= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Vladimir_M comments on What is moral foundation theory good for? - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (296)
You are right that Haidt is missing that piece, although judging by his recent writings, he might be slowly converging towards the answer. Namely, the answer is that, contrary to Haidt's model of contemporary ideologies, there are in fact no such people.
What does exist are people whose ideology says that harm and (maybe) fairness are the only rational and reasonable moral foundations, while the other ones are only due to ignorance, stupidity, backwardness, malice, etc. Nevertheless, these same people have their own strong norms of sacredness, purity, authority, and in-group loyalty, for which they however invent ideologically motivated rationalizations in terms of harm and fairness. These rationalizations are usually very flimsy, and often they amount to little more than an instinctive emotional urge to dismiss anyone who asks unpleasant questions as crazy or malicious. Yet, given the high status and institutional dominance of such ideologies, their adherents generally do manage to create a public image of themselves as concerned only with the "rational" foundations (and thus superior intellectually and morally to their ideological opponents).
As for the claim that "you need loyalty, authority and sanctity to run a decent society," I would actually go further and say that they are necessary for any sort of organized human society. In fact, the claim can be stated even more strongly: since humans are social beings who can live and reproduce only within organized societies, these things simply will exist wherever there are humans. Therefore, if you are concerned with harm, the only reasonable question you can ask is about the practical consequences of the (necessarily multi-foundational) social norms in different societies on whatever metric you use to evaluate harm. And here you will find that, even in terms of a purely utilitarian metric, an accurate analysis of the social role of the norms based on these "irrational" foundations will give you very different answers from those given by the pseudo-rational ideologies that claim to reject these foundations.
While they are likely necessary for organized human society, I think the argument is that their purpose is purely instrumental. It's sort of like how in the prisoner's dilemma, the concept of 'trust' ('tit for tat with forgiveness' variants) is an instrumentally useful strategy for winning points in a group of a certain kind of agents. Even if humans have loyalty, authority and sanctity built-in, they can still recognize their instrumental role and can only instrumentally optimize for those.
The trouble is, absent certain unusually favorable circumstances, attempts at such optimization run into insurmountable practical problems. For start, such analysis would be tremendously difficult even for a superhumanly unbiased intellect. And then there is the even worse problem that realistic humans will be under an almost irresistible temptation to bias their analysis in favor of their own particular authority, sanctity, and in-group norms.
I wonder if the topic of "moral foundations" would better be considered as "human universals that sometimes contribute to some of the things that get labeled 'morality'." Because plenty of the time, the instrumental ones also contribute to things that get labeled "immorality". The purity universal includes the sexual jealousy of the abusive spouse; the loyalty universal includes Milgram's subjects; and so on. We recognize that these are morally significant, but in a negative sense: the abuser is not merely pursuing a positive purity ideal in ill-chosen ways, and Milgram did not find people longing for something to be loyal to, but people who responded with obedience even in situations where doing so was immoral.
Don't forget pathological altruism for the harm equality foundation.
Perhaps fairness could also be interpreted as a sacred value, and a useful heuristics to reduce harm.
Fallacy of gray? Arguably no one has completely removed all minor unconscious belief in purity/sanctity/authority based values, but I think endorsing harm/fairness values at least correlates with holding fewer values based on P/S/A, even secretly.
I am also not clear whether you're saying only that mainstream large liberal parties like UK Labor or US Democrats secretly have many P/S/A values, or whether you would say the same is true of people like Peter Singer or the more pragmatic/less ideological strains of libertarian. I think the gradient from the Pope to Nancy Pelosi to Peter Singer is quite clear, even if the last might still have some P/S/A values lurking somewhere.
If you disagree, can you name a few purity, sanctity, or authority based values you expect intelligent liberals or libertarians on LW to endorse?
There are two distinct questions here:
Are the standard liberal ideological positions (in the American sense of the word) really as low on the sacredness/authority/in-group values as Haidt would claim?
Are there, generally speaking, significant numbers of people (perhaps weighted by their influence) whose ideological positions are truly low on the sacredness/authority/in-group values? (Whatever their overlap with the standard liberal positions might be.)
I believe that the answer to (1) is decisively no. And here I don't have in mind some minor holdovers, but some of the very central tenets of the ideology of modern liberalism -- which are largely liberal innovations, and not just unexamined baggage from the past. So even if I'm committing fallacies here, they're not fallacies of gray. In this thread and the linked older comments, I have already elaborated on one significant example where the standard liberal positions are heavy on sacredness (the sacralization of individual autonomy in sex-related matters). I could also give examples of liberal authority and in-group values, some of which I've already mentioned in passing. Unfortunately, you can probably see why such topics are, practically by definition, inordinately likely to inflame passions and destroy the discourse.
As for (2), clearly, if you look for outliers hard enough, you'll find them, and there is some variability even among people closer to the mainstream. But I think that you are greatly underestimating how much of the entire utilitarianism shtick in the contemporary ideological debates is just a convenient framework for rationalizations of views and intuitions held for completely different reasons. (And it's not very different for egalitarian and other arguments that leverage the fairness intuitions.)
Even when it comes to bullet-biters who will be convinced by utilitarian (or egalitarian etc.) arguments to adopt odd and extreme positions on some issues, it's a mistake to conclude from this that they have done an equally consistent scrutiny of all their beliefs, or even the majority of them. I think this is a good description of someone like Singer (with the caveat that I haven't read anything close to a large and representative sample of his work, so that my view of his particular case might be biased).
I think my problem with your responses on this thread so far has been that you've taken various liberal positions, said "Obviously this a sacredness value, liberals say it's about harm but they are lying", and not justified this. Or else "Some people say they are utilitarians, but obviously they are lying and have sacredness and purity and authority values just like everyone else" and not justified that either.
For example, where exactly is this liberal sacredness around sexual autonomy? The place I see liberals really get worked up about this is tolerance of homosexuality, but the standard liberal mantra in this case, that it's okay because it "doesn't harm anyone", seems to me to be entirely correct - it's throwing out a conservative purity-based value in favor of a genuinely harm-based value. Liberals are pretty happy to oppose clear-cut cases of harm in sexual relations like rape or lying about STDs, not to mention that most of them oppose pedophilia and prostitution.
In order to demonstrate that liberal sexual values are sacredness rather than harm based, you'd need to point out some specific sexual practice that was harmless but which liberals still violently opposed (arranged marriage? Do liberals have a strong opinion on this?) or harmful but which liberals supported (maybe no-fault divorce? But this is far from universally-supported among liberals, it's far from clear that it's harmful, and I don't think most liberals who do support it refer to a principle of sexual autonomy or have the fervor that tends to characterize sacred values.)
Overall I think liberal support for sexual autonomy, insofar as it's a useful idea at all, to be mostly based around autonomy values (obviously), harm values (as the liberals themselves say), and maybe an overreaction to really disliking conservative values around things like homosexuality or sexual "prudery". I think you have further to go in demonstrating that there's really a strong foundation of sacredness there, although I understand if you don't want to turn this thread into a debate on sex mores.
I agree that certain liberal values are based on sacredness (diversity and anti-racism) or purity (environmentalism), although I have yet to hear any good argument that liberals explicitly value authority. But two examples, both of which are polluted with confounders (racism really is really harmful), hardly seem like enough to say they are just as interested in these values as conservatives and totally deceiving themselves when they say they aren't.
And I have the same objections to your comments on libertarians and utilitarians. Yeah, only a few percent of the population is either (although it's more in places where people are genuinely interested in philosophical and political issues and likely to think for themselves, and only about 20% of Americans self-identify as "liberal" anyway). But libertarians for example seem ruthlessly consistent in opposing government intervention into any area (except maybe defense and policing), and I have a higher opinion of utilitarians than you do. Once Peter Singer says he can't really see any problems with infanticide because it doesn't harm anyone, the hypothesis that he still is secretly trying to uphold sacredness values just as much as everyone else becomes pretty hard to support.
Similarly, not every case of hypocrisy is a case of secretly having sacredness or purity values. I don't fail at efficient charity because I secretly believe that inefficient charity is sacred. I fail at efficient charity because utilitarianism is really hard.
"Lying" is not the right word, since it suggests conscious deception. The term I have used consistently is rationalization.
Arguing against liberal positions on such matters is very difficult because they tend to be backed by a vast arsenal of rationalizations based on purportedly rational considerations of harm or fairness, often coming from prestigious and accredited intellectual institutions where liberals predominate. This is of course in addition to the dense minefield of "boo lights" where an argument, whatever its real merits, will trigger such outrage in a liberal audience that the discourse will be destroyed and the speaker discredited.
So, while I can readily point out concrete examples of the sort you're asking, unfortunately in many of them, crossing the inferential distances would be an uphill battle, or there would be immediate unpleasantness that I'd rather avoid. Therefore I'll limit myself to a few more vague and general points:
Laissez-faire in sex leads to all kinds of expensive negative-sum signaling and other games. Why not crack down on those, which would lead to a clear improvement by any utilitarian metric?
If it's OK for the government to ban smoking and other activities harmful for public health, why not extend such treatment to sexual activities that have obvious and drastic public health implications?
If the alleged vast inequality of wealth is a legitimate complaint against economic laissez-faire, why is it not legitimate to complain about the vast inequality of sexual and romantic opportunities (and of the related social status) under sexual laissez-faire? (The problem is by no means limited to men, of course.)
Why the automatic hostility towards the idea that under sexual laissez-faire, a huge segment of the population, which lacks sufficient prudence and self-control, will make disastrous and self-destructive choices, so that restrictive traditional sexual norms may amount to a net harm reduction? Especially since liberals make analogous arguments in favor of paternalistic regulation of practically everything else.
There are many other examples too, but these are the best ones I can think of without either running into enormous inferential distances or sounding too provocative. It really seems to me that liberal norms change suddenly and dramatically towards laissez-faire once sexual matters come under consideration, and I don't see how this could be because their regular considerations of harm and fairness just happen to entail laissez-faire in this particular area and nowhere else.
Explicitly, certainly not often. But in many of their observed views and behaviors, I detect strong authority-based intuitions, even though they will invariably be rationalized as something else. The typical way is to present authority as some kind of neutral and objective expertise, even in areas where this makes no sense.
As I said, I'm not an expert on Singer in particular, and I don't deny the possibility that he might be an outlier in this regard. (Although I do remember reading things from him that seemed to me like a clear case of rationalizing fundamentally non-utilitarian liberal positions.) Also, I agree that someone's serious utilitarian bullet-biting on some issues provides some evidence that he is overall less dedicated to the values of sacredness etc. I do think, however, that you underestimate how often such serious bullet-biters can be inconsistent on other issues.
I've often seen you say this kind of thing in your comments. Do you participate in another forum where you do describe the details? Or alternatively, are you preparing us to eventually be ready to hear the details by giving these vague and general points?
I think there is a good chance that many of your ideas are wrong and you are probably more confident about them than you should be. (Nothing personal, I just think most new ideas are wrong and their proponents overconfident.) I could argue against the vague and general points that you offer, but it feels pointless since presumably you have stronger arguments that you're not sharing so I have no way of convincing you or bystanders that you are wrong, nor is it likely that you can convince me that you are right (without sharing those details). I imagine other potential critics probably feel the same and also stay silent as a result. In the meantime, readers may see your comments stand uncriticized and form an incorrect idea of what other LWers think of your views (i.e., that we're less skeptical of them than we actually are).
I thought I'd draw your attention to this issue in case it hadn't occurred to you already. Perhaps it might spur you to form or speed up a plan to make public your detailed ideas and arguments?
I agree that this is a valid concern, but I don't think your evaluation of the situation is entirely fair. Namely, I almost never open any controversial and inflammatory topics on this forum. (And I definitely haven't done so in a very long time, nor do I intend to do it in the future.) I make comments on such topics only when I see that others have already opened them and I believe that what has been written is seriously flawed. (In fact, usually I don't react even then.)
Therefore, while I certainly accept that my incomplete arguments may cause the problems you describe, you must take into account that the alternative is a situation where other people's arguments stand unchallenged even though they are, in my opinion, seriously flawed. In such situations, leaving them unanswered would create a problem similar to the one you point out with regards to my comments, i.e. a misleading impression that there is a more agreement with them that there actually is. (This even aside from the problem that, if I am correct, it would mean wrong arguments standing unchallenged.)
In these situations, I take my arguments as far as I believe I can take them without causing so much controversy that the discourse breaks down. This is a sort of situation where there is no good outcome, and I believe that often the least bad option is to make it known that there is some disagreement and voice it as far as it can be done. (In the sense that this outcome, whatever its problems, still makes the best out of the unfavorable trade-offs that unavoidably appear whenever some controversial and inflammatory topic is opened.)
Of course, there are many ways in which I could be wrong. Maybe the arguments I see as flawed are in fact usually correct and I'm just creating confusion and misleading people by parading my mistaken contrary beliefs this way. Maybe these topics are so unimportant that it's always better to ignore them than to raise any amount of fuss. Maybe my comments, however careful and diplomatic I try to make them, still serve as a catalyst for too much bad discourse by other posters. Relevant to your comment, maybe the confusion and misleading impressions left by my comments end up worse than the alternative outcome in case I stay silent. I recognize all these possibilities, but nevertheless, I think the concrete objection from your comment fails to recognize the relevant concerns I outlined above.
Yes, it's quite possible that you've thought through these issues more thoroughly than I have. But one thing that makes me more skeptical than usual is that you're the only person I know who often makes claims like "I privately have better arguments but I can't share them because they would be too inflammatory". If your arguments and conclusions are actually correct, why haven't other people discovered them independently and either made them public (due to less concern about causing controversy) or made similar claims (about having private arguments)? Do you have an explanation why you seem to be in such an uncommon epistemic position? (For example do you have certain cognitive strengths that make it easier for you to see certain insights?)
If I were you, I would be rather anxious to see if my arguments stand up under independent scrutiny, and would find a place where they can be discussed without causing excessive harm. I asked earlier whether you discuss your ideas in other forums or have plans to make them public eventually. You didn't answer explicitly which I guess means the answers to both are "no"? Can you explain why?
To offer another data point in addition to Konkvistador's, HughRistik made similar claims to me. We had a brief private exchange, the contents of which I promised to keep private. However, I think that I can say, without breach of promise, that the examples he offered in private did not seem to me to be as poisonous to public discourse as he believed.
On the other hand, I could see that the arguments he gave where for controversial positions, and anyone arguing for those positions would have to make some cognitively demanding efforts to word their arguments so as to avoid poisoning the discourse. I can see that someone might want to avoid this effort. But, on the whole, the level of effort that would be required didn't seem to me to be that high. I think that it would be easy enough (not easy, but easy enough) for Vladimir_M to make these arguments publicly and productively that he should want to do this for the reasons you give.
(I'll also add that the evidence HughRistik offered was serious and deserved respectful consideration, but it did not move me much from my previous mainstream-liberal views on the issues in question.)
Merely expressing certain thoughts in a clear way is deemed to poison the discourse on this forum, whereas expressing certain other thoughts, no matter how rudely, aggressively, childishly, and offensively, is not deemed to poison the discourse. The only way to get away with expressing these thoughts on this forum is to express them as Vlad does, in code that is largely impenetrable except to those that already share those ideas.
And as evidence for this proposition, observe that no one does express these thoughts plainly on this forum, not even me, while they are routinely expressed on other forums.
Lots of people argue that we are heading not for a technological singularity, but for a left political singularity, that will likely result in the collapse of western civilization. You could not possibly argue that on this forum.
Indeed it is arguably inadvisable to argue that even on a website located on a server within the USA or Europe, though Mencius Moldbug did.
Sorry, I composed the above comment in a rush, and forgot to address the other questions you asked because I focused on the main objection.
Regarding other forums, the problem is that they offer only predictable feedback based on the ideological positions of the owners and participants. Depending on where I go, I can get either outrage and bewilderment or admiring applause, and while this can be fun and vanity-pleasing, it offers no useful feedback. So while I do engage in ideological rants and scuffles for fun from time to time on other forums, I've never bothered with making my writing there systematic and precise enough to be worth your time.
Regarding other thinkers, I actually don't think that much of my thinking is original. In fact, my views on most questions are mostly cobbled together from insights I got from various other authors, with only some additional synthesis and expansion on my part. I don't think I have any unusual epistemic skills except for unusually broad curiosity and the ability to take arguments seriously even if their source and ultimate conclusion are low-status, unpleasant, ideologically hostile to my values and preferences, etc. (Of course, neither of these characteristics is an unalloyed good even from a purely epistemic perspective, and they certainly cause many problems, possibly more than benefits, for me in practical life.)
The problem, however, is that on controversial topics, good insight typically comes from authors whose other beliefs and statements are mistaken and biased in various ways, and whose overall image, demeanor, and affiliation is often problematic. And while people are generally apt to misinterpret agreement on a particular point as a full endorsement of someone, and to attack a particular argument based on the author's mistakes and biases on other questions, I think LW has some particularly bad problems in this regard. This is because on LW, people tend to assign a supposed general level of "rationality" to individuals and dismiss them if sufficient red flags of supposedly general irrationality are raised.
Whereas in reality, on controversial and ideologically charged questions, there is much less consistency within individuals, and people whose rationality is sterling as judged by the LW public opinion (often not without good reason) typically have at least some horribly naive and biased views, while much good insight comes from people whom LW would judge (also often with good reason) as overall hugely biased and irrational. (The only people who maintain high standards across the board are those who limit themselves to technical questions and venture into controversial non-technical topics only rarely and cautiously, if at all.) So that on many questions, saying "I think X has good insight on topic Y" would be just a way to discredit myself. (When I think it isn't, I do provide references with the appropriate caveats.)
Considering the source of the arguments, they most likely have not been seriously evaluated by many other careful thinkers, so you must have very high confidence in your ability to distinguish between good and bad arguments from object-level considerations alone. If you can actually, on your own, synthesize a wide-ranging contrarian theory from such diverse and not pre-filtered (and hence low in average quality) sources that is also correct, I would say that you have extremely unusual epistemic skills.
I agree with your assessment of this as a problem and an opportunity. But instead of trying, by oneself, to gather such good insights from otherwise biased and irrational people, it would be a better idea to do it as a community. If it seems too difficult or dangerous to try to change LW's community norms to be more receptive to your mode of investigation, you should build your own community of like-minded people. (From Konkvistador's not entirely clear description in the parallel thread, it sounds like you've already tried it via a mailing list, but you can probably try harder?)
I have privately discussed the arguments and found them convincing enough to move my position over the past year much more in his direction.
The best course of action is perhaps a correspondence with assured privacy? The problem is that one to one correspondences are time consuming and have their own weaknesses as a means to approaching truth seeking. I tried to get more open discussion of such arguments on a mailing list but as your probably know most didn't participate or write enough material to make reasoning explicit in ways they do in regular correspondence.
Also I felt this important enough to say to break my one month streak of staying off LW, I will now (hopefully) resume it.
Thank you for this data point, but it doesn't move me as much as you may have expected. I think many flawed arguments are flawed in subtle enough ways that it takes "many eyes" to detect the flaws (or can even survive such scrutiny for many years, see some of the flawed security proofs in cryptography for important commonly used algorithms and protocols as evidence). I personally would not update very much even if I saw the arguments for myself and found them convincing, unless I knew that many others with a diversity of expertise and cognitive styles have reviewed and had a chance to discuss the arguments and I've looked over those discussions as well.
Typically the first thing I do after finding a new idea is to look for other people's discussions of it. I'm concerned that many are like me in this regard, but when they come to Vladimir_M's "vague and general" arguments, they see them highly upvoted without much criticism, and wrongly conclude that many people have reviewed these "vague and general" arguments and found nothing wrong with them when it's more of a problem with potential critics lacking sufficient incentive to attack them. Even worse, if Vladimir_M's conclusions become commonly accepted (or appear to be commonly accepted) on LW due to such dynamics, it sets up a potentially bad precedent. Others may be tempted (not necessarily consciously) to overestimate how inflammatory some of their arguments are in order to gain an edge in getting their ideas accepted.
(As I mentioned, Vladimir_M may well have already thought through these issues more thoroughly than I have, but I wanted to bring up some possible downsides that he may have overlooked.)
Observe that one of my previous replies to you have been silently deleted.
The reason you don't see Vlad's arguments is that you don't hang out in the kind of forums where people such as Vlad are allowed to plainly state their arguments.
I've browsed Stormfront a few times (rather extensively). That is certainly a forum where people like Vlad would be allowed to plainly state their arguments, and might even reasonably get some cheering. However, there is a slight problem; I haven't seen any actual people like Vlad there, and that is understandable, since people like Vlad have some self-respect and probably wouldn't be caught dead posting at such crackpot shitholes.
(I certainly saw some people like Vlad in the comments on UR, but even there about every third comment is useless angry noise.)
Every time but one that I've seen a post deleted on LW, it has been because of the medium, not the message.
That is, the way the message was written was counter to discussion - for example, it contained a direct insult. (Calling someone a liar is pretty much never going to foster healthy discussion.) This happens for both controversial and uncontroversial opinions.
If you'd like, feel free to PM me any post you've made in this thread which has been deleted, or the approximate content thereof, and I can post it either as a direct quote or, if you'd prefer, rephrased in such a way that I think the composition of the post does not warrant deletion, so that we can test whether it's the message itself or merely the manner you express it which has been warranting deletion.
Someone ask Vlad, "such as?"
He makes no real reply.
I reply "Such as, for example ..."
Observe what happens.
Comments like yours - where people hide behind unspecified claims of inferential difference, mindkilling, and unspoken reasoning - piss me off more than the most hateful comments I've seen on the internet. That's probably a failing, but an understandable one. Manipulating and teasing my curiosity with the intent of having me take you more seriously than you deserve is something I really don't appreciate. I dislike you.
Have you considered ever just privately. ... you know .... asking him about details? He's always obliged when I did so.
I also dislike your dislike because there clearly are things that are counter-productive to discuss on LW.
Vlad didn't reply to my request. I don't suppose you would mind summarizing one or two of his more salient arguments?
I'd say that it's their very tone - diplomatic, refined and signaling broad knowledge and wisdom - that adds to the provocative value. After all, nobody would get very stirred up over a usual internet comment like "Your soooo dumb, all atheists and fagz will go 2 hell 4 destroying teh White Man!!" I do not suggest that you deliberately decrease your writing quality, of course.
Then presumably you think that the entire progressive agenda must be wrong, seeing as for the last two thousand years it would have been perceived as evil and insane, seeing as pretty much every taken for granted progressive verity was, before it became an article of faith, dismissed by progressives as a slippery slope argument.
For example, until the mid nineteenth century, everyone knew that female sexuality was so powerful, irrational, destructive, and self destructive that women needed their sex lives supervised for their own good, and everyone else's good. Everyone knew that democracy was stupid and evil because the masses would eventually try to vote themselves rich, and end up electing Caesar. Everyone knew that if you tried to tax more than five or ten percent, it would hose the economy, and you would wind up with less tax revenue. Everyone knew ...
I expect you to agree with me that we went of the rails when we emancipated women and gave the vote to every adult male.
Oh, really? I was not aware that, say, Galatians 3:28 was a passage censored or denounced by the entirety of medieval clergy. Perhaps you're, ah, slightly exaggerating?
"The last two thousand years" is the most hilarious bit of the above for me, given my view that the "progressive agenda" as broadly understood (or not understood at all, if you happen to be sam0345) basically appeared with Christianity, as its key part that was quite involved in its growth. See Robert Nisbet's History of the Idea of Progress for a conservative-progressive account, or Zizek's works on Christianity (The Fragile Absolute, The Puppet and The Dwarf, etc) for a communist one.
One of the curious things about early Christianity is that it is a religion of converts. For the first few generations, Christians were not the children of Christians, and they were not people who had converted under threat of violence as was common later on. They were adults who had converted from the religions of Judea, Greece, Rome, or Persia. The idea of conversion may have descended from the idea of initiation, found in Mithraism and in Greco-Egyptian mystery cults.
Christianity rather readily incorporated ideas from Greek philosophy, Jewish mysticism (of John the Baptist and the Essenes), and Mithraist mythology (the idea of a resurrected savior who was the son of God, which is not found in Jewish messianic beliefs). It opposed itself explicitly to Jewish legalism (the Pharisees, progenitors of Rabbinic Judaism) and nationalism (the Zealots / Sicarii / Iscariots).
If anything new — such as "the progressive agenda" or specifically the universalism and tolerance expressed in Galatians 3:28 — did appear with Christianity, we might ask, how did this new thing emerge from Christianity's antecedents and influences? We can be pretty sure that despite their mathematical advances, the ancient Greeks did not have a formal basis for morality, for instance ....
You're right, I shouldn't have used the word "lying". That mistake bothers me when other people do it, and I'm sorry for doing it myself.
But other than that...I'm afraid the whole point of my last post was to ask for examples, that we have different standards of what constitutes an example, and that I'm still not happy. For me, "Liberals have strong norms around equality" is not an example; I'm thinking something more along the lines of "You know how liberals are pro-choice? That's irrational for reasons X and Y and Z."
Can you give an example of a specific laissez-faire sexual policy that causes expensive negative-sum signaling games, and a practically workable less laissez-faire policy that would solve those negative-sum signaling games?
Can you give an example of a sexual activity that has such obvious and drastic public health implications that it should be banned?
It doesn't seem illegitimate to complain about it. What particular policies are you recommending?
You're assuming the conclusion when you say "automatic hostility". If you gave examples of a traditional norm that solved this problem, I would have be able to form more of an opinion on whether that traditional norm was genuinely harm-reducing.
Can you give an example of a liberal intuition which is authority-based but gets rationalized away to something else?
Can you give an example of a serious bullet-biter being inconsistent on other issues?
I hate to sound like a broken record here, it's just that anyone supporting any position at all can say "All my opponents really hold their positions for terrible reasons, and all their seemingly-good arguments are really just rationalizations". In the absence of specific evidence, this is just an assertion, and not an uncommon one.
Even though I have some pretty good guesses what you mean by some of these, I don't want to find myself straw-manning you by accident just because it's easy for me to come up with examples I can refute.
I understand if you don't want to start a brouhaha by posting controversial positions publicly. If you want to private message me an example or two, I'm usually pretty hard to offend, and I promise not to share it without your permission.
OK, if you want to delve into a concrete example with all the inflammatory details, PM me your email address. (I find the PM interface on this site very annoying.) If the discussion produces any interesting results, maybe we can publish it later suitably edited.
I'll also post a further reply later today, addressing some of your points that I think can be answered satisfactorily without going into too much controversy.
Are there liberals who try to crack down on commercial advertising wars? As far as I know, some liberals may grumble about the social waste of Coca-Cola and Pepsi spending millions to expand their relative share in a zero-sum competition, but they don't actually try to suppress it.
Smoking bans are not absolute, just in closed public places where the smoking affects nonconsenting third parties. Liberals tend to favor legalization of recreational drug use when no third parties are affected. They also would, I think, support criminalizing having unprotected sex if you knowingly have a STD and you don't tell your partner, which is the closest analogue I can imagine to smoking bans. So I don't see the inconsistency.
This is difficult to argue for or against unless you specify what concrete government measures to alleviate sexual and romantic inequality you think liberals should support. If prostitution was legal (and many liberals support that, especially if there are regulations to avoid coercion and exploitation) the "purely sexual" chunk of the problem would be subsumed under economic inequality, which liberals are concerned about.
You could make the same argument about many other things than sex. E.g. if people are free to choose where to live, they might make self-destructive choices (like buying a big house and then being crippled by mortgage payments and not being able to take vacations or enjoy life; or deciding to live in a "bad" neighborhood because it is cheap without considering the impact on their children, etc). Or you could argue that people should not be able to choose their jobs, their college degrees, etc.
The fact is, liberals do not support paternalistic regulations of "virtually everything else". It is quite likely that the pattern of which regulations they support and which they do not is not logical, nor based entirely in harm/fairness considerations, but based instead on a mixture of harm/fairness considerations, autonomy considerations, status quo bias, path dependence effects on which causes are suitable for political action, tribalism (opposing things conservatives like and vice versa), and some sanctity/purity impulses. But I don't see a reason to single out sexual autonomy as an area and ascribe to liberals a strong sanctity foundation on it, at least not in the arguments you have provided.
I don't know about automatic (and I am not presenting my own position) but it is certainly legitimate for a person to be hostile to being coerced into a worse situation because someone else believes (even correctly) that other people will benefit from said coercion. Similarly, it is hardly unreasonable for the one person who is being tortured for fifty years to be hostile to his own torture, even if that torture is a net benefit to the population.
If you want to do harm to people (whether paternalistic control or counterfactual torture) you should expect them to fight back if they can. Martyrdom is occasionally noble but it is never obligatory.
I don't have any significant disagreement here, except that I'm not sure if you believe that people's ideological views tend to be actually motivated by this kind of self-interest. I certainly don't think this is the case -- to me it seems like a very implausible model of how people think about ideological issues even just from common-sense observation, and it's also disproved by the systematic evidence against the self-interested voter hypothesis.
"Traditional sexual norms" (and the power relations they entail) did not arise through a process that optimized for harm reduction; they arose through a process of cultural evolution. At various points in time, patriarchal societies — by treating women as baby factories and men as killing machines — could outbreed and conquer less-patriarchal ones. That's when and why those "traditional sexual norms" arose.
It would be remarkable if this process had arrived at even a local minimum for harm, for the same reasons that it would be remarkable if biological evolution had arrived at a maximum for intelligence, happiness, or any other trait that we individually find desirable. (Heck, "traditional sexual norms" are optimized for sending excess boys to go kill other tribes' men and rape their virgin daughters. We call it "warfare" and it even today involves quite a lot of rape.)
So proposing "traditional sexual norms" as a harm reduction appears to be some combination of naturalistic fallacy and privileging the hypothesis; we have no reason to bring this particular set of norms to mind when we think of strategies for harm reduction, since it was selected for other goals.
But we can also ask, "For what reasons would it come to certain people's minds to politically advocate 'traditional sexual norms' if they don't actually want the things that 'traditional sexual norms' are optimized for, namely lots of conquest and rape?" Since we know about self-serving bias and privilege denial, we may suspect that at least some such advocates do it because it would serve their personal interests at the expense of others. That said, this runs the risk of fundamental attribution error. It is more likely the case that certain people find themselves in situations where they feel personally challenged by sexual laissez-faire, and respond by claiming the morality of traditional sexual norms, than that they do so because they are fundamentally misogynistic people.
When Vladimir_M uses the phrase "traditional sexual norms", he probably is not referring to those norms which you are referring to in your post. Rather, he is probably speaking of a certain subset of Western norms, likely lifelong heterosexual monogamy. This is extremely unoptimized for "lots of conquest and rape".
Not completely sure they're actually negative sum. They might look like that from a purely materialistic perspective ("lotteries are bad because the expectation value of how much money you'll have if you play is less than if you don't play" -- it is, but that also applies to going to the cinema), but if you factor in Fun Theory aspects...
I can't think of a way to achieve that (without large costs/risks/drawbacks).
If this was downvoted for disagreement: Why do you think signalling is negative-sum? How you think a ban on certain sexual practices could feasibly (costs not outweighing benefits) be enforced?
Providing that which was specifically requested, concrete examples of liberals sacrificing human lives to sacredness in the particular matter of sexuality, will of course result in this post being marked down, and were I to point to examples of the more obvious and extreme examples of sacrificing lives for sacredness, such as the environment, it would be marked down even more.
But here goes:
Let us suppose a capitalist was doing something that frequently caused harm to others and himself, for example operating a car battery recycling center where he dumped acid containing lead sulphates in on the ground, in drains, in a nearby stream, etc. Then he would be strongly regulated and supervised.
But female sexuality frequently results in harm to their children, their husbands, and themselves, and it is pretty much unthinkable to restrict it, even in the case of a married woman with children. Similarly, the response to the AIDs epidemic was to invent an imaginary heterosexual aids epidemic, rather than shut down the bathhouses. I am pretty sure that if Chuck E Cheese's cheese was killing vast numbers of people due the frequent presence of dangerous molds in the cheese, it would be shut down very rapidly without anyone worrying about restricting the liberty of cheese eaters to eat as much cheese as they liked, in any form they liked, any place they liked.
Similarly, vaccination against certain sexually transmitted diseases. They want to vaccinate vast numbers of people that are unlikely to need it at considerable expense, and possible risk of harm, in order that those that do need don't suffer possible stigma by having to request it. If you actually wanted to provide herd immunity, you would vaccinate the main disease reservoir, which is adult male homosexuals, not schoolgirls. If this was, say, an expensive rabies vaccine, people would get it on the basis of potential exposure, and animals would get it on the basis of being a potential disease reservoir. Instead it is being targeted at those least likely to benefit, and least likely to cause risk for others, because targeting it where it might actually be most useful might stigmatize the recipients. No one seems to worry that Chuck E Cheese might be stigmatized by visits from the health inspector, and they would worry even less if some customers were dying because their cheeses had the wrong molds growing in them. On the contrary, they would think it a damned good thing if they got stigmatized for harms that they indirectly or carelessly caused.
We face a vast pile of very restrictive regulation to prevent harm to that which liberals consider sacred, on the basis of vague, small, questionable, and nebulous externalities, yet if women fail to express their sexuality in what used to be the approved channels, or express their sexuality in what used to be unapproved channels, this is apt to cause massive externalities, particularly to children. And if female sexual autonomy is sacred, unlike Chuck E Cheese's cheese, male homosexual autonomy is ten times as sacred, as we saw in the AIDS epidemic.
Cheese gets aggressively regulated for a vague, slight, and quite possibly nonexistent risk of harm. Sexual misconduct does not, despite major and alarming harm, and not only is it not regulated, but aggressively protected from social disapproval.
If someone wants to sell homemade sauerkraut at a farmer's market, they need to first hire a team of lawyers and consultants to shepherd them through the bureaucracy, lest they somehow cause inadvertent harm to their customers, but if a woman feels that sex with her husband is insufficiently fulfilling and starts banging a pimp from time to time, because the pimp is so much edgier and cooler than her husband, the entire apparatus of state is not only not going to do anything to restrain her, it is going to use violence against her husband and children to prevent them from reacting negatively to this development.
The controversy over vaccination of young women for "certain sexually transmitted diseases" was over HPV, which is the predominant cause of cervical cancer in the U.S. and does not have any particular connection with "adult male homosexuals" any more than with other groups. HPV does cause other cancers (anal, penile, oral, etc.) but these are much more rare than HPV-caused cervical cancer.
According to the CDC, every year in the U.S. there are 16700 new cases of HPV-related genital or anal cancers in women, predominantly cervical cancer; while there are only 1900 new cases of HPV-related genital or anal cancers in men — including both gay and straight men.
In other words, vaccinating young women for HPV can be expected to directly and selectively help those young women — the specific young women who receive the vaccination, via individual rather than herd immunity. It secondarily helps their (male and female) sexual partners, although HPV-caused penile cancer is much rarer than HPV-caused cervical cancer. It does not appreciably help male homosexuals — who are, after all, a population not noted for having sexual contact with young women.
Sources:
Stigmatization is a concern with social norms about male homosexuality because gay men have, in fact, been heavily shunned/persecuted/stigmatized based on their sexuality. This has had large negative consequences in the lives of gay men, both for men who have faced stigma/shunning and for men who were prevented from having fulfilling romantic lives. There is no parallel concern with pizza parlors.
Antagonistic sexual politics also make it harder to promote public health. It is generally extremely difficult to enforce restrictions against sexual activities, so it helps a lot to have buy-in from the affected community. That is unlikely to happen if "public health" efforts are seen as coming from the persecutors, which makes it important for public health officials to disassociate themselves from the generalized disapproval of men who have sex with men.
But public health-motivated regulation of sexual activities does happen. After the AIDS epidemic hit the US in the early 1980s, many bathhouses were, in fact, shut down or heavily regulated. In San Francisco, for example:
Husbands, fathers, and capitalists, are either demonized or ridiculed on every television show. This is clearly having undesirable effects - less capital formation, less family formation, and less enterprise formation. Why is some people's stigmatization horrid, shocking, and in fact sacrilegious, while other people's stigmatization is no problem at all?
Imagine a public health campaign that told us that certain sexual behaviors were literally dirty, in that one was apt to catch a wide variety of diseases, and that people who engaged in these practices were apt to spread disease even to people who do not engage in them, so that people who engaged in these practices tended to be literally dirty..
Sacrilege
Now substitute "production" for "sex", and perhaps "pollution" for "disease". Absolutely no problem at all. In fact such a campaign would be pious, even if those condemned were plausibly innocent. Even if the campaign was totally untrue, it would be deemed truthy.
OK, let's put the Rawlsian veil of ignorance down. So I don't know who I'm going to be. I'd still prefer a few parts-per-thousand probability of getting AIDS than a 10% probability of having a sexual orientation for a gender with whom I'm forbidden from having sex with.
(OTOH, a monogamous relationship, incl. marriage, is more-or-less-implicitly a contract where you agree --among other things-- not to have sex with anyone else, so I do agree that the behaviour of “the entire apparatus of state” you describe in the second part of the last paragraph is wrong.)
EDIT: Retracted -- numbers are way off (see below).
How much?
Wikipedia indicates that this number is substantially too high. Random representative samples seem to give results of a few percent or less, with higher figures coming from non-representative samples such as prisons, urban areas which concentrate the gay population from surrounding regions, and unscientific polls by condom manufacturers.
I had also underestimated the probability of fatal STDs by an order of magnitude: AIDS alone caused 4.87% of all deaths in 2002. (OTOH, the fact that there are quite a few countries with a two-digit prevalence of HIV makes me seriously doubt sam0345's claim that “the main disease reservoir” “is adult male homosexuals”. There's no way gay men comprise a major part of 26% of Swaziland's population.)
AIDS in Africa is not spread by homosexuals, but by foreign aid: More precisely, by needle reuse in health facilities supported by foreign aid.
In the west, AIDS is, in its pattern of affliction and causation, wrath of God disease. In Africa, AIDS is, in its pattern of affliction and causation, wrath of progressivism disease.
The more AIDS patients you have, the more money you get, so no incentive to sterilize needles. And everyone feels a pleasant glow of progressive holiness and piety at the sight of non homosexuals and non drug users getting AIDS, so no one really wants to halt this display of holiness and sacredness.
The typical African AIDS victim is the faithful wife of a faithful husband who catches the disease because she attends a foreign aid funded clinic while pregnant. That will teach them to be married and faithful.
An article in New Scientist from a decade ago talking about a "controversial new analysis," without any follow-up in subsequent years is a pretty weak source. Here is Robin Hanson's post, arguing for the same claim with more recent and better sources, although still unconvincing.
Last I heard, $400 for a course, $100 for a dose. If this did not involve sex, such a vaccine would be targeted at at risk populations.
A ten pack of combined tetanus and diptheria vaccine costs $20 and everyone is at roughly comparable risk, so it is reasonable to give the tet/dipth vaccine out like lollipops or McDonald's toys. Maybe the HPV vaccination should be handed out free at the sex clinic, but it seems to me that the reason that they want to give it to schoolgirls is because they do not want to give it out free at the sex clinic.
Cheating is quite common; about 20% of married people have affairs and the rate is higher in putatively-monogamous unmarried partnerships. Around 3% of children are the result of affairs.
I'm not sure what other sorts of "contracts" have a 20% chance of default. I don't think banks would offer you a loan if they thought there was a 20% chance you wouldn't pay up. Even Florida's foreclosure rate isn't that bad!
End-user licence agreements of commercial software?
I'm not sure this case is as clear cut as you think. In any case I'd imagine you were around for the debates on this topic precipitated by Eliezer's Three Worlds Collide.
If you can reduce autonomy to sacredness in this general sense, I wonder if you're employing a fully general counterargument. If someone says, "My values aren't based on sacredness; they're based on X!", you could always reply, "Well, if X is the basis of your values, then you've elevated X to such a high level of importance that it's basically sacred to you. So, you see, your values turn out to be based on sacredness after all."
That would indeed be a fully general counterargument, but it's not the sort of argument that I'm making. My theory is not that liberals elevate harm and fairness so much that they should be called "sacred" for them. Rather, my theory is that they have their own peculiar moral intuitions of sacredness -- which is evidenced by the fact that if these intuitions are challenged by arguments based on harm or fairness analogous to those they accept in other cases, they react with emotions and rationalizations in a manner typical of people brought into dissonance by an attempt to elicit conflicting moral intuitions.
Of course, my view may be wrong, but I don't think it can be dismissed as a fully general counterargument.
Right. And, to be clear, I did not mean to accuse you of that. I did not mean that you were using the fully general counterargument to say that liberals don't care about harm and fairness. I was only considering the possibility that you were using the fully general counterargument to say that concern for sexual autonomy is really about sacredness. You seemed to be alluding to different arguments regarding harm and fairness, which you hesitate to give in full detail.
I haven't read Haidt, so I don't know how he accounts for "concern for autonomy" under his system. Does he reduce it to fairness and harm somehow? Or does it arise incidentally out of diminished concern for authority?
I've read Haidt's book, and I'd say he skirts around the topic of autonomy (sexual and otherwise) in liberal thinking, never giving it a satisfactory treatment, and avoiding issues where it would unavoidably come to the fore. For example, as a notable and glaring omission, the book doesn't address the controversies over abortion at all. (Thus putting Haidt in a very odd position where he purports to have a general theory of moral psychology that explains the contemporary American ideological rifts, but nonchalantly refuses to apply it to the single most ideologically charged moral issue in the U.S. today.)
Now, as you probably guess, I would hypothesize that he avoids autonomy-centered topics because they tend to contradict his theory of liberals as low on sacredness. But whether or not one agrees with this view, it seems clear that his treatment of such topics is incomplete and unsatisfactory.
I would taboo the word "autonomy" in this context, or at least give a clear definition, because there are at least 2 different things that it could refer to.
In Haidt's six foundations theory, the closest thing to "autonomy" as it is being used in this discussion is probably the liberty/oppression foundation (the 6th foundation to be added):
The liberty/oppression foundation is somewhat underdeveloped in Haidt's book, and discussed separately from the other foundations in a way that's organized a bit strangely, probably because the book was already in progress when he decided to count liberty/oppression as a sixth foundation. Haidt does not seem to have any published papers yet on the liberty/oppression foundation, but he does have one under review which focuses on libertarians.
In Richard Shweder's three-area theory, which was the original basis for Haidt's theory, "autonomy" has a different meaning. It is one of the three ethics - "autonomy" is the blanket label given to the individualistic/liberal approach to morality which involves harm, rights, and justice. The ethic of autonomy is contrasted with the ethic of community (ingroup and hierarchy) and the ethic of divinity (purity and sacredness). In one of Haidt's earlier papers, which used Shweder's system, experimental participants were given this definition of autonomy:
If you look at that definition and think "but that's all of morality, mushed together in one big category" then congratulations, you're WEIRD. In Shweder's approach, being obsessed with autonomy is precisely what is distinctive about liberals. The utilitarian, who applies cost-benefit analysis to everything and is willing to make any tradeoff, is just one member of the autonomy-obsessed family of moral perspectives. People who rigidly apply concepts of rights, liberty, or justice are part of that same family. The grand Kant-Bentham debate is just a factional squabble which is happening in one corner of the moral triangle.
Haidt's six-foundation approach can be considered a refinement of this view, which keeps Divinity, splits Community in two (ingroup & hierarchy), and divides Autonomy in three (harm, fairness, and liberty). Although there are some complications (fairness is somewhat Community-tinged, and liberty might be too).
Most of the points relevant to your comment are covered in this reply to Tyrrell McAllister, so to avoid redundancy, please follow up on that comment if you think it's not an adequate answer.
Frankly, utilitarianism is also community tinged, specifically the whole "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one" aspect of it.
How do you reduce autonomy to sacredness? I think of sacredness as something that inheres in some single object of veneration towards which a group of people can genuflect, such as a family shrine, a flag, a saint, or (for the left) "the environment". I would also extend the notion of a "single object" to slightly more abstract things, such as a single holy text (which might exist in multiple copies) or a single ritual way of eating (which might be enacted on multiple occasions).
In other words, sacredness should have some close connection to group cohesion. While I haven't read any of Haidt's books, I've listened to a couple of interviews with him, and he seemed to be very interested in the "groupish" qualities of the values in his system. In his BloggingHeads.tv interview, he even seemed to go so far as to suggest that group selection explained how some of these values evolved.
Autonomy doesn't seem like it would fit into such a notion of sacredness. "Individual autonomy" is a "single thing" at only a very abstract level. Every individual has his or her own autonomy. Unlike a shrine or a holy text, there is no one autonomy that we all can worship at once.
In principle, we could all gather together as a community to worship the one idea that we are each autonomous — the Platonic form of autonomy, if you will. But I don't get the sense that most people have a sufficiently concrete notion of the general idea of autonomy to be able to hold it sacred. For example, they would lack the confidence that everyone else is thinking of precisely the same idea of autonomy. Something can't serve as an object of community worship if the community members aren't sure that they're all worshiping the same thing.
People might have a sufficiently concrete conception of "my autonomy" or "your autonomy" or "her autonomy". These are things that we can easily latch onto as values. But then we're talking about a bunch of different "autonomies", which lack the unity that a sacred object seems to require.
One way in which sacredness commonly manifests itself is through sacred boundaries that serve as strong Schelling points. In fact, I am convinced that any large-scale human social organization depends to a significant degree on Schelling points whose power and stability rests on the fact that the thought of their violation arouses strong moral intuitions of sacrilege. (Even though this might be non-obvious from their stated rationale.)
Take for example the ancient Roman pomerium, the boundary of the city of Rome that was explicitly held as sacred. In particular, bearing arms within the pomerium was considered as sacrilege, and this norm was taken very seriously during the Republican period. Of course, a norm like this can easily be given a practical rationale (preventing coups, assassinations, etc.), and it seems plausible that it indeed had a practical effect of this sort, contributing to the long-standing stability and competitive success of the republican institutions. However, it was in fact the sacredness aspect that gave the norm its power, since a consequentialist rationale for any norm can always be rationalized away, thus making it a weak Schelling point, easily pushed down a slippery slope. And indeed, when the reverence for this traditional norm of sacredness started fading in the late Republic (along with many others), it was a good sign that the Republic had indeed gone to the dogs, and soon the state was torn by constant civil wars between competing generals who had no problem finding justifications and support for their plans to conquer Rome and seize power by armed force.
Similarly, intuitions of sacrilege can be associated with non-physical boundaries. Take for example the modern norms against euthanasia, even in cases where it's voluntary and in fact strongly desired by the patient, and the alternative is nothing but a prolonged suffering. People are horrified by the thought of euthanasia because it violates the perceived sacredness of human life. And again, one can make a cogent Schelling point/slippery slope argument in favor of such norms, but this is not what gives them their power.
Now, it seems quite plausible to me that this is in fact a common state of affairs for all sorts of norms that deal with the prohibition of crossing certain boundaries. Not all such norms are based on sacredness intuitions, of course -- they can also rest on a basis of fairness, harm, liberty, or some mix of those -- but in that case, their violation causes different and lesser kinds of outrage, and it's also easy to convince people to make exceptions based on concerns for fairness, harm, or liberty. For example, the norms about private property rights seem to be typically in this category: their violation causes nothing similar to the visceral feelings of sacrilege, and it's easy to convince people that some violations and curtailing of property rights are OK if you can convince them that it reduces harm and increases fairness or liberty.
With this in mind, I think it should be reasonable to ask whether the liberal intuitions of personal (and particularly sexual) autonomy are in fact a sort of pomerium backed by moral intuitions of sacrilege triggered by the perceived violations of this autonomy. (Whether or not we end up agreeing on the answer to this question.)
How much would someone have to pay you for you to be willing to slap your father in the face (with his permission) as part of a comedy skit? $ _
People tend to give high numbers for this question (or aren't willing to accept any amount), much moreso than if they are asked about their willingness to slap a friend. It is a violation that crosses some important boundary which one might label "sacred".
But in moral foundations theory, it is not a violation of the purity/sanctity foundation. It's a violation of the authority foundation.
Conclusion: "sacredness" (in this sense of a special-feeling boundary which people feel a strong aversion to crossing) is not limited to the purity foundation. It can apply to other foundations as well.
There are many more examples of taboo actions, for all five foundations, here. This collection is from a paper by Graham & Haidt (2011), Sacred values and evil adversaries: A Moral Foundations approach; many of the examples were developed in Haidt's earlier research.
Graham and Haidt say that the examples from all five foundations are violations of sacred values (even the ones that do not involve purity/degradation). They define "sacredness" separately from the purity foundation:
It's worth checking out the table at the end of the Graham & Haidt paper where they put together the pieces for a moral narrative based on each of the five foundations, including what people, things, and ideas that have become "sacred objects" and what evil they need to be protected from. For the Harm foundation, sacred values are "nurturance, care, peace", sacred objects are "innocent victims, nonviolent leaders (Gandhi, M. L. King)", evil is represented by "cruel and violent people", and examples of idealistic violence are "killing of abortion doctors, Weather Underground bombings". (Killing abortion doctors is also classified under Purity.)
I'm having trouble distinguishing your notion of "sacred" from the very broad notion of "deserves respect". Is there something more to your meaning of "sacred" besides "deserves respect"?
I agree that liberals believe that lots of things deserve respect. I agree that, typically, every individual's sexual autonomy is among these things. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of liberals added sexual autonomy to their list of things-that-deserve-respect because of some sort of Schelling-point-type phenomenon.
Are you saying something beyond this?
There's no denying that liberals use the language of respect a lot. Furthermore, I doubt that many liberals would want to deny it. So, in that sense, you could say that liberals appeal to sacredness a lot. But I thought that Haidt was using "sacred" in a different sense. How is your disagreement with him here more than semantics?
I don't think sacredness/purity is just about group cohesion. Some purity rituals (from an evolutionary point of view) are clearly about avoiding contagious diseases. Other sacredness taboos are about not doing things that have short term benefits but cause long term problems, especially when the short term benefit of the action is much more obvious than the long term harm.
Right, group cohesion isn't the only reason for these rituals, but they can still serve that function (eg, kosher diets).
Can valuing autonomy be explained by valuing purity? That doesn't seem plausible to me, since people so often want to use their autonomy to violate other people's purity norms (eg, sex 'n' drugs).
This blog author critiques an analysis of the abortion controversy that he or she attributes to Haidt. So Haidt evidently applies his theory to abortion somewhere.
Just in case I don't remember correctly, I've just checked The Righteous Mind's index for "abortion." It lists three pages, each of which mentions abortion only in passing as an example of a public moral controversy, without getting into any analysis whatsoever of the issue. To the best of my recollection, there is no such analysis elsewhere in the book either, nor in anything else I've read by Haidt.
As for the blog you link to, I strongly suspect that the author is in fact extrapolating from his (her?) view of what Haidt believes, not relaying an actual argument by Haidt. I might be wrong, but a few minutes of googling didn't turn up any relevant statements by Haidt.
Using Amazon's "Search Inside the Book" feature, I found some discussion of abortion (along with birth control) on page 209 of Haidt's The Happiness Hypothesis. I wonder if that book is working with an earlier version of his theory, because he talks very explicitly about the importance of autonomy to liberals on those pages.
What is the difference between an ideology and morality?
The questions Haidt ask are about what we judge to be moral. I simply don't judge disrespect for authority (for instance) as immoral in itself.
I'm also not convinced that purity is as instrumentally necessary as you say; and judging by that article, neither is Haidt. And loyalty can, at least in many cases, be replaced with the algorithm for which it is is a heuristic: reciprocal altruism.
I am not going to analyze you in particular, but what I write certainly applies to typical people who adhere to modern ideologies that claim to be concerned exclusively with harm and fairness.
These people would presumably insist that they "don't judge disrespect for authority... as immoral in itself." But what people say are rationalizations, not the real motivations for their beliefs and actions. To employ Haidt's rider-elephant metaphor, you see the rider insisting loudly that disrespect for authority is not immoral by itself, while the elephant is charging to stomp you to death, infuriated by your disrespect. Whereupon the rider, if pressed to explain what happened, invents a rationalization about how your real sin is in fact something in terms of harm (and maybe fairness), or maybe how you're simply being delusional or disingenuous. It's similar for sacredness and loyalty, of course.
Can you think of any functioning human society without strong norms of sacredness/purity when it comes to, say, sex or food?
(Of course, with regards to the present-day Western societies, this applies to the entire contemporary ideological spectrum. In fact, people who supposedly have a "rational" harm/fairness-based approach to these matters are, in my opinion, characterized by particularly intense fervor driven by their sacredness/purity-based norms.)
Their overlap is only partial. Ideologies normally also include non-moral beliefs (although moral motivations usually lurk not very far underneath). In turn, some moral judgments are human universals, and others may be a matter of such strong consensus within a particular culture that calling them ideological would stretch the term beyond the normal variation in its meaning.
I certainly agree with the descriptive claim that people often rationalize, and that western liberals often do have their own ideas of sacredness.
But I think it's probably wrong to say that all discussion of morality is rationalization. If that were true, nobody would ever be swayed by a moral argument. In fact, people do change their views -- and they frequently do so when it is pointed out that their stated views don't match their actions.
I suspect that this will come down to a question of what is sacred. For instance, the French definitely have a very strong food culture, but I suspect that they mostly would not regard violations of that as immoral. And, of course, the particulars of which sexual arrangements are considered sacred has varied widely across human cultures. If the sacred in food and sex evolved to combat parasites, then it is at this point, in Western societies, an onion in the varnish.
Like many other cases where changes in technology have cause unprecedented social arrangements (agriculture allowing cities, for instance), purity norms in sex and food may weaken or disappear.
This is a non sequitur. An argument may change people's moral beliefs and intuitions by changing the underlying tacit basis for their rationalizations, whereupon they get displaced by new ones. The most frequent way this happens is when people realize that a realignment of their moral intuitions is in their interest because it offers some gain in power, wealth, or (most commonly) status, or perhaps it will help avoid some trouble.
Moreover, pointing out that people's stated views don't match their actions is almost never an effective way to change their views. Usually it's effective only in provoking hostility and making their rationalization mechanisms work somewhat harder than usual.
They have never been just about parasites, especially when it comes to the norms about sex (and the whole enormous cluster of related issues about reproduction, family, etc.). Strong norms about these matters must exist in order for any human society to function and perpetuate itself, and it seems to me that humans are hardwired to use the sacredness foundation as the fundamental basis for their moral intuitions about many of them. Even if it were possible to formulate these norms based on "rational" considerations of harm and fairness in a way that wouldn't be just a convenient rationalization for deeper intuitions -- and I don't think anything like that is possible -- such norms would probably be unworkable in practice with realistic humans.
(I could conceive more easily of a hypothetical society in which food-related norms would be free of purity/sacredness. But it still looks implausible that people wouldn't keep inventing new ones like they presently do, even if it requires ever more creative rationalizations. Plus, it seems to me that such norms can be practically useful in a variety of ways.)
But isn't that precisely what the west has done (not completely, of course), and what the polyamorous community has done to a much greater degree?
On the contrary -- it seems to me that the modern Western societies are, by all historical standards, exceptionally obsessed with sacredness norms on sex-related issues. See my old comment I linked earlier, in which I elaborate on some particularly striking manifestations of this.
(Also, among the most amusing posts on Overcoming Bias are those where Robin Hanson elicits outrage from the respectable progressive folk by putting some sex-related issue under dispassionate scrutiny and thereby violating their sacredness intuitions.)
As for the polyamorists, I don't have any direct insight into the inner workings of these communities except for a few occasional glimpses offered by LW posts and comments. But unless they are composed of extremely unusual self-selected outliers (which might be the case given their very small size), I would suspect that they are again just rationalizing a somewhat different (and possibly even more extreme) set of sacredness norms.
Purity is an unusual foundation, since it can apply at the object level or the meta level. On the object level, people believe things like "don't eat pork because it's unclean" or "don't have premarital sex because it takes away your purity."
On the meta level, moral purity can apply whenever people hold firmly to a principle or policy. Republicans demand ideological purity in opposing all tax increases, and Kant gets accused of valuing his own moral purity more than another person's life for refusing to lie to the murderer at the door. More generally, any misdeed feels "dirty", so moral purity motivates people to avoid breaking any moral rule. This does seem to involve genuine feelings of purity/sanctity/contamination/disgust - witness the the large role of sin and purification in many religions, and the Lady MacBeth effect in the general populace (i.e., college sophomores). Violating a moral rule is a stain on you, which you may or may not be able to cleanse away.
Meta-level purity supplements a moral rule which has other bases. I don't think that moral values against taxes and lies are based primarily on purity, even if there is some purity thinking involved in treating them as sacred values and refusing to compromise or consider tradeoffs. Lady MacBeth may have become obsessed with washing her hands but that does not mean that the (felt) wrongness of murder is due to it being a purity violation.
The principle that the government should not interfere in people's sex lives sounds like another case where purity is operating at the meta level, where the primary foundation is something else. In this case, it's probably foundation #6, liberty/oppression, which is activated particularly strongly for liberals because sexual restrictions have been a form of oppression against women and gay people.
There are other cases where people vehemently want the government to keep its hands off (e.g. guns on the right, abortion on the left), and the common thread seems to be that the individual should have the right to control something and do with it what they want, without outside interference. The purity foundation is recruited to help make these rules absolutist (e.g., people get very suspicious of any regulation that is even loosely related). It may also play some role in determining which particular rules are the ones that became absolutist, but if it is a factor I'd guess that it comes in third (at best), after how close/personal/important the issue is to people (e.g., involving control over your own body or personal protection) and how much of a threat to autonomy there is / has been.
Then why don't they apply the liberty principal to government regulation in other aspects of their lives?
The unsatisfying answer is that moral foundations theory doesn't explain why the foundations get applied in the ways that they do - that differs between cultures and involves a lot of path-dependence through history. But Haidt's theory does at least provide some guidance for conjecture, so I'll speculate about why sexual liberty became important to liberals based on the liberty/oppression foundation.
The way that Haidt describes it, for American liberals the liberty foundation is primarily about wanting to protect sympathetic victims from oppression. Telling the story from that point of view, sexual restrictions have been a form of oppression, involving shunning and other social punishments for victims like women who had sex outside of marriage or men who loved other men. With the sexual revolution, liberals threw off these arbitrary and oppressive restrictions, and brought us much closer to a world where no one can stop you from being yourself (holding your sexual identity openly without fear of reprisal) or from having sex with who you want to, how you want to (as long as you are consenting adults).
Government regulation in many other aspects of people's lives has not involved such obvious oppression of sympathetic victims.
Now, could someone return the favor and offer their speculation about how the purity foundation led liberals to value sexual liberty? Vladimir_M mentions that people tend to apply purity-based morality to sex, which is true, but they tend to apply purity at the object level as a reason to restrict sexual activities. Sexual liberty would be applying purity at the meta level as a reason to allow sexual activities. Sex can spread disease (the purity/contamination framework originally evolved for avoiding illness), involves the body in a way that is closely related to many elicitors of disgust, and because of its evolutionary importance people are prone to having strong intuitions & emotions about sexual activities that don't readily fit in other foundations. So it's understandable that people would tend to get squeamish about various sexual practices and want to restrict them based on purity concerns. It's not clear to me how those purity concerns jump to the meta level and reverse direction.
(Let's leave aside, for now, the less thoughtful liberals and conservatives, since what they think isn't interesting).
I don't understand why you put autonomy in the category of sacredness. Haidt considers liberty an independent foundation, and I don't think it requires rationalization to consider nonconsensual sex to be a case of harm!
The thing is, what determines when autonomy is absolute and inviolable, and when it should be weighed against other concerns?
When it comes to interventions in human affairs by the state and other institutions, modern liberals pride themselves on their supposed adherence to (what they see as) rational and scientific cost-benefit analysis and common-sense notions of equality and fairness. They typically assert that their opponents are being irrational, or acting out of selfish interest, when they insist that some other principle takes precedence, like for example when conservatives insist on respecting tradition and custom, or when libertarians insist on inviolable property rights. In particular, liberals certainly see it as irrational when libertarians oppose their favored measures on the grounds of individual liberty and autonomy.
However, there are issues on which liberals themselves draw absolutist lines and lose all interest for cost-benefit analysis, as well as for concerns about equality and fairness that are perfectly analogous to those they care about greatly in other cases. Sex is the principal example. Liberals argue in favor of comprehensive intervention and regulation in nearly all areas of human life, but in contrast, people's sexual behavior is supposed to be a subject of complete laissez-faire. This despite the fact that many arguments that liberals normally use against the evils of laissez-faire and in favor of economic intervention, wealth redistribution, and paternalistic regulation, would apply with equal (or even greater) force to sex as well. Yet an attempt to argue in favor of more restrictive sexual norms on any of these grounds will be met with immediate hostility by liberals -- often so fierce that you'll be immediately dismissed as obviously crazy or malicious.
I don't think it's possible for liberals to salvage the situation by claiming that sexual laissez-faire is somehow entailed by the same considerations that, according to them, mandate complex and comprehensive regulation of almost everything else. This would be vanishingly improbable even a priori, and a casual look at the arguments in question definitely shows a glaring inconsistency here. The only plausible explanation I see here is that, just like everyone else in the human history, liberals base their sexual norms on a sacredness foundation -- except that for them, this foundation has the peculiar form of sacralizing individual autonomy, thus making a violation of this autonomy a sacrilege that no other considerations can justify.
Ironically, the sexual norms based on sacralized individual autonomy end up working very badly in practice, so that we end up with the present rather bizarre situation where we see an unprecedented amount of hand-wringing about all sorts of sex-related problems, and at the same time proud insistence that we have reached unprecedented heights of freedom, enlightenment, and moral superiority in sex-related matters. (And also a complete impossibility of discussing these topics in an open and honest manner, as witnessed by the fact that they reliably destroy the discourse even in a forum like LW.)
The unprecedented amount of hand-wringing might not be indicative of an increase in the number or magnitude of sex-related problems if it turns out that previous norms also discouraged public discussions of such problems. What are the other metrics by which we can say that the current set of norms are working badly in practice? Are there fewer people having sex, are they having less enjoyable sex, or are their sexual relationships less fulfilling and of shorter duration or are these norms destabilising society in other ways?
This is probably the most insightful comment that I've seen on LW in a long time.
'Using the purity foundation' =/= 'Unable to think about it rationally and genuinely consider both benefits and costs.'
The purity foundation involves specific patterns of thought & feeling including the emotion of disgust and modeling the world in terms of purity and contamination, or elevation and degradation. People can be absolutist and unwilling to consider tradeoffs for moral views that come from any of the foundations (including harm/care, e.g. not wanting to torture a child no matter how big the benefit).
This is a wild exaggeration. There are large domains of life where liberals favor a large amount of freedom. See the 1st amendment, for instance. The standard distinction puts liberals higher on social liberty but lower on economic liberty; Haidt has used the term "lifestyle liberty" to describe the kind of liberty that liberals support. Liberals are relatively consistently opposed to legal restrictions on self-expression, for example, and they generally have social norms encouraging it (with some exceptions where it runs afoul of other norms).
I don't see a very plausible story of how the purity pattern of thinking would form the basis for norms of sexual permissiveness (maybe you could fill in some of the details?). The simplest explanation that I see is that sexual restrictions became tagged, in liberals' minds (and in liberal culture) as traditionalist/oppressive/sexist/bad. (Because a lot of sexual restrictions did fit that pattern.) So, by pattern matching, now any proposed sexual restriction sounds bad, like something they support and we oppose. There are various particular psychological and cultural mechanisms that contributed to making this stick. For instance, it probably helped that sex can fit within the social/lifestyle/self-expressive category where liberals tend to be more laissez-faire. And it helps that they (the people who want to restrict human sexuality based on their retrograde puritanism) continue to exist (rather prominently, in many liberals' minds), because that makes it easy to associate proposed sexual restrictions with them and to be suspicious of people who propose such restrictions.
Do we actually see this hand-wringing from liberals, though? I'm not really sure what you're talking about, unless it's gay marriage, in which case most liberals don't seem to be hand-wringing so much as pushing forward along the same path as ever: towards more sexual freedom. There's hand-wringing from conservatives, but I don't see how this is relevant to your point.
I think you and I must know very different liberals.
"Namely, the answer is that, contrary to Haidt's model of contemporary ideologies, there are in fact no such people."
This seems to be obviously untrue. Unless "no such people" has finally become a synonym for "very few such people percentagewise" Even if you replace "morality" with "instinct" this is almost certainly untrue. Sincere utilitarians, labelled as such or not, do in fact exist. There are also people who naturally lack some or all such instincts altogether.
"As for the claim that "you need loyalty, authority and sanctity to run a decent society," I would actually go further and say that they are necessary for any sort of organized human society. In fact, the claim can be stated even more strongly: since humans are social beings who can live and reproduce only within organized societies""
Humans can reproduce and live outside of organized societies (unless you define a pair as a society). Authority is a word that adds nothing to a neutral description other than a means for demonstrating deference. Perhaps some kind of policing type people are necessarry but calling it an authority isn't. Not all humans are social beings.
"What does exist are people whose ideology says that harm and (maybe) fairness are the only rational and reasonable moral foundations, while the other ones are only due to ignorance, stupidity, backwardness, malice, etc. Nevertheless, these same people have their own strong norms of sacredness, purity, authority, and in-group loyalty, for which they however invent ideologically motivated rationalizations in terms of harm and fairness."
Who are you talking about? (some group I assume) This doesn't sound implausbible. The vast majority of humans are hypocrites barring significant cost, or amoral enough enough in the first place to be incapable of hypocrisy (not that this is a bad way to be if you're optimising for politics.)There would have to be a hell of a selection effect for any group to not be made up of a majority of such people. How would you know the difference between someone who was actually motivated purely by harm and fairness and someone who merely claimed to be or wrongly believed they were? Bearing in mind the oppurtunity cost of examining everyone who claims to be utilitarian and the minimal or even negative payoff from identifying such a person as such do you think you'd be aware of such people if they did exist?
"And here you will find that, even in terms of a purely utilitarian metric, an accurate analysis of the social role of the norms based on these "irrational" foundations will give you very different answers from those given by the pseudo-rational ideologies that claim to reject these foundations."
I presume you mean that the answer will be that these things are necessarry for any society. If so, what makes you think the status quo is a necessity? Why would the way things tend to be, be the only way things can be? What role (which actually needs to be filled) do any of these things play that can't be filled some other way?
Also, as I don't want to wait for my post to drop off most recent 5 before I can post again I'll mention here that this, from the OP: "I just can't imagine a woman saying, "yeah, he's going to rape my daughter, but I really love him!"" does actually happen, but instead of saying "he's going to rape my daughter" they usually just don't think about or refuse to admit that bit, or simply don't believe it happened. Unless all the people claiming that happened to them are lying, which seems unlikely. Obviously it also happens inside marriages.