The nature of human moral judgment.

How do human beings decide what is right and wrong?

How do we hope to gain insight into the similarities and differences between the moral judgments of people of different ages, from different cultures, with different educational backgrounds and religious beliefs, involved in different occupations and exposed to very different circumstances.

Nothing captures human attention more than a moral dilemma. Whether we are soap opera fanatics or not, we can’t help sticking our noses in other peoples affairs, pronouncing our views on right and wrong, justified or not. For millennia, philosophers have speculated about how people make moral decisions, what decisions they make, and what decisions they ought to make.

What are our moral judgment on Equality and Diversity and what understanding of this have we.

Question

• You are driving on a deserted road at night and are confident no one else is around. You come to a stop sign. Do you stop?
• Prior to an election, reliable polls have shown that there will be a clear winner in the party political race in the UK. Do you vote?
• If the majority of citizens believe in something, should that become law?
  
  
• What do you think?
• Does it matter?

What is are emotion around Equality and Diversity

The proverbs tell us that there's a fine line between love and hate, and new scans of the brain's "hate circuit" have confirmed similarities between the two powerful emotions.

But whereas loved-up partners are likely to be less rational, the new scans show hate to be colder and more calculating.

Semir Zeki of University College London, UK, who has previously mapped the neural circuits involved in romantic and maternal love, and colleague John Romaya selected 17 subjects who expressed a strong hatred for an individual - typically an ex-lover or colleague.

The subjects answered a questionnaire to assess the level of their hatred, and they provided the team with a photo of their nemesis, along with pictures of three other less provocative individuals.

Each subject then viewed their chosen photos for roughly 16 seconds, while an MRI scanner mapped the activity in their brain. By comparing their responses to the hated face with their reaction to the neutral photos, the team could identify the neurological circuits we use when feeling intense hatred.

The results showed two brain regions that our "hate circuit" shares with the "love circuit" - the putamen and the insular cortex or insula.

The putamen is thought to be used to prepare the body for movement - so it's possible this be active either to provide protection of the loved one, or to prepare for an aggressive or spiteful act from the hated one. The insula is associated with feelings of distress, such as jealousy.

Scheming hatred

However, there was also an important difference. The areas of the frontal cortex associated with judgement and reasoning are typically less active when viewing a lover compared to someone more neutral, meaning they are less likely to feel critical of their partner.

The hate-filled subjects, though, only showed a reduction in one small part of this area, while the rest was still active.

We may use this area to judge the consequences of our actions and to predict the behaviour of our nemesis, Zeki says. "In love, you take leave of your senses and go wild for that person, but in hatred it seems you must be all there to calculate your next move," he says.

The team found that the amount of brain activity corresponded with the level of hatred the subjects had previously admitted in the questionnaire.

Zeki suggests similar brain scans could one day be used in court - for example, to assess whether a murder suspect felt a lot of hatred towards the victim.

In the future, he hopes to investigate how brain activity would differ when experiencing hatred towards a group of people rather than a specific individual - for example, a race or nationality, sexual orientation, disability, trangender, age, religious belief, social class.

• What do you think?
• Does it matter how we engage in equality and diversity?
• What about community cohension?

Breaking Repetitive Statement Injury within Superstition, breaking the chains that hold us down.

How beliefs can harm us.

Late one night in a small Alabama cemetery, Vance Vanders had a run-in with the local witch doctor, who wafted a bottle of unpleasant-smelling liquid in front of his face, and told him he was about to die and that no one could save him.

Back home, Vanders took to his bed and began to deteriorate. Some weeks later, gaunt and near death, he was admitted to the local hospital, where doctors were unable to find a cause for his symptoms or slow his decline. Only then did his wife tell one of the doctors, Drayton Doherty, of the hex.

Doherty thought long and hard. The next morning, he called Vanders's family to his bedside. He told them that the previous night he had lured the witch doctor back to the cemetery, where he had choked him against a tree until he explained how the curse worked. The medicine man had, he said, rubbed lizard eggs into Vanders's stomach, which had hatched inside his body. One reptile remained, which was eating Vanders from the inside out.

Great ceremony

Doherty then summoned a nurse who had, by prior arrangement, filled a large syringe with a powerful solution. With great ceremony, he inspected the instrument and injected its contents into Vanders' arm. A few minutes later, Vanders began to gag and vomit uncontrollably. In the midst of it all, unnoticed by everyone in the room, Doherty produced his pièce de résistance - a green lizard he had stashed in his black bag. "Look what has come out of you Vance," he cried.

"The voodoo curse is lifted."

Vanders did a double take, lurched backwards to the head of the bed, then drifted into a deep sleep. When he woke next day he was alert and ravenous. He quickly regained his strength and was discharged a week later.

The facts of this case from 80 years ago were corroborated by four medical professionals. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about it is that Vanders survived. There are numerous documented instances from many parts of the globe of people dying after being cursed.

With no medical records and no autopsy results, there's no way to be sure exactly how these people met their end. The common thread in these cases, however, is that a respected figure puts a curse on someone, perhaps by chanting or pointing a bone at them. Soon afterwards, the victim dies, apparently of natural causes.

Voodoo nouveau

You might think this sort of thing is increasingly rare, and limited to remote tribes. But according to Clifton Meador, a doctor at Vanderbilt School of Medicine in Nashville, Tennessee, who has documented cases like Vanders, the curse has taken on a new form.

Take Sam Shoeman, who was diagnosed with end-stage liver cancer in the 1970s and given just months to live. Shoeman duly died in the allotted time frame - yet the autopsy revealed that his doctors had got it wrong. The tumour was tiny and had not spread. "He didn't die from cancer, but from believing he was dying of cancer," says Meador. "If everyone treats you as if you are dying, you buy into it. Everything in your whole being becomes about dying."

• He didn't die from cancer but from believing he was dying of cancer – Repetitive Statement Injury (RSI)

Cases such as Shoeman's may be extreme examples of a far more widespread phenomenon. Many patients who suffer harmful side effects, for instance, may do so only because they have been told to expect them. What's more, people who believe they have a high risk of certain diseases are more likely to get them than people with the same risk factors who believe they have a low risk. It seems modern witch doctors wear white coats and carry stethoscopes.

The nocebo effectThe idea that believing you are ill can make you ill may seem far-fetched, yet rigorous trials have established beyond doubt that the converse is true - that the power of suggestion can improve health. This is the well-known placebo effect. Placebos cannot produce miracles, but they do produce measurable physical effects.

The placebo effect has an evil twin: the nocebo effect, in which dummy pills and negative expectations can produce harmful effects. The term "nocebo", which means "I will harm", was not coined until the 1960s, and the phenomenon has been far less studied than the placebo effect. It's not easy, after all, to get ethical approval for studies designed to make people feel worse.

What we do know suggests the impact of nocebo is far-reaching. "Voodoo death, if it exists, may represent an extreme form of the nocebo phenomenon," says anthropologist Robert Hahn of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia, who has studied the nocebo effect.

Life threatening

In clinical trials, around a quarter of patients in control groups - those given supposedly inert therapies - experience negative side effects. The severity of these side effects sometimes matches those associated with real drugs. A retrospective study of 15 trials involving thousands of patients prescribed either beta blockers or a control showed that both groups reported comparable levels of side effects, including fatigue, depressive symptoms and sexual dysfunction.

A similar number had to withdraw from the studies because of them.

• How does RSI play out in Equality and Diversity?
• What do you think?
• Does it matter?

Human beings complexity and inequality moments the complex and complication for Equality and Diversity

AROUND the time of the G20 summit in London on 2 April, the streets of cities across the world were filled with people protesting against the excesses of the banking bosses, among other things. Chances are you agreed with the sentiment. Chances are too that if you had been asked to put your hand in your pocket to fund a campaign to seize their bonuses, even if you wouldn't see any of the money, you'd have been sorely tempted.

If so, congratulations: you have just confounded classical economics, which says that no rational person should ever reduce their own income just to slash someone else's. And yet that's exactly what we do. Classical economics, it turns out, is a pretty terrible predictor of how we actually behave.

But why do we inflict pain for no gain? On the face of it, it is rather a mean way of going about things. Does spitefulness stem from an upset sense of fairness? Or something altogether darker: envy, lust for revenge - or perhaps even pure aggression?

It might be all those things. Economists, anthropologists and evolutionary biologists have been teasing out how, used with caution, spiteful behaviour can be one of our best weapons in maintaining a fair and ordered society. But intentions that are noble in one situation can be malicious in another - making spite a weapon that can all too easily backfire into persist inequality.

Human spite is a complex affair. It is not pure selfishness in the Darwinian sense, like a stag that picks a fight with another. Though it might be gored in the process, the stag is actually acting in its own best interests. If it ends up with more mates, then the chances of passing on its genes are increased, an evolutionary prize worth fighting for.

Nor is spite as we practice it true spite in the biologist's sense. That would involve diminishing our own evolutionary fitness just so we can lower that of some unrelated individual. That behaviour exists, but it is hard to come by, says Stuart West, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Oxford. There is a particular type of freeloading wasp, for example, some of whose larvae do not develop into adults capable of reproduction, but instead kill unrelated larvae of the same species, freeing up resources for their siblings. And in several types of bacteria, spiteful cells produce chemicals that kill both themselves and other members of their kind, unless they carry a genetic marker of relatedness to the suicidal individual. That makes microbes the kings of true spite, says West.

Human spite is something altogether subtler. Psychological motivations and social contexts influence our course of action. That requires a very special set of circumstances and skills, says Marc Hauser, a biologist at Harvard University. First, it needs a stable social grouping in which unrelated individuals interact regularly, and in which costs incurred retain relevance. What's more, you must also be able to spot when you're getting a raw deal, identify the guilty party, and be willing to do something about it.

That requires what Hauser has dubbed "floodlight" intelligence - the ability to see the big picture and combine many cognitive inputs over time. That, he suggests, might make both spite and reciprocity - the doing and returning of favours - uniquely human qualities. The "laser-beam" intelligence of most animals might be superb at solving individual problems, but it is simply not good enough at generalising experience to develop such complex behaviours in spite of our uniquely human qualities.

Naughty but nice

If that's true, the floodlight is switched on at an early age. At a meeting of London's Royal Society in January, Hauser reported preliminary results from experiments in which children between 4 and 8 years old were offered varying numbers of sweets for themselves and another child unknown to them. They had to pull either a lever delivering the sweets, or another that tipped the sweets out of reach. Infants of all ages almost always rejected one sweet for themselves if the other child was set to receive more. The older children often also rejected sweets if they got more than the other child. Where that kind of concern about inequality disappears to is unclear, because we adults certainly don't have it. Imagine you have four pound on your side, and there's one on the other side. It's highly unlikely that you'll dump your four pounds." But the negative, spiteful version persists: most of us would be quite prepared to sacrifice a pound to stop someone else getting four. Spite is the ugly sister of humanity.

What motivates this emotive behaviour? A clue is provided by laboratory experiments known as public goods games. In a standard public goods game, each participant is given the same amount of money, some or all of which they can pay into a common pot. What's in the pot is then multiplied by the experimenters and divided equally between the players, so that even those who put in nothing get a share of its contents. The best outcome for all is if everyone puts their cash into the pot. But that does not naturally happen. In repeated rounds of the game, some individuals hold on to their own cash and hope to leech off other people.

• What is our understanding of this for Equality and Diversity?
• What do you think?
• Does it matter?
  

What is the true understanding of Equality and Diversity within human behaviour within individuals within society?

What this could mean to organisation?

Unfairness aversion and relationship involving mutual exchange have been identified as two primary motivations underlying human decision making. However, because income and wealth inequality exist to some degree in all societies, these two key motivations can point to different decisions. In particular, when a receiver is less wealthy than a benefactor, a give and take action can lead to greater inequality.

In a study report data from a trust game variant where trustees’ responses to kind intentions generate inequality in favours of investors. In relation to a standard trust game treatment where trustees’ responses reduce inequality, the proportion of non-give and take decisions is twice as large when something done in return promotes inequality. Moreover, we find investors expect that this will be the case.

Overall, although both motives clearly play a role, their found strong evidence for inequality aversion. The results call attention to the potential importance of inequality in principal agent relationships, and have important implications for designing policies aimed at promoting cooperation. So how do we get to understand how social conditioning works and social trust work with equality and diversity how do you understand the power relationship and the dynamics of outcome and process and autonomy work within this.

• Do you think we need to understand this more?
• Does it matter for persist inequality within our society?
• What do you think?

How doe social trust work with Equality

The importance of social trust (or generalised trust) has become widely accepted in the social sciences around the issues of Equality. Social trust is important because it correlates with a number of other variables that are, for most people, normatively highly desirable. At the individual level, people who believe that most other people in their society in general can be trusted are also more inclined to have a positive view of their open institutions, to participate more in politics, and to be more active in civic organisations. They also give more to charity and they are more tolerant towards minorities and to people who are not like themselves. Trusting people also have a more optimistic view of their possibilities of having an influence over their own life chances and, not least important, of being happier with how their life is going. For societies, generalized trust seems to be an important asset, and as such it has been conceptualised as one central part of social capital (Coleman 1988; Putnam 1993). In sum, both at the individual and societal levels, many things that are formal desirable seem connected to social trust and have been attributed to social capital more generally. The issue of the principle of cause and effect is admittedly a different question from the statistical correlations, but so many correlations point in the same direction that social scientists have begun to pay a lot of attention to trust.

If we look at means-tested system we have in the UK to get benefits, in contrast, single out people because they are poor and treat them as if they were undeserving. Poverty and inequality already rip apart the social fabric. Belittling recipients of government programs leads to social strains in two ways: the poor feel isolated and feel that others deem them unworthy. The unfair criticism of welfare recipients feeds on public perceptions that the poor truly are responsible for their own poverty. Neither side sees a shared fate with the other. Universal programs do not cast a statement that attacks somebody’s character on the responsibility of benefits and thus do not destroy trust. When they work well, they can even help to create it.

• Why, then, is there so little change in levels of trust and equality?
• How does trust and inequality play?
• How do we as Individual bring trust to play around equality and diversity?
• How doe we as organisation bring trust to play around equality and diversity?
• Does it matter?
• What do you think?
  

Does Equality Matter?

Three approaches to inequality of Outcome and Process and Autonomy

To begin with equality itself and the basic question of whether inequality matters? It may be that to many people the question itself will appear unnecessary, so obvious is the answer to it. It is because of the take for granted quality of that shared thinking that I wanted to begin with a reminder of what lies behind that answer may be not at all widely shared outside our own circles.

For those on the radical right inequality also matters. It is the precondition for the sort of good society which the neo cons, as we have come to call them, envisage. For the true believers of the Thatcherite premiership and the Bush White House, inequalities mattered and matters a great deal. It is not a to be regretted or unavoidable by product of market mechanisms it is the spur which drives the lively and creative to succeed and which ensures that the undeserving obtain their just deserts. Without inequality, the dead hand of social engineering intervenes to hold back those who create the wealth on which the rest of us depend while, utterly uncooperatively, the state rewards and fosters the very behaviours which any civilized society would most wish to eliminate.

Thus it rewards those who fail to work with unemployment benefits, encourages the production of children outside wedlock by increasing state support as each new infant is created and excuses crime, and the violation of property in particular, by those whose way of life has placed them apart from the decent main-stream. The ‘idle, thieving bastards’ school of social analysis, as identified by Bagguley and Mann (1994), is alive and well, the best part of two decades after Mrs Thatcher left Downing Street.

Let us not forget, either, that those who support these views have answers to the problems as they describe them. Lean and very mean social support, provided as much as possible by family and charity, more orphanages for children whose parents (invariably mothers and, in the USA, almost as invariably black) cannot support them and, in the one service which the radical right guru von Hayek was keen to see the state provide, larger prisons and plenty more police officers.

There is, of course, a variation on this position, in a sort of Labour middle way.

Here inequality remains an unavoidable and inevitable by product of modern globalised, marketised economies. The good news, however, is that everyone is getting better off, and as Mr Brown has said, so long as that is true, the fact that some are getting better off faster than others is nothing too much to get worried about. The worst effects of inequality are to be mitigated, but the direction of travel, with its ever growing gap between the best and the worst off in society, is once and for all set. In contrast with the first position, poverty is an enemy which governments must attack, but the achievement of a more equal society is one which is impossible and unnecessary.

Finally there is the position adopted, I would guess, by most people reading this that inequality does matter, and that the classless ambition remains one to be pursued, even in difficult times.

The case for working, deliberately, to create more equal outcomes, processes, autonomy rather than simply more equal opportunities to become ever more unequal, has two necessary rationales the practical and the moral.

The practical case for more equal societies includes the contention that such societies are more successful economically drawing on the talents of all the citizens at a society’s disposal, rather just a section of them and socially.

More equal societies have less crime, less fear of crime and, crucially as far as concerned, enjoy better health as study by Richard Wilkinson and Michael Marmot.

Morally, the case for fairness draws on all these practical benefits but does not depend on them.

To quote the classic text of R.H. Tawney, it relies on the concept of ‘equal worth’.

Equality in this sense is absolutely not, as its critics suggest, about a dull uniformity. It is entirely consistent and supportive of diversity, but a diversity in which there is similarity of esteem including a far greater similarity of economic rewards between the duke and the dustman, the brain surgeon and the bus driver and so on. This belief in the unique worth of each human being, of course, is a fundamental building block in any worthwhile society.

• What do you think?
• Does it matter?
  
  

Does Rejection Hurt?

When we look at Equality and Diversity.

A neuro imaging study examined the neural correlates of social exclusion and tested the hypothesis that the brain bases of social pain are similar to those of physical pain. Participants were scanned while playing a virtual ball-tossing game in which they were ultimately excluded. Paralleling results from physical pain studies, the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) was more active during exclusion than during inclusion and correlated positively with self-reported distress. Right ventral prefrontal cortex (RVPFC) was active during exclusion and correlated negatively with self-reported distress. ACC changes mediated the RVPFC-distress correlation, suggesting that RVPFC regulates the distress of social exclusion by disrupting ACC activity.

So what are organisations doing about the issues of social capital and social mobility within equality and diversity issues?

• What do you thinks?
• Does it matter?

What is Identity

All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players: they have their exits and their entrances; and one man in his time plays many parts, his acts being seven ages. – William Shakespeare

In many parts of the world, blood is shed by people who clash over identity.

Nobel laureate Amartya Sen, author of ‘Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny,’ destroys two fallacies about identity: the beliefs that an individual possesses one and only one identity and that this identity is merely inherited.

Multiple Identities

All individuals possess multiple identities. It is perfectly possible to be, at the same time, a father at home, a teacher at work, an amateur musician among mates, a Sunni in the mosque, a Muslim in society and a British person abroad. The same person can be a Birmingham City fan, can enjoy fast cars and prefer Pepsi to Coke. Another person can be a Christian and similar to the former in other respects. Yet another one can simply differ in gender and in the choice of soft-drinks.

The question, of course, is which of the above classifications constitute a person’s identity and which not? Clearly, one cannot seriously imagine bonding or arguing over Pepsi and Coke for long, which is why it is not an identity. On the other hand, religion, nationality, age, disability, sexual orientation, transgender, social class and language are far more important aspects of identity. Irrespective of these, one can also find common grounds with individuals of similar wealth, occupation, interest or political opinion, which adds therefore to one’s set of identities.

To be consistent in the weight we attached to our multiple identities is a difficult task. As parents of newborn babies, two individuals may find new bonds as they share joy and misfortune. But when asked to vote in an election or apply for a job promotion, they can find that their religious or ethnic differences matter much more than their parenthood.

Some identities are durable, some are only fleeting, without due consideration to their real importance. People can find solace in their shared humanity when striken by disease and natural disasters nature’s great levellers.

• What do you think?
• Does it matter ?

Human Equality

The equality of men and women is an inbuilt aspect of human nature. There are obviously some physical differences. However, the souls of men and women are identical. This does not mean that men and women cannot have separate clubs and activities and stuff, or that organizations can not set their own rules for membership. It just means that men and women are, in fact, equal, and should be treated as such.

Diversity is another natural reality that should be reflected in our culture and our laws. Every human being is equally precious. Race and gender, age, sexual orientation, religious belief, disability, transgender, social class are really irrelevant when it comes to the value of people and the dignity and respect. It is our words and deeds that determine our value. Are we helpful and harmless in our voluntary actions, or are we causing trouble and harming people and being destructive?

As human beings we have created system at the time we thought were helpful and now realise that this has hinder our growth around the social constructed systems that we operate in.

The cultural diversity of the human race is a great strength of human civilization. We complement each other very well. All human beings love and respect each other. That is the universal law taught in every religion and reflected in the constitution of every nation.

Today, a diverse assortment of ancient and more recent civilizations are coming together into one global civilization. The United Nations Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights are the constitutional foundation of this of our global civilization. Cooperation and Competition can coexist at peace with one another, unity in diversity, freedom, equality and justice for all, are universal principles, declare in all nations.

We do have the capacity to improve ourselves and help others. Many people choose to remain in a barbaric condition. Selfish and materialistic. Many other people choose to improve ourselves and help others. The point is, that while we are inherently equal, we are also free to choose to improve ourselves and help others, or not.

We have instincts that we have inherited from the animal kingdom. We also have the moral values and spiritual principles revealed in the Word of God. These moral values and spiritual principles are the foundation cornerstone of human nature and civilization. The Religion of God, revealed by the Manifestation of God, is the source of the moral values and spiritual principles, which are the impulse causing human nature to evolve and human civilization to advance.

• When we look at equality and diversity like that it is simplistic.
  
• What do you think?
  
• Does it matter?