Will Wilkinson - Latest Comments in Limited Government and Morality as a Fill-in-the-Blanks Slate

Re: Limited Government and Morality as a Fill-in-the-Blanks Slate

Steven — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 17:52:06 -0000

Can you elaborate on what a "fill in the blanks slate" means? I thought Haidt's theory was that each of us is born with a different setting to our moral sense equalizer. So the liberals, for example, are the ones born with their "disgust" setting turned way down and their "fairness" setting turned way up. I had thus far assumed these settings were fixed, I didnt' realize they could change.

They can change?

Re: Limited Government and Morality as a Fill-in-the-Blanks Slate

mk — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 00:09:34 -0000

Ah. I misread your original post. I zoomed in on "the artificiality of nationalism" and thought you were saying that nationalism was bad or morally illegitimate.

But really you're saying here that Homo Sapiens' evolved, ingrained sharing norms are not sufficient to ensure that your average human would react with moral revulsion to the repeal of the New-Deal style welfare state. That sounds quite possible.

Re: Limited Government and Morality as a Fill-in-the-Blanks Slate

Will Wilkinson — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 11:15:43 -0000

The fact that individuals are composed or smaller constituents and are not indivisible atomic ultimates strikes me as having zero to do with the point about artificiality. I don't think institutions are unreal. But they are social constructions and biological individuals aren't. I don't doubt that the Cato Institute or the Washington Redskins or the United States of America exist. But the point is that United States of America is pretty far from anything that exists in nature, and far, too, from the socially constructed institutions of the human ancestral past. Also, nations are nothing like a sum of anything.

I'm VERY interested in the question of the granularity of personhood. My pet theory is that continuity in subjective personal identity is a solution to a intrapersonal coordination game that helps solve interpersonal coordination games in small, face-to-face, reputation-based communities. I don't think this makes persons a "fiction", since I don't buy any essentialist metaphysics of persons that I would accept as a contrast. But the sense of stable ongoing identity has a function, and that function is served partly by having an unfounded horror of disintegration.

Re: Limited Government and Morality as a Fill-in-the-Blanks Slate

mk — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 10:42:53 -0000

First, there is the artificiality of nationalism, and the modern welfare state is nothing if not an expression of economic and moral nationalism.

The individual is just as artificial as the nation, no? We're the sum of a bunch of self-interested neurons and other cells in a pretty similar way to how a nation is a "sum" of self-interested people, right?

And yet self-interest of an individual is thought to be OK. We're alright with letting people self-actualize, rather than wanting to impose a really strict norm like "do research for a year on how you can best help the world, and then do exactly that."

Of course, humans are moral agents and neurons are not. So I guess it sounds like we're saying: hone your analysis down to the finest possible granularity of moral agents, and then grant those agents a large level of autonomy.

So what about conflicted people? What if it were possible to "grant autonomy" to distinct personalities in a person's head by chopping their brains in half very carefully? What if we found that you could create 5 brains instead of 1 by doing surgery on a very young developing brain (with very very plastic neurons)? Would we then be morally obligated to dissolve the "fiction" of indivisible moral identity?

Weird questions, but basically I am wondering how rock-solid the philosophy is here. We may well bump up against questions like these, and sooner than you might think.

Re: Limited Government and Morality as a Fill-in-the-Blanks Slate

Will Wilkinson — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 09:19:30 -0000

Gil, Indeed, I think literature and pop culture are really important to sensitizing and desensitizing various aspects of people's moral sense. South Park, I think, has probably done more to ridicule the moralizing disgust response than anything ever, which may make Parker and Stone great benefactors of humanity.

Re: Limited Government and Morality as a Fill-in-the-Blanks Slate

GilM — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 03:17:02 -0000

So, what methods are available and effective to shift the general population's moral calibration towards classical liberalism?

Does reading Ayn Rand cause people's moral calibration to shift? Or, does she only appeal to those who were already there?

What about things like the Drew Carey videos at reason.tv, or Penn & Teller's "Bullishit!"?