DISQUS

One thing I thought while reading your post was about the interesting phenomenon among non-libertarians of implicitly believing a bad bill is better than no bill at all. I believe that non-libertarians often conceive of bad legislation as 'at least trying' whereas doing nothing is tantamount to not trying.

This seems to treat Congress as one big person, which it isn't. But it also suggests that Congress is a very, very stupid person, who would rather do something awful rather than nothing just so he can feel better about himself.

That said, nice take down of Avent. One of these days a truly liberal coalition will be strong enough to at least put up a fight against guys like him.

One very important omission in the chart is the failure to disaggregate Protestants. The original data show that the number of Evangelicals is exploding but the number of liberal Protestants is imploding faster. But this means that as a whole American Christianity is becoming more orthodox, even if it's numbers are shrinking. This may counteract a bit of your joy, Will.

Not only that, but I'm concerned that many of these 'no religion' folks felt that way twenty years ago. The main thing that has changed is that it is more acceptable to say you have no religion. I could be wrong, but I bet the numbers would be somewhat smaller if you knew who really had no religion before. Most people don't like to admit it to themselves.

And the Catholic drops are misleading too. Lots of these people were 'ethnic' Catholics and never went to mass. When the scandals hit, they just said, "To hell with that sick shit." I mean, maybe I'm wrong, but that looks pretty plausible to me as an explanation.

Interestingly, the US has had far more secular periods in the past, like in its early decades. We have a cyclically religious history, with periodic Great Awakenings. Maybe we won't have another one, but the 21st century is proving as recalcitrantly religious as the 20th.

It's really interesting - of course, if there's a God, we'd expect for humans to find it natural to believe in Him and to perhaps have a tendency to attribute agency to nature as a result. (Are people folk Aristotelians?!) So these results don't weigh against belief in God at all. In fact, one of the evolutionary psychologists who works on this stuff - Justin Barrett - Why would anyone believe in God? - is a Christian and thinks that his work substantiates Plantinga's thesis in God and Other Minds that belief in God is much like believe in other minds - its properly basic.

Will, I dunno. That may be so for social liberalization but not for economic liberalization. I see little correlation between being secular and being economically liberal. The least liberal economic regimes have been the most secular.

Will,

As one who both agrees with most of your political positions and is a liberal Protestant, I find much of what you've written here a bit confusing. Why is the success of liberalism necessarily tied to a move toward the kind of moral code possessed by those Haidt calls liberal?

The sacredness variables are ones that need not be abandoned. Instead, they can be reoriented in a way that buttresses liberalism. Most of history's great liberal movements were either led or support by many Protestants. Protestants have often (and often not, to be fair) seen liberty and choice as a sacred gift from God, even though they have often had a traditional Christian position on social morality (condemnation of homosexual practices, abortion, divorce, even birth control, etc.). It seems to me that the kind of person that has a social morality that includes these sacredness variables can be well-suited to be liberal depending on how sacredness is articulated.

Anyway, I'm worried because the loss of the sacredness variable is associated with secularization. And tying secularism and liberalism together is a mistake, not only philosophically but prudentially. It is unlikely that a liberal movement can be permanently successful if it is not acceptable and supported by (probably even enthusiastically supported by) a great multitude of persons of faith. Instead of fighting a 'global culture war' for the kind of liberal morality you prefer, it seems better for liberals to show that liberalism is compatible with certain conceptions of sacredness that will likely always be a deep part of the social morality of many religious persons.

Will, Jeff Sachs looks much weirder than in that picture than any other I've seen him in. Almost alien. And you definitely win for 'hippest-looking'. Way to go with the pink shirt (Is it Pink? Plum?)!

Will,

Hi. A philosophy graduate student here who follows your blog.

I have to quibble a bit. When Levin claims that Haidt runs together the history of a faculty with its nature, I think what he means is that Haidt runs together the origin of a faculty with its truth-reliability.

If he means this, then I understand the point. We cannot suppose that our moral judgments are unreliable merely because they have evolved in such and such a way. Our 'ick' judgments may yet be valid!

The obvious reply is to suggest that evolutionary history alone gives us no reason to suppose that our 'ick' judgments track any good-makers or right-makers. But oh dear, Will, I worry if this is your reply. For what reason do we have to think that evolutionary history alone gives us any reason to think that moral-judgments-as-such track any right-makers? It seems very little, at least to my mind.

Furthermore, Levin might (if he gets this deep into the issues) appeal to God to account for the truth-reliability of our 'icks'. I wonder what you'd say then besides denying that God exists.

(Incidentally, I think that evolutionary history alone gives us very little reason to suppose that *any* of our judgments are truth-reliable. See Plantinga here.)

Of course, you're a constructivist though, right? So you rule out the very possibility of a morality outside of a rational construction. The 'tracking' issue won't apply to you. Or perhaps to Haidt and others. My understanding is that most of the big cognitive scientists who work in this area are either constructivists or moral nihilists of some form or another (error theorists (Josh Greene is an error theorist), expressivists (although you might deny expressivism is a nihilism)).

But if this is so, and Haidt and others are mostly constructivists anyway, then Levin can't accuse them of running metaethics and science together. There's the science and then there's the metaethics. However, I think he has a point IF what he's saying is that the cognitive science alone does not entail a metaethical thesis (as Haidt and others sometimes seem to imply). You give the distinct impression that you think it does when you say:

"Studying the natural history of the moral sense is almost the only truly illuminating way to study it. It’s a whole lot better than simply trying to tease out the implications of our moral judgments from the first-person perspective — from the inside."

Sorry for the ramble.