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.

moral psychology, naturalism

Technically I majored in philosophy, a double major with English. Because the philosophy department was tiny, I graduated one class short of fulfilling that double major -- I had taken most of the classes the department offered, which made it more and more difficult to find a session of any of the remaining classes that didn't conflict with anything else. I'd already been accepted into a Master's program in History, so it didn't make sense to put that off for a year just to take one class, so my Bachelor's is officially only in English. I almost went back to philosophy after that program, when LSU offered me a fellowship in their PhD program, but moved to Indiana instead.

Anyway, for whatever reason I have been less diligent in keeping up with readings in philosophy than I have in history or religious studies -- maybe, unconsciously, because I didn't get that degree, and so think of myself as "less" of a philosophy student than a history one.

Any academic program leaves you with a lot of gaps, but in some disciplines, the gaps are felt more inuitively and obviously than in others -- it's pretty easy to understand, as a historian, where your gaps are, for the simple reason that you're obviously aware of the existence of the many eras and countries about which you have no familiarity. If you took a class on antiquity and a class on the Renaissance, you absorbed a little about the Middle Ages but you have a clear sense that your understanding of European history has a large gap in it. The map of philosophy is a lot less clear. I didn't even have a good sense of what "the philosophy of biology" entailed, for instance, until two degree programs later, when I happened to take a seminar on it.

I don't know that I am necessarily as concerned with my gaps in philosophy as I am in other areas, to be honest, but I am trying to shore my reading and understanding up. At the moment, the book I'm reading in the car is the first volume of a series of essay collections on moral psychology -- the intersection of philosophy (especially ethics) and psychology. The first volume begins with a discussion of the naturalism debate, perhaps the defining debate in ethics in the 20th century.

Interestingly, this was the second context in which I read about philosophical naturalism -- the proposition that there are no supernatural influences in the world -- in the span of a week, and the contexts were very different. In the first, Alvin Plantinga argues in Where the Conflict Really Lies that evolution contradicts the claims of naturalism. Plantinga is one of the most important theologians of the last century, but in attempting to counter the idiocies of the New Atheism, he goes too far -- it's this train of thought that led him to support intellectual design for a while, and when you're in the room with those guys, you really have to take a long look at your life.

The surface meaning of philosophical naturalism -- "there is no supernatural world" -- is the least interesting part of it to talk about. In ethics, the naturalism debate is concerned more specifically with the question of whether moral philosophy, normative philosophy, whatever you want to call it -- a philosophical framework that defines what is right and what is wrong -- needs to be grounded in an understanding of human behavior and the natural world, and/or whether it is possible to have a system of ethics that does not depend on the existence of God. That may sound like two questions, but your answer to one tends to dictate your answer to the other.

This may seem like a non-issue to laymen, but they would probably differ considerably on what the "obvious" answer is. The fact is that philosophers have tended to agree with Kant's insistence that an ethical framework has to postulate the existence of God. People who agree with that further tend to think that it's fine to talk about what's right and wrong without concern for how humans are built -- they're the ones who are the quickest to attack "relativism," or to paint as relativist any ethical reasoning that invokes the findings of social sciences. Philosophers and scientists alike are surprisingly uncomfortable with the idea that ethics should be informed by an understanding of human behavior and biology -- far more than you would think given the horseshit narratives we're always fed about godless science.

Now, me, I've already said that I condemn the use of the afterlife as a behavioral incentive, so it's not surprising that I find the idea that "there can be no ethics without God" abhorrent. More importantly, I don't think that belief in God requires -- or even easily leads to -- the belief that ethics can be considered only in a vacuum without reference to human realities. There are a lot of aspects of the naturalism debate that involve too much nit-picking and hair-splitting for me to be interested in, so maybe it's good I didn't take that fellowship; I am kind of a utilitarian about philosophy, I quickly lose interest in the questions whose answers have no impact on behavior. 

Though philosophers, thankfully, don't do this, the whole kerfuffle reminds me of some of the worst idiotic things that Christians say -- it's always Christians in my experience, but perhaps in countries with different religious demographics, other denominations are just as guilty: 

"If you don't believe in God, how do you know right from wrong?"

"If you don't believe in God, how does your life have any purpose?"

They're roughly the same question, at least from these dips. And it's always, always from Christians who know very little about their own religion, have thought very little about Christian ethics, and certainly don't have any real answers -- answers that have actually changed what they do in life -- to the "purpose" question. Fuckwits all. These questions are just signals that tell you what the asker is deriving from their religious identity -- a sense of superiority and security, a sense of settledness.