Posted on 01/12/2008 4:47:55 PM PST by shrinkermd
...The starting point for appreciating that there is a distinctive part of our psychology for morality is seeing how moral judgments differ from other kinds of opinions we have on how people ought to behave. Moralization is a psychological state that can be turned on and off like a switch, and when it is on, a distinctive mind-set commandeers our thinking. This is the mind-set that makes us deem actions immoral (“killing is wrong”), rather than merely disagreeable (“I hate brussels sprouts”), unfashionable (“bell-bottoms are out”) or imprudent (“don’t scratch mosquito bites”).
The first hallmark of moralization is that the rules it invokes are felt to be universal. Prohibitions of rape and murder, for example, are felt not to be matters of local custom but to be universally and objectively warranted. One can easily say, “I don’t like brussels sprouts, but I don’t care if you eat them,” but no one would say, “I don’t like killing, but I don’t care if you murder someone.”
The other hallmark is that people feel that those who commit immoral acts deserve to be punished. Not only is it allowable to inflict pain on a person who has broken a moral rule; it is wrong not to, to “let them get away with it.” People are thus untroubled in inviting divine retribution or the power of the state to harm other people they deem immoral. Bertrand Russell wrote, “The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists — that is why they invented hell.”
We all know what it feels like when the moralization switch flips inside us — the righteous glow, the burning dudgeon, the drive to recruit others to the cause...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
If I understand Kant correctly—my knowledge is limited to an undergraduate course years ago as well as some leisure time reading since then—his primary error is in assuming that morality originates internally to man rather than externally.
“Bertrand Russell wrote, ‘The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists — that is why they invented hell.’”
I’ve read some of Russell’s writings and in my opinion he is overrated.
One of Russell’s arguments for why he doesn’t believe in Satan goes something like this: to believe in something evil reflects an evil intrinsic to the believer, so Russell somehow gets rid of the evil within himself by claiming not to believe in Satan. Remarkably sophomoric.
The traditional Christian teaching, which derives from Jewish teaching, is that morality is a matter of law but also of inward conscience.
But conscience is not merely personal opinion or private judgment, as is often thought by moderns. According to the natural law tradition, conscience is is an objective arbiter put into every person by God Himself.
As St. Paul puts it, the law of God is “written in the heart,” even of the gentiles who have not seen the laws of Moses or heard the word of Jesus (Romans 2:14-15).
So even New York Times ethicists have a God-given conscience; they just don’t very often seem to listen to it.
Yes, that is a very good post. I just fumbled around.
Not at all. It’s interesting that The New York Times is raising the subject.
Oddly enough, quite a few people say exactly that about abortion, which suggests that they don't really think it's wrong or a moral decision.
There used to be people called “bums” and “tramps”; today they are “homeless.”
And I think that if you took a poll, the vast majority of people would be no more happy sitting next to a "homeless person" on a subway than they used to be about sitting next to a bum or tramp.
Two important points this article glosses over. The first is that the way things are often moved into and out of the moral sphere is by changing the way a person views the actors or victims. For example, by convincing a person that an abortion only kills a "fetus" and not a "baby" or by calling one's enemies pigs or dogs or something else that dehumanizes them. What that does is eliminate empathy and the emotional responses that are critical for healthy moral decision-making and encourages people to think more like psychopaths.
The second is that psychopaths are the dirty little secret of this research because many psychopaths are highly intelligent and charismatic and can understand what other people are thinking and feeling but they simply don't care. Caring about things -- consequences, your own life, others -- is critical for moral thinking. And what that demonstrates is that the emotional component of moral decisions is critical, not a problem. The absence of emotional attachment and feeling doesn't produce better moral decisions but worse ones, as the heartless utilitarian thinks nothing of sacrificing millions for some objective or even simply to remain in power.
And that leads me to wonder if society hasn't been "psychopathisized" by deadening our emotional reaction to the decisions of others in the name of "tolerance". We've been encourages by framing, perspectives, and spin to wash away the outrage and shock and not feel anything about the moral decisions of others, making people morally very much like psychopaths.
To illustrate how much things have changed, nearly 40 years ago, the Star Trek episode "The Conscience of the King" has the unrepentant Kodos, who had executed several innocent people for faulty utilitarian reasons, asks Captain Kirk, "Who are you to say what harm was done?" and Captain Kirk glibly responds, "Who do I have to be?" His "Who are you to judge?" argument wasn't expect it to be taken seriously in the 1960s. Today, he'd be taken very seriously and it's Captain Kirk that would be seen as the one in the wrong for being too judgmental.
And many of them are in government.
Many of them are in positions of power, both government and business. Bank robbers rob banks because that's where the money is. Psychopaths go into government and business because that's where the power is.
Exactly.
There is a problem not just because of a false notion of tolerance, although that is part of it. Now sadistic and graphic violence is offered as the main ingredient of many forms of entertainment -- so-called music, also video games and movies. There has always been violence in movies, but in the old movies the "good guy" would resort to violence reluctantly when he had to and he would often be shown trying to avoid or minimize having to act violently. And the good guy represented some righteous cause or other. Violence was subordinated to some moral rules. I know the real world never exactly worked that way but at least the entertainment was not anything goes. And now -- especially consider the video games -- violence is between "bad guy A' and "bad guy B" and the violence is quite senseless and often sadistic. Children are taught that violence is fun, there are no serious consequences to violence, and since there is no right or wrong it is okay to act on one's violent impulses.
Agreed. Even the word and idea of “cool” is part of it. What does it mean to be “cool”? Emotionally detached and aloof? Isn’t that how psychopaths behave and isn’t that why parents used to warn their kids to say away from the “cool” delinquents?
....And nowhere is moralization more of a hazard than in our greatest global challenge. The threat of human-induced climate change has become the occasion for a moralistic revival meeting. In many discussions, the cause of climate change is overindulgence (too many S.U.V.’s) and defilement (sullying the atmosphere), and the solution is temperance (conservation) and expiation (buying carbon offset coupons). Yet the experts agree that these numbers don’t add up: even if every last American became conscientious about his or her carbon emissions, the effects on climate change would be trifling, if for no other reason than that two billion Indians and Chinese are unlikely to copy our born-again abstemiousness. Though voluntary conservation may be one wedge in an effective carbon-reduction pie, the other wedges will have to be morally boring, like a carbon tax and new energy technologies, or even taboo, like nuclear power and deliberate manipulation of the ocean and atmosphere. Our habit of moralizing problems, merging them with intuitions of purity and contamination, and resting content when we feel the right feelings, can get in the way of doing the right thing....
Liberalism acknowledges its own moral confusion.
Kant did more than discuss this. Too bad nobody reads Kant anymore, and probably can’t read Kant if they don’t learn to read on their own after the gummint school is done with them.
Kant must be read. His intro to moral philosophy is the most read of his works and it sure doesn’t say that.
Unless it has been seared.
Oh, nonsense. Anyone who says "I don't like abortion, but I don't care if you have one" (or "I don't like abortion, but I can't force my beliefs on you) is saying that very thing.
I prefer St. Paul.
Kant also quoted from Matthew.
One would think Hobbes was a Christian.
Schopenhauer was a curmudgeon and even pissed off Goethe. As far as the meaning of terms, no two philosophers agree and if they did they would be out of business.
The Brits are apparently unaware of the appendix following the OT.
All business is God’s business!
The oil Arabs know that.
It should be clear from the very last clause that Pinker is not speaking of morality here. Morality is not what results from aligning our acts with our lifestyles.
He can slip this one by us only if we are not alert to the clear distinction between moralization and morality.... The former is an opinion, "doxa"; the latter, an inheritance.
Jeepers, I'm reading along here, and just at the point I was thinking, "Thank God, Pinker isn't resurrecting his bete noir, the incest taboo, one more time!" But I jumped the gun there. It seems he can't help but raise it; he even dramatizes it here. Evidently the incest taboo drives him nutz, because there's nothing in his theory that can account for what seems to amount to an instinctive, universal, visceral revulsion of human beings for incest.
Go figure Stevie!
And he'll never be able to account for his dilemma, either, so long as he holds the human person reduces to a machine; and his morality to "lifestyle choices."
It seems there is a clear distinction between noumena as denoting "thing-in-itself" and the ancient meaning you indicate, "what is thought." They are not equivalent definitions. To make them synonyms, it seems that what is necessary would be "to draw all of reality into the human mind." Elsewhere, Kant seems to argue in favor of the impossibility of this. In any case, I strongly doubt the two meanings can be reconciled.
Given the above, I can see why you "smell a subreption." :^)
Those darned German philosophers!
What I learned in two college courses in the Philosophy of Ethics:
It is futile to argue about this. Everybody has to figure it out for themselves.
Apparently, there is something in our nature that turns down sex in children who are raised together. I know there are exceptions and incest is a real problem, yet these acts are so rare, I believe this study had merit.
Similarly, it is noted that many married couples lose all sexual interest (not all thought; it is also noted that many men will colloquially refer to their wife as “mother” both in and out of the presence of their children.
I can’t remember the source, but I think E.O. Wilson mentioned this in “Of Human Nature” or one of his other books. I remember recalling the original article when I read it in E.O. Wilson.
I also note Steven Pinker has written on this study; in How the Mind Works) he suggests that genetic influence is at work via the Westermarck effect, whereby people raised in close proximity (whether related or not) tend to feel little sexual attraction to each other, after maturity. Incidentally, Freud thought the incest taboo was universal but he failed to give a simple reason for this other than society punished and discouraged sexual behavior between children of the same family as well as parents of those children.
From Wikipedia: "...Reverse sexual imprinting is also seen: when two people live in close domestic proximity during the first few years in the life of either one, both are desensitized to later close sexual attraction. This phenomenon, known as the Westermarck effect, was first formally described by anthropologist Edvard Westermarck. The Westermarck effect has since been observed in many places and cultures, including in the Israeli kibbutz system, and the Chinese Shim-pua marriage customs, as well as in biological-related families
Your post was excellent.
If they must, then what "benchmark" is to be used as the standard of truth against which what people "figure out" has to be measured? Or is it the case that the people who "figure it out for themselves" always reach the same conclusion, just "naturally," as it were?
So far, I didn't think I'd been "arguing" with anyone. What did I miss?
The hockey team was in one of my classes. They decided they would go by gut feel, and that is the usual standard.
It seems like Freud can't buy a clue here, any more readily than Pinker can.
To the extent that Freud says the incest taboo is universal, he is probably correct (based on empirical evidence). But then to "reduce" the universal phenomenon to a mere judgment of human society seems to leave the key piece of the puzzle out of the picture. Which is: why do human societies universally find incest abhorrant in the first place, such that they discourage and punish it?
This abhorrance can be ex-post-facto rationalized by science. But even non-scientific peoples have what seems to be a natural a horror of incest. How is that to be explained?
Thank you so much for writing, shrinkermd, and for your kind words. [Plus thanks for the interesting post! Of course, I have a confession to make: I do imagine Steven Pinker is a hard-core nut case.... :^) ]
Sometimes "gut feel" is all you've got to go on. I tend to trust it myself, especially when you've got nothing else to rely on (e.g., direct experience, evidence, etc.). :^)
But then, of course you are doing psychology not philosophy.
Good call. But then I’ve been studying the so-called observer problem lately....
My comment is founded (naturally) on my understanding that cognitive capacity is hierarchical and that our position, while above that of horses and toads, is far below God’s capacity. And that Kant’s discussion of the maxims of morality (from what I’ve read) appears to assume (as do most discussions on this question) that these maxims can originate in the minds of men, which doesn’t make sense because they originate in God.
From what I can tell, the phrase from post 27 “to draw all of reality into the human mind” addresses this concept.
Another good call reasonisfaith! "To draw all of reality into the human mind" is (1) impossible; and (2) an indication of a will that seeks to make "man the measure of all things." Or so it seems to me, FWIW.
Thank you so much for writing!
The Pinkers of the world leave me cold. Here they are in a self-imposed box insisting that their box is "all that there is." Only the ostrich hopes to change his reality by hiding his head - the rest of the creatures know better.
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