Categories versus practices: moral leadership & teenagers running amok

In today’s psyche.co essay, Adolescence is a ‘use it or lose it’ time for moral development I’ve learned about moral foundations theory, and as I read it, I felt like pointing out, or shouting, that using the word categories, for practices, might help with tick-a-box data collection, but can lead to boxed-in thinking. As a failed poet I always grumpily fume against the terminology various philosophical-level discussions in the soft sciences take.

Defintions are important they say so they grab any damn metaphor and run with its defintion. Done. Tick. Box. Boxed.

In one sense, one frame, one metaphor: I am talking about the resolution of the data/digital scan. If behaviour is an analog experience and moral psychologists are collecting data and testing hypothesis, then ‘they’ are a kind of scanner, chopping up the analog into discrete chunks that can be isomorphically labelled with a number (the category, my practice), and the codes thus produced can be manipulated and algorithmed, counted and statisticised.

Given a big enough data set the graininess goes away, they say.

So whether you call the discrete chunks categories or practices, might make no difference practically. Here the methodology is governed by the technological capabilities of the investigators making the inquiry. Technology itself is a type of prior, when collecting data. The is a lot of experience, and replication one hopes involved it the design. This is also why technology is not neutral, because it has limits, and not just that of the point-of-view of the background of those with the intention to ‘build it’.

These are biases of a sort— biases not of preference but facts on the ground.

I mean, these are our tools we have at hand, and it is what it is, and if that behaviour looks like a nail we might need to hammer it down. 出る釘は打たれる

Boxing things into categories is one such hammer. They are mechanically sound but often lack insight into emergent phenomena or bias-informed movement and their  composition. This means the categorical based research might not be able to explain themselves fully.

For research this is an issue, for businesses based on algorithms churning the the data of our bit-falling lives, they do not care at all.  In any case, middle-management will make the hammer work like a screwdriver, however badly, if it is told to, or if that the only way to get the job done.

That said, this is not the case in this article at psyche. The article is worth reading because it covers growth, and what can go wrong when we mature into adulthood. But more than this, counter to what I have just said about crude mechanistic categories. The article both agrees with what I have just said, about categories, and it disproves my fears of category worship. The article does so, by way explaining our selves as adults that we, as adults, often think in categorical types, in a lovely aporia of reading.

I mean, what else have  we got?

Category == bad thinking, can destroy the world

[…]adults rely more on the categorical type of violation, as opposed to the degree of harm or injustice caused. For example, an adult is more likely than a child to consider disrespect for authority as a serious moral violation despite no real harm being caused to anyone.

I have my gaps too.

So some direct quotes to illustrate that rashness I had in judging the article based on its choice of categories.

This helps to explain the extreme acts of violence perpetrated by Gendron and similar teenagers, who are driven by a warped sense of morality and desire to belong to a perceived in-group.

This is the worldbuilding urge. People see warped versions as a lack of morality, immorality or sociopathy. But in these cases, they are just trying to be good humans with very bad practices. 

With children and teenagers this is a leadership issue. I agree with the following:

It is common to shy away from political discussions with middle and high schoolers. Yet my research suggests that, whether openly discussed or not, teens are internalising certain political identities and aligning their moral beliefs to match. When groups espouse hateful and bigoted beliefs as prerequisites for membership, expect members to maintain such beliefs as moral obligations, and expect people with diminished capacity for anticipating consequences – including certain vulnerable teens – to act on them.

…

Finally, I believe it’s important to educate teens about the logical connections between our evolutionary past, social groups and moral beliefs. This will contribute toward a more secular consensus around what is right and wrong, thus removing some key moral contradictions in the social and cultural environment, and provide a truer north for youth to calibrate their moral compasses.

This orginally appeared on substack.com, February 2023. 

The whole Andrew Tate evil is a case in point. Unpoliced narcissism gives rise to these monsters.