I don't care how much you care. Part 2
I still want to know if you actually make a difference.
In part 1, I argued that our feelings were not as important for running a school (or a zoo) as is often thought. I ended by discussing the role of feelings in making moral judgements about education.
Judge not, lest ye be judged
Another way in which we should not be motivated by feelings rather than systems is in our responses to different ways of doing things. Something we often see in online discourse is schools or teachers being attacked for doing things their own way. An unfamiliar acronym for helping children pay attention, or a well-regulated procedure for transitions between lessons, is all it takes to set some people off. It is understandable (if not excusable) when people who know nothing about teaching object when they see rules they don't understand being enforced. It is far harder to understand why some teachers get irate when they see unfamiliar rules being enforced. If I don't use SLANT, or my school doesn't have silent corridors, then there must be something wrong with SLANT or silent corridors. As far as I can tell, this is purely an emotional reaction. When I ask people why one set of expectations or procedures that work is morally scandalous when compared with another, more common alternative, you get nothing coherent. If it doesn't feel right, then it must be wrong. And if it is wrong, then it can be declared with no evidence that the teachers implementing the procedure have sinister motives; that the procedures are the first step to fascism, or that children's mental health is harmed by the procedures. All three of these arguments can be advanced without any evidence at all; they are just based on "vibes". Some people, when asked about alternatives to a given rule or routine, will even claim that if a teacher was competent or a school was well run, there would be good behaviour without the use of that rule or routine. And when you ask them how that would happen, they cannot tell you.
However, the issue raised here is a complex one.
Feelings and moral judgement
I don't want to argue that feelings are irrelevant to moral judgements. The rationalist, who thinks moral theories can only be deduced from abstract principles, is rarely much help with moral dilemmas. Nevertheless, it should be noted that some thinkers deride our moral intuitions when they are based on certain feelings. Steven Pinker does not give a lot of weight to moral disgust:
Though wise people have long reflected on how we can be blinded by our own sanctimony, our public discourse still fails to discount it appropriately. In the worst cases, the thoughtlessness of our brute intuitions can be celebrated as a virtue. In his influential essay “The Wisdom of Repugnance,” Leon Kass, former chair of the President’s Council on Bioethics, argued that we should disregard reason when it comes to cloning and other biomedical technologies and go with our gut: “We are repelled by the prospect of cloning human beings . . . because we intuit and feel, immediately and without argument, the violation of things that we rightfully hold dear. . . . In this age in which everything is held to be permissible so long as it is freely done . . . repugnance may be the only voice left that speaks up to defend the central core of our humanity. Shallow are the souls that have forgotten how to shudder.”
There are, of course, good reasons to regulate human cloning, but the shudder test is not one of them. People have shuddered at all kinds of morally irrelevant violations of purity in their culture: touching an untouchable, drinking from the same water fountain as a Negro, allowing Jewish blood to mix with Aryan blood, tolerating sodomy between consenting men. And if our ancestors’ repugnance had carried the day, we never would have had autopsies, vaccinations, blood transfusions, artificial insemination, organ transplants and in vitro fertilization, all of which were denounced as immoral when they were new...
...Our habit of moralizing problems, merging them with intuitions of purity and contamination, and resting content when we feel the right feelings, can get in the way of doing the right thing.
On the other hand...
I would argue our moral intuitions, including such things as disgust, are important. However, they are not sufficient and can be mistaken. And they work better for judging our actions than for casting judgement on others. If doing something makes us feel like we have become cruel or unkind, that is important information for judging how we should behave. We should try to avoid acting in ways that make us feel uncomfortable, guilty or ashamed if we can. And certainly, we should try not to behave in a way that makes us disgusted with ourselves. However, when judging others we shouldn't simply be led by our feelings to think that somebody else is cruel, unkind or disgusting. That is too likely to be a matter of prejudice. Attributing bad motives to others is easy and makes us feel better. Being disgusted by others, where there is no objective reason for this, can be intolerance. Thomas Sowell advised on distinguishing between morality and sanctimony (or as he put it, sanctimoniousness):
There are so many substitutes used in our society-- substitutes for eggs, substitutes for wood, substitutes for diamonds-- that perhaps we should not be too surprised to find substitutes for morality as well. One of the most widespread substitutes for morality, especially among intellectuals, is sanctimoniousness.
How do you tell morality from sanctimoniousness? For one thing, morality is hard and sanctimoniousness is easy. Anyone who has succumbed to temptation, and then felt deeply ashamed long afterwards, knows how hard morality can be.
Sanctimoniousness is easy. There are editorial writers who are sanctimonious every day of the week, without any visible sign of fatigue. As far as they are concerned, those who disagree with them are not merely in error, but in sin. Morality means being hard on yourself. Sanctimoniousness means being easy on yourself-- and hard on others.
I think this sets out a good principle for the weight we should give to feelings in moral judgements. Do listen to your moral intuitions when deciding how to act, and use them to challenge yourself to do better. Don't listen to moral intuitions when deciding whether others are your moral inferiors. If a school does something differently from the way you do it, find out why. Seek to understand. Look for actual evidence about how it works. Don't assume that if it doesn't feel right, it isn't. And most of all, don't ever assume you care more than people who do things differently.
Your feelings don't change the facts
A further issue is that we should not make empirical judgements about education based on sentimentality. Too many supposedly factual claims about education are made because of how they make the person making the claim feel. Equally, too many statements of objective fact are contested because of how they make the audience feel. This is why so much time discussing education is wasted on establishing who is the more virtuous, rather than discussing who is right. It's not that the facts and logic are all that matter, it's that our feelings often mislead us, and we have more chance of noticing when that happens if we apply facts and logic. And, too often, our feelings fool us in ways that mean we are even wrong about what feelings we are experiencing. Our moral outrage may, in reality, be blind prejudice. Our compassion for children can turn out to be self-serving sentimentality. And our confidence in our convictions may be revealed as the sanctimony of the bigot.
If your best argument for an educational idea is that it feels right, it is probably wrong. And if your best argument against somebody else’s educational idea is that it feels wrong, they could well be right.
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