I live in New Haven, Connecticut, which is a city in the East Coast of the United States. As an exercise I thought of where my own society fits as a society. Using theories we talked about in last lecture, so we're plainly individualistic. We're not very collectivist. We're plainly autonomy oriented. The ethics that we use is an ethics of rights and fairness. If, if I tried to persuade somebody that they should do something because it's right and it's right because of what God believes or it's right because of respect for our Country or something, they would roll their eyes at me. Are you moral arguments in my society take place over questions over people's freedom, people's liberties. Notions of equity, and fairness, and sympathy, and care. Autonomy, notion. Non-community notions and non-divinity notions. I'm not sure whether we're tight or loose. I've been to tighter places like Tokyo. I've been to looser places like Guadalajara. So we're sort of probably in between. But the exercise of figuring out where your country stands on the, these parameters and where your society stands. Makes you realize that, that the, the, sort of how crude it is to say a whole swath of countries, you guys are this and you guys are that. To talk about the West versus the East in such a way that treats China and India, for instance, as morally indistinguishable is maybe a useful first pass, but in the end we're just going to have to get a lot sharper. Even within a country, so, so, the, the, the moral system of Americans as a whole, may well be different than the moral systems of Indians as a whole. But plainly within the United States, over all sorts of moral issues your average resident of Connecticut, where I am, is going to reason differently than your average resident of Alabama. Or Colorado. Or Texas. New Mexico. You have these different places which have these, their own politics, their own moral views. It's not, the differences by world standards are not huge. But they're there and they're quite interesting. There's variation within an-, any society. And, and so, any proper theory of moral psychology will have to help us understand not only the ways in which Americans are different from Chinese. But also ways in which people from the American South are different from America North. And how I'm different from my neighbor down the road. And and, and as a way to explore this, I want to zoom in on an American case. With apologies for people who are less familiar with the American case but it, it, it's an area where we've done a lot of study. And I think it's quite likely that some of the conclusions from this American case could extend more broadly. We'll look at an American case of a specific sort of moral difference. And, as a way to introduce this difference, I've put up here some. Some issues that people have moral opinions about. I, I begin with God, guns, and gays. It's a, it's a famous appr, expression. It was first used to my knowledge by a republican senator in the 1990s, who announced his platform, was he was going to run on God, guns, and gays. And what he meant was he was going to argue that religion is very important. And it's important for morality. It's something which should be respected, it should be listened to. Guns, we should have rights for guns. He was very much against restriction on gun laws. And as for gays homosexuality was viewed as a sin. Seemed morally wrong to be a, to be shunned socially, but also blocked by the force of law. And so the, the phrase because of the pleasant alliteration of gods guns, should just be God probably. God, guns, and gays has stopped. Then they have others. Abortion, capital punishment, health care, affirmative action, foreign aid. These are political issues, these are social issues, but they're fundamentally moral issues. You, your view on any of these topics will turn on your notions of what's right and wrong. And although some morality might be universal, the fact that we're going to fight about these suggests that, at least here, they aren't universal. There really are differences. What's interesting, and what's obvious to anybody who's, who's observed politics, is that ones views on these issues are not independent. More you, you, you're stance on moral issues, connects in interesting ways. So for instance if I know somebody in America is pro-gun. They are very much against gun control laws, they think Americans should have the right to bear arms and this right should not be infringed in even the slightest way by governments. Suppose I know that, I could guess that they are against abortion. I could guess they don't believe women should have a so called right to chose. Now I might be wrong, its a statistical guess, but it's not a bad guess. If, if I hear someone is very much in favor of socialized medicine in the United States, in which the government takes care of all health care, a single-payer system known as, I could guess that they are in favor of gay marriage Somebody who is obsessed with the idea of strongly military is probably against affirmative action. Again, these aren't perfect, but they are reliable. You can take moral issues that aren't obviously connected, like healthcare and gay marriage, and find connections. So what explains this? Well, a lot of the variation in peoples' moral views, a lot of the what could cause people to, to kind of go from, from this position, to a series of moral issues, to this position, can be captured on a single parameter. This parameter, as if you would turn a single knob, your views on all sorts of issues will go with that turn. And this parameter is entirely familiar. It goes under some slightly different names, but we give you it here as a contrast between liberal and conservative. So you can take college undergraduates, or older people, or the whole country for that matter, and ask everybody where do you fall on that scale. Are you a conservative, either very conservative, conservative, slightly conservative. Are you liberal, very liberal, liberal, slightly liberal. Are you in that middle part are you a moderate. And it turns out that people's answer to that single question, that single very crude question, predicts a lot of things about their moral views. So why is that so? To put it another way, what is it to be a conservative or a liberal? What goes in the heads of people who have conservative viewpoints as opposed to those who have liberal viewpoints? Well, because conservative and liberal are political terms among other things, they, they represent groups that are in constant clashing. And because they're of different moral positions, they also represent views that are in constant conflict. We don't tend to like so much people who hold very different views than we do. Particularly, when we're fighting over the question of which views get to hold sway over our laws and our policies. So, if you ask a liberal they may tell, explain to you, that conservatives, the conservative psychology what goes on their heads could be explained fairly simply. They are selfish and simple minded. If you ask a conservative, the conservative might point out that the liberal is an immature bleeding heart. Someone, someone so overwhelmed by, by empathy and care that they can' think intelligently about hard problems. Conservatives are said to be greedy and uncaring about others. While, liberals are failures trying to leech of the successful. If you ask many, if you ask people on one side, they will say their side is rational, the other side is emotional. If you ask people on the other, they will tell you the other thing. Everyone sees themselves as the rational agents and sees their opponents as people swayed unreasonably by weird emotions, and agendas, and ideas. In the end, I think, at the deepest level, there is a temptation to see those of, those who have different political or moral views and simply evil. This may be enjoyable. I don't think it's, it, it, it is within your own in-group to castigate the other group and mock the other group as a source of tremendous fun. I won't deny indulging in it sometimes myself. But it's not how science is done. As science is done it's kind of an empirical interesting question. How do you characterize these different political makeups? And this is, this is a question of, I'd describe it as a question of science political psychology maybe, but neuroscience these days. But of course it's a broad question. The question of the nature of political differences. Particularly those political differences that correspond to moral differences is one that has engaged all sorts of people including political scientists, economists, philosophers, and alike. So let's look at a few, a few ideas here. One idea is proposed by Thomas Sowell. And Sowell suggests that liberals and conservatives have different world views. Very broadly, conservatives have a constrained vision and liberals have an unconstrained vision. And a better way to put this is conservatives have a tragic vision of human nature. liberals, a Utopian vision. The psychologist Jonathan Haidt, nicely sums it up by associating the conservative view with a quote from Immanuel Kant. "Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made." And he associate, associates the liberal view with the stylings of John Lennon and, particularly, the song, "Imagine". If I was there to try to sing "Imagine", well, first, you won't want to hear it and, second, I'd probably entering some sort of copyright violations. So I'll see if I can get away with just reading aloud, just two parts of it. Imagine there's no heaven, it's easy if you try. No hell below us, above us, only sky. Imagine there are no countries, it isn't hard to do. Nothing to kill or die for, and no religion, too. And if you were to pull people and say, you know, John Lennon or Immanuel Kant. You'd probably get answers that would, sort of, relate in a fairly clear way to their political leanings. In general, one could argue that, that because of this tragic vision, utopian vision difference. All sorts of things follow. It follows that conservatives would be more sympathetic towards tradition. Especially religious tradition, because, because, if, if, something has been around for a long time and its kept us surviving, we kept going with it, we should be, we should be very loath to give it up. We are on a precipice And, you don't start messing around when you're on a precipice. On the other hand, if you're liberal, you may have more enthusiasm for trying new things. For top down solutions. For Utopian ideas of intellectuals and scientists for how to reshape us, make us kinder to others. Make us less racist. Make us better people. And so some of these things could correspond legitimately from these broader views of human nature, that go on with liberals and with conservatives. Now, I'm not sure how happy people would be though with this analysis, it's controversial for many reasons. For one thing, it, one could always tell a story for why a given conservative view. Well, that could naturally follow from a tragic view on human nature. While a given liberal view could naturally come from utopian view of human nature, but it's kind of easy to tell these stories. And the problem is that there is not as regular a connection between specific views and liberals versus conservatives, as some people seem to believe. So for instance, liberals once adopted views that conservatives now adopt, and vice versa. So notions of IQ testing, which are now largely hated by liberals were once a very liberal Idea. notions, certain ideas about healthcare which were once championed by conservatives are now championed by liberals and hated by conservatives. It's also not clear how well this sort of continuum as I've been describing it works for other countries. You don't want a political psychology that's entirely geared towards the United States of America. Because to the extent it captures real facts about how we think and how we and, and, and our moral sense, you'd want it to apply more, more broadly. Also I did say, and I think it's true, that where you stand on the scale from very liberal to very conservative, has huge predictive powers about your moral views on all sorts of things. But it's not perfect, and there are people who don't really fall onto the scale at all. So, many Americans, for instance, identify themselves as libertarians. And libertarians don't really fit on the scale. Libertarians, for instance, are very much in favor of gay rights, including gay rights to marry, if, if people can marry, because because they, they are totally against intervention of all sorts. Another hand they're very against things like socialized medicine because they are highly skeptical of a government intervention. So its not clear that people political views clearly fall into a liberal, John Lennon, versus conservative, Immanuel Kant perspective. Let's explore a different approach, not necessarily rejecting the Thomas Sowell ideal, which may have a lot of truth to it, but maybe supplementing it or expanding upon on it. And this different view bring, brings us back once again to Shweder. So Shweder talked about three sorts of ethics, community, autonomy and divinity. And he argued that these ethics were emphasized in different ways in the countries around the world. Where United States is, is famously and exceptionally obsessed with autonomy over overriding everything else. Well, Jonathan Haidt, who was Shweder's student. and, and who is an extremely influential moral psychologist and we've seen his views earlier in this lecture series, earlier in this class. And he argues that we can adopt Shweder's perspective and extend it to not just differences across different countries, but to differences within the United States. And so he takes Shrader's view and he slightly re, re, restructures it in terms of five moral foundations. So instead of community, there's the moral foundation of authority, which relates to the notion of hierarchy and, and who you're, who's above you and who's below you. And ingroup, which captures the notion that part of an ethics of community is notions like patriotism. Or the, the evils of betrayal. Autonomy relates to different notions involving care and fairness. And and divinity involved notions of purity and sanctity. So, what Haidt did and he has done a lot of work since then but here is a classic study, which I want to focus on. Is he just got people to rank themselves as to how where they stood on the scale from very liberal and very conservative. And just ask, how seriously do you take these different moral foundations. How seriously do you take harm and fairness? Which correspond to, to Shweder's anatomy ethics. How seriously do you take in group and authority? Which correspond to Shweder's community. And how strong do you take purity? Which corresponds to Shweder's ethics of divinity. And here are the results. And as you'll see, they're quite striking. The conservatives more or less rank them all the same, the conservatives take all of these moral foundations seriously. The liberals, particularly the very liberals are different. The very liberal liberals take harm and fairness, as extremely morally important. But other values, in group authority purity, much less so. Haidt goes on to argue that, what we see in American conservatives, is the pattern we see all around the world. Where most people around the world take all of these values seriously, to some extent or another. What we see in liberals is a very unusual case where an ethics of autonomy. Notions of the wrongness of harm, the importance of fairness, are privileged powerfully over other ethical principles. And this graph is going to lead us to certain questions we could ask about the details of these moral foundations. Which will, be the topic of our next two classes. [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [BLANK_AUDIO]
