Huh, again take this with a grain of salt because it’s been so long since I read it, but my reading was not that there is a “real” thing called purity (whatever that means) but that human beings will tend to construct something called “purity” or “sanctity” that is important to us, and that this is a part of psychology that we can’t discount even if rationally there’s no reason for it. Basically, I agree very much with your #2 and I think Haidt would too, but I think he would say that people DO tend to make “sanctity” constructs out of societally preconceived notions and so therefore this is going to be a societal thing that governs people’s reactions whether it makes rational sense or not.
(I also agree with your #1, but I would also agree with Haidt that it’s not generally speaking the underlying reason why a person might react with visceral disgust to the idea. For someone like me, I might react with visceral disgust, then think through that and decide okay, maybe my societal preconceptions aren’t a good reason after all, and then think of #1 as a reason why it makes sense to object to it.)
People also tend to make in-groups and out-groups, but I wouldn’t recommend that modern societies designate an out-group to channel their hatered towards.
Sanctity and purity in and of themselves are nonsense concepts. They should be discarded, along with superstition and tribalism, on the ash-heap of history.
Like I said, I agee with Haidt’s description of how people work. I just think the conclusion shouldn’t be “therefore we need to accept that people are hardwired to be concerned with purity”. We need to understand that these are arbitrary concepts that perhaps had purpose in a pre-rational society (in the sense that many harmful things are also taboo; but many other things are taboo because they harm not people but the social structure that placed certain elites on top) but are now obsolete.
That’s it exactly. These notions of “purity” and “sanctity” and such are quite real. Amongst conservatives. Folks of a liberal personality tend to answer as above with “Yawn. How primitive. We are, or should be, beyond that nonsense by now.”
When Haidt got done with his book he basically said “Conservatives have balanced personalities that contain all these vital needs from a laundry list of traits. While liberals care mostly about fairness and largely ignore most of those other traits. And I, Haidt, think those other things are very important, so that’s the right way for a person and a society to be organized”. He said the last sentence fairly softly in that book.
Yes, I too found his discoveries and data and explanations perceptive and informative. Conclusions, not so much.
Yes, this agrees with my impression. I certainly didn’t get the impression that Haidt believes that conservatives are better humans, inherently or otherwise. But he does think that liberals have certain blind spots. (He talks about a study he did with other researchers in which conservatives understood liberals’ moral point of view better than liberals understood conservatives’.)
Heh, while I may not disagree with you about sanctity (I’m not sure whether I do or not – I have to think about that a bit), I actually think pretty strongly that tribalism, when it can be directed into the in-group and not against hatred to the out-group and when the in-group is sufficiently inviting but with boundaries (both of which I admit can be super hard but can be done with concerted effort; I’ve been part of such an effort before), is super important for human beings, and when one tries to deny that, one gets into trouble. Human beings tend to need to form tribal groups, whether that’s religion, bowling groups, parent groups, online groups such as the Straight Dope (we’re about fighting ignorance! Yeah, go us!), music groups, what have you. Hence the books like Bowling Alone and so on. I really don’t think you can disassociate tribalism from the human psyche.
Wow, I really don’t remember that. I’ll have to look that up. What I remember him saying is something more like, “Conservatives pull from this laundry list of traits, while liberals prioritize fairness over the other traits. And I, Haidt, think that both sides either a) assume that the other side prioritizes exactly the same things they do, or b) think that what the other side prioritizes is stupid. I lean liberal, but I don’t want to write off half my fellow citizens, so I am going to try really really hard not to say that what conservatives prioritize is stupid.”
But anyway, I’ll have to check it out again and reread the conclusion.
I would love to dive into dual topics of whether tribalism and sanctity have their place in our future or not. My own thoughts on the matter could use fleshing out. Each of those is probably its own thread, though.
@Babale: That sounds very fair! Ping me if you start one (I don’t usually hang out in GD) and I’ll try to at least drop by.
@Thudlow_Boink : ah, thanks for that. I’d completely forgotten (and still don’t remember, honestly) the discussion of moral capital, but this sounds interesting.
I may be missing something, but it seems like a bad example and a bad argument to me.
It’s a bad example because to many people in the modern world, moral concerns extend to treatment of animals. With bestiality, it’s unclear if the animal is suffering. And furthermore, even if this animal is not suffering this time, a person who engages in bestiality presumably may want to repeat the act, and how can we be sure no suffering will ever be caused with organisms that cannot give verbal consent?
And it’s a bad argument because, as you say, the feeling of disgust is largely visceral. Why does the feeling of disgust even exist? It’s probably because certain acts put us more at risk of illness / disease, or producing diseased offspring, and we evolved a revulsion to those acts.
But if someone were to ask me whether a particular act is moral or not, I can evaluate that act logically, and conclude that something that triggers my disgust reflex is nonetheless completely morally benign.
There is an absolute good and bad.
But we don’t determine that standard.
It is determined by the Creator (God) who
has already given it to us in His Word.
The post-modernist / atheistic / agnostic /
secular view doesn’t believe
in it. They will convince you that good and bad
are just subjective and relative terms that are
determined by man’s reason, rationale, and
majority vote…all of which are wrong.