Moral Quandaries

Robert Tulip · Posted: Thu Jan 17, 2008 8:51 am Post subject:

Wow, this is an amazing essay, and the first thing of Pinker's I have read. I can see why you are discussing The Stuff of Thought.

In his essay, he calls for a periodic table of morality, grounded in neuroscience. The exciting thing about the trolley example for this elemental project of moral chemistry is that the decision to pull the lever is made physically in the rational part of the brain while the decision not to heave-ho the fatso comes from the emotional part, shown by study of neuroscience. This says a lot about what consciousness is as a function of the brain. However, I thought his comments about repugnance seemed a bit of a spanner in his scheme.

I loved his final comment that changing the atmosphere and ocean is taboo. In my view this will be the main solution for climate change, so maybe I am living in the lost land of taboo. The really interesting theme here, with Pinker bringing in Dawkins, is how good morality is adaptive in evolutionary terms, and the need to find a new planetary evolutionary morality.

Theomanic · Posted: Thu Jan 17, 2008 10:06 am Post subject:

I'm slowly going through the essay when I have time at work, so hopefully I'll have more to say later.

Theomanic · Posted: Thu Jan 17, 2008 10:11 am Post subject:

Dissident Heart · Posted: Thu Jan 17, 2008 11:58 am Post subject:

What if the obese man on the bridge was a dangerous pedophile?

What if there was a cadre of terrorists on the runaway trolley on their way to unleash, well, terror on the city?

What if the single trolleyman laboring on the spur of the track was a terrorist sabotaging the trolley for, well, terror?

What if the car that killed the dog, belonged to the dog's owner, and the killing was purposeful, with intent to provide dinner?

What if the flag was actually the funeral flag given to the widow of a fallen soldier?

Cool

MadArchitect · Posted: Thu Jan 17, 2008 1:27 pm Post subject:

What if the man on the bridge had hooves for feet?

What if there was a cadre of Republicans on the trolley, on their way to the National Convention?

What if the single trolleyman laboring on the spur was trying to put his only child through college?

What if the car that killed the dog were Kitt from Knightrider?

What if the flag was made of non-biodegradable material?

What if what if what if what if... Why complicate these scenarios even more?

Robert Tulip · Posted: Thu Jan 17, 2008 9:23 pm Post subject:

DH's 'What if's don't help, because the point Pinker makes about the trolley is that in fact we use different parts of the brain for moral judgment depending on instinctive emotional reactions, and these hypotheticals would just illustrate variance in neurological reaction. We shudder with repugnance at taboos such as cannibalism. How we try to think rationally about such an issue can be secondary to the wired sentiment, and gets back to a point dissident heart made recently about reverence as a founding principle. And on evolution, we should look at this in positive terms, on the expectation that cooperation will prove more adaptive than competition. Soylent Green was a very silly movie, as the economics of killing people (was it at age thirty?) to eat them just would not ever stack up. (Says he, age 44).

JulianTheApostate · Posted: Thu Jan 17, 2008 11:28 pm Post subject:

Theomanic · Posted: Fri Jan 18, 2008 9:43 am Post subject: Tangental disagreements

Julian: Are you disagreeing the law says you can't take organs from people without their consent? I think, at least where I live (Ontario), you can give consent while you are alive, and your family can give consent when you are dead. Without that consent, it's illegal to take organs from the deceased. I could be mistaken. I personally don't agree with that, but my point was while that remains to be true, cannibalism would logically follow as needing consent.

Robert: I think you are confusing two movies, and missing my point besides. The other movie you're remembering is Logan's Run. It hasn't anything to do with Soylent Green. As to the economics of this dubious old sci-fi movie, I don't believe they were killing people, they were simply collecting the dead (especially from things like suicide booths). I'm not an economics major, but I don't see why that wouldn't be cost effective, since you don't even need a farm or to feed your livestock or anything. Especially in the distopian future we are given to accept where there is a massive food shortage. Again, I could be mistaken. My point was that we may some day be in a food crisis also, and any waste at all would be unforgivable. So maybe then we would practice cannibalism.

I finished the essay yesterday and it was very excellent. It makes me wonder if everyone with wildly variant morals from the norm has brain damage.

MadArchitect · Posted: Fri Jan 18, 2008 11:11 am Post subject:

Julian, there are a couple of problems with hypothetical scenarios like the ones given by Pinker, but a particularly pertinent one in this case is how little they take into account.

With your transplant scenario, for example, the good you might do for the one patient would probably be offset by the cost to the hospital, who would no doubt be embroiled in at least one law suit, with the result being that it would have to divert money away from health care.

Even beyond that, there's the question of precedent. If you can disregard a person's wishes concerning their body, why not also their wishes regarding inheritance? After all, it could be argued that there is enough poverty in the world to warrant redirecting the estates of just about all middle to upper income deceased and funneling it into charitable organizations.

For that matter, why stop with a single organ. A corpse could easily be harvested for any number of organs, and the parts that aren't useful for a medical transplant can be used in any number of other ways. Native Americans apparently had a use for every part of the bison (except for the squiggly thing in the Far Side cartoon). That doesn't take into account the psychological effect on the bereaved and their need for some sort of meaningful closure, of course, but they'll come around, and what's their psychological discomfort next to the good of society?

I realize that this is lapsing into the realm of the absurd, but that's kind of the point. Just considering a hypothetical without any literal context clarifies what, precisely? I do think there's a use for hypotheticals like these, but they're mostly useful as an analogy when you're already talking about a real-world circumstance, the ethics of which are in dispute. Philosophy students like posing life-boat exercises and similar hypotheticals as a kind of game, but it rarely amounts to much. We've taken up these hypotheticals in reference to practically nothing, and, as such, they strike me as a little fatuous.

JulianTheApostate · Posted: Sat Jan 19, 2008 2:00 pm Post subject:

Mad, we seem to have different ideas about what kinds of arguments provide the most insight. For example, you read more philosophy that I do. When I attempt to read a philosophy book, I tend to get lost in the abstractions, becoming unsure about what's being said or how the ideas relate to the real world. In my mind, Pinker's hypotheticals are more germane than most philosophical discourse.

Pinker brought up various interesting ideas.

jales4 · Posted: Sat Jan 19, 2008 4:45 pm Post subject:

MadArchitect · Posted: Sat Jan 19, 2008 7:18 pm Post subject:

I think Jan raises another interesting objection, and even if we were to dismiss it as a probability (and I'm not saying that I would dismiss it), it serves to illustrate my point about such hypotheticals. It's too easy to seal the moral question off in a vacuum.

Robert Tulip · Posted: Sat Jan 19, 2008 7:45 pm Post subject: Re: Tangental disagreements

medmo · Posted: Thu Jan 31, 2008 9:34 pm Post subject: Re: Moral Quandaries

Gut reactions:


	FORUMS	ABOUT	BOOKS	VIDEOS	TRANSCRIPTS	LINKS	BLOGS	DONATE	CONTACT