Couple of follow-up links on the TED talk on the moral perspectives of conservatives and liberals (https://plus.google.com/u/0/+RhysTaylorRhysy/posts/8RXo2EFZZad?cfem=1), via Bill Brayman. The Scientific American piece has the more detailed background information whereas the Psychology Today piece presents a more skeptical (the good kind) analysis.
From SA :
His next milestone came in 2001 when he published, "The Emotional Dog and its Rational Trail," which he describes as "the most important article I’ve ever written." ... it helped shift moral psychology away from rationalist models that dominated in the 1980s and 1990s. In its place Haidt offered an understanding of morality from an intuitive and automatic level. As Haidt says on his website, "we are just not very good at thinking open-mindedly about moral issues, so rationalist models end up being poor descriptions of actual moral psychology."
This is key. Someone studying moral psychology ought, like any scientist studying any issue, try to detach their own personal beliefs from their conclusions as much as possible. Haidt seems to do that well, in my humble opinion. Trying to describe morality by different parameters without making moral judgements about those parameters seems like a good approach. Of course, the process of study and its application are two different things...
His article also gave rise to the elephant-rider metaphor, a major theme in his research that readers of his first popular book, The Happiness Hypothesis will recognize. The metaphor describes how our unconscious cognitive capacities guide and control our conscious deliberations. As he explains in the book, "the mind is divided into parts that sometimes conflict. Like a rider on the back of an elephant, the conscious, reasoning part of the mind has only limited control of what the elephant does." The metaphor, Haidt explained to me, "really started in my psych 101 class when I was trying to explain psychology using quotes that I had collected. I thought it would be interesting to analyze them. And so the rider and the elephant is the metaphor I came up with."
I like this metaphor a lot - it make conscious choices the more sophisticated ones, doesn't forbid them from influence but makes them subject to other forces. Sometimes the rider might be trying to go one way as hard as they can but the bloody elephant just doesn't listen; at other times the two are in harmony.
What comes out of The Righteous Mind is initially pessimistic but ultimately optimistic. At first, Haidt reminds us that we are all trapped in a moral matrix where we our "elephants" only look for what confirms its moral intuitions while our "riders" play the role of the lawyer; we team up with people who share similar matrices and become close-minded; and we forget that morality is diverse. But on the other hand, Haidt is offering us a choice: take the blue pill and remain happily delusional about your worldview, or take the red pill, and, as he said in his 2008 TED talk, "learn some moral psychology and step outside your moral matrix."
Now for the PT piece :
Traits, at least as conceived of by the major trait researchers Costa and McCrae, are seen as almost exclusively determined by genes (although it would be the subject of another post, Costa and McCrae consistently argue this point-I, however, would challenge their characterization as over-exaggerating the genetic case for traits). Political values are transmitted largely via the family (I assume this is true, but would have to explore the research on it). So I could imagine a very interesting adoption study where the trait openness of the biological parents could be analyzed and compared to the political ideology of the adoptive family in predicting the adopted individual's political values. If anyone knows of research on this topic, I would love to hear it.
I continue working my way through Yale's online Introduction to Psychology course. In a recent lecture, Bloom states that personality and intelligence and largely due to nature, not nurture. Children tend to have similar I.Q.'s to their biological parents, not their adopted parents, he say (I don't think he mentions any similar studies on personalities but I'd have to check). My interpretation is that personality is a predisposition to believing certain ideologies - no-one is born event with knowledge of (let alone trust in) Maxwell's equations, but some are more likely to accept them than others. Education is still going to matter, but different people require problems to be framed differently to reach the same conclusions. I also like Haidt's assertion that genetics gives you an at least somewhat malleable "first draft" world view rather than something that's set in stone from birth. That rings true to me because even young infants seem to have distinct personalities but people do change over time.
Somewhat tangentially, I'd also add that if this is true, it doesn't mean that everything is hopeless. Rather, I suspect it means that the organisational system of society becomes more important, not less, because you have to have people in roles that are beneficial to themselves and others, not try and force them to act in a way that you think is better... a sophisticated approach would consider feedback, where systems both change and are changed by their participants. That's for a future post, probably. Eventually. Maybe.
Back to PT :
A closer examination reveals that it is not accurate to claim that liberals think that in-group loyalty, respect for authority, and purity have NO relevance. That would be a score of a 0 on his scale. If you look at the graphs, they actually generally cluster around a score of a 2, which I believe corresponds to 'somewhat relevant'. So the correct interpretation is that liberals value do no harm and fairness MORE than the other three, but they value the others to some degree.
That seems tempting but it's not what Haidt says, but he doesn't explain what the "endorsement" scale on the graph actually means. So I think this is a very risky claim.
He uses the interesting argument that conservatives have five moral value systems operating, whereas liberals only have two. This catches the attention of the liberals, which I think is a good thing, because it suggests that liberals may actually be less complex in their thinking, which would come as a shock to their system ). However, what if we simply asked the question: What values should our government be operating from? And answer that by saying that in-group loyalty, purity and respect for authority SHOULD EQUAL fairness and do no harm, my guess is many in the audience would say that is a seriously flawed value system. In group loyalty, purity and respect for authority are somewhat relevant, but not nearly as relevant as the other two.
No, not necessarily. Haidt has the nice statement that liberals value fairness and care above order, and would rather have a society with those values even at the expense of (at least some measure of) chaos. In contrast conservatives value stability and order more highly. And while Plato, in his world building exercises, went to really extreme lengths to maintain stability (i.e. banning children from creating their own games), I wouldn't rush to dismiss stability and order as a civic virtue. I like stability, just not when it's stable and awful. The best condition is (duh !) stable and good. And loyalty and authority (perhaps not so much purity) are important aspects of that, which when things go well prevent chaotic destructive elements from taking hold. That said, I wouldn't like to guess as to the relative importance of these values from a governmental perspective. At least not right now...
First, he talks about traits, which he does so to set the stage that the mind has a foundational architecture. But he does not really connect the dots between Openness to Experience and the five moral systems (although I have not read all of his stuff, I have not seen this in his writing either). I do not believe a factor analysis of openness to experience would yield Haidt's moral systems. So the connection between trait Openness and the five moral systems remains nebulous to me.
This I agree with. Maybe Haidt elsewhere states the connection more clearly but it wasn't at all obvious to me from his talk : he switched from openness to the other values quite suddenly.
A related criticism is that by connecting the moral values to liberal and conservative viewpoints, he is confounding morality with beliefs about the proper role and function of government.
I don't think so, he doesn't talk about government at all - it's a Western perspective to equate liberalism/conservatism with specific polities. In eastern Europe, for instance, it's the Right who are the liberals and the Left who are conservative. We probably need better labels for these things... I would describe myself as socially liberal and financially Left, i.e. authoritarian.
But where does freedom fit into the scheme? Surely, freedom is a moral-political-governmental value? The paper acknowledges the value libertarians put on freedom, but after reading through it I remained unclear exactly how freedom fits into the five systems.
From the talk, isn't that just authority ? If you value authority and loyalty more highly, you value freedom less highly, by definition. I've not read the paper though.
A related issue is that Haidt was talking about social issues, but as the libertarian perspective suggests, social and economic views are somewhat intertwined. This leads to the question: Are Haidt's five systems moral systems or are they beliefs about the things governments should concern themselves with?
Which is a very good question. My biggest criticism - and I like Haidt's approach very much - is that while there are a good many issues I can easily see as morally complex, and bearing in mind that no-one sees themselves as the baddies (Mitchell and Webb notwithstanding : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8JOpPNra4bw), there are still some issues I have difficulty attributing to "a different moral perspective" and not sheer malevolence. A philosophical look at Haidt's work would concern itself with whether each of the five values really is moral but more particularly if we can really say if someone with any combination of these values is inevitably a moral person. Someone who values only authority and nothing else, say, wouldn't obviously be a sophisticated moral philosopher, they could just be a dick. Nevertheless, while it's crucial that Haidt and other researchers try and characterise moral positions, the rest of us still have to make morally informed choices. While we may be aware of our own perspectives, we can't always escape it. Ultimately, we do have decide what's right and wrong.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/theory-knowledge/201201/jonathan-haidts-moral-political-psychology
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/jonathan-haidt-the-moral-matrix-breaking-out-of-our-righteous-minds/
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/jonathan-haidt-the-moral-matrix-breaking-out-of-our-righteous-minds/
I enjoyed reading your analysis. I like the way you characterized Haidt's frame of the liberal mindset which tends to value fairness and care above order, and identified the "moral" ambiguity of that stance. Bottom line, I think reality presents choices between bloody and bloodier, not perfect and imperfect. That difference in the way things are framed is what loosely defines those who deal with the world as it is attempting to make realistic progress with an understanding that part of the cost of both existence and progress is built on some kind of sacrifice vs. those who want and expect perfection now, not understanding how we can all too easily sacrifice what we do have on the altar of the perfect. A moralistic veneer on what is essentially the parasitic and predatory act of oxytocin junkies.
ReplyDeleteMy guess is, generally speaking, that what we call morals are a verbal symptom with a biological cause. Those of us that make the effort to examine ourselves and additionally find cause to build an abstract moral cocoon to justify what we observe ourselves doing, do so out from the raw material of our biological disposition. We are mostly Texas sharpshooting; blowing holes in the barn then drawing a convenient moralistic target around the most populous aggregate of holes. We slap a verbal paint job on our biological engine and sometimes pretend we are the paint job and not the engine, or confuse the two, or think the paint job is the operator of the engine, etc.
If we were cats, we would moralize about how we're justified to stalk and kill other creatures or punishingly toy with them until dead to amuse ourselves or keep our hunting skills sharp. In fact, some of us track along similar moralistic lines when we speak of our relationship to the rest of the food web. (I am making an observation here, not an accusation.) Our verbal identity is a puppet ruler peddling ideas for the most part.
For the spectrum of humans currently hanging out as temporary leaves on the evolutionary tree, who are behaviorally inclined largely by the momentum of ritual echoes of happenstance beyond our direct control and view, who also either want or accept the cultural norm that we must craft a justified verbal self image, we usually do this by bending the world with bare words.
If the inherent monstrosities conjured up by our local biological stew withers in the face of a fragile verbal cocoon of identity then we have a host of tactics to remedy the breeches in order to contend with the ambivalence. Among these is to secrete functional silos of categorical dissonance to hide one part of ourselves from the others, or fail to focus on certain aspects, or use projection, or any other number of tactics to put the band aid on the warning light. My guess is this is why those with the least genuine justification tend to gesticulate the most wildly and behave as if their moral paint job is somehow the apex of sacrosanct rather than so much reeeee.
I think morals as we frame them are an irrelevant sideshow. Good and bad are kings with no clothes - manufactured like money, whose value depends on the belief we breathe into it. I think a more effective frame is to think in terms of constructive or destructive relative to the dependencies inherent in a given system such as that which defines the coherency of our own rippling echo of nested biological dependencies. Creating a climate of growth toward our full maturity.
As far as I can tell, our best way forward is to do our best to have each other's backs and that of the larger body of life we live in and depend on, while also defending against antagonists to that economy of nourishing exchanges.To do our best to avoid unnecessary cruelty in order to minimize all the attending drag on our progress.
I could be missing something(s)
Joe Carter A very thoughtful response, as always.
ReplyDeleteAnother thing that interested me from Bloom's lectures : the concepts of universal constants and cultural variability in psychology. Much of what seems moral in one culture seems reprehensible in another. Haidt's formulation is very intriguing in that the same sort of variation appears in widely separated cultures. It would be fascinating to compare this by splits other than geographic, e.g. age, gender, religion, etc. With the caveat that I'm sure these five values might be subject to revision and revaluation, but the principle is what interests me. It does seem to lend credence to a genetic basis for morality.
What really interests me is how we might use this. I don't think I can ever escape the prison of my own ideologies, but I will claim that I'd revise my favoured policies in light of evidence. Having an objective tool to predict how people are likely to respond in light of new policies and systems - not how I'd like them to behave or how I think they should behave, but simply what they would actually do - well, that'd be something. I suspect none of us can avoid making subjective moral judgements. Scientific reasoning is often driven by ideology and subjective bias more than we'd like to admit, but - and this is the crucial bit - such ideas can be (and are) tested far more objectively, albeit imperfectly. And that, perhaps, is as much as we can hope from politics and morality : subjective ideas, tested objectively. If (hypothetically speaking) we can't objectively establish what's right and wrong, then we can at least assess what actually happens.
Such a tool would not be a magic bullet. What one side thinks of as a desirable outcome might be disgusting to another. But if we can't agree on the morality, objective predictions would be a good place to start.
I could go on, but fortunately I'm pressed for time. :) There's a nice discussion in the earlier thread too.
We're all missing something, that much seems certain... ;)
... OK, just one more thing. :) Drawing over from the other thread, I like how Haidt's parameters completely ignore intelligence. Something I would say the political left is definitely guilty of, maybe more than the right, is in assuming that its moral beliefs are rational conclusions. Regardless of whether they're correct or not (it's pretty obvious what I think about them), we on the left tend to take it for granted that morality is a rational thing, that our conclusions are correct, and that by extension anyone who disagrees is either misinformed, irredeemably irrational, and/or stupid. We rarely stop and acknowledge the possibility that we might simply believe our conclusions - even supposing they're correct! - due to genetic predisposition or irrational beliefs. The closest we get is an occasional note that morality and values on the right are driven by ideologies and emotion, with rarely a nod that we do the same. Haidt's approach to reduce things to more fundamental parameters, to try and find the key building blocks of moral beliefs as entities independent of (but perhaps not uncorrelated with) intellectuality, is welcome.
ReplyDeleteThat is not to say that I don't think rational moral judgements are possible or that I don't (massively) favour one side over the other. But that's another story.
Rhys Taylor Maybe he did not see IQ as a relevant enough factor because of the negligible difference between the disposition of each population. (Assuming it is accurate to parse across a spectrum like that) I could be wrong.
ReplyDeleteI think the value of his work is that it implies that the same way specialized organs are more effective at the various tasks the whole body faces as long as they are proportionally applied in the context of a specific environment, that our focal spectrum also works that way. It's not a question of either-or in my mind, but when each aspect (openness or a more rigid structural approach) is more effective to emphasize given the opportunity or demand conveyed through the environment.
Like I said, I think what we call morality is a verbal paint job on a biological engine. Our rationale applies to what we believe, it is not why we believe what we do. It is a descendant domino falling and not a first cause as far as I can tell.
I don't have enough trust in the lens I am equipped with to disqualify one side or the other. Again I think each has value contextually. Prior to the radio telescope there was no real way to see the valuable aspects of the cosmos that can only be seen and understood through that lens. I try not to conflate my lack of understanding a portion of the bandwidth with someone else's failure to see that my limited perspective is the full extent of reality.
I genuinely think I could be missing something(s)
Joe Carter I think it would be incredibly interesting to see the split by IQ or some other intelligence measure, regardless of the result. My point was that we tend to frame everything in terms of intelligence and don't often divorce it from morality. Moral parameters may or may not correlate with intelligence and that in turn may or may not be a causal connection; such a correlation could also be due to more cultural factors. Either way, it would be useful to know. While it might be a mistake to assume moral beliefs are due to objective judgement, it would also be a mistake to assume that intelligence plays no role in decision making, even if it's not connected to moral ideologies. Just as people of the same intellect may make different choices if they have different morals, so too will those who share moral values if they have different intellects.
ReplyDeleteI reserve judgement on the fundamental nature of morality. But I absolutely, 100%, slap-it-on-bumper-sticker endorse the notion of applied effectiveness. Obligatory Plato quote :
Considered in itself, no action is either good or bad, honourable or shameful : how it comes out depends entirely on how it is performed. If it is done honourably and properly, it turns out to be honourable; if it is done improperly, it is disgraceful.
My assessment of Plato's view of morality is that he found it to be objective but not absolute. You couldn't say that any one action is good or bad without its proper context : it was at least partially relational. I tend to share that view.
Rhys Taylor Hans Eysenck thought higher intelligence across multiple factors would result in avoidance of extreme political views in either direction. i.e. more intelligent people would tend to be moderate/centrist. His thought, if I understand it, was that extreme views tend to be associated with hidebound dogmatism, and that rigidity of thought was (according to him) more appealing to less intelligent people who in today's terms would be suffering from the Dunning/Kruger effect.
ReplyDeleteHe was quite controversial and maybe the mark of being right is pissing off both ends of the spectrum, but then again, he may have been predisposed to be moderate and made the evidence fit his predilection. I found this an interesting read.
https://scindeks-clanci.ceon.rs/data/pdf/0048-5705/1998/0048-57059803257S.pdf