Category Archives: Human Nature

I Heart Adam Smith

Posted on by

I’m really glad I got a chance to finally read A Theory of Moral Sentiments closely. It is I think deeply incoherent in a way that highly recommends it, because it is the incoherence of lived moral reality.

To be happy is to be loved and praised. Also, to be happy is stoic indifference to love and praise. The love of high relative standing is based on misery-making self-deception. And this self-deception turns the wheels of industry, which produces wealth, and leaves even those of low relative position in a good absolute position. Which is all you really need to be happy! That is, as long as you are stoically indifferent to love and praise, to relative position. Which, really, none of us are, because, OMG, we really really want other people to think highly of us. And, hey, again, that’s a pretty good thing when you think about it, otherwise none of us would be self-deceived enough to do all the crazy hard work that creates the wealth that leaves us all in a good absolute material position. So, you personally should probably worry about becoming actually praiseworthy, instead of just seeking to receive praise, because you’ll be happier if you deserve it, whether or not you get it. Unless everyone is doing this. In which case we’ll all just be poor, which isn’t good at all.

A different strand… We are naturally sympathetic. Of course, our sympathy is rather limited and weak. But because we are sympathetic, we sympathize with the weakness of others’ sympathy. So, being sympathetic to the limits of others’ sympathy, we mute the expression of our own emotions, so that others will not be made uncomfortable or burdened by their failure to connect fully with what we really feel. And, likewise, we appreciate it when others do this for us.  A sympathetic person doesn’t put other people out. Observing many instances of this pattern of praise for the sympathetic accommodation of weak sympathy (“thank you for not asking me to be that sad for you!”), we produce a general rule. And then we apply it to ourselves and come to disapprove of freely expressing unmuted emotion even when alone — even though we are actually having our emotions and not trying to sympathize with them. Our natural sympathy, wedded to the general weakness of sympathy, generates an individual conscience that demands that we be no more emotional than other people are ready to handle. Therefore, stoic self-command is awesome. “It’s OK! Just let it all out.” Nonsense! Why would you so rudely embarrass yourself with your own emotions?

This is truly great stuff.

On the Willingness of Past Selves to Let You Buy Them a Beer

Posted on by

Steven Berlin Johnson writes:

But sitting here at forty, for whatever reason, I’m imagining it the other way: would 1985 Steven have happily had a beer with the current model? I think he would, and that the pair of us would have hit it off. That’s one measure of success, right? Your continuity with your past selves; their willingness to let you buy them a beer.

Yeah. That’s one measure of success. It’s also one measure of failure. My secret theory is that the point of personal continuity is to solve assurance problems. Stability in personality, values, and aims is to a large degree a function of the nature of our iterated games. If not for those ongoing games, continuity matters very little. (You are then free to be “authentic” in the Sartrean sense.) If you are deeply socially embedded, enmeshed in a web of thick obligations, you can’t just turn on a dime and become a whole new person. Change has to be gradual and semi-imperceptible in order to bring along gently one’s ongoing cooperative partners. You know a relationship is about to end when someone says: “I don’t know who you are any more.” So we remain more or less the same to sustain our relationships, to enable the mutuality of lovers, family, friends, and community.

So whether or not continuity is a sign of success depends on the worth of those relationships. If you find yourself after twenty years as submissive, superstitious, and hidebound as ever, then continuity may be your greatest failure. Who cares if this was an “effective” strategy in your particular ongoing social tit-for-tat. That might not have been a game worth playing. Pathetic continuity is no success.

When I was the age Johnson was in 1985, I didn’t drink beer.

[Via PEG.]

Uncooperative Collectivsm

Posted on by

Gated summaries of gated papers are annoying, but the result is interesting, so I thought I’d pass this along:

Put four Boston students-all strangers-in a game where they must distribute tokens among themselves using rules that reward both selfish and cooperative moves; allow them to punish each other by taking back tokens (albeit at a cost to themselves); and then watch the chips fall. The students not only penalize freeloaders- that is, players who don’t give enough tokens to the group- but also respond to each other’s punishment by giving more to the group in subsequent rounds. So do students in western European countries such as the United Kingdom, Germany, and Denmark.

But half a world away, in the more collectivist cultures of Istanbul, Turkey; Riyadh, Saudi Arabia; and Muscat, Oman, the play is a little rougher. Students give less overall to the public weal. And when punished, the freeloaders strike back, exacting revenge from the do-gooders who penalized them in earlier rounds. Closer to home, students in Greece, Russia, and Belarus likewise act less altruistically and more readily ding their cooperative colleagues.

Having watched college students play the token game in 16 cities, the researchers conclude that “culture strongly influences cooperation and punishment,” says Simon Gächter, an economist at the University of Nottingham in England and one of the study’s authors.

[...]

Ironically, a distaste for civic cooperation and the rule of law tends to travel with collectivism, data from the World Values Survey show. Collectivistic societies stress interdependence between people and the pursuit of group goals. But not just any people or group’s goals count, explains Gächter: “In these societies you cooperate with people inside your network, which is organized along family and friendship lines. In our experiments, everyone is an outsider to everyone else. You might not accept punishment from outside your network.”

Conversely, individualistic societies view each person as independent and value the pursuit of individual goals. These mores are more prevalent in wealthier democracies, notes Herbert Gintis, an economist at the Santa Fe Institute, in an accompanying article. “In modern, market-based societies, group boundaries aren’t very important,” explains Gächter. “You have to be able to cooperate with unrelated strangers.” And so rather than being hotbeds of cut-throat competition, capitalist democracies are actually kinder and gentler than more traditional economies—at least for strangers.

Similar results have been rolling in for a while now. So it should be considered scientifically and thus intellectually bogus to characterize individualist cultures and markets societies as encouraging some kind of atomized dog-eat-dog ethic. There is tribalist solidarity, which certainly has its share of mammalian gratification, but leads to vicious conflict between tribes. And then there is liberal, market solidarity, which is based not in exclusion, or a feeling of warmth for our kinsmen, but in a perhaps less “meaningful” yet much more materially significant relations of extended mutual advantage.

[Thanks to Ashley March for the article.]

Procrastination Is Not Laziness

Posted on by

I’m sympathetic to but ultimately must disagree with Seth Stevenson’s take on procrastination, a topic I sadly know a great deal about.

Why did I subject myself to so much stress, instead of starting my work earlier like “normal” people do? Well, you’ve no doubt heard all manner of theories regarding the root cause of procrastination. Fear of failure. Crippling perfectionism. Abnormally low type-2 phloxiplaxitus levels.

I’m here to tell you that it was none of these things. The root cause of my procrastination, in technical terms, is this: I’m lazy. Extremely lazy.

Don’t judge, pal—you’re lazy, too. It’s why you procrastinate. When there’s a difficult, disagreeable, or tedious chore that needs to get done, guess what? You don’t want to do it. So you don’t. Until you have to.

It’s just that simple, my slothful friend.

I’m sure I procrastinate as much as Stevenson, but the thing is, I’m not lazy! I am in fact super-industrious. It’s just that I am always motivated to do something other than the thing that most needs to be done. Stevenson mentions Da Vinci was a flaky, distractable procrastinator. OK.  But lazy? That’s retarded. Doing something else is not laziness; it’s misdirected industriousness.

No discussion of procrastination is complete with John Perry’s now-classic essay “Structured Procrastination.” You can even buy a “I’m not wasting time, I’m a structured procrastinator  t-shirt!”

Econonerd Shindig

Posted on by

Tyler and Alex’s son give their impressions of the party at Robin Hanson’s lovely home yesterday afternoon. It’s a special kind of relief to be able to spend a few hours with a whole house full of people with whom one does not have to be defensive about thinking rationally (i.e. “reductively”, “autistically”, “soullessly”) about tough questions. This is a party where you’re the weird one if you don’t think it’s appropriate to apply cost-benefit analysis to the choice to have kids, or if you don’t think it’s more or less obvious that open immigration is welfare-enhancing, or that robots are awesome. Good times. Here’s some pics.

The Contradiction of Expelled

Posted on by

Larry Arnhart states it well:

The folks at the Discovery Institute have made a big mistake in their production of this movie. The political rhetoric of the Discovery Institute’s “wedge strategy” depends upon hiding a fundamental contradiction. But this movie makes the contradiction so evident that any viewer can see it. On the one hand, the rhetorical strategy of the Discovery Institute is to say that “intelligent design” is not a creationist religious belief but pure science, and therefore teaching “intelligent design” in public high school biology classes does not violate the First Amendment’s prohibition on establishing religion. On the other hand, the popular success of the Discovery Institute’s rhetoric depends on appealing to Biblical creationists who assume that “intelligent designer” is just another name for God the Biblical Creator.

This contradiction–both affirming and denying that “intelligent design theory” is the same as Biblical creationism–became evident in the 2005 case in Dover, Pennsylvania. Leaders of the Dover Area Public School board wanted to teach Biblical creationism. They were warned that this would violate U.S. Supreme Court decisions declaring that teaching creationism as science violated the First Amendment separation of church and state. They then decided to teach “intelligent design theory” as a disguised form of Biblical creationism. The trial made clear their deception, and this also exposed the contradiction in the Discovery Institute’s rhetoric.

Rather than covering up this contradiction, this movie makes it hard for any viewer to ignore the contradiction. When Bruce Chapman–President of the Discovery Institute–is interviewed by Stein, Chapman says that journalists distort the true position of intelligent design by saying that it’s a creationist religious belief, because the “intelligent designer” is clearly God. Chapman vehemently denies this. But then for the rest of the movie, it’s asserted that anyone who denies “intelligent design” is therefore an atheist who denies the existence of God!

Read the whole thing. You can hear me ranting about intelligent design in this now-vintage America’s Future Foundation roundtable.

Catallaxy: Frankly, It's Unnatural

Posted on by

Here’s Yale psychologist Paul Bloom talking with UNC experimental philosopher Joshua Knobe about the evidence for our native bias toward theism. (Don’t worry! The clip’s just 3 minutes.) Everything he says could just as well be applied to folk ideas about planned economies versus spontaneous orders:

Knobe goes on to mention that people seem to revert back to a childlike penchant for intention-based agentive explanation when we become old. Maybe we need to put an age limit on policymakers.

For Leaving the Community Behind

Posted on by

Richard Chappell says, “communitarianism creeps me out.” That makes two of us. More from his excellent post:

I’m so incredibly grateful to be where I am now, to have the opportunity to dedicate my life to the discipline of philosophy; I can’t even begin to imagine being nearly so happy doing anything else. The academic philosophical community is the first to which I’ve felt that I truly belong. But if I had been born a Maori, if my skin were a darker shade, then suddenly I would have been obliged to remain with my ethnic community instead? *shudder*

[...]

So, count me in favour of meritocracy and the upward-mobility (though not the crass materialism) of “middleclassness”. Count me in favour of “elitism”, understood as the claim that some ways of life are better than others, tempered by the cosmopolitan insistence that the best forms of life not be closed to anyone merely due to the circumstances of their birth. (Sadly, this demand is yet to be met. Much more still needs to be done to enable humanity. But entrenching class divisions in the name of “solidarity” is not the place to start. We should want as many people as possible to join the creative classes — to vacate the working class and its culture, not hold people there and reinforce it.) Count me in favour of liberalism.

Richard emphasizes that one need not be some kind of egoist or a pinched individualist unable to value a common enterprise to think this. It’s just generally better for people if they do not feel pushed to consider their parents’ culture a cage within which life must be lived.

How to Be Grotesquely Reductionist and Utilitarian about Human Love and Life

Posted on by

This post by one “Deep Thought” is a brilliant example:

This isn’t rocket science; men with easy access to prostitution or to promiscuous women have little incentive to marry. Suddenly there is nothing to offset their legal and financial obligations as a husband – so why take on the obligation? Women who are promiscuous face disease, pregnancy, and emotional trauma – all of them reduce their ability to be a valuable wife.

This probably helps explain what’s going on with prostitution bans, but is it supposed to be a moral reason to endorse them? Dramatic reconstruction:

Sweetheart… Since I have no easy access to women who sell sex, will you share my life so I can use you for sex? I mean, even if there were a few more easy women around here, I’d have no use for you. Definitely no reason to make a commitment to you. But there aren’t. Oh well. So… I love you? And Oh! Here’s a diamond.

Maybe this tells us something about the great romance of being the mother of Deep Thought’s four children, but for my part, I share my life with Kerry because she is brilliant and exciting and we mesh in so many ways and I love her. As far as I can tell, the existence of Craiglist’s Casual Encounters has no bearing on this, my greatest source of happiness.

It gets even more obsessively biological. This is, sensibly enough I suppose, written by a Catholic guy with a theology degree who attends Latin mass and thinks “the Patriarchy, when controlled by Judeo-Christian morality, is a protector of and advocate for women.” [!!!]:

the future belongs to those who show up. If you don’t have kids, you have no stake in the future. If you have kids, you not only have a stake in the future, you can influence it in ways almost impossible to duplicate without kids.

[...]

bans on prostitution exist not just to avoid the exploitation of sex workers; they are in place not just because the majority of world religions declare them immoral; they were passed not solely to fight the spread of disease; they were written with more than the goal of reducing the numbers of poor, fatherless children. No, they are there to protect the future.

Again, I can see the explanatory power here. But to think that this has justificatory power is simply grotesque. This is to reduce individual human beings to tokens of a biological type, to reduce the purpose of an individual human life to a link in a biological chain there is no moral value in forging. Yes, the future belongs to those who show up. But the present belongs to each individual human being. We have lives because a lineage has been perpetuated. But our lives are not for perpetuating lineages. Our lives are for our living. Our duty is to treat one another as free and equal persons, as ends in themselves, which means we are duty-bound not to use people and their lives for purposes not their own. We treat people with the respect they deserve. Whoever shows up, shows up. If you’re interested in that, then breed away. But do leave the rest of us alone.

How Sex Is Different, Part I

Posted on by

I’ve got time to kill while waiting in LAX, so I might as well try to clarify my position on prostitution by saying how I think sex is different from other kinds of human activity. Obviously, sex is central to reproduction, and reproduction is central to natural selection, and natural selection is central to why we have the kind of minds and the kinds of sentiments we have. In particular, it looks like sex has an important attachment function for humans, helping to cement pair-bond relationships. Partly because of this function, sex turns out to be a lot of fun for humans, and we do it recreationally in a way that most primates don’t.

People fixated on discreditably vulgar versions of evolutionary psychology (in addition to making the naturalistic fallacy as if making the naturalistic fallacy is a path to riches) tend to miss the cultural variety in sexual norms within the uniformity of evolutionary logic. You don’t need Margaret Mead blank slate-ism to show that there is a fair amount of play in human sexual norms and sexual psychology. Even incest taboos are more variable than most are inclined to think. That said, it is true that there are regularities in male and female sexual psychology. Men will generally tend to be more indiscriminate in partner choice and women will tend be more concerned with screening. And it is also true that lack of paternity confidence will tend to make men extremely jealous and disposed to coordinate to control the sexual behavior of women. Concerted slut-shaming is a classic male strategy to raise the cost of female extra-pair coupling. Shaming norms and even articulate ideologies that reinforce the shared belief that women’s sexual liberty is hugely dangerous to the social order, and to women themselves, are very common and I think are largely explained by a mix of paternity confidence issues and male dominance of social and cultural institutions, which may also have a partly biological explanation.

To reify or essentialize this pattern, and to unthinkingly endorse it, is to compound mistake upon mistake. These kinds of patriarchal sexual mores have relaxed immensely in the West in the last half century and the result is that people–especially women–are doing much better, not worse, in the places where sexual liberalization has occurred. The specialness of sexual psychology mostly helps us to understand the panic about and strenuous resistance to liberalizing norms of female sexual autonomy. And the history of moral panic contrasted with the good results of actual recent sexual liberalization  gives us reason to be especially skeptical about the special damage that will come of deregulating women’s sexual behavior.

I want to say something more about what’s special about sexual experience itself, but I have to catch a plane.  

More Misbehavioral Economics

Posted on by

I say, again and again, that it is an embarrassing non-sequitur to argue that people are “irrational” and then leap to the conclusion that they need benevolent paternal guidance from the state. After all, if people are irrational then voters are irrational, politicians are irrational, bureaucrats are irrational, etc. To this, Ezra Klein responds:

I’m not sure what exactly it is that Will finds so inexplicable here. Behavioral research often finds that consumers act irrationally in certain situations. So given a specific set of constraints, they may underestimate future risk, prove oversensitive to loss, exhibit significant status quo bias, and so on and so forth. All problems.

Now, the government may be made up of people, but it is not made up of people carrying out transactions under these conditions.

Perhaps Ezra is right, but only because people acting inside government institutions are much less likely to themselves bear the cost of their mistakes, and will therefore likely make more of them. There is no way to wriggle out of the fact that people who win elections are just like the rest of us.

I really wish people would pay more attention to Vernon Smith, who invented experimental economics, won the Nobel Prize for it, and remains by far the most philosophically rigorous theorist of the relationship between individual rationality and institutional performance. (Ted Bergstrom’s paper here [pdf] is a good overview.) What Smith’s work shows is that, yes, individuals in isolation don’t act according to canonical postulates of rationality, but that well-structured market institutions will nevertheless tend to converge on the efficient outcome, as if the agents were behaving with full “rationality”, even though they are in fact limited, confused, and ignorant. The “rationality” of the outcome is more a function of the structure of the institution than of the “rationality” of those acting inside it.

Responsible social science therefore compares the way real people perform when embedded in different real-world institutional settings. What you surely don’t do is perform selective empirical work to discover an “anomaly” in decision making, and then deploy a priori high theory to infer that one set of institutions (markets) won’t work, because, in fact, the performance of a market institution might turn out to be indifferent to the anomaly or limitation. That’s what Smith has proved. If you’re going to be an empiricist, then be an empiricist, and actually test the effect of the anomaly in the performance of the relevant institutions. Until you do this, it’s either arbitrary, naive, or willfully ideological to posit another set of institutions (government) as a fix. Because there may be nothing to fix. And, even if there is, government may be the wrong kind of institution to fix it. You’ve got to run the experiment.

There is a great deal of carelessness in generalizing the results of anomaly-focused behavioral economics. As Steven Levitt and John List write in their short article on behavioral economics in Science ($$$) this month:

Perhaps the greatest challenge facing behavioral economics is demonstrating its applicability in the real world. In nearly every instance, the strongest empirical evidence in favor of behavioral anomalies emerges from the lab. Yet, there are many reasons to suspect that these laboratory findings might fail to generalize to real markets. We have recently discussed several factors, ranging from properties of the situation — such as the nature and extent of scrutiny — to individual expectations and the type of actor involved. For example, the competitive nature of markets encourages individualistic behavior and selects for participants with those tendencies. Compared to lab behavior, therefore, the combination of market forces and experience might lessen the importance of these qualities in everyday markets.

List has run a number of field experiments that show that this is the case. Smith has run a number of lab experiments that show that the frequency of a “mistake” goes down as the cost of making it goes up.

Ezra continues:

An easy example is the research on opt-out 401(k)s. We know, from the economists, that investing in 401(k)s is generally a wise idea. We know, from the statisticians, that far fewer people do it than should. We know, from the behavioralists, that far more people would do it if the default setting put you in the 401(k), rather than forced you to wander down to HR and specifically ask for it. And so folks in the government, acting with more information and in a different context than folks in an office, think up a policy to “recognize the power of inertia in human behavior and enlist it to promote, rather than hinder, saving.”

At exactly which point in this process does Will fear that the same irrationality that keeps someone from creating a retirement account will foul up a regulator’s efforts to ease their way into a retirement account?

As I said to Dan Ariely in our chat, I think behavioral work is really valuable, especially when it suggests to us how people might better structure their affairs to get more of what they want. I think the evidence shows that 401(k) opt-out defaults are often a good idea, and that businesses ought to make that part of their standard labor contract, if that is something that they think would be appealing to their prospective employees.

I also think that this minor fact about the general distaste for filling out complicated forms can hardly be used to justify further encroachments on the right of individuals to negotiate the terms of their contracts with employers. I think Ezra’s argument here is both strangely narrow and ungenerously extreme. I don’t doubt that non-terrible policies are sometimes successfully enacted. To doubt that would be a bit like a market skeptic doubting that anyone ever succeeds in buying a candy bar. That would be terrifically dense. What I doubt, very strongly, is that the discovery of “irrationalities” undermines the authority of market institutions more than it undermines the authority of government institutions. Are people more or likely to behave irrationally when voting for their congressman or when buying a sandwich? Do buyers for private organizations sign contracts for $76 screws? Etc.

So, no. I don’t fear the mandatory opt out 401(k) plans in particular will be a giant debacle. But I do fear that half-baked behavioral economics is being used to undermine support for market institutions in general, way ahead of the evidence. And I fear that a fundamentally confused assault on “rationality” is being used successfully to promote paternalistic control by elites and, necessarily, to encourage the docility of those who are to be controlled.

[Added: If you have not read Ed Glaeser's "Paternalism and Psychology" [pdf], then you probably should.]

Misbehavioral Economics

Posted on by

I have unforgivably neglected to link to yesterday’s episode of Free Will featuring a discussion with Dan Ariely, the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Behavioral Economics, about his new book Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions. I really enjoyed talking to Dan, who is incredibly creative in experimental design. It is good fun reading about the experiments, but I found Dan frustratingly naive about the implications of many of his findings, as I vented here.

I’m pretty sure Dan is guilty of the the fallacy of asymmetrical idealization, and I think he falls victim to a number of confusions common among behavioral economists that are inevitable when you completely destroy the formal neoclassical economic model of rationality but insist on using it as a benchmark of rationality anyway. (I discuss this at greater length here.) But like I told Dan in the diavlog, I’m totally on board with the project of finding out how we actually do make decisions, which is obviously of the first importance. His extremely valuable work is clearly at the cutting edge of that effort, and Predictably Irrational is well worth reading, if only to get a good sense of some important (and perplexing) recent findings.

Limited Government and Morality as a Fill-in-the-Blanks Slate

Posted on by

So far I have found this month’s Cato Unbound extremely stimulating. It sure helps when you get to invite the discussants, but the problem of how exactly limited-government types think government can realistically be limited really is of the first importance.

I think Anthony de Jasay is right that incentive-compatibility problems plague attempts to keep government lean and limited. That said, I think a certain kind of anarchist, like de Jasay, tend to somewhat oversell the impossibility of limited government. As Gordon Tullock likes to emphasize, given the vast amount that could be extracted by political predation, the puzzle for the political scientist is to explain why so little is invested in rent-seeking. Part of the answer lies in the structural constraints de Jasay mentions in his essay. The prospect that financial and human capital may flee a grabbing hand, or the fear that the electorate will rise up in anger and panic when the thicket of opportunistic regulation has begun to strangle prosperity, may rein in government. But these are constraints implicit in the nature of things, not ones imposed by law as limits on lawmakers. So it is interesting that he also mentions the campaign-finance rule as a constraint on the size of government, since that seems open to choice, to design, in a way that the other constraints are not. This seems like an admission that certain rules can successfully bind.

I think I’m almost entirely in agreement with the main thrust of Jerry Gaus’s reply. The problem isn’t so much the weakness of formal, paper constraints, but the weakness of formal constraints that are not reinforced by our moral sentiments. If a formal rule is seen as merely conventional, and therefore revisable by the relevant authority, and not as moral, there may be little resistance to overriding it in order to meet the demands of weightier moral rules. I found this passage especially illuminating:

[I]f the basic normative commitments of classical liberals were widely conceived of as moral rules, then there would be much deeper resistance to government-made rules that seek to cancel or override them. The problem is that the opposite seems nearer the truth: for many citizens, their understanding of the moral norms related to fairness endorses government-made rules overriding the conventional rules of property. The welfare state reigns supreme not because the state and it allies have tricked the rest of us in a power grab; it reigns supreme because in the eyes of most citizens it conforms to the egalitarian fairness norms that have evolved with humans (Fong, Bowles, and Gintis, 2005). Classical liberals who convince themselves that the New Deal is best explained as a power grab by Roosevelt and his allies are manifestly deluded: it was (and still is) very widely seen as demanded by our sense of fairness.

I think this is on the right track. But I think it’s worth emphasizing that the power grab explanation is not at all inconsistent with the “mandate of fairness” explanation. Power-seeking politicians can create the perception that their role and their power is legitimate by appealing to deep-seated moral sentiments. Second, I’m not so sure that our egalitarian sentiments are all that close to a pure expression of egalitarian sharing norms. First, there is the artificiality of nationalism, and the modern welfare state is nothing if not an expression of economic and moral nationalism. To see co-nationals in a vast pluralistic territory as part of a common tribe in which even an attenuated form of ancient sharing norms apply requires an incredible, imaginative, “unnatural” expansion of the circle of affinity.

But I think the general point stands. Moral rules are processed differently than conventional rules. If limited government is going to have a chance, it must be in sync with our moral sentiments and dispositions to moral judgments. I don’t think this is impossible. I’m pretty well sold on something like Jonathan Haidt’s multidimensional conception of the moral sense. And there may be something like a classical liberal calibration of the moral sentiments, such that certain rules limiting the domain of political power and collective choice may come to be experienced as distinctively moral, and therefore non-optional.

Now, I don’t know that there is such a thing, but there might be. I do think there is a broadly liberal calibration of the moral sense, I think that it is prevalent in liberal societies, and that is what makes them stably liberal. That means, in no small part, that the government is effectively limited in what it may do to people. Limited government is evidently possible because it is actual.

The idea that the there are various dimensions of the moral sense each with its own parameters implies that morality is a fill-in-the-blanks slate. The moral sense then isn’t an exogenous variable acting as a hard constraint on feasible social coordination. Nor is it infinitely malleable. There are only so many combinatorial possibilities, and the feasible cultural/developmental paths from one combination of settings to another may be quite limited.

But this kind of view does I think put ideas about pluralism and liberal neutrality that both Jerry and I are very fond of in a tight spot. The multidimensional moral sense view makes it pretty clear that liberal society requires that a certain kind of moral personality become common in the population. A specifically classical liberal society, in which the certain further limits on the scope of politics are felt strongly to be moral, may require an even more tightly-focused and even more-broadly shared, fine-tuning of the moral sense. But I’m not certain I’d even want that.

Yes, Mies van der Rohe is Antiseptic and Cold and Socialist

Posted on by

Yes, I know the political history of the Bauhaus and the International School, thank you very much. (That major in the history and philosophy of art is not worth nothing!) And I admit it does put a strain on my not-very-well-thought-out analogy, if that’s the modernism you had in mind. Of course, I had in mind houses that actually are very lovely and quite nice to live in. How about Frank Lloyd Wright (everybody loves him, right?) or Richard Neutra?

Perhaps the difference in mentality I had in mind is better captured by the difference between the person who is able to grasp why Mark Rothko, say, is a much greater painter than Bouguereau. If you don’t get it, well, then that just proves my point, doesn’t it?

Anyway, semi-silly aesthetic analogies aside, the point is that people’s natural tastes for social structure runs toward the tribal and teleological, but this isn’t actually that good for people. Market liberalism, which is too abstract or “thin” to seem really satisfying or meaningful, since there is no single common goal that transcends the goals individuals happen to have, actually leaves people better off than all the alternatives, and measurably so. It’s not hard to understand why people are so attracted to National Greatness, or to Bouguereau. But with a little inspection of the evidence, or a little development of taste, one can see why this is a mistake… is what I was getting at.

It’s not just that you should be ashamed of your vulgarity if you thrill to the idea of America uber alles, though of course you should, but rather that you should be ashamed of preferring a morally worse state affairs over a better one. People who thunder on about virtue like to complain about the immaturity and self-indulgence of individuals in commercial societies, but those people are very often the ones seeking to indulge atavistic social instincts that our moral culture has begun to mature past.

I don’t have a beef against virtue. Far from it; I’m a big fan of the attempt to study character strengths scientifically. But virtues, if they are worth caring about, are instrumental to well-being and relative to social and economic structure. McCain’s brand of military virtue isn’t admirable in a politician. It’s dangerous. And it does not seem to me that McCain has any worthwhile virtues that, say, Mitt Romney lacks. Indeed, I suspect that my man Mitt has modern managerial and leadership virtues that all the other candidates lack. If Romney is the candidate of virtue, it’s because he’s a first-rate capitalist, not an abstemious Mormon family man. And, as far as I can tell, Barack Obama has a much more inspiring capacity for leadership than does McCain, if that’s the sort of thing you like. The only reason a virtue-thumper would be touting McCain in particular is an infatuation with the virtues of war.

Pinker on the Moral Sense

Posted on by

Nice overview. But I found the ending part on why the Haidt calibration view doesn’t imply relativism a bit shady—a bit Straussian even!

Pinker struck me as arguing that there are real external facts about human flourishing that help underpin the authority of the harm and reciprocity dimensions of the moral sense, whereas the new science of morality helps us to see that we are subject to all sorts of “illusions” when it comes to the authority, in-group, and purity dimensions.

Now, I agree about a trillion percent with what I imagine Pinker is going for here: improving real human well-being by establishing the cultural dominance of a distinctively liberal calibration of the moral sense. That is, in fact, the ticket. But I simply don’t see how this stands as an adequate reply to someone who says that it is better that millions suffer and/or die for the greater glory of the tribe, or the Prophet, or to prevent the defilement of the blood of the Motherland. Yes, it is an objective fact of the world that if the well-being of each is our aim, then liberal morality, and its concomitant institutions, such as the extended order of market cooperation, are the necessary means. But, tragically, we do not all share this aim.

Must we? From the perspective of morality per se and not just from the perspective of one among many moralities? Is human flourishing of overriding importance–does it get greater weight than alternatives—because of it’s very nature. Or are those of us with an already liberal moral sense simply willing to go to the mat for the idea? To my mind, Haidt’s views do leave us with relativism. And the obviously correct thing to do is to fight and win a global culture war for a liberal morality. The ongoing fight against liberal morality is sometimes so savage because, well, because the people fighting it are not liberals for one thing, but also because the advantages of liberalism—greater wealth, better health, longer lives, more deeply satisfying individuation, etc.—are so attractive, so enticing, and therefore so dangerous to those whose sense of meaning is bound up in an illiberal calibration of the moral sense.

Why not just say that a more thoroughly liberal calibration of the moral sense will deliver a huge list of incredibly attractive goods for everyone in the world, and leave it at that? If some can’t be persuaded to care about those goods, then their kids can be. And their happy, health, wealthy, long-lived kids will little lament the loss of their backwards ancestral codes.

My unpublished essay on Haidt and politics, here.