FOUR Vote for Me (Here's Why)

Vote for Me (Here's Why)

Suppose the gods were to flip a coin on the day of your birth. Heads, you will be a supremely honest and fair person throughout your life, yet everyone around you will believe you're a scoundrel. Tails, you will cheat and lie whenever it suits your needs, yet everyone around you will believe you're a paragon of virtue. Which outcome would you prefer? Plato's Republic-one of the most influential works in the Western canon-is an extended argument that you should pick heads, for your own good. It is better to be than to seem virtuous.

Early in The Republic, Glaucon (Plato's brother) challenges Socrates to prove that justice itself-and not merely the reputation for justice-leads to happiness. Glaucon asks Socrates to imagine what would happen to a man who had the mythical ring of Gyges, a gold ring that makes its wearer invisible at will:

Now, no one, it seems, would be so incorruptible that he would stay on the path of justice or stay away from other people's property, when he could take whatever he wanted from the marketplace with impunity, go into people's houses and have sex with anyone he wished, kill or release from prison anyone he wished, and do all the other things that would make him like a god among humans. Rather his actions would be in no way different from those of an unjust person, and both would follow the same path.

Glaucon's thought experiment implies that people are only virtuous because they fear the consequences of getting caught-especially the damage to their reputations. Glaucon says he will not be satisfied until Socrates can prove that a just man with a bad reputation is happier than an unjust man who is widely thought to be good.

It's quite a challenge, and Socrates approaches it with an analogy: Justice in a man is like justice in a city (a polis, or city-state). He then argues that a just city is one in which there is harmony, cooperation, and a division of labor between all the castes. Farmers farm, carpenters build, and rulers rule. All contribute to the common good, and all lament when misfortune happens to any of them.

But in an unjust city, one group's gain is another's loss, faction schemes against faction, the powerful exploit the weak, and the city is divided against itself. To make sure the polis doesn't descend into the chaos of ruthless self-interest, Socrates says that philosophers must rule, for only they will pursue what is truly good, not just what is good for themselves.

Having gotten his listeners to agree to this picture of a just, harmonious, and happy city, Socrates then argues that exactly these sorts of relationships apply within a just, harmonious, and happy person. If philosophers must rule the happy city, then reason must rule the happy person. And if reason rules, then it cares about what is truly good, not just about the appearance of virtue.

Plato (who had been a student of Socrates) had a coherent set of beliefs about human nature, and at the core of these beliefs was his faith in the perfectibility of reason. Reason is our original nature, he thought; it was given to us by the gods and installed in our spherical heads. Passions often corrupt reason, but if we can learn to control those passions, our God-given rationality will shine forth and guide us to do the right thing, not the popular thing.

As is often the case in moral philosophy, arguments about what we ought to do depend upon assumptions-often unstated-about human nature and human psychology. And for Plato, the assumed psychology is just plain wrong. In this chapter I'll show that reason is not fit to rule; it was designed to seek justification, not truth. I'll show that Glaucon was right: people care a great deal more about appearance and reputation than about reality. In fact, I'll praise Glaucon for the rest of the book as the guy who got it right-the guy who realized that the most important principle for designing an ethical society is to make sure that everyone's reputation is on the line all the time, so that bad behavior will always bring bad consequences.

William James, one of the founders of American psychology, urged psychologists to take a "functionalist" approach to the mind. That means examining things in terms of what they do, within a larger system. The function of the heart is to pump blood within the circulatory system, and you can't understand the heart unless you keep that in mind. James applied the same logic to psychology: if you want to understand any mental mechanism or process, you have to know its function within some larger system. Thinking is for doing, he said.

What, then, is the function of moral reasoning? Does it seem to have been shaped, tuned, and crafted (by natural selection) to help us find the truth, so that we can know the right way to behave and condemn those who behave wrongly? If you believe that, then you are a rationalist, like Plato, Socrates, and Kohlberg. Or does moral reasoning seem to have been shaped, tuned, and crafted to help us pursue socially strategic goals, such as guarding our reputations and convincing other people to support us, or our team, in disputes? If you believe that, then you are a Glauconian.

WE ARE ALL INTUITIVE POLITICIANS

If you see one hundred insects working together toward a common goal, it's a sure bet they're siblings. But when you see one hundred people working on a construction site or marching off to war, you'd be astonished if they all turned out to be members of one large family. Human beings are the world champions of cooperation beyond kinship, and we do it in large part by creating systems of formal and informal accountability. We're really good at holding others accountable for their actions, and we're really skilled at navigating through a world in which others hold us accountable for our own.

Phil Tetlock, a leading researcher in the study of accountability,

defines accountability as the "explicit expectation that one will be called upon to justify one's beliefs, feelings, or actions to others," coupled with an expectation that people will reward or punish us based on how well we justify ourselves. When nobody is answerable to anybody, when slackers and cheaters go unpunished, everything falls apart. (How zealously people punish slackers and cheaters will emerge in later chapters as an important difference between liberals and conservatives.)

Tetlock suggests a useful metaphor for understanding how people behave within the webs of accountability that constitute human societies: we act like intuitive politicians striving to maintain appealing moral identities in front of our multiple constituencies. Rationalists such as Kohlberg and Turiel portrayed children as little scientists who use logic and experimentation to figure out the truth for themselves. When we look at children's efforts to understand the physical world, the scientist metaphor is apt; kids really are formulating and testing hypotheses, and they really do converge, gradually, on the truth. But in the social world, things are different, according to Tetlock. The social world is Glauconian. Appearance is usually far more important than reality.

In Tetlock's research, subjects are asked to solve problems and make decisions. For example, they're given information about a legal case and then asked to infer guilt or innocence. Some subjects are told that they'll have to explain their decisions to someone else. Other subjects know that they won't be held accountable by anyone. Tetlock found that when left to their own devices, people show the usual catalogue of errors, laziness, and reliance on gut feelings that has been documented in so much decision-making research. But when people know in advance that they'll have to explain themselves, they think more systematically and self-critically. They are less likely to jump to premature conclusions and more likely to revise their beliefs in response to evidence.

That might be good news for rationalists-maybe we can think carefully whenever we believe it matters? Not quite. Tetlock found two very different kinds of careful reasoning. Exploratory thought is an

"evenhanded consideration of alternative points of view." Confirmatory thought is "a one-sided attempt to rationalize a particular point of view." Accountability increases exploratory thought only when three conditions apply: (one) decision makers learn before forming any opinion that they will be accountable to an audience, (two) the audience's views are unknown, and (three) they believe the audience is well informed and interested in accuracy.

When all three conditions apply, people do their darnedest to figure out the truth, because that's what the audience wants to hear. But the rest of the time-which is almost all of the time-accountability pressures simply increase confirmatory thought. People are trying harder to look right than to be right. Tetlock summarizes it like this:

A central function of thought is making sure that one acts in ways that can be persuasively justified or excused to others. Indeed, the process of considering the justifiability of one's choices may be so prevalent that decision makers not only search for convincing reasons to make a choice when they must explain that choice to others, they search for reasons to convince themselves that they have made the "right" choice.

Tetlock concludes that conscious reasoning is carried out largely for the purpose of persuasion, rather than discovery. But Tetlock adds that we are also trying to persuade ourselves. We want to believe the things we are about to say to others. In the rest of this chapter I'll review five bodies of experimental research supporting Tetlock and Glaucon. Our moral thinking is much more like a politician searching for votes than a scientist searching for truth.