Arbitration & Mediation

Resolving Moral Conflicts

By Victoria Pynchon

As you can imagine, I have a lot to say about the resolution of conflict -- and the negotiation of solutions -- where moral beliefs are implicated and non-negotiable.  Because I don't have time, I'm leaving you with the end of an excellent, must-read Sunday New York Times Magazine article by scholar Steven Pinker -- author of How the Mind Works -- entitled The Moral Instinct.

But in any conflict in which a meeting of the minds is not completely hopeless, a recognition that the other guy is acting from moral rather than venal reasons can be a first patch of common ground. One side can acknowledge the other’s concern for community or stability or fairness or dignity, even while arguing that some other value should trump it in that instance. With affirmative action, for example, the opponents can be seen as arguing from a sense of fairness, not racism, and the defenders can be seen as acting from a concern with community, not bureaucratic power. Liberals can ratify conservatives’ concern with families while noting that gay marriage is perfectly consistent with that concern.

The science of the moral sense also alerts us to ways in which our psychological makeup can get in the way of our arriving at the most defensible moral conclusions. The moral sense, we are learning, is as vulnerable to illusions as the other senses. It is apt to confuse morality per se with purity, status and conformity. It tends to reframe practical problems as moral crusades and thus see their solution in punitive aggression. It imposes taboos that make certain ideas indiscussible. And it has the nasty habit of always putting the self on the side of the angels.  .  .  . 

There are many [] issues for which we are too quick to hit the moralization button and look for villains rather than bug fixes. What should we do when a hospital patient is killed by a nurse who administers the wrong drug in a patient’s intravenous line? Should we make it easier to sue the hospital for damages? Or should we redesign the IV fittings so that it’s physically impossible to connect the wrong bottle to the line?

. . . . . . 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.

Full post as published by Settle It Now Negotiation Blog on January 14, 2008 (boomark / email).