I liked the article’s focus on hypocrisy. Nothing is as badly needed in our culture as a rational code of ethics.
I liked the idea of the psychologists putting together experiments to explore the nature of hypocrisy more deeply, but I was disappointed at some of the buried assumptions in their experimental protocols.
Talking about one of the experiments they said,
"It would be unfair to give yourself the easy job." And I thought, maybe yes, maybe no – it depends. Unless you've bought into altruism and feel duty bound to sacrifice, in which case they just be measuring altruistic tendencies.
And,
"The researchers call this moral hypocrisy because the people were absolving themselves of violating a widely held standard of fairness (even though they themselves hadn’t explicitly endorsed that standard beforehand)." If the pronoun “they” refers to the subjects then the researchers are saying it is moral hypocrisy to violate a standard others hold, but you don't. Whoa! That doesn’t track.
“The importance of group cohesion, of any type, simply extends our moral radius for lenience. Basically, it’s a form of one person’s patriot is another’s terrorist.” Moral subjectivism? - were they studying the psychology of cultural relativism or just accepting it as "human nature"?
"We’ve survived as social animals because we are so good at spotting selfishness and punishing antisocial behavior." And,
“The question here,” Dr. DeSteno said, “is whether we’re designed at heart to be fair or selfish.” sigh... Psychology has gotten much better at looking at positive traits and studying the nature of happiness – but apart from Branden, most are still in the dark about the psychology of rational self-interest.
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