Monthly Archives: July 2014

is a network a good representation of a person’s moral worldview?

Here is a method that I and some colleagues have been using to model the moral worldview of individuals and of groups. First, pose questions about individuals’ principles, beliefs, and methods and ask them to respond with ideas that they endorse. Then show them their own ideas in a table and ask them to identify pairs that they consider closely related. That will allow you to generate a network diagram of their ideas. Give the diagram back to them and ask them to explain their ideas and connections to their peers. As they do so, ask them to modify their own networks.

This method will generate network graphs for each individual at each time-point during the discussion. All of their networks can be placed on the same plane to produce a map of the group; and to the extent that they have chosen the same ideas, the group will have a connected network. See, for example, these maps of the Summer Institute of Civic Studies and two of its members:

subject3subject2subject1

Of course, you will get networks because you have asked for networks. You could instead ask people to give you lists of moral ideas, in which case you would receive lists back. People’s lists could be shown as sets that would overlap when two or more individuals chose the same ideas. Respondents could also be asked for ranked or weighted lists or for lists of ideas that trump other ideas, just as all the diamonds may trump all the clubs in a card game. In the “5 Whys?” technique, individuals propose a basic idea, answer the question “Why?” about it, then ask “Why?” about the reason they have given, and so on. That method will produce a chain or ladder of ideas, instead of a network.

On what grounds is the network model preferable?

We could treat it as a method for modeling the moral psychology of research subjects. In that case, it would be an empirical psychological model and we would want to know whether it was reliable and valid. Reliability would be assessed as follows. Do individuals and groups give substantially similar responses when studied at different times and when the questions and instructions have been changed in superficial ways that should not alter the results? Validity would be assessed by asking whether the results for individuals and groups correlate with other reliable measures of moral thinking, such as how people respond to dilemmas or how they express moral views in narrative form. Both reliability and validity would have to be tested with samples of people who varied by culture, age, religion, language, etc. Regardless of the results that came back from initial studies, the method could be tightened. For instance, this summer I gave extremely vague instructions about what should count as a link between two ideas. Clarifying those instructions should improve reliability.

This suggests a whole empirical research agenda, which I consider valuable and have just begun to pursue. I’ve also argued that the model is consistent with and explains empirical results by Ann Swidler and Stephen Valsey, who do not use a network model. That is a modest claim of validity. Using the network concept to reinterpret previous empirical work in moral psychology would be another part of the research agenda.

However, there are two other ways to use the model that I find more significant. The first is normative. I want to argue that certain network forms are morally preferable–quite apart from how many people hold those forms. For example, networks should be relatively flat and dense. Making distinctions among network forms only becomes possible if we think of moral ideas as networks. If we model moral psychology using lists, then we will be restricted to asking how many items are on people’s lists, whether they are consistent, how they are ranked, and whether the right ideas are listed. Network models open up additional questions about how ideas are structured. To pursue this line of inquiry, we would not hypothesize that people think with networks of ideas. We would posit that their ideas can be so modeled and inquire into the differences among network forms.

The other (related) use is conceptual. A network is a picture, and I want us to shift our picture of morality. At the beginning of the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein quotes St. Augustine and asserts that the quoted “words give a particular picture [Bild] of the essence of human language” (PI, 1). Wittgenstein suggests other pictures, starting with the metaphor of a game and going on to families and woven fibers. He wants to shake our confidence in the standard picture and argue that certain questions that it provokes are pointless. “What is your aim in philosophy? To show the fly the way out of the fly bottle” (PI, 308).

In a similar spirit, I would like to shake our confidence in a set of standard pictures of morality that generate false questions. For example, Rawls thought that we live in a world of many “reasonable but incompatible comprehensive doctrines.” That “fact” about the world posed difficult problems. How could we construct a political system that was fair to all the comprehensive doctrines? Would that system not also require its own comprehensive doctrine? His picture was not an idiosyncratic one. It arose from a widespread assumption that people hold rival but internally coherent moral worldviews. In my Nietszche and the Modern Crisis of the Humanities (1995) and Reforming the Humanities (2009), I assemble evidence that this assumption was fundamental for a whole range of modernist authors, from Hegel and Nietzsche to Leo Strauss and Jacques Derrida. For instance, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra says: “A table of values hangs over every people. Behold, it is the table of their overcomings; behold, it is the voice of their will to power.” Note: one table for each people, and every table different. “Never did one neighbor understand another: his soul always wandered at his neighbor’s madness and evil.” 

We do not need this picture. If you map many people’s worldviews as networks, you will not ask the question: “How many comprehensive doctrines do we see here, and on what grounds do they conflict?” You will see diversity and disagreement, but not plural systems of thought. And so some of the dilemmas of modernism and of liberalism will vanish.

The debate about foundationalism in ethics should also end. Traditionally, we call moral views “foundationalist” if all their ideas derive from a few that are large and indubitable. Basically, no one wants to be called a foundationalist these days, because a dependence on indubitable ideas is problematic. Geoffrey Sayre-McCord redefines the issue by calling any ideas, no matter how modest and fallible, “foundationalist” if they have some kind of epistemic advantage over one’s other ideas.* But then why talk about “foundations” at all? This is a metaphor, alluding to a building with a large, strong base on which the rest of the edifice is constructed. The metaphor produces an infinite regress: on what does the “foundation” of morality rest? If we switch to a network model, the paradox disappears. Moral ideas are linked, and some have stronger reasons than others. Some have non-moral reasons. A persuasive position includes lots of ideas that are reasonably well founded and well connected to each other. 

*Geoffrey Sayre-McCord, “Coherentist Epistemology and Moral Theory,” in Walter Sinnott-Armstrong and Mark Timmons, eds., Moral Knowledge? New Readings in Moral Epistemology (New York: Oxford, 1996), pp. 137-189.

propaganda in Russia and in the USA

(Washington, DC) Russian media serves a steady diet of stories about how the crashed Malaysian airplane was filled with already-dead bodies; definitive proof that Ukraine shot it down to frame the Russian separatists; and even evidence that it’s the same Malaysian jet that vanished in March in the southern hemisphere, stored secretly and deployed now in a plot to hurt Russia. (For a sample of this coverage—I don’t know how representative—see the English version of Pravda today.) Maria Snegovaya reports that the Russian media generates very strong domestic popular support for Putin’s policies.

Western writers like criticize Russian propaganda. Russians write back in the comment fields to denounce such criticism. Many make tu quoque arguments: America does all of this, too (i.e., the propaganda, the killing, or both). They are correct that the following problems are not limited to Russia but are also prevalent in countries like the USA:

  1. Deliberate manipulation of public opinion by governments and media companies;
  2. Macho, militaristic nationalism and its reliable appeal to mass publics;
  3. Confirmation bias, or the preference for information that reinforces one’s existing views and interests; and
  4. Valuing the lives of one’s own countrymen far above the lives of foreigners.

Without these phenomena, it would be hard to explain why the US invaded Iraq after 9/11, how most Americans can forget US involvement in Central American genocide when the victims’ children try to migrate across our borders, or how we can tolerate assassinations by drone missile.

On the other hand, making the tu quoque argument is not good for Russia or for Russians. The United States and other democracies have mechanisms for error-correction and accountability that may be badly flawed and frayed today, but that are still hard-won and worth fighting to defend. They are absent in Putin’s Russia. Russians are the primary victims of that lack.

One mechanism is partisan competition. George W. Bush dominated American public opinion at the onset of the Iraq War. But a little-known Illinois state senator was one of those who strongly criticized the invasion. Six years and a few months later, that state senator succeeded Bush in the White House, having benefited politically from his opposition to the war. I am not satisfied by the Schumpeterian justification for elections—that they allow us to vote the incumbent idiots out when their performance becomes intolerable. But a Schumperian democracy is better than none at all. Incumbents are vulnerable; the opposition has powerful incentives to criticize them. Those protections are missing in Putin’s Russia.

Additional protections come from a genuinely independent civil society and press. I realize it is hard to demonstrate that the press and civil society are more effective in the US than in Russia, since they are not working all that well here. Mark Kleiman writes:

Russian mass media is now dominated by an extreme-nationalist lunatic fringe, built up by Putin and his cronies but no longer under their detailed control. … It’s a scary picture. What’s scarier is that, if you change the names, it applies to the relationships among the plutocrats, the GOP apparatchiki, and the world of the Murdochized press, the Koch-driven think-tanks, and Red Blogistan.

That is a claim of equivalence. I heard a similar argument in June from a Russian delegation of academics who visited me in my office. They insisted that they have more NGOs (millions!) than we do and that Putin funds them to ensure their independence from Western influence. I had no crisp refutation to offer, nor was I interested in asserting our system’s superiority. The worthwhile question is not which country has a better public sphere. But I am highly skeptical that Russians are, in fact, being served by an independent press or a robust civil society. If my skepticism is correct, then they and their neighbors (not Americans) are the ones who will suffer.

adult civic education in the Workforce Redevelopment Act

The Workforce Investment Act of 1998 consolidated federal adult education programs. Congress just passed a re-authorization that has gone to the president for his signature. Section 201 deals with Adult Education and Family Literacy. The reauthorized section 201 “create[s] a partnership among the Federal Government, States, and localities to provide, on a voluntary basis, adult education and literacy activities.” The list of purposes for these activities begins with employment and job skills, as one would expect for a Department of Labor program. But the Campaign for the Civic Mission of Schools alerted me to section 4(b), which mentions another outcome: “acquiring an understanding of the American system of Government, individual freedom, and the responsibilities of citizenship.” Section 243 then specifically mentions “integrated English literacy and civics education.” Funds for this purpose are to be allocated–in part–on the basis of the number of newly naturalized citizens per state. Money can flow to nonprofits, state agencies, universities, libraries, etc.

Of course, everything depends on how these provisions are implemented. Civics education for new immigrants could be mere jingoistic propaganda, or it could be well-intentioned and yet poorly handled. However, as I argued in a CNN.com column last year, we can and should educate new immigrants for effective and responsible civic participation. That will be good for them as individuals, good for their communities, and good for democracy. I am enthusiastic about these provisions in the Workforce Investment Act. It is now up to us to make sure they are well implemented.

Frontiers of Democracy 2014

I’m with more than 140 scholars, practitioners, and activists from as far away as India, Ukraine, and Israel at Frontiers of Democracy 2014. We are streaming some of the conference live, but another good way to check in on the conversation is to follow the Twitter hashtag #demfront. So far, I’ve hear lots of tough, passionate, and thoughtful conversation about whether the small-scale democratic practices that we create–practices marked by deliberative and relational values–have anything to do with the large-scale structures that dominate our lives. One way that they might relate is by actually shoring up existing institutions, at the expense of justice. But can we critically assess powerful structures in a way that gives us agency? If this conference became a critical seminar on global crony capitalism, would we do anything differently after we left?