I retract my Republican-Party-Bad post
I recently wrote a blog post titled “Conservatives good, Republican party bad.” There was quite a lot of reader push back, from left, center, and especially right. These readers have convinced me that my argument in the post was wrong, and that it was not very “Haidtian” of me to declare one side to be “bad” without a great deal of research, including efforts to solicit counterarguments. I seem to have gotten “carried away” by my liberal inclinations, as SanPete put it. I hope readers will at least allow me to turn this into a useful exercise in which I examine the episode from the perspective of The Righteous Mind.
First, as to why I wrote the post: I had just appeared on the Tavis Smiley show, and to prepare for it I had read Smiley and West’s new book “The Rich and the Rest of Us: A Poverty Manifesto.” The book includes many accounts of people in desperate straits, people who had worked all their lives and now, through no fault of their own, were out of a job and therefore out of health insurance, and in default on their mortgages. It’s heart-wrenching stuff, but I was particularly open to Smiley’s point of view because I was about to go on his show and talk with him, so the “social persuasion link” and the “reasoned persuasion link” of the social intuitionist model were working in tandem. I had stronger feelings of empathy than I normally would have.
The day before my talk with Smiley was taped (April 29) I read the Edsall column. I’ve talked with Edsall several times, and have a working relationship with him, so there too, I’m particularly open to being persuaded by him. And he was citing evidence on empathy collected on YourMorals.org – my research website – as analyzed by my friend and colleague Ravi Iyer. That same day I read the Mann and Ornstein essay in the Washington Post. I assumed (erroneously) that Ornstein was a conservative because he was at AEI, which gave the seemingly bipartisan team of Mann and Ornstein far more credibility in my eyes. So it all came together for me on that day – the feelings of sympathy for the poor and anger at Republican hard-heartedness, which put me into a “can I believe it” mindset, along with a powerful statement from what I thought was a bipartisan team saying that the Republican Party was the problem in Washington, which gave me permission to believe. I could feel my elephant and rider shuffling over to the left. The day after the Smiley interview aired (May 8), I wrote the blog post.
The reader reaction was swift, constructive, and (with the exception of one repeat-commenter) civil. Ben and SanPete pointed out that I was reading Cantor’s remarks in the most uncharitable way, whereas Cantor’s basic point — about the value of having “everyone in,” having everyone contributing even a token amount, is similar to one I made myself in a NYT essay about the value of “all pulling on the same rope” as a way of getting people to “share the spoils” of their joint effort. James Wagner, Tom, and The Independent Whig all pointed out that the Republican stance on “no new taxes” is very much a principled stance, once you understand their decades-long frustration with leaders in both parties who negotiate grand bargains, including spending cuts, but the cuts end up not happening, so spending keeps rising, government keeps growing, and bankruptcy looms ever closer. (I have been persuaded about the fiscal and moral damage done by our entitlement binge by Yuval Levin). So desperate measures, such as drawing a bright line at zero, are indeed backed up by a moral passion which I can respect. You really see that passion in Whig, backed up by a consequentialist analysis of what happens when one side keeps “caring” and spending.
Whig also linked to a point-by-point response to Mann and Ornstein that shows –as usual – the necessity in these complex matters of hearing from an advocate on the other side. One can make a case that the Democrats are the problem, or at least that the two sides are equally at fault for the dysfunction.
I’m not saying that both sides are necessarily equal; centrism doesn’t commit me to splitting the difference, or saying that both sides are always partially right in any dispute. But centrism does commit me to listening carefully to arguments from both sides, and taking my own biases into account, before trying to render any verdict. I didn’t do that. And my knowledge base as a social psychologist would give me no special skills in rendering such a verdict even if I were to put in the time. As James Wagner put it (in a separate email):
“you’re more of a descriptive than a prescriptive guy: I really want to urge you to stay more firmly with your competitive advantage, which is providing information and synthesis that the left and right can both hear well on why we act the way we do. You’re so incredibly good at that, and it’s exceedingly rare. Quite afield from current (or old) event analysis, which is not your bailiwick, which my brother-in-law does better than you.”
Point granted, chastisement accepted.
Well, even if I was wrong to write the original post, at least I can claim that I was wrong for reasons that can be explained by The Righteous Mind. And I hope this episode has an inspiring ending in that the entire debate was carried out so civilly, often with acknowledgment of points on the other side, and with such attention to making claims supported by evidence, that it did in the end change my mind. I never said reason is impotent. I just said that we’re bad at using it by ourselves to find the truth.From page 90:
We should not expect individuals to produce good, open-minded, truth-seeking reasoning, particularly when self-interest or reputational concerns are in play. But if you put individuals together in the right way, such that some individuals can use their reasoning powers to disconfirm the claims of others, and all individuals feel some common bond or shared fate that allows them to interact civilly, you can create a group that ends up producing good reasoning as an emergent property of the social system.
Thanks to you all, for making this blog a reasoning social system.
jon
This is simply amazing. Unfortunately, the public at large has no respect for such self-reflection, otherwise we might be able to get some politicians in office who are more like you.
When I was a young, poor student working three jobs to put myself through college it actually surprised me that I didn’t have to pay any income taxes. It was certainly a welcome relief, but I wouldn’t have been bothered to have to pay something. I’m pro tax overall. As Lewis Black says, I like paying for public services because I don’t want someone waking me up in the middle of the night saying “grab a shovel, there’s a hole in the freeway and somebody’s got to fill it.” Taxes are far easier than that.
Meanwhile, I have utter sympathy for what you went through leading up to posting that blog because I’ve been there many times myself. Fortunately for me I am much less in the public eye. As a fellow knee-jerk liberal I say congratulations to you for “feeling” like the Republican Party is getting a lot wrong (they are). As a fellow intellectual I say congratulations on seeing the error of assuming that means they are categorically wrong (they aren’t).
Maybe we should get you this mug, then people can’t say they weren’t warned: http://www.cafepress.com/pithstop.45485867
I appreciated your wise comments, Susan. I think you analyzed the situation perfectly. While I was part of the “yeah, right on, Jonathan” team when I first read his blog comments about being disappointed in the GOP for their failures, I see both sides of the issue better, thanks to you, Susan, Neal and of course, Professor Haidt.
I enjoyed the part of your book when you were discussing the “liberal progress narrative” and the “Reagan narrative.” In order to understand the modern Republican party I think you need to articulate the “elite conservative narrative.” I don’t think their moral taste buds suddenly changed, but the moral cuisine consumed by these conservatives began to change (and I believe this was bolstered by complicated historical factors). This, I think, is one of the contributing factors to the removal of moderates from the conservative party. What this “elite conservative narrative” is, I’m not confident enough to articulate, but when staunch conservatives like David Frum and Bruce Bartlett question this narrative (even a little bit) they aren’t always welcomed by their tribe.
David Frum has recently written Patriots to question it further: “Patriots is, I hope, a funny book. But the humor is not farcical. It comes from life. The people of Patriots are inventions or composites. But the incidents are based on reality, and some of the most extreme statements in the dialogue are taken verbatim from public records. Patriots offers a harsh assessment of the political culture of Washington. Because I’ve focused my lens on the part of Washington I know best, the conservative subculture, some may interpret Patriots as a critique of conservatism only. Such an interpretation would be a mistake. If I’d had different life experiences, I could have told a similar story with a different focus. Even as is, one of the book’s most cynical characters is drawn from the liberal side of the aisle. Two of the book’s most positive characters come from the conservative side. As remarked by one of the people we meet in Patriots, bad people can espouse good ideas, and good people can espouse bad ones.” He also said in an interview with Robert Wright on bloggingheads: “In a Democratic society elites justify themselves through service. To the extent they do a good job and deliver for people then those are positive elites. And one of the things that the book is an lament for is the demise of the responsible elite … But at least Walter [contemporary fictional Republican politician] has internalized some of the ethic of being a responsible member of an elite, at a time when everybody around them says we’re not members of an elite, we’re oligarchs. We’re going to use the system for our own benefit without reference for what’s going on anywhere else. And that’s our political life and that makes me very angry.”
Or, as Chris Mooney relates the story of Bruce Bartlett in his new book: “You might think, based on his resume, that Bartlett would have impeccable cred in the conservative movement. Trained as a historian, but frankly an economics wonk, over his career Bartlett has worked in the Reagan White House, the George H.W. Bush Treasury department, on staff for Congressional Republicans (including Ron Paul and Jack Kemp), and on the think tank circuit—Cato Institute and Heritage Foundation. He’s seen all parts of the conservative movement. He’s kicked the tires. “For a long time, I was a very loyal Republican,” he offers. But near the middle of George W. Bush’s first term in office, Bartlett began sensing something was very amiss. In late 2003, Bush and Congress created Medicare Part D to pay for senior citizens’ prescription drugs—and did so in a way that not only blocked the government from negotiating with pharmaceutical companies for better prices, but added considerably to federal budget deficits. “I was just absolutely flabbergasted,” says Bartlett, “because any half competent budget analyst knew Medicare was our number one budget problem.”…“I thought, naively, if I just wrote about only domestic policy and quoted a lot of conservatives, and wrote only stuff that no conservative could disagree with on the substance, and documented it well, then people would be forced to accept it,” Bartlett remembers. Instead, the National Center for Policy Analysis dismissed Bartlett after seeing the manuscript. According to a report that soon emerged in The New York Times, the conservative outlet “did not want to be associated with that kind of work.” Bartlett, it seemed, had betrayed the team, the group. He had been far too individualistic, and frankly, too Open. The transformation was complete, and now Bartlett no longer calls himself a Republican—though he still insists that, in the Burkean sense, he’s a conservative.”
As many have described, the modern Democratic party resembles the earlier moderate Republican party before they began to get more extreme. But as things stand now, we have yang and more yang.
“As many have described, the modern Democratic party resembles the earlier moderate Republican party before they began to get more extreme. But as things stand now, we have yang and more yang.”
THIS THIS THIS THIS x1000
http://www.politicalcompass.org/uselection2012 Obama is far right, just look at the evidence without thinking from the orthodoxies of the 2 party system.
Compare to the 08 obama http://www.politicalcompass.org/uselection2008
It’s very simple to get, I think if anyone applies reasoning to our foreign policy from outside the 2 party box things look pretty wrong… In fact, I’d say that unless you’re knowledgeable on it you have no basis whatsoever for speaking on economics (Jon says that the welfare state and entitlements are TOO much)
“(I have been persuaded about the fiscal and moral damage done by our entitlement binge by Yuval Levin). ”
How the hell can anyone look at our medical costs comparatively and not see something wrong, forget empathy think of efficiency.
His crypto conservatism and lack of appreciation for reason annoys me… Interesting information being presented but the conclusions…
Oh and Mr.Centrist Haidt, I challenge you to take the post the results… I’ll bet 10$ you won’t reach the middle.
I’m serious, take the test and if you go center email me and I’ll pay you.
Wow. I just finished the book and loved it, but this saga – from your original post, to reading the comments, to this retraction post – really puts everything home. I’ll be coming back here a lot. Thank you!
Comment
I’m about as pleased to see this post as I was disappointed to see the one it’s retracting. I especially enjoyed this bit:
“I’m not saying that both sides are necessarily equal; centrism doesn’t commit me to splitting the difference, or saying that both sides are always partially right in any dispute. But centrism does commit me to listening carefully to arguments from both sides, and taking my own biases into account, before trying to render any verdict.”
I think this is indeed the most important message of The Righteous Mind. I wouldn’t expect reading it to change anyone’s political persuasion, but I would hope that doing so might allow us to step outside our moral matrices long enough to recognize that not everyone who disagrees with us is evil or stupid. Smart, well-meaning individuals can and do disagree about issues of substance, even when it seems like the “right” answer should be obvious.
I’m still trying to figure out what progressives mean by “good” and”bad” when they utter these words, and whether these terms are considered by them as having some sense which is not merely descriptive, or predictive of an outcome they would prefer to see, but which cannot be said to be “really” good or bad in itself.
“Lack of empathy (at liberal-like levels), bad” , for example could mean any number of things. It could mean for example that liberals believe that there is some universal organic template to which human beings by their nature should conform, unless there is an organic defect. But that of course would imply that they are not really liberals in the sense generally used nowadays.
On the other hand, maybe all these words mean is that they just prefer that the people, or as it is also known, ‘the evolutionary product’, with whom they happen to associate in this political space, should feel warm and fuzzy and self-sacrificial with less prompting – or obvious coercion – than they might wish to conspicuously employ.
The question really amounts to this: what can words like “good” and “bad”, and “right” and “wrong” mean in the mouths of political progressives, other than as clubbish terms of approbation for behaviors or “values” which they think will serve their own interests? Interests, which it is important to point out , the run-of-the-mill materialist progressive can be fairly taken to believe are merely derived from random, value free physical, and ultimately meaningless, facts.
How in the world can a group of people nursed on the Meadian relativism nipple, brought up (despite Robert Wright) affirming the directionless and random workings of evolution, mocking the concept of natural law, and displaying the “fact-value dichotomy” like a philosophical trump card, even utter words like “good” and “bad” without at the same time directing a wink to, and a then a nudge to the ribs of, any listener ?
Certainly it is legitimate to ask if there is any reason for a non-Progressive to see a Progressive’s use of these “value” terms, as anything more than cynical Darwinian puffery …
DNW, do you have any liberal friends that you’ve talked with about this?
There is a correlation between relativism and liberalism, but neither implies the other. There are many liberals who believe in objective morality as much as it appears you do, and most believe at least some of morality is objective and universal.
For those who reject moral objectivism (usually because it appears to not fit the evidence well), there are various ways to understand values, but it typically comes down to what people care about. Empathy for the feelings of others, love of fairness, of liberty, learning, happiness, security, community, whatever matters to people forms the bases for morality. These need not be “interests” in any narrow or selfish sense. The values are understood to be subjective but natural. The words “good” and “bad” apply in most of the same ways they do for those who believe those values are objective.
I’m a moral relativist, although I sort of fit into the box Jon describes (which I don’t think actually fits any of the policies by the democratic party).
Although I don’t agree with how Sam Harris tried to say it was objective, the moral landscape was an excellent book.
“For those who reject moral objectivism …, there are various ways to understand values, but it typically comes down to what people care about. ”
Yeah, I don’t doubt that in general what people care about is related to what they value or vice versa, or that your feelings do not well-up within a context that is not for all practical intents and purposes purely natural.
But that was not my focus. I was trying to determine if what you [and I don’t really mean “you”, I mean “political progressives”] care about can be subjected to an evaluative process which refers to imperatives that are not conditioned by your feelings – especially when terms such as “good” and “bad” are applied.
I don’t think that if you confined yourself to saying that “I feel this urge” or, “that makes me feel warm and secure” anyone would have any reason to dispute what you are saying about your own feelings.
And if instead of saying that it is “bad” that Republicans didn’t wish to underwrite or affirm such and such a behavior, you said that you felt one urge which when coupled to other feelings you had, inclined you to wish that Republicans would cough up the costs involved in satisfying your – neither objectively good or bad – urge, I doubt that many people would dispute that you were saying that you wanted what you wanted, and that you also wanted others to provide some or all of it.
It’s only when you get to the point where you begin implying that they should be sacrificing some advantage or satisfaction or goal of their own so that your satisfactions or goal or advantage can be realized, and apply evaluative terms like good and bad to the alternatives, that it becomes problematical.
You could go the utilitarian route but the famous problem there is the contortions they must go through in defining the greater good, and even then, 1, the allocated greater good cannot be demonstrated to be unconditionally distributive across the individuals making up the population, and 2, the process assumes the values it, superficially at least, purports to demonstrate.
“Empathy for the feelings of others, love of fairness, of liberty, learning, happiness, security, community, whatever matters to people forms the bases for morality. These need not be “interests” in any narrow or selfish sense.”
Well ok. If you wish to admit that for you it is basically a circular process, but also wish to add the proviso that because this circular process is objectively ascertainable or can be sampled and confirmed by publicly available means that it is therefore “objective” in some sense while not being binding or obligatory, then fine. I guess any non-supernatural artifact or effect is in some sense then, “objective” ; though one cannot infer from that what its goodness or badness value is.
Thus, how the terms good and bad come to have meanings – if they do for liberals – that distinguish them from exact synonyms for the phrase “I want X” remains obscure to me.
Perhaps good and bad as terms are just applied instrumentally, as alluded to in my remarks about utliitarianism above: as terms expressing an estimate as to whether some action or attitude will advance or not some desired end which is viewed as neither “really” good nor bad – but just desired, and therefore dubbed “good” by the person experiencing the desire, whatever it might be.
DNW…I’m short of time here, so let it be noted that this conversation can continue later. However, it seems to me that putting the word values into quotes, when discussing other people’s, implies a pre-determined position.
I’m a social liberal, fiscal conservative, and have spent 30 years with DoD (and all that implies.) Let me give you the excruciatingly short version: People are not things, and it is morally reprehensible to treat them as if they were.
“DNW, do you have any liberal friends that you’ve talked with about this?”
Yes. And most of them – those not admitting to a purely emotive theory of ethics – seem to assume the value of their “values” rather than justify them.
In those cases where justifications are attempted it is usually along the lines of suggesting that what is claimed to be a socially constructed or subjective categorization, be opened up because of a subjective impulse that it be done.
Progressives seem to me to have abandoned the rhetorical practice of staking claims based on intrinsic rather than conventional or granted rights. Which at least shows that many have become aware in these last years of the inconsistency that would result should they try it.
DNW, I’ve responded below, where there’s more room.
Wasn’t going to respond, then I realized I have to cover this anyway…you’ve delivered up a monologue cloaked in a straw-man question, curiously over- and under-intellectualized all at once- a mouse’s nest of jangled phrases and discomfited grammar. Why you have wandered here, of all places, to spout bias and effrontery is unclear- did you think moral foundations theory, or the above stouthearted confession, a good platform upon which to riff on your motivated beliefs about outgroups? I hope you can someday see how useless and petty such a string of snide statements is, outside of the joy garnered through exercising one’s biases with alacrity. A shame really, because you seem a smart fellow, and I think the question is a good one. I will pretend you actually asked it, and provide a preface of an answer. I’m taking a flyer that you can engage that big brain of yours constructively, since that’s a strong conservative trait. It’s always good to think about your question, anyway. Don’t worry- you’ll still be able to denigrate us just as well afterward if you like, as I can’t present enough human heterogeneity here to break your stride.
Others may, perhaps accurately, see the question within ideological contexts: I don’t. I see our moral approach driven by culture and what we term political ideology (what I think of as individual and group selection criteria couched in personality, clumped in two somewhat competing groups, presumably to societal advantage). But our basic idea of good and bad, and our relation to them, are the basis of that moral expression, a foundation of it. Many religious liberals have an answer to your question that we both may be able to intuit. For the other, say, 60% that don’t self-identify as religious, at a certain level such people can’t answer the question of what they mean when they say “good” or “bad”, I think by definition- but struggling to get at the answer anyway for ourselves is both useful personally and the subject of a broad and effective spate of research at the moment, as psychologists increasingly take notions like good/evil, right/wrong, integrity, and sin as useful, even vital sociological handles. There are many good introductions to secular humanism out there to provide us clarity on our motivation and ethics as well: I think they provide both comfort and an impetus to work to address the question well. People who ask your question ingenuously, in the right setting, should be treated to a fair answer that displays the basis for our personal moral approach, and that addresses our sense of what integrity empirically means to us. Otherwise we could well resemble the composite liberal creature you caricatured from your perch.
I see it as prima facie ridiculous to assume only conservatives have principles tantamount to fixed, rough zones of proper behavior. Natural law is a concept held tightly or more loosely by everyone I know, whether they lean to the teleological or no. Liberals on the whole don’t reject the concept of natural law, however often a conservative utters such rejection as a truism, though certainly our versions may contrast yours widely. I grant you that liberal openness can translate to less respect for certain forms of perceived natural law. There are often values behind that questioning, whether you share them or no- that may be one reason why so many of us evolved. Other times, liberal disrespect of natural law seems misplaced and even dangerous, as we address commonly in this forum.
You want to hotwire ethics to the part where we castigate my liberal expression of good as bad, and make inferences about the form that evil takes (puffery, cynicism, materialist, etc). Which is fine, in a way- ideological crosstalk is all about saying your good is my bad- but you’re deftly sandwiching integrity in there where it doesn’t belong, probably due to both the bias I see leaking all over the page and genuine liberal integrity weakness you’ve witnessed. Integrity belongs more in the above discussion about how we determine good and bad for ourselves. Don’t try to suggest that the liberal “good” is a cynical term that means bad for all of humanity because of our eternal, cynical quest of self-interest. I have to listen to liberals spew that same uninformed nonsense about conservatives all the time. That ignores the whole nature of moral structures, solely to latch your world view to the center of the universe. Liberal cynicism exists, yes, along with puffery, and bias around self-interest breathes down everyone’s neck- but a whole half-nation breathing the same air you do but working under an evil (different) set of morals to cynically seek self-interest? Nice try. Not the nature of humans- not in the main, anyway. Know it looks that way- looks that way to me too, kinda right about when you start talking. That’s the nature of different moral structures- the other guy looks cynical, puffed, and driven by self-interest. In other words, he looks like he’s got integrity problems because of his flawed morals, and like it’s only going to get worse from here. The fundamental attribution error, perhaps our most important bias, strikes quite close to this point from a certain angle.
I look forward to evidence of any actual interest in your question: certainly you’re right about some liberals, and it’d be useful to think together about who, how, when, and why we have integrity problems. I’ll even not breathe a word about conservatives for the duration- we can stick with your outgroup. You have a valuable viewpoint, if you’d use it without a pope’s outfit of overlay: well-schooled and contrasting. You may sideswipe me instead as a response of course, and win the field thereby- if so, congratulations in advance, as I’m sure it’ll be well done. But I’ll not respond in the event of any breath of repetition whatsoever of your displayed attitude, because to do so would be to engage with you in an attempt at personal entertainment through bias reinforcement, which I try to avoid because, by my lights, that’s bad (a kind of opposite of good. In a way. Look, it’s complicated). As is often the case with ideological diatribe, you have well circumscribed a scattered subset of your outgroup, a few of whom I’ve glimpsed or clashed with through the years. There are many such about, no doubt, and too many in politics, where lack of integrity can be well-rewarded. Would you care to inquire how on earth the rest of us get out of bed in the morning, given the Meadian and other paps we suck- or is it all invariant vanity, vanity to you? I was at a lovely black Baptist service a little while ago, complete with this amazing dance/mime of a long, pre-recorded speech and song- have you ever seen such a thing? They’re doing it a lot now. Would you care to speculate with me what that inspiring young mime, or someone in the audience, might mean when they say something is good? Or how they might employ cynicism? I’m having dinner with a friend Friday night whose genitals were chopped off when she was an infant, because they were offensive-looking to the pediatrician. She later built a very effective, global education and medical advocacy organization, after building and selling a multi-million dollar business overseas- would you like to talk about what constitutes “really” bad to her? Or were you just making small talk.
I wandered in here, having read the excerpt from his latest book in The Week magazine, wanting to ask why, in his analysis, Dr. Haidt identifies “family” as “authoritarian”, rather than “caring”. I had been feeling sort of cheerful, because it seemed, from many of his writings, that there might be a way to maintain relationships with ALL the people I love and respect, regardless of their political opinions. A way to talk with everyone.
And here I find that that isn’t true, that it is impossible to conduct an argument, inquiry, debate, without the whole “room” sinking to abuse of each other.
I’ve worked for government programs for the poor, underprivileged, disabled–and whatever pretty words they said, my fellow workers were just as much self absorbed, insensitive jerks as were those people, nuclear and electrical engineers, whom I worked with at other times. Stop calling names, for God’s sake, and SHOW some of this famous compassion and openness to ideas you claim for “liberals”.
Ok I get that I was militant, but seriously? You think entitlements are the problem? It’s not the empire that swallows it all? Read the book I linked you- Killing Hope by WIlliam Blum or hegemony or surivival by Noam Chomsky.
You don’t think we should try to emulate say the french health care system? There’s no issue with the enormous amounts of money we spend on healthcare because our private system is so screwed up compared to europe?
Oh and on another note, gee look at the nordic countries which once again for many years have scored the highest in happiness http://finance.yahoo.com/news/the-happiest-countries-in-the-world.html
…
I went back and read your other post you retracted. I’d highly highly suggest the documentary century of the self by Adam Curtis rather than reading newspapers for a day just watch that, truly amazing.
Still occupying my mind, so http://www.examiner.com/article/grover-norquist-says-raising-taxes-on-the-middle-class-isn-t-a-tax-increase
Norquist also is going to appear in Ayn Rand’s atlas shrugged film, or Paul Ryan loving her along with a lot of congressional republicans.
There’s literally dozens of conservatives who have said something along the lines of cut welfare who cares, the poor should suffer it’s a christian virtue.(made the headlines quite a few times, don’t care enough to remember their names)
In the end whether or not they do see the poor as evil and rich as good, their policies portray that and benefit the elite class.
When half the country is statically in poverty, I find this all to be a serious problem. The party system is not serving the populace’s needs.
oh and read this http://www.newleftproject.org/index.php/site/article_comments/a_short_history_of_neoliberalism_and_how_we_can_fix_it
Meh.
Your retraction is … not accepted, even if it is acceptable.
Your initial intuition was the correct one.
The GOP are “turtling” on fiscal issues. I use the term in the same way as Putnam and yourself (opposing constructive, hive-like behavior), just extend its coverage.
They are the party of the wealthy and they know that someone has to pay.
They sense rightly that the vast stores of private wealth and its enjoyment are under threat, even by their own short-sightedness and ideological failing.
One example: The entire bad-mortgage, derivatives-amplified economic catastrophe, since day one, has been about ‘who pays?’ to them. Nothing more. NOTHING more.
In economic contraction, the pie shrinks, and the only way to “prime the pump” is Keynesian economics; and they won’t pay, even though faster growth will line their pockets disproportionally in the long-term. They turtle, instead and offer bogus compromises like cutting taxes, which are known to do nothing in such circumstances and provide slim multiplier affect, if at all. The other way, is to forgive debt, bad debt, to clear the markets and “start fresh”. Nope. They won’t pay. They turtle, instead, act hyper-short term (“preserve capital”) and hyper-parochial (“Let GM fail”), despite that such a thing eventually helps them as a group, because of faster economic growth rates (bigger pie).
So Ornstein and Mann’s headline is correct, no matter HotAir’s little-idea factory. It’s factual that they stirred up a lot of extremism to get the political support they needed to … not pay, to turtle. (Very Marxist, that, too, right? Capital conditioning political reality/irrationality… They’ve grown in what they are willing to co-opt. lol )
And, besides, Johnathan Haidt is allowed to have a sacred, too!!! While you make your life as a researcher, please don’t let that cloud your perspective so that you become something as preposterous as a journalist, when analyzing the events around you.
And all this stuff about “civility” is so distinctly American, no? Any WEIRD will tell you that “strong views, weakly held” is just as good as the current American distaste with sound and well-meaning confrontation.
Oh, and just for the sake of analysis, don’t think I don’t see the “other side”, that I’m “blinded”.
‘They” think that by defending the economic order, they are defending the moral order. Afterall, what else is “proportionality” (and its Greek chorus, “moral hazard”).
But, this is their blind spot, not mine, not yours.
How can we know? A couple ways.
One is that morality is also concerned with the truth, not just what is stimulating their receptors or taste buds.
And the truth is twofold.
First, we know by economic science that an blind embrace of “proportionality” is the wrong policy response during times of crisis. (I’ll just direct the reader to Paul Krugman to sort that out.)
Second, there is little that the Democrats are proposing that is truly disruptive of the moral order implied by the economic order, that isn’t temporary or close to self-evident.
Mortgage debt relief, on a temporary basis, in bankruptcy court? Yes, of course.
Student-loan financing? Yes, of course.
A stimulus that fits the size of the problem and delivers a worst-case stop-gap and accelerating GDP growth? Yes, of course.
A modest-sized jobs program? Yes, of course.
Food stamps at $31/wk per person, so we aren’t starving people so that the wealthiest can “turtle”? Yes, of course.
The list goes on. The weight of their moral claim is in the truth of the situation’s reality, and that is why is it fine to say that the GOP is a problem, right?
DNW, again, when you speak of political progressives it isn’t the same as speaking about moral subjectivists. Many political progressives, perhaps most, believe in objective morality in the same ways most conservatives do. Nothing about political progressivism implies moral subjectivism. Progressivism is fully consistent with belief in intrinsic rights.
It’s hard to tell exactly what you’re wondering about. You seem to understand that for moral subjectivists all morality ultimately comes down to subjective feelings (or beliefs), so there’s no evaluative process which refers to imperatives that are not conditioned by feelings or derived from imperatives conditioned by feelings. To say “x is good” isn’t generally synonymous with “I want (or favor) x” for a moral subjectivist, but it may amount to the same thing if x is a fundamental value. That’s consistent with most common uses of “good” and “bad.” The primary definitions of “good” in my dictionary are “of a favorable character or tendency” and “virtuous, right, commendable.” For a moral subjectivist to say a policy is good generally means that it’s favorable, virtuous, right or commendable because it promotes some value, such as human well-being.
Since moral objectivists and moral subjectivists usually agree that human well-being is a proper goal, that usually works fine. If there’s no common goal, that’s a problem, but moral objectivists can disagree just as implacably with each other about values as with moral subjectivists.
Nothing about moral subjectivism implies things aren’t really good or bad unless you define those ideas in ways that imply a certain kind of full objectivity.
In saying subjective moral values need not be “interests” in any narrow or selfish sense I’m not saying anything circular or about objectivity. I’m simply saying that my concern about my neighbor’s welfare, for example, isn’t selfish and isn’t what some people mean when they speak of “interests,” a term often restricted to self-interest.
Is your concern merely linguistic, or is something more at stake? My own view is that both moral objectivism and moral subjectivism have problems, similar to problems that exist for religious belief and rejection of religious belief. But I don’t count linguistic problems as significant.
Dr. Haidt,
🙂
(This is my story and I’m sticking to it. )
HA! You tricked me (but in a good way)! I walked right into your well conceived and brilliantly executed trap.
What a deviously clever plot you hatched. How conniving you were to set out the “Republican Bad” bait that you knew would solicit a strong response, just so you could, as you have always done, lead by the example of actually walking the walk and not just talking the talk. And I fell for it hook, line, and sinker.
Touché, Jon Haidt, and hearty and heartfelt kudos to you for teaching all of us how to have a civil discussion about politics.
You’re absolutely correct that it is leaders in both parties who have fallen prey to the siren song of better living through bigger, redistributive, government.
And thanks very much for recognizing my “passion” for what it is and not taking it personally or as gratuitous spite. It is deeply felt and honestly arrived at, which is why I let myself go with it as far as I did, but I hope in expressing it I was not too over the top, and my appreciation, understanding, and praise for you and your ideas was not too under the radar.
I second the quote from James Wagner, especially the parts about “incredibly good” and “exceedingly rare.”
A positive ending indeed (as usual).
Well, as long as you are representing yourself to us as honestly having arrived at such views, then please consider the problems with your narrative, from the “Liberal” perspective, to help you on your journey.
You paint the liberals as rigging a fair process (for outcomes). Please.
This sentiment might be part of what some liberals see as “serviceable lies” that create the odd-looking (myth) “morality” of the Right. Yes, it’s good for recruiting for your ranks and for repeating to create solidarity, but not so good for good governance.
At best, liberals re-rig an already incredibly rigged process or set of processes. When large wealth inequalities get created, no one knowledgeable really believes that it is because people are being compensated at their marginal productivity of labor. Good grief, no.
It is blind adherence to these serviceable lies that has led the GOP to repugnant moral stances, like the wholesale embrace of the disgusting CEO culture (and sometimes even worship of it, no matter how uncouth the individual or the tactics). Don’t believe me? Put these jobs up for bid and see how quickly the salaried spoils drop in an efficient market for them.
And this, in turn, has led to crazed moral assertions like “punishing success”, so very much out of touch with present reality. With rare, rare exception, people who are successful, even moderately so, credit luck, circumstance, and the people around them, as much as “hard work” (including hard work building a chimp-like coalition to “take over” corporate reins) or “equality of opportunity”.
Best.
Keep fighting the good fight, Amicus! I am appreciating your ride into this fray.
It’s hard to tell exactly what you’re wondering about. ”
Again, as I said before : “I was trying to determine if what you [and I don’t really mean “you”, I mean “political progressives”] care about can be subjected to an evaluative process which refers to imperatives that are not conditioned by your feelings – especially when terms such as “good” and “bad” are applied.”
The repeated failure of this exchange to engage on point, seems to me to indicate the near impossibility of communicating across conceptual gaps that may be unbridgeable on an everyday basis. At least if you are really sincere about being puzzled by the sense of my question.
I make this latter remark because it looks to me as though you express puzzlement about what I am saying about progressives (I am using the term more or less interchangeably with what we nowadays call modern liberals) while largely granting that what I say about the circularity and emotive foundation of their evaluative process as being true.
Or maybe I am just having a problem grasping the sense of your following passage, and deciding whether it is intended as a partial concession to my understanding or take on the situation, or just as a description of what you view as a faulty analysis:
” … You seem to understand [did you mean wrongly believe, or properly understand?] that for moral subjectivists all morality ultimately comes down to subjective feelings (or beliefs), so there’s no evaluative process which refers to imperatives that are not conditioned by feelings or derived from imperatives conditioned by feelings. To say “x is good” isn’t generally synonymous with “I want (or favor) x” for a moral subjectivist, but it may amount to the same thing if x is a fundamental value. [is that a denial or a grant?] That’s consistent with most common uses of “good” and “bad.” The primary definitions of “good” in my dictionary are “of a favorable character or tendency” and “virtuous, right, commendable.” For a moral subjectivist to say a policy is good generally means that it’s favorable, virtuous, right or commendable because it promotes some value, such as human well-being.
Since moral objectivists and moral subjectivists usually agree that human well-being is a proper goal, that usually works fine. If there’s no common goal, that’s a problem, but moral objectivists can disagree just as implacably with each other about values as with moral subjectivists.
Nothing about moral subjectivism implies things aren’t really good or bad unless you define those ideas in ways that imply a certain kind of full objectivity.”
So, now even if the first sentences quoted are not a grant of my general characterization but a denial, the final paragraph apparently concedes my observations regarding the relativistic, non-objective, and instrumental (but “relatively” objective nature), of the progressive’s or liberal’s notions concerning the status of evaluative statements such as “this is good” or “that is bad”.
You say if we agree on ends it’s less of a problem. Of course it is. Until such time as specific means of addressing ends, trample the very the ends they are supposed to aid.
Now, I’m not going to start mocking Sam Harris’ hilarious question begging attempt to ground an objective moral scheme on the principle that all you have to do in order to determine if something is really really bad is to grant that it is really really bad, or attribute any such nonsense to you. But certainly even the most casually informed political progressive has to be aware that the trend line in progressive-land has generally been to challenge the objective grounding of universal terms: implying that they do not “really exist” as natural kinds, but merely as conventional and socially conditioned assignments.
Which is probably what has Harris and I take it Robert Wright as well, scrambling these last years to pour a little concrete under their own foundational preferences.
But it’s kind of hard to do if universals themselves are not believed by a significant number of your political allies to have any status as objective entities.
If you make a convention which you apply to some social construct, then break a convention which applies to a social construct which is itself more or less a convention, then so what?
…Cont. (Space limits apparently. The last word should be “war”.
Too, the emptiness or at least incoherence of the progressive’s recently popular concept of “the thriving of the human person” (I like how the word “conduct” has also become popular) becomes especially apparent as we view the attempts to redefine persons to include, say, apes; or observe the denial that the term “human” is a valid universal which is based on an objective natural kind.
And who knows if or when the latest genome research may make [if it hasn’t already] our traditional idea of “one humankind” unsupportable.
Again, even taking instrumental-ism as a kind of necessary ingredient in your process of achieving your ends via a relative good, I have already described to you what I see as the problem with the utilitarian notion of the greater good as a meaningful end. The so-called greater good does not in fact imply a genuinely distributive logic; only a conventionally or legally fictive one.
No amount of Rawlsian jiggering or level resetting or complexity seems to address the matter – certainly not in an emerging welfare state like ours where the Chief Executive officer of the government seems enamored with the idea of “positive liberty” – which implies a kind of state directed behavior which makes a mockery of the concept of negative liberty. Instead, the issue of whether the term good distributes across the class of all persons to whom it is ostensibly applied, is merely defined away: i.e., a distributed benefit is implied to you. If you don’t see it as one, or can’t find it, it’s because you don’t understand your own best interests. Which, if you were not so selfish, you might have the ability to properly understand as the enhancement of selves not your self, because all selves equally deserve satisfaction, even if yours must be actively sacrificed for theirs.
Or maybe your problem is that you simply lack sufficient mirror neurons. Not that that condition is good or bad in itself; since, no natural attribute has any objective value or status. But we can in fact count the number of sensitive types who do wish you were more sensitive, and through polling their emotional responses to your lack of appreciation or concern for them, eventually conclude that your response does not satisfy them, and it therefore is, sort of, kind of, “objectively” in some sense, “bad”.
“Is your concern merely linguistic, or is something more at stake?”
Yes, more is at stake. I want to have enough information to decide whether when I am listening to a progressive or a liberal use terms like good and bad, whether I am listening to thinly veiled barks, or whether I am listening to arguments made by someone whose logic can be traced to something more than has been infamously said to be, “the state of their digestion”.
Knowing that, gives a rational man some indication of how best to respond, and some insight into just what, it actually is that he is responding to when claims are made upon his person or time or wealth or family.
By the way, I think that Haidt’s work is interesting and that he is pursuing informative and valuable research.
It looks as though he seeks to ground these preferences we have been talking about in organic dispositions. That would make them objective enough for most people.
Though it would not answer or even pretend to address questions of should or ought. Though, I guess if one could say that a cleft palate or schizophrenia is a defect of some kind in that framework, you might be able to convincingly push the reasoning envelope a bit when it came to sociopaths or something.
Nor I think can Haidt successfully arbitrate conflicts between populations having significantly divergent organic dispositions and moral sensibilities, with perhaps, or I guess necessarily, divergent or even incompatible reproductive strategies – though he seems to be taking a stab at it with his ying/yang approach.
What I think is unquestionable is that his research may indicate ways of deciding on the basis of factual information, whether certain affiliations are enhancing or self-refuting, and dampen the emotions and lessen the “pain” involved in drawing whatever inferences it might be reasonable to draw. Taking it to a bit of an extreme, better an amicable divorce for example, than a war.
“Yes, more is at stake. I want to have enough information to decide whether when I am listening to a progressive or a liberal use terms like good and bad, whether I am listening to thinly veiled barks, or whether I am listening to arguments made by someone whose logic can be traced to something more than has been infamously said to be, “the state of their digestion”.”
I’m glad you actually brought up Haidt’s research in your latest post because if you actually read his work you’d at least have a starting point, but of course it appears you exempt yourself from the motivated reasoning hypothesis.
Everywhere on the internet you’ll find barks coming from every political position imaginable. It’s kind of strange that you’re seeking enlightenment on the issue from random internet comments and expecting the most rational liberal position to be articulated, but it’s clear that you’re here to make yourself feel better (nothing like winning an argument on the internet). I love when trolls find the places on the internet that are trying to promote civility.
Having re-read Jonathan Haidt’s posts here, and his link to the NYT essay, I now more clearly see what the problem is with my question. I had been mystified that any commenters here who chose to respond, seemed to be consistently avoiding the actual question I was asking; responding instead with talk about “empathy” as if it had already been decided that it was a determinant of the meaning of “good”
In turn I was not paying attention to what were really Haidt’s (and I guess by extension some of their) key remarks; instead focusing on what I took to be a lack of response on what I thought was the critical pattern of inference that needed to be explained.
This also may shed some light on why those who have taken offense at my questions seemed to skim over what I saw as the critical logical issues in order to offer up objections to my insensitive tone or my generalizing, and to respond with tu quoque rejoinders on the matter of valuation.
Thus, Jomathan Haidt quotes himself as saying:
” … if all individuals feel some common bond or shared fate that allows them to interact civilly, you can create a group that ends up producing good reasoning as an emergent property of the social system.”
The common or shared fate dogma which I have been sneering at when I placed it in the mouth of Rawls, functions as a kind of axiom, one which is not so much demonstrated as assumed as a predicate which then conditions the form through which later moral judgments are expressed.
Haidt’s discovery that we may have differently adjusted or even kinds of moral sensibilities at the organic level, is construed as a phenomenon to be taken into account within a system which assumes a shared fated – and presumes as “good” a willingness to self-sacrifice for very significantly different others – and not a potential marker practically sectioning off operationally divergent natural kinds.
I had therefore earlier been waving off one of Haidt’s most basic predicates (even if it is formulated as a conditional) without fully realizing the conditioning role it played.
Trying to resolve issues concerning the exact status of the “liberal” notion of what is “objective” is now revealed as futile.
Whether progressives would grant the point that in saying that Mr. Joe X’s subjective belief about the category of a thing is publicly ascertainable and therefore “objective” in some sense, is not logically the same as to say that it can be intersubjectively demonstrated (even in principle) that all members of some category do share “essential attributes”, misses the bent of the liberal mind.
Whether Jonathan Haidt “really” thinks that kinds are found or created, or both, I cannot say. But I think that I can for now assume that when it comes to moral principles, rather than moral “tastes”, he believes they are socially constructed rather than deduced from pre-existing natures, and that they derive their validity from pronouncements or aims, rather than organic forms.
Different moral tastes, are seen as something to be accounted for and perhaps managed in order to preserve a social form which has been creatively decided upon (in some manner), not as determining the most viable social form for some moral “type”.
I personally think this is misguided. And not to put too fine a point on it, I think that Haidt’s forthright remarks concerning the difficulty a society of pure liberals would confront in perpetuating either their association or their lives, and his necessary equivocation or at least splitting of the definition of liberty in order to accommodate a liberal desire to be able to say that they too are in favor of “liberty” as well as equality and caring, are pretty strong indicators for the case that he – perhaps better than any of us – knows it but just cannot yet quite figure out how to manage the information and preserve his beliefs at the same time.
In any event, I am sure that most people reading this would agree that facts are more important than feelings or social cohesion for the sake of social cohesion.
Thanks for your challenging comments, unfortunately or maybe fortunatly they are only partially accessible to me. Do you have no will to improve the social form? Is it safe to assume that you have thrown in with the Catholic church, along side Alasdair Macintyre? When you seem to understand that a certain amount of social cohesion necessarily precedes facts, how can you be sure that most readers of this blog value facts over social cohesion for cohesion sake? I’m puzzling over the difference between this blog as a reasoning social system and a reason worshiping moral matrix.
From The Righteous Mind, “My definition of morality was designed to be a descriptive definition; it cannot stand alone as a normative definition. (As a normative definition, it would give high marks to fascist and communist societies as well as to cults, so long as they achieved high levels of cooperation by creating a shared moral order.)” You should probably read the book before you begin pontificating.
“(I have been persuaded about the fiscal and moral damage done by our entitlement binge by Yuval Levin). ”
At the risk of over-posting, I have to say, most decidedly having read this polemic now, I am not.
The origins of our fiscal problems do not lie in our “*social* spending”, conventionally understood. The conjecture that there is a social-spending “binge” going on is outrageous moral rhetoric.
First the moral damage.
Are we really to believe that somehow people are “better off morally” if they face the fires of “working-poor”; periodic “character building” joblessness (either through fault or none of their own), and a slew of other economic indignities (we’ll just call them “incentives” instead, in “polite” company)? Pshaw!
True, some programs horribly turned things upside down and offered crap alternatives. It’s not clear these aren’t technical, rather than “spiritual” problems. Or even problems not imagined in this essay. Why don’t companies _supply_ jobs that are suited to the needs of particularly situated workers? Why do they ignore the needs of single, working mothers? Why do they not tailor positions to the semi-retired elderly?
Besides, what were the moral alternatives? The “traditional institutions”? Don’t make me laugh. These are the same “institutions” that brought us red lining in the cities, white flight to the suburbs, and migrants-for-sale, just to make a _short_ list. (Even now, the “traditional institutions” are hard at work to keep certain people from voting.)
Now for the “fiscal damage”.
Having gotten the moral insight wrong, some too easily shade the facts on the fiscal situation to suit. But facts are stubborn things. The truth is that it has *never* been “social spending” that is bankrupting America.
For the big-ticket items, the stuff that has put the commonweal at risk in the same period as Yuval Levin analyzes, it is the moral recklessness of the GOP. (One doesn’t make this kind of conclusion lightly, without deliberation.) This is three-fold. First, security and war. Second, large tax-cuts without fiscal improvement first. Third, the moral disaster of irrational “free markets”.
“Star Wars” and the price tag of Ronald Reagan’s wistful vision of the universally loved, post-war American GI cost us dear. Check the fiscal accounts – his moral tragedy is in the numbers. George W. Bush didn’t pay for “his wars” (and we might well call them that, sadly). He just said, “War’s on. We’ll deal with that later.” Never asked for moral sacrifice, either of them. Just said, “We’re #1. We’re back! Bring it on! War is economically stimulative.”
Unlike Andrew Mellon, say, who sensibly drove the 20’s prosperity the conservative way, by feeding positive gains in public finances back into the economy via tax cuts, Reagan’s Devolutionaries were Me-Mine-Now financial engineers. They got their tax cuts / tax code restructuring. The revenue-expense accounts never balanced, in a reasonable amount of time. (In a fit of moral slight of hand, they infamously blamed “welfare queens”.) The wealth inequalities got going in earnest (the morality of defined benefit pensions was destroyed as an obligation, employee-to-worker). Eventually, in a supreme coup, the new radicals (not conservatives) on the high court made it so that unlimited, anonymous private wealth could “get into politics” to finish the job. That was moral, somehow.
There was never a catch-up tax, a true-up for their failure. George H.W. Bush, bless him, did try, despite an enormous competitive challenge, at the time, from Japan. He raised taxes to close the gap.
However, that brazen, thoroughly Burkian heresy solidified the moral, economic “exceptionalism” of the reactionary Right: even when we get it wrong, we are always right. Norquist was just getting going, back then. The Devolution had reached moral-epistemic closure. Recently, Paul Krugman, in another context, summarized it thus (total paraphrase): it used to be when your economic theory was contradicted by the facts, it was an embarrassment. Now, it is a badge of valor.
We all know the Bush-II era nonsense. The unpaid for war (that was supposed to last some 18-24 months and be self-financing) under the utterly bizarre, Orwellian moral frame of “support the troops!”.
We knew then, when those cuts were voted, that there was an aging population, just around the corner, less than a decade away. But, we had to have tax cuts, instead of public savings (debt paydown), i.e. bolstering the fiscal accounts so we’d be in a position to deal with it when the aging came to be a fiscal drain. It was worse than moral abdication. They passed structural tax cuts to solve the cyclical problem of the dot-com bust. The results have proved to be, as predicted, a DISASTER for the public finances and for our current politics, which has become a ridiculous, morally-indecisive, caustic formalism because of it, predicated on super-majority in the Senate as a rule, not exception.
Regarding public finances, I won’t elaborate on the enormous moral disaster of free markets in our times except two words: Daniel Mudd.
Most everyone knows the story about the economic disaster. Except, they don’t, because it’s been obscured. To analyze the problem properly is to “attack capitalism”.
As for the long-term peril in our fiscal situation, two things.
The real peril is from health care. Check the CBO’s, not Levin’s analysis. About 1/3 of the long-term fiscal problem is with simple aging of the population and another 1/3 with the high pace of health cost inflation.
We can deal with health cost inflation. Doesn’t even require draconian rationing. It does require bold action, most likely. And, if that is not possible, more experimentation than is implied by Levin’s one-note analysis. In any case, it’s a far more focused challenge than a long, doleful narrative about the welfare state.
Aging is a wealth re-distribution problem (and that’s why that doleful narrative has to be sung, over and over). The fact that it was made worse by the moral short-sightedness of Bush’s would-be structural tax cuts doesn’t change the factual assessment of what it amounts to. The desire of some to welch on the moral obligations in one way or the other doesn’t either.
The second point is that the moral failings of the GOP on the environment add a surreal aspect to worry about long-term fiscal imbalances (20-30 years), because we’ll all be drown, not in debt, but in H2O.
The comedy is that the floods will come on the just and the unjust in that reckoning, a perfect encapsulation of the moral bankruptcy of the big “C” Conservative state, a natural recompense of “socialize the risk, privatize the return”, nature’s rebuke of thinking in terms of process only and not community outcomes as well.
[I leave pensions out, due to length only. There is nothing magic about pensions. If you get mortality tables right and productivity growth estimates right, you can have a non-bankrupting pension system. The rest is noise. ]
” the emptiness or at least incoherence of the progressive’s recently popular concept of “the thriving of the human person” (I like how the word “conduct” has also become popular) becomes especially apparent as we view the attempts to redefine persons to include, say, apes; or observe the denial that the term “human” is a valid universal which is based on an objective natural kind.
And who knows if or when the latest genome research may make [if it hasn’t already] our traditional idea of “one humankind” unsupportable.”
Perhaps in these words DNW reveals his ‘real’ concerns? He is holding on to a belief that science will reveal the existence of ‘races’ and this will justify his ‘feelings’ that ‘they’ are not like ‘us’.
I too am the product of a typically liberal Jewish family who later spent time in Asia (japan) and came away with a different way of looking at society and culture.
In my case, I went considerably further right then you but perhaps I had less distance to travel since we were liberals not leftists (I was raised to be morally opposed to Communism for example while many of my friends and relatives were not). My parents were academics and my father in particular raised us from an early age with a solid grounding in rational skepticism with a bias towards empiricism.
On the intuition thing, James Q Wilson wrote a book that argued for the existence of an inborn and universal ‘moral sense’. Of course not all intuition is of a moral nature- much is simply rooted in the urge to survive which may be socially modified (‘women and children first’). If Wilson was correct though many of our moral decisions are rooted in biology and we might assume for example that Afghan tribal men know on some deep level that forcing young boys into sexual apprenticeship is wrong in the way some Germans no doubt sensed shoveling women and children into gas chambers was wrong despite what they had been taught. What are the universal limits of moral behavior? Not long ago many would have argued homosexual marriage would lie outside since a universal prohibition has been in effect and is still in no danger of being erased in many parts of the world. Overcoming survival-based intuitions for a greater good is an essential part of society though it can also lead to horrors (the mainstreaming of suicide bombing). Recognizing when a survival-based prohibition is no longer essential (eating Kosher food for health reasons) moves us closer to more controversial moral predicaments like abortion in which utilitarian or rights-based thinking in many cases swamp moral objections.
But what troubles me most about what I have heard you discuss so far is that you don’t seem to take into account the attraction of counter-intuitive reasoning. As a conservative I am far more aware now then I was as a liberal of unintended consequences for example and I recognize that many things that agree with our intuitions are in reality far more complex. ‘Good’ actions endorsed by ‘good’ people (banning DDT for example) often have calamitous consequences. For me, the rejection of the political identity associated with liberalism required cultivating independent thinking from what my ‘tribe’ presumably passed on to me in my genes. Of course you whole argument is a kind of skeptical attack on our ability to know anything objectively and in this way is not really that different from various post-modern assaults of truth except you posit a (pseudo?) scientific cause.
Very thoughtful comments. Thanks for sharing.
I’m not sure why you seek the book’s thesis as a skeptical attack. It seemed more rather clearly framed as a kinda new dialectic, intended to point the way to the truth (something like your demonstrated ability to perceive that, on the abortion question, it is wise/moral to sometimes switch from one “frame” of moral thinking to another to get at “a working truth”, if one could be so bold with words).
For instance, one could use these insights, along with well known cognitive errors, as educational tools. People hear narratives that resonate (including ones that might be deceptive or false). To sort out the truth of them, they have to do work. Work is biologically costly.
So, it is possible that people fall into cognitive traps, one way or another, rather than getting a “full moral education”, let’s call it.
Take your concern about unintended consequences. Fair enough. But, is is an error not to apply this concern more broadly?
To wit: we put in place “free markets”. There are many benefits. We aptly consider it the least worst solution for all of us (similar to how “democracy” was once described…). But there are costs. Are they “unintended”? Maybe, maybe not, depending on your analysis and the circumstances.
And what’s the moral way to fix them? Do we have a jubilee year, to “reset” the system, as was prescribed in Leviticus? Do we have a New Deal? Do we have progressive taxation? Put another way, there are parallel pressures for redress for the unintended consequences and we can openly consider them without fearing action paralysis, no?
Chris Story | May 28, 2012 at 8:22 pm
“Thanks for your challenging comments, unfortunately or maybe fortunatly they are only partially accessible to me. Do you have no will to improve the social form? Is it safe to assume that you have thrown in with the Catholic church, along side Alasdair Macintyre? When you seem to understand that a certain amount of social cohesion necessarily precedes facts, how can you be sure that most readers of this blog value facts over social cohesion for cohesion sake? I’m puzzling over the difference between this blog as a reasoning social system and a reason worshiping moral matrix.”
Chris,
I was going to respond to your questions yesterday, but decided to reconsider whether it was even appropriate; as this is Haidt’s blog and really about his take on moral foundations, not mine.
But since my asking of the original questions seems to have provoked a number of heated questions as to why I should even have asked what I asked, I’ll at least address yours.
“Do you have no will to improve the social form? Is it safe to assume that you have thrown in with the Catholic church, along side Alasdair Macintyre? “.
To “improve the social form” ? Not in the sense you probably mean. My comments on Macintyre might suggest why.
And so, no, on Macintyre. Although I think that some form of realism is less incoherent than the alternatives, and although virtue ethics makes a kind of realist sense in the way that other theories do not, Macintyre seems to construct his theory of morals on additional principles – specifically “dependency” – which I am not willing to endorse on the basis of what I have so far read. This is because dependency, even when taken as a universally experienced human phenomenon does not really seem to me to logically imply what Internet commentary seems to presume it implies in his system of moral inferences. I’ll reverse the image somewhat to make what I am saying about implication plain as regards the operation: If you grant or stipulate that I should respect and serve my parents because of a particular relationship I had with them, it does not imply that I owe your parents because 1. I was once a dependent child, and 2. because parents are due respect. But maybe my take is just based on the shallow Internet commentary I have read.
” … how can you be sure that most readers of this blog value facts over social cohesion …”
You did me the favor of taking the remark literally. I was being somewhat, well, more than somewhat, sardonic. Fortunately it didn’t come through, and on reflection I should have just left the comment out entirely.
Adam | May 28, 2012 at 11:19 am
“From The Righteous Mind, “My definition of morality was designed to be a descriptive definition; it cannot stand alone as a normative definition. (As a normative definition, it would give high marks to fascist and communist societies as well as to cults, so long as they achieved high levels of cooperation by creating a shared moral order.)” You should probably read the book before you begin pontificating.”
Again:
” … it would give high marks to fascist and communist societies as well as to cults, so long as they achieved high levels of cooperation by creating a shared moral order.”
and,
“… if you put individuals together in the right way, such that some individuals can use their reasoning powers to disconfirm the claims of others, and all individuals feel some common bond or shared fate that allows them to interact civilly, you can create a group that ends up producing good reasoning as an emergent property of the social system.”
So, although we may disagree as to whether I was pontificating, I think that we can agree that based on the information above, when at least in the kinds of discussions contemplated here a liberal uses the terms “good” or “bad”, he has some instrumental notion of goodness or badness in mind as one tending to or not, produce some effect which can in itself neither be said to be ultimately good nor bad – other than on what are possibly emotive terms.
So, despite your expression of pique Adam, thanks nonetheless for the additional confirmation.
It does in fact make categorizing the interpersonal claims leveled by those on political left a “good” deal easier.
“I think that if there’s anything distinctive it’s the thoroughgoing secularism of Dewey and Whitman, which is described in my book. There’s no God, no reality, no nothing that takes precedence over the consensus of a free people. What I like about Dewey and pragmatism is the anti-metaphysical claim that there’s no court of appeal higher than a democratic consensus. ” Richard Rorty.
And there we have it. Once you bracket the terms “free” and “consensus” as being empty and functionless as serious limiting conditions, you come to a pretty good understanding of what that kind of progressive mindset implies in practical terms for anyone who is willing to unreservedly throw his lot in with, and to commit to sharing a fate with, the kinds of people who style themselves as “progressives”.
Julie Thomas | May 30, 2012 at 4:50 am
” the emptiness or at least incoherence of the progressive’s recently popular concept of “the thriving of the human person” (I like how the word “conduct” has also become popular) becomes especially apparent as we view the attempts to redefine persons to include, say, apes; or observe the denial that the term “human” is a valid universal which is based on an objective natural kind.
And who knows if or when the latest genome research may make [if it hasn’t already] our traditional idea of “one humankind” unsupportable.”
Perhaps in these words DNW reveals his ‘real’ concerns? He is holding on to a belief that science will reveal the existence of ‘races’ and this will justify his ‘feelings’ that ‘they’ are not like ‘us’.”
If Julie, you accept the usual progressive idea that universals are nothing more than conventions you hardly need to go chasing after “races” for those who are “other” and unlike.
Haidt’s moral foundation theory in fact seems to posit just that situation.
Take for example 100 folks of whatever narrowly defined “race” you like. And if Jonathan Haidt is correct that the sub-sample of the psychological kind we call “liberals”, who are identifiable as a type on the basis of their liberal style moral “taste buds”, could not as a discrete grouping preserve their associations or even their lives without reliance on the “conservatives”, you would hardly need to go looking for conventional races in order to discover what might, what might to repeat, be self-defeating kinds of social arrangements with “others”.
Which is probably way the Ying/Yang argument is so important in practical terms for progressives. If it cannot establish likeness and identity of interests , it can “hopefully” establish either a mutual and reciprocal dependency relationship or at least a meshing of interests between types.
I am making no claim either way regarding any heritability of “liberal ” or conservative sensibilities, though it seems to be implied. If it can be demonstrated that it is not, then most of the problem simply evaporates.
But in more general terms, if you admit that you cannot objectively define man or woman or person or human being, it’s difficult to see how you could stake any claims concerning the objectivity of the membership assignments you make, or the rationality of any interpersonal claims you base on them.
DNW, I may not be in your league in terms of explaining myself eruditely but I think you are making an error of judgement that reveals an irrational ‘belief’, when you say that it is still possible that science will show that we are not all one people; we all Lucy’s children.
That is the starting point for a new grand narrative that explains you and me and everyone else.
DNW, I answered your questions directly. For moral subjectivists there’s no evaluative process that refers to imperatives that are not directly conditioned by subjective feelings (or beliefs) or derived from imperatives conditioned by feelings. That doesn’t prevent words like “good” and “bad” from having their ordinary meanings, unless you go beyond dictionary definitions, which don’t imply objectivity. For a moral subjectivist, if x is a fundamental value, “x is good” basically amounts to the same thing as “I (or we) want (or favor or value, etc) x.” This doesn’t make talk of moral values empty, functionless, or barking.
Progressivism and moral subjectivism aren’t the same, nor does one imply the other, whatever the general trend may be. It appears you treat them as the same because you think it gives a short cut for dismissing progressivism, but progressivism doesn’t require moral subjectivism, and moral subjectivism doesn’t have the problems you think it does. It has other problems, as does moral objectivism (see below). There’s nothing circular about moral subjectivism, nor is it incoherent. (People may be incoherent in how they hold any view.)
There are progressives just as committed to moral objectivism as you are. Some are religious; some accept natural kinds, Natural Law, Aristotelianism, or some other objectivist philosophical view. Most liberals, like most people, aren’t philosophers, and have no well developed views on moral objectivity or universals. They don’t know who Rawls and Rorty are and don’t necessarily think as they do. Nor do all progressive philosophers agree with Rawls and Rorty. Liberals don’t differ from conservatives in generally merely assuming their values. Conservatives generally do the same.
Knowing whether someone is a moral objectivist generally doesn’t give any useful information when he makes claims upon a person or time or wealth or family. A moral objectivist may be opposed to your values, and intractable by reason, while a moral subjectivist may share your values, and be swayed by appeals to them.
I don’t follow your criticisms of utilitarianism, Rawls, or Rorty. Everyone values both negative and positive liberty.
I mentioned above that I view the problems of moral objectivism and moral subjectivism as similar to those of religious belief and rejection of religious belief. To elaborate just a bit, the former faces evidentiary problems, and the latter potential motivational problems. There’s no good rational ground for partisans of either view to smugly dismiss the other.
It’s possible to recast most of Haidt’s ideas, including what seem to me the most useful ones, in terms consistent with moral objectivism. He does argue against moral rationalism, but that doesn’t rule out moral objectivism.
Haidt’s yin-yang talk depends on shared values of human flourishing. His forthright remarks concerning the difficulty a society of pure liberals would confront in perpetuating either their association or their lives aren’t about moral subjectivism. They’re about inadequate appreciation of the binding moral foundations: authority, loyalty and sanctity. He’s equally forthright about the defects of a society of pure conservatives.
Sanpete,
I’m not sure why you are retracing ground that has been covered, and then announcing conclusions which have already been drawn, as if they had earlier been in dispute.
See, I am perfectly willing to, and in fact thought I did earlier, grant that if some liberal felt such and such an urge, and engaged in, say, vocal behaviors communicating both his internal state and his dispositions toward environmental conditions which would in his estimation tend to satisfy that urge, that: insofar as any of that business were subject to public observation and confirmation, that that public observation and confirmation would meet one sense of “objective”.
For example: If you say that you personally find vanilla ice cream satisfying, and that you feel that having ready and free access to a supply of it paid for by others is “good” as you would instrumentally use the word, and that you want others to cooperate in the provision of your supply, then, with none of those conditions being in principle incapable of empirical confirmation, they – the conditions – would therefore in some sense qualify as “objective”.
But the question as far as moral objectivity goes, is not in determining whether these feelings and desires really exist in you and can be verified as existing within you to a reasonable degree of certainty, but whether they are respect worthy enough to imply that any rational operator would be compelled by a common logic to cooperate, even to the extent of doing so self-sacrificially, in satisfying them.
For example and to off focus from the pronoun “you”, what, if say a Mr. X is perverted? Or alternatively, what if there is no human nature to pervert? Perverted or not: What is Ms Y’s cooperation in aid of, if she does not share the same impulse, nor feel any inner impulse to accommodate, assist, underwrite, or even affirm? If Perverse why affirm? If contrary-wise no nature to condition a choice, then why affirm anyway if merely disinclined? X feels the desire for an affirmation for itself; Y feels a desire to focus on more satisfying investments for itself . What arbitrates; especially if Yin/Yang is really nothing more than a useful – for some – myth when taken (mistakenly) to function in a distributive sense?
Now, in response to your other angle: Whether you believe that progressivism implies relativism or not, notwithstanding “whatever the general trend may be”, is, from the perspective of my question, of little moment. I think that in reflecting, you’ll agree.
The general trend and the general case are well established. And, if contrary to the trend, say, progressive Trotskyites of the World Workers Party [no reference to a real party intended] wish to take up the cudgels on behalf of an objective human reality against some group of left-wing hedonic subjectivists, they are perfectly welcome to do so. Then they can say why – apart from having a gun pointed at my head – reason dictates that I should underwrite their particular plan for “human thriving”, and consider them human material intrinsically worthy of a commitment to a “shared fate”.
So, if there is some progressive somewhere who, and despite “whatever the general trend may be” says that he believes that the term “good” when he uses it, implies or refers to a supporting framework of categorical and objective human imperatives, then he is welcome to make his argument.
That would be more in the way of a demonstration that there really are liberals and progressives who mean something is rationally mandating when they refer to goods and the values of ends, than is found in just asserting that some do mean something along those lines, and then professing uncertainty as to why Rorty or Dewey or Utilitarianism or the Logical Positivists might be thought to more truthfully characterize “the general trend” of the progressive mentality.
Finally, I don’t have an argument with Haidt’s findings regarding moral “tastes” nor with his suggestions that these senses of the sacred, make miscommunication with others more likely.
Nor do I doubt that he envisions a system of improved communication leading to a lessening of hostility, maybe greater systemic efficiency, and possibly an enhanced well-being for some of the denizens of the system, as all are brought more cooperatively into line. So it was done, “And he called it ‘good’.”
Now we could, and I did, ask if that meant really good, or just kind of effective in realizing an end whatever that end happened to be.
But then we already have the answer to that too: as it was settled along with the question as to whether his project was descriptive or normative. Just descriptive.
Now, with a nod to Jonathan Haidt’s interesting research, I’ll bow out and respectfully leave his proprietary bandwidth a bit less cluttered than before.
DNW
DNW, I’m just responding directly to questions you asked and comments you made.
Clearly, my stating a subjective preference doesn’t imply that a rational operator would be compelled by a common logic to cooperate. Neither does your stating a moral view and believing or claiming it’s objective. Agreement must be established in either case, or one must have some other reason to cooperate. Coming up with a rationally compelling case that your view is objective is at least as much a problem as any you might think I’d face in seeking and negotiating shared subjective moral goals as a basis for cooperation.
I still don’t agree with your view that it’s at all helpful to ignore the fact that progressivism and subjectivism aren’t the same. I still think it only confuses matters in the service of an invalid short cut to dismissing progressivism. (Classical utilitarianism is an objectivist theory, by the way; it assumes the objective value of happiness.)
Haidt’s book isn’t only descriptive. Moral Foundations Theory is descriptive, but the book also takes numerous prescriptive stances in arguing for yin-yang and so on.
Jon there are rare moments when I have hope for the future of our country. I just watched you an in interview with Bill Moyers and I had one of those moments.
I am heading to the bookstore today to buy your book!
Sincerely,
Darren Hunter
Author of the Exile Project
I think the reviewers, so far, have failed to capture the magic of this work. I’m not sure why. They fail to understand the metaphysics of what is being said, I think. I think Jon maybe grasps how important it could be, that is why its reach exceeds the scientific grasp of the moment, in places, but that is okay, in my opinion.
However, it is music, not books that will save the world. Answer was in front of us all the time, maybe. 😉 LOL.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=paH0V6JLxSI#!
I am an elderly retired engineer and I would like to tersely make a few points about the various blogs concerning commentaries on the work of Prof. Haidt.
First I should say that the views expressed by Darren Hunter are basically identical to mine.
Second, as an amateur scholar of editorial pages since I was a boy of 11 delivering five Chicago dailies and religiously reading the editorial pages every day, I have a very well-placed cynicism about journalists. After a couple years I concluded that the only thing really worth reading was there was the syndicated columns of Damon Runyon. I am mildly repentant over this because it appeared as if the only individual that takes these issues in an objective sense and with some valid criticisms is Mr. Saletan of the New York Times. An awful lot of the commentaries that I read are reminiscent of “nattering nabobs” where people are talking past each other as opposed to constructive dialogue as Prof. Haidt advocates in a kind of sciency perspective.
Third, as a design engineer of over 30 years, the concept of creative thinking to find solutions of difficult problems with respect to producing functional products is rarely if ever found in blogs about our cultural and political difficulties. By way of example, I find that the nurses union (AFL-CIO) advocacy of a transaction tax on all Wall Street firms to be a terrific idea. Besides the money raised by such a tax, it opens up the nefarious activities of these psychopaths on Wall Street and in banking to public scrutiny. By my reckoning, there ought to be severe criminal penalties for evading such a tax. Naturally there will be a flight of capital as a result, but these people do not deserve the privilege they have of operating on our soil.
Lastly, I would circumspectly suggest to Prof. Haidt that he familiarize himself with the work of Dr. Kiehl at the University of New Mexico where he studies psychopathology using fMRI at a penitentiary. He has spoken publicly about the likelihood of psychopathology being on a continuum as opposed to a discrete fraction of our population as it appears in most publications. Perhaps it is whimsical to state, but sometime in the future I can see in investment brokers and candidates for office proudly saying that certifiably, using a highly advanced version of the MMPI, they are above the two sigma limit with respect to Mother Teresa as opposed to above the two sigma limit with respect to Ted Bundy.
As all conservatives know, the Christ will be returning to earth soon (it may even happen by the end of this year). I can imagine you patiently explaining to the Christ that the Devil’s point of view should be given a decent hearing and the rest of us should carefully consider both the Christ’s and the Devil’s teachings before making up our minds. According to you, taking money from food stamps, Medicaid to give tax cuts to the rich is just another valid way of solving our problems I am sure the Christ will be impressed by your fairness.
What a sour onion you are, since you don’t mind my saying so.
Here’s is what Professor Haidt actually wrote, compared to your aspersions:
“Mani’s preaching developed into Manichaeism, a religion that spread throughout the Middle East and influenced Western thinking. If you think about politics in a Manichaean way, then compromise is a sin. God and the devil don’t issue many bipartisan proclamations, and neither should you.
America’s political class has become far more Manichaean since the early 1990s, first in Washington and then in many state capitals. The result is an increase in acrimony and gridlock, a decrease in the ability to find bipartisan solutions. What can be done? Many groups and organizations have urged legislators and citizens alike to take “civility pledges,” promising to be “more civil” and to “view everyone in positive terms.” I don’t believe such pledges will work. Riders can sign as many of them as they please, but the pledges are not binding for elephants. To escape from this mess, I believe that psychologists must work with political scientists to identify changes that will indirectly undermine Manichaeism.
Jonathan Haidt (2012). The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (Kindle Locations 5271-5279). PANTHEON. Kindle Edition. “
Hard to be more literal about demonizing than that!
Do you seriously think we shouldn’t understand other views and those who hold them better than you apparently wish to? Do you think black-and-white thinking is part of the problem, perhaps, as many who oppose fundamentalism do? Because in that post you’ve got it in spades, and it’s blocking your understanding of conservatives and what Haidt is about.
Oops–that’s in reply to David, in case it’s not clear.
I understand conservatives only too well – they are the one who want to cut food stamps while refusing to cut oil industry subsidies.
I thought, believed and still do, that “we the people” is the solution.
Yes, If only Self reflective people like you in office instead “party politicians”.
Demonizing the other and this new “compromise vs common ground” lingo labels a very amusing and disturbing battle field. All neatly moderated and inflamed by the “Matrix” mind numbing media sound bites.
Its so very sad and most unfortunate that “they the political party’s” have run away with the government of We the people.
Consider, just perhaps The Party System is a dualism which creates, promotes and sustains conflict…. Rather than representation. .
But its said how does a citizen become elected to office….
so therefore we’ve bought into the need the Party System with all the problems:
Finance to elect, pacs, unions, negative advertisements, a mega million pay to play system.
“We’ve accepted this” as the means to the end of electing or placing a representative?
(Of whom do they represent)
So
The means justify all?
Or maybe has “the means” created the problem were in.
If so
Can the problem which created the problem correct the problem….?
Can a party be self reflective?
Can the media self restrain its thirst to stir controversy?
As a member of a local Occupy group and a national atheist group, I find myself at odds with details concerning the demonization of conservatives and theists. These groups (occupy, atheists, conservatives and theists) continully generate and post materials that are alarmist and provocative, churning the biases of the metaphysically commited. A recent posting via an atheist website concerns a Mr. Hagee preaching a position that all ‘witches, satanists and atheists should leave the country’. Rationally, this does not seem to be a real solution.
There has been much conversation within Occupy and the Atheists concerning finding common ground, but it appears that such a desire is in flux due to constant filtering and posting of new provocative materials. Occupy and Atheist activists constantly post new vids concerning their last harrasment(s). Many of which are intertaining, but cause me to cringe with every new insult that offends my sence of kindness and fair play. Recently I have attempted to make inputs to the local Occupy to see if there might be a way to moderate actions so to keep insight of principles and deeper ethics and to remove the ‘what might be cool’ from decision making.
I thank you for your work, I hope to read your books ASAP.
I have not read the blog you are now retracting. But I will wager that you need to be better informed about how the total burden of taxation is distributed, when ALL kinds of taxes are taken into account. It is almost meaningless to observe that many pay no “income taxes.” That is pure propaganda. This can only be true because of an arbitrary definition of what is an “income tax.” In particular, there is no reason that the payroll tax should not be seen as just as much an “income tax” as what we call an “income tax.” There are scholars who have objectively examined this complex subject, and I recommend that you acquaint yourself with their work, before you give into so easily to mere obiter dicta and propaganda.
“I’m not saying that both sides are necessarily equal; centrism doesn’t commit me to splitting the difference, or saying that both sides are always partially right in any dispute. But centrism does commit me to listening carefully to arguments from both sides, and taking my own biases into account, before trying to render any verdict. I didn’t do that. And my knowledge base as a social psychologist would give me no special skills in rendering such a verdict even if I were to put in the time.”
This discussion depends a lot on definitions. Centrist and moderate by what standard? On the political scale most would call statism the left and anarchy the right. Then conservatives and most libertarians would be considered moderate. Our democratic Republic is a moderate or centrist form of government as it contains elements of state authority and of freedom. Today, through the influence of the leftish media, academia and the leftward drift of politics over time, centrists are considered right wing –but only relatively speaking.
Another point about the drift of these discussions is a lack of economic understanding as morality cannot be understood without taking into account of the intercourse among all of the people in markets. There is no more moral system than free market capitalism which the left considers evil because it lacks control by their statist idea of government. Boiled down, today all Dems and some Repubs say they are being “fair” when they take, by force, from those who earned their wealth and give it to those who didn’t –for which they expect the votes of the beneficiaries. There is nothing fair, charitable or moral about that system which is prevalent today.
I think it absurd that free market capitalism is “moral.” Show me something “moral” about it.
Does it adjust itself if people are unemployed? If people starve? Homeless? Can’t afford health care?
Does the free market care if one person owns everything and everybody else does without? Which free market mechanism adjusts for HUMAN need?
None. Pure free market capitalism is a free-for-all where the strong take everything and the moderates and weak are screwed.
Only “statist” intervention adjusts the free market to benefit humans.
The free market leaves large groups and large sections of geography unserved. Appalachia is poverty-stricken because the free market does not prefer low populations or harsh geographies. People there still had dirt floors and no public utilities in the 1970s. Where is the “morality” in leaving these people unserved? Today, every person (in the areas I’m aware of) have access to all basic utilities–and that only happened because of “statist” intervention.
If free market capitalism is “evil,” it has nothing to do with “control.” It has everything to do with its uncaring, unfeeling behavior of seeking greatest profit not seeking greatest human need.
RE: “I think it absurd that free market capitalism is “moral.” Show me something “moral” about it.”
Just to get you started on this deep and rich topic, try one or two of these books:
The Morality of Capitalism ( http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/the-morality-of-capitalism/)
Defending the Free Market: The Moral Case for a Free Economy (http://www.amazon.com/Defending-Free-Market-Moral-Economy/dp/1596983256/ref=pd_sim_b_2)
Capitalism and Freedom: Fortieth Anniversary Edition ( http://www.amazon.com/Capitalism-Freedom-Fortieth-Anniversary-Edition/dp/0226264211/ref=pd_sim_b_1)
The Road to Serfdom: Fiftieth Anniversay Edition (http://www.amazon.com/Road-Serfdom-Fiftieth-Anniversary/dp/0226320618/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1343315139&sr=1-2&keywords=the+road+to+serfdom+by+friedrich+hayek)
Mr. Haidt, you defend the GOP position of “no new taxes” based on past GOP concessions not going as planned. You look at their position in a greater context than just the statement itself. But what about what the GOP itself has done? Every GOP president in my life has drastically increased the national debt–far more than the Democrats–because they raised spending on borrowed money. How can I take them seriously about the “principle” of not growing government when they balloon the size of gov’t for their own purposes? George W. Bush even ridiculed the idea of “pay as you go,” meaning gov’t lives within its means.
A principle is something you believe even if, no…especially when, it hurts you. All I see from the GOP are “principles” used as cudgels when Democrats are in power, but get swept aside whenever it benefits them. How is deferring payment to the Middle Class’s grandchildren a principled position?
If lower taxes is a principle, why do Republicans steadfastly refuse to cut payroll taxes? Or only cut them (a little) on condition that the 1% get another cut? If the GOP are truly principled, they would support every tax cut the Democrats offer.
Good questions. After reading and thinking deeply about the ideas put forth in The Righteous Mind, I struggle with just such questions. I am confused by much of the discussion here and in other venues (such as the comments section of the book’s page at Amazon) in part because much of the back-and-forth relies on what I see as gross generalizations about “conservatives” and “liberals”. It seems that making such generalizations gets in the way of focusing on brass-tacks specifics having to do with, for example, actual legislation, actual policy, specific measures and actions, proposed and undertaken by members of either party. As you point out, the GOP has a history going back a few decades now of enacting specific laws and programs that put the lie to supposedly “conservative” principles. How does one translate wisdom about the yin-yang of “conservative” and “liberal”, into the prevention of such a bad GOP track record of lawmaking and of GOP hypocrisy and corruption in government? And it is so depressing that one of the standard replies to such a question nowadays is “the other side does it, so your question is moot.”
I thought that Yuval Levin’s article on the moral failure of the welfare state would be a good place to see whether I might be convinced as well about our “entitlement binge” as well as to see the alternatives to Medicare, Social Security, and Medicaid envisioned by a supporter of “real democratic capitalism.” I read the words “what it is about capitalism that needs to be tempered and balanced.” Unfortunately I read nothing that suggested that anything about the practice of capitalism needed to be tempered. Not a word about the wizards of financial markets who have no skin in the game and therefore get all the upside and none of the downside. Not a word about how to incentivize oil drillers to avoid the temptations of immediate profits by skimping on “best engineering practices.” What I saw was the utopian belief in the natural goodness of businessmen to be responsible, moral people. I think Dr. Haidt’s statement that “people find ways to believe whatever they want to believe” is one that is “tempered and balanced” and results in an attitude of doubt toward the utopian ideals of conservatism. Although Levin’s article quotes Edmund Burke, I think this one by Burke goes more to the heart of the matter: “the restraints on men as well as their liberties are to be reckoned as among their rights.”
This is a late comment but I finished reading your excellent book only a few days ago. The book is great for explaining why there are different attitudes about politics and religion and why it can be difficult for compromises to be reached. What seems to be missing, and why I look forward to reading what you will write about corporate ethics in a possible future book, is the possible consequences from the current political context. Our groupishness can be manipulated, as you had pointed out with references to such works as Whats the matter with Kansas? When people are at or near the top of any social hierarchy, or a superorganism that you call it, they apparently can lose empathy for those at the bottom or those affected by their actions/decisions. This can lead to terrible results for those affected. Similarly the dehumanizing of the out-group can also lead to terrible results for those affected, as in any war crime or hate crime, where the victim is no longer seen as a human being. It seems psychopathic behavior might be seen in someone or in some group that is not innately psychopathic. I was of course happy to get some confirmation bias when reading your book after my musings over the past years on my web site, plus there were more social conditions I had not taken into account, since I am not a psychologist. The bottom line for me is I cannot fault you for revealing a little passion with a post about good/bad. We live in trying times (and I feel the superorganisms are the severest threat because of their lack of accountability) and it will probably take some passion backed by sound principles to make a difference for many others to take note and reconsider their nature, more than just writing a book expressing those principles or reading that book.
Jonathan, you are to be congratulated on achieving a level enlightenment that most have not attained.
I am impressed that even though You “wrote the book” on the subject, that you are open to change, and have seen the prejudice that clouds the vision of each and everyone of us. You have succeed clearing my view to some degree and that of all who will read our book… except those who choose not to see the truths that you present.
We must all meet in the middle and find solutions for our collective future.
Thanks for your leadership and contributions.
By the way I am a conservative republican who has great empathy and really does care about our great country and all of it’s people.
I like your work, keep it up, and maybe we can all come together to solve our collective troubles and celebrate our successes.
Jon, this sort of cluelessness is something I see a lot on the left in recent years. Eric Cantor was making a “social inclusion” argument, that society should resist devolving into feudal relationships between highly productive elites and “vassals” who are denied opportunity, mostly due to societal neglect, but in return are “taken care of” by the elites.
At one point, this was an issue the left cared about, but nowadays you only hear such talk on the right. Our political system is trending towards a coalition of the very rich and the very poor against the middle, with (right now) Democrats being the party of the rich/poor and Republicans the middle (though I stress that things change, quickly, in American politics these days).