{"id":15227,"date":"2015-05-08T13:11:29","date_gmt":"2015-05-08T17:11:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=15227"},"modified":"2015-05-08T13:26:21","modified_gmt":"2015-05-08T17:26:21","slug":"its-not-just-what-you-think-but-how-your-thoughts-are-organized","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=15227","title":{"rendered":"it&#8217;s not just what you think, but how your thoughts are organized"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>We come into the world with no moral ideas at all and must learn them from others. We learn not just from arguments and explicit principles, but also by observing practices and experiencing emotional reactions.<sup>1<\/sup> We must make judgments about complex, evolved, historically contingent phenomena (such as, among many others, marriage, democracy, and art) that we cannot apprehend as wholes\u00a0but must learn to assess from accumulated and vicarious human experience.<sup>2<\/sup> In Habermas\u2019 terms, we begin with a \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=5840\">Lifeworld<\/a>\u201d formed of our shared experiences and improve it through explicit deliberation with diverse people in civil society.<sup>3<\/sup><\/p>\n<p>Some people are much better at this process than others are, and we can explain why by understanding their moral worldviews\u00a0as networks of ideas and connections and considering how their whole networks are organized. Consider these hypothetical discussion partners:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><em>Aaron<\/em> constantly returns from any situation or moral consideration to the same value. He considers that value immediately relevant to all others and nonnegotiable. It defines his moral identity and appears to him manifestly true. Deliberating with Aaron is impossible, but not because his network contains a foundational belief in the sense of one that is \u201cinfallible, or indubitable, or incorrigible, or certain.\u201d<sup>4<\/sup>\u00a0What makes him a poor deliberator is rather the over-<em>centralization<\/em> of his network of moral ideas. One cannot find a route around his core principle.<\/li>\n<li><em>Bao\u00a0<\/em>endorses a lot of moral ideas, examples, and principles. But he cannot connect one to another. Asked why he believes <em>P<\/em> or <em>Q<\/em>, he has nothing to say about his\u00a0reasons, let alone can he\u00a0offer a chain of reasons that connects <em>P<\/em> to <em>Q<\/em>. It is hard to talk to Bao\u00a0because his\u00a0network is <em>disconnected<\/em>.<\/li>\n<li><em>Carlos<\/em> simply has nothing to say about many choices, dilemmas, and cases that arise in conversation and practice. He can discuss some topics cogently, but many others seem not to interest or concern them. The problem with Carlos\u2019 network is that it is too <em>small<\/em> (having too few nodes) or has too <em>restricted<\/em> a scope.<\/li>\n<li><em>Dominique<\/em> cheerfully holds both <em>P<\/em> and <em>not P<\/em>, depending on her mood or perhaps her self-interest or convenience. Dominique frustrates deliberation because her network harbors blatant <em>inconsistencies<\/em> that she does not attempt to resolve.<\/li>\n<li><em>Eduardo <\/em>is committed to one idea, like personal liberty or economic equality, and he will not recognize the legitimate pull of other values that conflict with his <em>summum bonum<\/em>, e.g., order and security, solidarity and community, or democracy. Eduardo\u2019s network is consistent but impossible to connect to if one holds other values.<\/li>\n<li><em>Fiona <\/em>holds many ideas and can thoughtfully connect them to each other. But asked whether she has tried to <em>apply<\/em> any of his ideas in practice or observed them in application, she demurs. Fiona\u2019s network is well structured for talk but disconnected from experience.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>This list can be extended. The point is that the structure of a moral network is important. That follows from the premise that we each begin with whatever ideas and connections we happen to hold, and our responsibility is to refine the whole set in discussion and collaboration with others. In that case, we should be concerned not only about the various values that we endorse, but also with how they are configured. The best networks for discussion are likely rich, complex, connected, not overly centralized, and not necessarily fully consistent.<\/p>\n<p>Notes<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>\u00a0Cf. Owen Flanagan, \u201cEthics Naturalized: Ethics as Human Ecology,\u201d in Larry May, Andy Clark , and Marilyn Friedman (eds.) <em>Mind and Morals: Essays on Ethics and Cognitive Science<\/em> (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1998)\u00a0p. 30: \u201cThe community itself is a network providing constant feedback to the human agent.\u201d<\/li>\n<li>See Richard N. Boyd, \u201cHow to be a Moral Realist,\u201d in Geoffrey Saye-McCord, <em>Essays on Moral Realism<\/em> (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), p. 205: \u201c\u201cMuch [moral] knowledge is genuinely experimental knowledge and the relevant experiments are (\u201cnaturally\u201d occurring) political and social experiments whose occurrence and whose interpretation depends both on \u201cexternal\u201d factors and upon the current state of our moral understanding.\u201d Cf.\u00a0Friedrich A. Hayek, <em>The Constitution of Liberty<\/em> (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), pp. 59-65<\/li>\n<li>Habermas\u2019 preferred metaphor is a <a href=\"http:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=13225\">horizon<\/a>, but he explicitly mentions networks in J\u00fcrgen Habermas, <em>Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy<\/em>, trans. by William Rehg (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996), p. 18.<\/li>\n<li>Geoffrey Sayre-McCord, \u201cCoherentist Epistemology and Moral Theory,\u201d in Saye-McCord, p. 154.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>We come into the world with no moral ideas at all and must learn them from others. We learn not just from arguments and explicit principles, but also by observing practices and experiencing emotional reactions.1 We must make judgments about complex, evolved, historically contingent phenomena (such as, among many others, marriage, democracy, and art) that [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[29,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15227","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-moral-network-mapping","category-philosophy"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15227","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=15227"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15227\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15233,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15227\/revisions\/15233"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15227"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15227"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15227"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}