I'd like to welcome everybody back. We we began the lectures last week by talking about moral differences and we gave some examples of this. We started with a Herodotus, who reminded us of the differences in how societies treat the dead. And pointed out that what some people find absolutely natural, in fact, morally mandatory, other societies find disgusting, vile, wrong. We we looked at a list provided by anthropologist, Richard Shweder. We listed all the ways in which societies differ, and it's a pretty impressive list regarding the roles of men and women regarding domains such as sex and alcohol and eating meat and how to raise your children. But then we went on in the series of lectures that followed. To argue for underlying moral universals. And we made a case for moral universals to at least some extent, looking at cross cultural facts, ways in which societies are the same, ways in which they differ, looking at evolution, exploring how evolutionary theory can ground certain moral universals. And looking at child development. Looking at how, what we know about young children, development of young children. The capacities of young babies support the idea that some aspects of morality are universal, and are universal because they are part of our natures. We are born with them. In this week, I want to start off with the same sort of differences. But this time I want to talk about the differences. This time I want to explore the differences for their own sake. And there are three reasons to do so for this sort of course. The first is that interested, differences are interesting. When you're excited about morality, when something shocks you, and something moves you, it tends to be over a difference. I mean, if you think it's okay to eat meat, it's kind of perturbing, kind of interesting, that other people think it's terribly wrong. If you think it's wrong that cousins marry, it's interesting to see that there's other societies where it's a-okay. If you think it's right to abort a fetus, that a woman has a, ha, has a right to abort her fetus. You, you are moved, you are surprised that other societies and other people might think so differently from you. Now, we, our attention is drawn to weird societies where the morality is crazy. It's just so different. And we'll talk about some of those. But, we're also fascinated by differences that we see in people around us. Maybe people who are our friends, who are our family. Who live in our, our neighborhood. These differences, the fact that these people so close to us can disagree with us, so much about morality. Is both intriging and, I think, upsetting. A second reason to be interested in differences is that they can tell us a little bit about the nature of morality. They can tell us how morality works. So, one way to figure out the workings of a complicated system is to see which aspects of the system vary independently. So as an example, take the domain of intelligence. Suppose you're interested in human intelligence and how it works. It's, then interesting from that standpoint, that we can pull apart two separate types of intelligence; verbal intelligence and spatial intelligence. And by looking at differences, we could realize that these are two parts of a complex system. So your verbal intelligence could stay constant, while your spatial intelligence can go up and down, and your spatial intelligence could stay constant while your verbal intelligence goes up and down, and the fact that these two can vary independently. Of each other tells us a bit about intelligence and how it works. If it always turned out that people who were high in verbal intelligence were high in spatial intelligence, and those low in verbal intelligence were low in spatial intelligence that would tell us something quite different. And so one could adopt a similar strategy with regard to morality. Differences can tell us how this machine works. What parts it has? How the parts are connected to one another? Now, it could turn out that this strategy won't work. It could turn out, for instance, that to the extent people differ in their morality, it's just random, it's just schmutz, it's, it's all over the place. It could turn out that way but it doesn't turn out that way. What we're going to see in the lectures that follow is that there's an order and systematicity to moral differences. Some things go together, some things don't, and by the study of these differences we can learn a lot about structure. And, constitution of our moral psychology. The third reason to be interested in differences, is that it helps us to be clearer of about our own morality. So there's a temptation. If you don't know that other people are dif, different from you, there's a temptation to believe that the way you do things is the only way to do things. and, and so, looking at other societies, and other people, can be hugely transformative. Because you learn there's a different way to do things, there's a different way to think about sex or property, or raising children. Moreover, not only is there a different way to do things, but people apparently live their lives under these different moral hues. And they're not crazy. They're not even obviously dysfunctional. Somehow, it works for them. Now, knowing this, I think it expands your perspective. It can give you a bit of humility about your own moral view. Now, Herodotus would go further. So Herodotus as, as, we discussed. Thinks that once you see the differences, and once you see how seriously everybody takes their own morality, you end up as a, a moral relativist. You think that there's no way in which one moral system is better than another. To me that goes way too far. I'm not, I'm not a moral relativist. I think we can make evaluative claims that, this moral system in certain ways is better than this moral system. I just think that in order to do so, what we need just as a starting point, is a more sophisticated and careful way of thinking about differences. Before we go on to say what those guys do is just wrong, they have a screwed up morality, we want to be clear on what their morality is and give it the most extensive and sympathetic analysis that we can. This week is broken up into seven lectures. The first is an introductory one, which is what we're doing now. In the next lecture, I want to very quickly talk about three proposals as to how societies differ along moral dimensions. Then, I want to look and ask the question of how individuals differ within a society and I want to look at a particular case study. That of the difference in the United States, and in other countries, between liberals and conservatives. It's a difference which has a lot of moral consequences, and I want to discuss what the consequences are, and present different theories as to what's going on in the mind of one person that makes him a liberal, and then a mind of another that makes him conservative. The next two lectures will deal with two extraordinarily interesting phenomena in morality. Notions of disgust or purity, and notions of honor. These are interesting because they have these powerful effects on how we live, and they're interesting because they vary. Some societies have a huge amount of emphasis on purity. Some a huge emphasis on honor, and some not much empath, emphasis at all. In the last two lectures, I will find, I will get to the topic. I'm sure some of you will say finally, of religion. Many of you when you're thinking about a course on moral psychology on the discussion of. Morality, that moralities of everyday life. You may think, well that has a lot to do with religion. And, so what we'll do in the last two lectures is we'll look at the ideas, we'll look at the data, and we'll explore the, the extent to which that's true. We'll explore the role that, that religion plays and that differences in how people think about and practice religion. Play in our moral lives. [MUSIC]
