Comments on: The Moral Instinct

By: hf

hf — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 01:22:38 +0000

obsession with “fairness” misguided?

Certainly you could make that case. I briefly considered it, but it seemed weaker than the case I did make.

By: nobody.really

nobody.really — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 21:43:25 +0000

Let’s analyze what the following would mean for someone with Care 5 and Fairness 5:

Community 0. This person sounds like one of those dicks who think strangers deserve consideration.

Authority 0. She definitely qualifies as an anarchist, but not a violent one.

Purity 0. Seems like a sane person. Genuine health concerns appear to fall in the Care/Harm category.

I see your bid and raise you: Of what value is Community, Authority, Purity or FAIRNESS, except as they affect Care?

What conclusions would you draw about Paul, with Care 5 and Fairness 5? This would presumably be someone who cared deeply about reciprocity. Paul would be most enthusiastic about scratching the backs of those who could return the favor. He might also help people who were not in a position to return the favor, but only in is spare time. He’d be angry with and ruminate about those who did not reciprocate, including himself; he may well be consumed with guilt over all the debts he could not repay to his long-dead parents, etc.

Conversely, what conclusions would you draw about John, a person with Care 5 and Fairness 0? Such a person would presumably seek to help those who were in greatest need or for whom John could do the most good. He’d steal from the rich to give to the poor (except to the extent that he thought that the reaction to this behavior would cause more bad than the behavior produced good). He’d write songs called “All You Need is Love,” scripts called “Pay it Forward,” and parables called “The Good Samaritan.” And he wouldn’t give two figs about the past, whether good or bad, except as it affected strategy and tactics for helping others.

Which sounds better to you? In short, is the liberal obsession with “fairness” misguided?

It’s not an entirely hypothetical question. The next US President (and the current one, for that matter) will need to choose whether to continue to expend US resources in nations to which we may owe some duty (Afghanistan, Iraq?), or to divert those resources to nations where we might do the most good (Sudan). It seems so abstract, a choice between the backward-looking perspective of fairness or the forward-looking perspective of care. Yet millions of lives hang on this question.

By: hf

hf — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 20:52:10 +0000

(Critically, I think the Nazi “fiend from Hell” seems immoral to conservatives and probably even to devils from a different society.)

By: hf

hf — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 20:22:47 +0000

Let’s analyze what the following would mean for someone with Care 5 and Fairness 5:

Community 0. This person sounds like one of those dicks who think strangers deserve consideration.

Authority 0. She definitely qualifies as an anarchist, but not a violent one.

Purity 0. Seems like a sane person. Genuine health concerns appear to fall in the Care/Harm category.

By: hf

hf — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 19:39:02 +0000

Er, wha? The research would only support conservatism if you think that having all five feelings ‘is good’. Well, someone with strong scores (whatever that actually means) in Care and Fairness, and 0 in the other three areas, sounds like a good person. At most, I might call them misguided. Someone with Care 0, Fairness 0 and 5 for the others sounds like a fiend from Hell. So why should we give any ‘moral weight’ to these other scores?

By: Astraea

Astraea — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 16:20:02 +0000

hf, I get the idea of lawful evil. I guess I’m not getting how that relates to your assertion that “But while this makes the data seem suspect, the work does not actually support conservatism “

By: hf

hf — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 06:39:21 +0000

Related: Why the ___s hate the ___s

By: RonF

RonF — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 23:48:11 +0000

Promoting LOYALTY (solidarity):

Well, there are the passages that instruct Christians to settle disputes among themselves and not haul each other into court.

Honoring PURITY:

Jesus’ insistence on associating with those generally considered “impure” wasn’t so much a denial of the concept of purity than it was a redefinition of it. He was saying that it wasn’t an occupation or an accident of birth or a failure to observe a ritual that made you impure, it was what was in your heart. IIRC he was questioned once about whether eating food meant for idols made you impure, and he responded that it was not what you put into your mouth that made you impure but what came out of it. I should look it up but I don’t have time right now.

By: RonF

RonF — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 23:40:59 +0000

Daran, the fact that Jesus held up a coin and asked people “Whose picture is this” points towards the fact that taxes belong to Caesar, but not worship. I haven’t heard of any non-fringe Christian group that holds that you shouldn’t pay taxes.

By: hf

hf — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 21:40:55 +0000

http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~altemey/

I guess I just expect everyone to know what site I mean, I’ve mentioned it enough. ^_^

By: hf

hf — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 21:36:02 +0000

Certainly. Why? Do you think it has no basis in fact? That nobody who kills for fun, say, ever has a strong interest in purity? I linked this at Robert’s site, though that comment has curiously disappeared, and directed his attention to the Posse section in Chapter 1.

By: Astraea

Astraea — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 20:51:02 +0000

(see comment 30).
The one about D&D and Lawful Evil?

By: LyssaD

LyssaD — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 18:55:29 +0000

Shorter Pinker: Chomsky’s theories on language also hold for morality.
i.e.,
Everyone has the same intuitions re (morality),
these acceptability judgments demonstrate our tacit knowledge of (morality),
I see no way this (moral) knowledge could be learned, therefore it is innate.

Unfortunately, the conclusion is sheer creationism, firstly, and secondly, the basic premise is false since intuitive judgments vary both intra- and inter-subjectively, making them useless as data. The past thirty years have consistently demonstrated this, as has this entire thread. Pinker is just the leading cultist, a sort of Tom Cruise of Chomskyism.

By: hf

hf — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 18:36:42 +0000

Interesting. But while this makes the data seem suspect, the work does not actually support conservatism (see comment 30).

By: Astraea

Astraea — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 14:49:53 +0000

The reason Haidt found that Librals lean toward “justice” and “harm” is because he deliberately set out to show that liberals and social justice moral theories lean toward seeing “justice” and “harm” as moral while discounting “purity” and “authority.”

His paper, When Morality Opposes Justice: Conservatives Have Moral Intuitions that Liberals May Not Recognize has an agenda. To set up five type of “morals” as equal to justify conservative theory as moral. For example, opposition to homosexual marriage is “moral” because it has to do with respecting social traditions and institutions, which people need:

“Conservatives and many moderates are opposed to gay marriage in
part due to moral intuitions related to ingroup, authority, and purity, and
these concerns should be addressed, rather than dismissed contemptuously.”

So it’s no surprise that the questions would be designed the way they are.

By: hf

hf — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 06:09:27 +0000

Incidentally, when I tried to find an analogy for “your minister” I thought of my (first) Kokikai Aikido sensei. And yes, not only would I slap her if she really wanted me to, but I’ve reached the point where I’d also slap a druid priestess if she really wanted me to.

By: hf

hf — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 03:35:30 +0000

Er, by not using money with Caesar on it? How would that work today?

By: Daran

Daran — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 03:30:50 +0000

Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s

This is an utterance of Delphic ambiguity. It could be interpretted, as he presumably intended the Pharisees to, as demanding that taxes etc., be paid to Caesar. But his followers might have interpretted it as saying that nothing should be rendered unto Caesar.

By: hf

hf — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 21:59:34 +0000

Robert, I may register for your site later, but I’ll point it out here first: you have a really weird definition of Lawful Evil. D&D Devils have a strong focus on Purity in my book, with pit fiends as the pinnacle of this; they earn their rank by spending some absurd length of time in the Pit of Flame, purifying themselves of all non-devilishness.

By: nobody.really

nobody.really — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 20:32:47 +0000

Oh man, I suck as a troll. Ok, let’s try this: Is racism immoral? An excerpt from The Moral Instinct:

Moralization is a psychological state that can be turned on and off like a switch, and when it is on, a distinctive mind-set commandeers our thinking.

The first hallmark of moralization is that the rules it invokes are felt to be universal…. The other hallmark is that people feel that those who commit immoral acts deserve to be punished. Not only is it allowable to inflict pain on a person who has broken a moral rule; it is wrong not to, to “let them get away with it.” People are thus untroubled in inviting divine retribution or the power of the state to harm other people they deem immoral. Bertrand Russell wrote, “The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists — that is why they invented hell.”

We all know what it feels like when the moralization switch flips inside us — the righteous glow, the burning dudgeon, the drive to recruit others to the cause. The psychologist Paul Rozin has studied the toggle switch by comparing two kinds of people who engage in the same behavior but with different switch settings. Health vegetarians avoid meat for practical reasons, like lowering cholesterol and avoiding toxins. Moral vegetarians avoid meat for ethical reasons: to avoid complicity in the suffering of animals. By investigating their feelings about meat-eating, Rozin showed that the moral motive sets off a cascade of opinions. Moral vegetarians are more likely to treat meat as a contaminant — they refuse, for example, to eat a bowl of soup into which a drop of beef broth has fallen. They are more likely to think that other people ought to be vegetarians, and are more likely to imbue their dietary habits with other virtues, like believing that meat avoidance makes people less aggressive and bestial.

Much of our recent social history, including the culture wars between liberals and conservatives, consists of the moralization or amoralization of particular kinds of behavior…. Rozin notes, for example, that smoking has lately been moralized. Until recently, it was understood that some people didn’t enjoy smoking or avoided it because it was hazardous to their health. But with the discovery of the harmful effects of secondhand smoke, smoking is now treated as immoral. Smokers are ostracized; images of people smoking are censored; and entities touched by smoke are felt to be contaminated (so hotels have not only nonsmoking rooms but nonsmoking floors). The desire for retribution has been visited on tobacco companies, who have been slapped with staggering “punitive damages.”

At the same time, many behaviors have been amoralized, switched from moral failings to lifestyle choices. They include divorce, illegitimacy, being a working mother, marijuana use and homosexuality. Many afflictions have been reassigned from payback for bad choices to unlucky misfortunes. There used to be people called “bums” and “tramps”; today they are “homeless.” Drug addiction is a “disease”; syphilis was rebranded from the price of wanton behavior to a “sexually transmitted disease” and more recently a “sexually transmitted infection.”

This wave of amoralization has led the cultural right to lament that morality itself is under assault, as we see in the group that anointed itself the Moral Majority.

At the risk of further vexing the Moral Majority, I ask whether it is at last time to de-moralize racism. Would it not be sufficient – or even beneficial – to treat racism as just another human foible to be compensated for, like farsightedness or a lack of facility with math? After all, I don’t mind asking my wife to read the menu to me or calculate the tip; she’s better at those things than I am. I’m not proud of it, but there it is, and we live in a culture that does not penalize me much for admitting it. Wouldn’t it be equally beneficial to live in a culture where my wife could be free to say, “Honey, would you speak to that Latina waitress about the slow service? I’d do it myself, but I’m afraid my racism might get the best of me.”

Instead we treat racism like masturbation. I suspect everyone’s doing it, even absentmindedly, but I’m not supposed to acknowledge it. Who benefits from this?

Or is racism simply one of those things that requires not mere compensation, but punishment, to ensure that no one “gets away with it”? Does it inevitably trigger the righteous glow, the burning dudgeon, the visceral charge to the fray? Even if another alternative reaction were desirable, would it be possible?