David Brooks attempts once again to dissolve an entire branch of human endeavor into a handful of “recent” (usually, for some reason, taken to mean “true”) Templeton-funded studies from more empirical sciences. (See also the discussion at The Immanent Frame I curated on his effort to do the same to religion.)

Socrates talked. The assumption behind his approach to philosophy, and the approaches of millions of people since, is that moral thinking is mostly a matter of reason and deliberation: Think through moral problems. Find a just principle. Apply it.

One problem with this kind of approach to morality, as Michael Gazzaniga writes in his 2008 book, “Human,” is that “it has been hard to find any correlation between moral reasoning and proactive moral behavior, such as helping other people. In fact, in most studies, none has been found.”

Today, many psychologists, cognitive scientists and even philosophers embrace a different view of morality. In this view, moral thinking is more like aesthetics. As we look around the world, we are constantly evaluating what we see. Seeing and evaluating are not two separate processes. They are linked and basically simultaneous.

It may be that Gazzaniga (whom I knew a little when I was at Santa Barbara and respect very much) is looking in the wrong places. Max Weber, famously, did quite a nice job pointing out how, over time, a certain set of theological ideas produced certain kinds of behavior. One could list endless examples. One simply cannot argue that moral reasoning has no bearing on behavior. The question, rather, is how. Perhaps, rather than Socrates, Brooks might have called to mind Aristotle, who understood that moral education is a slow, steady process of mimicry, reflection, and the cultivation of habits—too slow, probably, to show up in an undergraduate subject after an afternoon’s cognitive science study.

I’m all for using cognitive science as a tool for uncovering new dimensions to moral education and moral dilemmas. But we cannot mistake the tool for, in itself, either a question or an answer. These are privileges we can and should retain for ourselves: the right to think, to decide, to reflect, and to discuss. When we give them up, we abandon both the responsibility for the consequences and the adventure of agency.

via Op-Ed Columnist – The End of Philosophy – NYTimes.com.

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