RE: Thinking the unthinkable: taboos and transhumanism

From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Sun Aug 10 2003 - 00:28:52 MDT

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    Rafal wrote

    > [See]the article (" Tetlock, P.E., Kristel, O., Elson,
    > B.,Green, M., and Lerner, J (final revision process/2000).
    > The psychology of the unthinkable: Taboo trade-offs,
    > forbidden base rates, and heretical counterfactuals.
    > Journal of Personality and Social Psychology")
    >
    > ### http://www.psy.ohio-state.edu/social/tetlock/rsch2.htm, top of page.

    (You have to log in to see the whole paper. Enter
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    for the password.

    Here are the first few paragraphs after the abstract. If
    this doesn't acidly comment on our recent Robert-centered
    discussion, I don't know what does.

      The Psychology of the Unthinkable:
      Taboo Trade-Offs, Forbidden Base Rates, and Heretical Counterfactuals

      Philip E. Tetlock, Orie V. Kristel, S. Beth Elson, Melanie C. Green, and
      Jennifer Lerner. The Ohio State University and Carnegie Mellon University

        Research on social cognition ultimately rests on functionalist
        assumptions about what people are trying to accomplish when they
        judge events or make choices. The most influential of these
        assumptions have been the intuitive scientist and the intuitive
        economist. The former tradition depicts people whose central
        objective is to understand underlying patterns of causality, thereby
        conferring some advantage in anticipating life-enhancing or
        threatening events (cf. Kelley, 1967). The latter tradition depicts
        people as decision-makers whose overriding goal is to select
        utility-maximizing options from available choice sets (Becker, 1981;
        Kahneman & Tversky, 1979). Although theorists often disagree sharply
        over how well people live up to the high professional ideals of
        science or economics (Mellers, Schwartz, & Cooke, 1998), theorists
        agree in placing a normative premium on intellectual flexibility and
        agility. Good intuitive scientists and economists look for the most
        useful cues in the environment for generating accurate predictions
        and making satisfying decisions and quickly abandon hypotheses that
        do not "pan out." Rigidity is maladaptive within both frameworks.

        This article explores the empirical implications of an
        under-explored starting point for inquiry: the notion that, in many
        contexts, people are striving to achieve neither epistemic nor
        utilitarian goals, but rather--as prominent historical sociologists
        have argued (Bell, 1974)--are struggling to protect sacred values
        from secular encroachments by increasingly powerful societal trends
        toward market capitalism (and the attendant pressure to render
        everything fungible) and scientific naturalism (and the attendant
        pressure to pursue inquiry wherever it logically leads).
        
        A sacred value can be defined as any value that a moral community
        implicitly or explicitly treats as possessing infinite or
        transcendental significance that precludes comparisons, trade-offs,
        or indeed any other mingling with bounded or secular values. When
        sacred values are under assault, the apposite functionalist metaphor
        quickly becomes the intuitive moralist/theologian. Sacred values
        are often ultimately religious in character but they need not have
        divine sanction (hence our hybrid designation of the functionalist
        metaphor as moralist/theologian). Sacred values can range from
        fundamentalists' faith in God to the liberal/social democratic dogma
        of racial equality to the radical libertarian commitment to the
        autonomy of the individual. Although the theoretical framework
        proposed here does not differentiate sacred values with or without
        divine mandate, many writers -- from Samuel Johnson to Fyodor
        Dostoyevsky to T.S. Eliot -- have drawn sharp distinctions here, and
        have even suggested that only sacred values anchored in faith in God
        can sustain genuine moral outrage and cleansing. To paraphrase
        Dostoyevsky, if there were no God, no act -- not even cannibalism --
        would be forbidden. which depicts people engaged in a continual
        struggle to protect their private selves and public identities from
        moral contamination by impure thoughts and deeds (Belk et al.,
        1989).
        
        The most emphatic ways to distance oneself from normative
        transgressions are by: (1) expressing moral outrage---a composite
        psychological state that subsumes cognitive reactions (harsh
        character attributions to those who endorse the proscribed thoughts
        and even to those who do not endorse, but do tolerate, this way of
        thinking in others), affective reactions (anger and contempt for
        those who endorse the proscribed thoughts), and behavioral reactions
        (support for ostracizing and punishing deviant thinkers); (2)
        engaging in moral cleansing that reaffirms core values and loyalties
        by acting in ways that shore up those aspects of the moral order
        that have been undercut by the transgression. Within this
        framework, rigidity, accompanied by righteous indignation and by
        blanket refusal even to contemplate certain thoughts, can be
        commendable -- indeed, it is essential for resolutely reasserting
        the identification of self with the collective moral order (cf.
        Durkheim, 1925/1976). What looks irrationally obdurate within the
        intuitive-scientist and economist research programs can often be
        plausibly construed as the principled defense of sacred values
        within the moralist/theologian research program (Tetlock, 1999).

        This article identifies three types of normative proscriptions--
        taboo trade-offs, forbidden base rates, and heretical
        counterfactuals--that people consciously or unconsciously impose on
        cognitive processes that are fundamental to rationality in the
        intuitive scientist and economist traditions. Here we consider each
        proscription in turn.

    Lee



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