Moral Dumbfounding

[flotsam]

Read something absolutely fascinating in The Believer (a wonderful little literay/general interest mag). Wondered what you guys thought. What do you do when you are morally dumbfounded?


Interviewer: I want to star out talking about he phenomenon you call “moral dumbfounding.” You do an experiment where you present five scenarios to a subject and get their reaction. One of these scenarios describes a brighter and sister Julie and Mark vacationing in the south of France. They have some wine, one thing leads to another, and they decide they want to have sex. They use two different kinds of contraception and enjoy it, but they decide not to do it again. How do people react to this, and what conclusions do you draw from their reaction?

Jonathan Haidt: People almost always start out by saying it’s wrong. Then they start to give reasons. The most common reasons involved genetic abnormalities or that it will somehow damage their relationship. But we say in the story that they use two forms of birth control, and we say in the story that they keep that night as a special secret and that it them even closer. So people seem to want to disregard certain facts about the story. When the experimenter points out these facts and says “Oh, well, sure, if they were going to have kids, that would cause problems, but they are using birth control, so would you say that it’s OK?” And people never say, “Ooooh, right, I forgot about the birth control. So then it IS OK.” Instead they say, “Oh, yeah. Huh. Well, OK, let me think.”

So what’s really clear, you can see it in the videotapes of the experiment, is: people give a reason. When that reason is stripped from them, they give another reason. When the new reason is stripped from them, they reach for another reason. And it’s only when they reach deep into their pocket for another reason, and come up empty-handed, that they enter the state call “moral dumbfounding.” Because they fully expect to find reasons. They’re surprised when they don’t find reasons. And in some of the videotapes you can see, they start laughing. But it’s not an “It’s so funny” laugh. It’s more of a nervous-embarrassment puzzled laugh. So it’s a cognitive state where you know that something is morally wrong, but you can’t find reasons to justify your belief. Instead of changing your mind about what’s wrong, you just say: “I don’t know, I can’t explain it. I just know it’s wrong.” So the fact that this state exists indicates that people hold beliefs separate from, or with no need of support from, the justifications that they give. Or another way of saying it is that the knowing that something is wrong and the explaining why are completely separate processes.

Interviewer: Are the subjects satisfied when they reach this state of moral dumbfounding? Or do they find something deeply problematic about it?

JH: For some people it’s problematic. They’re clearly puzzled, they’re clearly reaching, and they seem a little bit flustered. But other people are in a state we call “comfortably dumbfounded.” They say, with full poise: “I don’t know; I can’t explain it; it’s just wrong. Period.” So we know that there are big differences in people on a variable called “need for cognition.” Some people need to think about things, need to understand things, need to reason about things. Many of these people go to graduate school in philosophy. But most people, if they don’t have a reason for their moral judgments, they’re not particularly bothered.

Interviewer: So you conclusion is that while we might think that Reason or reasons are playing a big causal role in how we arrive at moral judgments, it’s actually our intuitions – fueled by our emotions – that are doing most of the work. You say in you paper that reason is the press secretary of the emotions, the ex post facto spin doctor.

JH: Yes. That is right.

[peter_mary]

Read something absolutely fascinating in The Believer (a wonderful little literay/general interest mag). Wondered what you guys thought. What do you do when you are morally dumbfounded?



I like this concept of "morally dumbfounded," but I found one part of the discussion painfully absent: what about the influence of cultural and moral paradigms? He seems to suggest we have an "intuition" (which is often a euphamism for "the spirit" or "Spirit"), but what about the possibility that we understand the principles associated with "swimming," we just haven't learned to see "the water" yet? We know HOW our society and it's norms operate, we just know WHY.

In other words, we may come to moral conclusions without actually thinking, but instead just regurgitating moral reasons. When those reasons are all undercut, the paradigm is left free floating...but it's still intact.

I think that's what Zen (and other ways of approaching moral reasoning) is trying to suggest. We have to learn to assess each moral situation on the merits of the specific circumstance, rather than relying on platitudes or rules. The rules may be good in the general sense, but they will ALWAYS break down on the perimeter of explored experience. That's one of the difficulties I have with religion, is that it encourages people to rely on rules rather than thinking through a situation and making a determination for sound reasons.

Me? I don't find myself morally dumbfounded on this example at all. Of course, the religious right would castigate me as a "moral relativist," and I guess I would answer, "yeah, that's me."

Peter_Mary

[helemon]

I like this concept of "morally dumbfounded," but I found one part of the discussion painfully absent: what about the influence of cultural and moral paradigms?

That was my take as well. The researcher is ignoring that this rule is highly conditioned into people both by society and to a degree by nature. The rules that the people state are valid reasons for avoiding such relationships and have likely served as the foundation for the creation of this social norm. Even if risk of pregnancy was removed these people will still have to deal with the internal conflict of knowing they have broken a major social taboo which if ever discovered could result in personal shame and isolation by their society. So even if they use contraception and make a pack to tell no one they will still be haunted by this concern of their secret being discovered perhaps by a future significant other. There is also no chance that such a relationship could continue openly in modern society, unless of course they were ancient royals where such familial pairing were normal and encouraged.

[elder_nomo]

Read something absolutely fascinating in The Believer (a wonderful little literay/general interest mag). Wondered what you guys thought. What do you do when you are morally dumbfounded?.
I totally agree, Flotsam, this is absolutely fascinating!

To pick a little nit, I had some trouble with the way the interviewer phrased a couple of things:
He said "the knowing that something is wrong and the explaining why are completely separate processes."
Maybe it's the ex-mo in me that objects to "knowing" that something is wrong. I wish he'd said "believing" something is wrong.

He also said "it’s actually our intuitions – fueled by our emotions – that are doing most of the work" and again I have some trouble with the wording. I think these moral judgements are learned, not intuited. Maybe not taught outright, but learned just the same. And that's why they can be so troublesome.

Regardless of those things, which I admit are somewhat off the main point, the article IS fascinating.
Thanks for posting it.

Oh, and to answer your question.....
Just reading the one example caused me to go slightly bonkers trying to figure out why I believed it was wrong, and then even IF I believed it was wrong, and all the way back again and around and around. Dumbfounded is a good word for how I felt.

edit note: I posted this before reading posts by P_M and Helemon... Interesting...I think we're saying some of the same things in different ways.

[flotsam]

I love the critiques you guys have been putting up here. I went through the article and gleaned the parts that I thought would either answer your questions, or provoke you further..

I'm very interested in which pillars you folks see Post-Mo's and TBM's using, and what that may mean to the way we communicate across that boundary.


Interviewer: So now where do these moral intuitions come from? I guess I’m looking to see if you they’re a product of evolution.

JH: Yes, I do. We’re born into this world with a lot of guidance as to how to make our way. Our tongues come with various receptors that make us respond well to fruit and meat. Our bodies are designed to give us pleasure when we encounter fruit and meat. And to get displeasure from bitter sensations. So our bodies are designed to mesh with properties of the real world, the real physical world – to track nutrients and poisons.

Similarly, our minds come equipped to feel pleasure and displeasure at patterns in the social world. When we see someone cheat someone else, we feel displeasure, dislike. And this dislike is a signal to us to avoid that person, to avoid trusting that person, coopering with him. When we see a heroic act, or an act of self-sacrifice, or charity, we feel and emotion that I call moral elevation. We feel a warm, very pleasurable feeling that includes elements of love. We’re much more likely to help such people, to trust them and to want relationship with them. So just as our tongues guide us to good foods and away from bad foods, our minds guide us to good people, away from bad people.


One of my favorite quotes is from Max Weber; “Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance that he himself has spun.” So I think that with morality, we build a castle in the air and then we live in it, but it is real castle. It has no objective foundation, a foundation outside of our fantasy, but that’s true about money; that true about music; that’s true about most of the things that we care about.


There are at least four foundations of our moral sense, but there are many coherent moral systems that can be built on these four foundations. But not just anything can be built on these foundations. So I believe that an evolutionary approach specifying the foundations of our moral sense can allow us to appreciate Hindu and Muslim cultures where women are veiled and seem to us to lead restricted lives. These are not necessarily immoral cultures. Given that most of the world believes that gender role differences are good and right and proper, they are unlikely to be wrong, by which I mean, they are unlikely to be incoherent or ungrammatical moralities. We in America, especially liberals, use only two of these four bases. Liberals use intuitions about suffering (aversion to) and intuitions about reciprocity, fairness, and equality.

But there are two other foundations – there are intuitions about hierarchy, respect, duty … that’s one cluster. And intuitions about purity and pollution, which generate further intuitions about chastity and modesty. Most human cultures use all four of these bases to ground their moral worldviews. We in the West, in modern times especially, have to some extent, discarded the last two. We have built our morality entirely on issues about harm (the first pillar) and rights, and justice (the second). Our morality is coherent. We can critique people who do things that violate it within our group. We can’t critique cultures that use all four moralities. But we can critique cultures whose practices are simple exploitation and brutality, such as apartheid South Africa of the American slave South.

[Fredl]

OK, lets say my response is to the effect that I have no idea what is right or wrong for them, I can only say what would be right or wrong for me and to say for myself, I'd have to actually be in the situation and understand all the virtually infinite number of details associated with a real-life situation to know what I'd want to do.

Which is, indeed, pretty much how I feel about it.

May I consider myself morally dumbfounded from the outset without having to undergo further questions?

Fred

[helemon]

So just as our tongues guide us to good foods and away from bad foods, our minds guide us to good people, away from bad people.

Our minds tend to guide us toward young attractive, wealthy, and powerful people and often causes us to over look the fact that such people can also be "bad" and harmful to us; while frequently pushing us away from old, ugly, poor people. Not saying this is a good thing, just that this bias is there.

But what does this say about the churches attempt to portray Joseph as a young extremely handsome charismatic leader while attempting to hide his all of his flaws?


Liberals use intuitions about suffering (aversion to) and intuitions about reciprocity, fairness, and equality.

But there are two other foundations – there are intuitions about hierarchy, respect, duty … that’s one cluster. And intuitions about purity and pollution, which generate further intuitions about chastity and modesty.


I reject the idea that liberals have no sense of hierarchy, respect or duty. Liberals reject an unquestioning allegiance and respect for hierarchy. The foundation of democracy rests on people being willing to question their leaders and hold them accountable. There is little moral value in blindly following someone simply because they are the current leader. Liberals also have a different sense of what duty is. Duty to liberals is not blindly following your superiors, it is working to ensure equality, fairness, reciprocity, and working to ensure that we preserve our environment rather than simply viewing it as a resource for harnessing and conquering to maximize immediate ROI. I also think liberals recognize that issues related to purity and pollution are varied among human cultures and therefore strive to ensure that one groups concepts bout purity and pollution are not forced on others. I think liberals also tend toward validating issues of purity and pollution against documented scientific fact rather than mythological traditions. Also liberals extend the notion of purity and pollution beyond the individual and their relationship to the divine and extend to the scientifically based concepts of environmental pollution.


Most human cultures use all four of these bases to ground their moral worldviews. We in the West, in modern times especially, have to some extent, discarded the last two. We have built our morality entirely on issues about harm (the first pillar) and rights, and justice (the second). Our morality is coherent. We can critique people who do things that violate it within our group. We can’t critique cultures that use all four moralities. But we can critique cultures whose practices are simple exploitation and brutality, such as apartheid South Africa of the American slave South.

Again I reject that liberals have some how discarded these other pillars. I think they have transformed them and recognized that their rules are not everyones rules. Where other cultures derive these pillars from religious traditions, liberals tend to derive them from observable phenomena and a perspective of tolerance.

[aether]

Liberals use intuitions about suffering (aversion to) and intuitions about reciprocity, fairness, and equality.

But there are two other foundations – there are intuitions about hierarchy, respect, duty … that’s one cluster. And intuitions about purity and pollution, which generate further intuitions about chastity and modesty.

I have a problem with what this guy is saying. True, there are cultures built upon these four pillars. But the way I see it, the first two he lists are relatively concrete and have almost unanimously the same definition. Everyone can see and feel suffering all around them. It's pretty clear when someone is being harmed. By the same token, the concept of justice is relatively clear-cut. If all the rules are known by a people, then those people know when someone is cheating or playing unfairly.

But then he gets into what he considers the more important pillars: heirarchy and respect, and purity and pollution. Both of these have no physical incarnation. Hierarchy depends on so many things, and like Helemon said, there is little moral value in blindly respecting and obeying someone just because they are the leader. If it's emotional or spiritual hierarchy we're discussing, then that is individual for every person and cannot apply to society as a whole.

And as for purity, that is entirely, utterly subjective. He uses modesty as an example of purity, and it's a disgusting lack of logic in his argument. Who's to decide whether the bare human body is spiritually pure or polluted? Who's to say whether sex is dirty or whether it's holy and divine?

In an individual life, I think it's advisable for people to use all four pillars in their judgements. But when it comes to government and culture, like this man is suggesting, we cannot use the same rubric or it leads to things like prejudice, discrimination, sexism, violations of the first two pillars that are justified by invoking the other two. It's a terrible way to run a city (or country, or planet).

[flotsam]

Ok, this has been fun. What I think is really interesting is that it seems you folks have been viewing Haidt here as a conservative. Well, watch for the exciting conclusion.


Interviewer: What are the prospects of discussion between conservatives and liberals, given that conservative make use of two modules – purity and hierarchy – that we liberals care little about? Are we speaking different languages? How can we get past this?

JH: First it would help if liberals understood conservatives better. If I have a mission in life, it is to convince people that everyone is morally motivated – everyone except for psychopaths. Everyone else is morally motivated. Liberals need to understand that conservatives are motivated by more than greed and hatred. And Americans and George Bush in particular need to understand that even terrorists are pursuing moral goods. One of the most psychologically stupid things anyone ever said is that the 9/11 terrorists did this because they hate our freedom. That’s just idiotic. Nobody says: “They’re free over there. I hate that. I want to kill them” They did this because they hate us, they’re angry at us for many reasons and terrorism and violence are “moral” actions by which I don’t mean morally right, I mean morally motivated.

Interviewer: And at the same time you want liberals to understand that we didn’t go into Iraq just for oil or Halliburton.

JH: Of course not. Bush is Manichean. He really believes that we are in a battle of good vs. evil. Now I think strategically that he led us into disaster. But I never believed for a, moment that this was about oil.

Interviewer: So what would the consequence be of everyone understanding that the other side is morally motivated? I guess we could just get down to the nuts and bolts of the issue at hand.

JH: We would become much more tolerant , and some compromise might be possible, for example, on gay marriage. Even though personally I would like to see it legalized everywhere, I think it would a nice compromise if each state could decide whether to legalize it and not body was forced one way or another by the Supreme Court. And then gay people who live in Alabama, if they wanted to get married, could go to Massachusetts.

Interviewer : OK let’s bring this around full circle. What do you thin of Julie and Mark and their consensual sex in the south of France. Is it wrong?

JH: It’s fine with me. Doesn’t bother me in the least. Remember: I’m a liberal. So if it doesn’t involve harm to someone, it’s not a big deal to me. Liberals love to find victims, and incest cases are usually ones in which someone is being harmed. But that’s the trick of the question. They’re both adults, and it’s consensual. So liberals have an especially hard time trying to justify why it’s wrong. But I wrote the story, so I know the trick.


OK, this is what's interesting to me on this question. Poeple who have left Mormonism and people still devout probably have about the same traits that Haidt describes as dividing liberals and conservatives respecitvely. So (taking in to account fine tuning done we've been doing to the theory here) is there a way to communicate across the boundary? Is there a way to have a mutually satisfying conversation with a TBM about Mormonism while still being true to our unique experience?

[helemon]

Ok, this has been fun. What I think is really interesting is that it seems you folks have been viewing Haidt here as a conservative. Well, watch for the exciting conclusion.


I didn't assume he was conservative. I just disagreed with his statements such as liberals disregarding two of his "pillars."


OK, this is what's interesting to me on this question. Poeple who have left Mormonism and people still devout probably have about the same traits that Haidt describes as dividing liberals and conservatives respecitvely. So (taking in to account fine tuning done we've been doing to the theory here) is there a way to communicate across the boundary? Is there a way to have a mutually satisfying conversation with a TBM about Mormonism while still being true to our unique experience?

What you are forgetting is that it takes two to have a conversation. Most TBMs are not willing to do that. Numerous exmos and postmos have talked about how such attempts at dialogue are viewed as hostile attacks by TBMs.

I think most of us would be happy to have a conversation with TBMs and I think most of us would be very tolerant of what they had to say, but I highly doubt that the TBM would tolerate our perspective for very long.

[miss taken]

I havn't got anything to add on this account, accept I came up with 'morally dumbfounded' too. Thanks Flotsam. Really enjoyed reading all this.