Or at least, that was my theory before my wife shared some of her psychology reading.
Robert Hare studies psychopaths. His study of pscychopathy (can anyone pronounce that? I'm going with a homeopathy-style syllable-accented short-o) is rather extensive, and he notes a number of things that I hadn't previously known about psychopaths. While most folks who look into psychopathy know that psychopaths have very little/no conscience, there appears to be an additional piece of information that most of us didn't know. Apparently psychopaths also don't feel (much) fear.
If one takes and applies the modular-brain theory, and Occam's razor...one might be inclined, as I am, to believe that the lack of ability to feel fear causes a lack of conscience. Following the train of thought...
Conscience is created through fear. Particularly fear of social disapproval.
To remind folks of some other ethical theories...Dr. Haidt's 5 moral dimensions are:
- loyalty/ingroup/outgroup
- fairness/reciprocity
- harm/care
- purity
- authority (obedience)
- Trader ethics
- Protector ethics
I thus conclude that ethics are inculcated in kids rather young, mostly by means of fear (some disgust), in order to permit proper functioning in society. And thus all our moral intuitions are suspect, and I should pursue instead a rationalist approach to both meta-ethics and ethics, even though rationalist approaches fail a lot more than traditionalist approaches, as per my "how-to-know" post. David Schmidtz gives the rationalist meta-ethics a solid foundation. And I am uncertain as to how much farther one can productively go ethically in general. What kind of social environment does one face is probably the next question.
Posts
2 comments:
There is a part of morality that comes from math, and from our nature as physical beings. Rands is does leads to ought, even if she didn't get all the details. Non-zero sum games, prisoner dilemmas etc.
There is fear and there is how to achieve ones goals. A lot of little kid morality is aligning ones emotional self to ones self interest. Lots of testing. lots of automatic programs. Slow slow learning.
As per some previous posts...I think it's stronger than that.
1. Self interest doesn't take ethics, as conventionally understood. Only Rand's highly nonstandard definition permits that.
2. Rational calculation can get you the iterated prisoner's dilemma results which says that roughly you should play nice with others unless it's a clear conflict situation, and even if the opponent screws up. Math supports Jesus. Other Cheek, etc.
3. So far we're in a situation that says...cooperation with others is in your self interest...without talking about the value gained from other people/the human existence as a social animal. So the result is probably a lot stronger than that. It may even be the case that ALMOST always, you are best helped by a general niceness.
4. But I can't help teach most 3yos the math to get there. So I teach ethics.
5. My new assertion: The mechanism by which ethics is actually learned is strongly tied up with the fear response. Probability 70% because those people with a broken fear response also have broken ethics / conscience. Also witness pangs of conscience/guilt as personally experienced. Same kinds of physical response as fear. Ditto people's responses to being quizzed about ethical issues...fight/flight.
Post a Comment