Jump to Introduction & Chronology
Jump back to Previous: Zen Physics X. Taoism + To taste
The Righteous Mind
Despite Haidt’s talking about psychopaths, it wasn’t until I recommended this book to a friend with a feloniously criminal family, that it occurred to me that the author’s emphasis on politics and peculiar beliefs like UFOs almost amounts to misdirection, given the relevance of what he says here for criminal activity. It’s curious when elephants lean in the direction of conspiracy theories or toward beliefs without any basis in reason, but it can become dire when the elephant leans in the direction of theft, rape, and other forms of violence.
Part II - There’s More to Morality than Harm and Fairness
Central Metaphor - The righteous mind is like a tongue with six taste receptors
Chapter Five - Beyond WEIRD Morality
p95 [He’s talking about recruiting participants for his dissertation research at a McDonalds’ in West Philadelphia] ... Each time someone said that the people in a story had done something wrong, I asked, “Can you tell me why that was wrong?” When I had interviewed college students on the Penn campus a month earlier, this question brought forth their moral justifications quite smoothly. But a few blocks west, this same question often led to long pauses and disbelieving stares. Those pauses and stares seemed to say, You mean you don’t know why it’s wrong to do that to a chicken? I have to explain this to you? What planet are you from?
p96 These subjects were right to wonder about me because I really was weird. I came from a strange and different moral world -- the University of Pennsylvania. Penn students were the most unusual of all twelve groups in my study. They were unique in their unwavering devotion to the “harm principle,” which John Stuart Mill had put forth in 1859: “The only purpose for which power can be rightly exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.” As one Penn student said: “It’s his chicken, he’s eating it, nobody is getting hurt.”
...
I and my fellow Penn students were weird in a second way too. In 2010, the cultural psychologists Joe Henrich, Steve Heine, and Ara Norenzayan published a profoundly important article titled “The Weirdest People in the World?” The authors pointed out that nearly all research in psychology is conducted on a very small subset of the human population: people from cultures that are Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (forming the acronym WEIRD). They then reviewed dozens of studies showing that WEIRD people are statistical outliers; they are the least typical, least representative people you could study if you wanted to make generalizations about human nature. Even within the West, Americans are more extreme outliers than Europeans, and within the United States, the educated upper middle class (like my Penn sample) is the most unusual of all.
I skipped the opening sentence of this chapter, “I got my Ph.D. at McDonald’s.” I myself like to say I learned at least as much driving a taxi for two years while attending college as I did in all my classes at Arizona State University. We would both agree, I think, that people limited to what today might be termed the “curated” experience of the world of middle class students attending universities, have a highly distorted view of the world and of what people are really like.
Just as wonderfully trained and skilled architects like Daniel Burnham and Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier made a mess of urban planning because they started with abstract ideas rather than how cities actually work; in the past several centuries radical -- and often well meaning -- political reforms have been instigated by Ivory Tower WEIRDos with no sense of human nature on the streets.
This doesn't really belong here, but I was also thinking about unusual ways in which people are made “invisible” (in terms of being unaccountable for their actions) in modern civilization. The railroad in the 19th and the Interstate in the 20th made people invisible by allowing them to move about from community to community faster than their reputation could travel. The impersonal character of large cities is also a form of invisibility. In a city, people are not as likely to be aware of either your virtues or your vices.
...The WEIRDer you are, the more you see a world full of separate objects, rather than relationships... Westerners have a more independent and autonomous concept of the self than do East Asians... when asked to write twenty statements beginning with the words “I am . . . ,” Americans are likely to list their own internal psychological characteristics (happy, outgoing, interested in jazz), whereas East Asians are more likely to list their roles and relationships (a son, a husband, an employee of Fujitsu).
...
p97 ...it makes sense that WEIRD philosophers since Kant and Mill have mostly generated moral systems that are individualistic, rule-based, and universalist. That’s the morality you need to govern a society of autonomous individuals.
But when holistic thinkers in a non-WEIRD culture write about morality, we get something more like the Analects of Confucius, a collection of aphorisms and anecdotes that can’t be reduced to a single rule. Confucius talks about a variety of relationship-specific duties and virtues (such a filial piety and the proper treatment of one’s subordinates).
If WEIRD and non-WEIRD people think differently and see the world differently, then it stands to reason that they’d have different moral concerns. If you see a world full of individuals, then you’ll want the morality of Kohlberg and Turiel -- a morality that protects those individuals and their individual rights. You’ll emphasize concerns about harm and fairness.
p98 But if you live in a non-WEIRD society... You’ll have a more sociocentric morality, which means... that you place the needs of groups and institutions first, often ahead of the needs of individuals. If you do that... you’ll have additional concerns, and you’ll need additional virtues to bind people together.
...I’ll set aside the question of whether any of these alternative moralities are really good, true, or justifiable. As an intuitionist, I believe it is a mistake to even raise that emotionally powerful question until we’ve calmed our elephants... It’s just too easy for our riders to build a case against every morality, political party, and religion that we don’t like...
Three Ethics Are More Descriptive Than One
p99 ...[Richard] Shweder was the leading thinker in cultural psychology -- a new discipline [in 1992 when Haidt arrived at the University of Chicago] that combined the anthropologist’s love of context and variability with the psychologist’s interest in mental processes. A dictum of cultural psychology is that “culture and psyche make each other up.” In other words, you can’t study the mind while ignoring culture, as psychologists usually do, because minds function only once they’ve been filled out by a particular culture. And you can’t study culture while ignoring psychology, as anthropologists usually do, because social practices and institutions (such as initiation rites, witchcraft, and religion) are to some extent shaped by concepts and desires rooted deep within the human mind, which explains why they often take similar forms on different continents.
p99 ...They [Shweder and colleagues] found three major clusters of moral themes, which they called the ethics of autonomy, community, and divinity. Each one is based on a different idea about what a person really is.
The ethic of autonomy is based on the idea that people are, first and foremost, autonomous individuals with wants, needs, and preferences. People should be free to satisfy these wants, needs, and preferences as they see fit, and so societies develop moral concepts such as rights, liberty, and justice, which allow people to coexist peacefully without interfering too much in each other’s projects. This is the dominant ethic in individualistic societies. You find it in the writings of utilitarians such as John Stuart Mill and Peter Singer (who value justice and rights only to the extent that they increase human welfare). and you find it in the writings of deontologists such as Kant and Kohlberg (who prize justice and rights even in cases where doing so may reduce overall welfare).
...The ethic of community is based on the idea that people are, first and foremost, members of larger entities such as families, teams, armies, companies, tribes, and nations. These larger entities are more that the sum of the people who compose them; they are real, they matter, and they must be protected. People have an obligation to play their assigned roles in these entities. Many societies therefore develop moral concepts such as duty, hierarchy, respect, reputation, and patriotism. In such societies, the Western insistence that people should design their own lives and pursue their own goals seems selfish and dangerous -- a sure way to weaken the social fabric and destroy the institutions and collective entities upon which everyone depends.
In the case of nationalism (Fascism in particular, but not exclusively) belonging to other teams -- being Jewish, for example -- is also seen as weakening the collective.
p120 The ethic of divinity is based on the idea that people are, first and foremost, temporary vessels within which a divine soul has been implanted. People are not just animals with an extra serving of consciousness; they are children of God and should behave accordingly. The body is a temple, not a playground. Even if it does no harm and violates nobody’s rights when a man has sex with a chicken carcass, he still shouldn’t do it because it degrades him, dishonors his creator, and violates that sacred order of the universe. Many societies therefore develop moral concepts such as sanctity and sin, purity and pollution, elevation and degradation. In such societies, the personal liberty of secular Western nations looks like libertinism, hedonism, and a celebration of humanity’s baser instincts.
...
p109 In 1991, Shweder wrote about the power of cultural psychology to cause such awakenings [as the author experienced while working in India]:
Yet the conceptions held by others are available to us, in the sense that when we truly understand their conception of things we come to recognize possibilities latent within our own rationality . . . and those ways of conceiving of things become salient for us for the first time, or once again. In other words, there is no homogeneous “backcloth” to our world. We are multiple from the start.
I cannot overstate the importance of this quotation for moral and political psychology. We are multiple from the start. Our minds have the potential to become righteous about many different concerns, and only a few of these concerns are activated during childhood. Other potential concerns are left undeveloped and unconnected to the web of shared meanings and values that become our adult moral matrix...
...
p110
- The WEIRDer you are, the more you perceive a world full of separate objects, rather than relationships.
- Moral pluralism is true descriptively. As a simple matter of anthropological fact, the moral domain varies across cultures.
- The moral domain is unusually narrow in WEIRD cultures, where it is largely limited to the ethic of autonomy (i.e., moral concerns about individuals harming, oppressing, or cheating other individuals). It is broader -- including the ethics of community and divinity -- in most other societies, and within religious and conservative moral matrices within WEIRD societies.
- Moral matrices bind people together and blind them to the coherence, or even existence, of other matrices. This makes it very difficult for people to consider the possibility that there might be more than one form of moral truth, or more than one valid framework for judging people or running a society.
An obvious example of the divinity mentioned here would be Father Ferapont in The Brothers K. He had an exaggerated sense of what was acceptable personal behavior and existed in a particularly mystical matrix that scarcely overlapped with our secular reality at all. Brave New World is a very odd instance of a sociocentric moral order focused on personal pleasure rather than either autonomy or “sanctity and sin, purity and pollution”.
In Faust and Doctor Faustus perhaps we see the development of ethical autonomy (the Calvinist need to find salvation as an individual) that combined with the Greek autonomy of Socrates (and the Cynics, as well). But, also in Doctor Faustus we see the German longing for a more supportive, sociocentric, community, resulting in National Socialism.
No comments:
Post a Comment