I spent a couple of days finishing Jonathan Haidt's book The Righteous Mind. Haidt is a moral psychologist (or at least he studies moral psychology; there's probably a difference). The book was interesting in a couple of ways. Haidt, who was the coauthor of The Coddling of the American Mind, apparently did his PhD work in the late 80s at the University of Pennsylvania. I was an undergraduate there at the same time. He talks a lot about talking to subjects at the McDonald's on Walnut Street, at the edge of campus. He also talks a lot about Paul Rozin, who I believe taught my intro to psychology course.
Beyond taking me down me down memory lane, Haidt, in alignment with the work of David Hume, argues that our moral decision making is usually emotional. We have an emotional reaction to a situation, and then we use reason to construct a rational framework for our snap judgment. I'm not totally sure I buy this argument. I do get, though, that this is the way a lot of people make decisions.
Haidt has an interesting section in his book about Weird Morality. Since it personally hits home, I'll quote at length from it here:
"I got my PhD at McDonald's. Part of it, anyway, given the hours I spent standing outside of a McDonald's restaurant in West Philadelphia trying to recruit working-class adults to talk with me for my dissertation research. When someone agreed, we'd sit down together at the restaurant's outdoor seating area, and I'd ask them what they thought about the family that ate its dog, the woman who used her flag as a rag, and I got some odd looks as the interviews progressed, and also plenty of laughter--particularly when I told people about the guy and the chicken [a man has sex with a chicken and then kills it and eats it]. I was expecting that, because I had written the stories to surprise and even shock people."
"What what I didn't expect was that these working-class subjects would sometimes find my request for justifications so perplexing. Each time someone said that the people in a story had done something wrong, I asked, 'Can you tell me why that was wrong?" When I had interviewed college students on the Penn Campus a month earlier, this question brought forth their moral justifications quite smoothly. But a few blocks west, this same question often led to long pauses and disbelieving stares. Those pauses and stares seemed to say, You mean you don't know why it's wrong to do that to a chicken? I have to explain this to you? What planet are you from?"
"These subjects were right to wonder about me because I was weird. I came from a strange and different moral world--the University of Pennsylvania. Penn students were the most unusual of all twelve groups in my study. They were unique in their unwavering devotion to the harm principle, which John Stuart Mill had put forth in 1859: The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. As one Penn student said: It's his chicken, he's eating it, nobody is getting hurt.
I wonder if that was me.
I've always wondered through the years if my degree from Penn was an implicit endorsement of sex with chickens.
Now I know.
On a more serious note, Haidt is also trying to figure out why left and right seem so opposed to each other today, and he does a really interesting thing to try to figure out the differences. He basically argues that there are five kinds of moral groundings: care/harm, fairness/cheating, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, and sanctity/degradation.
Haidt argues that liberals tend to base their moral framework almost exclusively on care/harm and fairness/cheating. While conservatives also base their moral evaluations on care/harm and fairness/cheating, they're far more interested in the last three dyads.
Haidt's idea makes complete sense. I often think of my own evolution. I was raised Catholic by fairly conservative teacher parents (not Republicans but socially conservative) in a lower middle class household in a dying industrial city that in the 80s was home to a lot of white ethnicities: Polish, German, and Italian, especially Italian. At my Catholic boys' high school, Michael Corleone was not just a fictional character but a role model for success in life. And he was a snazzy dresser. Ok, so he was also very evil. Everybody has weaknesses.
In Erie, you couldn't hold office unless your name ended in a vowel. Clearly, authority/subversion, loyalty/betrayal, and sanctity/degradation were the core moral dyads of my upbringing Then I went to Penn and, eventually, to graduate school in English. The matrix reversed itself almost totally: care/harm was the primary moral determiner: identity politics, environmentalism, feminism, and a really vague kind of socialism.
But those new matrices of the last 30 years have always sat rather uneasily with some of my core conservative values: I'm against abortion, and I always have been. When I think of my volunteer work with Amnesty International, I've been driven as much by sanctity as I have by care/harm: the sanctity of life and the sanctity of free speech. In my personal relationships, I care more about loyalty than I do about care/harm and fairness/cheating.
Speaking of fairness/cheating, I've been of two minds about this one, to no end of consternation to both my liberal and conservative friends. In terms of one hot button issue, gay marriage, I don't see it as a fairness issue. I'm for civil unions and legal rights. But to my mind marriage is between a male and female for the purpose of procreation. That you can't sway me on. I guess I come down on the side of sanctity on that one. However, there's another fairness issue that I'm a little more mixed about. In rural New Mexico there was a lot of welfare cheating and inter-generational welfare use. A lot of my conservative colleagues were absolutely grossed out by this. And I confess that at times, I was a little grossed out as well. However, I would also say (and genuinely believe) to my conservative friends: yeah, this is a little parasitic, but I'm more concerned about parasites at the top of the food chain. My friends seemed genuinely perplexed by my concern. After all, they said, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffet earned their money.
It's true. They did. But this earning is probably never as clean as conservatives would make it seem to be. Bill Gates was up to his elbows in anti-trust litigation. Jeff Bezos will probably be as well. More than that, once you hit a certain point in wealth accumulation, the whole thing becomes kind of unfair: lobbying power to write favorable laws, direct access to lawmakers, access to the media, and power to shape lives. I'm not sure how fair all this is. And while my friends had problems with people abusing welfare--and I have this problem as well--they didn't seem to recognize the abuses of people who inherit (not just a lifetime or two of capital) vast fortunes. These people tend to have a lot of power, and they don't really do anything for their money.
In any event, Haidt's work was really interesting: a trip down memory lane and a way to think about moral matrices.
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