On Wed, 23 May 2007, psychohist wrote:
> The main one I'm thinking of was an article in Scientific American ten
> or twenty years ago. I don't remember everything it covered, but I do
> remember that it specifically addressed automobile accidents, and
> whether the driver maneuvered to save himself or family member
> passengers. A substantial ****tion - I think the majority - of people
> said they would try to save family members first, but in actual
> accidents, nearly all put themselves first.
I'm not sure that's a particularly good insight into morality, since a lot
of what goes in on that sort of accident is done as survival reactions.
I'm talking about things like airliners on fire on a runway, capsizing
ferries, burning buildings, and so on.
> I agree that situations with people under orders are very different
> from people acting independently, and different from the ones I've
> been discussing. That said, I think the interesting parts of the
> prisoners and guards experiment were the parts that went well beyond
> orders.
There was a lot more to the behavior than that, which involved the guards
bonding together and so forth. When those other conditions haven't
happened in other attempts to replicate that experiment, the cruelty above
and beyond orders also didn't happen.
> I certainly agree there are innate elements to behavior, but as in
> this case, they nearly always act to the benefit of the individual -
> in this case, to prevent that individual's being cheated, not to
> prevent the stranger's being cheated. I don't think that kind of self
> interest is what morality or ethics are about.
No, not really, which is why game theories are always so puzzled by it.
There are elements to the behavior that are, from a self-interest
perspective, quite irrational. Further, the very same emotions can create
anger when watching an injustice done to someone else.
> For morality, something in between; basically, something that happens
> only with others around who already know about the behavior. I'd say
> it probably happens at about the same stage as learning to read does
> for most modern Americans. For ethics, closer to learning about
> American History, if at all.
Have you really read the articles I've been posting?
> I agree there are positive emotional reactions to people one feels
> closely attached to. I don't count that as 'conscience' or 'morality'
> because I think that those concepts imply behavior that applies to
> strangers as well as loved ones.
That behavior can and does apply to strangers so long as they are
humanized. I've seen interviews with the people involved in that guard
and prisoner study you've been considering and even there, one of the
"prisoners" being interviewed said that he was told by one of the "guards"
to clean a toilet with his hands and looked up at the "guards" and said
soemthing like, "Man, that's going too far," and the "guard" agreed and
just backed off. The key was that the "guard" saw him as a person in that
moment rather than a thing.
> As I said before, the innate emotions work well when we live in the 20
> person hunter gatherer groups we evolved for. When we live in
> societies of 200 million, we have to learn new behavior patters that
> will serve us for that different situation.
I think the solution there lies in extending the attachment we had for 20
people to 200 million rather than bani****ng the emotions that served us
well with 20 people in favor of the unexplored country of cold rational
ethical systems that allow us to remain emotionally detached from others.
The body counts racked up by social experiments that tried to banish
traditional morality and remake humans to follow some utopian ideal
suggests that such ideas are far more dangerous to humanity than the
emotions that we relied on thousands of years ago when societies were
smaller.
John Morrow
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