From last Sunday’s NY Times Magazine, an article arguing that there are five moral themes, biologically programmed, that all other moralities are built on:
The exact number of themes depends on whether you’re a lumper or a splitter, but Haidt counts five — harm, fairness, community (or group loyalty), authority and purity — and suggests that they are the primary colors of our moral sense. Not only do they keep reappearing in cross-cultural surveys, but each one tugs on the moral intuitions of people in our own culture. Haidt asks us to consider how much money someone would have to pay us to do hypothetical acts like the following:
Stick a pin into your palm.
Stick a pin into the palm of a child you don’t know. (Harm.)Accept a wide-screen TV from a friend who received it at no charge because of a computer error.
Accept a wide-screen TV from a friend who received it from a thief who had stolen it from a wealthy family. (Fairness.)Say something bad about your nation (which you don’t believe) on a talk-radio show in your nation.
Say something bad about your nation (which you don’t believe) on a talk-radio show in a foreign nation. (Community.)Slap a friend in the face, with his permission, as part of a comedy skit.
Slap your minister in the face, with his permission, as part of a comedy skit. (Authority.)Attend a performance-art piece in which the actors act like idiots for 30 minutes, including flubbing simple problems and falling down on stage.
Attend a performance-art piece in which the actors act like animals for 30 minutes, including crawling around naked and urinating on stage. (Purity.)In each pair, the second action feels far more repugnant.
Umn… no, not for me.
To be sure, the thought of sticking myself with a pin sounds less repugnant than sticking a child. But keeping the TV stolen from a rich person’s house seems only marginally more repugnant to me.1
As for the other three, I don’t find the second action at all more repugnant, in any of them. And in the last one, I’d rather see a piece in which actors acted like animals than one in which they acted “like idiots.”
This doesn’t show that the “5 morals” theory is wrong. What it shows is that even if these five moral “ingredients” are universal, the application of them still varies enormously by culture, by subculture, and by individual. Even within as narrow and selected a group as “people who read the New York Times Sunday Magazine,” the writer is mistaken to assume that readers will share a common moral understanding.
Later on, however, the article does say:
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.
So perhaps my reaction is just typical of a liberal.
- I’d have other objections to keeping the TV — for instance, not wanting to encourage housebreaking, which can lead to injury or death if things go wrong — but that’s an intellectual response, not a felt response. [↩]
Number 1, okay. Number 2 would fall under “likely to get caught” rather than harm – the person responsible for the computer error may also get punished! I wouldn’t say a bad thing I didn’t believe without a very good reason, would slap anyone if I had their permission and Number 5 brings out my embarrassment squick – I’d rather see someone play at being an animal than at being a fool, because only one induces cruel laughter.
Number 1, yeah, the second one is more of a problem. Number 2, they’re both wrong. Number 3, again, I don’t like either (since I don’t believe what I’m saying). Number 4, neither one is wrong. Number 5, I don’t see either as wrong, but yeah the second one squicks me out in a way the first one doesn’t.
I am suspicious of the wording of the author’s comment though. The phrasing “lopsided moral weight” makes a distinct moral judgement in-and-of itself that the liberals are doing it wrong, much like the word disproportionate would. Almost like he’s trying to cast the liberals moral weighting as violating “fairness”, which is, after all, one of the moral dimensions liberals are supposed to care about.
“Community” would be more compelling if the example wasnt rooted in the “morality” of nationalism.
Accept a wide-screen TV from a friend who received it at no charge because of a computer error.
Accept a wide-screen TV from a friend who received it from a thief who had stolen it from a wealthy family. (Fairness.)
It says a lot to me about the morals of the author that he (?) thinks that the first choice is more moral than the second. To me the choice boils down to whether it’s more moral to receive stolen goods directly from the thief as opposed to second-hand. From my viewpoint, it pretty much destroys viewing the author with any credibility on morality and judgement.
I can’t see me going onto talk radio either here or in another country and saying something about my country that I didn’t believe. And as far as community goes, I’d say that doing so in the U.S. would probably do more harm to the community, since it might sway the opinion of someone who actually has the vote and a civic role in the U. S.
I see no difference between the two choices in #4; but then, I have a reasonably close relationship with my priest and he’s the type of guy who might actually suggest me doing that for one reason or another.
#5: hm. I suppose you could pay me to do either one. In fact, based on some of the things that have happened on one of my family’s Canada canoe trips, you could say I’ve paid to do the second choice.
Jesus, these are poorly written options. And I think Haidt would have achieved different results for liberals and conservatives if his questions reflected “communitarian” ethics as opposed to “group loyalty.” Yet so minor is the difference between most of these options – that is, when one can be teased by a hair’s breadth – that a proper response to most of these questions is “neither.”
The only one I agree with is the first one.
See, related:
Is ‘Do Unto Others’ Written in Our Genes?
From a while back.
Number 1, yeah.
Number 2, I don’t get it. Aren’t both choices based on stealing? Except that one is more direct and the other is a little harder to get caught at?
Number 3 I think is flawed. Why am I saying something I don’t believe in the first place. Isn’t that a moral issue in and of itself? And yes, I agree with the commenter who said that in this country, you may influence someone that votes. In foreign countries, they are more likely to have objective views anyway.
Number 4, no problem for either if I have permission.
Number 5. See, I’m more squicked by the first one. And this comes entirely from a disability perspective. I am highly intolerant of people with cognitive disabilities getting made fun of (one could use the term, Idiots, though I would not.) Whereas, I work with many folks with physical disabilities who have a wide range of ways that they manage their bodily waste issues and quite resent all the hype that equates ‘dignity’ with how you go to the bathroom. Pee is just not that big of deal to me and does not have anything to do with purity or any other morality. Its bodily waste, it serves a function. Big deal.
In all of these “morality” surveys, the questions themselves are loaded with the bias of the author.
You’ve misunderstood the intent of the author entirely. Yo thinks, if anything, that the two choices are equally “moral” from a purely logical standpoint; but yo is saying that as an empirical fact, many people have a stronger knee-jerk moral reaction against the second than the first.
Again, that you write this shows that you’ve misunderstood the intention of the author. Yo’s point is to report empirical facts about how people’s morality and judgment work in real life, not to make an argument that X is better than Y morally.
Yeah, that was exactly my reaction. Put in the terms of this guy’s work, that means that we see Number 5 primarily as either a Fairness or a Harm issue, rather than primarily a Purity issue.
I always find the “I’d rather die than be unable to wipe my own butt for the rest of my life” perspective — which I’ve heard expressed pretty much in those words a bunch of times — kinda funny in what it implies about the speaker’s life. Speaking for myself, wiping my butt is NOT the pinnacle of my existence, without which life is worth naught.
So perhaps my reaction is just typical of a liberal.
I’d like to think that it’s not a typical liberal response to think “wealthy people aren’t fully human anyway”, so stealing their TV is no big deal, whereas it would be if we were talking about a middle-class or working-poor family.
I’d also note that the NY times article isn’t written by Haidt, who proposed the moral theory in question; it’s a take by Steven Pinker, who is an economist. I won’t go so far as to say economists are not fully human, but Pinker is definitely an example of the “in the long term….” school of thought.
Pinker’s a psychologist (or cognitive scientist), not an economist.
I read about this article elsewhere earlier (animalperson.net). I think the theory needs a lot more work; it’s an incomplete theory or at least seems that way according to the NY Times article. For example, hypothetical situations are not great models of morality. And surveys of people responding to hypotheticals may not represent true moral thought and behavior.
“Pinker’s a psychologist (or cognitive scientist), not an economist.”
What he isn’t is an ethicist or moral philosopher.
I had an instict once, but I was able to get it loose.
Pinker actually is something of a moral philosopher, he’s just coming at these very old questions from a very new perspective.
I think the five general themes are about right, and that they are universals. Where culture comes into play is how those universals are mediated and expressed; a Sicilian and a Saudi are going to have different ways of looking at fairness, perhaps. The five examples (invented by the article author I think) are pretty lame.
I found the throw-the-switch vs. toss-a-hobo argument fascinating. Interesting how our emotional systems can override our rational systems, and probably not predictive of great success for rationalistic approaches to government.
It’s not that new an approach, actually.
I think it’s inaccurate to frame it the way they do here.
It’s not that I disagree with the idea. I would agree that many–most–people have some concept of fairness, say.
But their application of it depends on how big their world of “fair” is. When you think about “fair”, are you judging it on an instant? Or are you looking at whether your whole life is fair, whether your ancestors were treated fairly, etc?
Is it more “fair” to stick my own palm, or that of someone else? I don’t know: who am I? Did I just get out of prison, where I’ve been wrongfully held for the last 40 years? Are they my false accuser? Was it malicious or accidental?
Did I get my extremities blown off last year? Have I been living a sinecure and receiving unreturned benefits from society my whole life? Am I unusually sensitive to pain, so that this will seem a lengthy agony rather than a pinprick? Am I white and are they black; am I black, and are they white?
It’s no surprise that most NYT readers (like me) would say it’s better to stick their own palm; that’s probably true for rich people whether you take a small view or a large one. But it certainly can’t hold true for everyone. Look at examples from this blog: Is it “fair” or “unfair” to tax the rich more; to spend more, or less, money on slower, average, or faster students; to give racial preferences to whites, minorities, or nobody; to hold people accountable for their ancestors’ doings, or not?
I suspect that, indeed, we may all share those five traits or something like them. But we’re so different in our applications of them that there’s no real similarity to be found. Thus, this seems like one of those useless statements like “we are all driven by emotions” or something.
With pretty rare exceptions, a justification based on “fairness” can be found for a lot of shit, even fairly repugnant stuff. I don’t see how it’s a great wonder to find a common thread of such little use.
Without commenting on Pinker’s status, I had a similar thought about economists. Economists become accustomed to people being aghast at their theories, not primarily because the theories are inaccurate but because the theories contradict dominant sentiments. Some economists revel in this role; some grow defensive in it; but they all seem to acclimate to it eventually.
Then I read in the NYT article:
I wonder if anyone has done a study of head trauma and economists…?
So economic theory has similarities to the behavior/logic of some people with traumatic brain injury? Interesting. And somewhat explanatory… of some economic theory anyway.
I don’t think the “harm” question is about fairness though — it’s about whether it’s more morally repugnant to stick a pin in your own palm or in an unfamiliar child’s palm. That one was totally clear to me because I’m perfectly capable of deciding to consent to doing that to myself, and the child isn’t (and presumably did not or would not).
The other ones I had weird knee-jerk reactions to.
#2, I was like, well obviously it’s better to steal things from rich people instead of a store where someone might get laid off for having it stolen. That probably speaks to how I think the world is inherently unfair, so notions of fairness are flipped. Of course on reflection, I’d have to say they’re both morally equivalent to stealing, could both result in harm of one sort or another (I wouldn’t want to encourage my friend to pursue a career in housebreaking) etc.
#3, was super-clear to me that the latter one was worse and far more uncomfortable, at least in a knee-jerk reaction. If it was something negative that I really believed to be untrue, I would have more shame (a gut emotional reaction related to morality) saying it to an out-group than an in-group. This might be because I grew up partially in a heavily shame-based culture. It feels worse to me to “make us look bad” to someone else, if it’s a lie.
#4, my knee-jerk was that I would rather slap an authority figure than a friend, because I am knee-jerk anti-authoritarian.
#5, I had the same reaction as Leora and Amp. I suspect the “acting stupid and falling down” was meant to be some sort of neutral “control” for this exercise though, without regard for how offensive it is. I’d probably still rather watch people crawling around like animals and peeing though, but that’s because I’m perverse, which is related to with notions of purity.
I mean, upon a lot of rational reflection you could probably perceive most of these to be morally equivalent, perhaps with the exception of the first one, and if the last one was actually given a neutral control. The interesting thing to me is how this stuff ties into our gut feelings about shame, honor, losing face, revulsion, perversion, and what that says about the roots of “morality” and the psychological implications. If you’re testing knee-jerk stuff, I really would jump one way or the other way for all of these, although three of them in the opposite direction of how I’m “supposed” to… because I’m a perverse, anti-authoritarian Robin-Hood-fantasy type, but I adhere to basic moral principles about harm, and have some community-shame sense.
Come to think of it someone should make a Dungeons & Dragons style “alignment” system that uses these five axes instead of the traditional two! Hah, that would be hilarious.
Come to think of it someone should make a Dungeons & Dragons style “alignment” system that uses these five axes instead of the traditional two! Hah, that would be hilarious.
I am so on it.
This book does a much better explaining and demonstrating this phenomenon. Granted, it’s a book, not a short article, but goodness, those examples are terrible. The book has much more sophisticated ones, for anyone who’s interested.
Done!
(I apologize if this appears twice.)
I was thinking of Steven Leavitt for no discernible reason.
I have, on several occasions, gone back to a store to pay for something I’d inadvertently lifted. My ‘rule’ in this situation is that if the error was my fault, I’ll inconvenience myself to remedy it, but if it is the store’s fault, then I’ll only remedy it if the inconvenience is minimal, (which normally means if I haven’t gone far from the store when I notice it).
My knee jerk reactions to the scenarios:
1. The second option is definitely worse. But this is partly based on the calculation that sticking a pin in my palm would only hurt for a minute, whereas listening to a child cry because I’d stuck a pin in his/her palm would hurt for longer. I’m not particularly empathic in any useful way, but other people’s pain tends to freak me out and I’d rather deal with my own pain than watch theirs, so I’d also take option 1 over option 2 if the other person was an adult.
2. What would I want with a TV anyway? I’ve already got a computer. But since both seem like stealing to me, I don’t see any real way to chose between 1 and 2 except for the not encouraging a friend to take up housebreaking angle. I’d also argue that the lack of empathy for the wealthy victim that people here display is not about seeing the wealthy as less than human but rather based on a calculation that losing the TV would be a minor inconvenience to the store or wealthy person but a major loss to a poorer person.
3. Eh, whatever. It’s the lie that bothers me, not the saying it in or out of the country. Why make up something negative when there are so many real negatives about the US to discuss? If it were something negative that I did believe, I’d prefer to say it on the talk radio program with the larger audience, regardless of location. Assuming no other ulterior motives.
4. Can I slap the authority figure? PLEASE? I have difficulty deciding if I’m, in the AD&D axis, a chaotic or lawful. I tend to get annoyed at people for breaking laws or rules (including minor rules like using cell phones on planes), but mostly because it seems unfair and inefficient: the rules are there because things go better when everyone follows them. Whatever that means.
5. I agree with amp. I do have some “purity” element, though, in that I worry about the actors having to crawl through urine. Still, I suppose they knew what they were getting into when they decided on the script and urine is basically sterile. If they don’t have a problem with it, why should I?
I think the underlying problem with this schema is that it is attempting to oversimplify something quite complicated. Come back after about 50 years of progress in neurobiology and try again.
Oh hell, people, is this the internet or what?!? Amp provides us with a provocative article about morality, and what do we give him in return? Thoughtful reflection? Piss on that.
It’s time to play WHAT WOULD JESUS DO? Specifically, what moral variables mattered to Jesus? And is Jesus a liberal or a conservative? THAT should get people’s blood pumping!
1. Avoiding/remedying HARM: Jesus was all over this one, healing the sick et al. This seems to be his strongest suit.
2. Promoting FAIRNESS (reciprocity): Not so much. His whole “love your enemies/pray for those who persecute you/turn the other cheek/give him your coat as well” theme seems pretty un-reciprocal. Generosity, not fairness, seemed to be the order of the day.
3. Promoting LOYALTY (solidarity): Mixed. While Paul seeks to eliminate the distinction between Jew and gentile, I don’t recall this being a big theme with Jesus. On one occasion Jesus seemed to want to withhold a miraculous healing from someone because she was not Jewish, but he ultimately relents. But I don’t recall that many interactions between Jesus and gentiles.
4. Honoring AUTHORITY: Mixed. Jesus sometimes defended textual authority (asserting that every word of the prophets would be fulfilled) and authority figures (“Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s….”). But on other occasions Jesus defied both textual authority (“You have heard it said, ‘An eye for an eye.’ But I say unto you, love your enemies….” “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone….”) and authority figures (priests, pharisees).
5. Honoring PURITY: No so much. Jesus associated with plenty of “unclean” folk, lauded a hypothetical member of the despised Samaritans, and was willing to work on the Sabbath, violating one of the purity rituals.
By my scoring, then, Jesus doesn’t entirely match the profile of either a liberal or a conservative. Damn, this wasn’t as provocative as I thought it would be….
Pingback: Pandagon :: Having to clean up after the performance artists violates my sense of fairness, though :: January :: 2008
Oh man, I suck as a troll. Ok, let’s try this: Is racism immoral? An excerpt from The Moral Instinct:
Moralization is a psychological state that can be turned on and off like a switch, and when it is on, a distinctive mind-set commandeers our thinking.
The first hallmark of moralization is that the rules it invokes are felt to be universal…. The other hallmark is that people feel that those who commit immoral acts deserve to be punished. Not only is it allowable to inflict pain on a person who has broken a moral rule; it is wrong not to, to “let them get away with it.” People are thus untroubled in inviting divine retribution or the power of the state to harm other people they deem immoral. Bertrand Russell wrote, “The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists — that is why they invented hell.”
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. Health vegetarians avoid meat for practical reasons, like lowering cholesterol and avoiding toxins. Moral vegetarians avoid meat for ethical reasons: to avoid complicity in the suffering of animals. By investigating their feelings about meat-eating, Rozin showed that the moral motive sets off a cascade of opinions. Moral vegetarians are more likely to treat meat as a contaminant — they refuse, for example, to eat a bowl of soup into which a drop of beef broth has fallen. They are more likely to think that other people ought to be vegetarians, and are more likely to imbue their dietary habits with other virtues, like believing that meat avoidance makes people less aggressive and bestial.
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…. 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. Smokers are ostracized; images of people smoking are censored; and entities touched by smoke are felt to be contaminated (so hotels have not only nonsmoking rooms but nonsmoking floors). The desire for retribution has been visited on tobacco companies, who have been slapped with staggering “punitive damages.”
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. 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”; syphilis was rebranded from the price of wanton behavior to a “sexually transmitted disease” and more recently a “sexually transmitted infection.”
This wave of amoralization has led the cultural right to lament that morality itself is under assault, as we see in the group that anointed itself the Moral Majority.
At the risk of further vexing the Moral Majority, I ask whether it is at last time to de-moralize racism. Would it not be sufficient – or even beneficial – to treat racism as just another human foible to be compensated for, like farsightedness or a lack of facility with math? After all, I don’t mind asking my wife to read the menu to me or calculate the tip; she’s better at those things than I am. I’m not proud of it, but there it is, and we live in a culture that does not penalize me much for admitting it. Wouldn’t it be equally beneficial to live in a culture where my wife could be free to say, “Honey, would you speak to that Latina waitress about the slow service? I’d do it myself, but I’m afraid my racism might get the best of me.”
Instead we treat racism like masturbation. I suspect everyone’s doing it, even absentmindedly, but I’m not supposed to acknowledge it. Who benefits from this?
Or is racism simply one of those things that requires not mere compensation, but punishment, to ensure that no one “gets away with it”? Does it inevitably trigger the righteous glow, the burning dudgeon, the visceral charge to the fray? Even if another alternative reaction were desirable, would it be possible?
Robert, I may register for your site later, but I’ll point it out here first: you have a really weird definition of Lawful Evil. D&D Devils have a strong focus on Purity in my book, with pit fiends as the pinnacle of this; they earn their rank by spending some absurd length of time in the Pit of Flame, purifying themselves of all non-devilishness.
This is an utterance of Delphic ambiguity. It could be interpretted, as he presumably intended the Pharisees to, as demanding that taxes etc., be paid to Caesar. But his followers might have interpretted it as saying that nothing should be rendered unto Caesar.
Er, by not using money with Caesar on it? How would that work today?
Incidentally, when I tried to find an analogy for “your minister” I thought of my (first) Kokikai Aikido sensei. And yes, not only would I slap her if she really wanted me to, but I’ve reached the point where I’d also slap a druid priestess if she really wanted me to.
The reason Haidt found that Librals lean toward “justice” and “harm” is because he deliberately set out to show that liberals and social justice moral theories lean toward seeing “justice” and “harm” as moral while discounting “purity” and “authority.”
His paper, When Morality Opposes Justice: Conservatives Have Moral Intuitions that Liberals May Not Recognize has an agenda. To set up five type of “morals” as equal to justify conservative theory as moral. For example, opposition to homosexual marriage is “moral” because it has to do with respecting social traditions and institutions, which people need:
“Conservatives and many moderates are opposed to gay marriage in
part due to moral intuitions related to ingroup, authority, and purity, and
these concerns should be addressed, rather than dismissed contemptuously.”
“Conservatives and many moderates are opposed to gay marriage in
part due to moral intuitions related to ingroup, authority, and purity, and
these concerns should be addressed, rather than dismissed contemptuously.”
So it’s no surprise that the questions would be designed the way they are.
Interesting. But while this makes the data seem suspect, the work does not actually support conservatism (see comment 30).
Shorter Pinker: Chomsky’s theories on language also hold for morality.
i.e.,
Everyone has the same intuitions re (morality),
these acceptability judgments demonstrate our tacit knowledge of (morality),
I see no way this (moral) knowledge could be learned, therefore it is innate.
Unfortunately, the conclusion is sheer creationism, firstly, and secondly, the basic premise is false since intuitive judgments vary both intra- and inter-subjectively, making them useless as data. The past thirty years have consistently demonstrated this, as has this entire thread. Pinker is just the leading cultist, a sort of Tom Cruise of Chomskyism.
(see comment 30).
The one about D&D and Lawful Evil?
Certainly. Why? Do you think it has no basis in fact? That nobody who kills for fun, say, ever has a strong interest in purity? I linked this at Robert’s site, though that comment has curiously disappeared, and directed his attention to the Posse section in Chapter 1.
http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~altemey/
I guess I just expect everyone to know what site I mean, I’ve mentioned it enough. ^_^
Daran, the fact that Jesus held up a coin and asked people “Whose picture is this” points towards the fact that taxes belong to Caesar, but not worship. I haven’t heard of any non-fringe Christian group that holds that you shouldn’t pay taxes.
Promoting LOYALTY (solidarity):
Well, there are the passages that instruct Christians to settle disputes among themselves and not haul each other into court.
Honoring PURITY:
Jesus’ insistence on associating with those generally considered “impure” wasn’t so much a denial of the concept of purity than it was a redefinition of it. He was saying that it wasn’t an occupation or an accident of birth or a failure to observe a ritual that made you impure, it was what was in your heart. IIRC he was questioned once about whether eating food meant for idols made you impure, and he responded that it was not what you put into your mouth that made you impure but what came out of it. I should look it up but I don’t have time right now.
Related: Why the ___s hate the ___s
hf, I get the idea of lawful evil. I guess I’m not getting how that relates to your assertion that “But while this makes the data seem suspect, the work does not actually support conservatism “
Er, wha? The research would only support conservatism if you think that having all five feelings ‘is good’. Well, someone with strong scores (whatever that actually means) in Care and Fairness, and 0 in the other three areas, sounds like a good person. At most, I might call them misguided. Someone with Care 0, Fairness 0 and 5 for the others sounds like a fiend from Hell. So why should we give any ‘moral weight’ to these other scores?
Let’s analyze what the following would mean for someone with Care 5 and Fairness 5:
Community 0. This person sounds like one of those dicks who think strangers deserve consideration.
Authority 0. She definitely qualifies as an anarchist, but not a violent one.
Purity 0. Seems like a sane person. Genuine health concerns appear to fall in the Care/Harm category.
(Critically, I think the Nazi “fiend from Hell” seems immoral to conservatives and probably even to devils from a different society.)
Let’s analyze what the following would mean for someone with Care 5 and Fairness 5:
Community 0. This person sounds like one of those dicks who think strangers deserve consideration.
Authority 0. She definitely qualifies as an anarchist, but not a violent one.
Purity 0. Seems like a sane person. Genuine health concerns appear to fall in the Care/Harm category.
I see your bid and raise you: Of what value is Community, Authority, Purity or FAIRNESS, except as they affect Care?
What conclusions would you draw about Paul, with Care 5 and Fairness 5? This would presumably be someone who cared deeply about reciprocity. Paul would be most enthusiastic about scratching the backs of those who could return the favor. He might also help people who were not in a position to return the favor, but only in is spare time. He’d be angry with and ruminate about those who did not reciprocate, including himself; he may well be consumed with guilt over all the debts he could not repay to his long-dead parents, etc.
Conversely, what conclusions would you draw about John, a person with Care 5 and Fairness 0? Such a person would presumably seek to help those who were in greatest need or for whom John could do the most good. He’d steal from the rich to give to the poor (except to the extent that he thought that the reaction to this behavior would cause more bad than the behavior produced good). He’d write songs called “All You Need is Love,” scripts called “Pay it Forward,” and parables called “The Good Samaritan.” And he wouldn’t give two figs about the past, whether good or bad, except as it affected strategy and tactics for helping others.
Which sounds better to you? In short, is the liberal obsession with “fairness” misguided?
It’s not an entirely hypothetical question. The next US President (and the current one, for that matter) will need to choose whether to continue to expend US resources in nations to which we may owe some duty (Afghanistan, Iraq?), or to divert those resources to nations where we might do the most good (Sudan). It seems so abstract, a choice between the backward-looking perspective of fairness or the forward-looking perspective of care. Yet millions of lives hang on this question.
obsession with “fairness” misguided?
Certainly you could make that case. I briefly considered it, but it seemed weaker than the case I did make.