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Evan, Lavinia and I presented on Generalizations and Morality.

We played a clip from Dave Chappelle’s “Killin Me Softly” DVD. The video clip consisted of a comedian, Dave Chappell, making cultural joke about how humans interact.

Now…What does this joke represent about how we as humans make decisions in our every day lives?

What Dave Chappell is either indirectly or directly conveying is that humans interact with one another and make crucial everyday decisions through creating generalizations and using those generalizations to predict the outcomes of certain behaviors and actions.

As U.S. citizens we generalize that all people wearing a blue or black uniform with a matching cap, a badge, and a gun are police officers. We not only generalize about their looks for identification, but we also generalize about their behavior. We generalize that if a police officer sees that we need help, he or she will try to help us. We therefore, use these generalizations to make predictions about how they will behave if we call for help. On a specific case by case not every police officer will help us, but that doesn’t mean that the generalizations we make are not useful.

In fact, every interaction we have with another human, involves the interpretation of a generalization we created in our head. We write our papers a certain way, because we predict through generalization that our professor likes certain types of writing. What about the Patriot Act?

Many social theorists such Max Weber, Emile Derkheim argue some extent that our ability need to generalize to make assumptions about ones behavior lead to the creation of social norms, which in turn lead to the creation of communal laws.

Ultimately our ability to interpret behavior to make generalizations has greatly increased our ability to survive as a species. With out it we would not be able to function. It is clear that the characteristic of making generalizations and using them to our decision making advantage was evolutionarily selected for. We are now biologically wired to make generalizations about everything, either consciously, or unconsciously.

However, we have come to a point in our civilization where making certain generalizations, including those associated with race, ethnicity or gender are morally unacceptable. Even if it is our natural tendency to make generalizations, it is also our natural tendency to make moral decisions.

Morality, like generalizing, also has a selective advantage. The two major theories about how morality evolved in humans suggest that morality either allowed groups to work well together, group selection, or that morality gave individuals a selective advantage by enticing them to help others in need, and in turn receiving necessary help when they needed it. Either way, morality evolved just as generalizing, giving us humans a selective advantage over other species.

So now we presented two characteristics, generalizing and morality, that are both very important to our survival as evolution has dictated, are now conflicting with one another.

So what is next? For the rest of our civilization, will humans have to repress the desire to generalize in certain situations? If so, what will be the repercussions of doing so? Will this create sociopaths or other psychological issues? It seems to us that morality is wining this war, but is this the right thing for humans as a society? As a species?

We wanted to portray that as humans it is inevitable that we make generalizations, even if they are negative. Unfortunately, making generalizations can conflict with morality, therefore which will win out or will we just suppress the negative generalizations. From class we could clearly see that individuals today are just suppressing negative generalizations to keep from conflict and to be “morally” correct. The important thing that did not seem to get emphasized in class is that we all make negative generalizations, it might not seem as blatantly negative to us such as assuming a woman dressed in a short skirt wants attention, however any generalization we make could offend someone and could be considered immoral. Who is to decide which generalizations are immoral or are all generalizations immoral?

I also do not understand the comments made about the Patriot Act. How is it ok to generalize/stereotype towards people that are not US citizens? Wouldn’t that just be as immoral as generalizing/stereotyping US citizens? Where are these boundaries drawn? Why can we not just understand that it is our human nature to generalize which in turn helps us survive, and that at times making negative generalizations does increase our chances of survival. It does not mean it is morally right, but it still happens.