Morality and intoxication
July 14, 2020 11:19 PM   Subscribe

Why do people behave immorally when drunk? Moral philosophers look at drunkenness. If morality is based on emotion, why would intoxication cause immoral behavior?
posted by russilwvong (60 comments total) 25 users marked this as a favorite
 
Since the paper mentions the trolley problem: The trolley problem scene from "The Good Place."
posted by russilwvong at 11:26 PM on July 14, 2020 [6 favorites]


“Morality is based on emotion”?

Huh. I’ve been doing it wrong.
posted by armoir from antproof case at 11:38 PM on July 14, 2020 [4 favorites]


I don't act immorally when drunk/intoxicated. I just act drunk/intoxicated. YMMV.
posted by Windopaene at 11:41 PM on July 14, 2020 [28 favorites]


Technically an animal with no hope of controlling its drives cannot be said to ever act morally. If the physiological effect of alcohol is suppression of inhibition, a very drunk person cannot be said to have any morality at all in the moment of being drunk, which is why we cut teenagers some slack when they first get drunk. At some point adults come to terms with the fact that drinking excessively will lead to self harm or harm to others at which point it becomes predictable and culpability returns. This doesn't excuse rape planning with the aid of alcohol even if the perpetrator gets drunk him or herself.
posted by benzenedream at 12:04 AM on July 15, 2020 [8 favorites]


> Since the paper mentions the trolley problem

a cursory search-find indicates the paper doesn't mention the trolley problem?

If indeed it does, might be better to link to an at least semi-academic introduction to same instead of a clip from a television show?
posted by 7segment at 12:10 AM on July 15, 2020


7segment: a cursory search-find indicates the paper doesn't mention the trolley problem?

Almost all searching in the paper is broken for some reason, and cut-and-paste is really weird, too. Something weird going on with the characters.

The trolley problem is talked about but not really explained, I'm guessing because it's considered well-enough known in moral philosophy.
posted by clawsoon at 12:15 AM on July 15, 2020 [6 favorites]


I repeated this quote about capital-R Rationalists the other day, because it got me wondering exactly where our moral values come from:
You can't really talk about rationality without talking about values, but they don't talk about them because most values sit on an ultimately irrational foundation. So they stumble around optimizing rationality with respect to their shared unexamined values...
...so this post is timely for me. I do think there's strength to the idea that many of our moral values are ultimately based on "moral sentimentalism", as the paper puts it. If we hear about something and it makes us feel scared or angry or disgusted, we're more likely to decide that it's morally wrong. I was watching a documentary about Nazi death camps the other day; it was sickening; my feeling of revulsion for the perpetrators and sympathy for the victims certainly bolstered my moral response.

But then I think about the differing moral responses to claims about sexual harassment by professors. There were at least a few people who identified the "real victims" as the professors who were being accused, and the making of accusations as the moral fault. To me it seemed like this was mostly based on who people identified with; if you were Steven Pinker, you were more likely to be scared when you heard what happened to the poor professor and make your moral judgements accordingly. Even that, though, still bolsters moral sentimentalism; it just adds a bit of tribalism to the mix. Which part of the story made you feel scared? That's probably the part that you'll decide is morally wrong.

On the other hand, there does definitely seem to be a fair amount of calculation in my day-to-day moral judgements. My moral values aren't being constantly tossed in a sea of emotions. I'm thinking about the consequences of my actions. I'm thinking through the contradictions in what I believe and what I do. Having never been drunk, I'm guessing that some of that thought goes away under the influence of alcohol. But to rescue moral sentimentalism a bit, maybe most of my thinking and reasoning is actually me trying to anticipate how I will feel about myself in the future if I make one moral choice versus another? Will I be proud of myself, will I be ashamed, will my future self be disgusted with my current self? Maybe my calculation is all in service of emotion - my best guess about my future emotions, anyway - after all?

As the paper points out, though,
the literature on confabulation has rendered deeply problematic any theory that relies on introspection for its account of practical reason and the will
...so all of my introspective thoughts on this may not be worth much.

Perhaps I should defer to moral philosopher and noted alcoholic Jim Gaffigan. "No-one has ever done a shot and then done something they're proud of..."
posted by clawsoon at 12:24 AM on July 15, 2020 [15 favorites]


Morality is based on weighing competing ethical imperatives and choosing the greater good/lesser evil (this message brought to you by the Biden 2020 Campaign). If you deliberately suppress your cognitive ability then you’re going to have greater difficulty doing that and come to some occasionally hilarious and occasionally tragic but mostly just stupid conclusions.
posted by Ryvar at 12:25 AM on July 15, 2020 [10 favorites]


Any idea how much of the research mentioned in the article has survived the replication crisis? I know that the evidence for the role of mirror neurons has been heavily criticized, and some of the research gives me vague thoughts of small-n studies on WEIRD students, but I have no actual idea how many of this paper's references have been left standing.
posted by clawsoon at 12:33 AM on July 15, 2020 [1 favorite]


Ryvar: Morality is based on weighing competing ethical imperatives

But where did those ethical imperatives come from in the first place?

I missed one thing in my (probably useless) introspecting above: Some of my moral values come from being told what's wrong and what's right. Not much thinking or emotion involved; I just believe people whom I trust when they tell me that something is wrong.

I've wondered sometimes if that's part of the attraction of religions. It's uncomfortable to have weak and wavering emotional and cognitive responses to something that everybody else seems to have strong moral opinions about. Taking on strong moral opinions that have presumably been worked out over centuries by people with heightened ethical intuitions and strong moral reasoning can seem like a wiser choice than resting on one's own weak and wavering moral intuitions.

(Come to think of it, that probably applies to at least some of my support for movements like BLM. I don't have much visceral experience to go on, so I mostly trust what other people, who have thought and felt deeply about the problems, have to say.)
posted by clawsoon at 12:50 AM on July 15, 2020 [2 favorites]


Any idea how much of the research mentioned in the article has survived the replication crisis?

Part of the paper's argument leans on ego depletion, which is an intuitively attractive idea that has mixed reviews when it comes to whether the evidence supports its existence or not.

Another quote from the paper:
[O]ne might expect [alcohol] to produce both more good and more evil, in roughly equal proportions. And yet this is not what happens. On the contrary, loss of inhibition, and the associated cognitive impairments, generates a profusion of anti-social behavior, which easily outweighs the benefits produced by the occasional "helpful drunkard" (Steel et al. 1985).
Is this true, though? Perhaps I've hung out with the wrong alcoholics, but what I've mostly witnessed is more music being made, more cheerful conversation, more expressions of love, more altruistic purchases of alcohol for strangers. Are these not pro-social behaviours? And the study they reference found that alcohol could make "high conflict" people more helpful, which seems contrary to this paper's conclusions.

Is the paper's central fact - that alcohol produces more evil than good - true?
posted by clawsoon at 1:50 AM on July 15, 2020 [17 favorites]


clawsoon: "No-one has ever done a shot and then done something they're proud of..."

False.
posted by emelenjr at 3:02 AM on July 15, 2020 [33 favorites]


Considering that the two most murderously sociopathic US presidents in my lifetime were non-drinkers, I’ll take my chances with the booze.
posted by homerica at 3:50 AM on July 15, 2020 [24 favorites]


Is this true, though? Perhaps I've hung out with the wrong alcoholics

It's pretty obvious this is at least not a binary dynamic, right? And also a subject area that's pretty impossible to get our empirical hands around in a test setting. Think of these examples:

# of drinks:

(0) Is the person acting pro-socially because they have a basic human interest in socializing even before alcohol enters in?
(1) Is the buying of drinks altruistic or is it social posturing? Is the person trying to impress prospective mating partners?
(5) Is the interest in a cherished piece of music genuine joy? Is it nostalgia for a psychological wound? Is it a 'party trick'?
Etc

...And I'm basically on team booze here. I'm just saying that this is a weird problem to try to solve with observation, data and critical thought.

I think that the two things I've heard about alcohol that I believe most is (1) as above, inhibitions are mitigated and (2) people are more aggressive. These are not the same thing.

The current C19 environment is one where the costs of reducing adherence to social mores are increased. So I think, like most things, the idea of the morality of a cause-effect with alcohol is highly context specific.
posted by Reasonably Everything Happens at 5:12 AM on July 15, 2020 [3 favorites]


"No-one has ever done a shot and then done something they're proud of..."

On the way home from a particularly cheery new years celebration and finding myself in need of relief, I unzipped and left my mark on the gates of our PMs official residence. Behind those gates, at that point in time was a man who had been openly taking bribes while in the highest office.

It remains a high point. I'm still not sure how I did it without being arrested, but there you are.
posted by bonehead at 5:38 AM on July 15, 2020 [16 favorites]


Morality is just remaining within certain bounds set by the larger group and it's part of our cognition. If sociability comes from orbital prefrontal cortex and alcohol inhibits the activity of it then wouldn't we by definition lose our ability to run our actions through our inbuilt "will this affect my place in the group" routines? Our behavior would be reflexive without any information other than the limited stimuli the amygdala would process.
posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 5:50 AM on July 15, 2020 [2 favorites]


Considering that the two most murderously sociopathic US presidents in my lifetime were non-drinkers, I’ll take my chances with the booze.

Well,um...
According to his Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, Nixon's trouble was that a small amount of drink would set him off and late-night threats of military action were made when the president was the worse for wear.

When North Korea shot down a US spy plane in April 1969, an enraged Nixon allegedly ordered a tactical nuclear strike and told the joint chiefs to recommend targets. According to the historian Anthony Summers, citing the CIA's top Vietnam specialist at the time, George Carver, Henry Kissinger spoke to military commanders on the phone and agreed not to do anything until Nixon sobered up in the morning.
Teetotal Trump and the drinking presidents
posted by y2karl at 6:00 AM on July 15, 2020 [9 favorites]


Morality is just remaining within certain bounds set by the larger group and it's part of our cognition.

It's a pity how much time people who study morality waste on that, when the answers are always so obvious.
posted by thelonius at 6:01 AM on July 15, 2020 [8 favorites]


"Is the paper's central fact - that alcohol produces more evil than good - true?"

I suspect that it's impossible to answer this objectively.
posted by kevinbelt at 6:14 AM on July 15, 2020 [3 favorites]


I'd suggest more that intoxication impairs complex action, emphasizing immediacy and simplicity of response rather than acting to overturn moral values more explicitly. Simplicity provides judgement of actions a relatively starker contrast, where the more notably unusual stands out more, which would likely be anti-social behavior for being further from the norm for most than an increased pro-social act, say in tipping better than usual as opposed to yelling at the waitstaff. The former would be following the same basic pattern as one normally might, but with an added generosity, intended or no, while the latter might be highly unusual and more noticeable unless one is an asshole all the time, in which case the net change wouldn't be that remarkable anyway.

If complex actions are made more difficult, then the possible outcomes of any action are fewer and rendering some more extravagant "good" perhaps more difficult for the extra effort and thought required, while some "bad" is made simpler for just being a more available option.
posted by gusottertrout at 6:21 AM on July 15, 2020 [5 favorites]


You have 34 colleagues on Academia

Beware clicking this link.

For a paper that's distributed with a service that's harvesting your info, the use of the term "morality" is suspect.

Is "morality" a useful scientific concept? Is it in the DSM? Are there objective statistical measures of degree of morality? Can it be measured without a religious skew of one sort or another?

Alcohol among other chemicals, devices (txting:), conditions (tiredness) certainly affects people, reduced reaction time in an emergency being perhaps the most dangerous (driving). Having given up accessing the paper I cannot give a metric about it's objectivity but would not guess a high score.
posted by sammyo at 6:21 AM on July 15, 2020 [2 favorites]


Are there objective statistical measures of degree of morality?

The paper references crime statistics for percentage of those committed while intoxicated, but also notes people sometimes drink in order to commit crimes making tracing the connection difficult and there would also be those for whom being intoxicated is a common enough event for any behavior or who are perhaps more inclined to immorality even absent drink that that measure is somewhat suspect.
posted by gusottertrout at 6:35 AM on July 15, 2020 [1 favorite]


We never spent much time pondering moral philosophy in the bar business. And our concept of what constituted permissible behavior was definitely more relaxed than that of society as a whole. But we could sniff out someone who was probably going to be trouble as soon as they walked in the door. Dispensing a mind altering chemical to a room packed with both genders of breeding age hominids tends to really sharpen the senses...
posted by jim in austin at 6:36 AM on July 15, 2020 [10 favorites]


"No-one has ever done a shot and then done something they're proud of..."

False. I didn't start writing, writing well, until I started drinking. From recovery experts I've talked to, this isn't unusual; sometimes the loss of inhibition allows the drinker to develop skills that would otherwise lay fallow. Ultimately, drinking destroyed my ability to write, and, sober, I've never recovered it. But if I'm honest with myself, the few years I spent putting my heart and soul into my writing was the proudest time of my life.
posted by SPrintF at 7:03 AM on July 15, 2020 [5 favorites]


I'd suggest more that intoxication impairs complex action, emphasizing immediacy and simplicity of response rather than acting to overturn moral values more explicitly.

This. My own, erm, experimentation suggests that drunkenness takes away from your ability to see the probable consequences of your actions.
posted by Slothrup at 7:10 AM on July 15, 2020


When I get drunk I am generally more amiable. Does that mean I'm inherently good?
posted by grumpybear69 at 7:29 AM on July 15, 2020 [10 favorites]


I don't think my morality changes when I'm drunk, but I'm definitely less inhibited. I don't think I'd do anything while drunk that I would be morally against sober, though I might do something (especially say something...) I have the good sense not to say or do when sober.

OK, I may also sing while drunk, which is probably best described as cruel and unusual punishment for those around me. I tend not to do that sober, around people.

When I get drunk I am generally more amiable.

Same. I am way more friendly and extroverted when I've had a few drinks. If I really, really, really dislike someone... I'll be very friendly and explain to them why I don't like them.

I've only been fighty while drunk once. I was very, very drunk and while getting into an elevator with a stranger and making small talk they made a comment about having a bad day and they wished they "had a kid or a cat to kick." I wheeled on them and roared "you want to KICK A CAT?!" while my friend inserted himself between us and the door opened and they scurried away as quickly as they could. I swear I would not have hit them, I only wanted to scare them. Which, apparently, I did.

It seems my love of cats remains, sober or drunk. Not so concerned with kids, apparently.
posted by jzb at 7:42 AM on July 15, 2020 [12 favorites]


If two people want to have a fight, and they have a fight, is that morally bad, morally good, or neutral?

Does it make any difference if they have the fight as part of a karate tournament versus after getting drunk at the bar?

Edit: Does it make any difference if they both enjoy it?
posted by clawsoon at 8:14 AM on July 15, 2020 [2 favorites]


I've always thought of alcohol as reducing complexity of thought and thus inhibitions/high level thinking - and you go with your first reactions. Maybe those give you some insight into yourself: I realised years ago that when drunk, I was less likely to do something really risky, because it turns out that I'm actually a scaredy-cat.
posted by jb at 8:29 AM on July 15, 2020 [9 favorites]


But where did those ethical imperatives come from in the first place?

I'm not a moral philosopher but to me morals are the collectively negotiated parameters of our social contract. But that has me wondering how to delineate between morals and ethics.

I stand by my initial point that, if it's "considered well-enough known", there exists a better introduction to the topic than 300 seconds of a flash-in-the-pan TV series.

I'm guessing TGP is considered well-enough known in TV shows about moral philosophy. :P
posted by simra at 8:35 AM on July 15, 2020 [5 favorites]


The notion that being drunk brings about more negative outcomes than positive outcomes does make a certain amount of sense.

Drinking lowers inhibitions -- that much is not contested. The result of lowered inhibition is the question at hand, and I'm of the opinion that due to the social praise/sanction water we're swimming in, good behavior tends to require less disinhibition for a person to undertake.

In other words, good behavior is more likely to happen when you're operating under normal inhibitions because society rewards it.

That doesn't mean that all sorts of good behaviors aren't amplified while inhibition is lowered by alcohol, just that we don't really take note of it, because typically it's socially acceptable or socially encouraged behavior in the first place.
posted by tclark at 8:46 AM on July 15, 2020 [2 favorites]


The result of lowered inhibition is the question at hand, and I'm of the opinion that due to the social praise/sanction water we're swimming in, good behavior tends to require less disinhibition for a person to undertake.

I wonder if this changes for anxious individuals--there are a lot of things that are socially encouraged that I don't do because I'm too anxious (example: there's a very sweet old lady in my building I'd like to reach out to and spend time with because I know she's lonely but ahhh anxiety!!!). I'm essentially too inhibited to do a lot of socially encouraged behavior. Alcohol might end up actually being a net good for me.

I don't have any datapoints, though, because I don't drink because I'm too anxious about how it'll impact my behavior. Whomp whomp.
posted by brook horse at 8:52 AM on July 15, 2020 [9 favorites]


It’s a lot easier to quantify bad results than good, but anecdotally I’ve created art and music and made friends while intoxicated, and spend most of my sober time adding value to rapacious capitalist’s portfolios.
posted by rodlymight at 8:56 AM on July 15, 2020 [7 favorites]


I'm essentially too inhibited to do a lot of socially encouraged behavior. Alcohol might end up actually being a net good for me.

That makes perfect sense -- there are plenty of people (myself among them) for whom a bit of lowered inhibition will make you more social in a good way because that person's default mode is anxious/reserved and there are plenty of scenarios where social anxiety or reservation is counterproductive.
posted by tclark at 9:10 AM on July 15, 2020 [7 favorites]


Morality is just remaining within certain bounds set by the larger group and it's part of our cognition.

I do not accept this assertion. If it were true, there would be no people holding to moral standards more rigorous than their group, and that is demonstrably false.
posted by Kirth Gerson at 9:10 AM on July 15, 2020 [5 favorites]


I got a big laugh in rehab when I admitted that drunk me volunteered for All The Things. I was a very altruistic alcoholic.
posted by Ruki at 9:17 AM on July 15, 2020 [6 favorites]


Looks like the lead author on this paper also inspired another scholar to write a book, Moral Thinking, Fast and Slow.

Most of the other papers citing this one are in Russian, which unfortunately limits my ability to read them. However, this Russian paper has its abstract in English. They attempt to empirically answer the question with a tiny (n=40; perhaps they ran out of money for booze?) and therefore probably pointless study. Their conclusion:
The results showed that moral judgements did not always change under alcohol influence but when they did, responses shifted in different directions: some individuals began to judge harmful actions as less permissible while others began to judge them as more permissible.
And this M.A. candidate who cites the OP paper argues that
morality is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition of prosociality, and may in fact be an obstacle to it.
I should really dig into this more because now I'm wondering whether moral values change or are revealed by alcohol. If a drunk does something wrong do they still recognize that it's wrong (but find themselves overcome by darker urges)? Or are they like the Trump voters who reveal themselves when they say that "he only says what everybody is thinking"?

And one more thought in this disjointed comment: The paper talks a lot about Haidt's conception of morality (many previouslies) as an exemplar of moral sentimentalism. Haidt argues that conservatives and liberals have different foundations for morality:
Haidt's thesis is that we humans all have five foundations of morality – five sources of intuitions and emotions that drive everything we do:
  • Harm/Care
  • Fairness/Reciprocity
  • In-Group/Loyalty
  • Authority/Respect
  • Purity/Sanctity
Both conservatives and liberals all agree on the first two points; but the real trouble comes on the final three. As Haidt said in regard to those points, "We can say that liberals have a kind of a two-channel, or two-foundation morality. Conservatives have more of a five-foundation, or five-channel morality."

Now, that math may make it sound as if liberals are less moral than conservatives, but Haidt is careful to point out that it's not as simple as that:
Liberals reject three of these foundations. They say "No, let's celebrate diversity, not common in-group membership." They say, "Let's question authority." And they say, "Keep your laws off my body."

Liberals have very noble motives for doing this. Traditional authority, traditional morality can be quite repressive, and restrictive to those at the bottom, to women, to people that don't fit in. So liberals speak for the weak and oppressed. They want change and justice, even at the risk of chaos.

Conservatives, on the other hand, speak for institutions and traditions. They want order, even at some cost to those at the bottom.
Might it be that the different moral foundations that Haidt proposes are affected differently by alcohol? Maybe respect for authority goes down while group loyalty goes up, or something like that?

And - this is probably answered in the literature, so if anybody knows I'd be eager to learn - how exactly do you decide that for the purposes of a study whether an action is more or less moral? Are there universally agreed upon moral values that are used for the studies, or do study authors assume that whatever they consider moral and immoral is good enough? A bunch of the research cited in the paper seems to sidestep this question by focusing on how long moral reasoning tasks take when drunk or sober, but does that really shed any light on moral behaviour and/or moral values?

Final question: What's the moral over/under on writing a giant comment about morality while neglecting to get breakfast for my daughter?
posted by clawsoon at 9:18 AM on July 15, 2020 [5 favorites]


Another exploration of the subject: Moral Psychology's Drinking Problem
posted by clawsoon at 9:24 AM on July 15, 2020 [1 favorite]


("Moral Psychology's Drinking Problem" is an entertaining and thoughtful read, if you're able to access it.)
posted by clawsoon at 9:32 AM on July 15, 2020


How does the alcohol placebo effect play into all of this, where people do "drunk things" when they believe they are drinking alcohol even though they are not?
posted by clawsoon at 9:59 AM on July 15, 2020 [3 favorites]


Re: Haidt - Just curious what the hell Sanctity actually means. Wikipedia gives an explanation of "Sanctity or purity: abhorrence for disgusting things, foods, actions; opposite of degradation". With the exception of food that will actually kill you or make you vomit, these are all defined by in-group generated standards. There is no action that is disgusting except in context and as judged by an in-group. Outrage over purity is almost always an expression of in-group loyalty and respect.
posted by benzenedream at 10:02 AM on July 15, 2020


they wished they "had a kid or a cat to kick." I wheeled on them and roared "you want to KICK A CAT?!"

Drunk you appears to not like children...
posted by Greg_Ace at 10:09 AM on July 15, 2020 [3 favorites]


clawson, it seems to me that conservatives try to get purity about sex and liberals try to get purity about food.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 10:13 AM on July 15, 2020 [6 favorites]


good behavior is more likely to happen when you're operating under normal inhibitions because society rewards it.


I’d say, rather, that a lot of good behavior is constrained by the practical cost to the doer, not by social feedback. Are drunks likelier to give their coat to someone in the cold?
posted by clew at 10:16 AM on July 15, 2020 [3 favorites]


simra: But that has me wondering how to delineate between morals and ethics.

Looks like you're not alone: "Ethicists today, however, use the terms interchangeably. If they do want to differentiate morality from ethics, the onus is on the ethicist to state the definitions of both terms."
posted by clawsoon at 10:17 AM on July 15, 2020


Liberals also have a stronger purity response for the environment, seems to me. There’s definitely appeal to the spiritual value of wild species existing in fundraisers, frex. And currently liberals grant more authority to science than conservatives do.
posted by clew at 10:19 AM on July 15, 2020 [2 favorites]


I wonder if this changes for anxious individuals--there are a lot of things that are socially encouraged that I don't do because I'm too anxious

From what I’ve seen, pro social drinking is usually a) people who do good anyway so not much difference, and b) people whose anxiety or heightened sense of threat generally makes them aggressive, but when relaxed by alcohol they were able to take a more reasonable view of other people’s motivations, thus making them kinder.
posted by corb at 10:41 AM on July 15, 2020 [1 favorite]


corb: people whose anxiety or heightened sense of threat generally makes them aggressive, but when relaxed by alcohol they were able to take a more reasonable view of other people’s motivations, thus making them kinder.

I wonder if the research on paradoxical reactions to benzodiazepines has any insight to offer. Benzodiazepines normally reduce violent behaviour by calming people down and reducing feelings of being threatened. However, some patients have exactly the opposite outcome and become more violent. This paradoxical effect is relatively low in the general population (1%-ish), but much higher in people with brain injury and mental retardation. I learned about it when my daughter briefly took a benzodiazepine as a seizure medication; she suddenly found violence to be the most fun and hilarious thing she could possibly imagine. She was so excited to go to school every day because school is where you get the chance to beat up on other kids.
posted by clawsoon at 10:55 AM on July 15, 2020 [2 favorites]


Ctrl-F veritas

(This paper is five years old?)

+1 to brook horse; personal data point: drinking, then registering this account.
posted by Iris Gambol at 11:14 AM on July 15, 2020 [1 favorite]


Another exploration of the subject: Moral Psychology's Drinking Problem

Wow, thanks, clawsoon. That chapter is fascinating and brings up a whole bunch of ways of looking at this issue I hadn't thought of. I was gonna make a comment, but after reading that I need to think a lot more about what I think.
posted by straight at 11:38 AM on July 15, 2020 [1 favorite]


The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Moral Sentimentalism is also pretty good, if longer and less entertaining. It adds even more ways to look at the issues, though it doesn't get into alcohol other than to say that most of us probably aren't concerned with what a drunken Viking would think of our actions.

What happens when a group which regularly gets drunk and violent finds out that they are purposely being denied alcohol? Do they subsequently act more or less morally?
posted by clawsoon at 11:57 AM on July 15, 2020


"Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut" - Hemingway
posted by gottabefunky at 12:29 PM on July 15, 2020 [6 favorites]


morals are the game, ethics are how one plays it.
coming from 3 generations of alcoholics. my immediate family has 3 recovering with 90 years of sobriety between the three and one just got a higher degree in the field. I'd have to say absolutely moral compass gets hidden in the mud room when drinking.

as with nitrous oxide.
posted by clavdivs at 1:20 PM on July 15, 2020 [1 favorite]


The question "Why do people behave immorally when drunk?" is about as useful as "Why do people behave immorally when Christian?" or "Why do people behavior immoral when playing Monopoly?" Maybe it's been said in the above comments already (I scanned quickly, my apologies), but why is there a presumed special association between drunkenness and immoral action? Maybe I'm missing something, bit this just seems like confused nonsense.?
posted by flamk at 1:24 PM on July 15, 2020 [2 favorites]


I've learned to avoid lots of groups when drinking because they were likely to do something harmful then. And these were people I liked working with, or trusted to hang out with, when sober. I don't think that's rare, flamk.
posted by clew at 7:04 PM on July 15, 2020


I don't see a way to engage with the original content in a way that critique makes sense, given how the author of the paper has set things up.

I have a B.A. in Phi/Rel. I chose not to continue either to terminal degrees, for reasons, but I can have discourse on this. Relatedly, off and on, I was in food service from 11 to about 40. The last stretch was over a decade of primarily bartending/bar supervising, so I know a thing or two about intoxicated people.

I barely read any of the article. From a tech standpoint, the author chose options to make it deliberately hard to have a discourse using actual context.

Examples:
1. The very first thing before you even get to the document is to sign in via gmail or facebook to read. No, thank you. I'll be happy to pay in cash to download, but you don't need my Personal Information, especially because:

2. I don't want to be forced to sign in with a federated ID. I am sure others don't want to because of two recent metas. (Only linking for posterity. Apologies all... Shitty fucking times.)

3. Copy/Paste deliberately broken to the original article unless you download, thus giving personal information. Why should anyone engage with the original article if they are essentially forcing people to provide personal information to the author?

4. Disabling copy/paste unless you sign in via Google or Facebook makes it harder to annotate text to give one's best replies to the original question. I do not trust the original author's intent, especially because:

5. The question is leading. Where is the proof that "...[P]eople behave immorally when drunk?"

Almost everything I have ever read about alcohol consumption (or abuse) is that it's a depressant and just depresses your guard and you would do whatever you wanted to do anyway.

So, angry drunks are angry in real life. Ditto with happy drunks. I have been the one serving for over a decade, and it tracks pretty well.

**************

I think I really started to check out when a stat form the article was "In the U.S., alcohol consumption was involved in 28-86% of homicides."

That's...

That is the original author completely arguing from bad faith, IMO.

Bowing out at least until Sunday. Apologies if I don't connect with anyone immediately who disagrees.

posted by a non mouse, a cow herd at 7:39 PM on July 15, 2020 [2 favorites]


a non mouse, a cow herd: The very first thing before you even get to the document is to sign in via gmail or facebook to read. No, thank you. I'll be happy to pay in cash to download

You can. I believe that the OP linked to a free version for the rest of us skinflints.

I swear that when I went to that link the other day it asked me for payment, but today I see the full article and a line on top saying, "Access provided by University of Toronto Libraries". Considering that I have no U of T library access, I have no idea what this means.
posted by clawsoon at 7:54 AM on July 16, 2020


I suppose an argument can be made that people who get drunk enough to factor into this are solving an emotional problem in the short term and they act more honestly about their feelings. They may be seeking attention while drunk as a triggered sideways reaction to others, exposing the social roots of their emotional problem which they can't solve themselves (essentially picking a fight with the past to defend their diminished self-respect, which may include targeting vulnerable people who remind them of themselves, because they don't respect those).
posted by Brian B. at 9:15 AM on July 16, 2020 [1 favorite]


I believe that the OP linked to a free version for the rest of us skinflints.

Yep, you should be able to read the whole paper on the academia.edu site without registering. For anyone who's having trouble, I poked around on Google Scholar, and it looks like there's a direct link to the PDF.

As a layperson, I found the philosophy paper interesting because it's an accessible window onto a debate within moral philosophy: is morality based on emotion (moral sentimentalism) or is it based on our ability to suppress behavioral impulses like wanting to hit someone (deontic moral psychology)?

The paper shows how philosophers think about this kind of puzzle. If morality is based on emotion, and alcohol doesn't induce any particular emotion, unlike meth or cocaine, why is drunkenness associated with so much immoral behavior? I don't have the background to say which is correct, but I felt the authors made a pretty good case for the deontic school of thought. SEP on deontological ethics.

A third school of thought is consequentialism (utilitarianism being one example). Ex Urbe (Ada Palmer) on Machiavelli and the invention of consequentialism. The trolley problem is an argument against consequentialism. ("The Good Place" also ends up arguing against consequentialism, right?)

Of course these arguments are primarily about where morality comes from, not its content. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
The differences between those philosophers who hold that there is a universal morality is primarily about the foundation of morality, not about its content. Neither Kant [deontological ethics] nor Mill [utilitarianism] regarded themselves as inventing or creating a new morality. Rather both of them, like Hobbes, regarded themselves as providing a justification for the morality that is [already] accepted by all. ...

... morality, like all informal public systems, presupposes overwhelming agreement on most moral questions. No one thinks it is morally justified to cheat, deceive, injure, or kill simply in order to gain sufficient money to take a fantastic vacation. In the vast majority of moral situations, given agreement on the facts, no one disagrees, but for this very reason, these situations are never discussed. Thus, the overwhelming agreement on most moral matters is often overlooked.
Personally I like Hans Morgenthau's account of norms (including moral norms), which is simple enough for a layperson like myself to apply. It lines up pretty well with the deontological view.
posted by russilwvong at 9:34 AM on July 16, 2020 [2 favorites]


Considering that the two most murderously sociopathic US presidents in my lifetime were non-drinkers

Yeah, but the current occupant makes up for it by snorting adderal and oxy all day
posted by Saxon Kane at 6:39 PM on July 16, 2020


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