From: ian glendinning (psybertron@gmail.com)
Date: Tue Sep 13 2005 - 16:45:50 BST
Erin,
I didn't see Arlo's original comment, but you raise a very interesting point.
One of my many aphorisms is "What we say, What we do, and What we say
we do, are three different things. (Even those of us with apparently
strong moral world-views).
I believe this kind of hypocrisy is a real part of all (western)
social anthropology - Nils Brunsson has written a whole book about it
in the management of organisations. I believe it's a defense mechanism
we all use when the only rationale for decision making we're allowed
to use (by the organisation / culture / community we find ourselves
part of) is logical positive "SOMist", where the moral values are
heavily discounted by the prevaling decision making rationale. It
takes real heroism to break it.
"Blindness" is too kind. It's more a culturally conditioned
justification for discounting what we see.
Ian
On 9/13/05, Erin <macavity11@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> Hello ALL,
>
> Arlo mentioned a disturbing scene of people driving by hitchhikers. I think
> Sam commented that it was a haunting image and I think Platt said he didn't
> see the footage. Well I thought I would share this...just reading it on
> the chronicle website.
>
> "On Wednesday, Loyola's president drove out of the city, past men on front
> porches cradling shotguns and families pushing their possessions in grocery
> carts, dazed children riding on their shoulders. Some tried to hitchhike,
> but Father Wildes had been warned about carjackings and shootings by people
> who were desperate to leave the city. "As a priest, one of the hardest
> things to do was to drive by those people, but I wanted to live to see
> another day and do what I have to do," he said.
>
> I have never been in a situation like that and honestly I don't know what I
> would have done if I saw somebody hitchiking. This made me think of
> something.....I'll call it "moral blindness" after the phenomenon "change
> blindness" (where we are not as good at detecting change in a
> scene/person/etc. as we think we are...one example is where they switched
> people asking for directions and the person giving directions didn't even
> notice). Actually I think that is getting closer to what they called change
> blindness blindness (how inaccurate we are with our assessing what changes
> we would notice or be blind to)
>
> I was just wondering if all our assesments of our morals really match up
> with our perceptions/actions in the real world or are we suffering from
> "moral blindess" or "moral blindness blindness" (e.g. our assessment of
> whether we would stop to pick up the hitchhiker vs. whether we actually
> would have stopped if put to the test).
>
> P.S. I am not saying the priest is a hypocrite or the people saying he
> should have stopped are all talk...I am bringing this up because I am just
> curious to how our personal assessment of our own morality
> matches/mismatches with our actual morality and how can we really know if
> they mismatch (e.g. another example of what might be "moral blindness" what
> if you thought the choice you were valuing was motivated by intellectual
> values but was actually motivated by social values)
>
> Erin
>
>
>
>
>
>
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