Abstract Minutiae

How to Conceptualize Morality: Near vs Far

Adam Gurri has a fantastic new post, arguing for Aristotelian moderation when it comes to our “far mode” or telescopic morality: 

The telescopic friends and loved ones I have known over the years have obsessed over problems far away, which they were unable to meaningfully influence. Moreover, they were righteous about this, and either implied or outright told those of us with more mundane concerns that we were immoral for ignoring the cosmic injustices occurring around the world on a daily basis.

Adam has hit one of the real oddities of modern civilization: moral outrage over emergent systems no one has the power to influence. Still, I think his analysis could be made clearer and more consistent with some tighter theoretical backdrop. 

First, its worth making explicit that this is discussion about how morality works within construal level theory – a set of findings in social psychology related to how people conceptualize things differently based on spatial, temporal and interpersonal distance.

When things are distant, we tend to be more abstract and idealistic, our mental “far mode”. When things are close, “near mode” helps us focus on the practical and personal details. Conventional moral discourse tends to privilege the “far mode,” a topic Robin Hanson has been on for years. For example: 

Far mode … makes us think more in moral terms when our acts have weaker personal consequences. link

far minds offer flexibility, perspective, and self-control to enable civilizations, far minds are also more deluded and hypocritical. link

Near-far theory predicts that we’d tend to focus our ideals and moral outrage and praise more on the largest social scales. link

To Adam, one of the most destructive applications of the far mode occur in our media, which in his view has become a 24/7 moral outrage machine. His solution is to correct our far bias with a more selective media diet, focusing on the “things on which you can make a difference and for which you have the most context on which to deliberate.”

Adam’s implicit metaphor throughout his near-far posts has been that of the golden mean, drawn no doubt from his appreciation of Aristotle’s virtue ethics. To Adam, our near and far modes represent two extremes, both of which pose their own problems and excesses. Presently, society has veered toward the far direction, and is in need of a ‘near’ correction.

I take exception with this metaphor, and fear that it oversimplifies just enough to lead to error. Let me explain.

The near-far ways of construing the world exist for a reason; they are a product of our brains evolution. And a central lesson from evolutionary psychology is that our mental modules could only have been selected for if they served a function specific to a certain domain: 

Domain specificity means that adaptations evolve to solve problems in particular domains, and therefore are less well suited to solve problems in other domains. 

My view is that near and far modes of moralizing are basically specialized ways of reasoning. I am not looking to find their golden mean. Rather, I want to employ both modes under the right adaptive circumstances.

In previous posts I’ve discussed how this feeds into my variation on Simon Blackburn’s theory of moral quasi-realism, in terms of what he calls the “supervenience constraint”: to be meaningful, moral attitudes have to be able to 'supervene’ to non-moral facts. Otherwise, you’ll make category errors.

For example, when it comes to monetary policy, the only intelligible framework is a utilitarian one. So switch on your far mode: We are dealing with an economy’s “big picture” and simply have no choice but to be abstract, impersonal, calculating, and analytically egalitarian. There is no such thing as “virtue based monetary policy,” no “optimal control path” for virtuosity-rates.

Nonetheless, virtue is still central at the personal level. We want a central bank chair-person who practices prudence, self-control, and moderation. So switch on your near mode, because Peter Singer notwithstanding, living your life as a pure utilitarian is probably not possible.

In a past post I’ve called this the moral gestalt. Sometimes we need to moralize about the forest, while other times we need to moralize about the trees. Taking the average of the two will do nothing but leave your worldview a blurry mess.

Thus the way I frame the problem is in terms of mental states supervening to natural properties: Mind => Property. Monetary policy has “far” properties, and thus fits with a “far” conceptual mode (Far => Far), whereas an individual’s character is granular and personal, fitting to a “near” conceptual mode (Near => Near). 

Instead of worrying about extrema, this implies that there are two types of specific moral category error: Using your near mode on far properties (Near => Far); And using your far mode on near properties (Far => Near). Because we are animals outside of our adaptive environments, we should expect our mind to frequently misfire; to apply a near heuristic to a far problem, and vice versa.

This helps clarify Adam’s (and Robin’s) attack on “telescopic morality”. When the media is ginning up its latest national controversy, they are in essence toying with our primate cognition. For instance, many of our 'near’ instincts are clearly adaptations for producing cooperation within our group. Anti-social behavior is appropriately chastised with shame and indignation. Yet the last time I checked Donald Sterling wasn’t in my social group. Indeed, going red with anger at a strange old man’s racism is as mal-adaptive as road rage or obesity. 

On the positive side, we have altruistic instincts for helping our friends and family. These are completely virtuous heuristics for the near mode, but misfire when applied to far problems. For example, going on an expensive trip to Africa to help build mud huts may sooth your conscience but is mostly a wasted effort. Likewise, while it may be a virtue to help a friend in need, but when politicians do it the result is corruption, patronage and failed states. 

In both cases a more effective way to help eradicate poverty would be to apply far mode, abstract or utilitarian thinking. Switching construal levels lets one see the forest for the trees, i.e. the big moral gains that would result from the spread of high impact technologies like free markets, open borders, rule of law and evidence based medicine.  

As these examples show, the problem isn’t our use of far mode, per se. Usually, its our near mode that’s at fault, erroneously projecting itself onto far problems. But more rarely, our far mode can project itself onto near problems. A consistent utilitarian would push a fat man into an on-coming trolley to save five lives, but at such a near level we understandable hesitate. Close up, there are real moral distinctions between an act of omission and an act of commission. 

To clarify further I’ve created this handy chart, showing the array of mind and property matchings: 

The key to being a moral agent in our modern civilization, then, is to stay vigilant of your moral attitudes and behaviors, to try to eliminate the instances where misfiring is common. In today’s world, I have to agree with Adam that this means reducing the role and one’s own consumption of moralistic media and tribal politics.