{"id":14585,"date":"2014-11-26T09:12:14","date_gmt":"2014-11-26T14:12:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=14585"},"modified":"2014-11-26T09:12:14","modified_gmt":"2014-11-26T14:12:14","slug":"self-moral","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=14585","title":{"rendered":"“the self is moral”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Summarizing a body of empirical research, the Duke psychologist\u00a0Nina Strohminger argues that what constitutes our identity is our moral character, not (for instance) the memories that we have stored so far. Asked what characteristics a soul\u00a0would hypothetically carry into another body, subjects choose\u00a0the soul’s\u00a0moral character. Asked which psychological changes\u00a0would make someone into a new person, subjects select moral<\/em> changes\u00a0above\u00a0total amnesia or an inability to recognize moral features. Given a chance to improve their own moral character with an imaginary pill, people say they would decline because that would mean abandoning their selves.<\/p>\n

According to Strohminger, “moral features” constitute “the most important type of information we can have about another person.” She continues:<\/p>\n

So we\u2019ve been thinking about the problem precisely backwards. It\u2019s not that identity is centred around morality. It\u2019s that morality necessitates the concept of identity, breathes life into it, provides its raison <\/i>d\u2019\u00eatre<\/i>. … What is it to know oneself? … When we dig deep, beneath our memory traces and career ambitions and favourite authors and small talk, we find a constellation of moral capacities. This is what we should cultivate and burnish, if we want people to know who we really are.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I would like to connect this discussion to\u00a0psychological research on how we perceive the identities of ordinary objects, such as\u00a0apples and chairs. (This link may have been made already; I have not looked.) According to experiments<\/a> by\u00a0Sloman, Love, and Ahn, people perceive as\u00a0integral or essential those features\u00a0of an object that could not change without affecting many other features. Therefore,\u00a0a network model is useful. Think, for instance, of the many features of an apple (its crunchy texture, sweet taste, origins on a tree, function of protecting seeds, color, size, role in Greek myths, etc). These features can be seen as nodes in a conceptual network. The nodes that we see as more definitive of appleness are the ones that have higher\u00a0network\u00a0centrality.<\/p>\n

Likewise, I would model\u00a0any person<\/a> as holding many ideas in his or her head at any time. The individual\u00a0ideas are all subject to change. Some are linked to others, forming a large, complex, and evolving conceptual network. Some of the nodes are moral ideas, however you define morality.\u00a0When we think of another person’s identity, we\u00a0should\u00a0not cite just one or a few clear-cut principles or virtues. That would reduce the complex person to an abstraction.\u00a0But we should\u00a0have in mind a cluster of connected–although not always mutually consistent–nodes that are relatively central to that person’s\u00a0whole network. These nodes cannot change without setting off a cascade of other changes that may be sufficient to alter the\u00a0person’s whole character.<\/p>\n

In short, as\u00a0Strohminger writes, “the self is moral”–and I would add that the moral self is a network of ideas defined by the cluster(s) of relatively central nodes. That is what our souls\u00a0would take with us into\u00a0new bodies or a new life.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Summarizing a body of empirical research, the Duke psychologist\u00a0Nina Strohminger argues that what constitutes our identity is our moral character, not (for instance) the memories that we have stored so far. Asked what characteristics a soul\u00a0would hypothetically carry into another body, subjects choose\u00a0the soul’s\u00a0moral character. Asked which psychological changes\u00a0would make someone into a new person, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[29,5,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14585","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-moral-network-mapping","category-philosophy","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14585","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14585"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14585\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14601,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14585\/revisions\/14601"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14585"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14585"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14585"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}