Matter of Fact - How morals distort our ability to reason logically

Meeting up with the speakers the night before our annual conference in Doha I enjoyed a candid discussion with men who together look after literally tens of billions of dollars in various projects that will decide how one of the fastest-growing cities in the world will ultimately take shape. Half way through the evening one of the guys quipped that he hoped that I was not recording our conversation. It struck me that this was one of these moments where we could look back years from now and without a sound recording, no one would be able to recall and much less admit even to ourselves, if any of our predictions about the future would prove to be flawed.

It is fascinating that our minds are almost incapable of allowing us to remember any instances when we were wrong. At best, we may be able to admit to having been misinformed and been led astray in our thinking. It’s a self-defence mechanism that even has us making up completely false memories to reframe our mistakes so that they make sense and serve a purpose.

No one, not even the best and brightest, are immune from false memories. Hillary Clinton claimed on numerous occasions with apparent sincerity that she remembered landing in Bosnia under sniper fire and running with heads down to the car for cover. When footage was found that could jog her memory of her very relaxed and peaceful arrival that day, she claimed to have misspoken.

Even worse than altering memories from our past, we suffer from similar handicaps in our failure to correctly interpret our present reality. Every day we are often unable to see plain facts, causal links or lack thereof, to anything that runs counter to our beliefs.

The TV where I sit in our open landscape office is constantly turned to CNN where for months now I have been force-fed Piers Morgan speaking on the US gun problem. For perspective: there are an estimated 300 million guns in America that won’t just disappear. Statistically, if all guns are considered equally likely to cause deaths, to reduce just one fatality you would have to retrieve 10,000 guns. Secondly, more than half of all non self-inflicted gun fatalities are constrained to ethnic minorities in circumstances involving illegal drugs, i.e., a minuscule proportion of the US population.

Yet, these uncomfortable observations, along with the groups that are suffering the most, are simply ignored and excluded from the discussion altogether! Instead, the problem is presented as impacting everyone equally. Consider that swimming pools in back yards kill more children than guns do. There you have a direct problem with an obvious solution that would see immediate and clearly measurable results. Yet, I’ve never seen a campaign against private swimming pools.

I am not using this sensitive and controversial topic to make a statement on either guns or swimming pools but to demonstrate how what we deem as morally right is often inextricable from what we perceive as being factually correct. By the same token, our concept of ‘wrong’ can distort our thinking, as our minds often fail to distinguish between being factually and logically incorrect with something that is morally wrong or unjust.

Despite living in an information age where the average person has attended college and consumes hours of news each day, we are more incapable than ever to apply rational and critical analysis. Therefore, an idea that is presented as morally normative in the eyes of the public can be sold off on that basis alone as scientific truth. 

The scariest part is that studying how blind spots function doesn’t help a person that much in trying to avoid them in his or her own thinking. My guess, and safest bet, is that if you instinctively feel that something is right and the people around you generally share in this feeling with you, assume that you are suffering from some form of delusion or another! Clearly, Oscar Wilde was onto something when he said: ‘Whenever people agree with me I always feel I must be wrong’.