Beyond WEIRD Morality
It's time to expand our view of right and wrong
Before we continue with this week’s edition of Synapse, I want to apologize for missing your inbox last Sunday. I needed a break and gave myself permission to take a Sunday off. It’s been a tough year for a lot of us and I encourage each of you to cut yourself some slack. I’ve got some interesting content planned for the next few weeks. Thanks in advance for your support!
In Toward a Quest of Understanding, I discussed the virtue of using neuroscience and to better understand human nature in an effort to become more compassionate and understanding human beings. Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind is a book helps me work toward that end and this week I want to share another important tidbit I’ve learned: that even though WEIRD people (Western, Educated, Industrial, Rich, Democratic) are statistical outliers in the global population, they are often the subject of research in the social sciences. The result of this is a tempting erroneous conclusion that WEIRD morality is the “correct” morality.
For example, many psychological studies are conducted on college students because they are located at the same place that these studies are being conducted and are easy to find/recruit. One moral tenant emphasized on many college campuses—especially secular ones—is the harm principle which was popularized by John Stuart Mill and others and states that the only reason anyone should exercise power in a society is to prevent harm.
In other words, moral judgements shouldn’t be extended as long as there isn’t harm done to any person.
Yet, when we venture out into non-WEIRD societies, we find that there is more to morality than harm and fairness. For example, most people would claim that incest is immoral without appealing to any claim of harm. “Incest is just wrong. Period.”
Decades of social science research summarized by Haidt have actually found three types of ethics across WEIRD and non-WEIRD societies:
Ethic of Autonomy: The concept that people have their own unique wants and needs and that people have a right to pursue those wants and needs given that they aren’t harming others. This is the foundational ethic of secular, western societies.
Ethic of Community: The concept that individuals are first part of a group—family, city, nation, etc—and then an individual. Concepts such as duty and hierarchy are more pronounced in this ethic. Many non-western societies value the ethic of community more than autonomy. If the U.S. were a community-first society and not an autonomy society, the conversation around the COVID-19 vaccine would look a lot different, for example.
Ethic of Divinity: The concept that human beings are vessels of a divine soul. In this ethic, honoring God is more important than an autonomy and community-centric ethic. Foundations such as purity, degradation, pollution, and sanctity are important in the divinity ethic.
Haidt criticizes the modern western attempt to build a moral fabric on just the principle of autonomy, claiming that such a morality is “unsatisfying and potentially harmful.”
Learning about WEIRD morality has helped me understand how people can come to different moral conclusions. For example, I cringe at the thought of a mandated COVID-19 vaccine in the U.S.—but maybe that’s just my WEIRD reliance on the autonomy ethic showing. I can see how a community-focused ethic could come to a different conclusion.
I continue to believe that a huge step toward decreased political/religious polarization—and therefore true human progress toward a better society—is understanding each other. Next week, we’ll take a look at a more nuanced topography of human morality, what Haidt calls are our “moral taste receptors.”
Thanks for reading.
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📚 P.S.S. I having forgotten about our Free Will book discussion that I announced here. I am working through the book now (it is admittedly more dense than I thought it would be) and will have more info on this in the coming weeks.
I sense some confusion in the distinctions made between ethics of autonomy, community, and divinity. First off, social science research has observed that sickly, stressed societies tend toward collectivism; while healthy, unstressed societies tend toward individualism. But it gets complicated in the real world, as these social science constructs don't perfectly map onto conventional meanings of those words, at least in Western culture and in WEIRD bias. Only the ethic of autonomy seems fully developed in this theory, as the other two are a bit muddled. The separation of all three is not clear in all cases, maybe not even in most cases, especially if we cast our net more widely.
Let's look at an example from the anthropological record. According to Daniel Everett, a healthy, unstressed population like the Piraha are very individualistic, as many hunter-gatherer tribes tend to be. Individual Piraha act autonomously, and collective action is very limited as top-down organizing is non-existent, but that isn't to say there isn't a strong sense of community and communal identity. It's just there is no authority or hierarchy to enforce group conformity and collective action. It's the authority of a shared culture that holds it together, very much grounded a sense of place not in abstract ideologies and vast identities (e.g., ethno-nationalism).
So, autonomy isn't necessarily and inevitably opposed to community, rather opposed to collectivism. We shouldn't confuse and conflate community with collectivism. The difference is collectivism is defined by authoritarianism, xenophobia, social dominance, conventionalism, conformity, etc. But community doesn't require any of that. This is a distinction that many anarchists and left-libertarians (e.g., anarcho-syndicalists) would maintain, as would paleo-conservatives and a variety of other communitarians. But it might be easy for community as communitarianism, when under highly stressful conditions, to become collectivism.
Likewise, the ethic of autonomy might not always be separate from an ethic of divinity. Many religious traditions (Buddhism, Gnosticism, mysticism, Protestantism, Anabaptism, etc) have emphasized an individual relationship to the divine or individual practice of spirituality. They tend to allow for more autonomy and often a stronger development of individual self, with which to hold oneself apart in direct divine presence or mindfulness. Particularly, in the West, the ethic of autonomy came from various influences of non-Catholic Christianity, with the personal experience of divinity co-emergent with the still small voice (conscience, inner voice).
There is an amusing parallel between the 3 ethic pillars and traditional Christian virtues (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theological_virtues) that provide a moral foundation for the believers. In my view, faith maps to divinity, hope to autonomy and charity to community. I suppose religions work for a reason?