Your Levels of Moral Analysis

Cognitive dissonance required

Photo courtesy of Gareth Ellis

When people think of debate, we think of disagreements. And when we think of disagreements, we merely think of “differences in opinion.” We see all the same issues, we just want to go different directions with them.

But often two people aren’t just arguing from different lived experiences or slightly different values. They’re arguing from entirely different planes of ideas. There are different layers of reality that people are operating from. They don’t see the same issues.

Differences in opinion often have to be sorted out by looking at level of analysis — in other words, what level of morality someone is using as the foundation of their belief. There are different layers of morality in conflict with each other.

I first heard this “level of analysis” concept years ago from Jordan Peterson, as a way of distinguishing different levels of scientific or philosophical debate. The theoretical, the general, the practical, the specific. Because these different levels, irritatingly, adhere to different priorities or sets of facts. Different levels play by different rules.

As a simple example: if you're trying to explain the behavior of human-run companies, you cannot simply cite the laws of physics. Because there are so many layers of phenomena (cells, organs, humans, groups, and organizations) in between the physics and the final output that there isn’t one cohesive way to explain how one became the other. New properties and new concerns emerge with each higher level.

In fact, science is just a series of fields constructed to explain what physics cannot yet explain. In an ideal world, we would only have one field of science: physics. And it would have become advanced enough to explain our neurons, our social behavior, and economics.

(I know of three separate people whose life project is to construct a “theory of everything,” because it's an enticing idea.)

But that’s probably a pipe dream. So for now we’re stuck with different levels of analysis. If you want to analyze the behavior of companies, you have to use sociology, demographics, economics, and politics. If you want to analyze particles, you use physics.

I find this “level of analysis” idea to be a useful framework for figuring out why disagreements happen between people and what disagreements are actually made of. In relationships or debate or anywhere else.

Imagine a hierarchy, or a pyramid, with different levels of beliefs. It might look something like this:

At the bottom of the pyramid, nothing matters. We’re animals; human life is just physics and base instincts. This is where nihilists and the driest atheists live. This is also where psychopaths live, and they never leave. Because, as far as we understand, they can’t. They are trapped in a world where human suffering has no meaning; pleasure and pain are simply things to be chased or avoided on instinct.

And this is where people like me, normal people, store our opinions of humanity that are brutal and cold. Opinions like:

• War and murder are natural, animalistic phenomena;

• Capitalist exploitation of weak people is inevitable;

• Incentives drive human behavior, and always will, because we entertain our base urges for sex and power and we’re never going to stop doing that;

• And ultimately human joy and suffering don’t mean that much. Life is painful and then you’re dead, forever.

If you’re an honest person, there are probably pieces of you that hold opinions like these, somewhere. Deep down maybe. How much we cover up these brutal beliefs in our daily lives is what separates us from animals (and from each other).

As you move up the pyramid, you gain a morality that is broad and humanistic — you choose to believe that human pain and pleasure matter. And you also might hold beliefs like “humans are not more important than other species — the pleasure and pain of animals matters too.” And beliefs like “the environment matters. Earth itself matters.”

And then above that, your morality starts to narrow. By the time you reach the top, your morality is pretty constraining. Rather than caring about nothing, or about everything, you have made decisions to care about only certain things above others.

These levels can be divided up any number of ways depending on what your experience and your genetics have taught you to care about. Most of us leave alone brutal nihilism, and most of us (these days) leave alone narrow, dogmatic religious concerns.

Most of us spend most of our lives in levels II and III — some combination of broad human concern, and concern for those close to us. Some muddy conflict between the global, the national, the personal, and the traditional.

Arguments can come from any place in the pyramid. Which is why debating people is so hard. You may not even be considering the same things when you debate someone. You may be starting from different assumptions, with no way to make those assumptions meet anywhere (or even to make those assumptions clear in words).

And each level of the pyramid trumps the one below it. Not in debate, but in our own minds and hearts.

If your first priority is your family, that means that you’re going to have opinions, deeply-held opinions, that protect your family first and foremost — and sometimes that’s going to put you at odds with the other people around you.

For example, as a brother I want to defend my brothers. Against anything. Against everything that might hurt them.

The problem is, sometimes they are wrong. And they feel the same way about me. We are all wrong sometimes. And yet unflinching loyalty is an essential human trait: it is glue that holds personal relationships and communities together. If you can't stand up for those close to you, even when they're wrong, you have little value as a member of kith or kin.

What that means practically is that, even if one of my brothers went out and started a fight for a bad reason, I would fight alongside him. I mean, what am I going to do, join the other guys at the bar and help kick the shit out of my own brother? No. I'm going to make those clowns sorry they didn't just take his bullying and walk the fuck away. Because that's what brothers do. We make people sorry they fucked with one of us.

However, if we move back down one level to the humanist level, that makes me wrong. I am wrong for defending something I know is wrong. Because what I've just done, while good for me, was bad for the entire rest of the world. I enabled bad behavior and punished those who stood up against it.

That’s exactly what you’re not supposed to do.

But family is important, and sometimes you have to make that trade.

So my intervention in a fight my brother started was okay on levels I and III, but not level II (and probably not level IV, although we don’t pay many dues to level IV). This is why life is hard.

I’m not a postmodernist — I don’t believe morality is “completely subjective” and “there is no right answer to anything ever.” Because that’s even worse than being nihilistic — it’s obnoxiously stupid. We all have a good sense of what is right and what is wrong. Sometimes there is just a right thing to do, because by common sense it just makes everything better than the other options.

But sometimes, life makes us choose between what is right at one level and what is right at another. Which means that part of being right, sometimes, is being wrong.

Some beliefs are anchored on humanity in general; some on culture, community, or tradition; some on the well-being of whoever happens to live near you; and some on what is deeply personal.

And some beliefs are simply anchored on getting oneself ahead, building a good life for oneself. Because that is also a worthwhile thing to do. Right?

And none of these is wrong. All of them are perfectly sane places to anchor your beliefs.

For another example: a Christian mother who refuses to give her child medication because “God will take care of it” is doing the moral thing (or what she thinks is the moral thing) at level IV, but she is absolutely and unequivocally wrong at levels II and III. Because anyone with any common sense of the real world, this world right here, knows that her daughter would be better off with medicine.

But then, at level I, who cares? It's her daughter. What can we do?

Abortion is an issue that makes no difference to me at base level, because it’s just one more human life that is very unlikely to affect the world at large. People die all the time, and frankly I don’t care. Because I can’t. What am I going to do, weep all day for every lost life in the world? I can't spend my whole life weeping.

Then at level II, abortion has social implications I care about: for instance, I’d like irresponsible, fast young people to stop having kids outside of wedlock. Because it’s overwhelmingly a negative thing for the rest of us. It puts people into the world who have less love and stability than they should have, and are more likely to live lives that make my world a worse place to live in. The blast radius of bastard children is pretty large. So… let them have abortions. Hell, make them have abortions.

And yet I also don’t believe in enabling bad behavior. If people have sex, the consequence is that they need to raise kids. That’s what sex is. So in that way, I’m against abortion.

And then at level III, the level of family, it becomes an intensely personal issue that I take very seriously. If I had a daughter who was raped, of course I'd want her to be able to get an abortion. And in fact at that point I could probably kill with my bare hands anyone who tried to stop her from getting one.

So which one of these levels of moral concern is wrong?

None of them.

Which is why we’re still debating about abortion after all these years. Because there is no wrong answer, and therefore there is no right answer.

Part of being a human, ridiculously and unfortunately, is cognitive dissonance. That’s the price you pay at the door. You have to internally disagree with yourself or else you’d never get anything done. On top of disagreeing with other people.

I know of almost zero human beings who are fully integrated — that they have opinions that either stay at one level of the pyramid all of the time, or that satisfy all the levels they care about at once. Maybe David Deutsch, Steven Pinker, or Kanye West. Or the pastor from my childhood Presbyterian church. Because those people are miraculously good at keeping cohesive morals (or in Kanye’s case, he just doesn’t give a shit about anything so he’s satisfied with himself no matter what he does).

The rest of us have to temporarily forgo some levels of the hierarchy in order to make the most pressing decisions before us. And there are always decisions before us.

Louis CK's comedy is a great example of the base level. Louis paints a picture of the world where nothing matters and we're all going to hurt each other and then die, and there's nothing morally wrong with that. What makes comedians like Louis CK, George Carlin, and Ricky Gervais so great is that they are willing to take us down to level I and let us walk around there.

It’s useful to move up and down the pyramid, to see the different layers of giving a shit. It’s a reminder that we’re all just doing our best.

Drink some water and watch comedy because it makes you smarter.

JR

“‘What happens after you die?’ Lots of things happen after you die. They just don’t involve you.” - Louis CK