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Ch. 5: Beyond WEIRD Morality

Posted: Fri Jun 22, 2012 12:23 am
by Chris OConnor
Ch. 5: Beyond WEIRD Morality

Re: Ch. 5: Beyond WEIRD Morality

Posted: Thu Jul 19, 2012 8:02 am
by DWill
I would highly recommend reading this chapter, even it's the only one you read in the book. Haidt shows us that, indeed, there is more to morality than concerns about harm and fairness for much of the world. In fact, he says that we in the U.S. are outliers on the morality scale, with our extreme form of belief in the autonomy of the individual. It's important to say that Haidt is looking at the subject descriptively; he's merely showing that for more "socio-centric" societies (that is, the majority of world societies) "ethics of community and divinity" are enveloped into morality. He conveys this in the form of an interesting personal journey of his own, from a dedicated WEIRD moralist (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) to a pluralist, one who appreciates other ways of organizing the world, which is after all what morality does. A stay in India, one in which he was not insulated from the local culture but had to experience it closely, brought about his conversion. During his stay, and even after it when he had returned to the U.S., he experienced a sense of the benefits that could come from arranging the world in a seemingly arbitrary way based on custom and ritual. He tells us about the two "incompatible identities" he brought with him to India: "on the one hand, I was a 29-year-old liberal atheist with very definite views about right and wrong. On the other hand, I wanted to be like those open-minded anthropologists I had read so much about and had studied with...My first few weeks in Bhubaneswar were therefore filled with feelings of shock and dissonance...In short, I was immersed in a sex-segregated, hierarchically stratified religious society, and I was committed to understanding it on its own terms, not on mine."

Much else of interest in the chapter, too, such as the similarity between physiological disgust (rates in a trash can, e.g.) and moral disgust. Why do we not feel moral disgust toward bank robbers but do feel that way toward child pornographers?

The most important takeaway, according to Haidt: In terms of our moral make-up, "We are multiple from the start. Our minds have the potential to become righteous about many different concerns, and only a few of these concerns are activated during childhood." It's mostly about the culture we're raised in.

Re: Ch. 5: Beyond WEIRD Morality

Posted: Thu Jul 19, 2012 8:49 am
by Dexter
I thought his description of India was very interesting.

There seems to be a conflict (that's not really the right word) between evolutionary and cultural explanations. He's giving an evolutionary account, yet also showing how much culture matters (and that your views often change over your life). If you're saying we're wired for all those potential moralities, but only some are activated, is that just an unfalsifiable evolutionary explanation?

And as that review pointed out, even though he specifically says he is being descriptive, there is also something of a mingling between the is and ought statements.

Re: Ch. 5: Beyond WEIRD Morality

Posted: Thu Jul 19, 2012 10:17 am
by johnson1010
Dexter:
If you're saying we're wired for all those potential moralities, but only some are activated, is that just an unfalsifiable evolutionary explanation?
What is meant by "wired" here?

I don't think that we are wired, or have a built in process that builds capitolism, communism, the caste system, or any particular cultural moral structure.

i do think we are wired to experience self preservation and extend that to others in the form of empathy. These are simple experiences which have been extrapolated upon to create a variety of social structures that codify moral conduct. I think there is an element of evolution at work, though not in the biological sense, in how these codified moral structures emerge and i don't think that the people of india were in any way pre-destined to have that particular moral structure.

Re: Ch. 5: Beyond WEIRD Morality

Posted: Thu Jul 19, 2012 1:38 pm
by LevV
On page 131 Haidt pulls a definition of innateness from The Birth of the Mind by G. Marcus:

Nature provides a first draft, which experience then revises.... "Built-in" does not mean unmalleable; it means "organized in advance of experience."

He goes on to explain this in much detail in Ch 12. In may make sense to wait for more participants to read this chapter before getting into it in more detail.

Re: Ch. 5: Beyond WEIRD Morality

Posted: Tue Dec 10, 2019 3:28 pm
by DWill
Dexter wrote:I thought his description of India was very interesting.

There seems to be a conflict (that's not really the right word) between evolutionary and cultural explanations. He's giving an evolutionary account, yet also showing how much culture matters (and that your views often change over your life). If you're saying we're wired for all those potential moralities, but only some are activated, is that just an unfalsifiable evolutionary explanation?

And as that review pointed out, even though he specifically says he is being descriptive, there is also something of a mingling between the is and ought statements.
I thought the review said that if Haidt was being truly descriptive, he would recognize that Kant was working on the should angle of morality. That would tend to release Kant from the stigma of having his facts wrong, in Haidt's view. I thought, by the way, that the reviewer got it right when he said that Haidt is at his best when he's revealing to us aspects of human nature, and is at his worst when trying to be polemic. The polemic against the new atheists in Chap. 4 doesn't hit the mark, and the one against Bentham and Kant in Chap. 6, where he calls them autistic, doesn't either. Haidt doesn't seem to be cut out for polemics. Maybe his publisher or editor encouraged him to go for controversy to increase sales.

Re: Ch. 5: Beyond WEIRD Morality

Posted: Sat Feb 01, 2020 11:56 am
by DWill
Kind of picking up the conversation we were having about the last chapters, regarding using reason, we don't see much on reason here. That's probably because Haidt goes into the values, or moralities, of traditional, non-WEIRD, sociocentric cultures in which divinity, purity, and authority become important in one way or another. You just don't offer reasons for values like those; they just exist and you probably accept them out of a feeling that the whole community benefits, and probably you don't want the disapproval of violations, anyway. When the major moral concern is autonomy, with only the individual level needing to be recognized, reasons are readily employed to justify judgments of harm or unfairness.

It's a disorienting experience in India Haidt describes. He says he could only have had it by living with Indians for an extended period, having to accommodate himself to their customs. The result of his stay in Bhubaneswar was that he became less of a liberal, but in a sense more liberal, in accepting moral frameworks very different from the one he had always before lived within. He realizes that we all have the receptors for different moral tastes (as he will later term them); it's our particular cultural experience that determines which of them become "activated."

So cultural/moral relativism is something the woke, anthropologically literate person will be espousing. Relativism might not be something a person bound by a particular morality can easily see, though. Morality binds and blinds, as Haidt will also say later.

Re: Ch. 5: Beyond WEIRD Morality

Posted: Sun Feb 02, 2020 7:59 pm
by geo
DWill wrote:. . .It's a disorienting experience in India Haidt describes. He says he could only have had it by living with Indians for an extended period, having to accommodate himself to their customs. The result of his stay in Bhubaneswar was that he became less of a liberal, but in a sense more liberal, in accepting moral frameworks very different from the one he had always before lived within.
Haidt even offers a few general suggestion for expanding one's worldview into other moral realms. If you're a liberal, for example . . .
. . . when you travel, or become a parent, or perhaps just read a good novel about a traditional society, you might find some other moral intuitions latent within yourself. You might find yourself responding to dilemmas involving authority, sexuality, or the human body in ways that are hard to explain.
Or if you're a conservative . . .
. . . if you then face discrimination yourself (as conservatives and Christians sometimes do in the academic world), or if you simply listen to Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, you may find a new resonance in moral arguments about oppression and equality.
I have read that reading literature makes us more empathetic—in Haidt;s view, help us fit into other moral matrices besides the ones we're used to—although obviously living in another culture would be far more encompassing.

I believe the main point of this section is: there's more to morality than harm and fairness. Haidt does a pretty good job informing us about what moral diversity really is before trying to convert us, as he was converted, (to a more understanding and less judgmental state).

It's probably pretty obvious that I've struggled with having Trump as our president. I struggle to understand why people support him, though it probably helps that there are a few Trump supporters in my family. My father was one, before he passed away last year. And my mother-in-law is as well. I think reading this book will help me understand what has often baffled me in the past. Indeed, I think it already has.

Re: Ch. 5: Beyond WEIRD Morality

Posted: Sun Feb 02, 2020 9:30 pm
by DWill
geo wrote: It's probably pretty obvious that I've struggled with having Trump as our president. I struggle to understand why people support him, though it probably helps that there are a few Trump supporters in my family. My father was one, before he passed away last year. And my mother-in-law is as well. I think reading this book will help me understand what has often baffled me in the past. Indeed, I think it already has.
I'm sorry to hear of your father's death. geo.
He, Trump, might be the acid test of empathy, I agree. I don't have close family who are in Trump's column, even though we suspect our new son-in-law (!). My mother has always been the least likely person I've know to be critical of people. When she says, "I can't find a single good thing to say about Trump," I have to wonder if there's not something objectively right about her opinion. Yet it's true that her experience has no similarity with that of the average Trump supporter, so what does she, or I, really know about what drives people to such loyalties? I like some people who support Trump. Of course, we avoid politics.

Re: Ch. 5: Beyond WEIRD Morality

Posted: Mon Feb 03, 2020 12:41 pm
by geo
DWill wrote: . . . .what drives people to such loyalties? I like some people who support Trump. Of course, we avoid politics.
I wonder what moral foundations, if any, are triggered by Trump's political messages. What does Make America Great Again mean in terms of Haidt's theory? The commonality seems to be a collective loathing of liberals and Hillary Clinton, in particular. It seems driven by us-versus-them. Trump has called Fed chair, Jerome H. Powell, an “enemy” of America. It seems primarily a connection to the loyalty/betrayal foundation.