Observational Basis for Ethics--Alan Fiske


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Observational Basis for Ethics--Alan Fiske

I have some videos for you and they're long. But I believe they are a rabbit hole well worth going down.

The first is by Alan Fiske. It is called "Dr. Fiske's Talk - The Objective Basis for Morality." This is at a YouTube account that only has one video, so I don't know how long it will be available.

If you are not familiar with Alan Fiske, I highly recommend you watch it while the watching is good. There doesn't seem to by much by him on YouTube.




Fiske's main idea is that he is an anthropologist with psychological leanings. So, as he made clear in the Q&A part, he is not interested in making a prescriptive morality. He is content to observe humans and describe what he has seen.

He has found four areas where humans instinctively deal with values re social relationships (or, to use his language, "organize their sociality"): authority ranking, communal sharing, equality matching and market pricing. I find his terminology clunky, but I love the four concepts behind it. Rather than explain what this is, I will let him do it in an introductory essay to his thinking.

The Inherent Sociability of Homo sapiens

The coordination of interaction is all the more challenging because of the variety of domains that must be coordinated: work, exchange, distribution and consumption, moral judgments, sanctions and forms of redressing wrongs, aggression, sexuality, social identity, the meaning of objects, places, and time. If people use different models to coordinate each domain, how can they deal with the resulting cognitive complexity of social life, let alone integrate several domains to form a personal relationship or an institution?

The answer, surprisingly, is that people use just four fundamental models for organizing most aspects of sociality most of the time in all cultures (Fiske 1991a, 1992). These models are Communal Sharing, Authority Ranking, Equality Matching, and Market Pricing. Communal Sharing (CS) is a relationship in which people treat some dyad or group as equivalent and undifferentiated with respect to the social domain in question. Examples are people using a commons (CS with respect to utilization of the particular resource), people intensely in love (CS with respect to their social selves), people who "ask not for whom the bell tolls, for it tolls for thee" (CS with respect to shared suffering and common well-being), or people who kill any member of an enemy group indiscriminately in retaliation for an attack (CS with respect to collective responsibility). In Authority Ranking (AR) people have asymmetric positions in a linear hierarchy in which subordinates defer, respect, and (perhaps) obey, while superiors take precedence and take pastoral responsibility for subordinates. Examples are military hierarchies (AR in decisions, control, and many other matters), ancestor worship (AR in offerings of filial piety and expectations of protection and enforcement of norms), monotheistic religious moralities (AR for the definition of right and wrong by commandments or will of God), social status systems such as class or ethnic rankings (AR with respect to social value of identities), and rankings such as sports team standings (AR with respect to prestige). AR relationships are based on perceptions of legitimate asymmetries, not coercive power; they are not inherently exploitative (although they may involve power or cause harm).

In Equality Matching relationships people keep track of the balance or difference among participants and know what would be required to restore balance. Common manifestations are turn-taking, one-person one-vote elections, equal share distributions, and vengeance based on an-eye-for-an-eye, a-tooth-for-a-tooth. Examples include sports and games (EM with respect to the rules, procedures, equipment and terrain), baby-sitting coops (EM with respect to the exchange of child care), and restitution in-kind (EM with respect to righting a wrong). Market Pricing relationships are oriented to socially meaningful ratios or rates such as prices, wages, interest, rents, tithes, or cost-benefit analyses. Money need not be the medium, and MP relationships need not be selfish, competitive, maximizing, or materialistic—any of the four models may exhibit any of these features. MP relationships are not necessarily individualistic; a family may be the CS or AR unit running a business that operates in an MP mode with respect to other enterprises. Examples are property that can be bought, sold, or treated as investment capital (land or objects as MP), marriages organized contractually or implicitly in terms of costs and benefits to the partners, prostitution (sex as MP), bureaucratic cost-effectiveness standards (resource allocation as MP), utilitarian judgments about the greatest good for the greatest number, or standards of equity in judging entitlements in proportion to contributions (two forms of morality as MP), considerations of "spending time" efficiently, and estimates of expected kill ratios (aggression as MP).

People often use different models for different aspects of their interaction with the same person. For example, roommates may divide the rent evenly and take turns cooking dinner for each other (both EM), buy ingredients for the meal at the store (MP), share their food and drink at the table without regard to who consumes what and share living and bath rooms (CS), pay for long-distance calls according to the costs they each incur (MP), and one may sell her used car to the other. On the softball field one is a coach, the other player (AR); yet in their sexual relations they like to reverse these roles of domination and submission.


I'm not going to discuss this in this post, but I probably will later in the thread. For now, let me throw out an idea.

Whenever I see a major conflict between Objectivism and something that constantly nags at me, I think it can be examined in light of these four categories and a solution found. I have often said that the problem with some of Rand's positions is not that they are wrong, on the contrary, they are insightful. But she gives them more scope than they can support. I'm excited about Fiske's observations because I believe this solves the scope problem. Even if this is not valid for anyone else, it makes perfect sense to me. I am going down this rabbit hole for a while.

Rand's form of thinking can be applied to each of the four categories and I believe a very satisfactory result will come out. This is the good thing about Fiske's work. He just says humans are going to seek right and wrong in these four areas because he has observed God knows how many cultures doing just that. But he doesn't say what that right and wrong is prescriptively or should be (with the exception of some fascinating work involving 8 month old babies). He just says what he has observed.

For those who want to dig a bit deeper, here is a PDF of one of his published papers, and a very good exposition to boot:

The Four Elementary Forms of Sociality: Framework for a Unified Theory of Social Relations

Now for the quirky part. This involves Steven Pinker. I became interested in Fiske because he was mentioned in the following video that I looked at seeking something else entirely:

RSA Animate - Language as a Window into Human Nature

I enjoyed this video so much that I decided to seek out the full lecture from which it was drawn. But the weird clunker is that Pinker says Fiske found three forms of sociality, not four: dominance, communality and reciprocity.

Here is the full talk, which has the bonus that Pinker examines all kinds of foul language. The result is quite hilarious.

Steven Pinker - The Stuff of Thought: Language as a window into human nature

This is a lot of video, I know. But if you have never encountered these arguments before, I believe you are in for a treat.

For myself for now, I will go with Fiske's four categories (although the condensations into three Pinker did might be useful for some other things like fleshing out fiction), and I need to reflect on Pinker's examination of why and how we cuss. This last is just out of orneriness. :smile:

Michael

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