Exploring Moral Intuition and Rationality

M3 Bearcast Ep 977: Exploring Moral Intuition and Rationality

In this episode of the M3 Bearcast, host Malcolm Travers dives deep into the psychological and social frameworks that govern how we argue, believe, and perceive power. Drawing from recent live stream highlights, the conversation shifts from the "why" of moral disagreements to the complexities of personal deconstruction and the subtle realities of privilege.

Malcolm is joined by a panel of recurring voices to unpack why facts often fail to persuade and how we can better navigate difficult conversations in an increasingly polarized world.

Inside This Episode:

• The Myth of the Rational Human: We explore Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind, discussing the idea that we are "moral storytellers" rather than "rational truth seekers." Learn why identifying an opponent's underlying values is more effective than attacking their facts.
• Social Judgment Theory: A breakdown of how persuasion actually works—not as a binary switch, but as an incremental movement across latitudes of acceptance, non-commitment, and rejection.
• Beyond "Church Hurt": A nuanced look at religious deconstruction. We discuss why reducing the choice to leave a faith to "emotional hurt" overlooks the intellectual and theological labor of those who find certain doctrines no longer tenable.
• The Power of Community Care: Analyzing the Black Panther Party’s legacy—why providing social services and "doing the job of the state" was seen as more threatening to the establishment than armed resistance.
• Defining Multi-Layered Privilege: From "tall privilege" to masculine presentation and educational background, we discuss how to identify the social power we carry and the importance of not weaponizing it against others.
• The "Emperor with No Clothes": A lighter (but telling) look at the sycophancy within political circles, featuring a bizarre story about Donald Trump, Marco Rubio, and a pair of ill-fitting Florsheim shoes.

Key Concepts Mentioned:

• The Anchor Position: Your subjective "normal"—the values and beliefs that inform your worldview.
• Moral Foundations: The frameworks of Care/Harm, Authority/Subversion, and Liberty/Oppression.
• Respectability Politics: The intersection of class, language, and discrimination.

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Peace.

Transcript

 M3 Bearcast Ep 98 Exploring Moral Intuition and Rationality

M3 Bearcast Ep 98 Exploring Moral Intuition and Rationality

Speaker 48: [00:00:00] Hello, ed. Welcome to the M three Bear Cast. My name is Malcolm Traverse. Male Media Mind is a grassroots organization dedicated to uplifting and unifying our community through dialogue, insight, creativity, and knowledge. And on this podcast, I break down some of the issues that I bring to my live streams on Wednesdays at 7:00 PM Eastern on youtube.com/male medium on two.

And those conversations are usually around conver.

Community, self-development, spirituality, relationships, and mental health. And in this episode, I bring to you a few videos from my live streams that we discussed.

The first being on. Moral intuition versus

rationality and the idea that we're not necessarily defending what is true, but defending what we value and when getting into conversations with people, remembering to ask what the underlying value. That they're defending [00:01:00] rather than whether or not their arguments are true.

We also talk about social judgment theory and the idea that we aren't persuaded completely from a single. Instance of an argument, but rather we judge the value of an argument on a latitude of acceptance, indifference, or rejection. And slowly over time our anchor position changes and what that means for discussing difficult.

Controversial issues with people you're trying to persuade.

We talk about the process of deconstruction and how sometimes people reduce leaving the church to church hurt or being. Violated emotionally or socially by the church itself or people in the church, rather than people just finding the arguments about doctrine, illegible or illogical.

And we talk about the concept of defining privilege even for minority [00:02:00] groups. What privileges are in your life and are you

able to accept

privileges in certain circumstances, even if in many others you are marginalized?

And we also talk about power and politics. One video dealing with the Black Panther Party and why they would've seemed threatening, not just because of guns, but of their threatening the social order by providing social services to their communities. And the Unseriousness, by which some of the sycophancy of the Trump cabinet and a specific incident

where Trump has his cabinet members wearing clothes that don't fit. Alright, here are the clips.

Speaker 39: Most disagreements aren't about facts. In the book, the Righteous Mind, Jonathan Haight argues that humans are not primarily rational truth seekers. We are instead moral storytellers. We have moral [00:03:00] intuitions first, and then our reasons come later. We reason more like lawyers defending a client, then scientists defending a hypothesis.

And even then remember, scientists are still human. And this is why political, cultural and personal arguments feel impossible to resolve. Because the thing is people aren't disagreeing about data. Instead, they're often operating from different moral foundations altogether. Care versus harm, authority versus subversion, liberty versus oppression.

And so you should use this book as a sort of translation manual when someone makes. A strong moral claim, the first question you should ask shouldn't be, is this true? Instead, it should be, what value framework are they thinking from? And you see, if you can't translate someone's moral language into their own terms, you can't persuade them.

And in fact, you can't even fully understand them. 

Speaker 40: I remember reading that some years ago. I think I had book's about 20 years old, and uh, it is really good. I might have [00:04:00] to pick it up again, but. Yeah. At the core of it is the idea that none of us are truly rational unless we choose to be

within the way that we see the world. Mm-hmm. Because we truly believe it to be correct. Um, it's, you have to actively dissuade yourself from protecting if you want to grow as a person. And, um, and so instead of. Listening to people's arguments about being true or not, like they were saying, think about like, what underlying value are they trying to protect?

What, what thing is important to them? Um, and maybe learn some more about why that is. Instead of trying to tear down someone's arguments. 'cause it's, yeah.

Anyway. Number four. 

Speaker 41: Yeah, number four. 

Speaker 40: Yeah. People will just dig in. 

Speaker 42: Um, people keep saying the same thing in my comments. Um, you just have church hurt. I get why people say that.[00:05:00]

I think that's a story that people understand. Um, somebody gets hurt by church folks and then they walk away from the faith, but that actually wasn't my story. If my story was just church hurt, I would've left a long time ago. The truth is, I stayed much longer than most people would have, um, because I believe deeply.

See, I was a devout Christian. I didn't grow up as a casual Christian. I went to Bible college. I was a pastor. I mentored Christian artists. Um, I taught scripture. People used to literally call me to explain the Bible and break down theology. You know, there was a time where prayer scripture in ministry where the center of my entire life, um, my faith meant everything to me.

So when people say you just got hurt by church people, it misses something important because church hurt is when someone leaves because people treated them badly. Uh, my questions didn't start with people. They started after years of studying the beliefs themselves. Um, and the reason those questions matter so much to me is because my faith meant everything to me.[00:06:00]

Speaker 41: Mm-hmm. 

Speaker 42: And when you spend that much time studying scripture, teaching it, defending it, and building that li your life around it, eventually, um, the questions get deeper than just people messed up. Um, you start wrestling with the theology, right? Uh, the doctrines, the things, uh, you were taught to believe, right?

Um, whether you can still honestly stand behind them. Um. And that process isn't easy. Um, it is not something that most people go through casually. Um, and I understand why people want a simple, uh, explanation like church hurt, right? Um, but sometimes the journey is much deeper than that. And, um, sometimes someone wrestles honestly with what they were taught and the conclusions change and, um, whether people agree with that or not.

I think that type of honesty deserves curiosity and not just the labor. Um, so I ask you something, if someone spends years of studying a belief system deeply and eventually concludes that they no longer believe it, do you think that [00:07:00] always comes from hurt? 

Speaker 40: No. 

Speaker 41: No? 

Speaker 40: Yeah. 

Speaker 41: Um, obviously you've had a, a growth spurt in, in your mental capacity, so, you know, for, you know, your, your, um.

You know, your belief system has changed. I mean, like, I tell everybody, it, it happened to me. I, I, I become afraid of why they run around the church, you know, in sheets and, and, and what, why is the pastor so wealthy and nobody else that concerned me if I'm participating in this because, um, we're supposed to be.

Doing the right thing. We're supposed to be doing good. Why? Why is everybody down here and these people on this, on this riser, this is a riser. Why are they doing so well and nobody else? And so I think what happens is that when we become, when you, when you change and you know you do, you [00:08:00] probably went to therapy and it changed, like we said earlier, and.

Belief system. When your belief system, when you have to ask yourself, I can do I believe in the magic baby, do I believe, do I believe in the story that's been told over and over and over again, and when you can't parse it out? People like that concern me because they are members of cults. If you can, if you can believe and believe that it's a magic baby from the, from the magical, from the magical mystical virgin that somebody came from the dead after three days without any respiratory aid, um, you know, if you believe in that, that's fine.

I can separate the two. Now, do I believe in heaven and hell? Yeah, but do I, 90% of this, you're going to just cease to exist. I didn't, I was born in 1973. I did not, I wasn't aware of what happened in 1972. 

Speaker 40: Right. 

Speaker 41: Because I wasn't here. Right. 

Speaker 40: Yeah. So I think, [00:09:00] you know, his belief system collapsed mainly because he had certain facts 

Speaker 41: mm-hmm.

Speaker 40: That were given by his faith that turned out to not be tenable. I'll tell you one of the most basic ones, which is, um, disproven by math. And that is just the idea that God is omni, omnipotent, all powerful. 

Speaker 41: Mm-hmm. 

Speaker 40: You know, and so it's, that sounds, you know, like logical, if it's God, God is all powerful. Uh, unfortunately that's not even possible.

It's almost like saying, you know. How do we say it? Like a square circle, you know, like a, it is either a square or a circle. It's not both. The reason why is because power is the ability to, to move something in a direction. Mm-hmm. And if it's all powerful that you're moving in opposite directions. You see what I'm saying?

You're, you're working against [00:10:00] itself. And I, I'll tell you the um, the basic. Um, reason, reason you can like prove this is, you know, could God create a rock so heavy that he couldn't lift it right In the one direction? You're talking the omnipotence of the most heavy object. The other is the omnipotence of the strongest person.

And these two are in opposite directions, right? And the, and, and it's untenable omnipotence in a. Single being is just not possible. 

Speaker 41: Right. I I, the funny part, 

Speaker 40: the funny part is they did this on The Simpsons, oh God. It was the, the funniest one. Homer says, you know, could God heat a burrito so hot that he couldn't eat it?

Speaker 41: And he can, I mean, that, I 

think 

Speaker 40: that's what I'm saying. It's, it's a, it's a quandary because if he can heat a burrito so hot, he can't eat it. Then he's not all [00:11:00] powerful because he can't do a thing. Meaning that the burrito never got hot, so hot that he couldn't eat it either. Either he can't eat it or he can't heat it.

One of the two will negate the other force, and power is moving in a direction. So if you, you know, how do I put it like this? Like you can be. It is like if you make everything special, nothing is special, you 

know? 

Speaker 41: Correct. But it sounds like I don't, I don't care what he says his disillusionment came from.

Man, I, I mean, you can just tell some, I mean, people asking him the right question, like I think he became disillusioned with man and not the word. I mean, that, that's my personal opinion. And I, I think he just 

Speaker 40: learned, well, there's a, there's a part of that that's true. But I [00:12:00] think, like we said about our opinions and how we defend them as a part of our identity, um, I'm sure there is a lot of, um, personal hurt that comes from leaving that identity.

Right, 

Speaker 41: right. 

Speaker 40: Let's say you do. Um, 'cause he said there was a lot of church hurt that he could have left before, so it is not like the church hurt didn't exist. He stayed, like you said, long after he probably should have left. And so there, there was some hurt and the loss of his theology, 

Speaker 41: well messy alert coming in, I think him and the pastor stopped fooling around and he decided to leave the church.

Messy alert. 

Speaker 40: Sure. Okay. 

Speaker 41: Yep, yep. 

Speaker 40: You know? 

Speaker 41: Yeah. It's what? It's alright.

Speaker 45: and Hoover decides that the Black Panther party is the most dangerous, uh, organization in the country. It actually isn't 'cause of guns. United States has got more guns than any [00:13:00] small black community. And Winston-Salem, North Carolina, is ever gonna have what they were afraid of.

Was exactly that. It was the care. Mm-hmm. It was the food, the 

Speaker 46: goodwill. 

Speaker 45: It was the protecting you when you were illegally evicted from your home. It was the clothing, it was the healthcare that they mm-hmm. Were providing for people, 

Speaker 46: doing the job of the state, 

Speaker 45: doing the job of the state. Delegitimizes, the state.

And the people will then start to turn to each other. And that is a threat when you don't want those people to self-organize. It really is as simple as that. I don't think that most political parties, especially not in our two party system, wanna be a threat to the system they're trying to run. 

Speaker 41: Oh, hell no.

Speaker 45: So they don't go help people 'cause that's a threat. 

Speaker 44: Hell no. 

Speaker 40: She's right. It is. It is pretty fascinating.

Speaker 46: and I said, I'm not scared of a germ.

You know, I used to snort cocaine off a toilet. Seats. 

Speaker 47: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Is like, if the phrase he ain't, his daddy was brought to life in some kind of unholy [00:14:00] frankensteinian science experiment. Yep. But here we are. So let's apply Social judgment theory. We're all about how to understand persuasive messaging based on one's point of reference.

Social judgment theory is a concept that looks at the psychological process of persuasion, and it operates with two key understandings. The first is that what a person finds to be reasonable on reasonable in terms of persuasive messaging is going to be informed by their lived experience. And the second understanding is that persuasion is an incremental process.

And by that I mean we typically think of persuasion as a binary of either a person is persuaded or they are not. But the fact of the matter is, it'd be more accurate to say that persuasion is a matter of degrees of receptivity to a particular message. This theory has four components to it. The first is the anchor position.

The second is the latitude of acceptance than we have the latitude of non-commitment and then the latitude of rejection. The anchor position is where you are as a person. This is your values, your beliefs, your ideals. This is what you consider to be normal and true and healthy. And [00:15:00] this is intensely subjective and that's okay.

Now, there are some people who are gonna say, but what about objectivity? And I need you to understand that is a related but separate discussion. Now, here's how the latitudes work. The latitude of acceptance is all the stuff that you're willing to go along with because it makes sense to you. Either it directly aligns with your own live experience, or it is new information that is easily reconciled with the stuff that you already believe in.

Mm-hmm. And so any sort of persuasive messaging within the latitude of acceptance is easy for you to go along with. The latitude of non-commitment is further away from your anchor position, and this is stuff that you're not necessarily willing to accept, but you can entertain it because it's new to you, it's foreign to you.

It doesn't actively go against anything that you already know, and you don't particularly find it defensive. So you're willing to engage with the ideas. You're just not there yet in terms of actively accepting it. And then of course the last stage is the latitude of rejection, and this is the furthest away from the anchor position, and this is all the stuff that you are not willing to accept.

This is all the stuff that actively goes against the things that you believe. It challenges stuff that you [00:16:00] hold very dear, or you find it flat out offensive. All of this is a non-starter. Now, in terms of the practical application of this theory, let's say that you encounter someone who aligns himself with the current Secretary of Health.

I want you to keep two things in mind. The first thing is they weren't born thinking this way. They have lived a life. They've had a variety of experiences and they've received some persuasive messaging that have led them to this moment where they align themselves in this particular way, but this also means that they can be persuaded out of it.

The second thing to keep in mind is I want you to consider where your latitude of acceptance overlaps with their latitude of non-commitment and try to pull them in that direction. If you're going to have repeated conversations with this individual, that means that you are building common ground that you can expand on, and if you're not gonna have repeated conversations with that person, you are hopefully moving the needle just a little bit that someone else can then move a little bit further in another conversation.

Speaker 40: So it was kind of interesting. One of the things I think I got from that was [00:17:00] the idea that persuasion is not gonna happen all at once and people don't come to these beliefs all at once. 'cause the funny thing is, you know, RFK Junior comes from the left, right? And there are plenty of other people on the left who have some other weird shit.

Like we were talking about Jenny, Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey, you know, for instance, happened to be on that shit. And, um, it's really fucked up. Who's that other one? Like, um, 

Speaker 41: um, 

Speaker 40: out of California and liberals who are on that? Uh, 

Speaker 41: yeah. What was, what's that bitch name? I mean, a lot of them are anti-vaxxers and all 

Speaker 40: kinds.

Mm-hmm. 

Speaker 41: Shit. And they, they got mad at the state of California. And 

Speaker 40: yeah, 

Speaker 41: the governor was still requiring motherfuckers to get vaccinated before you, um, right. 

Speaker 40: Your 

Speaker 41: kids to school. And they was like, well, I'm not gonna put those kids to school. They was like, well, fire, we don't want you to give everybody motherfucking cooties, nigga.

Speaker 40: Yeah. They got into this idea [00:18:00] of like purity culture and um, pesticides and dyes and, you know, they started, they came, came into a sort of anti-government perspective from. The idea that they, the government was lying to us about our medicine and our food or, and um, yeah, it was one of those horseshoe type politics where they were so far to the left that they actually started to be like right wing, 

uh.

Speaker 6: Privilege has become one of those words that nobody wants to have attached to them. But I think in doing that, we are hindering ourselves from being able to understand what privilege is and how to exist even when we do have that privilege. I am both black and queer, and in the context of the United States, those two particular categories are not categories that carry social power.

If anything, they lead to much more disenfranchisement. However, I am also tall, formerly educated, and have a full-time job. Those things are absolutely points of privilege that afford me a level of lifestyle that other [00:19:00] people are not able to access. The goal here is to not weaponize the privilege that I carry.

So because I am tall when I'm in the grocery store and somebody asks me to reach for something that's on a shelf that they cannot reach, I don't think twice, because it's very easy. I can just grab, here you go. That is what it looks like to not weaponize my privilege. But I think quite frankly, we don't always think about how much privilege we are all carrying and not weaponizing that privilege is what we should all be aiming to do.

That is what it means to do the work. 

Speaker: So I think the privilege that I am always made aware of, I mean, I think tall privilege is one being big, but the major one is just being male and masculine. Like where you were talking about. Um, 

Speaker 2: yeah, yeah, 

Speaker: yeah. The, the fact that I am, um, people just assume that I'm straight and that people, because of that, uh.

Think that I can, for one, like defend myself. That's the first thing is [00:20:00] like, I don't feel unsafe in most situations where if I were smaller or female, I would probably feel unsafe. 

Speaker 2: So, you know, we do forget about male privilege when we're talking because, you know, we are so many more other minorities.

Speaker 4: Mm-hmm. 

Speaker 2: You forget about, it's a huge thing to have male masculine presenting energy. 

Speaker 4: Mm-hmm. 

Speaker 2: Or that's huge. You know what I mean? Because we can go in a room and be, have you ever been in a room with somebody talking about gay people? No. Seriously. I'm like, 

Speaker: no. I, I, I, not in particular, but, um, you know, I, I have entered into rooms where, uh, people.

Or unaware that the of there was a black person in the room. Like I, I do remember those. This, oh, shit. Malcolm's here.

I know what that's like. Yeah. 

Speaker 2: I was in a room recently and I was saying [00:21:00] is man, you know this Atlanta, I, these goddamn F-bombs and Yeah. You can't even tell, talk about 

Speaker: that a lot. Yeah. 

Speaker 2: Well, you know, you can't even tell who they are no more. Great day. And man, and then the other one who I thought was the, was, was a, was a gang, was like, 

Speaker: yeah, 

Speaker 2: yeah.

You gotta fight 'em off with the stand. Like, nigga you all getting bang gang bang by every nigga that walked by the window, stop playing. But, and that, that's crazy. And we never, I, I never think about educational privilege. 

Speaker: Yeah. Certainly with class and just income level, uh, education. Yeah. You know, like, um, the ability to communicate or, um.

For you will gain a certain amount of respect. I remember when I was telling you about how my mom used to get on me about speaking a certain way, I realized what she was trying to do was like, make sure that I was less likely to be discriminated against because, um, you know, if y were to [00:22:00] speak more like a VE, you know, it would just, it would, I would be discriminated against more.

I mean, it just would, um, I don't believe in the sort of respectability politics that sometimes people attribute to that, but I definitely understand the idea of like, um, you know, 

Speaker 2: now 

Speaker: there are certain signals of class that come with speaking. Well, 

Speaker 2: now that's, that's very true. But I think when I moved to the South flag, uh, when I moved to the south, the, the speech thing was out the window for me.

You know what I mean? Mm-hmm. Because. A BE is the, the norm. Mm-hmm. Even at, at work, you know, even in professional circle. That's true. Um, 'cause I was told that, I was told the other, and I was pissed and I was using $10 words and you know, I was in there, I was [00:23:00] getting it. And um, I was, and, and the black person that was on the call after we finished, she was like, you should have just relaxed and got into your blackness and let her have it.

I was like, I let that bitch have it. What do you mean all my SAT words at that bitch. Go ahead now. Um, I'm serious. It's, it depends on, I guess depends on who you are,

Speaker 7: Trump does a thing where all the men who work with him, he guesses their shoe size and then he buys them a pair of his favorite shoes. Now, before you go, like, oh, I bet Trump likes real nice shoes.

That's pretty cool. No, Trump likes floor shine shoes. What? Honestly, I didn't know they still made floor shine shoes. I remember when I was a kid. They're not, they're fine. I mean, they're fine, they're fine. I'm just, they're not, 

Speaker 2: they're 

Speaker 7: not presidential. Right. Sorry, I just lost that floor shine, uh, sponsorship.

Anyway, uh, so Trump guesses the shoe size of the men around him and then he buys them a pair of these shoes. But he [00:24:00] doesn't ask people their shoe size 'cause he's Trump. He guesses, and this is what Marco Rubio's walking around in. Yep. That's Marco Rubio's foot. And he's literally walking around in a pair of clown shoes because Marco Rubio couldn't say, sir, no, I don't wear 10, I wear seven and a half.

They're not serious. People doing serious things. Not serious people. 

Speaker 2: That is crazy. 

Speaker 7: You know how much my dad would yell at me if I let another man do that to me? 

Speaker 2: Yes. I was just like my father would dig himself out of the grave and come kick me in the face. If you let another man bitch you out like that, you wearing big ass suits like clown clown now.

Speaker: So there were memes of that. I did not know what it was about. But there are memes of Marco Rubio and big clown slippers. Yes. Coming up and being alls to Trump. 

Speaker 2: The other thing is he is Cuban American. We don't play that [00:25:00] shit. You don't let no other nigga bitch you out for no shoes. 

Speaker: Well he is Trump's bitch.

He is. 

Speaker 2: No, mark. This, 

Speaker: you know, there was another thing, I think it was on, um, where was it? Um, the Bull Work podcast. He had a, um, representative or someone from the government who was making an official White House, uh, visit. And he was walking with Trump going to different people in the West Wing. And they would ask him, you know, like, how's the economy?

The economy is wonderful sir, it's blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It was like people are literally bullshitting him. When they didn't have to bullshit him, you know what I mean? Like, this was a private meeting. Right. And he, he started to realize like, no, the economy is not great, but it, that's the kind of environment that exists in his White House that they, you know, he's the emperor with no clothes.

Speaker 4: Right. 

Speaker: And you have to go wear the big 

Speaker 4: go. 

Speaker: Mm-hmm. You have to wear the big ass [00:26:00] shoes 'cause oh, these are great shoes, sir. You ain't gonna know what's not shoe you got on anyway. He can't 

Speaker 2: even remember what he gave you

big ass shoes. 

Speaker: He's like, he said they are not serious people. They do serious things, but they are not serious people. 

Speaker 48: All right. And that'll do it for this episode of the M three Bear Cast. I hope that you enjoyed, and if you would consider following us on social media, go to mail media mind live.com. You'll find links to all of our social media accounts. Subscribe to us on YouTube, hit the bell and join us on our live streams.

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