Tuesday, September 13, 2005

on social norms.

Taking a break from Katrina and all things fetus-related, let's get down to the real business of blogs: pretentious navel-gazing.

In college I came up with a certain particularly complex philosophical theory, which I intended to use as a foundation for exploring the human moral capacity. I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately: the model I came up with for human moral processing is essentially a function machine where we all have objective inputs [the man hits the girl], and they’re run through a subjective set of norms and experiences in order to create a fully subjective moral determination [it is wrong that the man hit the girl], nuanced to whichever social norms we acknowledge. The model is nothing new - it's a finely tweaked ripoff of Hume - but what I find really interesting is the hierarchy of the social norms themselves.

The theory and norm sequence is roughly: our human capacity for abstract thought is an exaptive trait. We weren’t intentionally endowed with any sort of “soul” or “mind” which differs from our “brain” – we just happen to have evolved a certain awareness (perhaps as a side effect of our proportionately overlarge brains, which evolved for whatever phenotypic reason) that is capable of that most unique trait: self-awareness. From our self-awareness, we became able to judge ourselves, as individuals, in terms of how we viewed others’ behavior. We noted patterns, causes and effects on both individuals and society at large, and from that we established a highly complex (and highly subjective) set of social norms, which fall into three rather specific categories. In increasing order of sophistication: manners, morals, and laws.

Most social norms, those whose violations would be notable but not earth-shattering, fall under “manners” – proper etiquette, consideration for others, etc. We don’t feel the need to attribute their existence to any source greater than society itself. They evolve constantly, and we adapt quickly to their change. Why do we follow them? Why not? We just do. What would the neighbors think if we didn’t? If we violate these norms, our friends shun us when we run into them at the grocery store, or we receive scornful looks from our mothers. We can be forgiven, but our forgiveness comes at the whim of others.

The other two categories of social norms are (at least to the mass mind) immutable, and thus they require attribution to a higher power in order for self-obsessed individuals to respond the force of their dictates. The most entrenched and fundamental social norms are morals, which we attribute variously to a deity or to the more abstract (but still, in its way, godlike) “human nature.” Life is to be valued. Don’t harm others unnecessarily. Keep your promises. Morals underscore grand things: religion, war, and kings. If you act immorally, your punishment is in kind: bad karma, damnation. You can be forgiven through prayer, or by hoping your other good deeds will balance out the scale at the end of the day. Forgiveness is out of our hands.

And then there’s the third and final kind of social norm, laws: codified, organized and systematically enforced. Their authority comes from the power we grant to the government (Hobbes and the rest of them cover that whole transaction exhaustively, and I don’t really feel the need to take sides in the eternal debate over whether we need the social contract because man is inherently good or because he is inherently evil), and their violation results in an earthly penance: imprisonment, levied fines, or a particularly specified act of violence. We are forgiven once our penance is served, though laws often overlap with morals and manners and we can feel their weight long after we’re done paying the legal price.

Of the three, I think laws are the most interesting because they're the most psychologically irrational. Manners make sense on a primal level - conformity is valued when it comes to pairing off and mating, and it's a way to tell who's "in" and who's "out." And morals work too - while the acknowledgment of a greater power might be seen as irrational by some, it's a fairly straightforward macrocosm of parental rulemaking, which - like manners - we can also trace through a memetic evolution: children whose parents laid out immutable rules for them were less likely to be injured or die in the course of a day's playing out by the caves. When you're a kid and you ask your parents why you have to abide by a certain rule, they say "because I said so," and up until a certain age you truly do believe that they are infallible. Morals are the great "beacuse I said so": you can trace their justification back to a certain point, but then you hit what certain of us like to call "The God Block," which is: "because."

But what's the rationalization for codified laws? No one ascribes immutable authority to their governments (on the contrary: the legal systems generally acknowledged to be the "best" are ones who contain rules for their own modification), and our impetus for following laws seems to be a combination of fear of punishment if we don't (deterrance), and a psychological confusion of laws with morals (we just do what they say, we don't question why). It's so irrational - social contract theory doesn't actually apply to the real world, but laws do - that it must be highly sophisticated. I just can't seem to figure out how.

And that's why I want to go to law school. (?)

ETA: I forgot one of the most important things about laws as a form of social norms, and perhaps this is the answer to my question about sophistication. Basically, laws reflect behaviors that we'd like everyone to conform to, but which for some reason either aren't intuited in the same way that manners are, or are unintuitively specific manifestations of morals. We need to codify them in order to have a reference for our "ideal" societal structure, and systemic punishment logically follows from that codification. The question then becomes why we overextend our social expectations beyond that which we can intuit - therein lies the sophistication.

on social norms

Taking a break from Katrina and all things fetus-related, let's get down to the real business of blogs: pretentious navel-gazing.

In college I came up with a certain particularly complex philosophical theory, which I intended to use as a foundation for exploring the human moral capacity. I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately: the model I came up with for human moral processing is essentially a function machine where we all have objective inputs [the man hits the girl], and they’re run through a subjective set of norms and experiences in order to create a fully subjective moral determination [it is wrong that the man hit the girl], nuanced to whichever social norms we acknowledge. The model is nothing new - it's a finely tweaked ripoff of Hume - but what I find really interesting is the hierarchy of the social norms themselves.

The theory and norm sequence is roughly: our human capacity for abstract thought is an exaptive trait. We weren’t intentionally endowed with any sort of “soul” or “mind” which differs from our “brain” – we just happen to have evolved a certain awareness (perhaps as a side effect of our proportionately overlarge brains, which evolved for whatever phenotypic reason) that is capable of that most unique trait: self-awareness. From our self-awareness, we became able to judge ourselves, as individuals, in terms of how we viewed others’ behavior. We noted patterns, causes and effects on both individuals and society at large, and from that we established a highly complex (and highly subjective) set of social norms, which fall into three rather specific categories. In increasing order of sophistication: manners, morals, and laws.

Most social norms, those whose violations would be notable but not earth-shattering, fall under “manners” – proper etiquette, consideration for others, etc. We don’t feel the need to attribute their existence to any source greater than society itself. They evolve constantly, and we adapt quickly to their change. Why do we follow them? Why not? We just do. What would the neighbors think if we didn’t? If we violate these norms, our friends shun us when we run into them at the grocery store, or we receive scornful looks from our mothers. We can be forgiven, but our forgiveness comes at the whim of others.

The other two categories of social norms are (at least to the mass mind) immutable, and thus they require attribution to a higher power in order for self-obsessed individuals to respond the force of their dictates. The most entrenched and fundamental social norms are morals, which we attribute variously to a deity or to the more abstract (but still, in its way, godlike) “human nature.” Life is to be valued. Don’t harm others unnecessarily. Keep your promises. Morals underscore grand things: religion, war, and kings. If you act immorally, your punishment is in kind: bad karma, damnation. You can be forgiven through prayer, or by hoping your other good deeds will balance out the scale at the end of the day. Forgiveness is out of our hands.

And then there’s the third and final kind of social norm, laws: codified, organized and systematically enforced. Their authority comes from the power we grant to the government (Hobbes and the rest of them cover that whole transaction exhaustively, and I don’t really feel the need to take sides in the eternal debate over whether we need the social contract because man is inherently good or because he is inherently evil), and their violation results in an earthly penance: imprisonment, levied fines, or a particularly specified act of violence. We are forgiven once our penance is served, though laws often overlap with morals and manners and we can feel their weight long after we’re done paying the legal price.

Of the three, I think laws are the most interesting because they're the most psychologically irrational. Manners make sense on a primal level - conformity is valued when it comes to pairing off and mating, and it's a way to tell who's "in" and who's "out." And morals work too - while the acknowledgment of a greater power might be seen as irrational by some, it's a fairly straightforward macrocosm of parental rulemaking, which - like manners - we can also trace through a memetic evolution: children whose parents laid out immutable rules for them were less likely to be injured or die in the course of a day's playing out by the caves. When you're a kid and you ask your parents why you have to abide by a certain rule, they say "because I said so," and up until a certain age you truly do believe that they are infallible. Morals are the great "beacuse I said so": you can trace their justification back to a certain point, but then you hit what certain of us like to call "The God Block," which is: "because."

But what's the rationalization for codified laws? No one ascribes immutable authority to their governments (on the contrary: the legal systems generally acknowledged to be the "best" are ones who contain rules for their own modification), and our impetus for following laws seems to be a combination of fear of punishment if we don't (deterrance), and a psychological confusion of laws with morals (we just do what they say, we don't question why). It's so irrational - social contract theory doesn't actually apply to the real world, but laws do - that it must be highly sophisticated. I just can't seem to figure out how.

And that's why I want to go to law school. (?)

ETA: I forgot one of the most important things about laws as a form of social norms, and perhaps this is the answer to my question about sophistication. Basically, laws reflect behaviors that we'd like everyone to conform to, but which for some reason either aren't intuited in the same way that manners are, or are unintuitively specific manifestations of morals. We need to codify them in order to have a reference for our "ideal" societal structure, and systemic punishment logically follows from that codification. The question then becomes why we overextend our social expectations beyond that which we can intuit - therein lies the sophistication.