Metaphorical Thought

We have seen throughout¹ this book that people conceptualize a great many things in terms of metaphor, morality itself being one of those things. The fact is that conceptual meta­phor exists on a large scale and that it plays an enormous role in moral thought. Take the moral principle that punish­ment for crimes should be fair. This requires the use of the metaphor of Moral Accounting, and it prompts different accounting schemes around the world. In America, we ask how big a fine or how long a time in what kind of jail is to count as a punishment. The metaphor Well-Being Is Wealth prompts us to try to find a common measure in terms of which we can balance the moral books—balance one kind of harm (assault on well-being) in terms of another. The metaphor of Moral Accounting, being a metaphor, always requires further interpretation if we are to function in terms of it. And the fact that there are many kinds of possible interpretation means that the moral injunction that punish­ment be fair cannot be followed in just one way. It too has a multiplicity of possible interpretations. Such a multiplic­ity of interpretations for a moral injunction violates the need of Strict Father morality for a moral rule to have one ab­solute, universal, true-for-all-times-and-circumstances, clear and unequivocal meaning. The very existence of conceptual metaphor makes Strict Father morality unworkable because it violates the possibility for absolute moral standards.

Imperfect Communication

As for perfect communication, it should be obvious that it simply doesn't work. The failure of perfect communication between liberals and conservatives should show that clearly. The fact of that failure is so prominent in cognitive science and linguistics that it has even become the subject of a best-selling self-help book—Deborah Tannen's You Just Don't Understand. Tannen, a former student in my department and now a distinguished professor at Georgetown University, is just one researcher in a field of thousands studying the nature of human discourse and its difficulties. (Sec References, A4.)

One of the principal results in this discipline is that differ­ent people have different principles of Indirect speech. Some people are understates, who say less when they mean more, stop short of the punchline, and let the hearer draw his own conclusion. Others are overstates, who exaggerate and never miss a punchline or stop short of a conclusion. Different people even have very different views of what constitutes polite conversation. For some people politeness means being indirect, asking a question rather than making a direct re­quest, for example. For others politeness means directness, saying exactly what you mean, no more, no less. And once one gets into the details, the differences in conversational strategies get far more complex than this. Add to this all the meaning variation introduced by framing, world view differ­ences, metaphor, radial categories, fuzzy categories, and prototype-based reasoning, and you can see why communi­cation is so very far from perfect.

Thus we can see that none of Strict Father morality's re­quirements for what the human mind must be are actually met by real human minds functioning in real discourses. Strict Father morality is simply out of touch with real minds. Moral absolutism is not true because conceptual absolutism is not true. And moral training by enforcing obedience cannot work because people are not just simple reward-punishment machines.