I think that the Taliban know that blowing up girls' schools (and the girls) is wrong.
I would totally disagree with this. Unfortunately, I think that this assumption that those who are against us "really" believe as we do and are deliberately acting in a way they know is wrong is terribly corrosive to finding solutions; it implies both that we need not sincerely explain ourselves to "the bad guys", and simultaneously, that they can be convinced to stop doing bad things if we shine a light on the things they're doing, since it's assumed that they're really feeling guilty and don't believe the things they say.
You cannot shame a person into behaving properly if they believe they are already behaving properly.
What? Are you kidding me? This may be something that we won't agree on, but I chose that extreme example for a reason. Can you honestly say, with a straight face, that you believe these people think that killing innocent schoolgirls is good? And I'm not talking about the ends-justify-the-means kind of good, but rather objective good.. Do you really think that? If so, then what exactly what are we supposed to "explain" to them, and why would you imagine that they can be reckoned with at all? Wouldn't that make them, sort of, oh I don't know... totally frickin' evil to the core? How does it benefit us to assume that about our enemies?
Besides, the evidence is against you here. When the Taliban announced last month that are now devoting themselves to protecting civilians, I can't imagine that their embrace of the PR value is completely detached from reality.
BTW - This is still nate_meurer... I can't login from my home for some reason, thus the new account.
Also BTW - Yes, I am equating the folks who hounded Turing to this death with the Taliban.
I strongly recommend it! It changed my understanding of what morality is and what moral beliefs to expect in others, and deepened my understanding of my own moral intuitions.
The key insight that is relevant here is that educated Westerners (like me and, presumably, you) see morality as mostly about harm and fairness. But that view of morality is not so popular outside the West. When we see people doing harm to innocent girls we find it hard to believe that they think they're doing good. But other cultures are relatively more concerned with morality relating to authority/obedience, in-group/out-group treatment, and purity/disgust.
When people persecute homosexuals or let improperly-dressed girls burn[1] they're acting based on the purity/disgust aspect of morality, and probably authority/obedience too. I expect they also usually feel conflicted about it, because burning schoolgirls must register on the harm-based morality meter. I think the way to engage with fundamentalists who do this kind of thing is to emphasize the harm done, and try to undermine the concept of purity-based morality.
(Westerners also have some reckoning to do with disgust-based morality. It is hard to argue against infertile adult consensual incest using the morality of harm and fairness, but many Westerners still regard it as immoral, and find it hard to explain their moral intuitions. Similarly, Bush Administration-appointed bioethicist Leon Kass coined the term "the wisdom of repugnance"[2], using the argument against genetic engineering. I wish humans would abandon repugnance as relevant to morality.)
Research on morality can tell you a lot about what morals people have, but it can't tell you anything about what morals people ought to have.
I think that repugnance and disgust exist precisely because they are pretty good heuristics for things humans thrived by avoiding in general (like your example of incest), and continuing to thrive may depend on allowing your disgust to influence what you do even when you can't articulate a rational reason for it.
>Research on morality can tell you a lot about what morals people have, but it can't tell you anything about what morals people ought to have.
Yes, I recommended Haidt because the topic was whether the fundamentalists were acting according to their understanding of morality. If you're saying that research on morality doesn't yield conclusions on something like "real true morality", then I agree. But I'd add that Haidt's research helped me see inconsistencies in my morality, and in this way it's affected my view of the morality I ought to have.
I agree that repugnance can be a good heuristic for personal actions. I wish that people wouldn't impose their sense of repugnance on others, though. You know how Jews aren't allowed to mix dairy products and meat? I thought that was just an arbitrary rule until I went to Israel and talked to some Jews. They didn't just find it immoral because the Torah said so; they found the idea of a cheeseburger or a meat-topped pizza disgusting, as we might find the idea of meat ice cream disgusting. So I'm concerned that repugnance can easily get attached to arbitrary things.
More abstractly, we can view repugnance as nature's buggy hack to get us to avoid harmful things, dating from before we were as intelligent and knowledgeable as we are now. Purity-morality is just harm-morality implemented on an obsolete system. Now that we're intelligent enough to judge harm more competently than instinct (i.e. we get fewer false positives), we can and should override that judgment, when it helps us. (Trivial but real example from real life: I used to find mushrooms disgusting, just because. After Haidt got me thinking about the usefulness of repugnance, I looked up the nutritional value of mushrooms, found that mushroom-phobia was unhelpful, and decided to get over it.)
There is no objective good. If propagandistic violence towards women increases the overall birth rate, then it may well be a practical, Darwinian good.
They don't even claim to believe that killing innocent schoolgirls is objective good, so that's a total straw man. Obviously, the ones who believe (and I'm not saying all of them do, of course), believe that protecting innocent people is good, and killing evil people is good, and so on. In some cases, they and we would disagree on what "innocent" entails.
I would say that at least some of the Taliban are evil, sure. Does that mean they can't change, or that they can't be reasoned with, or at least intimidated into not harming people? No, though that might be the case with some. I dunno.
How does it benefit us to assume that about our enemies?
Seeing your enemies as they are can only help, as far as I can see. Assuming that they really believe what you do, but for some reason have acted as though they don't -- well, I don't think that's going to be very helpful in predicting their future actions.
Well yes, I understand that they would claim that murdering schoolgirls is good, taken in isolation. Of course the act has to be taken in context.
The distinction I'm after is this:
Nate's brand of Taliban: Blowing up this school serves a greater good, which overwhelms whatever bad is inherent in the act.
Your brand of Taliban: Blowing up this school and killing everyone inside, in this situation, is unambiguously good.
My problem is that I don't believe that the Taliban, in general and as a rule, are completely without a trace of Nate's description. If there's any evidence at all that I'm right, and I think there is, then recognizing this gives us at least something to work with-- makes them less alien.
However, I do understand your overall point about the danger of ascribing moral bases across cultural lines, and you may well be right. We've waded into territory where I'm largely a layman.
I also do not believe that the Taliban are completely without a trace of Nate's description. I just think that, as a rule, they'd see things in general as either good or bad, but not really as a mix of good and bad. I grew up in a worldview that was similarly inflexible, where an action was either a good action or an evil one, but never "kind of good" or "kind of evil"; we might be uncertain about which side it's on, or wrong about it, but the fuzziness isn't ascribed to the action or the Deity's view of the action. Possibly for this reason, I don't actually view the Taliban's beliefs as "alien", or hard to understand. I just have goals that conflict with their goals.
I would totally disagree with this. Unfortunately, I think that this assumption that those who are against us "really" believe as we do and are deliberately acting in a way they know is wrong is terribly corrosive to finding solutions; it implies both that we need not sincerely explain ourselves to "the bad guys", and simultaneously, that they can be convinced to stop doing bad things if we shine a light on the things they're doing, since it's assumed that they're really feeling guilty and don't believe the things they say.
You cannot shame a person into behaving properly if they believe they are already behaving properly.