“The Help” and Racial Morality

Patricia Turner gives her take on the much-celebrated (and much-maligned) summer movie, The Help:

This movie deploys the standard formula. With one possible exception, the white women are remarkably unlikable, and not just because of their racism...

Jim Crow segregation survived long into the 20th century because it was kept alive by white Southerners with value systems and personalities we would applaud. It’s the fallacy of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” a movie that never fails to move me but that advances a troubling falsehood: the notion that well-educated Christian whites were somehow victimized by white trash and forced to live within a social system that exploited and denigrated its black citizens, and that the privileged white upper class was somehow held hostage to these struggling individuals.

But that wasn’t the case. The White Citizens Councils, the thinking man’s Ku Klux Klan, were made up of white middle-class people, people whose company you would enjoy. An analogue can be seen in the way popular culture treats Germans up to and during World War II. Good people were never anti-Semites; only detestable people participated in Hitler’s cause.

I can’t make much sense of the claim that a person’s moral worth has something to do with the degree to which we would applaud his personality or enjoy his company. This seems to confuse a kind of folksy, southern social sensibility — perhaps not even an accurate one — with an actual standard for making judgments about morality. It ought not be much of a surprise, that is, that people who act nicely are sometimes very immoral. But I don’t think this is even the point that Professor Turner is driving at.

In broad strokes I understand what she is trying to say: in revisiting past eras of moral depravity, it is a crutch to simply depict people who subscribed to a wayward moral norm as blatantly nasty and unsavory. It is more difficult, though more honest, to try to locate the moral flaw in people who seem nice and friendly on the surface.

But morality and personality are two entirely different things. People who act politely, do nice things for their friends, resist coveting their neighbor’s wives, and so on, are subscribing to certain sentiments to be sure, but those kinds of personal and social commitments are not of the same class with commitments to — or questions about — the extant social order. The question is not, how do we understand a white southerner from the 1960s who is a nice person but goes to White Citizens Council meetings? The question is, how do we understand a white southerner from the 1960s who questions or rejects the notion of black inferiority? To focus on the former is to assume that morality is critically linked to personality, and that we should raise a red flag when a nice person does something immoral. But it isn’t morally relevant whether I might enjoy the company of a member of the White Citizens Council, any more than it’s morally relevant whether I might enjoy the company of a homophobe or a misogynist — it’s just, perhaps, a questionable feature of my personality. Morality is much bigger and broader, and yet more difficult to recognize, than the impressions we gather over dinner or the company we prefer to keep. What do we say, for instance, of the grouch or the hermit who resists the White Citizens Council meetings? Personality traits ought not cloud our thinking about morality.

After the end of slavery, public opinion polls of white southerners showed a rising (albeit gradually) acceptance of black citizenship. After the desegregation of public schools in the 1950s, polls showed increasing tolerance towards the presence of black students in previously white-only schools. After the civil rights movement of the 1960s, a similar phenomenon happened again; within a decade, the thought of a white man giving up his seat to a black man on a bus became normal. What this shows is that, contrary to the notion that “you can’t legislate morality,” it is in fact fairly easy to legislate morality. What you cannot legislate quite so easily is personality; there has never been a good way to impel a populace towards being more desirable dinner guests, or towards more charmingly giving up their seat. What people see as morally right or wrong — acceptable or unacceptable — has nothing to do with personality and everything to do with social norms, which are often defined by legislation.

That is why, in trying to understand the 1960s south or any other period of moral depravity, it can be misleading to try to draw a correlation between personality and morality. Those nice white folks who attended the White Citizen Council meetings weren’t secretly bad people — they really were nice people. They just also happened to be immoral people, in the technical sense that they were subscribing to a norm that, fifty years later, we recognize as immoral. But in that respect they were not alone.

In every era, even our own, social norms press upon our personal value systems with incredible force. We like to think of ourselves as moral people, but whether explicitly or implicitly, we assent to certain moral standards that our children and grandchildren will undoubtedly decry as unjust. Why do we do this? It has nothing to do with how nicely we act, or what desirable company we are, but rather with the inescapable human tendency to rely on externally prescribed standards of morality. Which is why the only really interesting question is, how are some people able to escape this net? Moreover, when they do escape, how do they go about deciding what is right and wrong?

Anyone who doubts that morality is a causal result of legislation should consider a hot-button social issue of our time. Take gay marriage, for instance; is it plausible to think that as more states (and perhaps eventually the federal government) take more legislative steps towards accepting gays, approval of gays as represented in public opinion polls will decline?

Treating the Untreatable

A fascinating piece from David Eagleman in the latest issue of The Atlantic takes a look at how recent advancements in neurobiology may have implications for the way our legal system processes offenders. Here is a (perhaps controversial) sample:

Variation gives rise to lushly diverse societies – but it serves as a source of trouble for the legal system, which is largely built on the premise that humans are all equal before the law. This myth of human equality suggests that people are equally capable of controlling impulses, making decisions, and comprehending consequences. While admirable in spirit, the notion of neural equality is simply not true.

The piece is incredibly well-reasoned and even hopeful. The framework it offers for a new legal system is more nimble and nuanced than anything I have seen. And yet, there are some serious philosophical problems embedded in Eagleman’s argument. One of the early points he makes is that modern neuroscience has just about ruled out the possibility of human beings possessing free will. This point leads into his broader argument that, in many cases, people can’t be held to account for their actions any more than they can be held to account for their brain chemistry; if you can causally link a person’s behavior to physical phenomena in their brain, then you can’t really assign fault, Eagleman says.

I wouldn’t presume to differ with Eagleman about the science here. My hunch is that he is exactly right: either “free will” doesn’t physically exist, or else science has not yet discovered its physical source(s). But at the end of the day, Eagleman isn’t all that interested in free will; he is interested in how our legal system could respond to these new developments in neuroscience such that we process offenders in a way that is both more humane and more conducive to the overall safety and welfare of our society.

This sounds terrific on its face, and Eagleman even describes a method for non-invasively conditioning people out of bad behavioral tendencies that could lead them to harm others. But safety always comes with a price tag. One immediate concern is this: if we do not have free will, as Eagleman suggests, and if there is no agency behind our actions, then we do not really qualify as autonomous beings. If this is true, then there is no clear moral problem with nipping all potential hazards in the bud, as it were. Eagleman points out that 98% of all death row inmates have a particular section of their genetic code in common. If so, what would be wrong with DNA-testing all fetuses and aborting those with the dangerous genes? There has never been much of an objection to curtailing the life or liberty of a non-autonomous being, after all, whether it is human or not. (Throughout the history of philosophy, human beings have generally been treated as the standard of autonomous beings, but the findings Eagleman describes seem to cast doubt on that supposition.)

This may seem extreme and unnecessary. Eagleman might offer an alternative strategy: let’s just keep a close eye on these at-risk cases as they grow and develop, he might say. That is indeed the moderate course, but there is something a bit heavy-handed about his actual recommendations for how to go about this. Leaving aside the fact that our society has long suffered from a baffling level of violent crime, to suppose that a society could simply medicate, condition, and repress its way to safety seems inept.

What is striking about Eagleman’s proposal, among other things, is that it subtly reinforces the purpose of having a legal system in the first place — to define and enforce an arena of acceptable social behavior. I would submit that whether this defining and enforcing is done through judges and lawyers, or through psychoactive drugs and biofeedback, the objective is much the same: our society wants — and needs — to have a uniform code of conduct. Which begs the question, on what grounds ought we assume that drugs and therapy are better at getting at this goal than the system we already have in place? Suppose one learns that her child has a high genetic disposition towards sexual deviance. Should the state require — or even encourage — preemptive neurological treatment? And towards what end? Suppose that thirty or forty years from now, the collective understanding of sexual deviance has shifted. Laws can be changed, but drugs cannot be untaken.

An issue that Eagleman fails to address, thus, is that the defining of acceptable social behavior has to come before enforcement. Certain types of behavior will never be acceptable and so are properly subject to enforcement. But other types of behavior straddle the line between acceptable and unacceptable, and so it is questionable that they should be made subject to any kind of enforcement, let alone an irreversible mechanism such as drug therapy.

We can hopefully imagine, that is, that serial killing and child molestation will never be socially acceptable for any future society. But beneath the class of “objectively undesirable” activities (my term), there is a huge class of activities, behaviors and habits that might be described as “subjectively undesirable.” Think of gambling, smoking, alcoholism, drug addiction, sex addiction, overeating, playing too many video games, shopping too much. The list goes on, and where precisely does one draw the line between what is a disease and what is a failure of upbringing, community, or even personal will? What ought to be treated by a doctor and what ought to be handled through personal, spiritual or other means? When one goes so far as to describe “poor impulse control” as a medically treatable symptom, as Eagleman does, one seems to insist that the resources of science and medicine are the only effective outlet for anyone dealing with any type of undesirable behavioral trait.

That kind of mindset, I would argue, encourages passivity on the part of the afflicted, to be sure, but it has the most starkly negative ramifications for people who are perfectly healthy and fine — precisely the people we shouldn’t have to worry about. Whether or not we possess free will as a matter of biology, it is better to live our lives thinking that we do. Otherwise, we easily fall into the trap of thinking we are blameless and powerless. I cannot begin to enumerate the potential problems for a society composed purely of these types of people, nor can I can argue with Eagleman about the science. But I think he seriously misunderstands the philosophical implications of his own proposals, both for our society and for individuals.

Neurobiology, like the other natural sciences, is an empirical discipline: it makes “man is…” statements. Philosophy, while it has made some forays into the empirical realm, is fundamentally a normative discipline: it says, “man ought to be…”. It is one thing to say that free will cannot be empirically substantiated; it is quite another to say that because free will has no empirical support, we should re-design our society — and indeed our individual interpretations of our own behavior — under the conceptual banner that free will is a myth. I fear that Eagleman knows not what kind of dangerous territory he steps onto with a suggestion like this.