indessed roscivs

In a recent book called the Blank Slate, Steven Pinker writes about how what society considers moral and immoral can change quite easily over the years—”moral emotions … can be turned on and off like a switch. These mental spoinks are called moralization and amoralization …They consist in flipping between a mindset that judges behavior in terms of preference with a mindset that judges behavior in terms of value.”

Certainly a lot of recent changes have been about things becoming morally acceptable. Pinker lists, for example, some things that have become talked about in terms of “lifestyle choices” rather than moral sins:

divorce, illegitimacy, working motherhood, marijuana use, homosexuality, masturbation, sodomy, oral sex, atheism … Similarly, many afflictions have been reassigned from the wages of sin to the vagaries of bad luck and have been redubbed accordingly. The homeless used to be called bums and tramps; sexually transmitted diseases were formerly known as venereal diseases. Most of the professionals who work with drug addiction insist that it is not a bad choice but a kind of illness.

But that’s not the entirety of the story. It’s not just a matter of society becoming more “permissive” or amoralizing all behaviors. Pinker continues,

for all the behaviors that have been amoralized in recent decades, we are in the midst of a campaign to moralize new ones. The Babbitts and the bluenoses have been replaced by the activists for a nanny state and the college towns with a foreign policy, but the psychology of moralization is the same. Here are some examples of things that have acquired a moral coloring only recently: advertising to children, automobile safety, Barbie dolls, “big box” chain stores, cheesecake photos, clothing from Third World factories, consumer product safety, corporate-owned farms, defense-funded research, disposable diapers, disposable packaging, ethnic jokes, excessive salaries, fast food, flirtation in the workplace, food additives, fur, hydroelectric dams, IQ tests, logging, mining, nuclear power, oil drilling, owning certain stocks, poultry farms, public holidays (Columbus Day, Martin Luther Kind Day), research on AIDS, research on breast cancer, spanking, suburbia (”sprawl”), sugar, tax cuts, toy guns, violence on television, weight of fashion models

I saw on the elevator news the other day a perfect example of the results from one of the recent actions to be moralized: smoking. Pinker writes,

For many years the decision of whether to smoke was treated as a matter of preference or prudence; some people simply didn’t enjoy smoking or avoided it because it was hazardous to their health. But with the discovery of the harmful effects of second-hand smoke, smoking is now treated as an immoral act. Smokers are banished and demonized, and the psychology of disgust and contamination is brought into play. Nonsmokers avoid not just smoke but anything that has ever been in contact with smoke; in hotels, they demand smoke-free rooms or even smoke-free floors. Similarly, the desire for retribution has been awakened; juries have slapped tobacco companies with staggering financial penalties, appropriately called “punative damages.” This is not to say that these decisions are unjustified, only that we should be aware of the emotions that may be driving them.

The tiny tv screen in the elevator revealed to me that the MPAA will take smoking into account when determining movie ratings. In other words, if a movie is on the borderline between PG-13 and R, the presence of smoking that doesn’t “reflect the dangers of the habit or portray a historical figure” may tip the scales to R.

Like Pinker, I don’t think these decisions are necessarily unjustified, but at the same time, I wonder along with Pinker:

The question is whether they are best handled by the psychology of moralization (with its search for villians, elevation of accusers, and mobilization of authority to mete out punishment) or in terms of costs and benefits, prudence and risk, or good and bad taste. Pollution, for example, is often treated as a crime of defiling the sacred, as in the song by the rock group Traffic: “Why don’t we … try to save this land, and make a promise not to hurt again this holy ground.” This can be contrasted with the attitude of economists like Robert Frank, who (alluding to the costs of cleanups) said, “There is an optimal amount of pollution in the environment, just as there is an optimal amount of dirt in your house.”

Is the psychology of moralization the best choice in this case? Whether or not it is, I think this recent MPAA decision certainly shows that it is the choice we as a society have made.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 15th, 2007 at 6:48 am and is filed under politics, movies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.