Foot tattoos: Morally offensive?
Ampersand links to this interesting article by Steven Pinker about how there’s five moral themes that seem to exist cross-culture, and might be biologically “programmed”. (I hate the word “programmed”, even if there’s a legitimate reason to think something is inborn to us. It implies both that the tendency is not malleable and that the culture-specific manifestations are somehow inborn. There’s a bit of Pinker’s eagerness to overdo the “programming” talk in this article, but it’s not too bad.) This particular article avoids generalizing the specifics to our culture by making it clear what is considered “immoral” is extremely flexible, even if the way that it’s understood stays the same—people have emotional rejections of the immoral act and then rationalize it, instead of reasoning about it. The examples in the story are culture-specific, but mostly because they need to be for the reader to understand.
Ampersand drew up short when he read this one example of how the five moral categories manifest in our culture.
The exact number of themes depends on whether you’re a lumper or a splitter, but Haidt counts five — harm, fairness, community (or group loyalty), authority and purity — and suggests that they are the primary colors of our moral sense. Not only do they keep reappearing in cross-cultural surveys, but each one tugs on the moral intuitions of people in our own culture. Haidt asks us to consider how much money someone would have to pay us to do hypothetical acts like the following:
Stick a pin into your palm.
Stick a pin into the palm of a child you don’t know. (Harm.)Accept a wide-screen TV from a friend who received it at no charge because of a computer error.
Accept a wide-screen TV from a friend who received it from a thief who had stolen it from a wealthy family. (Fairness.)Say something bad about your nation (which you don’t believe) on a talk-radio show in your nation.
Say something bad about your nation (which you don’t believe) on a talk-radio show in a foreign nation. (Community.)Slap a friend in the face, with his permission, as part of a comedy skit.
Slap your minister in the face, with his permission, as part of a comedy skit. (Authority.)Attend a performance-art piece in which the actors act like idiots for 30 minutes, including flubbing simple problems and falling down on stage.
Attend a performance-art piece in which the actors act like animals for 30 minutes, including crawling around naked and urinating on stage. (Purity.)In each pair, the second action feels far more repugnant.
Ampersand didn’t feel the automatic, knee-jerk reactions—he felt #1 was bad, #2 was a little bad but not too bad, and the last 3 were equal in his eyes. Since morality is often about what we feel more than our reason, I asked myself how I thought, and have to admit that 1, 2, and 5 set me off, though I would probably reconsider the negative reaction to #5 after a moment. Later in the article, though, Pinker says that which categories your prioritize depend on culture entirely, and that creates a conflict in our political culture.
In a large Web survey, Haidt found that liberals put a lopsided moral weight on harm and fairness while playing down group loyalty, authority and purity. Conservatives instead place a moderately high weight on all five.
I’m more curious to hear about this lumper vs. splitter phenomenon, then, because it seems that a lot of conservatives, especially social conservatives, are serious lumpers and have trouble distinguishing between an assault on authority and something that ruffles their sense of purity. Abortion, for instance, sends social conservatives on a tailspin of emotional reactions—they can’t separate their fury at the female assault on authority that dictates their gender roles from their disgust reaction at the physical process of abortion. There’s certainly people on the left who have their purity issues—a lot of vegans clearly have moved beyond a rational approach to their diet to feeling that animal products are contaminating—but this tailspin of being unable to distinguish between moral categories seems to be more of a problem for conservatives.
I’m making the assumption here that splitters are more likely to be rational, since they can distinguish categories and not have emotional reactions to some of them, but I might be off-base. I’m also curious about liberals and authority, since I can think of some people who make a moral duty out of rejecting authority, automatically distrusting anyone with position or success, no matter how irrational. Some people do earn their position, and the automatic desire to undermine anyone without considering whether or not they do more good than bad with their authority can be damaging. I’m thinking specifically of the way that a musician will lose esteem with some fans when she gains authority through popularity, or the way that there’s an automatic dismissal of an activist’s talents if they gain any mainstream credibility. There’s a good reason to be suspicious of the corrupting power of the mainstream, but to the point where you won’t admit evidence that some people stay good? That’s getting into irrationality territory—maybe it’s not an issue of authority, though, but of purity, with authority being seen as a contaminant in a weird, backwards kind of morality flip.
I’m also curious to see if there’s a chicken-and-egg situation with lumpers and splitters. Maybe liberals seem more likely to be splitters because liberal politics demands that you do make distinctions between categories and you get better at splitting them up. I’d bet that your cultural pressures form your tendencies on this issue far more than the other way around.
One thing I found amusing about the whole article is how it inverts the Christian right’s argument for their own existence, i.e. that humans are born with the stain of Original Sin and need their specific religion to wash the stain off, and without religion, people are immoral wretches. It seems actually that people are born with moral structures and pick up their cues from society. If anything, religion perverts morality—the article made it very clear that morality can chance as a culture’s needs change, but religions turn into this massive obstacle to that if they’re trying to hold onto their power. At least that’s true in our culture, with the religious right becoming a major obstacle to the moral rewriting of gender roles to fall more in line with our democratic society, a rewriting that needs to happen if we want to be, well, more moral.
84 Responses to “Having to clean up after the performance artists violates my sense of fairness, though”
Leave a comment
Line and paragraph breaks automatic, e-mail address never displayed, HTML allowed: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <code> <em> <i> <strike> <strong>
My problem with #3 would be the “which you don’t believe” part. I don’t think it’s a good example of demonstrating community loyalty, because for a lot of people (conservative or liberal), the act of lying probably is closer to “harm” than “community.”
I would have no problem with slapping a minister with his permission, but I don’t recognise the authority of ministers in general, so that’s possibly another bad example.
On the other hand, maybe I’m just a “super-splitter.”
I’ve come across the “lumper vs. splitter” thing with regard to evolutionary biology and taxonomy (how many different types of cichlids are there? and the like). But then again, I’ve been reading a lot of that stuff lately.
I felt a least a tickle on all of these (probably the result of an conservative upbringing), but could have overcome it on some, if the incentive was high enough. #5, for instance, does trigger some revulsion, and I’d avoid that scenario largely because I find performance art boring, ergo not worth the work of overcoming my instinctive revulsion at waste products. But I would overcome it to clean up after my incontinent grandfather.
Maybe this is at the root of the problems liberal have in talking to conservatives. I’ve had a lot of success convincing conservatives that their prejudice against gays (purity) was immoral because of fairness. The cognitive dissonance was enough to get them to think about it. But if I came at them with “your purity fixation is stupid”, I wouldn’t get anywhere.
Amy has done some writing on Haidt in the past over at our place, and let’s just say she doesn’t think much of it, especially when it comes to ridiculous categories like “purity.”
The thing is that while a lot of us may not find purity that interesting, the moral revulsion that attends the boring biology of sexuality with social conservatives isn’t something we can just ignore. The purity balls thing, for instance, bespeaks a bone-shaking moral revulsion at the idea of sticking your penis in a hole some other guy has touched. (That women are not “holes” and vaginas are self-cleaning are facts that don’t seem to penetrate the social conservative brain.)
Now Haidt might mistakenly think that having less categories of irrational morality offense makes one “less moral”, and if so, he’s a fool. But just the strict observation that these categories exist, without judging whether or not that’s good, doesn’t seem to me to be offensive. I wouldn’t confuse describing moral categories with approving of them. Saying that most people’s morality seems to be a matter of knee-jerk reactions than thoughtful processes doesn’t offend me. It seems true enough. The incest taboo, for instance, is a good example where I’m utterly irrational, which is sort of embarrassing, but what are you gonna do? I’d be lying if I said, “You know, incest is a-okay with me if no one gets hurt.”
Are we supposed to read “minister” as MP or as some sort of religious figure? Not that this would necessarily change my answer, given the opportunity to slap a right-wing minister or politician.
The last two, in the “purity” category, make no sense to me. People very frequently pay to see others crawl around naked on stage. And also frequently pay to see people acting “like idiots,” as I would place the vast majority of comedy in that category.
Back when I first heard about this story, I went and took the test at http://www.yourmorals.org, to see what I ended up with. On a 0-5 scale, my ratings:
Harm 3.9
Fairness 4.5
Loyalty 1.1
Authority 0.6
Purity 0.0
The averages for liberals were 3.8, 3.8, 2.0, 2.2, and 1.6, while conservatives averaged 3.2, 3.0, 2.9, 3.3, and 2.9.
Ultimately, I disagree with Haidt that these can be considered cross-cultural norms when three of the five aren’t considered norms by half of our society. But it is instructive insofar as it shows a difference in the way liberals and conservatives approach society, and why conservatives are able to override worrying about what’s fair in deference to what important people tell them — why, in short, it’s okay not to help poor people because rich, important people say so.
Yeah, I’ve got a problem with that minister thing as well. It seems that there’s going to be a huge bias there: religious people recognize that person as an authority, non-religious people don’t. It doesn’t mean that the non-religious don’t respect authority; we just don’t respect that authority. So it’s false to say, based on the responses to these questions, that liberals respect authority less than conservatives.
They should have used someone that pretty much everyone recognizes as an authority, like a cop for example.
Also, weighing responses by how much we’d have to be paid to do the following? So, in the second example, I’m supposed to say how much I’d have to pay someone to give me a free wide-screen TV.
Uh, what? That makes no sense at all.
You may be reading too much into the whole “lumpers” vs “splitters” deal. It’s a fairly basic conflict that occurs in many fields. Basically, you have some people who focus more on the similarities between two things and some who focus on the differences. (I am guessing that Haidt would be considered a lumper and that a splitter would come up with more moral imperatives.) Arguably, both lumpers and splitters suffer from a bit of intellectual myopia.
Oops, I mean how much I’d have to be paid to accept a tv… Point being, free TV (though stolen) with a cash bonus and I get to decide how much cash? Makes no sense.
Can I just say how much I hate Steven Pinker and outright reject anything he says, just because he says it? He’s so anti-feminist it burns.
Um, I wonder what that makes me?
Yes, yes, yes, you’re fanTAStic ‘cuz you can’t be tempted by a TV, ::yawn::. Better run now: “This American Life” is on.
Didn’t we cover that issue a couple weeks ago?
+++
As to whether these five categories are cross-cultural, rejecting them because the two wings of the American culture disagree on their priority seems laughably parochial.
Per Amanda’s above comment: But, if you look at the idea of “purity” beyond contemporary religious right use of the word, it involves a whole lot of other things that have nothing to do with sex. For example, the idea in many religions/cultures that certain animals are/were impure for human contact/consumption. The Hebrew law’s purity codes (from which many contemporary religious views on purity descend) included prohibitions against, for example, making cloth out of two different types of fibers. Some anthropologists believe the idea of purity has to do with ideas of order: everything in its proper place, avoiding the “unatural” mixing or separation of certain things, and so on. Certainly, modern secular Americans have certain ideas about “purity” in terms of cleanliness, smelliness, avoiding bacteria and so forth (lots of which relates back to your comment about sex, but also includes lots of non-sex related, non-human body stuff). The example Pinker gives might be better if the second example in #5 were a show where people ate dog shit. Purity is a really, really complicated idea that seems almost impossible to describe in a way that doesn’t rely heavily on the specific culturally-defined concepts of purity that the individuals discussing it have (or at least are aware of).
To me, that’s would be sort of like saying “Drunk driving is a-okay with me if no one gets hurt.” Since we have to judge the morality of our acts before we know what the results will be, the issue should be risk rather than result. Both incest and drunk driving involve high risk for harm.
In #2 I don’t see how one is more repugnant than the other.
The only reason I’d ask for more money for the second option would be because I’m assuming personal risk by accepting stolen merchandise.
Attend a performance-art piece in which the actors act like idiots for 30 minutes, including flubbing simple problems and falling down on stage.
Attend a performance-art piece in which the actors act like animals for 30 minutes, including crawling around naked and urinating on stage. (Purity.)
The second example bugs me: I would refer to that as more of a “hygeine” issue than a “purity” one, and it’s possible that people could have a “rational” reaction in addition to their “emotional” one. I think a lot of people would have a different level of repugnance between actors urinating into toilets (or chamber pots or whatever) placed on a stage and urinating directly on a stage itself.
It also strikes me as odd to combine nudity with urination in that example. I realize it’s for the “act like animals” performance, but it just seems like a weird juxtaposition. (Would it be better if, instead of acting like animals, they stayed clothed and turned their back to the audience to piss on the stage? Why?)
I don’t know, maybe it’s the whole “performance artist” dog whistle that’s bugging me.
Course, the “slapping someone who has consented as part of a skit” doesn’t bother me either way. It would bother me, I think, if it were someone noticeably weaker than myself, (say a child or an elderly person) or if I were uncertain of the enthusiasm of their consent for any reason.
Foot tattoos: Morally offensive?
No, but they do sound painful.
I’d find it waaaaay easier to cold-cock many of the ministers I’ve known as opposed to a friend. But that’s just me.
Well, can you blame ‘em? That’s the next-worst thing to being queer.
You just don’t understand. The other guys’ still been there. It’s the principle of the thing. Can’t you see that?
And can ya blame ‘em? That’s the next-worst thing to being queer.
You just don’t understand. The other guy’s still been there. It’s the principle of the thing. Can’t you see that?
Love the headline, my thoughts exactly.
Also unfair on the front row audience within splash range.
Foot tattoos? Unattractive, like nearly all tattoos, but none of my business and therefore not morally offensive.
I’ve been wanting to punch a minister since I was about eight years old.
Okay, so if everyone in America values the harm and fairness options, and only half of us, more or less, care about the other three, what are the political solutions to this? Am I, a liberal who couldn’t care less about community, authority or purity, supposed to a) learn to care about these things, b) learn to talk about them so as to bamboozle conservatives like the person upthread who was causing cognitive dissonance in conservative acquaintances, or c) learn to use some kind of post-structuralist wu-shu to make conservatives learn that the last three moralities are obsolete or pointless?
This is interesting as a parlor game but I’m wondering whether it has any practical application.
I think that the substance of the examples is completely beside the point the author was trying to make. The fact that he did not pick an example that would call into play your particular “purity” moral value doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist for you - just that it is something else. Like why a lot of people are skeeved by insects, or mice. And the lumper or splitter aspect, as some have said, is about making the categories themselves and how many there are.
For example the whole list is kind of moot for me because I get turned off by the idea of doing something for money, that is not work I am performing or in exchange for some value I am giving. I suppose if the amount of money became huge I would probably change my mind but then I just think, that is ridiculous, no one would offer me a huge sum of money for slapping someone. And no, I would NOT go on those humiliating TV shows where people abase themselves for money. Uggh!
At the same time, yes I understand those moral categories and I agree with the idea of liberal vs conservative responses for the most part. For me, harm and fairness are very important. Community - well pretty important actually, although I would not want to do anything dishonest out of loyalty to my family etc - and think of the whole world as my community to some extent. Authority - yes, less of a concern with that… Purity - I don’t think I have a strong concern… although my “doing things for money” aversion is a kind of purity thing perhaps!
The only one I really saw a difference on was #1. For the rest I was either equally upset or equally indifferent.
I’m gonna go try that quiz out that Jeff posted and see what my results are…
*takes quiz*
Harm: 4.8
Fairness; 3.5
Loyalty: 0.5
Authority: 0.9
Purity: 0.8
I don’t think the questions are great either, but you can make up your own (I think harm is obvious):
Fairness: you and a coworker do the same work, but are paid very different salaries;
Community: you are told that you will get a lesser sentence if you turn in a friend (think McCarthy type trials);
Authority: you hear people making fun of an expert (I’m not much on the authority thing, so can’t come up with a good example);
Purity: would you eat food from the trash.
This idea is similar to the Chomsky idea on language–that language is innate. Note that this doesn’t mean there is a common language or even that the same sounds are used in all languages (and so not all cultures would emphasize all aspects of the innate morality). It does mean that people have ‘hardware’ to learn language (which goes away, which is why most people never lose their accent if they learn a language after a certain age).
I agree that religious people might have a problem with this because it says that some form of morality is innate and has evolved.
Well, I’m wondering if it gets hung up on the specific examples. For example, with community loyality I can see that liberals openly question the concept of national identity, but may have strong ties of loyalty to other forms of shared community. In-house I openly disagree with many leftists/GLBT activists/feminists, but in the larger world I’m reluctant to air those criticisms. And while the left may be openly skeptical of patriotism, it has its own rituals of communal membership.
Likewise the authority example seems to be loaded with bias because many people on the left don’t have ministers, and many others are committed pacifists. That doesn’t mean that we don’t have authority figures that we look up to.
The last one is also loaded because everyone who hasn’t been living under a rock for the last two decades recognizes a practical application with the war over arts funding. So of course those who see the agenda behind that question are going to rank the two equally. But I think that debates over pornography, diet, and medicine tie in strongly into this value.
The idea is interesting but the samples don’t work because of the wording. The authority question is rendered meaningless when the person being slapped is granting permission. The community question, as others point out is actually about lying. The performance art piece compares one thing which isn’t exactly impure with a physical act (maybe if the first choice been something physically messy or emotionally inappropriate). I agree with others who suggest alternate examples.
You only *think* Pinker sometimes annoys you, Amanda. Just try to imagine how an evolutionary biologist feels about his slapdash theorizing.
Looking at the list:
from the POV of an Actual Evolutionary Biologist™, I find myself singing one of these things is not like the others. Harm, fairness, loyalty, & authority can all be described in ways that make sense for any social animal.For instance, baboons (as in the book I recently reviewed) respect authority, in that they take careful account of status in their dominance hierarchy. Baboons also show loyalty, by forming matrilineal family alliances that rise or fall together.
But purity is different. It is not a moral principle that comes out of our natural social life, I don’t see any continuity between “purity” and animal behavior. Tellingly, only situation #5 above involves people “acting like animals” — because animals show no equivalent of this moral category alone, even though they can be fair, obedient, loyal, and reluctant to harm.
So I think the liberal moral philosophers & psychologists who don’t include “purity” as a moral principle are not being arbitrary or capricious. Purity *isn’t* a moral principle in the same way as the others are, it’s a different category of thing.
The paper which asserts these five moral categories is titled “When Morality Opposes Justice: Conservatives have moral intuitions that liberals may not recognize.”
I think it would merit reading to know the motivation for developing these five categories. It’s a response to moral theories that focused on morality defined as preventing harm, focusing on issues of justice and fairness.
And after reading 5 pages, this paper is starting to sound a lot like “conservatives are moral, too, even when our morals hurt people!”
From the paper:
Our claim here goes further: we argue that the “principles” of principled conservatism go beyond fairness to include principles that liberals do not acknowledge to be moral principles, such as unconditional loyalty to one’s group, respect for one’s superiors, and the avoidance of carnal pleasures.
I’m not a psychologist or sociologist by any means, so if someone can clarify that would be awesome. (I also didn’t read the entire article Amanda linked to, I’m just responding to the idea of the five categories of morality issue).
The most amusing line:
“In the West, we believe that in business and government, fairness should trump community and try to root out nepotism and cronyism.”
I find it odd that even while Pinker acknowledges cultural specificity, he challenges the logic of those protesting Muhammad the Teddy Bear while accepting that Americans would universally be horrified at the idea of cleaning up with scraps of an American flag.
#1 is the only one where my morals seem to be in line with the cultural standards. #2 and #3 seem equivalent, and #4 and #5 are reversed (I’d have a harder time slapping a friend than a minister, and if one is going to do performance art, one might as well go really over the top with it).
The examples are themselves too culture-specific. I think there are ways to make them more universal, in a way that demonstrates Pinker’s general point (though his impulse to come up with a taxonomy of Five Basic Moral Impulses is silly):
1) Leave as is. We all agree.
2) The example given is peculiar. Why not make it much more basic–two people do the same work and one gets paid more than the other.
3) Replace “country” (an impossibly large abstraction) with “neighborhood.”
4) Replace “minister” with “parent.”
5) Consensual incest. Doesn’t really matter what you compare it to.
I read through the list, and none of it made me go “ugh.” Then I took the quiz, and I got 4.8 harm, 4.5 fairness, 1.0 loyalty, 0.9 authority, and 0.3 purity.
I agree, purity as used in this paper and survey is orthogonal to the other 4 metrics.
I’m the reverse of the usual on #5, and I’d say it’s precisely because I place a high premium on purity. Watching people do embarrassing or humiliating things like flubbing simple problems or falling down just creeps me the heck out. Watching people piss in public is wholesome by comparison.
(Pretty much all the other examples seem similarly socially-conditioned to me — what if it was a mom-and-pop company that had made the computer error, and I knew this could put them out of business? And the whole authority one is so loaded that it’s hard to imagine someone putting it in with a straight face…)
I think what this says is that conservatives are “better” at taking certain kinds of tests where the answers are clearly cued by the tester — which probably gets us back to the “authority” line again.
Speaking of authority, the top story on the front page right now is about a statement by Al Gore. This is a man who has zero institutional power to affect the policies he’s talking about. The only thing that makes him or his opinions relevant is that he has charisma and authority bestowed upon him by large chunks of the left.
Our claim here goes further: we argue that the “principles” of principled conservatism go beyond fairness to include principles that liberals do not acknowledge to be moral principles, such as unconditional loyalty to one’s group, respect for one’s superiors, and the avoidance of carnal pleasures.
I’ve had way too many personal experiences with the “unconditional loyalty” BS to allow unconditional loyalty to anyone as a “moral good”: unconditional loyalty only works when the receiver of the loyalty is a perfect being who will never lie, cheat, steal, belittle, or abuse (emotionally and physically) the giver of the loyalty. Or make a mistake, for that matter. There’s a level of responsibility on the part of the leader and personal integrity on the part of the follower that is destroyed when “unconditional” loyalty is demanded or given.
Avoidance of carnal pleasures? Such as…? Food? Drink? A nap in a sunbeam? Smells? A good workout? (Yes, I know they mean “sex”, but how can you knock sex without invoking the whole “flesh vs. spirit” duality?)
I think #1 is obvious, but I have qualms with the others.
On #2 it would depend on what the computer error was. If it was misdelivered or something then it is certainly just as bad as the taking the stolen property.
On #3 my problem is that I don’t believe what I am saying. I would actually rather lie in a foreign country then my own because I care more about being honest to people I know.
I don’t even see 4 and 5 as moral issues at all. I’d slap my minister if he/she volunteered for comedy, and I wouldn’t act like an animal because I’d prefer to not be naked on stage covered in other people’s urine. It’s not immoral to do so, but I just find it gross.
It seems to me that all of these are just sub-categorizations of harm, to individuals or to society, mainly the latter. I also agree with the many above who have suggested that the lib/con differences are not so mcuh in valuing the category, but rather who/what is seen as community, authority or pure, and how that identification occurs.
I’m going to slightly disagree with some who think purity is out of place. I think it is very much in place, just that the more standard ideas of purity are extremely outdated and have gotten wrapped up in ancient ignorances. A lot of the traditional divisions of pure/impure denote a healthy/illness barrier and, not always correct, extrapolations there of. I think the distinction between health/illness still has a place in modern society (an aspect of harm reduction), but it just needs to be for modern society, not a stone/bronze/iron/etc age society.
I’ve had way too many personal experiences with the “unconditional loyalty” BS to allow unconditional loyalty to anyone as a “moral good”: unconditional loyalty only works when the receiver of the loyalty is a perfect being who will never lie, cheat, steal, belittle, or abuse (emotionally and physically) the giver of the loyalty. Or make a mistake, for that matter. There’s a level of responsibility on the part of the leader and personal integrity on the part of the follower that is destroyed when “unconditional” loyalty is demanded or given.
As has been said - liberals love their country like an adult loves their spouse, in full awareness and in spite of their flaws. Conservatives love their country liek a three year old loves their mommy.
I don’t feel that “purity” is necessarily about sex, but about the idea that something can be tainted by association with something we deem to be a “sinful” act. For example, I admit that I would have a very hard time watching a performance art piece that involved meat, or animals being butchered. If I watch movies with Jeffrey Jones, his child pornography indictment bugs me a bit by association. I can see that Alan Moore, Lars von Tier, and David Cronenberg are brilliant at what they do, but sometimes the ways in which they approach sexualized violence really turns me off to their work.
I don’t think conservatives have unconditional loyalty either.
I find the wording in #2 to be ambiguous. What does it mean to say someone got a free TV “because of a computer error?” If it means the computer mistakenly showed them as having ordered and paid for a TV when they hadn’t, then keeping the TV seems tantamount to theft. On the other hand, if the computer error played havoc with the person’s account with the store, and store management gave them a free TV by way of apology, that’s honest.
So we have two questions about individual people being harmed (the child being pricked and the merchant losing money on the television), and two questions about social structures being harmed (the “nation” and the authority of the minister - although specifically NOT the minister himself, since he is in on the act). Then there’s a the purity question, which is a toss up but most people agree it’s primarily social/societal.
So the real question in this quiz is, how highly do you value social constructs and institutions? If we were to invert the authority/power structures and ask about a child pricking an adult with a needle, a store sending someone a bill for a TV that wasn’t paid for, a nation saying derogatory things about a citizen, a minister hitting someone in a play, and a group of citizens picketing a piece of performance art, you would likely get exactly opposite results.
Obviously someone who leans authoritarian will score high on this quiz, and low on the inverted quiz. This thing has to do with a very narrow area of morality - the relationship of the individual to society. It doesn’t even cover ideas like honesty and sacrifice, which are certainly just as universal and where the target of the harm isn’t inherent to the question.
I’d think the main manifestation of the “purity” fetish in mainstream non-fundie American culture is in the ridiculous proliferation of antibacterial products. The OMG GERMS ARE EVERYWHERE! pitch seems to sell pretty well.
I also recall seeing a picture not too long ago of a drinking fountain made out of a toilet (for an art exhibit, I believe); the toilet was brand new and had never been used for waste, but almost no one was willing to drink from it.
So, I would imagine (at least some) animals do display a concern for “purity” in that sense by keeping their waste away from their food, yes?
The fear of toilets is conditioned into humans during toilet training. Infants and small children don’t give a damn.
So, I would imagine (at least some) animals do display a concern for “purity” in that sense by keeping their waste away from their food, yes?
and then there’s dogs who try to eat their own (or other dogs’) poop, or our cats who constantly had to be kept away from the toilet bowl water.
Conservatives love their country liek a three year old loves their mommy.
I’ve been trying to get myself into the mindset of the Bush Loyalist for some time, and still cannot see how that “unconditional loyalty” allows one to break the law or distort the truth.
And Purity looks to me like cultural constructs, backed up by emotions and conditioning. I’ve seen performance art pieces that embarrassed me profoundly. Pity is more the emotion stirred than disgust. But impure? We are all ritually impure, no matter what public moralists say.
the conversation going on about what, exactly, the naming of these “values” might actually mean are really interesting and worth having. actual thoughtfulness notwithstanding, i took the test and for the ones that “liberals” were found to score highly on (the first two) i scored higher than the liberal average, for the middle one where the liberal and conservative scores were about even i was too, and and for the last two i scored lower than the “low” liberal average. does this have anything to do with my selecting not just liberal but “very liberal” as my political bent? who knows! i also am amused/sheepish that i was glad to see my low scores on the “purity” and “authority” ones (whatever they might mean). cause those are wack, man.
Some do — but the ones I know offhand who do are rodents (e.g. prairie dogs, but I’ve seen it in mice, too). Primates are natural slobs and humans haven’t had permanent “nest sites” all that long by evolutionary standards, so no, I wouldn’t expect “purity” to be “programmed into us” the way loyalty or compassion may be.
My biologist’s spidey-sense suspects that “purity”, as an obsession, may be a function of language and/or conceptualization — that it’s related to the way we create conceptual categories, “A not B”. Not enough is yet known about animals’ mental categories to say what the continuities are, but certainly it’s not obvious in our closest relatives.
“conversations…ARE interesting”
still working on my subject-verb agreements skills.
Of course, if Purity is just conditioning or an attachment to your conditioning, then Liberalism is exactly the ability to challenge some of it.
And didn’t someone say “Authority is the mask of Violence?”
I should add that the reason many rodents are neat housekeepers is when they live all their lives in one set of tunnels or other restricted spaces, spend most of their time inside, and store food in their “houses”. Such rodents will have separate rooms for evacuation, for food storage, and for babies.
I once found that mice had been living in the back of my china cupboard, where they had very neatly been using the tea light holders for toilets, while they had filled the small vases with seeds. Freudian analysis of the mouse psyche would be fascinating.
Harm 2.9
Fairness 3.8
Loyalty 2.6
Authority 2.8
Purity 2.1
But after looking at the questions I thought they were incredibly crudely cued, especially for a country like the US (although plenty of others qualify) where the right wing has adopted a wide range of “counterculture” language and pose. For example, the only people I’ve seen lately calling books subversive have been self-promotiing wingnuts playing outrage-the-liberals.
I found myself thinking time and again that the researchers were using a bunch of dogwhistle phrases rather than actual words in their questions — some people, for example, construe loyalty as circling the wagons, while others think it includes forcing people to do right. Same with “respect for authority”, which is not the same as slavish obedience, or with measures of disgust. (And yes, when Dick Cheney speaks out against America, as he does almost every time he opens his mouth, I wish he would shut up, but somehow I don’t think that wish is what they’re trying to capture in their devotion-to-authority score…)
I didn’t have that high an opinion of Pinker before, but his apparent willingness to uncritically accept crap like this puts him down a bunch of notches.
I also recall seeing a picture not too long ago of a drinking fountain made out of a toilet (for an art exhibit, I believe); the toilet was brand new and had never been used for waste, but almost no one was willing to drink from it.
Also noted in supermarket studies. Some people get really squicked if you pack the toilet-paper with food items in the same bag.
The purity thing is all about taboos. (See Mary Douglas.) It’s arguably derivative from loyalty and authority, insofar as taboos can mark the boundaries of a group and are enforced by those with authority. Observance of taboos can enhance the power and apparent legitimacy of authorities, too.
Looked at from that angle, purity definitely is cross-cultural, but there’s no reason to think it’s biological rather than cultural. Others have pointed out how widely definitions of purity vary from one culture to the next, and this too militates against the idea that it’s somehow inborn or “programmed.” (I don’t like that term either, it’s too close to crappy EvPsych.)
For all these reasons, purity has got nothing to do with morality as I define it. Thanks for posting the quiz, Jeff - it’s amusing even if it’s bunk.
paul:
Yes! Now, they may be doing it on purpose — because they think that what people really mean by “morality” is “which set of dog-whistles do you respond to?” But that’s something they need to *prove*, not assume.Wingnuts tend to treat premarital sex, gay sex, and rape as equal wrongs.
We secular liberals tend to view rape as very wrong and the other two as not wrong at all.
Would this have anything to do with the fact that for many wingnuts, they are all acts that defy Authority (god)? Meanwhile they are not so much concerned with the consent vs. non-consent aspect, that we’d all focus on (i.e. Harm).
Also, I am a bit disappointed because I thought the post was going to address foot tats specifically. I was excited to learn about why else I was morally bankrupt.
Well, hopefully they’d all be orthogonal to each other; otherwise, they’d be different ways of measuring the same thing, wouldn’t they? That’s kind of unfair; we’re not distinguishing here between authority that’s been earned and that which hasn’t been–consider the people upthread talking about how the example of a minister isn’t a good one, because they don’t automatically respect people wearing the minister badge. I’d guess that you consider Gore’s authority unearned (”bestowed”), but I’d still wager that the people bestowing said authority think he earned it, while the people respecting a minister believe that he got it by some magical handwaving rather than by earning it.hopefully they’d all be orthogonal to each other
thank goodness for n-dimensional reality.
If anyone wants to know more about Haidt’s moral philosophy, check this out…
Sycorax! I saw a toilet like that (don’t know if it was the one you saw a picture of). It was in the Exploratorium, a science museum in San Francisco. I definitely drank from it. it felt a little weird. but I also have a drinking fountain fetish… and I was thirsty.
You have to look at any cultural practice in terms of what goods it is aiming for. Veiling, or keeping women in the home, is usually aimed at goods of chastity and modesty. Not all human practices are aimed at moral goods.
ARGH, wtf, so he totally IS making normative claims, AND begging the question (”i’ll assess morals using criteria that i can then use to assess morals”). or something.
Having now read a bit of Pinker’s article, I’ll add:
the social moral values he discusses may have some truly instinctive component. I do not think the moral impulse toward “purity” is literally instinctive. It *may* be the result of “programming”, though: if a child’s development of language and symbolic thought tends to encourage dichotomous thinking, which is really IMHO what purity is about.
In that case, our social moral values would be pre-programmed into our hardware; “purity” is the result of the programming language itself performs in our brains.
Windy, Thanks for that. I had a bad feeling when I was reading Haidt’s paper but didn’t have the patience to read through the entire thing.
That is just disturbing.
For #1, would the second choice be better or worse if it’s a child I *do* know? Is harming a child supposed to be the morally repugnant part (in the “children are innocents” tradition), or harming a stranger ?(”do unto others”–or, as John Lennon said, “Instant karma’s gonna get you.”) What if it’s an adult I don’t know? Or an adult I do know? (Why am I sticking pins in these people anyway? Am I a writer for “Criminal Minds” or something? )
grendelkhan: That’s kind of unfair; we’re not distinguishing here between authority that’s been earned and that which hasn’t been–consider the people upthread talking about how the example of a minister isn’t a good one, because they don’t automatically respect people wearing the minister badge. I’d guess that you consider Gore’s authority unearned (”bestowed”), but I’d still wager that the people bestowing said authority think he earned it, while the people respecting a minister believe that he got it by some magical handwaving rather than by earning it.
Well, that’s sort of unfair. Having clergy in the extended family, I know that in most denominations it works just like any other profession. You go to the right schools, spend your time in underpaid internships or in half-time junior pastoral roles, and compete for a limited number of positions. And that authority certainly is not unconditional. There isn’t any tenure in pastoral careers. If there is a conflict between you and the comittee of church members who write your paycheck, you really don’t have much recourse.
Ministers only have authority (or a job) as long as they reflect the consensus of the congregation. If there is not a consensus, there are few political conflicts as bitter or nasty or petty as internal church politics.
I’d rather see people acting as animals, including urination, than mock retarded people. The animals bit seems like more of a meaningful art– a statement about the rule of civilization or of evolution, whereas the other is unfair (mental retardation is something that can’t be helped, and the afflicted people do their best to overcome it) AND harmful– causing emotional distress to the family members of retarded people.
As for slapping a friend or a minister by consent, I would have no trouble doing either, but would try to arrange the choreography so that there was little to no actual contact. Although I’ve never had an actual minister, having been raised outside religion, so the authority there is awfully weak. Still– professor? governor? Anyone I can think of who I might see as having authority over me, as long as they don’t mind the slapping, I’d slap. Heh. In fact, slapping the governator would be FUN.
And INDEED, isn’t most good comedy a slap to authority? Metaphorical, most often, but the same sense of authority being rebelled against.
Windy, Thanks for that. I had a bad feeling when I was reading Haidt’s paper but didn’t have the patience to read through the entire thing. That is just disturbing.
And he says he’s a liberal himself, so it’s apparently only a kind of theoretical exercise for him. But looks like he hasn’t thought it all the way through - how about a moral system where atrocities are motivated by purity and duty? Are we allowed to criticize Nazis? And weren’t segregation and apartheid motivated as much by purity as by monetary gain?
Ultimately, I disagree with Haidt that these can be considered cross-cultural norms when three of the five aren’t considered norms by half of our society.
Couldn’t agree more Jeff. I can’t remember exactly what scores I got when I did that test (it was doing the rounds on ScienceBlogs a few weeks ago) but I scored very highly for fairness and harm, and very, very low for authority, purity and loyalty. Which isn’t exactly surprising, as I’m absolutely committed to the view of morality as based on fairness, and I view the concepts of authority, purity and loyalty as essentially anti-moral. They’re the bullshit people use to justify immoral actions.
I do not actually feel a difference in #3. Neither in #4, after trying all possible autorities I can think of. (Well, with some I’d rather slap them than a friend, actually.) The only exception might be a disabled septugenarian teacher I respect a lot, but more because I’d be worried about hurting them.
In #5, the distinguishing characteristic is smell. I’d hate to see the second variant live on stage! In #2, “wealth” is the keyword, not the difference if it’s a person or a business now missing a flat-screen TV.
The point with #1 is that a kid cannot give meaningful consent.
The strangest thing, to me, seems to measure reluctance in money. Do they assume not only that everyone can be bought, but also that their price depends only on their morals, not their situation? I’ve met people desperate enough to do everything on the list for the rent money, while I would pay for the privilege to slap some people.
Interesting that he claims to be a liberal. In his paper he claims that acknowledging the conservatives’ moral concerns can help open dialogue. But many feminists, including Amanda and other bloggers, have more convincingly argued that this doesn’t work.
I’ll agree that purity seems like a weird choice for the concept and that pretty much every specific is going to be socially trained, but I have to go with the belief that we come pre-wired with circuits that are all ready for us to get trained to use.
If I think of it as “we have an instint for purity” I kind of go “meh,” but if I think of it as “we are instinctively set up to be taught what is icky” I can’t really disagree.
Not that there is any specific thing that it is natural to find icky as a universal human experience, nor that we can’t train ourselves to de-ick something we were taught, just that “Ick” seems to be a universal human experience in some form.
Catherine: Like why a lot of people are skeeved by insects, or mice.
What is the morality of a phobia? My stepmother is phobic of cats, does that make cats impure?
The longer I think about this “purity” issue, the less I get it. What is purity? Cleanliness? A desire for simpler times with easier answers? Something else entirely?
I find all but the sticking a pin in a kid questions to be weird.
The slapping thing, for example, is about consent for me, not authority. I’ve done theater. If they’re on stage with me, they consented, and we get the job done. And, outside of a skit or play, I simply don’t slap people (BDSM aside. Again, consent.)
The big screen TV, too. For me, it is about whether it is legitimately the other person’s to give away, not how they got it. As I read the two choices, it isn’t his to give away either way, unless the store who made the computer error told him to keep it rather than return it (in which case, he can keep it in the same room with his unicorns and flying pigs, because that ain’t gonna happen.)
I don’t argue the premise of the study, but the author(s) have some pretty weird underlying assumptions, seems to me.
Shorter Pinker: Chomsky’s theories on language also hold for morality.
i.e.,
Everyone has the same intuitions re (morality),
these acceptability judgments demonstrate our tacit knowledge of (morality),
I see no way this (moral) knowledge could be learned, therefore it is innate.
Unfortunately, the conclusion is sheer creationism, firstly, and secondly, the basic premise is false, since intuitive judgments vary both intra- and inter-subjectively, making them useless as data. The past thirty years have consistently demonstrated this, as has this entire thread. Pinker is just the leading cultist, the Tom Cruise of Chomskyism.
CBrachyrhynchos: The only thing that makes him [Gore] or his opinions relevant is that he has charisma and authority bestowed upon him by large chunks of the left.
One might say that the only legitimate authority is the one that is freely given. Not quite sure yet if I agree, have to consider it.
Shorter Pinker: Chomsky’s theories on language also hold for morality.
i.e.,
Everyone has the same intuitions re (morality),
these acceptability judgments demonstrate our tacit knowledge of (morality),
I see no way this (moral) knowledge could be learned, therefore it is innate.
Unfortunately, the conclusion is sheer creationism, firstly, and secondly, the basic premise is false since intuitive judgments vary both intra- and inter-subjectively, making them useless as data. The past thirty years have consistently demonstrated this, as has this entire thread. Pinker is just the leading cultist, a Tom Cruise of Chomskyism.
Peter:
I can. I use the term “instinct” rather carefully, and unless I can think of a parallel in animal behavior I will doubt it’s a human instinct.The only exception is language. The evidence IMO is really strong that humans have an instinct to use language (spoken or signed) and with certain parameters. This is one reason I suspect “purity” as a moral quality is tied up in language, somehow.
Can you think of an animal behavior that looks like a concern for purity? The closest thing I can think of is food aversion,
I’d rather see people acting as animals, including urination, than mock retarded people.
The Republicans have only themselves to blame, Sam.
It seems to me that all but #5 are about “harm”, unless the focus is purely on physical harm in order to make these particular points. (I guess I’m a “lumper”).
It’s wrong to prick a kid’s hand because it hurts them, it’s wrong to steal the TV because it harms the company or the person who bought it, it’s wrong to slap someone with or without their permission because it hurts them, it’s wrong to lie about your country because lying for no good reason is wrong…well, there’s my irrationality showing up.
The fifth one just grosses me out, though like someone else said, I’ve got no problem cleaning up after a relative or changing a diaper. So does that fall under “community”?
Have you spent a lot of time caring for infants or toddlers? I’m not sure that “Ick” is in fact a universal human experience in any kind of pre-programmed or pre-programmable form.
But I wouldn’t be surprised if training kids into having that sense were an integral part of any culture that survives past the point of clusters larger than a clan, just for the obvious bacteriological reasons.
I concur that number 4 is harmless. The minister agreed to be assaulted/humiliated on stage, so what’s the problem? If he didn’t agree, then that would be unacceptable, at least in part because of the assault on authority, but mainly because it’s unfair to publicly humiliate a person for no good reason.
I’m surprised that conservatives were found to place equal weight on all of the five things; I do not find their policies to be at all conducive to fairness or community. And about “community,” I find it really annoying, and possibly indicative of poorly-thought-out questions, that “community” was identified solely as (verbal) devotion to some abstract entity. It included nothing at all about actually acting to protect the community in which you live, which conservatives, favoring laissez-faire capitalism and doing everything to let huge multinational corporations off the hook, would score really poorly on. Seriously, who measures morality by what you’re willing to say about whatever you’re trying to convince people you value? Shouldn’t it be measured by what you’re willing to do to protect it?
#1: No, I’m not poking the child, for any amount of money. You need to make the circumstances more desperate for me to consider that one, or, preferably, have some of the benefit of the act go to the child. #2, no, not that one either. #3, well, not if the statement is false. I’d consider publically criticizing my country in a foreign country for something where it deserved the criticism. #4, I really don’t see why slapping my minister should bother me, given that it’s all a stage performance and done with his permission. #5, the urination would be the part that would bother me. If it was just nudity like in Equus, I’d watch it. Still, if I had to choose between #1, #2, #3, and #5 (second option in all cases), I’d pick #5.
Like why a lot of people are skeeved by insects, or mice.
I dunno. I suspect a lot of people are skeeved out by insects and mice particularly for the same reasons that they freak out preschoolers.
Around three or four is when little kids really begin to understand that they are separate from other people and that they are individuals. Insects - and sometimes other animals like mice - freak a lot of preschoolers out at this age because they finally understand that even little things like insects have minds of their own, and the idea that other things have agency and can’t be controlled and manipulated like a block or a ball scares them. It seems logical to me that this would carry through to adulthood for some people.
And yes, it seems illogical that they would freak out over the small things they can’t control, and not the big things they can’t control. But preschoolers tend to obsess over illogical fears precisely because you can do something about a spider, but you can’t do a whole lot about a polar bear. You can refuse to watch a scary movie or insist on a night light, but you can’t do anything to keep mom and dad from dying.
FYI, this is also about the time most kids become obsessed with gender. They are trying to create an identity - and categorize others - and declaring “I’m/he’s/she’s a boy/girl” is a really easy way to do that. Thus the popularity of Disney Princesses among preschoolers who often have never even seen half the movies.