The Geography of Morals: Varieties of Moral Possibility

by Owen J. Flanagan

The Geography of Morals is a work of extraordinary ambition: an indictment of the parochialism of Western philosophy, a comprehensive dialogue between anthropology, empirical moral psychology, behavioral economics, and cross-cultural philosophy, and a deep exploration of the opportunities for
self, social, and political improvement provided by world philosophy.

We live in multicultural, cosmopolitan worlds. These worlds are distinctive moral ecologies in which people enact and embody different lived philosophies and conceive of mind, morals, and the meaning of life differently from the typical WEIRD -- Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic --
person. This is not a predicament; it is an opportunity. Many think that cross cultural understanding is useful for developing a modus vivendi where people from different worlds are not at each other's throats and tolerate each other. Flanagan presses the much more exciting possibility that
cross-cultural philosophy provides opportunities for exploring the varieties of moral possibility, learning from other traditions, and for self, social, and political improvement. There are ways of worldmaking in other living traditions -- Confucian, Daoist, Buddhist, Hindu, Jain, Muslim,
Amerindian, and African -- that citizens in Western countries can benefit from. Cross-cultural learning is protection against what Alasdair MacIntyre refers to as being imprisoned by one's upbringing.

Flanagan takes up perennial topics of whether there is anything to the idea of a common human nature, psychobiological sources of human morality, the nature of the self, the role of moral excellence in a good human life, and whether and how empirical inquiry into morality can contribute to normative
ethics. The Geography of Morals exemplifies how one can respectfully conceive of multiculturalism and global interaction as providing not only opportunities for business and commerce, but also opportunities for socio-moral and political improvement on all sides. This is a book that aims to change
how normative ethics and moral psychology are done.

Genres: Philosophy, Anthropology, Nonfiction

376 pages, Hardcover

First published October 24, 2016

About the author

Owen Flanagan, Ph.D. (born 1949) is the James B. Duke Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Neurobiology at Duke University. Flanagan has done work in philosophy of mind, philosophy of psychology, philosophy of social science, ethics, contemporary ethical theory, moral psychology, as well as Buddhist and Hindu conceptions of the self.

Flanagan earned his Ph.D from Boston University and his Bachelor of arts degree from Fordham University.

Flanagan has written extensively on consciousness. He has been realistic about the difficulty of consciousness as a scientific and philosophical problem, but optimistic about the chance of solving the problem. One of the problems in a study of consciousness is the hidden way in which conscious states are dependent on brain states. Flanagan has proposed that there is a "natural method" to go about understanding consciousness that involves creating a science of mind. Three key elements of this developing science are: 1) paying attention to subjective reports on conscious experiences, 2) incorporating the results from psychology and cognitive science, and 3) including the results from neuroscience that will reveal how neuronal systems produce consciousness.

Flanagan is currently on the Editorial Board of Greater Good Magazine, published by the Greater Good Science Center of the University of California, Berkeley. Flanagan's contributions include the interpretation of scientific research into the roots of compassion, altruism, and peaceful human relationships.

-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Owen_Fla...

Reviews

[Barry Magid · Rating 5 out of 5]

“What does it take to play music with feeling?” asked Wittgenstein. “A culture,“ he replied. Owen Flanagan has masterfully surveyed the varieties of cultural geographies which have given rise to the vast range of feelings and values we call morality. In contrast to Kantian or Rawlsian attempts to determine universal, ahistorical, culturally independent moral principles by pure reason, Flanagan, following critics such as Bernard Williams, looks at the way a cross cultural perspective can interrogate what we are inclined, from our own parochial perspective, to imagine to be timeless truths or reflections of a shared human nature. But if morality cannot be derived from absolute ethical rules, neither can it be built up from Humean sympathy, empathy or fellow-feeling. One wants to imagine that surely everyone would agree that it’s better to care for babies than torture them, until one remembers the prevalence of infanticide. Such conclusions incline him to a version of virtue ethics, by which different cultures define and organize themselves around a core set of values, as Aristotle did with the virtues of courage, justice, moderation and discernment and which Mencius, around the same time, described as benevolence, propriety, righteous and wisdom. The question then naturally arises, to what extent do these virtues overlap, and is there a “first nature;” an evolutionary given set of moral dispositions, that underlie the wide variety of cultural variations that we can hone into a disciplined and virtuous “second nature.“ Of course, when we undergo our moral re-education, we are not transforming our first nature –we are endeavoring to replace one second nature -one conditioned, say, by a consumer culture - with another preferred second nature, for instance, one newly conditioned by a monastic discipline. Flanagan, in his earlier work, described us as all living in a Platonic universe; every culture operating with some version of the true, the good and the beautiful. Yet each may define these dimensions differently, sometimes radically differently. Moralities seem to share a Wittgensteinian family resemblance, not necessarily having any single quality in common. So even if we want to pursue a quest for the “moral modules” underpinning all subsequent expressions of their development, their hypothetical existence in the deep background does nothing to help us resolve the conflict associated with incommensurate moralities. Flanagan, citing Jonathan Lear, examines the conflict between tribal Crow Indians, for whom “scoring coups” by raiding and seizing their enemies’ horses, was part of an honor based warrior culture that collided with an encroaching white culture that saw what they did as nothing more than “stealing horses.” Flanagan notes there is no value neutral place to stand to “objectively” describe what was going on. Ultimately, the description belongs to the victor. This is a point that goes back at least to Machiavelli, who noted that one could cultivate the classical Greek and Roman warrior virtues if one wanted worldly success or the Christian virtues of humility and compassion if you were focused on your soul in the next world, but that you could not do both. It does not seem plausible that the discovery of a first nature, an evolutionarily selected morality ,will help us sort out the rival claims of the Iliad and the Bible. What counts as valuable in each will be a factor of whose reading, where and when.
So far, much of the pursuit of our first nature has focused on the problem of aggression (going back for instance to Konrad Lorenz ‘s On Aggression) and whether it is a biological given we must come to terms with. Flanagan confronts our Western assumptions about anger and aggression with the alternative view from Buddhism and Stoicism, each of which claim that anger can be extirpated. Our WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) perspective would have us believe that eliminating anger is either 1) not possible (biology) 2) not desirable( necessary for justice) nor 3) healthy ( repression). Flanagan sympathizes with the Dalai Lama’s view that it is indeed possible to eliminate anger, but doing so, like learning to play music with feeling, may require a cultural background, belief system, and disciplined meditative form of life simply unavailable to Westerners –even those who, calling themselves Buddhists, pursue self-improvement a few hours a week on a cushion. It would have made an interesting contrast if Flanagan had similarly explored the cultivation of celibacy, a virtue also practiced by the Dalai Lama, but notably not by Chogyam Trungpa Rimpoche. Has the Dalai Lama eliminated sexual desire along with anger? Is the elimination of those passions a necessary part of the cultivation of No-Self? If not, why not?
When we look at the variety of definitions and organizations of the virtues, we see that some cultures, perhaps especially Asian ones, assume the unity of the virtues; that to successfully cultivate one, one must cultivate them all and that they naturally form a harmonious whole. But following Isaiah Berlin, we might counter that some virtues are intrinsically at odds with other ones --- not just at the level of cultural incommensurability but at the level of the individual psyche. Freud’s version of the moral sprouts --- the ego, id and superego – portrays a self that at the deepest level is in conflict with itself. Contemporary psychoanalytic self state theory (Bromberg) sees mental health in the capacity to hold and experience competing needs (say for intimacy and autonomy) simultaneously in conflict without resort to denial or dissociation. Perhaps a model of the mind that foregrounds conflict, complexity and competing goods is one better suited to a diverse non-homogenous culture.
Flanagan’s in depth exploration of alternative moral pathways, opened up by dialogue with a different cultures, especially Buddhism, is a welcome corrective to the provincialism of Western philosophy’s presumptions of universalism. It is ironic that Buddhism presents itself as an equally universal ahistorical account of the nature of the mind (empty, impermanent and interdependent) that properly understood inevitably gives rise to its own compassion based morality.

[Joseph Morris · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is more of an exploratory book then a thesis-based book. Flanagan doesn’t tell you how things should be, he just shows you lots of worldviews you should consider. To the extent that there is a thesis for this book it is: “people from ‘Western Educated Industrialized Rich Democracies’ (WEIRD folks, in Flanagan’s terms) have a rather specific moral sense that is one of a wide range of moral possibilities, but because they are the economically dominant society in the present world, tend to think that that is the only moral framework that is naturally available to humans, and it probably would be beneficial to Western societies to review other world moral systems to see how they might solve some particular Western problems.”

In order to support that thesis, Flanagan does a fair amount of bushwhacking into different moral systems just in order to prove the point that there are different frameworks. In particular, he looks to Stoic (ancient and modern), Confucian (Mencius in particular, but also others), and Buddhist strains of thought. He also looks within different moral systems within Western democracies, using in particular Jonathan Haidt’s “moral foundations theory” to show ways of disassembling moral sensibilities into constituent parts, and how some but not all of those constituent parts show up in different political worldviews, and in particular the priority of in-group loyalty, respect for authority, and purity/sanctity that are important to American conservatives but not American liberals.

A lot of the book (part III) is an analysis of anger, and whether it is virtuous or necessary. The primary thesis-antithesis setup that he uses is between WEIRD anger on the one hand (anger is often good, or at the very least psychologically necessary), and Buddhist and Stoic (in particular Seneca) approaches to anger on the other hand, which approach anger with a much more critical stance, with Buddhists typically wanting its extirpation in the individual, and Stoics ranging between extirpation and greater rational control over anger. As is his custom, or worldview, Flanagan doesn’t argue for the extirpation of anger, but he seems to think that there should be more examination of the extirpation of anger, or at the very least whether it warrants the role it has in emotional and social life of WEIRD societies as naturalized and necessary.

Part four deals with different worldviews on what constitutes the self, contrasting the WEIRD perception of atomic selves with more interdependent views of selves that are more common in East Asians, South Asians, Amerindians and Africans. Although the individualist versus collectivist feuds are common to the point of seeming like a trope, Flanagan is able to demonstrated no more academic way, but also with diagrams of how those worldviews interact with moral systems. So left me with a more clear and detailed picture of what it previously been a nebulous sense of collectivist versus individualist social and moral systems.

Although at times I long for a little bit more overall theoretical structure just to help me put the contents of the book together, I thoroughly enjoyed the voyages that Flanagan took me onto different ways of thinking about how humans set up moral systems. The title is obviously a borrowed from Nietzsche, and I came to this book after reading other philosophers that share Nietzsche’s belief that there is no absolute natural argument for a particular moral system, in particular Richard Rorty, but also to a lesser extent the sort of genealogical expression of ideas by Quentin Skinner (Flanagan doesn’t cite, but you should check out Skinner’s lecture on the genealogy of liberty on YouTube if you have a spare hour). Robert Sapolsky’s Behave was also a good exploration of the biological influences, but also the limits of those influences, on human behavior and social systems. What Flanagan is trying to do is show that the naturalization of moral systems can only go so far, and that there are other ways other than WEIRD moral systems that we should look to when he perceived failings in our own society. Or another way of looking at it, moral systems can only be natural so far as they are prevalent in all oral societies, and we can see that a lot of the moral systems of Western industrialized democracies are specific to the societies, and are therefore not “natural” in the sense that they are genetically determined or inevitable.
One nice structural touch that Flanagan does is every part of the book (there are four) concludes with a bibliographical essay. Those essays are not just a statement of all the works (essays, books) that influenced that part of his book, but are written together into a narrative style where Flanagan describes how they were important to him, and came to cause him to put the book together in the way that he did. Flanagan’s style of writing is very humble and that is very much aware of how much he does not know, and that, for he does know, he is indebted to others. In doing so, he may indirectly demonstrate a lesson that one could take from his book, which is that anything of value is a product of many people interacting, rather than the product of the specialness of one particular person. The end result for the reader is a stronger book that tells you about its influences more completely than a standard bibliography would.

I’ll leave you with part of a quote from JS Mill that Flanagan uses near the conclusion of the book: “It is hardly possible to overrate the value, in the present low state of human improvement, please see human beings and contact persons to similar to themselves, and with modes of thought and action unlike those with which they are familiar… It is indispensable to be perpetually comparing their own notions and customs with the experience and example of persons in different circumstances from themselves; there is no nation which does not need to borrow from others, not merely particular parts or practices, but essential points of character in which its own type is inferior.”

[Steve · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not sure I understood the overall theme of this book, it seemed to wander around a bit. But most of the wanderings were educational and thought-provoking. And I guess with "geography" as part of the title one is allowed to meander a bit. I liked his melding together of eastern & western philosophy, and also his statements about how the study of morality must be informed by our understanding of our evolutionary background as animals.

A few parts of the book, especially in the sections about eastern philosophy got a bit past me and I didn't fully grasp them, but in general I felt like I understood what he was getting at.

[Seth · Rating 4 out of 5]

Responding to Elizabeth Anscombe's famous challenge that philosophers should give up on moral philosophy until we have a "philosophy of psychology," philosopher Owen Flanagan summarizes a) what we know or suspect about human ethical judgment based on evolutionary psychology, the moral psychology of the child, moral foundations theory, and "trolleyology," and b) what we know about variations in ethical reasoning and its relationship to world-making in non-North Atlantic and non-modern cultures, taking a special look at the role of anger in Tibetan Buddhist culture and stoic philosophy, and comparing and contrasting Confucian philosopher Mencius's "sprout" theory with modern moral foundations theory. It is a joy to read Flanagan's clear, thoughtful, and erudite commentary on a wide-range of moral issues. Flanagan writes in long sentences that contain all the "ifs, ands, and buts" necessary to properly qualify his conclusions--sentences that are occasionally leavened by the application of a sharp wit and a willingness to employ the Anglo-Saxon vernacular when nothing else will quite do. He concludes that we North Atlantic moderns, living in multicultural, liberal democracies have a sufficient "unforced consensus" (to use Charles Taylor's felicitous phrase) as to the virtues and the proper content of character to allow us to teach consensus ethics and virtue in our public schools, and to assert that a life aspiring to moral excellence is the best sort of human life one can live. At the same time, while we inculcate our young with the consensus view on virtues like fairness, justice, and compassion, we should also expose them to other cultures and ways of world-making which contain variations on the content of the virtues, which virtues trump other virtues, and so on, so that they are exposed to a range of ethical possibilities. Some of our current ethical ideas may not be the best possible ethical ideas imaginable for ourselves, and it may be worth our while to rethink some of our beliefs about anger and justice, for example, with an eye to how other cultures manage things. There is always a question, however, about how well ideas borrowed from another culture can be integrated into our own conceptual ecosystem. To what degree are "borrowed ideas" assimilated into the existing culture so that they are no longer quite what they were in the culture they were borrowed from, and to what degree can the borrowing culture accommodate itself to better align with the borrowed ideas?

With this volume, Flanagan effectively changes the rules of the game for how ethics ought to proceed going forward. While referencing the great ethicists in the Western philosophical tradition, it must also take into account the findings of empirically grounded research as well as the wisdom of non-Western traditions, including the Taoist, Confucian, Buddhist, Islamic, Amerindian, and African traditions. Only then can we take into account the full range of ethical possibility.

[Billie Pritchett · Rating 3 out of 5]

I like Owen Flanagan a lot, the work he is done on moral personalities across culture and also a book on what we can learn from Buddhism as a philosophy. I've only read his essays about moral personalities and not his book, Varieties of Moral Personality , but that's where I suppose I should go if I wanted to understand his fuller treatment. Anyway, all that said, I wasn't a huge fan of this book, The Geography of Morals. Its subtitle promises an understand of "moral possibility," but there ends up being very little cross-cultural comparisons about what might be possible, that, say, contemporary Americans could learn from other countries. There's one subject Flanagan does stump on, though, and that's anger. He writes a lot about how Buddhist and Stoic philosophies view anger as bad, something that ought to be minimized, whereas people in the West tend to value some forms of anger.

Flanagan analyzes the many different rationalizations and justifications contemporary Westerners give for anger and tries to show how these arguments fail. Here is an example of that style of argumentation. One argument for anger is that it's a reliable indicator of our feelings and therefore ought to be trusted. Just as we know something is wrong in an area of body when we feel pain there, so too is the case with anger. It is us recognizing that something out there in the world that's affected our mind/brain is wrong. Flanagan pushes back on this view. The analogy to pain in the body may very well be wrong, and anger more like disgust. We can, for instance, view certain countries' food as disgusting at first sight and then learn to like the food--that is to say, the feeling of disgust can be tempered or in some cases eliminated altogether. It might be the same with anger.

I could give other arguments that Flanagan challenges regarding anger, but you can get those from the book if you're interested, and I for one don't want to focus on them too much because it still seems odd to me that Flanagan spends time only looking at this issue. Obviously it's an issue he's deeply concerned with, and thinks we can learn a lot if we take the idea seriously. I agree, but there are still so many other issues worth considering, and I would have liked to have seen more focus on other matters of cross-cultural comparison that we could learn from.

[Heather Pagano · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting premise, though it felt like Flanagan was still exploring exploring the topic and not all his ideas seemed fully thought through. For me the section on anger in different cultures changed my perspective and was worth the price of admission.