Нотатки:
Three major principles of moral psychology:
- Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second.
- There’s more to morality than harm and fairness.
- Morality binds and blinds.
Moral foundations: Care/harm, Liberty/oppression, Fairness/cheating, Authority/subversion, Loyalty/betrayal, Sanctity/degradation.
Human nature is not just intrinsically moral, it’s also intrinsically moralistic, critical, and judgmental.
When I was a teenager I wished for world peace, but now I yearn for a world in which competing ideologies are kept in balance, systems of accountability keep us all from getting away with too much, and fewer people believe that righteous ends justify violent means.
And as with all foreign travel, you learn as much about where you’re from as where you’re visiting.
These subjects were reasoning. They were working quite hard at reasoning. But it was not reasoning in search of truth; it was reasoning in support of their emotional reactions.
Saying “Because I don’t want to” is a perfectly acceptable justification for one’s subjective preferences. Yet moral judgments are not subjective statements; they are claims that somebody did something wrong.
We do moral reasoning not to reconstruct the actual reasons why we ourselves came to a judgment; we reason to find the best possible reasons why somebody else ought to join us in our judgment
If you want to change people’s minds, you’ve got to talk to their elephants.
But Carnegie was in fact a brilliant moral psychologist who grasped one of the deepest truths about conflict. He used a quotation from Henry Ford to express it: “If there is any one secret of success it lies in the ability to get the other person’s point of view and see things from their angle as well as your own.” It’s such an obvious point, yet few of us apply it in moral and political arguments because our righteous minds so readily shift into combat mode.
Empathy is an antidote to righteousness, although it’s very difficult to empathize across a moral divide.
I had long teased my wife for altering stories to make them more dramatic when she told them to friends, but it took twenty years of studying moral psychology to see that I altered my stories too.
Affective reactions are so tightly integrated with perception that we find ourselves liking or disliking something the instant we notice it, sometimes even before we know what it is.
The brain tags familiar things as good things. Zajonc called this the “mere exposure effect,” and it is a basic principle of advertising.
Your elephant knows which way to lean in response to terms such as pro-life, and as your elephant sways back and forth throughout the day, you find yourself liking and trusting the people around you who sway in sync with you.
Human minds, like animal minds, are constantly reacting intuitively to everything they perceive, and basing their responses on those reactions. Within the first second of seeing, hearing, or meeting another person, the elephant has already begun to lean toward or away, and that lean influences what you think and do next. Intuitions come first.
Moral judgment is mostly done by the elephant.
It’s clear that moral intuitions emerge very early and are necessary for moral development. The ability to reason emerges much later, and when moral reasoning is not accompanied by moral intuition, the results are ugly.
When does the elephant listen to reason? The main way that we change our minds on moral issues is by interacting with other people. We are terrible at seeking evidence that challenges our own beliefs, but other people do us this favor, just as we are quite good at finding errors in other people’s beliefs.
If there is affection, admiration, or a desire to please the other person, then the elephant leans toward that person and the rider tries to find the truth in the other person’s arguments. The elephant may not often change its direction in response to objections from its own rider, but it is easily steered by the mere presence of friendly elephants […] or by good arguments given to it by the riders of those friendly elephants […].
Our bodily states sometimes influence our moral judgments. Bad smells and tastes can make people more judgmental (as can anything that makes people think about purity and cleanliness). Psychopaths reason but don’t feel (and are severely deficient morally). Babies feel but don’t reason (and have the beginnings of morality).
Our moral thinking is much more like a politician searching for votes than a scientist searching for truth.
[…] People seemed to say to themselves: “Here is some evidence I can point to as supporting my theory, and therefore the theory is right.
When we want to believe something, we ask ourselves, “Can I believe it?” Then […], we search for supporting evidence, and if we find even a single piece of pseudo-evidence, we can stop thinking. We now have permission to believe. We have a justification, in case anyone asks. In contrast, when we don’t want to believe something, we ask ourselves, “Must I believe it?” Then we search for contrary evidence, and if we find a single reason to doubt the claim, we can dismiss it. You only need one key to unlock the handcuffs of must.
It’s so important to have intellectual and ideological diversity within any group or institution whose goal is to find truth.
[…] Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (forming the acronym WEIRD). […] WEIRD people are statistical outliers; they are the least typical, least representative people you could study if you want to make generalizations about human nature.
You can’t study the mind while ignoring culture, as psychologists usually do, because minds function only once they’ve been filled out by a particular culture.
Can the artist simply tell religious Christians, “If you don’t want to see it, don’t go to the museum”? Or does the mere existence of such works make the world dirtier, more profane, and more degraded?
But in India, and in the years after I returned, I felt it. I could see beauty in a moral code that emphasized self-control, resistance to temptation, cultivation of one’s higher, nobler self, and negation of the self’s desires.
We never considered the possibility that there were alternative moral worlds in which reducing harm (by helping victims) and increasing fairness (by pursuing group-based equality) were not the main goals.
Partisan mind-set: reject first, ask rhetorical questions later
If you grow up in a WEIRD society, you become so well educated in the ethic of autonomy that you can detect oppression and inequality even where the apparent victims see nothing wrong.
Moral matrices bind people together and blind them to the coherence, or even existence, of other matrices.
Reasoning can take you wherever you want to go.
As you watch the surgery, you notice two nurses assisting in the operation—one older, one younger. Both are fully attentive to the procedure, but the older nurse occasionally strokes your son’s head, as though trying to comfort him. The younger nurse is all business. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that there was conclusive proof that patients under deep anesthetic don’t hear or feel anything. If that were the case, then what should be your reaction to the two nurses? If you are a utilitarian, you should have no preference. The older nurse’s actions did nothing to reduce suffering or improve the surgical outcome. If you are a Kantian, you’d also give the older nurse no extra credit. She seems to have acted absentmindedly, or (even worse, for Kant) she acted on her feelings. She did not act out of commitment to a universalizable principle. But if you are a Humean, then it is perfectly proper for you to like and praise the older nurse. She has so fully acquired the virtue of caring that she does it automatically and effortlessly, even when it has no effect. She is a virtuoso of caring, which is a fine and beautiful thing in a nurse. It tastes good.
The brain is like a book, the first draft of which is written by the genes during fetal development. No chapters are complete at birth, and some are just rough outlines waiting to be filled in during childhood.
Everyone cares about fairness, but there are two major kinds. On the left, fairness often implies equality, but on the right it means proportionality — people should be rewarded in proportion to what they contribute, even if that guarantees unequal outcomes.
We are the descendants of successful tribalists, not their more individualistic cousins.
Authority should not be confused with power. Even among chimpanzees, where dominance hierarchies are indeed about raw power and the ability to inflict violence, the alpha male performs some socially beneficial functions, such as taking on the “control role.” He resolves some disputes and suppresses much of the violent conflict that erupts when there is no clear alpha male.
Particular rules and virtues vary across cultures, so you’ll get fooled if you look for universality in the finished books.
Republicans since Nixon have had a near-monopoly on appeals to loyalty (particularly patriotism and military virtues) and authority (including respect for parents, teachers, elders, and the police, as well as for traditions).
The process of converting pluribus (diverse people) into unum (a nation) is a miracle that occurs in every successful nation on Earth. Nations decline or divide when they stop performing this miracle.
Why did most players pay to punish? In part, because it felt good to do so. We hate to see people take without giving. We want to see cheaters and slackers “get what’s coming to them.” We want the law of karma to run its course, and we’re willing to help enforce it.
The feeling of being dominated or oppressed by a bully is very different from the feeling of being cheated in an exchange of goods or favors.
Real armies, like most effective groups, have many ways of suppressing selfishness. And anytime a group finds a way to suppress selfishness, it changes the balance of forces in a multilevel analysis: individual-level selection becomes less important, and group-level selection becomes more powerful.
When everyone in a group began to share a common understanding of how things were supposed to be done, and then felt a flash of negativity when any individual violated those expectations, the first moral matrix was born.
Victory went to the most cohesive groups — the ones that could scale up their ability to share intentions from three people to three hundred or three thousand people.
Bees construct hives out of wax and wood fibers, which they then fight, kill, and die to defend. Humans construct moral communities out of shared norms, institutions, and gods that, even in the twenty-first century, they fight, kill, and die to defend.
From the tattoos and face piercings used among Amazonian tribes through the male circumcision required of Jews to the tattoos and facial piercings used by punks in the United Kingdom, human beings take extraordinary, costly, and sometimes painful steps to make their bodies advertise their group memberships.
We trust and cooperate more readily with people who look and sound like us. We expect them to share our values and norms.
Nature can trigger the hive switch and shut down the self, making you feel that you are simply a part of a whole.
It’s no puzzle to understand why people want to lead. The real puzzle is why people are willing to follow.
Research on social capital has demonstrated that bowling leagues, churches, and other kinds of groups, teams, and clubs are crucial for the health of individuals and of a nation.
I believed that happiness came from within, as Buddha and the Stoic philosophers said thousands of years ago. You’ll never make the world conform to your wishes, so focus on changing yourself and your desires. But […] I had changed my mind: Happiness comes from between. It comes from getting the right relationships between yourself and others, yourself and your work, and yourself and something larger than yourself.
We live most of our lives in the ordinary (profane) world, but we achieve our greatest joys in those brief moments of transit to the sacred world, in which we become “simply a part of a whole.”
A college football game is a superb analogy for religion.
Trying to understand the persistence and passion of religion by studying beliefs about God is like trying to understand the persistence and passion of college football by studying the movements of the ball.
Often our beliefs are post hoc constructions designed to justify what we’ve just done, or to support the groups we belong to.
When people believe that the gods might bring drought or pestilence on the whole village for the adultery of two people, you can bet that the villagers will be much more vigilant for—and gossipy about—any hint of an extramarital liaison.
Rituals, laws, and other constraints work best when they are sacralized. […] “To invest social conventions with sanctity is to hide their arbitrariness in a cloak of seeming necessity.” But when secular organizations demand sacrifice, every member has a right to ask for a cost-benefit analysis, and many refuse to do things that don’t make logical sense.
In the medieval world, Jews and Muslims excelled in long-distance trade in part because their religions helped them create trustworthy relationships and enforceable contracts.
Putnam and Campbell reject the New Atheist emphasis on belief and reach a conclusion […]: “It is religious belongingness that matters for neighborliness, not religious believing.”
Binding usually involves some blinding — once any person, book, or principle is declared sacred, then devotees can no longer question it or think clearly about it.
Here’s a simple definition of ideology: “A set of beliefs about the proper order of society and how it can be achieved.”
The most basic of all ideological questions: Preserve the present order, or change it?
The human mind is a story processor, not a logic processor.
When I speak to liberal audiences about the three “binding” foundations — Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity — I find that many in the audience don’t just fail to resonate; they actively reject these concerns as immoral.
Here’s the line that quite literally floored me: “What makes social and political arguments conservative as opposed to orthodox is that the critique of liberal or progressive arguments takes place on the enlightened grounds of the search for human happiness based on the use of reason.” As a lifelong liberal, I had assumed that conservatism = orthodoxy = religion = faith = rejection of science.
John Stuart Mill said that liberals and conservatives are like this: “A party of order or stability, and a party of progress or reform, are both necessary elements of a healthy state of political life.”
For American liberals since the 1960s, I believe that the most sacred value is caring for victims of oppression. Anyone who blames such victims for their own problems or who displays or merely excuses prejudice against sacralized victim groups can expect a vehement tribal response.
When corporations are given the ring of Gyges, we can expect catastrophic results (for the ecosystem, the banking system, public health, etc.).
Putnam found that diversity reduced both kinds of social capital. Here’s his conclusion: Diversity seems to trigger not in-group/out-group division, but anomie or social isolation. In colloquial language, people living in ethnically diverse settings appear to “hunker down” — that is, to pull in like a turtle.
Emphasizing differences makes many people more racist, not less.
The reason it’s mostly democracies that are the targets of suicide terrorism is that democracies are more responsive to public opinion. Suicide bombing campaigns against dictatorships are unlikely to provoke a withdrawal from the terrorists’ homeland.