novapsyche | (no subject)

[Poll #895491]

I am a cultural relativist. So it disturbs me when I hear people claim that morality is "hard-wired in us", or that racism is, similarly, genetic.

I have long believed that ethics and morality are not of the same animal. A person in my society (I use American society because that is what I've studied and am most familiar with) can do something that is terribly unethical yet somehow may conform to that person's moral code (for example, invading a sovereign nation to perhaps bring about the Apocolypse).

Rapists, to use another (extreme) example, may see the world through the Madonna/whore lens, which sets the rapist up as an enforcer of society's moral code ("If she hadn't been out alone after dark/if she weren't wearing what she had on/if she didn't have that reputation, then she wouldn't have been raped"). Sexually empowered women threaten the fabric of society, in this worldview; so the remedy is to remove that power through force, to reassert traditional male sexual power by any means necessary. Ethically, I believe this is a horribly mistaken view of society; but for some this is the natural order of things--not only the way things are, but the way things should be.

I believe a person can be amoral and yet subscribe to a code of ethics and thus live a respectable and respectful life. On the flip side, I also know that a person can be enthralled by cognitive dissonance, believing themselves to be upright and moral yet doing the most despicable things (Frederick Douglass, in his Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, often derided the "Christian" slaveholders, who beat their slaves savagely during the week, yet saw themselves as pillars of the community when they attended church on Sunday).

How any of this could be "hard-wired" is beyond me.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

although readin wikipedia (i know, not an end-all-be-all resource, but good for refreshing my brain) there is a lot of fuzzy crossover. i think i personally tend to think of ethics as right vs. wrong, a kind of absolute value if you will, but within that i think of morality as being cultural and more based, so you can see where semantics may become sticky.

outside of the vs. question, i am a strong believer in nature vs. nurture where many things fall into both categories, but i always think of ethics and morality as taught (nurture) and a majority of humans (non-sociopaths) as predispositioned to accept the ethical and moral offerings they are schooled in.

Fuzzy is a good word. Outside of philosophy circles, the terms are used by the general public interchangeably.

I read some of the prior discussion on your LJ. Sociologists (at least some) say that group identity is important, and discrimination and racism are the negative by-products of a group identity.

Unfortunately, I think racism is common and widespread. I don't think we're biologically predisposed to be racist, however.

The process of discrimination is a normal development in children. They learn to discriminate between a cat or a dog, for instance. A large cat or a small dog will throw them off until they learn that size is not what defines a cat or dog.

Seems to me some people just equate different with bad, others see different as good. Neophobe, meet neophile. Neophobes would seem to be predisposed to hold discriminatory values.

Some evidence for the "hard-wiring" theory would be other animals. I can't think of a specific example, but if you take a baby animal and stick it with a mother of another species, the mother will kill the "outsider". Of course, many animal mothers will raise outside species as their own, so this would be inconclusive evidence.

I don't think this applies to primates. S told me she was reading research on how we select mates. This research focused on smell. People in the study selected a shirt, from a collection of shirts with different people's body odors.

Turned out our brain is wired to choose the body smell of someone whose genes are different. The subjects had a strong preference for the least genetically similar individual.

This makes good evolutionary sense. The more variety in your offspring's genes, the more chance they won't have genetically linked problems, like color blindness.

What does all this mean? It would seem to me that discrimination and racism are learned, not hard-wired. Your family/culture transmits these beliefs. Your brain, however, is telling you to have children with someone NOT like you.

I think much of what we call discrimination and racism is based on overgeneralization. One co-worker is X, and is a jerk, so all X'es are jerks. The women in your family can't fix cars, so no women anywhere could fix a car.