Taboos
While we’re on the subject of biases and the difficulty of spotting one’s own (especially compared to the extreme ease of spotting everyone else’s) – Nigel later asked me a follow-up question for that interview he did at Virtual Philosopher, about just this issue. I didn’t see it until after he posted the interview, so I’ll post the q and a here, on account of relevance.
NW: Do you really believe we can eliminate our prejudices, the political, ideological and moral commitments that usually infect our judgements? I’m thinking of what Nietzsche said about how philosophers end up simply confirming their own prejudices under the guise of applying reason dispassonately…
OB: Well, I don’t really believe there’s any certainty or guarantee of that, of course; I don’t believe we can or should ever relax into confidence that we have. But I think we can make the attempt, I think something is better than nothing, I think awareness of the issue at least helps us to be vigilant. If nothing else, I think understanding the mechanism helps. If we realize that X commitment influences our thinking and causes us to ignore or downplay or attempt to explain away evidence we don’t like, there is at least a chance we can try to correct for that. If we’re not even aware of the mechanism, there is little hope we will try to correct for it.
I could have answered more thoroughly, and better…Actually I argued with JS a bit about that part of B&W’s About page, which he wrote, and which is where Nigel got that phrase about the political, ideological and moral commitments that usually infect our judgements. I said (September 2002 it must have been) we can’t and don’t want to get rid of them, surely? And he said no, but that’s not what the about page says, it says B&W opposes ‘Those disciplines or schools of thought whose truth claims are prompted by the political, ideological and moral commitments of their adherents, and the general tendency to judge the veracity of claims about the world in terms of such commitments.’ It doesn’t oppose the commitments, it opposes schools of thought whose truth claims are prompted by the commitments. I think I went on arguing for awhile, not quite grasping the distinction, but then I finally did.
But there is still a question: do I really believe we can have thoughts whose truth claims are not prompted by our commitments? Then I’d give much the same answer – I don’t think we can ever be confident or certain about it, or that we should, but I do think we can be aware of the issue and try to correct for it, and that awareness is step one. So it is with biases, and with all quirks and habits that distort our thinking.
Along the same lines: I’ve been yapping a lot about taboos lately, so it keeps occurring to me to try to figure out if I have any taboos, and if so what they are. I can name some of my basic assumptions, and some commitments, but I’m not sure about taboos – which makes me suspect I just haven’t dug hard enough. Or, indeed, that I’m just flattering myself.
It depends what we consider a taboo, of course. There are some arguments that I find exasperating and don’t feel like bothering with, but I think not for taboo-like reasons but just because they’re familiar and fatuous – the ‘atheism is just another faith’ trope is high on that list. I’m thinking of taboo as an irrational revulsion – a Yuk – as opposed to a heightened or vehement or irritable reaction; I’m also thinking of it as morally righteous; as dealing in shame or guilt or moral blackmail of some kind. A ‘how dare you’ kind of thing. Holocaust jokes – that might be a candidate; except it doesn’t come up, so it’s not a very good one. I want some realer taboos than that.
Update: I suggested a spot-the-taboo game, but then when I saw the comments realized it was way too narcissistic. Enough about me; what do you think about me? That kind of thing. So never mind the game. Unless you’re up for a nice game of hockey? I’ll just get my skates.
I have noticed, if I’m not mistaken, that you have a taboo about the use of a certain swear-word.
As you mentioned Holocaust jokes, I’ll add that I have a taboo about jokes that mock the disabled told by the able-bodied. I don’t object to disability jokes from the disabled themselves on the ground that as they have it their allowed to say what they like about it.
Are we limiting ourselves to intellectual taboos? If not, how about cannibalism (assuming the corpse in question was not killed to be eaten, but had died in a car crash say). Gnawing on Granny just doesn’t appeal to me at all, but I am a veggie.
YUK! Eating granny… erk. Right out of WTM too.
If you kill your own livestock for food, you only make the mistake of eating the old and infirm once. And died-in-the-paddock is right out, for reasons of we don’t know WHAT we might catch by eating such meat. Thats a biblical taboo as well as common sense.
Kill it yourself, and choose for youth, health and pleasing plumpness. No names, no pack drill, what, what, old chap???
But OB, how are we to guess your taboos? It sounds like just an opportunity for projection, especially when you don’t know yourself.
Lets float a few ideas – eating your own young? Coprophilia? ‘A’s for lays? U-turns at traffic lights?
Swear-word? The sexist ones you mean? Not quite a taboo in the sense that there are reasons for it – but a taboo in another sense, yes.
Oh, well, I didn’t mean guess, Chris, I was thinking perhaps they were glaringly obvious to everyone but me. And I meant intellectual ones, so I figured I’d have revealed them.
Maybe not such a good game after all – too narcissistic!
Nemmine.
Nah, your taboos are not on display, just a couple of well-justified prejudices.
Taboos don’t get displayed much I think – most of them are too widely-shared to even notice.
Frozen chickens! Frozen chickens are right out!
At risk of being the serious-minded party-pooper, reading this post after glancing over the obit of Elizabeth Fox-Genovese this morning, with its documentation of her crashing swing from left to right in politics, I was thinking how interesting it is as one who is advancing towards middle years to see oneself becoming more open to the validity of positions one would have rejected axiomatically as a youth — such as the positive value of certain aspects of ‘bourgeois morality’, to name but one.
Perhaps this means there is potential for a taboo-busting conversion to Roman Catholicism in me. I do hope not. I also especially would not like to end up getting a medal from a Republican klutz…
just a couple of well-justified prejudices.
Surely you mean biases, by definition a prejudice can’t be well justified, unlike biases which can be.
with its documentation of her crashing swing from left to right in politics
Time for a broad unsubstantiated generalisation. Not that I’ve read the obit’ in question, but something I’ve noticed about folks who radically change their political beliefs is that they tend to have been pretty dogmatic on one side, then flip over to the other side. It is more a fundamental cognitive problem in the first place, a wholesale swapping of one set of dogmas and prejudices for another.
Saner souls seem to moderate any youthly views as they get older in the light of experience. I am no longer quite the pinko I was at 16, however I’m pretty much on the same team with the belief that in an open society the state needs to be much more than a minimalist enforcer of contracts.
My bias is of course thinking I’m a sane soul :)
“My bias is of course thinking I’m a sane soul”
And isn’t it all of ours. Which of course is what Nigel was getting at, and quite right too. Julian likes to point that out as the great danger for philosophers: thinking that, as they are philosophers you know, hem hem, rational, queen of sciences, hem hem, therefore they are nobody’s dupe. It’s a good point and also quite interesting…if it’s right it means that the more reason you have to think you’re (at least comparatively) rational and skeptical, the more susceptible you are to this trap. Terrible bind.
Hence my quest for my hidden biases or taboos or prejudices or blind spots or what have you. Not (at least in intention) narcissism, just an attempt to escape the trap of valuing reason and therefore becoming blind to own irrationality.
We’re all doomed!
Hence my quest for my hidden biases or taboos or prejudices or blind spots or what have you
But you’re asking the wrong people, most of us here seem to have similar biases to you. However you wouldn’t trust folks who are have radically different ways of viewing the world. Where is a God when you need one? Oh for an unbiased impartial observer.
We’re only doomed to muddle through as best we can, which we can do quite well at times.
“But you’re asking the wrong people, most of us here seem to have similar biases to you.”
mmph. Okay, so I’m looking for the lost object here under the lamp instead of where I lost it, because the light is better.
But still – there are rational skeptical etc people who have different biases. I hear from some of them once in awhile.
Anyway it can just be like seeing something on our own backs. I can see yours, you can see mine; so it goes. If it does.
Kind of what I meant by muddling through I suppose, it’s the best we can do without any absolutes to guide us.
TTFN and goodnight.
Much easier on the blood-pressure to just accept that you hold views that exist at one point on a wide [indeed multi-dimensioned] spectrum, and that, since you’re a] not Dictator of the World, and b] don’t live in a plebiscitary democracy, most of the time it matters not a jot what either you or anyone else believes. Feel free to feel right. When you are asked to actually take responsibility for something, then is the moment to take stock.
The sad point, of course, is that that is just when most people are least likely to embrace productive doubt…
To BJN:
As Robert Frost put it:
“I never dared be radical when young
For fear it would make me conservative when old”
Consider the etymology of “radical”. Same root as “radish”, really (heh.)
Might this imply that a radical is, at bottom, a sort of fundamentalist?
Hi Paul, I’ve never heard that one, I shall remember it.
The trouble with migrating to places like Xianity Today or Islamic fronts is that substance is one thing and methodology is another. I agree that it’s necessary to read what the other side has to say, provided the other side has real arguments; but I can’t say I think it’s either useful or necessary to expose oneself to mere unargued dogma or dogmatism. So it depends what one means by ‘the other side’…
Being lazy, I find that reading G Tingey, Cathal, ChrisPers and Merljin gives me all the variety of response I need.
>…Feel free to feel right.< On the other hand one might be inclined to the attitude implicit in Ophelia’s and Jeremy’s little (in size, not in scope!) book, “Why Truth Matters”. >…most of the time it matters not a jot what either you or anyone else believes.< Of course it doesn’t – with the exception of the importance to oneself.