http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=disgust-is-in-the-eye-of-the-beholder
This article was about shame and disgust, especially as those emotions affect people who are the subject of sexual crime. It is also about morality, and our moral judgments. The central thesis is that while certain behaviors can have certain psychological consequences for the victims of those behaviors, and those consequences should be taken seriously, morality is not something that exists outside the human condition, i.e, there is no moral order in the universe. All moral judgments are culturally relative.
I think this conclusion is wrong, and in fact even evil. I am going to use this post to explain why. Now some of the subject matter dealt with in the article is going to be disturbing to some people, but I think that ideas like this must be engaged and shown to be the crap that they are, lest the air of authority granted by science help morally blind people like this writer infect others.
The writer explicitly states that there is no external moral order, and that morality is relative in the article. See here:
Commenting on our disgust at sexual abuse of children, the writer says, "Although such powerful symbolic disgust responses are all too real in the damage they can do to a person's well-being, you may be surprised to learn that their precise parameters have no basis in a moral reality."
Here's the final paragraph: "Morality is not out there in the world; it is a way of seeing, and it is constantly evolving. The emotional atmosphere of our own culture has undergone radical social climate changes. To assume we are now finally glimpsing a clear moral reality that previous generations did not would be stupendously foolish of us."
I'm going to come back to that final paragraph shortly. But I want to systematically show how a lack of philosophical acumen can retard the thinking of even the most scientifically minded, and this article is a great vehicle to accomplish this. Whitehead said that philosophy, science and religion all need each other, that without all of them, the whole picture of the truth is incomplete. This writer, while he may be scientifically gifted, by leaving out the philosophical and the religious is spreading falsehoods... he cannot see the truth. Let me lay out the truth for you.
I will proceed with my analysis by showing the following: first, I will show that the writer's main evidence is rather flimsy, and open to interpretations that leave open clear possible conclusions that contradict his. Second, I will show how the writer's own analysis of the consequences of certain behaviors within certain cultures presupposes an objective moral standard of the kind whose existence he rejects. Third, I will show that his argument entails conclusions that are clearly false, when applied equally across all fields of inquiry, both empirical and affective (ad absurdum). When I am done, it will be clear that the writer lacks philosophical acumen and therefore, is incapable of reasoning properly on the subject he is writing about. I will show he is wrong, and what it is about the way he thinks about the world that has led him down this wrong-headed path.
The thrust of his argument can be found here. I warn you these details are pretty rough to read, but they must be engaged if I am to make a full run on what he says.
Here is the argument that morality is relative:
"Although such powerful symbolic disgust responses are all too real in the damage they can do to a person's well-being, you may be surprised to learn that their precise parameters have no basis in a moral reality.
Anthropologists have long known just how easy it is to make Western moral compasses spin out of control by describing other so-called exotic cultural traditions, especially those involving sex. Consider one elaborate ritual in Papua New Guinea, described by anthropologist Gilbert Herdt, now at San Francisco State University. In the tribe he called the Sambia, boys close to their eighth or ninth birthday are banished to a bachelor's hut filled with older males whom they must fellate. The Sambia believe that the ritual transforms their youths into mighty soldiers. In our society, this ritual would be unspeakable, causing irreparable harm and condemning these boys to lifelong issues with their sexuality. In contrast, Sambia adults and older teenagers who participate are seen as altruistic. The Sambia perceive harm in denying boys participation in the ritual because doing so would permanently brand these children as weaklings who would be judged unworthy of defending the community as adult warriors.
The notion of abnormal sexuality is as much a matter of straying from our culture's script as it is one of violating the laws of reproductive biology. This is not to excuse or downplay the violence done to victims of abuse but to note that the concept of perversion or going against what is right is a phantom of the moralizing human mind."
So, the writer thinks that since the Sambia do not feel like what happened to them is bad or harmful, it therefore was not harmful. One can infer, and only infer, from the article that these young men do not grow up with particular issues of shame or disgust, or some kind of discernible mental health issues that lead to suicide or self-harm (more on this later), and so what we should gather from this is that what happened to them is not inherently wrong.
There is a lot to disagree with here, but let me tease out only one point for brevity's sake: how does the writer KNOW that these young men have suffered no negative effects from what happened to them? For instance, is every person in this tribe indescribably happy and well-adjusted (whatever that could mean for this particular writer). What I mean is, the writer is setting up a counterfactual-type problem that he doesn't seem to be aware of. By claiming that NO harm was done to these people he is claiming to know something he can't possibly know. What if we imagine for the moment a culture exactly like this one, all things equal EXCEPT this practice of (what any sane person can see is) abuse. Can this writer claim, with any certainty, to KNOW that people in that imagined society would not be happier, with less tertiary psychological issues, than the Sambia? The writer picks out a few very narrow types of harm, says he sees no sign of them, and then says that the practice does no harm. Cultural practices have wide consequences, not all of them easily discernible. It is not clear that there is no harm done by these practices, at least not from this article. In truth the claim that any practice is 'harmless' or 'harmful' requires a level of knowledge about the whole of a society that a scientist just doesn't have.
Harm cannot be easily and neatly defined. At best all the writer can show is that responses to harm look different in different cultures, NOT that these young Sambia males are not harmed by what happened to them. He cannot with any certainty say that this society is not harmed by what happens to these young men.
I suppose in cultures where ritual murder of children was practiced, or where slavery was common, no discernible negative effects of the kind the writer lists here might have been noted. Perhaps shame and disgust was no problem there either, maybe suicide rates were no higher in these cultures. But would one say that these people were doing no harm?
And that brings me to the second point. The writer clearly thinks that we should help people in our own culture who are victims of sexual abuse, and it is important to note the reasons why:
"Avoiding such a morally aversive person gets far more complicated, however, when the primary source of your symbolic disgust is you. After all, there are only three ways to escape the self—depressive sleep, drugs and suicide. Needless to say, none of these options is healthy.
Once a person feels tainted in this way by an act judged to be especially unacceptable by his or her own society, either as the victim of the act or as the offender who feels genuine shame and remorse, these rankling feelings of symbolic disgust can quickly metastasize into malignant self-hatred. Sexually abused children, for example, are far more likely than their peers to develop an exhaustive suite of psychopathologies later in life. Suicide rates skyrocket, and correlations have been found with everything from chronic depression to self-harm (such as cutting), substance abuse, eating disorders, paranoia, hostility and psychoticism."
The writer deems certain practices as 'unhealthy', but one must wonder what his standard of judgment is. Much of what is listed above is perfectly acceptable in some cultures around the world, including suicide. It is not seen as 'unhealthy' as he says here. You see, even the ability to analyze the health of practices within a culture is lost, in a purely morally relativistic framework. "Health", "harm", these words are value-laden, and just as subject to cultural contextualization as 'good' and 'bad'. In the end the writer gives us no reason why we should care about the victims of abuse at all. For if all our moral judgments are culturally relative, so are our judgments of health and a lack thereof. All there is, is nature...blind, indifferent, and without standards.
The writer cannot have his cake and eat it too. He cannot, on the one hand, remove from us our ability to base our morally judge cultural practices and yet retain softer moral judgments closer to home.
But even if we granted all of the writer his judgments (though how we could do that without attributing to him self-contradiction is beyond me) and even if we granted that his judgment of the Sambia tribe is correct (there is no harm there), then that still doesn't mean that morality is not grounded in a reality beyond us. We are not forced to that conclusion. Nothing follows from the fact that the Sambia are not harmed by these practices... it tells us absolutely nothing about whether those practices are, in fact, evil or not. There is no argument here.
To show an analogy, there are tribes that have no words to distinguish green and blue. And many of these tribes can't see certain shades of certain colors. Their culture influences their ability to perceive color. Does that mean that these colors can't be so distinguished, or that somehow there is no fact of the matter about color? Hardly. Colors pick out real features of the world, features like photon wavelength and such. It is stupid to think that one culture's inability to perceive certain colors means those colors don't exist.
In point of fact the foolish one is NOT the one who thinks that our culture is not glimpsing moral truth, as the writer suggests in his last paragraph. The fool is the one who suggests that such thinking is foolish. In point of fact, increases in education, and awareness of other cultural norms, tend some societies in the direction of cultural norms like those found in the west, regarding issues like this one. The very fact that, given the choice, and cleansed of superstition, individuals and cultures move this direction is a sign that there are, in fact, moral truths that some cultures teach their members to perceive, as William Talbott brilliantly argued in his book WHICH RIGHTS SHOULD BE UNIVERSAL?
The most this writer can argue, from a purely scientific standpoint, is that some cultures don't SEEM harmed by practices that are more harmful than other cultures. This difference can be as much attributed to a difference in the ability to perceive moral truth as the lack of an existence of moral truth. Such arguments are settled not on scientific, but philosophical grounds. That is why they call it metaphysics...because it is beyond physics.
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