The "Moral Matrix"

[Kev H]

Let's take a couple of these up.

Your emphasis was on the 'risk of being wrong.' But there is no explanation, here or in the speech, what this supposed 'risk' might consist in. In short, what risk? This is nonsense.

If he means the risk of being wrong, in itself, meh. I'm wrong quite a bit. I don't like it, but I take the risk hundreds of times a day. I never allow the risk of being wrong to prevent my making a decision, unless I think I can get more data and believe I lose nothing by waiting the time it takes to become better informed.

I think he means some other risk, a special risk that in some unspecified way inheres only to this decision. It might be nice to have some idea what risk this might be.

Shall we suppose that this 'magical' process begins at its beginning, as the speech and this excerpt suggest we do? It has no effect on the argument, because this concern, worried at for some seconds in the speech, is a straw man-- no one ever suggested that gestation doesn't begin at its beginning. That's the logic, but the emotional thrust of making the straw man argument is to bolster the second assumption, that the potential of a fertilized egg, two unified zygotes, is the same potential as a newborn's.

Well, clearly, it isn't. Many newborns die at ninety, many die only a few days old. Many fertilized eggs are dumped when they fail to implant, many will have died, been miscarried, or whatnot at some time in the course of gestation, because of many different causes. Statistically, then, the potential of a given fertilized egg is not equivalent. Most eggs pass through without even being fertilized, and an overwhelming proportion of sperm fail to achieve anything at all.

These terms, magical and sacred, are null terms, logically, and serve only to bolster the emotional appeal. He does so much gushing, asking us to wonder and marvel and hold to be magical, that I come away from the speech feeling that he wants his listeners to answer the question on emotion alone, attaching infinite value to magical processes. His 'Life' almost always has a capital letter, it's precious, it's magical, its potential is infinite and so is its value.

Life on the genuine planet Earth is much more about dinner. Everything exists, in the animal kingdom, to eat something else. I like living, but I do realize that I continue to do it in despite of many hundreds of thousands of organisms which raven for me, whether as nutrients or as a vehicle for their own reproduction. There's more than one disease for every part of me. In the end, many organisms will actually succeed in eating me (fewer if I leave directions to have the husk cremated). I suggest that Life is only Precious in a very limited way, to a limited group of other living beings, and wholly temporarily. This gushing over-sentimentalizing is not very convincing, especially for someone characterized as a moral philosopher.Now let's have a look at these. There is no justification made by this philosopher to explain why the only moral choices involve bearing to full term. I have to supply the connection myself, and it seems to have to do with the Holy Magical Sacredness Of Life. If a natural process, gestation or any other process, has begun, I don't think a sane morality would make us stand off and helplessly allow the process to fulfill itself. I put out house fires for a living and rescued people from hazardous situations in an ambulance. I took action many times on the job to interrupt ongoing processes, however Magical, and I felt morally justified.

There is more happening in a pregnancy than a magical process of Life. There is the entire surround, beginning with the mother, whose risks, again statistically, based on facts, are considerable. They are so considerable that I think the man ought to consider them. He does not devote any vigor to that. For him, the purpose of morality is the preservation of that pair of united zygotes, and once they are present, the mother and all the rest of creation is only of secondary importance, even though they, too, posses a Magical and Sacred Wonder-inducing Life, each of their very own. His perspective is warped on this, but again he makes no moral argument why the fetus takes utter priority. I can only assume it's mostly because women generally don't count for very much.

Hi, cant. You seem late to this argument, and choosy in the way those who only want to dissent are choosy--no construction, only destruction. Your choice, but a sad one, in my opinion.

For example, your comparison to everyday choices in your "risk of being wrong" section is callous or very disingenuous, and in either case, I ask you to be more fair. Nor is it fair to poo-poo life as magical by saying there's all kinds of life (using the most broad definition we have) before in-a-way admitting our kind of life (the higher life that includes a reasoning/philosophical mind) is "Precious in a limited way" (and funny enough, you pay homage to how tentative it is when you mention all the things waiting to kill/eat you). We know it's rare (our kind), and we know it's very temporary--is that supposed to be a refutation of some point?

We also know the speaker is energetic and his points are based in his observations/thoughts rather than a bundle of dry facts--are you seriously demeaning him for that?

So rather than using your own set of emotional words like "gushing" and "warped," consider being a more thoughtful poster than you have been.

 

[cantdog]

Hi, cant. You seem late to this argument, and choosy in the way those who only want to dissent are choosy--no construction, only destruction. Your choice, but a sad one, in my opinion.

For example, your comparison to everyday choices in your "risk of being wrong" section is callous or very disingenuous, and in either case, I ask you to be more fair. Nor is it fair to poo-poo life as magical by saying there's all kinds of life (using the most broad definition we have) before in-a-way admitting our kind of life (the higher life that includes a reasoning/philosophical mind) is "Precious in a limited way" (and funny enough, you pay homage to how tentative it is when you mention all the things waiting to kill/eat you). We know it's rare (our kind), and we know it's very temporary--is that supposed to be a refutation of some point?

We also know the speaker is energetic and his points are based in his observations/thoughts rather than a bundle of dry facts--are you seriously demeaning him for that?

So rather than using your own set of emotional words like "gushing" and "warped," consider being a more thoughtful poster than you have been.

Too sorry, old man, not to have met the standard for 'thoughtfulness."

The point of my post is that there is a bigger picture than an isolated precious fetus in a sort of bubble of moral imperatives. The context in which the fetus exists, in the genuine world, is complex and variable. The preciousness of its life may have to be set against the preciousness of many other lives, for example. The consequences of conception, gestation and birth can be grim, in some cases.

My point is that the moral philosopher chooses to de-emphasize all else than the fetus, which he seems to see as an all-important arrow into the future.

Secondarily, I point out two other flaws. One, the lack of explanation as to why he makes this choice. If there's a principle, he doesn't state it; the closest he comes is to repeat descriptions of the vast potential and precious magicalness of Life. If that's his argument, he still has blown off everyone else's life for no particular reason that I can see.

The second flaw is the assumption that Life has some sort of infinite value. I have not observed that to be the case. The Author of nature has authored himself a system which is not characterized by a lot of veneration of life, as life, of itself. Many kinds of life contend all the time, and succeed by defeating other kinds of life. I eat, for instance. I think even a cursory amount of 'observations/thoughts would call the attention of a moral philosopher to the matter. Life really doesn't seem to have any of the infinitely valuable characteristics he seems to assume.

The man begins with that false premise, applies it unfairly only to the fetus, refusing to grant the mother or any other part of the larger moral context the grace of a hearing. For that reason, yes indeed, I wish to contend. I believe we have a mistaken moral philosopher here.

...........

Now that I've said all this, I am no further ahead than I was at the end of my other post here, because this is only rephrasing. I shall now move on.

Can't tell if this has been thoughtful enough. I leave that to your judgment.

My destruction was thorough, if brief. It still took several paragraphs, even though I was choosy. You want construction? I shall certainly post a third time.

Finally, yes, I did come late to the thread. I can't guarantee to be here right off the bat every time a new thread begins. My apologies for that, too. Inattentive of me.

 

[xssve]

Next, there's Authority, and this I thought a bit of a misnomer. Judging from the items in the questionnaire, the content of Authority is not along the lines of Adorno's authoritarianism, hierarchical behavior, and obedience to authority, so much as along the lines of conformism. The questions asked pertain to following social mores, more than doing what the leader says. It seems, at any rate, that it should be explained by what Kev wrote about pack behavior.

This is where his argument falls apart, he's trying really hard to make this a "core" value, but he contradicts himself in the video when he talks about how cooperation increases when there is "punishment", real or implicit in order to elicit the desired behavior - i.e., respect for authority translates to "fear of punishment", which is an enculturated response, not a "natural" one, albeith based on the "pleasure principle", i.e., the average organism seeks pleasure and avoids pain, but as anybody who has ever raised a teenager, or even been one, the concept that humans innately respect authority is patently ludicrous - this isn't science, it's the usual neo-Christian syncretization of anything and everything that might give them an advantage, distorted by their central obsession with control.

In short, bullshit. Sadly, he will likely confuse a lot of people on this complex subject, but in fact it's very simple: organisms seek to survive long enough to reproduce, period, the rest is diversity and process.

"Respect for authority" has caused more damage to the gene pool than any other human abstraction you can name, that's demonstrable.

 

[cantdog]

Third post

The value of life in the real world is not what the observations/thoughts of the moral philosopher indicate. If I can vitiate his argument with the mere observation that I eat, then he needs revision.

Because the fact that I eat demonstrates that the value of any life is contingent. I kill to eat, other life forms do the same, waste products of the process are in turn consumed, building more food chains, and amass into working ecologies.

That's the context of the value of a life. If we did (and we actually don't) derive our morality from observation and deduction, determining the will of the Author from the characteristics of His system, we could not begin, as the moral philosopher does, with the utter preciousness of any given Life.

What humans actually do, in the world the philosopher inhabits but hasn't read well, is start life with a moral sense, built in. It is an evolving thing, changing quite radically as we mature, especially as we mature spiritually, but it is always available. It is as available as reason or memory or imagination, and in use all the time.

Consider, since we are observing and thinking, how decisions are made, because that is what a moral sense is for, isn't it? Remember that we make hundreds of decisions an hour, large and small. If you can put aside preconception, you will see that some decisions are made mostly with the sense of the common good, which I will call common sense; some are largely the product of intuition; some are actually mostly made using reason. In each case though, the other elements are still present, and can easily contribute to the decision.

The elements of decision are reason, memory, intuition, imagination, common sense, and the moral sense. In most decisions, two or more of them are most important in the moment of choice. I am not making this up; have an attentive look at the way you make real-world decisions, and you'll see what I mean. Talk to other people, ascertain how they decide things, and it will only confirm it.

Wisdom consists in the balancing of these faculties, not allowing one to carry the field in defiance of the others. Reason, for instance, by itself, can only make good choices in limited spheres of endeavor, like formal logic and mathematics. You can't throw it out, just as you can't throw any of the elements out, not without making a grave error, but for most purposes, deriving morality from a rational construct is artificial. That's what the moral philosopher does with his principle of the sacredness of a life. Reasoning from that premise leads him into foolishness, whereas consulting his native morality, his memory, his sense of the common good, his imagination, along with his reason would show him a wiser and more balanced way to think about these things.

 

[cantdog]

Phaedrus

"What is good, and what is not good, Phaedrus-- do we need other people to tell us these things?"

Morality is not something brought out for special occasions, but an intimate part of decision making, every day. For that reason, it is pikestaff plain that we can't get it from a Bible or the Analects, or Ayn Rand or Spinoza or Kant. We can't wait that long; we need it every day, right through our lifetimes.

I am making a study at the moment of the moral sense in babies and toddlers and young children. I do it by talking with them, talking with their parents, and so on. Objective science is a bit clumsy in this sphere of inquiry, since there is no meter whose dial can twitch when the moral sense is in use. Such study, like that of most wisdom traditions, is not done with facts, to seek truth, but by testimony, by talking with people and eliciting what they experience as they do things, comparing it to what I see myself doing, and so on. Truthfulness is attainable, but not truth, not yes-no, binary scientific truth.

That's why I smiled when you accused me of holding the moral philosopher up to some sort of crucifix of Reason, because I know all too well the limits of the factual in that arena. And ironically enough it was the philosopher who overcommitted to reason, by attempting to apply some over-arching derived principle to a moral decision. Doing that nearly always results in a reductio, and so the moral philosopher with logical principles is hoist on the petard of reason itself, which acknowledges reductio.

 

[amicus]

CantDog...there are several things, 'wrong', with your scenario, one, you do not differentiate sentient life from all other forms of life and I parse you do that on purpose.

You may not perceive human life as 'special', but we have determined, through science, that we appear to be the only sentient form of life in our solar system and, notwithstanding Sagan's 'billions and billions', it is quite possible that humanity is the only form of sentient life in this galaxy and perhaps the universe at large.

"...Reasoning from that premise leads him into foolishness, whereas consulting his native morality, his memory, his sense of the common good, his imagination, along with his reason would show him a wiser and more balanced way to think about these things..."

What you posit is almost a silly as Jean Auel's Neanderthal man consulting ancient memories while fully stoned to the gills.

Perhaps that is your excuse, or it may be fodder for a sci fi novel; but it sure as hell ain't science or philosophy.

As KevH said, you came to his post to dissent, as you usually do with mine and the faith you hold high and proud is the right to take a human life without cause; abortion.

You do this with auld fashioned existential fuzziness, in that since there are so many forms of life consuming and being consumed that why should a human life be any differently perceived? Really an asinine presentation.

I don't care to debate with you, I just want to point out the utter silliness in your populist proclamation that man should consult: 'his native morality, his memory, his sense of common good and imagination'.

Hell, wmrs2 comes across as a genius compared to that tripe.

Amicus...

 

[xssve]

From Verdad's link:Is ‘Do Unto Others’ Written Into Our Genes?

Extreme liberals, Dr. Haidt argues, attach almost no importance to the moral systems that protect the group. Because conservatives do give some weight to individual protections, they often have a better understanding of liberal views than liberals do of conservative attitudes, in his view.

Hahahhahhahahhahhahahhahhahaaaaa!!!




As if.

 

[amicus]

From Verdad's link:Is ‘Do Unto Others’ Written Into Our Genes?
Hahahhahhahahhahhahahhahhahaaaaa!!!
As if.

~~~

Thanks for the, 'bump' xcssve, without that I would not have noticed:

"...“A liberal morality will encourage much greater creativity but will weaken social structure and deplete social capital,”.."

'destructive of order...' might better express the modern liberal morality.

That which Haidt identifies as, 'moral intuition', is more aptly described as reaction to reality.

While a child, reaching an age that enables it to move its limbs as it chooses, may put his hand in fire once, he will not willingly do so a second time.

When a child similarly nuzzles a breast for nourishment, if the milk was sour, he might return once to confirm his decision, but not a second time.

Therein the beginnings of a 'natural morality', gained by interaction with reality, the source of all moral values.

And only humans, sentient beings, are blessed with the ability to extend that initial experience of harsh reality and thus form concepts and abstractions about other moral issues that may arise.

So...thanks...xcssve...



amicus....

 

[cantdog]

From Verdad's link:Is ‘Do Unto Others’ Written Into Our Genes?
Hahahhahhahahhahhahahhahhahaaaaa!!!




As if.

Quite so. Common sense is denied in principle, for Randists, for example. Ideology is the error of elevating reason above all else. Life does not derive from precepts and follow logically upon them, and so a system of that sort must fail signally to describe life, let alone predict it.

 

[Verdad]

From Verdad's link:Is ‘Do Unto Others’ Written Into Our Genes?
Hahahhahhahahhahhahahhahhahaaaaa!!!




As if.

That's one of the many parts that snapped my suspense of disbelief, too. God knows a lot of it was required anyhow. I suspended it once again to write that long post, thought to give it a shot, invite some more opinions, but all in all, Haidt seems to be doing busy work. Even if I try real hard to swallow it all, I'm none the wiser for the effort. The explanatory power of his theory is somewhere around nil.

 

[xssve]

[/I]


~~~

Thanks for the, 'bump' xcssve, without that I would not have noticed:




'destructive of order...' might better express the modern liberal morality.

That which Haidt identifies as, 'moral intuition', is more aptly described as reaction to reality.

While a child, reaching an age that enables it to move its limbs as it chooses, may put his hand in fire once, he will not willingly do so a second time.

When a child similarly nuzzles a breast for nourishment, if the milk was sour, he might return once to confirm his decision, but not a second time.

Therein the beginnings of a 'natural morality', gained by interaction with reality, the source of all moral values.

And only humans, sentient beings, are blessed with the ability to extend that initial experience of harsh reality and thus form concepts and abstractions about other moral issues that may arise.

So...thanks...xcssve...



amicus....

So you demonstrate "natural morality" by deliberately misrepresenting a direct quote, literally editing it to get it to say what you want?

So I'm guessing a taste for the truth is not part of any "natural morality"?

 

[JamesSD]

'destructive of order...' might better express the modern liberal morality.

A more accurate statement is that Liberals place less value on maintaining order when faced with choices regarding equality or liberty. It's not that order is bad, but not causing harm and fairness are more important.

 

[cantdog]

A more accurate statement is that Liberals place less value on maintaining order when faced with choices regarding equality or liberty. It's not that order is bad, but not causing harm and fairness are more important.

Fuckin A. A threat to liberty, a move on the part of the society toward tyranny, agitates Liberals. It's supposed to perturb conservatives, as well, but the people running the place are neither the one nor the other. They are managers. They went to school for that. Managers just want things to run smoothly and control is very important to them. Leaders (which is a personal quality, and a manager might be one as much as anyone) achieve order in things by building consensus and respect, but managers only want to find something in way of a process which imposes control and order. Check out the reaction to these new 'non-lethal' weapons coming out now. Who likes them?

 

[cantdog]

...

A humorous (I hope) example: my dentist office is filled with fundies--as if going to the dentist weren't bad enough, I have to listen to horrendous Christian "rock" music and hear them babble about church activities and shit. Unfortunately for me, I had put off dentistry for about ten years and had to get about 8 fillings over a period of three months. These people don't hate their children or anyone's children, nor do they want them to be stupid or unhappy--they were always planning parties (even alternative Halloween parties with candy and whatever they do there, maybe pin the tail on Jesus). They talked about saving for college, and how scared they were now that so-and-so was driving. They would do big charity functions and involve the children so they would hopefully see the value of charity. And every one of them, beyond a doubt, would vote to make abortions illegal. I wouldn't hang out with these people or go to their church, but I know that their beliefs are coming from a positive attempt to make the world better for everyone, including the unborn.

I don't think I ever met any such fundies. I work in a church, and the amount of smug self-reinforcing discourse about this issue and gays and all the whole constellation of hatreds is astounding. In the end, the standard is a collection of ancient books and the bizarre conclusions men have drawn from trying to reconcile them to each other after assuming they were intended to be absolutely true, word for word. An absurd premise, this leads to even more absurd babble, and a politics quite disconnected from anything intended to result in a decent society to live in. Any charity along the way is incidental by comparison. Sane people do charity, too, and find these people opposing them on grounds that wouldn't convince a baboon.

 

[Pure]

note to cantdog.

you've made excellent postings! esp. 77 and 79, above, about the context of decisions about "life," and the complexity of moral decision making.

nice!

 

[xssve]

That's one of the many parts that snapped my suspense of disbelief, too. God knows a lot of it was required anyhow. I suspended it once again to write that long post, thought to give it a shot, invite some more opinions, but all in all, Haidt seems to be doing busy work. Even if I try real hard to swallow it all, I'm none the wiser for the effort. The explanatory power of his theory is somewhere around nil.

In the instance where he discusses how cooperation is obtained by the threat of punishment, it's a frame up, he never mentions that even more productive cooperation can be obtained by the promise of reward - the experiment was designed to elicit a specific set of results that back up his premise.

Technically, primates, particularly the apes, are acentric/centripetal, acentric meaning without center, i.e., independent action, "self actualization", centripetal is "arranged about a center, organized, hierarchical.

What this means is, that your average primate is primarily motivated by self interest: they hunt and gather more or less independently, food sharing is largely confined to infant care and occasionally, courting.

Underlying this is a centripetal social organization, the alpha hierarchy, which is transparent under ordinary conditions: the strongest or cleverest males who are at the top of the hierarchy benefit from it for the most part by stealing food from the others. It's real purpose only becomes apparent when an external threat to the troop manifests, a leopard for example, whereupon, the centripetal alpha hierarchy instantiates, the males, led by the alpha male, distract the leopard by putting on displays throwing things and confusing it, allowing the females, younger and older troop members a chance to break for shelter. After the threat has subsided, the troop resumes it's acentric behaviors.

Baboons are centripetal/acentric, and are more or less in a constant state of alert, and exhibit and altogether more martial social order: the live for the most part on the open Savannah where there may not be as much cover, trees etc., and the alpha males form a, circle of sorts, a defensive screen. In order for this to be effective however, the more vulnerable members of the troop have to be kept in a relatively tight bunch, they can't wander off in every direction in search of food as the arboreal Apes do, and the Alpha and his lieutenants will basically herd the troop from one watering hole or feeding ground to the next, circling, biting or cuffing any who stray too far from the group.

Of course, it's fairly easy to draw the parallels from this to human political constructs: conservatives espouse more of a centripetal/acentric political ideology, the leopards are abstract: liberals, women, gays, communists, competing religions, etc., and they never run out, if they do they just invent new ones in order to keep the "troop" in a constant state of centripetalized order - even ostensible "rugged individualists" like ami there get their panties in a bunch over any threat to the "social order", real or imaginary, and he can never seem to decide whether he's a noble savage or a representative of a dominant (false) consensus, it depends entirely on context, but under any threat, real or perceived, he immediately appeals to authority.

The real beneficiaries of social order are the those int he alpha hierarchy of course, and when the centripetal order is relaxed, the hierarchy itself tends to become more fluid again - as I've mentioned elsewhere, athletes and entertainers may become popular, thinkers, inventors, etc., may gain status and popularity, and this is the advantage of the acentric state, it tends to spur competition in creative areas, rather than the simple ability or propensity to apply force or coercion - it's the reason authoritarian states tend to be rather more short lived than more democratic ones: they may be extremely successful for a short period, but eventually they fall behind the curve as more acentric cultures adapt to the threat and innovate ways of neutralizing it.

Even if not threatened militarily, these cultures tend to stagnate economically after the momentum of the previous, more acentric cultural condition runs down, Spain under Franco for example, Uganda, etc., or for that matter, the Catholic hegemony of the Middle ages.

But when we say "society" or "social order" who are we talking about exactly?

Usually church and state, of course, the arsitocracy perhaps, but as far as I'm concerned, if they're getting the benefits of alpha status but throwing you in front of the leopard instead of taking it on themselves, who the fuck needs them?

Its a dynamic system, not a static one.

 

[xssve]

To summarize and conclude, what is required for a free society, is some form of reaching a consensus on what is a valid threat and what is not - the whole "if we don't maintain order through force society will collapse" is itself an ersatz "leopard", there are threats, and some modicum of social order is desirable, not everybody is civilized or sociable, for various reasons, and it's generally not a good thing fro group fitness to allow these individuals to operate with impunity, but the centripetalists tend to exaggerate any threat, and extend them out categorically to cover their political enemies.

Everything is in extremes, they are always under attack from without, trying to dislodge them form their "natural" authoritarian perch, they're always at "war" and they cannot be trusted to tell a real threat from a bogus one, since they manufacture bogus threats on a constant basis - in fact, if they run out of real threats, they simply turn on each other.

 

[Pure]

Purity--avoidance of disguting things, cleanlines-- as one of the pillars of morality

Purity--avoidance of disgusting things, cleanliness-- as one of the pillars of morality [corrected]

Haidt believes “liberals” –and moral and social philosophers, generally-- are not very sensitive to moral stances that flow from concerns about purity (aka decency; adjectives: pure, clean, decent, unpolluted; antonyms: indecent, unclean, disgusting, polluted). Purity is linked to cleanliness, and the suggestion of Haidt and others is that 'moral cleanliness' is not simply a metaphor, but stems from our embodied experience.

Haidt and Schnall used a number of examples in their experiments on these topics:


Dog
Frank’s dog was killed by a car in front of his house. Frank had heard that in China people occasionally eat dog meat, and he was curious what it tasted like. So he cut up the body and cooked it and ate it for dinner. How wrong is it for Frank to eat his dead dog for dinner?


Kitten
Matthew is playing with his new kitten late one night. He is wearing only his boxer shorts, and the kitten sometimes walks over his genitals. Eventually, this arouses him, and he begins to rub his bare genitals along the kitten’s body. The kitten purrs, and seems to enjoy the contact. How wrong is it for Matthew to be rubbing himself against the kitten?

How do you react to them? Do you have moral views that go beyond fairness and ‘no harm.’ (Any 'conservatism' in you? )

===

Summary of Haidt's position: There is research on primitive or basic emotions, such as disgust; the unique facial signs (repugnance) and feelings (wanting to be sick). It is possibly a universal. Further several psychologist has linked specific feelings such as this, to moral judgements. In other words, our ‘primitive’ forbears developed [through evolution] feelings of disgust, for instance around dead animals, vomit, excreta; these were—rightly in many cases—thought to be dangerous, or even deadly. These were, at very least, capable of causing revulsion, nausea, and ‘unclean’ feelings. Hence hand washing after touching them. Hence some acts-- e.g, handling, eating, etc.--give rise to impurity, moral/physical dirtiness.

The paper is summarized below.
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=embodied-metaphor-moral

SA summary of Haidt, Schnall.

August 1, 2008
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Vol. 34, No. 8, 1096-1109 (2008)

Disgust as Embodied Moral Judgment
Simone Schnall , Jonathan Haidt , Gerald L. Clore , Alexander H. Jordan

How, and for whom, does disgust influence moral judgment? In four experiments participants made moral judgments while experiencing extraneous feelings of disgust. Disgust was induced in Experiment 1 by exposure to a bad smell, in Experiment 2 by working in a disgusting room, in Experiment 3 by recalling a physically disgusting experience, and in Experiment 4 through a video induction. In each case, the results showed that disgust can increase the severity of moral judgments relative to controls. Experiment 4 found that disgust had a different effect on moral judgment than did sadness. In addition, Experiments 2-4 showed that the role of disgust in severity of moral judgments depends on participants' sensitivity to their own bodily sensations. Taken together, these data indicate the importance—and specificity—of gut feelings in moral judgments.

Key Words: disgust • emotion • morality • embodiment • embodied cognition
==
Complete paper at
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=2562923

 

[xssve]

Purity--avoidance of disgusting things, cleanliness-- as one of the pillars of morality [corrected]

Haidt believes “liberals” –and moral and social philosophers, generally-- are not very sensitive to moral stances that flow from concerns about purity (aka decency; adjectives: pure, clean, decent, unpolluted; antonyms: indecent, unclean, disgusting, polluted). Purity is linked to cleanliness, and the suggestion of Haidt and others is that 'moral cleanliness' is not simply a metaphor, but stems from our embodied experience.

Outside of any cogent hygiene issues, it embodies Narcissistic neurosis as much as anything, and there are as many neurotically germ and purity obsessed liberals as there are conservatives - a lot of it is inherited on both sides from the Grahamite movement, i.e., a fairly recent development.

Another way of putting it might be that they are in deep denial about the fact that their shit stinks as bad as anybodies.

 

[Pure]

xssve

well, there may be as many germ obsessed liberals as conservatives (and H notes the 'pure organic food' obsession).

the question though, assuming youre a bit of a liberal, do either of the examples, Dog and Kitten cause any reaction--or moral reaction/judgment in you?

how, if at all, are your moral judgements affected by disgust and related feelings?

 

[past_perfect]

Well, Matthew will find out how wrong it is, when the kitten starts clawing. Hm, I guess that wasn't exactly a moral reaction though...

 

[xssve]

well, there may be as many germ obsessed liberals as conservatives (and H notes the 'pure organic food' obsession).

the question though, assuming youre a bit of a liberal, do either of the examples, Dog and Kitten cause any reaction--or moral reaction/judgment in you?

how, if at all, are your moral judgements affected by disgust and related feelings?

They may have at one time, in the first, it would depend on how hungry I was, in the second, I have had, er, erotic episodes with cats in the bed, although I stopped short of fucking them, lol, I remember a Penthouse story letter about a guy who liked to let flies crawl around on his cock (am I sick?) but I don't believe either example is an indication of any "innate" mechanism - the problem with those theory is that it's very difficult to separate an enculturated bias from a "natural" reaction - children are squicky about very little, and on the contrary, are pretty much fascinated by any sort of bodily emission often well past adolescence - if they aren't discouraged from doing so.

Oddly, by contrast, they do appear to be disgusted by the notion of sex, quite often extended to the opposite sex in general, at least until early puberty, whereupon disgust turns into fascination.

Disgust is just a response that tells you to be careful, don't eat rotten meat, plants that are caustic often incorporate unpleasant scents, etc. we avoid spiky or wildly colored flora or insects, as these too are often toxic or dangerous, Tomatls were considered poisonous for some time after their introduction to Europe - soft, pulpy and brightly colored are danger signals - most edible fruits are fairly hard and sweet tasting and smelling, rather than bitter and acidic - it might have taken a while to get used to lemons and limes as well, although they do have a delectably sweetish smell.

Our olfactory senses are not as well developed as say dogs, but, they work on a subconscious level with more accuracy than we might suspect.

 

[cantdog]

Connecting fastidiousness to conservatism? Surely there need be no connection at all. The idea reminds me of the babble high school students do when they first encounter yin and yang, the philosophical ideas. The illustrative examples they are given are light/darkness, dry/wet, hot/cold, male/female. Soon they are attempting to split everything in the world into opposite pairs, assigning one to yin and the other to yang.

Pure/impure, though-- that stands on another plane, rather like very/not very. You can be very hot, not very hot; you can have pure light, impure light. Pure dryness, impure dryness.

The world really doesn't, moreover, divide neatly into yin and yang pairs of opposites. (Tell Hegel: the thesis/antithesis thing is a special case, really.) That kind of dogmatic babble, attempting to make the observed world comply with some isolated idea-- that's what talking to an ideologue is like.

For one thing, Liberal and Conservative are not all there are, and not opposites.

 

[xssve]

Absolutely - and ideologues disgust me.

Liberals, I'd hazard, are less centripetal as a rule, more stubborn individualists - they tend to be more creative and experimental, whereas conservatives don't like to step outside the box, much less think outside of it - I recommend Blood on the Nash Ambassador by Eric Mottram, which contains a rather brilliant essay on American fears of invasion, from within and without, "underground forces", the dark, Dionysian underground energies: Blacks with their drugs, wild music, and giant penises, communists, etc., energies that are nevertheless required to reinvigorate the otherwise static - or stagnant - culture. I used to have an excerpt I scanned with OCR, but it's on one of my old hard drives.

Liberals are the risk takers, the experimenters, the innovators - acentric behavior. As in economics, all the action in cultural evolution takes place on the margins. Conservatives are the stable center of the herd, they let the liberals try the new stuff out, mock it if it fails - if it works, they pretend they invented it: all of the sudden it wasn't that crazy fucking liberal who did it, it was "the White Race" or some such, of which they of course, are the proud representatives.

So it goes.

 

[xssve]

For the most part, they are loathe to forego the benefits of cultural advance, they fear change, but advance is change, and it's often hard won, and they decry the often messy process by which it is achieved, often trial and error in very unexpected, and not always pretty ways. They feared that humans would be crushed by the gravitational forces of the enormous speeds (15 mph) attained by automobiles when they were first introduced, and now they mock liberals fro not driving the biggest, fastest most unmanageable automobiles they can obtain - as we have moved from experimenting with speed to trying to conserve precious resources.

Seems to me that Haidt is trying to push the notion that questioning authority is "unnatural", i.e., typical neo-feudalist conservative sophistry, the purity stuff is the bait - liberals "dirty", conservatives "clean" - who wants to be dirty? This is a propaganda technique known as "virtue words", i.e., leading people to make value assignments by creating associations with virtue words like "clean" and "pure", and dissociation with word concepts like "dirty" and "disgusting", although these are often abstract perceptions rather than empirical assessments of hygiene.

Categorical virtue and corruption. It's almost pure propaganda; the usual techniques are being employed: demonization, guilt by association (appeal to fear), appeal to authority and transference (associating the theory of reciprocal altruism with the Golden Rule to give the Bible an air of scientific accuracy), Red Herrings, oversimplification, etc., etc., etc.

It' Behe all over again, these people have no respect for the truth, I'll bet he's fronting some neo-con PR campaign, it's psyops, pure and simple.