Monthly Archives: September 2014

Illinois adopting the “C3” Social Studies framework

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This is exciting news for me as a co-author of the College, Career and Civic (C3) Framework for the Social Studies, a long-time ally of the Illinois Civic Mission Coalition, and a friend of Shawn Healy:

State Superintendent of Education Christopher A. Koch has announced that he has requested a review of the state’s arts and social studies education standards. …

Another group of education partners will form a task force, led by the Illinois Civic Mission Coalition, to develop new social studies standards. The task force will consist of teachers representing various grades, as well as representatives from the disciplines of civics, economics, geography, history and sociology. The panel will review the College, Career and Civic Framework, which was published last fall by the National Council for the Social Studies, to guide its efforts. The group will also draw from the experiences of several other states that have recently embarked on a similar process.

“Strong social studies standards join the core disciplines of math, English language arts and science to help not only prepare students for college and careers, but for engagement in civic life,” said Shawn P. Healy, chair of the Illinois Civic Mission Coalition and the Civic Learning and Engagement Scholar at the Robert R. McCormick Foundation. “This is a promising step in reviving the civic health of our state.”

Other states–at least including New York, Connecticut, and Kentucky–are also using the C3 to help revise their standards.

Jonathan Haidt’s six foundations of morality

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Jonathan Haidt and colleagues propose that human beings have six different areas of moral concern: care, fairness, liberty, loyalty, authority, and purity. They argue that individuals and cultures differ in how they define and value these six areas, which they call “Foundations.” For instance, secular Westerners are unusual in giving very heavy weight to the first three. Within the USA, conservatives care about all six and realize that liberals are only concerned about the first three; but liberals fail to grasp conservatives’ concerns for loyalty, authority, and purity. Therefore, conservatives can predict liberals’ answers to specific questions quite accurately, but liberals do not understand conservatives–with consequences for elections and public debates.

I find these results illuminating. For example, it rings true that liberals are pretty immune to traditional concerns about purity; and even when we oppose something because it’s impure (such as completely consensual incest), we refuse to invoke concepts of purity in our reasons. At the same time, we liberals may actually have our own purity concerns. For example, I would never leave a glass bottle in the woods, and I would be at least mildly upset to see one there. I suspect the damage caused by an inert glass bottle is minimal; producing my breakfast probably hurt nature much more than a little littering. But I regard the woods as pure, and a human deposit there as a pollutant–in the moral sense.

We could call my reaction “irrational,” but that would presume that only care, fairness, and liberty are rational concerns. Haidt, who is explicitly Humean, would say that reason is and ought to be the slave of the passions. We human beings happen to have six (not just three) bases for our moral passions. Liberals are just odd; we are not distinctively rational.

The main method is factor analysis influenced by conceptual categories. Factor analysis, which is used very widely, takes people’s actual responses to surveys and looks for clusters that suggest an unobserved “factor.” For example, people may not know that they are driven by a concern for care, but their answers to a range of more concrete questions may cluster together empirically, and “care” may be a good label for this cluster. Since “Individuals are often unable to access the causes of their moral judgments,” the real causes must be unconscious and instinctive. We may not know that care is one of our Moral Foundations; that is an empirical finding.

For Haidt et al., moral factors must have two characteristics in addition to statistical clustering: 1) they must be found empirically in many cultures across the world–although it is to be expected that some cultures will miss some factors–and 2) there must be a Darwinian evolutionary explanation for why human beings would have developed these concerns.  Darwinian explanations are supposed to be not mere stories that illustrate evolutionary theory but findings of biology or archaeology.

Finally, Haidt’s method is cumulative and falsifiable. He and his colleagues propose six “Foundations” right now, but they expect to add more.

A lot of assumptions are built into these methods. Arguably, the assumptions are vindicating themselves pragmatically by yielding valuable insights; but it may also be the case that the assumptions drive the methods, which determine the results. Either way, I see these premises:

1. Haidt et al. are interested in very broad categories (“Foundations”) and will even sacrifice tighter correlations if necessary to bring more survey response under broad headings. One could instead investigate the pervasive but subtle differences that arise between two people of the same cultural and ideological background, or within one person’s thinking about one moral concern. For example, I may think about care in five different ways in respect to one complex interpersonal situation.

2. Haidt et al. broaden the definition of morality to include matters–such as authority and purity–that are viewed as extra-moral by, for example, Kant. But they still name six domains as moral and exclude other psychological constructs that may explain our judgments (e.g., competition, lust, and hatred) from the list. This seems to imply a substantive theory of what counts as “moral,” despite Haidt’s repeated claims that he is a naturalist who seeks to describe, not prescribe. What if I insist that authority is not moral or that Will to Power is?

3. Haidt acknowledges that moral norms and beliefs change, but the Foundations Theory does not seem useful for explaining such changes. Haidt is a liberal who argues that liberals are rhetorically hobbled by our inability to invoke loyalty, authority, and purity. Nevertheless, the country has moved dramatically in a liberal direction on social issues that are entwined with purity and authority (e.g., gender roles). How could that happen so quickly?

4. This stream of research is concerned with the often unconscious causes of our moral judgments. It is not concerned with the way that we articulate reasons and arguments to justify our conclusions. This is because Haidt et al.–like most empirical psychologists–find that our explicit reasons are poor predictors of our concrete judgments. Our reasons are not causal.

And yet I would maintain that our reasons can be good or bad, and it matters that they are good. We are morally accountable for the quality of our reasons. It is not only important to judge and do right, but to think right. Besides, we sometimes form judgments contrary to affect because of our reasons, or we decide what to do when our instincts conflict by considering the applicable reasons, or we persuade other people by citing reasons, or we construct institutions on the basis of reasons that then constrain our behavior. Thus the ways we connect our ideas have at least some significance.

Ultimately, I think that the Foundations Theory is a form of science. It is a cumulative and falsifiable body of research, generating useful findings. Yet one can start in other places and also make progress.

I would start with the assumption that human beings are evolved animals whose brains are the product of Darwinian design. But I would also note that we human beings live and think in immensely complicated social settings that have emerged from the uncoordinated choices and actions of billions of people over thousands of years. Emergent phenomena, such as actual languages, religions, governments, and communities, are at the heart of our moral concerns. Although human beings with evolved characteristics have made these institutions, they take on lives of their own and influence us profoundly while also structuring the decisions we make. For instance, our institutions officially embody norms that we may find onerous and undesirable once applied. Although we may not be psychologically influenced by the abstract ideas that we endorse, we are politically influenced by the abstract ideas that we have written into our constitutions and catechisms. I think most of the action is at this level–in how we navigate complex and emergent systems rather than how we apply very basic biological drives.

Although people from different backgrounds hold contrasting values, there are some commonalities across time and culture. Haidt et al. and many other empirical psychologists assume that these commonalities came first and are morally fundamental, and the differences are relatively superficial. Michael Walzer summarizes this view: “Men and women everywhere begin with some common idea or principle or set of ideas and principles, which they then work up in many different ways. They start thin, as it were, and thicken with age.” “But our intuition is wrong here,” Walzer writes. “Morality is thick from the beginning, culturally integrated, fully resonant.” When we find commonalities in distant places, these  are simply “reiterated features of particular thick and maximal moralities.”

[Sources: Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion (New York: Pantheon, 2012); Jesse Graham, Brian Nosek, Jonathan Haidt, Ravi Iyer, Spassena Koleva, and Peter H.Ditto, “Mapping the Moral Domain,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol 101(2), Aug 2011, 366-385; and Michael Walzer, Thick and Thin: Moral Argument at Home and Abroad (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994), p. 4, 10.]

social capital and economic mobility

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My colleagues and I have a stream of work that argues that civic engagement is valuable economically–it helps the individuals who engage and their whole communities. I would never argue that civic engagement is the only thing that matters; an economy can be crushed by external, macro-level changes, such as the demise of an industry or a bad policy. But how we associate is an important factor.

A strong contribution to this literature is by Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren, Patrick Kline, and Emmanuel Saez, “Where is the Land of Opportunity? The Geography of Intergenerational Mobility in the United States,” NBER Working Paper No. 19843 (January 2014). The authors examine the tax records of 40 million parents and then their children as adults. They find that where you grow up has a major effect on your mobility–on whether you move up the income distribution compared to your parents when you were a child. The raw differences between a childhood in San Jose and in Charlotte, for example, are striking.

The next question is what about these communities matters. In a model that also includes many other plausible factors, the authors find the largest effects from racial segregation (not being African American, but living in a community that is predominantly African American is bad for mobility); inequality (being a child in a more equal community boosts mobility); the quality of primary schools; social capital (“proxies for the strength of social networks and community involvement in an area”); and family stability.

The authors find that these factors are statistically independent, but I would argue they are conceptually related and tell a coherent overall story. For example, segregation is a different empirical construct from social capital–you can have a community rich in associations even though it is racially segregated. And Chetty et al find that both factors matter independently for mobility. Yet the fact that they both count seems to suggest a broader story: we are better when connected. Likewise, school quality is a different matter from family stability, and yet both may reflect a greater capacity to provide structure and care for our children. And certainly, social capital is good for school quality.

[Some cautions here about using empirical evidence to make a case for something that you would value anyway, such as civic engagement.]

was Montaigne a relativist?

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The most interestingly radical form of cultural relativism has three elements, I think:

  1. People’s norms, habits, values, and ways of thinking are pervasively diverse.
  2. The variation is not so much among individuals as among large groups; or (to put it another way) beliefs and values cluster into composites that we call “cultures.”
  3. Since our perceptions and assessments of any culture are shaped by our own, we cannot know or judge objectively.

I do not necessarily share these premises but believe they are essential to the history of thought. Modernism and postmodernism (in all their varieties) are basically responses to these three ideas. I am open to the possibility that cultural relativism was discovered/invented several times in human history–e.g., in India in the 15th century–yet I have long believed that the rise of cultural relativism in Europe around 1800 was epochal; it prompted entirely new ways of thinking that spread with European power around the world.

But what about Montaigne (1533-92)? A case can be made that he was already a thoroughgoing cultural relativist during the Renaissance. Unlike the later figure of Giambattista Vico (1668-1744), who has also been called a relativist, Montaigne was hardly obscure in his own time. He had a profound and direct influence on thinkers as important as Shakespeare, Bacon, Pascal, and Descartes. Thus I can see three possible theses:

  1. Montaigne was a cultural relativist, and these other figures understood that. They were exposed to cultural relativism far before the modern era and either endorsed it privately or deliberately rejected it–but in either case, it was in their worldview.
  2. The major thinkers whom Montaigne influenced did not understand the idea of cultural relativism. They read the relevant passages in his Essais without seeing their radical implications, as we do.
  3. Montaigne did not conceive of cultural relativism. Neither he nor his early readers understood his writing as relativistic, in the modern sense. Nor should we.

Key passages to consider come from the essays “On Habit” and “On the Cannibals” (translated here by M. A. Screech). In “On Habit,” Montaigne first catalogs many of the bizarre ways in which behaviors and norms vary across history and geography. He lists nations where sons are supposed to beat their fathers, where people grow hair only on the left sides of their bodies, where women are the only warriors, where it is honorable to have as many lovers as possible, and where, over 700 years, no woman ever had sex outside of wedlock because it was unthinkable.

Apparently, Montaigne believes the first premise of cultural relativism that I summarized above–that manners are “infinite in matter and infinite in diversity”:

To sum up, then, the impression I have is that there is nothing that custom may not do and cannot do. … The laws of conscience which we say are born of Nature are born of custom; since many inwardly venerates the opinions of the manners approved and received about him, he cannot without remorse free himself from them nor apply himself to them without self-approbation.

Further, Montaigne seems to endorse the second principle of cultural relativism, that beliefs and values come together in whole structures that we might (today) call “cultures”:

It is greatly to be doubted whether any obvious good can come from changing any traditional law, whatever it may be, compared with the evil of changing it; for a polity is like a building made of diverse pieces interlocked together, joined in such a way that it is impossible to move one without the whole structure feeling it [emphasis added].

But I am not so sure that Montaigne believes the third premise of true relativism: that our understanding and assessment of cultures are determined by our own cultures. I think he rather argues that proper understanding and evaluation are more difficult than we assume because we are biased in favor of the familiar.

…. But the principal activity of custom is so to seize us and grip us in her claws that it is hardly in our power to struggle free and come back into ourselves, and reason and argue about her ordinances [emphasis added.]

“Hardly in our power” does not mean impossible or undesirable; on the contrary, our main duty is to “struggle free” from custom so that we can “reason and argue” better.

For instance, when Montaigne was disgusted by a French nobleman who blew his nose with his bare hands, he forgot to ask whether that might not actually be a good idea. “I considered that what he said [in his own defense] was not totally unreasonable, but habit had prevented me from noticing just that strangeness [about our own habits, such a blowing our noses into cloths] which we find hideous in similar customs in another country.”

In “On the cannibals” the main point is that we recoil at eating human flesh because it is not our custom, but we ignore the closer-to-hand horrors of torturing people on account of their religious faith. If we paid more attention to the strangeness and indefensibility of our own nation’s norms, we would discover the greatest (and most objective or universal) virtues, which include gentleness and tolerance. As Montaigne writes in “On Habit”:

The Barbarians are in no wise more of a wonder to us than we are to them, nor with better reason–as anyone would admit if, after running through examples from the New World, he concentrated on his own and then with good sense compared them. Human reason is a dye spread more or less equally through all the opinions and all the manners of us humans, which are infinite in matter and infinite in diversity [emphasis added].

Thus Montaigne is not skeptical about our duty–or our ultimate ability–to understand and judge the diverse ideals of human beings. He just thinks that this is harder than we assume. He is trying to shake our naivety in order to improve our reasoning, much like the Hellenistic philosophers when they taught paradoxes of logic and perception in order to strengthen our intellectual discipline and dissuade us from arrogance.

If this is not only what Montaigne meant, but also how his first readers understood him, then they did not derive cultural relativism from his texts. Instead, they drew conclusions reminiscent of Epicurean philosophy: it is hard to know what is right, foolish to set oneself above other people, and wise to focus on the inner life.

One more problem arises. If we detach ourselves as much as possible from our own local customs in order to attain objectivity, won’t we become critical of “traditional law” and then damage society by striving to undermine its norms? The solution to that problem is to live a contemplative and not an active life, to withdraw to one’s chateau and write introspective essais instead of trying to influence the world. For …

it is his soul that the wise man should withdraw from the crowd, maintaining its power and freedom to freely to make judgements, whilst externally accepting all received forms and fashions.

I conclude that Montaigne was not quite a relativist, nor was anyone for another century after him. Because he shunned politics, he was not the most helpful guide to the design of societies; but he was an excellent theorist of moderation, modesty, and introspection.