The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Vio - By Steven Pinker Page 0,388

maintain precious relationships, it is not enough for us to say and do the right thing. We also have to show that our heart is in the right place, that we don’t weigh the costs and benefits of selling out those who trust us. When you are faced with an indecent proposal, anything less than an indignant refusal would betray the awful truth that you don’t understand what it means to be a genuine parent or spouse or citizen. And that understanding consists of having absorbed a cultural norm that assigns a sacred value to a primal relational model.

In an old joke, a man asks a woman if she would sleep with him for a million dollars, and she says she would consider it. He then asks if she would sleep with him for a hundred dollars, and she replies, “What kind of a woman do you think I am?” He answers, “We’ve already established that. We’re just haggling over the price.” To understand the joke is to appreciate that most sacred values are in fact pseudo-sacred. People can be induced to compromise on them if the tradeoff is obfuscated, spin-doctored, or reframed.185 (The joke uses the landmark figure “a million dollars” because it reframes a mere exchange of money into a life-transforming opportunity, namely becoming a millionaire.) When life insurance was first introduced, people were outraged at the very idea of assigning a dollar value to a human life, and of allowing wives to bet that their husbands would die, both of which are technically accurate descriptions of what life insurance does.186 The insurance industry mounted advertising campaigns that reframed the product as an act of responsibility and decency on the part of the husband, who would simply be carrying out his duty to his family during a period in which he happened not to be alive.

Tetlock distinguishes three kinds of tradeoffs. Routine tradeoffs are those that fall within a single relational model, such as choosing to be with one friend rather than another, or to purchase one car rather than another. Taboo tradeoffs pit a sacred value in one model against a secular value in another, such as selling out a friend, a loved one, an organ, or oneself for barter or cash. Tragic tradeoffs pit sacred values against each other, as in deciding which of two needy transplant patients should receive an organ, or the ultimate tragic tradeoff, Sophie’s choice between the lives of her two children. The art of politics, Tetlock points out, is in large part the ability to reframe taboo tradeoffs as tragic tradeoffs (or, when one is in the opposition, to do the opposite). A politician who wants to reform Social Security has to reframe it from “breaking our faith with senior citizens” (his opponent’s framing) to “lifting the burden on hardworking wage-earners” or “no longer scrimping in the education of our children.” Keeping troops in Afghanistan is reframed from “putting the lives of our soldiers in danger” to “guaranteeing our nation’s commitment to freedom” or “winning the war on terror.” The reframing of sacred values, as we will see, may be an overlooked tactic in the psychology of peacemaking.

The new theories of the moral sense, then, have helped explain moralized emotions, moral compartmentalization, and taboo. Now let’s apply them to differences in moralization across cultures and, crucially, over the course of history.

Many assignments of a relational model to a set of social roles feel natural to people in all societies and may be rooted in our biology. They include the Communal Sharing among family members, an Authority Ranking within the family that makes people respect their elders, and the exchange of bulk commodities and routine favors under Equality Matching. But other kinds of assignment of a relational model to a resource and a set of social roles can differ radically across time and culture.187

In traditional Western marriages, for example, the husband wielded Authority over the wife. The model was mostly overturned in the 1970s, and some couples influenced by feminism switched to Equality Matching, splitting housework and child-rearing down the middle and strictly auditing the hours devoted to them. Since the businesslike psychology of Equality Matching clashes with the intimacy that most couples crave, most modern marriages have settled on Communal Sharing—with the consequence that many wives feel that the couple’s failure to keep tabs on contributions to household duties leaves them overworked and underappreciated. The spouses may also carve out Rational-Legal exceptions, such as a prenuptial agreement, or the stipulation in