Via EconLog I came across this Edge piece from Jonathan Haidt. It discusses the evolved nature of morality and how odd the western/liberal/individualist conception of morality common in academia is which focuses on only two factors (harm & fairness) whereas a broader sample of people would reveal three additional ones (loyalty, respect & sanctity) that have roughly equal weight weight with each other and the aforementioned two. Despite being an atheist himself, he points out the flaws in arguments of the New Atheists and points out that the religious & conservative are more likely to charitably give their time, money and blood to others.
As an emotivist, I was happy to see Kantian/logical ethics skewered as post-hoc rationalizations for split-second intuitions; “reason is the servant of the passions” to quote David Hume. As I mentioned before, I endorse a contractarian basis for society because I think it would be least prone to dysfunction. Unlike many libertarians I don’t actually believe normative “rights” exist, but I think people can agree to abide by certain rules, though which ones are entirely up to them and cannot be objectively evaluated. David Friedman has a good explanation here of how property rights can emerge using the idea of Schelling points. I don’t think any of the five factors Haidt discusses have any sort of objective validity but I find myself focusing on the “harm” factor. It might seem somewhat odd given my somewhat right-leaning nature to be a sort of liberal-of-liberals (embracing a subset of their values rather than the broader conservative ones), but it seems sensible to me since I don’t want to be harmed! I don’t dismiss the idea of procedural fairness on rule-utilitarian grounds, but the idea of an outcome as being “fair” strikes me as rather odd. Perhaps my notion of fairness was shaped in childhood games where fairness was simply adherence to the rules and if you thought any of the possible outcomes wasn’t “fair” you had no business playing. I will also wholly admit to a strong sense of disgust (the source of purity/sanctity), which is why I am an admitted homophobe, but it simply doesn’t seem like a “moral” issue to me and I bear no animus as a result of it. If I can close my eyes to the disgusting, then it simply doesn’t exist and I am not harmed.
EDIT: I didn’t feel this deserved it’s own post, but I just wanted to note that a defense of moral “relativism” just appeared at Lew Rockwell, something I didn’t expect to see before. It wanders off on boring tangents after a bit though. And now an attack on it in a poor film review. Either way, neoconservatives are bad (I’ll agree there).
Entitled to an Opinion 
September 12, 2007 at 8:28 pm
Excellent post. I wonder if there might be a prescriptivist argument that the harm principle takes logical precedent over other evolved moral intuitions, especially when reified/codified through legal order. But I suppose that may just be a gut feeling.
Seriously though, this has me rethinking a number of arguments I’m sketching at relative to abortion and antinatalism. I seem to be alone in finding nothing intuitively objectionable about killing fetuses, while nevertheless being (mostly) persuaded — on Hareian-consequentialist-libertarian slippery slope grounds — that it should be illegal. Frankly, I’m looking for a way out.
Much appreciated.
September 12, 2007 at 9:07 pm
I’ve heard the term “Hareian” used before (I inferred it was supposed to be a very bad thing), but have no idea what it means. Guess I’d better get googling.
I suspect the preference for the harm principle is just be a gut feeling on my part and upholders of other principals could construct similar arguments for why their favored ones should be held above harm. A lot of this sort of thing is basically “Chocolate is better than vanilla, and if you disagree try to top these wicked rhymes I can spit out like it’s nothing”. The rhymes can be impressive though.
September 13, 2007 at 7:33 am
Good post, took me a while to understand various terms though (emotivist?)
September 13, 2007 at 7:54 am
FYI I find that taking a materialist mental stance is a strong mind-hack, acting as an eliminator of disgust and, in athletics, as a source of “physical willpower”.
I find it laughably obvious why liberalism discards 3 of Haidt’s “moral emotions”, namely that the retained emotions are sufficient for a well ordered society and the eliminated ones are incompatible with maximizing the benefits of trade. I also find it disappointing that Haidt fails to include honor or exaggerated sex role. Through much of human history and in many societies chastity and beauty were seen as nearly *the whole* of female virtue.
September 13, 2007 at 8:10 am
If those values actually are more adaptive, then I suppose the oddness is that the majority of humanity (who are not western, secular liberals) have these other values. One explanation for why ingroup/outgroup distinctions are not found among liberals is that they live in urban environments with lots of different groups and where it is impossible to get on without pluralistic values. Most of humanity lived in small bands where cohesion was more important.
Emotivism is the meta-ethical theory that normative statements like “X is good” have basically the same meaning as “Hooray, X!” or “I approve of X and think you should too”, with the reverse for “bad”.