Moral disagreements

I have heard it said that even though everyone agrees that firetrucks are red, we all actually "see" a different color when we look at one. For example, my "yellow" might be your "pink"; we just don't know it. The band Greenlaw has written a song wherein the idea that "we don't see the same color blue" is utilized to great poetic effect.

It's an interesting idea, but I think it is largely untrue (except in special cases, like color-blindness): our sense of sight is just too fundamentally important; too fine-tuned; and too old (in evolutionary terms), to vary as much as that. But when it comes to our sense of morals, the same cannot be said: morally speaking, it may in fact be truthfully said that we don't all "see the same color blue". More...
This is important because many of the modern world's most polarizing issues - though they appear to be intellectual divides - are in fact moral divides. The distinction is not trivial: if issues like these are treated as intellectual divides, then our opponents must be either misinformed, stupid, or amoral; if they are moral divides, however, we can see how our opponents might be simultaneously well-informed; intelligent; moral and genuine - it's just that their moral values are slightly different from our own.

The key difference is that while it is possible to be more intelligent than someone, it is impossible to be "more moral": thus intellectual debates can have an absolute "winner"; moral debates cannot.

American politics have in recent years become increasingly polarized, with conservative republicans clustered on the far right and liberal democrats on the left. The realization that our political affiliations stem from our individual moral sensitivities (as Jonathan Haidt argues convincingly) might go a long way in ending this era of mutual incomprehension.

Moreover, morality is at least partially heritable. Very loosely speaking, this means there are "liberal" and "conservative" genes, which may be influencing the stance that individual people (like yourself for example) have taken on issues like abortion, preemptive war, and economic policies. This means that, if you are willing to accept that homosexuality is "not a choice" - as most liberals are - then you might have to accept the same argument from someone who votes Cheney / Palin in 2012.

A recognition of these facts would, I believe, go a long way in easing the polarization of American politics; treating such disagreements as intellectual ones too easily leads to shouting matches, because they are, in fact, about moral values; they are disagreements between people who place a varying emphasis on the rights of the unborn versus the those of the living; security versus pacifism; economic freedom versus economic equality. There are no "right" or "wrong" answers to these moral questions, simply because their solutions are, inevitably, moral compromises.

Thus, many of these debates are analogous to a disagreement over the color of a shirt between people who are genuinely "seeing" a different color when they look at it. So the conversation is only productive if the parties involved can understand the fundamental reason why the disagreement is taking place; they must first agree that: yes, they are viewing the same object; and no, neither one of them is lying; and yes, that they actually are seeing different colors when they look at the shirt.

At this point you might ask "if some of our most fundamental disagreements are moral ones, and yet we are unable to "see the same color blue", how can these issues ever be resolved? Are we forced to merely agree to disagree?"

Fortunately, I don't think so: just as we can use science to determine the actual color of the shirt (by measuring the frequencies of light that it reflects), we can use it to resolve moral disagreements. Basically, we have to shift the focus of our debates from moral issues that appear to be intellectual, to genuinely intellectual issues. As Steven Pinker, in his (excellent) book The Blank Slate, points out:

"...biological facts are beginning to box in plausible political philosophies. The belief on the left that human nature can be changed at will, and the belief on the right that morality rests on God's endowing us with an immaterial soul, are becoming rearguard struggles against the juggernaut of science."