Purity and Defilement: Part 11, Warrants, Dumbfounding and Moralization

A few week ago you'll recall that I discussed four "moral situations" from a study conducted by Haidt, Koller & Dias (1993):

1) A woman is cleaning out her closet, and she finds her old American flag. She doesn’t want the flag anymore, so she cuts it up into pieces and uses the rags to clean her bathroom.

2) A family’s dog was killed by a car in front of their house. They had heard that dog meat was delicious, so they cut up the dog’s body and cooked it and ate it for dinner.

3) A brother and sister like to kiss each other on the mouth. When nobody is around, they find a secret hiding place and kiss each other on the mouth.

4) A man goes to the supermarket once a week and buys a dead chicken. But before cooking the chicken, he has sexual intercourse with it. Then he thoroughly cooks it and eats it.

In the study Haidt et al. asked subjects if they felt anything wrong in these scenarios The answer was a strong yes. Participants had very clear feelings that a moral principle was being violated in each of these four scenarios.

And yet, when asked by the researchers to provide the exact principle being violated in a given scenario, the participants struggled to produce an answer. The participants had strong judgments of wrongness but had difficulty describing the reasons behind their feelings.

Haidt et al. calls this phenomenon moral dumbfounding. Moral dumbfounding occurs when we have a feeling of wrongness but have difficulty articulating coherent moral warrants for our feelings and judgments. The phenomenon of moral dumbfounding suggests that a great deal of moral judgment is affective and emotional rather than cognitive and rational.

The moral dumbfounding research is important for our purposes because it is associated with disgust psychology. In the last post we discussed how disgust psychology is involved with attributions of holiness, sacredness and divinity. Our focus was on the notion of dirt--taboo mixing--where the holy is desecrated by contact with the profane. This activates a contamination logic that monitors boundaries and creates spaces of quarantine, a Holy of Holies in the midst of a sinful world.

In that discussion we also noted that the movement of desecration is downward. Something high and heavenly is "brought down." This suggests that as we move through life we move up and down through a vertical dimension, sorting things into higher or lower categories and moving closer to or farther from the divine. Judgments of propriety, sanctity, and holiness, the feelings of spiritual elevation and decent, monitor this vertical dimension warning of situations when the "high" and the "low" are in danger of coming into contact.

Movement along this vertical dimension is captured by the moral foundation of Purity/Sanctity in Haidt and Graham's research. A related analysis is Richard Shweder's notion of three moral grammars called autonomy, community, and divinity:

1) Ethic of Autonomy

Violations to autonomy and agency. Limitations of freedom or violations of rights. Core values are freedom, choice, harm, individualism, and rights.

2) Ethic of Community

Failures of duty and solidarity with the group. Core values are duty, role-obligation, respect, loyalty, preservation of community, compliance with authority and norms.

3) Ethic of Divinity

Disrespect for or degradation of the sacred found in God, human dignity or the Order of Creation. Core values are purity, sanctity, propriety and dignity.

As we noted in the last two posts, disgust psychology regulates the emotions associated with the ethic of divinity. For example, cross cultural research conducted by Rozin, Lowery, Imada and Haidt (1999) observed that disgust is uniquely associated with violations of the divinity ethic as opposed to autonomy and community violations. Specifically, violations of autonomy (e.g., your rights are violated) or community (e.g., someone fails to do their duty) are generally met with anger, indignation and scorn. Righteous indignation, in short, regulates most of the moral domain. However, violations of the divine are met with disgust rather than anger.

Why is this important? The answer goes back to Haidt's research on moral dumbfounding. You'll note, if you read back through the scenarios above, that the ethic of divinity is implicated in each scenario. The issues tend to revolve around degradation or a violation of the proper order of things. Thus, our feelings of wrongness in each case are closely aligned with feelings of revulsion, disgust and impropriety.

So why are we dumbfounded? We are dumbfounded because the ethic of divinity is driven by an emotional system, disgust psychology. This means that our ability to talk reasonably about the divine is horribly compromised. Take, for example, the situation I discussed in the last post: My use of the word "crap" from the pulpit during a sermon. Many people were offended. But why? The situation is similar to the moral dumbfounding scenarios. My action was deemed inappropriate and improper by some. Yet there were those, myself included, who felt no offense. We didn't experience the situation as "wrong," as a divinity violation. How, then, to reconcile the two viewpoints? Each group is working with a felt emotion and if those felt emotions are at odds there is little that can be done to foster mutual understanding. Nor can we provide warrants for which feeling is "in the right." Rightness and wrongness, in the divinity ethic, is the emotion. The emotion, the feeling of offense, is the moral warrant, the judge and the jury regarding a purity violation.

This is deeply problematic. It means that moral dumbfounding scales up to affect the community. This complicates how moral and spiritual adjudication is to be accomplished in the church. Two groups of people sit with different felt experiences and little by way of conversation or discussion can rescue the situation. This is the problem noted by Martha Nussbaum in her book Hiding from Humanity. In Hiding Nussbaum discusses why disgust, unlike anger, cannot form the basis of law:

Because the notion of harm or damage lies at the core of anger's cognitive content, it is clear that it rests on reasoning that can be publicly articulated and publicly shaped. Damages and harms are a central part of what any public culture, and in any system of law, must deal with; they are therefore a staple of public persuasion and public argument...anger (and nonanger) may be misguided, but if all the relevant thoughts stand up to scrutiny, we can expect our friends and fellow citizens to share them and to share our anger...

Disgust is very different from anger...You can teach a young child to feel disgust at a substance--by strong parental reactions and other forms of psychological influence. Imagine, however, trying to convince someone who is not disgusted by a bat that bats are in fact disgusting. There are no publicly articulable reasons to be given that would make the dialogue a real piece of persuasion. All you could do would be to depict at some length the alleged properties of bats, trying to bring out some connection, some echo with what the interlocutor already finds disgusting: the wet greedy mouth, the rodentlike body. But if the person didn't find those things disgusting, that's that.

A similar analysis holds in the church. If the felt experiences of the divine (and, by definition, the profane) differs within the church then these groups will be at an impasse, literally dumbfounded by their inability to find common ground. One group finds the word "crap" intensely offensive. Others don't. And, as Nussbaum notes, that's that.

What I'm saying, in a strong form, is that if our experience of the divine is regulated by disgust psychology then our conversations about God, sin and holiness are being torpedoed at some deep level. A dumbfounding is occurring. Consequently, conversations about God are inherently difficult because our experience of the divine is being regulated by emotion rather than logic. I think people in the churches have always known this. I'm just trying to illuminate the mechanics or, rather, identifying the monkeywrench that keeps jamming up the gears.

But the problems only begin here. It get much worse. In a prior post we discussed the promiscuity of disgust, how a wide variety of stimuli can elicit disgust reactions. This is often seen in what is called moralization. For example, you might find smoking to be a "disgusting habit." Thus, when you see someone smoking you can't help but experience slight feelings of disgust, revulsion, contempt or superiority toward the person smoking. Moralization occurs when these feelings of mild disgust or disapproval attach to behaviors or social issues. Notoriously, these feelings wax and wane. What was moralized in one generation is no longer a problem for this generation. And visa versa. Steven Pinker, in his book The Blank Slate, offers the following list of things that have become moralized in our generation (with some additions/edits of my own)

advertising to children - automobile safety - Barbie dolls - "big box" chain stores - cheesecake photos - clothing from Third World factories - consumer product safety - corporate-owned farms - defense-funded research - disposable diapers - disposable packaging - ethnic jokes - executive salaries - fast food - flirtation in the workplace - food additives - fur - hydroelectric dams - IQ tests - logging - mining - nuclear power - oil drilling - owning certain stocks - poultry farms - public holidays (e.g., MLK day) - research on stem cells - research on breast cancer - spanking - suburbia ("sprawl") - sugar - tax cuts - big government - toy guns - violence on television - weight of fashion models

Conversely, there are many behaviors that that are becoming amoralized in relation to the feelings of previous generations. As examples Pinker lists divorce, illegitimacy, working motherhood, marijuana use, homosexuality, masturbation, sodomy, oral sex, atheism, and the practice of non-Western culture.

To be sure, may of the issues listed above involve issues of harm, danger and fairness. But we are less interested in the moral issues involved in a particular behavior than in the way a particular issue takes on a moral tone or feel. Of particular interest is how that moral tone or feel attaches to people who engage in these moralized activities. Specifically, it feels to us that these people move lower on the divinity dimension. The people come to represent moral and spiritual contaminants. As we noted above, if you moralize smoking it is hard to respect smokers. Mild feelings of disgust and contempt begin to emerge.

This, then, is the real problem with disgust. It is not simply that disgust psychology greatly complicates moral reasoning due to emotionally driven magical thinking. It is, rather, that disgust properties become attached to the people engaging in what we perceive to be immoral actions. As Nussbaum writes,

If disgust is problematic in principle, we have all the more reason to regard it with suspicion when we observe that it has throughout history been used as a powerful weapon in social efforts to exclude certain groups and persons...[disgust] often doesn't stop at feces, cockroaches, and slimy animals. We need a group of humans to bound ourselves against, who will come to exemplify the boundary between the truly human and the basely animal.

To summarize the last ten posts, we have been approaching the events in Matthew 9 from the stance of morality. We've discussed disgust psychology, the magical thinking involved in contamination appraisals and the entailments of purity metaphors. We've discussed how notions of sin and holiness are regulated by disgust psychology and, thus, create communal dumbfounding. And yet all this isn't the most disturbing aspect of Matthew 9. The problem of Matthew 9 isn't in the moral reasoning of the Pharisees, that they shouldn't have framed the situation using a purity metaphor. No, the real problem in Matthew 9 is that the Pharisees saw human beings as vectors of contamination and pollution.

In the coming posts we will examine these social forms of pollution.