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Vladimir_M comments on What is moral foundation theory good for? - Less Wrong
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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?
Quality and quantity were the only sex-related problems that came to mind?
Pregnancy, particularly pregnancy out of wedlock, and venereal disease are the traditional sex-related problems. Both of them are massively higher after sexual liberation. (Out of wedlock births are also exacerbated by welfare, which is part of a larger political discussion.)
Births out of wedlock are somewhat difficult to hide from government record-keepers in developed countries like the US, though they may be possible to hide socially (which is what most people care about anyway). Out of wedlock births among African Americans are currently at ~70%; in 1940, a full generation before the civil rights era, it was 19%.
Venereal disease is a bit harder to compare to last century (whereas we have out-of-wedlock rates going back quite a bit), and there are issues with diseases (like syphilis) becoming treatable and overall medical care (including reporting) increasing. But the impact of the Sixties on American gonorrhea rates is still clear. (It also seems likely that gay liberation contributed to the AIDS epidemic- but the primary comparison there is to Cuba, where those with AIDS were quarantined. Unsurprisingly, quarantine reduces transmission rates.)
Out of wedlock birth rates have exploded with sexual freedom:
-http://www.familyfacts.org/charts/205/four-in-10-children-are-born-to-unwed-mothers
Marriage is way down:
-http://www.familyfacts.org/charts/105/the-annual-marriage-rate-has-declined-significantly-in-the-past-generation
This is probably the most insightful comment that I've seen on LW in a long time.
Read his entire comment history. (FWIW Vladimir_M is I think my second favorite LW commenter.)
'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 would guess - things like "less desirable" men not being able to find a mate, teenage pregnancy, single motherhood, STDs, rape ...
But yes, those don't seem to be things liberals complain about more than conservatives; I'm not sure if Vladimir was implying they did, or talking about something else.
(Personally, I can't tell if there really is "unprecedented amount of hand-wringing" or if it's just availability bias - it's easier to think of examples of people complaining now than of people complaining 50 years ago)
I think you and I must know very different liberals.
Looking back at my comment, I did perhaps use a very broad brush at certain points, which is unfortunately hard to avoid if one wishes to keep one's comments at reasonable length. However, I'd still be curious to hear where exactly you think my description diverges from reality.