A few weeks ago, I started thinking about which animal society humans are most like. This isn't such an odd mode of thinking, I tell myself. There are many animal metaphors in language to describe human behaviour. 

"Birds of a feather flock together." 

"Breeding like rabbits."

"What's good for the hive is good for the bee."

Zoologists are taught to be careful not to anthropomorphise their subjects, but perhaps there is just as much danger of doing the reverse; to zoo-ologise the human in the quest to understand what our nature really is. As I'm not a zoologist or a biologist, my musings on this could only go so far. But browsing my local library I stumbled upon Nichola Raihani's new book The Social Instinct. It turns out that Raihani is a biologist who has actually thought a lot about our similarities with animals. 

To use an animal metaphor to explain human society might be to found an argument on a naturalistic fallacy, saying that any particular organisation of things is 'natural' because it already exists in nature, and we have little choice but to accept the way things are. However, Raihani manages to talk about the similarities between us without falling into this trap. There are many such similarities, and this is not surprising, given we share our genes with so many other animals, our traits, development and behaviours all find cognates in the natural world. 

Cleaner wrasse, for instance, are fish that make a living by cleaning the dead matter from other fish passing by on the reef. They apparently just as paranoid about bad customer reviews as the average small business manager, and will punish each other in order to make sure their partners don't nibble the client's flesh instead of the dead matter, you know, just once, as a treat. There are so many of these great animal anecdotes in this book, including some especially weird ones about the reproductive behaviour of spiders.  

Raihani is also concerned to point out the differences between us and animals. Firstly that we are so sexually egalitarian. Our closest cousins, the great apes, are in general much more polygynous (one male to several females) in their relationships; a much smaller proportion of males get to mate and father young than we do. This puts us much closer to bird couples when it comes to rearing young, but even that would be a misleading metaphor. Bird couples are often solely responsible for the survival of their young, while human children can rely on the support of the extended family and grandparents especially. It can also widen to include the whole community, and this is one reason that parents are so unperturbed by the concept of sending underdeveloped children to school to be cared for by near-strangers. 

It's important to point out these differences, seeing as the online 'manosphere' seems to be currently obsessed by the idea that 'women only want wealthy alpha males.' This kind of argument illustrates the point that animal metaphors are not just speculative, but real life discourses with political and social effects. Raihani treads very carefully in her section on the family but doesn't pull punches - at some level, our reproductive behaviour can be described as a conflict between genes. However, this conflict leads to co-operative behaviour as our genes act as if they seek to derive mutual survival benefits by playing nice. When it comes to everyday social relations, what the biology uncovers is actually a fairly banal fact-of-life: we want other people to like us, so we work to maintain our reputation as good co-operators, and we apparently relish the chance to punish the uncooperative, or bring down the boastful. Insisting on your alpha-hood among humans is thus more likely to earn a person haters than followers. 

Human societies are large and complex, unlike our closest cousins, and this has led some to compare us with social insects like ants and bees. Raihani explores the differences between us and hive-minded creatures as a recurring theme over the whole book. Like us, these insects form large social groups with a hierarchy and a division of labour, they are at times, fiercely territorial and are some species are in a state of constant war between colonies. Sometimes this metaphor is invoked when we have to get together and work on a common project, or defeat a common enemy. Whereas nation-states do have a very hivish vibe about them (something not lost on the makers of the film Antz), humans are importantly different from eusocial species.

A central idea of the book is the tension between individuals and their social groups. In eusocial species, Raihani makes the case that the individual ant or bee has become somewhat de-individualised. Much of the time, they are acting as if their individual genes don't matter, and that what they are reproducing is the hive itself. What makes this possible is a strong vertical solidarity; ants and bees are typically all sisters, and all the progeny of the queen. By being a 'worker' they are helping their genes through their sister's other offspring. Human societies are a much looser federation. Our ability to produce and care for our own offspring has been preserved, and thus the goal of our genes is more closely aligned with our individual bodies. Though hard work and sacrifice is often demanded of us by modern, industrialised, national societies, we operate on the basis that there must be something in it for us or our kids. 

Raihani devotes the last section of her book to explaining how such societies arose among humans, a species that evolved to live in much smaller bands of foragers, loosely dependent on each other, and fiercely egalitarian. Indeed, she makes a great defence of what others have called our 'egalitarian syndrome,' our sense that there is something unfair about others having more, whether praise, position or resources (Gavrilets, 2012). In this explanation, she doesn't tread much new ground and follows the argument that agriculture makes state society possible. Her own understanding of this is that agricultural families produce many more children and this ultimately leads to the domination of the fertile land by farmers. This leaves people with nowhere to run if the social conditions tip towards tyranny, meaning that despots can essentially domesticate the population and reap the surplus they produce. 

However, her model for deducing this leaves out some critical detail - why are resources not shared equally in agricultural societies? She assumes the existence of a leader of the community holding on to more, but this is a bit unsatisfying. Why do the others let him hang on to more, if they would not allow that in a forager band? I would add the conjecture of economist Paul Collier that this tipping towards hierarchy is hard to resist due to the potential for 'scale economies of violence' to emerge, in which a minority unproductive class, specialising in violence, can cream off the agricultural surplus to support their lifestyle.  Early Kings, argues Collier, were little more than thugs. 

One important question she does address is, why don't the workers rise up and use their superior numbers to overthrow the elite? While others have attempted to understand this with reference to culture, (which certainly does play a part), Raihani sees it mostly as a simple numbers game. Action against tyrants is an act of co-operation; it relies on people ready to come together for a common cause. But while we can often do that on a small scale, it often becomes quite difficult as the number of people required for action grows. This is because the more people involved in an endeavour, the less your individual contribution seems to matter, and possibly, the less you have to gain. If the punishments for rebellion are harsh enough, then often the disincentives outweigh the incentives on an individual level.

This is certainly the case when it comes to action on climate change, as Raihani goes on to discuss. We've all felt the futility of separating the paper and plastic for recycling in the knowledge that many people continue to contribute daily to carbon emissions on an industrial scale. She has no easy solutions, but follows the 'think global act local' school of thought that argues for building smaller local co-operative institutions and processes with an understanding of the systemic and global effects that action could have. There is more than a shade of pessimism in this, but Raihani is not a doomer. It's not too late to act. But failure is a relatively strong possibility. 

Ultimately, the book did not answer my question about the best animal metaphor for human society, because it showed quite clearly that humans behave in quite unique ways that make most such metaphors deceiving. We do share recognisable behaviours with animals, but we have taken sociality to vertiginously complex new forms. Consequently we face incredibly complex new challenges in which our individual motivations and social obligations are often at odds. Understanding what is happening to us demands probing beyond these neat comparisons to assess what is particular about humans, and this book serves as a great introduction to this endeavour. 

References

Gavrilets, S. (2012) ‘On the evolutionary origins of the egalitarian syndrome’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - PNAS, 109(35), pp. 14069–14074. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1201718109.

Raihani, N. (2021) The Social Instinct: How co-operation shaped the world, Penguin: London, UK

https://www.sheswithhim.com/

Jayne Riew is a photographer and the wife of the moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt, whose Moral Foundation Theory I've written about in a series on this blog. It's almost certainly no coincidence that one of her recent photography projects, sheswithhim.com, deals with similar themes as Haidt. In this project she presents interviews with women who voted for Donald Trump in the 2016 US election. Trump faced Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, and the interview's focus seems to have been how these women, some self-described as feminists, justified voting against the first female candidate for a major US party in favour of Trump, who was caught bragging about his sexual misconduct with women to a journalist leading up to the election. 

Riew's work is an interesting case study for the application of moral foundations theory to politics, and also provides an opportunity to analyse the data with a more critical lens and concepts from discourse analysis. Do conservative moral foundations underlie the women's justifications, or can discourse analysis tell us more about how language is used to construct these political arguments? 

The first thing to notice about these interviews is that the answers come from a defensive position. The women seem to have been asked why 'as women' they voted against Clinton and for Trump. This fact frames their argument as a defence of their status as 'good women,' whatever society takes that to be. Posed this way, the question appears more like a challenge. How can a good woman have voted for Donald Trump (and against Hillary Clinton)? This implicates both their identity and their moral justifications. Since this is an oppositional question, it is also more easily understood as coming from a Democratic world-view. The women were not responding to a neutral, but to an imagined hostile Clinton voter - perhaps another woman. This somewhat informs the language and arguments they used in response. 

There are two main arguments the women draw on to justify their choice. The first is that Clinton was not a good candidate to vote for, and further, that the Democratic party was not a good choice either. They argue this in two ways. One is that Clinton and the Democrats were not competent and therefore not a 'rational' choice, and the second that they were morally wrong, and therefore no a 'moral' choice. Grievances include: Clinton's approach to Benghazi, her somewhat hypocritical feminism, the Democrats treatment of car manufacturers, the mishandling of the Flint water crisis, the lack of jobs, the apparent lack of immigration controls, and unfair taxation. These were presented both in moral and rational terms as reasons against the Democrats. 

The second argument used is quite different. They argue against what some of them call 'the left' or 'liberals' - the wider cultural movement associated with the Democratic party and Clinton voters. The women object to the power that these people have in the media and in academia, and to the way they treat the political opposition. It is this group that the women seem to be responding to in their question. They talk about the left as rigid, self-obsessed, lazy, belligerent and rude. Some of the women apparently cast their vote as a kind of protest against this phenomenon. Trump himself does not appear so much in the arguments of these women; they seem to be giving arguments to vote against Clinton, rather than arguments in favour of Trump. None of the women seem happy to defend his character, but it is excused. 

Can moral foundations theory make sense of these arguments? I tried to code some of their responses for moral foundations, but the process is actually quite difficult. Sometimes it is obvious when a person is using a moral argument: 

"The big corporations get away with everything. But small businesses are the backbone of this country!" 

This clearly falls into Haidt's 'fairness' foundation. The Democrats are being criticised for their support of monopoly capitalism which is impacting the interviewee's small business. She argues against this on the grounds that the economy should be fairer. 

On the other hand, sometimes it is far from obvious when a moral argument is being used:

"Just look at the Middle East. We take out flawed yet stable dictators, and then we’re surprised that someone worse fills the void? I am very critical of the way Hillary handled Libya." 

What kind of argument is this? Is it an argument from rationality, that Clinton was not good at handling the Libyan civil war? Or is it an argument from the moral foundation of care, that Democrats do not care about the Libyan people? Given the ambiguity of many passages in the interviews, it seems possible to imagine a moral foundation for much of what was said, and even then it is not clear when a statement falls into one foundation or another:

"A true feminist would not stand for such degrading behavior."

Is this a statement about the sanctity of womanhood, or an appeal for equal treatment on the basis of fairness? There is no reason it could not be both, but it serves to illustrate that there is a lot of room for interpretation in moral discourses. They do not always fit in neat boxes. 

Looking across all six interviews and trying to code for moral foundations, there is another interesting feature that provides a sticking point for Haidt's theory. The women drew variably from each of the foundations, but the overall picture was that there was an almost equal reliance on each of the foundations. Three women drew from fairness discourse, three from care, three from sanctity, three from loyalty, and three from liberty. Two drew from the fairness related 'proportionality' discourse (that you get what you deserve, not equality). It is somewhat predicted by Haidt's theory that conservative voters will draw from these categories equally - but for one problem. None of the women drew from the foundation of authority and subordination. There was no talk about the disobedience of children, the insubordination of employees, or lack of willingness to submit to military discipline. 

Perhaps this is because these women were drawing on arguments they thought the average 'liberal' would relate to. Perhaps this was because, as Haidt tries to show, independent voters lying somewhere between the parties have more mixed moral feelings than the extremes, and need not have drawn on the discourse of authority to make their case. Whatever the case, I think the broadness of the moral foundations and the variability of their use suggests that moral discourses are best understood as functional tools for doing things with words, rather than natural categories with defined parameters. 

Looking from the perspective of discourse, we can see that the women construct their arguments to defend themselves from accusations of being 'bad women.' They are reacting to a moralisation of their position which draws from a discourse of loyalty, or solidarity as a sisterhood. This in itself is interesting, since Haidt argues that liberals are less concerned about loyalty to the group. Yet here the argument is that female Trump voters are engaging in betrayal. To reject this subject position they try to construct themselves as good women within the prevailing discourses of womanhood.

" ...my husband and I do everything. We work hard."

"I’m also a feminist. My generation went through women’s lib together."

"My husband and I enjoy a nice life. We've raised five amazing children to adulthood."

  "As a legal immigrant who came for graduate school, then worked for free to get experience, struggled for years..."

A good woman is constructed as a hard worker, a law-abiding person, a wife, a mother, selfless, but also capable of advocating for herself according to her identity. These statements function to inoculate the women against this positioning on the basis of their vote. They present a counter-narrative arguing that 'good women can vote against Clinton.' These accounts also present a counter-narrative to the prevailing one about Trump's hostility to immigrants - some of these women highlight their migrant status, arguing that immigrants do not need to credit these claims of hostility. 

The women also draw on the moral discourse of care to explain their vote. Whereas Haidt characterises Democratic voters as more motivated by care, these Republican voters also draw on care discourses, and in this way critique the Democrats for showing a lack of care:

"...when Governor Snyder went to Washington to ask for help. I read the court proceedings. They made him beg for assistance and cross examined him. Families in Flint needed help."

"...we know a lot of small business owners who can't make ends meet and it's a direct result of Obamacare and taxation."

Certainly, care discourse can be variable and situational - it is a moralisation that all understand, and it can be appealed to in the interests of all kinds of social groups, from car manufacturers to migrant families. What is more important in discourse analysis is the function that care discourse is used for. Here it is used to communicate contempt for the Democratic party, while the record of the Republican party is not analysed, from which cases can surely also be taken . Moralisation is here acting simply as a stake inoculation for the speaker who does not necessarily have to show moral care in a consistent way. The vote could easily have been for unspoken reasons, or even for no particular reason at all. This problematizes Haidt's insistence that people have different moral personalities; the differences drawn upon might be artefacts of the discourses of each party in relation to each other. 

Reasons to vote against the Democrats are certainly not reasons to vote for the Republicans, but within the interpretative repertoire of these women, there really is no other alternative. The interviews indicate that Trump was successful in presenting himself as the anti-establishment candidate who represented the promise of a new and different politics. He was also able to act as a lightening rod for the women who felt threatened what they constructed as the hegemony of liberal discourses in the media and academia. 

"I also resented that when I opened the October issues of my fashion magazines, the editors all endorsed Clinton for president."

"Yale is the place where you go to have intellectual discussions, right? Where there's diversity and dynamism? Not really. Everyone is on the left..."

"In almost every social setting I find myself in I am insulted by arrogant people who assume that everyone agrees with their politics..."

The women construct their social world as filled with liberals, and they define themselves in opposition to this. The left is constructed as a threatening monolithic entity which supported Hillary Clinton and has no space for a critique of her, or the Democratic party. The interviewees insisted that they were being stereotyped, but also engaged in some stereotyping of their own, characterising the left as lazy, naive, and weak, all tinged with the language of moralisation. In doing so, they constructed themselves as the opposite, and their vote as proof of their character as 'good women'. They talk about themselves as independently minded, pro-women, courageous and hard-working, claiming the discursive high ground against the hordes of Democrat voters. From this we see the way that political and moral language is involved in the discursive construction of the self; their political stance defines their difference and uniqueness. Perhaps this is slightly ironic, given that defining the self in political terms is something of a critique of the left, to find a similar process occuring in Trump voters. 

The existence of this corpus of interviews itself should raise some questions. Riew herself voted Democrat, but it seems that this selection of interviews does contain an argument against certain aspects of the US culture war. Taken all together, these interviews seem to present the narrative that voters were responding to the country swinging "too far left" during the Obama years, whatever this is understood to mean. This is something that Haidt himself has made a particular point of arguing in interviews about the state of academia and politics. It has also become a common position for right-wing media to take in the years since the Trump vote, characterising itself as an insurgent movement to reinstall the 'moral majority' as cultural hegemons in the USA and beyond. What function this argument serves could be the subject of a different post.

A look at the moral discourses of politics in this blog shows they can be thoroughly relative. They are quite flexible enough to be used in many and various sites where power is contested; what terms such as care and fairness mean look very different through the eyes of people inhabiting different social identities, and are used variably to argue for diverse political outcomes. 

Given the reservations I have about Moral Foundations Theory, perhaps it might be too much to expect that I think it has anything interesting to say about political science. However, even though I believe Haidt is wrong about moral politics, I think it is wrong in an interesting way that sheds some light on what we do and don't know about the topic. 

Haidt's approach in Moral Foundations Theory implies that each foundation is a personality dimension on which individuals will find themselves, and further, that the strength of this feeling between individuals is likely normally distributed across the population. There is an average or median level of concern about care and harm, or sanctity, or liberty, and that is where most of the voters are. It seems logical to conclude from this that a political party wishing to gain power and a mandate has simply to strike at the median voter's strength of moral prejudices to take the biggest share of the vote and govern in the most democratic way. This, Haidt insists, is the problem with the US Democrats. They are just too left wing. Too liberal. They don't appeal to the median voter. The Republicans on the other hand, draw on all the moral foundations, and therefore appeal to the median voter more easily. 

The practical application of this theory is decidedly mixed at best. In the case of trying to take the whole population along by appealing to the middle voter, one recent example is the UK based "Independent Group for Change", members coming from each side of the political aisle, who decided the best way was straight down the middle - got ignored by voters. In the case of reaching across the aisle and grabbing swing voters, results are more encouraging, for instance the UK Labour Party's victory in the 1997 general election after following a more neoliberal line of messaging than the traditional pro-union platform. It remains to be seen whether this works in times of polarisation. Keir Starmer is certainly trying to reach across the aisle to people with 'concerns about immigration' and 'eco-terrorists,' however he seems to be alienating many Labour activists with his language. 

As I've argued in the section on MFT as a cognitive theory, we likely don't need a theory of distinct modules to understand the association between moral language and emotions. That doesn't mean Haidt hasn't discovered something interesting though, which is that different political factions draw on different discourses of morality to gain political support. Haidt argues this reflects a genetic personality difference in voters (amplified by their social environment and identity), but I think we should also consider the social context within which these different discourses work. The question is whether Haidt has discovered a 'universal' distinction (being true for all places and times) or a 'particular' distinction (referring to a particular place and time). For example, Haidt focuses on two extremes of a spectrum (later broadening to three distinct groups) - but it's almost certainly no coincidence that he does this in the context of the two-party system of US politics. Is this the result of there being essentially two extremes of political personality or is something else happening?

It's been argued by others (Ian Shapiro has an interesting series on modern politics on this) that a first-past-the-post political system almost inevitably results in a two party system, and of course, US politics is FPTP. Other systems can support larger alternative parties (such as the proportional representational system used in countries such as Germany and Spain). This means that in the US there are two main political identities; there are also people who have chosen one of them, and people who have not. Much of the research on social identity shows us that once we start identifying as part of a group, we are locked into the norms (including moral norms) of the group and this makes us sort of blind to the norms of the other. Research does show (Cohen, I think?) that people who identify as Democrats are less likely to endorse policies which are presented as Republican, and vice versa, but if those same policies are presented as Democratic, then they do support them. This leaves us with a dilemma. Do people hold moral and political beliefs because of their brains or identities? Haidt argues that, in this case, identity follows personality; our personalities suit us for different kinds of life and interests, and ultimately make one identity more appealing than another. 

However transferring this theory to UK politics we might see a different picture. In the UK the system is nominally FPTP but we only vote on local representatives, not for the presidency. Can we really say there are two extremes in British politics? If so what is different about the personalities of the Scottish voters who keep re-electing the Scottish National Party? Are they more progressive and liberal, or more nationalist and conservative? We could certainly test their attitudes, but likely the most important factor is going to be Scottish national identity, expressed in whatever moral terms necessary. There are also Green voters, who draw on discourses of care, but also of sanctity (in a completely different way than the northern Irish DUP). The point here is just that identity often does not follow personality, but can be made up of all kinds of competing factors such as geography, social class, parenthood, etc. 

This leads back to the more general critique I have of the theory, which is that the themes of the moral discourses don't have necessary connections with any particular political issues. It is easy to rationalise why liberals might care more about the right to choose to terminate a pregnancy than conservatives in terms of a personality theory; but there doesn't necessarily need to be a debate about the topic in the first place. This is not something that is a huge conservative concern in Britain, for example; and attitudes in the US were not always so polarised. It is not an argument between the eternal foundations of care and sanctity of life; it is merely an argument about abortion between two socially opposing forces that draws on the concepts of care and sanctity to make a case for each side. Focus on the issue has defined it and separated the sides, turning it into a political weapon to beat the others with. 

Instead of reflecting an underlying quality of human nature, it seems that these moral issues in political messaging are actually acting as forms of brand marketing; each party in the system must have a unique selling point that activates the emotions of the consumers (er, the voters). It feeds a social division more acute than that of the iPhone v Android, which people in the middle don't care about and unfortunately cannot seem to avoid. Going for the middle also doesn't work, because the middle is now apathetic and sees no hope of resolving the issue. On the other hand, this moral divide is likely also driven by media narratives. Moral messaging about political issues is universally filtered through some kind of mass media. Haidt could argue that different personalities are activated by different kinds of headlines, but perhaps there are more prosaic reasons that media outlets are able to define the terms of moral debate - "the medium is the message". It's perhaps a cliché argument, but getting your political news from newspapers, Facebook, news channels, YouTube or Twitter results in a completely different view of the world due to the material factors in the production of the news. 

As to what this all means, I can't go much further into detail, as I didn't study political science; however it seems quite an intractable problem of democracy that it can easily be dragged towards factionalism and away from the goal of utilitarian policy making. In terms of Moral Foundations Theory, it is far from settled that personality is the only, or even main factor in the structural problems of democracy. However, at least in raising the question MFT gives us reasons to further examine the moral discourses of politics. 

One of Haidt's early concerns in the development of Moral Foundations Theory is to explain how the moral intuitions evolved. He argues that moral intuitions are innate, and in so doing feels the need to provide an evolutionary story for their existence. For instance in regards to the care/harm foundation, he argues that the emotions involved in looking after infant children through their development are the basis for the evolution of a cognitive module programmed to react to perceived sources of harm that is passed genetically through the population. These emotions provide an advantage through preserving offspring and thus the future of the species. A mother who feels no emotion to spur care for her child will not likely be a successful mother given the long development of human children. 

If we ignore the critique of the modular theory above, the evolution of caring for infants must be one of the least controversial evolutionary psychological theories. Mammals have quite vulnerable young, and in order to be a successful mammal species, parents must be motivated to care for them. In social mammals, where caring for others is expanded to kin and clan members, that is an arguably helpful adaptation for a species in terms of keeping more breeding pairs and children alive. Humans have been very successful as a species in comparison with related species like Neanderthals or Homo Florensis; Haidt and others believe this is because humans are capable of large scale-cooperation. This co-operation is theorised to have been supported by our ability to maintain trust through pro-social behaviour. I feel that I am in no way well-read enough on the topic to be able to say whether this is correct or not, and I am not going to critique this aspect of the theory. 

Instead, I want to focus on what Haidt says about moral matrices and group selection. Group selection has been furiously debated in evolutionary biology. Briefly, it is the hypothesis that some traits are selected for at the level of the group, and that groups which can more successfully fill the world with their offspring than other groups will eventually come to dominate other groups. Whether this is true or not is not really my concern; my concern is that Haidt implicates moral foundations in the success or failure of a social group to reproduce. He does this not only to explain the survival of Homo Sapiens over Homo Neandethalensis, but also to explain the dominance of different cultural groups over others. Perhaps if you are strong on Haidt's liberal foundations, you begin to see the problematic implications of such a theory that "more morally developed cultures" are destined to dominate others. However, I think the real problem with this is that there is very little evidence provided for such a claim. 

The one concrete example Haidt gives in The Righteous Mind is that of the cohesion of the Greek warriors under the command of Macedonian king Alexander the Great, who were able to defeat the much larger forces of the Persian Empire. This is the one human v human example of group selection that he references in the book, however he does not cite any historian to back up his implied claim that the Macedonian armies had a more developed innate moral sense that led to cohesiveness in battle. A simple Google search turns up an article that cites Alexander's own tactical genius as the key difference between the Greeks and Persians. There is no suggestion that the Persian "immortals" were a less cohesive fighting force. Furthermore, the defeat of the Persian army did not result in the selection of "Greek people" over the Persians. They were a small occupying army that eventually splintered into rival factions; Alexander took a Persian bride, we can safely imagine that the genes of "the Persians" survived the occupation.

In case it could be argued that this was actually an illustration of the necessity of moral emotions (the Greeks could not have succeeded without them); let's take a look at another case, the colonization of America, for an example of how they are neither sufficient or necessary. This is a clear case in which one group comes to dominate another group, but it is far from clear that "developed moral intuitions" were the cause, or even that the oppressed group has been selected against. The brutal colonisation by Europeans of the Americas occurred over centuries and resulted in a massive depopulation of the indigenous occupants of the land.  But when we think of the cause of such domination, do we think of it as the destiny of moral development? Instead it seems an insult to morality; the conquest by a more numerous people with an abundance of technological and material advantages of another people hardly makes a good case study for the potency of moral emotions. In reality, the Europeans could do this because settled agriculture had been developed in Europe for millennia and intensified to produce a huge population. When they arrived in the Americas with guns and smallpox, they simply overran indigenous communities who subsisted on broadly less "land-efficient" methods.  It could be argued that their moral sense had to be aligned with co-operation on their mode of production, but which came first? Furthermore, indigenous communities and their genes survived this deadly exchange, making up the broader moral community of the present day Americas. 

However, we could move evolutionary thinking from the level of biological to cultural formations such as certain regimes or empires, and ask whether their moral foundations make them adaptive and likely to survive in a population or not. One example might be the Nazi regime, whose ethics of obedience, sacrifice, purity and 'strength' led them to attempt colonization of the east. It could be argued that they had drifted too far into the conservative side of moral foundations, becoming blind to the others. For instance, the Nazis undervalued the importance of the ability to critique authority or ideas of the sanctity of the nation, and so didn't properly evaluate the risks of invading the USSR. This ultimately led the regime to its downfall (though the population of Germany itself was preserved). 

Perhaps this is making the mistake of treating a qualitative difference like a quantitative difference. Saying something like "the Nazis made errors because they were twenty points higher in authority orientation, leading to group think at the level of a society," rather than focusing on the actual content of the moral discourse: "the Nazis made errors because the criticism of Hitler was made discursively impossible in the moral discourse of Nazism." This starts to drift into the more general critique of MFT as an ethical theory; it is not enough to say we have certain moral foundations without specifying the content of the moral discourse. Can we really say whether a particular foundation is 'adaptive' without looking at the actual instances and behaviours that are considered morally relevant in that particular time and place? 

It's clear from these short examples that proposing "developed innate moral intuitions" as the cause for the victories and defeats of history is not well thought out. However, Haidt's real concern is that without a full suite of moral emotions his own present day US society will decline and fall. This is something I will examine more in depth in the next blog post about MFT as a sociological theory. 

In preparation for my independent project, I've been reading US psychologist Jonathan Haidt's book, The Righteous Mind. The book is a popular science explanation of his theory of moral intuitions, often known as Moral Foundations Theory, which was also discussed in the developmental psychology section of DE200. In these blog posts, I'm not going to try to give an explanation of the MFT, but try to "critically examine" what it claims to explain, and what implications it has in broader social science. 

In these blog posts I'm also not going to do citations, but I will try to give credit to people for ideas I'm drawing from. And as an undergraduate writing this, I'm obviously going to be lacking specialist knowledge from certain areas. These are just musings I've had that I want to share. 

I'll post the blog in separate chapters over the next week or so.