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Men: Would You Marry an American Woman?[W:771]

Men: Would you marry an American Woman?


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again, you seem to think morality is an exercise in logic, this is your first fundamental flaw in your reasoning.

I think when you look at the moral beliefs through time and cultures you there is a pattern that forms. A certain underlining understanding that is getting built upon as human understanding expands and people learn to understand themselves better. If however you are forming your own morality than I fail to see why you wouldn't use reason to find the answer. If the foundational support is built on essentially what amounts to nonaggression than there is no reason to consider anything that causes aggression morally valid. Of course, other things come into play here, but morally sound behavior would at some point even if it is culturally created have to have some sort of logic behind it. It can't simply be emotional and responsive to the world around you without there ever being a reactive response that makes people think of the consequences of those actions. If the consequences to aggression are always negative, as in pain or oppression, then clearly people could determine that it is the aggression itself that is the problem and apply it logically across the board.
 
That predisposes though that respect / submission to tradition is a moral value and that loyalty to one's group is a moral value. I think care / harm, fairness / cheating, and liberty / oppression are certainly moral values that just about everyone would agree on as being moral values. The other two are much more subjective though. For example, I think you should be loyal to your family, but I don't understand why respect for tradition is a moral value at all.

Maybe they are moral values, but as a moral value they are certainly off my radar screen. Its kind of like how some people sense and perceive while others feel and judge. The latter group is far more prone to having gut feelings. I can honestly say that i don't think I have ever had a gut feeling in my life. So I suppose we are all wired up quite differently.

I don't think traditions are really morals but more like a system of beliefs.
 
I don't think traditions are really morals but more like a system of beliefs.

But the whole "Moral Foundations Theory" predisposes that respect for tradition is a moral value. I don't get that at all.
 
Lets start over, but this time I will state my reasoning. Children are by default selfish and self centered.

We agree.

So as children mature, parents tend to have to be the ones to say things like "stop kicking your brother!" or "we need to learn to share" which are lessons in morality.

Here's my point - just because a parent engages in the practice of socializing her child to a parental norm doesn't imply that the lesson has stuck, even if the child begins to behave in the desired manner. This is so because we haven't controlled for the heritability of behavior. Does the parent hold that value because they too were socialized into holding that value or does the parent hold that value because it feels right, because there is something innate in the parent which allows that value to be expressed?

Here's Scientific American interviewing Harris:

But my primary motive was scientific. During the years I spent writing child development textbooks for college students, I never questioned the belief that parents have a good deal of power to shape the personalities of their children. (This is the belief I now call the “nurture assumption.”) When I finally began to have doubts and looked more closely at the evidence, I was appalled. Most of the research is so deeply flawed that it is meaningless. And studies using more rigorous methods produce results that do not support the assumption. . . .

There has also been some improvement in research methodology, due not to my nagging but to a greater awareness of genetic influences on personality. It’s no longer enough to show, for example, that parents who are conscientious about childrearing tend to have children who are conscientious about their schoolwork. Is this correlation due to what the children learned from their parents or to the genes they inherited from them? Studies using the proper controls consistently favor the second explanation. In fact, personality resemblances between biological relatives are due almost entirely to heredity, rather than environment. Adopted children don’t resemble their adoptive parents in personality. I’m not particularly interested in genetic effects, but the point is that they have to be taken into account. Unless we know what the child brings to the environment, we can’t figure out what effect the environment has on the child. . . .

The belief that parents have a great deal of power to determine how their children will turn out is actually a rather new idea. Not until the middle of the last century did ordinary parents start believing it. I was born in 1938, before the cultural change, and parenting had a very different job description back then. Parents didn’t feel they had to sacrifice their own convenience and comfort in order to gratify the desires of their children. They didn’t worry about boosting the self-esteem of their children. In fact, they often felt that too much attention and praise might spoil them and make them conceited. Physical punishment was used routinely for infractions of household rules. Fathers provided little or no child care; their chief role at home was to administer discipline.

All these things have changed dramatically in the past 70 years, but the changes haven’t had the expected effects. People are the same as ever. Despite the reduction in physical punishment, today’s adults are no less aggressive than their grandparents were. Despite the increase in praise and physical affection, they are not happier or more self-confident or in better mental health. It’s an interesting way to test a theory of child development: persuade millions of parents to rear their children in accordance with the theory, and then sit back and watch the results come in. Well, the results are in and they don’t support the theory!
 
But the whole "Moral Foundations Theory" predisposes that respect for tradition is a moral value. I don't get that at all.

Meh, I'm not buying it. :lol: I think morals are different than beliefs.
 
That predisposes though that respect / submission to tradition is a moral value and that loyalty to one's group is a moral value. I think care / harm, fairness / cheating, and liberty / oppression are certainly moral values that just about everyone would agree on as being moral values. The other two are much more subjective though. For example, I think you should be loyal to your family, but I don't understand why respect for tradition is a moral value at all.

Maybe they are moral values, but as a moral value they are certainly off my radar screen. Its kind of like how some people sense and perceive while others feel and judge. The latter group is far more prone to having gut feelings. I can honestly say that i don't think I have ever had a gut feeling in my life. So I suppose we are all wired up quite differently.

This is a very interesting comment that you've made. It nicely illustrates the very point that Haidt is making. You're honestly trying to assess the validity of his schema and you find it wanting on the two values that liberals lack but which conservatives have.

Now how do you respond when I tell you that I do understand the moral value of group loyalty and respect for tradition. I get it. You know what respecting group loyalty gets me when liberals see it? The charge of racism. The charge of bigotry.

We could spend pages of comments here building up arguments for each of the values, developing them step by step, because they can all be supported via argument, but if the two conservative values don't resonate with you then I would suggest that this is signaling that you lean liberal in your moral universe.
 
We agree.



Here's my point - just because a parent engages in the practice of socializing her child to a parental norm doesn't imply that the lesson has stuck, even if the child begins to behave in the desired manner. This is so because we haven't controlled for the heritability of behavior. Does the parent hold that value because they too were socialized into holding that value or does the parent hold that value because it feels right, because there is something innate in the parent which allows that value to be expressed?

Here's Scientific American interviewing Harris:

But my primary motive was scientific. During the years I spent writing child development textbooks for college students, I never questioned the belief that parents have a good deal of power to shape the personalities of their children. (This is the belief I now call the “nurture assumption.”) When I finally began to have doubts and looked more closely at the evidence, I was appalled. Most of the research is so deeply flawed that it is meaningless. And studies using more rigorous methods produce results that do not support the assumption. . . .

There has also been some improvement in research methodology, due not to my nagging but to a greater awareness of genetic influences on personality. It’s no longer enough to show, for example, that parents who are conscientious about childrearing tend to have children who are conscientious about their schoolwork. Is this correlation due to what the children learned from their parents or to the genes they inherited from them? Studies using the proper controls consistently favor the second explanation. In fact, personality resemblances between biological relatives are due almost entirely to heredity, rather than environment. Adopted children don’t resemble their adoptive parents in personality. I’m not particularly interested in genetic effects, but the point is that they have to be taken into account. Unless we know what the child brings to the environment, we can’t figure out what effect the environment has on the child. . . .

The belief that parents have a great deal of power to determine how their children will turn out is actually a rather new idea. Not until the middle of the last century did ordinary parents start believing it. I was born in 1938, before the cultural change, and parenting had a very different job description back then. Parents didn’t feel they had to sacrifice their own convenience and comfort in order to gratify the desires of their children. They didn’t worry about boosting the self-esteem of their children. In fact, they often felt that too much attention and praise might spoil them and make them conceited. Physical punishment was used routinely for infractions of household rules. Fathers provided little or no child care; their chief role at home was to administer discipline.

All these things have changed dramatically in the past 70 years, but the changes haven’t had the expected effects. People are the same as ever. Despite the reduction in physical punishment, today’s adults are no less aggressive than their grandparents were. Despite the increase in praise and physical affection, they are not happier or more self-confident or in better mental health. It’s an interesting way to test a theory of child development: persuade millions of parents to rear their children in accordance with the theory, and then sit back and watch the results come in. Well, the results are in and they don’t support the theory!

There is a ton of debate in science over this though. Personally I think E.O. Wilson's Sociobiology Theory is the best one and that almost all of our behavior was instilled through evolution and thus we are far more instinctual than we realize.

That said I am not sure what this guy is getting at because by almost any measure we are a statistically more peaceful society in a statistically more peaceful world than possibly ever before today.
 
This is a very interesting comment that you've made. It nicely illustrates the very point that Haidt is making. You're honestly trying to assess the validity of his schema and you find it wanting on the two values that liberals lack but which conservatives have.

Now how do you respond when I tell you that I do understand the moral value of group loyalty and respect for tradition. I get it. You know what respecting group loyalty gets me when liberals see it? The charge of racism. The charge of bigotry.

We could spend pages of comments here building up arguments for each of the values, developing them step by step, because they can all be supported via argument, but if the two conservative values don't resonate with you then I would suggest that this is signaling that you lean liberal in your moral universe.

I am certain that I lean liberal in my moral universe. I think group loyalty is an instinctual artifact of evolution though, rather than a moral value.
 
There is a ton of debate in science over this though. Personally I think E.O. Wilson's Sociobiology Theory is the best one and that almost all of our behavior was instilled through evolution and thus we are far more instinctual than we realize.

As JUDITH (not a dude) noted, there as a lot of controversy, but controversy defending bad methodology doesn't signify that there are two valid and competing models battling it out. Lots of what we think we know about personality development never controlled for the heritability of behavior, for genetics, so we can't really say that those studies are valid. As she also noted, when proper controls were instituted, the environmental factors were mostly wiped off the map. So in my review of that literature I'm not really seeing the controversy you allude to.

As for Wilson, I don't disagree with your assessment.
 
I am certain that I lean liberal in my moral universe. I think group loyalty is an instinctual artifact of evolution though, rather than a moral value.

Let's play with that position. So what if it is? What should we do about it? Should we train people to ignore their instinct? Can people be trained to ignore what they feel is right? Essentially, should we form "Reeducation Camps for Conservatives" to train them to think like liberals?
 
Let's play with that position. So what if it is? What should we do about it? Should we train people to ignore their instinct? Can people be trained to ignore what they feel is right? Essentially, should we form "Reeducation Camps for Conservatives" to train them to think like liberals?

No of course not, but rather we ought to be cognizant of what is most likely purely an instinctual belief.
 
I'd suggest that you give Haidt's work more attention. It maps pretty damn well to observable reality. This puts him into a different league than most psychologists who do bull**** endlessly. Don't throw the baby out with the bath water.

s predicted, libertarians showed lower levels of emotional responsiveness on standard measures of the moral emotions of disgust and empathy (Figure 3). Multivariate analyses indicate that, consistent with McAdams' personality model and previous research on these moral emotions, these dispositions relate to values, in ways which may predispose some individuals to choose to identify as libertarian. From an intuitionist perspective, libertarians' relative lack of emotional reactions may help explain the generally low levels of moral concern that we found in Study 1 (see also [25]). McCrae and Costa [51] argue that low levels of neuroticism, agreeableness, and extraversion are indicative of an unemotional style. Libertarians were the only group to report a more systematic, rather than empathic, way of understanding the world, a characteristic of men [62] that may explain why libertarianism appeals to men more than women. If morality is driven largely by emotional reactions, and if libertarians are less emotional on most of the measures we examined, then libertarians should be moved by fewer moral concerns, as was the case in Study 1.

If that is the basis they are going on then I can see why I disagree entirely with his work.

If you want to piss off liberals, quoting Haidt's work can be beneficial, it just depends on how harshly you can get the point across. For instance, look at how tacomancer phrased the distribution of morality and now watch this: liberals lack two moral values - they're simply deficient and they overcompensate by going through the roof on issues like equality, which means that conservatives can well understand the views of liberals because we overlap with their moral compass but liberals are completely baffled by how conservatives think because liberals are morally stunted. That will insult most liberals. The trick is to phrase it correctly, but still honestly report the findings.

He was framing it in a way that made them morally superior. However, from my observation emotions leads people to be irrational, and as liberal prove everyday in their policies, immoral as well.
 
You know what respecting group loyalty gets me when liberals see it? The charge of racism. The charge of bigotry.

I'm going to point to another thread from this evening to illustrate the point above. Take a look:

Now what precisely is racist about wanting to restrict immigration? Secondly, I'm going to assume that your concern is that the motivation for immigration restriction is rooted in stopping the spread of multiculturalism and if so, I'm still not understanding how wishing to maintain the culture of one's parents is Exhibit A in a trial of racism. If this is your argument then it seems that the only way to refute the charge of racism is to renounce a desire to maintain a "white culture" and to embrace some hybrid cultural mishmash. Are Japanese racists for wanting to maintain a distinct Japanese culture?

. . if you can't see why all the things I've listed are examples of why the Repub party is perceived as racist, then honestly I don't know what to say to you except - Enjoy your bubble of denial.
 
No of course not, but rather we ought to be cognizant of what is most likely purely an instinctual belief.

An instinct which serves . . No Purpose? What purposes do the instincts for the other moral values serve?
 
An instinct which serves . . No Purpose? What purposes do the instincts for the other moral values serve?

Every moral value is not necessarily purely based in an instinctual behavior. For the vast majority of human evolution we have been hunter / gatherers, As hunter gatherers an instinctual loyalty to one's group had distinct advantages for survival and propagation.

By being cognizant of it, I mean that one objectively look at their predisposed behavior. For example, one might naturally feel more comfortable being loyal to those they see in their group such as those that look like them, have the same culture, religious beliefs, ethnicity and so on. By recognizing that as an instinctual behavior rather than one actually based in reason, one can counter such predisposed behavior with reason and thus empathize with others.
 
If that is the basis they are going on then I can see why I disagree entirely with his work.

If his assessment doesn't apply entirely to you then that doesn't necessarily mean that his assessment is wrong for you might not be the median example of what constitutes a libertarian.

I certainly have libertarian leanings and I've engaged with libertarians and I tend to agree with his research conclusions. The autistic libertarians drive me batty, kind of like the doctrinaire communists. The logical constructs of their world views are pretty alien to a lot of people. Have you seen the open-borders libertarians try to make their case? They certainly do come across as unemotional to me. That doesn't have to mean that every libertarian fits that template. The systematic world view sure looks accurate to me. I tend to prefer that myself rather than a worldview wracked and whipsawed by emotion, but I don't find that description insulting.

He was framing in a way that made them morally superior.

It's always difficult to take the measure of a man by a small sample of his writing. I've been reading Haidt's work for nearly a decade, long before he became a public intellectual. He's pretty good at checking his own bias and shooting fire at the liberalism of his colleagues and profession.
 
Every moral value is not necessarily purely based in an instinctual behavior. For the vast majority of human evolution we have been hunter / gatherers, As hunter gatherers an instinctual loyalty to one's group had distinct advantages for survival and propagation.

By being cognizant of it, I mean that one objectively look at their predisposed behavior. For example, one might naturally feel more comfortable being loyal to those they see in their group such as those that look like them, have the same culture, religious beliefs, ethnicity and so on. By recognizing that as an instinctual behavior rather than one actually based in reason, one can counter such predisposed behavior with reason and thus empathize with others.

But there are rational reasons. I subscribe to that reasoning. It convinces me. It's pretty tight reasoning too, so it's not confirmation bias that we're dealing with here.

It's funny what you're doing. Again, you're fleshing out Haidt's categorization. You just don't see the reasoning. It's quite likely that you could follow the logic of it but the right neurochemicals would not be triggered and so it just wouldn't "feel" right to you.

For example, I'll offer up one point. People will feel a deeper bond with someone who shares common history, common values, common behaviors, etc. This is the opposite of diversity. The high level of trust induces willingness to sacrifice and to share for the common good. That is absent in more diverse societies.

Can you convince yourself to empathize with a man who values Clitoridectomy as a practice to be inflicted upon his wife and daughters? As a viewpoint and cultural practice, that's pretty damn diverse from what most liberals in the West subscribe to. Can you leapfrog your loyalties and empathy over that chasm?
 
If his assessment doesn't apply entirely to you then that doesn't necessarily mean that his assessment is wrong for you might not be the median example of what constitutes a libertarian.

It's not so much about me, but about the basis of the research. I don't agree with their view on morality.

I certainly have libertarian leanings and I've engaged with libertarians and I tend to agree with his research conclusions. The autistic libertarians drive me batty, kind of like the doctrinaire communists. The logical constructs of their world views are pretty alien to a lot of people. Have you seen the open-borders libertarians try to make their case? They certainly do come across as unemotional to me. That doesn't have to mean that every libertarian fits that template. The systematic world view sure looks accurate to me. I tend to prefer that myself rather than a worldview wracked and whipsawed by emotion, but I don't find that description insulting.

Libertarians that recognize borders in the sand puzzle me. A nations border is illogical and serves no purpose. It is method of separation and control by the government. A person from Mexico, a person from the US, and a person from Canada have no reason to be sorted in such manners. Nation states serve a purpose in that they provide people choices of governance, but the fact a choice is necessary shows weakness in man, but it is also that weakness that makes them even more illogical to maintain. The military complex is a cancer on the world and it is that very division that keeps people supporting it. It has permitted the state to wage what are essentially acts of legalized murder on a grand scale for centuries almost always in the name of power. Classical liberals were right when they said that a standing army can not be permitted to exist. It is an artifact of the past that is counter to peace, which is the very cornerstone of morality.

Some will argue that it is simply the property of a country, but it is illogical for a nation to own anything. People have the right to own the earth because they can provide their labor towards it and therefore have the right to do with it as they see fit, but the nation is simply the collective organization of self defense, which would mean the property of the nation if it exists at all would couldn't possibly be the property of the state, but simply be maintained in it's natural state. I can live with borders, but they are not logical. I suppose I'm proving your point, but I don't understand the emotional appeal to a nations border.

It's always difficult to take the measure of a man by a small sample of his writing. I've been reading Haidt's work for nearly a decade, long before he became a public intellectual. He's pretty good at checking his own bias and shooting fire at the liberalism of his colleagues and profession.

The original link by taco and the research was heavily leaning in favor of liberal thought. It would honestly surprise me to find out he is not a liberal himself.
 
It's not so much about me, but about the basis of the research. I don't agree with their view on morality.



Libertarians that recognize borders in the sand puzzle me. A nations border is illogical and serves no purpose. It is method of separation and control by the government. A person from Mexico, a person from the US, and a person from Canada have no reason to be sorted in such manners. Nation states serve a purpose in that they provide people choices of governance, but the fact a choice is necessary shows weakness in man, but it is also that weakness that makes them even more illogical to maintain. The military complex is a cancer on the world and it is that very division that keeps people supporting it. It has permitted the state to wage what are essentially acts of legalized murder on a grand scale for centuries almost always in the name of power. Classical liberals were right when they said that a standing army can not be permitted to exist. It is an artifact of the past that is counter to peace, which is the very cornerstone of morality.

Some will argue that it is simply the property of a country, but it is illogical for a nation to own anything. People have the right to own the earth because they can provide their labor towards it and therefore have the right to do with it as they see fit, but the nation is simply the collective organization of self defense, which would mean the property of the nation if it exists at all would couldn't possibly be the property of the state, but simply be maintained in it's natural state. I can live with borders, but they are not logical. I suppose I'm proving your point, but I don't understand the emotional appeal to a nations border.



The original link by taco and the research was heavily leaning in favor of liberal thought. It would honestly surprise me to find out he is not a liberal himself.

Whaaaatt? :shock:
 
I suppose I'm proving your point, but I don't understand the emotional appeal to a nations border.

I like you and agree with you on a number of topics, so don't take it badly when I write that I'm laughing with you, not at you. Yeah, you are proving my point. What I never see addressed is how to reconcile social welfare spending (it's never going away) with libertarian theory, how cultural values can separate peoples and the behavioral genetics aspects of race can be reconciled with libertarian theory. The world is messy this way. Libertarianism seems to me to presuppose a neat, logical world peopled by "Economic Man."

On civil liberties, libertarians do a bang up job in fighting the Totalitarian Liberalism that is shat upon us but the impulse to extend those liberties to everyone irrespective of nationality takes the principle too far, IMO. I certainly don't want to live under Totalitarian Liberalism and I don't want to live in an atomized society of Libertarian purity. I want community. I want to be a part of something greater than myself. I want to be bound to other people - I'll get their back and they'll get mine. That reality is found between the Totalitarianism of Liberalism and the Purity of Libertarianism.
 
Whaaaatt? :shock:

Franz Oppenheimer once defined the State as the “organization of the political means”—the systematization of the predatory process over a given territorial area." It is a fact of the world that it is the division of land into territorial governmental monopolies that leads to destruction on a grand scale.
 
Franz Oppenheimer once defined the State as the “organization of the political means”—the systematization of the predatory process over a given territorial area." It is a fact of the world that it is the division of land into territorial governmental monopolies that leads to destruction on a grand scale.

Yeah, well, it's kind of silly to concentrate on something SO unrealistic.
 
It would honestly surprise me to find out he is not a liberal himself.

Here is how he directs fire into his own camp:

He polled his audience at the San Antonio Convention Center, starting by asking how many considered themselves politically liberal. A sea of hands appeared, and Dr. Haidt estimated that liberals made up 80 percent of the 1,000 psychologists in the ballroom. When he asked for centrists and libertarians, he spotted fewer than three dozen hands. And then, when he asked for conservatives, he counted a grand total of three.

This is a statistically impossible lack of diversity,” Dr. Haidt concluded, noting polls showing that 40 percent of Americans are conservative and 20 percent are liberal. In his speech and in an interview, Dr. Haidt argued that social psychologists are a “tribal-moral community” united by “sacred values” that hinder research and damage their credibility — and blind them to the hostile climate they’ve created for non-liberals.

“Anywhere in the world that social psychologists see women or minorities underrepresented by a factor of two or three, our minds jump to discrimination as the explanation,” said Dr. Haidt, who called himself a longtime liberal turned centrist. “But when we find out that conservatives are underrepresented among us by a factor of more than 100, suddenly everyone finds it quite easy to generate alternate explanations.”​
 
Yeah, well, it's kind of silly to concentrate on something SO unrealistic.

Did you ever notice that wars are fought between nations, and it's why people say such things as "a war between nations", instead of saying "a war between the people of nations"? Countries love to fight each other, don't they? Isn't it interesting that we are defending the state in a fight that many times it picked? Did you ever notice that every offense that people say will be created under anarchy are almost all legally sanctioned by the state? Find me something that people will say will happen in anarchy and I will provide you with exactly how it is already part of government. That is the enjoyment of talking to people on this forum. They never understand exactly what they are saying. They support a policy that forces someone into action and then they speak of freedom. I laugh at them from my computer chair knowing they don't even realize how foolish they really are.
 
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