Another headline, another senseless tragedy. During a week full of them, this one hardly caused a blip on my radar, except that it happened here. First I read that a group of teens forced a boy to watch his mother repeatedly raped, then have sex with her himself at gunpoint.…
I raised this question at a recent family gathering, because I see it as my role to raise such questions: Assume that you're living alone. How often should you clean the drinking cup you use in at your bathroom sink? The first answer came from a brother-in-law who cautiously answered…
I've studied moral philosophy for many years, mostly in frustration. Though many philosophical theories of morality have offered tantalizing glimmers, they ultimately fail to account for the “moral” decisions people make in the real world. Traditional philosophical accounts of morality have appeared especially feeble in light of the ongoing and volatile American culture wars. For instance, some of us claim that torture is OK while others feel that we have a moral duty to impeach the President and Vice-President for failing to stop the torture. Starting with the assumption that both sides to this controversy are sincerely, no philosophical moral system begins to account for both of those positions. Luckily, we are in a new era with regard to understanding morality. Cognitive scientists such as psychologist Marc Hauser and primatologist Frans de Waal are studying morality with new sets of tools. Recently, I had the opportunity to read an extraordinary article by Jonathan Haidt (pronounced "height") and Jesse Graham: "When Morality Opposes Justice: Conservatives Have Moral Intuitions That Liberals May Not Recognize." This article is written in an easily accessible style and its 16 pages are packed with ideas that bridge Haidt’s theories to the real world. If you're in the mood to watch rather than read, sit back and view this video of Haidt describing his approach (the 30-minute video moves right along--Haidt is an eloquent speaker as well as a talented writer). I’m not going to try to hide my excitement at Haidt’s approach. The more I learned about it, the more I thought of the words T. H. Huxley spoke upon learning of Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection: "How stupid of me not to have thought of it." If you want to test your own moral foundations before proceeding, go to Haidt’s site and take a short test to determine your own moral foundation. Then read on (either read Haidt’s article or come back here).
It is striking that so many conservatives spend so much energy condemning gays. They don't just criticize gays; they condemn gays with intense passion. Nor does this process of moral judgment usually involve any sort of delicate weighing process. Too often it is a visceral and unrelenting moral harpooning delivered by the likes of Ted Haggard—or, at least, the sort of judgment previously delivered by the then-closeted version of Ted Haggard, whose name is now synonymous with “reaction formation.” Many of the people who condemn gays on street corners and pulpits remind me of steam boilers on the verge of blowing up. Anti-gay bigots are rarely if ever attempting to work through the details of any of the three main historical philosophical approaches to morality (consequentialism, deontology or virtue) when they condemn gays. No, there is nothing much philosophical about the way most people rail against the gays. They are not driven by any sort of philosophy. In my experience, they are primarily driven by disgust. What especially disturbs conservative Christians are images of men kissing men and men having sex with other men. Such images are so incredibly disgusting to those who hate gays that it has become a favorite insult on the streets and in the military to shout "You're GAY!" And when this insult is hurled in the process of casting moral judgment, it is done by people whose faces are contorted with utter disgust. Because such condemnations of gays are so visceral, this raises the issue of whether disgust is a valid basis for morality . . .
I just finished listening to a lecture by Carol Dweck at IT Conversations, Dweck, a Stanford psychologist, is the author of Mindset: The New Psychology of Success.
Dweck’s idea is straightforward, though widely applicable. She starts with the premise that there are two kinds of people, those with “fixed mindsets” and others with “growth mindsets.” Those with fixed mindsets see their lives as being about proving themselves and not making mistakes. It is important to them that they look smart at all times. Those with “growth mindsets” have deep-seated beliefs in cultivating and developing their own qualities. Their lives are about stretching and growing, a process that is not thwarted (and is sometimes actually enhanced) by making mistakes.
How do you tell which mindset you have? During the interview, Dweck offered this simple test: “True or false, you can’t change how smart you are.” If you think this is true, you probably have a fixed mindset.
This distinction important because there are adverse consequences to having a fixed mindset. If you have a fixed mindset, failures label you as a failure for the rest of your life. People with fixed mindsets develop inaccurate views of themselves. They block out negative information for the sake of their egos. Compare this to growth mindsets, where failures are not self defining, but merely bumps along the way. Failures are, indeed, opportunities for growth. Those with growth mindsets actually crave negative information. They stay in touch with their own liabilities in order to …
