Random quote
For most people an irresistible pleasure is associated with obedience, credulity, and a quasi-loving submission to a master they admire.

Gabriel Tarde (1843-1904)

The moral foundations of behaviour

Nelson Mandela

Why do people behave morally? What is the origin of moral behaviour? What does morality actually involve? These are intriguing questions that philosophers and psychologists have been asking almost as long as they are asking questions. In these blogs, I have presented already some answers given by the American developmental and comparative psychologist Michael Tomasello. At least as interesting are the answers given by the American social psychologist Jonathan Haidt in his book The Righteous Mind. What makes this book interesting is not only the moral theory presented there, but also that he uses his theory to explain why people have such different views in matters of politics and religion. However, the meaning of this moral theory goes far beyond politics and religion. In this blog I want to deal with Haidt’s schema of the foundations of morality, hoping that it will help you understand the political and religious (and other) discussions and differences better.
People often differ in their political and religious views. These differences are not only theoretical, but they make that people act in different ways and support different political parties and religious organisations. This made Haidt, together with others, realize that there is not one foundation of morality, although interpreted by different persons in different ways, but that morality has a modular structure. Morality basically consists of several modules, and each module is a moral challenge of what is important to realize. Different moral views involve then different combinations of such modules, and different ideas about which modules are most important. What then are these modules, or moral challenges, or, as Haidt usually says, foundations of morality? Here they are (from Haidt, pp. 178-179, 215):

1) The care/harm foundation. This makes us sensitive to signs of suffering and need of others and makes us despise cruelty. It makes that we want to care for those who are suffering.
2) The fairness/cheating foundation. This makes us sensitive to indications that another person is likely to be a good or bad partner for collaboration and reciprocal altruism. It makes us also sensitive to proportionality and makes us want to shun or punish cheaters.
3) The loyalty/betrayal foundation. This makes us sensitive to signs that another person is (or is not) a team player. It makes us trust or reward such people, and it makes us want to hurt, ostracize or even kill those who betray us or our group.
4) The authority/subversion foundation. This makes us sensitive to signs of rank or status, and to signs that other people are or are not behaving properly, given their position.
5) The sanctity/degradation foundation. This makes us wary of a diverse array of symbolic objects and threats. It makes it possible for people to invest in objects with extreme and irrational values – both positive and negative – which are important in binding people together. For example, in the religious field, think of “holy” objects and places; or think of the special meaning the national flag has for many people.
6) The liberty/oppression foundation. This makes people notice and resent any sign of attempted domination. It triggers an urge to band together to resist or overthrow bullies and tyrants.

This, what Haidt calls, the Moral Foundations Theory describes the elements or modules that in different combinations and stressed in different ways form our moral, religious and political views. When political views clash, we often can understand why this happens by analysing them and then see, for instance, that for political view X modules 1) and 2) are most important, while for political view Y modules 4) and 5) gives the goals that are most important to pursue. Although knowing this may not prevent heavy clashes between advocates of these political views, it may help both sides understand each other better, which can be a first step to depolarization and a common solution of the problems in question. Generally today, we see a growing polarization in all Western countries, be it in the USA, Spain, the Netherlands, or in any country, whichever, and this leads to growing internal tensions and demonization of “the other”. Haidt’s Moral Foundations Theory can be a useful instrument in helping to overcome this undesirable situation.

Random quote
Those who are accustomed to judge by feeling do not understand the process of reasoning, for they would understand at first sight, and are not used to seek for principles. And others, on the contrary, who are accustomed to reason from principles, do not at all understand matters of feeling, seeking principles, and being unable to see at a glance.

Blaise Pascal (1623-1662)

Language and manipulation

Soviet propaganda in Moscow in 1983

Language has an influence on the person you are. We have seen it in my last week’s blog. However, the influence of language doesn’t occur only at the individual level but also on the group level and on the level of nations. No wonder that language is often used to manipulate groups if not whole peoples. Some political orators are very skilled in using language for manipulating the will of the people and make them do what they like. Often this has ruined the country. Here I want to discuss two ways of manipulating collectivities such as states with the help of language. Again, I have made use of Viorica Marian’s The Power of Language (esp. chapter 7).
In all countries of the world, words are used for influencing if not manipulating the way people think. I still remember that when the first people from Southern Europe, North Africa and Turkey arrived in the Netherlands in the 1960s, looking for work, they were called guest workers. Soon, however, the authorities thought that it was better to call them immigrants, a word that after a few years already was replaced by allochthones. Now, many years later immigrants officially are called newcomers. Sometimes special words are used for special categories like knowledge immigrants. These word switches were often used in order to avoid the pejorative meanings that the old words had got by replacing them by more neutral if not positive words. This is a good reason, of course, but it is manipulation, anyway.
The person who has best described how, especially in a negative way, language can be used for manipulation is George Orwell (see his 1984). Orwell called this substitution of old words by new words and old word meanings by new meanings “Newspeak”. For instance, take the word “free”. The word is not removed from the vocabulary, but in Newspeak it is used to communicate only the absence of something, for instance “The dog is free from lice”. That it once referred also to “politically free” or “intellectually free” is removed from the vocabulary. Because quite recently yet I wrote several blogs about this kind of manipulation (see for example here and here), I’ll give no further explanation.
Newspeak and language manipulation are often manners for oppressing people and making them obey the will of the leaders. A related phenomenon is discouraging the use of a certain language if not completely forbidding its use in order to promote and shape the national identity of a country. It happens both in dictatorships and in democracies. I don't think it goes too far to say that language is the soul of a people. Therefore, by suppressing the use of a certain minority language one can try to suppress the identity of the group of the speakers of this language. By forcing them to speak the national language, the authorities can try to make this minority accept the national identity, if not immediately then in the long run. As Marian says it (pp. 133-4): “[D]omination through language cuts to the heart of a nation and its people precisely because language and mind are so closely connected. To forbid not only certain words but entire languages is to forbid a certain way of thinking and of being in the world.” An example of the promotion of the majority language for the national unity and identity is the russification of the Soviet Union, when the country yet existed. In Turkey Kurdish, the language of the Kurdish people in the east of the country, had been forbidden till 1991 for use in public, since it was considered an expression of separatism and a provocation of the unity of Turkey. Especially since the invasion of Ukraine by Russia (which occurred in fact already in 2014), in Ukraine Ukrainian is promoted as the national language at the cost of Russian, which had been the major language when the country was a part of the Soviet Union and yet long thereafter.
However, when authorities in a country try to suppress a minority language, they often forget that language suppression can lead to resistance and national division. This can be seen in many countries, for instance in Turkey but also in Spain, where the Catalan language had been forbidden from 1939 till 1975. Even books in Catalan were then destroyed. This ban on Catalan has been an important factor contributing to the wish of Catalonia to become independent of Spain. Also in Belgium we see that the restriction of the rights of the Dutch language speakers till the 1960s has led to an independence movement in Flanders (the Dutch speaking part of the country) and, in the end, to the federalization of the state as a provisional (?) solution.

Random quote
Of all the follies of the world, that which is most universally received is the solicitude of reputation and glory.

Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592)

Person and language

I am Pinocchio

Following Viorica Marian’s The Power of Language. Multilingualism, Self and Society, in my blog last week I explained how knowing several languages has a positive influence on your perception of the world and on your health, and that it affects your emotions as well. However, the influence of knowing more than one language, and of language in general, goes much farther. It’s one of the main factors that make you the person who you are. Take memory. In the discussion on the question whether and to what extent you are the same person that you were many years ago, many philosophers ascribe a decisive role to memory: The idea is that, when as an adult you still remember what you did as a child, you as an adult are still the same person as the child whose deeds you remember (the so-called psychological continuity thesis). Here I don’t want to discuss the thesis as such (see my old blogs and see here), but in the present context it is important that what you remember is not independent of the language you used when you were acting in the past and of the language you use for recalling your past. The language you speak influences in at least three ways what you remember, so Marian (pp. 112 ff.):
1) Through language co-activation at the time of encoding
2) Through language dependent memory
3) Through the labels used in remembering.
1) This is about the same effect that appeared in the association test in my blog two weeks ago. After a certain event a monolingual English speaker will easily remember a fly and a flashlight if they happen together while a bilingual English-Spanish speaker may be more likely than a monolingual English speaker also remember the arrow (“flecha” in Spanish) passing by.
2) More interesting in view of the psychological continuity thesis is language dependent memory. This involves, so Marian (pp. 113-4), that “the likelihood of remembering something increases if you are using the same language that was used when the original event occurred… [Multilinguals] remember different things about their lives and recall information about the world differently in their native versus their second languages because the accessibility of those memories varies. What comes to the forefront changes across languages… In turn, the memories accessed influence how we think about ourselves and our lives and how we interact with others.” However, if this means that we remember different things about our youth dependent on the language we use and, maybe, that in the extreme case we must switch to the language we used when we were young in order to remember what we did then, this raises the intriguing question whether we are different persons dependent on the languages used. Even more, does this mean that when speaking a second language I am not identical with the child I was long ago, while I am still identical with this child if I speak my first language? Here it is not the place to try to answer this question, but I think that a further exploration of the issue would be an important contribution to the discussion on personal identity. It may throw a new light on the answers given so far.
3) A third factor that influences memory is how things are labelled in a language. For instance, Spanish uses two different words to refer to a corner, namely “rincón” (inside corner) and “esquina” (outside corner). Therefore, speakers of Spanish have better memory for where items are placed in a display that involves corners than speakers of English have. (Marian, pp. 115-6) Or, another example, in Dutch there is only one word for “male cousin” and “nephew”, namely “neef” (and one word for “female cousin and niece”: “nicht”). Think how much more difficult it is for a Dutch person to recall what kind of family relationship he or she has with a certain relative than for a Chinese who has already eight different words for “cousin”, depending on the relationship to him or her (on the maternal or paternal side; male or female; younger or older).
Many psychological investigations but also investigations in other fields ignore the languages the test persons speak. In addition, they ignore the question whether test persons are monolinguals or multilinguals and whether they are tested in their first languages or in a second language. As an example, I mentioned the discussion on the psychological identity thesis. Is this disregard of language right? I think that this blog makes clear that it is not. Humans, and certainly test persons, are not “language free”. What they feel, perceive, think, remember etc. depends to a great extent on the languages that they speak and that shaped them; on their mother tongues in the first place, but also on the other languages they learned. Language has a big impact on the person you are. One would almost say: Tell me which language you speak and I’ll say who you are. Or maybe even: Tell me which language you are speaking now and I’ll say who you are, at this moment.

Random quote
The fundamental question that one ought to be asking before launching a war is basically this: would a war be worth it morally? Is what is at stake in this conflict–the evil that war might prevent in this case–worth all the evil that this war can be expected to create?

Henry Shue (1940-)

Otto Dix, The War

 

Otto Dix (1891-1969), The War

In view of the present times, I have uploaded this triptych by Otto Dix instead of my regular weekly blog.