Kaj_Sotala comments on People who "don't rationalize"? [Help Rationality Group figure it out] - Less Wrong
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This reminds me of a bit in The Righteous Mind, where Haidt discusses some of his experiments about moral reasoning. When he asked his university students questions like "is it right or wrong for a man to buy a (dead) chicken from a store and then have sex with it before eating it", the students had no problem providing a long list of various justifications pro or con, and generally ending up with an answer like “It’s perverted, but if it’s done in private, it’s his right”. In contrast, when Haidt went to a local McDonalds to ask working-class people the same questions, he tended to get odd looks when he asked them to explain why they thought that the chicken scenario was wrong.
Haidt puts this down to the working-class people having an additional set of moral intuitions, ones where e.g. acts violating someone's purity are considered just as self-evidently bad as acts causing somebody needless pain, and therefore denouncing them as wrong needs no explanation. But I wonder if there's also a component of providing explicit reasons for your actions or moral judgements being to some extent a cultural thing. If there are people who are never asked to provide justifications for their actions, then providing justifications never becomes a part of even their internal reasoning. If we accept the theory that verbal reasoning evolved for persuasion and not for problem-solving, then this would make perfect sense - reasoning is a tool for argumentation, and if you never need to argue for something, then there's also no need to practice arguments related to that in your head.
Actually, Haidt does seem to suggest something like this a bit later, when he discusses cultures with a holistic morality, and says that they often seem to just follow a set of what seems to be (to us) ad-hoc rules, not derivable from any single axiom:
One might hypothesize that moral systems like utilitarianism or Kantian deontology, derived from a small set of logical axioms, are appealing specifically to those people who've learned that they need to defend their actions and beliefs (and who therefore also rationalize) - since it's easier to craft elaborate and coherent defenses of them. People with less of a need for justifying themselves might be fine with Analects of Confucius -style moralities.