More on Moral Radii: The Circle Collapses
Directly continuing from Thursday's late entry, what causes the moral circle to shrink?
Social psychologists have long studied this phenomenon, and I've referred to a few of these experiments in a past entry.[1]
Bloom listed the following (with the exception of conformity, which I have added):
distance -- We are less likely to treat people morally the farther away they are from us.
euphemism -- We are less likely to treat people morally if we use more pleasant sounding terms for things.
removal of names -- We are less likely to treat people morally if we do not use their names. (Consider how prisoners and concentration camp workers are given numbers.)
disgust -- We are less likely to treat people morally if we consider them disgusting.
conformity -- We are less likely to treat people morally if others are not treating them morally or if we are ordered to not do so by an authority figure.
I found the idea of names fascinating, considering how important names were especially in older times.
But what Bloom talked most about was disgust. Apparently, there is no human culture that does not have disgust and no human culture that does not have facial expressions for that disgust. Animal byproducts are almost always triggers of disgust in cultures.
Bloom presented two interesting studies.
In one, it was found that people considered disgusting to subjects did not even "light up" the same neuronal signatures in the brain as "normal" people do. In other words, people's brains do not even consider "disgusting people" as human in the same way.
It is no wonder that American slaves and Jewish concentration camp prisoners had simple human privacies taken away. If they could make others look disgusting by forcing them to do disgusting things out of necessity, they would no longer be seen as human.
Now clearly, different people have different sensitivity to disgusting things. Some people faint at blood; for others it poses no problem, for example. Another study showed a correlation between those more sensitive to disgusting things and those having negative attitudes towards homosexual people. That is, people more likely to be grossed out by, say, animal intestines, were more likely to hold negative views of homosexuals. (Bloom made no effort to interpret this finding further.)
When it comes down to it, though, what makes the moral circle collapse is perhaps less interesting than what makes it grow. That will be the topic of my next public entry.
Social psychologists have long studied this phenomenon, and I've referred to a few of these experiments in a past entry.[1]
Bloom listed the following (with the exception of conformity, which I have added):
I found the idea of names fascinating, considering how important names were especially in older times.
But what Bloom talked most about was disgust. Apparently, there is no human culture that does not have disgust and no human culture that does not have facial expressions for that disgust. Animal byproducts are almost always triggers of disgust in cultures.
Bloom presented two interesting studies.
In one, it was found that people considered disgusting to subjects did not even "light up" the same neuronal signatures in the brain as "normal" people do. In other words, people's brains do not even consider "disgusting people" as human in the same way.
It is no wonder that American slaves and Jewish concentration camp prisoners had simple human privacies taken away. If they could make others look disgusting by forcing them to do disgusting things out of necessity, they would no longer be seen as human.
Now clearly, different people have different sensitivity to disgusting things. Some people faint at blood; for others it poses no problem, for example. Another study showed a correlation between those more sensitive to disgusting things and those having negative attitudes towards homosexual people. That is, people more likely to be grossed out by, say, animal intestines, were more likely to hold negative views of homosexuals. (Bloom made no effort to interpret this finding further.)
When it comes down to it, though, what makes the moral circle collapse is perhaps less interesting than what makes it grow. That will be the topic of my next public entry.