Taboos

[duchess of malfi]

This is a quite interesting quiz that Syl once pointed out to me.

www.philosophersmag.com/bw/games/taboo.htm

If you take it be warned, the chicken question is a bit on the nasty side (IMHO).

[Worm of Despite]

Taboo - The Results
Results

Your Moralising Quotient is: 0.00.

Your Interference Factor is: 0.00.

Your Universalising Factor is: -1.

What do these results mean?

Are you thinking straight about morality?

You see nothing wrong in the actions depicted in these scenarios. Consequently, there is no inconsistency in the way that you responded to the questions in this activity. However, it is interesting to note that had you judged any of these acts to be morally problematic, it is hard to see how this might have been justified. You don't think that an act can be morally wrong if it is entirely private and no one, not even the person doing the act, is harmed by it. The actions described in these scenarios are private like this and it was specified as clearly as possible that they didn't involve harm. One possibility might be that the people undertaking these acts are in some way harmed by them. But you indicated that you don't think that an act can be morally wrong solely for the reason that it harms the person undertaking it. So, as you probably realised, even this doesn't seem to be enough to make the actions described in these scenarios morally problematic in terms of your moral outlook. Probably, in your own terms, you were right to adopt a morally permissive view.



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Analysis: Morality, Taboos and the "Yuk Factor"

Probably most of us would like to believe we are able to give good reasons for the moral judgements that we make. For example, if we were asked why it was wrong for the older girl to push the younger boy off the swing, as described in the first question of this activity, we might talk about the fact that the boy's rights had been violated or about the fact that he experienced at least some physical harm. Whilst it is true that the philosophical waters would soon become muddied if we examined our reasoning more carefully, we are able to give at least prima facie good reasons for our judgement of moral wrongdoing.

However, there is a class of activities where it is much more difficult to offer arguments to support a judgement of moral wrong. This is the class of activities which are harmless (at least in a narrow sense), private and consensual, yet violate strong social norms. The examples we utilised in this activity were to do with the taboos and rituals associated with death, food and sexuality.

No doubt some people will suspect that we have constructed this activity with the intention of showing that people are just mistaken if they think that things like having sex with a frozen chicken are wrong. This is not the case, since it is possible to at least make arguments that such things are wrong. Here is an example of one such argument. Human beings are God's creations. Their sexuality is a gift from God to be enjoyed only in the context of a monogamous union between one man and one woman. Chickens, frozen or otherwise, are not part of the picture. Therefore, to have sex with one is to abuse the gift of sexuality, and will necessarily harm a person's relationship with God. It follows that having sex with poultry is a moral wrong.

So if the intention then is not to show that the moral prohibitions surrounding taboos cannot be justified, what are we trying to show with this activity?

Morality and Harm

The intention is to demonstrate that there are tensions in the way that people reason about morality. One important tension has to do with how central the idea of harm is to many moral frameworks. Previous research suggests that, with the exception of the siblings story, most people judge the scenarios presented here to involve neither harm to the protagonists nor to anybody else; but that, regardless, plenty of people still think that these scenarios depict acts which are morally wrong (see Haidt, Koller and Dias, Affect, Culture and Morality).

This activity asks people precisely to make judgements about whether acts can be wrong if they harm only the protagonist and whether they can be wrong if they harm no-one. If the answer to the second question is "no", then automatically any claim that the scenarios presented here involve moral wrongdoing results in difficulties. To retain a consistent moral outlook, it would be necessary to show either that there is harm in the acts depicted here, or to revise the judgement that some kind of harm is necessary for moral condemnation. Both resolutions contain philosophical complications.

There is harm in the acts depicted here

This will probably be the most popular response amongst people who think that their moral outlook has been unfairly identified by this activity as involving a possible contradiction.

There is no doubt that it is a defensible position to argue that there is harm in the acts depicted here. However, it is not an easy argument to make. Primarily, this is because these scenarios have been set up precisely in such a way so that it seems that no harm has occurred. The protagonists suffer no ill-effects as a result of their actions and their actions remain private. Given this, any argument that harm occurs is going to be very difficult to ground empirically. However, this is not to say that it cannot be done, simply that it is something which will require a good deal of thought.

The other point to make is that it is possible that a judgement that harm occurs is an ex post facto rationalisation of a prior intuition that the acts depicted here are morally wrong. In other words, people don't like things like incest and sex with poultry, they are pretty good at inventing stories to explain why they don't like them, but, in fact, they don't like them regardless. We already know that people engage in this kind of retroactive reasoning when justifying their responses to taboo type stimuli (see Haidt, Koller and Dias). We also know that judgements of wrongdoing by people who take a moralising stance towards the kinds of acts depicted here are better predicted by asking them whether they would be bothered to see these acts than by asking them whether anyone is harmed. The suspicion, then, is that a judgement that harm occurs is simply a buttress of a prior baseline moral commitment.

Harm is not necessary for moral condemnation

It is possible to argue that there is no harm, nor possibility of harm, in the actions depicted here, and yet they are still wrong, by insisting that harm is not necessary for moral condemnation. But again there are difficulties with this kind of argument.

The major problem is the danger that it will deprive the justifications offered for particular moral judgements of any real content. For example, whilst it is easy enough to claim that siblings should not have sex with one another because it violates the rules governing human sexuality which have been laid down by God, it is much more difficult to show what is wrong with violating these rules unless one talks about harm (though, of course, there is nothing to stop one simply asserting that it is wrong to break rules). Thus, one finds the idea in Christian theology that Man is harmed by his sins in that they constitute a barrier between himself and God.

Some philosophers have gone so far as to suggest that a notion of "harm", understood in a certain kind of way, is a prerequisite of proper moral reasoning. For example, Jeremy Bentham, the founder of classical utilitarianism, argued that pleasure and pain (a "positive harm"), instantiated in the notion of utility, are the only proper measures of value. In his terms, then, a wrong act is one which increases pain (or which, given equally possible choices, results in the least pleasure). Although utilitarianism has moved on since Bentham's day, it is still possible to find philosophers who are willing to argue that pain (and, by implication, a certain kind of harm) should be the central concern of moral philosophy. Richard Ryder, for example, in Issue 23 of TPM, argues that "our prime moral duty is to reduce the pains of others and especially of those who suffer most."

Of course, this is not to argue that these philosophers have got it right, and that some conception of harm has to be central to the moral judgements that we make. Rather, it is simply to claim that if one wants to argue that an act can be wrong without harm, or the possibility of harm, then it is necessary to think carefully about how one justifies the attribution of wrongdoing, in order to avoid at least some notion of harm - however broad - entering into the moral calculus.

The "Yuk Factor"

The other tension in moral reasoning that we hope this activity helps to elucidate has to do with the role of reason and emotion in moral judgements. One of the interesting things which Haidt et al found when exploring people's reactions to the scenarios featured in this activity is that people who have very strong emotional responses to these stories frequently find it difficult to provide an explanation or justification for what they are feeling. According to Steve Pinker, this is because our moral convictions are rooted not so much in reason, as in the evolutionary make-up of our minds. In his words: "People have gut feelings that give them emphatic moral convictions, and they struggle to rationalize them after the fact. These convictions may have little to do with moral judgements that one could justify to others in terms of their effects on happiness or suffering. They arise instead from the neurobiological and evolutionary design of the organs we call moral emotions." (The Blank Slate).

The dangers of rooting moral attitudes in emotion are obvious. It means that a "yuk-factor" might lead us to condemn actions - and even people - we have no good reason to condemn. For example, consider the fate of the untouchables in the Indian caste system. They were not allowed to touch people from the higher castes; they were not allowed to drink from the same wells; on public occasions, they had to sit at a distance from everybody else; and in some regions, even contact with the shadow of an untouchable person was seen as polluting and necessitated a purification ritual. Such prohibitions might sit easily with a certain kind of raw sentiment. They are much harder, if not impossible, to justify in the light of reason.

However, one must be careful not simply to assume that emotion has no role to play in moral reasoning. Indeed, some philosophers claim that it is just a mistake to think that moral judgement involves anything other than emotion. A. J. Ayer, for example, in line with the dictates of his logical positivism, argued that ethical statements are nothing more than the expression of emotional attitudes. He denied that it was possible for ethical statements to be factually true. Rather, they are exclamations of the form 'Hurrah for X!'.

Even if one does not accept this kind of extreme "emotivism", it is still fairly easy to see that emotion can play some kind of role in good moral reasoning. Empathy, for example, would seem to be an important component of a proper moral outlook. It is hard to imagine that the atrocities of the holocaust would have occurred had its protagonists been more able to imagine themselves in the emotional position of their victims. Indeed, the philosopher Jonathan Glover has argued that many of the atrocities of the last century were possible precisely because people's moral emotions had been switched off.

Nevertheless, it is probably right that we are suspicious of moral judgements which are rooted in the "yuk-factor". Steve Pinker, in The Blank Slate, puts it like this: "The difference between a defensible moral position and an atavistic gut feeling is that with the former we can give reasons why our conviction is valid. We can explain why torture and murder and rape are wrong, or why we should oppose discrimination and injustice. On the other hand, no good reasons can be produced to show why homosexuality should be suppressed or why the races should be segregated. And the good reasons for a moral position are not pulled out of thin air: they always have to do with what makes people better off or worse off, and are grounded in the logic that we have to treat other people in the way that we demand they treat us."

[Avatar]

Your Moralising Quotient is: 0.03.

Your Interference Factor is: 0.00.

Your Universalising Factor is: 0.00.

Morailty is a function of environment on the whole. Anything that hurts nobody cannot be immoral. Morality based on some arbitrary rule is meaningless.

--Avatar

[duchess of malfi]

I still think the chicken thing is icky.

[Kinslaughterer]

Interestingly enough, most taboos are created on the very idea that someone will be harmed through that action. Cultures generally invent specific taboos to protect their individuals from preceived distress. Don't eat pork. Why? you'll get parasites and die. That was prehistorically when food preperation was a bit less thorough than it is now. Often to reinforce these taboos, cultural entities would introduce their virtue by attaching divinity or simply say the gods prohibt the eating of pork and they will curse any who do (ie they get lethal parasites) effective.
Problems arise when there is no longer significance to those taboos the become rather silly superstitions and urban legends. Some are still relevant however. Incestual encounters do generally increase the percentage of genetic disease or maladaptive recessivity.

[Avatar]

Duchess--Icky indeed, but it's not like anybody is forcing you to do it. That's the point. What people want to do to themselves, is up to them.

(Not that I think you feel differently.)

Kinslaughterer-- (you were posting at the same time as I was) I certainly agree that some taboo's exist for very good reasons, as you describe in terms of the incest taboo, or dietary restrictions, and that very often the only way to enforce them was to have them handed Down by a deity.

As you say though, such taboo's may become meaningless in terms of progress.

However, there is a big difference between taboo's designed to protect people from specific and measurable harm, and those instituted simply on a basis of control, or the imposition of a personal view/morality on others.

It's the whole "for your own good" thing. People are too ready to decide that they know what people should be doing for their own good.

Are there any historical examples of cultural/behavioural taboo's that were not directly related to the survival of the group, and yet were enforced? At least when you're instituting a dietary taboo for example, it's easy for folk to see that if yu break it, you'll probably die. The same cannot be said for behavioural taboo's, such as the still all too prevelant one against homosexuality.

And as for taboo's designed to prevent you from hurting yourself, why bother? Hurt yourself enough, and you'll not get the chance to pass on your genes. Hurting yourself isn't immoral, it's stupid. And if you're stupid enough to hurt yourself to the extent that you die, well, we're probably better off without those genes anyway.

--Avatar

[Kinslaughterer]

Quite often culture are a sort of organism that considers itself to a single entity rather than being made up of individuals so its survival is somewhat different. Compare it to a government that doesn't want to surrender power once its voted out. Immorality is a cover for both what is deemed behavioral deviance and anti-establishment. Some taboos are certainly simple social controls and unlike our society they are far less likely to be questioned.

[Avatar]

Agreed, and that is part of my problem with the whole concept of society in general. I don't like the thought that a culture or society is thought of, (usually by the people who run it) as one entity.

And that, for the people in charge, that entity is frequently merely considered an extension of their own indiviuality.

For all our talking about the rights of the individual, when it comes to the ordering of world affairs, it does indeed seem that nation/states are considered the people, and those who populate them merely ants, living parts of the great and ponderous mechanism of society.

Pity that government isn't an expression of the will of the individual, rather than the supposed will of the majority. (Which turns out to be the will of the "leader" anyway.)

--Avatar

[firelion]

They should have mentioned if the man's sister was hot or if the chicken was still frozen.Not that would have swayed my answers in the least mind you.

[Avatar]

--A

[Rowan]

Results

Your Moralising Quotient is: 0.00.

Your Interference Factor is: 0.00.

Your Universalising Factor is: -1.


My results are identical to Lord Foul's. Should I be giving that some thought?

[I'm Murrin]

Your Moralising Quotient is: 0.10.

Your Interference Factor is: 0.00.

Your Universalising Factor is: 1.00.

I didn't like that question about the boy being pushed off the swing - I had to answer 'yes' or 'no', but didn't feel either way about it. To me, morality just wasn't something I could associate with that scenario.

[Avatar]

Hmm, I know what you're saying, but given that it had to be answered, I looked at it as somebody taking something from another, simply because they were able to. Clearly immoral.

--A

[Nathan]

Results

Your Moralising Quotient is: 0.00.

Your Interference Factor is: 0.00.

Your Universalising Factor is: -1.

Same again here. I saw nothing wrong in any of the actions as they were presented.

[Nathan]

Ah, but the question put itself forward as someone who takes something because they want to. How can an action be immoral if the intentions are not immoral?

Why should the boy have the swing? Did he pay for its use? Did he have any more right to use the swing than the girl? Because he got there first? Why should the girl's right to the swing be overwritten by the boy's right to the swing? He's just as morally culpable by staying on the swing as she is for taking it off him.

I had to say no, because they cancel each other out.

[Avatar]

hmm, an interesting view. And some good points. But did she have the right to exercise force in order to take it?

She could always have done something else until the swing was free. It's an example of "might makes right" in my opinion.

If the both had an equal right to it, and one has it first, does that mean you have to deny his right in favour of the stronger?

--A

[Nathan]

Good question, to which I reply:

Him keeping the swing is also an example of Might make Right, he has the power of "I was on it first".

If both have an equal right to it, and one has it first, does that mean you have to deny her right in favour of the quicker?

[Avatar]

Uuh, briefly, yes. Especially if the both had an equal opportunity to get there.

There is no difference between this and a child finding a coin on the ground. If a bigger kid smacks the smaller one to get the coin, is that all right? Is he inflicting harm to take what the other has, or is he just excercising his own right to dominance by virtue of his strength?

Both are equally "wrong". The original child has no right to the coin either, other than the fact that he already possess it. Is it wrong for him to pick up the coin? Perhaps. But a second child hitting him for it doesn't make it "better".

--Avatar

[duchess of malfi]

The girl could have asked or negotiated for the swing before resulting to use of force. That would have been more moral IMHO.

[matrixman]

Your Moralising Quotient is: 0.03.

Your Interference Factor is: 0.00.

Your Universalising Factor is: 0.00.

Looks like Avatar and I are on the same wavelength.

I notice people are getting -1 for Universalising Factor. You can get negative values on this test? That's a bit hilarious.

Him keeping the swing is also an example of Might make Right, he has the power of "I was on it first".

I'm not sure I follow that reasoning. What Might does the boy possess? I interpret it to mean physical intimidation. What show of force is the boy displaying to intimidate and discourage the girl from approaching the swing? Is he armed with a Slingshot of Mass Destruction or something?

The girl could have asked or negotiated for the swing before resulting to use of force. That would have been more moral IMHO.

I agree.