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Moral Feelings

In August of 2013 Thabiti Anyabwile set off an Internet firestorm with his TGC post on the “Ick Factor” in the discussion of gay marriage. One blogger wrote “Your Gagging Isn’t Loving” 

While you can’t base community morality on your individual emotional response to a particular a practice you find revolting, it’s important to note that these kinds of deep, intuitive emotional responses to practices are an important component of an individual and communal moral matrix. It’s not hard to understand that a heterosexual male would find the idea of sexual contact with another male revolting just like it isn’t hard to imagine that a gay man wouldn’t find the idea of sex with a woman to be revolting. This kind of “ick” factor is commonly accepted all over the place. Marty McFly doesn’t want to kiss his young mother whose infatuated with him in “Back to the Future”. Gagging and vomiting is a part of many comedy sketches with it comes to sexual acts with different classes (taboos) or individuals.

Jonathan Haidt has done a lot of good work on what makes up moral intuitions. (Check out his two books The Happiness Hypothesis and The Righteous Mind along with his TED talks for more background.) Many of these feelings are pre-rational. Haidt uses the illustration of an elephant and a rider. The elephant is the irrational, pre-conscious, emotional brain that informs us of its thinking through our feelings. The rider is the rational part of the brain that seeks to direct the elephant usually with mixed results (See Paul in Romans 7). The rider has a certain amount of influence over the elephant but usually not control, which really isn’t such a bad thing. The rider and the elephant have different kinds of smarts. The elephant is deeply practical, conservative, and focused on self-preservation. The elephant is very aware of its immediate surroundings. The rider can look beyond the immediate surroundings through reason and engagement with other riders. The rider might say “I should eat fewer calories my food supply is secure” but the elephant says “let’s just keep a few extra pounds on us because elephants throughout the centuries have known that good times come and go and if something unexpected happens you might not eat everyday and this fat will help you survive.”

Neither the elephant nor the rider are infallible and they are both having conversation with other elephants and riders. They are both communal. One strong function of the rider is to make their elephant look good among other riders. The riders make up stories to justify many of the decisions of the elephant. Riders fabricate justifications for the intuitive decisions of elephants and share those with other riders. The elephants meanwhile are taking cues from the other elephants as to why what they should do and how they should think about things. This is why sociology of knowledge works.

Riders and Elephants in Moral Tribes Continue reading →