moral psych, continued

More from my moral psychology reading --

One of the oldest questions in the social sciences is where the incest taboo comes from. In almost every culture, we find a strong condemnation of sex between close relatives, and any time we find ANYthing in "almost every culture," we ask why that is. Is it biological, like the maternal bond? Is it a common reaction by disparate cultures to common environmental challenges, like the traditions of cooking meat or making clothing? Is it something else?

It's an interesting question in of itself, an interesting series of questions -- you can break it down into the two fundamental components, "why do people have an aversion to sex with their close relatives?" and "why do they condemn incest committed by others?" There are testable mechanisms of kin aversion that suggest an answer to the first question (siblings raised together but unrelated by blood share the aversion, for instance, suggesting a mechanism based on childhood coresidence).

The second question is tougher. It's easy to understand why individuals support the idea that murder's wrong -- because the more individuals who do so, the less likely they'll be murdered. But opposing third-party behavior that doesn't involve you and doesn't use your resources, there's no clear benefit there.

The chapter isn't just concerned with incest. That's the jumping-off point: this is the broader and more pertinent question, this idea of where this subset of moral sentiments -- these feelings we have about the things people do that don't impact us -- comes from. One of the suggestions is that the way human cognition and theory of mind work leads to us evaluating actions as though we were a participant, i.e. our own kin aversion leads us to condemn others' incest because on some uncontrollable level we are still reacting as though it's incest we're part of. If it's gross for us it's gross for everybody.

Have you ever been grossed out by watching somebody eating food you find disgusting, or just hearing about it on Facebook? This argument is saying that it's a similar effect (it's not saying the same mechanisms are involved; this is just an analogy).

I don't know yet if the explanation works for me, and besides, I haven't even finished the chapter, but it's interesting to look at in light of many of the social issues of the last couple years:

* The guys who don't understand what the big whoop is about Orange is the New Black, because there's no male character for them to relate to

* The religious right's obsession with other peoples' sexual behavior

* In particular, the insane response to gay marriage that has people arguing that some dude is going to marry a fucking walrus or something

* The difficulty some people have understanding why it's necessary to say Black Lives Matter, and that this isn't implied by "All Lives Matter"

I think what I'm getting at is that on the one hand we have an empathy gap that's behind a lot of culture war problems. The empathy gap is what causes somebody to see their misfortunes as bad luck and somebody else's as evidence of not trying hard enough, for instance, or prevents someone from understanding the importance of representation in media, politics, civil service, leadership, etc.

On the other hand we have this bizarre fussiness-fueled hatred where people -- sometimes the same people -- just can't stop worrying about what other consenting people are doing with each other, and the suggestion made by this moral psych reading that that reflex originates with these people imagining themselves getting gay married all over the place, gay married the hell out of. I suppose that's not surprising given how often "but it sets a bad example for the kids" comes into the conversation with these turdballoons.

That "other hand" isn't an overabundance of empathy or anything like that, but it's clearly something that draws on the same cognitive capacities, something from the same engines of humanity. (So too with the need to post a Facebook status about every tragedy in the news to somehow make it about you -- it's irritating, but the mechanisms involved still come from the same toolbox as the one that makes people run back into burning buildings to save the other kids, etc etc.)

The empathy gap is something I aim to talk a lot about. I didn't mean to bring it up before having the time and mental space to devote an entry to it.

But everything I'm talking about here is, at any rate, an interesting lens through which to look at morality. Most people don't reason about their morality much. They memorize codes and processes and dos and don'ts. They get very upset when their resulting lists are challenged or changed. Most people, in my experience, don't even think much about where they derived their morals from, and if they do, they are usually wrong.

A lot of these blog entries are just going to taper off, because I'm just jotting down thoughts I have after reading something -- often, things I think about while swimming in the morning after morning reading -- and those thoughts don't necessarily arrive neatly packaged.