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Summer Reading: The Righteous Mind VI: Fairness and Moral Disgust
Saturday, July 14th, 2012
Robert Wechsler
Moral Disgust
In his book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (Pantheon, 2012), Jonathan Haidt discusses Richard Shweder's theory regarding three major clusters of moral themes: autonomy, community, and divinity. Our culture, unlike most cultures, gives precedence to autonomy over community, even though the concepts important to community also appear in our culture, including respect, patriotism, hierarchy, and reputation.
But what is most interesting with respect to government ethics is the third cluster of moral themes, divinity, which includes moral concepts such as sanctity, sin, purity/pollution, and elevation/degradation. What is interesting is how active divinity is when government ethics issues arise. Clearly there is the issue of sin: people get very angry when they feel officials have done wrong, almost to the point where it is not an issue of misusing or wasting public funds, or disappointing expectations, but rather doing wrong in a more cosmic sense, breaking a taboo.
One reason for this is that corruption, as implied by the word itself, is not just about breaking a law or doing wrong. Its other principal meaning involves impurity, an important moral concept in the divinity cluster. And a secondary meaning involves degrading others, as in "corrupting a minor." Corruption is about as bad as it gets, even if it involves a small amount of money. It's because corruption is such a value-laden word that I try to use it sparingly, except in the expression "institutional corruption," which itself is too strong, I feel.
As I noted in an earlier post about this book, disgust is a feeling important to determining ethical misconduct in government. Considering that corruption in our culture is tied to impurity, decay, and degradation, it is natural that it elicits feelings of disgust, even though no food is involved. To see how important disgust (normally applied to food) is to divinity, consider all the food laws in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
Haidt says that moral disgust is strong whenever we feel people have been degraded. When those who run our community turn out to be less than than their position would imply, it disgusts us. It even makes us feel degraded, dirty, somehow tainted ourselves. Similarly, when people do something good, beyond our expectations, we feel elevated by hearing about their conduct. One reason we don't sufficiently understand our feelings about government corruption is that we don't look at them in comparison with the opposite feelings that arise when we learn about the virtuous actions of ordinary people.
The divinity cluster, and the disgust it engenders, makes individuals seek to cultivate their higher, nobler feelings and actions, and to resist temptation. But it also contributes to feelings of disgust about different types of people, including feelings between men and women, and of races toward each other. Disgust is a powerful emotion that can contribute to good conduct as well as bad.
Fairness
The central theory of Haidt's book, which comes out of Shweder's theory of clusters of moral themes, is what he calls Moral Foundations Theory. It posits the existence of moral modules or foundations, of which there are six: care/harm, fairness/proportionality, liberty/oppression, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, and sanctity/degradation. The argument is based on evolutionary theory, but you'll have to read the book for the ways in which these foundations are responses to adaptive challenges. Haidt also applies the foundations to liberals, conservatives, and libertarians, but this application is, for the most part, irrelevant to government ethics.
What is relevant is that only one of the six foundations is equally common to those who embrace all three ideologies: fairness/proportionality. And that happens to be the foundation most important to government ethics. Cooperation among individuals, especially across groups, depends on playing tit for tat, being fair. The result is that we feel very angry when we feel people in power, who have obligations to all of us, do not treat us all equally. And we also hate it when they cheat on us, when they don't give us what our democracy requires: honesty, openness, and respect. And, of course, the responsible spending of our tax dollars, which means competitive bidding, hiring on the basis of skills, etc.
Fairness/proportionality is also the foundation that officials most often use to justify their misconduct, both to themselves and, when caught, to the public. They say that they have done so much for the community, and received so much less than they could have outside government, that they deserve more. They've earned it. The total of what they have taken, or shared with others, is fully proportional to, or even much less than, what they have given.
Of course, all the foundations come into play to some extent. Ethical misconduct is harmful in that it leads to the misuse of taxpayer funds. Ethical misconduct is seen as betrayal of our democratic values. And it degrades our leaders and makes us feel bad about trusting those in authority. But the strongest emotions relating to ethical misconduct come from government officials giving preferential, that is, unfair, disproportionate treatment to those with whom they have special personal, business, and even partisan relationships. That's why people feel so strongly about nepotism, cronyism, and political patronage. That's why people are so turned off to government when they see contracts and grants going to the friends and families of politicians, and when land use and other important decisions always seem to go in favor of the big contributors to and business associates of high-level officials.
Continue with the next post on this book.
Robert Wechsler
Director of Research-Retired, City Ethics
---
In his book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (Pantheon, 2012), Jonathan Haidt discusses Richard Shweder's theory regarding three major clusters of moral themes: autonomy, community, and divinity. Our culture, unlike most cultures, gives precedence to autonomy over community, even though the concepts important to community also appear in our culture, including respect, patriotism, hierarchy, and reputation.
But what is most interesting with respect to government ethics is the third cluster of moral themes, divinity, which includes moral concepts such as sanctity, sin, purity/pollution, and elevation/degradation. What is interesting is how active divinity is when government ethics issues arise. Clearly there is the issue of sin: people get very angry when they feel officials have done wrong, almost to the point where it is not an issue of misusing or wasting public funds, or disappointing expectations, but rather doing wrong in a more cosmic sense, breaking a taboo.
One reason for this is that corruption, as implied by the word itself, is not just about breaking a law or doing wrong. Its other principal meaning involves impurity, an important moral concept in the divinity cluster. And a secondary meaning involves degrading others, as in "corrupting a minor." Corruption is about as bad as it gets, even if it involves a small amount of money. It's because corruption is such a value-laden word that I try to use it sparingly, except in the expression "institutional corruption," which itself is too strong, I feel.
As I noted in an earlier post about this book, disgust is a feeling important to determining ethical misconduct in government. Considering that corruption in our culture is tied to impurity, decay, and degradation, it is natural that it elicits feelings of disgust, even though no food is involved. To see how important disgust (normally applied to food) is to divinity, consider all the food laws in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
Haidt says that moral disgust is strong whenever we feel people have been degraded. When those who run our community turn out to be less than than their position would imply, it disgusts us. It even makes us feel degraded, dirty, somehow tainted ourselves. Similarly, when people do something good, beyond our expectations, we feel elevated by hearing about their conduct. One reason we don't sufficiently understand our feelings about government corruption is that we don't look at them in comparison with the opposite feelings that arise when we learn about the virtuous actions of ordinary people.
The divinity cluster, and the disgust it engenders, makes individuals seek to cultivate their higher, nobler feelings and actions, and to resist temptation. But it also contributes to feelings of disgust about different types of people, including feelings between men and women, and of races toward each other. Disgust is a powerful emotion that can contribute to good conduct as well as bad.
Fairness
The central theory of Haidt's book, which comes out of Shweder's theory of clusters of moral themes, is what he calls Moral Foundations Theory. It posits the existence of moral modules or foundations, of which there are six: care/harm, fairness/proportionality, liberty/oppression, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, and sanctity/degradation. The argument is based on evolutionary theory, but you'll have to read the book for the ways in which these foundations are responses to adaptive challenges. Haidt also applies the foundations to liberals, conservatives, and libertarians, but this application is, for the most part, irrelevant to government ethics.
What is relevant is that only one of the six foundations is equally common to those who embrace all three ideologies: fairness/proportionality. And that happens to be the foundation most important to government ethics. Cooperation among individuals, especially across groups, depends on playing tit for tat, being fair. The result is that we feel very angry when we feel people in power, who have obligations to all of us, do not treat us all equally. And we also hate it when they cheat on us, when they don't give us what our democracy requires: honesty, openness, and respect. And, of course, the responsible spending of our tax dollars, which means competitive bidding, hiring on the basis of skills, etc.
Fairness/proportionality is also the foundation that officials most often use to justify their misconduct, both to themselves and, when caught, to the public. They say that they have done so much for the community, and received so much less than they could have outside government, that they deserve more. They've earned it. The total of what they have taken, or shared with others, is fully proportional to, or even much less than, what they have given.
Of course, all the foundations come into play to some extent. Ethical misconduct is harmful in that it leads to the misuse of taxpayer funds. Ethical misconduct is seen as betrayal of our democratic values. And it degrades our leaders and makes us feel bad about trusting those in authority. But the strongest emotions relating to ethical misconduct come from government officials giving preferential, that is, unfair, disproportionate treatment to those with whom they have special personal, business, and even partisan relationships. That's why people feel so strongly about nepotism, cronyism, and political patronage. That's why people are so turned off to government when they see contracts and grants going to the friends and families of politicians, and when land use and other important decisions always seem to go in favor of the big contributors to and business associates of high-level officials.
Continue with the next post on this book.
Robert Wechsler
Director of Research-Retired, City Ethics
---
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