A Mature Philosophy

Is Personal Epistemology What I’ve Been Looking For?

Through the research I’m doing as an RA, I encountered the idea of personal epistemology; the Cole’s Notes version is that different people have different measurable attitudes towards how people gain knowledge, what knowledge is like, and so forth. In general, research into personal epistemology fit into two streams: 1) research into epistemic beliefs addresses the particular individual beliefs a person might have, while 2) developmental models of personal epistemology chart how personal epistemology changes over a person’s life. Personal epistemology and its developmental focus are the invention of William G. Perry with his 1970 Forms of Intellectual and Ethical Development in the College Years, but these days Barbara Hofer and Paul Pintrich are the major proponents and experts.

Perry studied college students for all four years of undergraduate school, asking them questions designed to elicit their views on knowledge. What he determined is that they gradually changed their views over time in a somewhat predictable pattern. Of course, not all students were at the same stage when they entered university, so the early stages had fewer examples, but there were still some. Generally, he found that students began in an dualist stage, where they believe that things are either true or false, and have little patience for ambiguity or what Perry calls relativism.* In this stage they believe that knowledge is gained from authorities (ie. professors)—or, if they reject the authority, as sometimes happens, they do so without the skills of the later stages and still tend to view things as black and white. As the stages progress, they start to recognize that different professors want different answers and that there are good arguments for mutually exclusive positions. By the fifth stage, they adopt Perry’s relativism: knowledge is something for which one makes arguments, and authorities might know more than you but they’re just as fallible, and there’s no real sure answer for anything anywhere. After this stage, they start to realize they can make commitments within relativism, up until the ninth stage, where they have made those commitments within a relativist framework. Not all students (or people) progress through all of the stages, however; each stage contains tensions (both internally and against the world/classroom) which can only be resolved in the next stage, but the unpleasant experience of these tensions might cause a student to retreat into a previous stage and get stuck there. Furthermore, with the exception of the first stage, there are always two ways to do a stage: one is in adherence to the authority (or the perceived authority), and the other is in rebellion against it.** It’s all quite complicated and interesting.

The 50s, 60s, and 70s show clearly in Perry, both in his writing style, his sense of psychology, and his understanding of the final stage as still being within a relativist frame. His theory foundered for a while but was picked up Hofer and Pintrich in the early 2000s. They, and other researchers, have revised the stages according to more robust research among more demographics. Their results are fairly well corroborated by multiple empirical studies.

According to contemporary developmental models of personal epistemology, people progress through the following stages:

Naïve realism: The individual assumes that any statement is true. Only toddlers are in this stage: most children move beyond it quite early. Naïve realism is the extreme gullibility of children.

Dualism: The individual believes statements are either right or wrong. A statement’s truth value is usually determined by an authority; all an individual must do is receive this information from the authority. While most people start moving out of this stage by the end of elementary school or beginning of high school, some people never move past it.

Relativism: The individual has realized that there are multiple competing authorities and multiple reasonable positions to take. The individual tends to think in terms of opinions rather than truths, and often believes that all opinions are equally valid. Most people get here in high school; some people proceed past it, but others do not.

Evaluism: The individual still recognizes that there are multiple competing positions and does not believe that there is perfect knowledge available, but rather gathers evidence. Some opinions are better than others, according to their evidence and arguments. Knowledge is not received but made. Also called multiplism. Those people who get here usually do so in university, towards the end of the undergraduate degree or during graduate school. (I’m not sure what research indicates about people who don’t go to university; I suspect there’s just less research about them.)

This link leads to a decent summary I found (with Calvin & Hobbes strips to illustrate!), but note that whoever made this slideshow has kept Perry’s Commitments as a stage after evaluism (which they called multiplism), which isn’t conventional. As with Perry’s model, there are more ways not to proceed that there are to proceed. Often people retreat from the next stage because it requires new skills from them and introduces them to new tensions and uncertainties; it feels safer in a previous stage. Something that’s been discovered more recently is that people have different epistemic beliefs for different knowledge domains: someone can hold an evaluist position in politics, a relativist position in religion, and a dualist position in science, for instance.

All of this pertains to our research in a particular way which I’m not going to get into much here. What I wanted to note, however, is that I am strongly reminded of Anderson’s pre-modern, modern, post-modern trajectory, I outlined just over a year ago. It’s much better than Anderson’s trajectory, however, for two reasons: 1) it’s empirically based, and 2) in evaluism it charts the way past relativism, the Hegelian synthesis I had been babbling about, the way I’d been trying to find in tentativism (or beyond tentativism). Perry’s model may or may not do this (without understanding better what he means by relativism, I can’t tell what his commitment-within-relativism is), but Hofer, Pintrich, et al.’s model does. Evaluism is a terrible word; I regret how awkward tentativism is, but I like evaluism even less. However, in it there seems to be the thing I’ve been looking for.

Or maybe not. It reminds me of David Deutsch’s Popper-inspired epistemology in The Beginning of Infinity, but it also reminds me literary interpretation as I’m used to practicing it, and so I can see a lot of people rallying under its banner and saying it’s theirs. That doesn’t mean it is theirs, but it often might be, and what I suspect is that evaluism might be a pretty broad tent. It was an exciting discovery for me, but for the last few months I’ve started to consider that it’s at best a genus, and I’m still looking for a species.

But this leads to a particular question: which comes first, philosophy or psychology? Brains, of course, come before both, but I’ve always been inclined to say that philosophy comes first. When, in high school, I first learned of Kohlberg’s moral development scheme, I reacted with something between indignation and horror: I was distressed at the idea that people would—that I would—inexorably change from real morality, which relies on adherence to laws, to something that seemed at the time like relativism. Just because people tended to develop in a particular way did not mean they should. What I told myself was that adults did not become more correct about morality but rather became better at rationalizing their misdeeds using fancy (but incorrect) relativistic logic. Of course I was likely right about that, but still I grew up just as Kohlberg predicted. However, I still believed that questions of how we tended to think about morality were different questions from how we should think about morality.

And yet it is tempting to see personal epistemology as the course of development we should take. Confirmation bias would lead me to think of it this way, so I must be careful. And yet the idea that there are mature and immature epistemologies, and that mature ones are better than immature ones, makes a certain intuitive sense to me. I can think of three possible justifications for this. An individual rational explanation would imagine this development less as biological and more as cognitive; as we try to understand the world, our epistemologies fail us and we use our reason to determine why they failed and update them. Since this process of failure and correction is guided by reason and interaction with the real world, it tends towards improvement. An evolutionary pragmatic explanation is also empirical and corrective: during the process of human evolution, those people with better epistemologies tended to survive, so humans evolved better epistemologies; however, given their complexity, they developed later in life (as prefrontal cortices do). A teleological explanation would suggest that humans are directed, in some way, toward the truth, and so these typical developments would indicate the direction in which we ought to head. I’m not sure I’m entirely convinced by of any of these justifications, but the first one seems promising.

So what comes first: psychology or philosophy? And should we be looking less for the right epistemology or a mature one?

-/-/-

*I’m still struggling to understand what Perry means by relativism, exactly, because it doesn’t seem to quite be what I think of relativism as being: it has much more to do with the mere recognition that other people can legitimately hold other positions than oneself, and yet it seems to be overwhelmed by this acknowledgement. It seems more like a condition than a philosophy. I'm still working it out.
**Perry writes about a strange irony in the fairly relativistic (or seemingly relativistic) university today.
Here’s the quotation:

In a modern liberal arts college, […] The majority of the faculty has gone beyond differences of absolutist opinion into teachings which are deliberately founded in a relativistic epistemology […]. In this current situation, if a student revolts against “the Establishment” before he has familiarized himself with the analytical and integrative skills of relativistic thinking, the only place he can take his stand is in a simplistic absolutism. He revolts, then, not against a homogeneous lower-level orthodoxy but against heterogeneity. In doing so he not only narrows the range of his materials, he rejects the second-level tools of his critical analysis, reflection, and comparative thinking—the tools through which the successful rebel of a previous generation moved forward to productive dissent.

Please Read Responsibly?

A Using Theory Post 

A person might think I was a bit hard on John Green's "books belong to their readers" theory of interpretation when outlining my own. Well, it turns out that I wasn't hard enough on it; in the meantime I discovered a rather more insidious version of that argument, coming from John Green himself.

Before I begin, I want to preface this all by saying that I respect John Green's commitment to public education very much; I find his Internet presence kind, compassionate, and otherwise admirable; his politics seem empathetic, and in general he seems well-intentioned. My impression is that he is likable, and worthy of being liked. But at the same time there are some problems with his theory of interpretation, and I hope you'll agree with me when I'm done here that those problems require attention.

John Green published the following Tweets (on a date which I have not been able to determine):

The transcription reads like this:

I was sedated for an endoscopy today and was told to stay off social media for a day. So you know what that means: Twitter rant. | I've been marathoning Twilight movies all day, which has been totally enjoyable... | ...and I'm thinking about how easy it is to dehumanize the creator or fans of something extremely popular. | I've done this, too. I made fun of the Twilight movies without even having watched them. I'm sorry for that, and embarrassed. | When we make fun of Twilight, we're ridiculing the enthusiasm people have for unironic love stories. Have we nothing better to satirize? | Yes, you can read misogynistic gender dynamics into the stories, but tens of millions of people have also proven that you don't HAVE to. | Do we really believe that tens of millions of people who found themselves comforted and inspired by these stories are merely wrong? | Isn't our disdain FAR more misogynistic than anything in the stories? | Art that is entertaining and useful to people is a good thing to have in this world. And I'm grateful for it and celebrate it. | So big ups to the Twilight fandom, and to Stephanie Meyer, who has been relentlessly attacked professionally and personally over Twilight... | ...in ways that male authors of love stories never are. I'm gonna go back to watching the movies now. /rant

(I used "|" rather than "/" to indicate line breaks because Green used a "/" himself.) Of course Green is saying some important things in this rant: it is maybe inadvisable to criticize something that one hasn't read (though this varies depending on the quality of the sources you have read which describe the text); the way in which criticism of the Twilight fandom resorts to insulting age and gender is a problem; if female authors of love stories are attacked in a way that male authors are not (and I have no reason to doubt Green's observation), then this is a serious problem, too. I don't mean to detract from any of these valuable claims. And I haven't read Twilight, so I guess I can't give you a good reading of it. But I can notice, and will notice, that John Green is using an enormously troubling theory of interpretation in the middle of his rant. Essentially, he places the responsibility for a text's meaning entirely on the reader's shoulders.

Green at first seems only to be claiming that "misogynistic gender dynamics" are not inherent to the books or films, but are rather something that certain readers have manufactured: he writes, "Yes, you can read misogynistic gender dynamics into the stories..." (emphasis mine), and the phrase "read into" is usually used to imply that the interpretation is something the reader added to the text. In the terms of biblical studies, "read into" indicates eisegesis rather than exegesis. So far Green seems to be making a typical anti-intellectual claim about feminist interpretation: the text is only what it appears to be with a naive reading, and any further meanings are simply added by the interpreter, so neither the text nor the author are responsible for those meanings. But Green then makes a strange move when he writes, "...but tens of millions of people have also proven that you don't HAVE to. Do we really believe that tens of millions of people who have found themselves comforted and inspired by these stories are merely wrong?" This exhortation suggests a different theory of interpretation than the one which insists on a naive reading of a text; rather, it suggests that interpretation is an act of agency on the part of the reader, and it suggests that the number of people who support a particular interpretation gives that interpretation legitimacy.

This a whole new spin on "books belong to their readers." In this version, a text has no independent meaning outside of how different readers have read it: if readers choose to read Twilight as having misogynistic gender dynamics, then it does; if readers choose not to, then it doesn't. And since nothing can be said about the text in itself, the only meaningful distinction between interpretations is whether or not they will produce a valuable reading experience. But Green goes further: the meaning of a book seems to derive from its readers collectively. He seems to say that if "tens of millions" of people interpret a book in a particular way, then that is the best way to interpret it; at the very least he suggests that if millions of people interpret a book in a particular way, then it's a legitimate interpretation.

Of course this theory of interpretation is almost certainly false, and texts do have a set of meanings intrinsic to themselves; see Part I of my Theory of Reading series for that. But I also want to suggest that Green's error here isn't innocuous. If the meaning of a text is determined entirely by the reader, then no criticism of any text is possible: the Mein Kampfs and Marc Discoll's sermons of the world are only awful because we interpret them that way. Such inability to criticize gives those people who are harmed by such texts no ability to explain that harm, and it prevents us from holding people accountable for what they say and write. Or, alternately, if the majority interpretation of a work is taken to be correct, then we are holding authors responsible for things that they did not write. Neither situation is at all desirable: the meaning of what people is independent of its readers and we can therefore hold them accountable for what they actually wrote, but the "books belong to their readers" theory denies us that necessary ability. This applies not just to the fringe cases of hate speech, but to any speech act at all.

What Green wants to protect, I think, is the value that those millions of readers have gotten from Twilight: "Do we really believe that tens of millions of people who found themselves comforted and inspired by these stories are merely wrong?" But this is a question wrongly asked: there's no reason that latent (or not-so-latent) misogyny would make those readers' comfort and inspiration somehow wrong or inauthentic. Rather, Twilight proves capable of providing comfort and inspiration in spite of its misogyny. (It's also possible that the comfort and inspiration is based on the readers' internalized misogyny, such that what seems to be a good reading experience is a detrimental one, but I don't want to rely on that argument because I've been feeling queasy lately about suggesting people have false consciousness when they disagree with me about what's been good for them.) This is why it's both useful and true to distinguish between the reader's experience and the text's meaning.

The irony, of course, is that John Green regularly relies on the independent existence of a text's meaning. The first is in his practice of literary interpretation, which is part of his professional career. There is no point whatsoever in interpreting texts if whatever interpretation you like is admissible: you could read the phone book as a communist epic if you wanted to under his stated theory. (Of course, it may be possible to read the phone book as a communist epic with legitimate interpretation, but the point is that it also may not be possible, and you can't tell until you try.) But, furthermore, John Green's own books are regularly misread, and he insists that those are misreadings. It is often charged that his novel Paper Towns is an example of a Manic Pixie Dream Girl story, where by loving a quirky girl character the boy protagonist is freed from a boring life, and often frees the quirky girl in some way, too. Green rejects the interpretation:

Have the people who constantly accuse me of this stuff read my books? Paper Towns is devoted IN ITS ENTIRETY to destroying the lie of the manic pixie dream girl; the novel ends (this is not really a spoiler) with a young woman essentially saying, “Do you really still live in this fantasy land where boys can save girls by being romantically interested in them?” I do not know how I could have been less ambiguous about this without calling the novel The Patriarchal Lie of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl Must Be Stabbed in the Heart and Killed [source].

He knows perfectly well that his intentions are not relevant to the conversation (source), so on what does he rely to claim that this is a misreading? Well, he relies on the text's own features, the only thing on which he can rely: he offers a brief analysis of the novel using paraphrases of the text itself.

---

So who is responsible for the meaning of a text?

The author, I would say, in terms of moral responsibility: it is the author's actions which produced the text. And we apply all of the concerns of moral responsibility to the question when we are asking whether an author is culpable for problems with the text. The author's intention does not determine whether or not the text caused harm; on the other hand, the author's ability to anticipate whether the text would cause harm isn't irrelevant, either. It the text's harm is utterly unpredictable, then the author cannot really be held responsible for that harm.

But how can we tell if an author could predict a book's harm? Look at Paper Towns: many many teenage boys read this as an endorsement of treating their female colleagues like Manic Pixie Dream Girls (or so I've read on tumblr). Could Green have predicted this frequent misreading?* I don't know if I can answer that, but his culpability relies on the answer. My guess is that he's not on the hook for Paper Towns, at least not insofar as the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope is concerned. But the sheer purported ubiquity of the misreading gives me pause: how plausible is it that a frequent misreading is all that wrong? It's still wrong, absolutely, but I'm inclined to say that there's something about the text which lends itself to being misread in that way. In the case of Paper Towns, a reader who knows nothing about feminist criticism, or who is already invested in the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope, might be prone to misreading the book in this particular way.

This discussion throws up a strange consequence, though: it looks like readers are responsible for their reading, in some senses. Namely, insofar as authors aren't responsible for misreadings of their tests, are readers then responsible for whatever misreadings they commit? I suspect so, but it's hard to say. There could be a middle space of simple error, where no one is at fault (or maybe there's a middle space of overlap, where both are). And there's still a lot left unanswered: the "insofar" in the second sentence of this paragraph will be really hard to determine, for example. I admit that it is really hard for me to say how charitable we ought to be when working out whether an author could have predicted the way zer book was interpreted. Fortunately, the stakes aren't often very high, but when they are, I feel strongly that we need to keep clearly in mind the distinctions between the author's knowledge of the text, the text's internal meanings, and the reading experience.

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*I have not read Twilight, but I have read Paper Towns, and it is my assessment that Green's claim is right: the book deflates the Manic Pixie Dream Girl narrative. However, his critique only becomes obvious in the last quarter of the novel. For the first half, the novel appears to be the sort of story it is critiquing, and I'm not sure I'd fault someone for putting the book down during that time if the apparent MPDG narrative was upsetting them.

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UPDATE: My friend Jon wrote the following on my Facebook in response to this post, and gave me permission to share it here:

Yes, you can read a critique of the MPDG trope into PT, but hundreds of thousands of people have also proven that you don't HAVE to. | Do we really believe that hundreds of thousands of people who found themselves comforted and inspired by the hope that they can save a girl by being romantically interested in her are merely wrong?

Postlude: Eternal Consequences

or, What Kind of Harm?

I see that I had planned to write another Moral Foundations post and had forgotten to do so! This is my attempt at recovering that fumbled intention. 

In the previous post of my Moral Foundations Series, I wrote, "If moral intuitions can be wrong (which is a truism these days), should we even be talking about Moral Foundations Theory? Shouldn't we be talking instead about deontology, consequentialism, virtue ethics, moral nihilism, immoralism, divine command theory, or other logical bases for morality?" My proposed answer was that, on the one hand, there's an argument to be made that Moral Foundations make bad philosophy, but on the other hand, we cannot act morally without investments, and our Moral Foundations provide those investments.

 Ethical philosophy's role, then, might be to manage those investments. I wrote in "What Kind of Character is a Virtue Ethicist?", in my Good People and Going Wrong series, that telling me your moral philosophy (I discuss deontology, consequentialism, and virtue ethics) doesn't help me figure out what matters to you. If you say, "I am a deontologist," I don't know what you think your duties are. If you say, "I am a consequentialist," I don't know what goods you are trying to maximize and what harms you are trying to minimize (and for whom). If you say, "I am a virtue ethicist," I do not know what virtues you are trying to cultivate. Your moral structure might be clear, but I still don't know what your values are. What I wonder, then, is if the Moral Foundations provide those missing values.

That sounds great, but there's a problem. Some of the Moral Foundations lend themselves to certain moral philosophies better than others. Harm/care, for instance, seems to work much better with consequentialism than with deontology or virtue ethics. I suppose you could say, "I have a duty to provide care," or "I have a duty to do no harm," a sort of layman's Hippocratic Oath, but these are pretty heavily skewed towards consequentialism. Meanwhile, it seems very difficult to articulate loyalty or authority/respect in consequentialist terms: how would you maximize loyalty in a system? These lend themselves much more to deontology or, perhaps especially, virtue ethics. One of the reasons I've never declared for a particular moral philosophy is that none of them deal especially well with all three of harm/care, fairness, and freedom/oppression.

 The difficulty of expressing certain values in certain moral systems might explain why the deontologists I've known have often been social conservatives while the consequentialists have often been social progressives. But I actually wonder whether those social conservatives really are so deontological after all. A lot of Christians seem to be consequentialists in one respect: they care very much about the consequences their actions will have on the fate of their soul. So they might be divine-command flavoured deontologists or they might be virtue ethicists of Christlikeness, but for a lot of them, the eternal consequences matter; a long-game consequentialism is powering a short-game deontology (or virtue ethics). I must not lie, despite the consequences on this side of the grave (deontology), because to stray from God will have consequences on the far side of the grave (consequentialism). And the drive to proselytize is all about this! We have to save those souls from the fire (harm/care)! (Now certainly not all Christians are driven by afterlife concerns--I'm not, for example--but there is such a stereotype for a reason.)

This shows up particularly well in the purity/sanctity Foundation, I think. Purity binds together all three of consequentialism, virtue ethics, and deontology. Normally the moral or ritual laws which protect purity are deontological ones--pre-marital sex is defiling (for women and not for men, but that's another matter), and it does not matter whether the consequences of not having pre-marital sex are, let's say, the death of every living thing in a the neighbouring village. But, at the same time, the loss of purity is a consequence and constitutes damage to a person's virtue. (Indeed, I'm reading virtue ethics now as a very specialized kind of consequentialism, in that it has to do with the consequences actions have on your soul/identity/character.)

I don't think we're doomed to failure if we use moral philosophy as a structure which the Moral Foundations fill out, just because the results are sometimes difficult or make the structure look different; indeed, I've said over and over again that the content you plug into structures changes how those structures operate, and the structures into which you plug the content changes what that content means. The fact that some combinations will be clunky or will require retro-fitting is unsurprising if you look at it in the way I've discussed genres. What I think the exercise shows us is that consequentialism, deontology, virtue ethics, divine command theory, et al aren't so nicely separable after all. Oh, there are probably people who do distill their moral philosophies down (Kantain deontologists who eschew concerns about salvation, total utilitarians who do not care about how their hedons are distributed), but most of us aren't purebreeds. Most of us are left with the hard work of kludging together a mutt moral system which does justice to our values as best we can make it.

This is the last Moral Foundations Series post. The index is here: link.

An Apology to Authenticity

I have perhaps been unfair to what I've been calling the Polonius virtue. While, when I started out writing about it, I said that I thought you could likely build an argumentative robust version of it, I haven't been doing the best job of keeping that in mind. Instead, I've generally been thinking of people who adhere to the Polonius virtue as being pretty seriously mistaken. Of course even thinking that they're mistaken might be kind of strange, since I first came up with this idea in the context of Moral Foundations Theory, and there are real questions about whether moral foundations (or values) are even opinions anyway, at least in the sense that we think of them; we don't seem to choose which foundations matter to us. But I still want to make a case for valuing authenticity to oneself, in some shape or another.

To recap, I suspect that authenticity is value that a statistically significant proportion of humans care about. One version of this is the Polonius virtue, so called because of this line from Hamlet, spoken by Polonius: "This above all: to thine ownself be true, / And it must follow, as the night the day, / Thou canst not then be false to any man." To whit, it is a moral good to be true to yourself, a proclamation taken to mean many things. I think the problem, in fact, is that it's taken to mean so many things, and so many of those things are silly that I forget that some of them may not be so silly. For instance, I won't apologize for thinking that acting "true" to your every impulse is a good thing; hardly anyone can believe that if they keep in mind how many times people have conflicting impulses. But I think there might be one possible reading which isn't so silly: you shouldn't lie about yourself to yourself.

If you want to navigate the world with much hope of success, it will be much better if you are honest about yourself. This isn't a claim that there is some deep, immutable self to which you might be honest, nor is it even a claim that there is a temporary but nonetheless coherent self-of-the-moment about which you might be honest. I can fully recognize that I'm conflicted, that I'm partially opaque to myself, etc. and so forth, and still say that I tend to feel certain ways about certain things (so, for instance, I am afraid of heights, I have depression) and that I tend to do certain things (so, for instance, I usually articulate inchoate emotional content in logical, procedural ways). If I'm going to make it, I ought to know all of this about myself.

Another take on it: I need to recongize when people around me are making demands of me which don't honour the ways in which I differ from their ideas about what humans are. I typically see drives for authenticity as being a little anti-conventional, and I think this insight--that people do make demands of you which just don't mesh well with your personality, your needs, your cognitive style, etc.--is where that anti-conventional attitude might come from. Sometimes the dominant narrative just won't work for us; we aren't all or always so easily caught up in our culture's folkways. Being honest about this does seem rather important, at least as a condition of other goods.

And, for goodness sake, this is precisely the sort of thing I've been hoping other people would start adopting (particularly ones I think of as being uber-logical, disembodied rational types, like the Less Wrong people--and that may be unfair caricature, as well). I guess I've been an advocate for particular version of the authenticity ethic and I didn't even know it. Which is ironic in the technical sense. I'm a perfect example of what can go wrong if you aren't aware of yourself: I spent most of my life with dysthymia and I didn't even know it. Had I known it, things might have gone much better for me. And I'm also a decent example of what can go well if you are aware of yourself: I knew in advance that I was going to have a depressive breakdown, and I got a medical leave in time to weather that storm without damaging my academic career. So this specific kind of authenticity ethic is one I'm deliberately cultivating.

I think there are a few ways the Polonius virtue can go wrong, however. The first is when knowing yourself becomes an excuse to remain static. The second is when people start generalizing about what people are like; this can be a case of thinking other people are more like you than they are, or in can be a case of reasoning out from beliefs you have about human behaviour, even when it does not correspond well with the evidence/other people's experiences. The third is using an authenticity ethic to support selfish behaviour. The fourth (perhaps a superset which contains the third) is privileging authenticity over other goods. I'd explicitly disagree with what Polonius actually says: you can be true to yourself (whatever you take that to mean) and still be false with other people. (The most obvious example is that you could lie, and know you're lying.) And I think a lot of the metaphysics or anthropology that people build around the authenticity is unfounded .As an example, you could say that Freudian psychoanalysis is a huge and erroneous mythology built out of the valuable recognition that we are opaque to ourselves and spend a lot of time trying to repress/suppress our desires so that they correspond with societal norms.

Another way it can go wrong, too, is that we can fool ourselves into thinking that we know ourselves when we don't. Smart people prone to introspection are, apparently, really bad for this: smart people are terribly good at rationalization, and trick themselves into thinking they know their own mind. I'm inclinded to think that a fairly good knowledge of psychology--maybe not formal education but at least some commitment to following academic psychology, rather than folk psychology--would help people in this, but maybe not. That might just improve the plausiblity of their rationalizations, not improve the accuracy of their rationalizations. Really, awareness of the limitations of self-awareness is a kind of honesty to oneself, isn't it?

So in future I will try to be fairer to this ethic, and recognize that it probably has a place, when articulated in a certain way and when it is not burdened with baseless metaphysics. In retrospect, it seems appallingly obvious that, at minimum, being honest with oneself about oneself is pretty important to proper functioning. We've just got to pair that with the twin insights that 1) we can never really know ourselves entirely and 2) we are constantly in flux.

And I'm sorry if I offended anyone with my callous dismissal of authenticity as a moral good.

Satanism's Ethics (Are Kind of Boring)

Today's post will be my six-hundred and sixty-sixth, according to Blogger (this may be untrue in that I think Blogger counts unpublished posts, and I have a half dozen or so unpublished posts). In light of this, I will write about Satanism.

I can't recall the first time I realized that Satanists were 1) real and 2) people, though it was probably around my fourth year of undergraduate. I recall hearing a very touching story that a human resources worker at Queen's University told to my Christian fellowship about a student who was complaining about the struggles of undergraduate university; when the student said that she thought she was losing her faith, the HR worker asked what faith that was, and the student answered, "Satanism." The HR worker then proceeded to treat her with sympathy and compassion, despite knowing that this student prescribed to a worldview deliberately built in opposition to the HR worker's own beliefs. Somehow this story went a long way to normalizing Satanism for me.

That being said, at the same time Satanism seems really weird to me, because it embraces the metaphysics it opposes; unlike atheism, its vehement rejection is a kind of affirmation in that, although it flips all of the moral values, it nonetheless maintains the cosmological beliefs. (Also, it is amply and inaccurately represented in movies, especially in the 90s and early 00s.) So when I made myself a course-reader style package of miscellaneous materials one summer, I include some readings about Satanism from a Religious Studies/Anthropology anthology I got out of the library. I thought this religion-of-conflict might have yield some interesting insights into religion and/or culture. And what I learned is this: Satanism is actually kind of boring.

I'll be more specific, because I suppose certain aspects of Satanism are not so boring, and I'm sure there are Satanisms, so maybe certain varieties of Satanism are more intellectually robust. What I find to be so boring about Satanism, as described and examined in Edward J. Moody's "Urban Witches,"  is its core ethical system. Moody writes that Satanist virtues are simultaneously defined as 1) that which Christianity considers a sin and 2) natural human motivations:

The seven deadly sins of Christian teaching--greed, pride, envy, anger, gluttony, lust, and sloth--are depicted as Satanic virtues. Envy and greed are, in the Satanic theology, natural in man and the motivating forces behind ambition. Lust is necessary for the preservation of the species and not a Satanic sin. Anger is the force of self-preservation. Instead of denying natural instincts the Satanist learns to glory in them and turn them into power.¹

Because of its emphasis on desires that are "natural" to some universal "man," these Satanic ethics remind me of what I call the Polonius virtue, the idea that acting authentically (or true to yourself) is a moral good. I've never found the Polonius virtue convincing because 1) it is not something I intuitively feel, 2) I've never encountered a justification of it, let alone a persuasive one, and 3) I do not believe in a coherent or stable self to which one might be obliged (and this last one's pretty lethal to any chances I might have of adopting the Polonius virtue).

The most interesting move that the Satanists make regarding morality is linking definitions 1 and 2 and explaining why what Christians call sins are actually virtues:

Satanic novices are taught that early church fathers deliberately picked on those aspects of human desire that were most natural and made them sins, in order to use the inevitable transgressions as a means of controlling the populace, promising them salvation in returning for obedience.

Were it not for this explanation, it would seem mighty convenient that everything Christians condemn is actually praise-worthy. The explanation itself is actually a not too different from things Christopher Marlowe was (probably falsely) accused of having said in the early modern period.²

I don't know why I was expecting something more interesting than this. I guess I thought that if anyone had a really wild and unexpected morality, it would be Satanism, but it turns out that it fits right in there with genetic determinism, pop-psychoanalysis, and what Walter Truett Anderson calls neo-romanticism (think hippies and New Agers), movements with an emphasis on the interior self as the source of morality and truth. It also has some things in common with existentialism, but it reminds me more of genetic determinism and pop-psychoanalysis. I presume more conservative Christian writers would say that it's boring because everything that's not the truth limits God, Creation, and humanity, or because anything that derives morality from the self cannot be as rich as something that derives morality from an institution/tradition/wellspring of all Being. But I'm not going that route: certainly there are lots of belief systems I consider to be factual wrong but still well-worked out and internally compelling (for instance, Nietzsche's immoralism). Satanism isn't that.

I suppose it's as pertinent to ask why I think this is boring as it is to ask why it is boring. I think it's boring because it has no room for growth or improvement. It's static and non-dynamic. The Christian vision (or, anyway, my Christian vision) of ethics involves a person striving to better themselves through action; it's not just that my past actions become increasingly more ethical, but that I change as a result of my actions. That self to which Polonius ethicists would say that I am obliged is shifting; how do I authentically act out a shifting self? Or how do I act out an internally conflicted self? Satanists seem to want to locate authenticity in desires and impulses, but these are not always consistent: I have impulses of charity as much as I have impulses of greed, and what of my desires to inhibit other desires? Authenticity to a certain self seems doomed or nonsense unless that self to which I am authentic is a deliberate self, that is, the self that I want or will rather than the self that I have. This kind of authenticity is not just more interesting but also quite simply possible, which can't be said for regular-old Polonius ethicism. I think there's still a lot of debate concerning what kind of self I ought to cultivate, though. Christians are already on top of this idea, but I'm sure Satanists could construct a more intellectually rigorous ethics on this model as well (if some haven't already constructed it); in order to do so, however, they could not appeal either to a dubious historical account of Christianity or to inherent desire any more, which means that they'd have to build a whole new set of justifications for the sort of authenticity to desire that they've been espousing. (Nietzsche would likely make a decent starting point for that kind of work.)

EDIT: I'm also kind of surprised that the justification given for lust is reproduction. That sounds, well, exactly like Christian doctrine about sexual attraction: it's good if it leads to reproduction. The Satanists aren't adding the corollary (it's bad if it doesn't), but even so, this similarity is striking. In other words, if Satanists define "lust" simply as "those feelings which are necessary for reproduction," then they have a really tame idea of what lust is, and don't seem to understand how the churches are using the word.

--------------
1  Of course, since this and one other article are the sources of my understanding of Satanism, and these articles are old enough, what I'm writing here may not apply to Satanism generally, or to the Satanism of any particular individual you (reader) may know. All of what I say applies only to Satanism as I, through Moody, describe it.
2  It's actually possible that Marlowe did say a number of the things that the Baines Note accused him of saying, but at the time he did so he was a spy for the English government, acting out the role of traitor and conspirator in order to gain information. So, in a sense, the government was condemning him for doing what it was paying him for doing. Little wonder if Marlowe did become seditious.

Kinds of Abandon in The Golem and the Jinni

The Golem and the Jinni, by Helene Wecker.

Helene Wecker's debut novel The Golem and the Jinni is a lovely novel, even if it does read a little like the first novel it is (there's too much coincidence). As the back of the book explains, it is about Chava, a golem, and Ahmad, a jinni, arriving in New York City in 1899. Chava's master-husband wakes her for the first time minutes before his unsuspected death; when Chava arrives in New York, she is masterless. Ahmad has been trapped in a flask for centuries, and when he is released by a Syrian tinsmith in Manhattan he is still trapped in the human form given to him by the same Bedouin wizard who put him in the bottle. Assorted plotlines unfurl and characters develop, including members of both the Syrian and Jewish immigrant communities and including Yehudah Schaalman, a deadly Kabbalist sorcerer. In a sense it is a book about immigrants in America (Wecker says so explicitly), as the Golem and the Jinni are immigrants in immigrant communities, but the eponymous protagonists are also immigrants to a parody humanity, both trying to act human despite the ways in which their natures rebel against human constraints.

Chava and Ahmad become friends of a sort (though their first meeting is late in the novel, more than a third of the way through), bound by the fact that each of them is a mythical creature pretending to be human for fear that the humans around them, compared to whom both Chava and Ahmad are incredibly powerful, would quickly destroy them in fear and distrust. But they make poor, quarrelsome friends most of the time, because as much as both of their natures resist the humanity they are forced to take on, they resist in very different ways. Chava is a golem, a creature made to serve; without a master, she is aimless, and a quirk of the magic which bound her to her master now allows her (compels her) to feel the desires of everyone she encounters, and when she feels those desires she has an impulse to serve them. (With one exception: she was made to be sexually faithful to her husband.) Chava also fears running amok; whenever a golem gets a taste for violence, it is said, that golem will never stop. Ahmad, on the other hand, is a powerful jinni, a fire spirit once able to enter dreams, fly, and change his shape at will. He roamed the deserts and acted on his whims and desires without thought to consequence. While he retains some of his power, he is bound to human form and certain human vulnerabilities (and worse). And so while both struggle with being human, their desires are radically different: Chava hates the freedom of being human, while Ahmad hates the constraints of being human. Let me excerpt a passage for you (I admit it's a little long):

She shook her head. "You misunderstand me. Each golem is built to serve a master. When I woke, I was already bound to mine. To his will. I heard every thing, and I obeyed with no hesitation."
"That's terrible," the Jinni said.
"To you, perhaps. To me it felt like the way things were meant to be. And when he died--when that connection left me--I no longer had a clear purpose. Now I'm bound to everyone, if only a little. I have to fight against it, I can't be solving everyone's wishes. But sometimes, at the bakery where I work, I'll give someone a loaf of bread--and it answers a need. For a moment, that person is my master. And in that moment, I'm content. If I were as independent as you wish you were, I'd feel I had no purpose at all"
He frowned. "Were you so happy, to be ruled by another."
"Happy is not the word," she said. "It felt right."
"All right, then let me ask you this. If by some chance or magic you could have your master back again, would you wish it?"
It was an obvious question, but one that she had never quite asked herself. But then, couldn't she guess? What sort of man would take a golem for a wife, the way a delivery man might purchase a new cart?
But oh, to be returned to that certainty! The memory of it rose up, sharp and beguiling. And she wouldn't feel as though she was being used. One choice, one decision--and then, nothing.
"I don't know," she said at last. "Maybe I would. Though in a way, I think it would be like dying. But perhaps it would be for the best. I make so many mistakes, on my own."
...
She'd half decided to turn back toward Broadway; but then he said, "Do you remember what I told you before? That I was captured, but have no memory of it?"
"Yes, of course I remember."
"I have no idea," he said, "how long I was that man's servant. His slave. I don't know what he made me do. I might have killed my own kind." There was a tight edge in his voice, painful to hear. "But even worse would be if I did it all gladly. If he robbed me of my will, and turned me against myself. Given a choice, I'd sooner extinguish myself in the ocean."
"But if all those terrible things did happen, then it was the wizard's fault, not yours," she said.
Again, that not-quite laugh. "Do you have colleagues at this bakery where you work?"
"Of course," she said. "Moe and Thea Radzin, and Anna Blumberg."
He said, "Imagine that your precious master returns to you, and you give yourself to him, as you said you perhaps would. Because you make so many mistakes. And he says, 'Please, my dear golem, kill those good people at the bakery, the Radzins and Anna Blumberg. Rip them limb from limb."
"But why--"
"Oh, for whatever reason! They insult him, or make threats against him, or he simply develops a whim. Imagine it. And then tell me what comfort it gives to think it wasn't your own fault."
This was a possibility she'd never considered. And now she couldn't help but picture it: grabbing Moe Radzin by the wrist and pulling until his arm came free. She had the strength. She could do it. And all the while, that peace and certainty.

To be honest, I am more sympathetic to Chava's plight than to Ahmad's. Ahmad's desire is freedom, and his growth as a character is to move from moral nihilism to greater responsibility; his attendant fear is simply that he will lose his freedom. Chava's desire is to be servant to a master which will grant her certainty in her decisions, but her fear is more than just that she'll remain aimless; her fear becomes the dark parody of what she desires, that she will be servant to someone who would cause her to hurt others. And, indeed, this is precisely what the threat of running amok is to her: she would be servant to her own darkest impulse, the golem's buried but ever-present taste for violence. It's not just that I recognize both Chava's fears and her desires more than I recognize Ahmad's; I find the fact that what she fears is the logical extension of what she desires to be more interesting than Ahmad's simplicity.

But what interests me most is how both of them desire a kind of abandonment. Ahmad wants to abandon himself to his own desires, be they good or bad; he wants to abandon himself to freedom. Chava wants to abandon herself to her master's desires; she wants to abandon herself to service. If each of them got what they wished, they would lose themselves. Chava explicitly acknowledges this--"I think it would be like dying"--but even Ahmad would dissolve into a sort of formlessness, being a shape-shifter and perpetual wanderer. He would not be recongizable. (To an extent this is a writer's trick; he would probably have a continued sense of identity, but his jinni name is kept from us because it's supposedly inarticulable by humans, and in the flashbacks to his time as a free jinni he did not appear, at least to me, to be quite as fully developed a character as when he was human; at any rate, it wasn't until he starts following humans and investigating them that he starts to differentiate from other jinn. I think this was deliberate on Wecker's part.) As much as Chava's nature and Ahmad's nature rebel against their current human condition, it is exactly that condition--not free of conscience or consequence, but free to make decisions nonetheless--which makes them characters. They gain identity by their humanity.

While The Golem and the Jinni is no allegory, the point is pretty plain. Chava and Ahmad are different in origin and different in ability than humans, but otherwise they are hardly different at all. This sense that being human is horribly uncomfortable, either because we rebel against the limitations our humanity gives us or because we rebel against the freedom our humanity gives us. Some people prefer one rebellion to another, but each fails. From what I can tell Wecker is not particularly religious, but I think that between Chava and Ahmad (but more Chava) some of the particular struggles and griefs of religious life are well represented. I saw much of my own fears and concerns in Chava, and while I do not feel that The Golem and the Jinni provided much way forward as far as those struggles go, I nonetheless found it an enormously satisfying read, not least because character-driven fantasy novels are so hard to come by.

The Morality of Aliens, Dragons, and Dead Philosophers

or, Disorganized Thoughts on Moral Foundations Theory

A Moral Foundations Theory post

In this post I'm just catching together the topics that I want to bring up but don't have a coherent through-theme which might hold them together.

1. If moral intuitions can be wrong (which is a truism these days), should we even be talking about Moral Foundations Theory? Shouldn't we be talking instead about deontology, consequentialism, virtue ethics, moral nihilism, immoralism, divine command theory, or other logical bases for morality? Aren't moral sentiments (for that's what the Moral Foundations are), well, sentimental?

On the one hand, yes. Moral Foundations are moral sentiments/intuitions, and since people disagree about them (that's the whole idea behind Moral Foundations Theory), they must sometimes be wrong for some people. Probably a rigorous and consistent moral philosophy would be better. But...

On the other hand, no. We can talk about morality not as moralists or moral philosophers but as psychologists and anthropologists and culture critics. I can take as my object of study not what I should do, but how people try to work out what they should do. An anthropology of morality is valuable. But I also think that Moral Foundations Theory, or anyway the sorts of things we might figure out when thinking about Moral Foundations Theory, can help in asking the moralist's questions. I cannot act morally without investments (see this post; as usual, Beck is my touchstone for all questions about the psychology of morality). It is good to consider what those investments are and how they operate. Moreover, my response to other people's morality is itself governed by morality; Moral Foundations are then data for my moral decision making.

2. The Moral Foundations tests I took (I took a few) all had a question which asked whether a person's mathematical ability might influence your moral decision. I'm curious about that question. I assume it's a question to determine whether a person is answering randomly; anyone who says that they do think a person's moral worth is linked to their mathematical prowess must either be answering randomly, lying, misunderstanding the questions, or morally alien. But that got me thinking: could there be a morality--an alien, orange-and-blue morality to be sure--that does value math in this way? Some sort of technocratic or narrowly meritocratic society? Actually, now that I write this out, it doesn't seem so absurd; fantasy novels assure me that some people (and cultures) assign a moral value to physical strength. Perhaps another person or culture could assign moral value to mathematical ability?

3. On the topic of orange-and-blue moralities, is such a thing possible? What would a truly alien morality look like? How could one identify it? Would we be able to even tell that it is a morality? (I suppose this might not be too far fetched; for a long time, existentialism struck me as really alien and Nietzsche's immoralism still does.)

4. I wonder how (and if) Moral Foundations Theory meshes with the classic Dungeons and Dragons' alignment system. This is the first time I realized it, but I suppose it would be best to think of Good/Evil as being moral and Lawful/Chaotic as being political; I've always thought of both axes as different ways of measuring morality, but perhaps they are the different branches of axiology. So are the Moral Foundations all subsumed under Good/Evil? This seems unlikely: freedom/oppression and authority/respect look like Lawful/Chaotic--that is, political--virtues as much as Good/Evil--that is, moral--virtues. As far as gameplay goes, it might make sense to replace the moral alignment chart with a simplified version of Moral Foundations Theory, but I suspect we would be even better served to overlay them. You could work out your alignment, and then work out your Moral Foundations. After all, "Evil" doesn't exist in the Moral Foundations; if you are an Evil character, perhaps the Moral Foundations you hold are the principles you fight against? How does acrasia (when people act against their own better judgement) fit into all of this? I'm at times tempted to dismiss the Good/Evil alignment axis on same grounds that Plato would: we cannot will evil. But at other times I know better: I do what I do not will, and I do not do what I will, and sometimes it seems that I do not will what I will, either.

5. And while we're talking about ancient Greeks and moral philosophy, I want to talk about the Euthyphro dilemma. The only reason I scored as highly as I did in the purity/sanctity measure is that I said that what God wills is good. They asked if whether God's feelings about my behaviour influences how moral that behaviour is, and I said yes. But I said yes because God wills what is good; I was not agreeing that what God wills is good simply because God wills it. So the creators of the quiz embedded the Euthyphro dilemma into this quiz: is the Good good because the gods admire it, or do the gods admire the Good because it is good?
But more simply, I think the question is misleading; God's will is not clearly accessible to us, so all we have to work it out is our morality anyway. The question isn't going to illuminate that reasoning at all. (I suspect. But there are tests you can do to see whether a question in a questionnaire contributes to the measure for which it is designed, so maybe I should reserve judgement until those tests are done.)

Index

Purity Disgusts Me

or, Are My Results the Right Ones?

A Moral Foundations Theory post

After I took the Moral Foundations Theory test and got my results, I was tempted to feel pretty smug about those results. Of course I scored the way I did; the Moral Foundations I prefer are the better ones. (Confession: I succumbed to that temptation for a while.) As much as I talk about listening to conservative viewpoints openly, I admit that I have a very hard time practicing what I preach. Most conservatism strikes me as misguided (say, conservative economic policy) and some of it strikes me as horrible (anti-homosexuality rhetoric and policy). It takes a lot of effort to think about conservatism more charitably, but I can do it: I remind myself that I was once more conservative than I am, and I look to conservative thinkers who I respect (Eve Tushnet, for instance, whose opinions on homosexuality I would find pretty repellent were she not homosexual herself). Opposing same-sex marriage isn't always evil, I can convince myself to recognize; it's just misguided and uncharitable. Given my emotional investment in being leftist, seeing that my results were a slight exaggeration of the typical liberal results was something of a triumph for me; I had been worried that my conservative roots might show.

Eventually I remembered to try to think about the Moral Foundations from a conservative point of view. (In general, trying to think from another point of view is a skill/virture I want to develop.) And what struck me is this: conservative-me would argue that liberals were in the wrong here because all of the Moral Foundations are important. Morality is best understood as the maximization of all of the Foundations (or virtues, we'd be well off to call them). Unless you develop, follow, cherish all six of them, you have a stunted morality. Conservative-me doesn't hold purity higher than freedom or care, after all; conservative-me holds purity alongside freedom and care. Moreover, I talked in the last post of this series about how the different Foundations might shape each other or influence how we interpret the other Foundations. So conservative-me would say that conservative-me understands freedom, and understands care, and understands fairness, better than a liberal/socialist-me, because conservative-me interprets those concepts in light of purity, loyalty, and respect. Freedom can only be truly achieved if purity is achieved as well, and vice-versa.

Now, I think Beck's posts at Experimental Theology about disgust show how concerns about purity warp the other concerns rather than inform them: when we are working with disgust (and disgust is the engine that drives purity), we can't think straight about the rest of it. We infrahumanize those we associate with disgust, and once we do that, we stop applying all of those other virtues to them. Disgust is something we need to fight against in ourselves, and we cannot wage that particular battle if we value purity. However, listening to conservative-me's little soapbox sermon did give me pause: am I missing out on something? Should I value loyalty more? Should I value respect/authority more? Is it possible that there's something to this purity thing which deserves my attention?

The trouble is that my response to purity (as a Moral Foundation) is disgust. I sometimes catching myself curl my lip when I read anti-homosexuality rhetoric; racism is awful anyway, but when it's tinged with concerns about purity, I start to feel revulsion towards that racism. (Lovecraft's fiction is a good example of racism that is preoccupied with purity. cf "The Shadow Over Innsmouth.") So it's really hard for me to think straight about this topic. However, Beck's research seems pretty spot-on from what I can tell, so I'm not too worried that my dismissal of purity as a Moral Foundation is unfounded (heh heh). That said, I cannot dismiss loyalty or respect/authority so easily. I wonder how you might resolve this problem: I'm back at meta-ethics again.

Index

Building Your (Axiological) Foundation on Sand

or, Are These Really the Foundations After All?

A Moral Foundations Theory post

In my first post of this series, "The Polonius Virtue," I wrote, "Freedom--whether articulated as liberation, choice, agency, or anarchy--is a pretty common trope for political speeches and actions, everything from liberation theology to pro-choice advocacy to justifications of foreign and domestic military violence." I don't suppose it will be controversial to say that freedom, as a buzzword, is taken up by most sides of each issue. In the same post, I also outline ways that I thought the moral foundation authenticity/artificiality operates in such different discourses as existentialism, Daoism, neo-romanticism, and genetic determinism. In the second post, "Unnatural Acts and Unnatural Ingredients," I suggest that sexual purity (eg. homophobia, pro-chastity) and biological purity (eg. anti-GMOs, environmentalism, organic food movement) are "one moral foundation (purity/disgust) mobilized in different realms (sexual, ritual, environmental, dietary)." So, I ask, if one moral foundation can be mobilized in different realms--freedom in both communism and capitalism, authenticity in existentialism and genetic determinism, purity in homophobia and environmentalism--how foundational are they? What else is involved that allows (or compels) these foundations to wind up producing such varied philosophies? Would that something else be foundational, instead?

I also notice how some of these concepts bleed into one another. In existentialism, freedom/oppression cannot be fully untangled from authenticity/artificiality; indeed, the same can be said of Daoism, though it formulates the relationship between the two moral foundations differently. In certain strains of environmentalism, natural authenticity is virtually synonymous with natural purity...and, I suspect, you could dig up some Internet pundit who equates sexual purity with sexual authenticity, as well. So it isn't just that individual moral foundations start to splinter; separate moral foundations start to fuse (or, anyway, are found to be fused).

I haven't any idea how to find a definitive answer, but I have some ideas about where we could start loving the question.

1. Maybe the use of the word "freedom" is cynical when it is used to support foreign military violence. Its speakers would not actually score very highly on the freedom/oppression scale if they took the Moral Foundations test. But they know (anecdotally, probably not experimental-psychologically) that other people value freedom highly, and so when they preach war, they marshal "freedom" for support. This cynicism might be conscious, unconscious, semi-conscious, doublethink, or whatever.
While I think this would go a very long way explaining the freedom example, I don't think it adequately addresses the purity/sanctity or authenticity/artificiality examples; I think that at least some of the time, people do genuinely (ie. non-cynically) use the same foundations to support different philosophies, and recent evidence supports me on that.

2. Maybe freedom does matter to warmongers, but their decision to monger war is made without reference to this particular moral foundation (or, anyway, this moral foundation lost out to the other factors in the decision-making process). Instead, they were swayed by some other motive--desire for public favour, xenophobia, love of Empire, American civil religion, whatever--and they use "freedom" as a post-hoc rationalization for their decision. As with post-hoc rationalizations generally, they really do believe that this moral foundation is motivating them. This is very much like #1, but without the cynicism.
There's pretty good evidence that people rationalize non-rational decisions rather a lot, so to me it feels like post-hoc rationalization is a good answer. But I don't like it for a few other reasons: I suspect that, at least in the biological purity examples, it would be hard to construct ulterior motives that were more plausible than disgust. Disgust is very strong, and the evidence to support disgust as a motivator is solid. Again, this story works better for freedom than for purity.

3. Maybe cultural expectation, social pressures, upbringing, and so on matter more than moral foundations. These other forces might shape moral foundations, but not all people in a family, community, etc. have the same foundations. However, they might wind up holding the same opinions because these social pressures shape the foundations in assorted ways. Mom is harm/care-oriented and Dad is authority/respect-oriented, but both wind up opposing the de-criminalization of polygamy (say). This isn't so much post-hoc rationalization as a pressure to interpret those foundations in different ways. The foundations are polysemic; they contain several (though limited) possible meanings (or, if you prefer, applications or expressions). So the moral foundations are still the tools by which people formulate moral opinions, but there is nothing inevitable about what opinion people will use those foundations to formulate. Or, if it is inevitable, something other than the moral foundations determines which opinions people will hold.
However, the trouble here is that foundations still don't seem to matter much; in order to explain how "freedom" can found such radically different philosophies, you'd have to say that social pressures exert overwhelming influence...and then Moral Foundation Theory is all but useless. The evidence that I know of suggests that the Moral Foundation Theory does describe some bit of reality rather well, so something in this story is wrong.

4. You can repeat #3 for pressures other than the ones described: personality, fear, whatnot. Same story, and same problems.

5. Perhaps the different ways freedom can be mobilized has something to do with how this foundation interacts with the other foundations. We already see that they are intertwined; maybe the forces exerting pressure on a moral foundation are the other foundations. We interpret freedom differently depending on how heavily we value freedom compared to care, or purity, or loyalty. Maybe, with a higher loyalty score, we start to value our country's freedom more than another country's.

6. Perhaps the difference is something so simple as a disagreement about the facts about the world. We have different data, so when we apply a standard axiology, we get different results.

Ultimately, my guess is that there isn't one answer for this problem. I would suggest that one person's case might resemble #1 most while another person's case resembles #4 most. I've got no real answers. I think, though, the problem lies either 1) in how Moral Foundation Theory articulates and explains the moral personality traits it measures or 2) in how I understand that articulation and explanation, because the data suggests that Moral Foundation Theory is measuring a valid feature of human moral reasoning. The data makes sense; it correlates with other measures, it show internal consistency, the studies are replicable. So there's something to this theory. But are those somethings foundations? What role do they play in moral reasoning? I don't know. (Maybe that's just because I haven't read the research. I'm firmly seated in my philosophy armchair.)

Index

Unnatural Acts and Unnatural Ingredients

or, What Kind of Pure?
A Moral Foundations Theory post

[EDIT 25 July 2012: I feel like this needs a caveat. I do not really believe that the distinction between natural and unnatural acts is a valid one. At best the distinction relies on an ontology that I consider to be erroneous; at worst it is incoherent. So when I talk about people calling acts unnatural, I am trying to mention those claims in the way of anthropology (that is, they are the subject of my consideration) rather than citation (that is, they are not claims I'm using to support my own). I'm not sure if anyone has been reading this differently, but I want to make it clear. But I should also note that I am a pescetarian/selective vegetarian now and I was one when I wrote this post.]

From the outset, I will cite my primary resource for these speculations: Richard Beck's book Unclean, which looks at the psychology of disgust and how it relates to Christian culture, theology, etc. I don't have the book to hand, so I can't block-quote a relevant section, but it deals with the underlying psychological mechanisms of disgust, and how we use disgust metaphors when talking/thinking about morality. One of Beck's claims (one that I think bears up under scrutiny) is that about the only domain in which the purity metaphor controls our conversation about morality is sexuality. Chastity is controlled by a logic of purity (and therefore disgust), but lying or consumerism are not.

Indeed, I noticed that a number of the questions which I suspect contribute to the purity and sanctity measure on the Moral Foundations test dovetailed with Beck's observations (as they would; Beck drew on the theory in his research). There was a question about chastity, there was a question about whether an act's "unnaturalness" was sufficient to make it immoral, and there was a question about whether feeling disgust about an act was an indication of its morality. There was another question about whether pleasing God is relevant to an act's moral status, but I'm going to deal with this concern elsewhere. According to Moral Foundations Theory, purity tends to be the most political conservative of all of the scores; it is here that there is the greatest discrepency between liberal and conservative participants (much to both groups' horror, I'm sure.) I wonder about this, though, because I see purity/disgust governing another ethical realm, one I generally consider more left-leaning, which I touched on in my post on authenticity: environmentalism.

Like last time, I have no systematic evidence for this but instead have a cluttered list of examples. If you've seen the movie Fern Gully, however, you might have some kind of idea: the environment is possessed of a certain purity which pollution (maliciously) defiles. While clear-cutting and poaching are foci of environmental activism, the ones I tend to think of are all concerned with introducing foreign substances into the environment (which is the basis of disgust, cf Unclean): oil spills, CO2 emissions, ground water contamination, garbage in the oceans. Landfills, floating garbage islands, smokestacks, filthy water pouring into rivers: these elicit disgust. For this reason, I think a lot of environmentalist activism, if not theory, operates with an implicit purity logic or rhetoric.

The word "unnatural," so often used these days to describe homosexual activity, comes to mind also in terms of the food we eat. People fear unnatural ingredients (despite the fact that this term has no clearly definable meaning) and unnatural foods (as in genetically modified foods); as far as I can tell, this fear has a viceral more than logical force. Many vegetarians express revulsion at the thought of eating meat, and lots of vegan activism relies on extremely disgusting images of slaughterhouses (which, you know, can hardly be photographed in a non-disgusting way). It makes sense that we would be particularly vulnerable to purity-thinking with regard to our food, because disgust's primary function is to prevent us from ingesting harmful substances.

I don't think either environmentalism, vegetarianism, or the organic food movement (only carbon-based foods!) are especially right-wing these days (though I'm skeptical that political orientations like right-wing or left-wing are historically consistent, and certainly there have been avowed reactionaries, like C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkein, who have been environmentalists). So there seem to be, at least in contemporary Western moral reasoning, two kinds of purity: sexual and biological. One of these is conservative and the other liberal.

I would really like to see empirical studies of this, because if I'm right, then purity/sanctity may not be a strictly conservative measure. Instead, the test's questions pick out a single kind of purity at the expense of another, skewing the results. Of course, we might want to say that sexual purity and biological purity are different moral foundations altogether, but 1) then biological purity should be represented in Moral Foundations Theory and 2) I am skeptical that they are very different, but are instead one moral foundation (purity/disgust) mobilized in different realms (sexual, ritual, environmental, dietary) like authenticty can be mobilized in different realms (truth-telling, existentialism, spontaneity, emotional self-expression).

If one moral foundation can be mobilized in different realms, though, this might call into question certain assumptions that Moral Foundations Theory makes, or at any rate certain assumptions that I made about Moral Foundations Theory and how we can use it, particularly to talk about politics.
I should also note that the description given of purity/sanctity does not really seem to reflect the concept, or at least not as elucidated by Beck. The quiz I took describes this measure as being about abstract religious or philosophical views about morality, which doesn't seem right at all. At the very least, things like utilitarianism and deontology, about as abstractly philosophical as you could get, are not well captured by the questions the quiz uses to detect purity/sanctity. Either that or I'm badly misunderstanding this measure, which I think is possible.

Moral Foundations Series Index

The Polonius Virtue

or, Are These All the Foundations They Could Think of?
A Moral Foundations Post

When I took the test and got my results, I was a little surprised because I thought two concepts were missing: freedom and authenticity.

Freedom's absence was conspicuous because I had expected to have a fairly high ranking in freedom (or whatever concept they had to oppose oppression). Further, freedom--whether articulated as liberation, choice, agency, or anarchy--is a pretty common trope for political speeches and actions, everything from liberation theology to pro-choice advocacy to justifications of foreign and domestic military violence (which is grossly ironic). As it turns out (according to Wikipedia, anyway), liberty/oppression is actually a concept in Moral Foundations Theory, but it hasn't migrated over to any of the tests I have done. Does anyone know why this might be?

What I really want to talk about is a moral foundation that I suspect does exist but is missing from Moral Foundations Theory: authenticity.

Authenticity's absence was also fairly conspicuous to me, but for a different reason: I was expecting to have a low score in this measure. I tend to think of authenticity as the Polonius virtue: "This above all: to thine own self be true, / And it must follow, as the night the day, / Thou canst not then be false to any man." Of course calling it the Polonius virtue isn't really a compliment: I think we have changable and contextually-informed identities and that we have no complete internal identity to which we owe some kind of allegiance. In other words, I think authenticity, naively imagined, is generally meaningless. (As we'll see, I think some people have made it more robust, at which point I become much more sympathetic.) However, I know that a lot of people do have certain sentiments that could be organized under this concept and aren't especially clearly organized under concepts that already exist in the Moral Foundations quiz I took. For this reason, I suspect that a good study would find people operating on this assumption. Let's ennumerate some.

1. Some people--a lot of people--value truth very highly. Including the desire for truth here may well be a sort of equivocation; the dogged pursuit of the truth of the world might not be especially similar to the dogged pursuit of the truth of oneself. Similarly, semantic honesty--never make false claims about the world--is not the same as emotional self-disclosure. Of the examples I'm going to list, truth-seeking and -telling seems least connected to authenticity. But I'm not sure truth fits well under the other concepts, either.

2. Existentialism values authenticity very highly. In fact, this is likely its highest (or only) value, though it would understand the term much more like #1's articulation than Polonius's. Is this a moral sentiment of existentialism's own, though, or an extension of #1's, or a philosophical system entirely disjointed from moral foundations?

3. Somewhat more brutally than existentialism, there are some who seem to think that genetics are destiny. You should act in certain ways (for instance, men should sexually pursue multiple women; women should seek to raise children) because these behaviours are genetically encoded. This might fit here? It seems a recycled version of straw Freudian psychoanalysis, which also seems to value a kind of authenticity.

4. Taoism also values authenticity in much the way Polonius does, but with a metaphysics to support it. In my understanding, Taoism does tend to pair authenticity with freedom, but it's worth pointing out that the Taoist sort of freedom and the Taoist sort of authenticity don't look quite so undisciplined or spontaneous as we might imagine. According to Stephen Prothero, Taoists would say that we've been severed from our true natures; Taoist practises require discipline and, well, practise, but eventually the practitioner would become authentic. (If there's a version of authenticity that I find plausible, it would be this one. Of course, I would be using a different metaphysics.)

5. Taoism might appeal very much to those who Walter Truett Anderson calls neo-romantics (see this post for a definition), though the practices of New Agers and radical environmentalists might not be recognizable to a traditional Taoist. (Though maybe I'm wrong. Maybe it would be recognizable.) There's a certain stereotype of people who talk about being yourself and getting back to nature, an idea that human action should be grounded in a certain human nature. I'd like to see if this stereotype would bear out empirically; are there many people who take such a line seriously? (I'm not being judgemental; I just want to be sure that I'm characterizing this position correctly.) I suspect this bears some relation to the common contemporary exhortation to honest self-expression, to letting people (or friends, anyway) know what you're really feeling. Although this concept bears a striking structural similarity to genetic determinism (truth to an intrinsic nature), I think it's far more innocuous. (I suspect the structural similarity comes from the fact that they share pop psychoanalysis as a common ancestor.)

Could these five (or six, I guess, since I put psychoanalysis in with genetic determinism) groupings constitute an empirically supportable concept, in the way of personality test indicators? My suspicion is that it does represent an existing moral sentiment, but I would like to see the evidence. I would like to hear your opinions on it.

I also notice that the there's a bit of equivocation in the concept of nature under authenticity (especially in #4 and #5): according to the stereotype, environmentalism might sometimes correlate with authenticity (but, again, I'd like empirical studies on this). One must be true to oneself, to maintain ones true self, in much the same way that we wish to keep nature (the environment) true to its nature. And this made me think more about the moral sentiments behind environmentalism. I think there's a lot of harm/care behind environmentalism, at least for me, but on a gut level a lot of people, when they're talking about the environment's authenticity (is this really the wild?) seem to being talking about the environment's purity. And purity is already one of the moral foundations.

I'll save purity for another post and I'll end with the reminder that I'm speculating and that what I really want is empirical evidence for all of this, but I'm also wondering aloud whether authenticity, while paired with freedom sometimes (ie. spontaneity and self-expression) and honesty at other times, might also bear some relation to purity.

Index

Moral Foundations Index

A week or so back I took the Moral Foundations quiz. (I took about half of the quizzes available at this website.) These were my scores:

harm and care - 3.8
fairness and reciprocity - 3
loyalty - 1.8
authority and respect - 1.5
purity and sanctity - 1.3

The order given is fixed; the quiz did not automatically rank them. It is a coincidence that my ranking corresponded to the established order. As far as the rankings go, I am unsurprised.

I rather like this construct because it corresponds with something I had been working with already (I know, I know, that's confirmatin bias): moral action has more to do with particular values, perhaps even personality, than with moral philosophical systems like deontology or utilitarianism. But I think the quiz, in its particular manifestation, has a few problems that I want to wiggle around a bit. I'll do this in a series of shorter posts to break it up.

I. The Polonius Virtue, or, Are These All the Foundations They Could Think of?
In which I suggest that freedom and authenticity might also be moral foundations and discuss the latter at length.
II. Unnatural Acts and Unnatural Ingredients, or, What Kind of Pure?
In which I think about the roles disgust and nature might play in not-so-conservative discourse.
III. Building Your (Axiological) Foundations on Sand, or, Are These Really the Foundations After All?
In which I think about how well these foundations work like they're supposed to, or like I think they're supposed to.
IV. Purity Disgusts Me, or, Are My Results the Right Ones?
In which I wonder whether there's any merit to valuing all of the Moral Foundations rather than concentrating on a few.
V. The Morality of Aliens, Dragons, and Dead Philosophers, or, Disorganized Thoughts on Moral Foundations Theory
In which I think about moral intuition, math, orange and blue moralities, and Dungeons and Dragons moral alignments charts.
VI. Postlude: Eternal Consequences, or, What Kind of Harm?
In which I think about harm/care and purity/sanctity in consequentialist and virtue ethical terms, and in light of typical Christian ideas about salvation.

To Exist is to Differ, Part Two

To Exist is to Differ

Difference as a Place of Study

Part Two


"I tend to see the similarities in people and not the differences."
Isabel Allende

A cursory look over my more politically- or socially-minded posts in the last few years indicates how obsessed I am with a proper attitude toward difference, even if I was not aware that this was a theme in my writing. In what is easily my most popular post of all time, "Sexy Bodies, Disabled Bodies," I introduce my interest in atypical anatomy, though at this time I was not aware of that term (which is Alice Dreger's). However, it is with my ill-fated (because unfinished) series on The Boundaries of Self that I insist that any definition of "body" or "self" must fully account for atypical anatomies without simply designating them "exceptions." The way I run with McCloud's Four Campfires, which is really a kind of structuralism, is to make it about difference rather than sameness. My most recent concern with ethics has been about meta-ethics, the ethics of addressing differences in ethical beliefs. When I talk about political axes (here and here), I get anxious about categories (left v. right) that ignore other ways organizing political belief and activity. I defend the existence of many denominations insofar as they address differences in congregants' needs. I consider myself a heretic in most communities (heretic: a person who has beliefs unorthodox to the community of which zhe insists zhe is a part). Also, if you were to pay much attention to what I say in the comment sections of those blogs in which I participate--Unequally Yoked, Experimental Theology, Elizabeth Esther--you'd probably notice that many of my contributions, and most of my arguments, involve me saying that someone or another is over-generalizing. What may have started out as simple contrarianism during my years as a teenager--when my Grade 9 English teacher said that a first-person past-tense narrator must always survive the story, I immediately wrote and submitted a short story in which the first-person past-tense narrator dies--has become for me a political and social commitment to the appreciation of difference.

I think my academic career has played a role in this, which I outlined in my previous post, as has my extra-curricular reading of post-modernists and continental philosophers. You could also attribute this, maybe (but only maybe), to my habit of hopping between Protestant churches, or my taste for speculative fiction, or my interest in psychology, or my habit of imagining what it would be like to be a non-human animal. (For instance, did you know that the Common Octopus has semi-autonomous limbs? The octopus's central nervous system instructs a limb to complete a particular task, but the limb works out how to achieve the task using its own local nerve cluster. While humans have something like this going on with our ganglia, octopedes' limbs actually do some of their own problem-solving, which is far more extensive than what our ganglia do. It would be fascinating to experience semi-autonomy of one's limbs.)

OK. So what do I mean by "a proper attitude toward difference"?

1. Epistemology. I don't fully know. I have only recently figured out, after all, that this has been a general issue in my thinking. I am also phobic of completion, or certainty, in my personal philosophy, so even if I had been thinking about this for years I doubt that I'd have come to any kind of conclusion.

2. Axiology. What I don't mean is some form of total ethical relativism. I don't think that different ways of doing things are all equally valid. I would say that there are multiple ways of doing things that are just as good, but that doesn't mean that all things are equal. Some ways of doing things are very bad. It's just that there isn't a single best way of doing things. (You might think of this as a few local optima, but none of those local optima are a global optima.) So while I'm not an ethical relativist, nor a metaphysical relativist, I could maybe called a weak cultural relativist.

3. Axiology. Of course there are certain kinds of difference which I would condemn. For instance, certain kinds of criminal behaviour are unacceptable deviations from typical behaviour. I wouldn't celebrate difference without qualification. But my condemnation is based on ethical violations; whether or not the behaviour is different--or, in a more loaded term, deviant--from other people's behaviour is irrelevant to my condemnation. By the same token, I am willing to criticize normative behaviour (for instance, capitalist materialism).

4. Metaphysics, Axiology. What I am willing to say is that a lot of differences aren't comprehensible in terms of good/bad, or good/better/best. Bodies, for instances, are never wrong; no body is better at being a body than another. Some bodies are in more pain than others, of course, and that might well be a result of differences in those bodies. Social conditions make certain bodies more comfortable than others. But there is no Platonic form of "body" from which any given body deviates. No body is more typical of body-ness than another body. Any claim you make about bodies ought to apply equally to all bodies; if it does not, your claim is false (or at least applies only to particular bodies, but that distinction ought to be clear and appropriate). A failure to account for atypical bodies, in fact, is easily the biggest reason why a lot of atypical bodies are uncomfortable to have; the body itself is often not uncomfortable (cf. Dreger's One of Us).

5. Axiology. I would also be willing to say that the failure to account for atypical bodies, or atypical psychology (or even typical but non-normative psychology, like introversion), is endemic to Western philosophy, politics, art...really just Western culture generally. It is also probably a problem in lots of non-Western cultures, too, but I can only speak about Western culture with any reliability. I opened this post with the Isabel Allende quote because it is an example of a common attitude that seems to be in support of inclusion but must result in a failure to understand, and thus to include, people who are different from me. Focusing on similarity at the expense of difference is not a moral good, but so many people seem to think it is a moral good.

6. Epistemology. In the end, I would say that, as with texts, to exist is to differ. Humans have a lot of similarities, yes, but we are also idiosyncratic. Whether those idiosyncrasies are for good or ill I cannot say, but any theory or program or attitude that fails to account for those differences cannot really explain human behaviour, human need, or human dignity. Such an epistemological failure cannot help but produce metaphysical and axiological failures as well. This, for me, is the bedrock of a proper attitude toward difference. (So, with apologies to Eve Tushnet, I actually am a special snowflake, and so are you.)

It's important to note that I have other commitments than just this respect for differences, and some of these commitments might trump the commitment to difference, but ultimately I don't think I can explain and understand my own ideas without at least addressing the above.

(tl;dr: Just as the differences between texts must be addressed in any explanation of those texts, so too must the differences between people be addressed by any account of human behaviour; failure to do so results in other failures, usually ethical or political ones; these failures are really common in our culture; there are a lot of different kinds of difference and it turns out that I talk about them a lot.)