Today we talked a bit about the role that vivid examples play in making general properties into elicitors of attitudes.
Introspecting the moral issues I'm most passionate about, I find that in some cases, indeed, there are vivid examples which prompt those beliefs (or at least maintain them in a very strong fashion). However, I think it should also be emphasized that vivid examples are not the whole story on what influences us to have strong moral attitudes towards this or that property. Consider an example:
When I was very young I was at a park with my parents. There were not a lot of people around. I was throwing a few rocks as high up in the air and as far as I could manage. At one point I turned around and threw one and, to my horror, there was another child standing in the 'field of fire.' As the rock fell to the ground, it turns out that it harmlessly landed 10-20 yards away. Neither my parents nor the child (nor anyone else, as far as I could tell) noticed. However, the terror and guilt I felt was influential on me. I don't know exactly how I conceptualized it then, but basically I concluded that your actions can have serious consequences. I remember thinking that I could have killed the child with the rock.
In the example above, there are certainly powerful emotions at work, and the event is vivid in my mind even today recalling it. However, it does not represent a vivid example of a certain type of action having ill consequences for fitness, nor is it a vivid example of brutality, shirking, etc. No terrible consequence was actualized. The event was influential because I could imagine the bad consequences which I could have easily caused (given my carelessness). The role vivid examples play need not be a linking up between event types (with certain general properties) and innate types of actions we might be predisposed to be sensitive to. Nor need it be a linking up of an event type and ill consequences more generally. The connection between carelessness and bad consequences wasn't established by a vivid example alone, but by an emotionally charge event and my imagination of possible bad consequences.
Other values I hold passionately are not even prompted by particular events (as best as I can tell), but are the result of ideological positions I've adopted. While some free-market conservatives may be rich and want to keep their money, and some socialists may be poor and want entitlements, material conditions seem not to be enough to explain moral and political positions generally.
Both the above examples illustrate the limitations of the influence of vivid examples on the properties that come to elicit moral attitudes. Vivid events (even with appropriate innate predispositions) are not necessary for generating strong moral beliefs about events that instantiate certain properties. They may sometimes be influential, but are not necessary.
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I think you're absolutely right that vivid experiences aren't necessary. Things must be more complex than that. It was really a matter of considering whether there is a systematic influence, which might contribute to our genealogy of morals.
Your rock-throwing example is quite striking. I'm sure a lot could be learned from it about the development of moral attitudes, but I'm afraid I don't have much of interest to say. I am not certain it gives us a case relevant to the evaluation of the hypothesis about the role of vivid experiences in the development of moral generalism. It may be a case in which moral egoism emerged in a noticable way. I am not sure. It depends on what sort of disposition emerged:
bel [x involves placing people at risk of serious harm] --> con:x
or
bel [x involves MY placing people at risk of serious harm] --> con:x
(obviously these are extremely rough characterizations)
From your description it may be that what emerged was largely a disposition of the latter sort rather than the former sort. If so then it doesn't yet speak to the hypothesis about moral generalism, since it would be a case in which moral egoism emerged.
I did have a hypothesis about moral egoism, though I didn't really discuss it. The hypothesis was that which elicitors of moral egoism emerge in an individual is influenced by experiences which, in the evolutionary environment, were correlated with severe sanctions by one's community. This is not obviously so in the case of the rock-throwing incident. Perhaps it was so. For instance, perhaps it's relevant that you were aware that you had placed yourself at risk of very strong con-attitudes by many people, including your parents and total strangers. That awareness is correlated with doing something which actually does place one at risk (i.e., we tend to have accurate views about it). Thus, perhaps that element of the experience contributed to the emergence of the disposition.
It is interesting that you say you experienced "terror" at the prospect of the rock hitting the kid. What exactly were you terrified about? In particular, to what extent were you terrified by the potential prospects for him and by what extent were you terrified by your own potential prospects? Here's a relevant thought-experiment: how terrified would you have been if a complete stranger had thrown the rock? or if it had fallen from a ledge? If you would have been less terrified, then perhaps the difference is due to the difference in the extent to which you were aware of yourself as facing grim prospects.
There is another hypothesis which seems to me very plausible. Presumably there was enough uniformity in norms in the evolutionary environment so that inflicting certain kinds of harms was correlated with strong sanctions in pretty much every social environment. For instance, causing serious bodily damage to a member of one's group who was minding their own business. Thus, your awareness that you might have behaved in that way might have been relevant to the emergence of the disposition. In effect, the suggestion is that we may have developed a tendency, upon coming to recognize that our behavior places us at great risk of harming someone in a certain sort of way, to become especially disfavorably disposed with respect to that sort of behavior.
If that's right, then the interesting question arises of what sort of behavior? It would make sense if what happens is that the elicitors which emerge are sensitive to certain gross features of the behavior, tending toward those features which are in our control and which would tend to be of a harm-causing sort. For instance, I can imagine that if I went through that experience, I might have developed an especially strong aversion to causing hard objects to move with great force into areas outside my visual field. I do in fact have such an aversion. Perhaps I had a similar experience.
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