dispatches from TJICistan

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/13/magazi…

…We all know what it feels like when the moralization switch flips inside us – the righteous glow, the burning dudgeon, the drive to recruit others to the cause. The psychologist Paul Rozin has studied the toggle switch by comparing two kinds of people who engage in the same behavior but with different switch settings…

Much of our recent social history, including the culture wars between liberals and conservatives, consists of the moralization or amoralization of particular kinds of behavior. Even when people agree that an outcome is desirable, they may disagree on whether it should be treated as a matter of preference and prudence or as a matter of sin and virtue. Rozin notes, for example, that smoking has lately been moralized. Until recently, it was understood that some people didn’t enjoy smoking or avoided it because it was hazardous to their health. But with the discovery of the harmful effects of secondhand smoke, smoking is now treated as immoral…

I find smoke gross, I’d enjoy a world where no one smoked, and I don’t understand people who smoke.

…but I don’t consider them evil, and I’m willing to employ them, and do business with them.

I note that for leftists to get smoking to be “moralized”, they had to lie about it.

http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_…

…a 1993 Environmental Protection Agency report … classified ETS as a “Group A Carcinogen,” that is, as a significant risk to health.

It now turns out that the influential 1993 EPA report “Respiratory Health Effects of Passive Smoking: Lung Cancer and Other Disorders” was as phony as a three-dollar bill…

the sober conclusions of … federal district court judge … William Osteen, whose recent ruling invalidated the very foundation of the EPA report. Judge Osteen’s views coincide with a Congressional Research Service analysis released in late 1995 that had serious reservations about the EPA report…

Judge Osteen determined that the EPA had “cherry picked” its data and had grossly manipulated “scientific procedure and scientific norms” in order to rationalize the agency’s own preconceived conclusion that passive smoking caused 3,000 lung cancer deaths a year. In addition, Osteen ruled that the EPA had violated the Radon Act, which was the agency’s authority for disseminating its “de facto regulatory scheme” that intended to prohibit passive smoking. The agency responded, embarrassingly, with an ad hominem attack on the judge, not on the … logic of his arguments…

the EPA … simply set aside 19 of the original constellation of 30 ETS studies and then, defying all scientific standards, simply changed the “confidence levels” in the statistical analysis …

And the sordid tale gets worse. The EPA chose to omit entirely from its analysis two recent U.S. ETS studies that had determined that passive smoking was NOT a statistically significant health risk…

Getting back to the NYT:

At the same time, many behaviors have been amoralized, switched from moral failings to lifestyle choices. They include divorce, illegitimacy, being a working mother, marijuana use and homosexuality.

I support the right of all adults to engage in all of these behaviors.

…but I also note that the attempts to prove these as equally efficacious on various scales also abuse (or obfuscate) the underlying statistics and math. Sometimes this is explicit, othertimes it’s done by just labeling certain topics verboten (once, it was behavior X; now it is the repercussions of behavior X).

Many afflictions have been reassigned from payback for bad choices to unlucky misfortunes. There used to be people called “bums” and “tramps”; today they are “homeless”. Drug addiction is a “disease”

I, for one, lobby long and hard to take back the word “bum” from for the biggots!

… there seems to be a Law of Conservation of Moralization, so that as old behaviors are taken out of the moralized column, new ones are added to it…

Excellent point.

…Dozens of things that past generations treated as practical matters are now ethical battlegrounds, including disposable diapers, I.Q. tests, poultry farms, Barbie dolls and research on breast cancer. Food alone has become a minefield, with critics sermonizing about the size of sodas, the chemistry of fat, the freedom of chickens, the price of coffee beans, the species of fish and now the distance the food has traveled from farm to plate…

And, again, the one stunning thing is how economically, mathematically, and statistically ignorant the left is on these issues.

Live in a blue state, and you’ll constantly hear lies about lifesaving technologies causing autism or other diseases, “local” food, etc., etc., ad nauseum.

Many of these moralizations, like the assault on smoking, may be understood as practical tactics to reduce some recently identified harm.

Pshaw.

But whether an activity flips our mental switches to the “moral” setting isn’t just a matter of how much harm it does.

Indeed.

Right thinking people (i.e. libertarians) need to (a) disambiguate things that cause no harm, from things that cause individual harm, from things that have harmful externalities; (b) label the first two types as things that people have the right to do, even if their betters scorn them, and label the final type (those with harmful externalities) as such, and allow enforcement of regulation and punishment only on this subset of things.

That is why an older approach to moral psychology, led by Jean Piaget and Lawrence Kohlberg, tried to document the lines of reasoning that guided people to moral conclusions…

Most people immediately declare that [ certain enumerated victimless ] acts are wrong and then grope to justify why they are wrong. It’s not so easy … People don’t generally engage in moral reasoning, Haidt argues, but moral rationalization: they begin with the conclusion, coughed up by an unconscious emotion, and then work backward to a plausible justification.

As a theist, I’ve got an easy out: there is an absolute morality, and God caused us to evolve a moral sense that relates this morality to us.

Thus, I do not have to justify, via reason, why it is wrong for people to eat a pet that got killed in an accident in order to know that it is wrong.

For the same reason, I do not have to justify, via reason, why it is wrong for people to murder and eat a neighbor to know that it is wrong.

(Note that many “brights” would argue that these are different cases, because murdering a neighbor is clearly wrong, because humans inherently have the right to live. This is, I assert, a bogus distinction, as the “brights” are just pushing things back one level, to their tier of moral axioms, and – these being axioms – they still can not defend them in any coherent way. Yes, yes, I acknowledge that my neighbor is a person just like me. So why can’t I kill and eat him? OK, sure, I acknowledge that he prefers to remain a lawyer rather than an entree, and his family would miss him. So what? I still asert that it’s moral to murder and eat him. Hmmm? What’s that? “It’s just wrong”? Fascinating.

At least my leap to faith based axioms is acknowledged as a leap to faith based axioms, which – if nothing else – makes it a bit more honest, no?

Joshua Greene, a philosopher and cognitive neuroscientist, suggests that evolution equipped people with a revulsion to manhandling an innocent person.

…But then we created the State, to do it for us…

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. It’s not surprising that each side thinks it is driven by lofty ethical values and that the other side is base and unprincipled.

I’ve read this before, but it’s still fascinating.

…as are many other aspects of the article. Go read it.

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