Moral Relativism vs. Moral Authority

Born in Hawaii—a crossroads of culture between Far East and Far West—of a white mother from Kansas and a black father from Kenya and raised partially in Indonesia by a Muslim stepfather, an African-American man with an unlikely background and an even more unlikely name, Barack Hussein Obama, arose to become President of the United States. Does that globalized pedigree, along with a prodigious intellect, give him a unique moral authority?

In his riveting speech yesterday in Cairo, Barack Obama spoke clearly and forcefully about moral issues in a way that perhaps no American President has ever done before.

Shunning the soaring rhetoric that he often uses and excels with—and that predecessors like Reagan, JFK, and FDR employed to great effectiveness—Obama instead resorted to plain and simple words that could survive translation into many languages, most notably Arabic and Hebrew, but also Farsi, Russian, and Chinese, among others. Speaking firmly and forcefully, making clear what is right and what is wrong, he managed at the same time to be respectful of others and to carry a message of peace and goodwill. It was a tour de force.

On democratic governance, Obama said:

I know there has been controversy about the promotion of democracy in recent years. And much of this controversy is connected to the war in Iraq. So let me be clear. No system of government can or should be imposed by one nation by any other. That does not lessen my commitment, however, to governments that reflect the will of the people.

Each nation gives life to this principle in its own way, grounded in the traditions of its own people. America does not presume to know what is best for everyone, just as we would not presume to pick the outcome of a peaceful election.

But I do have an unyielding belief that all people yearn for certain things: the ability to speak your mind and have a say in how you are governed, confidence in the rule of law and the equal administration of justice, government that is transparent and doesn’t steal from the people, the freedom to live as you choose. These are not just American ideas. They are human rights. And that is why we will support them everywhere.

Now, there is no straight line to realize this promise. But this much is clear. Governments that protect these rights are ultimately more stable, successful and secure. Suppressing ideas never succeeds in making them go away. America respects the right of all peaceful and law-abiding voices to be heard around the world, even if we disagree with them. And we will welcome all elected, peaceful governments, provided they govern with respect for all their people.

This last point is important because there are some who advocate for democracy only when they’re out of power. Once in power, they are ruthless in suppressing the rights of others.

(APPLAUSE)

So no matter where it takes hold, government of the people and by the people sets a single standard for all who would hold power. You must maintain your power through consent, not coercion. You must respect the rights of minorities and participate with a spirit of tolerance and compromise. You must place the interests of your people and the legitimate workings of the political process above your party.

Without these ingredients, elections alone do not make true democracy.

Note that these words were spoken in Egypt, where a brutal dictator (Hosni Mubarak, who did not attend the speech) has held power for decades, suppressing opposition and limiting the rights of his citizens. That was an audacious move on Obama’s part, to call out his host in his own country (although not by name), but it was done with such deftness and moral authority that he could hardly be criticized for it.

Also, as you probably know by now, the President skillfully and boldly took both Israel and Palestine to task, challenging them to rise above the past and to live up to the legitimate aspirations of people everywhere—both their own and their neighbors—for security, peace, stability, and prosperity. If any one man can bring these two sides to a just and lasting accommodation, it might just be Barack Hussein Obama.


Now, let us turn to the question of moral relativism.

A group of American scholars led by Jonathan Haidt at the University of Virginia, along with his collaborators Pete Ditto (UC Irvine), Jesse Graham (UVA), Ravi Iyer (USC), Craig Joseph (Northwestern), Sena Koleva (UC Irvine), and Brian Nosek (UVA), have developed what they call Moral Foundations Theory.

Here is how they describe it:

Moral Foundations Theory was created to understand why morality varies so much across cultures yet still shows so many similarities and recurrent themes. In brief, the theory proposes that five innate and universally available psychological systems are the foundations of “intuitive ethics.” Each culture then constructs virtues, narratives, and institutions on top of these foundations, thereby creating the unique moralities we see around the world, and conflicting within nations too. The foundations are:

1) Harm/care, related to our long evolution as mammals with attachment systems and an ability to feel (and dislike) the pain of others. This foundation underlies virtues of kindness, gentleness, and nurturance.

2) Fairness/reciprocity, related to the evolutionary process of reciprocal altruism. This foundation generates ideas of justice, rights, and autonomy.

3) Ingroup/loyalty, related to our long history as tribal creatures able to form shifting coalitions. This foundation underlies virtues of patriotism and self-sacrifice for the group. It is active anytime people feel that it’s “one for all, and all for one.”

4) Authority/respect, shaped by our long primate history of hierarchical social interactions. This foundaiton underlies virtues of leadership and followership, including deference to legitimate authority and respect for traditions.

5) Purity/sanctity, shaped by the psychology of disgust and contamination. This foundation underlies religious notions of striving to live in an elevated, less carnal, more noble way. It underlies the widespread idea that the body is a temple which can be desecrated by immoral activities and contaminants (an idea not unique to religious traditions).

Much of our present research involves applying the theory to political “cultures” such as those of liberals and conservatives. The current American culture war, we have found, can be seen as arising from the fact that liberals try to create a morality relying almost exclusively on the Harm/Care and Fairness/Reciprocity foundations; conservatives, especially religious conservatives, use all five foundations, including Ingroup/Loyalty, Authority/Respect, and Purity/Sanctity.

You can take a simple online test (the Moral Foundations Questionnaire) to measure your reliance on and endorsement of these five psychological foundations of morality, and to see how you match up with a large sampling of American “liberals” and “conservatives”. This is how I scored:

(Green = Treder, Blue = Liberals, Red = Conservatives)

But the big question—assuming you buy into this group’s premise—is whether each of these five foundations have equal legitimacy or moral standing. Given that they all currently exist in the world to varying degrees among different cultures, and that they have arisen over thousands of years of human civilizational development, can we rightly say that one is better than another?

As noted, American liberals (aka progressives) rely almost exclusively on the first two foundations listed above while conservatives use all five about equally. Can we apply a better/worse value judgment on that fact, or must we fall back on the “different but equally okay” construction of moral relativism?

I would submit that President Obama in his speech came down clearly on the side of: YES WE CAN apply a value judgment. We can decide that simply because all five foundations are found in human cultures, that does not automatically make them of equal worth.

Some things matter more than others. There is a difference between right and wrong. Significantly, that difference does not arise from religious distinctions, but from humanist principles—this was an unspoken but clearly implied part of the President’s message.

Here is what IEET Executive Director James Hughes had to say when I asked him about Moral Foundations Theory:

The way I parse it is that they are right about the liberal/conservative intuitional differences, but wrong about the political/ethical conclusions.

In other words, just because conservatives still have three “monkey brain” moral intuitions that are incompatible with Enlightenment values doesn’t mean we have to cut them any slack.

The very fact that so many of us “liberals” have been able to suppress or re-purpose our “might makes right,” “category transgression is dirty,” and “our group is better than their group” impulses shows that moral progress over monkey brain impulses is possible. We should be championing that as a victory for neocortical moral progress and transhumanist aspirations to improve on the evolved brain, and not simply throwing up our hands in relativistic resignation.

I call this values stance “post-postmodern” or “neo-Enlightenment” in that I think we can champion the superiority of Enlightenment values while acknowledging that they are historically situated, that they have a rocky history (white man’s burden etc.), and that we need to remain self-critical.

Quite so. Just as Obama challenged Jews and Arabs to rise above their past grievances and enmities, we also can and must rise above the base animal impulses we’ve inherited from evolution and replace them with enlightened moral values.