Righteous Minds and the 8th Amendment

(Two quick notes, which you can think of as a trigger warnings if you like. First, the point here is to try and think about the referendum on the 8th in a neutral way, in order to better understand the functional aspects of this kind of political discussion. If you can’t or don’t want to think about this subject in that way – read something else. And second… apologies for the quality of the photography.)

From the Irish Referendum Commission:

On Friday 25th May 2018, you will be asked to vote on a proposal to change the Constitution of Ireland. The proposed change to the Constitution concerns the regulation of termination of pregnancy.

Article 40.3.3 of the Constitution, as interpreted by the Supreme Court, means that it is lawful for a pregnancy to be terminated only where the pregnancy poses a real and substantial risk to the life of the mother. This includes a risk of suicide. The proposal on 25th May is to delete Article 40.3.3 of the Constitution and to insert in its place that

“Provision may be made by law for the regulation of termination of pregnancy ”

Article 40.3.3 of the Constitution reads as follows:

“The State acknowledges the right to life of the unborn and, with due regard to the equal right to life of the mother, guarantees in its laws to respect, and, as far as practicable, by its laws to defend and vindicate that right.”

The purpose of this article is to review a selection of the posters being used to persuade voters how to vote. In doing so I’m going to refer to the Moral Foundations theory, as popularised in Jonathan Haidt’s book The Righteous Mind (Haidt also significantly contributed to the development of the theory in conjunction with others, but as far as I can see it isn’t “his theory”). From the Wiki description of that book:

(Haidt) uses research to demonstrate social intuitionism, how people’s beliefs come primarily from their intuitions, and (that) rational thought often comes after to justify initial beliefs. In the second portion of the book, he presents moral foundations theory, and applies it to the political beliefs of liberals, conservatives, and libertarians in the US.

Haidt argues that people are too quick to denigrate other points of view without giving those views full consideration, and attempts to reach common ground between liberals and conservatives. He makes the case in the book for morality having multiple foundations, and said in an interview that …”[religion and politics are] … expressions of our tribal, groupish, righteous nature”. Haidt himself acknowledges that while he has been a liberal all his life, he is now more open to other points of view.

The key moral foundations posited by Haidt in that book are (this is from the Moral Foundations wiki page):

• Care: cherishing and protecting others; opposite of harm
• Fairness or proportionality: rendering justice according to shared rules; opposite of cheating
• Loyalty or ingroup: standing with your group, family, nation; opposite of betrayal
• Authority or respect: submitting to tradition and legitimate authority; opposite of subversion
• Sanctity or purity: abhorrence for disgusting things, foods, actions; opposite of degradation
• Liberty or personal freedom: freedom from coercion by a dominating power or person; opposite of slavery

The last of these was introduced in the latter chapters of the Righteous Mind “to differentiate between proportionality fairness and the objections (Haidt) had received from conservatives and Libertarians… whose moral matrix relies almost entirely on the liberty foundation.” (This is again from the wiki, the bullet point above is my summary.) As such the relative importance of the “Liberty” foundation for Left and Right wing people is less well understood the others. I’m going to proceed on the basis that it is a lagging rather than leading foundation – in other words, everyone is all for personal freedom where they are otherwise morally comfortable with the specific act in question. In the case of the 8th that would mean the Liberty foundation is very important for people voting Yes, and irrelevant for those voting No, but it could easily be the reverse given a different question. If that’s wrong it’s my fault rather than Haidt’s.

A central thrust of Haidt’s theory and of key interest to this article is that “Liberals” focus on the Care foundation to the near exclusion of all else and that “Conservatives” have an equal interest in all 6 (and are therefore in theory by comparison far less motivated by Care considerations). The below graph illustrates this point (per the above it omits “Liberty”):

In The Righteous Mind, Haidt proposes that one way of winning over your natural political opponents is to speak to them in their intuitive moral language rather than yours. Haidt is interested in reducing partisanship by encouraging mutually intelligible discussion. However it is also a piece of practical advice: you can’t persuade your opponent by talking to them like they’re you.

Assuming that the “Yes” side is the liberal one, and the “No” side the conservative, to what extent do the posters align with the intuitive moral tendencies Haidt has set out; and to what extent do each side’s posters attempt to persuade voters from the other side by speaking to them in their own moral language?

Looking at the selection of Moral Foundations, if you were to guess beforehand what the “No” approach would be, you would have guessed the following – that we are polluting and degrading the country by bringing abortion laws, which disregard the sanctity of life; you would expect this appeal to be cloaked in the language of tradition and nation, with abortion as a betrayal of the Ireland and the Irish character, which has always (from the standpoint of a No voter) had a special reverence for the innocence of young life. In other words – the “No” posters would rely heavily on Sanctity/ Purity with some aspects of Authority & Loyalty mixed in. That would have been a good guess and would have captured a large selection of the content of the posters, albeit that those themes found their way into the posters with varying degrees of explicitness.

The “one in five” poster is probably the clearest example of this. “Don’t bring this here” is a clear appeal to Sanctity – “we’re clean, bringing abortion into the country will make us dirty”. The fact that the source of the “uncleanliness” is England make the appeal to tradition and Irishness explicit.

This pair of posters from the National Party include versions in Irish as well as English, clearly tying a No vote to traditionalist, nationalist sentiment.

The Yes posters are simpler to evaluate, in that going by the Foundations theory they are likely to primarily refer only the moral “flavour” of Care for the pregnant woman. The posters often reflect this by simply stating a synonym for Care alongside an appeal to Vote Yes. Alternatively they evoke the Care Foundation by forcing the reader to think of a person they know that might be impacted by the issue. There’s lots of these:

There is a logical question as to why the concern expressed for women in “Yes” posters qualifies under the “Care”, whereas the concern for the unborn child in the No posters doesn’t. It’s a matter of opinion, but to my eye the No posters hinge less on evoking empathy and more on persuading the reader that since the foetus is alive in every sense that is familiar to us (growing nails, heartbeats, leg kicks), that performing abortion is therefore crossing a sacred boundary of choosing to end a life. In that sense the point is not persuade the reader to Care for the child but to resist sullying yourself and your country by allowing the degrading and immoral act of abortion to be performed there. The line between these two positions – protecting someone out of a desire to care for them. on the one the hand, and protecting them out of a desire to preserve a sacred moral boundary on the other – is not always clear. I think this illustrates that people’s political motivations are a mixture of unlikely, competing and contradictory urges, and most people are motivated by all moral flavours to some degree or another, all of which is in keeping with the theory.

A significant minority of the Yes posters are make clear appeals to the “Liberty” foundation. This reflects that a significant motivator for people most convinced by Yes is the feeling that the current law deprives women of their bodily autonomy by forcing them to carry on a pregnancy and/ or give birth to a child in circumstances they don’t want, or where it is in their medical interests not to do so. Some examples of this type are below. Again, while all of these posters speak in an empathetic language, the central point is not to make you feel the emotions of the woman but to understand her feelings of restriction and imprisonment. I think this is a good example of the usefulness of the Moral Foundations framework as I personally would not have understood the importance of this perspective – of feeling imprisoned or enslaved by the current laws – without applying. that lens. It helped me understand the language and commentary I was hearing from committed Yes voters.

Is either side in this debate trying to convince the other?

The best way to test is to ask, “what would each say if they were trying to convince the other side in their own terms?” In theory the best way to appeal to the wavering undecided voters open to persuasion for Yes would have been to ask them to identify with and feel sympathy for the unborn in something other than a biologically mechanical way; maybe as simple as showing them a picture of an unborn child and suggesting “this could have been you”. A similar approach to move a voter from No to Yes might have been to try and expand the circle of sanctity to include women, perhaps by stating that “women’s lives are sacred too”. These slogans sound as insipid to me as they do to you, and I can’t believe they would change the mind of anyone who already had a fixed position.

The basic problem is that, to the most convinced people from either side, the difference between the two positions is morally insurmountable. You either believe that what is growing inside a woman’s womb at 12 weeks (and before) is a living person due the rights that should be accorded to all living people, or you don’t. Vice versa for the idea that whatever happens within a woman’s body is solely that woman’s prerogative and concern; and you can’t believe both. The weakest point of The Righteous Mind is the idea that consensus in politics is achieved by partisans on either side making their case, each acting on a break on the other and pulling the other a little towards the centre, until we have a political equilibrium everyone can live with. I have never seen politics function like that it my lifetime and it doesn’t seem to be the case here. In between the two increasingly hardened partisan extremes is an inert and politically disconnected mass of people who instinctively lean very slightly one way or another, but who are open to persuasion. When I say “persuasion” what I mean is a sort of emotional or rhetorical jostling. The point is not convince these people; you’re merely trying to push them into position so that they’re very slightly more on your side than they were a moment ago, with a 55% chance of voting for you rather than a 45% chance. Some examples of this sort of approach are below. I would say the Yes posters here are better; that may be a reflection that (as Haidt’s theory suggests) they have a wider variety of moral approaches to work with. The No posters wanly attempt to work on the Care foundation (“Love Both”) but they can’t push that too far, and the fact the posters are mostly wordless seems to reflect that. To a convinced and determined voter for either side, these posters will elicit nothing but a contemptuous shrug, but to the unconvinced they may push them very slightly in the right direction.

Many of the posters and slogans seems to reflect the impossibility of convincing anyone. That’s why you end up with posters like these Sinn Fein ones, which are a peculiar mixture of cynical and stupid, with a profound moral issue being used as a canvas on which Mary Lou MacDonald can execute a vacuous personal branding campaign while adding nothing helpful to the discussion itself.

To summarise then, the way in which each side communicated to the public reflects the accuracy of the Righteous Mind and the Moral Foundations theory in predicting the form of political discussion. As a theory (like a lot of theories) it’s better art describing what’s going on than it is at telling you how to change it. Anyone looking to establish a broad consensus or tamp down the excessive hysteria of the 8th debate won’t have been cheered by anything they saw. I certainly wasn’t. On the whole I’ve found the referendum to be a demoralising experience; it’s mostly been the sound of two mutually uncomprehending groups talking past each other and to themselves. Ireland is not the morally homogenous country it used to be; as that common ground continues to vanish, so does the basis of effective moral communication with our countrymen and women. Subjects like these aren’t going to get any easier to talk about. The rancour associated with the referendum feels like something we’ll see. more rather than less of in future.