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The Righteous Mind
Chapter Eight - The Conservative Advantage - Continued
Fairness As Proportionality
[Rick Santelli, in February 2009, voices The Tea Party’s opposition to the] $75 billion program to help homeowners who had borrowed more money than they could now repay... “The government is promoting bad behavior.” He then urged President Obama to... hold a national referendum to see if we really wanted to subsidize the losers’ mortgages, or would we like to at least buy cars and buy houses in foreclosure and give them to people that might have a chance to actually prosper down the road and reward people that could carry the water instead of drink the water... This is America. How many of you people want to pay for your neighbors’ mortgage that has an extra bathroom and can’t pay their bills?... [sic]
p177 ...in fact Santelli was arguing for the law of karma.
p178 It took me a long time to understand fairness because, like many people who study morality, I had thought of fairness as a form of enlightened self-interest...
In the last ten years, however, evolutionary theorists have realized that reciprocal altruism is not so easy to find among nonhuman species... It seems to take more than just a high level of social intelligence to get reciprocal altruism going. It takes the sort of gossiping, punitive, moralistic community that emerged only when language and weaponry made it possible for early humans to take down bullies and then keep them down with a shared moral matrix.
...Reciprocity works great for pairs of people, who can play tit for tat, but in groups it’s usually not in an individual’s self-interest to be the enforcer -- the one who punishes slackers. Yet punish we do, and our propensity to punish turns out to be one of the keys to large-scale cooperation...
p179 [Another clever experiment shows that] ...Punishing bad behavior promotes virtue and benefits the group. And just as Glaucon argued in his ring of Gyges example, when the threat of punishment is removed, people behave selfishly.
Why [in the experiment I skipped] did most players pay [their funds] to punish [people who were not carrying their water]? In part, because it felt good to do so. We hate to see people take without giving. We want to see cheaters and slackers “get what’s coming to them.” We want the law of karma to run its course, and we’re willing to help enforce it.
p180 When people trade favors, both parties end up equal, more or less, and so it is easy to think (as I had) that reciprocal altruism was the source of moral intuitions about equality. But egalitarianism seems to be rooted more in the hatred of domination than in the love of equality per se. The feeling of being dominated or oppressed by a bully is very different from the feeling of being cheated in an exchange of goods or favors.
...we began to notice that in our data, concerns about political equality were related to a dislike of oppression and a concern for victims, not a desire for reciprocity. And if the love of political equality rests on the Liberty/oppression and Care/harm foundations rather than the Fairness/cheating foundation, then the Fairness foundation no longer has a split personality; it’s no longer about equality and proportionality. It is primarily about proportionality.
When people work together on a task, they generally want to see the hardest workers get the largest gains. People often want equality of outcomes, but that is because it is so often the case that people’s inputs are equal. When people divide up money, or any other kind of reward, equality is just a special case of the broader principle of proportionality. When a few members of a group contributed far more than the others -- or, even more powerfully, when a few contributed nothing -- most adults do not want to see the benefits distributed equally.
... now... we can look beyond individuals trying to choose partners (which I talked about in the last chapter). We can look more closely at people’s strong desires to protect their communities from cheaters, slackers, and free riders, who, if allowed to continue their ways without harassment, would cause others to stop cooperating, which would cause society to unravel. The Fairness foundation supports righteous anger when anyone cheats you directly... But it also supports a more generalized concern with cheaters, leeches, and anyone else who “drinks the water” rather than carries it for the group.
p181 In a large industrial society with a social safety net, the current triggers [of the Fairness foundation] are likely to include people who rely upon the safety net for more that an occasional lifesaving bounce. Concerns about the abuse of the safety net explains... the man who did not want his tax dollars going to “a non-producing, welfare collecting, single mother, crack baby producing future democrat.” It explains the conservative’s list of reasons why people vote Democratic such as “laziness” and “You despise people who work for their money, live their own lives, and don’t rely on the government for help cradle to grave.” It explains Santelli’s rant about bailing out homeowners, many of whom had lied on their mortgage applications to qualify for large loans they did not deserve...
A personal aside here, I got one of those 1990's loans that banks shouldn't have been making (I was a free-lance programmer with no guaranteed source of income). I didn't actually lie -- so far as I can recall, and I tend to remember things like that -- but that was because they were so eager to make the loans that they didn't bother to ask the obvious questions. I paid off my 30 year mortgage in about 10 years, and am very grateful to the idiot bankers who made these loans. If I hadn't been forced to buy my apartment; and if the banks weren't in the middle of a sort of banking rave at that moment, I wouldn't be able to live in San Francisco. So from my point of view, it all worked out for the best.
Three Versus Six
...The various moralities found on the political left tend to rest most strongly on the Care/harm and Liberty/oppression foundation. These two foundations support ideals of social justice, which emphasize compassion for the poor and a struggle for political equality among the subgroups that comprise society. Social justice movements emphasize solidarity -- they call for people to come together to fight the oppression of bullying, dominating elites. (This is why there is no separate equality foundation, People don’t crave equality for it’s own sake; they fight for equality when they perceive that they are being bullied or dominated, as during the American and French revolutions, and the cultural revolutions of the 1960s.)
Invoking the American and French revolutions here may have been a mistake. My understanding of the American Revolution is that it was entirely in agreement with what is given here as conservative or libertarian morality. The Colonists wanted to be left alone to trade with whomever they pleased and to exploit the Native American lands to the west without restriction. Just as the secessionists of the Confederate States of America wished to exploit their “property” as they saw fit. The bullying and domination was that of a parent refusing to allow a child to set the cat on fire.
The French Revolution (and the recent Occupy movement) are somewhat more complex as they involve coalitions with different agendas. The moderate/liberal faction was indeed attempting to redress perceived wrongs. But the more radical factions -- besides simply wanting to see things burn -- had class or faction favoring regime change and wealth reallocation in mind.
p182 Everyone -- left, right, and center -- cares about Care/harm, but... liberals turn out to be more disturbed by signs of violence and suffering, compared to conservatives and especially libertarians.
Everyone -- left, right, and center -- cares about Liberty/oppression, but each political faction cares in a different way. In the contemporary United States, liberals are most concerned about the rights of certain vulnerable groups (e.g., racial minorities, children, animals). and they look to government to defend the weak against oppression by the strong. Conservatives, in contrast, hold more traditional ideas of liberty as the right to be left alone, and they often resent liberal programs that use government to infringe on their liberties in order to protect the groups that liberals care most about. (Note 56. Berlin 1997/1958 referred to this kind of liberty as “negative liberty” -- the right to be left alone. He pointed out that the left had developed a new concept of “positive liberty” during the twentieth century -- a conception of the rights and resources that people needed in order to enjoy liberty.) For example, small business owners overwhelmingly support the Republican Party in part because they resent the government telling them how to run their businesses under its banner of protecting workers, minorities, consumers, and the environment. This helps explain why libertarians have sided with the Republican Party in recent decades. Libertarians care about liberty almost to the exclusion of all other concerns, and their conception of liberty is the same as that of the Republicans... the right to be left alone, free from government interference.
Except -- for the Republicans -- when drugs or sex is involved when they want government all up in your business.
p183 The Fairness/cheating foundation is about proportionality and the law of karma. It is about making sure that people get what they deserve, and do not get things they do not deserve. Everyone -- left, right, and center -- cares about proportionality; everyone gets angry when people take more than they deserve. But conservatives care more, and they rely on the Fairness foundation more heavily -- once fairness is restricted to proportionality. For example, how relevant is it to your morality whether “everyone is pulling their own weight”? Do you agree that “employees who work hardest should be paid the most”? Liberals don’t reject these items, but they are ambivalent. Conservatives, in contrast, endorse items such as these enthusiastically.
You could look at the antipathy on the left for the very rich and for corporations to be this same, “people get what they deserve, and do not get things they do not deserve”.
Liberals may think that they own the concept of karma... but a morality based on compassion and concerns about oppression forces you to violate karma (proportionality) in many ways... liberals are often uncomfortable with the negative side of karma -- retribution... After all, retribution causes harm, and harm activates the Care/harm foundation. A recent study even found that liberal professors give out a narrower range of grades than do conservative professors... [who are] more willing to reward the best students and punish the worst.
The remaining three foundations -- Loyalty/betrayal, Authority/subversion, and Sanctity/degradation -- show the biggest and most consistent partisan differences. Liberals are ambivalent about these foundations at best, whereas social conservatives embrace them. (Libertarians have little use for them, which is why they tend to support liberal positions on social issues such as gay marriage, drug use, and laws to “protect” the American flag.)
p184 ...Liberal moral matrices rest on the Care/harm. Liberty/oppression, and Fairness/cheating foundations, although liberals are often willing to trade away fairness (as proportionality) when it conflicts with compassion or with their desire to fight oppression. Conservative morality rests on all six foundations, although conservatives are more willing than liberals to sacrifice Care and let some people get hurt in order to achieve their many other moral objectives.
p185 ...Why do rural and working-class Americans generally vote Republican when it is the Democratic Party that wants to redistribute money more evenly?
...[They are] in fact voting for their moral interests... they don’t want their nation to devote itself primarily to the care of victims and the pursuit of social justice. Until Democrats understand the Durkheimian vision of society and the difference between a six-foundation morality and a three-foundation morality, they will not understand what makes people vote Republican...
Class morality - Haidt is looking at this from the perspective of current American politics, but how do these moral foundations map with pre-bourgeois class structures? The peasants. The Gentry. The Church.
I'd guess they were all conservative and socicentric. I still think the nobility is a special -- individualistic -- case. And recalling Thorstein Veblen's brilliant insight into the similarity between the upper and under classes, whatever would pass for an underclass in a traditional society would also probably reject many moral foundations. But, then again, Veblen was mostly looking at Calvinist attitudes toward work. Still, the upper and under (criminal) classes both tend to act as parasites on the remainder of the population, and that would seem to be common to traditional and bourgeois societies.
And I have to repeat, once again, what I learned from Annie Dillard, that in nature 10% of insects are parasitic. I think there is a similar proportion among humans.
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The Righteous Mind
Chapter Seven - The Moral Foundations of Politics
p129 Behind every act of altruism, heroism, and human decency you’ll find either selfishness or stupidity. That, at least, is the view long held by many social scientists who accepted the idea that Homo sapiens is really Homo economicus. “Economic man” is a simple creature who makes all of life’s choices like a shopper in a supermarket with plenty of time to compare jars of applesauce. If that’s your view of human nature, then it’s easy to create mathematical models of behavior because there’s really just one principle at work: self-interest. People do whatever gets them the most benefits for the lowest cost.
[There follows a test we take comparing a series of choices that should be equivalent -- as neither costs us more -- but we do feel differently about the options] ...If you found any of the actions in column B worse than their counterparts in column A, then congratulations, you are a human being, not an economist’s fantasy. You have concerns beyond narrow self-interest. You have a working set of moral foundations.
This exercise turned out to be more interesting for me than the author probably intended. I just barely passed as human. I acknowledged that I did indeed consider sticking a sterile hypodermic needle into a child to be worse than into myself (care/harm). I didn’t initially pass the stolen TV test, not because I don’t see that as worse, but because I wouldn’t accept the non-stolen TV either (fairness/cheating). I’ll give him this one, so I pass on two of the five questions.
After that it goes down hill, and this will be explained in the coming pages: I would say something critical about my nation both at home and abroad (loyalty/betrayal). I’m not sure about slapping a male friend or my father (Authority/subversion), with their permission. I would definitely need to be paid to do either. I said I would do both for $100, but I’m not sure that’s really true. I would need to be paid at least $1,000 to attend either of the avant-garde plays (sanctity/degradation), but I’m not sure I would need to be paid more than that to watch the people acting like chimps. If the less degrading play was performed by mimes I would totally fail this one.
A Note on Innateness
p130 It used to be risky for a scientist to assert that anything about human behavior was innate...
...now we know that traits can be innate without being either hardwired or universal. As the neuroscientist Gary Marcus explains, “Nature bestows upon the newborn a considerably complex brain, but one that is best seen as prewired -- flexible and subject to change -- rather than hardwired, fixed, and immutable.
I get this distinction but "prewired" and "hardwired" are equivalent terms in the world of wiring, as opposed to the world of intellectual metaphors.
...Marcus suggests a better analogy: The brain is like a book, the first draft of which is written by the genes during fetal development. No chapters are complete at birth, and some are just rough outlines waiting to be filled in during childhood. But not a single chapter -- be it on sexuality, language, food preferences, or morality -- consists of blank pages on which a society can inscribe any conceivable set of words. Marcus’s analogy leads to the best definition of innateness I have ever seen:
p131 Nature provides a first draft, which experience then revises. . . . “Built-in” does not mean unmalleable; it means “organized in advance of experience.”
The list of five moral foundations was my first attempt to specify how the righteous mind was “organized in advance of experience.” But Moral Foundations Theory also tries to explain how that first draft gets revised during childhood to produce the diversity of moralities that we find across cultures -- and across the political spectrum.
The Care/Harm Foundation
p132 ...your mind is automatically responsive to certain proportions and patterns that distinguish human children from adults. Cuteness primes us to care, nurture, protect, and interact. It gets the elephant leaning... the Care foundation can be triggered by any child... [infant toys] were designed by a toy company to trigger your Care foundation...
It's good he doesn't have a test here because I would fail it unless he threw in puppies or baby goats.
...
It makes no evolutionary sense for you to care about what happens to my son Max, or a hungry child in a faraway country, or a baby seal. But Darwin doesn’t have to explain why you shed any particular tear. He just has to explain why you have tear ducts in the first place... Darwin must explain the original triggers of each module. The current triggers can change rapidly. We care about violence towards many more classes of victims today than our grandparents did...
p134 Political parties and interest groups strive to make their concerns become current triggers of your moral modules. To get your vote, your money, or your time, they must activate at least one of your moral foundations...
This is also true for street beggars and is behind many cons.
Bumper stickers are often tribal badges; they advertise the teams we support... The moral matrix of liberals, in America and elsewhere, rests more heavily on the Care foundation than do the matrices of conservatives...
...but conservative caring is somewhat different -- it is aimed not at animals or at people in other countries but at those who’ve sacrificed for the group. [like veterans] It is not universalist; it is more local, and blended with loyalty.
The Fairness/Cheating Foundation
...
p136 Evolutionary theorists often speak of genes as being “selfish,” meaning that they can only influence an animal to do things that will spread copies of that gene. But one of the most important insights into the origins of morality is that “selfish” genes can give rise to generous creatures, as long as those creatures are selective in their generosity. Altruism toward kin is not a puzzle at all. Altruism toward non-kin, on the other hand, has presented one of the longest-running puzzles in the history of evolutionary thinking. A big step toward its solution came in 1971 when Robert Trivers published his theory of reciprocal altruism.
Trivers noted that evolution could create altruism in a species where individuals could remember their prior interactions with other individuals and then limit their current niceness to [just] those who were likely to repay the favor... Trivers proposed that we evolved a set of moral emotions that make us play “tit for tat.” We’re usually nice to people when we first meet them. But after that we’re selective: we cooperate with those who have been nice to us, and we shun those who took advantage of us.
...The original triggers of Fairness modules are acts of cooperation or selfishness that people show toward us. We feel pleasure, liking, and friendship when people show signs that they can be trusted to reciprocate. We feel anger, contempt, and even sometimes disgust when people try to cheat us or take advantage of us.
The current triggers of the Fairness modules include a great many things that have gotten linked, culturally and politically, to the dynamics of reciprocity and cheating. On the left, concerns about equality and social justice are based in part on the Fairness foundation -- wealthy and powerful groups are accused of gaining by exploiting those at the bottom while not paying their “fair share” of the tax burden... On the right, the Tea Party movement is also very concerned about fairness. They see Democrats as “socialists” who take money from hardworking Americans and give it to lazy people... and to illegal immigrants...
p138 Everyone cares about fairness, but there are two major kinds. On the left, fairness often implies equality, but on the right it means proportionality -- people should be rewarded in proportion to what they contribute, even if that guarantees unequal outcomes.
The Loyalty/Betrayal Foundation
...
[Description of Robbers Cave State Park camp experiment by Muzafer Sherif]]
We all recognize this portrait of boyhood. The male mind appears to be innately tribal -- that is, structured in advance of experience so that boys and men enjoy doing the sorts of things that lead to group cohesion and success in conflicts between groups (including warfare). The virtue of loyalty matters a great deal to both sexes, though the objects of loyalty tend to be teams and coalitions for boys, in contrast to two-person relationships for girls.
Despite some claims by anthropologists in the 1970s, human beings are not the only species that engages in war or kills its own kind. It now appears that chimpanzees guard their territory, raid the territory of rivals, and, if they can pull it off, kill the males of the neighboring group and take their territory and their females. And it now appears that warfare has been a constant feature of human life since long before agriculture and private property. For millions of years, therefore, our ancestors faced the adaptive challenge of forming and maintaining coalitions that could fend off challenges and attacks from rival groups. We are the descendants of successful tribalists, not [of] their more individualistic cousins.
p140 Many psychological systems contribute to effective tribalism and success in inter-group competition. The Loyalty/betrayal foundation is just a part of our innate preparation for meeting the adaptive challenge of forming cohesive coalitions. The original trigger for the Loyalty foundation is anything that tells you who is a team player and who is a traitor, particularly when your team is fighting with other teams. But because we love tribalism so much, we seek out ways to form groups and teams that can compete just for the fun of competing. Much of the psychology of sports is about expanding the current triggers of the Loyalty foundation so that people can have the pleasure of binding themselves together to pursue harmless trophies. (A trophy is evidence of victory. The urge to take trophies -- including body parts from slain foes -- is widespread in warfare, occurring even during modern times.)
And, Yes, modern times includes the American side of the Pacific War.
...
The love of loyal teammates is matched by a corresponding hatred of traitors, who are usually considered to be far worse than enemies. The Koran, for example, is full of warnings about duplicity of out-group members, particularly Jews, yet the Koran does not command Muslims to kill Jews. Far worse than a Jew is an apostate... Similarly, in The Inferno, Dante reserves the innermost circle of hell -- and the most excruciating suffering -- for the crime of treachery. Far worse than lust, gluttony, violence, or even heresy is the betrayal of one’s family, team, or nation.
p141 Given such strong links to love and hate, is it any wonder that the Loyalty foundation plays an important role in politics? The left tends toward universalism and away from nationalism, so it often has trouble connecting to voters who rely on the Loyalty foundation, American liberals are often hostile to American foreign policy...
Settembrini, in The Magic Mountain, is an interesting instance of this as his universalism was over-ridden by his Italian nationalism... just like Mussolini. (And since I've written about chapters in advance of publishing, I happen to know that this reference to Mussolini will resonate later.
The Authority/Subversion Foundation
...
p142 The urge to respect hierarchical relationships is so deep that many languages encode it directly. In French... speakers are forced to choose whether they’ll address someone using the respectful form (vous) or the familiar form (tu)... Until recently, Americans addressed strangers and superiors using title plus last name (Mrs. Smith, Dr. Jones)... If you’ve ever felt a flash of distaste when a salesperson called you by first name without being invited to do so... then you have experienced the activation of some of the modules that comprise the Authority/subversion foundations.
...
[Submissive displays of chickens, dogs, chimpanzees considered.]
...authority should not be confused with power. Even among chimpanzees, where dominance hierarchies are indeed about raw power and the ability to inflict violence, the alpha male performs some socially beneficial functions, such as taking on the “control role.” He resolves some disputes and suppresses much of the violent conflict that erupts when there is no clear alpha male. As the primatologist Frans de Waal puts it: “Without agreement on rank and a certain respect for authority there can be no great sensitivity to social rules, as anyone who has tried to teach simple house rules to a cat will agree.”
p143 This control role is quite visible in human tribes and early civilizations. Many of the earliest legal texts begin by grounding the king’s rule in divine choice, and then they dedicate the king’s authority to providing order and justice...
...
When I began graduate school I subscribed to the common liberal belief that hierarchy = power = exploitation = evil. But when I began to work with Alan Fiske, I discovered that I was wrong. Fiske’s theory of the four basic kinds of social relationships includes one called “Authority Ranking.” Drawing on his fieldwork in Africa, Fiske showed that people who relate to each other in this way have mutual expectations that are more like those of a parent and child than those of a dictator and fearful underlings:
In Authority Ranking, people have asymmetric positions in a linear hierarchy in which subordinates defer, respect, and (perhaps) obey, while superiors take precedence and take pastoral responsibility for subordinates. Examples are military hierarchies . . . ancestor worship ({including} offerings of filial piety and expectations of protection and enforcement of norms), {and} monotheistic religious moralities . . . Authority Ranking relationships are based on perceptions of legitimate asymmetries, not coercive power; they are not inherently exploitative.
My first thought was the Roman political structure where the Patricians (the word literally means “fathers”) had exactly this relationship with the Plebeians. The result was hundreds of years of class struggle. Though it is worth noting that even after all the revolutions, the Roman upper classes continued to hold this “pastoral” status in the state.
p144 The Authority foundation... is more complex than the other foundations because its modules must look in two directions -- up toward superiors and down toward subordinates. These modules work together to help individuals meet the adaptive challenge of forging beneficial relationships within hierarchies. We are the descendants of the individuals who were best able to play the game -- to rise in status [why would they have to rise in status?] while cultivating the protection of superiors and the allegiance of subordinates.
Here I’m reminded again of Christopher Tietjens and his mourning of the passing of the Tory order. That Tory order was precisely this relationship -- both up and down. This is also why Dostoyevsky was so upset about the freeing of the serfs. America represented a world without an Authority foundation -- all the talk about machinery, in The Brothers K. was misdirection.
The original triggers of some of these modules include patterns of appearance and behavior that indicate higher versus lower rank. Like chimpanzees, people track and remember who is above whom. When people within a hierarchy order act in ways that negate or subvert that order, we feel it instantly, even if we ourselves have not been directly harmed. [Remember one of Pavel’s most annoying characteristics -- to Dostoyevsky -- was his dress and grooming. The dress and housing of the middle classes would also be seen as an affront to the natural (Tory) hierarchy.] If authority is in part about protecting order and fending off chaos, then everyone has a stake in supporting the existing order and in holding people accountable for fulfilling the obligations of their station.
The current triggers of the Authority/subversion foundation, therefore, include anything that is construed as an act of obedience, disobedience, respect, disrespect, submission, or rebellion, with regard to authorities perceived to be legitimate. Current triggers also include acts that are seen to subvert traditions, institutions, or values that are perceived to provide stability. As with the Loyalty foundation, it is much easier for the political right to build on this foundation than it is for the left, which often defines itself in part by its opposition to hierarchy, inequality, and power...
This also explains why I have such a hard time getting riled up by many of the “BlackLivesMatter” cause célèbres.
I'm going to break this chapter in half here and resume it next time.
