Confucianism - Freedom and democracy 2.0
Is Confucianism a religion?
IV. A sidebar – Margaret Anscombe, Jonathan Haidt, and Sam Harris toward the psychology of morality
Kant and Bentham, Rawls and Mill sought to abstract morality from religious ideology. They proposed belief in universal reason and the greatest good for the greatest number. But now particularly in a diverse, plural world, we find universal reason … lacking and “the greatest good” sometimes not good enough. As Alasdair MacIntyre told us, a morality that is everywhere is the morality of no place. Morality is necessarily local, everywhere.
A virtue ethic – like early Christianity or Confucianism – avoids the universalist constraint. We can have a commandment to love one another, and we can have natural law and beatitudes, but we look to exemplars – those we can emulate – for instruction on what is moral in a particular situation. How do we learn to be the best human we can be?
Science of morality
In 1958 virtue ethicist Margaret Anscombe suggested we stop doing moral philosophy for the time being in her famous paper Modern Moral Philosophy. From the beginning of the paper -
… it is not profitable for us at present to do moral philosophy; that should be laid aside at any rate until we have an adequate philosophy of psychology, in which we are conspicuously lacking…. the concepts of obligation and duty – moral obligation and moral duty, that is to say – and of what is morally right and wrong, and of the moral sense of ‘ought’, ought to be jettisoned..; because they are survivals or derivatives of survivals, from an earlier conception of ethics which no longer generally survives…
Anscombe, G.E.M., 1958, “Modern Moral Philosophy.” Philosophy, 33: 1–19. Available at https://sites.pitt.edu/~mthompso/readings/mmp.pdf
Anscombe threw down a moral gauntlet for virtue ethicists. I can’t comment on her investigation of the intricacies of Hume’s is-ought distinction. But her reference to a philosophy of psychology seems something with which we can now contend.
Now we do have a way to respond to Margaret Anscombe. We have some scientific approaches to morality.
In this sidebar I want to note recent work by Jonathan Haidt and Joshua Greene on the psychology of morality.
First, though, Sam Harris. Harris is the writer and neuroscientist whose books, lectures and podcasts make him one of the “four horsemen” of the new atheist movement. His 2010 book The Moral Landscape: How Science can Determine Human Values promotes a science of morality that aims to steer between morality as entirely subjective and morality as dictated by God.
Harris’ standard? The only viable moral framework is one where "morally good" things pertain to “increases in the well-being of conscious creatures."
That still allows for a lot of social interpretation. I think Harris puts too much weight on science as determining human values, but he does get us past the is-ought conundrum (Hume's law) by showing that the “is” of science can help tell us decide which values lead to human flourishing (an ought). He also gets us past the extreme relativity of some liberals by reminding us that some opinions, some values are better than others – otherwise, knowledge has no value.
Expertise requires that we reject some opinions. For knowledge to have value, we have to say some things are better than other things. We are still plagued in some progressive and some conservative corners by a deformed concept of democracy - that my ignorance is just as good as your expertise. This is the result of too many rights, too much Kant not enough Aristotle or Jesus. Harris asks how some progressives have convinced themselves that there is no such thing as moral expertise, every opinion has to count, every culture has an equal point of view.
Harris does think that with sufficient rationality, we will converge on some agreement about some moral values, a la Kant. I don’t think Harris could never get to a virtue ethic in which the human heart-mind instructs us in right and wrong. Confucians certainly respect science, but they also respect tradition, history, and moral exemplars.
Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt goes a couple of steps further, though, with the identification of modules or beliefs and emotional tendencies that construct an individual’s moral landscape.
Haidt on moral modules
American liberals and conservatives might be distinguished through the work of Jonathan Haidt on moral modules, first popularized in his book The Righteous Mind. In international surveys over fifteen years, Haidt and colleagues have identified sources of moral behavior in half a dozen or so moral frameworks or modules. Modules are collections of beliefs around a central concept.
The original theory proposed five foundations: Care/Harm, Fairness/Cheating, Loyalty/Betrayal, Authority/Subversion, and Sanctity/Degradation. It now includes a sixth parameter, Liberty/Oppression.
Colin Prince has a useful summary in his Seattle University Law Review article, Moral Foundation Theory and the Law. Briefly, from his article -
According to Moral Foundations Theory, differences in people's moral concerns can be described in terms of five moral foundations:
- Care: cherishing and protecting others; opposite of harm
- Fairness or proportionality: rendering justice according to shared rules; opposite of cheating
- Loyalty or ingroup: standing with your group, family, nation; opposite of betrayal
- Authority or respect: submitting to tradition and legitimate authority; opposite of subversion
- Sanctity or purity: abhorrence for disgusting things, foods, actions; opposite of degradation
These five foundations comprise the building blocks of morality in every culture. Every society constructs its own morality, but the different weights given to the five foundations make up the differences in social practices.
Researchers have found that people's sensitivities to the five/six moral foundations correlate with their political ideologies. Using the Moral Foundations Questionnaire, Haidt and Graham found that libertarians are most sensitive to the proposed Liberty foundation, liberals are most sensitive to the Care and Fairness foundations, while conservatives are equally sensitive to all five/six foundations. Joshua Greene argued however that liberals tend to emphasize the Care, Fairness and Liberty dimensions; conservatives the Loyalty, Authority and Sanctity dimensions. For example, The Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street are both populist movements that talk a great deal about fairness and liberty, but in very different ways.
According to Haidt, the differences have significant implications for political discourse and relations. Because members of two political camps are to a degree blind to one or more of the moral foundations of the others, they may perceive morally driven words or behavior as having another basis—at best self-interested, at worst evil, and thus demonize one another. All of morality is based on attempts to reduce conflict and find fairness. Of course, those terms are themselves wide open to interpretation.
Researchers postulate that the moral foundations arose as solutions to problems common in the ancestral hunter-gatherer environment, in particular intertribal and intra-tribal conflict. The three foundations emphasized more by conservatives (loyalty, authority, sanctity) bind groups together for greater strength in intertribal competition while the other two foundations balance those tendencies with concern for individuals within the group. With reduced sensitivity to the group moral foundations, progressives tend to promote a more universalist morality. Note that it is the universalizing force of capitalism that says “history is bunk.”
Although Haidt has survey results over a long period of time and from many different countries, one can still quibble with the definitions of terms like care and sanctity. Not only can people differ on what the terms mean, but the stability of the definitions can be suspect. Nevertheless, I think Haidt goes a good way toward giving Anscombe the philosophy of psychology that she wanted. From Prince’s article - Haidt and his fellow researchers present a framework of morality that does three things: organizes moral categories, explains the roots of those categories, and predicts which moral arguments may carry weight with certain listeners. The psychologists call this framework “moral foundation theory” …. In sum, Haidt argues that morality evolved to suppress selfishness, and does so through the individualizing approach (justice and fairness) and the binding approach (loyalty, authority, and purity).
What do Haidt’s moral modules tell us? That Kantian ethics is leaving out too much, that many people value some things differently than the accepted western progressive idea. Not only is there no universal reason, but reason alone is insufficient. The Confucian heart-mind tells us that, too. Humans are defined not just by reason, but by emotion and empathy.
In the US it is up to progressives to come to some understanding of that, since the other side is not so interested. Tu Weiming tells us Confucianism is compatible with a sense of duty and ethic of responsibility. For conservatives, that is almost like channeling Haidt. And Margaret Anscombe should be happy to learn of moral foundations theory.
Next: V. Another sidebar - Augustine, Garry Wills, MacIntyre, Rights and the Church Today http://chinareflections.com/index.php/81-sections-from-book-comments-encouraged/490-confucianism-freedom-and-democracy-2-0-is-confucianism-a-religion-v-another-sidebar-augustine-garry-wills-macintyre-rights-and-the-church-today
