Claim: The moral foundations are the built-ins in the monkeybrain of how to interact with other people. Basically, the moral foundations provide solutions to 3 problems that a social/pack animal faces:
- How do we interact with the outgroup?
- How do we identify the ingroup?
- How do we interact with the ingroup?
Two additional problems: how do I care for myself, and how do I care for my family, are solved before this using simpler game theory.
As always, here's Haidt's page. Moral foundations list:
- Harm/care
- Fairness/reciprocity
- Ingroup/loyalty
- Authority/respect.
- Purity/sanctity
- Liberty/constraint
Foundations 1,2,6 are the foundations that are used in the presence of ingroup. Foundations 3-5 are foundations used to exclude other folks from the ingroup, identify membership, and justify treating the outgroup badly. Hunter gatherer tribes appear to be very high on 6, very low on 4. So do farmers. And super-significantly, so do the richest people. (Wealth > $5M? slam dunk for super-strong don't tell me what to do sentiments) So do folks who aren't raised in systems that are designed to teach obedience (all schools try -- some suck, some religious homeschoolers).
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4 comments:
Are farmer children disobedient?
Are farmer wives not subject to their Husbands?
Same questions for H/G
Haidt is very muddled. Skillfully equivocating on brain/mind, they are able to use teleological language while claiming to be evolutionists. I speak of the first paper in their publication list.
There are odd sentences everywhere even in pure biology such as "Infant brains hardly vary across cultures & races".
So do adult brains vary?
And the distinction between proper and actual domain of a module is just say-so with no reasons provided. Unless it is that the proper domain is the intersection of actual domains over all cultures.
Gyan,
Thanks for dropping by the blog. I forgot to say so earlier.
1. Farmer Children ... they appear to be moderately disobedient...but even more than that, not subject to parental authority except in a very narrow range. Are they more or less obedient than schooled or factory-kids? I think less, and by a lot.
2. Wives...women's lib is VERY new. There is some indication wifely obedience was substantially minimized in some "uncle" cultures with matrilineal property inheritance. But the evidence seems unclear.
Adult brains do vary substantially: use causes neuron growth in various directions.
Haidt's moral foundations, like all theories, are a model for better understanding/predicting the world. He claims that it is easier to understand human ethical variation if you first understand that there are 6-ish categories that human ethical positions fall into
(fairness, care, ingroup, authority, purity, liberty), and that many differences between folks' politics comes down to differences in how important they find the elements.
I put low/negative value on authority, near-zero value on ethical purity, and very high value on liberty. My self-identified ingroup is contrarian high-IQ geeks, and almost no one is very good at identifying their own ingroup biases. I'm average-ish on fairness & care.
Everyone but the anarchists puts MUCH lower value on liberty than I do. Conservatives tend to favor policies that rely on ingroup/outgroup distinctions and put a FAR higher value on authority. Liberals tend to put a substantially higher value on care.
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