I've come out in the past as a relatively strong fan of (a) Jon Haidt's moral analysis (b) evo-psych analyses of ethics, and (c) David Schmidtz brand of back-referential meta-ethics. Yesterday, driving home from San Jose, I listened to a Russ-Roberts Econtalk podcast that gave me a 4th model of ethics: What ethics are necessary to have a society that improves the lives of its citizens?
In a very short analysis...here's how it goes:
1. In order for wealth, you need division of labor
2. If you have division of labor, you encounter (infinitely?) many situations where CEO has knowledge of option A, but Manager has knowledge of ascending options ABC, which the CEO cannot know about.
3. For division of labor to work, the CEO needs to expect that the Manager will use his knowledge of option C to better the company.
4. This doesn't work without real, justified trust in the other members of society.
5. Trust is complicated, and there are prerequisites to trust.
6. One prerequisite to trust is: Rule-based behavior, NOT Act-based behavior. (Rule utilitarianism, virtue ethics, and deontological ethics all pass this test. Act-utilitarianism notably doesn't)
7. Another prerequisite to trust is: negative rules trump positive rules.
Quick analysis...very interesting. I would think that my reactionary friends online would get a lot of mileage out of the position.
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On the subject of Haidt's work:
I think that his work is interesting and valuable. At first, I suspected that his work was in a long line of slandering conservatives in the vein of The Paranoid Style in American Politics, but I note with approval that as a result of his research he has changed his political affiliation from Democrat to independent. Thinking outside the establishment box must be harder than I would've suspected for a psychology professor.
That having been said, I've taken some online surveys that he provides and I still think he's missing something important. (Though for research purposes, perhaps starting simple is inevitable.) All he's testing is Kahneman-fast moral impulses. A valuable thing to be researched certainly, but if we actually want help making moral judgements, surely we should be aiming higher than knee jerk reactions.
I think our modern political culture emphasizes this error. Everybody's vote counts, but nobody has an incentive to think things through. Politicians are rewarded for enabling voter rationalizations rather than confronting them with hard choices.
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