[lit-ideas] Re: Moral Judgment and Perceptual Metaphor -- Good to Think?
- From: Robert Paul <rpaul@xxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 02 Aug 2010 14:02:22 -0700
John McCreery quotes Jonathan Haidt.
/Morality is so rich and complex. It’s so multifaceted and
contradictory. But many authors reduce it to a single principle, which
is usually some variant of welfare maximization. So that would be the
sugar. Or sometimes, it’s justice and related notions of fairness and
rights. And that would be the chemist down the street. So basically,
there’s two restaurants to choose from. There’s the utilitarian
grille, and there’s the deontological diner. That’s pretty much it./
Well, really, Mr Haidt should get out more. That 'morality' is 'rich and
complex' is easy to say. What's harder to say is where this richness and
this complexity lie—in philosophical theories of morality; in the
blunders and confusions of difficult human choices; in trying to explain
the emotional and rational basis of the virtues; in talking of grief,
guilt, happiness, freedom, responsibility, joy, love, friendship, loss
and a thousand other things? Which of these Mr Haidt has in mind is not
clear. To say that utilitarianism (Mills' or Rawls') and a rule-governed
morality based on Kantian duty are 'pretty much it,' is to display an
astonishing intellectual carelessness.
/We need metaphors and analogies to think about difficult topics, such
as morality. An analogy that Marc Hauser and John Mikhail have
developed in recent years is that morality is like language. And I
think it’s a very, very good metaphor. It illuminates many aspects of
morality. It’s particularly good, I think, for sequences of actions
that occur in time with varying aspects of intentionality.
/
Whether we /need/ metaphors and analogies to think about 'difficult
topics' (as Plato did with his analogy between the psyche and the polis,
or as Kukele did with his dream of ouroboros and the benzene ring) would
seem to be an empirical claim about cognition. What troubles me is that
I have no idea what it is to think about morality on its own, apart from
thinking about some of the perplexities I mentioned earlier, that is the
/stuff/ of moral concern.
What really aroused me from my mid-morning slumbers was that Haidt seems
not to have heard of, let alone read or thought about the philosophers
who have actually written on moral issues in sharp, sensitive and
illuminating ways, whose insights go well beyond a crude taxonomy of
moral 'theories' such as one might find in an elementary textbook.
I have in mind Martha Nussbaum's explorations in such works as /The
Fragility of Goodness/, and /Love's Knowledge/, and Amélie Rorty's many
essays on a range of subjects central to the philosophy of human actions
and desires. The bibliography on her Web page
http://amelierorty.blogspot.com/ should be evidence that Mr Haidt knows
little if anything of recent (well, hardly /recent/) philosophical work
on investigations that should be of most concern to him.
/But, once we expand the moral domain beyond harm, I find that
metaphors drawn from perception become more illuminating, more useful.
I’m not trying to say that the language analogy is wrong or deficient.
I’m just saying, let’s think of another analogy, a perceptual analogy./
I'll end my peevish remarks by saying again that to speak of 'morality'
as being this or that by using metaphors and analogies drawn from this
place or that place would seem to be the stuff of academic cocktail
parties.
John himself says
To an anthropologist entranced for more than four decades by
Levi-Strauss’ call to consider the “logic in tangible qualities” and a
student of Victor Turner, who envisions dominant symbols as
bipolar–one pole a cluster of concepts the other, the sensory pole, a
cluster of tangible qualities that evoke powerful emotions, Haidt’s
thinking is highly appealing. What say others here?
I say that I'd like to hear more about what John has taken from
Levi-Strauss and Turner, that is, some specific examples of it; and
further, that I don't see how his's own suggestive remarks are inany way
depend upon Mr Haidt's blinkered pronouncements.
Robert Paul
The Reed Institute
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