Intelligence and morality

[Valentin Pearson]

Are intelligent people more likely to be moral than unintelligent people? Sometimes I think that to be capable of being moral, you have to have sufficient understanding. Less intelligent people have less understanding, and so their perception of what's right and wrong is limited. Obviously it's possible to be highly intelligent and be a bad person, but at least you would have an understanding of what you're doing.

 

[MusicForThePiano]

This is a worthy philosophical undertaking and a just inquisition. I do believe so, but from what we have seen with those who are in power in the last 80 years or so, is that more than 99% of them are not moral people. Probably a handful are (Ron Paul, Assad, Putin to some extent), and another handful of ones who became moral to their own people as an aversion to being in the club or out of a reviling of the power structure (Qaddafi, Saddam). Regular people are a much more difficult metric to measure, because there are so many and intelligence can come in many forms. Guile and cleverness, most commonly exhibited by jews, and layers of intrigue, do not befit the Aryan Christian, nor the Chinese, nor the Vedics, whereas true craftsmanship and understanding of their surrounding environments do befit these peoples naturally.

What is moral to a Christian in Europe may not be moral to a Chinese Confucian or Taoist, let alone a mountain Buddhist. Though, in general, a respect for life and reason seems to permeate each race of people.

They used to have these discussions to great extent in older times, and they are desperately due back for public discourse.

 

[Valentin Pearson]

I can't remember where I heard this, but I think someone wrote a book about levels of morality. Some people do what's right because it benefits themselves, others do it because it feels good, others do it because it benefits the other person, etc. And some do the right thing because of fear of being a social outcast.

 

[Australia Sucks]

I think that women (with a few exceptions of course) have a lower base level of morality than men. Due to wokeness and the poz you won't be able to find any official scientific research to confirm this suspicion (it won't be allowed to happen or will be silenced if it does), but I feel most of the members on this forum intuitively know its true.

 

[Caduceus]

Are intelligent people more likely to be moral than unintelligent people? Sometimes I think that to be capable of being moral, you have to have sufficient understanding. Less intelligent people have less understanding, and so their perception of what's right and wrong is limited. Obviously it's possible to be highly intelligent and be a bad person, but at least you would have an understanding of what you're doing.

Mainland Chinese and jewish people are highly intelligent races, with very little moral scruples.
Your theory does not reflect real life.

 

[Iacobus]

Morality is linked to the nous, or the heart, not to the intellect. Perception of God's Law is completely independent of intelligence. Christ said unless you are like a child you will not enter into the Kingdom - the implication being pure and simple hearted surpasses being clever or intelligent.

Being intelligent just lets you be immoral in craftier and less obvious ways if you so choose. Many such cases.

 

[DanielH]

I think that women (with a few exceptions of course) have a lower base level of morality than men. Due to wokeness and the poz you won't be able to find any official scientific research to confirm this suspicion (it won't be allowed to happen or will be silenced if it does), but I feel most of the members on this forum intuitively know its true.

Don't get me wrong, I think women need to be brought under control and disenfranchised and that men make BY FAR better decisions for society, but I wouldn't say men are necessarily more moral. Each sex and each individual has vices they are predisposed to, don't really need to go into that further. I'd say for men and women in the West we're about at an all time low in morality.

Being intelligent just lets you be immoral in craftier and less obvious ways if you so choose. Many such cases.

(We've all got this little fella standing on one of our shoulders, whispering into our ears. Reject the grabbler!)

 

[Wutang]

I spent quite a bit of time reading articles Jared Taylor's American Renaissance website about the link between IQ and morality. Ghetto African Americans were typically used as the example due to their higher rates of law breaking and lower IQ. At first glance the connection seems pretty obvious but then I also saw an article on the website about ho these ghetto blacks would also have very poor impulse control and would score higher on psychopathic traits. I think the connection with their behavior and IQ is overstated. Instead I would say impulsiveness and inability to delay gratification is the big part for immoral behavior. While low IQ and impulsivity often comes together as a pair they aren't the same qualities. I'm sure we can imagine real world examples of either someone we know personally or some figure we've heard about that wasn't too bright but otherwise isn't an immoral person.

Here's a math teacher who taught some special education students and his experiences with them. These are kids that around 80 IQ or lower and have very noticeable diminished reasoning faculties, much more so than the typical black but from what the teacher saw, these kids otherwise weren't really any more prone to being destructive or anti-social compared to anyone else. These anecdotes serve as examples of people with low IQs but don't have corrupted wills or low impulse control. These kids actually seemed willing to grind hard and weren't lazy so they weren't deficient in virtues in the way we would think a prototypical immoral person would be.

Noahpinion on IQ–or maybe just no knowledge.

Well, turns out that Noah Smith has made my last post for October an easy choice. It all began when he and Miles Kimball declared that there’s only one difference between kids who excel in ma…

educationrealist.wordpress.com

Tre, who was in a math support class of mine last year, had phenomenal retention of any concrete fact he learned. Total inability to grasp abstract concepts. Couldn’t estimate. Couldn’t isolate x. Couldn’t figure out what the slope of a line was. I’d ask him things like “if you rolled a ball down this line, which one would go faster?” and he’d struggle for minutes just to figure out what I meant. If it wasn’t real, it didn’t exist. He got pretty good at percentages without actually understanding them—but 20% was divide by 5, 25% was divide by 4, 10% was divide by 10. He was motivated. Great kid, fantastic athlete, failing algebra for the fourth time kept him off the his strongest sports team his senior year and broke his heart. But he took up a second sport and made the state finals. He seemed a bit slow in conversation, but nothing that would mark him as really low intellect. He held a job, worked hard, was a popular kid. There was no way he would be passing the test, and when I communicated this to the AVP, she said, “He was not classified correctly, for various reasons”—one of the reasons probably being that Tre is black. She mentioned his tested IQ that his parents included in his file, and it was well south of 90, but still much higher than 70.

Mohammed was in another of my math classes last year. Unlike Tre, does not communicate his mental disability immediately. He talks quickly, cracks decent jokes, likes people around, while Tre was happier off in a corner listening to music. It took me a while to realize that Mohammed, who is neither black nor Hispanic, wasn’t retaining any information at all. Once I did realize this, I looked more closely at his IEP and saw he was a special day students with an IQ in the mid-80s. Also an excellent athlete, but very different from Tre. No fact grasp at all. He couldn’t remember what you told him five minutes ago, much less yesterday. But he could solve a simple algebraic equation with a calculator. He’d have to relearn it almost every day, but he had the ability to abstract that Tre lacks. He very badly wanted to move on to the next math class in the sequence, against the recommendation of his special ed adviser, and nagged me constantly to support him in this quest. I was willing to help him try, but his sport kept him out of the classroom a couple days a week for nearly a month, and everything I’d managed to do to keep him not rolling backwards was undone. So I passed him and talked him into an easier course.

The point is this: Tre and Mohammed, while not obviously or actually “dumb as a box of rocks”, as Smith indelicately put it, were noticeably less able than almost all my other students in five years, despite considerable motivation on their part and a huge amount of support on mine. I have probably had a couple other students with as low intelligence, but couldn’t be sure because they were never around or made class miserable by misbehaving. This suggests to me that my rough approximation of my students’ cognitive ability is correct. I haven’t taught many kids with IQs south of 90, and most of them my lowest IQ kids were in my Algebra I classes.