morality

Photo by R/DV/RS, Flickr CC

Intimate depictions of human suffering often make headlines. When 12 young boys became stuck in a cave in Thailand for over two weeks, media across the globe dedicated extensive coverage to their precarious rescue. In an interview with Vox, sociologist Tim Recuber explains why so many people watch coverage of disasters. According to Recuber, the key to this puzzle is “empathetic hedonism.” Recuber explains,

“There’s a certain kind of pleasure in really feeling for someone else, even if those feeling are bad. That’s what that term is trying to name. In a culture that tries to venerate empathy, being able to say, ‘I saw that footage, it’s really horrible, I feel horrible for those kids’…it does mark you as a moral person…People get to demonstrate they have this ability.”

However, not all victims of disaster receive the same level of empathy. People generally feel more empathy towards people they can relate to:

“Empathy is really partial. We’re more inclined to be empathetic to people who we feel are like us. Identifiable victims, relatable victims. And oftentimes racial, class, and gender biases get in the way of empathetic identification. There are even studies that show that people viewing a person’s skin being pricked by a needle will have more of a [physiological] reaction when the skin is the same color as theirs.”

In his interview, Recuber also grapples with the ethics of such media consumption. What may be most important, he concludes, is to allow victims the agency to decide whether or not to be in the spotlight. Recuber finds no harm in caring about suffering kids, but cautions that privacy invasions can deepen trauma.

Dean Hochman, Flickr CC.
Dean Hochman, Flickr CC.

Amid presidential candidate debates and national conversations surrounding gun violence and police brutality, issues and positions are often framed as conservative versus liberal (and those are equated with Republican and Democrat, respectively). While we recognize that both parties have moral values that guide their beliefs and support of certain political agendas, a debate must necessarily leave some room for a change of heart. But how can you change an opponent’s mind?

Sociologist Robb Willer, one of the authors of a paper published in Personality and Social Psychology, is quoted in Quartz: “Morality can be a source of political division, a barrier to building bi-partisan support. But it can also be a bridge if you can connect your position to your audience’s deeply held moral convictions.” Make sure your foe knows the morals behind your position, and they’ll be more likely to give it a careful listen. After all, the rationale for changing their mind—making the moral choice—is already clear.

Does the "wrong" come in creating the secret or telling it? Photo by John Perivolaris via flickr.com. Click for original.
Does the “wrong” come in creating the secret or telling it? Photo by John Perivolaris via flickr.com. Click for original.

Philosopher Peter Ludlow, a faculty member at Northwestern University, writes in a recent post for “The Stone” blog on NYTimes.com that, instead of undermining systems and generally acting immorally, people like Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden took real risks to expose what Hannah Arendt famously called “the banality of systemic evil.” In a lengthy dissection, Ludlow looks at the leaks that so many have condemned and, noting that one of Aaron Swartz’s self-professed favorite books was the sociology text Moral Mazes, and finds an emerging extra-institutional morality across the cases. Ludlow concludes:

…if there are psychological motivations for whistleblowing, leaking and hacktivism, there are likewise psychological motivations for closing ranks with the power structure within a system — in this case a system in which corporate media plays an important role. Similarly it is possible that the system itself is sick, even though the actors within the organization are behaving in accord with organizational etiquette and respecting the internal bonds of trust.

Just as Hannah Arendt saw that the combined action of loyal managers can give rise to unspeakable systemic evil, so too generation W has seen that complicity within the surveillance state can give rise to evil as well — not the horrific evil that Eichmann’s bureaucratic efficiency brought us, but still an Orwellian future that must be avoided at all costs.

For more on weighing the costs and benefits of surveillance, be sure to check out “A Social Welfare Critique of Contemporary Crime Control” and pretty much all of the Community Page Cyborgology here on TSP. For more on moral ambiguity, consider Moral Mazes by Robert Jackall (updated and released in paperback by Oxford University Press in 2009) and Teaching TSP’s piece on the “Obedience to Authority” and the Milgram experiments.

At The Reason Rally 2012 in Washington, DC. Photo by makelessnoise via flickr.com.

Americans are extremely dubious about the integrity of atheists. In fact, an article by several of Minnesota’s own sociologists, “Atheists as Other,” found that atheists are the least trusted minority. Most Americans think that the absence of belief in the divine renders one prone to turpitude and without basis for morality.

According to Rohan Maitzen in a recent article from Salon, the remedy for this ethic-less reputation lies in the most unlikely of places, namely the semi-obscure novel Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe by famous atheist George Eliot. In contrast to Richard Dawkins’ and Christopher Hitchens’ confrontational stance toward religion, Eliot understood “religion as the form through which many people have, historically, expressed their best moral impulses.” She did not mind religiosity so long as it fostered feelings of sympathy and responsibility for human suffering.

At once a “stringent moralist and an unbeliever,” Eliot wove a tale of human suffering, loss, and redemption through the experiences of the title character, using the “affective power of fiction to convert us to faith, not in God, but in humanity.” Indeed, through the tale of Silas Marner and her own letters to her deeply religious family, Eliot poignantly makes the case for the morality of atheism, mainly because “in a material universe there are no rewards or punishments to come later.” Summing it up, Eliot explained to another writer,

It is a pang to me to witness the suffering of a fellow-being, and I feel his suffering the more acutely because he is mortal—because his life is so short, and I would have it, if possible, filled with happiness and not misery.