Are conservatives more morally balanced?

Only marginally related to the post, but a great image just the same – from turtblu on Flickr

Readers with prodigious memories may recall a post I wrote a couple of years ago about the work of psychologist Jonathan Haidt on the cognitive basis for human morality.  Haidt has developed a model he calls “social intuitionism”.  Here’s my amateur summary from the 2006 post:

Haidt and Bjorklund ¹ are decisively in the intuitionist camp, though  basing  their arguments very much on empirical research in cognitive psychology (including their own research).   Their theory certainly seems (at least to this non-expert)  solidly grounded in current cognitive science research.   They claim that human moral behaviour emanates from a set of moral intuitions that are hard-wired into the brain and therefore identifiable across all human cultures, albeit that their precise shape is strongly influenced and moulded by social and cultural factors during a childs development.   They also argue that the initial moral flash of intuition that precedes every individual moral decision may be modified by social factors at the time.   However, that social influence is anything but a process of intellectual reasoning in the vast majority of cases.   The process is  little more than the outworking of our desire to fit our moral decision-making into a consensus of the community or peer group of which we  see ourselves  as part: the morality of the herd.

The vast majority of what passes for moral reasoning is in reality no more than post hoc justification of decisions actually already reached on an intuitive basis, a conclusion that doesnt look promising for idealistic political theories like  Habermass  concepts of communicative rationality and deliberative democracy.   That wont come as  a  huge  surprise to  readers of political blogs, a domain where (like political discourse generally)  bloggers and commenters mostly just  shout past each other (however civilly)  from entrenched, predetermined positions.

According to Haidt and Bjorklund, the brains  intuitive innate moral modules are also  eminently susceptible to triggering and therefore manipulation by the way in which a moral (or political) issue is framed (ref Tversky and Kahneman in economics, Sunstein from a more specifically moral perspective), a proposition that also wont come as a surprise to marketing gurus or political spin doctors.

Haidt and Bjorklund identify 5 specific innate moral modules in the human brain:

• Harm (a sensitivity to or dislike of signs of pain and suffering in others);
• Reciprocity (a set of emotional responses related to playing tit-for-tat, such as negative responses to those who fail to repay favors);
• Hierarchy (a set of concerns about navigating status hierarchies, for example anger towards those who fail to display proper signs of deference and respect);
• Concerns about purity (related to the emotion of disgust, necessary for explaining why so many moral rules relate to food, sex, menstruation, and the handling of corpses); and
• Concerns about boundaries between ingroup and outgroup .

Now it seems that the mainstream media has caught onto Haidt’s work.  He has become a pet subject for op-ed pundits.  See, for example, this NY Times article by Nicholas Wade and this one only a few weeks ago by Steven Pinker.  Pinker’s article is especially worth reading, covering a vast range of work in the social sciences in an accessible and entertaining way.  I suppose it isn’t surprising that Pinker should be enamoured of Haidt’s work.  After all, Pinker’s main claim to fame is as a populariser of Noam Chomsky’s theory that a “universal grammar” is hard-wired into human brains, and so a theory like Haidt’s arguing that a basic moral structure is also hard-wired into our brains is very likely to meet with his approval (perhaps he experienced a moral intuition to that effect, and engaged in post hoc reasoning with a bit of confirmation bias thrown in …).

The one aspect of Pinker’s article I found jarring, however, was this passage:

The ranking and placement of moral spheres also divides the cultures of liberals and conservatives in the United States. Many bones of contention, like homosexuality, atheism and one-parent families from the right, or racial imbalances, sweatshops and executive pay from the left, reflect different weightings of the spheres. In a large Web survey, Haidt found that liberals put a lopsided moral weight on harm and fairness while playing down group loyalty, authority and purity. Conservatives instead place a moderately high weight on all five. Its not surprising that each side thinks it is driven by lofty ethical values and that the other side is base and unprincipled.

My first reaction was to wonder whether Pinker’s rather right wing political views might be causing him to misrepresent Haidt’s arguments.  However, some further Googling revealed that these really were Haidt’s conclusions.  In this article from Edge, Haidt explains his argument at some length.  Here is a substantial extract for those who don’t have time to read the whole thing:

My UVA colleagues Jesse Graham, Brian Nosek, and I have collected data from about 7,000 people so far on a survey designed to measure people’s endorsement of these five foundations ². In every sample we’ve looked at, in the United States and in other Western countries, we find that people who self-identify as liberals endorse moral values and statements related to the two individualizing foundations primarily, whereas self-described conservatives endorse values and statements related to all five foundations. It seems that the moral domain encompasses more for conservativesit’s not just about Gilligan’s care and Kohlberg’s justice. It’s also about Durkheim’s issues of loyalty to the group, respect for authority, and sacredness.

I hope you’ll accept that as a purely descriptive statement. You can still reject the three binding foundations normativelythat is, you can still insist that ingroup, authority, and purity refer to ancient and dangerous psychological systems that underlie fascism, racism, and homophobia, and you can still claim that liberals are right to reject those foundations and build their moral systems using primarily the harm/care and fairness/reciprocity foundations.

But just go with me for a moment that there is this difference, descriptively, between the moral worlds of secular liberals on the one hand and religious conservatives on the other.  There are, of course, many other groups, such as the religious left and the libertarian right, but I think it’s fair to say that the major players in the new religion wars are secular liberals criticizing religious conservatives. Because the conflict is a moral conflict, we should be able to apply the four principles of the new synthesis in moral psychology.

In what follows I will take it for granted that religion is a part of the natural world that is appropriately studied by the the methods of science. Whether or not God exists (and as an atheist I personally doubt it), religiosity is an enormously important fact about our species. There must be some combination of evolutionary, developmental, neuropsychological, and anthropological theories that can explain why human religious practices take the various forms that they do, many of which are so similar across cultures and eras. I will also take it for granted that religious fundamentalists, and most of those who argue for the existence of God, illustrate the first three principles of moral psychology (intuitive primacy, post-hoc reasoning guided by utility, and a strong sense of belonging to a group bound together by shared moral commitments).

But because the new atheists talk so much about the virtues of science and our shared commitment to reason and evidence, I think it’s appropriate to hold them to a higher standard than their opponents. Do these new atheist books model the scientific mind at its best? Or do they reveal normal human beings acting on the basis of their normal moral psychology?

1) Intuitive primacy but not dictatorship. It’s clear that Richard Dawkins (in The God Delusion) and Sam Harris (in Letter To A Christian Nation) have strong feelings about religion in general and religious fundamentalists in particular. Given the hate mail they receive, I don’t blame them. The passions of Dawkins and Harris don’t mean that they are wrong, or that they can’t be trusted. One can certainly do good scholarship on slavery while hating slavery.

But the presence of passions should alert us that the authors, being human, are likely to have great difficulty searching for and then fairly evaluating evidence that opposes their intuitive feelings about religion. We can turn to Dawkins and Harris to make the case for the prosecution, which they do brilliantly, but if we readers are to judge religion we will have to find a defense attorney. Or at least we’ll have to let the accused speak.

2) Moral thinking is for social doing. This is where the scientific mind is supposed to depart from the lay mind. The normal person (once animated by emotion) engages in moral reasoning to find ammunition, not truth; the normal person attacks the motives and character of her opponents when it will be advantageous to do so. The scientist, in contrast, respects empirical evidence as the ultimate authority and avoids ad hominem arguments. The metaphor for science is a voyage of discovery, not a war. Yet when I read the new atheist books, I see few new shores. Instead I see battlefields strewn with the corpses of straw men. To name three:

a) The new atheists treat religions as sets of beliefs about the world, many of which are demonstrably false. Yet anthropologists and sociologists who study religion stress the role of ritual and community much more than of factual beliefs about the creation of the world or life after death.

b) The new atheists assume that believers, particularly fundamentalists, take their sacred texts literally. Yet ethnographies of fundamentalist communities (such as James Ault’s Spirit and Flesh) show that even when people claim to be biblical literalists, they are in fact quite flexible, drawing on the bible selectivelyor ignoring itto justify humane and often quite modern responses to complex social situations.

c) The new atheists all review recent research on religion and conclude that it is an evolutionary byproduct, not an adaptation. They compare religious sentiments to moths flying into candle flames, ants whose brains have been hijacked for a parasite’s benefit, and cold viruses that are universal in human societies. This denial of adaptation is helpful for their argument that religion is bad for people, even when people think otherwise.

I quite agree with these authors’ praise of the work of Pascal Boyer and Scott Atran, who have shown how belief in supernatural entities may indeed be an accidental output of cognitive systems that otherwise do a good job of identifying objects and agents. Yet even if belief in gods was initially a byproduct, as long as such beliefs had consequences for behavior then it seems likely that natural selection operated upon phenotypic variation and favored the success of individuals and groups that found ways (genetic or cultural or both) to use these gods to their advantage, for example as commitment devices that enhanced cooperation, trust, and mutual aid.

3) Morality binds and builds. Dawkins is explicit that his goal is to start a movement, to raise consciousness, and to arm atheists with the arguments they’ll need to do battle with believers. The view that “we” are virtuous and our opponents are evil is a crucial step in uniting people behind a cause, and there is plenty of that in the new atheist books. A second crucial step is to identify traitors in our midst and punish or humiliate them. There is some of that too in these booksatheists who defend the utility of religion or who argue for disengagement or détente between science and religion are compared to Chamberlain and his appeasement of Hitler.

To my mind an irony of Dawkins’ position is that he reveals a kind of religious orthodoxy in his absolute rejection of group selection. David Sloan Wilson has supplemented Durkheim’s view of religion (as being primarily about group cohesion) with evolutionary analyses to propose that religion was the conduit that pulled humans through a “major transition” in evolutionary history.

Dawkins, along with George Williams and most critics of group selection, acknowledge that natural selection works on groups as well as on individuals, and that group selection is possible in principle. But Dawkins relies on Williams’ argument that selection pressures at the individual level are, in practice, always stronger than those at the group level: free riders will always undercut Darwin’s suggestion that morality evolved because virtuous groups outcompeted selfish groups.

Wilson, however, in Darwin’s Cathedral, makes the case that culture in general and religion in particular change the variables in Williams’ analysis. Religions and their associated practices greatly increase the costs of defection (through punishment and ostracism), increase the contributions of individuals to group efforts (through cultural and emotional mechanisms that increase trust), and sharpen the boundaries biological and cultural between groups. Throw in recent discoveries that genetic evolution can work much faster than previously supposed, and the widely respected work of Pete Richerson and Rob Boyd on cultural group selection, and suddenly the old consensus against group selection is outdated.

It’s time to examine the question anew. Yet Dawkins has referred to group selection in interviews as a “heresy,” and in The God Delusion he dismisses it without giving a reason. In chapter 5 he states the standard Williams free rider objection, notes the argument that religion is a way around the Williams objection, concedes that Darwin believed in group selection, and then moves on. Dismissing a credible position without reasons, and calling it a heresy (even if tongue in cheek), are hallmarks of standard moral thinking, not scientific thinking.

4) Morality is about more than harm and fairness. In Letter to a Christian Nation, Sam Harris gives us a standard liberal definition of morality: “Questions of morality are questions about happiness and suffering To the degree that our actions can affect the experience of other creatures positively or negatively, questions of morality apply.” He then goes on to show that the Bible and the Koran, taken literally, are immoral books because they’re not primarily about happiness and suffering, and in many places they advocate harming people.

Reading Harris is like watching professional wrestling or the Harlem Globetrotters. It’s great fun, with lots of acrobatics, but it must not be mistaken for an actual contest. If we want to stage a fair fight between religious and secular moralities, we can’t eliminate one by definition before the match begins. So here’s my definition of morality, which gives each side a chance to make its case:

Moral systems are interlocking sets of values, practices, institutions, and evolved psychological mechanisms that work together to suppress or regulate selfishness and make social life possible.

In my research I have found that there are two common ways that cultures suppress and regulate selfishness, two visions of what society is and how it ought to work. I’ll call them the contractual approach and the beehive approach.

The contractual approach takes the individual as the fundamental unit of value. The fundamental problem of social life is that individuals often hurt each other, and so we create implicit social contracts and explicit laws to foster a fair, free, and safe society in which individuals can pursue their interests and develop themselves and their relationships as they choose.

Morality is about happiness and suffering (as Harris says, and as John Stuart Mill said before him), and so contractualists are endlessly trying to fine-tune laws, reinvent institutions, and extend new rights as circumstances change in order to maximize happiness and minimize suffering. To build a contractual morality, all you need are the two individualizing foundations: harm/care, and fairness/reciprocity. The other three foundations, and any religion that builds on them, run afoul of the prime directive: let people make their own choices, as long as they harm nobody else.

The beehive approach, in contrast, takes the group and its territory as fundamental sources of value. Individual bees are born and die by the thousands, but the hive lives for a long time, and each individual has a role to play in fostering its success.The two fundamental problems of social life are attacks from outside and subversion from within. Either one can lead to the death of the hive, so all must pull together, do their duty, and be willing to make sacrifices for the group. Bees don’t have to learn how to behave in this way but human children do, and this is why cultural conservatives are so heavily focused on what happens in schools, families, and the media.

Conservatives generally have a more pessimistic view of human nature than do liberals. They are more likely to believe that if you stand back and give kids space to grow as they please, they’ll grow into shallow, self-centered, undisciplined pleasure seekers. Cultural conservatives work hard to cultivate moral virtues based on the three binding foundations: ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity, as well as on the universally employed foundations of harm/care and fairness/reciprocity. The beehive ideal is not a world of maximum freedom, it is a world of order and tradition in which people are united by a shared moral code that is effectively enforced, which enables people to trust each other to play their interdependent roles. It is a world of very high social capital and low anomie.

It might seem obvious to you that contractual societies are good, modern, creative and free, whereas beehive societies reek of feudalism, fascism, and patriarchy. And, as a secular liberal I agree that contractual societies such as those of Western Europe offer the best hope for living peacefully together in our increasingly diverse modern nations (although it remains to be seen if Europe can solve its current diversity problems).

I just want to make one point, however, that should give contractualists pause: surveys have long shown that religious believers in the United States are happier, healthier, longer-lived, and more generous to charity and to each other than are secular people. Most of these effects have been documented in Europe too. If you believe that morality is about happiness and suffering, then I think you are obligated to take a close look at the way religious people actually live and ask what they are doing right.

Don’t dismiss religion on the basis of a superficial reading of the Bible and the newspaper. Might religious communities offer us insights into human flourishing? Can they teach us lessons that would improve wellbeing even in a primarily contractualist society.

Hmmm. 

1. Haidt’s then co-author[↩]
2. i.e. the five “moral modules” I explained earlier – KP[↩]