Morality, Rationality, Humanity, Politics.

[Rorschach]

Ross Gittins has been reading. I'm not sure i agree with his conclusions or those of the writer of his latest "good read". I am pretty certain, it is much more complex and simpler than the theory described here though.

How intuitive morality has challenged the rationalists
October 3, 2012
Ross Gittins
The Sydney Morning Herald's Economics Editor

Paul Keating still quotes his early mentor, Jack Lang: ''In the race of life, always back self-interest - at least you know it's trying''. This may be why, as treasurer, Keating so readily embraced economic rationalism. The economists' working model assumes the self-interest of the individual is the sole force that makes the world turn.

Fortunately, the latest research tells us it's not that simple.

I can't go on a sight-seeing holiday without taking a few good books for a little intellectual sustenance at the end of the day. One book I took this time was a ripper, The Righteous Mind: Why good people are divided by politics and religion, by Jonathan Haidt, a moral psychologist at the University of Virginia.

Haidt (pronounced Height) says decades of research by political scientists have concluded that self-interest is a weak predictor of voters' policy preferences.

Why? Because people care about the groups they belong to - whether they be racial, regional, religious or political. They seem to be asking themselves not ''what's in it for me?'' but ''what's in it for my group?''. Political opinions function as ''badges of social membership''.

Whereas the old view was that natural selection had caused us to evolve into self-seeking competitors, Haidt argues we're more accurately thought of as ''homo duplex'' - a creature who exists at two levels: as an individual and as part of the larger society.

Human nature is mostly selfish: our minds contain a variety of mental mechanisms that make us adept at promoting our own interests, in competition with our peers, he says. But human nature is also ''groupish'': our minds contain a variety of mental mechanisms that make us adept at promoting our group's interests, in competition with other groups.

''We evolved to live in groups. Our minds were designed not only to help us win the competition within our groups, but also to help us unite with those in our group to win competitions across groups,'' he says. ''We are not saints, but we are sometimes good team players.''

All this goes a long way towards explaining the psychological roots of morality. Haidt defines moral systems as interlocking sets of values, norms, practices and institutions that work together to suppress or regulate self-interest and make co-operative societies possible.

His research leads him to believe moral intuitions arise automatically and almost instantaneously in our minds, long before moral reasoning has a chance to get started. Moral reasoning is not something we do to figure out the truth. Rather, it's a skill we evolved to further our social agendas - to justify our own actions and defend the teams we belong to.

Human nature is intrinsically moral, but it's also intrinsically moralistic, critical and judgmental.

''Our righteous minds made it possible for human beings - but no other animals - to produce large co-operative groups, tribes and nations without the glue of kinship,'' he says. ''But at the same time, our righteous minds guarantee that our co-operative groups will always be cursed by moralistic strife.''

We're much more aware of other people's moral shortcomings than our own, often making us ''selfish hypocrites so skilled at putting on a show of virtue that we fool even ourselves''.

Haidt says one of the hardest problems humans face is co-operation without kinship. We instinctively co-operate with people to whom we're directly related, but co-operation within wider groups carries the ever-present temptation to ''free-ride'' - to enjoy the benefits co-operation brings while avoiding pulling our weight.

The more people free-ride, and the more we see others failing to pull their weight, the more co-operation breaks down and we all forgo the benefits it could bring.

Haidt argues morality is, in large part, an evolved solution to the free-rider problem. We develop norms of acceptable, co-operative behaviour and find ways to sanction people who aren't co-operating.

His empirical research into the moral sentiments of people from around the world leads him to identify six dimensions to people's moral concerns. First is care/harm; we are sensitive to signs of suffering and need, and despise cruelty. Second is liberty/oppression; we resent attempts to dominate us. Third is fairness/cheating; people should be rewarded or punished in proportion to their deeds.

Then there's loyalty/betrayal; we trust and reward team players, but want to sanction those who betray the group. Next is authority/subversion; we recognise rank or status and disapprove of those not behaving properly, given their position. Finally there's sanctity/degradation; we care about what we do with our bodies and what we put into them.

Haidt believes these moral concerns are shared by people regardless of their culture, nationality or wealth. But, of course, people interpret them differently and put more weight on some than others.

Our differing moral emphases are reflected in our differing political sympathies. So the unending battle between small-L liberal and conservative policies is a manifestation of ''deeply conflicting but equally heartfelt visions of the good society''.

Haidt finds that small-L liberals' moral concerns are limited to just the first three dimensions: they care deeply about the harm suffered by minorities and the needs of the poor, about oppression and about fairness.

Conservatives, on the other hand, care about all six dimensions. Their most sacred value is to ''preserve the institutions and traditions that sustain a moral community''. So they worry also about maintaining loyalty, acceptance of authority and the sanctity of our bodies.

The conservatives' broader range of moral concerns means they understand the motivations of liberals better than liberals understand the motives of conservatives.

Haidt argues the community benefits from the ever-present tension between the two sides - each emphasises important aspects of maintaining a good society - if only we could restore a greater degree of civility between the contending parties.

Ross Gittins is the Sydney Morning Herald's economics editor.

Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/politi ... z28CXd05jN" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Rorschach]

Credibility crosses paths with much of this topic.
In Australian politics today Credibility is a major concern for many Australians because in our polity it is a scarce commodity. The problem for many is discerning real credibility from falsehoods. Facts then play a major part of this discernment. The media tend to muddle the facts almost as much as politicians, perhaps it is their political bias that gets in the way.

Facts matter as readers select own truth
November 3, 2012
Mark Colvin

Ten years ago, American reporter and satirist Russell Baker wrote of ''journalism's age of melancholy''. ''Newspaper people, once celebrated as founts of ribald humour and uncouth fun,'' he said, ''have of late lost all their gaiety, and small wonder.

''They have discovered that their prime duty is no longer to maintain the republic in well-informed condition - or to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable, as the old gospel has it - but to serve the stock market with a good earnings report every three months or, in plainer English, to comfort the comfortable''.

If only it had stopped there.

In the past decade the changes roiling the journalism industry have just speeded up.

And you can only describe 2012 as an annus horribilis. Redundancies have seen many journalists leave the country's biggest media conglomerates, News Ltd and Fairfax Media.

It's a worldwide trend. We are all facing revolutionary times. Not only journalists either...

This time it's not industrialisation, but digitisation, creating the revolution.

There are exceptions, but newspapers everywhere are seeing circulation and advertising revenues going off a cliff. Newspaper dollars have turned to digital dimes and those in turn are turning into mobile pennies.

The digitisation tsunami has finally hit, meaning mainstream media in Australia and around the world face not one, but several crises at the same time.

There's a crisis of consensus, where journalists find it increasingly difficult to find a common ground from which to write.

There's a crisis of authority, in which institutions that have tended to hand down pronouncements like stone tablets from the mountain top find themselves subject to disagreement, abuse or ridicule.

There's a crisis of credibility, as, Wizard of Oz-like, the curtain is pulled away from authorities such as News Corp and the BBC to reveal the sometimes despicable reality.

Looming over all, though, is the fourth crisis, the biggest of all - the crisis of finance. How, in the age of creative destruction brought on by digitisation, can we make journalism pay?

By a crisis of consensus, I'm talking about the way people can create their own reality stream.

It's particularly advanced in America, because 25 years ago they abandoned the fairness doctrine, a regulation mandating a degree of balance on the airwaves.

Now you can run a creationist channel that excludes Darwinists from the airwaves - you can say again and again Barack Obama was born in Kenya, and refuse to look at the documentary evidence. You can spout climate change alarmism, call people misogynists, etc, etc, etc...

In Australia we still regulate the airwaves. ACMA ordered fact-checking training for Alan Jones after he repeatedly used figures which were scientifically wrong about carbon dioxide. But even if this has the desired effect, which I doubt, it's shutting the door after the horse has bolted. Yet who checks the checkers for their political or dogmatic bias?

You no longer need Fox News or shock jocks to feed your prejudices and screen out facts. You create a world where you get all your news from Twitter and Facebook and blog sources you've chosen. Like Arsie and Juvenile Monk... very selective reading indeed. That world is already upon us. One-third of under 30s in the US already get their news from social media - far more than newspapers and equal with TV. And they want to lower the voting age...

Even in the most hermetically sealed worlds, it's still possible for facts to get through. In my view, the only responsible way to act in the face of this crumbling of the consensus is to become more rigorous - to hope we can still penetrate prejudices with facts. But we can't do it just by pronouncing it so.

Because the second crisis is one of authority. The authority of newspapers and the TV networks was an artefact of scarcity, and we don't just live in a time of media abundance but super-abundance. I hardly think shows like The Project have any real authority.

We can no longer hand down pronouncements from the mountain top. The newspaper editorial guiding us on how to think or vote looks bizarre to the Web generation.

I like the fact that if we've made a factual error on the 5pm edition of PM, someone may tell me about it on Twitter in time to correct it for the 6pm edition. We are subject to constant real-time scrutiny. And prejudice...

How do we react? Crowd-source. That can mean anything such as asking people to help scour big government document dumps and commission reports.

A bushfire in Cobar? We'd have mobile phone photos and videos, eyewitness accounts, interviews with people who posted on social media, probably hours before the first reporter even got his or her boots on the ground.

Then there's the crisis of credibility. What can I add, after a month when the BBC, held up as a bastion of editorial rectitude and even prudery, has been revealed as having sheltered for nearly half a century one of Britain's worst serial paedophiles? What more is there to say after years of revelations about phone hacking in Rupert Murdoch's UK tabloids? Or the ABC and it's deluge of politically biased shows paraded as current affairs or open expert panels.

Credibility is not just about what you put in the paper, or on the airwaves, it's about how you get that information, what you do with it, and how you conduct yourself as a corporation. OR AS AN INDIVIDUAL...

It's not nearly enough to have closed the News of the World as expiation for hacking Milly Dowler's phone. The British tabloids - and by no means only the Murdoch press - needs a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to clean the stables. But who decides just what the Truth is? We cannot allow Big Brother to take over.

This was not just a press corruption issue, but a corruption issue which infected the system from top to bottom.

The hacking scandal and other incidents have coloured the credibility of the mainstream media around the world. It couldn't have happened at a worse time.

Which brings us inexorably to the economic crisis. Are tough well-funded editors - such as Ben Bradlee of the Washington Post exposing Watergate or Harold Evans of the Sunday Times revealing the scandal of thalidomide, or Graham Perkin at the Age pursuing police corruption - a thing of the past?

The best stories are often hard, long and expensive to dig up. A well-funded media with a broad readership is essential to fund and support that. Increasingly that looks like wishful thinking.

Where will the money to employ journalists come from?

It's not all bleak. The London Evening Standard claims to have made a profit for the first time since it dropped its cover price to zero. It did so mainly by radically slashing distribution costs. Instead of carrying the paper to 9000 different outlets a day, they now drop big bundles in train stations, for commuters to pick up. Readership jumped from 100,000 to an astonishing 700,000 with a corresponding advertising bonanza.

For most papers and magazines the switch from print to digital looks unavoidable. Delivery is expensive and the more connected people are, the more apps and digital editions will substitute. Several American papers have switched to digital editions during the week and kept their weekend editions in print, and that's a halfway house I expect to see here soon.

But what content will they sell? In the US, a company called Narrative Science sells thousands of stories about Little League Baseball games and stock market movements to local papers and outlets such as Forbes.com. Its founder believes that in 15 years "more than 90 per cent" of news stories will be computer-generated. Local chains in the US are outsourcing news stories to the Philippines. Now that... is a worry.

Rolling and local news will be worth almost nothing. Computerised stories will be so cheap Microsoft or Telstra or the AFL, which already have their toes in the water, will be able to do a huge amount of the job now done by newspapers. It's simple economics.

My biggest worry is where the few journalists who'll be needed for this high-level journalism are going to come from. Who in this social media-sourced world will still hire a plane to send a reporter hundreds of kilometres to cover a fire?

If we want a world where journalists can be paid to tell the truth we have to negotiate these massive changes at the same time. Good journalism - journalism of integrity - is a social good and an essential part of democracy. We have to do everything we can to try to preserve it. Before it is too late!

This is an edited version of Mark Colvin's Andrew Olle Media Lecture address delivered on Friday night. Colvin hosts ABC Radio's PM.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/ ... z2B7gHAUpN" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;