Part of the mission of the Parr Center's Ethics in the News blog is to educate interested members of the Parr & UNC community about ethics and everyday life. There are other ways to do that, to be sure, than merely foregrounding news stories that have an ethical aspect to them. 

So today, I wanted to share some resources for understanding some of the recent empirical moral psychology which is playing such a big part in recent discussions in philosophical ethics.




Above is a video of a lecture by psychologist Jonathan Haidt on the evolutionary origins of morality and on what he calls the five main pillars of morality: Harm, Fairness, In-group, Authority, Purity. He says that Blue State Liberals consider only Harm and Fairness violations to be moral violations. Red State Conservatives (and most of non-Western peoples) consider violations of any of the five to be moral violations.

Additionally, here's a video of Haidt speaking at a New Yorker conference. He claims that diversity and mobility (which is what you encounter when you live on water routes) shrink the moral domain to just Harm and Fairness.

And, here is an important paper by Haidt, for those who are interested and want to dig deeper. 

The idea of the power of moral emotions and the post-hoc rationalizations that people do to defend their emotional judgments is an important Haidt-idea. It is discussed more in the paper than in the video, although he mentions it in the interview portion of the New Yorker video.

He says, and I'm paraphrasing:

"People's reasoning is not the source of their judgments. We make our moral judgments with our gut. It's like aesthetic judgment. You see something and you have an instant reaction. You can't stop yourself. 'That's beautiful' is your judgment. And then you think of reasons why the artwork is beautiful but that reason may not necessarily be the feature of the painting the caused your reaction/judgment. And analogously in morality, we see something and we just have an immediate reaction. Then we are so good at reasoning... but we don't reason in order to find the truth... moral reasoning developed, I believe, in order to help us persuade others to see things our way. Moral reasoning is practiced very strategically in order just to defend what you already believe because of your emotional response."

By the way, I don't know if I necessarily endorse his view, if it's his view that there may be something irrefutably valuable in the other three moral pillars. Perhaps I think it's better to be committed to a society with high mobility, high diversity and lots and lots of tolerance. The reason Authority and In-Group and Purity go away in modern cultures on trading routes is because they tend to favor unfairness to some group that is trying to live with the other groups.

Enjoy the videos!