Author: Curt Doolittle

MORAL OUTRAGE IN INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS, BY THE VOX POPULI

Do you know what the terms “bias”, “cognitive bias”, “sex differences in moral bias”, “wishful thinking”, “projection”, “moral grandstanding” and futile attempts at “social construction” mean – and what their relationship is to developmental, cognitive, and experiential immaturity?

There’s a relationship between developmental or cognitive maturity and moral grandstanding, particularly in the context of social construction.

Moral grandstanding can sometimes arise from the interplay between an individual’s level of maturity both developmentally, in knowledge, and in scale of knowledge and their desire to influence social norms or perceptions.

Let’s look a little deeper:

Developmental and Cognitive Maturity:
• Less mature individuals might exhibit moral grandstanding as they seek validation for their beliefs or actions due to insecurity, inexperience, or a desire to belong. They may oversimplify complex issues and express them in emotionally charged, absolutist terms.
• As people mature cognitively and experientially, they often become more comfortable with nuance and are less driven to seek approval or moral affirmation through grandstanding.

Experiential Maturity:
• Personal experiences can shape one’s understanding of morality and social issues, often increasing empathy and reducing the need for moral posturing.
• However, even those with significant life experience may engage in grandstanding if they feel their identity or worldview is threatened.

Social Construction and Identity Formation:
• Individuals often use moral grandstanding as a tool for identity formation and influencing social perceptions. By proclaiming moral positions publicly, people try to shape their identity as a member of a particular group.
• This behavior is linked to the desire to construct a social image that aligns with specific norms or ideals, often driven by peer validation, especially in contexts where social media amplifies grandstanding.

Cognitive Moral Scaling:
Now there is also a problem of moral scaling. In that children are conscious only of being treated similarly, then we increasingly mature until we recognize that people are different in ability, phase of life, and interest, so we accept one another’s variations.

Then we mature further if we have the experience, of running a family, or a small business, or an enterprise, or an industry, or a bureaucracy, or a government, or an attempt to organize other governments. Or worse, an attempt to geostrategically regulate the behavior of governments toward each other, extending even to war.

This is the ‘scale’ problem of moral judgement. The most common of which is the feminine attempt to scale the moral intuition of the family over which they have both knoweldge and control, to the polity where they have no knowledge and control, and thus encourage moral hazard (bad behavior). Then they refuse to punish the bad behavior to correct it. Worse, they all to often, whether female or cognitively feminine male attempt to

People, especially the less able, immature, ignorant, inexperience, or even experienced at a large scale, seem to project their level of moral intuition into fields where morality may result in a choice of Pareto optimums wherein all are equally unhappy, but cannot be made happier without making people even less happy, and where in some cases, particularly in war, some people must be made very very unhappy, and perhaps miserable, suffering, or dead in the present time in order to prevent an even worse consequence at some future point in time.

So in addition to immaturity and maturity we also have a scale problem in both developmental and cognitive, and in experiential maturity.

The solution to these issues is to train people in limits based reasoning (outcomes), first, including the heterogeneity of individuals, sexes, classes, ethnicities, civilizations, and races. And second, to provide a system of measurement that assists them in making the hard judgements when seeking the best for all not just now but for the long term future.

Adult Behavior
This is how adults must and do make practical decisions in the international arena. And the ignorance and immaturity (and too often femininity) of the population in a democratic polity, prevents them from speaking the whole truth and nothing but it, to a population that’s the equivalent of geostrategic preschoolers.

This is a kind, and scientific means of explaining that most moral outrage in the field of international relations is almost entirely childish: immature.

Affections
CD

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