-
Website
http://willwilkinson.net/flybottle -
Original page
http://www.willwilkinson.net/flybottle/2008/01/13/pinker-on-the-moral-sense/ -
Subscribe
All Comments -
Community
-
-
Top Commenters
-
Popular Threads
- A Little Mystic Nationalism
- Scott Winship on Income Inequality
- Now Let Us Praise Results-Facilitating Virtue!
- Why Are There So few Women in Philosophy?
- Hey, I Can’t Actually Quite Imagine a World in Which Things Are Exactly as Different as the Need to Be to Give Me What I Want, but It Would Be Neat if I Could!!
As one who both agrees with most of your political positions and is a liberal Protestant, I find much of what you've written here a bit confusing. Why is the success of liberalism necessarily tied to a move toward the kind of moral code possessed by those Haidt calls liberal?
The sacredness variables are ones that need not be abandoned. Instead, they can be reoriented in a way that buttresses liberalism. Most of history's great liberal movements were either led or support by many Protestants. Protestants have often (and often not, to be fair) seen liberty and choice as a sacred gift from God, even though they have often had a traditional Christian position on social morality (condemnation of homosexual practices, abortion, divorce, even birth control, etc.). It seems to me that the kind of person that has a social morality that includes these sacredness variables can be well-suited to be liberal depending on how sacredness is articulated.
Anyway, I'm worried because the loss of the sacredness variable is associated with secularization. And tying secularism and liberalism together is a mistake, not only philosophically but prudentially. It is unlikely that a liberal movement can be permanently successful if it is not acceptable and supported by (probably even enthusiastically supported by) a great multitude of persons of faith. Instead of fighting a 'global culture war' for the kind of liberal morality you prefer, it seems better for liberals to show that liberalism is compatible with certain conceptions of sacredness that will likely always be a deep part of the social morality of many religious persons.
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/issue_marapr_2004/...
Hitler's argument was made in moral terms, as was Marx's; both are moralizers born out of the Western tradition of 'liberal morality,' albeit gone bezerk. But then, Madonna's tongue down Britney's throat is widely perceived as the exact metaphor for people to use to reject 'liberal morality.'
Mr. Wilkinson is correct, though, that it is economics which is going to be decisive in the morality/ideology/theology wars. But what drives worldwide exponential growth in economic prosperity over the past five hundred years has very little to do with morality. The 'liberal morality' is not the engine up front, leading humanity and prosperity; it's the caboose, vaingloriously taking credit. And most definitely, the engine leading humanity is not found in any theology.
I'm surprised that Dr. Pinker is not further along in his moral inquiry. He writes brilliantly about human identity formation, so one would think he'd make the connection that Watson pointed out will dominate the 21C: the meld of psychology with biology.
In that interdisciplinary meld in the century ahead, we'll learn that the origin of all moral systems, all theologies, all social codes, all ideologies and all political theories over the past five thousand years is biological, not philosophical. When that happens, both moral absolutism (homicidal at its extremes) and moral relativism (suicidal at its extremes) will become treatable pharmacologically (because Watson & Crick proved that all of biology obeys the laws of chemistry).
In short, no more thugs. Not because of 'liberal morality,' but because they are on a drug regimen for what ails them. Throw into the 21C biology/psychology meld the nascent subdisciplines of evolutionary psychology and political psychology, and I should think Dr. Pinker might like to re-think his views about morality. He sounds dated already.
The rich band together...the poor should, too.
Why not just say that a more thoroughly liberal calibration of the moral sense will deliver a huge list of incredibly attractive goods for everyone in the world, and leave it at that?
Illiberal people may not find those goods attractive.
If some can’t be persuaded to care about those goods, then their kids can be. And their happy, health, wealthy, long-lived kids will little lament the loss of their backwards ancestral codes.
I find it funny that supposedly godless types have some belief in a "zeitgeist" that must be on their sides. By the standards of Haidt I suppose I would be a liberal, or perhaps more liberal than liberal with an even more reduced set of moral intuitions. At the same time I recognize it is entirely possible that everything I cherish is doomed and that human history and progress are absurd. What to me is an plausible explanation of why liberalism will ultimately be defeated by illiberalism is found in The Return of Patriarchy. I also discussed that a bit in the Marginal Revolution thread Defeat the modernity.
I will fight; will fight with understanding.
Here In my mind, the weather never changes
Skill overcomes, difficult situations.
A straight line exists between me and the good things.
I have found the line and its direction is known to me.
Absolute trust keeps me going in the right direction.
Any intrusion is met with a heart full of the good thing.
Try to compare what I am presenting.
You will meet with much frustration.
Try to find ... similar situation.
You will always find the same solution.
As the heart finds the good thing, the feeling is multiplied.
Add the will to the strength and it equals conviction.
As we economise, efficiency is multiplied,
To the extent I am determined the result is the good thing.
So I say:
I have adopted this and made it my own:
Cut back the weakness, reinforce what is strong.