looking at and paying attention to what you actually value.

You answer the second question by learning from your own experience, or the experience of others, about the actual effects of various actions.

Speaking of, here's the acting philosophy of Bill Shatner:

"I. Am. NOT. GOING. TO. OVER. ACT. TODAY!"

What happens when the fly flies away?

You seem to want to emphasize the distinction between making moral judgments and justifying those judgments. This is fine, I guess; but your use of the tennis-player analogy and the phrase “on the fly” tends to obscure what that distinction really is; and, ultimately, you don’t come to terms with the implications of Brooks’ argument.

First, to the extent that moral judgments are in fact judgments, they are not made “on the fly.” Most people would likely agree, if questioned, that an action is ill-considered if it is based on a moral judgment that has been made in the same way that Venus Williams hits a tennis ball.

Actually, it is a rhetorical error to characterize moral decision-making as akin to the act of hitting a tennis ball. Actually, moral decision-making is nothing at all like hitting a tennis ball. To argue otherwise is a tacit acceptance of Brooks’ main assumption:

"[Moral judgments] are rapid intuitive decisions and involve the emotion-processing parts of the brain. Most of us make snap moral judgments about what feels fair or not, or what feels good or not. We start doing this when we are babies, before we have language. And even as adults, we often can’t explain to ourselves why something feels wrong."

Brooks’ position amounts to no more than the claim that moral judgments are not really judgments; they are really expressions of mere preference. This is not a new position; it is one that has been defended in various forms throughout the modern and post-modern eras. The only novelty today is the claim that there is scientific evidence that supports this view.

“Socrates”—Brooks should say Plato, since little is known about Socrates’ “approach” to philosophy—Socrates expends great effort in the Republic and elsewhere trying to refute the Preference View of ethics (so, clearly, even in ancient history, this view was not new). He argues that moral judgments are rational to the extent that they achieve some level of objectivity and are, therefore, not reducible to mere preference (although obviously preference will be present). The Preference View denies the possibility of this kind of objectivity.

This is the dispute. The question of justification is a sidetrack. That is, the problem of justification is a subset of the problem of moral objectivity. The main issue—is there such a thing as moral truth?—is lost in your discussion.

“Socrates” understands the problem of preference in general; and, more specifically, he is well aware that preferences are formed early on. That is why (again, in the Republic) proper habituation is central to the education of the philosopher. Initially, the future philosopher needs to be trained to have the “correct” preferences.

But the fact that moral reasoning must be grounded in proper habituation does not suggest that it is done “on the fly”; nor does it entail that moral reasoning is reducible to or entirely determined by whatever habituation precedes it. In other words, it does not follow from the fact that reasoning “comes later” (as Brooks puts it) that reason is either necessarily and definitively “guided” by the emotions or that reason is “a servant masquerading as a high priest.”

In fact, the whole point of the so-called “Socratic method” is to get people to question their firmly held, seemingly instinctive, preferences. Brooks is wrong at the outset. Socrates doesn’t “talk.” He questions. And the assumption behind his questioning is twofold: (1) he assumes that reason makes it possible for someone to free himself from the slavery of his habitual preferences; and (2) that, once freed, reason can reach some kind of moral and intellectual objectivity.

Whether or not Socrates is correct in these assumptions, it is important for people to understand that the possibility of moral objectivity is what is at stake. Unfortunately, you end up papering this over.

What Xenos said. Are we going to take those preferences and emotions Brooks blithely exalts as given (and which he tacitly wants to support the established moral and political order) or do we bring them into the light, describe them, question them, see whether they make sense?

The difference between tennis and ethics is that the rules of physics are well known, whereas those underlying ethics are not. What Brooks and others are pointing to is that it seems the rules for ethics come from the structure and evolution of the human brain, not from some universal cosmic laws. Therefore it behooves philosophers to understand the human brain in order to make ethical prescriptions; otherwise they are effectively predicting where the tennis ball is going to go without understand of the laws of physics.
In short, you have the entire argument upside down. Looking inside the brain for the rules of ethics instead of looking at how brains deal with pre-existing laws is a Copurnican revolution, and all you've done in this post is insist that the Earth cannot revolve around the sun because it is well known that the sun revolves around the Earth.

@ SecularAnimist:

I think you left out a question, namely "What should you value?" This question arises when there isn't a clear answer to the question "What do you value," i.e., when there is a conflict among things we actually want. I want another drink, but I want to drive home safely and go to work without a headache tomorrow. I want more money, but I want to avoid the consequences of cheating on my taxes or robbing a liquor store. I want to sleep with this or that person, but I want to avoid either lying to or hurting my spouse. We resolve conflicts like this by ranking the objects of desire. It's not just a question of what we want most, but what we think the happiest equilibrium is among all our conflicting desires. And sometimes it requires that we teach ourselves to value something more, or less, than we otherwise would. To me, that's the benefit of moral reasoning. It's not about following a bunch of rules for their own sake; it's about achieving a working system of preferences to resolve conflicts among desires.

I thought the Copernican revolution began when folks realized that there was a simpler explanation for the observed movements of the planets than the outrageously complex math necessary for those movements to have the earth as the center of the orbits.

I don't think anybody has observed anything remotely as clear, nor that the explanation that the electricity of brain chemistry simplifies much.

Robert Wright wrote a book some years back, The Moral Animal, which examined how it is that, with some exceptions, the Rule for all successful human societies has been for certain basic moral precepts, e.g., honesty and monogamy.

Before any of you knuckleheads drag up all the exceptions, f'r instance regarding polygamy, Wright's point is that very few polygamous societies are successful, compared with and certainly in any long-term competition with societies that, however much they may fail, hold up monogamy as the ideal. The simplest explanation is that monogamous societies tend to have a smaller percentage of young men with neither families nor property. Societies with lots of young guys who fit that description tend to fight a lot.

Likewise, he examined why honesty is generally The Rule , at least within the society itself. (Although, for example, IIRC it used to be a point of honor for some warrior societies to never, ever tell the truth to any outsider.) The simplest explanation for that is simply that any society in which individuals cannot trust each other has great difficulty growing wealth.

So I dunno as it is real smart to look to medical explanations, cuz UNlike the Copernican insights, the data isn't clear and it isn't a simpler analysis.

1) the assumption of innate good is part of Stoic thought..see Seneca and Cicero, et.al. it's survived all these years under the name natural law philosophy.
2) just because some human act is rapid doesn't mean that it's 'emotional' or even 'intuitive' Venus Williams' responses are automated, or delegated to reflex level. Like walking or vocabulary they don't have to be thought out anew each time. What we call emotion is actually another way of thinking, or having opinions. Conversely, there is no possible thought content free of emotional color -even doing mathmatics.
3) It reminds me of when 'cognitive psychology' came along. These folks had made the discovery that people think! No-one ever thought otherwise aside from American behaviorists. When I'd mention Descartes, Hume and Kant, I'd be told they didn't count. Duh.
Duh Brooks

Mr. Toad wrote: "I think you left out a question, namely 'What should you value?' This question arises when there isn't a clear answer to the question 'What do you value,' i.e., when there is a conflict among things we actually want."

I think you are conflating two different things.

First of all, it is entirely commonplace -- as the examples you give suggest -- to have conflicting values. You value A, and you also value B, but if you act to realize value A, the same actions will negate value B.

The answer is simple, though not easy: life being what it is, you just can't always have everything you want. You have to decide what you value the most, and figure out what actions will realize the most value for you -- sometimes at the cost of negating other values -- and act accordingly. But in the end, you will decide, and you will act.

The other meaning of the question "what should I value?" is "what are the right values to have?"

But the only way to answer that question is to point to some other, external set of values against which you compare your actual values to see if they are "right". But how do you know if those values are "right"? Compare them against some other set of values. And then compare those against another set.

But for that to work, you have to eventually reach some ultimate set of values that are objectively right. And I reject the idea that there is such a thing. The ability "to value" is the essence of subjectivity. The very nature of values is that they are subjective.

Even if someone believes that an almighty God has ordained a set of objectively "right" values, it is still up to that person whether to accept those values or not. And that decision is still based on that person's subjective values. Perhaps he or she values something prohibited by God so much, that he or she is willing to accept eternal damnation in hell as the price of realizing that forbidden value.

Even certain "values" that would appear to be empirically, objectively shared by all human beings are ultimately subjective. We can empirically observe that we all value air, water and food -- our very bodies "value" them objectively, because without them we would die. But many a person has willingly died in order to save the life of someone else, whose life they subjectively valued more than their own.

As long as we are capable of volitional action, there is really no escape from acting as we will, in order to realize our own values. And I tend to see all efforts to establish some universal or objective system of values as attempts to escape from that inescapable responsibility.

Jon-Erik: howdy! ;)