Righting and wronging

1 Creating and maintaining norms

TBC

2 Sacredness

TBC

3 Taboos

Taboos are powerful means of controlling some societal ill. Taboos are like garden variety social norms but fed on interhuman growth hormones. They have a proven track record in making some things utterly off-limits for most people most of the time. We like them because there is a good case that some things should indeed be as far off limits as possible. Rape and murder and other cases of extreme violence are ills that we can make a strong case for handling as taboo acts; If you did it, you did wrong and your claimed intention doesn’t matter.¹

Things that are nebulous, complicated and opaque are risky to taboo.

We want to be very certain that a blanket ban is a good idea on things we taboo, because if we are successful at making them taboo it will be hard to talk about them to make them un-taboo. Taboos, once set running, have their own momentum and find their own natural level, which may be more or less stringent than we were hoping.

We want them to encode rules that do not require heroic effort to abide by, for the vast majority of the population, or if they do, that effort is worth it. So making same-sex contact taboo makes us into hypocrites.

3.1 Taboo as finite resource

If we deploy taboos too frivolously, we might weaken all the taboos. Suppose I really want to stop jaywalking, so I attempt to foster an anti-jaywalking taboo. People who jaywalk by accident and suffer no ill effects might start to wonder if all the taboos are as over-certain as the jaywalking taboos.

4 Think of the children

See Think of the Children.

5 Incoming

Morality and other weapons—Aporia:

So what is morality for? Well, disagreement continues but I have argued, with Peter DeScioli, that human moral judgment is a way to choose sides. A conflict breaks out. Maybe your partner slams into another skier on the slope. You want to avoid being on the losing side of the conflict that is about to emerge, so you choose based on who did what—barrelling into another skier—rather than who you like most—your partner. By using actions to choose sides, people can avoid siding with someone who is about to be attacked by other third parties.

In short, no, moral judgment isn’t for cooperation. It’s for side-taking.

This account explains the puzzling fact that many moral rules don’t actually improve cooperation—prohibitions on everything from art to zoophilia are examples—and many rules, in fact, make things worse for entire communities, sometimes for generations.

• Haidt’s theory of moral foundations should probably go here
• Weaponized Sacredness
• The Scintillating But Ultimately Untrue Thought
• Overcoming Bias : We See The Sacred From Afar, To See It Together
• When explaining becomes a sin—by Tom Stafford file under taboos and Tetlock and compassion/comprehension
• Morality and other weapons - Aporia

6 References