Cosmos Philosophical Ideas｜5+1 flavors of "Good people are always self-righteous" after reading Part 2

foreword

Time passed quickly, and I unknowingly returned to Matt City to post steadily every Friday, and I have come to the third article. There is also an essay in the middle of a dialogue with myself , expressing my thoughts in my mind and sing praises to the world. vicissitudes of life.

If you read my previous article , I mentioned this book "Good People Are Always Self-righteous", you should find that the experiments and examples given by this psychologist are quite interesting. In the first part of the book, he mentioned, Humans are not rational at all. We can always make decisions in an instant, and then rationality will give reasons and arguments for our choices.

Today is the second part of the book. This time, the atmosphere created between the lines is not as relaxed and funny as the previous part, but with a slightly worried and helpless tone , he talks about the polarization of American politics , analyzes the Democratic Party and the Republic The moral foundation of both parties .

harm and fairness

People's moral intuition about "harming others" can be quite strong, and when we ask five-year-olds with little education what is good, what is innocuous, and what is wrong.

He cites an experiment done by Elliot Turiel, where the teacher asked the children: If a boy wants to play on a swing, he pushes a little girl off of it, right? As a result, all the children immediately said , " No !" He wanted to prove through this experiment that people's moral intuition about " harming others " is very strong . (P.31)

Here, as in the previous part, the author uses a central metaphor to bring out what he wants to say. This metaphor is much simpler and easier to understand than the previous metaphor of the rider: he compares the human righteous heart to the tongue , which has five +1 taste receptors , which together constitute a whole function - taste , which is morality .

For the moral foundation of human beings, the indicator of "harm" can be said to be the most common flavor, followed by fairness. The author's point is that in addition to harm and fairness , there should be other values as the moral foundation. .

you're weird

Until he gives a definitive answer, as always, he brings in the subject through interesting experiments: the author says he comes from a strange and moral world that is very different from that of the University of Virginia, the University of Pennsylvania.

When passers-by responded to the "moral dilemma" he devised every time with the expression "Which planet are you from ? What kind of strange question?" what ? What is his moral basis ? ( really weird )

Three cultural psychologists have done dozens of studies on the Western (W), educated (E), industrialized (I), wealthy (R), democratic (D) minority. Their initials just add up to WEIRD ( weird ), and it turns out that, like the letters, the typical personalities that psychologists have summarized don't apply to them at all .

And Americans are more extreme than Europeans, especially educated upper-middle class, such as Penn State college students, who have several qualities: the weirder you are, the more you see the world full of individual interpersonal relationships . He also pointed out that when Easterners and Westerners use the sentence pattern "I am..." to introduce themselves, Easterners often introduce themselves with social roles , identities, and relationships with others , while Westerners directly introduce themselves. Tell me what your personality traits are .

The author feels that different societies and cultures have different views on eccentrics and non-eccentrics, and the moral systems proposed are also very different . For example, Kant and Mill's theories are mostly individualistic , while Confucius believes that people are always in a network of social relations , and What are the responsibilities that people should bear in social relations? Therefore, the author believes that the question of "what kind of moral system is better?" is put aside, and we should first clarify what morality cares about . (P.154-158)

Invisible moral matrix beyond habit

The author argues that the problem with American politics today is that people on both ends of the political spectrum see people on the other end of the spectrum as idiots, Democrats see themselves as ethical , for peace , and labor rights , while Republicans are a group that supports War , big business , racist people . Everyone feels that they have seen the world clearly, and that the worldview they recognize is the only possibility, but they have never thought that there are other moral worlds in the world .

The author argues that either the Republican Party, which supports the divine ethical ground (God), or the Democratic Party, which focuses on the autonomous ethical ground (the subject's rationality), has only seen one side. After he went to India to investigate, he found that there are various moral values in the world. When he liked the Indians who treated him well, he found that even if he did not fully agree with the moral values constructed in their hearts , he could still " understand " " Why do they think so . (P.159-P.166)

5+1 moral taste buds

Going back to the first question, in order to understand why people have such different views on morality, let’s start by discussing the evolutionary characteristics shared by human beings. Although morality is used by the author as a metaphor for taste, it does not mean that it is flexible enough to “anything can be ”. Just like if you only use one flavor of ingredients to cook, the finished product must be quite unpalatable. (P.178-P.180)

The author cited experiments to show that if Kant and Bentham were still alive today, they would definitely be considered Asperger's patients, because their moral system is very strong, but they ignore the ability to empathize with other people's feelings. He believes that it is not comprehensive enough to discuss only the way these two philosophers should point out the proper moral operation by means of reasoning, logic , and mathematics. Therefore , he agrees that Hume's method of emphasizing multiple and perceptual is the method that he pays more attention to . (P.181-P.189)

Through the painstaking research of cultural psychology, the authors and colleagues found that all cultures construct moral matrices according to common cognitive logic, and found that these five basic principles of morality: caring / harming , fairness / deception , loyalty / betrayal , authority / subversion , Holy / depraved , through evolutionary research, it is found that human beings have encountered these problems for hundreds of thousands of years, and different groups have different moral intuitions and constitute different communities. (P.192-P.197)

Subsequently, the author analyzes each moral principle in depth, and I will not help to organize it here, because I think that intuitive understanding of these five indicators does not affect his theory. Those who are interested can read the introduction of P.206-P.231 in particular.

In 2005, he set up a "Moral Foundations Questionnaire" questionnaire based on these five indicators, and collected 1,600 responses within a week, and found that the more liberal people were , the more his moral matrix was most concerned about. The principles are caring and fairness , that is, liberal morality is made up of two basic principles.

In contrast, conservatives believe that the importance of the five basic principles of morality is very close, so we can say that conservative morality is composed of five principles . Over the next few years, the researcher iteratively improved the questionnaire , added more questions , and set up a website to speed up questionnaire collection. By 2011, he had received feedback from a total of 132,000 respondents. It turned out that these fundamental differences persisted no matter what they asked . (P.248-P.257)

However, they immediately discovered that when someone tries to dominate others, people notice it and get angry about it, a value shared by most liberals and some conservatives, and more likely than other values. It has become a common basis for both parties , so the principle of "freedom/oppression" is added. But even with the addition of the sixth indicator, the moral outlook of both liberals and conservatives is still the difference between three principles and six principles .

This report answers the confusion of some Democrats: they are the ones who have been speaking out for the disadvantaged , why do farmers and labor still vote for the Republican Party ? The reason is very simple. These people vote to choose their own moral interests, and do not want their country to pursue caring for the disadvantaged and pursue justice, while overly ignoring other values. (P.265-P.276)

summary

For the author, he deals with the issue of "gut first" in the first part, and the second part illustrates how the "six indicators of morality" affect one's political position, and as we become more aware of the differences between the two sides and understand each other's ideas at the same time. , we are also gradually able to move towards dissecting the meaning of the group itself.