Moral Quandaries

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:

Frank 013 · Posted: Fri Feb 01, 2008 9:34 am Post subject:

I only have an answer to one of these questions…

DWill · Posted: Thu Feb 21, 2008 12:12 pm Post subject:

On the first scenario (brother and sister having sex), yes, I have a problem with it, and I don't consider it moral. Is my response a rational one? I suppose not. Is that something to worry about? I don't think that it necessarily is. We can't find in ourselves rational bases for some things we feel or believe, but that does not automatically mean that we should disavow these feelings/beliefs, or even that some quality we might be able to call rational is not in fact there.

As a non-theist, I could not subscribe to a view that a god's disapproval makes brother/sister sex wrong. The impulse to proscribe this relationship came from the human mind and was then ascribed to a god to make the prohibition more potent. What do we do about this and other deep beliefs that have a primary existence in the mind and are not in fact the creations of religion? That they have been incorporated into theistic religions does not provide, just on that basis, the justification to reject them. Can we as individuals be arbiters of each moral proposition through a logical process? Shouldn't a skeptical view extend even to our own powers of rationality?


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