Ethical Hardware, or “Why Do I Care?”

It is at the intersection of the humanities and social justice that we can conceptualize integrity – in its broadest sense – as the ethical responsibility to make the world a better place for all. In this definition, integrity is not exclusive to academia; rather, it is qualified as an academic premise in the context of postsecondary education and research. Conceptualizing integrity as ethical responsibility requires a nuanced understanding of ‘ethics’/‘the ethical’ and ‘responsibility’. I define responsibility not in negative terms, as a tedious and burdensome inevitability, but in positive terms, as the affirmative and rewarding pursuit of a goal that is inherently and/or instrumentally beneficial. This pursuit, or its refusal, then, becomes an ethical problem insofar as it has real, social consequences. By ethics, in turn, I do not mean a set of prohibitive rules and punitive measures, perhaps set out by a higher being that transcends our earthly plane of existence, or enforced by an indifferent legal authority that is solely concerned with maintaining social order and punishing transgressions. Instead, I describe ethics as the immanent, productive, sustaining, empowering, and liberating biosocial determinations of life for humans (and other animals) as embedded and embodied beings. This may sound more confusing than helpful, but to unpack this definition of ethics, which I have presented from a new-materialist, biosocial lens, I will need to borrow – perhaps, a bit too extensively – from Canadian American neuro-philosopher Patricia Churchland’s 2011 Braintrust: What neuroscience tells us about morality. In this book, Churchland argues that recent developments in biological sciences and experimental psychology can help us understand the interlocking neural mechanisms that underpin ethics/morality as a function of sociability. She posits a four-dimensional model for moral social behavior, including caring, mental state attribution, social learning, and social cooperation (p. 9).

Caring, as a first dimension of ethics, is a primary function of nervous systems, particularly the brainstem-limbic circuitry, which is designed to seek well-being/pleasure and avoid ill-being/pain for self-preservation (Churchland, p. 30). In mammals, the neurochemistry of attachment and bonding helps extend the scope of care from oneself (“self-caring”) to offspring and beyond, to non-offspring others (“other-caring”, perhaps even “self-sacrifice”). More specifically, the same neurochemical mechanisms (oxytocin, arginine-vasopressin, and their portfolio of receptors) that activate the female brain’s maternal mode to care for others that are offspring also enable the animal to care for others that are not offspring (p. 31), to ensure species survival. Similarly, in human animals, self-caring extends to other-caring because our brains are wired to make us feel anxious and distressed when the well-being of our loved ones is threatened, and to make us feel safe and content when they are fine (pp. 39–40).

Other-caring is a function of mental state attribution, also referred to as “theory of mind”. Theory of mind is essential to understanding the goals, desires, intentions, emotions, and beliefs of other individuals, as well as predicting their behavior – to avoid trouble and seek opportunities, for instance. Humans are particularly skilled at mentalizing and empathizing, but research has shown that several other species, including primates, rodents, and birds, also possess mental representational skills (Churchland, p. 134). A neural mechanism that supports mental state attribution involves mirror neurons, which are activated when an animal performs an action or observes the same action being performed by another. This discovery has led to the hypothesis that mirror neurons may support the understanding of others’ mental states by enabling the simulation of observed actions (pp. 135–7). However, we still lack sufficient knowledge about the precise cerebral mechanisms involved in mental representation, since identifying another’s mental state does not necessarily involve internally simulating that same state (pp. 149–52). It is also worth noting that mental state attribution is not initially based on self-attribution and then applied to others. Rather, self-attribution and other-attribution are co-developed in the context of social interactions (p. 153). This takes us to the next two dimensions of ethics, namely, social learning and cooperation. It is evident that these processes are deeply interconnected and, thus, delineating clear boundaries between them would be impossible. Before we move on to the other dimensions of ethics, it will be useful for the purposes of this chapter to briefly explore gender differences in the affective aspect of theory of mind.

Christov-Moore et al. (2014) argue that observed gender differences in empathy point to evolutionary roots besides socialization (p. 621). They hypothesize that these differences may have arisen in response to stereotypical masculine and feminine roles throughout evolution. In other words, males and females may have evolved different cognitive and affective (theory of mind) skills in response to different selective pressures in their ancestral environments (pp. 609–10). For example, females may have evolved greater sensitivity to emotional cues and a greater ability to form and maintain social bonds, while males may have evolved greater spatial and mechanical abilities related to hunting and tool-making (p. 621). Other studies have also found minor gender differences in theory of mind skills, but these differences are not thought to be solely determined by biological sex. Rather, socialization, including cultural expectations and gender stereotypes, may have played a role in shaping the development of theory of mind skills (Pons et al., 2007; Chaplin & Aldao, 2013). Both males and females, it appears, can develop similar cognitive and affective skills through socialization and learning.

Social learning and cooperation, as the two other dimensions of ethics, are grounded in self-caring and attachment. While learning and internalizing social practices, meant primarily to ensure survival and regulate coexistence, is rewarded with approval from others and leads to emotional joy, failing to conform can result in disapproval, stigma, punishment, and exclusion – thus, causing emotional pain to the individual (Churchland, 130–2). Social cooperation, similarly, is anchored in the same oxytocin-vasopressin network that enables mammals to extend self-care to infants and a broader range of caring relationships (pp. 63–4). In evolutionary terms, social cooperation – for example, scavenging or hunting in groups – may be explained as an extended function of mate-attachment and cooperative parenting (pp. 89–92). To help further clarify this, I have created a diagram based on Churchland’s neuro-biosocial model of ethics as a blueprint for humanities students to practice ethical agency and engage in meaningful, integrous, prosocial action (see Figure 1).

Figure 1. A visual interpretation of Churchland’s neuro-biosocial model of ethics

Although Churchland does not map a direct path from other-caring to cooperation, we can use this model to imagine a mode of social organization based on extending care, empathy, and compassion to all sentient others – not just those in our close circle of caring relationships and not just humans, for that matter. There is evidence that empathy, underpinned by the theory of mind circuitry, drives prosocial, cooperative, altruistic behavior (Christov-Moore et al., 2014, p. 621). Compassion is the extending of care to all individuals without discrimination in the context of morally relevant, comparable interests. It involves providing support to those who need it and validating/accepting those who live non-conventional lives but do not pose risks to survival, cooperation, coexistence. Aggression/hatred against gender nonconforming individuals, for instance, may be explained as a negative remnant of a primitive tendency to limit one’s circle of caring because of intergroup competition for resources, or to punish group members who violate social practices that jeopardize survival, coexistence, sexual selection, and sharing resources fairly.

While tension/aggression tends to heighten in situations of scarcity and competition for resources, abundance can lead to more cooperation. As a historical case in point, the shift from foraging/hunting-gathering to farming changed the nature of social life enormously. Agriculture supported larger populations, leading to the development of more complex tools and new cultural practices that were based on cooperation rather than competition (Churchland p. 94). However, even in modern times, we still witness expressions of intolerance, hatred, and/or violence (as rooted in misogyny, transphobia, homophobia) against individuals and practices that do not necessarily jeopardize social survival, sexual selection, or sharing resources, but that in a way challenge arbitrary, contractual, and inherited cultural codes that serve no concrete or relevant biosocial functions. Social norms that do not function to ensure survival and regulate coexistence fairly lack grounded ethical justification. The social-ethical continuum, underpinned by a shared neurochemical platform, enables us to alter problematic social practices and find better solutions to complex problems through care, compassion, learning, and cooperation. In the next section, I will explore a contemporary case in point to argue that fostering academic integrity is essential to the attainment of social justice through ethically committed knowledge production and civic engagement.