The kind of rationality that's... not.
July 16, 2006 8:00 AM   Subscribe

The neurophysiology of political reasoning: "Essentially, it appears as if partisans twirl the cognitive kaleidoscope until they get the conclusions they want, and then they get massively reinforced for it, with the elimination of negative emotional states and activation of positive ones." But where do we get our initial biases? (via)
posted by anotherpanacea (21 comments total) 2 users marked this as a favorite
 
The second link is pdf. Doh!
posted by anotherpanacea at 8:09 AM on July 16, 2006


I'm suspect that is where a person's initial biases come from. The "5 Foundations of Morality" should be immediately suspect. I would argue, on the contrary, that people are socialized into beliefs which shape their identity. Attacking someone beliefs becomes an attack on not only the beliefs, but the person. As far as the "5 Foundations of Morality" go, the research seems strange because it is put into the Conservative-Liberal context. Where would a libertarian fit (re-read the first link)? What about others who fit neither left or right, or those who fit left and right?

Personally, I would argue along these lines.
posted by j-urb at 9:49 AM on July 16, 2006


from the pdf: liberals rated concerns related to harm and reciprocity as being significantly more relevant to moral judgment than had conservatives

"This sort of conclusion stinks of the rabble, which sees in bad actions only the wretched consequences and, in fact, makes the judgment "It is stupid to act badly," while "good" it assumes without further thought is identical with "useful and agreeable." So far as every utilitarianism of morality is concerned, we may guess from the start it had the same origin and follow our noses: we will seldom go wrong." - Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
posted by fleetmouse at 9:59 AM on July 16, 2006


Previously.
posted by public at 10:34 AM on July 16, 2006


Dammit, I was hoping this thread would catch a blaze.

:blows on embers:

Come on! I can't even get a reaction out of quoting Friedrich "human pipe bomb" Nietzsche? :D

Anyways thanks for the great post, anotherpanacea - I downloaded that pdf and another one linked on the blog to read on an upcoming boring flight.

j-urb: I would say that libertarians are morally motivated primarily by reciprocity (speaking within the confines of this system) - though they might frame it as free-market reciprocity, mutually beneficial exchange of goods, etc.
posted by fleetmouse at 12:43 PM on July 16, 2006


I'd suggest, in this context, that libertarianism is not an ethical/moral viewpoint. That is, it has no recognizably moral features, but rather appeals directly to abstract notions of rights in asking to be left alone. Some libertarians may simply be skeptical about the state, but these people are not morally libertarian: they have values with which they judge others and themselves. In that sense, they may be either "liberal" or "conservative."

From the second link: "The five foundations are psychological preparations for caring about and reacting emotionally to
harm, reciprocity (including justice, fairness, and rights), ingroup, hierarchy, and purity."

So while 'liberals' are only concerned with the first two (care and justice) while conservatives must balance these against the last three, it's not clear that libertarians (in their description of desirable political policies and their justifications for that position) respond to any at all. Nietzsche is apropos here, as the modern libertarian is largely a nihilist... the worst possible character type in Nietzsche's view.
posted by anotherpanacea at 12:58 PM on July 16, 2006


Not really. That's a misreading of both Nietzsche and libertarianism. Nietzsche had several kinds of nihilists, some tragic, some contemptible. Libertarians are sort of similar to the "Priests" but not that close, because while they prioritise the world of abstract reason over the real world, they don't do so in a way that seriously threatens power structures as they are. They're not Last Men because the Last Men are technocrats without ideology. Libertarianism probably falls under the arguments against anarchism rather than nihilism proper.

As for libertarianism itself, of course it has "ethical/moral" viewpoints. This inability to see the moral claims of the other side is pretty much exactly what the "5 foundations" guys are writing against. Libertarianism's moral claims vary widely in how robust they are and how well they demand one's rational assent, but they certainly exist.

Good post though. Interesting subject.
posted by Pseudoephedrine at 1:37 PM on July 16, 2006 [1 favorite]


Purity?

Purity Of Essence?

Really, people make moral decisions on the basis of the concept of Purity? Yikes.
posted by Freen at 3:54 PM on July 16, 2006


This inability to see the moral claims of the other side is pretty much exactly what the "5 foundations" guys are writing against.

Yep... the closest I can think of would be the Nozickian theory of Entitlement, which I will argue is not a moral intuition, at all. I welcome challenges to that assertion, but at this point there is nothing about Nozick (or libertarians) that strikes me as particularly moral.

Nietzsche had several kinds of nihilists, some tragic, some contemptible.

Hmmm... here we are in agreement (except in the use of the word 'tragic,' but I know what you mean), so I don't see why you're accusing me of misreading. But you indicate that perhaps nihilists are occasionally celebrated, which is simply untrue in Nietzsche's work. Nihilists are always the least healthy of the Nietzchean characters.

Libertarianism probably falls under the arguments against anarchism rather than nihilism proper.


The attempt to conflate libertarianism with the anarchist tradition is simply absurd. Emma Goldman was an anarchist; Ayn Rand was a libertarian. Anarcho-capitalism is either a contradiciton in terms or just capitalism par excellence. The market, after all, is a form of government well-known for its tyrannical tendencies.
posted by anotherpanacea at 4:51 PM on July 16, 2006


Really, people make moral decisions on the basis of the concept of Purity?

You didn't really think that gay marriages would destroy heterosexual ones, did you? People think butt-sex is gross, and often base their politics on that single judgment.
posted by anotherpanacea at 4:52 PM on July 16, 2006


People think butt-sex is gross, and often base their politics on that single judgment.

I guarantee a good chunk of the people who are against gay marriage are regular consumers of heterosexual anal porn (I'm basing this claim on an excruciatingly hilarious memory I have involving a youth group minister, Kraft pasta salad, and a box of porn videos) -- though granted it's probably the kind in which the woman screams in pain rather than pleasure, which just satisfies their moral passion for hierarchical sexual relationships.
posted by stemlot at 8:40 PM on July 16, 2006


Yep... the closest I can think of would be the Nozickian theory of Entitlement, which I will argue is not a moral intuition, at all. I welcome challenges to that assertion, but at this point there is nothing about Nozick (or libertarians) that strikes me as particularly moral.

Sure it is. It's a formulation of the principles of distributive justice - how goods are to be distributed in order to be distributed justly amongst people. You may disagree with it (I do), but that's different. Nozick's entitlement theory deals with a specific concern of morality, one that goes back to Aristotle. To say that it is not a "moral theory" is simply parochial.

Hmmm... here we are in agreement (except in the use of the word 'tragic,' but I know what you mean), so I don't see why you're accusing me of misreading. But you indicate that perhaps nihilists are occasionally celebrated, which is simply untrue in Nietzsche's work. Nihilists are always the least healthy of the Nietzchean characters.

Nietzsche has various kinds of nihilist of various amounts of merit. I'm not claiming that he celebrates them, but he treats them differently based on the typology of nihilism he sets out.

For example, the "true nihilist" is the person who cannot stop willing, who possesses a great capacity to will in fact, but who, finding every thing he has considered unsuitable to will to be, wills nothingness itself. This is the "tragic" nihilist I was referring to earlier. This person is desperately sick in Nietzsche's view, but is not a contemptible person. Rather, it is tragic that their capacity for willing greatness has been stunted by Theory. Giving them the hope to become free spirits is one of the implicit goals of Nietzsche's work.

In contrast, the Last Men are unredeemable, completely contemptible, and utterly without any sort of merit. Priests are impressive for their dedication to the will to truth as will to power, but contemptible because they have become pathological in pursuit of truth, such that they have forgotten honesty ("truth" and "honesty" are distinct in Nietzsche, but that's another discussion). And so on, through the half dozen or so types he set out (the gathering near the end of Zarathustra gives a rough list that he elaborates on in other works).

The attempt to conflate libertarianism with the anarchist tradition is simply absurd. Emma Goldman was an anarchist; Ayn Rand was a libertarian. Anarcho-capitalism is either a contradiciton in terms or just capitalism par excellence. The market, after all, is a form of government well-known for its tyrannical tendencies.

You missed the point of what I was getting at. Nietzsche wouldn't see any fundamental difference between an anarchist and an anarcho-capitalist, just as he didn't between socialists and anarchists. The distinctions you're making simply wouldn't matter to him.

He would most probably treat libertarianism as a form of socialism or anarchism because all three ideologies seek to gain power in the name of freedom and justice, and claim that they will do so through the reconciliation of theory and practice through reason. That one favours markets, and the other the state and the third neither of them would just be a technical debate.
posted by Pseudoephedrine at 9:42 PM on July 16, 2006


Pseudoephedrine- We remain in agreement on Nietzsche, so I'm just gonna drop that. What's important about Nietzsche is that he starts with a rejection of moral intuition, so he'd be opposed to the thrust of Haidt's article. (My comments on anarcho-capitalism were unwarranted, I see. This is good.)

Nozick... there's a problem. You suggest that Nozick's Entitlement theory is "a formulation of the principles of distributive justice." I don't quite agree, as just distribution is posited as a possible -result- of that theory, but entitlement is a basic proposition for Nozick. For Nozick, just outcomes or distributions are not important, (this is the basis of my discomfort with Nozick) but rather he concerns himself only with just principles in the acquisition and transfer of goods. In other words, entitlement is basically an extension of an intuition we all have about property: "what's mine is mine." I agree that this sense of exclusivity in property is an intuition, but I disagree that it is moral.

In fact, I dispute whether intuitions that present themselves as moral are really moral at all: as we can see from Haidt, both the moral sense of purity and of ingroup exclusivity are obviously immoral while suggesting otherwise to those evolutionarily predisposed to these demonic imperatives. While I wouldn't go so far as to equate morality with altruism, I do think it must be reasonable. In this sense, the notion that any transfer or acquisition is or was ever justly achieved seems absurd to me. Set aside the problems of colonialism and tyranny under which most present wealth was developed, and you've still got to account for the justice of property's claim on future generations, who are disadvantaged during enclosure and acquisition (having not been born) but, according to Nozick, subject to its results. Bah: Kant disproved this claim more than two centuries ago, based on the simple insight that a finite earth cannot be infinitely sub-divided.
posted by anotherpanacea at 7:16 AM on July 17, 2006


I think our "initial" biases favor our cultural investments, inherited or otherwise, be they skin color or gender or religion. This is how common sense is grounded: The intuitive or native understanding that everything believed is just a luxury or advantage and that we are, in the end, equal in actual, physical needs. This is where the terms common bias and special bias are justified to denote a bias that is either serving common needs, or merely one's vested interests.

The greatest bias in the world is a faith in belief itself (true belief). This converted the luxury of belief into a necessity of sorts, spawning a fundamentalist dilemma to have faith in words in order to gain one's "true" physical needs. So, what innocently began as a pursuit of "true" knowledge, ends in magical, polar or purist thinking. This is the unfalsifiable and circular mindset of duality and opposition, which are the dogmatic assumptions of both Marxism and its counterpart, libertarianism, as well as all modern religion. Libertarianism is the fatalistic fallacy from the intuitive realization that "We can choose, therefore we are free (from fate)" but which dogmatically concludes, "I am free, therefore I choose (my fate)."
posted by Brian B. at 11:01 AM on July 17, 2006


I don't quite agree, as just distribution is posited as a possible -result- of that theory, but entitlement is a basic proposition for Nozick. For Nozick, just outcomes or distributions are not important, (this is the basis of my discomfort with Nozick) but rather he concerns himself only with just principles in the acquisition and transfer of goods. In other words, entitlement is basically an extension of an intuition we all have about property: "what's mine is mine." I agree that this sense of exclusivity in property is an intuition, but I disagree that it is moral.

Why isn't it though? It deals with moral concerns (justice), establishes rules of conduct which are necessary, if not sufficient, for justice, and which contrasts with other moral positions (other forms of distributive justice). I think entitlement theory is insufficient for justice, but it's certainly concerned with justice, and proposes certain conditions for justice to be the case.

In fact, I dispute whether intuitions that present themselves as moral are really moral at all: as we can see from Haidt, both the moral sense of purity and of ingroup exclusivity are obviously immoral while suggesting otherwise to those evolutionarily predisposed to these demonic imperatives.

I disagree that they are not moral concerns. They are not moral concerns I share, but they are moral concerns. Not to make an ad hominem argument, but merely to point out how pervasive these concerns are, re-read your own argument against including libertarians amongst anarchists in light of "ingroup exclusivity" and "purity" and then consider whether that was not at its root a moral argument about excluding the immoral people from a categorisation so as not to taint the "good" people by association.

Another, somewhat infamous example, is Godwin's Law. What are we trying to do by comparing someone to the Nazis? Well, most of the time, we are trying to "taint" them by association with them. If we can make the association stick, we have successfully cast someone outside of the moral-rational community. They are no longer "pure" enough nor are they part of the "ingroup". Similar things go on with racism, sexism, etc.

My point here is not to say that it is bad that we cast actual Nazis out of the moral community, but to show that even we - rational individuals concerned primarily with justice and morality - have concerns that are prima facie moral and that involve notions of "purity" and "ingroup". What differentiates our use of these concepts from others is (ideally) that our use is founded in rational division - Nazis are corrosive to justice and care, to include them in our moral projects and web of moral concerns would endanger the existence of everything else we care about. In contrast, the nationalist/racist/sexist/whatever does not base their use of their principles on application of critical rational inquiry, but on de facto historical realities, which may or may not be moral (they usually aren't, just to be clear).
posted by Pseudoephedrine at 11:36 AM on July 17, 2006


The off-the-cuffness of this conversation is causing some mispeaking and misunderstanding on my part, for which I apologize. I hope this clear up my position.

So: entitlement theory is concerned with -rights- and something it calls 'justice.' The deontological status of entitlement rights isn't particularly complicated in Nozick's work; he doesn't justify entitlement so much as he asserts it with the help of our most selfish instincts. Moreover, the entitlement hypothesis is not at all concerned with distribution, and Nozick uses the word 'justice' in a way that Aristotle, for instance, would not recognize. (He's simply misapplying the concept of justice which must for Aristotle be either arithmetic or geometric, i.e. a matter of distribution of goods either equally or according to merit.)

We run into the same problem with the word 'morality.' I have asserted that we humans have a number of imperatives running, some of which present themselves to us as 'moral.' However, only reason can tell me whether my desire to castrate rapists (for instance) is a moral impulse or the manifestation of immoral rage. So morality can not be intuitive, though morality must be intimately related to our intuitions. The same is true about impulses towards purity and exclusion, as well as respect for hierarchies. Yet justice and care can never go wrong in this way, since they immediately submit themselves for rational review. We look at a innocent being tortured, and we feel the injustice of the injury: then we are informed that he is a terrorist and child molester, and our judgment shifts (perhaps not completely, if we disagree with torture, but the judgment is biddable.) Yet our intuitions regarding purity do not work this way: nothing can make shit smell sweet, and homophobes are notoriously intransigent about their biases.

What you call ad hominem is in fact a good warning, but I'm not revolted by libertarians... as the saying goes, "Some of my best friends are libertarian!" Rather, I simply think they are wrong. The point you make about 'purity' and 'tainting' seems to me overly metaphorical; you've extended the jargon of purity beyond what Haidt intends, and I think lost the thread of the argument. If purity is about avoiding things we take to be 'gross' (and therefore unhealthy) I doubt verbal association with Nazis intends to create this sense of revulsion or abjection. It -is- about ingroup fidelity and outgroup exclusion, because "we" are not Nazis, and would feel alienated and bereft of identity if we recognized a strong similarity.
posted by anotherpanacea at 1:27 PM on July 17, 2006


So: entitlement theory is concerned with -rights- and something it calls 'justice.' The deontological status of entitlement rights isn't particularly complicated in Nozick's work; he doesn't justify entitlement so much as he asserts it with the help of our most selfish instincts.

Certainly so. But this doesn't mean it's not moral. In order to make that claim, you'd have to argue that self-interest is completely and inherently amoral or immoral. I'm unaware of a single moral philosopher who thinks that self-interest is inherently immoral, rather than being contextually immoral. We can argue that Nozick fails to adequately balance self-interest with other concerns, but this is a moral argument, and it presupposes that entitlement theory is concerned with morality as well.

Moreover, the entitlement hypothesis is not at all concerned with distribution, and Nozick uses the word 'justice' in a way that Aristotle, for instance, would not recognize. (He's simply misapplying the concept of justice which must for Aristotle be either arithmetic or geometric, i.e. a matter of distribution of goods either equally or according to merit.)

Of course it's concerned with distribution. It determines that goods should be distributed in such and such a way (through just transfers and acquisitions, etc.). It also closes off certain kinds of distribution (through unjust transfers and acquisitions). Nozick and Aristotle are not in agreement about many aspects of morality - that they disagree about the specifics of justice does not mean they are not both, qua moral philosophers, concerned with it.

Once again, simply recognising that Nozick's theory is a moral theory does not mean we have to accept it as true, or as particularly moral to put into practice.


We run into the same problem with the word 'morality.' I have asserted that we humans have a number of imperatives running, some of which present themselves to us as 'moral.'


Yes, but you haven't given us a good idea of how to distinguish moral imperatives from non-moral imperatives.

However, only reason can tell me whether my desire to castrate rapists (for instance) is a moral impulse or the manifestation of immoral rage. So morality can not be intuitive, though morality must be intimately related to our intuitions.

You're packing too much into the word "intuitive" there. Morality cannot be uncritical, sure. Morality is not a case of instructions being beamed into our brain, sure. Morality must result solely from critical reflection towards the determination of principles whose mechanistic application can tell us how to act in a situation: No. To tip my intellectual position, I'm in sympathy more with Bernard Williams, Aristotle and John McDowell - the virtue ethicists.

The same is true about impulses towards purity and exclusion, as well as respect for hierarchies. Yet justice and care can never go wrong in this way, since they immediately submit themselves for rational review.

No they don't. They can, and should be submitted for rational scrutiny, but the history of lynch mobs shows that "justice" is not a property that is fundamentally associated with rational review of it. The history of obsessives and stalkers and unhealthy relationships show that "care" is not scrutinised unless it's well, scrutinised. Unless one rationally investigates these matters, they don't include any process of rational investigation.

We look at a innocent being tortured, and we feel the injustice of the injury: then we are informed that he is a terrorist and child molester, and our judgment shifts (perhaps not completely, if we disagree with torture, but the judgment is biddable.) Yet our intuitions regarding purity do not work this way: nothing can make shit smell sweet, and homophobes are notoriously intransigent about their biases.

Sure they do. Otherwise we would never have made the strides we have against racism and homophobia. Nor would we eat strange foods. Disgust is as open to rational investigation as any other motivation - both Martha Nussbaum and Jean-Paul Sartre have written famous books investigating disgust - its genesis, its development, its loss, etc.

Sure, disgust is a very strongly rooted emotion that is hard to change, but that doesn't mean it is given or set in stone. It simply means that we must take similarly powerful steps to overcome it, rather than just haranguing them.

What you call ad hominem is in fact a good warning, but I'm not revolted by libertarians... as the saying goes, "Some of my best friends are libertarian!" Rather, I simply think they are wrong.

Your point wasn't that they are wrong though, but that the association of anarchists and libertarians was "simply absurd". Why is it absurd? Sure, they disagree politically, but so do socialists and anarchists, and they are often associated without anyone calling it "absurd".

The point you make about 'purity' and 'tainting' seems to me overly metaphorical; you've extended the jargon of purity beyond what Haidt intends, and I think lost the thread of the argument. If purity is about avoiding things we take to be 'gross' (and therefore unhealthy) I doubt verbal association with Nazis intends to create this sense of revulsion or abjection. It -is- about ingroup fidelity and outgroup exclusion, because "we" are not Nazis, and would feel alienated and bereft of identity if we recognized a strong similarity.

Purity's a huge part of it as well. Consider the constant discussion of homophobia, racism and sexism as "pathological" - as diseased. Consider the visceral recoil one has when an acquaintance with whom one has been having an otherwise pleasant conversation with suddenly pipes up and goes "Fucking kikes!" or something similar. Consider the concern non-smokers have about smokers, and about secondhand smoke "giving them cancer" or "killing them" which is all out of proportion with the risk they actually face. Or the disdain for fat people as being immoral and disgusting. Concern for one's health is one of the oldest and least contested moral concerns, and is pretty much entirely rooted in concerns about purity.

These are all moral positions (in the broad sense of dealing with morality, not in the specific sense of "good") and they are all concerned with purity. It doesn't matter if they're metaphorical, fictitious, completely true, or otherwise. They need merely involve somehow, a concern for purity. Only by recognising that can we rationally investigate them and determine good ends to use them to achieve, instead of simply falling prey to having them filled by simple historical prejudice.
posted by Pseudoephedrine at 2:59 PM on July 17, 2006


I'm logic-chopping a bit, but so are you. I think it's disingenuous to place Nozick as an ethicist; he's clearly a political philosopher. That some of his claims about the organization of man and society have a moral tone is the product of the proximity of ethics and politics. I'll grant you that I'm being too dogmatic in my assertion that those can be separated. If not a moral theory, it is at least not morally neutral.

However, the notion that entitlement is a distributive theory is just as spurious. It's a response to Rawls, so distribution is in the air. Yet it takes no distribution to be more just than another; as you say, it concerns itself only with regulating transactions. The difference is almost exactly that between utilitarianism and natural duty, or consequentialism and deontology. The results, in this sense, are immaterial to the theory, though of course Nozick has a number of dogmas about what the results would be.

By the way, I'd tip my hat to virtue ethics, too. Technically, I'm a civic republican, but that just means I like Aristotle's Politics in addition to the Nicomachean Ethics. However, I think it's important to understand that arete, which is often translated as virtue, is very different from ethics. Excellence is a better translation than virtue, because of the Christian impact on that word. But maybe you know this already.

I'm almost indistiguishable from a Kantian on this question: "how to distinguish moral imperatives from non-moral imperatives." I'd say that moral intutions are those that pass the universalizability test, or at least the common sense test. However virtues, including civic virtues, are achieved through additional steps. (Actually, I'm an Arendtian, which means that I'm a secular Augustinian... but that's a book-length discussion.)

...disgust is a very strongly rooted emotion that is hard to change, but that doesn't mean it is given or set in stone.

Haidt's article suggests that some people have this capacity and some do not. Some people are capable of reflecting and changing their aesthetic judgments, and some are stuck. To my mind, this flexibility is one of the chief liberal virtues, but Haidt rightly suggests that open-mindedness is not for everyone. In the same way, it may be that our country's 'progress' is not progress at all, but merely the gradual segregation of different types of people whose primary divisions occur not on cultural or racial lines, but with regard to the different moral intutions they experience as obligations. (This is his account of the red state/blue state phenomenon.)

I still think you're misreading Haidt on the notion of purity, but I've already made my arguments and you've responded. Ok, just this, quickly: perhaps it would help if you would consider the aesthetic/ethical divide. Aesthetics doesn't always have to be about art; in its phenomenological form it is primarily a set of questions about ethical and cultural aesthesis... and abjection is key to that project. What does a moral duty -feel- like? What is the relationship between the ethical judgment of evil or vice and the aesthetic judgment of ugliness or disgust?
posted by anotherpanacea at 8:19 PM on July 17, 2006


What does a moral duty -feel- like? What is the relationship between the ethical judgment of evil or vice and the aesthetic judgment of ugliness or disgust?

I'm convinced that there isn't any particular key difference between aesthetics and morality - both are learning to perceive certain arrangements of the world as "good" and others as "bad". The process by which we're aesthetically cultured is not only similar, but _is_ part of the same process by which we're morally cultured, the process of "formation" (Bildung). This is not to say that "formation" is always a successful process, or that it produces evaluations of good or bad that should be uncritically accepted.

Rather, the unity of formation means that aesthetics is going to be involved in any moral judgement and vice versa. We should harness aesthetic considerations to back moral considerations, rather than excluding them and holding them separate. That is, we should treat someone who finds homosexuality disgusting as someone who is not only morally incorrect, but aesthetically incorrect as well. Their character is improperly formed.

All of this is a lengthier way of saying that we should find the bad disgusting and the good pleasing, both morally and aesthetically. We don't, but this is because of a social and individual failure - to take on character development as a serious task - a failure of paedogogy - that has warped the proper relationship of these kinds of values.

I must admit, I'm not completely convinced by Haidt's article. While much of it isn't particularly objectionable, I'm worried about his catalogue of moral intuitions (I don't think it's complete, or that there are a finite number of moral intuitions or virtues). I think he's also wrong on the "Some people are just close-minded and always will be" score. I'd agree insofar as our standard strategies of moral persuasion are rather crude.

But this doesn't need to be the case - if we really wished to, we could deploy a veritable psychological arsenal the likes of which even the most stubborn person couldn't resist. We have such an arsenal already, in fact. It's just being deployed to convince us to buy shit and vote in certain ways rather than to be good people. So sure, when you harangue a homophobe, he doesn't end up thinking that gays are any less disgusting or evil. If anyone harangued you to do something, you'd react in exactly the same way. So we have to move away from haranguing one another (which is 99% of political debate in America right now) and treat this as a technical question about persuasion, rather than a question of blame and shame.
posted by Pseudoephedrine at 10:40 PM on July 17, 2006


All of this is a lengthier way of saying that we should find the bad disgusting and the good pleasing, both morally and aesthetically. We don't, but this is because of a social and individual failure - to take on character development as a serious task - a failure of paedogogy - that has warped the proper relationship of these kinds of values.

I definitely think this is the right direction, but then I tend to avoid evolutionary psychology work like Haidt's when I'm doing any serious thinking. We can never tell how much phenotypology is being imported into the genotypes, i.e. how much his arm-chair evolutionary speculations reflect deepseated prejudices about the value of these traits. Here's the challenge, of course: our aesthetic reactions may be less persuadable than we would like. Pedagogy and rhetoric can do a lot, but they may not be able to turn every soul towards excellence. This is why mass advertisements seem unable to persuade us of much -other- than buying and voting.

Generally the question we like asking least is this: "what if some people are naturally worse than others?" But as my Straussian friends remind me, it is cowardice to avoid the difficult questions. What if some people are less-than-completely teachable, for instance? What if arete, unlike communal values, is born rather than bred?
posted by anotherpanacea at 9:42 AM on July 18, 2006


Then we should resolve to tolerate moral mediocrities but refuse them the right to dictate moral policy for the rest of us. It's worth pointing out that societies like Ancient Sparta managed to confront this problem successfully for hundreds of years (as did the Roman Republic, and as does the Society of Jesus to the modern day, for that matter).

While I don't want society to be Spartan, Roman or Jesuit, we should look to their successful strategies for ideas for our own paedogogy. People have overcome these problems before, and there's nothing to say that they can't again.
posted by Pseudoephedrine at 11:36 AM on July 18, 2006


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