Morals: Where They Come From

#236: Wrongfulness Is Just... Wrong

Vox's Sigal Samuel has an article up about Patricia Churchland's simple theory:

"Mothers came to feel deeply attached to their children because that helped the children (and through them, the mother’s genes) survive. This ability to feel attachment was gradually generalized to mates, kin, and friends. "

What this theory doesn't explain, though, is how morality is generalized from people you love to people you don't know.  If morality is empathy, expanded, there comes a point when we have to condemn our own if we're to be objective: "Sorry, brother, but you can't take a stranger's chicken; it's wrong to do so."

I'd say that there are two legs that morality stands on: empathy and universality.  The latter is what is missing in the above; and we get it from math.  Math is the ability to see things objectively, from on high.  That's because an objective number stands for something subjective.  We can then substitute ourselves, or our friends, for a number, then switch the number for a stranger.  Hey, the stranger's the same as me when looking at it that way.

A few interesting observations:
   * The more one is confronted with strangers, the more comfortable one is forced to become with this abstraction: "That could have been me." in order to remain healthy.  This means that urban dwellers tend to be abstract thinkers.

   * Likewise, the less one confronts strangers, the easier it is to slip into a subjective morality: "He's one of us, and I'm comfortable with that."  This means isolated populations tend to be subjective thinkers, able to immerse themselves deeply in their own traditions.

   * Obviously, these are both extremes.  The closer one comes to a healthy integration, the better.  But, it takes independent thought to merge the two.  "My/Your family's ways are superior/inferior in this one regard, based on my values that I've tested and developed over the years."

It goes without saying that our two tendencies line up quite well with Blue and Red politics, though Red's descent into unthinking subjectivity ("Never criticize the Big Boy.") means that Blue's minor failings (the tendency towards 'open borders', for example, with that tendency's unknowns: heavier traffic? less open space?) will be judged less harshly, while the unthinking toadyism of Red's present course will be brought down with what will likely be a mighty crash.