22. The human mind

Strict Father morality is not just out of touch with the realities of raising children. It has a problem that goes even deeper. It is out of touch with the realities of the human mind.

To see why, we need to look first at ten deep and necessary assumptions made by Strict Father morality, and then look at what the human mind would have to be like if those ten assumptions could hold. Here are those assumptions:

There is a universal, absolute, strict set of rules speci­fying what is right and what is wrong for all times, all cultures, and all stages of human development.

If this were not true, there would not be strict moral bound­aries, there would be no single straight and narrow path for us all to follow, and there would be no absolute moral standards. This is why conservatives cannot tolerate multiculturalism, which denies this claim, maintaining instead that different cultures may have different rules and standards Conservatives assume that denying absolute rules and stan­dards is to say that there are no rules and no moral standards at all. The only possibilities they see are moral absolutism or chaos. We will see below that such a dichotomy is raise.

Each such rule has a fixed, clear, unequivocal, di­rectly interpretable meaning which does not vary.

If rules have any significant variability of meaning, then moral boundaries and standards are not strict and the "same" rule could legitimately mean different things to different peo­ple. If people don't understand "the" rules in the same way, then there is no such thing as "the" rules. There are only different understandings. If the rule is not directly interpret­able, then what counts as a moral standard is subject to interpretation, which means it cannot be absolute.

Each moral rule must be literal, and hence must make use of only literal concepts.

If a moral rule is metaphorical, then it is not directly inter­pretable. In order to know how to follow it, one would have to supply a metaphorical interpretation. But since different metaphorical interpretations are possible, the rule would not be fixed and absolute.

Each human being has access to the fixed, clear, un­equivocal meaning of moral rules.

If someone cannot understand exactly what the rule is in­tended to mean, then punishment for disobedience cannot have the effect of getting the person to follow the rule.

Each rule is general, in that it applies not just to spe­cific people or actions but to whole categories of peo­ple and actions.

Rules cannot define general moral standards if they are just about specific individual people and actions. They must be about categories of people and categories of actions.

The categories mentioned in each rule must have fixed definitions and precise boundaries, set for all time and the same in all cultures.

If the definitions of the categories were not absolutely fixed, then the meanings of the rules could vary from person to person, culture to culture, or time to time, and they would no longer be absolute. If the boundaries of the categories were not precise, then the moral standards would not be clear and people would not be able to know exactly what was right and what was wrong.

This is a major point. Moral absolutism requires concep­tual absolutism. If variability of meaning of any sort is inher­ent in concepts, then the rules using those concepts are sub­ject to the same variability of meaning. And if that happens, then the whole idea of absolute, universal moral rules be­comes impossible.

All human beings must be able to understand such rules in order to have the free will to follow them or not.

You can't make a free choice to do or not to do something if you don't know what that thing is.

These rules must be able to be communicated per­fectly, from the legitimate authority responsible for en­forcement to the person under the obligation to follow them. There must be no variation in meaning between what is said and what is understood.

People can't obey your orders if they have a different idea than you do of what those orders are.

People do things they don't want to do in order to get rewards and avoid punishments. This is just human nature and is part of what it means to be "rational."

The whole idea of rewarding or punishing people for follow­ing or not following rules depends on this being true. If it is not true, then punishing people for breaking rules and offer­ing rewards for following them will have no effect. Without such an effect, authority breaks down.

But, for this to be true, people must be able to under­stand precisely what constitutes a reward and what constitutes a punishment. There must be no meaning variation concerning what rewards and punishments are.

Here we return to the invariability of meaning. It makes no sense to impose punishments if the meaning of the punishment is not itself clear. If the idea of what the punishment is can vary substantially, then what you think of as a punish­ment might be understood by someone else as being neutral or even as a reward. Remember Brer Rabbit and the brier patch.

These are minimal conditions on the way human beings must function in order for Strict Father morality to be viable. If these conditions are not all met, then that moral system be­comes incoherent. For example, suppose that people do not operate generally by reward and punishment. Then the threat of punishment will not be a deterrent, nor the promise of reward an incentive. Without reward and punishment guiding human action, Strict Father morality cannot get off the ground. In short, Strict Father morality requires perfect, pre­cise, literal communication, together with a form of behav­iorism.

Thus, Strict Father morality requires that four conditions on the human mind and human behavior must be met:

1. Absolute categorization: Everything is either in or out of a category.

2. Laterality: All moral rules must be literal.

3. Perfect communication: The hearer receives exactly the same meaning as the speaker intends to communicate.

4. Folk behaviorism: According to human nature, people normally act effectively to get rewards and avoid punish­ments.

Cognitive science has shown that all of these are false. The human mind simply does not work this way. And it's not that these principles are off just a little. They are all mas­sively false. But, before going on to see why they are false, it is important to see why it is important that they are false.