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The boundaries of the thinkable.

Article Excerpt
Be it conservatism or liberalism, Marxism or libertarianism, or our topic at hand--environmentalism--all 'isms' come with conceptual boundaries--and litmus tests for which opinions fall inside or outside the bounds of reasonableness for that 'ismatic' worldview. Can a good conservative back abortion rights or higher marginal tax rates? Or a good liberal condone racial profiling? Or a good communist support China's transformation into a capitalist state? Or a good pacifist endorse military intervention in Darfur? Or a good environmentalist support pollution trading permits, French-style nuclear-energy programs, or the Copenhagen Consensus's low-priority ranking of the threat posed by global warming?

These questions resist precise answers because 'isms' don't obey the norms of classical logic (notwithstanding the occasional efforts of thought police to lay out well-defined necessary and sufficient conditions for category inclusion and exclusion). 'Isms' are best viewed as fuzzy sets with porous, shifting boundaries--and as organized around prototypes. This means that although it is easy at any given juncture in history to design a prototypic 'ismatic' belief system (informed observers can rattle off with high interjudge agreement the positions, pro and con, that the prototypical 'true believer' should take), it is hard to say at what point one has added or subtracted enough features to or from the prototype that it no longer falls in its original category--and the liberal has become a conservative or vice versa (hence the frequent need for transition categories like 'neoconservatives' and 'neoliberals').

Political psychologists have a longstanding interest in how communities of cobelievers define the boundaries of the thinkable and where they set their thresholds for issuing fatwas, excommunicating deviants, excluding former participants from coalitions, or just shunning someone at a cocktail party. Our starting point is Tetlock's sacred value protection model (SVPM), (1) which takes as its starting point an undeniable fact of political life: the tendency of like-minded souls to coalesce into communities of cobelievers dedicated to defending and advancing shared values. The SVPM posits that cobelievers seek reassurance from each other that their beliefs are not mere social conventions but rather are anchored in backstop or sacred values beyond challenge. These values can be as diverse as the causes around which human beings cluster: in pro-life communities, it would be bizarre to challenge the sacred mission of saving the unborn; in libertarian communities, it would be bizarre to challenge the sacred status of property rights; and in scientific communities or groups relying on scientific expertise, it would be bizarre to challenge the notion that assertions about nature can be tested objectively (within a range of uncertainty) and deep truths revealed. Those foolish enough to ask why sacred values are so special--what is wrong with stem cell research or faking data or redistributive taxation?--reveal themselves to be dim-witted or ill-intentioned outsiders who just don't get it.

Here it is worth pausing to note that our topic at hand--elite environmentalist organizations--already poses a special challenge to our analytic framework. Insofar as these organizations attach a sacred status to both moral values, such as a commitment to be good custodians of the planet for the sake of future generations, and scientific values, such as a commitment to abandoning preconceptions about what constitutes good custodianship in response to dissonant evidence, these organizations inevitably straddle the boundaries of politics, science, and increasingly religion. Straddlers, so defined, are especially vulnerable to the most psychologically painful type of value conflict--that between competing sacred values. The canonical dilemmas are those in which either fidelity to scientific norms requires acknowledging evidence that undercuts a policy stance one prefers on moral grounds, or fidelity to moral-political objectives requires ignoring or discounting evidence that one knows has probative scientific value. Hypothetical examples of the former dilemma might be: 'I detest the nuclear power industry but increasingly see it as a key part of the solution to global warming,' or 'I find emissions trading ethically distasteful but must admit that it seems to work quite well.' Examples of the latter might be: 'If I acknowledge this flaw in these computer models of global climate, critics will seize on it to stall even more,' or 'If I concede that this geoengineering proposal has merit, it opens the door to a wave of far more dangerous schemes.'

These sources of ambivalence complicate applying the SVPM, for it is much easier to predict the behavior of individuals and organizations not torn by clashing sacred values--those with no compunctions about suppressing inconvenient facts or about inventing convenient ones.

With these caveats, we push forward. Drawing on a long list of social scientists over the past century, especially Emile Durkheim, the SVPM identifies two typical methods that moral communities use to defend sacred values: moral outrage and moral cleansing. The model also identifies a powerful class of variables capable of modulating moralistic responses: real-world constraints.

The model defines moral outrage as an aversive arousal state, with cognitive, affective, and behavioral components: harsh trait attributions to norm violators, anger and contempt aimed at them, and enthusiastic support for thought police charged with enforcing both norms and the meta-norm of punishing those who fail to punish norm violators. It is worth stressing that the model predicts sharp reactions against even those caught contemplating taboo trade-offs or contaminated compromises. The psycho-logic here is that of 'constitutive incommensurability': our commitments to other people require us to deny that certain things are comparable (e.g., valuing lives in dollars). Constitutive incommensurability arises whenever treating a value as commensurable subverts one of the values in the trade-off calculus. In this sense, taboo trade-offs are morally corrosive. The longer observers believe that a decision maker has contemplated an indecent proposal, the harsher their assessments of that person's character, even if that person ultimately comes around and makes...