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Ch. 8 - The Felicity of Virtue

#129: Mar. - May 2014 (Non-Fiction)
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DWill

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Re: Ch. 8 - The Felicity of Virtue

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In my very non-expert view, there can be no doubt that our sociality, and therefore our capacity for positive caring, is genetic. Primates that have some of the came capacity are a clue. For some reason, it's the more negative things about us that we "suspect" of being based in genes.

Quite a number of years ago I read a prescient book by Paul Goodman called Amusing Ourselves to Death: public discourse in the age of show business, published in 1985. I guess the title might have become a catch-phrase.

Back to add a part about what Pinker says in The Better Angels of our Nature. I don't recall him speculating about a "collapse" of civilization, but he does acknowledge that some big disruption could occur, and that might result in more lawlessness and crime. But he doubts that even that would cause us to revert to thinking that women should be used as chattel, watching animals suffer is good sport, public torture and execution are good means of social control, others can be enslaved, etc. Really going back to ground zero morally might take some fairly unimaginable near-extinction event with total loss of the record of our civilization.
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Re: Ch. 8 - The Felicity of Virtue

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DWill wrote:In my very non-expert view, there can be no doubt that our sociality, and therefore our capacity for positive caring, is genetic. Primates that have some of the came capacity are a clue. For some reason, it's the more negative things about us that we "suspect" of being based in genes.
Thanks for your comments, DWill.

Maybe the main purpose of cultural morality is to provide group cohesion. Those with shared values can relate to one another. But those shared values are probably more or less universal and based on individual (genetic) morality. At least the basic tenets of morality such as do not kill, do unto others, help others. I've heard the Mormons in Salt Lake City have an amazing social network.

Plato talks about justice in his dialogue, Gorgias. I'm reading about it now in Will Durant's THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY. There's some difficult concepts about justice versus strength that I don't quite grasp. But this paragraph seems to address the dynamic of social justice versus individual justice. (I take justice here as an aspect of human morality.)
Durant wrote:He points out that justice is a relation among individuals, depending on social organization; and that in consequence it can be studied better as part of the structure of a community than as a quality of personal conduct. If, he suggests, we can picture a just state, we shall be in a better position to describe a just individual. Plato excuses himself for this digression on the score that in testing a man's vision we make him read first large type, then smaller; so, he argues, it is easier to analyze justice on a large scale than on the small scale of individual behavior. But we need not be deceived: in truth the Master is patching two books together, and uses the argument as a seam. He wishes not only to discuss the problems of personal morality, but the problems of social and political reconstruction as well. He has a Utopia up his sleeve, and is resolved to produce it. It is easy to forgive him, for the digression forms the core and value of his book.
DWill wrote:Back to add a part about what Pinker says in The Better Angels of our Nature. I don't recall him speculating about a "collapse" of civilization, but he does acknowledge that some big disruption could occur, and that might result in more lawlessness and crime. But he doubts that even that would cause us to revert to thinking that women should be used as chattel, watching animals suffer is good sport, public torture and execution are good means of social control, others can be enslaved, etc. Really going back to ground zero morally might take some fairly unimaginable near-extinction event with total loss of the record of our civilization.
I guess the question remains, is it cultural morality that has led us to understand that women and men are equal and that animals should not be abused for sport? I like to think these are innate, and that we only need to formulate a society that can accommodate the way we want to be. Maybe it's a diseased society that leads us to a depraved condition in which we can regard women as something less than human or to derive some kind of twisted pleasure in killing animals for sport. Certainly one aspect of hatred/fear of outsiders is very tribal. An example of our genes distorting our view of reality, as Wright would say.

Speaking of killing animals, I have to mention something I saw that turned my stomach. The killing of giraffes for sport? I want to believe this is a horrible joke. Actually, I'm not going to post the link because it's too disturbing. I only want to understand how anyone can think it's okay to shoot giraffes for fun? Who are these people and what culture could produce such depraved individuals?
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Re: Ch. 8 - The Felicity of Virtue

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Speaking of killing animals, I have to mention something I saw that turned my stomach. The killing of giraffes for sport? I want to believe this is a horrible joke. Actually, I'm not going to post the link because it's too disturbing. I only want to understand how anyone can think it's okay to shoot giraffes for fun? Who are these people and what culture could produce such depraved individuals?
I hope one day a felony can be charged to a human being that kills any animal for sport.
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Re: Ch. 8 - The Felicity of Virtue

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ant wrote:
Quote:
Speaking of killing animals, I have to mention something I saw that turned my stomach. The killing of giraffes for sport? I want to believe this is a horrible joke. Actually, I'm not going to post the link because it's too disturbing. I only want to understand how anyone can think it's okay to shoot giraffes for fun? Who are these people and what culture could produce such depraved individuals?


I hope one day a felony can be charged to a human being that kills any animal for sport.

Attitudes towards animals differ widely within and between countries. Your comments bring to mind an experience I had some years ago with a young Mexican family who had just moved to my old neighborhood in Toronto. We were looking at a front page newspaper story they couldn't believe. The story was about a man being arrested for cruelty to a dog. They thought that if someone could be arrested for cruelty to a dog, AND be a front page news story, then they must surely be living in Paradise!.
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Re: Ch. 8 - The Felicity of Virtue

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ant wrote:
Speaking of killing animals, I have to mention something I saw that turned my stomach. The killing of giraffes for sport? I want to believe this is a horrible joke. Actually, I'm not going to post the link because it's too disturbing. I only want to understand how anyone can think it's okay to shoot giraffes for fun? Who are these people and what culture could produce such depraved individuals?
I hope one day a felony can be charged to a human being that kills any animal for sport.
Ant, I wondered whether you mean killing the animal solely for pleasure and then not eating the meat, or simply the act of killing a wild animal regardless of whether someone is fed with the meat. There are a lot of deer hunters in our area, and with a few exceptions, they eat the deer they kill. But is the act of liking the hunt and the kill wrong in itself? Is it much better to let someone unknown to us kill domesticated animals to provide our meat?
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Re: Ch. 8 - The Felicity of Virtue

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The book contains a number of provocative topics, and sometimes Haidt puts an unexpected spin on them. An example here was the boost he gives to a generally conservative outlook on morality. He comes out for character education and for a generally less diverse palette of morals in our society. Diversity in morality equals anomie, he says; we need to have moral agreement on virtues to be cultivated, rather than just saying don't harm others and do some good deeds, but otherwise don't be concerned about morality. The Enlightenment, which turned morality into a scientific project on moral reasoning and essentially reduced morality to one element, ended up impoverishing morality somewhat in Haidt's opinion. At the end of the chapter he is of two minds about the moral stance of today, valuing the inclusiveness we've achieved through moral liberalism, yet feeling that in the civic sphere we need to again emphasize the "good old-fashioned values." Value-free has been a mistake. This reminds me of arguments for education that emphasize a frankly pro-American attitude, which in terms of teaching history would mean slanting it in the direction of American exceptionalism, even promoting the myths over what might be the objective truth.

I can see the benefit of Haidt's broader view of morality as the catalog of moral virtues a la Ben Franklin. Today we tend to divide along lines of one or a few moral positions, such as the ones that currently define liberals and conservatives. This causes bad feelings and demonization. But what if we didn't get so caught up on, say, religious fundamentalists and instead tried to look at positive character traits of such people that we're missing? Maybe it doesn't matter so much that one is a creationist; he or she can have "excellences" that overshadows that one moral trait. This would amount to admiring people based on their strengths of character, something Haidt says was the norm until fairly recently in history.
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Re: Ch. 8 - The Felicity of Virtue

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DWill wrote:. . . Today we tend to divide along lines of one or a few moral positions, such as the ones that currently define liberals and conservatives. This causes bad feelings and demonization. But what if we didn't get so caught up on, say, religious fundamentalists and instead tried to look at positive character traits of such people that we're missing? Maybe it doesn't matter so much that one is a creationist; he or she can have "excellences" that overshadows that one moral trait. This would amount to admiring people based on their strengths of character, something Haidt says was the norm until fairly recently in history.
Really good point. I plead guilty for occasionally hyper-focusing on religious beliefs. :chatsmilies_com_92: This is an issue of self control, but these are polarized times, perhaps an aspect of superficiality in a society that has stopped worrying about more meaningful things?

Haidt seems to articulate conservative ideas better than conservatives do. Of course, the media usually plays up the extreme elements in politics, so the more moderate messages on both sides tend to get lost.

I have always thought conservatives were on to something with their focus on family values, although the world is rapidly changing and there doesn't seem to be much we can do about it. Haidt says: "we can’t go back, either to a pre-consumer society or to ethnically homogeneous enclaves."

I like Haidt's discussion of "anomie," a word coined by Durkehim, the sociologist. At the risk of sounding like an old fogey, it seems to me that our culture glorifies youth and superficiality over family and tradition, and it's this inversion of values that has led to the rise of the individual which has perhaps contributed to the decline of the family unit.

I read a book a few years ago (The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism by Andrew J. Bacevich ) which discussed America's shift from being producers to consumers. The author identified that time period as the start of our decline. And I have to agree. I just can't see how this is a sustainable path, as Wendell Berry has argued as well.

Anyway, this passage by Haidt says it all.
Before the Industrial Revolution, Americans honored the virtues of “producers”—hard work, self-restraint, sacrifice for the future, and sacrifice for the common good. But during the twentieth century, as people became wealthier and the producer society turned gradually into the mass consumption society, an alternative vision of the self arose—a vision centered on the idea of individual preferences and personal fulfillment. The intrinsically moral term “character” fell out of favor and was replaced by the amoral term “personality.
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Re: Ch. 8 - The Felicity of Virtue

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Why do something that doesn't benefit our genes?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=632CHpeHYZE
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That was a great little film. Somebody said that the feeling of "vastness" also applies not just to experiences of nature but also to situations where we really feel the connection with other people and that we are not just isolated egos. I think that's right.

True about Haidt, a middle-of-the-roader at this point, representing conservatism better than conservatives--although David Brooks does well, and George Will, too, in a more intellectual vein.
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Saw this on the WhoWhatWhy web site today. This is Haidt's TED talk from a couple of years ago that changed the way I look at the political spectrum.

http://whowhatwhy.com/2014/04/14/guy-stupid/
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