william's blog | 2012-02-04 11:43:46 +0000 
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Morality
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  Date: October 22, 2008  8:44pm
Author: William Morgan
   URL: http://masanjin.net/blog/old2.txt

Just read a great Stephen Pinker article about morality [1] that appeared the
in NY times earlier this year. Being the curmudgeonly contrarian that I am, I
most enjoyed the identification and dissection of the moralization so
prevalent but so rarely recognized in my peer group:

   "[W]ith the discovery of the harmful effects of secondhand smoke,
    smoking is now treated as immoral. Smokers are ostracized; images of
    people smoking are censored; and entities touched by smoke are felt to
    be contaminated (so hotels have not only nonsmoking rooms but
    nonsmoking floors). The desire for retribution has been visited on
    tobacco companies, who have been slapped with staggering "punitive
    damages.""

And:

   "[W]hether an activity flips our mental switches to the "moral"
    setting isn’t just a matter of how much harm it does. We don’t show
    contempt to the man who fails to change the batteries in his smoke
    alarms or takes his family on a driving vacation, both of which
    multiply the risk they will die in an accident. Driving a gas-guzzling
    Hummer is reprehensible, but driving a gas-guzzling old Volvo is not;
    eating a Big Mac is unconscionable, but not imported cheese or crème
    brûlée. The reason for these double standards is obvious: people tend
    to align their moralization with their own lifestyles."

There's also the compelling idea that we're not actually less moral than we
were in the past (a claim that old people have been making since time
immemorial), but rather, our morality has simply shifted to other things:

   "This wave of amoralization has led the cultural right to lament that
    morality itself is under assault, as we see in the group that anointed
    itself the Moral Majority. In fact there seems to be a Law of
    Conservation of Moralization, so that as old behaviors are taken out
    of the moralized column, new ones are added to it. Dozens of things
    that past generations treated as practical matters are now ethical
    battlegrounds, including disposable diapers, I.Q. tests, poultry
    farms, Barbie dolls and research on breast cancer."

I'm reminded of one of my favorite Paul Graham essays, <i>What You Can't Say
[2], the thesis of which is that the powerful ideas that define the modern age
are often ideas that were completely verboten in earlier times (e.g.
Copernicus's claim that the earth revolves around the sun); thus, if we want
to identify powerful ideas that will shape the future, we should look to
things that are taboos today.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/13/magazine/13Psychology-t.html
[2] http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html</i>


Replies
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John, on October 23, 2008  3:15am:
["| Thanks for the pointer, Wm!  You've prompted me to go back to _The Selfish\n", "| Gene_, which slipped to the bottom of my pile a few months ago with the last\n", "| few chapters unread.  I highly recommend it.\n", "| \n"]
This delicious text version served up by Whisper <http://masanjin.net/whisper/>.