“The Moral Self” Jesse Prinz, City University of New York Today Speaker Series Series

So, it is an extreme pleasure to be here, and it’s extremely gratifying. Watching Professor Wrenn’s development has been one of the most enjoyable, gratifying, stimulating experiences of my career. We all knew he was a star when he was a student at Washington University. And really, to talk about the progression of somebody who was already so good then may sound absurd, but there has been progression, and it's just marvelous to be able to see him here today. And there are many others in this department whose work I follow closely and admire. I had the great pleasure of spending much of the day with the Professor Torin Alter, which was both enjoyable and very philosophically stimulating, as always, and I’m grateful for that and for the many others here. Seth Bordner was mentioned, another person whose development has been very gratifying to watch. So I'm grateful for the opportunity to speak to you.

The project that I'm going to share with you today is really an effort to bring together two strands of philosophy that have been hardly marginal. They’re among the most mainstream things that philosophers have worked on in the history of our field, but they've too infrequently been brought together. So, it’s a project that's about a kind of synthesis in philosophy, and one question is a question of personal identity, and stated most simply, is the question “who am I?” or, for that matter, “who are you?” – questions of what makes me the person that I am, what makes you the people that you are, and that problem has been addressed by some of the most distinguished figures in the history of our field. This is the problem of how should I act, a problem of . So, all questions of morality and questions of identity are among the defining issues in the field of philosophy, but they're too seldom brought together. And we can see that by considering some of the most distinguished positions on these fields. This is John Locke, John Locke wearing a very ridiculous and foppish wig, which hopefully, with the cycles of fashion, will return to our wardrobe in the not-too-distant future. But John Locke really brought the question of personal identity into conversation in philosophy in 1690 when he published his An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, and he was interested in what makes a person the person that they are. Locke developed the series of thought experiments, this is a still from the magnificent film called The Atomic Brain, and the older woman on your left decides that, given the ailing condition of her body, she better relocate herself into another younger body, so she hires some young chambermaids, and after selecting the most beautiful of the 3, organizes a brain transplant so her brain can be put into the body of another. And in order to follow this plot, we need to adopt the view that she's going to sort of be the same person, that still getting her we can talk of the post transplant youth as the older woman in a new body her identity has remained the same. And that kind of thought experiment which is very central to Locke's argumentation suggests that one of the central aspects of our notion of personal identity—what makes me—is that having the body that I have might not be as crucial as having the mind I have, that preservation of the mind is crucial to who we are on.

But this raises a question: which traits of mind, which of our various psychological traits are essential? I mean, could some of them go, for example, each day you form fleeting beliefs that change, that shift, that you lose. Your memory of what you had for breakfast this morning might remain vivid today, but it's lost tomorrow. Is that part of who you? And so we have to ask if the psychological traits that we have are some more important to identity, and that central question which Locke poses will be central for us tonight. Just by way of a little history, Locke himself weighs in on this question, and while there is scholarly debate about exactly what he claims, one of views that has been attributed to him, which we’ll come back to, is that memory is key. So, one of the ways

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“The Moral Self” Jesse Prinz, City University of New York Philosophy Today Speaker Series Series in which you preserve identity over time, which he cares a great deal about, is through linkages or chains of memory. We’ll come back to that in just a moment, but they just give you a flavor of the issues that Locke is interested in raising when he talks about personal identity. Now, quite independent of that are issues of morality, questions about how we should act, what kind of a character we should have. Many major philosophers have weighed in on this debate, including Locke. On the screen you see Immanuel Kant, who is a monolithic figure in the history of moral philosophy, and Kant has views that are distinctive to Kant but are also in many ways representative, so in asking the questions, “how should we be moral?” “What is it to be moral? We’re really asking questions about what kinds of conduct should we engage in, or maybe what rules of conduct, what principles should I apply, what procedures should I follow in order to decide how I should act morally. And this raises a question about whose rules matter here. Whose rules are the ones I should follow, and for Kant, and in this respect he is quite typical of philosophers in the Western tradition, the rules that we should follow are universal.

So the project of moral philosophy is often to deliver a set of rules for conduct, or procedures for arriving at right action, that anyone in virtue of their human nature or rational capacities could recognize and consent to. So morality is about universals and personal identity is about the traits that are distinctive of individual persons. And if you if you review the philosophical views about these two domains, what you the find is a disconnect. So if you focus on the universal in your approach to morality, you are thereby neglecting, or intentionally bracketing off, the personal. There’s a morality that’s not about our distinctive identity as persons. They are about something that is generic that could be shared by any person, regardless of their identity, and conversely, identity is about particularity. Theories of identity tend to be highly individualistic. John Locke, here pictured without his wig, is advocating of you that really a very individual feature, memory, is constitutive of being the person that you are so you and you alone have these memories.

What makes you is this biographical feature that's unique to you. So the theory of identity is individualistic, and importantly if not more it's not anything about your value. So there is a kind of disconnect between theory of identity and theories of morality, but if you ask somebody in the real world who are you, what makes you, then I think you tend to see identity and morality coalesce. They come together in various ways. So want to illustrate that pictorially. The various political choices, our advocacy positions, become central to our lives, and those who engage in various kinds advocacy end up strongly identifying with certain causes. And so you might be pro-life, you might be pro-choice, maybe you're your issue is the environment, maybe its global poverty. Whatever it is, some issue that you care about might become part of who you take yourself to be. So when you project, when you present to somebody something about your identity your values are often put in the foreground. It’s very important to who you are.

Values are not just things we have. They’re part of our identity, so the goal of this project is really to take theories of identity and theories of morality and try and bring them together in some substantive way, to capture that bit of that folk wisdom. To try to make this case, what I want to do is first talk a little bit about what morality is. It’s a contentious topic, but I'll give you my own perspective, and after saying a little bit about what morality is, I want to suggest that, if morality is like that, if our best theory of reality goes a certain direction, then it may turn out to be a very, very important construct for thinking about identity.

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“The Moral Self” Jesse Prinz, City University of New York Philosophy Today Speaker Series Series

Now, as Chase mentioned in the introduction, my own views tend to be very parasitic on various views in the history of philosophy, and to put it little less gingerly, I am a philosophical plagiarist. I am someone who believes that, despite socialization in our field, which encourages kind of killing the father or inventing entirely new theories and ideas with each generation, we should always recognize that in any healthy field true and good views are likely to occur in our historical past. And if we survey the history and look for views that continue to find robust support, we could endorse those rather than feeling compelled to constantly invent the new. And the particular class of views which had been most drawn are from the empiricist tradition. This is a picture of , who Chase Wrenn mentioned in the introduction, and with respect morality, humans use it very clear. He thinks that morality is fundamentally about the heart, about the passions. So when you talk about moral values, what you're really talking about is something about our feelings. And in plagiarizing Hume, there is a kind of expectation that you don't simply do a cut-and-paste job. There are certain principles of academic conduct that would make that somewhat awkward, so we have to do some updating in the form of updating that I have been partial to. To try and find evidence from the social sciences, typically from neuroscience and especially from experimental psychology. To support the claims that Hume was defending at the beginning of his a Treatise in Human Nature, Hume endorses a kind of naturalistic methodology. He says we really need to ground our theories of morality and other things in the scientific study of who we are as human beings. So making good on that requires looking to our best social science and trying to test the various theories that Hume and others put forward. The claim that morality is about passions leads to various predictions, and one of them is that when we make a moral judgment, if I decided something is morally good or morally bad, I'm doing that by consulting my heart. I’m introspecting on my feelings, so when somebody says, “well, what you think about inheritance tax? Is that good or bad? Should we should we tax people on money they've inherited because, after all, they didn't work for it. Or is that an injustice since it belongs to their family and the government doesn't have the right to take that away?”

So, you’re presented with a question like that one thing you might do is sort of look inside and say, “how do I feel about that?” And your gut reaction, your immediate emotional response, becomes central to the delivery of your answer. So if that’s the theory, then one way to test the theory is to see whether people consult their when making moral judgments, and psychologists would do that by manipulating or altering people's emotions and seeing if it affects what judgment they report. So Kendall Eskin, who was a graduate student in psychology some years ago at my institution at the City University of New York, developed a study that I was a co-author on, together with the Natalie Kasnik, another psychologist in the department, where I administered different beverages, a neutral beverage like water and a very disgusting beverage Swedish bitters. So Swedish bitters are apparently the popular in Sweden, but if you're not from Sweden are actually repellent. They’re the kind of beverage that you wonder why anyone would ever bottle and drink. There is a very, you have this horrible puckering sensation when you drink it. So he gave people samples of these beverages, and then, in what was presented as an entirely independent and separate study, he asked them to answer some questions about morality. So, for example, if you find a wallet on the street, is it okay to take the money from the wallet before returning the credit cards to their owner, or if you're writing a job resume, is it okay to the lie or distort your educational background or some other aspect of your experience on the resume? He gave people a scale of 1 to 100 and said, “How bad is this behavior, lying on your resume, taking money from a wallet,” and after drinking the

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“The Moral Self” Jesse Prinz, City University of New York Philosophy Today Speaker Series Series water, the average response for these items was about 60%, somewhere in that neighborhood. So little bit bad, not genocide, not horrific but not exactly upstanding behavior. But after drinking the bitters, the number moved up to somewhere near 80%. So we’re talking that a pretty big jump in wrongness just because of the taste in your mouth.

So disgust can have a pretty dramatic impact on how wrong something seems and with my wonderful collaborator Angelika Seidel, we have expanded this research trying to look at other negative emotions to see their impact and morality, and to give you just one example of that research, we were interested in the idea that anger, like disgust, might be an important for making moral decisions. And Angelika developed, we developed a technique for inducing anger using sound, and I don’t know if any of you have heard of Japanese noise music, but this is something that many people listen to recreationally. But the rest of us mere mortals respond a little bit differently. Rather than finding it pleasurable, we find it aversive and, more specifically, irritating, so it's a great way to induce anger and irritation by simple sensory stimulation. And just so you're able to share the pleasure that our participant’s experience, we give them headphone, so you have to really imagine an intense exposure to this. I'm going to play for you a few seconds of a band called Masonna that we use in the studies.

Great, we recommend you go out and buy it. Apparently not everyone agrees, and after listening to that, people report being very irritated. And then we asked them questions about the resume, the wallet. Also, is it okay to cut in front of somebody aggressively with your car on the highway? And what you're seeing is a data graph, so the red bars are the response of wrongness for people who just your heard this this very irritating music. The control condition with no music is the yellow bars, and what you can see, for everything we gave them in this particular study, it looked more wrong after hearing these obnoxious sounds.

You can also do this with positive emotions, so we asked people, “is it a good thing, in fact, is it obligation to give money to people who are homeless” and various other scenarios involving helping behavior. In this case we play pleasant music, this is the “Morning Mood” from Edvard Grieg’s Peer Gynt Suite, and it’s this uplifting, fearful, saccharine music. How many of you would rather listen to this than the noise music? How many of you would rather listen to the noise music? So, there are individual differences, but we found that after listening to the uplifting music, people generally thought the upstanding behavior, the pro-social behavior, was more good than they would leave if they had been a listening to know music in the control condition. So, people are consulting how they feel in making these kinds of decisions. So this is just a couple of examples from really what's become a very, very large literature linking emotion to moral judgment, and I think this would this would make Hume very happy, make him smile.

Moral judgments in this view involve our emotions and our moral values. If a moral judgment is an emotional state, an emotional response to a situation that you're considering, a moral value need be defined as an emotional disposition. It’s the emotion you would have if you were confronted with that situation. A judgment is something we have here and now. A value something we have at all times. But suppose I say I'm against inheritance. I'm not thinking about inheritance tax all the time, unless I’m kind of obsessive about that cause, but if I say I have the value being against inheritance tax, then that means that, should you raise this issue, you should expect me to get emotionally upset

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“The Moral Self” Jesse Prinz, City University of New York Philosophy Today Speaker Series Series about it. So moral values can be thought of in terms of emotions as well, and this raises a question: which values are mine? So the reason why this is an important question is many of us have emotional dispositions that we disown, that we no longer recognized as reflective of who we are, and one way to think about this distinction is when asked about your responses, your emotional responses in the moral domain, there are certain things that were totally willing to outwardly endorse. We’ll explicitly say, “Yes, I feel this way, and I'm glad I feel this way. It's important to me. It’s something that I identify with.” So, for example, if you are pure member of a political party and you have a strong emotional response when you hear a member of the opposition party giving a speech, and somebody says, “why you getting worked up over that speech,” you might say, “because I really am against that set of values.” So political party association is something we tend to endorse.

If you have a set of moral values associated with a religious view that you endorse, that might be another example. Some of us have various personal causes that we take to be important to ourselves, so you might find yourself having strong views about, say, that maybe you're a vegetarian, and when you see things that involve exploitation of animals, this might upset you. And you might say, “Well, I really care about this cause. It’s a personal cause for me.” I mention things like this to contrast them with things we outwardly disown. So sometimes, for example, we have biases that have been inculcated through our socialization that we've come to distance ourselves from. So, you might be raised in a community that has a certain set of values, some of which you’re happy to endorse, but others of which you now consider antiquated. So, for example, there have been very, I think, quite radically changing attitudes towards things like gay marriage, and there's a generation gap here. So you might find that people, who are, say 25 and younger, now are more open to this idea than their parents. But if you are raised in the a cultural setting where this was considered very taboo, you might still have the negative knee-jerk response to it, but you disown that: “Yeah, I know I don’t, you know, that creeps me out in some way, but I recognize that that response is biased, so I'm going to reject it.”

Or another example of the various selfish behaviors. Sometimes we do things that are self-interested at the expense of others, but when we step back and look at them, we think, “I shouldn't have acted so selfishly.” There are fleeting fads. There might be a trend that arises very briefly in issues of value that then goes out of style, and those things also we might say, “yeah, I temporarily entertained the view, but I don't consider that very important or central to me.”

Now, I want to define the term “the moral self” as just, this is a technical term, stipulating as a set of values I endorse, the set of values that you endorse, as opposed to the values that you reject, excluding some of the emotional dispositions you might have But the ones that you endorse are your moral self. The ones that you reject are not part of the moral self, so that's just what I mean by the term. So what I want to now do is take this idea of the moral self, the set of values you endorse, and suggest that notion is very important to our identity. So by calling it the moral self, I'm kind of just inviting this idea, the thinking of values as part of the self is going to be illuminating. Now I want to say at the outset is that, when it comes to theories of identity, theories of who we are, there are many, many things that make up an identity. It’s a very social concept. It's something we use to communicate to other humans about who we are. It’s something we organize our lives around, and there may be many facets. And I don't think is a fact of the matter, which of these psychological facets are really the true self and which ones are not; rather, I think what we should do is look for all

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“The Moral Self” Jesse Prinz, City University of New York Philosophy Today Speaker Series Series the things that contribute to making us who we are. And with respect to the philosophical traditions that have asked this question, I would say this is where the controversy would lie: that morality has been ignored, and it is important to the self so that it is already a somewhat a controversial claim. But a bit more controversially, I think it's actually more important than the things that have been emphasized in mainstream discussions of this issue.

Now, philosophers raise two kinds of questions about identity. One of them is called a synchronic question of identity. So right now there are many, many things that are going on inside your mind; there are many psychological dispositions. You have many psychological traits. You have some of those things might really seem like they're essential to know you, and some of them might not. So, if you have an allergy or an aversion to peanut butter, in somebody says, “Is that really essential to whom you are?” Well, maybe not. There might be other things, like, I don’t know, you might not be wild about a certain kind of music, but maybe through exposure you could come to develop a taste for that kind of music. Would that be a radical change in your identity, in whom you are? Maybe not. So of the various psychological features of a person at a given time, some of them are part of their identity to greater extent than others. So that’s the question of synchronic identity. It’s a question of which psychological traits are more important to who we are.

There’s also question of diachronic identity. If a person changes all the time—we all do—some of our traits will come and go. Which of these transformations really matters to identity? So if you develop a dislike for peanut butter after liking it for many years, are you now fundamentally a different person. I think most of us would agree that no, that shift in case is not such a dramatic change that we call it a change in personal identity. But other things might be a change in personal identity. So a diachronic account of identity is going to be the account of which changes are really a threat to who we are as individuals.

I want to begin with the synchronic issue, and my strategy here is going be very straightforward. What I want to do is catalog the number of mentions of synchronic identity that have been emphasized by various philosophers that, I think, have in a very commonsensical way might be associated with identity. And I want to suggest that if we list, we could just brainstorm together for this, the kinds of things that we might think are important to our synchronic identity, that are important to who we are right here and now, they all turn out to have a link to morality.

So I want to begin with a dimension of identity that’s called embodiment. The idea is that even if in some fundamental way the mind is more important than the body when it comes to identity, the feeling of our body, the sense of having the physical body that we do, the feelings that occur inside of our body, we feel as belonging to us in some basic sense. So if somebody does something to physically hurt you, you're going to feel that. It's happening to you. This event is happening to me. So we feel a kind of ownership of our bodies that relates it to self. And what I want to suggest here is that morality has a link to the body, and because of that, when we experience our moral responses, we’re also experiencing this kind of bodily state.

So this is William James, and William James had a particular theory of the emotions that link emotions to the body. He said that when the emotion is induced, suppose you see a scary animal like this ferocious, dangerous, horrible life-threatening bear, what's going to happen is you’re going to

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“The Moral Self” Jesse Prinz, City University of New York Philosophy Today Speaker Series Series have a perception of it. There is a typo on the slide. For the perception of the bear-snake— slimy, slithering bear—and then you have a real response, a bodily response, to this creature, to this threat, now when your body responds to a threat you perceive a change in the body. And here the emotion is the experience of the body responding to the stimulus. So the feeling of your body freezing is the fear that you experience towards the bear-snake, and so I think James is basically right about this. I won’t review the evidence. I’ll make James smile. But the thought here is there is a program right now in psychology and cognitive neuroscience that tries to make good on the claim that the emotions we experience are connected to bodily feelings. Now, if morality is connected to emotions and emotions are connected to bodily feelings, then morality is connected to experience of the body. So, if we experience the body as part of ourselves, that means we experience morals as part of ourselves. And there’s various evidence in support of this.

So, for example, to take up a slide from the paper by Harenski, she and her collaborators found that when people see images that have moral significance. There is a strong response in the brain centers associated with the body. So seeing a burning crosses, opposed to a burning car, generates responses that are felt in this very embodied way. There's also evidence that when you ask people moral questions about themselves, you again see brain activation that’s associated with bodily response. So consider a series of questions where some the questions have to do the self, other questions have to do with these facts about the world. So, a question about the self is “do forget important things,” “do you have a quick temper,” “do your good friend you think you can be trusted?” Facts about the world would be things like, “you need water in order to live,” and what's found in this particular study by Johnson and collaborators is that the questions about the self that have his moral character again engage brain areas that are associated with bodily response, like posterior cingulate and other medial structures in the front of the brain.

Another thing that people think is important to synchronic identity is action. Those things that are really part of me are going to especially include things that I use in deciding how to act, questions about how I should behave. So what are the things that factor into my practical deliberation about what I should do? And here again I think morality is going to be a major factor in choosing how to act, and you can show this again by talking about the moral emotions. So if morality is grounded in the emotions, there’s a lot of evidence suggesting that emotions have a huge impact on behavior. Arguably we would not behave. We would do nothing if we didn't experience emotion.

There’s this disorder that’s caused by brain surgery in a structure called interior singular, the major emotional hub, and if you do damage to this part of brain, people sometimes have a syndrome called akinetic mutism where they don't act. They just sit completely indifferently to the world, and they do nothing. They’re completely conscious; they can remember later on when they recover things that were said to them, but they've no motivation to act. Why? Well, you’ve temporarily disrupted their emotions. If you induce emotions, you can show dramatic impacts on behavior. Happiness makes us act pro-socially. We do good things for others when we’re happy. Guilt makes us give to charity. Disgust leads to avoidance behavior. Anger leads to punishment behavior. So the emotions that are centrally involved in moral response are also very linked to action. You could also show that action can be affected by how people conceive of themselves. In moral terms, “what kind of person are you?” If you come up with an adjective to describe yourself, the mere introduction of that adjective has a dramatic impact on behavior.

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“The Moral Self” Jesse Prinz, City University of New York Philosophy Today Speaker Series Series

So, in a classic study by Miller Brickman and Bolin, kids in an inner-city school were trained in various ways to be tidier. These kids were lie typical kids, quite messy in the classroom. And they tried various methods. The character: reward them for being tidy. The stick: punish them for their slovenly behavior. None of these things worked, but then they tried a method of social labeling, where they simply came the classroom and they said, “You children are very tidy. You're so tidy. What tidy children you are.” A bald-faced lie. It wasn't true, complete misinformation, but telling kids that they’re tidy makes them tidier. So the conceptual categories under which we think about ourselves can have a dramatic impact on our behavior. And, don’t worry about reading this, but you can see that it's a long-standing impact. Even weeks after being told that they’re tidy, these kids continue to be tidier, and kids in comparison conditions. And I think when we label ourselves, suppose you tell the world that your environmentalist, so on your Facebook page you, like, have a post like, “I really care about the environment,” and the next day or the next week somebody says, you're in the store, “a paper or plastic.” You have that here. So that you might be asked if you want a paper bag or a plastic bag for your groceries, and now you're like “oh, I’m on record as being environmentalist. I better take the paper bag because plastic is going to end up at a landfill for seven generations.” So that’s the case where the labels under which we put ourselves in the moral category have a huge impact on determining how we act.

Another very dramatic example of this, people who choose to sacrifice their own lives for something very often do this, in fact, I would say almost always, do this for causes that have a moral character. So would you kill yourself, suppose you love music? I really love music. My favorite thing in life is country music. And somebody says, “oh, really? Do you really love country music? Would you die for it?” That's a stupid question, but if somebody says, “I really care about social justice” or, you know, “I really am against the you know told how a Terry and is a in some of these is love somebody tried to impose a totalitarian regime in the United States,” would you die, would you risk your life to try and prevent that from happening? Now, people might be more willing to say yes, and phenomena like suicide-terrorism are a reflection of people who are really willing to lay down their lives for a cause, not for a musical cause, but for a moral cause.

You can look at wartime behavior. There's some wonderful on work suggesting that when people engage in decisions that involve life-and-death, their personality, their selves their moral values, play a central role in this. So there's work, for example, by Kristin Monroe, who’s a political psychologist on Holocaust perpetrators, bystanders, and rescuers. During the Holocaust some people did nothing, some people engaged in genocide, and others helped victims of genocide, and they all had very different conceptions of the self. So rescuers tend to focus on this notion that everyone is a human being and our shared common human nature. Bystanders tend to focus on the construct a self, construal of powerlessness. They said there was really nothing I could do, and people who are perpetrators tended to view themselves as victims. So, if you see yourself as having been unjustly trespassed against by the people that you are trying to aggress against, that your government is trying to aggress against, you’re more likely to be a participant in that aggression. So the way you construe yourself as a human being, as a person, has a big impact on your moral behavior.

Another factor of synchronic identity is attitude strengths. Some things we feel more strongly about than others. So if I say, you know, what's your view about, I don’t know, potatoes, is it well I, you

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“The Moral Self” Jesse Prinz, City University of New York Philosophy Today Speaker Series Series know, “I care about potatoes. I like potatoes alright.” How strongly do you care about potatoes, and not that strongly? If you’re a potato farmer, this might matter a lot to you, but for the rest of us, you can like potatoes great deal, but they're not that important to you.

So psychologists have gotten into the idea of attitude strength, in a lot of different measures of attitude strength, and the thought is identity, personal identity, might relate to the attitudes we hold most strongly. So it turns out that in the psychological literature on attitude strength, the construct of attitude strength has been measured in a number of different ways.

One is in terms of intensity, how strongly do you feel something. Another is in terms of importance, how important is it to you? And a third is in terms of centrality. Now these turn out to be dissociable. In fact, there's very little correlation between them, so suppose you say, “yeah, I really love music,” and Tony says, “well, okay, how intensely do you experience music when you listen to it,” and you're like, “really, when I hear disco, baby, I got to dance.” It’s just like that. If somebody says, “How important is this to you in your life, that you know what he really gotta dance,” but it's not all that important to me, like it's the high priority in my life. How central is it to you? Would you say disco is at the core of your identity, and unless you’re in the business, you’re like, “no, it's just a recreational activity that I occasionally partake in.”

Linda Skitka, who’s a terrific psychologist in this area, has shown that these come apart with one exception. Moral values correlate in all these dimensions. They’re intensely felt. They’re important to us, and we consider them central to who we are. So moral values on attitude strength are the only one of our values and preferences that seem to be strong in all three ways. Another aspect of synchronic identity is self-expression. So here’s something I call the “Facebook fact.” So in social media we’re asked to say things about ourselves. They could ask you anything. They could ask you for biographical information, like where were you born, what was the first ocean you saw, but instead what did they ask you? They ask you who you have sex with. They ask you what God you worship. And they ask you something about your political orientation. And all of these are very revelatory about your moral self, and so why should it be that political orientation is among the few things that you present to others in social media? Clearly, this is important to what we want to express about ourselves, and in the interest of time I’m going to just skip this slide, but I want to suggest that there are other interests. Facebook also asks you things like what music you like and what films you like, and I want to suggest that these other things that may look very far removed from morality are actually all ways of signaling values to others. So if you look at these two guys and you have to say which one is more liberal than the other and which is more conservative, how many would guess that that this guy on your left is the liberal? And how many would guess that this is the more liberal guy, the hippie on the right? Of course, we can make these kind of guesses based on stereotypes, and the stereotypes can be wrong, but the fact that we have the stereotype is important because we can exploit what we can communicate to others, what we care about morally, in ways that look like a far removed from morality, like what music we listen to or how we dress. So I did a study where I'd asked people a bunch of questions, like “guess whether somebody’s liberal or conservative based on the following features” that have nothing overtly to do with politics. Somebody listens the country music or watches Fox news or reads military history or is an army veteran or enjoys hunting or driving American cars or wears cowboy boots with khaki pants or wants a big family or watches college football or drives a pickup truck or does not drink alcohol or

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“The Moral Self” Jesse Prinz, City University of New York Philosophy Today Speaker Series Series reads very little or loves eating meat or reads the Bible or enjoys NASCAR races. What the heck do NASCAR races have to do with morality? The answer is if you’re a NASCAR fan, you’ve just communicated to everyone who knows that that it’s more likely that you’re conservative.

Then there is a liberal personality. They listen to other music, like hip-hop. They listen to NPR radio. They read poetry. They enjoy foreign travel. They drink Starbucks. They buy organic produce. They can be openly gay. They listen to jazz. They ride skateboards. They wear tie-dye T-shirts. They enjoy museums. They dye their hair unnatural colors. They're interested in Eastern religion. They love sushi. They ride bicycles, and they read fashion magazines. They look different. We signal to each other constantly in many ways what our values are. I was just on an airplane this morning, and I took pictures from the airplane magazine. This is totally fresh. This is new for you. I want you to guess based on appearance alone whether somebody is a liberal or conservative. How many say this person is a liberal more likely let's put it is a more likely to be liberal and conservative more likely be liberal and conservative? How many say more likely to be conservative and liberal? Okay, so the majority goes for conservative in this case. More likely liberal or conservative? More likely conservative and liberal? More conservative and liberal? More likely to be liberal and conservative? More likely to be conservative or liberal? Okay, they’re liberal. More likely to be conservative, more likely to be liberal? Okay, slight split vote, but I think the guy looks conservative. More likely to be liberal, more likely to conservative? Clearly, liberals they like foreign travel. More likely to conservative, more like the liberal. Golf, the guy’s clearly Republican. More likely to be conservative? More likely be liberal? Right, so this little bowl cut, why should we, we should not, you people, should not answer my questions. Jesse, you are crazy. There is no way we should be able to guess somebody's politics from these pictures of them. We don’t know anything about them. We signal it all the time. Making your hair look like that tells people you’re liberal. Why should that be? They’re arbitrary associations that we develop, the cultural code where we project our moral identity and, of course, they all look American, and because of that, we can guess as opposed to people who don't look American, that they’re pro-democracy. We can guess that they favor education for women. We can guess that they’re against public executions. There are lots of things we guess about looking American. It says something about shared values.

Here, another aspect of synchronic identity is like that, distance from people who are different from us. I’m going to be very fast with this. We don't like to have friends in other parties. Linda Skitka did another cool study where she put a backpack on the chair in her lab, and she either put a pro-choice button on it or pro-life button, and then she brought another participant in the lab. And she said, “You’re going to be in an experiment with that other student. Would you just pull over chair next to their chair?” And she just measured where people placed the chair, and if it was a pro-choice button and the person to the subject next to them was pro-choice, they would put the chair pretty close. If it was a pro-life button they put the chair further away. So we’ve been looking at this. I'll just mention this in passing, but I have a study that’s still unpublished but with a collaborator named Helming. We did a study basically asking, “who would you want to go to work with, who would you want to have sex with, who would you want have as a friend?” And we showed that you can choose your friends, your work partners, your romantic partners. As a function of politics, people don't want to be in bed with somebody whose values differ too far from our own, and I won't go through the data on that But the picture that emerges here is that we’re very tribal about our morality.

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“The Moral Self” Jesse Prinz, City University of New York Philosophy Today Speaker Series Series

Morality develops a certain group to which we belong, and that group becomes very important for identity.

We’re almost out of time, and we’ve been talking almost entirely about synchronic identity. And I'm just going to skip ahead for a moment to give you one more issue that has to do with diachronic identity. So, suppose your values change. Will you still be the same person, or will you become a new person? Now this is a picture of an individual who was brainwashed, Patty Hearst, who was a daughter of a very, very, very wealthy publishing magnate who got involved in radical politics with a group that turned her into a kind of bank robbing, radical terrorist. And people often described this as being a new person. I watched a film from Morocco the other day called Horses of God, which is about a drug dealer living in the suburbs of a Moroccan city who gets converted in prison to radical Islam and becomes a suicide terrorist, and his whole personality changes dramatically. It’s even embodied when he's the street drug dealer. He’s kind of moving around almost like a predatory animal, and when he is the Islamic radical, he becomes very poised, very gentle. His entire physical demeanor, his being in the world, has changed. I think our intuitions are that if you undergo such a moral transformation you become a new person. So what I want to leave you with is some experiments that we’ve been doing to examine this. With Shaun Nichols, we conducted a study where you ask, “what happens if you get hit on the head and lose your moral values? Are you the same person or not?” And so the vignette said you accidentally fall while walking in the mountains. The accident causes a head injury. It has a profound effect of your values. The memory and general intelligence that you had before remain the same, but the injury causes you to stop behaving morally. For example, before the accident you used to do helpful things for people in your community, and after the accident you stop caring about any of that, and you only have to fulfill your own. Are you the same person? And we found that on a scale of 1 to 7, people tended to say, “No, you're not the same person.” The average score was 2.2. Then we gave people a memory version: you lose all your memories. Are you the same person? Here, the average score was 4.4 on our scale, which is that you’re in some sense not the same person, but it’s over the midline of the scale, far with midline of the scale. People consider you pretty much the same person if you lose your memory but a different person if you lose your morals. So, as compared to the preservation of memories, the preservation of morals matters more.

We looked at loss of agency capacity we looked at loss of your ability to construct narratives about your life they didn't matter as much for personal identity. We looked at moral change. We looked at it in the first person, in the third person. Your values change. Are you the same person? No. Someone else's change. Are they the same person? No. We looked at positive change and negative change. Your values become much better are you the same person? No. Your values become worse. Are you the same person? No. Moral change changes who we take ourselves to be. The overall implication of this research is that, when we think about who we are, when we ask fundamental questions about personal identity, it turns out that who we are is very central to what we care about morally speaking, and I think that this issue matters a great deal. It matters because, when we try to form alliances with other people, when we form social bonds, we very often take people who are morally like us, and that is an indication that human group formation is tracking moral identity. And if we don't think about morality as constitutive of identity in this way, we’ll lose purchase on that phenomenon. Why do we want to affiliate with some people and not others, and part of the answer, at least, is if you affiliate with people who are morally different from you, it's not only unpleasant to

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“The Moral Self” Jesse Prinz, City University of New York Philosophy Today Speaker Series Series listen to somebody who’s espousing values you disagree with; it’s threat your identity. And correlatively, that’s sort of the negative side, why do we form such polarizing groups? Why do Republicans hate Democrats and Democrats hate Republicans? It's not as they disagree that the disagreement is at the core of who they are as people, who they are they as individuals. But another thing is that if we want to get along with each other, we need to recognize that we have these different values, and these values are expressions of different ways of being in the world, different moral identities. We should respect them. If we didn't have variation in values, and everybody believed the same thing, identities would become very homogenous. If we stopped thinking of values as based on universal truths, that we need to settle and arrive at consensus for, and instead start thinking that you that values about different ways of expressing ourselves, different forms of identity in the world, different tribes that can coexist as a form of celebration of human plurality, then the conflicts that once drove us completely nuts can start to be celebrated as aspects of individual expression. Off you go back to John Locke, the problem with John Locke is he is an individualist. He defines identity in terms of memory. Each of us has our own memory. Individuality is not the key to identity. Group membership is. Who I am is partially a function of what moral tribe I belong to. The problem with moral philosophy, the problem with Kant, is that moral philosophers tend to search for moral universals, but morality is not universal. The fundamental function of really in human life forget that philosophy is that human life is to form again a tribe, a human group, a particular constellation of human beings who found ways of getting along with each other. So philosophers have erred in making it really big, and they've erred in making identity too small. Both identity and morality converge at the level of group. Who I am functions as a part of the groups I belong to, and if you recognize that, then the confrontations with other groups should not be seen as aversive, as threatening. We should see it as a fundamental celebration of who we are.

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