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So, in this brief lecture I'm going to stick

with, purity and honor, but I'm going to shift gears.

Early on we made a distinction

between descriptive questions and normative questions.

Descriptive questions concern, how do things work, what are they about.

Their questions of science and this is what, this class has been all about.

Normative questions are questions how

should we live. What's the right thing to do?

And for the most part I have been trying to veer away from them, but

here for the purpose of this short lecture I want to get into normative issues.

I want to sort of ask the question, what should we think about purity and honor.

Should we value them?

now, when making these, asking these

questions, we have to tread very carefully.

It's very difficult to do this sort of project, I think, in an intelligent way.

I mean, for one thing, somebody's else's morality will

inevitably fall short by the standards of your own morality.

Because someone else's morality will have, by definition if it's a

different morality, will have values that you might not necessarily share.

So so if I was to say oh honor and purity

a defender of honor and purity says look one of the values, one of the advantages

of honor and purity is that it helps us protect female sexual modesty.

Well I could respond by saying I don't, who cares about female sexual modestly.

All that matters is whether women have the same freedom, and, and,

and autonomy, and so forth. Who cares about that?

But the champion of honor and purity may say well I care.

Not only do I care, but that's, that's a value which

I take seriously, and it's a value that my morality endorses.

And so, like they said on the clip in Justified, we're at an impasse.

But I don't really think it's always as bad as all that.

One reason why it's possible

to challenge moral views, or to champion moral views, to compare

and contrast different moral views, is that people do share a lot.

They do, there's a lot of morality, moral notions, that people have in common.

And there one could make arguments that, that could appeal

to to beliefs and premises that, that both the participants share.

So for instance you

could say to somebody look, we both value

X, well your morality falls short of achieving X.

So for instance, you know, if, if somebody's moral

system, I made a case, if somebody's moral system

caused needless suffering, I'm pretty sure they would agree

yeah, that's a bad thing about my moral system.

They might argue that it has other positive traits that override it.

But still we

could all agree needless suffering is bad and so, so

that would be one way to evaulate a moral system.

Another way is consistency, where if, if you could

argue that their moral system gives rise to moral

conclusions, that they are entirely sure are wrong, this

could lead them to distrust other aspects of the system.

That's all vague but I'll, I'll give a more

concrete example.

Because I think these sort of arguments could be made against purity.

Against a sort of morality that

revolves around sanctity, divinity, purity and disgust.

That connects to our beliefs particularly, but other people's sexual practices.

Now purity has its defenders.

So remember, many people who characterize themselves as very

conservative give purity a considerable amount of, of, of value.

and,

and you know, brilliant scholars, like Leon Kass, have written, repugnance is

the emotional expression of deep wisdom,

beyond wisdom's power completely to articulate it.

So Kass says we should listen to disgust.

Disgust could tell us, give us moral insights.

I actually think that there's two arguments against this view.

And I'll present both of them.

One is that disgust has had a horrible history.

So, so now I'm sort of repeating things that we'd introduced in the

first week, but I'll, I'll read again a quote by, by Martha Nussbaum.

Throughout history, certain disgust properties, sliminess, bad smell,

stickiness, decay, foulness, have repeatedly and monotonously been

associated with Jews, women, homosexuals, untouchables, lower-class people, all of

those are imagined as tainted by the dirt of the body.

Disgust has lead us to more, to, to, to moral decisions and moral acts,

morally motivated acts, that everybody today would agree are horrible.

There's nobody seriously, certainly not Kass,

certainly not anybody else, who says,

we were right to be disgusted at the idea of interracial marriage.

But, we were and so the concern is

if disgust has led us wrong in the past, how can we rely on it now?

That is some of you would want to make the argument

that, when I think about gay people being married, I feel disgust.

And I take that as a reasonable guide that something has gone wrong here.

The problem with that argument is that 30,

40 years ago people said exactly the same thing about interracial marriage.

But all of us, including you, know

that interracial marriage, there's nothing wrong with it.

And so, so, if one is going to rely on disgust, say as an argument against gay

marriage, then one has, then, then, it, it is necessary to show how the disgusted

people feel towards gay marriage, is somehow different

then the disgust that people felt towards interracial marriage.

Now I want to be clear.

I'm not here arguing for one position or another.

For all I know there's an excellent argument against gay marriage

involving, maybe it destroys a family, maybe it makes people sad.

Maybe whatever.

The, the specifics of it fall outside the scope of the course.

But my point is that if

disgust is your motivating force for for, for

your moral view, you have to explain why

you take it seriously now when you don't

take it seriously for its consequences in the past.

And there's another argument which concerns

the, the evolution of disgust, and here

as in other places, we see that the normative and descriptive aren't quite so

different as one would imagine.

Because often descriptive factors enter

into normative considerations and normative arguments.

And in particular the, the standard account of where our discussed

feelings come from, the account that I talked about in week

one, the account that is supported by many scholars like Paul

Rozin John Haidt, Dan Kelly, is that we have disgust to motivate

avoidance of parasites and poison.

It, it, we are grossed out by feces, we are grossed

out by rotten meat, by urine, by, by vomit, and so on.

Because we don't want to eat those things.

And being grossed out is, is ev, ev,

evolution's way of keeping us away from those things.

The fact that we find people disgusting,

and what people do disgusting, is an accident.

And so, if this is

true, and it's an empirical claim,

one could develop another better theory perhaps.

But if this is true, if this is the best theory we

have, then there's no reason to rely on disgust as a moral guide.

Because it hasn't evolved to be responsive to what we value as moral goods.

And in this regard disgust is different from other moral faculties we have.

Like empathy, or even guilt, or shame, or anger which

can go awry, but those seem to be genuinely moral emotions.

And that the reason why we have guilt and shame

and anger has to do with our interactions with people.

Doesn't mean that they're always good moral guides,

but it does suggest that they're worth taking seriously.

There's nothing in the emotion of disgust

to believe that it's worth taking seriously.

What about honor? Well honor has its critics.

I think one of the, the best critics is Steven Pinker in his recent book

Better Angels of Our Nature, where he

chronicles the decline of violence over human history.

For an enormous decline it of, of how much we murder each other.

And part of his argument is that

the decline of violence is in part due to a, a cultural

shift regarding honor. And in particular a shift from a culture

of honor, which leads to retaliation. It leads to payback.

It leads to war.

To what he would call a culture of

dignity, where violence is less of a thing.

Where actually violence might look foolish.

It might, you might want to seem you're above violent retaliation.

He nicely illustrates this by a, a great, quote from the Russian leader Khrushchev.

So at one point Khrushchev says I'm not some Czarist officer

who has to kill himself if he farts at a fancy party.

It's better to back down than to go to war.

What he means is he's not some

putz who has to, who is so caught up in honor

that somebody offends him he has to jump in and do battle.

He's above that.

And being above that, Pinker argues, is one reason why the world

is, is strange though it seems a safer and, and more peaceful place.

If you find a Pinker claim implausible, if you say

what do you mean the world's a safer, more peaceful place.

That's fine.

This'll be a topic we're going to move

to as we approach our final lectures.

So we'll get more into this claim about the decline of violence.

What's important now is the idea that honor is an accelerant to violence.

But on the other hand, one could defend honor and one can defend

honor and defend cultures of honor in one of two ways I think.

One can defend honor by arguing that although honor

in itself may not accord with a certain secular morality.

And a, a morality of autonomy.

Still, honor can, can help us achieve the goals,

that this ethics of autonomy is hoping to achieve.

And this is a point made by

Christopher Baum, who studies hunter gatherer societies.

And he points out that these

hunter gatherer societies are often very egalitarian.

They, they, they are not, you have might have imagined because

they, they are free of central government that it'd be run

by a powerful alpha male man and then, alpha

male person, and who would then lead over everybody.

And everybody would be subservient to him and everything.

It turns out hunter gatherer societies are like Occupy Wall Street.

They're a bunch of people who are loosely coordinated and are kind of equal.

And so you might say well, this means that members of hunter gatherer

societies don't care about status.

They don't care about honor and, and hierarchy.

But Bob argues opposite.

He says that if you look at what they say and

what they do, it turns out that they are obsessed with honor.

They are obsessed with status. They're obsessed with hierarchy.

But because of that they're all jockeying into position and nobody wants to

be on the bottom.

And so they, they're willing to group together

to keep someone else from being on top.

And then so through a community of people, you know, all who

take status very seriously, you end up with a society which is equal.

And you can argue that modern day cultures of honor, basically serve

a similar role to establish in certain ways, better, more egalitarian, societies.

Now, this isn't, this isn't an argument that a champion of honor would make.

And, and so I want to sort of end by, by voicing as best

I can, what someone who has a different moral view from me would express.

And, I think what, what they would point out is that

people from a secular autonomy based perspective tend

to be very crtiical of moral positions that rely on honor and purity.

But what we're missing out is that honor and purity

and related moral principles, moral foundations, are

connected to a conception of a person, what it is to be a person that's

much richer, than a conception you would have without it.

To some extent, an emphasis on people, a culture of honor,

or ideas some things that people do are disgusting and some things

that people do are elevated, can be seen as a response to a

very secular consequentialist morality where all that matters is the maximization

of happiness and the satisfying of goals. We

talked, we talked early in this class about utilitarian philosophy.

And utilitarian, consequentialist philosophy is this,

look what's good is what makes more,

most people happy, what satisfies the most goals what avoids the most pain.

But we also pointed out that age doesn't sound much like morality.

Morality isn't just acting in a way that, that makes the world a better place.

Rather morality is, is a way of acting to protect people's

rights and freedoms, to treat them with care, and compassion, and respect.

And the sort of things that we're talking about

here, like purity, and divinity, and honor arguably help

us escape from a sort of bloodless

conception of human nature and human possibility.

They arguably are linked up to a notion of a person which is

more elevated, more transcendent than a secular

consequentialist could ever hope to think about.

And this is a nice link to the final two lectures on this

week, which concerned a relationship between morality and religion.

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Disgust and Honor II

Moralities of Everyday Life

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