The Moral Self

Jesse Prinz, City University of New York

Philosophy Today Speaker Series
Series

So, it is an extreme pleasure to be here, and its extremely gratifying. Watching Professor Wrenns
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 Im 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. Theyre 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, its 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 morality. 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
identitywhat makes meis 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 well 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
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in which you preserve identity over time, which he cares a great deal about, is through linkages or
chains of memory. Well 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? Were 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. Theres a morality
thats 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. Its very important to who you are.
Values are not just things we have. Theyre 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. Its 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
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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 David Hume, 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. Im 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, youre 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 thats the theory, then one way to test the theory is to
see whether people consult their emotions 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.
Theyre 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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Jesse Prinz, City University of New York
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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 were 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 emotion for
making moral decisions. And Angelika developed, we developed a technique for inducing anger
using sound, and I dont 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 participants 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 Griegs Peer
Gynt Suite, and its 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. Its 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 Im 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
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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. Well explicitly say, Yes, I feel this way, and I'm glad I feel this way. It's important to me.
Its 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. Its 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 youre 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 dont,
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. Its a very social concept. It's something we use to
communicate to other humans about who we are. Its 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 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 dont 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 thats the question of synchronic identity. Its a question of
which psychological traits are more important to who we are.
Theres also question of diachronic identity. If a person changes all the timewe all dosome 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 thats 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,
were 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 youre going to
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have a perception of it. There is a typo on the slide. For the perception of the bear-snake slimy,
slithering bearand 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
wont review the evidence. Ill 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 theres 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 thats 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, theres 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.
Theres this disorder thats 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. Theyre 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, youve 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 were 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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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 theyre tidy makes them tidier. So the conceptual categories under which we think about
ourselves can have a dramatic impact on our behavior. And, dont worry about reading this, but you
can see that it's a long-standing impact. Even weeks after being told that theyre 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, Im 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 thats 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, whos 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, youre 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 dont know, potatoes, is it well I, you
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know, I care about potatoes. I like potatoes alright. How strongly do you care about potatoes, and
not that strongly? If youre 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. Its 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 youre in the business, youre like, no, it's just a
recreational activity that I occasionally partake in.
Linda Skitka, whos a terrific psychologist in this area, has shown that these come apart with one
exception. Moral values correlate in all these dimensions. Theyre intensely felt. Theyre 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 heres something I call the Facebook fact. So in social
media were 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 Im 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 somebodys 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
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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 youre a NASCAR fan, youve just
communicated to everyone who knows that that its more likely that youre 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, theyre 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 guys 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 dont know anything about them. We signal it
all the time. Making your hair look like that tells people youre liberal. Why should that be? Theyre
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 theyre pro-democracy. We can guess that they favor education for women. We
can guess that theyre 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. Im 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,
Youre 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 weve been looking at this. I'll just
mention this in passing, but I have a study thats 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 were very tribal about our morality.

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Jesse Prinz, City University of New York
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Morality develops a certain group to which we belong, and that group becomes very important for
identity.
Were almost out of time, and weve 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. Its even
embodied when he's the street drug dealer. Hes 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 weve 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
youre in some sense not the same person, but its 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, well 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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listen to somebody whos espousing values you disagree with; its threat your identity. And
correlatively, thats 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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