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Sometimes I puzzle over why my political/moral intuitions are so different from those of other people who are intelligent and with whom I share many personal values.
These things burn much oxygen and energy in our lives and relationships. Someone close to me just spent a whole week avoiding certain topics because she was with people who become agitated over them. We all know that feeling.
Why is it like this? Why do I feel uneasy about just chatting with so many people about what's going on in the world?
Like many problems it has its roots in some mistaken assumptions.
It's not differences in personal values, evidence or intelligence
We all have different moral intuitions and most of us could probably articulate our personal 'values' in a way that feels and sounds coherent.
But differences in personal values aren't sufficient to explain how you can end up disagreeing.
Shared values can still end in ethical asymmetry.
It's naive to say that difference arises because of 'evidence'; that you have 'better' evidence or more evidence.
Evidence helps you to reason in a certain direction, but the reasoning still has to start from somewhere. Evidence justifies a position but doesn't produce it.
Some people think it's just about intelligence or 'thoughtfulness'. But this is to treat moral principles as both a priori (known by reason alone - thereby advantaging more intelligent people) and a posteriori (known through experience - ie evidence).
People with the same values, evidence and intelligence can still occupy incommensurate positions.
Unless you want to fall back on a theory of 'ethical intelligence' (ie some people are just ethically more/less 'intelligent' than others, independently of general intelligence) something else is going on.
Abortion and Gaza
I first noticed this tangle and confusion during the kerfuffle over abortion in the US a while back. And it has returned to trouble me with the Gaza situation.
It was when I began thinking that political (moral) disputes are often structured like this:
Adeimantus: "Blue is good !!!!"
Thrasymachus: "No !!!! Ab minor 7th is better"
Adeimantus: "Nonsense. I will show you Rayleigh scattering. There, that proves it"
Thrasymachus: "But what about the emergent waveform of A♭–C♭–E♭–G♭"
This goes on until each suspects that the other is stupid and/or corrupt.
Whether you're an anti-abortion activist publishing pictures of mashed up foetuses that were previously healthy and viable or calling the Gaza situation 'genocide' and demanding that Israel stops trying to disarm Hamas, the evidence you offer is not seen as evidence by certain others.
Mutilated baby corpses represent something awful in the world. But it's a mistake to assume that someone who is not persuaded to the same ethical standpoint about the actions that produce them is evil.
This is where paradigms matter more than intuitions, values and evidence.
We used to live within a paradigm of the divine and sacred. Now we live within a paradigm of reason and rights.
Being steeped in the paradigm of western liberal rights-based autonomy I never really noticed how this governs how I think about questions like this, not just what I think about them. But this determines what counts as evidence in arguments like abortion. If I were in the religious paradigm of the sacred and divine I'd see it all differently.
Paradigms shape your mind. One is not 'correct' and another 'wrong', as such. Although we're often wired to compete in the 'who's most intelligent or virtuous' olympics you don't get quantum physicists suggesting that Isaac Newton was stupid. They understand that they're operating in a different paradigm, rather than accessing objective truths.
All paradigms work like this.
The aborted healthy foetus does not have the status of evidence in the argument about women's bodily autonomy, for someone like me. The death has little-to-zero moral valence. It's just not how I think about it.
Similarly, the outcome I hope for Israel produces consequences which I cognitively process in the same way.
This is because I'm wired to perceive contextual trade-offs rather than moral absolutes.
Whether I reasoned myself into the configuration of a non-moral-realist or eventually 'discerned' it as a fundamental personal cognitive feature doesn't matter.
[I do remember being disappointed in the early Ethics classes at university that I wasn't going to get answers to fundamental questions about moral right and wrong. So, for what it's worth, it feels to me that I reasoned my way to consequentialism, after starting out on a quest for deontological proofs]
Fancy words like 'deontology' and 'consequentialism' matter a lot because they explain how ordinary people who may never have heard of them end up with intractable differences.
This is because they aren't just differences of opinion that could be ironed out with patience, respect and the right language patterns - they are mutually exclusive 'paradigms'. And that changes what represents the most productive reactions to a perspective you object to. In short, it makes listening more enlightening than talking.
Paradigms are under-recognised. Awareness of them is rare.
I spent most of my life thinking that political left and right was just a clash of values and that they were basically promoting fairness or selfishness as virtues.
It should be obvious that most of our political disputes are not because of differing values.
Adeimantus: "Fairness is good!!!"
Thrasymachus: "Yay! Let's hear it for fairness!!!"
Adeimantus: "We should create the conditions where the maximum number of people can be most comfortable"
Thrasymachus: "Love this - I'm totally onboard"
Adeimantus: "Great! Then we agree that we should take resources away from comfortable people and give them to people in need"
Thrasymachus: "Er, no. You said that fairness is good and taking resources away from people isn't fair"
Adeimantus: "Selfish bastard!"
The reason that it is not obvious is because they manifest as exchanges of thought between different paradigms.
In the case of Israel's offensive on Gaza here's the way it's typically perceived from within the paradigms that say it's evil (those who call it genocide) or justified (people like me).
This is from the perspective of deontology and consequentialism.
The deontological paradigm features universal moral principles from which flow rights and rules. Moral focus is also typically on the concept of a 'victim'.
Things like the sanctity of life and prohibitions against collective punishment make Israel's actions intrinsically wrong, no matter the goal. And the number of victims makes it a slam dunk for the deontologist.
In the consequentialist paradigm (which I inhabit) whatever prevents the annihilation of Israel or future pogroms like October 7 is justified.
I've come to think about WW2 in this context. We (the Allies) killed many more Germans than we needed to in securing decisive victory. And the Americans saved countless Japanese lives (let alone US servicemen) by going nuclear on civilians, so that they wouldn't fight to the death for every inch of their home turf. This was better than not killing up to 600,000 German civilians from the air or not killing up to 300,000 Japanese civilians. That's consequentialism.
In deontological terms Nagasaki and Hiroshima were morally unjustifiable and Germany was long past any chance of prevailing when we really really went to town on carpet-bombing them to 'de-house' the population. So that was morally wrong too.
From the consequentialist perspective, the outcome of all that killing of non-combatants was two de-fanged and fantastic countries most of us admire. Something I hope for today, in the Middle East.
The clash of paradigms here is between the moral absolutist position that certain things must never be done. For example, inevitably killing many non-combatants and destroying civilian infrastructure. And a contextual trade-off - allowing for whatever maximises benefit for everyone in the long run.
People like me include harm to Palestinian Arabs in this calculation, given Hamas's strategy of maximising civilian casualties and the asymmetry of a conflict in which one side regularly proclaims that it loves death more than the other side loves life.
Those who are aghast at Israel's relentless pounding of an inferior enemy's territory and people see someone like me as morally corrupt or confused and I see those who think enough is enough as morally corrupt or confused in expecting Israeli people to live under permanent threat of annihilation.
The naive assumption that each side makes is that evidence might be able to sway the other. But the view from our respective paradigms means that much of the evidence produced by the other is not evidence at all.
This is where paradigms get really interesting.
The same pool of information may be available to everyone but the paradigmatic lens you see it through determines what counts as evidence.
Evidence-based arguments become endlessly recursive for this reason.
Adeimantus: "Look at that hospital the IAF bombed"
Thrasymachus: "Look at that tunnel full of rockets under it"
Adeimantus: "But they're fighting for their future"
Thrasymachus: "They were given billions for their future and invested it in tunnels and rockets"
Adeimantus: "What about the Nakba?"
Thrasymachus: "What about the preemptive attack by five neighbours that caused it?"
Adeimantus: "Look - Gaza has been like a starving prison camp for decades"
Thrasymachus: "How many prison camps double in population from breeding alone"
Adeimantus: "The IDF kills civilians who are surrendering"
Thrasymachus: "Yes, when fighters hide among them and start shooting"
Adeimantus: "Look how the country is on stolen land"
Thrasymachus: "Name me a country that isn't"
Everyone has the evidence to support their intuitions. None of it looks like evidence to the other side.
Someone publishes the image of an aborted previously healthy, viable foetus with its head crushed and expects me to see this as evidence that abortion is evil and wrong. What I see is something awful. What I do not see is evidence for there proposition.
A paradigm determines what counts as evidence to determine truth values.
A paradigm of any kind is like a pair of glasses that filter out some things and make others more apparent. Except that you don't even know that you're wearing glasses.
At best (with a huge expenditure of cognitive energy) you maybe understand that you're looking at the world through the glasses but most of the time you're only really looking at the glasses.
That's why someone else sees a plucky freedom fighter and I see a psychopathic death cult member. Same evidence - an underdog with a gun - different paradigmatic glasses.
Paradigms change the world
One of the most famous examples of differing paradigms is between classical and quantum physics.
For a long time we assumed that all objects have definite positions and velocities at all times, making the universe deterministic. Now we think that everything is probabilistic, so that there's a possibility that some of my protons are in your room right now.
Even the fact of you reading this proves the validity of the quantum physics paradigm (go look up how many parts of the device you're looking at only exist because of quantum mechanics).
Moving away from the assumption of a sacred order rooted in divine law toward individual autonomy and rights-based liberalism was another paradigm shift, which explains why it's so hard to understand strongly religious people and why all the arguments for atheism are paradigm-dependent and therefore tend not to have enough crossover to persuade the faithful - and vice versa.
People are unmoved by arguments from outside their paradigm because your own paradigm seems so obvious that everything outside it literally makes no sense.
So what? My paradigm is the right one and everyone else is still wrong
That's one possible approach to differing perspectives. It seems naive, uninteresting and unproductive.
Simple awareness of these ethical structures is possibly helpful in reducing personal agitation and smoothing out situations where self-censoring seems preferable to honesty.
Just understanding that people aren't necessarily stupid, bad or even strictly mistaken when they think things that yank your chain can cast them in a different light.
If ultra-conservatives on abortion understood that liberals aren't heartless and evil because a once-healthy baby's caved-in head doesn't move them to be against termination, the sum of bad feeling in the world would be reduced.
Accepting that values are downstream from something bigger and difficult to even notice, the sum of negative moral judgement would be reduced.
Learning about the paradigmatic frames we all occupy would encourage more respect and understanding between conflicting views.
Clearly, this doesn't happen often and soon I’ll explore why some personality types are drawn to moral absolutism as opposed to equanimity with ambiguity and uncertainty.
Thank you, that was interesting, I’d never considered the different paradigms argument. Can you suggest any resources to learn more about the range of different paradigms?