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Wenstop 2015 Phd Thesis.Pdf (2.440Mb) (This page is intentionally left blank) i On the nature and sources of normativity: Normativity as grounded in affective human nature Søren Wenstøp June, 2015 NHH – Norwegian School of Economics ii For Yujie, Edwin, and Olivia iii i. Acknowledgments I wish to thank all the persons who have contributed in big or small ways to make it possible for me to complete this work. First I wish to thank my advisor, Knut Ims, for his helpful suggestions and guidance. I also wish to give special thanks to those who have provided helpful comments: Bjørn Berdal (general), Magne Dybvig (philosophy), Kjell Grønhaug (social science and management), Ove Jacobsen (business ethics and economics), Sigmund Karterud (psychiatry and neuroscience), Kai Leitemo (economics and psychology), Jaak Panksepp (neuroscience and psychology), and Lars Jacob Pedersen (applied ethics). Other people I wish to thank for their friendship, intellectual stimulation, and interesting discussions include: Kristian Alm, Bettina Berdal, Simon Blackburn, Peter Booth, Johannes Brinkmann, John Broome, Øyvind Bøhren, Alexander Cappelen, Caroline Ditlev- Simonsen, Andreas Falkenberg, Siri Gullestad, Jørn Halvorsen, Heidi Høivik, Bernadette Hörman, Nigel Iyer, Wanjun Jiang, Svein Johansen, Håvard Koppang, Mark Kriger, Øyvind Kvalnes, Odd Langholm, Xiaohui Liang, Lasse Lien, Eric Lofquist, Alte Midttun, Adekola Oyenuga, Jens Erik Paulsen, Georg Rabl, Jørgen Randers, Daniel Rees, Hannes Reindel, Aksel Rokkan, Joachim Sandberg, Knut Seip, Marcus Selart, Per Anders Sunde, Lars Thue, Sigurd Troye, Bertil Tungodden, Fredrik Wenstøp, Kristian Wenstøp, and Bin Yang. I would also like to direct a special thanks to my son, Edwin, and my two sweet girls, Yujie and Olivia, who shapes my life as much as they do. Finally, I wish to thank my father, Fred, for his commentary and intellectual stimulation along the way, and my mother, Line, for her motherly and grandmotherly love and care, and innumerable cups of coffee. iv ii. Preface The motivation for writing this dissertation grew out of a dual interest in understanding the nature of normativity inherent in the psychological perspective from which ethical decisions are made, and a wish to improve ethical decision-making based on this understanding. The first part of this motivation was science-driven, the latter practical with normative ambitions. Starting out, I was looking at the practical domain of business and strategy. Early on I was intrigued and somewhat provoked by the fact that making strategic decisions normally entailed a moral dimension that sometimes was not explicitly addressed. For example, I saw a glaring contrast between influential management perspectives such as that represented by Michael Porter’s famous contention that corporations ought to fight for every bit of power, not just with competing firms, but with everyone in the external environment including its own customers, on the one side, and a genuine concern and respect for other people on the other. The interest in the dual aspects of normativity – the scientific aspect and the normative aspect – culminated in adoption of the research objectives as presented in the thesis. The business setting provided an arena for reflection around practical moral decisions. Realizing that there were more fundamental issues concerning situated human morality underneath the veneer of business life, however, my attention was soon directed at finding a way to square the descriptive reality of human biology and psychology with the normativity of moral values and moral reasoning more generally. I was particularly interested in where normativity starts, that is, where it comes from. What are its foundations? The quest for better understanding the normative foundations of ethics took me several places. My first inclination was to look for the normative foundations of ethics in moral philosophy. There I have been influenced by several contemporary figures. In 2004, after reading the works of John Broome, I contacted the author and was kindly invited to The v Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in the Social Sciences (SCASSS) at the University of Uppsala in Sweden to talk with him in person. Later, I had the opportunity to talk personally with another famous contemporary philosopher, the late Richard Rorty, at The Academy of Management conference in Honolulu in 2005. Finally, I had the opportunity to complete a PhD course held by Simon Blackburn, also a famous contemporary philosopher, at the University of Oslo. Each of the famous philosophers I encountered made an impression on me, but a very different one. Broome left me with the ambivalently feeling deep admiration and slight disappointment. Rorty left me feeling intrigued but at the same time provoked. Blackburn, meanwhile, left me feeling encouraged yet somewhat perplexed. As a result of my searching quest over the years, I feel that I have gained a reasonably good overview of the main debates about normativity, as well as what it would take to settle them. Despite several longstanding disagreements that remain to be resolved, moral philosophy and meta-ethics in particular, provided a number of useful insights and ways of conceptualizing ethics. As the current study presumably will bear out, the philosophical positions I defend are in broad strokes in line with the philosophical thinking of Simon Blackburn. However, concluded that, on its own, moral philosophy could not provide a fully satisfactory and definite way of grounding normative ethics. It became clear that it was vital to base my understanding of normativity also in the sciences. My next inclination was to look into the literature of psychology, especially the psychology of emotion. Rune Lines at NHH gave me many helpful suggestions as to what to read, including important contributions from his own work. When I delved into psychology, I discovered a multitude of theories and positions partly overlapping and partly in conflict, and vi sometimes aligned with the positions I knew from philosophy. The overall picture was that of a field rift with conflict. While psychology provided interesting empirical and theoretical input, I found the literature fragmented and heavily theory reliant, and far less than philosophy, directly concerned with questions of ethics and normativity. Generally, it seemed to focus on processes and relations between conceptual constructs, showing less interest in the content of those processes. Finally, it seemed empirically incomplete in key areas. Every scientific pursuit will of course be empirically incomplete, otherwise there would not be any point in further pursuit, but as several biologists and neuroscientists point out, psychologists frequently do not adequately incorporate knowledge provided by the life sciences. The area that was to become most important in my quest for understanding ethics was the human brain. I realized that a firm grasp of normative ethics (i.e. what it is, and how it comes to say what it says) has to relate to appropriate facts about what happens inside the brain. Hence, my quest took a turn toward the life sciences, and in particular neuroscience, which deals with the ‘meat of the mind’ head on. My understanding has benefitted immensely from reading works from a number of prominent neuroscientists, and as the thesis will show, I have found the works of Mark Solms and Jaak Panksepp especially compelling. Moreover, I have been fortunate to benefit from the advice of Jaak Panksepp and Sigmund Karterud, as competent neuroscientists, in my literature review of emotions. In my view, each of the three perspectives – philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience – provides valuable insights. However, it is above all integrating these perspectives and seeking their commensurable collaboration that matters. Hence, I decided to undertake the challenging task of putting them into an orderly and unified perspective, with vii the aim of understanding the normative foundations of business ethics decisions. The result is this thesis. Søren Wenstøp, June 22nd 2015 viii iii. Table of contents Acknowledgments Introduction iv Preface Introduction v Chapter 1 Introduction 001 Chapter 2 Theories of emotions and affect 068 Chapter 3 The brain-mind argument 150 Chapter 4 The emotion location argument 187 Chapter 5 The affective nature argument 222 Chapter 6 The emotional decision argument 253 Chapter 7 The dual relativist position 286 Chapter 8 The case against objective values 313 Chapter 9 The emotivist position 336 Chapter 10 Summary and conclusions 404 iii. Appendix List of tables and figures 425 ix Chapter 1: Introduction1 1.1 Opening remarks The overall aim of this project is to explore the foundations of human morality, or what is often referred to more formally as “ethics”. Consistent with widely accepted terminology in philosophy, I deploy the notion of normativity as the central concept of ethics. Thus, every branch of ethics implicitly or explicitly revolves around normativity, including fields that “apply” ethics to specific domains of practice such as business ethics and other forms of professional ethics. Throughout the thesis, I will use business ethics to exemplify applied ethics. I venture to show that understanding normativity has important practical implications, albeit indirect ones. I will not make any clear distinction between “ethics” and “morality” but think of “ethics” more as systematic thought about “morality”, so that ethics relates more to “theory” whereas morality relates more to “practice” and “contextual situatedness”.
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