Lesson 8, Part 3, It's complicated. I'm not kidding either. Let's take it from the top. From the last lesson. Sorry about this. [LAUGH] It's like the sixth time you've seen this slide. This stuff is hard. A little repetition never hurt anyone. Where deeply confusing stuff is concerned. Actually that's not true. Repeating confusing stuff is dangerous because it may reinforce it, as my old band director used to say, practice makes permanent. Perfect practice makes perfect. I doubt my ability to get perfectly straight about this confusing stuff, But I will really try and I hope you'll be less confused, at the end. Okay. This slide, this is my eternal puzzle. Well the last lesson in this one. It seems like Haidt and Plato are doing totally opposite things. Passion rules. Reason is his slave. Reason rules. Passion drools. But then I had a lot of fun last time arguing that it's just not clear. And then, right at the very end of last lesson, I made a few suggestions about what the difference really comes to. In the previous video, I dropped more hints in terms of my whole Galucus story. Let me try again another way. Somewhat repetitively but trying a new angle on it in the hopes that one of these ways is going to work for you. Last lesson, in the previous video I basically hinted that Haidt and Plato are both rationalists. And that they feel it is possible to offer rational accounts, rational accounts of the good in particular. It is possible to know scientifically what is good for folks. Haidt and Plato just disagree about whether it's possible to be a truly rational person. A pure rational spirit. Plato says yes, well maybe anyway. Haidt is definitively not. Haidt and Plato are also both intuitionists in Hiadt sense, at least roughly. If you ask them which does more thinking in people. The dog in us or that pitiful little rational tail on top. They're both going to say the dog. The masses are ruled by their passions, Plato will say, in a rather arch, aristocratic tone. The average mean, model and experience model experimental psych subject across all cultures is sure to be ruled by his or her passions, Haidt will say in a statistically valid sense. So to repeat, they're both rationalist and if you like both intuitionist. Even though Haidt talks as if rationalism and intuitionism are. Arch enemies. What's going on? I hope my little four square box can help. As you can see, I'm pointing out that there are at least four possibilities. You can say that rationalism is true in a descriptive sense. That is, people do act mostly rationally. Rationalism is then a claim about descriptive psychology. You can additionally or alternatively say it's true in a normative sense. People ought to be rational or anyway something should be rational. Or anyway, there is such a thing as rationality as a normative ideal. It's real. The same goes for intuitionism. You can say that it's true in a descriptive sense. Psychologically, people are driven mostly by forms of cognition that are more perception like. As Haidt describes that. Distinct from the empirical claim, that this is true. Is the normative claim, and it's a good thing too, That we are that way. Once you got four boxes, it's clear enough how you could mix And match, such that people turn out to be both intuitionists and rationalists. Specifically, I've got both Plato and Haidt pegged as descriptive intuitionist and normative rationalist. Actually, I've got Haidt in three out of four boxes. How can Haidt be both a normative rationalist and normative intuitionist? Easy, you just have to believe it's good and basically healthy for people to be basically doggish, and also that it's possible to provide a rational account to that effect and that's a good thing. Haidt fits both bills. Not to be a pain about it, but Haidt actually obviously belongs in all four squares to some degree. He is to some degree a descriptive rationalist. That is, he believes we humans have a thing called reason. It normally operates in a certain way and you can describe it. Here's a somewhat provocative quote from the beginning of his book, The Righteous Mind. Human beings are 90 percent chimp and 10 precent bee. That's a point about our cooperative tendencies. Feel free to read The Righteous Mind if you want to understand what the point is, but my present point is that surely this is a bit of an exaggeration for rhetorical effect. What would Plato say? He'd say, oh for crying out loud, don't exaggerate, Jonathan Haidt. If you want to say the rational portion in our soul is tiny, fine I'm with you about that, at least for most people. But admit it's there. There wouldn't be, even be a book called The Happiness Hypothesis or The Righteous Mind, after all, if humans weren't capable of stepping back and saying. Saying, hey we're really mostly chimp and bee. Something no chimp or bee has ever done, being noted. We couldn't have offered a rational account of the degree to which would chimp and bee like, unless to some degree we're very unlike both. This is perfectly obvious. Obvious, but the consequences of admitting the obvious, that is, we immediately recognize that what Haidt said was some what facetious. But trying to get serious about what it would take to correct that statement. Well that gets really complicated. Confused? Lets take a tour of our four squared diagram. Who are Kohlberg and Turiel? Have we met them? That's Lawrence Kohlberg and Eliot Turiel, not that you need to remember that. I mentioned at least Kohlberg last lesson, but I didn't say a lot. And I'm not going to say a lot now. Short version Kohlberg was, he is dead, and Turiel still is, he's alive. Developmental psychologists who have been, I'm just going to state my opinion, substantially refuted by the likes of Haidt. I'm not an expert on the empirical developmental psych and moral psych literature, so don't just take my word for it. But having kicked Haidt around the last few videos I'm, happy to say that I agree with him about this. It's ice to be able to say he's done some good solid empirical work, which I admire. The empirical charge against Kohlberg and Turiel is this. They seriously overestimate the psychological power, the causal efficacy, of rational argument. And rational thinking, and human thinking particularly about morality. They underestimate the power of emotion. We should really say the power of intuition, in Haidt's sense. If you don't believe me, read Haidt described many experiments that support him. If you want to be truly scrupulous, make sure you read Kohlberg and Turiel to. Because there's two sides to every story. But I'm on Haidt's side, more or less. However, Haidt sort of conflates Kohlberg and Turiel with rationalism generally. With Plato in particular. Kohlberg was a bit optimistic about the whole cave thing, but not Plato. It makes a big difference whether once in a great while a very unusual person gets up and leaves the cave. That's Plato's position. Or, if pretty much everyone eventually does it. It's part of the normal human maturation process. That's Kohlberg. Here's a quote from Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind. There's a direct line running from Plato to Lawrence Kohlberg. I'll refer to this worshipful attitude throughout this book as the rationalist delusion. Not to be too snarky, but this is just a terribly unhelpful way to use the word, the phrase rationalist delusion. It is false that there is one line, one rationalist target. Descriptively, a lot of different positions are consistent with rationalism. That's because the core of rationalism is normative, not descriptive. Rationalists think we ought to be rational, not necessarily that we are. This core is shared by Haidt himself. We ought to be more rational, in so far as we are scientists offering rational accounts. Particularly of the good. But wait. Don't I see a little greyed out Plato in the box with Kohlberg and Turiel? Isn't that where he in fact belongs. That little descriptive rationalism box, isn't that just the idea that our souls can be rationally autonomous from our lower nature? That's Glaucus all over again, the idea that we could be like this god that could be separated from his lower nature and rise up in this sort of golden autonomy. Plato thinks that in fact we are pure rational souls. Yes, that's right and that's fair. But its so metaphysical that its hard to know how relevant it is for purposes of arguing with Haidt. Well why wouldn't it be? I said it last time, I'm sort of repeating myself. Plato obviously believes metaphysical stuff that Haidt Most likely isn't going to buy. Maybe we'll all be pure rational souls when we're dead or some of us. It's nothing Haidt has refuted in the lab. Maybe there wil be reincarnation again. Haidt has no cognitive science basis for objection apart from a personal skepticism I should imagine. But Haidt could respond, hold your horses. That is, your bad horse, and your good horse. Plato is on the record as claiming there could be a class of rational philosopher kings. Not in the next world, in this one. Haidt has proved n the lab that this has bad institutional design. Because it depends on the view of psychology that is false. There are no rational people. There are no mostly rational people. We're all mostly elephant. Like it or lump it. Any institutional design that hinges on some class, even a small, well-educated class, turning out to be reliably, just plain rational. It's disaster. Total disaster. And by the way, Haidt would add, this is why it's so annoying that Hobalt keeps flashing his crazy old Plato graphic when he talks loosely about Haidt's empirical dreams of cross-level coherence. Haidt will say yeah, Plato and I are exactly the same. Happiness comes from between, except for the little detail of Plato's version of that being a total psychological disaster. Because he's suffering delusions of philosopher kingdom. And my version, not being a total psychological disaster. Because I'm being realistic about what you can expect from people. It's not just the metaphysics then. Or whether our souls were reincarnate. It's the institutional design. Because it's the empirical psychology. A fair point, but not a sufficient one. If Haidt has come up with a rationalist plan that will work, whereas Plato's won't work, it doesn't follow that Haidt is not a rationalist. What follows is that he's a better rationalist than Plato. Because he's being more rational about whether you can expect people to be more rational. And here's another thing, how essential is it to Plato's rationalist philosophy that his republic be constructable in practice? I'll answer by saying that it's not clear to me that even Plato believes it's constructable Debatable in practice. I know, I know. It sounds like I'm doing that thing I warned against. Plato's my guy, so when he starts to sound nuts, I try to play it off as colorful literary flourishes or myths. Or complex irony. Or whatever. Okay. Let's just suppose he meant it seriously. And that it was seriously wrong. Let's write off institutional design as a bad bet and then return to Plato's dialogue and see how much is left. After that hole gets pumped in the Utopian picture. What's left is pretty clearly most of Plato. For Plato, the real action is in the lower left quadrant and the upper right. And Haidts in there too, in main force. What do I mean? Well, what is nearly every Plato dialogue about? It's about the upper right quadrant and that it's a rational investigation of some subject matter, holiness, virtue, justice. You know the drill as Haidt says quote, I will use the words rationalist to describe anyone who believes that reasoning is the most important and reliable way to obtain more knowledge Unquote. That's Plato for sure. Okay, I'm starting to fill in the chart with little symbols from our Glauccus story. Pictorially, the top line now says, we don't believe in descriptive rationalism. People are capable of being pure rational spirits. Nevertheless science is good. It's good and possible to offer rational accounts, Plato thinks so, Haidt thinks so too. And Plato is very concerned about the lower left quadrant. His perennial problem you might say is, why do people keep saying such stupid things when we try to discuss the upper-right quadrant? Nearly every Plato dialogue is the fictionalized dramatic equivalent of one of those experiments Haidt liked so well. Which ones are those? Well, let's say the one with the fart spray in them. I'll spare you the details. Here's the short version. Fart spray, that is artificially induced, stinky air in the environmental, in the experimental environment makes people disgusted. And feeling disgusted shifts people's attitudes, particularly the moral ones. If you surreptitiously stink up the place, you can really get get people's moral backs up. Scientific fact, the doggie nose has its reasons of which the tail knows, well, not as much as it should, probably. I've already compared Socrates to a troll. When was that? Back in Lesson 1, was it? I wasn't planning to do worse than that at the time. But well, now that we come to it, suppose I compare him to a cloud of fart spray. He's certainly annoyed the Athenians. Just look at the way Athena's nose looks. He really gets up her nose, doesn't he? How does he do that? Well how much did he annoy them? I can't give you a scientific measurement unless it's this, hemlock is Poison. Again, science fact that some indication of annoyance. Someone's gotta be seriously annoying before you force him to drink hemlock. What did Socrates do to deserve that fate? Well, it's complicated. But part of it is this. Socrates, he's got this lose friends and get executed by people shtick, down pat. And just look at the effects. People can be thoroughly refuted by him. And do they change their mind? They do not. His manner, is very off-putting. Moral of the story. Ugly, and annoying won't sell. But isn't there something attractive about Socrates? Not just to us today clearly, but even to the Athenians back then. I mean, everyone didn't hate him, some people liked him. That's true but to make a long story short, it seems that many of those who admired him may have done so for the wrong reasons. At least from Plato's point of view. The wrong emotional reasons. Socrates really could knock people's teeth out, verbally. And the Athenians, who admired a good speaker and a good fighter, had a kind of respect for that sort of power. A grudging respect, but a respect all the same. But if you admire Socrates because you see the diagram on the right. When you watch him doing his business, rather than some more harmonious geometry as on the left. Well, you aren't really absorbing the stuff in the proper rationalist spirit, so I think Plato would say. So now you see the real problem. Lower left quadrant, descriptive intuitionism we are all Glaucus. Our divine aspect is so concealed that we are barely better than animals. We are in Haidt's term, terms, a bunch of emotional or intuitive dogs, especially where ethical questions are concerned. But upper right quadrant, rationalism ought to be true. We should be rational. We should at least try to offer rational accounts. The obvious way to get from lower left to upper right is, well we should sluff off our empirical bodies and become pure rational souls. Unfortunately, that's either impossible, Haidt or very, very, very, very hard and rare, that's Plato. So how we be the dwellers in the lower left that we are, and yet get in healthy regular contact with the wisdom of the upper right? There is such a thing as a rational theory of the human good, Haidt and Plato agree, how do you connect that to people's lives? People being the sort of beasts that they are, that's next video. For now, let's finish out our fourth quadrant, I know what you're thinking some further picture of the God Glaucus, right? Nope, that lower right square is Haidt and Hume, and nope, I got nothing. Well okay, I can show you an elephant. Do you ever get the feeling that professor [UNKNOWN] cartooning is getting a bit out of hand. I get that feeling sometimes. Let me translate all these clever, mythic icons back into plain English, pull it all together, and end this video. The lower left says basically, reason is the slave of the passions. Our reason is overwhelmed. Literally in the Glaucus myth. Water is overflowing and forcing us down, causing to be more animal by nature. That's descriptive intuitionism in Haidt's sense. The lower right say, reason ought to be a slave to the passions. That's normative intuitionism. Plato is totally on board with that first thing, people are mostly, mostly animals. He's not on board with the second thing. How can it be good for us to embrace our lower natures? Plato doesn't see the sense in it. In what sense do Haidt and Hume see the sense in it? Well first, it's true for them sort of in the sense that you ought not to flap your arms and try to fly to the moon. Don't try to do the impossible, at best it's a waste of time, at worst you'll get hurt. But our animal natures are better than just that. We're all animals, and guess what? Being an animal, being mostly animal is awesome. Most of what's good in our lives comes from the animal in us. Even the good bits we think are the most elevated. We wouldn't have a sense of transcendence if we didn't have a kind of overactive disgustometer in us. The god in us is a function of the dog in us. Plato would be appalled. Even though he often says, by the dog, which was evidently some kind of Egyptian curse. Anyway. So, that's a deep difference between Haidt and Plate. Plato and Haidt. But it shouldn't obscure a deep similarity. They have the same basic problem, and it preoccupies them both. How do we get people who live in that lower left box in touch with the rational wisdom in the upper right box? Maybe you're looking at the picture and thinking, okay upper left quadrant is out. How about lower right? Can the elephant sort of fly up to the rational sun above him? Good guess, but wrong. It's not in fact Haidt's view that we can do good, scientifically rigorous, psychology. Just be getting into some ecstatic state of flow, or praying, or feeling a great sense of oneness with the neighborhood. In fact, Haidt's answer is exactly the same as Plato's. We need to move from Glaucus to Glauca. That's next video.
