Tag Archives: morality

August 2023 in Review

Leave a reply

Most frightening and/or depressing story: Immigration pressure and anti-immigration politics are already a problem in the U.S. and Europe, and climate change is going to make it worse. The 2023 WEF Global Risks Report agrees that “large scale involuntary migration” is going to be up there as an issue. We should not be angry at immigrants, we should be angry at Exxon and the rest of the energy industry, which made an intentional choice not only to directly cause all this but to prevent governments from even understanding the problem let alone doing anything to solve it. We should be very, very angry! Are there any talented politicians out there who know how to stoke anger and channel it for positive change, or is it just the evil genocidal impulses you know how to stoke?

Most hopeful story: Peak natural gas demand could happen by 2030, with the shift being to nuclear and renewables.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: There are a number of theories on why “western elites” have not been (perceived to be) effective in responding to crises in recent years and decades. Many have to do with institutional power dynamics, where the incentives of the individual to gain power within the institution do not align with the stated goals of the institution. Like for example, not killing everyone. The possible silver lining would be that better institutions could be designed where incentives aligned. I have an alternate, or possibly complementary, theory that there has been a decline in system thinking and moral thinking. Our leaders aren’t educated to see the systems and or think enough about whether their decisions are on the side of right or wrong.

are “western elites” “irrational”?

Leave a reply

This long article on Naked Capitalism claims the leadership of western countries is not effective in a crisis, and I think there may be something to this. The Covid non-response and some recent bungled natural disaster responses from New Orleans to Puerto Rico to Hawaii come to mind. This article focuses more on Ukraine, and while that situation is certainly unsatisfactory, it is hard to see what the good options would have been. The U.S. choices (NATO expansion, Balkan War, CIA interference with foreign elections) you can point to as questionable were all made years or decades ago, when this author presumably thinks leadership was better.

I certainly share the sense that our political leadership today is not particularly confidence-inspiring. So why is this? The author gives a few possibilities [my thoughts in brackets]:

  • the rich and powerful are out of touch with ordinary people [nothing new here]
  • stormtrooper syndrome – assuming you are the good guys, your opponents or competitors are the bad guys, and the bad guys can’t win [but this was certainly the case during the Cold War and the public loved it!]
  • a “conspiracy of degenerates” – this would have to be hidden from public view
  • right-wing demagogues promoting conspiracy theories and offering a simple message as an alternative that appeals to the public [certainly happening, and this is the good old Hitler playbook we have to watch out for]
  • Iron Law of Oligarchies – any organization is controlled by a small number of powerful individuals whose top priority is increasing their own power, rather than the success of the organization
  • crabs in a bucket – one crab can escape a bucket, but supposedly two or more crabs will stop each other from escaping, the implication being that relative rank is important to us animals – if I can’t succeed at everyone else’s expense, I will make sure nobody can succeed
  • the “Mowshowitz theory” – a variation on the above where power seeking behavior is rewarded within organizations rather than alignment with the stated goals of the organization, and in fact furthering the goals of the organization without seeking power can be punished
  • “intra-elite signaling dynamics” – the power of ritual to signal acceptance of a particular belief system, and the more bizarre the better [exactly what these rituals are I had trouble following]

I have had my own theories for awhile, and they have to do with education. I do not think children are being educated well in basic logic and being able to spot logical fallacies. This makes us susceptible to propaganda. They are not being educated well in the behavior of complex, dynamic systems. They are learning plenty of math and science, but it results in short-term and literal thinking rather than longer-term and abstract thinking. And finally, I don’t think children are being challenged to think morally. I’m just talking about the habit of asking yourself before you make a small daily decision whether you think on balance the consequences are on the side of right or wrong, justice or injustice.

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

May 2021 in Review

Leave a reply

Most frightening and/or depressing story: The Colorado River basin is drying out.

Most hopeful story: An effective vaccine for malaria may be on the way. Malaria kills more children in Africa every year than Covid-19 killed people of all ages in Africa during the worst year of the pandemic. And malaria has been killing children every year for centuries and will continue long after Covid-19 is gone unless something is done.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: I learned about Lawrence Kohlberg, who had some ideas on the use of moral dilemmas in education.

Lawrence Kohlberg

Leave a reply

Lawrence Kohlberg pioneered teaching children to think morally through the use of moral dilemmas.

Kohlberg’s theory holds that moral reasoning, which is the basis for ethical behavior, has six identifiable developmental constructive stages – each more adequate at responding to moral dilemmas than the last. Kohlberg suggested that the higher stages of moral development provide the person with greater capacities/abilities in terms of decision making and so these stages allow people to handle more complex dilemmas. In studying these, Kohlberg followed the development of moral judgment beyond the ages originally studied earlier by Piaget, who also claimed that logic and morality develop through constructive stages. Expanding considerably upon this groundwork, it was determined that the process of moral development was principally concerned with justice and that its development continued throughout the life span, even spawning dialogue of philosophical implications of such research. His model “is based on the assumption of co-operative social organization on the basis of justice and fairness.”

Kohlberg studied moral reasoning by presenting subjects with moral dilemmas. He would then categorize and classify the reasoning used in the responses, into one of six distinct stages, grouped into three levels: pre-conventional, conventional and post-conventional. Each level contains two stages.

Wikipedia

I find this interesting because I think we teach children about basic morality like the golden rule, but a lot of people never progress to more abstract moral thought as they grow into adults. I am convinced if we all thought about the extent to which each and every one of our daily choices is right or wrong, the world would be a better place. We would still make some bad or selfish choices of course, but we would make more unselfish choices on balance. Instead, we go to work for companies and tend to uncritically adopt their profit-maximizing missions in place of our own values. If we thought more morally on a daily basis, we would still be under the same pressure to provide food and shelter for our families, and that would still drive a lot of our choices, but we would be weighing other considerations at the same time – for example, the suffering of other people and maybe animals, the destruction of millennia-old natural habitats, and consequences both near-term and well into the future – and that might subtly shift our small daily choices. Subtly shift a lot of small daily choices, and I believe it could add up to a large global shift for our civilization and species.

The criticism I hear of these ideas is that people make moral decisions based more on emotion than reason. But is it a valid criticism to say that if we don’t actively develop our capacity to apply rational thinking to moral choices, then our choices will be based mostly on emotion? That’s sounds more like a self-fulfilling prophecy to me.

disgust and morality

Leave a reply

This article claims that our natural disgust at parasites and other gross things is the origin of morality.

A ballooning body of research by Pizarro and others shows that moral judgments are not always the product of careful deliberation. Sometimes we feel an action is wrong even if we can’t point to an injured party. We make snap decisions and then – in the words of Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at New York University – ‘construct post-hoc justifications for those feelings’. This intuition, converging lines of research reveal, is informed by disgust, an emotion that most scientists believe evolved to keep us safe from parasites. Marked by cries of ‘Yuck!’ and ‘Ew!’, disgust makes us recoil in horror from faeces, bed bugs, leeches and anything else that might sicken us. Yet sometime deep in our past the same feeling that makes us cringe at touching a dead animal or gag at a rancid odour became embroiled in our most deeply held convictions – from ethics and religious values to political views…

These and related studies raise an obvious question: how have parasites managed to insinuate themselves into our moral code? The wiring scheme of the brain, some scientists believe, holds the key to this mystery. Visceral disgust – that part of you that wants to scream ‘Yuck!’ when you see an overflowing toilet or think about eating cockroaches – typically engages the anterior insula, an ancient part of the brain that governs the vomiting response. Yet the very same part of the brain also fires up in revulsion when subjects are outraged by the cruel or unjust treatment of others. That’s not to say that visceral and moral disgust perfectly overlap in the brain, but they use enough of the same circuitry that the feelings they evoke may sometimes bleed together, warping judgment…

From this point in human social development, it took a bit more rejiggering of the same circuitry to bring our species to a momentous place: we became disgusted by people who behaved immorally. This development, Curtis argues, is central to understanding how we became an extraordinarily social and cooperative species, capable of putting our minds together to solve problems, create new inventions, exploit natural resources with unprecedented efficiency and, ultimately, lay the foundations for civilisation.

This has interesting implications for the idea that there might be a “common morality”, akin to “common sense”, that just naturally applies to all rational people, although rational people might disagree about exactly what is included, just as scientists argue about the nature of reality but agree there is a single reality that can eventually be discovered. This is powerful because we can’t rely on reason alone as a guide to morality – there are sometimes things we could do that would be rational, but almost everyone would agree are wrong. Obvious examples would be if you could benefit yourself by lying, cheating, stealing, or killing, and be sure you could get away with it. In this case your gut tells you this is wrong even though it might be strictly rational, and that will be enough to deter most people. But if that gut sense of common morality is based partly on biological impulses shaped by past conditions that no longer apply, then maybe we should rely more on reason and less on our gut impulses of what is right and wrong.