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December 14 - December 14, 2024
In my own early research I showed that moral reasoning is not where the action really is; it's not the best thing to focus on. People typically make moral judgments quickly—often immediately (as you can tell if you attend to your own reactions while you listen to your friends gossiping). We then make up reasons slowly and laboriously, in order to justify our initial intuitive judgment. Our reasoning is like the “tail” wagged by the emotional (or intuitive) “dog.” This is why moral and political arguments can be so frustrating. The people you are arguing with put out a reason in support of
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A person's mind is divided into parts that sometimes conflict, like a small rider (controlled processing, including reasoning) sitting on top of a very large elephant (automatic processing, including all of our “gut feelings” and intuitions). Each of us may think that our “rider” is in charge; we think that we come to our views by carefully weighing the evidence on all sides. Yet when we argue with others, it often seems clear to us that their “elephant” is in charge. Others seem to be emotionally committed to a position, working hard to generate post-hoc reasons to justify that position. Of
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The human mind is not a blank slate, and evolution gave us a “first draft” of the moral mind, but culture and life experience edit that draft.)
Are proportionality and equality two different expressions of the same underlying cognitive module, as we had been assuming? Are they both related to reciprocal altruism, as the biologist Robert Trivers had described it? It’s easy to explain why people care about proportionality and are so keen to catch cheaters. That follows directly from Trivers’s analysis of how we gain by exchanging favors with reliable partners. But what about equality? Are liberal concerns about political and economic equality really related to reciprocal altruism? Is the passionate anger people feel toward bullies and
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For groups that made this political transition to egalitarianism, there was a quantum leap in the development of moral matrices. People now lived in much denser webs of norms, informal sanctions, and occasionally violent punishments. Those who could navigate this new world skillfully and maintain good reputations were rewarded by gaining the trust, cooperation, and political support of others. Those who could not respect group norms, or who acted like bullies, were removed from the gene pool by being shunned, expelled, or killed. Genes and cultural practices (such as the collective killing of
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Murder often seems virtuous to revolutionaries. It just somehow feels like the right thing to do, and these feelings seem far removed from Trivers’s reciprocal altruism and tit for tat. This is not fairness. This is Boehm’s political transition and reverse dominance.
Conservatives, in contrast, are more parochial—concerned about their groups, rather than all of humanity. For them, the Liberty/oppression foundation and the hatred of tyranny supports many of the tenets of economic conservatism: don’t tread on me (with your liberal nanny state and its high taxes), don’t tread on my business (with your oppressive regulations), and don’t tread on my nation (with your United Nations and your sovereignty-reducing international treaties). American conservatives, therefore, sacralize the word liberty, not the word equality. This unites them politically with
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It took me a long time to understand fairness because, like many people who study morality, I had thought of fairness as a form of enlightened self-interest, based on Trivers’s theory of reciprocal altruism. Genes for fairness evolved, said Trivers, because people who had those genes outcompeted people who didn’t. We don’t have to abandon the idea of Homo economicus; we just have to give him emotional reactions that compel him to play tit for tat.
Punishing bad behavior promotes virtue and benefits the group. When the threat of punishment is removed, people behave selfishly.
When people trade favors, both parties end up equal, more or less, and so it is easy to think (as I had) that reciprocal altruism was the source of moral intuitions about equality. But egalitarianism seems to be rooted more in the hatred of domination than in the love of equality per se.48 The feeling of being dominated or oppressed by a bully is very different from the feeling of being cheated in an exchange of goods or favors.
Everyone—left, right, and center—cares about Care/harm, but liberals care more. Across many scales, surveys, and political controversies, liberals turn out to be more disturbed by signs of violence and suffering, compared to conservatives and especially to libertarians.56
The Fairness/cheating foundation is about proportionality and the law of karma. It is about making sure that people get what they deserve, and do not get things they do not deserve. Everyone—left, right, and center—cares about proportionality; everyone gets angry when people take more than they deserve. But conservatives care more, and they rely on the Fairness foundation more heavily—once fairness is restricted to proportionality. For example, how relevant is it to your morality whether “everyone is pulling their own weight”? Do you agree that “employees who work the hardest should be paid
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