Summer Reading: The Righteous Mind III: The Social Nature of Moral Judgment

Anonymous

Wed, 07/11/2012 - 04:10

Book Reviews

The Ethics of Gut Reactions 
According to Jonathan Haidt's book <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Righteous-Mind-Divided-Politics-Religion/dp/03073…; target="”_blank”">The

Righteous Mind</a>: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and
Religion (Pantheon, 2012), our morality is driven by our gut
reactions, particularly about disgust. Disgust, based in senses (bad
smells, yucky tastes, gross textures), extends to feelings of
disrespect for people who offend our values, especially people who
do something we consider unfair. Our reasoning generally supports
our gut reactions with what Haidt calls "post hoc fabrications." 
 
Those involved in politics tend have a far higher threshold of
disgust when it comes to officials' ethical misconduct. And elected
officials tend to be more expert at making post hoc fabrications.

The best way to see how important emotions are to ethics is through
people whose emotions are limited, for example, psychopaths and
those who have had damage to their ventromedial prefontal cortex.
Those with damage to their ventromedial prefontal cortex feel no emotions
and yet do well on moral reasoning tests. But their lack of emotions
leaves them without the guidance necessary to make ethical
decisions. Nothing feels right or feels wrong. We need that feeling
of disgust or compassion to make ethical decisions. 
 
It is because psychopaths lack the emotions involved in compassion
and shame that they cannot act ethically. They say and do whatever
gets them what they want. 
 
But feelings themselves are not enough, because we can justify our
feelings (such as entitlement, revenge, or loyalty to a family
member or a colleague), even when they allow us to act wrongly. Why
do we feel called upon to explain our feelings? Haidt explains that,
with respect to our preferences, it's enough to simply say, "I don't
like it" or "I don't want to." But this is not sufficient when it
comes to others doing something that has nothing to do directly with
us. Not liking or wanting is meaningless in such situations. So we
turn to moral reasoning. He writes:<ul>

I can't call for the community to punish you simply because I don't
like what you're doing. I have to point to something outside of my
own preferences, and that pointing is our moral reasoning. We do
moral reasoning not to reconstruct the actual reason why we
ourselves came to a judgment; we reason to find the best possible
reasons why somebody else ought to join us in our judgment.</ul>

The Social Nature of Moral Judgment 
Haidt argues that moral judgment is, therefore, social in nature.
"Moral talk serves a variety of strategic purposes such as managing
your reputation, building alliances, and recruiting bystanders to
support your side." This is why moral judgment is so different in
poor and healthy ethics environments. In a healthy ethics
environment, one manages one's reputation by being open, responsibly
handling one's conflicts, seeking professional advice, and
acknowledging one's mistakes. In a poor ethics environment, one
manages one's reputation through denial, accusation, cover-ups, and
the insistence that one is a person of integrity. 
 
In a healthy ethics environment, alliances are not built on the
strategic manipulation of language, but on the basis of shared
democratic values. And in a healthy ethics environment, people try to recruit only those who share these values, rather than those whose
partisan or personal loyalties take precedence over the responsible
handling of conflicts by oneself and one's colleagues. 
 
The social nature of moral judgment can work for or against good
conduct. People can come to an official's defense, insisting that
she followed the law and is a woman of integrity. Or, more benefically for the community, people can
share their outside viewpoint with an official whose blind spots
prevent her from seeing the situation clearly. They can provide her
with viewpoints she couldn't see for herself, thereby triggering new
reactions and intuitions that will allow her to change her mind.
People occasionally do this themselves, but it is rare. We need
others, especially those we trust, not to support our
misunderstandings and misperceptions, but to challenge and correct
them. 
 
However, this isn't always easy, because these others tend to employ rational
arguments, while the official is being guided by emotions. Haidt
uses the metaphor of an elephant (emotions, intuition) and its rider
(reason). You usually have to appeal to the elephant, who quickly
leans one way or the other, not the rider, who has little control
once the elephant has leaned. This is why many government ethics
professionals try to get officials past their immediate emotions by asking
them to consider what their mother would think if they were to
engage in a certain kind of conduct. This is an emotional rather
than rational approach. and therefore often has a better chance to steer the
elephant in the right direction. 
 
Our Inner Lawyer 
The main way reasoning can work is if it is the reasoning of a
neutral professional, for example, an ethics officer. In fact,
another metaphor that Haidt uses to describe the relationship
between our ethical reasoning and our emotions is the lawyer-client
relationship. It is our inner lawyer that manufactures arguments to
serve our gut reactions. Many government attorneys help officials' inner lawyer manufacture
these arguments. An ethics officer is more likely to explain why and
how the inner lawyer is wrong. 
 
But even ethics officers should consider providing what Haidt
recommends: respect, warmth, and openness to hearing what the
official has to say before stating one's own case. "Empathy is an
antidote to righteousness," Haidt says, while recognizing the
difficulty of empathizing across a moral divide. For example, it may
be difficult to empathize with an official who insists on his
integrity and attacks the individual who has made allegations
against him, when the ethics officer knows that these allegations
are reasonable and feels that the official is unfairly turning the
situation into a personal attack on his political opponents. But it
certainly makes it more likely that the official will be open to a
different point of view if the ethics officer listens well and shows
respect and understanding for his plight, before providing his
advice. 
 
As Haidt says, "if there is affection, admiration, or a desire to
please the other person, then the elephant leans toward that person
and the rider tries to find the truth in the other person's
arguments." If an official rejects, or has no reason to please, the
individual providing ethics advice, the advice will make very little
difference. Unfortunately, many of the people with whom an official
has close ties, or desires to please, are the people least likely to
give the official valuable ethics advice, because they are too much
like the inner lawyer, seeking arguments to justify rather than
improve the official's conduct. 
 
Reputation vs. Truth 
The inner lawyer metaphor comes together with the social nature of
moral judgment in Haidt's conclusion to his third chapter and the
beginning of his fourth chapter:<ul>

Why did we evolve an inner lawyer, rather than an inner judge or
scientist? Wouldn't it have been most adaptive for our ancestors to
figure out the truth … rather than using all that brainpower just to
find evidence in support of what they wanted to believe? That
depends on which you think is more important for our ancestors'
survival: truth or reputation. Suppose the gods were to flip a
coin on the day of your birth. Heads, you will be a supremely honest
and fair person throughout your life, but everyone around you will
believe you're a scoundrel. Tails, you will cheat and lie whenever
it suits your needs, yet everyone around you will believe you're a
paragon of virtue. Which outcome would you prefer?"</ul>

Haidt notes that Plato's Republic is an extended argument for why it
is better to be than to seem virtuous. However, in The Republic,
Glaucon argues that an unjust man widely thought to be good is
happier than a just man with a poor reputation. Haidt believes that
Glaucon, rather than Socrates, is right. One reason is that
Socrates' argument depends on the rule of reason. But reason does
not rule; the elephant does. And to the extent it participates in
ruling, reason justifies emotions more often than it seeks the
truth. Reason is used primarily to persuade others (a social
process), not to discover the truth (an individual process). Of
course, reason is also used to persuade oneself, which makes it
doubly valuable as a persuader. No one persuades as well as someone
who believes his own arguments. 
 
Haidt draws from this a principle for designing an ethical society:
"make sure that everyone's reputation is on the line all the time,
so that bad behavior will always bring bad consequences." Another
way Haidt puts this is, "Design institutions in which real human
beings, always concerned about their reputations, will behave more
ethically." 
 
This is the argument for tough ethics enforcement. But it assumes
that ethics is more about bad behavior than it is about wrong
behavior. It accepts the government's official's gut reaction to
defend his reputation as a good person, which is what causes so many
of the problems in government ethics. An ethics program that
provides for enforcement, but focuses on training, advice,
disclosure, and discussion, has at least a chance to take government
ethics out of the damaging criminal enforcement paradigm into the
creation of an ethics environment where gut reactions will be about
acting responsibly (and thereby creating a good reputation for
oneself and for the government as a whole out of right behavior)
rather than about the skewed emotions that try to create a good
reputation out of wrong behavior, via the pretzel logic of legal
justifications and even more damaging denials, accusations, and
cover-ups. 
 
To work, ethics programs that depend primarily on officials' concern for their
reputation have to have serious criminal penalties and a great deal
of authority and resources. Such programs are very expensive and disruptive to a local
government. 
 
Continue with <a href="http://www.cityethics.org/content/summer-reading-righteous-mind-iv-acco… next post on this book. 
 
Robert Wechsler 
Director of Research-Retired, City Ethics 
 
---

Search

Summer Reading: The Righteous Mind III: The Social Nature of Moral Judgment

Tags

Share This Page