Kurt Gray on Moral Psychology, 2/22
notes from our discussion
On February 21, about twenty of our paid subscribers joined me in a Zoom conversation with Kurt Gray, director of the Deepest Beliefs Lab. Here are a few of my notes from the discussion.
Contra Jonathan Haidt, Gray believes that harm-avoidance is the essence of moral reasoning. That is, if someone says that “X is wrong,” you can be pretty sure that the person will say that “X causes harm.” People can differ over the amount of harm that X causes, and then arrive at different moral conclusions. But if they agree that X causes a lot of harm, then they will agree that X is wrong.
In the book The Mind Club, co-authored with the late Daniel Wegner, a moral situation is one in which an agent causes harm to a patient. An agent is someone perceived as being able to think and plan. A patient is someone perceived as being able to feel, especially to feel fear and pain. A human being can be both an agent and a patient, but in a moral situation we tend to separate the two. The example that I use is that we consider Derek Chauvin the agent and George Floyd the patient.
People in positions of power tend to be viewed as agents in this framework. This relates to Martin Gurri’s “revolt of the public.” Because elites no longer control information, the public perceives the “little guy” as the patient victimized by the agent. Institutions lose support, because we cannot see the leaders of institutions as well-meaning and fallible—instead we see them as evil.
Gray believes that to bridge political divides, people need to hear stories from the other side. Gray co-authored a paper that says,
In moral and political disagreements, everyday people treat subjective experiences as truer than objective facts.
In particular, if you tell a story how you avoided harm by doing something, this will at least get someone on the other side to see your position as rational from your point of view. For example, if you are against gun control and tell a story of how carrying a gun enabled you to avoid harm.
Another way to see the other side as rational and human is to see a list of positions on which you agree. It turns out that most people expect people on the other side to be worse than they really are. They might think that 15 percent of people in the other political party are ok with child pornography, when in fact it is less than 1 percent. So showing a Democrat a list of all things that nearly all Republicans agree are wrong (murder, slavery, etc.) you can enable Democrats to see Republicans as human. Of course, partisan spokesmen try to do the opposite—too instill the belief that the other side has no moral beliefs whatsoever.
Gray sees Twitter as useful for academics as a way of disseminating their work and discovering the work of others. But it causes harm in the general population because its algorithm is tuned to increase engagement, and engagement goes up when people are outraged.
It was a great talk that went by fast, so there wasn’t enough time to go into everything.
Big takeaway: To persuade somebody else, focus on the lesser harm of your proposal, and the greater harm of the alternative, or current. Gray’s current work has shifted away from the Agent – Patient discussion, which might be because it seems fairly accepted, towards the issue of harm. In papers available that I haven’t read yet.
The uncertainty of harm was not discussed. I think the best example to be more explored would be drunk driving, and drunk driving laws, combined with other driving laws. The drunk driver was the agent in deciding to drink, and drive, and to risk harming themselves and others. Note that the vast majority of drunk drivers do NOT cause fatal accidents; far more are arrested for DUI than cause accidents.
There was an example of rich man who, in dying, left his house and his rich art collection to the city of Philly, on the condition that the art stayed in the house, a few miles outside of the city. Later city officials moved that art into the city, under the theory that it caused “no harm”, since the prior owner had died. One mother of such an official disagreed, claiming all people wanting to put restrictions in their wills have been harmed, with the precedent that violating the express wishes of people who are now dead causes no harm.
The idea that violating some rule or prior agreement, because of “no harm”, seems nearly certain to be rationalization that uses a specific instance of claimed non-harm to stop enforcing some accepted norm. The loss of such a rule might well cause some harm to others. In the “art move” example, it seems clear to me that there is real harm in violating the agreement. But I can also understand those who claim it’s not harm.
For society, it seems certain that there are rules, laws, and cultural norms which result in some social optimal. Deviation from this results in a sub-optimal society, tho it might not be clear to identify exactly who was harmed, or by how much.
Children being harmed by the divorce of their parents is one I’m very familiar with – and now believe that “no-fault” divorce is a sub-optimal policy for society. Normalizing consent-based promiscuous sex is another socially sub-optimal norm.
Trying to measure, and compare, alternate moralities based on comparing the harms of those moralities seems a way to allow more fruitful discussions of comparative societies. But making harm the basis of morality might shut down those discussions. I’ve ordered a book and so I’m now waiting in Slovakia.
"Contra Jonathan Haidt, Gray believes that harm-avoidance is the essence of moral reasoning. That is, if someone says that “X is wrong,” you can be pretty sure that the person will say that “X causes harm.”"
Nope. Ask your husband or wife, "Honey, if I cheated on you and had a one night stand while away on a business trip, if you never learned about it, would it be morally ok, because no one was harmed?" - "No! It would not be morally ok! You moron!"
Or consider how nine years ago Lansburg got into some hot water asking if unconscious sex (not resulting in physical injury or pregnancy) should be a serious felony, because, after all, what was the 'harm', the situation being perhaps analogous to the kind of trespass that gets nominal damages because no actual damages. http://www.thebigquestions.com/2013/03/20/censorship-environmentalism-and-steubenville/
Well, it doesn't take reading many of the comments to see that people insist that 'harm' in terms of actual physical injury or damage or even from traumatic memories is absolutely not the point for many people, who say this is obviously extremely immoral behavior.
The trouble is that since harm *can* be used to justify moral opinions, such a story will be crafted as a rationalization to try and justify those views and to raise the status of those attitudes. Because, if you want to use the law to coercively impose them on others, the test is damages, so you have to pretend there *are* actual harms, even when there really aren't.
The danger (or 'opportunity' depending on your perspective) inherent in giving weight to 'offense' and 'emotional distress' and making them actionable in court is that innocent people can't easily defend themselves by disproving damages as it allows people to insist you take their word for it regarding subjective states of mind. If you make states of mind determinative, you will get many more cases of those states of mind, and hypersensitivity about everything will skyrocket - as Haidt has observed.
The point is, this is the obvious trouble with taking all these 'harm' stories at face value as if it really was the basis of morality. It isn't. It's just the only way we are now allowed to promote morality into law, so it's all one will ever see, especially in the intellectually respectable world.
The law is an exercise of power by domination, but one that conditions use and access through language, symbols, and ideas. But language and ideas are not some fixed stars in the heaven, and subject to all kinds of manipulations. One can open a lock with the key, or one can pick the lock, or just change the lock so it now opens with a different key. It is in this way that the lust for the power of law has a highly corrupting influence on the words and thoughts that are the key to opening that door, which has profound ripple effects throughout the whole culture.
Historically the law protected property, rights, health, welfare, and public morality. Some of those involved the deterrence of or remedy for injuries that were damaging harms in direct, clear, uncontroversial ways. Others had a more tenuous or indirect relationship to or justification in 'harm', and some *none at all*. But as those harm-indifferent exceptions were swept away, harm was all that was left, and so, everything must be framed in terms of harm now, even if those explanations are bogus, like they would be for examples above.
In the more religious past, few would have had any trouble with the idea that something can be deeply morally sinful even if it is merely thought (e.g., lust, envy, etc.), even if it causes no harm, indeed, even if it's a net benefit in material terms. This would not have struck them as somehow at odds or inconsistent with the underlying theme of their moral instincts and impulses. They wouldn't have felt any need for there to be a showing of harm to enforce such norms with law.
And it is still that way today, whether people recognize it or not, though the prevailing 'religion' especially regarding sexual morality is quite different.