I quite like this post--the invitation to openness. My number one value is probably caring--people like that are drawn to the helping professions, like nursing. What really struck with me while reading this, though, is how many schools of nursing embrace, tacitly or not, authority as the highest value. Nursing professors are supposed to be teaching care vs. harm--a literal proposition in health care. But the unspoken curriculum is obedience vs. disobedience, or authority and its evil twin, power. This is true of the history of nursing and it really needs to change, in part because it creates toxic work environments, but also because that focus keeps nurses from banding together to make the profession better for all. I don't think that care and authority are intrinsically in conflict, but in some nursing schools they are, even though "caring" is held up as ostensibly the highest value. That is a very bad paradox in terms of creating a mentally healthy health care system.
Wow--thank you so much for sharing these thoughts, based on your experience. It hadn’t even occurred to me that unquestioning deference to authority, which is so dangerous with doctors, is also a problem with nurses, but it makes total sense. Authority and hierarchies lead to zero-sum thinking, when what we need is to work together to find the best solutions. Thanks for sharing this!
I think it was Robert Sapolsky in "Behave" (if it wasn't from there I apologize, but I always like to recommend this book) looking at the part of the brain that registers disgust. He noted that people sensitive to disgust tend to be conservative. Seems intuitive.
He described a study of participants taking a quiz that rated how conservative they were. Then they put rotten food in a nearby garbage and it raised the levels of everyone.
I take these kind of studies with a grain of salt, but it seemed helpful to me in imagining how my conservative friends experience the world.
I like Sapolsky a lot--no need to worry about recommending him here! And I have also read that conservatives have higher disgust levels across the board. Makes sense to me: I am super-liberal and also, according to a beta-version of Haidt’s disgust test, feel almost no disgust, ever. Thanks for sharing the story of the experiment with the garbage--so interesting that we could be influenced so easily!
An interesting argument, and definitely one that holds some weight- but I don't think all things can be boiled down to people trying to achieve the same things by different methods. For example, I don't care at all about purity vs corruption, or to a lesser extent loyalty vs betrayal. My primary moral pair is care vs harm, so somebody who wants to hurt a bunch of people to remain loyal to a friend or enforce standards of purity really won't get any sympathy from me.
This issue came up many years ago, when Carole Gilligan published her book In a Different Voice. Gilligan argued that women tend to center their morality around loyalty and bonds with other people rather than around abstract principles. Then people started pointing out that centering your morality around loyalty is also what the Mafia does, and maybe abstract principles--like, “Don’t hurt people”--are more important than loyalty.
And I agree with you about purity. I’m working on yet another Moral Foundations post, in which I grapple with the sanctity foundation--which, full disclosure, I think is responsible for a lot of suffering.
If you take market theory to it's frictionless logical ideal state, it produces almost perfect equality, with everyone's share of resources equal to the cost of capital.
This would result in a kinder world and also the wealthiest.
So fans of Friedman or Hayak can say that they're trying to get the same result as the Bolsheviks.
Edit to add: market theory in its pure state is about how to coordinate the most cooperation
I quite like this post--the invitation to openness. My number one value is probably caring--people like that are drawn to the helping professions, like nursing. What really struck with me while reading this, though, is how many schools of nursing embrace, tacitly or not, authority as the highest value. Nursing professors are supposed to be teaching care vs. harm--a literal proposition in health care. But the unspoken curriculum is obedience vs. disobedience, or authority and its evil twin, power. This is true of the history of nursing and it really needs to change, in part because it creates toxic work environments, but also because that focus keeps nurses from banding together to make the profession better for all. I don't think that care and authority are intrinsically in conflict, but in some nursing schools they are, even though "caring" is held up as ostensibly the highest value. That is a very bad paradox in terms of creating a mentally healthy health care system.
Wow--thank you so much for sharing these thoughts, based on your experience. It hadn’t even occurred to me that unquestioning deference to authority, which is so dangerous with doctors, is also a problem with nurses, but it makes total sense. Authority and hierarchies lead to zero-sum thinking, when what we need is to work together to find the best solutions. Thanks for sharing this!
I think it was Robert Sapolsky in "Behave" (if it wasn't from there I apologize, but I always like to recommend this book) looking at the part of the brain that registers disgust. He noted that people sensitive to disgust tend to be conservative. Seems intuitive.
He described a study of participants taking a quiz that rated how conservative they were. Then they put rotten food in a nearby garbage and it raised the levels of everyone.
I take these kind of studies with a grain of salt, but it seemed helpful to me in imagining how my conservative friends experience the world.
I like Sapolsky a lot--no need to worry about recommending him here! And I have also read that conservatives have higher disgust levels across the board. Makes sense to me: I am super-liberal and also, according to a beta-version of Haidt’s disgust test, feel almost no disgust, ever. Thanks for sharing the story of the experiment with the garbage--so interesting that we could be influenced so easily!
That was a great insight about acceptance of authority: we all chose who the authority is for ourselves.
An interesting argument, and definitely one that holds some weight- but I don't think all things can be boiled down to people trying to achieve the same things by different methods. For example, I don't care at all about purity vs corruption, or to a lesser extent loyalty vs betrayal. My primary moral pair is care vs harm, so somebody who wants to hurt a bunch of people to remain loyal to a friend or enforce standards of purity really won't get any sympathy from me.
This issue came up many years ago, when Carole Gilligan published her book In a Different Voice. Gilligan argued that women tend to center their morality around loyalty and bonds with other people rather than around abstract principles. Then people started pointing out that centering your morality around loyalty is also what the Mafia does, and maybe abstract principles--like, “Don’t hurt people”--are more important than loyalty.
And I agree with you about purity. I’m working on yet another Moral Foundations post, in which I grapple with the sanctity foundation--which, full disclosure, I think is responsible for a lot of suffering.
If you take market theory to it's frictionless logical ideal state, it produces almost perfect equality, with everyone's share of resources equal to the cost of capital.
This would result in a kinder world and also the wealthiest.
So fans of Friedman or Hayak can say that they're trying to get the same result as the Bolsheviks.
Edit to add: market theory in its pure state is about how to coordinate the most cooperation