Why we care about morality - apparently

The good thing about holidays is getting time to read books. I' ll look at all the museos, oratorios, cappellas and duomos in Italy provided I can go back to my book when day is done. On this trip one book I read was Moral Tribes, by Joshua Greene, a young professor of psychology at Harvard.

One of the hottest areas of psychology these days is moral psychology - the science of moral cognition - which seeks to explain why we have moral sentiments and what use they are to us. It' s pretty coldly scientific and evolutionary, which may be disconcerting to readers of a religious disposition.

According to Greene and his confreres - another leading thinker in the area is Jonathan Haight, author of The Righteous Mind, which I' ve written about before - humans are fairly selfish individuals, but we are also highly social animals who like to be part of groups.

Groups, however, require co-operative behaviour, so we evolved moral attitudes to enable us to get along together in groups.

Biologists (and economists) have long stressed the importance of competition between us - survival of the fittest and all that - but it s not hard to see that humans' domination of the planet arises from our unmatched ability to co-operate with each other to overcome problems.

So humans are about competition and co-operation. Economists have schooled us to think of markets as all about competition - between sellers, between buyers and between buyers and sellers - but psychologists see markets as a prime example of human co-operation.

Co-operation through markets allows us to use specialisation - I produce what I' m good at, you do the same and we use the medium of money to exchange the things we ve produced - to increase our combined efficiency in production, leaving us all better off.

Studies have shown that people' s performance in well-known psychology games giving them a choice between selfish or altruistic responses can differ markedly between cultures. Turns out that people from cultures with more developed market systems tend to be less selfish and more co-operative.

So to these scientists, morality is a set of psychological adaptations that allow otherwise selfish individuals to reap the benefits of co-operation within groups.

But why do we want to co-operate within groups? So our group can compete more effectively against other groups.

" Our moral machinery evolved to strike a biologically advantageous balance between selfishness (Me) and within-group co-operation (Us), without concern for people who are more likely to be competitors than allies (Them), " Greene says. This moral machinery includes our capacities for empathy, vengefulness, honour, guilt, embarrassment and righteous indignation, he adds.

The fact is that each of us belongs to a whole host of groups: our family, neighbourhood, workplace, occupation, nationality, ethnicity, religious affiliation, sporting interest, political party and more.

The groups we belong to are the tribes we belong to. We feel a great loyalty to our groups, and greatly favour their interests over those of rival groups. This group selfishness and tendency to see the world as Us versus Them is tribalism.

So, much of the conflict we see around us - both within our country and, as we' ve become more conscious of in recent days, between countries and the groups within them - arises from tribalism.

Much of the conflict between tribes is simple self-interest - I favour my interests ahead of yours, and see them much more clearly than I see yours - but there are also genuine differences in values and disagreements about the proper terms of co-operation. One major source of disagreement in political life is between individual and collective responsibility.

Some disagreement arises from tribes' differing allegiances to what Greene calls " proper nouns" - gods, leaders, holy scriptures and holy places.

Obviously, tribally based morality gets us only so far. What Greene seeks is a "meta-morality" , which can help reduce conflict between tribes rather than just within them. To this end he reaches back to an old idea now out of favour with philosophers: utilitarianism.

(This is of relevance to economists because, though they 've spent the past 80 years trying to play it down, utilitarianism forms part of the bedrock on which the conventional economic model is built.)

According to Greene, utilitarianism answers two basic questions: what really matters and who really matters. What matters most is the quality of our experience. Economists call this " utility" and the rest of us call it "happiness" .

Who matters most is all of us, equally - otherwise known as the Golden Rule.

Thus Greene summarises utilitarianism as " happiness is what matters and everyone' s happiness counts the same. This doesn 't mean that everyone gets to be equally happy, but it does means than no one' s happiness is inherently more valuable than anyone else' s ."

He claims this meta-morality involves a moral system that can acknowledge moral trade-offs and adjudicate among them, and can do so in a way that makes sense to members of all tribes.

It s a nice thought. Somehow I think it will be a while before we measure up to that ideal. But it s always good to have a vision of what we should be aiming for and how we can move towards it.

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Digital revolution transforms productivity debate

A second former econocrat has joined former secretary of the Prime Minister's department Dr Mike Keating in seeking to lift the tone of the economic debate.

"We are spending too much effort debating how and how quickly we should bring the Commonwealth budget back into balance," Dr Ric Simes said in a speech to the Australian Business Economists this week.

"We need to elevate the economic debate from the level of catchcries about debt and deficits, or about productivity or even about the use of cost-benefit analyses. We need some deeper analyses being brought to the surface."

Simes, now a director of Deloitte Access Economics, formerly of Treasury and economic adviser to Paul Keating as prime minister, wants to see a more sensible discussion about productivity.
Productivity is obviously important and policy should indeed be focused on lifting it.

"But we do need to be careful about what this may mean in a particular circumstance," he said. One problem is that productivity is being used as a catchcry for myriad causes, often unjustifiably.

Simes agreed with Mike Keating's trenchant observation that "business associations, some leading employers and their camp followers in the media are insisting that future reforms must focus on alleged labour market rigidities and reductions in taxation, as if these were the most important influences on productivity".

And while "there is scope for improved labour relations to make a modest contribution to improved productivity ... the main responsibility for improvements in that regard lie with employers themselves," Keating has written.

"The best thing that employers and their trade associations could do is to stop passing the buck to everyone else for their own failings, and get on with making their workplaces more productive using the existing freedoms that they undoubtedly have," Keating concludes.

Simes adds that this is exactly what most businesses try to do. For his evidence, keep reading.

Simes' second problem with how "productivity" is being used in the debate concerns its measurement. "Productivity is simply a less than perfect measure of economic wellbeing, and having the public debate focus so much on what the Bureau of Statistics reports as productivity can be unhelpful."

Indeed, Professor John Quiggin, of the University of Queensland, had called productivity an "unhelpful concept", mainly because of problems with the way the contributions of labour and capital were measured in its calculation.

Simes agreed with Quiggin that we'd be better off using a term that was closely related to productivity, "technological progress" - that is, the introduction of technological innovations such as new products and improved production technologies.

Rhetoric - the choice of terms - did matter, Simes said, and had we been using the term technological progress instead of productivity, the debate wouldn't have been so open to distortion by vested interests.

"Tax, or industrial relations, or fiscal policy, can and should be refined, but they are not at the heart of why measured productivity weakened after 2000," he said.

But the measurement problem went further. "I think we have a fundamental problem in that our measures of gross domestic product or productivity are becoming less reliable proxies for economic welfare."

If instead of looking at productivity statistics we stand back and look at the way societies and businesses are changing, we find some profound changes under way, particularly the digital revolution.

We see consumers forcing retailers and media companies to transform. His own research had found that, without telework, only 14 per cent of new mums said they would return to work with their old employer, but 61 per cent said they would if telework was available.

His research had found how companies' information technology policies on staff use of social media at work and BYOD - bring your own device - were of growing importance in attracting young and talented employees.

He'd found that businesses able to create a "collaborative" working culture - including through use of digital technologies - succeeded in growing faster than otherwise.

What has this to do with productivity? First, most of the change we were seeing was being driven by individuals, whether they be consumers, workers, students or patients. To a trained economist, this should suggest that economic welfare had probably risen - and risen a lot.

It was hard not to conclude that individuals making deliberate decisions to do something new were adding to their own welfare, and to society's.

But, second, if this isn't showing up in our measures of welfare - such as GDP or productivity - then maybe there was something wrong with those measures. It seemed to Simes that "productivity, as measured, misses many, if not most, of the gains to consumer and social welfare that digital technology is delivering".

It didn't capture the benefits from improved convenience when we no longer had to queue for ages to renew a licence or at our bank branch. Nor the convenience of being able to search for a needed service in a fraction of the time it took before the internet.

It didn't capture the benefits of much greater choice. The Amazon books site, for instance, took costs out of the supply chain (thus reducing prices to consumers) but also provided much greater choice of books in a convenient manner.

Studies by Erik Brynjolfsson and others at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology had estimated that the easy access to a greater choice of books generated seven to 10 times the consumer welfare that the more efficient supply chain generated (the only bit that would make it into measured productivity).

He wasn't saying we should include the benefits of convenience and choice in our measurement of GDP - that wouldn't work.

No. "What I am arguing is that we need to be careful to base policy decisions on a deeper understanding of our objectives and not be driven by simplistic rhetoric," he said.

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Yes, there is more to life than happiness

Fed up with all the wrangling and speculation over who should be leading the Labor Party? Want something more substantial? How about the meaning of life - that weighty enough for you?

The question has been an object of contemplation by clerics and philosophers throughout the ages, of course, but in more recent times many psychologists and even a few economists have taken to studying it.

Psychologists' traditional focus has been on the abnormal - on relieving misery, helping people suffering from depression, alcoholism, schizophrenia, trauma and the like.

But for at least the past 30 years some psychologists and economists have been researching the nature of happiness. A spate of books has been written on the subject (including one by yours truly).

Then, about a decade ago, there sprang up among psychologists a new school known as "positive psychology", dedicated to helping the normal live more satisfying lives. The practitioners of positive psychology seemed to take over the happiness business.

The person most responsible for starting the positive psychology movement is Professor Martin Seligman, of the University of Pennsylvania. Seligman regularly works in Australia, and will speak at the Happiness and its Causes conference in Sydney next week, subtitled Life, Death and Everything. But is happiness all there is to the meaning of life? A lot of people doubt it. The spate of happiness books is now prompting a flow of anti-happiness books - including one by our own (eminently sensible) Hugh Mackay.

I think a lot of the problem lies with the word happiness. It's an eye-catching, emotive word beloved of book publishers and headline writers. But what does it actually mean? Different things to different people.

The critics interpret it very narrowly, as being perpetually in an upbeat, ho-ho-ho mood. And perhaps being a Pollyanna - looking on the bright side of everything and refusing to acknowledge problems.

If that's what happiness means it deserves to be ripped into by the critics. It's neither possible nor desirable to live like Dr Pangloss, and you could do yourself a mischief trying to.

Seligman points out that such an ideal favours those with an extroverted personality, disadvantaging the half of the population who are less expressive and more introverted.

Mackay argues that nature equipped us with the capacity to feel negative emotions - pain, sorrow, fear, even anger - for good reason.

But I've always used happiness to mean something much broader and more substantial. The seeking of pleasure and avoidance of pain is mere hedonism, and that's life without meaning.

Most of the academic study of happiness relies on surveys that ask people to rate their satisfaction with their lives on a scale of, say, one to 10. That's a bit broader, but recent research suggests people's answers to such a question are too greatly influenced by how they were feeling at the time they were asked.

Seligman has been giving the question much thought and the result of his cogitation is outlined in his latest book, Flourish. His objective is to guide the positive psychology movement away from happiness as its goal to something more encompassing, which he dubs "wellbeing".

Wellbeing, he argues, has five elements, of which only the first, "positive emotion", covers the narrow conception of happiness. He calls this "the pleasant life".

His second element is "engagement". Living the engaged life means regularly being in a state of "flow", where you become so absorbed in what you're doing you lose sense of time and consciousness of yourself.

It can involve your work or a hobby, but it requires an equal match between the challenge you face and your ability to meet that challenge. People in a state of flow realise they were happy only in retrospect.

Seligman's third element is "meaning". The meaningful life involves "belonging to and serving something that you believe is bigger than the self," he says. This is where other people first enter the picture.

"Today it is accepted without dissent that connections to other people and relationships are what give meaning and purpose to life," he says.

The fourth element is "accomplishment" - something Seligman added to his list only after a student told him his theory of what humans choose had a huge hole in it: "It omits success and mastery. People try to achieve just for winning's own sake."

Well, that's certainly the way it appears, though a leading economist researcher in this area, Andrew Oswald, of the University of Warwick, would argue that people want to win not for its own sake, but to increase their social status.

Billionaires scrabbling for their next billion aren't motivated by greed. They just want to demonstrate - to themselves and others - how good they are at playing the money game.

Anyway, Seligman now accepts that people pursue success, accomplishment, winning, achievement and mastery for their own sakes. He stresses, however, that his objective is to describe what people actually do to get wellbeing.

"Adding this element in no way endorses the achieving life or suggests that you should divert your own path to wellbeing to win more often," he says.

His fifth element is "positive relationships". When another founder of positive psychology was asked to say what it was about in two words or fewer, he replied "other people". Seligman says "other people are the best antidote to the downs of life and the single most reliable up".

No doubt, but that sounds a bit self-centred. For relationships to be "positive" they have to be two-way; you have to give as well as get. Whatever you call it - happiness, wellbeing, flourishing - it won't work if it doesn't have relationships at its core.

That's what we keep forgetting.

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