The Hidden Connection Between Morality and Language | Hacker News Reader

The Hidden Connection Between Morality and Language

nautil.us

18 pointsdnetesn15 comments

>"Decisions made by people speaking their non-native languages appear to be less concerned with morality and more concerned with rationality and utilitarianism."

Well, now that explains my embarrassingly immoral uses of Perl.

Speaking of embarrassing, I'd still really like to know why every time I hack Perl code, the following song comes always to mind?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPkTGm4RtVM

On a more serious note, I wonder if our "favorite" (native?) programming languages are the cause of some of the far too common overly emotional responses seen in language discussions?

I wonder if people will ever realize their morals are wrong despite being popular. We're so quick to judge people in the past or other countries (gay sex is illegal, say) but ignore our own backyards (sibling sex is illegal).

The comedian Lois C K made some bold steps exploring this. "I'm not saying I would kill a kid and fuck him, I'm saying that if I found a dead kid in a field, and it wasn't raining, I might take a shot, I don't know." I wonder if in another 100 years we'll escape our cultural cage and realize it's harmless to have sex with a dead child after all. It's a huge hurdle and there are lot of smaller ones on the way, but we overcame the sex between two men thing, maybe we're making some kind of gradual progress?

> I wonder if in another 100 years we'll escape our cultural cage and realize it's harmless to have sex with a dead child after all.

The problem is that dead children are not yet public property, so any defilement becomes an issue of vandalism.

Even if the child is subsequently buried on public land and allowed to decay into the earth, any aspiring terraphiliacs would then create a tragedy of the commons problem.

Of course, if you're Vinod Khosla, you could buy adjacent land, lock a gate, call upon ancient ancestral rights, have your way with the dirt, and tie the case up in the courts for years.

The mores relating to sexual activity are rapidly changing in the direction of liberalization in the US-- 10 years ago being gay wasn't popularly acceptable. On other fronts (polyamory and the galaxy of other sexual options) are rapidly becoming more acceptably and may be mainstream in another 5 or 10 years.

Necrophilia, zoophilia and pedophilia aren't on the radar for acceptance yet-- possibly these will come after poly-acceptance (so maybe in the 2030s? hard to say) but I wouldn't be too surprised if they end up sticking around, considering that beyond their reputations those philias are actually harmful.

"I wonder if people will ever realize their morals are wrong despite being popular."

Yes... their morals are wrong.

// “the use of a foreign language, as opposed to a native language, elicited less harsh moral judgments.”// I thought this is a common observation.

Indian movies, writings, conversations openly curse in English, but the exact words in native language would be considered as blasphemy.

I can attest to the observation about being more open in second language. I'm native Russian speaking English and I find that I can talk e.g. about sex in English much easier than in Russian where the right words seem too loaded, obscene, scientific, or euphemistic. But then, I think, the experience oozes back to the native part as well. Maybe speaking more than one language should steer people into being more open and accepting in general? If so, then Dutch people should be among the champions :)

I'm a native Russian speaker as well and can second that exact perspective.

An interesting corollary to this is the effect that the specific symbol map and grammar of a language has on native speakers. Do languages which have only an active voice, or only the imperative, lead to a more authoritarian culture? What of languages like basque which almost exclusively use the gerund?

I don't know the answer but it'd be fascinating to find out.

There is a number of widely spoken languages that lack a grammatical future tense. Chinese and Japanese spring to mind, but there are more, like Finnish and Hungarian. There must be an extensive body of research comparing cultures that have a future tense in the language to those who don't.

This is an interesting perspective... in those languages, is what we consider the active or imperative voice actually imperative? Or are their perceptions of the language differing from ours? What we consider imperative may not actually be perceived as imperative in their native tongue.

Say, wasn't it yesterday we were talking about how science in psychology is crap and full of poor reasoning and overdrawn conclusions? I mean, how can you go from this narrow laboratory observation to "illegal immigrants have different morals" without pause?

This is redirecting to the Nautilus home page.

I got redirected too.

It seems this is the correct url:

http://nautil.us/blog/the-hidden-connection-between-morality...

Thanks! Fixed.

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