Similarly, awesomeness makes me think of vengeance. Though some vengeance is disproportionate with the initial offense, and thus not so awesome, vengeance seems on the whole to have that aura of glorious achievement that you’d find at the climax of an action / adventure film. And yet that doesn’t really match my ideas of morality, though maybe I don’t feel strongly positively enough for the restoration of justice.
The idea that vengeance is awesome but not moral might be an artifact of looking at it from the victor’s side vs target’s side. So maybe we should distinguish between awesome experiences and awesome futures / histories / worlds.
But those were just the first distinctions between morality and awesomeness I thought of while reading. I’m probably missing a lot of stuff, since morality and awesomeness are both big, complicated things. They’re probably too big to think about all at once in detail, much less retrieve on a whim. Are there lists of of moral and/or awesome stuff we can look at to better define their overlap?
Schwartz is a psychologist who came up with 10 factors of culturally universal values. I’d say the factors of power, achievement, pleasure, excitement, self-direction, and tradition sound like things you’d find in awesome worlds, while pleasure, universalism, benevolence, conformity, and security sounds like things you find in worlds that are moral but not as awesome. Lovely and boring lives worth living. I included pleasure in both worlds, because that’s a hard one to skip on in valuable futures. I wonder how good of a weirdtopia someone could write that didn’t involve pleasure.
Anyway, that’s less haphazard, but still crude analysis. I mean, some tradition looks like narrative myths and impressive ceremonies, which are awesome, and some tradition looks like shaming people for being sexually abused, which is not awesome. So “tradition” doesn’t cut at the joints of awesome vs moral.
Is there a more fine grained list?
43 things is a popular website where people can list their goals, keep track of their progress, talk about why they failed, things like that. It’s probably biased toward far-mode endorsements, and misses out on a lot of aesthetics which aren’t neatly expressible as goal content, but it’s still an interesting source of data on morality and awesomeness. The developers of 43 things have a blog, where they do shallow statistical analysis, like listing top habit goals, but the lists are very short and have a lot of overlap.
If you look through the list, you’ll see a bunch of goals that start with “being”. Being ambitious, responsible, respected, etc. Also some appearance ones like “looking fit”. I think its fair to say that human goal content includes a fair bit of virtuousness, and that we could make a virtue theory of awesomeness just as much as a virtue theory of morality (though it might be too narrow a theory).
Sorting the big list turns out to be pretty hard, because the goals are a mix of awesomeness, boring morality, and other things. Like “Living close to family” initially sounds like a boring moral thing, but it sounds way cooler when they’re riding mechanical rocket dinosaurs with you and helping you take down the Dark Evil’s super weapon. Or even just “being a good parent”. That doesn’t sound as exciting as rocket dinosaurs, but neither can I quite bring myself to say that being a good parent is not totally awesome.
I did start sorting though. One thing that stood out is that awesome goals are more often about seeking and boring moral goals are more often about having. But that’s going off what I had when I accidentally closed the document unsaved, so small sample bias. I think I might have drifted back toward thinking about awesome experiences instead of awesome futures too. Or even just features of a high status life. And status clearly isn’t equivalent with morality. Oops.
In summary, I still really don’t know whether awesome futures are the same as moral futures, or whether awesome moral futures are the same as valuable ones.
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This comment is stupid. Morality is usually used to describe actions, not experiences or world states or histories. Calling awesomeness the same as morality is a type mismatch. Also I put universalism in the boring category, even though I had just said that justice-y vengeance is awesome. And I said goals on 43 things are biased to far mode, which they’re not if you just look at them (neither are they near mode), and it doesn’t matter either way because I didn’t do anything with 43 things other than name drop it, like that stupid Onion sketch. And why did I bring up goal content at all? Goals are the products of valuation thought processes, not the constituents. We have psychology and neuroscience; we can just look at how awesomeness feelings work instead of imaging situations associated with goals and decided, “hrm, yes, trench coats definitely sound awesome, I wonder what that tells me about morality”. And goals aren’t all that interesting for characterizing human values that aren’t moral ones, in that specific, social sense that Haidt talks about. Like I’m pretty sure not being horribly burned by fire is a common human value, and yet no one on 43 things wrote about it, and it’s only weakly implicit in Schwartz’ value taxonomy with the pleasure and security factors. And yet not burning people alive is probably a more important thing to ensure in the design of humanity’s future than making sure people can stay with their families or have high self esteem or have math parties.
There’s a humorous, satirical news story produced by The Onion, where the US Supreme Court rules that the death penalty is “totally badass”. And it is, even though badass-ness is not a criteria to decide the death penalty’s legality.
As badass as shooting a fish in a barrel. Which is to say, no, not really.
Not “badass” in the sense of jumping a motorcycle into a helicopter, bailing at the last moment, and landing safely in a rooftop swimming pool. But badass in the sense of atavistic, ceremonial, conducive to a kind of gravitas. I’m pretty sure there are more executions in movies than wasting-away-for-70-years-in-prison.
Awesome and moral clearly have overlap. How much?
There’s a humorous, satirical news story produced by The Onion, where the US Supreme Court rules that the death penalty is “totally badass”. And it is, even though badass-ness is not a criteria to decide the death penalty’s legality.
Similarly, awesomeness makes me think of vengeance. Though some vengeance is disproportionate with the initial offense, and thus not so awesome, vengeance seems on the whole to have that aura of glorious achievement that you’d find at the climax of an action / adventure film. And yet that doesn’t really match my ideas of morality, though maybe I don’t feel strongly positively enough for the restoration of justice.
The idea that vengeance is awesome but not moral might be an artifact of looking at it from the victor’s side vs target’s side. So maybe we should distinguish between awesome experiences and awesome futures / histories / worlds.
But those were just the first distinctions between morality and awesomeness I thought of while reading. I’m probably missing a lot of stuff, since morality and awesomeness are both big, complicated things. They’re probably too big to think about all at once in detail, much less retrieve on a whim. Are there lists of of moral and/or awesome stuff we can look at to better define their overlap?
Schwartz is a psychologist who came up with 10 factors of culturally universal values. I’d say the factors of power, achievement, pleasure, excitement, self-direction, and tradition sound like things you’d find in awesome worlds, while pleasure, universalism, benevolence, conformity, and security sounds like things you find in worlds that are moral but not as awesome. Lovely and boring lives worth living. I included pleasure in both worlds, because that’s a hard one to skip on in valuable futures. I wonder how good of a weirdtopia someone could write that didn’t involve pleasure.
Anyway, that’s less haphazard, but still crude analysis. I mean, some tradition looks like narrative myths and impressive ceremonies, which are awesome, and some tradition looks like shaming people for being sexually abused, which is not awesome. So “tradition” doesn’t cut at the joints of awesome vs moral.
Is there a more fine grained list?
43 things is a popular website where people can list their goals, keep track of their progress, talk about why they failed, things like that. It’s probably biased toward far-mode endorsements, and misses out on a lot of aesthetics which aren’t neatly expressible as goal content, but it’s still an interesting source of data on morality and awesomeness. The developers of 43 things have a blog, where they do shallow statistical analysis, like listing top habit goals, but the lists are very short and have a lot of overlap.
“A Hierarchical Taxonomy of Human Goals” (Chulef+ 2001) lists 138 unique goals derived from psychological literature and 30 goal clusters.
If you look through the list, you’ll see a bunch of goals that start with “being”. Being ambitious, responsible, respected, etc. Also some appearance ones like “looking fit”. I think its fair to say that human goal content includes a fair bit of virtuousness, and that we could make a virtue theory of awesomeness just as much as a virtue theory of morality (though it might be too narrow a theory).
Sorting the big list turns out to be pretty hard, because the goals are a mix of awesomeness, boring morality, and other things. Like “Living close to family” initially sounds like a boring moral thing, but it sounds way cooler when they’re riding mechanical rocket dinosaurs with you and helping you take down the Dark Evil’s super weapon. Or even just “being a good parent”. That doesn’t sound as exciting as rocket dinosaurs, but neither can I quite bring myself to say that being a good parent is not totally awesome.
I did start sorting though. One thing that stood out is that awesome goals are more often about seeking and boring moral goals are more often about having. But that’s going off what I had when I accidentally closed the document unsaved, so small sample bias. I think I might have drifted back toward thinking about awesome experiences instead of awesome futures too. Or even just features of a high status life. And status clearly isn’t equivalent with morality. Oops.
In summary, I still really don’t know whether awesome futures are the same as moral futures, or whether awesome moral futures are the same as valuable ones.
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This comment is stupid. Morality is usually used to describe actions, not experiences or world states or histories. Calling awesomeness the same as morality is a type mismatch. Also I put universalism in the boring category, even though I had just said that justice-y vengeance is awesome. And I said goals on 43 things are biased to far mode, which they’re not if you just look at them (neither are they near mode), and it doesn’t matter either way because I didn’t do anything with 43 things other than name drop it, like that stupid Onion sketch. And why did I bring up goal content at all? Goals are the products of valuation thought processes, not the constituents. We have psychology and neuroscience; we can just look at how awesomeness feelings work instead of imaging situations associated with goals and decided, “hrm, yes, trench coats definitely sound awesome, I wonder what that tells me about morality”. And goals aren’t all that interesting for characterizing human values that aren’t moral ones, in that specific, social sense that Haidt talks about. Like I’m pretty sure not being horribly burned by fire is a common human value, and yet no one on 43 things wrote about it, and it’s only weakly implicit in Schwartz’ value taxonomy with the pleasure and security factors. And yet not burning people alive is probably a more important thing to ensure in the design of humanity’s future than making sure people can stay with their families or have high self esteem or have math parties.
Heinlein’s The Rolling Stones has a very elegant balance of home and adventure. The family lives in a space ship.
As badass as shooting a fish in a barrel. Which is to say, no, not really.
Not “badass” in the sense of jumping a motorcycle into a helicopter, bailing at the last moment, and landing safely in a rooftop swimming pool. But badass in the sense of atavistic, ceremonial, conducive to a kind of gravitas. I’m pretty sure there are more executions in movies than wasting-away-for-70-years-in-prison.