Dunno how that happened. I stuffed up somewhere. To be clear, NPOV is not the author of post #33, I (SJ) am.

Humans have a hard-wired aversion to eating human feces. The smell generally induces nausea. This aversion may not be present in all humans, and it may be possible to overcome it in some circumstances, but it’s generally true that humans will not willingly eat human feces.

Other mammalian species exhibit the same behaviour.

But humans, like dogs, will willingly consume the excrement from other species.

Other species use different mechanisms for dealing with food purity.

Why don’t scavenging animals get food poisoning?

Answer: They do and some of them die as a result. However, species that rely on scavenging for much of their food have evolved counter-measures. They tend to be resistant to the toxins and microbes contained in their food. However, some do avoid things that are likely to be harmful or of little nutritional value. For example, most animals will not eat fresh manure that comes from their own species, although some relish the manure of other species. In fact, disgusting though it sounds, domestic dogs will often eat faeces from pet cats.

Other animals, such as rats, taste unfamiliar food cautiously and avoid it if it makes them ill. Dogs, hyenas and the like, eat whatever looks tempting, but at the least hint of untoward symptoms, vomit it up at once. Coyotes do this so smartly that poisoning them is an advanced art. Not only do they avoid anything suspicious, but the only poisons that will work on them are those that are so dangerous that the merest taste is fatal, such as fluoroacetates. Trappers of pest coyotes have largely resorted to “getters”, which shoot cyanide directly into the victim’s mouth to kill them immediately. Vomiting does no good after that…

Humans have a particular advantage here, in that we don’t have to rely on only those things that have been built in to, say, our sense of smell. We’re also able to make field observations, tell other people about them, and pass that information on from generation to generation. In lots of instances, those field observations have been subsequently proven false, and we no longer follow the recommendations (e.g. the pork thing.)

Thus, it is possible to argue that with a more efficient mechanism to process logical and emotional conflict, so important to achieving moral balance, “liberals” have a head start on “conservatives”.

There are also studies suggesting that learning to avoid past errors is easier for liberals compared to conservatives in studies that required rapid decision making.

An overview (rather than just bits and pieces of abstracts) is available
here, and includes

A review of that research published in 2003 found that conservatives tend to be more rigid and closed-minded, less tolerant of ambiguity and less open to new experiences. Some of the traits associated with conservatives in that review were decidedly unflattering, including fear, aggression and tolerance of inequality. That evoked outrage from conservative pundits.

Scientists instructed them to tap a keyboard when an M appeared on a computer monitor and to refrain from tapping when they saw a W.

M appeared four times more frequently than W, conditioning participants to press a key in knee-jerk fashion whenever they saw a letter.

Each participant was wired to an electroencephalograph that recorded activity in their anterior cingulate cortex, the part of the brain that detects conflicts between a habitual tendency (pressing a key) and a more appropriate response (not pressing the key). Liberals had more brain activity and made fewer mistakes than conservatives when they saw a W, researchers said. Liberals and conservatives were equally accurate in recognizing M.

Researchers obtained the same results when they repeated the experiment in reverse, asking another set of participants to tap when they saw W.

Mind you, conservatives will point to ACC activity (higher in liberals) when creating or processing lies: here (if you can get it) with an abstract here.

But that’s because the questions were about showing special “respect” for authority, rather than accepting the need to listen to it.

I suppose I don’t believe people in authority need special treatment – just that their directives generally need to be followed (providing that don’t completely violate my own ethical standards).

“Purity” to me doesn’t seem like a justifiable basis for moral judgement at all.
But the fact that our brain tends to use it for that purpose doesn’t particularly surprise me from an evolutionary point of view.

It’s annoying in too many ways to mention. The main thing is that it’s transparently constructed to confirm the aothors’ dodgy hypothesis allegedly linking moral priorities to political attitudes.

For what it’s worth, I apparently fall in between the average liberal and the average conservative when it comes to harm, fairness, and loyalty. But I more concerned with authority than either of them (who wouldn’t be, if you have two stubbornly disobedient children?), and less concerned with ‘purity and sanctity’ than either of them. The last of these is easy to explain, as I ticked zero for all the questions that ask whether something is wrong because it’s disgusting — that is, I took disgusting to mean physically, viscerally disgusting, rather than as a metaphor for moral outrage. But that’s exactly what they expect ‘liberals’ to do.

Haidt deals with Piaget and indeed succinctly contextualises the historical development of moral psychology in this paper, especially from page 4 onwards. Well worth a read.

Hmm. Read the piece, and if anthing, it lowers my opinion of Haidt

In just a few hundred years, Europe was transformed from medieval Catholic
feudalism to modern secular democracy. Was this change all for the good? That dependson the story you use to understand it. The sociologist Christian Smith (2003) argues that humans are moral, believing, narrating animals. We need to live in a moral order that iscreated by shared stories and that gives us beliefs about who we are, what we ought to do,and what is sacred. Smith extracts these stories, particularly the implicit meta-narrativesof various communities, including academic communities. He finds several such metanarratives at work in academic circles. One of the most influential he calls the Liberal Progress narrative:
Once upon a time, the vast majority of human persons suffered in societies
and social institutions that were unjust, unhealthy, repressive, and
oppressive. These traditional societies were reprehensible because of their
deep-rooted inequality, exploitation, and irrational traditionalism… But the
noble human aspiration for autonomy, equality, and prosperity struggled
mightily against the forces of misery and oppression, and eventually
succeeded in establishing modern, liberal, democratic, capitalist, welfare
societies. While modern social conditions hold the potential to maximize
the individual freedom and pleasure of all, there is much work to be done
to dismantle the powerful vestiges of inequality, exploitation, and repression. (p.82)

If this is your meta-narrative then the change from feudalism to modernity is the greatest moral advance in Western history. But Smith notes that sociologists used to have an alternate narrative, one based on German and English romanticism, which was a reaction to the rationalism and skepticism of the enlightenment. The Community Lost narrative says that:

Once upon a time, folk lived together in local, face to face communities
where we knew and took care of each other life was securely woven in
homespun fabrics of organic, integrated culture, faith, and tradition…. But
then a dreadful thing happened: Folk community was overrun by the
barbarisms of modern industry, urbanization, rationality, science,
fragmentation, anonymity Faith began to erode, social trust dissipate,
folk customs vanish. All that remains today are tattered vestiges of a
world we have lost. The task of those who see clearly now is to
memorialize and celebrate folk community, mourn its ruin, and resist and
denounce the depravities of modern, scientific rationalism that would kill
the Human Spirit.

If Smith is right that this meta-narrative has dropped out of the academic imagination, then it probably seems less true to you than does the Liberal Progress narrative. But we can get a better sense of why many people understood the arrival of modernity as a loss by viewing the transformation through the eyes of the early sociologists. In 19th Century Europe, dramatic increases in wealth, material comfort, and political freedom were complemented by the rising importance of the welfare of the individual in social and political theory. Several of the founders of sociology wrote about the dangers inherent in these changes. Tocqueville, Tonnies, Marx, and Weber all warned, in different ways, of the alienating effects of the loss of social connection and animating purpose as peoples lives became ever more governed by an industrial economy and a bureaucratic legal and political system.

This is an extraordinary rendition of the Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment times.

These are not two different versions of what went on in the past 1000 years in western society. How can one even begin?

In just a few hundred years, Europe was transformed from medieval Catholic(!!)! feudalism to modern secular democracy.

This is ahistorical bullshit. Surely everyone can recognise this. This has been a battle going on for at least a thousand years. Magna Carta anyone? Protestant reformation? English reformation?

Once upon a time, folk lived together in local, face to face communities where we knew and took care of each other

Which historian tells this fairy story? No reputable ones that I know of. It was dog-eat-dog. No ifs, no buts.

Haidt thoroughly discredits himself on the first page.

Dualism appears to be the human default (Bloom, 2004), and the belief that one has a soul taking temporary residence in ones body is widespread. On this view of the self, the body is a kind of temple that must be maintained in a way that is commensurate with its divine origins and sacred functions. This is why so many passages in the Old Testament, the Koran, and the Hindu Scriptures concern rules of purity and emphasize virtues such as cleanliness, temperance, and piety.

Yes, Leviticus is full of cleanliness stuff that is associated with what we’d now associate with public health issues, the kind of stuff that’s written into our current statutes. A lot of it (although forgivable given the state of knowledge at the time) was rubbish, though, which is why we don’t currently have statutes forbidding the comsumption of pork. It was a reasonable observation at the time eating pork makes you sick, so don’t eat the stuff. They didn’t have any theories about bacteria and cooking times available to them.

The Mosaic Law (i.e. the ten commandments) is also reflected in our current statutes, particulary the various state crimes acts. Thou shalt not kill? Check. Thou shalt not steal? Check.

The Mosaic Laws basically work without the necessity of a god to enforce them.

The Christian commandments:

1. Love God
2. Love the neighbour

also work fine without the the god bit.

The recognition of these facts was the essence of the enlightment. There will be rearguard actions going on for centuries.

The thing that Haidt seems to avoid is that everything he says has all been said before, usually in far less obscure terms, and that the previous analysis rejects the necessity or desirability of a “god” element.

Look, Ken, for you the things that Haidt says might come as a personal revelation. That happens sometimes. But at the moment, it looks like you’re shoving a copy of “Atlas Shrugged” in my face, and saying “look at this – it’s the best thing that’s ever been written”.

The conclusion that conservatives have a wider spread of moral values smacks of post facto justification to me.

Im bothered by Haidts claim that surveys have long shown that religious believers in the United States are happier, healthier, longer-lived, and more generous to charity and to each other than are secular people. The source for this is Arthur C. Brooks, who has built an argument about compassionate conservatism by narrowly defining compassion as charitable giving, and then cherrypicking in the US General Social Survey for data that supports the view that religious conservatives give more than non-religious liberals.

Im reading Haidts book The Happiness Hypothesis at the moment. It came as a bit of a shock to read Over and over again, studies show that people set out on a cognitive mission to bring back reasons to support their preferred belief or action. And because we are usually successful in this mission we end up with the illusion of objectivity. We really believe that our position is rationally and objectively justified. (Page 65)

This is precisely what I reckon Brooks does, and perhaps even Haidt himself.

Basically, Republicans have in spades all the things that combine to make us happy. Church attendance is particularly crucial. People who attend religious services regularly are more likely to report being “very happy” than those who don’t — 43 percent vs. 26 percent (a happiness boost, by the way, that cuts across all the major religious denominations). In addition, Republicans are more likely to be married than Democrats, and married people are happier than singles.

…

When I tell my liberal friends about Republican happiness, they usually reply angrily — angry not being a happy trait. “They’re just not paying attention,” one friend snapped. “Ignorance is bliss,” said another. Or perhaps it’s what Ralph Waldo Emerson said, putting it more eloquently and less angrily: “God offers to every mind its choice between truth and repose. Take which you please — you can never have both.”

…

If this isn’t depressing enough for liberals, it turns out that some of their own pet policies are to blame for their unhappiness. Once in power, Democrats tend to focus on issues that, according to the science of happiness, have little effect on our contentment — income equality, for instance, and racial diversity. Neither is linked to greater happiness. Countries with large disparities between rich and poor are no less happy than more egalitarian ones, studies have found. And the happiest countries in the world tend to be homogenous ones, such as Denmark and Iceland, not the ethnic melting pots that liberals celebrate.

…
(Ironically, the author, Eric Weiner, goes on to conclude that almost every President for 40 years has been a ‘happy’ President, who spoke to ‘happiness’, and implicitly posits an Obama victory.)

But I like philo‘s take, picking up from the Emerson quote above:

Ill propose another explanation: I think its likely that happy people are more likely to be Republicans, while unhappy people are more likely to be Democrats, for unhappiness gives one an incentive to seek change, and happiness an incentive to resist it. But the causal link goes in the other direction as well, for Republicans stress freedom and individual responsibility, which lead people to feel in control and take action that changes their lives for the better, while Democrats assign blame to institutions, which makes people feel powerless and discourages them from undertaking ameliorative courses of action.

Personally, if I was a depressed lefty searching for post-hoc justifications for my depression, I would suggest that conservatives are happier because they don’t care about all the injustice surrounding them.

But as I am not, I’ll admit that I quite like Haidt’s theory. My first consideration of it came when reading Wittgenstein in uni, and specifically when he points out that to express a belief in heaven is not to make a literal statement. Rather it is to describe a way of seeing (and thus judging) the world. Later, he commented that whilst not sure if he could share it, he admired religious belief.

Later, myself, wondering if I still believed in God or not and how to reconcile the angry militant atheist of my teenage years with the evident (to me) many goods of religion in human society, I could never really work out if religion was

1) just an evolutionary crutch that we were outgrowing, or
2) an essential part of human nature that we were foolishly replacing with stupitidies like environmentalism, or
3) one of many ways of organising society which would continue to compete with the new challengers, neither inherently better or worse.

Glad to see I’m not alone in wondering.

I think that’s already been said though.

Yes indeed he did. Haidt deals with Piaget and indeed succinctly contextualises the historical development of moral psychology in this paper, especially from page 4 onwards. Well worth a read.

As an avowed ‘liberal’, I reject hierarchy, purity and tribalism as any sort of sensible, humanitarian grounds for morality. As he and others have pointed out, that way justifies many of the sins of our forefathers.

Didn’t someone (Piaget?) suggest that these sorts of concerns (hierarchy particularly) were a developmental stage, and you could characterise someone stuck at that level (typically the morals of a pre-teen) as not as morally developed?

Haidt’s points are carefully made, and worth considering. I especially like his distinction between how religiously conservative group membership may have definite benefits for the ingroup on the one hand while having concurrent detriments for deviants and competing groups on the other hand, so how can we determine their absolute positives and negatives for humanity?

Certainly one of the social problems for many atheists is how to find an ingroup which provides the same sense of identity and communality as a religious grouping.

I hope this helps.

As for your first comment, isnt that precisely one of the points that Haidt (and by extension Ken) is making? Namely that by displaying some of the characteristics of their declared opponents, the new atheists are falling short of the liberal ideals they profess to support. I would imagine thats why its fairly common to see them labelled as fundamentalists, even by those who by rights one would expect to be their natural allies.

This is ridiculous, surely? Haidt’s claim is that he has identified an objective difference between liberals and conservatives. He then asserts that liberals aren’t conforming to the difference he’s identified.

Look, you might see some merit in what Haidt says, but to me, it’s just inconsistent nonsense.

Haidt actually makes the distinctions youre asserting, SJ, and partly in the extract I reproduced.

Well, yes, I saw that, and that was what prompted the initial “I dunno”.

He’s saying in effect “I’m not a fascist, [blows dogwhistle] but gosh, those fascists sure were right…”

There is certainly plenty of room for disagreement with Haidts arguments, but if you simply dismiss them as crap, I suggest that youre actually saying more about yourself than about his ideas.

I can see by reading back what I’ve written above that I’d given two major rebuttals to Haidt before dissmissing it as “crap”.

He’s waffling and enabling, Ken, nothing more. There’s no substance to his argument, especially in your last quote of the guy.

We social scientists know that the institution of marriage has changed substantially over the centuries. We also know that homosexuality is not a choice or a disease, and we know that gay people are just as good as straight people at parenting and citizenship. We can therefore predict that in
countries where gay people do get the right to marry, the new institution of marriage will be better and stronger than the old one. But it will be a change, and if social justice researchers really want to bring that change about, then they will have to understand the moral motivations that are at present working against them.

It’s also worth noting that he classifies himself as a “secular liberal” and believes “contractual societies such as those of Western Europe offer the best hope for living peacefully together in our increasingly diverse modern nations . . . “.

As for your first comment, isn’t that precisely one of the points that Haidt (and by extension Ken) is making? Namely that by displaying some of the characteristics of their declared opponents, the new atheists are falling short of the liberal ideals they profess to support. I would imagine that’s why it’s fairly common to see them labelled as fundamentalists, even by those who by rights one would expect to be their natural allies.