Summer Reading: The Righteous Mind VI: Fairness and Moral Disgust
<b>Moral Disgust</b><br>
In his book <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Righteous-Mind-Divided-Politics-Religion/dp/03073…; target="”_blank”"><i>The
Righteous Mind</a></i>: <i>Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and
Religion</i> (Pantheon, 2012), Jonathan Haidt discusses Richard
Shweder's theory regarding three major clusters of moral
themes: autonomy, community, and divinity. Our culture, unlike
most cultures, gives precedence to autonomy over community, even
though the concepts important to community also appear in our
culture, including respect, patriotism, hierarchy, and reputation.<br>
<br>
But what is most interesting with respect to government ethics is
the third cluster of moral themes, divinity, which includes moral
concepts such as sanctity, sin, purity/pollution, and
elevation/degradation. What is interesting is how active divinity is
when government ethics issues arise. Clearly there is the issue of
sin: people get very angry when they feel officials have done
wrong, almost to the point where it is not an issue of misusing or
wasting public funds, or disappointing expectations, but rather
doing wrong in a more cosmic sense, breaking a taboo.<br>
<br>
One reason for this is that corruption, as implied by the word
itself, is not just about breaking a law or doing wrong. Its other
principal meaning involves impurity, an important moral concept in
the divinity cluster. And a secondary meaning involves degrading
others, as in "corrupting a minor." Corruption is about as bad as it
gets, even if it involves a small amount of money. It's because
corruption is such a value-laden word that I try to use it
sparingly, except in the expression "institutional corruption,"
which itself is too strong, I feel.<br>
<br>
As I noted in <a href="http://www.cityethics.org/content/summer-reading-righteous-mind-iii-soc…; target="”_blank”">an earlier post about this book</a>, disgust is a feeling
important to determining ethical misconduct in government.
Considering that corruption in our culture is tied to impurity,
decay, and degradation, it is natural that it elicits feelings of
disgust, even though no food is involved. To see how important
disgust (normally applied to food) is to divinity, consider all the food laws in Judaism,
Christianity, and Islam.<br>
<br>
Haidt says that moral disgust is strong whenever we feel people have
been degraded. When those who run our community turn out to be less
than than their position would imply, it disgusts us. It even makes
<i>us</i> feel degraded, dirty, somehow tainted ourselves. Similarly, when
people do something good, beyond our expectations, we feel elevated
by hearing about their conduct. One reason we don't sufficiently understand our feelings about
government corruption is that we don't look at them in comparison
with the opposite feelings that arise when we learn about the
virtuous actions of ordinary people.<br>
<br>
The divinity cluster, and the disgust it engenders, makes
individuals seek to cultivate their higher, nobler feelings and
actions, and to resist temptation. But it also contributes to
feelings of disgust about different types of people, including
feelings between men and women, and of races toward each other.
Disgust is a powerful emotion that can contribute to good conduct as
well as bad.<br>
<br>
<b>Fairness</b><br>
The central theory of Haidt's book, which comes out of Shweder's
theory of clusters of moral themes, is what he calls Moral
Foundations Theory. It posits the existence of moral modules or
foundations, of which there are six: care/harm,
fairness/proportionality, liberty/oppression, loyalty/betrayal,
authority/subversion, and sanctity/degradation. The argument is
based on evolutionary theory, but you'll have to read the book for
the ways in which these foundations are responses to adaptive
challenges. Haidt also applies the foundations to liberals,
conservatives, and libertarians, but this application is, for the
most part, irrelevant to government ethics.<br>
<br>
What is relevant is that only one of the six foundations is equally
common to those who embrace all three ideologies:
fairness/proportionality. And that happens to be the foundation most
important to government ethics. Cooperation among individuals,
especially across groups, depends on playing tit for tat, being
fair. The result is that we feel very angry when we feel people in
power, who have obligations to all of us, do not treat us all
equally. And we also hate it when they cheat on us, when they don't
give us what our democracy requires: honesty, openness, and
respect. And, of course, the responsible spending of our tax
dollars, which means competitive bidding, hiring on the basis of
skills, etc.<br>
<br>
Fairness/proportionality is also the foundation that officials most
often use to justify their misconduct, both to themselves and, when
caught, to the public. They say that they have done so much for the
community, and received so much less than they could have outside
government, that they deserve more. They've earned it. The total of
what they have taken, or shared with others, is fully proportional
to, or even much less than, what they have given.<br>
<br>
Of course, all the foundations come into play to some extent.
Ethical misconduct is harmful in that it leads to the misuse of
taxpayer funds. Ethical misconduct is seen as betrayal of our
democratic values. And it degrades our leaders and makes us feel bad
about trusting those in authority. But the strongest emotions
relating to ethical misconduct come from government officials giving
preferential, that is, unfair, disproportionate treatment to those
with whom they have special personal, business, and even partisan
relationships. That's why people feel so strongly about nepotism,
cronyism, and political patronage. That's why people are so turned
off to government when they see contracts and grants going to the
friends and families of politicians, and when land use and other
important decisions always seem to go in favor of the big
contributors to and business associates of high-level officials.<br>
<br>
Continue with <a href="http://www.cityethics.org/content/summer-reading-righteous-mind-vii-mor… next post on this book.</a><br>
<br>
Robert Wechsler<br>
Director of Research-Retired, City Ethics<br>
<br>
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