Now, as you probably guess, I would hypothesize that he avoids autonomy-centered topics because they tend to contradict his theory of liberals as low on sacredness.
How do you reduce autonomy to sacredness? I think of sacredness as something that inheres in some single object of veneration towards which a group of people can genuflect, such as a family shrine, a flag, a saint, or (for the left) “the environment”. I would also extend the notion of a “single object” to slightly more abstract things, such as a single holy text (which might exist in multiple copies) or a single ritual way of eating (which might be enacted on multiple occasions).
In other words, sacredness should have some close connection to group cohesion. While I haven’t read any of Haidt’s books, I’ve listened to a couple of interviews with him, and he seemed to be very interested in the “groupish” qualities of the values in his system. In his BloggingHeads.tv interview, he even seemed to go so far as to suggest that group selection explained how some of these values evolved.
Autonomy doesn’t seem like it would fit into such a notion of sacredness. “Individual autonomy” is a “single thing” at only a very abstract level. Every individual has his or her own autonomy. Unlike a shrine or a holy text, there is no one autonomy that we all can worship at once.
In principle, we could all gather together as a community to worship the one idea that we are each autonomous — the Platonic form of autonomy, if you will. But I don’t get the sense that most people have a sufficiently concrete notion of the general idea of autonomy to be able to hold it sacred. For example, they would lack the confidence that everyone else is thinking of precisely the same idea of autonomy. Something can’t serve as an object of community worship if the community members aren’t sure that they’re all worshiping the same thing.
People might have a sufficiently concrete conception of “my autonomy” or “your autonomy” or “her autonomy”. These are things that we can easily latch onto as values. But then we’re talking about a bunch of different “autonomies”, which lack the unity that a sacred object seems to require.
How do you reduce autonomy to sacredness? I think of sacredness as something that inheres in some single object of veneration towards which a group of people can genuflect, such as a family shrine, a flag, a saint, or (for the left) “the environment”. I would also extend the notion of a “single object” to slightly more abstract things, such as a single holy text (which might exist in multiple copies) or a single ritual way of eating (which might be enacted on multiple occasions).
One way in which sacredness commonly manifests itself is through sacred boundaries that serve as strong Schelling points. In fact, I am convinced that any large-scale human social organization depends to a significant degree on Schelling points whose power and stability rests on the fact that the thought of their violation arouses strong moral intuitions of sacrilege. (Even though this might be non-obvious from their stated rationale.)
Take for example the ancient Roman pomerium, the boundary of the city of Rome that was explicitly held as sacred. In particular, bearing arms within the pomerium was considered as sacrilege, and this norm was taken very seriously during the Republican period. Of course, a norm like this can easily be given a practical rationale (preventing coups, assassinations, etc.), and it seems plausible that it indeed had a practical effect of this sort, contributing to the long-standing stability and competitive success of the republican institutions. However, it was in fact the sacredness aspect that gave the norm its power, since a consequentialist rationale for any norm can always be rationalized away, thus making it a weak Schelling point, easily pushed down a slippery slope. And indeed, when the reverence for this traditional norm of sacredness started fading in the late Republic (along with many others), it was a good sign that the Republic had indeed gone to the dogs, and soon the state was torn by constant civil wars between competing generals who had no problem finding justifications and support for their plans to conquer Rome and seize power by armed force.
Similarly, intuitions of sacrilege can be associated with non-physical boundaries. Take for example the modern norms against euthanasia, even in cases where it’s voluntary and in fact strongly desired by the patient, and the alternative is nothing but a prolonged suffering. People are horrified by the thought of euthanasia because it violates the perceived sacredness of human life. And again, one can make a cogent Schelling point/slippery slope argument in favor of such norms, but this is not what gives them their power.
Now, it seems quite plausible to me that this is in fact a common state of affairs for all sorts of norms that deal with the prohibition of crossing certain boundaries. Not all such norms are based on sacredness intuitions, of course—they can also rest on a basis of fairness, harm, liberty, or some mix of those—but in that case, their violation causes different and lesser kinds of outrage, and it’s also easy to convince people to make exceptions based on concerns for fairness, harm, or liberty. For example, the norms about private property rights seem to be typically in this category: their violation causes nothing similar to the visceral feelings of sacrilege, and it’s easy to convince people that some violations and curtailing of property rights are OK if you can convince them that it reduces harm and increases fairness or liberty.
With this in mind, I think it should be reasonable to ask whether the liberal intuitions of personal (and particularly sexual) autonomy are in fact a sort of pomerium backed by moral intuitions of sacrilege triggered by the perceived violations of this autonomy. (Whether or not we end up agreeing on the answer to this question.)
How much would someone have to pay you for you to be willing to slap your father in the face (with his permission) as part of a comedy skit? $ ___
People tend to give high numbers for this question (or aren’t willing to accept any amount), much moreso than if they are asked about their willingness to slap a friend. It is a violation that crosses some important boundary which one might label “sacred”.
But in moral foundations theory, it is not a violation of the purity/sanctity foundation. It’s a violation of the authority foundation.
Conclusion: “sacredness” (in this sense of a special-feeling boundary which people feel a strong aversion to crossing) is not limited to the purity foundation. It can apply to other foundations as well.
Graham and Haidt say that the examples from all five foundations are violations of sacred values (even the ones that do not involve purity/degradation). They define “sacredness” separately from the purity foundation:
Sacredness refers to the human tendency to invest people, places, times, and ideas with importance far beyond the utility they possess. Tradeoffs or compromises involving what is sacralized are resisted or refused. In prototypical cases these investments tie individuals to larger groups with shared identities and ennobling projects, and so tradeoffs or compromises are felt to be acts of betrayal, even in non-prototypical cases in which no group is implicated.
It’s worth checking out the table at the end of the Graham & Haidt paper where they put together the pieces for a moral narrative based on each of the five foundations, including what people, things, and ideas that have become “sacred objects” and what evil they need to be protected from. For the Harm foundation, sacred values are “nurturance, care, peace”, sacred objects are “innocent victims, nonviolent leaders (Gandhi, M. L. King)”, evil is represented by “cruel and violent people”, and examples of idealistic violence are “killing of abortion doctors, Weather Underground bombings”. (Killing abortion doctors is also classified under Purity.)
With this in mind, I think it should be reasonable to ask whether the liberal intuitions of personal (and particularly sexual) autonomy are in fact a sort of pomerium backed by moral intuitions of sacrilege triggered by the perceived violations of this autonomy. (Whether or not we end up agreeing on the answer to this question.)
I’m having trouble distinguishing your notion of “sacred” from the very broad notion of “deserves respect”. Is there something more to your meaning of “sacred” besides “deserves respect”?
I agree that liberals believe that lots of things deserve respect. I agree that, typically, every individual’s sexual autonomy is among these things. I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of liberals added sexual autonomy to their list of things-that-deserve-respect because of some sort of Schelling-point-type phenomenon.
Are you saying something beyond this?
There’s no denying that liberals use the language of respect a lot. Furthermore, I doubt that many liberals would want to deny it. So, in that sense, you could say that liberals appeal to sacredness a lot. But I thought that Haidt was using “sacred” in a different sense. How is your disagreement with him here more than semantics?
In other words, sacredness should have some close connection to group cohesion.
I don’t think sacredness/purity is just about group cohesion. Some purity rituals (from an evolutionary point of view) are clearly about avoiding contagious diseases. Other sacredness taboos are about not doing things that have short term benefits but cause long term problems, especially when the short term benefit of the action is much more obvious than the long term harm.
Right, group cohesion isn’t the only reason for these rituals, but they can still serve that function (eg, kosher diets).
Can valuing autonomy be explained by valuing purity? That doesn’t seem plausible to me, since people so often want to use their autonomy to violate other people’s purity norms (eg, sex ‘n’ drugs).
To me it seems that valuing autonomy is an example of avoid things that may have short term benefits but cause long term problems.
That sounds more like a concern about harm (“long term problems”) than about purity, at least if you are trying to describe the thought-process of someone justifying their valuing of autonomy.
If, instead, you are trying to describe the causal origin of the value, then wouldn’t Haidt ascribe all of his foundational values to that cause? Doesn’t he give ev-psych explanations (with a group-selectionist bent) for the origins of all of his foundational values? If I’m right about that, then he would probably argue that each of his foundational values persisted because, in the long run, it served the reproductive interests of the individual or the group. That is, the value led people to avoid short-term benefits that would cause long-term problems. Otherwise, this value would not have survived in the long run.
Doesn’t he give ev-psych explanations (with a group-selectionist bent) for the origins of all of his foundational values?
I wouldn’t know, I haven’t actually read his books. What bothers me is that unlike the other values, I can’t even give a definition of what constitutes purity/sacredness without appealing to a black box in my brain.
How do you reduce autonomy to sacredness? I think of sacredness as something that inheres in some single object of veneration towards which a group of people can genuflect, such as a family shrine, a flag, a saint, or (for the left) “the environment”. I would also extend the notion of a “single object” to slightly more abstract things, such as a single holy text (which might exist in multiple copies) or a single ritual way of eating (which might be enacted on multiple occasions).
In other words, sacredness should have some close connection to group cohesion. While I haven’t read any of Haidt’s books, I’ve listened to a couple of interviews with him, and he seemed to be very interested in the “groupish” qualities of the values in his system. In his BloggingHeads.tv interview, he even seemed to go so far as to suggest that group selection explained how some of these values evolved.
Autonomy doesn’t seem like it would fit into such a notion of sacredness. “Individual autonomy” is a “single thing” at only a very abstract level. Every individual has his or her own autonomy. Unlike a shrine or a holy text, there is no one autonomy that we all can worship at once.
In principle, we could all gather together as a community to worship the one idea that we are each autonomous — the Platonic form of autonomy, if you will. But I don’t get the sense that most people have a sufficiently concrete notion of the general idea of autonomy to be able to hold it sacred. For example, they would lack the confidence that everyone else is thinking of precisely the same idea of autonomy. Something can’t serve as an object of community worship if the community members aren’t sure that they’re all worshiping the same thing.
People might have a sufficiently concrete conception of “my autonomy” or “your autonomy” or “her autonomy”. These are things that we can easily latch onto as values. But then we’re talking about a bunch of different “autonomies”, which lack the unity that a sacred object seems to require.
One way in which sacredness commonly manifests itself is through sacred boundaries that serve as strong Schelling points. In fact, I am convinced that any large-scale human social organization depends to a significant degree on Schelling points whose power and stability rests on the fact that the thought of their violation arouses strong moral intuitions of sacrilege. (Even though this might be non-obvious from their stated rationale.)
Take for example the ancient Roman pomerium, the boundary of the city of Rome that was explicitly held as sacred. In particular, bearing arms within the pomerium was considered as sacrilege, and this norm was taken very seriously during the Republican period. Of course, a norm like this can easily be given a practical rationale (preventing coups, assassinations, etc.), and it seems plausible that it indeed had a practical effect of this sort, contributing to the long-standing stability and competitive success of the republican institutions. However, it was in fact the sacredness aspect that gave the norm its power, since a consequentialist rationale for any norm can always be rationalized away, thus making it a weak Schelling point, easily pushed down a slippery slope. And indeed, when the reverence for this traditional norm of sacredness started fading in the late Republic (along with many others), it was a good sign that the Republic had indeed gone to the dogs, and soon the state was torn by constant civil wars between competing generals who had no problem finding justifications and support for their plans to conquer Rome and seize power by armed force.
Similarly, intuitions of sacrilege can be associated with non-physical boundaries. Take for example the modern norms against euthanasia, even in cases where it’s voluntary and in fact strongly desired by the patient, and the alternative is nothing but a prolonged suffering. People are horrified by the thought of euthanasia because it violates the perceived sacredness of human life. And again, one can make a cogent Schelling point/slippery slope argument in favor of such norms, but this is not what gives them their power.
Now, it seems quite plausible to me that this is in fact a common state of affairs for all sorts of norms that deal with the prohibition of crossing certain boundaries. Not all such norms are based on sacredness intuitions, of course—they can also rest on a basis of fairness, harm, liberty, or some mix of those—but in that case, their violation causes different and lesser kinds of outrage, and it’s also easy to convince people to make exceptions based on concerns for fairness, harm, or liberty. For example, the norms about private property rights seem to be typically in this category: their violation causes nothing similar to the visceral feelings of sacrilege, and it’s easy to convince people that some violations and curtailing of property rights are OK if you can convince them that it reduces harm and increases fairness or liberty.
With this in mind, I think it should be reasonable to ask whether the liberal intuitions of personal (and particularly sexual) autonomy are in fact a sort of pomerium backed by moral intuitions of sacrilege triggered by the perceived violations of this autonomy. (Whether or not we end up agreeing on the answer to this question.)
How much would someone have to pay you for you to be willing to slap your father in the face (with his permission) as part of a comedy skit? $ ___
People tend to give high numbers for this question (or aren’t willing to accept any amount), much moreso than if they are asked about their willingness to slap a friend. It is a violation that crosses some important boundary which one might label “sacred”.
But in moral foundations theory, it is not a violation of the purity/sanctity foundation. It’s a violation of the authority foundation.
Conclusion: “sacredness” (in this sense of a special-feeling boundary which people feel a strong aversion to crossing) is not limited to the purity foundation. It can apply to other foundations as well.
There are many more examples of taboo actions, for all five foundations, here. This collection is from a paper by Graham & Haidt (2011), Sacred values and evil adversaries: A Moral Foundations approach; many of the examples were developed in Haidt’s earlier research.
Graham and Haidt say that the examples from all five foundations are violations of sacred values (even the ones that do not involve purity/degradation). They define “sacredness” separately from the purity foundation:
It’s worth checking out the table at the end of the Graham & Haidt paper where they put together the pieces for a moral narrative based on each of the five foundations, including what people, things, and ideas that have become “sacred objects” and what evil they need to be protected from. For the Harm foundation, sacred values are “nurturance, care, peace”, sacred objects are “innocent victims, nonviolent leaders (Gandhi, M. L. King)”, evil is represented by “cruel and violent people”, and examples of idealistic violence are “killing of abortion doctors, Weather Underground bombings”. (Killing abortion doctors is also classified under Purity.)
I’m having trouble distinguishing your notion of “sacred” from the very broad notion of “deserves respect”. Is there something more to your meaning of “sacred” besides “deserves respect”?
I agree that liberals believe that lots of things deserve respect. I agree that, typically, every individual’s sexual autonomy is among these things. I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of liberals added sexual autonomy to their list of things-that-deserve-respect because of some sort of Schelling-point-type phenomenon.
Are you saying something beyond this?
There’s no denying that liberals use the language of respect a lot. Furthermore, I doubt that many liberals would want to deny it. So, in that sense, you could say that liberals appeal to sacredness a lot. But I thought that Haidt was using “sacred” in a different sense. How is your disagreement with him here more than semantics?
I don’t think sacredness/purity is just about group cohesion. Some purity rituals (from an evolutionary point of view) are clearly about avoiding contagious diseases. Other sacredness taboos are about not doing things that have short term benefits but cause long term problems, especially when the short term benefit of the action is much more obvious than the long term harm.
Right, group cohesion isn’t the only reason for these rituals, but they can still serve that function (eg, kosher diets).
Can valuing autonomy be explained by valuing purity? That doesn’t seem plausible to me, since people so often want to use their autonomy to violate other people’s purity norms (eg, sex ‘n’ drugs).
To me it seems that valuing autonomy is an example of avoid things that may have short term benefits but cause long term problems.
That sounds more like a concern about harm (“long term problems”) than about purity, at least if you are trying to describe the thought-process of someone justifying their valuing of autonomy.
If, instead, you are trying to describe the causal origin of the value, then wouldn’t Haidt ascribe all of his foundational values to that cause? Doesn’t he give ev-psych explanations (with a group-selectionist bent) for the origins of all of his foundational values? If I’m right about that, then he would probably argue that each of his foundational values persisted because, in the long run, it served the reproductive interests of the individual or the group. That is, the value led people to avoid short-term benefits that would cause long-term problems. Otherwise, this value would not have survived in the long run.
I wouldn’t know, I haven’t actually read his books. What bothers me is that unlike the other values, I can’t even give a definition of what constitutes purity/sacredness without appealing to a black box in my brain.