PBH310: Moral Psychology & Abortion

Apologetics is about effective communication and persuasion, fundamentally about rhetoric (in the classical, non-pejorative sense): How can we change what people think about an issue, and offer a defence, in this case, of the pro-life stance that is persuasive?

But effective apologetics is not purely cerebral. Aristole says that effective communication is ethos, pathos, and logos: build a bridge, touch the heart, then deliver the message. We need to not just win a debate, but to truly reach the person to be effective in apologetics - to change both the heart and the mind.

That's where heart apologetics comes in: Heart apologetics is about the emotional layer of apologetics, about responding to emotional blocks to accepting an argument. Fundamentally, heart apologetics is applied moral psychology. Moral psychology is about understanding how we think morally. Heart apologetics is being sensitive to moral psychology in our apologetics, about applying the insights from moral psychology to our conversations in order to be effective communicators to both head and heart.

Note that moral psychology is about how the mind actually works, not how it ought to work. Moral philosophy (or theology), and the field of normative ethics in particular, is about what is actually right or true. Here, in moral psychology, we are looking at functionalist and descriptive definitions - moral psychology looks at how the mind operates when thinking about morality (not at questions of objective right and wrong).

For a guide through the field of moral psychology, I'm going to turn to Jonathan Haidt - whose name you'll see all over the Wikipedia article on Moral Psychology - and his landmark 2012 book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided By Politics and Religion, which draws on 25 years of groundbreaking research and which, I think, is full of wisdom for pro-life activists as a sort of textbook for a 300-level course in heart apologetics.

(I first encountered Jonathan Haidt's concepts from the book in late 2020, in the midst of pandemic and 2020 presidential election debates and conspiracy thinking, and then my friend Katie bought me the book a year later at the end of 2021, and I read it slowly in 2022, 2023, and early 2024. I knew there were deep insights into heart apologetics from my first encounter, but as I worked my way through the book, I became more and more convinced that it would be helpful to run a seminar on this.)

I'm going to pull out the core insights from Haidt's work that apply to pro-life activism, and leave aside philosophical bones to pick and worldview differences. In the first half, we'll look at the Elephant and the Rider; in the second half, the six taste receptors and the hive switch.

I need some good stories and experiments that speak to conservatives, not liberals, e.g. flag burning or religious desecration (maybe in reverse order, starting with secular religion first…)

I need some key images and graphs: the moral matrices from Part III, maybe the graphs from Part II as a warm up to that…

Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second.

• Moral reasoning is often the servant of moral emotions. Gut feelings can sometimes drive moral reasoning. Moral reasoning is sometimes a post hoc fabrication.
  • Haidt has a great intuitist way of building Part I… but he does so addressing a secular, liberal audience… this would need to be approached differently to address a conservative, religious audience in an intuitionist way
    • Can I use moral dumbfounding examples for religious conservatives?

Stop at 2:02

the social intuitionist model (image/diagram) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_intuitionism#/media/File:SocialIntuitionistCC.jpg

There's more to morality than harm and fairness.¹⁾

combine parts II and III into a second half, where Part II is descriptive and Part III is prescriptive (in parts of the pro-life application)

From YourMorals.org:

1. Care: Concerns regarding care and protecting individuals from harm
2. Equality: Equality is a psychological motive for balanced reciprocity, equal treatment, equal say, and equal outcome
3. Loyalty: Concerns regarding loyalty to others, self-sacrifice, and patriotism
4. Authority: Concerns regarding respect to authority and rejection of insubordination
5. Purity: Concerns regarding maintaining purity and preventing degradation
6. Proportionality: Proportionality is a psychological motive for rewards and punishments to be proportionate to merit and deservingness and benefits to be calibrated to the amount of contribution

need better definitions and understanding, and… can this just be combined with the second section? The lessons are in Part III, the discovery is in Part II

Morality binds and blinds. We are 90 Percent Chimp and 10 Percent Bee.

points to bring out:

• How political teams form, how people gravitate to the left or right
• For pro-life activism
  • First, there's a lot of wisdom here in internal community-building - active the hive switch
  • Second, there's a lot of wisdom here in being effective communicators
    • We need to understand how abortion advocates may be thinking, working off different moral foundations, and we need to have empathy and be able to speak their language
    • We also need to understand how abortion advocates may see us if they misunderstand our moral foundations, and be prepared to speak to the elephant in order to build connection and help lower their defences, etc