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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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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,
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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