The moral bankruptcy of deniers: sending the poor into a pit of smoke, pollution and disease

There's a very weird cartoon at WUWT from Josh at WUWT today (archived here). It looks as if he's urging the world to push poor nations into a pit of smoke, pollution and disease. Under a headline: "Turning our backs on the poor? Cartoon by Josh", Yep. Turning their backs on the poor is one thing deniers do well. Josh explains that he wants poor nations to build more and more dirty coal-fired power plants instead of clean renewable energy.

Josh has drawn some chap climbing down into a dark pit, labelled "smoke, pollution and disease", being urged on by deniers, presumably - and saying "thank you" for the privilege of being doomed to an early grave.

I won't post it - but if you want you can see the archived version.

Did I ever say deniers are morally bankrupt?

Downside of the Conservative Brain

Ends and Means - Is Morality Dependent upon World View?

On one of my rare visits to the blog of Judith Curry, I came across a conundrum.  She had an article discussing whether the ends justify the means. 

In it she had a paragraph about Peter Gleick who, by pretending to be someone else, obtained revealing documents from the Heartland Institute.  She implied that she believes the ends did not justify the means in that case.  Her very next paragraph was about the stolen emails from CRU, and the way she referred to them it's clear she believes that when it comes to stealing thousands of emails, the ends did justify the means.

However in the latter case, the use to which the stolen emails were put was for nefarious purposes (to misrepresent science and scientists and thereby try to delay action to mitigate global warming).  On the other hand, the use to which the Heartland Institute documents were put was to expose nefarious goings on.  They showed, among other things, the depths to which the Heartland Institute would stoop to prevent any action to ameliorate global warming.

Now I'm not one to see the world in black and white, but Prof Curry's position does strike me as very perplexing from a moral standpoint. 

(Coby posted an article recently on the Heartland affair, in which he discusses how ethical ends vs means issues are not always black and white.  Scott Mandia expresses the view that what Dr Gleick did was wrong, but that despite this error, he continues to contribute a heap of good to the world, while the Heartland Institute continues to only do bad.  He provides scorecards as evidence.)

Logical fallacies and flawed assumptions

Curry bases her article on a post by Roger Pielke Jr, which in my opinion has logical fallacies and flawed assumptions. 

He argues that people doing the right thing for the wrong reasons is akin to companies pretending horse meat is beef.  What he refers to is people wanting to mitigate global warming because they believe that it will cost relatively less to act sooner rather than later.  (Yes, his argument is more about cost in dollar terms in the relatively short term (decades) rather than loss of human life, biological diversity, and general ecological destruction over the medium to longer term (centuries to millenia.))

As well as disregarding medium to longer term impacts of global warming, there are (at least) two other flaws in Pielke Jr's argument:

Firstly, he says that the science is not 'strong' in regard to increasing costs associated with extreme events (hotter, longer droughts; bigger floods etc), as a proportion of GDP, even if we do nothing to limit global warming.  The jump from the science not being 'strong' to 'there will not be increasing costs/GDP associated with extreme events' as the world heats up, is a leap much to big to take IMO.  For one thing it's not a scientific point - the science is quite clear that we will get more and more often events that today are considered extreme.  The point he is putting forward is an economic one (not a scientific one) - that GDP will rise faster than costs associated with extreme events. IMO the science is at least grounded in evidence.  The economics has a lot more ifs and buts and assumptions (and in any case, he doesn't point directly to any cost/GDP projections to support his position.  He merely makes a passing mention of the Stern Review and the IPCC).

Secondly he seems to imply that even if people overly attribute an extreme event (today) to global warming then it is because someone (knowledgeable) has deliberately deceived them, rather than because they are ignorant or were mislead by another ignorant person.  There is nothing to support that assumption.

To sum up Roger Pielke Jr's position, he seems to be saying let's pay for extreme events as they happen.  Don't plan for them or take any preventative action now because the world will have more money in the future to deal with the increase in weather disasters.

To sum up Prof Curry's position, she seems to be saying:

1. Let the world heat up and do it's worst.  Let future generations deal with the consequences.

2. Deception is bad (even if you have good intentions) but stealing is good though you have bad intentions.

The Conservative Brain

I guess these positions are manifestations of the drawbacks of having a conservative brain. (Having a conservative brain is not inherently 'good' or 'bad'.  It has benefits as well as disadvantages.  There are upsides and downsides to having a liberal brain too.) 

This article gives some insight into the conservative brain. Put simply, scientific evidence indicates that people having a 'conservative brain' are more fearful (eg saying climate scientists are 'alarmists'); while people having a 'liberal brain' are more tolerant of uncertainty (more easily make decisions when there is inherent ambiguity). 

Then there is the finding that conservatives have a greater tendency to avoid self-harm ("I don't accept science because I don't want to pay tax"), whereas liberals avoid collective group harm ("I want to save the world and everyone and everything in it").

Combine those two tendencies of the conservative brain and you are part way towards explaining the difficulty many conservatives have when it comes to accepting, let alone acting upon, unpalatable facts that affect the whole world.

More of my musings on the conservative brain can be found here.

Is gang mentality more common among conservative men?

Thinking about what makes men form lynch mobs to attack who they see as an 'outsider' - such as an intelligent women, particularly if they think she doesn't share their world view.  Is the gang mentality more common among conservative men?

In trying to understand what motivates some men to gang up on women I came across this article: How coherence defines conservatism.

The article comments on the low tolerance of conservatives for ambiguity and cognitive dissonance, which is a well known and much researched attribute.  It goes on to discuss the search for 'coherence', which is the opposite of cognitive dissonance.

My thinking is that this may result in the suppression of rational thought when dealing with an uncomfortable situation, and a reliance on emotion to govern behaviour in such circumstances.   Emotional responses can cause people to lash out in an unpredictable way, with sometimes very adverse consequences.

That could in part explain why some men won't acknowledge when one of their rank is behaving like a sexist pig.  Instead of chastising the perpetrator who they see as one of their own, the conservative men gang up and say 'He's not being a sexist pig, you are - because you said that what he said was sexist.'

The Lynch Mob

Such a response is automatic in them and none of the gang members stop to think it through rationally.  It's driven by their emotion and they take comfort in the fact that every member of their gang is with them against the evil outsider (the woman). It's enough for these gang members that they've resolved the feeling of discomfort by attacking the victim not the perpetrator.  They regain their sense of 'coherence'.  Because they view the perpetrator as being one of their own, in their mind if they chastised him they would have had to own his behaviour and their minds could not tolerate that.  It would overload on cognitive dissonance.

That's no excuse of course.  The human brain, including the conservative brain, has the ability to reason.  It's the behaviour of a lynch mob for which there is no excuse. Lynch mobs and gangs operate like a single organism instead of operating like a group of individuals.  An individual needs to separate from the mob to think independently and start to behave in a more rational manner.  (In business jargon it's referred to as 'group think' and there are techniques to try to avoid it.)

Inertia vs effort, morality vs group coherence

The other aspect is that it takes effort to check to see if one of their own gang was in fact misbehaving.  Or to see if the 'outsider' is a trouble maker or if she is simply an individual who happened to observe something nasty and report it.  To not investigate is laziness - and morally repugnant.  However the gang encourages laziness and for some people, gang coherence is a stronger force than moral imperative or justice. There is a risk that if any gang member were to take the effort to look at the situation rationally (in my case it's clear that not one person bothered to look at the situation at all, let alone rationally), the other members would gang up on him and ostracise him.  So laziness is the 'safest' route - for individual 'coherence' as well as for group 'coherence'.

The dark side of the conservative brain

I figure my search for understanding the dark side of the conservative brain will lead in many different directions - from moral writings to cognitive science to ethics and philosophy and back to psychology more generally.