Dr. Jennifer Cole Wright is an Associate Professor of Psychology at the College of Charleston, where she directs the Moral Lab. There, she researches meta-ethical pluralism and the foundational role of humility in virtue development. Her forthcoming book, Understanding Virtue: Theory and Measurement, written in collaboration with Nancy Snow and Michael Warren, is set for release late this year. In this podcast, we talk about how people tease diversity apart from deviance. We discuss the role of morality in producing conformity, and how perceived social domains, folk meta-ethical understandings, and social practices aimed at virtue development bear upon the detection of diversity and the moral judgment of deviance.
APA citation: Cazzell, A. R. (Host). (2020, March 31). Diversity and Deviance with Jennifer Cole Wright [Audio Podcast]. Retrieved from https://www.ambercazzell.com/post/msp-ep32-JenColeWright
Note: This transcript was generated automatically. Please excuse typos and errors.
Jen Cole Wright (00:01:24):
One of the things that's going on in the apology. There is this conversation going on between a group of people who feel threatened by the, the, you know, the, the, the dialogue that these thing engagement that Socrates is doing with his fellow citizens. He's, he's, he's engaged in this exercise of trying to get them to think critically about why they do the things they do and what really matters when at the end of the day, what is it it should be driving our behavior and in an effort to try to get them to see that a lot of the things that we think are important ultimately are not really important when it comes to being a good person or living a good life and
Jen Cole Wright (00:02:10):
There. There's a, there's a, a sense of threat that's occurring within the group in part because, you know, arguably a lot of their values are being challenged. And so on a way, I guess my early thinking about morality is this boundary that's, that's trying to navigate, trying to control the space between the group and the individual. It probably started there, this, this, this thought about how do we, how do we regulate this space where on the one hand, a group of people has a set of values that they appreciate and that they want to uphold. And then you have individuals that are
Jen Cole Wright (00:02:52):
Acting in, in contradiction to those values. And sometimes that contradiction is acceptable and sometimes not. Sometimes it's threatening. And then how do we determine how that, that the appropriate balance it's achieved there.
Amber Cazzell (00:03:06):
Yeah. and so, so let's dive into that. In the deviance and diversity paper of yours that I read. You were talking about how, I mean there were two sort of ways of talking about how to tease apart diversity that sort of acceptable from deviance that, that we would come to morally judges. Unacceptable. So I know that like one frame of reference that you used was domain classification, like based in social domains theory. Could you tell us a bit about social domain theory for people who aren't familiar?
Jen Cole Wright (00:03:44):
Hmm. Well, so social domain theory, I mean, just a rough sense of social domain theory is that that if you, if, if you're familiar at all with Kohlberg the, the primary developmental model was one in which children start off as largely pre moral.
Jen Cole Wright (00:04:03):
So they don't really have, they think when, when they're thinking about right and wrong, like when, why they should do something or why they shouldn't. It's largely based on whether they're going to be rewarded or punished. Like what's, is this going to be something that's going to get me into trouble? Is this something that is going to gain me favor that that's a lot of, of the thought processes that children are going through. And it's not until, you know, they're getting up into early adolescence that they start thinking about morality as being something a little bit more robust. And that, and here we see the emergence of this idea that morality has to do largely with the, the regulation of the social space. So you have rules, moral rules, because they facilitate cooperation and they keep people, they, it's like the, it's almost like a social contract perspective where we all agree to follow certain rules because it makes the social space work better.
Jen Cole Wright (00:05:01):
And then if we're lucky we get, we developed past that to see that there are actually guiding moral principles. So one could, for example, be critical of the social space that you're operating in here. All these rules and regulations isn't that indeed, this is what we might think of Socrates is doing. So here's this social space that he's a part of that's regulating itself according to certain values. And he's standing outside of it and saying, I'm not so sure about these values. I'm not so sure that the values that we are upholding in this social space are good ones because it leads to a lot of pernicious outcomes that leads to two damaged individuals. It leads to inequities. And, and you know, there's, there's harm that these values cause and so we really should be reevaluating these values. And so he's taking what Kohlberg might call the the, or would call the post-conventional stance to his society.
Jen Cole Wright (00:05:55):
But that's not something that you achieve later in your development. And according to some of the developmental research, a lot of people never get there. So the social domain theory flips that developmental trajectory on its side and says, well actually even young children can make the distinction between those rules that are there because there's an authority figure that's put them there. Right? So in other words, something becomes wrong only in so far as there's a rule. So a teacher says, you know, you shouldn't be chewing gum in class, then it becomes wrong that you gum in class. But in the absence of that rule, there's nothing wrong intrinsically about chewing gum in class. So the wrongness comes with the rule, but they recognize that there are other wrong, this is wrong. It's kind of a funny word. Wrongness is, is there is, there is, there are things that are perceived as wrong, even in the absence of the rule.
Jen Cole Wright (00:06:57):
And so really the rule is created to capture the wrongness it's RV there. I see some things are wrong, some things become wrong by virtue of creating a rule and some things you, you create rules to capture the wrong necessarily. So when I say it's wrong to hit another child just to take their toy away, even if the rule wasn't there, it would still be wrong. So, so even very young children, you know, four to six year old children recognize the distinctions. So if you were to ask them if suddenly the teacher took away all the rules that they use to enforce behavior, every rule is like off the table. Would it be okay to chew gum in class? Well, sure. But would it be okay to hit another child to take a toy? No. It still would be wrong. That's not something that the teacher actually has authority over.
Jen Cole Wright (00:07:44):
Yeah. And then of course there's this other, in addition to the, what they we call the social conventional domain, which is where wrongness comes through. The rules that are created in the moral domain is where the wrongness already exists. There's this third dimension, which is the personal domain, which is the space. One way of thinking about it is that this, this is a space that the individual has authority over. So, so this is a space that a teacher wouldn't, it wouldn't be appropriate for a teacher or anyone else for that matter to create a rule to restrict your behavior. So you could think of the different domains in terms of where their authority lies, the personal demand, the authorities, and the individual social conventional domain. It's, it's in the social group itself and, or whoever we delegate as our authority figure, right? So there's certain circumstances under which we as a group decided we vote or whatever.
Jen Cole Wright (00:08:38):
And there's certain times where we have an authority figure that we recognize as being the arbiter in this space. And they're the ones who set the rules and then the moral domain, the wrongness comes from something else. And then that's where we get into all kinds of interesting debates about what's the source or the nature of the wrongness that exists there. Yeah. Yeah. Really interesting. So how, like how do people go about teasing apart which elements of our surroundings fall under which realm of authority? Well I think that's one of the challenges, right? And different, different societies, first of all, different societies emphasize these domains differently. So you might argue that the United States has a pretty strong, we put a pretty strong emphasis on the personal domain in the sense that we want to maximize the degree of freedom that people have to make to make choices for themselves.
Jen Cole Wright (00:09:35):
We recognize their authority to be able to determine a wide range of things about their lives. Whereas for example, I was reading an interesting article the other day about I teach a class called the psychology of social change. And it was looking at this question of what happens when you impose certain Western norms on other cultures. Like, you know, this idea that being able to marry for love, something where we feel individuals should be able to make the choice about their marriage themselves. But this is a very different attitude than you might find. For example, in India where there is the, the, the presumption is, is that leaving individuals to decide for themselves might be quite disastrous, not only for the individuals but the families. And so there's a lot more, there's a lot more regulations, social regulation, and of course the authority figure might be just a family.
Jen Cole Wright (00:10:27):
The afforded authority figure might be the larger community as a whole, like community norms. But there's this feeling that there needs to be more than just the individual who's making the decision of who you're going to be married to. That there's a, there's a wider range of concern and it's okay if what that does is it constrains the individual's authority because there that's appropriate. So there's this negotiation that we're doing constantly doing and trying to identify where is the line for personal authority. Yeah. And then when it comes to, you know, what counts is social, what counts as moral. This is a really, this is a big debate for us because even if, you know, I'm a moral objectivist, so I think that there is a, you know, there's a truth out there. It's, it's, it's, it's very particular lies to the given situations, but there's a truth out there, but that doesn't necessarily mean I have access to it or that I, that I have infallible access to it.
Jen Cole Wright (00:11:23):
So it's like, it's like being a scientist. I mean, you know, there's a world out there to be explored, but the process of exploring it is, it's a, it's an experimental process where sometimes we form true beliefs and sometimes we don't. Sometimes we walk around with false theories for, you know, decades before we realized that they were wrong. So we're in the process of trying to figure out, we have some pretty good guidelines, right? So that's pretty, pretty well recognized, that harm unnecessary or unwarranted harm. But then of course there's the catch words. Unnecessary. Unwarranted. That's tricky. How do we know when harm is unnecessary? Unwarranted. Unjustified. Because not all harm can be morally wrong, right? There's, there's harms that are, that, you know, when I go to the dentist and he causes me pain, that might be a good thing. So, so harm, harm is one of those indicators.
Jen Cole Wright (00:12:19):
Fairness is often used as an indicator or justice. This idea that things need to be equitable, they need to be fair. And of course if you get into moral foundation theory, you start introducing things like, you know, there has to be a recognition of authority, loyalty to group, you know purity enters in, in terms of perhaps our sense of what's, what's degrading to human beings versus, you know in alignment with the types of, like in alignment with our dignities humans. Certain things are dignified and certain things aren't dignified. So, so there's there's open debate about where the line between the social domain and where the moral domain lies. And that's an ongoing negotiation for sure. Yeah. So tell me about a bit about sort of the relationship between tolerance and, and each of these different domains. So, you know, I, I imagine naturally we're going to have the most tolerance for things that we think are in the personal domain, kind of to each his own type of thing.
Jen Cole Wright (00:13:25):
But talk me through what tolerance looks like for sort of this communal social domain versus the moral domain. Well, what my research over the years, and I started doing research on this when I was a grad student. And so the last, I guess it's been almost 15 years of research that I've done in this area. It's one of the most reliable and powerful findings I've, I've ever had where it doesn't matter how I test it, it doesn't matter how I ask the questions. It doesn't matter what the framework is. Moral, what domain you play something in is a huge predictor of tolerance. And I mean, so the eta squared is sometimes as high as like seven 70 or 80% of the, of the variance is explained. So that's huge. And it does, it's, I've done online surveys, I've done, you know, people in the lab.
Jen Cole Wright (00:14:16):
I've done everything. I've, I've tried all kinds of different things and what, and, and I've also tested tolerance and a lot of different ways. So we've had, you know, it can be questions similar to the ones that Linda Skitka asks in her research where it's like you know, would you be willing to date somebody who believed differently than you do? Or would you be willing to have some, what would you work for someone or would you vote for someone or would you be a roommate with someone? So we're looking at this question of like, how, how much would you want to interact with this person and how close would you be interested in being? How important is this difference for whether you are, you feel like you're able to share the same values or not? And really an in the end, in some respects, I, I think that tolerance comes down to this idea of our core values.
Jen Cole Wright (00:15:04):
But I'll get back to that in a second. Okay. So, so we, we've had, we've had people come into the lab and like, they had to set up chairs, right? They're going to have a conversation with someone. And the chairs were not set up yet and it was made to look like the person had the person they're going to be talking to it already come in and set up their chair, set their bag down and gone to the bathroom. And so now they're setting up their chair and we found that, you know, domain predicted not only how far away they'd sit from the person, but how much, how, how much they'd angle their body towards or away from that person in predicts how many resources they're willing to share with someone. Like if I have money and I get to distribute it, or if I'm deciding how much hot sauce you get or you know, just like all kinds of different things that people have tested, we've tested and other people have tested over time.
Jen Cole Wright (00:15:53):
If it's a moral difference, if, if you and I disagree on something that I take to be moral, then that's a flag to me that you're deviant and as a deviant, I don't have to tolerate you. I don't, and it's not just, I don't have to tolerate your belief. You and I disagree about abortion. It's not just that I don't have to tolerate, I don't have to listen to you talk about your view on abortion, but it, we take that to be a reflection. And this gets into you know Shawn Nichols in Nina astronomer. I can never say her last name. True. I mean, I can see it, but I can't say it. So, so the work on the moral self, there's research that's been done by a number of people on the moral self. And the idea is that if it's a, if we were to change something about you, how much would you still be the same person?
Jen Cole Wright (00:16:47):
And when you change people's moral values, they're a fundamentally different person. Interesting. Yeah. So whereas if you change, like, you know, other things about them, the music that they like in a variety of other things, they're still the same person. They've just changed certain things. So we take we take the fact that someone disagrees with us about a moral issue as being that they're, that they're a different sort of person. They're a fundamentally different person and they're not really, they're not a part of my group. They're not, they're not someone that I have to tolerate. Whereas if it's a personal issue, then it's like, look, I might be personally uncomfortable with the fact that you feel this way, but I don't, that's, it's, that's a space that we've, we've agreed is completely your space and I'm going to do my best to just, you know, I'm certainly going to accept you as a person and I'll do my best to be comfortable and engage with you because you're entitled to believe whatever you want to believe.
Jen Cole Wright (00:17:44):
So, so it really creates, in terms of our willingness to give people the space to, to do whatever they want and the, the internal emotional comfort that we feel with engaging with them and with accepting them as people who are a part of our group. I think tolerance has a lot to do with this idea of group identity, right? Because we, we know from a lot of the research done by Premack and by in the 80s, and then also out of Paul Bloom's lab. And anyways, so there's research that looks at how young, how pre-verbal infants are sensitive. They're sensitive to group membership. They're with before they're even able to talk. They recognize when someone's a member of a group or they're in the ingroup outgroup and also higher hierarchies. The other one that's really important, it's like if you are, if there's indicators that you are more powerful than someone else, like there's this great study where they have squares moving around on a screen and one of them is larger than the other and they're moving around a screen.
Jen Cole Wright (00:18:53):
All of a sudden their paths intersect. And if the little square moves out of the way of the big square, that's surprising to the child. So the infant, whereas if the, sorry, sorry. If the little square moves out of the way, the big square, that's normal. But if the big square moves out of the way of the little square, that's surprising. Hmm. And because, because you know, if you're, if you're little, you don't have status, the big square obviously has more status than you do. So you need to get out of its way when it's trying to move. And I've done a bunch of research with, with kindergartners, preschoolers and kindergartners looking at their understanding of, of group membership and hierarchy, using just objects that move around and screen and they're different colors or different shapes and different sizes. So group membership is one of those things that I think is really critical because what, what's happening or at least what I think and I, you know, certainly consistent with what other people have said about what I think part of what's happening in the social conventional space.
Jen Cole Wright (00:19:53):
And this is when we have to think of the social conventional space is a multi complex, multilayered space. Because I can belong to lots of groups. I can be, you know, I'm a citizen of the United States. I'm a professor at the college of Charleston. I'm a part of a book club that reads books on social justice. I'm, you know, I'm, I'm a, I'm in all these different, I'm in, in these different groups. Each of those has some significance to me and to my identity. But each of those groups arguably has certain core values that are the reason why you're there in the first place. There's core features to being a member of that group that make it satisfying to be a member of that group. And when those are threatened we tend to, we, when those particular core values are threatened, we tend to want to be able to reject and to not have to tolerate that individual who is interfering with those norms.
Amber Cazzell (00:20:55):
It's interesting. It kind of reminds me, I had Tage Rai on this podcast before and he had kind of talked about like, yeah, sometimes these this is backtracking a little bit and things you've said, but this idea that we seem to use certain behaviors as indicators of deviance and then project that into like larger swaths of, of, of thinking about what they're like, who they are, who they are, who they. So for instance, like this moral foundation stuff about having sex with a dead chicken. And like he was saying, well, part of what's going on there, part of people's moral judgements of that might also be not just that. Okay, well is the chicken being harmed? Well maybe that's a philosophical question, but that's also just really bizarre behavior. And so, yeah, you project then and think like, is this, is this like good person? Well, and then a lot of people call that into questions. I think that's interesting.
Jen Cole Wright (00:22:09):
Sure. Because I mean, one, it's not only a bizarre behavior, it's at what we would, what would be likely to call aberrant or deviant behavior because it just, it seems it's not the sort of thing you're supposed to have sex with. It's not right. It's like you don't, dead bodies are not things that you're supposed to be sexually attracted to. And so that strikes us as deviant behavior and you know, you might be able to give me a good story as to why I should, I should tolerate that particular behavior. But the worry is, is that if, if that's the sort of thing that you're into, then there's going to be somewhere along the way where you're also accepting of things that are going to be harmful to other people.
Jen Cole Wright (00:22:56):
It's like if you, if that's, if that seems like a good idea to you, even though in that particular instance you know that the chicken carcass isn't being harmed, you know, there's, there's, there's no clear, right. There's this larger story of if that's the sort of thing you're into, if that's okay with you, then somewhere else within the realm of things that you're likely to do is something bad. It's going to cause harm to people. There's going to be somehow this is just not going to end well. Yeah. It's interesting. It does seem like, I mean as you were seeing it, I was thinking like this is a slippery slope logic, but again, it is the morality. Yeah. That does seem to happen because there's certain boundaries. The thought is that we, that we, and this also the other sort of explanation for that behavior.
Jen Cole Wright (00:23:44):
The reason why think it's morally wrong, even though there's not obvious harm, is that there's harm to the individual, him or herself, right? So that there's a more virtue ethics approach to this where what you're doing is not healthy. It's, it's like you're, you're forming a sexual relationship with a dead carcass. This is not something that's, that's healthy and it's going to be, it's, it's like it's, it's harmful. And, and doing harm to yourself, psychological, emotional, moral harm to yourself is something that is a virtue. A virtue ethicists would say you shouldn't do, right? It's like you, you're cold. You're supposed to be cultivating this internal character, this, this, you know, this recognition and appreciation for what it's right to do and what it's not okay to do. And so you're doing what you're doing. Real harm to yourself would be another way of thinking about it.
Jen Cole Wright (00:24:34):
But both of those imply that there is a cohesiveness, which is right in order to escape the slippery slope argument municipally. So the reason why this slippery slope argument seems w why we might go there is because there's no necessary connection between one thing and the other thing, right? It's like when you, when you, when I was having a conversation with a fairly conservative friend of mine in Wyoming, and it's like we're talking about same sex marriage and he's like, you know, before he let it allow that pretty soon before you know it, you know, people can be married to sheep or cows or whatever, and it's like there's no, there's no logical connection between those two possibilities that would necessitate a move from one to the other. So that's a slippery slope. You're just, that's a, that's a fallacious claim that you're making.
Jen Cole Wright (00:25:26):
But if we can show that there is a cohesiveness that there's a code, a coherence to your norms and your values such that their reflection, one particular type of behavior is likely to also show up in a range of other types of behaviors, then the slippery slope doesn't really apply. We actually have reason to believe that if you're willing to have sex with a dead chicken, then maybe there's other things that we should be worried about.
Amber Cazzell (00:25:54):
Yeah. Interesting. So another, another thing as I was reading through your paper that I found fascinating was kind of this this common knowledge piece and like the degree to which people seem to think, well this is like basically this idea that moral principles can kind of hit this critical mass and then switch from being non objective to objective. So let's talk about some of the meta-ethical pluralism pieces of your work as well.
Jen Cole Wright (00:26:29):
Okay. Right. So, so at one point in time when I was doing the moral domain stuff, so I was looking specifically at how the early work that I was doing was just looking at how classifying things into different domains predicted outcomes. And one of the things I was interested in there is, I'm not assuming for myself that I knew what domain things entered into, but actually giving people the opportunity to say, I think this is a personal issue or a social issue of her or a moral issue. And sometimes I would give them some guidance as to how to think about those domains. And sometimes I wouldn't. And it didn't seem to make that much of a difference. It seemed pretty intuitive to people where things fell more or less. And they tended to think that things were one type of domain or the other, even though you, sometimes you could break out pieces and say, okay, there's a social element to this and there's a moral element to it.
Jen Cole Wright (00:27:18):
But anyways, one of the things that, I can't remember the full chain of events, but at one point in time I came across a good one in Darlene's article where they're there early 2008 piece where they showed that there was some difference in people's willingness to be objective of cross these different domains. And of course my initial thought was, Hmm, I wonder if that's just because they're assuming the domains for themselves, which is what most researchers do because the the allowing people to classify them sings the issues for themselves turns out to be a data and statistical nightmare. I mean there's a lot of complication that enters into doing analyzing the data and all that that you might want to avoid, but, but it cleans up a lot of noise I think is really important to clean up. But, so I'm looking at what they're doing and I'm thinking, well maybe it's just that they are assuming that people are putting things into certain domains when they're really not.
Jen Cole Wright (00:28:14):
So I went back and replicated their study. Only I allowed people, I use the same issues that they use by allowing people to put them into their own domains like the, to choose for themselves where they fell. And what I found is that more or less people were using the same domains, not entirely, but they're using the same domains as a good would in Darla. I mean, there was a couple of exceptions, but nonetheless that the this interesting difference and will it willingness to provide an objective grounding remained. And so that's, I realized that there was this interesting cause I think I had kind of been operating under the same assumptions as everybody else, that morality is going to tend to be because morality is this thing that's outside the social group. Like it's, it's wrong. This is something that's there to be discovered rather than to be created.
Jen Cole Wright (00:29:07):
That of course that meant that people generally speaking are Objectivists about morality. And then I realized by doing this study, it's like, well that's not exactly true because people are giving, sometimes they're giving more sort of relativistic responses and sometimes they're giving more Objectivists responses. And so I wanted to try to understand more what was going on there. And one. I mean there's a lot of different things that could be going on, but the, the, the, the sort of theoretical framework that I've chosen in, in, in going through my work and looking at how different ways of interpreting the findings is that we recognize that once we call something moral, once we put something in the moral domain, that that has the implications of, of putting it outside of the, of the social space. It's like it gets pushed out of the boundaries of what's acceptable, right?
Jen Cole Wright (00:30:01):
So once we say that it's, it's not morally appropriate, then the social group as a whole needs to stop doing it. But the problem is, is, and this is where the larger piece of diversity and deviance comes in, is that as a social group, social group is made up of individuals and individuals. The individuals within that group have their own autonomy. They have their own space to navigate. And that not only, not only is that reflected in the fact that they need to have space for diversity, to be individuals and to be different from everybody else in the group, but it also means that they have to have the space to make these critical decisions for themselves. They have to be able to reflect on things and say, yeah, I think I agree with you. I think that's wrong. The, the, the, the tendency to make that decision for people doesn't go very well.
Jen Cole Wright (00:30:56):
Right? I mean, one way of thinking about our own history in terms of the civil war, now living in the South and dealing with the aftereffects of slavery we have a center for the study of slavery in Charleston that I'm a part of. And we're, you know, we're doing a lot of work to try to understand the aftermath and the after effects of slavery. It's very much still a part of the narrative down here where, you know, the civil war was this, this to the extent that people are even willing to acknowledge it had anything to do with slavery. It was this, this this situation in which they were being told this is wrong and we're no longer going to do it before anyone was ready to get on board with that. It's like, how dare you tell me what I'm going to do and what I'm not going to do?
Jen Cole Wright (00:31:40):
So it doesn't usually go well for the conversation to get shut down prematurely, which means that as are, and of course, you know, social spaces are organic, they're changing all the time. Morality might be out there, but it's something that we have to discover and we have to try to understand and we're imperfect beings. So as we begin, it begins to occur to us that, Hey, maybe this is not such a good idea that we allow this to happen. Maybe we really should let women vote. Maybe we really shouldn't own other human beings. Maybe we would shouldn't factory farm billions of animals just because we happen to like to eat meat. These are things that we really should be considering as wrong. This, there's this space that it arguably needs to be created for there, for the, for the recognition of it being wrong to be acknowledged.
Jen Cole Wright (00:32:32):
Like, so there's this, people can begin to think, yeah, maybe there's something to this idea that it's wrong, but at the same time it's not shutting the conversation down. It's not, it's not prohibiting prematurely prohibiting people being able to make choices that, but then there's going to be this moment and there seems to be just this sort of number that you get to that, you know, who knows whether what it was, what percentage it is, where suddenly there's enough people who think, yep, this is totally wrong, that there's a natural inclination to say, okay, so now if you don't agree anymore, we no longer have to give you the space to be your own individual. Now this is just deviant behavior. So we're not going to accept it anymore. That's right.
Amber Cazzell (00:33:23):
Yeah. I mean does it have, does it have to do with sort of that concept of like of common knowledge? I mean cause clearly it clearly if there is sort of this critical mass where people think, well this is widely accepted enough now that I, I don't even really need to leave this space open, I can just be intolerant of this deviant behavior.
Jen Cole Wright (00:33:45):
It seems to, it seems it seems to have something to do with our perception of what's, and there was a really interesting I was reviewing an article that was looking at med ethical pluralism from a different perspective. What, or actually we just really looking at relativism and was arguing that that one of the things that's going on linguistically is that there's, there's, is there, can we assume that there's a common foundation of knowledge that we're sharing or not? When we're talking, when you and I are talking and we're using words and we're, we're referring to things, can we assume that there's a certain foundation of shared knowledge or not and so, and that and that, how that's determined? Well, there's not any like rigorous math to it, but is there is there are certain indicators that we use as signs that we have a certain foundation of shared knowledge or we don't, and so there seems to be something going on, or at least the argument would be that there's something going on where it becomes ubiquitous enough in our social space. The attitude is, is presence enough that we can assume that this is common knowledge. This is something that we share and therefore if you're a member of this group and we all share this knowledge, if you are no longer agreeing with it, then you have two choices. Either you're not a member of the group or you're, you're engaging in your, basically you're betraying their group. You're like a black sheep. You're, you're going to be punished perhaps even more severely because you're, you're betraying the group's values.
Amber Cazzell (00:35:22):
Yeah. Are you aware of any research that kind of looks at that intersection? Because this is, I mean this is something that I was curious about as I was reading through your work was, okay, so what? Yeah. Per, perhaps if they're not following this behavior, it indicates they're just not part of that group. So, so then what, what happens in the context of these multicultural exchanges where there isn't a shared morality? How do people view one another and behave towards one another?
Jen Cole Wright (00:35:54):
Well, I mean that's, that's so, so there's a couple of different complicated things in what you just asked. I mean, so one of the really interesting things is this question of when w, you know, beyond the, when is it common knowledge, what are the, what, when do we decide the person's just an outgroup member as opposed to an in group member who's betraying the rules? And, and I'm reading a book called the art of community and my psychology of community class. And he's got a lot of stuff in there that really actually relates to this whole discussion about what, what it means to form a community, what an actual community as opposed to a group.
Jen Cole Wright (00:36:34):
Right? Because, and that's, and that's one of the distinctions that I try to make in the, in one of the papers is there's lots of groups. Groups are just people who come together to do things or to accomplish things, but there's no sense of shared value or identity. Whereas communities are aware there's a presumption of shared identity, shared values that creates this space where certain people are a part of it and certain people aren't a part of it. Maybe there's, you know, there's various, you can have people visit the group and maybe they can join or maybe they can't join. Like there's, there's all kinds of really interesting things that he's articulating in terms of how people are allowed to join a community or not join a community. And a lot of us, especially in our culture, we really like this idea that Hey, we're all inclusive.
Jen Cole Wright (00:37:19):
Like anybody can be a member. But one of the things that he argues is that's not actually true. But even then, even when we have communities that say they're totally wide open to everybody, there's always at least implicit values that are shared by the people who are currently in the community that make certain people eligible to be part of it and certain people not eligible. Like we wouldn't be comfortable if this particular person joined. And so one of the things he argues is that people at communities need to get clearer on what those values are so that they're enforcing them in a, in a compassionate and intelligent way as opposed to just letting them implicitly operate in the background. So, but certainly one of the things that happens is that if you've got a shared set of values as a member of a community and then all of a sudden a community member is betraying those values, then there's going to be, I mean, you've got two options.
Jen Cole Wright (00:38:10):
One, you can engage in a sort of punitive action that then is either going to bring them back into the fold or you're going to kick them out of group, you're going to kick them out of the community. Yeah. So and so, well, I mean, I, I don't know. I would assume there's gotta be research out there somewhere and it'd be really fascinating to look at it. I know there's research looking at how when people think an in group member has betrayed and like the punishments that follow. But one thing I haven't seen is research that's looking at when do you take steps to like bring that person back into the fold and what does that look like? Like is there some sort of fine, is there, is there some sort of like ritual cleansing that has to happen? Is there like a, an apology that has to happen?
Jen Cole Wright (00:38:57):
Like how do they demonstrate the fact that they still are deserved to be a member of the group and when do they just get kicked out and I don't, that's really fascinating and I would imagine that there's probably stuff out there that doesn't really explicitly identify itself as being research in this area, but it still would count like research on gang membership for example, like how various communities form and like not only are there rituals that you have to engage in to prove that you deserve to be a member of the gang. For example, there are initiations, but then if you end up somehow the training, the group there are, there might be clear steps of things that you, risks that you have to take and things you have to do to be able to get back into the fold. Or if you're in a religious order and you do something wrong, like there's things that you have to do to get back into the fold and those would count as the sort of things that you have to do.
Jen Cole Wright (00:39:50):
But I think the key here is that it's, there's not, it's not the, the the sort of instrumental values or the tangent tangential values, but what the community would, would, if, if pushed to do so would identify as the core values that hold that group together, that hold the community together. It's a betrayal of those. That's really the key to whether something counts is deviant behavior or, or whether you have to tolerate it or not. Yeah. So now we have this, this experiment, this great experiment going on where we're trying to bring all these people together that come from all these different backgrounds and have all these different cultural, you know, foundations and assumptions and practices. So how do we make that work? You know, in many respects we don't. And so we ended up having a lot of conflict that that emerges where people are, I mean one way that you might read the liberal and conservative divide that exists is that it's a, it's a, it's a, a way of, of satisfying the psychological need to have a community that has a shared core of values.
Jen Cole Wright (00:41:04):
Yeah. And what's interesting there is, if I think of myself, and this gets back to the tolerance question you asked, here's one way of thinking about myself as a liberal cause I might as well just get it out there. Right? So here's one way of thinking myself about myself as a liberal. I am a liberal with it. I'm, I'm, I'm a member of, of a, of a country, the United States in which I have certain beliefs and there is a pretty healthy subset of the population that completely disagrees with me. Yeah. Right. So if you think about the, the mechanisms that I'm talking about in the med ethical, plural, pluralism research, what that's an indicator to me of is that I've got to be pretty tolerant of all this disagreement because as a member of the United States, as a citizen of the United States, there is a pretty healthy debate going on about these things.
Jen Cole Wright (00:41:59):
And yes, there's definitely people who agree with me, but there's also people who quite vehemently disagree with me. So now, and we haven't reached that magical number where we can just consistently all get on board and say, okay, this is what, this is what we're believing and we're, and it's not that rest is not going to be tolerated. So that what that does, that view of myself as a member of the United States promotes a tolerant perspective towards people who disagree with me. Because what I'm recognizing is a high degree of debate and disagreement within my, within the culture of my identification, I've identified my culture as the United States. The community is the United States. Here's an alternative view, which is that I'm a member of a community called liberals. And in that community there is a, there's the, well, let's say there's like a 90% 95% agreement on certain values.
Jen Cole Wright (00:42:59):
And so when a conservative walks into the room and expresses an alternative value, I've been given the cue by my group that I can be highly intolerant of that view because clearly it's deviant because within the community of importance, within my liberal community, I've been given the clear message that we have a consistent, we have a consistent message, we have consistent values, we have shared values. Yeah. So now I no longer have to be tolerant of anything that a conservative might say because they are not a member of my identified community. So the more we exaggerate and prioritize our political affiliation as a community of, of importance, the, the greater the justification, the greater the, the, the more those mechanisms of intolerance are triggered. Right. Whereas the more what we emphasize is the fact that we're all members of the same community, the more that prioritizes the need to be tolerant and to be open and to have dialogue. And so the exact same mechanisms are at play and how they're being, what, what's being triggered depends on how we identify our group.
Amber Cazzell (00:44:13):
Yeah. There, I mean that there's a lot in there. That's really interesting. And I, I just spoke with sociologist Steve Vaisey about, actually this was just yesterday we were talking about how the feeling of community emerges from having a shared sense of values and, and that, and not just that you have values, but also that it's salient enough that people want to act on those values and act in accord with those values. And then I was also thinking as you were talking about like, you know, at what point do you just figure, okay, this person is out side of our community and kind of push them out as a traitor versus versus pulling them back into the fold and coming in. And I guess I guess like the process of forgiveness and reintegration and stuff like it's, it is really fascinating to think about sort of these, these group dynamics and how to, how to create and maintain a shared narrative around that. And I, maybe there's more research out there than I'm aware of on this, but yeah, I think it'd be fascinating. So if you come, if you come across any research about sort of that what to do with people who have been deviant, let me know. I'd be curious to read it.
Jen Cole Wright (00:45:35):
In terms of bringing back them back into the fold?
Amber Cazzell (00:45:37):
Yeah. Bringing them back into the fold or, or kind of deciding, okay, this person is too far gone or whatever.
Jen Cole Wright (00:45:44):
Right, right. Yeah. And that's, I mean it's interesting because man, that's, that's, that gets at, and I actually, there was something else I want to say in reference to that it's going in a different direction, but first that gets at the, the ultimate issue in a way for me, which is that we do have to remember, and this is getting back to the, the, the blog that you were reading that you said initially you were thinking about, you know, that morality, it's tolerance is moral, but really morality also facilitates intolerance is that at some point we do have, regardless of what community we're in, we do have the knee, there's, there's a very important need to draw a boundary that says certain things are going to be outside the purview of what's acceptable behavior for, for reasons that have to do with the very real needs that we as human beings, we as living species.
Jen Cole Wright (00:46:43):
So, right, thinking about it even broader to include corporate can encompass all living entities. There are certain things we just objectively speaking need to thrive and to function well. And there are certain, there are certain and part of that is obviously protection from pernicious harms and oppressive practices, but also this, this, this space to have a life that is the one of our choosing the space to experience ourselves as choice makers. Whether freewill is an illusion or not right, to, to have that experience of free will and have the experience as being someone who's choosing to do something as opposed to something else who's, who's choosing values and who's expressing, I mean just just thinking about it from the standpoint of this specific set of environmental and genetic conditions that led to you versus me, you, someone you, you, yourself will never exist again.
Jen Cole Wright (00:47:42):
I, myself will never exist again. We are unique and that means that there's lots of ways in which our experience of the world and our capacity to express our place in the world is absolutely fundamentally unique. And being able to create space for that celebration of that uniqueness is really, really challenging because it requires, not only is it challenging for the group that we're a part of because that group is constantly looking for indicators that you belong and that you share those values and you share those practices in. You're doing all the things that you're supposed to do in order to be fulfilling what we take to be a shared conception of a good life. But it's also challenging to the individual because the idea of going out on your own and really exploring what it means to be you and trying things out and, and, and, and following your passion and like, you know, beating your own drum all the way that it's been talked about it.
Jen Cole Wright (00:48:41):
There's a, there's a fine line between genius and freak. There's a fine, and there's, and there's all this untapped territory where you have no idea, you have no idea of what you're doing is, is beautiful or, or ugly or crazy or brilliant or because the, the things that we use as markers for that are the social feedback that we get from other people. And so there's this really fascinating tension between going out there and really doing what you're called upon to do and needing feedback from others that this is okay. Like, you know, imagine you're an artist and you're just compelled to create art that speaks from the depth of your soul. But then all of a sudden people look at it and go, Oh my God, that's trash. What the heck is that? Does that, does, does the fact that it appeals to you aesthetically is that, is that lessened because it doesn't appeal to anyone else aesthetically like can you, can you trust your own aesthetic?
Jen Cole Wright (00:49:45):
You know, your own aesthetic genius or are suddenly you, you're thrown back on not, I'm just a sham. I'm not really an artist after all. And so there's this really fascinating tension between our capacity to be able to explore ourselves, to our, to the depth of our unique capacities and this need to continually bring it back to the group and say, is this okay? Is this okay? What do you think of this? Is this okay? And in a way that's vital to the group because the group then is able to constantly grow and change as individuals are bringing new ideas and new feedback and new experiences and new ways of doing things. The group can be like, Oh yeah, that's cool. We never thought about that before. Let's do that. Yeah. But then as soon as the group says, let's do that, it's not an individual thing anymore.
Jen Cole Wright (00:50:34):
Now it's a group thing. Right. So it's like, yeah, it is. It's interesting. I had never quite heard somebody frame like each of these domains as almost operating as like a a checks and balance system that allows for us to progress or grow stronger as a group, as a society. I thought, I thought that was fascinating. I think at one point you had talked about how about how the personal and moral domains work together to regulate the social cultural domain from like overreaching and causing personal or moral harm. Right. they actually think they're the same domain. I mean one of the things that I've come to think, you know, cause I was raised with the social domain theory, which, which thought of them as being discrete domains, but I really actually think that they're the personal and the moral, they're just the same regulatory system.
Jen Cole Wright (00:51:31):
It's just that it's just that one of their functions is to protect space for individual autonomy. Because of course, individual autonomy is moral autonomy, right? It's, I mean, having the capacity for autonomy, autonomy is a moral need to be, to be protected from infringement. We, you know, we have this space that needs to be morally protected. If you think about like all the human rights work that's out there, one of the fundamental things that human rights activists work for is people to have the space for moral autonomy, to be able to make choice, to be able to have, to have a life that they can live as they see fit. So it's a morally protected space. And then there's the other, the other function is that it is, it's not only protecting the individuals from the group, but it's protecting the group from the individuals and saying, okay, certain things are just harmful, right?
Jen Cole Wright (00:52:31):
And we don't have to, we need to be protected from these, these harmful forms of deviance. And that's getting back to the discussion a moment ago where we do have to recognize that there are boundaries and that there are certain things that we're, that we have good reason to say objectively speaking, this is just not, this is not okay. We don't, you know, when you, when you enter into a culture that it's decided that it's going to commit a genocide against one of the men, you know, this group of its own, you know, it's within its own domain. We've got, you know, like Rwanda, the inner Hutu deciding that they're going to just wipe out the Tutsi. That's not, there is no social space within which that's okay. Yeah. Yeah. So there are certain things that we as a species have the right to be intolerant of absolutely intolerant of and to, to try to create communities in a way that that never has to manifest.
Jen Cole Wright (00:53:25):
Mean. The problem is, is if it's already manifesting, then in a way it's too late. So our expressions of intolerance and the terms of like having international tribunals and putting people away for crimes against humanity, that is a reactive stance that's already too late. And the, and so when we're expressing and tolerance in that way, we've missed the opportunity to, to, to have that never happened. And so ideally speaking, we'd never have to actually manifest that kind of external intolerance because if we were doing our jobs well, we would be raising individuals within communities that never fostered that kind of fear and hatred. So that wouldn't manifest is that kind of okay, they're the bad guys. We need to wipe them out. We need to get rid of them. And that's the, that's the piece that is really critical is that we're constantly manifesting this space.
Jen Cole Wright (00:54:22):
That's why tolerance is so important. The space to recognize differences and to have, you know, to, to be compassionate and to have to have shared values that are mindful of what's needed so that everybody is benefiting from that equally in some way. Right. So you have to, tolerance for differences doesn't make a whole lot of sense when the society that you're in dramatically favors one group over another group. Yeah. Or one form of wealth over another form of wealth or one religion over another religion or so you, so that's the, and I think going back to this question, the United States, that's one of the puzzles with this multicultural experiment that we're in is that you've, we've really got two options. One is that it breaks down into these either these historical groups like, so we have, we have our, our ethnic and cultural backgrounds that we fall back into as our, as our group, our community identification, or we create these artificial groups.
Jen Cole Wright (00:55:22):
It's like liberal and conservative where that becomes our home and it becomes a way for us to feel satisfied that we're a part of something that matters to us. Like the NRA is so incredibly successful precisely because it provides people with a home where they feel they feel appreciated and they feel validated and they're willing to go to bat for, for all of the members of that group because they feel it. That's a space where they're safe to express their appreciation for you've gun ownership and all the things that go along with it. And so if we are, the only way out of that is to manifest at the, at the global level genuine shared values. I mean, I think that's something that P that people have argued the United States has lost or is losing, is these genuine shared values that are at an abstract enough level that it doesn't matter what cultural background you have or what, you know, what community you come from. It's something that you can identify as a core value that then unites us together. Yeah. I'm learning at a more abstract level in a way. It's like we value freedom. Okay, great. But then what does that mean? Right? So a lot of these things that we say we value have come under fire in ways that make people feel like they no longer have purchased anymore. So referring to yourself as a member of the United States and having that really resonate with you has become something that's less and less true. I don't think we meant to go into down this political path, but
Amber Cazzell (00:57:00):
Yeah, no, it's, I mean it kind of, so, so with the, just the last couple of minutes that we have here, I wanted to dedicate a little bit of time to talking about the role of virtues in, in all of this because like you had mentioned, okay, social practices I should say in the paper you had mentioned that social practices can point us towards moral issues and I'm wondering like if it's trying to find this larger you know, this larger moral value that we can all rally around as us citizens or, or even just global citizens, that something is our social practices strong enough to do that. And anyway, maybe I'll just turn this over to you to hear what you have to say. I think I had the hardest time wrapping my mind around this piece of the role of virtues in sort of teasing apart deviance and diversity and,
Jen Cole Wright (00:58:01):
Okay. Okay. So so first let me say this, the reason why I think virtues are so important and one of the reasons why I've been working recently, I've got a book coming out on understanding virtue from Oxford press sometime this year that's coauthored with Nancy Snow and Michael Warren. And one of the things that we're trying to do is we're trying to bring the, this rich philosophically valuable conception of virtue into the empirical domain. Cause there's lots of people, scientists and educators and practitioners who are very interested in virtue, but there's not really fabulous empirical work on it yet. Right? It's something that we need to do a lot of work on. But the reason why I think it's so important and why I think it fits into this larger conversation that we're having is that you might think of human behavior as being regulated at two fundamentally different levels.
Jen Cole Wright (00:58:59):
And the first one or, or the, the outside one is the external level. And that's where, you know, we have rules and we have regulations and we have, you know, we have, we have these punishments that will happen. Let's say for example, you know, we have speed limits and if you're speeding and you break the speed limit and there happens to be a cop there, you know, there's punishments, you'll get a ticket, you know, you can get your license taken. So we have these rules and regulations that are there to, to reward certain behaviors and to punish other behaviors. But one of the things that, that that is problematic about that is that if you rely too heavily on that external structure, then it's already too late. Right? Because that means that it's only motivating in so far as you could. In a way.
Jen Cole Wright (00:59:47):
It's actually, ironically getting back to the early Coburg, Ian, earliest Coburg and stage of development where the only reason you wouldn't do it is because you're going to get punished for it. And the only reason you would do it is because you're going to get rewarded for it. And so it's to the extent that people think they can get away with it, to the extent that the rewards get removed, you immediately are, the change in the behavior immediately disappears, right? It's like, Hey, I'm not going to get a reward. I'm not going to do it. If there's a chance I go, go, won't get punished, I'm going to do it anyways. And so this is a really it's not a good tool to use. It should be like the last ditch effort that we have in place to catch the people that are not already engaged in regulation.
Jen Cole Wright (01:00:31):
And so actually I guess we could say there's really three levels. So the next level might be social norms, right? So there an a more informal way where we regulate each other's behavior by virtue of having certain norms. So if, you know, if I had a student who were to walk in a male who were to walk in wearing, you know, a woman's dress, for example, there'd be all kinds of looks and there'd be people, there'd be a sense of discomfort. One of the things I like to say in my class is that, you know, I never have to worry about the fact that someone's going to show up naked. I've never had that happen once. And I just don't, I don't have to worry about. Right. And it's not because, I mean I guess there are laws but it's not because of the laws that they're not doing it.
Jen Cole Wright (01:01:12):
It's because of the profound embarrassment, the like the social stigma against doing something like that that just makes it not alive option for you to consider getting up and deciding whether you're going to go naked or put on clothes. Right. So that's one of the ways we regulate. But the, the one that is I think the most foundational, the most important and some of that is formed through this socialization process. So the reason why those norms work in the first place and the reason why the law is hopefully don't need to be used in the first place is because we developed this internal architecture that guides our behavior, that makes certain things live options and certain certain things not. So when I get up in the morning, it's not a part of my process of thinking to decide whether I'm going to go, you know, break into, you know, my neighbor's house to see if they've got any loose cash laying around so I can buy my latte. [inaudible]
Jen Cole Wright (01:02:10):
It's just, it just never enters into my mind to think that that's something that I would do. It's, it's in all the different ways that I could think about how am I going to able to afford a latte? You know, like, what am I going to do to be able to buy one? It never is. It never even enters into, into my mind as a live option because it's just, it's just inconsistent with the sort of person that I take myself to be in the sort of what I feel I owe my neighbors. And, you know, my sense of property and all these things that have been developed over time. And this is where I think virtues are really critical. Because part of what's happening when we're developing virtues is we're developing a way of being in the world. So certainly people can, for example, they can engage in generous actions.
Jen Cole Wright (01:02:55):
Someone can act generously in a given situation, but a generous person, what makes a person a generous person or an honest person or a courageous person is that they're inclined, they're disposed to respond to every situation in the world, generously or compassionately or courageously. Or it's just a part of how they're oriented to the world. That and, and of course what that means is it ends up getting reflected in all kinds of things. They might be more generous in the way they think about people. They're more generous with their time, they're more generous with their resources. They're more generous, like they're just there. It expresses itself in all of the different ways that they interact with the world around them. They might be more generous with themselves, you know, more generous with their children and, and so it manifests in the way that they interact with the world.
Jen Cole Wright (01:03:48):
And that's important. On the one hand because it's a way, the more we generate these virtues internally, the more likely we are to see ourselves when things that are going on in our environment are not consistent with that. So if I am a very honest person or a very compassionate person, then it becomes much more evident to me when someone like dishonesty stands out. A lack of compassion stands out in a way that it wouldn't necessarily stand out if I wasn't someone who was particularly honest or particularly compassionate. So it helps me to see, and it helps others to see where our actions are inconsistent, are, are, are not consistent with what we might consider the good life, right? Because ultimately we want to be, we would love a world, a world with more compassion and generosity and honesty. And courage is a better world than a world without them.
Jen Cole Wright (01:04:50):
So if we are oriented in that way, it makes us more sensitive to these things and it makes us much less disinclined to engage in those things ourselves. I might be tired, I might be frustrated. But if I have a disposition towards generosity, I'm going to express generosity. Despite the fact that I'm tired and I'm hungry and I'm all right. Whereas if I'm not disposed to be generous, then I might be inclined to be way more stingy. The minute I get tired, that's it. I'm not gonna, I'm not inclined to help anymore. I might be really super critical of people. So it's really important in that sense. And the other thing that I think is important when it comes to the multicultural piece is that, and this is a little bit of what I talk about in the paper, is that if I'm, so here's this particular practice that's going on, I learn that what you do is you reach out and you shake a hand with someone that you need them for the first time, you shake their hand.
Jen Cole Wright (01:05:45):
And that's a way of showing respect. It's a welcoming gesture and it's a way of showing respect. And I learned that. And then in the process of learning that I learned this is something that people do. It's something like when we moved to the South, my children went to school, we came from the Rocky mountains. And it didn't take them very long to realize that you said ma'am and sir, you said yes ma'am. Yes sir, no ma'am, no sir. And that, that was absolutely fun to found foundational to showing respect. And if you didn't do it, you're going to get called on it. You're going to get penalized for not doing it. And they learned how to do it. And what's really interesting is that they've maintained that even though they've left and now they live somewhere where it's not done anymore because they appreciated the, the value of it as a way of showing respect.
Jen Cole Wright (01:06:31):
Right? Th that it was, it was just a way for them to continue showing respect where they lived in a part of the country where there aren't those obvious signs of respects, like respect to something that's a little less ritualized in a way. So anyways, so, so let's say you're learning to say sir and ma'am as a, as a particular regional sign of respect. But what you learn from that, because it's so enforced, it's, it's not that, Oh, it's really important to say ma'am and serve by itself. It's that showing respect is important and this is how we show respect, right? But if showing respect is important, then it means not only am I, can I learn that, here's a here's, I might show respect this way, but then when I go over to this other neighborhood, they have a very different way of showing respect.
Jen Cole Wright (01:07:23):
And that's okay because it's a way of showing respect. And what's important here is that you're showing respect. It's not that you say ma'am or sir, it's that you're showing respect. So now I've learned that there's lots of different ways of showing respect and it opens me up to different ways of showing respect, but it also gives me the capacity to then look back and reflect on, yeah, I get the, you know, holding doors for women is a way of showing respect. I get that that's what's happening. But given the way our attitude about women are changing, like given this much more feminist perspective that we're learning how to take, we can also see how that's a disrespectful thing to do. See this treating women like they're, you know, like somehow they can't hold doors for themselves or you know, it's, it's, it's been meaning in a certain way or whatever.
Jen Cole Wright (01:08:13):
And women should feel like they want hold doors open for themselves. They don't want to be treated special. And so it allows for there to be this dialogue about what in fact is actually respectful. I see. So then we can change, we can begin to change our own behavior. So the interesting thing is that these specific practices introduce us to the much more general virtue practices that are at the root of them. They're at the heart. That's, that's really what actually matters. And then that becomes the fuel for not only appreciation for a wide variety of cultural diversity, but also a way to critically reflect on our own practices and say, yeah, but is this really actually respectful? I mean, I know that's why we do it, but what is it that we're implying when we do it? Like so and is that really what we're after? Or maybe should we change our practices if respect is what really matters to us. So it allows it, it prevents these rituals from becoming dead rituals where they're just done for the sheer sake of doing them. Like you might think of dogmatism, rigid dogmatism is like that. The sheer, the sheer need to do things for the sake of doing them and always doing them the same rather than having this organic growth where our practices change with our changing understanding of ourselves and our relationships to one another.
Amber Cazzell (01:09:40):
Interesting. Yeah, it makes me think a lot about, I often hear people complain about, you know, people saying hi, how are you doing? And just like don't listen to the response or whatever. Because because of the ritualization of trying to take the time to care, be kind or empathic, but not actually following through on that. Right. And then that pointing to some of these larger issues and calling us into question, okay, where do we want to go as a, as a group, as a society? How can we, how can we kind of maintain this intrinsic good? It's really interesting. Well, we're actually, we're, we're, we're way over time. I, I've had a lot of fun talking with you and I appreciate it. It's interesting. It's a lot of, it's a lot of interesting stuff to think about. I'm going to be chewing on domain theory as two domains now and even about ethical pluralism and common knowledge and, and all these different topics. So, anyway, thanks so much.
Jen Cole Wright (01:10:51):
Absolutely. My pleasure.