Still waiting for Jeff’s philosopher to give me some context for my musings on morality, but while we wait…

I just subscribed to The Mouse Trap, a blog about evolutionary psychology. Today’s entry was about moral dilemmas and moral development with a link to a discussion of Kohlberg’s Moral Stages. Kohlberg proposed that there are 5 (or maybe 6 stages) in a child’s moral development and crafted a test to determine the particular stage that a child is at by posing moral dilemmas such as this one…

In Europe, a woman was near death from a special kind of cancer. There was one drug that the doctors thought might save her. It was a form of radium that a druggist in the same town had recently discovered. The drug was expensive to make, but the druggist was charging ten times what the drug cost him to make. He paid $200 for the radium and charged $2,000 for a small dose of the drug. The sick woman’s husband, Heinz, went to everyone he knew to borrow the money, but he could only get together about $ 1,000 which is half of what it cost. He told the druggist that his wife was dying and asked him to sell it cheaper or let him pay later. But the druggist said: “No, I discovered the drug and I’m going to make money from it.” So Heinz got desperate and broke into the man’s store to steal the drug-for his wife. Should the husband have done that? (Kohlberg, 1963, p. 19)

…and seeing how the child reasons about the dilemma. The subject is then graded into one of the stages summarized below:

At stage 1 children think of what is right as that which authority says is right. Doing the right thing is obeying authority and avoiding punishment. At stage 2, children are no longer so impressed by any single authority; they see that there are different sides to any issue. Since everything is relative, one is free to pursue one’s own interests, although it is often useful to make deals and exchange favors with others.

At stages 3 and 4, young people think as members of the conventional society with its values, norms, and expectations. At stage 3, they emphasize being a good person, which basically means having helpful motives toward people close to one At stage 4, the concern shifts toward obeying laws to maintain society as a whole.

At stages 5 and 6 people are less concerned with maintaining society for it own sake, and more concerned with the principles and values that make for a good society. At stage 5 they emphasize basic rights and the democratic processes that give everyone a say, and at stage 6 they define the principles by which agreement will be most just.

Read the article (it’s an easy read) to get the full scoop especially if you want to argue with me in the comments

It occurred to me that the stages seem to oscillate between simplistic versions of liberal and conservative thinking (approximately, conservative, liberal, liberal, conservative) until stage 5/6 when a more abstract reasoning kicks in. Kohlberg claims that there is a natural progression along the stages and, although children do not skip stages, they can be helped through the stages by education and might get stuck at a stage if their education is incomplete.

Revisiting Rob’s Barefoot Dilemma in the context of Kohlberg’s stages, we might decide that rules are appropriate for very young (stage 1) children but that our goal should be to educate the child by providing different reasoning at each stage of moral development.

The goal for a healthy society would be to get everyone to stage 5 by the end of their education. This would allow us to prune back the overgrown Statute Book to remove all those laws rendered unnecessary in a moral society. The only laws left would be the ones that either

1. prevent harmful behaviour by the morally immature
2. prevent society from being hijacked by the plutocrats
3. provide the education and resources that enable everyone to participate in the moral society

Perhaps there could be different sets of laws for people at different stages of moral development (as there are now) but people would have to demonstrate the appropriate level of moral maturity before they could step up a level? The whole system would be administered by philosophers of course.

Morals are the rules that we follow when there are no rules and no one is watching.

Corollary

When we create laws to prevent immoral behavior, we make society less moral.

Citations

In the old days, you used to have to do tons of research - read books and do studies and stuff - before making claims like this. Now you can just stick it on your blog and someone will come along and say “that sounds just like what that famous philosopher said in his second book”. If only I knew someone who lived next to a philosopher, he could ask him.

Jeff and I pair-read 1984 and Brave New World a couple of years ago. Most people - me included, until my latest reading - seem to miss the point of 1984. ‘1984′ means they are watching you to those with only a casual acquaintance with the book. ‘1984′ should mean they are manipulating language, history and even thought to make criticism impossible. The lessons of 1984 seemed very relevant a couple of years ago (I wait with baited breath to see if the American public can see through the lies in the present election season) but I expect, that if we end up in a dystopia, it will be closer to the one described in Brave New World where even the alphas are conditioned and everyone is happy with their lot because all their basic needs are provided for.

I picked up Huxley’s Island without knowing what to expect. It started well (I fear I oversold it to Jeff based on that promising beginning) but what seemed at the first to be an overly stodgy exposition turned out to be the entire thrust of the book.

If you can get over the fact that you are reading Huxley’s prescription for utopia - dystopias are so much more interesting as long as you don’t have to live in them - it wasn’t too bad. I like the idea that you could build a perfect society by combining the harmless, distilled essence of Buddhist spirituality with the most positive offerings of science and technology. But - and I am sure it won’t surprise you, even if you haven’t read the book yet - it’s the unenlightened ones on the outside who will come along and fuck it all up for you.

Back to 1984 for a moment…the horrific ending of 1984 completely neutralizes, negates and ultimately ruins 1984 for me. It’s like an another corollary to Godwin’s Law. Room 101/the Holocaust were so evil that to compare anyone or anything with them is such an over-exaggeration you automatically lose the argument. If the Nazis had not committed the terrible crimes of the holocaust and if Orwell had not rolled out the rats-in-a-cage-torture-device you could make some very fruitful analogies with the Nazi’s and with Airstrip One’s manipulation of popular opinion. But because they did, anything short of 6,000,000 seems benign by comparison. I am not complaining about Godwin’s Law - 6,000,000 murders is a lot of evil - but I wish it were safe to quote Orwell and Rove in the same sentence. It should be.

Ron Jeffries, on the agile-testing mailing list said

The last couple of times I read it, I took a somewhat different lesson from /Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance/, having to do with one’s own level of caring, and the key role that plays in happiness, at least to a certain kind of person. I include myself in that “kind”. There are lessons to be learned about outsiders’ view of quality as well. I like my work to be appreciated — though sometimes I wonder whether that is perhaps a personality flaw. I also like it to be valued economically, which may be a flaw as well, but leads to a certain kind of convenience.

I like to consider myself “that kind of person too”.

I found it extremely shocking to hear various American commentators speaking, during the world cup, in support of diving (Balboa), professional fouls (Lalas and Wynalda), time-wasting (Balboa again), deliberate handball and various other offenses that I had always considered to be “outside the rules”.

The prevaling opinion of the commentators seemed to be that the yellow card was an opportunity for one-free-foul-to-be-used-wisely rather than a punishment for breaking the rules. The very presence of a punishment for an unethical act makes the act itself no longer unethical. The commit/don’t commit decision becomes a cost/benefit analysis rather than an ethical dilemma.

Puts me in mind of the early debate about whether the Bill of Rights might prove harmful because it could not possibly enumerate all of the rights which citizens should enjoy. As the rules for what we may or may not do become ever more well-defined, we lose the opportunities for making ethical decision-making. Eventually we will lose the capacity altogether. I fear that some of us already have.

Bertrand Russell says that

“The essence of the liberal outlook lies not in what opinions are held but in how they are held: instead of being held dogmatically, they are held tentatively, and with a consciousness that new evidence may at any moment lead to their abandonment. This is the way opinions are held in science, as opposed to the way in which they are held in theology.”

There is a fragility about uncertainty that makes robust certainty in the face of all evidence so appealing. But what happens to certainty when it becomes certainly and obviously wrong?

Maybe we’ll find out in November.

Scott Adam’s blog is very, very funny. He is often thought provoking and usually hilarious on subjects ranging from the frivolous - such as the ethics of walking naked from the shower (and is it OK to twirl?) - to the serious - like the question of whether Iran is trying to build nukes.

A lot of the fun comes from reading the comments. He even has funny readers and Scott has a particular talent for riling them up by taking non-stands on issues where clearly, according to his readers, he should taking a stand.

Scott recently formulated an Adamesque set of rules for debating. The highlight was a rule that says, if someone asks a question and the respondent tries to change the question before answering, the questioner wins by a knockout. That was pretty funny until Scott started asking some questions of the form :

Hypothetical parody of a serious contemporary issue with only two possible responses

• First answer is immoral
• Second answer is illogical
  

The knockout rules preclude changing the question and so Scott provided a valuable service to psychology (and dictators) by demonstrating that most people would rather be seen as immoral than illogical. A few killjoys (including me, I am ashamed to say) missed the point and thought it was an exercise in debating or politics or philosophy or science.

A follow-up experiment to see whether people are willing to justify their immorality precisely because the only alternative is illogical would be interesting.

Since reading Opening Skinner’s Box, Jeff and I have often fantasized about a school science experiment that is ostensibly about one thing but is actually about another. A favorite idea would be a project that tests my theory that if an object is about to fall from a table, men are more likely to try to catch it and women are more likely to put their hands in the air and say “eek!” A few isolated experiments seem to confirm the theory but we need more data to be sure.

I find the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis - the idea that thought is constrained by language - to be fascinating.

Here’s a variation on it from The Guardian

Take the Portuguese president of the European commission, Jose Manuel Barroso, for example. Barroso has an extraordinary knack: when he speaks English he not only talks but thinks like an Englishman; when he speaks French, he not only talks but thinks like a Frenchman. To hear him alternate from one to the other can be quite disconcerting, almost as if he’s switching between a left and right brain.

Andrew Sullivan just watched A Man for all Seasons which tells the tale of Thomas More’s struggles with Henry VIII over the relationship between religion, the law and executive power.

Roper: So now you’d give the Devil benefit of law!

More: Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?

Roper: I’d cut down every law in England to do that!

More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you - where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country’s planted thick with laws from coast to coast - man’s laws, not God’s - and if you cut them down - and you’re just the man to do it - d’you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake.

I have the DVD at home. Need to watch it again.