Moral Foundations: Which?

About a decade ago I wrote at my old blog about moral foundations theory, the idea that people have different fundamental moral feelings which drive their ethical intuitions; I also explored this at the Weekly Wonders tumblr. Although I have grown in my thinking a lot since then, a basic version of Haidt’s idea has become essential to the furniture of my mind; it seems obviously, trivially true that something about our ethics is both given and idiosyncratic. Our moral foundations are given in that they are neither something we chose nor something we acquired through reason but rather something motivating us without our even knowing why; they are idiosyncratic in that different people have different moral motivations. Our moral judgements are always driven by normative feelings, a particular kind of motivation along with appetites and fears. I know better than to trust what seems obvious to me, but I really can’t see how moral foundations theory could be wrong.¹

“The deadly Franciscan Fist,” Matt Baume, flic.kr/p/5C6xuP

That said, I still have some questions and concerns regarding moral foundations theory which I’ve never gotten into. My friend Jon has asked me to write a bit about this sort of thing so he can share it with his students and I’m going to use that request as an excuse to finally get around to airing those concerns. These concerns can be described roughly speaking as “which?” and “whence?” Today I’ll talk about “which?”

Haidt proposes six moral foundations (1. care vs. harm, 2. fairness and reciprocity, 3. liberty, 4. loyalty, 5. authority and respect, and 6. purity and sanctity) but remains open that these six may not be the real ones. This is to his credit, especially as it seems that these six cannot possibly exhaust the moral options. His method for determining these foundations is somewhat suspect, grouping words for moral concepts together by similarity rather than beginning with observations of actual human behaviour or reasoning.

Fortunately, there are alternatives. Oliver Scott Curry outlined such an alternative, MAC, on Twitter in December 2018, deriving moral foundations from evolutionary and game theoretical origins of morality. MAC isolates seven moral foundations based on evolutionary theories for altruism which he calls (unhelpfully) kinship, mutualism, exchange, hawk, dove, division, and possession.²

MAC has several benefits. It distinguishes between kin and in-group altruism. It acknowledges that virtues like courage and humility are important to many people’s moral universes. It finds a place for the (wholly emotional, not at all reasonable) sense that property is a moral concern.

I am concerned, however, that MAC does away with purity as a moral concern. They justified this because “it is not concerned with how we treat other people” and is not based in an evolutionary-cooperative account of morality. The first justification is false on the face of it: purity and sanctity concerns reliably involve the exclusion of individuals and groups and are thus incontrovertibly concerned with how we treat other people. The second justification seems arbitrary at best, begging the question at worst: to reject purity as a moral foundation because it is not based on an evolutionary-cooperative account of altruism does not leave leave space for normative judgements which we might observe that are not truly altruistic. Perhaps this is simply my misunderstanding, but if normative feelings concerning purity or sanctity are not moral, then what are they? They are quite clearly normative. In other words, MAC seems to be using “morality” to denote a different spectrum of concepts than anyone else is; if that’s the case, are they really talking about morality, or are they really talking about something more specific, like altruism?

My view, of course, is that there aren’t “real” categories out in the world; MAC cannot be wrong to slice the world up this way, so long as they are attending to an actual observable pattern, but they can certainly be misleading if they conflate it with other observable patterns. “Normativity” seems to be as observable pattern as “evolutionary-cooperative altruism.”

For the moment, then, I will be assuming that the following moral foundations are operative, but I remain open to being corrected:

1. Kin obligations (MAC: kinship)
2. Group loyalty (MAC: mutualism)
3. Reciprocity and responsibility (MAC: exchange)
4. Strength displays (MAC: hawk)
5. Humility and obedience (MAC: dove)
6. Fairness and equality (MAC: division)
7. Ownership (MAC: possession)
8. Purity and sanctity

I will consider later whether there might be more moral foundations.

---

1. I do disagree with several of Haidt’s elaborations of this work, for instance the idea that it is incumbent upon progressives to attend to moral foundations theory in order to improve political discourse, or that all moral reasoning is therefore post-hoc justification of moral intuition.
2. As is so often the case in psychology, this group desperately needs to improve their terminology.

A Sixth Theological World?

I have come to suspect I was wrong in a previous post on this blog; specifically, I thought I could justify W. Paul Jones’s fivefold model of theological worlds despite how natural or obvious a sixfold model appeared. Now I think that my work–however tenuous, perhaps misguided, it might be–strongly implies that there is a sixth theological world which Jones does not mention concerning community and social integration.

“Dungeons & Dragons” by Ville Miettinen at flic.kr/p/84pTyQ; according to Miettinen’s description, these people have been getting together for D&D for nearly 20 years

It might be the case that this work has already been completed. For my post on autism and masks I had been on Google searching for a particular passage in Jones’s Theological Worlds (which I could not find online, alas), and during this search I discovered that there is at least one article,  Jeanene Reese and Amanda Pittman’s “Theological Worlds Investigation” in the Journal of Youth and Theology 12(1), describing a sixth world identified among female students. As it happens, that article is behind a paywall which this ex-academic can’t easily pass. I would like to see it sometime but right now I think it might be useful that I can’t: if my work comes to the same conclusions as that paper but independently of it, that should suggest that we are all on to something. Therefore I’m going to press merrily on in the hope, but not the conviction, that this will all be productive.

Are Jones’s Theological Worlds Comprehensive?

Edit 5 May 2019: I have changed my position on the exclusion of negative problems in social organization, which I expand on in this post.

I have mentioned W. Paul Jones’s theological worlds construct more than a few times here. It is one of the constructs I use to help me understand why other people believe and assume the things that they do. But I’ve also expressed concern here about two potential problems that arise out of Jones’s very Christian emphasis: a) how useful is it to apply Jones’s construct to non-Christians and b) how comprehensive is his set of Worlds?

To an extent that last question is an empirical one which will be difficult for me to answer; Jones’s method involved surveying hundreds of people and I do not have the resources to do the same. But there is another way to attempt to answer the question about comprehensiveness which, I have discovered, might also help make his constructs more useful for non-Christians. After a bit of thought I think I have been able to schematize his Worlds so that they do, or at least might, cover all possible sources of anxiety and obsession about the human condition.

Stephane Lollivier at flic.kr/p/DnhB8H; I spent a while trying to find a Creative Commons image of a garrison town with a wooden palisade in boreal forest, but no such luck.

Let’s start with that human condition: human life is characterized by a) individual humans with their own internal dynamics b) embedded within and enmeshed with an environment which includes, but is not limited to, the facts of time and space, of the Laws of Thermodynamics, and so on, and c) associated with other individual humans (even if only their own parents) in ways more or less organized. The internal workings (understood both physically and psychologically) of any given human, which I will call human nature, has various requirements (ie. sustenance, medicine, narrative), some of which that person can only attain from the surrounding environment; when humans organize themselves into institutions, they usually do so with the purpose of making it easier for themselves to meet these needs through collective action. These organizations are necessary because it is often difficult for people to meet their needs either within themselves or through interaction with the environment. Even when it is not difficult to meet these needs alone, there is no guarantee that it will remain easy.

Therefore there are three places where crises may arise for any given person: in the environment (which, again, includes all contingent and all necessary features of existence, such as time and space and the laws of physics), in the person’s own internal workings (which might be generalized human nature or a specific person’s unique nature), or in human organization. Indeed, while all problems must necessarily involve elements of each of these three aspects of human existence, an individual person may experience one of these as being more responsible or more ultimately responsible in comparison to the other two.

A Partial Apology for Liberalism, or, A Partial Criticism of its Critics

Before I begin, a note is warranted: I will be dropping a lot of names in this piece and I want to put you at ease before you have to deal with them. I don’t expect that any of my likely readers will be familiar with most of the people I mention and I am trying to write specifically so that you can still understand what’s going on without knowing who they are. Anything I need you to know about them, I will tell you myself. I will also provide links should I fail in this endeavour or should I succeed in piquing your interest, but I do not intend for you to rely upon them. That said, let’s begin.

The Goddess of Democracy at UBC. Source: Carl Mueller at flic.kr/p/5cNvQY

A few weeks ago I found Love of All Wisdom, the philosophy blog of Amod Lele. There’s a lot going on with Lele’s work that I find interesting and compelling. An academic philosopher with a PhD in the subject, he describes himself as working in the Aristotelian, Buddhist, and historicist traditions and his work is wide-ranging, bringing a huge variety of both Western and non-Western philosophers to a problem. (His header has pictures of his major influences: Santideva the Indian Buddhist philosopher, Aristotle the ancient Greek empiricist, Hegel the German historicist, Confucius the traditionalist communitarian, and Martha Nussbaum the contemporary academic philosopher.) He also uses a few different categorization schemes for philosophies, two of which he’s organized into a quadrant system that I am thinking of adopting: integrity vs. intimacy and ascent v. descent. (If I was still at my old blog, I’d add it to my Taxonomies of Religions list.) His thought is new to me, but I admire his precision, erudition, creativity, and seriousness–a rare combination of traits in a thinker.

Although I would love to just list the things I’ve learned from Lele, what I want to focus on for this post is where his ideas intersect with those of other people whose thought I’ve encountered lately, who explicitly reject the anthropology, and therefore politics, of liberalism.*

Revisiting: Other People’s Epics

Every Some third Saturdays of the month I intend to re-post something I wrote for one of my assorted old blogs or tumblogs. This week I am revisiting the Thinking Grounds for “Other People’s Epics.” The first sentence is no longer quite true, but otherwise I think it holds of reasonably well. I spun out this theme quite a lot, possibly ad nauseum, at the Thinking Grounds. Immediate sequels included “Other People’s Mystery Novels” and “Other People’s [Insert Genre]s.”

Briton Riviere’s Una and the Lion. Una is the romantic interest of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene: Book One. Source: Sofi at flic.rk/p/ftjgXA

---

Other People’s Epics

One of my recurrent pastimes is to imagine what another person’s epic might look like.

As far as genres go, the epic is one of my favourites to think about. No individual epic counts among my favourite books (though, you know, Paradise Lost is pretty great). The reason I like thinking about them is that, at least in the English tradition, they have become a kind of formal game, thanks to the humanists of early modern England. (Note to readers: “early modern” is the new PC term for “Renaissance;” in England the early modern period spans the 1500s and 1600s, but it got started earlier in Italy, France, Spain, the Netherlands, etc.). Let’s dive into a bit of history, shall we?

What World Do You Live In?, Part 3

[You may want to read Part 1 and Part 2 first.]

Source: Ruth at flic.kr/p/rQKEbo

W. Paul Jones seems to have two uses in mind for his Theological Worlds construct: self-diagnosis and pastoral planning. First, the Theological Worlds can help individuals understand themselves. Second, the Theological Worlds can help churches organize their congregation into sub-congregations according to Theological World so that the congregants are engaging with people who fundamentally understand them. If the Inventory is mostly useless to you because, as I discussed previously, the questions make no sense to you, the first use does not apply to you. If you aren’t part of a congregation or other group that might reasonably organize itself in the way Jones imagines, the second use also does not apply to you.

These aren’t the only uses, though. My first exposure to Jones was through Richard Beck, and one of his insights was that if people don’t understand that everyone has their own Theological World, standard attempts of proselytization will fall flat:

Now, it’s a big shocker for some Christians to find out that many of their brothers and sisters don’t live within this theological world. Sin isn’t their obsessio. Not that they deny the existence and problem of sin, just that sin isn’t the defining quandary of their spiritual lives.

I am an example of a Christian of this stripe. Sin and guilt isn’t my obsessio. If you tell me that I’m going to hell I’ll just blink at you blandly and yawn. I’m emotionally unmoved. To be clear, it’s not that I don’t want to go to heaven. I do. I just don’t spend my life trying to save my own skin.

What World Do You Live In? Part 2

(Read Part 1 first.)

Source: the LAMP at flic.kr/p/ejNXiW

Having read his book, I had expectations about which theological world(s) W. Paul Jones’s Theological Worlds Inventory would place me in. World 3—that of T. S. Eliot’s “hollow men,” of people who feel like they might be wearing a mask over a personal emptiness—had most appealed to me in the book. Immediately on reading about it I felt an overwhelming recognition that I felt when reading about neither World 1 or World 2. (This was itself a bit of a surprise: based on the book’s introduction, World 3 did not look promising.) I had expected World 2 (animated by a conflict between violent chaos and small bastions of peace) to follow it fairly closely, and then World 4 (concerned with personal sin and forgiveness) a bit after. I did not expect to have much in common with World 1 (haunted by the universe’s apparent meaninglessness) or World 5 (characterized by unremitting suffering and endurance).

So while I was not surprised that the Inventory placed me high in World 3, I was surprised that it placed me just as high in World 5. (World 2 followed close, and Worlds 1 and 4 were equally and very far behind.) Indeed, the results are a bit flat and I think there might be problems with the Inventory itself, but on reading the descriptions in the Inventory I’m inclined to agree that I’m just as much an inhabitant of World 5 as World 3. I’ll discuss this in detail toward the end of the post; first, I want to look at the Inventory itself and the reasons I think it has problems.

What World Do You Live In? Part 1

One of the lenses through which I look at ideas and the people who hold them is W Paul Jones’s theological worlds concept. I wrote about Jones’s theological worlds before here, having learned about them in his book of the same name; they are personality types of a sort, though they pertain more to a person’s root cosmology than to whether or not a person enjoys going to parties.

Source: Classic Art Wallpapers at flic.kr/p/nKDY9i

I want to talk a bit more about the theological worlds now that I’ve taken Jones’s “Theological World Inventory” and gotten somewhat surprising results. As such rather a lot of this discussion will be navel-gazing, but I think even so that will throw off some useful material nonetheless. In this first post I’ll re-introduce the concept; in the second I’ll discuss the Inventory and my results; in the third I want to think a bit about the typology’s usefulness (including to whom the typology is useful).

Theological Worlds

Each theological world represents the fundamental dynamic, or perhaps dialectic, underlying a person’s engagement with the world. Jones’s own words from the introduction to his inventory will work as an introduction to the idea:

A World results from the interaction between two poles. The first is one’s obsessio, that lived question, need, ache, or dilemma which has its teeth into us at the deepest level. Other concerns are variations on that basic theme, standing in line behind its importance. The second pole is one’s epiphania, that which through one or more events, moments, and/or persons brings sufficient illumination, satisfaction, or healing to provide a lived answer worth wagering one’s life upon. One’s epiphania is what touches promisingly one’s obsession as fact or as hope.¹

After the End P.1: Madness and Meaning on the Fury Road

Source: Kaysha at flic.kr/p/sK8Pe3

Watching Mad Max: Fury Road (Miller 2015), which I very much enjoyed, I was struck by how existentialist the film was; indeed, it made me realize that all post-apocalyptic fiction has an existentialist seed. But then, there is also something post-apocalyptic about existentialism. God is dead, spake Friedrich Nietzsche in 1882. God remains dead. And we have killed him. If that doesn’t announce an apocalypse, I don’t know what does.

When Nietzsche declared God dead, he was not making a metaphysical claim but rather a moral and psychological claim: at one point, humanity relied on the authority of God to guarantee moral questions. In order to decide what to do, what kind of decision to make, they appealed to God; moreover, this appeal was beyond question. But as Nietzsche pointed out, by the end of the seventeenth century God no longer had ultimate moral authority. People might well still believe in God and derive their morality from that belief, but it was no longer the case that any moral code, any moral prescript, was unquestionable. God as a figure for absolute norms was dead. This was not a physical apocalypse but it was, at least, a social and ethical one. And as with so many apocalypses, some of us survived it (though, as Dallas Hunt might point out, the question is not so much “did we survive?” but “who is the ‘we’ that survived?”).

The Shape of Truth and of Error

Even if you’ve only been paying attention to me since I started this blog, one thing you might have noticed is that I am interested in other people’s various worldviews. In particular I find myself compelled by their structures or their shapes.* I enjoy looking at these worldviews on their own, but I also like gathering together different tools for analyzing each worldview. For instance, I wrote about contextual and idiosyncratic theology and philosophy, and in the course of that I described W. Paul Jones’s theological worlds. Even more than Jones, Richard Beck’s writing at Experimental Theology on Terror Management Theory, derived from the insights of Ernest Becker, especially influences my thought. Beyond my own favourites there are many ways of describing the shape of a worldview.

Source: Rob Deutscher at flic.kr/p/bF8brf

When I mention these general ways of organizing worldviews to friends, family, and acquaintances, some people respond well and some people are resistant. I suspect that many people resist because looking at the forms and functions worldviews generally take calls into question how true those worldviews can or might be. Should we be suspicious of a worldview that looks quite generic in its shape, if not in its details? What are the odds that a worldview is true if it is good at resolving psychological tensions, what many people call wish-fulfillment? I think, though, that this is the wrong way of looking at the problem.