The Psychologists Aid Ineffective Torture, Hobbes, and Incentives

In spite of the rhetoric employed by Damon and Colby concerning the search for higher moral truths, the basic moral principle that is consistently employed in this psychological literature is the bare Hobbesian one of resolving disagreement, or promoting cooperation. In his book Moral Tribes, Joshua Greene warns that even those who seek pragmatic agreement need “an explicit and coherent moral philosophy, a second moral compass that provides direction when gut feelings can’t be trusted.” So in addition to questioning whether psychological research can vindicate moral norms, we also have to ask whether the minimal moral norm of cooperation employed by psychologists is sufficient to provide them with a reliable moral compass....

When the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence published its extensive report on official torture in December 2014, Jonathan Haidt tweeted a link to an article by Matt Motyl, his former Ph.D. student, claiming that the report would not change anyone’s views on the morality or effectiveness of torture, owing to the phenomenon of cognitive bias, which distorts people’s assessment of the relevant evidence. Motyl warned that none of us should assume that our beliefs about torture are based on facts. Nevertheless, there are established facts. One of them is that psychologists secured enormous financial gains by collaborating in official torture, while also having clear evidence that it was ineffective.

This should be an important lesson concerning our moral frailty, one that should make us wary of conferring moral authority on sources that have no plausible claims to such authority, such as scientists of human behavior. Psychological expertise is a tool that can be used for good or ill. This applies as much to moral psychology as any other field of psychological research. Expertise in teaching people to override their moral intuitions is only a moral good if it serves good ends. Those ends should be determined by rigorous moral deliberation.

Psychologists have long been essential to the military, performing valuable and humane functions, treating returning veterans, devising selection procedures, studying phenomena such as PTSD. But when the defense industry supplies hundreds of millions of dollars a year to support research (both basic and applied) that is related to military psychology, there is always a potential conflict of interest between supplying results that the military wants and producing objective science.--Tamsin Shaw "The Psychologists Take Power," (feb 2016) New York Review of Books.  [HT Jason Stanley on Facebook]

In her important article, in which she brings together several lines of debate, Shaw is right to take influential psychologists to task along five distinct lines:

1. The involvement of psychologists in the torture program of the US Military;
2. The financial incentives of those psychologists (and the APA) involved in the torture program
3.  The deplorable way moral theory is theorized in psychology and/or tacitly presupposed in psychology.
4. The replication crisis in psychology.
5. The psychologists' tendency to present themselves as the experts of the moral.

For those familiar with my previous blogging on the toxic mixture of expert overconfidence and expert lack of ethics, it should come as no surprise that I agree with the thrust of Shaw's article and also many of its details. Yet, Shaw also ends up promoting (a) the wrong solution (a moral theory that can provide a moral compass) to an institutional problem and (b) seems willing to discredit an assumption that she claims "is consistently employed in this psychological literature...the bare Hobbesian one of resolving disagreement, or promoting cooperation" on misguided grounds.  And, while this is not her intention, perhaps, (c) she seems to allow that if torture had been "effective" [this is not defined--it is certainly effective in generating harms to tortured and torturer alike], the psychologists involvement with the torture program would have been vindicated. In what follows I leave (c) aside, and focus on (a-b).

First, incentives matter, and large financial incentives matter a lot in distorting even corrupting integrity of scientists. Not everybody will be so corrupted, but this is why there are policies that favor disclosures, prevent conflicts of interests, etc. While a "moral compass" can help navigate these incentives, there is no reason to think that folk with a PhD an high social status in a specialized discipline have the requisite "moral compass." Unless one is committed to a very strong unity of the virtues thesis, there is simply no reason to expect that the possession of epistemic virtues carries over to possession of a moral compass.

To be sure, I am not against efforts at cultivating a moral compass during the long apprenticeship of PhD and post-doc(s). I have no idea if it would really make a difference in light of extremely corrosive incentives. But the status quo -- shortening of PhDs, increased emphasis on funding success, publication rat-race -- discourage such cultivation. So, unless we reform scientific education massively, this is simply a non-starter. We are much better off looking more carefully at the ways our institutions (including the media machine that makes stars out of scientists ) reward and incentivize successful folk. Universities and funding bodies have a non-trivial role to play here to encourage disclosure, align incentives with humane ends, withhold recognition from torturers, etc.

Second, it sometimes seems that Shaw is also out to discredit "the bare Hobbesian" assumption "of resolving disagreement, or promoting cooperation." But here we need to be careful: if this assumption is fruitful within psychological research and made explicit in that research, then I do not see why it should be given up. After all, (i) minimal assumptions are better than maximal assumptions; (ii) cooperation is not a harm as such (and may be the most one can hope for in many circumstances). That it fails to provide the moral compass  to would-be-torturers is no argument against it as an assumption within psychological research (unless psychologists promote it as a means toward such a compass). After all, there is no reason to think that a Kantian or neo-thomist psychologist is less likely to torture. (It would be nice I were shown to be wrong about this!) As we are increasing learning (Eric Schwitzgebel has made this research popular) knowing full blown moral theory is not exactly conducive to moral behavior.