Will Wilkinson - Latest Comments in Yuval Levin on Haidt

Re: Yuval Levin on Haidt

Drake — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 19:46:44 -0000

Very nice.

Re: Yuval Levin on Haidt

Matt McIntosh — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 16:38:28 -0000

OT, but if Will is willing to take posting requests I have one for him: Bryan Caplan is having a lively exchange with Greg Clark over at EconLog, and they seem to be bumping up against Parfitesque issues. To my the best of my recollection I don't think Will has ever commented on the mere addition paradox or non-identity problem, but I'd like to see what he thinks!

Re: Yuval Levin on Haidt

Jannia — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 03:55:22 -0000

Aha!

I've been reading discussions of Haidt on blogs all over recently, and Levin's commentary keeps coming up, and I've been dissatisfied every time I've seen it, but haven't had the time to really sit down and figure out why, and here you come and do it for me.

Re: Yuval Levin on Haidt

Mike S. — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 20:58:09 -0000

When we in fact arrive at a better place after the change, as we generally do, the conservative mostly just makes peace with it while insisting that we all panic about the next moral shift, which will surely bring down all of society along with it.

This is meaningless without specifics. We are better off with the changed views about discrimination based on race. But are we really better off with the current consensus that sex outside of marriage is acceptable, even something to be celebrated? Well, adults who like indulging their sexual urges have more fun, but the large numbers of children without two parents, and the teenagers pushed into sexual activity before they are emotionally ready, aren't really better off. It's fatuous to claim that all changes in moral consensus are beneficial.

Re: Yuval Levin on Haidt

Mike S. — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 20:50:56 -0000

Levin wants to defend the shudder when it comes to, say, cloning, but (I trust) not when it comes to the subhuman treatment of the Dalits. So, those of us armed with reason inevitably ask: “What’s the difference?” And he doesn’t have a good answer.

I don't think Levin or Kass want to "defend the shudder" in the sense that they reify the "shudder" into some sort of moral imperative. They merely want us to pay attention when there is widespread instinctive resistance to some novel behavior. The idea that there is no good answer to the question "what's the difference between the 'shudder' some people feel towards cloning, on the one hand, and towards touching the Dalits, on the other, is preposterous. The same rational argument applies to both: human beings are ends, not means, by virtue of their rational nature, and therefore should be treated accordingly. In the case of human clones, this means not creating them merely to destroy them, or merely to fulfill the will of the person creating the clone in the case where the clone is brought to full term. In the case of the Dalits, it means that the Dalits are the same type of moral, rational being as the upper castes, and therefore ought to be treated the same. In the former case, the shudder points to a moral truth that can be rationally defended; in the latter, it points to a moral falsehood.

Re: Yuval Levin on Haidt

alphie — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 04:06:06 -0000

Have the "moral" obligations between parents and children changed so much?

Technology and increased wealth have probably more to do with the changes in, say, child labor laws and elder care than changing morals.

It's still not cool to let your elderly parents starve if you're making a good living, is it?

Re: Yuval Levin on Haidt

Selfreferencing — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 22:09:07 -0000

Will,

Hi. A philosophy graduate student here who follows your blog.

I have to quibble a bit. When Levin claims that Haidt runs together the history of a faculty with its nature, I think what he means is that Haidt runs together the origin of a faculty with its truth-reliability.

If he means this, then I understand the point. We cannot suppose that our moral judgments are unreliable merely because they have evolved in such and such a way. Our 'ick' judgments may yet be valid!

The obvious reply is to suggest that evolutionary history alone gives us no reason to suppose that our 'ick' judgments track any good-makers or right-makers. But oh dear, Will, I worry if this is your reply. For what reason do we have to think that evolutionary history alone gives us any reason to think that moral-judgments-as-such track any right-makers? It seems very little, at least to my mind.

Furthermore, Levin might (if he gets this deep into the issues) appeal to God to account for the truth-reliability of our 'icks'. I wonder what you'd say then besides denying that God exists.

(Incidentally, I think that evolutionary history alone gives us very little reason to suppose that *any* of our judgments are truth-reliable. See Plantinga here.)

Of course, you're a constructivist though, right? So you rule out the very possibility of a morality outside of a rational construction. The 'tracking' issue won't apply to you. Or perhaps to Haidt and others. My understanding is that most of the big cognitive scientists who work in this area are either constructivists or moral nihilists of some form or another (error theorists (Josh Greene is an error theorist), expressivists (although you might deny expressivism is a nihilism)).

But if this is so, and Haidt and others are mostly constructivists anyway, then Levin can't accuse them of running metaethics and science together. There's the science and then there's the metaethics. However, I think he has a point IF what he's saying is that the cognitive science alone does not entail a metaethical thesis (as Haidt and others sometimes seem to imply). You give the distinct impression that you think it does when you say:

"Studying the natural history of the moral sense is almost the only truly illuminating way to study it. It’s a whole lot better than simply trying to tease out the implications of our moral judgments from the first-person perspective — from the inside."

Sorry for the ramble.