http://chronicle.com/article/Jonatha...es-the/130453/In 1739 the philosopher David Hume wrote that "reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them." Hume disagreed with philosophers who aspired to reason their way to moral truth without examining human nature. An honest inquiry, he argued, reveals that reason is biased and weak while intuition propels our moral lives.
Haidt and his colleagues brought Hume into the laboratory by investigating how people react to harmless but disgusting stories that pit reason against intuition.
One tale featured a brother and sister named Julie and Mark who decide to make love while on vacation in France. She's on the pill; he uses a condom. The experience brings them closer. But they decide not to do it again. Was it OK?
Most people immediately condemn the siblings and then search for explanations. The dangers of inbreeding. Emotional damage. But when the experimenter points out that no harm befalls Mark and Julie, subjects typically resort to an answer like, "I don't know, I can't explain it, I just know it's wrong."
Haidt called the phenomenon "moral dumbfounding." He viewed it as a challenge to the "rationalist approach" that prevailed in moral psychology, a field heavily influenced by the ideas of Lawrence Kohlberg. Kohlbergian psychologists measured moral development as a series of increasingly sophisticated ways of reasoning about justice. A famous Kohlbergian task, for example, is the "Heinz dilemma": Should Heinz steal a drug to save his dying wife?
In 2001, Haidt chambered a bullet at rationalism in a classic paper that tied together moral dumbfounding, philosophy, and recent psychology findings on human judgment, while also bringing in anthropology and primatology. His conclusion: "Most of the action in moral psychology" is in our automatic intuitions. "People do indeed reason, but that reasoning is done primarily to prepare for social interaction, not to search for truth."
The 'incest taboo' is virtually intuitive because of the thousands of years of humans recognizing that, over time, inbreeding leads to all sorts of physical and social deformities.
It has been argued among social scientists for years that it is an almost universal taboo that is based in the desire to protect the continuation and growth of the species.
Reading Totem and Taboo was eerie for me. Maybe it was the intuition (as much from lived experience as the book, tbh) that morality and reason are more or less servants in the house of taboo.
I read in the article that he hasn't had much luck in getting political types to listen to him. There are probably lots of reasons they aren't listening, but one of them is bound to be that Social Scientists have a TERRIBLE history of bad policy suggestions.
btw, moral philosophers have risen pretty much as a body to speak out against Heidt, mostly for being "too sociological"
And I think they are right.
do you have a particular one of your own to add?
But the things about repeated behaviors over time (and repeated taboos over centuries) is that they seem intuitive after a long enough period of time, in much the same way that CEOs of major firms are considered 'brilliant' by many of their employees because they seem to 'intuit' solutions to problems.
Repe ion tends to make thoughts and behaviors 'imbedded' over time.
That is why they seem intuitive, and why intuition seems the servant of taboo.
It is nothing more than human behavior reinforced over and over and over and over, etc.
Uncertain of your meaning.
Eeeeewwwww
just if you had any criticism of your own to add. that's all.
what in particular disgusted you?Eeeeewwwww
Hume? Freud? the word sociology?
nothing new under the sun department (from 1911):
http://www.theamericanconservative.c...al-conversion/
5 Things the Science Doesn't Say About the Conservative Brain
http://www.alternet.org/module/printversion/155337
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