Like Will Wilkinson I found John Gray’s review of Jonathan Haidt’s, The Righteous Mind, entertaining if not particularly enlightening.
This is not my main point but I can’t help to note that Gray seems to think little of Haidt’s philosophical sophistication, yet in that same review pens paragraphs such as this
In his diary recording the persecution he suffered in Nazi Germany, Victor Klemperer reports on tradesmen and neighbors occasionally slipping him and his wife food and chocolate. Against the background of pervasive hatred and cruelty that Klemperer experienced, these fitful expressions of kindness must qualify as moral behavior. But they are in no sense “groupish.” Quite the contrary: they show people setting aside group identities for the sake of human sympathy. Those who helped Klemperer and his wife were violating the group-centered racist morality of Nazism—along with the morality that had in the past sanctioned persecution of Jews—in order to show concern for individuals. In effect, they were choosing between good and bad moralities.
Taken as a whole, these eloquent words don’t quite fall to the level of nonsense, but its certainly far from clear what meaningful statement Gray is making here and it does of course smack of appeal to emotion.
The larger point, however, is that I don’t see any fundamental tension between the work that Haidt is doing and moral philosophy. Gray writes
IT IS RATHER LATE in his argument that Haidt offers anything like a definition of morality, but when he does it is avowedly functionalist: “Moral systems are interlocking sets of values, virtues, norms, practices, identities, institutions, technologies, and evolved psychological mechanisms that work together to suppress or regulate self-interest and make cooperative societies possible.” Haidt recognizes that this is an entirely descriptive definition. He acknowledges that, if it were applied normatively, “it would give high marks to fascist and communist societies as well as to cults, so long as they achieved high levels of social cooperation by creating a shared social order.”
That is an implication of Haidt’s analysis about which he should be seriously concerned. But Haidt seems not to grasp the depth of the difficulties that he faces. There is a slippage from “is” to “ought” in nearly all evolutionary theorizing, with arguments about natural behavior sliding into claims about the human good. It may be true—though any account of how precisely this occurred can at present be little more than speculation—that much of what we see as morality evolved in a process of natural selection. That does not mean that the results must be benign. Freud tried to develop a view of human nature in terms of which morality could be better understood; but he accepted that much that comes naturally to humans—such as sexual predation and other types of violence—had to be repressed in the interests of a civilized life. Civilization sometimes requires the repression of natural human traits, including some that may be sanctioned by prevailing moral codes. The moralities that have emerged by natural selection have no overriding authority.
It is quite true that no description of the evolution of human morality tells us what we “ought” to do, but such descriptions in general and Haidt’s work in particular are incredibly useful to the moral philosopher.
For example, a significant chunk of moral philosophy could be understood as an attempt to divine what the following sentence is all about:
Sally said that eating meat is morally wrong, but I disagree.
Assuming that Sally did in fact utter the words “eating meat is morally wrong” what, if anything, am I disagreeing with?
Without diving too deep, let’s just say it is far from clear. However, Haidt is potentially offering us a clear first step.
According to Haidt I can understand that sentence as the following:
Sally said that eating meat violates either the principle of care, fairness, loyalty, respect, sanctity or liberty, but I disagree.
Importantly, if Haidt is right then my view of morality, projectivist anti-realism is seriously called into question. Indeed, taking Haidt seriously enough is grounds for accepting a full throated moral-realism.
So, I am deeply interested in the potential success of Haidt’s project.
Where I am confused by Haidt is his suggestion that of the six foundational values, conservatives see all six, libertarians see four and liberals only three.
Why should this be?
Are we suggesting that liberalism for example is a form of color-blindness; that liberals simply lack the cones to see three of the foundational moral values?
If this is the case are we to understand the growth of liberalism over time as the rapid spread of a genetic mutation? Is it the result of some sort of nutritional deficiency or environmental pollutant?
Moreover, it really seems like people are able to become more liberal or conservative as a result of primarily mental experiences. What is that all about?
Now I want to be clear that I am open to these possibilities. I am just not sure if that’s what Haidt means because he seems to suggest that through experience and intermingling liberals and conservatives can learn to put aside their differences.
However, doesn’t this suggest that liberals can in fact see all six foundational values?
4 comments
Comments feed for this article
Wednesday ~ April 25th, 2012 at 9:37 am
BSEconomist
I’m a little confused by your last few paragraphs here, but I thought that Haidt showed; not that liberals and conservatives weigh different sets of moral values, but rather that conservatives weigh all equally while liberals have three that they prefer above the others.
I think this is a problem, incidently, if you want to focus too much on the evolutionary aspect of the problem but from the perspective of choice all this means is that we may change our individual weightings. So you can say that evolution endows us with the “technology” of analyzing moral choice through a “purity” heuristic, but evolution doesn’t tell us how much weight to put on this judgment.
That’s my thinking anyway.
Wednesday ~ April 25th, 2012 at 10:38 am
Curt Doolittle
1) IMHO, Hadit has made the greatest contribution to moral philosophy in a century.He has, as you have stated, given us a language for discussing political preferences as biological in origin and not open to rational persuasion. The important deduction from this insight is: “a government that requires unanimity of belief is both impossible to pursue and the source of permanent social conflict.” Instead (as I have agued for years) our purpose is not to convince others of our ethic, not to create a uniform society, but to create institutions through which people with different sentiments can cooperate toward mutually productive ends. In my work, I argue that federalism is possible, but only financial federalism. Norms cannot be the providence of the state.
2) RE your statement: “It is quite true that no description of the evolution of human morality tells us what we “ought” to do, but such descriptions in general and Haidt’s work in particular are incredibly useful to the moral philosopher.”
It does however, tell us that there are **LIMITS** to what we can do.
3) it also tells us something that (we propertarians have argued) we may not like: our civic religion is built around homogeneity of beliefs. But even if we set the distribution of abilities between the races, and racial sentiments aside, the differences between the distribution of the sentiments between the genders, and the differences between participation rates in the genders, means that eventually, all democratic societies would eventually adopt care-taking legal systems. However, those of us with a little history, note that men in those societies abandon formal society and create alternative signaling systems for masculinity that are OUTSIDE the formal system. That’s a polite way of describing how the high trust society comes to an end, Mediterranean and Slavic style.
—
I adore Haidt. Aristotle, Machiavelli and Pareto, all of whom were conservatives, have tried to state these principles in different ways with different degrees of success. (http://www.capitalismv3.com/menu/glossary/#sentiments). But Haidt finally accomplished what they failed to.
Most importantly, it is additional evidence, that the conservative concept of human nature is the correct one, and the liberal concept of human nature has consistently turned out to be false — to dire consequences for all of us.
Thursday ~ April 26th, 2012 at 9:40 am
Nate W.
Two things (either for Karl or someone willing to take up the case on his behalf):
1. It’s not clear to me why Karl thinks his position is incompatible with Haidt’s. Some utterance of mine might be correlated with the holding of some state of affairs. My saying “ouch!”, for example, might be correlated with my being in pain. It doesn’t thereby follow that my utterance is a CLAIM that the state holds, and thus, a candidate for truth or falsity. When I say “ouch!” I am indeed EXPRESSING that I am in pain, but I am not SAYING that I am in pain. And likewise with moral utterances. Even if Haidt is correct and human moral verdicts on acts or act types are correlated with their rating on Haidt’s values scale, it doesn’t follow that those utterances are thereby claims to the effect that those values hold. Moral utterances could BOTH be correlated with Haidt’s five values AND be nothing more than syntactically sophisticated variants of “Boo!” and “Hurrah!”.
2. Karl attempts to problemtize Haidt’s position by comparing liberal attitudes to a sort of blindness and then suggests that this leaves Haidt with the problem of explaining how this blindness takes hold and propagates itself. The implication is that Haidt has no good story to tell here and that’s a problem. But I’m not sure the blindness metaphor is apt.
Take a person with red-green color blindness. Show him a (randomly chosen) red or green color swatch and ask him “What color would a NON- color-blind person say this swatch is?” We should expect him to be correct no more often (and no less often) than chance. He can’t see what the regular-sighted person sees, so he can’t predict the regular-sighted person’s response. If a sort of blindness were really what was going on in Haidt’s scenario, then what we should expect something similar. Liberals, unable to detect the qualities that conservatives detect, should be unable to predict what a conservative would think of say, some scenario that contains a violation of purity or authority. But it seems far-fetched that liberals do suffer from that sort of blindness. And if they don’t, it’s hard to see how a type of blindness is really what’s in play.
Thursday ~ April 26th, 2012 at 10:19 am
Jonathan Haidt
Dear Mr. Smith:
Thanks so much for this response to Gray. I was so puzzled by his essay; he seemed to want me to be a reductionist who tried to explain everything in terms of evolution, whereas all i’m saying to philosophers is that evolution helps us understand human nature, and unless you are a certain kind of extreme moral realist, human nature must be relevant to normative theory. Of course history matters; ideas and parties have a history. But Gray seems to be a blank-slater.
As for your question about whether liberals are missing “cones” or receptors for loyalty, authority, and sanctity: I think that a few people on the far left, especially anarchists, might be described that way. But I prefer to think about the foundations as taste buds which everyone has. Liberal/leftist morality is like a cuisine that activates just three of them primarily, and makes little use of the conservative three. But you can usually find some trace of it, e.g., liberals can do group loyalty in the fight against conservatives, but they just don’t like to do it so much in other contexts. And many liberals can use sanctity thinking about the environment and nature — it’s not just practical utilitarian thinking, it treats nature as something sacred and pure, which must be protected from desecration.