This newsletter is really a public policy thought-letter. While excellent newsletters on specific themes within public policy already exist, this thought-letter is about frameworks, mental models, and key ideas that will hopefully help you think about any public policy problem in imaginative ways. It seeks to answer just one question: how do I think about a particular public policy problem/solution?
PS: If you enjoy listening instead of reading, we have this edition available as an audio narration on all podcasting platforms courtesy the good folks at Ad-Auris. If you have any feedback, please send it to us.
A Framework a Week: The Basis of Morality
Tools for thinking public policy
- RSJ
The other day at a dinner with a few friends (in our ‘bubble’) the topic of farm laws came up. The usual argument followed. Farmers need to be freed from the overbearing power of the state that has kept them poor for so long versus Ambani/Adani will take over and control food prices in future leaving nothing for the farmers or the consumers. Things were going according to the script till the issue of morality came up. Both sides were convinced they had the stronger moral argument to support them. Luckily, the dinner was served and good food quietened things down.
This set me thinking about how we think about morality. Regardless of how we define political axes in India (left vs right, liberal vs conservative, statist vs free marketer), each side arrives at their ideology based on what they believe is morally right for the society. What’s the basis for our inherent self-righteousness and why does it differ among people?
About Morality
Jonathan Haidt in his superb book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religiongoes deep into this question. When he was at graduate school, Haidt learnt about Kohlberg’s six stages of moral reasoning. This model (Kohlberg’s) developed in the early 60s held that moral reasoning which forms the basis for ethical behaviour evolves over six developmental stages. These six stages were broken into three levels: pre-conventional, conventional and post-conventional. Each stage was more evolved and better at responding to moral dilemmas than the last. Kohlberg’s six stages were:
Level 1 (Pre-Conventional)
Obedience and punishment orientation
Self-interest orientation( What's in it for me?)
Level 2 (Conventional)
Interpersonal accord and conformity( The good boy/good girl attitude)
Authority and social-order maintaining orientation( Law and order morality)
Level 3 (Post-Conventional)
Social contract orientation
Universal ethical principles (Principled conscience)
Haidt found something amiss in this model. It seemed too cerebral with the rational mind driving moral decisions. In 2001, he wrote The emotional dog and its rational tail where he presented the social intuitionist model as an alternative to the rationalist model. Haidt’s point was simple: moral judgment was widely believed to be caused by moral reasoning. Instead, he argued, we reach a moral judgment based on our intuitions that are shaped by moral and cultural factors (link 1 in the model below). We construct a scaffolding of moral reasoning after that to support our judgment (link 2). Judgments based on reason (link 5) and change in intuitions after private reflection (link 6) are quite rare.
Theory Of Moral Intuition
It is a far-reaching paper that helps explain a lot of things around us.
What did Jefferson mean when he held certain truths as ‘self-evident’? Or, why do we now believe politics is downstream of culture? You can’t change politics unless you change culture. Why is this true? Or, why do you often end up in a political argument feeling frustrated that the other side doesn’t see your point of view which is moral or right?
To Haidt, this is because of our moral intuition. We don’t know why something is wrong but we just know it’s wrong. Haidt defined moral intuition as:
“..the sudden appearance in consciousness of a moral judgment, including an affective valence (good-bad, like-dislike), without any conscious awareness of having gone through steps of search, weighing evidence, or inferring a conclusion. Moral intuition is therefore the psychological process that the Scottish philosophers talked about, a process akin to aesthetic judgment: one sees or hears about a social event and one instantly feels approval or disapproval.”
Haidt gave the elephant-rider metaphor to explain this. This is a metaphor to explain how our unconscious mind guides our conscious rational faculty. The elephant is the total of our intuitions and our unconscious influences. It is large and chooses its own path. The rational conscious mind is like the rider on the elephant. She thinks she is controlling the elephant but that isn’t true.
“the mind is divided into parts that sometimes conflict. Like a rider on the back of an elephant, the conscious, reasoning part of the mind has only limited control of what the elephant does.”
Only a very skilled rider can sometimes change the course of the elephant. That’s the reason only the really sharp minds on either ends of the political spectrum can intellectually and morally justify the intuitions of the masses and direct them to a political or social goal. As Haidt concludes in his paper:
“The time may be right, therefore, to take another look at Hume’s perverse thesis: that moral emotions and intuitions drive moral reasoning, just as a surely as a dog wags its tail.”
But this wasn’t enough. Why do we have different moral reasoning among us? Why do two brothers who grew up together in the same household often hold diametrically opposite political views?
Our Moral Foundations
Haidt (with others) built the moral foundation theory to explain the differences in moral valence among people. They argued humans have six universal moral foundations that develop in them over time depending on culture, social interactions and their own understanding of the world around them. They proposed the five foundations of morality and later added a sixth:
1) Care/harm: This foundation is related to our long evolution as mammals with attachment systems and an ability to feel (and dislike) the pain of others. It underlies virtues of kindness, gentleness, and nurturance.
2) Fairness/cheating: This foundation is related to the evolutionary process of reciprocal altruism. It generates ideas of justice, rights, and autonomy. [Note: In our original conception, Fairness included concerns about equality, which are more strongly endorsed by political liberals. However, as we reformulated the theory in 2011 based on new data, we emphasize proportionality, which is endorsed by everyone, but is more strongly endorsed by conservatives]
3) Loyalty/betrayal: This foundation is related to our long history as tribal creatures able to form shifting coalitions. It underlies virtues of patriotism and self-sacrifice for the group. It is active anytime people feel that it’s “one for all, and all for one.”
4) Authority/subversion: This foundation was shaped by our long primate history of hierarchical social interactions. It underlies virtues of leadership and followership, including deference to legitimate authority and respect for traditions.
5) Sanctity/degradation: This foundation was shaped by the psychology of disgust and contamination. It underlies religious notions of striving to live in an elevated, less carnal, more noble way. It underlies the widespread idea that the body is a temple which can be desecrated by immoral activities and contaminants (an idea not unique to religious traditions).
6) Liberty/oppression: This foundation is about the feelings of reactance and resentment people feel toward those who dominate them and restrict their liberty. Its intuitions are often in tension with those of the authority foundation. The hatred of bullies and dominators motivates people to come together, in solidarity, to oppose or take down the oppressor.
As Haidt writes in the book:
“"the moral matrix of a culture is something like its cuisine: it’s a cultural construction, influenced by accidents of environment and history, but it’s not so flexible that anything goes. You can’t have a cuisine based on grass and tree bark, or even one based primarily on bitter tastes. Cuisines vary, but they all must please tongues equipped with the same five taste receptors. Moral matrices vary, but they all must please righteous minds equipped with the same six social receptors."
Why We Differ?
Over time Haidt developed a moral foundation questionnaire to understand how people from different political orientations (mostly from the US) valued the five moral foundations (the questionnaire dropped liberty). The results over thousands of surveys suggest the crux of the disagreement between liberals and conservatives (we are using the current American meaning of these terms here). Liberals value Care and Fairness deeply while Conservatives give almost equal weightage to all five foundations almost equally. As the abstract of the paper (the full paper is here) summarises:
“Across 4 studies using multiple methods, liberals consistently showed greater endorsement and use of the Harm/care and Fairness/reciprocity foundations compared to the other 3 foundations, whereas conservatives endorsed and used the 5 foundations more equally. This difference was observed in abstract assessments of the moral relevance of foundation-related concerns such as violence or loyalty (Study 1), moral judgments of statements and scenarios (Study 2), “sacredness” reactions to taboo trade-offs (Study 3), and use of foundation-related words in the moral texts of religious sermons (Study 4). These findings help to illuminate the nature and intractability of moral disagreements in the American culture war.”
Haidt (and Graham) argue that we need to use all five moral foundations to understand political or social issues. This suggests the onus is on the liberals to make the extra effort to go beyond their two values. This has earned the theory ire from the liberals. Haidt, who calls himself a liberal, has a more balanced view of this. He suggests we all need to step out of our moral matrix. We need to appreciate the diversity of our moral foundations. Once we do that it will be easier to step into others’ shoes.
That, like it is apparent to all of us these days, is easier said than done.
Matsyanyaaya: Vaccine Diplomacy
Big fish eating small fish = Foreign Policy in action
— Pranay Kotasthane
India’s vaccine diplomacy was widely discussed this week. On one hand, a few heads of state and international media organisations lauded the Indian government’s decision to supply vaccine shots for free even as its own domestic vaccination campaign has only started. On the other hand, there were arguments suggesting that the government should’ve first vaccinated its priority population before letting a single vial out. That in the amoral context of international relations, giving away vaccines for free amidst a health emergency is unaffordable altruism.
So, how to make sense of this?
I would argue that it’s not altruism but national self-interest that guides international humanitarian assistance efforts by all states. The Indian government’s vaccine diplomacy can also be explained through this lens of self-interest.
Let’s consider the facts first. 3.2 million Covishield vaccines have been supplied under grant assistance to a handful of neighbouring states out of the 11 million procured by the Indian government. Moreover, of the 30 million priority-sector workers supposed to be vaccinated under phase 1 of India’s vaccine programme, only 1.5 million have been vaccinated by Jan 23th.
Now consider the options in front of the Indian government. One option would have been to wait for phase 1 to complete before gifting vaccines away. As such, this option doesn’t mean that the recipient countries would’ve been left high and dry. They would’ve had to wait for commercial exports of Covishield outside the GoI’s procurement like Brazil did. A second option would’ve been to block all commercial exports of vaccines manufactured in India until phase 1 is completed. A third option would’ve been to divert a part of the procured lot to select countries right at the outset to signal the positive role that India can play in the world order. The first two options can easily be argued as hard-nosed realism. But its the third option, the one that India chose, needs more reflection.
While it is true that this one act of benevolence is unlikely to change the future behaviour of nation-states towards India, it crucially reminds the smaller states in the subcontinent that India cannot be easily substituted by China, especially given how opaque the latter’s vaccine journey has been thus far. Extending help in a crisis situation also improves India’s credibility in international fora. Finally, the norms of international cooperation have evolved in a way that makes complete apathy more costly than non-reciprocal overtures. In 2015, Pavan Srinath and I had written this in the context of humanitarian assistance and relief efforts:
“Countries are expected to do a certain minimum amount of international disaster relief, be it unilaterally, or through contributions to charities. This minimal assistance has increasingly acquired characteristics of altruism. Many animals give out distress calls for the benefit of the herd and at possible cost to itself. Similarly, international disaster relief is a slowly becoming a norm that is obeyed without explicit rewards except that of building an atmosphere of cooperation.”
In short, India’s vaccine diplomacy is an act of self-interest but not selfishness.
As for the question of vaccinating Indians, it’s not the lack of doses that are holding things up. The government needs to enlist the help of private enterprises to increase the pace of vaccine deployment as soon as priority-sector workers have been reasonably covered.
HomeWork
Reading and listening recommendations on public policy matters
[Video] The Moral Roots of Liberals And Conservatives: Ted Talk by Jonathan Haidt
[Article] Kohlberg’s Stages Of Moral Development
[Blog post] This meta-post on Gulzar Natarajan’s Urbanomics blog is a must-read for anyone interested in public policy in India. Don’t miss the linked article: Overcoming behavioural failings: Insights for public administrators and policymakers.
#102 How To Tame Your Elephant?