Can we trust our Moral Intuitions?

[DLJ]

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Stich is saying proximal cues from the environment cause things that end up in the norm box. Let's take something not really morally loaded as an example. You are a young child in an indigenous tribe. You see that every morning all the women and girls are sent to obtain water from a nearby river, while all the men go hunting or tend to the crops. Those are the proximal cues in the environment.
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Yup.  Douglas Adams put it well in relation to technology.

Note that being an atheist he says "natural order" not 'sacred order' (which is something I noticed in the Shweder research (used by J. Haidt for his Righteous Mind book) on Autonomy Ethics, Community Ethics and Divinity Ethics where responses relating to Natural Order and Sacred Order were grouped together).  



Same could be said about all social norms hence the oft observed tendency for people to become more conservative as they age.

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From there leads a solid line (not a dotted line)... to the left-most box. The left-most box has two items: "identify norm implicating behavior" and "infer contents of normative values." So here, a a boy in the tribe being exposed repeatedly to the proximal cue of the women getting water and the men hunting would infer a norm using your "rule-relating reasoning capacity" (the next box). This would be something like: "The women get water. The men hunt." Even if such a rule is not explicitly stated, one could come to accept it as a norm. Explicit statement of the rule would be another proximal cue, but it isn't necessary for something to end up in the norm box.
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"identify norm implicating behavior" and "infer contents of normative values" - Yup.  In Governance/Management/Operations-speak*, that would be about 'Principles'.

*For ease of typing I'll refer to this from now on as GMO (top-down design) or OMG (bottom-up evolution)  How appropriate is that!  

So these could be articulated or unspoken principles.  So far so good. It's the development (programming) of the child's Baseline Comfort Zone i.e. what's expected/normal.

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The next bit is counts a serious argument against the efficacy of moral intuitions. The norm box is empirically verified to influence emotional states. For example, you, as a young tribal boy go on the hunt with the men, and you see (for the first time in your life) that a woman has come along for the hunt. This causes an emotion in you (ie... this doesn't SEEM right... this isn't NORMAL... there is something WRONG with this...) and this in turn (solid line) affects your judgment.
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I'm guessing you meant "counts as"?  Or did you mean "discounts"?

On my diagram I've included these "moral intuitions" or gut-feels (see the green lines on my diagram) because I think all organisms have this ability in various ways.  It's a very rudimentary stimulus-response system that we just happen to connect with words like 'emotion' and 'morals' and most likely has its origins in Centre of Gravity:
Lean too far and you'll fall out of the tree became stray too far from what the social group expects and pariahdom awaits you.

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These things operate at a subconscious level. And Stich wants to argue that this sort of emotional entanglement (kluges) seriously undermines our moral intuitions. The big point is the empirically verified link between emotion and judgment.
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I'd go with 'underpins' rather than 'undermines' because I'm OK with "moral intuitions" given that I see a distinction between morals and ethics (definitions will follow).

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Now... for "other emotional triggers"... Stich recognizes that not every emotional trigger is resultant from an idea in the norm box. Let's say, you (as the tribal boy) were bitten by a tarantula multiple times one day, and the next day your friend wants to bring his pet tarantula along on the hunt. There's nothing in your norm box that says "this is a bad idea" (there's no rule against it that you've inferred from proximal cues) but your emotional system (triggered by the memory of being bitten) urges you to make the judgment that this is a bad idea.
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Yup.

For that, there's an Event Management process:

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The output appears to be a) "judgement" and b) post-hoc justification.  OK.  Not behaviour?  Hmmm.

Stich is concerned with judgments, and not behavior. That's why. Post-hoc justifications are also not really a concern of his either. It puzzles me that he put them on the chart, but, maybe he did so to show where they are in the causal chain.
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I think that the post-hoc bit has been added due to the J.Haidt reference - that's definitely one of his conclusions and he refers to this as "our Press Secretary".

The two motivations (compliance and punitive) appear to be output (is that the 'behaviour' part?) when I'd expect them to be baseline references and therefore part of 'beliefs' (articulated ones or otherwise).

Compliance is a dotted line, so you aren't expected to take the link TOO seriously. Although the line between beliefs and judgments (which most philosophers take as axiomatic) is also dotted, so...

I see the link between emotion and compliance. I'm not exactly sure how it's relevant or why Stich included it on his chart. I'd LOVE to read the academic papers where he outlines this. I, like you, am hungry for an in-depth analysis on the items in the chart, but frustratingly (in the 10-ish lectures I've watched, he always spends like 5 minutes on it and moves on).
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And yet, that's the bit that's most pertinent to what I do (best practices etc.) so yes, I too am curious.

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The main thrust of the chart is that we educated Westerners aren't really so different from the tribal boy. We have proximal cues that result in different norms in the norm box. And the moral norms that the tribal boy has (ie. don't hit other people, don't kill other people) are fundamentally similar to norm conventions about women getting water and men hunting.
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Quite.

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Stich argues moral nihilism. He doesn't identify as a moral nihilist. He calls himself a moral skeptic. He even said that he's open to the possibility of moral objectivism (and presents a few bits of evidence in favor of it), but he ultimately feels that the arguments for nihilism are very strong.
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And this is the main reason for having different words for the different parts of the system.  Yes, nihilism is correct.  Yes, moral-alerts (intuitions) happen.  Yes, societies have developed ethics (standards of right/wrong).  Yes, individuals jump between different justifications (sometimes in the same sentence).

Would you mind walking me through your diagram? Does the tribal boy example fit it? Because then (since I already described that example) we could explore parallels. (It's cool if it doesn't work. Any summary/description of how your chart works is fine.)

Okey dokey.

First, clarification with terminology/definitions:

A moral vs. morality

Morality
Noun. Principles concerning the distinction between right and wrong or good and bad behaviour.
Synonyms: ethics, rights and wrongs, correctness, ethicality
More: a particular system of values and principles of conduct.

I say definitions (plural) rather than definition (singular) because the above contains a number of elements:
- Principles
- "Ethics" as a synonym
- A system
- Values
- Conduct / behaviour.

Not specifically stated but implied are also... 'judgment' and 'measurement'.

This broadness / fuzziness / polysemantics is possibly why there is so much disagreement on the topic.

Incidentally, in my years as Mod on TTA with the occasional excursion here to see what troll-problems might be coming our way, the main difference between the two fora seemed to be that TTA inclined to morals as subjective and AF leaned to objective.

This then is my (draft) definition of morality: 
An evolved, human governance / continuity management system. 
This system is an evolved extension (in the cognitive domain) of the pre-human immune system and limbic system and requires an ethical baseline (requiring memory), emotion-based thresholds, event-detection (e.g. deception detectors; a conscience) and reasoning. It is enabled / influenced by chemical inhibitors and inducers and social constraints and drivers.

So that was morality. And now for 'a moral'.

To Google again:

noun
1.
a lesson that can be derived from a story or experience.
"the moral of this story was that one must see the beauty in what one has"
synonyms: lesson, message, meaning, significance, signification, import, point, precept, teaching
"the moral of the story"
2.
standards of behaviour; principles of right and wrong.
"the corruption of public morals"
synonyms: moral code, code of ethics, moral standards, moral values, principles, principles of right and wrong, rules of conduct, standards/principles of behaviour, standards, morality, sense of morality, scruples, ideals
"he has no morals and cannot be trusted"

The first one, above, is fine. Indeed, more than fine. I think it's the real thing. In the same way that our immune system is storing data regarding shit that happens biologically (events, incidents, problems) and what fixes were attempted and which ones worked, our morality system is storing data regarding shit that happens socially. The latter can be vicarious (a story) or personal (experience).

I'm less happy with the second definition because of its overlap with the 'morality' definition, and prefer to separate the two parts.


Let's use 'ethics' for the 'standards of behaviour' and leave 'moral' as the first part. This removes part of the polysemantics issue.  

This would now mean that we can say that "morality is about how you live with yourself whereas ethics is about how you live with others".
Although having said that, ethics (unlike morals which can be reserved for the individual) is applicable at both the individual level and the community/organisational level.

Which leads nicely to the basis of my diagram.  It's just a little something I put together based on a definition of 'culture' used in the best practice manuals:

Culture is simply the aggregate of individuals' behaviours.
Organisational Ethics determine the values by which the society (or enterprise) want to live (its code).
Individual Ethics are determined by each person’s personal values/principles and are dependent to some extent on external factors not always under the group's/society's control.
Individual Behaviours which collectively determine the culture of the society are dependent upon both organisational and individual ethics.

So I'm making a distinction between morality (the biologically evolved system for detecting significant 'moral' events) and ethics (the baseline of beliefs/rightness) with which an individual or group identifies.

Thus, culture acts as both an enabler and/or a constraint on both the developing and developed (maturing and mature) individual depending on how you look at it. 

And that's the main thrust of the flow diagram's boxes and yellow lines.  The green lines relate to the moral (or non-moral) alerts (see the Event Management diagram above).

The left side is a depiction of an individual.  I have a slide for 'all of evolution on a page' but I'm still working on a 1-pager for the development of an individual (to include the architecture, customisation and configuration of body schema, extended body schema, mind schema and extended mind schema). The GMO/OMG bit will be a separate diagram that help to explain why Virtue Ethics, Consequentialism, Duty Ethics etc. are all correct when seen as thinking tools rather than One System To Rule Them All.

So, to the tribal boy.  
(I'm imagining a MAGA hat kinda tribal but I guess that post-dates Stich's lecture)

Architecture has a couple of facets:
- The DNA building blocks
- The arrays that map e.g. actors and roles (e.g. men/women and food provider/nurturer).
Customisation is the early-life formation of the boy's principles and beliefs very much influenced by the environment in which he grows incl. phobias.  It's the development of the child's Baseline Comfort Zone (and discomfort, for that matter).
Configuration would include the plastic wiring of his neurons and perhaps his ability to get over the fear of tarantula or getting used to the idea that women can hunt.

So, Organisational Ethics would be the 'proximal cues' on Stich's diagram.

First sight of a woman hunter would be observation of someone else's Individual Behaviour (see pale purple rhomboid) that triggers an alert (see Event Management diagram).  

Was that enough of an explanation or did I miss something?