That gets a bit too close to moral relativism for my tatste. After all, what is self-evident to one culture is not self-evident to another.
I thought that was merely frowned upon.
Every society has rules, norms of behaviors and customs. Some are based on tradition. Some are pragmatic. Others who knows where they come from. But they provide structure. You can’t have a society where everyone just does whatever they want whenever they want. Nothing would get done and eventually everything would just grind to a halt. And there are enough idiots, lunatics, and psychopaths in society that we can’t really trust everyone to do what they want without any constraint.
So IOW, “Sanctity” sort of serves as indicators of the sort of normalcy and stability that society needs to function predicably. Which is not to say that those indicators can’t change over time. But I don’t think society can’t function if on some level people don’t know what behaviors, traits, skills, and whatnot they need to successfully contribute to it.
For example, not that long ago, most men had to wear suits to work. Or at least to a lot of high paying management work. So it society at the time, an expensive suit was an indicator of success as success allowed the person to purchase an expensive suit. Wearing a suit to a low level job would seem out of place, just as a lawyer showing up to his law firm in Bermuda shorts would be out of place.
In the years since, the culture has changed such that for many professions, a suit is not longer an indication of professional status (and in some cases, the opposite). I think that is due to a combination of other factors enabling determination of a person’s success (such as a public LinkedIn profile) as well as professions like Silicon Valley high tech creating a class of wealthy professionals who eschew suits and ties.
I think the main difference between Liberals and Conservatives is that Conservatives tend to view Sanctity as historical evidence for how society should work while Liberals are more open to change and new ideas.
Agreed. “Sanctity” allows leaders to compel the population to Just Follow Orders when there is a vague and incomplete understanding of potential harm.
I do agree that this is a risk.
I agree with this principle for myself, but the debate question as proposed is not about our personal beliefs, it’s about society. My disagreement is clarified here:
I agree on an individual level, but again, this is about society. From that standpoint, the above presupposes that the population at large is, or could be, receptive to such a logical definition, that people are blank slates who just need to be educated in critical thinking and prepared to process arguments about social principles at a higher level.
I do not believe this and I will not accept an assertion predicated on this assumption, because, again, I believe there is a substantial fraction of humanity that is simply unable to function in that way. I have read a variety of psychological and neurological studies which suggest that our belief systems and cognitive frameworks are not the result of absorption over time into an otherwise neutral baseline, but instead appear to be rooted in underlying in-built hardwiring that strongly predisposes us toward one or another ethical or moral paradigm. In other words, a man does not become a selfish, stupid bastard simply because he suffered a poor upbringing, and he would have been an altruistic angel if properly raised; rather, the man had a predilection for stupid selfishness which was actualized by his experience, and the best one could hope for is that a better upbringing would just have made him somewhat less obviously stupid and selfish.
Obviously this gets into the deep waters of Nature vs Nurture and the inherent qualities of humanity. That’s not the debate you asked for, and it’s perfectly understandable if you would prefer not to have your thread derailed. Nevertheless I believe it’s a key unspoken prerequisite of the debate question, perhaps the key prerequisite. If you believe people at large have the potential to think about things at a sophisticated level and valuable social principles can be argued and won logically, then sure, Sanctity can be made irrelevant. But if you believe (as I do) that huge numbers of people are simply unprepared for that kind of thinking and are congenitally resistant to or incapable of acquiring the associated reasoning skills, then Sanctity becomes a necessary, if flawed and admittedly problematic, tool in the social-engineering toolkit.
I would go further. I think that respect for “sanctity” is hardwired into human beings. Like a love of music or sexual appetite, different people are born with varying predictions for caring about sanctity. And of course, how that predilection is expressed will vary based on culture and experience. But i think it’s a basic feature of humans.
Sure, I would agree, though I’ll add a quibbling amendment. I would say that the potential respect for Sanctity is part of the default hardwiring, but I would also say that its controlling effect can be minimized to a varying extent by other separate factors on a person-by-person basis. Someone with a strong preference for logical thinking can transcend the arbitrariness of abstract perceptions of purity, as has been discussed above. Or someone with sociopathic tendencies might instinctively recognize a belief in the value of Sanctity in other people, and then maliciously exploit their behavioral tendencies while feeling no compulsion to honor or observe the taboo themselves and no guilt for ignoring it.
But I do agree with the basic idea that this is an inherent ingredient in human psychology, and therefore, in keeping with the core idea of the thread, it offers a powerful lever for controlling certain segments of the population (for good or, as noted above, for ill).
I think we are agreeing. I said that a predilection to respect sanctity is part of the default hardwiring, and that how that predilection manifests will depend on culture and experience. (And that different people feel it to different degrees.)
Anyway, i feel like asking “did we need this anymore?” is maybe interesting in the abstract, but it’s not a trait that’s going away any time soon.
I don’t think that people are blank slates. But I do think that they’re pretty damn pliable. Look at how divergent different cultures can be.
Our species has been around for about 200,000 years. We’ve had agriculture for around 12,000, and that was 10,000-5,000 years after some humans (Americans) lost all contact with the others. So clearly, evolution hasn’t had enough time to act here. Any cultural variation we see in the last 12,000 years could not have come from physiological changes driven by natural selection; it comes entirely from social pressures.
Imagine that you are the leader of a faction fighting a war. You and your family spend some time at the court of an ally, but he betrays you, so you flee. Your wife and infant son are left behind when you escape. Your top general takes it upon himself to sneak behind enemy lines and rescue them; he is able to retrieve your son, and he brings him to you. You are, of course, so unbelievably mad that your useful general would foolishly risk his life for a useless infant that you throw your baby against the rocks.
Hold up… what? You might say that this is the behavior of a psycopath! Who could do such a thing?
Well, the 14th century Chinese author Luo Guanzhong would disagree with you, as would the earlier storytellers and historians he based his work on; because he embalished exactly such a story to demonstrate just how virtuous Liu Bei was.
(In the clip everyone is freaking out when he throws the baby which may seem to undercut my point, but then they ask him why, he explains the point above, and their reaction isn’t “you monster!”, it’s “Ahh, you are such a wise man who puts his duty first!”)
Are you really telling me that when cultural forces have that much of an impact on our worldview, our genes make us irrevocable assholes? I think the very concept of assholitude is too culturaly relative for that to possibly be the case.
Now, I do think that our genes may make us more or less predisposed to empathy, more or less predisposed to rational thinking, more or less predisposed to being offput by people who practice behavior we find ‘disgusting’ - but all of that is filtered so much by our culture and upbringing that it’s only of secondary importance.
I would say this other way round. What is usually called “sanctity” or “ritual purity” etc. is actually just shorthand for “most people (or at least most of the ruling class) find this thing icky even if there is no rational reason it should be considered wrong”
And as I mention I think it has actually ceased to be a part of the moral compass for most people in the western world. Most (not a vast majority but a majority) people are now comfortable with the fact that just because they find something icky but it doesn’t cause harm, then it doesn’t make that thing “wrong”.
As I once heard a literature professor say, we didn’t become “modern” until the death of a child became more tragic than the death of a king.
As you can tell by my prior post, I do believe that we can do better 
I think your view is not unjustified. Certainly when we look around we see that the majority of people do not rationally inspect their own beliefs.
But this situation didn’t come about by chance. We have a 12,000 year history of central authority figures spreading unquestionable narratives. In the West, the dominant narrative is 2,000 years old. 700 years old in the Islamic world. Japan’s emperor either ruled or served as a figurehead for almost 1,500 years. The Chinese “Mandate of Heaven” concept is almost 3,000 years old and is still being alluded to by the current regime. Hinduism is similarly ancient.
And “noble savage” mythology aside, I doubt that the spiritual leadership of hunter-gatherer bands over the 190,000 years before that were particularly open to being questioned.
The very idea that Sanctity might be optional only started gaining widespread acceptance in the last couple centuries at best. If anything, I think it’s impressive that we threw off its figurative chains to the extent that we have so quickly.
I think “Sanctity” is something too complex to literally be preprogrammed in us. Rather, I think it is an emergent property of a few underlying human traits, namely our disgust response, tendency to divide people into ingroups and outgroups, and our tendency to assign moral weights to our dislikes.
I agree that these are all innate human traits that evolved in us and serve an evolutionary function. Disgust helped us avoid rotten food or decaying bodies. Morally judging our neighbors helped keep our bands cohesive.
Yet, we see that this is still mostly cultural. As societies grow who is “in” and who is “out” changes. This isn’t a new phenomenon - the modern civil rights movement finally took the process to its logical conclusion, but we can see the process start as soon as we have records. Tension over thiw process and whether it was happenig quickly enough (or too quickly) led to the Social War in the Roman Republic, for example.
Disgust is cultural, too. Allegedly it’s there to help us avoid rotten food, and yet, someone invented cheese; Surströmming exists; and ancient beer had so much crud floating in it that it was drunk with a straw.
I think if you raised a whole generation of people without society telling them “your disgust with an act is a sign that this act is immoral” then people might independently reinvent that concept, because I think you are correct about it being natural. But if you raised a whole generation while actively telling them that their disgust has no bearing on morality, that what should be considered is harm - you could certainly instill that value in them.
If the contention is not that this isn’t possible, but that it’s undesirable because without a disgust response people wpuld misbehave - I don’t buy it. I don’t think I’m inherently morally or intellectually superior to others; the fact that I think about these things and others don’t has to do with specific events in my history. For example, had I never gone to college, I highly highly doubt that I would ever have been willing to entertain these sorts of notions.
I agree with this, but I think @puzzlegal is saying that the tendency to take the path “I am disgusted by this act > they do this act > they are of poor moral character” is innate to humans. I agree that this is a natural trajectory for humans to follow, much like confirmation bias or superstition, because of how we think. To use a software analogy, it is a bug that’s inherent to the architecture of our operating system. But our final mental state isn’t just the operating system; it’s also the software we are running on the OS. That software is our upbringing, our education; and since it is designed with the OS in mind, it can work around known issues. For example, the scientific method is designed as a mental model that circumvents the pitfalls of confirmation bias and other cognitive bugs in our OS.
I agree with you in principle although I wouldn’t go do far as to say that most people operate this way. As you pointed out, enough peoplr operate this way now that “gay sex is an abomination” has been replaced by “gay sex harms the youths”. But the difference is aesthetic. The underlying argument is the same. How are the youth harmed? Presumably, by turning them gay. Even if that premise is granted, there’s only harm if being gay is innately bad. I think “gay sex hurts the youth” is what you get when someone makes a Sanctity based argument using the trappings of a Harm based argument, but at its core this is still about Sanctity.
But that’s a nitpick. Your larger point - that sanctity is mostly out of the equation for a large number of people - is one I agree with. And that’s a recent phenomenon. It proves that through cultural changes alone, without even a tiny fraction of the time it would take for evolution to work its magic, we see a portion of society move past sanctity-based thinking. That’s proof that this is possible.
This is a fantastic quote, and I will be stealing it going forward!
Sure, there’s a place for sanctity and purity. Sanctity of the home. Sanctity of marriage. Sanctity of life. “Sanctity” and “purity” have religious undertones, but in the context of public policy, it means something is inviolable.
In time of war a soldier shoots an enemy combatant who has already surrendered. Independent of martial and international law, this is wrong because it unjustifiably destroys the sanctity of life.
A married man commits adultery. The sex is consensual. His wife doesn’t care. This is presumptively wrong despite the lack of individual harm. It destroys the sanctity of marriage.
A man marries another man at common law. The state annuls the marriage. This is presumptively wrong even before consideration of emotional harm, because it destroys the sanctity of marriage.
Premise: a valid marriage may only be entered into by two individuals with capacity (i.e. adults). An older man marries a minor child. The minor later comes of age and asks the state to void the marriage. The state annuls the marriage. Given the premise, this is not destruction of the sanctity of marriage as no valid marriage ever existed.
The police break into a home pursuant to good faith reliance on a defective warrant - the clerk wrote the wrong house number or some such error. A court will (and should) find that the police had authority and are immune from litigation. The government is nevertheless in the wrong, because they have destroyed the sanctity of the home. (compare, Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (1985)).
I think the point of disagreement may be your definition of “modern society”.
For example. Premise: each valid marriage unites a man and a woman. Therefore, given the premise, it is not necessarily wrong for the state to void a same-sex marriage. Rather than destroying the sanctity of marriage, there was no valid marriage to begin with.
Premise: minors may enter into marriage. An older man marries a minor. The minor later comes of age and asks the state to void the marriage. The state annuls the marriage. Given the premise, this is presumptively wrong as the state has destroyed the sanctity of marriage.
Another example. Premise: each person is endowed with life at conception. It follows that abortion necessarily destroys the sanctity of life, and is presumptively wrong.
I think what you’re really asking with is whether such stereotypically ‘conservative’ premises have a place in modern society. I suggest that question is too broad for a single thread.
~Max
With the exception of children and others incapable of making decisions, this function is completely incompatible with my moral framework.
I can imagine a hypothetical world where the best scientific knowledge demonstrates that there would be less harm in a totalitarian state that enforces right-thinking and selective breeding. I can imagine a hypothetical where AIDS is a gay disease or where dilution of the races affects intelligence or where Judaism or Catholicism subverts civil order. In such societies I need sanctity, otherwise the state is not wrong. If today’s society seems less at risk of such corruption, it would be careless to conclude sanctity is useless.
~Max
There are plenty of practical reasons not to be gay. Parents that want grandchildren might prefer that their kids be heterosexual. Being gay can still get you beat up in some places. Gay people have a smaller pool of possible partners, and so probably end up with slightly lower-status ones on average. STD risks are higher.
That isn’t to say that anyone still making these claims is driven by practical reasons like this (not to mention that there’s not necessarily much choice involved), but it’s not impossible. Not to mention explaining the occasional paradoxes like “I don’t care if you have same-sex partners, as long as you aren’t gay”.
And in some cases, such as when one partner cannot have sex, such a relationship might strengthen the other parts of the marriage, and thus not harm the sanctity of it at all. On the other hand when a partner violates the trust of a marriage, perhaps a divorce is just recognizing the destroyed sanctity caused by the betrayal.
I’d like to know respect for what types of sanctity. Consider language. Cleanliness of language, in public, was considered a moral virtue when I was growing up, and that everyone used naughty language in private felt kind of dirty. Today the Times and the New Yorker publish stuff that would not be considered fit for Playboy. I don’t think the hardwiring for that sanctity was very deep. It was purely cultural.
The example of dressing for work is similar. Bill Gates’ first billion did a lot to break any kind of dress codes. He didn’t exactly come from the wrong side of the tracks, but came from a culture where youth counted more than respectability. This was explicit in Silicon Valley. When I started at Sun part of my welcome packet was an article about how Scott McNealy thought suits and ties were really stupid.
My people in the law still wear suits, so it is all culture. I don’t think my hardwiring is much different from my son-in-law who is a lawyer. So much culture that I saw him be converted to the greatness of suits in law school.
Consider the priest-penitent privilege. That is, if you confess to a priest the state may not force the priest to relate your confession. Not only that but the priest may not relate your confession even if he or she wants to. If that’s not sanctity, I don’t know what is.
~Max
If life has sanctity, it doesn’t go away just because someone is shooting at you. What’s the difference between shooting them befire or after they surrender, if the only criteria is “sanctity”?
In fact, there is a rational reason to avoid killing in general (Veil of Ignorance allows us to derive this through reason). There is a Harm-centered reason to avoid killing an enemy who surrendered (you shouldn’t kill anyone, and after surrender any justification you may have had to violate this principle is gone. Further, killing enemy POWs will lead to them killing your own POWs).
I don’t need sanctity to avoid killing an enemy POW.
Why? If they have an open relationship, and no one is harmed, I would argue it’s not wrong, precisely because sanctity is not a real thing. I would be opposed to any moral system that condemns a situation like that, where no one is harmed.
I don’t care about the sanctity of marriage, and in this case with a common law marriage neither did our two guys, since they never bothered to go through the formalities. I don’t see any damage here aside from harm to our two friends caused by the annulment itself or by them being unable to see each other in the hospital etc.
You’re coming up with an exception here, but if we just ignore sanctity to begin with, no exception is needed.
The government is in the wrong because it caused harm. The fact that our system doesn’t hold the government accountable for these sorts of mistakes is a problem because it doesn’t incentivize the government agencies to fix the problems that led to this issue.
Again, if there is such a thing as sanctity of home, it wouldn’t go away magically just because police have a valid reason for entry. If you light up a bong in your house does the sanctity dissipate? If not, what justifies the police in violating that sanctity sometimes, if not the prevention of harm?
If we say life begins at conception, harm principles apply to the fetus. Even from a pro life perspective sanctity is unneeded.
I think Haidt is on to something when he says that certain values leas people to hold conservative positions, sanctity being one of them.
Intent.
Sanctity of life is a rational reason.
No, it is not. I didn’t write it above, but I had in mind mercy killings. I got there after thinking of Breaker Morant (1980) which is set in the Boer War, c. 1900.
If sanctity is not a real thing, we don’t have a debate, do we? I’m not a utilitarian. My morals are expressly not based on harm.
It is my opinion that common law marriages are just as sacrosanct as marriages licensed by the state.
I chose the hypotheticals specifically to point out where you and I disagree, because I know you to base your morals on harm.
To use your own framework, authority justifies violations of sanctity. When it comes to public policy, unless I am god-king, authority is paramount. ETA: If I permit a guest into my home, the guest does not violate the sanctity of my home. The same applies to the government, via a social compact.
I can readily demonstrate the mother’s capacity for pain, but not the fetus’s.
~Max