Meme Engine

Haidt’s 6 Moral Foundations

Psychologist Jonathan Haidt has developed a fairly compelling list of “tastes in our moral pallet”.  The tasting metaphor is important, because though humans all share the same types of taste buds, we see lots of variation in food preference both between cultures and individuals.  The same variation (he argues) can be derived from our six moral taste receptors.

Here’s a description of the six moral foundations from his website MoralFoundations.org:

1. Care/harm: This foundation is related to our long evolution as mammals with attachment systems and an ability to feel (and dislike) the pain of others. It underlies virtues of kindness, gentleness, and nurturance.
2. Fairness/cheating: This foundation is related to the evolutionary process of reciprocal altruism. It generates ideas of justice, rights, and autonomy. [Note: In our original conception, Fairness included concerns about equality, which are more strongly endorsed by political liberals. However, as we reformulated the theory in 2011 based on new data, we emphasize proportionality, which is endorsed by everyone, but is more strongly endorsed by conservatives]
3. Liberty/oppression: This foundation is about the feelings of reactance and resentment people feel toward those who dominate them and restrict their liberty. Its intuitions are often in tension with those of the authority foundation. The hatred of bullies and dominators motivates people to come together, in solidarity, to oppose or take down the oppressor.
4. Loyalty/betrayal: This foundation is related to our long history as tribal creatures able to form shifting coalitions. It underlies virtues of patriotism and self-sacrifice for the group. It is active anytime people feel that it’s “one for all, and all for one.”
5. Authority/subversion: This foundation was shaped by our long primate history of hierarchical social interactions. It underlies virtues of leadership and followership, including deference to legitimate authority and respect for traditions.
6. Sanctity/degradation: This foundation was shaped by the psychology of disgust and contamination. It underlies religious notions of striving to live in an elevated, less carnal, more noble way. It underlies the widespread idea that the body is a temple which can be desecrated by immoral activities and contaminants (an idea not unique to religious traditions).

In his book “The Righteous Mind”, Haidt relates many stories from his research of people trying to justify all of their moral opinions using only the first foundation: Care/Harm.  I admit, I have the instinct to do this too.  The moral instinct comes first: “Something feels wrong about that…”, and then I try to justify my intuition by finding the harm “…maybe it would cause X sort of harm…”

Haidt’s research, as described in the book, largely consists of concocting stories about situations that will likely be seen as morally wrong, but where it is difficult to find the Harm.  In this way he demonstrates that there’s more to morality than Care/Harm. (for ex, stories about childless incest, sex with chicken carcasses, swearing at absent parents and other more or less creepy tales).

In our attempts at rationalization, we also begin to realize that maybe our moral intuitions aren’t as rational as we might have thought!  For instance the usual intuitions about The Trolley Problem seem (mathematically) irrational… we can change our moral opinions of the “right thing to do” by changing insignificant details (do you push the man, or pull a lever switching the tracks?) even though the end results remain the same.  Despite the irrationality in terms of the Care/Harm bottom line, the third foundation of Liberty/Oppression explains our reluctance to physically push the man pretty well.

Go have a look around MoralFoundations… pretty interesting stuff, with links to some morality tests you can take yourself.

metaconscious:

“Classification of fantasy and reality is itself a fantasy that humans created. Life begins when you make a distinction between yourself and others. From that moment on, the world becomes a stage for the story in which you are the main character. All humans live in a fantasy in which they are the main character. But the world doesn’t recognize you as the main character at all. What nonsense. Everyone lives their entire life tormented by this confusion. There’s only one way out of this hell. To place yourself in a position that is neither the main character nor a supporting role. In other words, the Author.”

— Kino no Tabi

I think there is some truth to this lovely quote.  Although… a work of fiction can go on, even after the protagonist dies.  As authors of our own world-views, we’ll never be able to dissociate entirely with the ‘specialness’ of our own perspectives.

Reality chooses its moments to trump our authored fantasies from time to time.

Consciousness is always present in moments when information is intentionally shared.

Listening to the last installment of BBC’s Mysteries of the Brain, I heard Dr Chris Frith made this observation:

“It is only what we are conscious of that we can deliberately communicate to other people.”

Dr Frith is a Philosopher, and Neuro-imaging researcher.  What he has here, I think, is a very good try at a criterion for “psychological consciousness”, or “scientific consciousness”.  I’m making up these terms, but what I mean by them is:

• Scientific Consciousness: A person is conscious of a thing or event if they report that they are conscious of it.

This may seem like sort of a non-definition, but it begins to make sense when you realize that Frith’s research covers areas where there are pretty big discrepancies between reacting to something and reporting awareness of it.  For example, patients with blindsight might report no sight at all in their left field of vision, despite perfectly working eyes.  Further, these patients can use information gathered from their blind area… asked to “guess” how many fingers a researcher in their blind area is holding up, they guess right every time, despite insisting there is no sight in this area.

To use my above terms, blindsight patients are not “scientifically conscious” of what takes place in their blind field.

The great thing about Frith’s characterization is that it provides a clear evolutionary motivation for why we might want this sort of consciousness: selective and deliberate communication!

The bad thing about it (for me) is that it’s only information-theoretical… it doesn’t tell us anything about breaking through the barrier from neurons to experiences.  For example, if a “completely” blind-sighted patient were to look at a rose, we know they’d report no consciousness, and we know they might be able to guess the color regardless… but do we know if something inside them is experiencing the color “Red”?  Can the answer be half-yes and half-no?

Let me end with a question that seems applicable to Frith’s suggestion: if I drive to work “on autopilot” with my mind wandering (pondering consciousness for example), am I conscious of things I react to on the drive?  Like, if I stop at 4 red lights, but can’t recall the number later, does that mean my awareness of them was at some less-than-conscious level?  On the other hand if I can recall the number later, was I conscious during the drive, or do I only become conscious when I think back on it later to count the stops?

This sentence is thirty eight characters long.

This sentence is thirty nine characters long.

dammit.

“It’s best to experience the world as personally and directly as you can rather than to sort of clothe things in concept.”

-Philip Ball

This is a beautiful quote from the science writer Philip Ball, but I can’t wholeheartedly agree.  The ability to drop a preconception, or discard a concept that doesn’t seem to fit is an important (and rare) ability.

But I think there’s just as much insight to be had by stepping back from a situation and generalizing… trying to look at the bigger picture.  I agree that one has to know when to stop theorizing and just live in your current moment, but the search for the right conceptual lenses to look at the world with is, for me, such an important part of life!

The Berry paradox

stickyembraces:

“It was in the air,”Douglas Hofstadter has written, “that truly peculiar things could happen when modern cousins of various ancient paradoxes cropped up inside the rigorously logical world of numbers,… a pristine paradise in which no one had dreamt paradox might arise.”
One was Berry’s paradox, first suggested to Russell by G. G. Berry, a librarian at the Bodleian. It has to do with counting the syllables needed to specify each integer. Generally, of course, the larger the number the more syllables are required. In English, the smallest integer requiring two syllables is seven. The smallest requiring three syllables is eleven. The number 121 seems to require six syllables (“one hundred twenty-one”), but actually four will do the job, with some cleverness: “eleven squared.” Still, even with cleverness, there are only a finite number of possible syllables and therefore a finite number of names, and, as Russell put it, “Hence the names of some integers must consist of at least nineteen syllables, and among these there must be a least. Hence the least integer not nameable in fewer than nineteen syllables must denote a definite integer.”

Now comes the paradox. This phrase, the least integer not nameable in fewer than nineteen syllables, contains only eighteen syllables. So the least integer not nameable in fewer than nineteen syllables has just been named in fewer than nineteen syllables.”

James Gleick - The Information

My God… this deserves some serious thought!