I review The Mind Club, one of the most insightful books that few people have read.
Wegner and Grey say that we use two different approaches for trying to enter the minds of others. When we try to understand their feelings, we use simulation. We try to imagine ourselves in a similar situation. When we try to understand their actions, we use theorizing. We try to imagine the chain of reasoning that someone used in order to arrive at an action.
It seems that often we can understand either feelings or motives, but not both. When we perceive only feelings, we see a moral patient. When we see only motives, we see a moral agent.
Although the book was written several years before the death of George Floyd, it clearly anticipates the frequent depiction of Floyd with the features of a big baby.
You also wrote about The Mind Club back on April 29.
Interestingly, that post is titled, “The Mind and Moral Categories” but the url says “speculation-on-the-psychology-of-woke”.
Re: “It seems that often we can understand either feelings or motives, but not both.” (The Mind Club)
Agency is behavior to try and fulfill one’s motive(s) in light of one’s beliefs about context and causality. If we set babies and robots aside, successful interaction usually requires discerning the other’s motives (or feelings) *and* beliefs. People routinely essay (and often accomplish) this dual task. (Of course, one’s own emotions sometimes distort agency; for example, when one gets angry at a rock after stumbling over it, or when one vents at family after a frustrating day at work, or when one makes an imprudent romantic overture in the grip of infatuation.)
A question, then, is: Why do people short-circuit discernment in public affairs, as Arnold describes?
Another question is: Why do people generalize wildly from rare scandals? It’s one thing to interpret George Floyd’s death as an interaction between a badly motivated police officer and a vulnerable addict. It’s another thing to conclude that law enforcement is rotten.
It’s a big country and you only ever hear about bad anecdotes, often from a media that has an agenda to push a particular perspective (which is why most people know who Floyd is, but not Tony Timpa).
It’s the where there’s smoke there’s fire heuristic. If you constantly hear about something in the news it must be important.. Moreover, if you see a sensational news story about a black man victimized by police every month for five years, that’s 60 different cases. That’s a very tiny number of black men in the country, but we are inclined to think that any problem where you can name dozens of examples from all around the country is a crisis, probably in part due to the fact that humans are optimized for small societies.
This moral dyad is no doubt somewhat prevalent and accords well with the left’s oppression axis, as explained in your Three Languages of Politics, but clearly doesn’t apply to the barbarism/freedom axes of conservatives and libertarians, who likely make up a larger segment of the population. Instead, conservatives see us as largely stupid and violent, with a select few priests and knights nobly corraling us to some kind of civilization and peace. Libertarians see most as lazy moochers, constantly forming gangs to try and steal from the work of the few John Galts, who thrive by intelligence and grit.
There is some truth in all these perspectives and many more: perhaps the real problem is the reductionism of those who try to force our complex world into just one of these axes that they favor?