moral psychologies

I finally picked up Jonathan Haidt’s book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.

Like many books of this scope, there are a few over-extensions of explanatory reach, but that’s been covered by many good book reviews in print.

Despite the overgeneralizations, there are many suggestive lines of thought concerning moral psychology.

For instance, consider the following hypothetical scenario:

A family suffers the tragic loss of the family pet, in this case, a dog that is hit by a car. Rather than allow a perfectly good meat go to waste, the family decides to cook the dog for supper.

Personally I hear this scenario and find it distasteful, if not disgusting. However, I would be hard pressed to say that it was morally wrong, and in fact I do not think it is.

Scenarios like this are meant to illustrate an instinctive distinction that many make between a taboo and a morally wrong action.

Here’s the interesting thing: In some cultures outside of America and the west in general, respondents would claim that the action was actually morally wrong, not merely a taboo.

Even though most cultures distinguish between taboos and actions that are morally wrong, the precise activities that fall into each or overlap are different depending on several factors.

One such factor tracks with the emergence of newer conceptions of autonomy and individualism. One might call philosophies that are inspired by autonomy, liberty, and individualism (e.g., the “west” generally) egocentric. The moral “bottom line” revolves around the harm principle (i.e., “One can do what one pleases as long as one does not harm another.”). So… in this more egocentric moral psychology, taboos (such as eating the family pet) are avoided because our culture or society judges that as grotesque or impolite, but not because there is any morally wrong content in the action.

In many parts of the world, however, the moral bottom line has a different focus. It’s not that a harm principle is lacking. Rather, it’s that the harm principle is differently articulated by an interpretation of the harm. Such philosophies of life are more sociocentric, where the concepts of duty, loyalty, and fidelity to tribe are paramount. As such, sociocultural taboos are group markers of inclusion (or exclusion), and the tendency to see the world in moral terms is extended much wider to include more types of behaviors into moral classification than what one may see in a more egocentric moral psychology.

Hence, what an egocentric moral psyche may see as a mere taboo may be interpreted as a morally charged issue for someone who is more sociocentric in their moral psychology.

Furthermore, it’s not the case that the sociocentric psyche sees these taboos as contingently possessing moral content (i.e., having moral evaluative properties because of their particular cultural evolution, etc.), but rather the tendency is to universalize their moral outlook, believing that their moral demarcations are normative for everyone else including those outside of their tribal affiliations, no matter their distinct cultural histories.

Now, you can probably already see the dangers lurking for overgeneralization and over-reaching explanations with this distinction in moral psychological outlook, and those dangers are real.

But as a research project into moral psychology, this is still a promising heuristic.

For example, it helps me make sense of why early forms of Judaism include so many taboos within their religious and moral laws, with no sharp distinction between these ceremonial forms of life and the moral point of view. Various “abominations” related to food choices, inter-racial marriage, fashion accutremonts, and human sexuality are lined up side by side. These all make more sense in the context of the sociocentric pressures at a pre-pluralistic time to reinforce and police tribal affiliations and “the Other.”

With the rise of egocentric moral psychologies, which personally I take to be a real advance in our moral outlook (I would say that, wouldn’t I?), the category of “mere taboo” has grown to encompass more of these types of tribal affiliations. The evolutionary arch then takes over and shaves away even many of these old taboos, resulting in a more tolerant, morally minimalist society – or at any rate, more tolerant if still few oasis zones.

I see some of the religious culture wars recapitulating this dynamic with patterns of retrenchment of liberty on the side of the sociocentric moral psyches and the extension of liberty on the side of the egocentrics. Yes, that sounds like the gross oversimplification of a classical liberal, but when empirical data points plot overall in a curve shape …

let the children play

What makes sense of regret? Obviously, there are the moral kinds of reasons, but that’s not what I have in mind. I can’t speak for anyone else, but when I end up regretting past actions, I do so believing that things could have been different than they in fact were. I could have made a different choice, imagining an alternate version of myself with slightly to vastly different desires, temperament, and beliefs at the crucial moment of decision.

This ability to reason or, at the very least, to imagine alternate scenarios – states of affairs that are in fact false but might have been true – is a really awesome and important ability (often called “counterfactual reasoning”). For instance, I imagine an alternate version of myself from this morning, and that version of myself has breakfast (when in fact it’s false that I actually had breakfast this morning).

I don’t think it’s unique to human species. There’s empirical evidence that many animals engage in behavior that is best explained with a theory of mind that attributes some similar power to them. In humans, however, the ability is deployed at higher levels of sophistication and placement within a social ecology.

Take little children, for example, who play make-believe. They imagine themselves not merely as alternate versions of themselves but as utterly different kinds of things, human and otherwise. My friend’s son plays make-believe, pretending to be a king or an animal or a fire truck or a school teacher or a... This complex cognitive behavior is actually practice for adult moral sensibility. It is a rudimentary form of the combination between counterfactual imagination and empathy. The dual abilities to imagine oneself in “another’s shoes,” so to speak, and to be able to see alternate possibilities of behavior and consequences retrospectively into the past (i.e., regret) and into the future (i.e., choice) form the raw materials of moral agency. Hence when children are whiling away hours and hours of pure, unbridled play, they are actually constructing the cognitive and conative structures that undergird high-functioning ethical character.

When I regret an action, especially one where the action affects someone other than myself, I perceive in my mind’s eye at least two things: (a) how things could have turned out differently and (b) what it’s like to be the other who suffers because of my poor decision. While these components are built into us by evolutionary mechanisms, they are also nurtured by things as innocent, simple, and vital as pure play.

These components are also the root structures that allow for us to be so good at deception and manipulation.

Two sides of a coin...

The virtue of thankfulness

This is an updated version of a post from my own blog written prior to Thanksgiving:

As Aquinas puts it in the Summa Theologiae, "Whether thankfulness is a virtue, distinct from the other virtues?" For Aquinas, the answer is yes, because thankfulness is "a special part of justice." Giving thanks to our benefactors, i.e. those who have given us a particular and personal favor, is an issue of obligation, or justice. We owe gratitude to them, and this is different from the related virtues of religion (owed to God), piety (owed to parents), and observance (owed to those who excel in dignity). We are left with thankfulness as a virtue distinct from these related excellences of character. His answer here only makes sense in light of the specific objection he is considering, as Aquinas distinguishes character traits by their objects, and it is on this basis that he claims a distinct role for thankfulness as a matter of justice.

The point, I take it, is that Thomas believes that gratitude is important in a variety of ways, related to God, parents, excellent human beings, and finally those who have benefitted us via a favor of some sort. We owe something to all of these persons, according to Thomas. One can see why we owe something to God, parents, and our benefactors, but why to excellent persons? I think we owe them gratitude for showing us how to live a human life in a way that is conducive to human flourishing. I think of people I know that have shed light on this by their example, and the claim that I owe them thanks seems very plausible. So thanks to Jon Sederquist, J.P. Moreland, Lewis Winkler, Dave Dishman, Terry McKinney, and the many others who have done this for me.

musing on "disagreement"

A brief musing about the concept of “disagreement”...

There is an obvious difference between the confidence we have (both psychologically and epistemically) when we assert that “2 and 2 makes 4” versus when we assert that “it is wrong to lie no matter what” (assuming we think it is).

It’s hard to disagree with the first assertion, but it’s not that hard to disagree with the second (personal note: I disagree with the second statement). In fact, one might make the stronger claim that the kinds of disagreements that attach to the latter kind of statement (and in fact to that very particular statement itself) are perennial.

I’ve seen this asymmetry in disagreement deployed to argue that the best explanation is that there is a fact of the matter about the first kinds of judgment (e.g., “2 and 2 makes 4”) but likely not one about the latter kinds of judgment (e.g., moral).

I have two queries...

First, it is interesting to note that the asymmetry is deployed against moral judgments. I wonder why this kind of asymmetry is not also deployed against other kinds of judgments that appear to elicit perennial disagreements. I have in mind the various theses that one finds in metaphysics, epistemology, aesthetics, political philosophy, history, cotemporary physics, psychology, etc. In short, nearly every domain of inquiry... Isn’t this just the specter of logical positivism making another appearance?

To be sure, I am aware of the various context-sensitivities that are part and parcel of moral judgment. I’m keenly open to forms of non-Absolutism (which should not be conflated with anti-objectivity). However, I’m curious as to why those who deploy the aforementioned asymmetry aim only or most prominently at moral judgment. Why not level the playing field en toto. At least the Pyrrhonian skeptics were consistent in their adoption of skepticism across the board with their disagreement criteria.

Second, as I look at some of the world-crushing events of only the past century, I think of World War II. I think that persons deeply involved in the Nazi and anti-Nazi war campaigns vigorously disagreed about the moral status of Jewish persons. I don’t think this stands as some kind of special evidence that there isn’t a fact of the matter about the moral value of Jewish persons.

Multiply instances of moral disagreement on the contemporary political and moral landscape, just in the United States, and I think we see a dazzling array of disagreement over all sorts of critical issues, none of which obviously can be said to be populated by participants who think the issues do not trade in cognitively contentful statements with truth value.

In fact, one might even say that the very existence of disagreement, more often than not, solidifies our belief that there are facts about which we disagree (where values are numbered among these facts that describe a situation). The old fact-value dichotomy that has been exploded numerous times over is still a kind of specter that just doesn’t get the hint that it’s been effectively exorcised in theory and definitely in practice!

So, I guess at the end of it all, I don’t get what’s supposed to be so significant about the phenomena of disagreement.