Moral Reasoning

Grapes of Wrath: On Morality and Fairness in the Monkey House

One of the guest speakers at the recent MAPP onsite has been Isaac Prilleltensky, who is the Dean of Education at the University of Miami. His research focus is on community well-being and its antecedents. In his lecture, he elaborated on the notion of well-being as a consequence (or at least: side-effect) of perceived fairness and justice in our lives. There is now considerable scientific evidence that these issues can have a major influence on our satisfaction with life and other important measures of psychological functioning. E.g., there´s a substantial statistical connection between a nations´ overall well-being and those countries´ Gini coefficient which, roughly speaking, measures the level of inequality in the wealth distribution of a country. I do not want to take a deep-dive into this here. If you want to know more, I would like to direct you to one of Prilleltensky´s recent papers by the name of Wellness as Fairness.

What really caught my attention is just how deeply the notion of fairness is rooted in our mammalian, tribal nature. I´ve already written a post on Paul Bloom´s research on the intuitive moral judgments of babies. But that´s by far not the end of the (moral) story. In the following video clip, you´ll see a snippet from a TED talk given by Frans de Waal, a Dutch primatologist a Emory University. He shows footage of an experiment involving capuchin monkeys. Bascially, two of them are “paid” for repeatedly carrying out a certain task by receiving cucumbers. Everything is OK. But then, the researcher starts to give one of the animals grapes instead – which (very obviously…) is considered to be a higher paycheck in the capuchin society. Watch what happens…

Can you feel that little monkey´s rage? And just for a moment: Transfer this to the realm of human emotion, multiply it by 10,000,000 (or so) – and try to understand what´s going on in countries like Egypt, Syria, and the Ukraine over the last years?

 

P.S.

If you´d like to learn even more on Prilleltensky´s work on community well-being, you might want to watch his TED talk on that subject…

The Edge of Moral Reasons: Why Liberals and Conservatives can´t get along

Why is it that liberals and conservatives cannot get along? We´re all human after all, aren´t we? Well…yes. But as you know, there are people who speak different languages which might lead to not being able to understand each other. Turns out, (far) right and left wing supporters may have the same problem – even if they all speak plain English.

One guest lecturer of MAPP´s fourth onsite was Stern School of Business´ Jonathan Haidt. Among other most interesting topics, he conducts research on moral reasoning. What he found has a lot to say on the state of current U.S. politics: Haidt has identified a kind of moral taxonomy, a set of five dimensions that all our moral judgments are based on (see diagram below). The problem is: conservatives tend to use all five dimensions to just about the same amount when making moral judgments. Liberals tend to use only two of them – the other are seen as not relevant. The result: liberals perceive conservatives as being uptight, while the latter perceive the aforementioned to be ‘morally loose’.

Both sides are literally ‘worlds apart’ – and building bridges is a tough task when the differences are engraved deep into your mind…

If you´d like to know more about your personal moral reasoning, please vitit Jonathan Haidt´s site www.yourmorals.org.

Haidt - Moral Judgment

Source for diagram

“Bad” Circles and “good” Triangles: Are Human Beings hard-wired for Altruism?

The morning of the last day of MAPP immersion week was once again hosted by Yale psychologist Paul Bloom. That day, he gave a brilliant lecture on (the development of) moral reasoning and corresponding research in that area. He argued that most research on the infamous trolley problem is seriously flawed – because all those thought experiments are typically carried out thinking about total strangers. Instead, he explained, our “moral sense” is necessarily awakened within close groups of acquaintances: our family and friends – our “tribe” – which in the end leads to completely different moral decisions.

What I found even more interesting is the question displayed the title of this blog post: Are we “moral blank slates” when coming into this world – or are children born with an innate preference to like “the Good”? In short: there is considerable empirical evidence that the latter may well be true. If you would like to find out, please watch this Youtube clip from the New York Times. It shows very cute (and insightful…) experiments carried out with six to twelve months old babies investigating – among other things – their ability to discriminate good and bad stuffed animals.

girl-suicide-bomber-300x231

Of course these experiments do not undoubtedly prove that all men are created (equally) good. But at least I´m pretty sure now we´re anything but hard-wired to become suicide bombers or the like. That is 100% nurture, not nature. Seeing pictures* like this almost breaks my heart…**

* This picture can be found on the internet numerous times. Unfortunately, I could not get hold of its original source. If you happen to know, please contact me.

** This is meant as an example only, I don´t intend to offend any Muslim people. Actually, one of our bridesmaids is Muslim. It´s just that this picture gives a perfect example of how men oftentimes corrupt their own children… :-/