22.5.05

No Fights?

To Love, Honour, And Overrate ... "Whatever does she see in him?" is a common refrain from mystified friends as yet another acquaintance settles for a strange choice of partner. The conventional explanation is that "love is blind" but new psychological research suggests that long after the first flush of passionate love has ebbed away, distorted, unrealistic perceptions of one's partner are the key ingredient to a successful marriage. ... The secret, it seems, is to see your partner as a lot nicer than he or she really is. The latest research, just about to be published in the academic journal Social Behaviour and Personality, measures a phenomenon referred to as "marital aggrandisement". Marital aggrandisement entails an idealised appraisal of one's spouse and marriage to the exclusion of any negative beliefs and perceptions. Those who aggrandise their marriages tend to endorse items on personality tests that are extremely unlikely to be completely true, for example, "My spouse doesn't make me angry" or "I do not recall arguments with my spouse". -- via Foreign Dispatches

I wish I could see the actual paper this is based on. I'm wondering what kind of objective standard they were comparing the subjective assessments to (some sort of data on the actual number of fights the couple has had?) If all they've got is a correlation between marital happiness and claiming you haven't fought could support the aggrandizement hypothesis. But it's also consistent with the commonsense hypothesis that not actually having fights leads to both happiness and a lack of memory of the non-existent fights. Indeed, there could be a mutually reinforcing loop, as a happy couple would be less likely to have additional fights.

Certainly the aggrandizement hypothesis remains plausible as well, and it's consistent with recent psychological research that suggests that attitudes and affect have primacy and remembered facts are put together as post-hoc rationalizations. (An attractively existentialist theory, it seems.) But I must admit to some bias, as I feel very certain that I had only one (minor) argument with my ex, who I dated for three years, and none so far with my girlfriend of five months.
Stentor Danielson, 10:47, ,

Utilitarian Shades Of Gray

Guest-posting on Evangelical Outpost, Kevin T. Keith presents a decent summary of consequentialist and utilitarian ethics. There are various nits I could pick, but one of his statements stood out to me because it reminded me of a post I'd been meaning to write. In his section on objections to utilitarianism, Keith mentions perhaps the most popular: it's too hard*. Utilitarianism as typically presented demands that we select the utility-maximizing action, declaring all other actions to be wrong. Given our natural selfishness, most people would find it impossible to truly maximize utility. Peter Singer, perhaps the foremost contemporary utilitarian philosopher, is famously hypocritical for not donating as much of his income to charity as his stated ethical system demands.

However, I think the "it's too hard" criticism relies on a binary moral template improperly imported from non-consequentialist theories (an importation made by Bentham and Mill themselves). In deontological and command-based ethics, rightness is presented as a black and white issue, so each act can be classified as either right or wrong. This kind of system is appealing because of its simplicity -- it gives a clear yes or no, which is useful both for the actor and for those judging him or her. But consequentialism provides us with a more subtle metric of rightness. Acts can be ranked by their contribution to utility -- and hence by their rightness. The utility-maximizing act is not the only right act, rather it is the most right act possible in the circumstances. Suboptimal acts are no longer collapsed into a single category of "wrong," but are rather judged as attempts with varying degrees of success. If he were to adopt this way of conceptualizing rightness, Peter Singer would no longer be a hypocrite, but rather a person doing better than many people but not as good as theoretically possible.

*Given the location of the Keith post, I should note that Christianity is quite explicit about the fact that God's commands are also too hard for people to obey, thus necessitating forgiveness and salvation.
Stentor Danielson, 09:51, ,