Below, in black, are the notes about the book in the book's own structure. Blue italics indicate my own comments.
Introduction:
Morals built our society into what it is. Jon wants us to discuss politics and religion with civility and will help us achieve that with this book.
Born to Be Righteous:
People are intrinsically moralistic, critical, and judgmental. This is good and bad. It causes strife but allows for balance.
What Lies Ahead:
Part I: About Intuition. Moral reasoning was not evolved to find truth, but to justify our actions and defend our in-groups after events rather than before them. The mind is divided into parts with only a small portion being consciousness. Metaphors can help people to understand who are unresponsive to reasoning.
Part II: There is more to morality than harm and fairness: liberty, loyalty, authority, sanctity. The right appeals to a broader package while the left appeals mostly to harm and fairness.
Part III: Morality binds and blinds. We're 90% competitive, selfish hypocrites and 10% cooperative. This perspective helps with comprehending other people's political and religious ideas. Once accepting a group, people become blind to alternative moral frameworks. This would highly suggest to me that in-groups are NOT a good thing and that we should sooner see "conscious life" as the group to which we belong. In such a way, we can have a truthful understanding of morality rather than a biased one. It seems he is going to argue that groups are good though. We'll see. Although, maybe it is impossible to not put oneself in a group. If I call myself groupless and find others in groups, I've already grouped myself outside of them and feel morally superior. Hmm... Liberal is more like a libertarian in European countries while to US it is akin to "progressive." Sen-Ts'an essentially said to not be "for" or "against" if you want to know truth. This actually sounds more akin to what I was just saying: don't belong to a group. So... why does he think groups belong in a moral framework especially given that they are there as a hindrance to truth? But then he says he doesn't think we should not be moralistic and thus we should pick sides lest we fall into chaos. I think he's balancing a fine line here and the language isn't particularly clear. Perhaps he is saying we need to stop being "for" or "against" in order to see properly but then, once seeing properly, we need to advocate for what is good. Sounds like typical backwards wisdom where in order to learn we have to stop knowing things.
Part I: Intuitions Come First, Strategic Reasoning Second.
ONE: Where does Morality Come From?
The left will lean to believe that morality comes from a basic concept of no harm no foul. The right will lean to believe that morality can dictate certain things are wrong even without harm coming from it. Example of intercourse with a chicken carcass. Gross, but morally indifferent to the left and morally wrong to the right (generally speaking).
The Origin of Morality (Take 1): Nature vs Nurture or Nativist vs Empiricist is a false dichotomy. The third answer is Rationalism: people figure it out, not innate and not taught. Since we can only "figure things out" by "learning" based upon what we know which is either nature or nurture, this seems like a useless nuanced third option. It's clearly a little of both and nothing more. Some ideas are innate and others learned based upon our upbringing as it jives with what is innate. Maybe that's his point? Jon gives an example that children younger than 6 or 7 tend to not comprehend that a volume of water is conserved when pouring from one glass to another if the new glass is a different shape. They might think it is now more or less water than in the original glass based upon the height of the water in the glass. They cannot comprehend until they are older even if we try to explain it. Even if we do not explain it, their minds will eventually learn it of their own accord. The author appears to be confusing "nurture" with "learned from adults" rather than simply "learned." The child still "learned" it based upon the "nurture" of his upbringing and his innate ability to reason as his brain matures. If he grew up with no glasses and no water, he may never learn this and thus it's a matter of nurture. In the same way, there was a tribe of BaMbuti Pygmies who lived in a dense forest in the Congo. Colin Turnbull was studying them and was surprised when Kenge, one of the Pygmy natives, after reaching a rare clearing without trees and with great visual distance, asked what kind of insects the buffalo were. He had not learned depth perception given the inability to see great distances. So his nurture, his upbringing, his experiences, prevented what could have come naturally. Nurture does not simply mean "learned from adults" and he is exactly explaining Nurture rather than any third option.
Jon will use the term "rationalist" to indicate anyone who believes reasoning is the best means to acquire moral knowledge. I find it hard to believe that moral knowledge as derived through "reasoning" (which I understand as being logic) can yield anything but a "no harm no foul" perspective. Perhaps his idea of reasoning is different. How can [useful] reasoning be done without logic though? Without logic, reasoning is pointless and will yield improper conclusions. I fear this is exactly what he means though. We make up reasons for things all the time but this will not yield moral knowledge without basing it on logic since one person's non-logical reasoning can yield a different result than another's. This clearly would indicate that one or more answer lacks actual knowledge and thus the process itself was useless. Only logical reasoning could be useful and only when axioms are correct.
Lawrence Kohlberg studied children and found that their moral judgments changed with age in seemingly 3 stages. The first stage, they understood right and wrong based on whether or not someone was punished by an adult for it. After that, they understand rules and authorities as defining morality. Finally, after puberty, they begin to reason it out themselves what is moral and may sacrifice one moral concept for a greater one.
The Liberal Consensus:
Kohlberg decided that the most moral kids were those who put themselves in other roles. He decided this was not as easily done in hierarchical structures of teachers, parents, authorities who are often a hindrance to truly putting oneself in another's shoes. Kids need to act things out and try rather than be lectured. This led to a great liberal concept that did not appreciate authority as much.
An Easier Test:
By using yes/no questions, Elliot Turiel found that children as young as 5 could distinguish between ambiguous rules of what to wear versus moral rules of harm such as pushing people off swings. A teacher can allow breaking the arbitrary rules, but not the moral rules. Jon concludes that despite some differences to Kohlberg's studies, they basically came to the same conclusion that "harm and fairness" were the basis of morality rather than loyalty, respect, duty, piety, patriotism, or tradition. They both thus conclude that authorities and hierarchies are ultimately harmful to development.
Meanwhile, In The Rest of the World:
Jon believes something is lacking in what Kohlberg and Turiel focus on: emotion. He discusses the Ilongot tribe whose men behead random other people as a means to bond with people and release pent up aggression within. He also discusses the Hua of New Guinea who have rules about not eating food that is red, wet, slimy, hairy, or came from a hole since such things resemble vaginas. They consider these rules as being moral in nature and not ambiguous. Jon compares this with religion in the west which focuses on sexual choices as moral despite lack of harm and indicates that liberals use food in a similar way to look down upon others for not using free-range, organic, fair-trade, etc. This is an unfair comparison. Some in the left consider free-range and fair-trade as moral due to the harm it causes to animals and people while others would prefer the harm not to be done but do not consider the use of such meat as immoral itself. Vegetarians and vegans often use morality of harm as a reason for not eating meat or using animal products while plenty on the left still eat meat and see it as a fact of how the world works. The rest, such as organics, GMOs, or considering "toxins" is not at all moral and the left would not claim it is moral unless it causes harm even if they still believe themselves superior in intellect for making better choices. This is not at all the same as vagina fruit or applying morals to sexual choices. Unless, of course, they are simply incorrectly drawing conclusions that harm comes from eating a watermelon. In which case, this is back to morality of harm. Once rid of the superstition that it's harmful, they should, in theory, lose the moral attachment to it and maybe, instead, keep only a religious attachment which is arguably unhealthy at worst and useless at best. Jon concludes that due to these other constructs of morality in all these other cultures, that there must be more to morality than simply rationalism. I think this conclusion is wrong. He's mistaking a respect for authority, mistaken rules against harm, and religious decrees to control people, into a base of morality that doesn't exist. No child automatically comes up with the idea that they should not eat watermelon. This is 100% influence via a culture's evolution in rules, society, and understanding.
The Great Debate
Richard Shweder indicates that older or non-enlightened cultures tend to organize around the whole of the group's needs (sociocentric) rather than the individual and that enlightenment lends to uplifting the individual as more important (individualistic) and having the group serve them rather than vice versa. Since we are more individualistic here, he thought he ought to test the Orissa where they are more sociocentric to see if results differ from Kohlberg and Turiel. He found that even 5-year-olds decided that it was morally wrong to do things that Americans would think is fine such as a woman eating rice with her husband and older brother. They would also say a husband beating their wife for disobedience was okay when Americans would not. They saw these as unchangeable moral situations and not societal rule-based things that could change in different cultures. From this, Shweder concludes that the "no harm" concept of morality is not built-in. Turiel rebutted by indicating that harm was indeed seen in these cases but they were hidden in underlying beliefs that we are unfamiliar with. For example, it was seen as morally wrong for a widow to eat fish but that's because Hindus believed fish would make her want sex and offend her dead husband and thus not reincarnate to a higher level. In other words, harm. Thus, Turiel claimed Shweder used trick questions and his conclusion was wrong.
Disgust and Disrespect
Jon agreed with Turiel that it wasn't properly controlled but also believed that Shweder might still be right if controlled properly. He performed his own experimentation and found in Brazil and even Philadelphia that the lesser educated or lower-class people followed Shweder's results in that they thought it was an unchangeable moral issue for a student not to wear a class uniform while middle-class educated people understood it as a mere social violation. The control that Jon used was asking if anyone was harmed in the particular story. The control is not particularly effective in my eyes. Asking if anyone was harmed is not the same as asking if potential harm could come from the situation. The widow eating fish, for example can be called "morally wrong" but even a Hindu would have to answer that no one was harmed in the story of a woman eating a fish. The problem is the potential to harm, not the harm itself. This does not mean that Shweder and Jon are wrong, but that it is still not properly controlled. The assertion that people can find things immoral beyond simple concepts of harm seems obvious, however. We already know this. As any person who finds homosexuality wrong and ask who is harmed by it and they will say it's wrong despite a lack of harm. Is the goal merely to indicate that harm is not the baseline of the human brain for determining morality? I'm not really sure how much that even matters. Even if it's not built-in that doesn't mean it's not a great method of determining what is moral and what is not. So what's the point in all this? Given the results, I don't see the ability to simply add anything as a moral base since there either isn't one or it's entirely fluctuating as early as 5 years old based upon culture. So either it's not innate or we can't determine it. That, or different things are innate to different groups based upon genes, but it seemed to be poverty-related and not genetic. Thus, I conclude there is evidence that we have no built-in mechanisms of morality and thus we determine it on our own and thus "no harm" is a good one to stick with. Jon concludes with saying Shweder argued that disgust and respect were learned moral characteristics but that Jon later learns and argues that disgust and respect are innate. He ends with a story about a son asking his father what would happen if people were to poop in random places and trying to remove the offended party with each subsequent question. Since the variable in comprehending an ambiguous rule of respect vs a moral rule of harm was poverty, I don't see how he can think it is innate. I guess we'll see as he continues.
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