William K. Black — Howard Dean Wants to Continue Austerity’s Assault on the Working Class

The Democrats are never ever going to figure this out because they are fixated on the Clinton surplus.

And even if they do figure it out, in order to be effective politically, persuasion has to be based on a moral argument rather than reasoning in terms of economic theory and providing facts and figures.

The fundamental problem is that a majority of Americans of all classes view indebtedness as immoral and irresponsible, especially growing indebtedness . 

This is going to be a tough nut to crack. 

While reasoning may be part of the argument, it is unlikely to carry the day with enough people to reverse course in the polls that politicians look at.

The framing must be based on morality rather than reason to work politically, and the argument must be based chiefly on rhetoric (persuasion) rather than logic (reasoning from evidence).

Conservatives figured this out long ago. Liberals are still clueless about it for the most part and when they attempt to use it they are clumsy with it because it doesn't fit their thinking style.

This does not imply countering the indebtedness is immoral view with arguments against that view, which will only reinforce it in the minds of those holding it. Cognitive scientist George Lakoff observes that most people  "moderates" comprising the political "center." They are biconceptual and hold aspects of the conservative and liberal world views characterized by the strict father world view and nurturing partner world view respectively. Even those whose view is dominated by the strict father are susceptible to appeal to the nurturing parent view. Moreover, dominance can shift through persuasion. The "Reagan Democrats" are a good example.

Rather than argue against the strict father-conservative point of view, liberals should instead appeal to the nurturing parent world view that they hold. Polling shows that most Americans are more inclined to the nutting parent world view and can be persuaded by arguments based on the morality of this point of view.

New Economic Perspectives
Howard Dean Wants to Continue Austerity’s Assault on the Working Class
William K. Black | Associate Professor of Economics and Law, UMKC

Daniel Little — Moral intuitions as evolutionary modules

People have moral reactions to the situations they observe around themselves -- within the work environment, in the family, on the street, or in international affairs. This is a psychological fact that is prior to moral philosophy. How should we understand this feature of ordinary human consciousness and cognition?

Jonathan Haidt is a moral psychologist who has some fairly original ideas on this subject. His most recent book, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, attempts to lay out a theory of moral psychology that puts moral intuition and judgment ahead of conscious moral reasoning, and independent from the content of what we refer to as moral philosophy.

Understanding Society
Moral intuitions as evolutionary modules
Daniel Little | Chancellor, University of Michigan at Dearborn

Ethics as a branch of philosophy is usually understood as moral reasoning. Reasoning is reflection on experience. Socrates: "An unexamined life not is not worth living" (Plato, Apology 38a). Social and political philosophy are closely connected with ethics through the study of action.

Experience is not merely of factual occurrences, based on perception of events "objectively," but also involves subjective appreciation that is bound up in the experience. Understanding is gained from reflection on experience. Knowledge is the confluence of experience and understanding through a process of reasoning that yields conclusions. Wisdom is the ability to use knowledge practically.

Recent investigation in cognitive science, by Antonio Damasio in particular, shows that the reason cannot be divorced from feeling in that they are inextricably conjoined in brain functioning. There are no "facts" that are not subjectively appreciated, although some matters more appreciated than others, such as routines hardly noticed. Moral intuition and aesthetic intuition applies to those matters that are more subjectively appreciated than others.

In The Feeling of What Happens, Damasio laid the foundations of the "enchainment of precedences": the nonconscious neural signaling of an individual organism begets the protoself which permits core selfand core consciousness, which allow for an autobiographical self, which permits extended consciousness. At the end of the chain, extended consciousness permits conscience. [Wikipedia]

Conscience is the basis of moral intuition. This is captured in the creation myth:  God forbids Adam and Eve eating "the fruit of the tree knowledge of good and evil" (Gen. 2:17). When they eat the forbidden fruit, their eyes are opened, and realizing they are naked, they are ashamed (Gen. 3:7). Here in the ancient narrative lies a teaching story that contemporary study of the brain also reveals scientifically. Moral intuition is somatic in addition to mental. In intuition feeling predominates over mind and in reasoning, mind predominates over feeling.

The explains why there are different moral types. People feel differently, and apparently early learning plays a crucial role in this. Those with a more visceral response relate to events more somatically than those accustomed to taking a more reasoned mental approach. 

George Lakoff has observed that conservative morality is more visceral and impassioned than liberal, which is more reasoned and more aloof. This is why conservatives are not swayed by liberal reasoning, and why liberals resist what they consider to be the "raw" reactions of conservatives.

In addition, some people are more empathetic than others, and those with a deficiency of feeling enabling them to mirror others feelings are sociopathic — not so much immoral as amoral. This seems to be the result of both endowment of mirror neurons and conditioning.

However important this somatic factor is, it is not the whole story of morality. But to ignore it as the foundation of morality in biology and evolutionary science is fatal to any moral theorizing.

Daniel Little — Moral Emotions

Why do people act morally? Why do people act altruistically, keep their promises, or act fairly? It is sometimes held that a part of the answer is that people have "moral emotions", and these emotions play a key role in the creation of moral actions.

What is a moral emotion? I'm sure that there are specialists who would offer different definitions of this concept; but I suggest that a moral emotion is a feeling or affect that is responsive to the situation of other living beings. Sympathy, compassion, humor, affection, and respect are all examples of moral emotions; but so are antipathy, rivalry, envy, and racial animosity. This inventory shows that what I'm calling "moral emotions" are not necessarily "moral" -- taking pleasure in the suffering of others is morally unattractive, but falls in the category of a feeling that is responsive to the situation of the other.

There is a related category of emotion that philosophers sometimes refer to as "cognitive emotions." These are feelings that are dependent on possessing certain kinds of beliefs. Feeling grateful is a cognitive emotion; it doesn't make sense to attribute this mental state to someone without also attributing to the person some set of factual beliefs about what has occurred in light of which being grateful makes sense. (Andrew Ortony, Gerald Clore, and Allan Collins provide some theoretical discussion of this topic in The Cognitive Structure of Emotions.)

These two categories do not fully overlap. There are moral emotions that have a cognitive basis. But there are also moral emotions that do not have a cognitive foundation -- for example, the emotional response most people have to a smiling infant. And there are cognitive emotions that do not have a social component -- for example, fear of illness.

It is clear that normal human beings experience these kinds of emotions and feelings. How should we factor them into our theory of action? How do emotions affect behavior? Some emotions seem to have an immediate causal power to create dispositions to specific kinds of action (dispositions that can nonetheless be overridden by higher functions of self-control). An angry person is disposed to lashing out at others. A person experiencing sympathy is disposed to providing aid to people in immediate need. A frightened person is disposed to retreat from the frightening situation. A person experiencing sadness may be inhibited from any kind of action. So emotions have a fairly direct relationship to action....

Understanding Society
Moral Emotions
Daniel Little | Chancellor, University of Michigan at Dearborn

What Daniel Little calls moral emotions play a central role action theory and decision making, hence in political economy, and they are central to politics and policy making. But, curiously, they are excluded from the consideration of rationality in neoclassical economics. Keynes considered them in terms of "animal spirits," for example, but not substantially otherwise.

This is strange in the Adam Smith, the founder of economics, or better, political economy, was a moral theorist, having published The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) well before The Wealth of Nations (1776). Karl Marx, too, was more a philosopher than an economist in the contemporary sense, and his work centers on emotion as much as on reason. Marx's concept of alienation, derived from Hegel's master-slave and "unhappy consciousness" analysis, later became a syndrome in contemporary psychology but was forgotten in economics. Hegel had maintained that behavior is contextually determined rather than natural in the sense of law-based, so that it is possible to transcend from one stage of consciousness to another. Marx held that it was possible to transcend the state of alienation and, moreover, that this was the direction of history at present, driven by increasing species-consciousness, that is, awareness of the universality of human nature.

Some economists have called for a more balanced methodological approach. Adolph Lowe called for a melding of economics and sociology in the 1930's in order to give economics on a strong footing in reality instead of being absorbed in stylized modeling. Kenneth Boulding introduced the concept of "psychic capital" and went on to develop the field of evolutionary economics, which attempted to approach social science holistically  Recent advances in cognitive science (Antonio Damasio) are beginning to have an impact, too, and behavioral economics is gaining ground. In fact, Daniel Kahneman was awarded the Nobel in economics enen though he is not an economist. So some progress is being made toward a more comprehensive approach. On the return of emotion to the study of economics, see Mabel Berfezin, "Emotions and the Economy."