YourMorals.org

Secular Sunday

February 24, 2019

Attendees:

·         Ann Brady	·         Pam Hill	·         Sean Bienert
·         Ronnie	·         Derek	·         John
·         Joe	·         Molly	·         Sean
·         Bob	·         Brian	·         Michael
·         Geoff	·         Caro	·         Tara
·         Josh	·         Lyn	·
·	·	·
·	·	·

Announcements:

Brian brought a book list from library

Bylaws – there have been some questions about the bylaws but consensus seems to be to wait until they pass, then change them.

Book club interest meeting right after meeting.

Bible club once a month.

Discussion Notes:

Started with a weird discussion of morality. Gene had posted some stuff in Plato’s Cave about “what if…” scenarios. Website “YourMorals.org” Moral foundation theory – six categories of how you lie on the Liberal, Conservative, Libertarian scale.

Subjectivity of morality – topic

John has a fascination with skulls (don’t judge) but sometimes the collection of them seems weird to him. This has been since high school. He knows how to boil them down and reassemble the skeleton. He hastens to say that this is not an obsession. He hit a hawk with his truck and it was injured enough that he had to mercifully kill it but removing the head seemed not quite right to him. There is no logical reason for this.

Tara pointed out that dead is dead. Think back to the terrorists who cut off their captives heads and how horrified we all were. There is no logical reason this should bother us more than shooting for example.

6 moral foundations

Care/harm – feeling others’ pain. The degree to which this is important in our judgements.

Fairness/cheating – ideas of justice, right and proportionality

Loyalty/betrayal – tribal ideas. Patriotism,

Authority/subversion – hierarchical social order

sanctity/degradation – disgust, contamination. Religious ideas.

liberty/oppression – hatred of bullies

When data was parsed conservatives are more equal in all areas. Liberals weighted towards care/harm and fairness/cheating. Libertarians weighted more towards liberty/oppression.

Example – the wall. Conservatives post things like “do you lock your door at night?” Difficult to argue with that. When you question them, they will say it protects us from enemies, but can’t name specific ways it does that.

Knowing where someone is on the scale helps you to figure out how to discuss things with people of opposing views in a way that will help you convince them of your position.

Josh - “All the arguments I’ve heard are either … or …” We make decisions then look for reasons to justify it. We have to give up the need to be right. Opinions and arguments are not the same. Arguments are things you need to win. Opinions are ideas you form.

We need to give up making things binary. That promotes argument. Nothing is as simple as this or that. It is a sorting mechanism that allows us to think more quickly and make decisions.

Kluge – talks about the haphazard organization of the brain.

Tribalism tends into this too. Binary arguments allow us to identify our “group” more quickly.

Unless we are being really intentional about our thinking, we are on “autopilot” most of the time. Lyn objects to this idea. She feels that we are often very rational.

Michael – The Economist podcast says that learning more things doesn’t so much broaden our minds and make us more open to new ideas. No evidence of this.

Back to equality/proportionality – liberals tend to look more for equality. Conservatives lean more towards proportionality (people pulling their own weight).

Sean asked if the study Gene mentioned was based in the US. Mostly. Some in India. Depending on your socio-economic status, your moral foundations will be different. Same results worldwide.

The definition of liberal, conservative, etc is different in other parts of the world but the divisions stay the same. Political systems are not binary, but the ideas tend to be.

Josh – some differences in regionalism, what is important historically, etc. but there are areas of broad commonality. It’s more like a color blob with the colors shifting around the edges, but mostly the same, depending on the issues that are important. Morality is not dependent on a position on the wall, but it is being made into a moral issue by both sides. Morality in politics is different than morality in general. Need to look at ethics too. Moral positions have some things/groups that remain the same over time. Political and ethical standards do shift over time.

Sean - Where our morals are right now is not where they are going to be in 50-100 years. Good idea to try to figure out where we are headed and how our legacy will be impacted.

John – question for Gene – did the study look at how religion affects your moral foundation? Not so much the affect of religion, but more political ideology. Conservatives have an advantage because they operate more evenly across all areas of foundation. Liberals have more trouble with this.

Sean points out that this accounts for 3 groups, but most studies look at 4 areas. Economic x-axis, authoritarianism on the y-axis. (Ronnie) Some of these do not lend themselves to states, only individuals. Authoritarian is based on how much control/power the central government has so most modern democratic states are authoritarian in this model.

You have to differentiate between how groups label themselves and what they actually do. Ridiculous to call Stalin a communist, he was totalitarian. What do people actually do? Figure out what you are trying to assess, then look at the actions and how they line up with the thing you want to assess.

We create our own fictions about what we do and are willing to do. A lot of conservatives will answer questions more liberal than they would think but who label themselves as conservatives because it’s what they are comfortable with.

Examples – Insane Clown Posse – born again Christians who talk about rape and murder and very bad things. People identified with them and then got left in confusion (I don’t get this cultural reference, so maybe Sean should elaborate).

Bob – what about those who don’t identify with any of these groups? Gene – doesn’t really address them.

Some labels don’t make any sense to us now – Liberal Republican, for example. We make sense of our world using words. If we don’t have a word to describe something, we make one up. Changing world zeitgeist.

Gene – example - voluntary human extinction movement – moral questions that are very difficult will continue to challenge us. Fritz Haber invented nitrogen fertilizer. Also invented chlorine gas used in WWI. He was also a nationalist German Jew who was run out of Germany. He also invented Zyklon gas which was used to exterminate Jews during WWII.