Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…First of all, the idea of the harm foundation isn’t just something that’s happened that is against my interests. We have a visceral sense of seeing somebody physically suffering, crying, we feel compassion for this emotional suffering. Simply saying this policy is going to work against your interests, that really doesn’t activate the harm foundation. But the more important point is the one that you suggest, which is, once people have taken a position on something, especially if it relates to sacred values — something that has become sacred to them — they’re pretty much impervious to arguments at that point. Let’s go back to the basics of moral psychology. In my book The Righteous Mind, I boil it down to three principles, we’ve already touched on the second one. The first principle is intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second. The basic fact about moral argument is that we’re not really listening to each other, we’re not actually open to reasoning. We start with our gut feeling or our partisan loyalty, and at that point we become lawyers. We’re really good at being lawyers and knocking down the other guy’s arguments, and giving them our own. The second principle is there’s more to morality than harm and fairness, that’s the moral foundations that we just talked about. And left and right, while they all have all the foundations, the left tends to focus more on the care, harm, the fairness, reciprocity, not so much on the tribal ones. The third principle is morality binds and blinds. That’s also relevant here, that’s the idea that people are incredibly good at forming groups — the key idea to keep in mind is the Arab proverb, “Me against my brother, me and my brother against our cousin, me and my brother and cousin against the stranger.” That’s basic social psychology, coalitional psychology. Once it becomes left versus right over Obamacare, it doesn’t matter however good your arguments are, I’m not listening. I’ve got my team, and we’re on a mission to defeat your team. Let’s turn to some of your work on campus, and with this idea of political correctness. I would say you’re the person who’s done the most in a good way to improve the quality of that debate and to make campus life more tolerant or more open. And I’m very appreciative of that. Let me ask you a question about how far this can go. Let’s take your vision of morality based on what you’ve called social intuitionism, and this modularity, where things just get triggered. If I look at America today, it does seem a more tolerant place than the America that I grew up with. Oh, yeah.…

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