In the last 2 posts about morality, I looked at moral statements being:
- based on empathy
- not provable from non-moral statements
- being non-arbitrary because of their evolutionary history
Today I’ll look at what this means for actual morality talk. The first point is that morality seems to require both empathy and reason. From the first post, without empathy, I don’t see how reason alone can do the job in building up moral statements. Without reason on the other hand all we have are our gut feelings with nothing to build a robust system from. For instance we know that many animals have considerable empathy, so the restrictions in their moral systems probably come from their limits of reasoning, generalisation and extrapolation.
It is also interesting to note that empathy and reason are probably not completely distinct but both are strongly associated with the evolution of a general-purpose intelligent system. Thus, for a system to be able to easily reason about others, a nice shortcut is it if simulates the reactions/feelings of others (ie. empathises with them). The converse relation holds too: in order to empathise with someone properly, you must be able to work out the consequences for them amidst a complex range of possibilities (ie. reason it out). So, we have two elements, both evolved, both non-arbitrary and both not provable externally.
So how do we account for disagreements? This was one of the main things brought up in the comments. Let’s take as a specific example, whether we should implement the death penalty. The disagreements to be had about the death penalty probably fall in 2 categories:
The first category is disagreement about facts, eg. whether the death penalty deters crime, what the chances are of being wrongly executed etc. For this to be a real disagreement, both parties have to agree on the same basic moral statements (driven by empathy) — if they don’t then it makes no sense to argue the mechanics of it. Of course these disagreements fall squarely into the reason hemisphere and can be resolved objectively, since the values themselves are in common.
The interesting thing is that there is an objective right answer for a given set of values. For instance if we have certain criteria of what makes for a good society, then there is a fact of the matter about whether having or not having the death penalty will make for a better society. Usually we can only estimate this (since we can’t do a control experiment keeping all other variables the same) but it IS important that an answer exists.
You might poo-poo this saying that it’s missing the whole point of moral disagreements by reducing these to something trivial. But I think that a surprising number of moral disagreements (probably a majority) fall squarely in the category of which path gives the best result for a set of values we all agree on. And it shouldn’t be surprising, since our empathetic nature is very similar, what with us being very biologically similar — whereas it’s the world that’s complex making the actual factual decisions difficult.
Of course there is the other side which is disagreement about values. For the death penalty, it might be the question of whether personal retribution is a legitimate (and important) consideration. So this might be a truly intractable position where two people start from different biologically-driven atomic moral propositions. A lot of the time this stems from the interplay of harm and disgust that I’ve blogged about before. There actually seem to be 5 basic elements: (harm, fairness, loyalty, respect, purity/disgust), see this TED talk for details.
These arethe 5 types of moral statements given as a gift by evolution to our “gut” and these are the ones we struggle to prioritise in those moral disagreements that don’t depend on facts. The importance each of these holds is what’s not provable (the subjective part of morality) but even so, just like the more basic concept of blanket empathy, these are non arbitrary. A normal person does not consistently prioritise disgust over harm: someone who fails to save a person drowning in shit would be labeled a sociopath.
It is the fact that these 5 are wired with reasonable variation that’s the source of those types of disagreements. However, even here, there is still a healthy range — there should be no need to convince any normal person that harm should take priority over anything else*.
So I think there’s a counterintuitive conclusion: morality is not provable but neither is it arbitrary. If we simply follow our biological tools of reason and empathy (not like we have a choice anyway!), by breaking down arguments into facts and values, decomposing the values according to the 5 intuitions and so on we can even arrive at situations where you can show how something follows, assuming you’re not arguing with a sociopath. This is as close to objective morality we can come but by jolly, I think we should take it.
It might seem that something is missing from this, that this account is missing some “key” ingredient that makes morality morality. More on this later but this is probably our false intuition talking — the one that thinks morality is somehow magical with an “essence of good” that permeates good deeds. But this is the same intuition that thinks living beings have an “essence of life” and minds have a “soul”…
*Of course evolution also gifted us with inconsistencies and blindspots in these, for instance the trolley problem. This is where the fun has been for all these centuries. The best I can propose is a transhumanist solution: once we can manipulate ourselves we can come up with a sane priority system for values and then implement it consistently.
35 comments ↓
Normally I agree with your posts michael, they are insightful (and inciteful!) but your recent posts on morality have left me rubbing my eyes in disbelief.
There is so much wrong (imo) with this post I am struggling to decide where to begin and will probably post a link to a full response, but for now:
Empathy – another term thrown in without due process. There is no explanation why we would empathise with a puppy over a bug, or over a tree that is being viciously chopped down. Biology gave us that empathy and it applies to a survival instinct for our species and that is a specious way to define your moral worldview.
My view that retribution is not legitimate stems not from any biological system but from pure reason. Similarly the view that the validity of the death penalty should be decided based on some idealised worldview is a valid and common one, but many people think that morality, society and laws should come from more basic principles and one of those is that people shouldn’t kill harmless humans therefore the death penalty is wrong and immoral.
“A normal person does not consistently prioritise disgust over harm: someone who fails to save a person drowning in shit would be labeled a sociopath.”
But the Trolley Problem actually shows us that sometimes doing nothing is the only moral decision (depending on your worldview).
Why are you so caught up in labelling anyone with less or different empathy a sociopath? People can often choose their moral disgust over moral harm and feel bad about it.
Would you consider religious people who are vehemently anti-homosexual (a better example of moral disgust over moral harm you couldn’t ask for) to be sociopaths?
…personally I’m struggling to see where you (keddaw) actually disagree with the post. Throwing in empathy “without due process” is sloppy but not wrong (and the reason we empathise with puppies but not with trees is because puppies are more like us, this should be obvious to anyone). Michael didn’t argue that reason has no role in deciding whether for instance retribution is legitimate so don’t really see the argument there either. And calling someone “caught up in labelling people sociopaths” when they only did it once is also rather strange. So what’s your ACTUAL disagreement?
I for one am enjoying these posts, not because they’re a thorough exposition of every aspect of human morality, but because it’s always an interesting topic, even if you don’t have the time or energy to delve into for instance exactly what “empathy” means.
Melliferax – it is in the course of these posts the phrase sociopath becomes overused, not this one specifically.
“the reason we empathise with puppies but not with trees is because puppies are more like us, this should be obvious to anyone”
Obvious, but not necessarily right (however you define right). Should we value Orang-Utans more than dogs because they are more like us? Should we have a DNA test before deciding the relative amount of empathy each creature deserves, or is it simply on the basis of looking like us? Can you see the nonsensical path this leads down?
When we decide to value a puppy over a duck-billed platypus we are making a decision based on evolution which has no relevance in the modern world – puppies are plentiful platypuses are not. But equally, should we care if a species goes extinct? And on a species level does the animal/plant itself matter or simply that we have one less species?
Michael is trying to tie together evolutionary gut instinct and reason and my case is that we should always abandon gut instinct when there is any kind of conflict with reason – to the point where the gut reaction should be ignored. This view is entirely contrary to Michael’s opening post on this.
There is also the issue of Michael trying to ignore much of our gut instinct but trying to retain the empathy part. The problems with empathy I highlighted notwithstanding, he looks like a Christian trying to cherry-pick morality from the bible, except he is using evolutionary traits instead of scripture.
Wow, strange that of all things morality’s what gives ultimate disagreement! I’ll try address some of these later today, but the first thing to point out is that the cherry-picking of evolutionary traits is something that we have to do because we have no choice. If we picked out no evolutionary traits and ignored all of them we wouldn’t have morality at all and if we tried to use all of them we’d have an incredibly inconsistent one.
Although I guess you would fall in the first camp if you say we should ignore most gut instincts, but this is where it all falls apart. “People shouldn’t kill harmless humans” — the problem is claiming that this stems from reason alone when it seems quite clear to me that you can’t prove that people “shouldn’t” do anything without prior ethical motivations.
So if I can show that reason alone can prove that “People shouldn’t kill harmless humans” then you’d rethink your thesis here?
I only require one thing to do so, can you give me the idea that people have a fear of harm (or simply things that they don’t like because some people like harm) that includes a self-preservation instinct? [Perhaps a better description would be a disinclination for things that do not appeal to them.]
With this I can form a moral guide that exceeds the Bible and goes beyond the Golden Rule. It is not perfect, but from first principles it beats the heck out of most philosophies. It is somewhat libertarian though…
Of course I would — but as per the first post on this all the attempts I’ve seen miss the mark by so much that I consider that an unlikely event.
Sure, people have a fear of harm but again, there is no logical connection between that and why *I* shouldn’t harm someone else despite their fear or aversion to it (or even because of it). The most detailed explication of this is in Hume who I always recommend on this on the is/ought problem and the theory of moral sentiment — he’s still right after all these centuries.
I just don’t see how anything like the golden rule can be proved using logic — the argument starts with statements of facts and ends with “X is moral” or “you shouldn’t do Y” — but the jump is pulling a fast one.
Michael, you sound so much like an apologist – we have to cherry pick (the Bible) because we have no choice. If we picked out no (Biblical morality tales) and ignored all of them we wouldn’t have morality at all and if we tried to use all of them we’d have an incredibly inconsistent one.
So we have to pick and choose the evolutionary traits we find to be rationally moral (?!?) and ignore those we don’t. How do we decide which traits are worthy? How do we decide which should be discarded.
Ultimately, however you choose to obfuscate it, you are using some (personal!) higher moral scale to judge, rank and select which of the gut instincts we should pay attention to and which we should ignore.
I’m not sure how exactly I am going to phrase my rational morality argument, especially avoiding the is/ought problem which is one I see almost everyone fall into. It may take me a couple of goes so I’ll respond when I have it concisely written…
I agree with Keddaw. Michael, you have skipped over every objection to your two earlier posts. Don’t you think you should address those first?
Apart from that… You say:
“The first point is that morality seems to require both empathy and reason.”
Seems to? Either it does and you can show it or it doesn’t and you can show that.
“From the first post, without empathy, I don’t see how reason alone can do the job in building up moral statements.”
I’ve said this before (I think) but I think you’re confusing moral statements with moral motivation. I think reason alone MUST do the job of building up moral statements. If you want to make moral statements that can be shown to be valid for everyone, that is.
Proving or showing that some course of action can be called moral doesn’t give someone the inclination to actually follow this couse of action. You seem to be groping for a means by which you can motivate someone into morality by showing them what is moral.
That will only work for people who have a strong desire to be moral already.
“Without reason on the other hand all we have are our gut feelings with nothing to build a robust system from.”
Exactly!
“Thus, for a system to be able to easily reason about others, a nice shortcut is it if simulates the reactions/feelings of others (ie. empathises with them).
The converse relation holds too: in order to empathise with someone properly, you must be able to work out the consequences for them amidst a complex range of possibilities (ie. reason it out).”
We have a system for this in our brains. Google for ‘mirror neurons’.
“So I think there’s a counterintuitive conclusion: morality is not provable but neither is it arbitrary.”
I’l ask you again: what is your definition of ‘morality’? People tend to imply a lot of different things when talking about morality. When you say it isn’t provable, do you mean that you can’t prove that it exists? Or do you mean to say that you can’t make objective moral statements?
Keddaw: “Obvious, but not necessarily right (however you define right). Should we value Orang-Utans more than dogs because they are more like us?”
Well, your original question wasn’t whether we SHOULD, but WHY we do it. Nor was the question about value, but about empathy. Our mirror neurons work better with puppies than bugs or trees, therefore, etc. Now that you’ve changed the question I’m going to decline to answer it, as it’s a much harder one and I’m still having breakfast.
Mellifrax – You’re right, it was a subtle, unintentional shift from would to should.
However, mirror neurones do not tell us why we like certain animals more than others, why do dogs elicit such empathy and not proboscis monkeys? The ‘why’ is an interesting issue but the ‘should’ is more important and, ultimately, more important.
EDIT: …The ‘why’ is an interesting issue but the ’should’ is more important and, ultimately, more informative.
Marc: To be honest I can’t make sense of most of the disagreements that have been presented, but I’ll have a go at the ones in your comment. On morality requiring both empathy and reason the post mentions what would happen if only one or the other is used. Again I don’t see how reason alone is doable. Now on what morality is, based on these posts, I instrumentally define morality as the application of reason to empathy. Anything more I think is as mysterian as vitalism in biology. I agree that moral reason is not the same as moral motivation, the example was that someone who has no empathy will not be motivated — but my point was that nobody has ever succeeded of using facts and logic alone to build up any moral statements (and this is what I mean morality being “provable” from the ground up).
Keddaw: I could just as well say you’re “religiously dogmatic” about the ability of reason alone to provide a moral basis, but in either case it would be a cheap shot (or rhetorical trick). The thing in question is whether or not this is in fact possible.
I’m looking forward to your argument but I think achieving it (starting with nothing but statements of fact and using only valid logical inferences to get to any moral statement without introducing an intermediary or implied moral statement) will be one of the greatest boons in the history of human thought of all time.
On us having to pick and choose I agree — but that is a statement of fact — we all pick and choose in the same way as we eat and breathe, as a purely biological process that can’t be controlled. My problem is with pretending we do not pick and choose.
I agree that you can give a reasoned argument as to why empathy and the principle of harm should take priority over the others (disgust, fairness etc), but once you’re down to a primary principle I don’t see how you can collapse it further into reason. It is true that there are many different prioritisations of the instincts, although because of our evolutionary history again as mentioned we are probably a lot closer in these instincts than we might think. But it’s true, there are other combinations which might have evolved under different game-theoretic constraints (eg. alien species). In which case again I don’t see how we can possibly bridge the gap with reason alone.
The problem is we have not accurately defined any of the terms we are using.
To what does empathy apply? Is it relative and is that right?
What is moral? This is key, if I use logic to come to a moral conclusion and it doesn’t fit in with someone else’s morals is it valid for them to say that it’s wrong?
To use logic to create a moral statement you have to gain agreement for each step, each one of which involves an acceptance of something that is not fundamental.
Here’s how you get an ought from an is (at an individual level at least):
- Creatures do not want to be harmed. (is)
- Creatures that are helpful to other creatures are less likely to be harmed. (is)
- Creatures ought to be helpful to other creatures to lessen the likelihood of being harmed by them. (ought)
Michael
“Now on what morality is, based on these posts, I instrumentally define morality as the application of reason to empathy. ”
And based on this definition, how do you decide what is moral / what are moral actions?
I would say that morality, by which I mean ‘the question of what we should and should not approve of or disapprove of’, has nothing at all to do with empathy or moral sentiments. Empathy and moral sentiments are very interesting subjects, but they can’t tell us anything about the ‘should-question’. They only tell us what we currently perceive as moral and why we do.
“but my point was that nobody has ever succeeded of using facts and logic alone to build up any moral statements ”
I disagree. Read: http://alonzofyfe.com/article_du.shtml
Keddaw: I really doubt that you think morality’s all about self-interest, do I have that correct?!
As for your argument, let’s take a look at 2:
Creatures that are helpful to other creatures are less likely to be harmed. (is)
I have an alternate to 2 which I doubt you can argue is any less trye:
2′: Creatures that are helpful to other creatures in situations when others are likely to find out are less likely to be harmed (is)
Now let’s add another premise
2.5: John wants to rape and murder children (is)
From this an alternate 3 follows:
3′: Therefore John ought to avoid raping and murdering children if others are likely to find out to lessen the likelihood of being harmed AND John out to rape and murder children if there is a very low likelihood of this being found out. (ought)
Interestingly, this similar form concludes that when he meets an abandoned child who will not be missed in the wilderness, not only CAN he rape and murder the child but he OUGHT to.
Marc: Ok, just looked at Fyfe’s page. From my quick and basic reading of him he defines good as “Is such as to fulfill the desires in question.” Then, his derivation still relies on saying that ought statements are of the form IF I want X then I will do Y (exactly as Keddaw has it). However he seems to also illegitimately introduce everyone’s desires into the equation, again as if one cannot consistently derive an “ought” from one’s desire to rape and murder. I still don’t see how you can derive any kind of universal which is what people generally mean when they speak of morality.
Looking further down based on his terminology I’d describe myself as being closest to a fact/value dualist, in that I think values are not reducible to facts except for the facts that certain beings (of sufficient cognitive complexity) have values. Specifically, if we forget empathy and just look at something like self-preservation, I don’t see how it can boil down to any facts “out there” except for the fact that this is an attitude that living creatures tend to hold because of X, Y, Z etc.
Hope this gets further to the meat of our disagreement at least in the terms you were using.
Michael
I don’t know if I agree with Keddaw’s statement, but your argument fails.
You haven’t shown how your alternate 3 follows from your premises, even if we assume for the moment that those premises are true.
The ‘ought’ you arrive at is not a moral ought, but an ought which applies to the fulfillment of John’s desire. IF John wants to fulfill his desire as stated in 2.5, THEN he should act as you conclude. No more premises needed. How you arrive at a ‘moral ought’ for John to act like this remains a mystery to me.
I don’t — I arrived at the exact same “ought” as Keddaw arrived at. I agree mine isn’t a moral ought which was the point — to show that the original argument didn’t derive a moral ought either. But after reading Fyfe’s article I still don’t see how the ought of desire utilitarianism is any different to this non-moral ought of the 2 examples.
Michael,
That was a VERY quick and basic reading.
You have cherry-picked:
“he defines good as “Is such as to fulfill the desires in question.””
If you would have read 2 lines beyond this, you would have seen Alonzo state:
“Now, for a word of warning. This is talking about generic ‘good’. I am not talking about morality or any more specific type of good — at least not yet. Certain specific value terms — such as moral terms — place limits on the objects of evaluation, or the relevant desires, or the types of relationships that exist. So, something can be good in the generic sense without being morally good. This ‘good in the generic sense’ is the sense of good in which it still makes sense for a psychopath to cut up an innocent victim and sigh, “Man, that was good!”.”
So, reread and come up with some real objections.
You also say:
“I’d describe myself as being closest to a fact/value dualist, in that I think values are not reducible to facts except for the facts that certain beings (of sufficient cognitive complexity) have values.”
So, do you think value exists as something in the real world or don’t you? Remember, the real world includes thoughts, attitudes and dispositions just as much as it includes tables, chairs and people.
“Specifically, if we forget empathy and just look at something like self-preservation, I don’t see how it can boil down to any facts “out there” except for the fact that this is an attitude that living creatures tend to hold because of X, Y, Z etc.”
You’re pretty close here. These ‘attitudes that living creatures tend to hold’ are their desires (and beliefs). Organisms don’t have a (conscious) desire for self-preservation, they have a desire to eat, sleep, have sex, get out of the cold and so on. A lot of these types of desires are not very malleable (you can’t take someone’s desire to eat away from him), so they don’t play a part in moral discussions. A lot of other desires ARE malleable and that is where morality comes into play.
I did go through that bit — but in no place did I see a convincing reason for a jump from the generic good (which is the related to Keddaw’s ought) to a moral good.
Maybe we should dump the term moral.
Read this post: http://atheistethicist.blogspot.com/2009/03/proper-object-of-moral-evaluation.html
Orr return to the ‘fact’ that all morality is subjective and the only way to prove that anyone’s morality is wrong is to show that it is internally inconsistent. Almost all religious morality falls at this basic hurdle.
So John ‘ought’ to rape and murder the child if he thinks he’ll get away with it. In his moral code there is no higher moral act than satisfying his desires. The only way that John is ‘wrong’ is in terms of the child’s rights. The only rights the child has are those that people choose to imbue it with.
What you are doing is imposing rights onto the child (not to be raped and killed) and saying that removing those rights is wrong.
I hope that’s what you’re doing – that’s what I do – and it is much easier/more basic to try to find out what set of rights people should have than to work out some ethereal morality (based on empathy and reason? Those two are often mutually exclusive!)
Once you try to work out what rights people should* have you not only enable moral statements to come easy and moral arguments to be evaluated, you also make massive political statements. Using individual rights as the basis for my morality, and recognising that everyone’s morality is subjective and different, is what led me to become much more libertarian in outlook.
* I know this appears to be an is/ought problem, but as a member of society I think everyone should be treated equally therefore any rights I claim for myself must equally be given to everyone else. It also appears to be the only possible way to have a stable society in the long-term as there is no institutional abuse of power or stealing of rights. This assumes a stable society is one’s goal!
Marc: I agree that the term moral might be one we could be better off going without. However, even if we abandon it for another term, when we get into discussions of What To Do (eg. should we torture terror suspects, should there be a flat tax, should polygamous marriages be allowed), it will still be broken down into concepts that are core values that won’t decompose into further logic — or that’s how I see it.
As for Fyfe’s post, I generally agree, however this quote might explain what I am saying:
It is not a mere convenience that we have reasons to use social tools such as praise and condemnation to promote desires that tend to fulfill other desires, or inhibit desires that tend to thwart other desires. This is a natural fact.
Nor is it a mere coincidence that any claim that breaks the inference between an agent’ desires and some prima facie appearance of wrongdoing is a claim that says that applying the social forces of blame or reward makes no sense. There is no sign, in these cases where an agent has a legitimate excuse, that there are bad malleable desires out there to be molded.
I agree but then the only thing that I think makes this not a coincidence is the fact that we have empathy, that we have evolved this for some non-trivial reasons and that is why we tend to consider the desires of others in our moral reasoning (and call this moral reasoning). This allows for the gap between self-interest and societal interest to be bridged through social consensus.
Once we have established this, I probably agree with much of what desire utilitarianism has to say, I just think that this does not make it provable from non-moral statements — and from what Fyfe says here he does not seem to disagree.
Keddaw: I agree with most, however my counterexample was only meant to show that yours does not do as much work as you claimed it does. The form of argument in both is the same so to stop from saying John ought to rape and kill the child we are forced to introduce extraneous things like the child’s rights or “everyone should be treated equally” without proving it — and yet this is exactly what a sociopath with perfect logic can question and that we can’t prove to him/her!
To have a stable society (for everyone and not just me) as a goal, or to believe in rights (of everyone and not just me) I believe I need empathy at least for that core, and I think this discussion has only highlighted this.
As for empathy and reason conflicting can you give an example of what you mean? I’m sure it happens but you could be referring to one of a few cases each of which might be explained differently.
Michael:
You’re right, he doesn’t agree. I would like to know where you think his theory is wrong or where he is mistaken about going from non-moral to moral statements.
You say
it will still be broken down into concepts that are core values that won’t decompose into further logic
I think that meshes nicely with DU. The core entities are desires. Or more specifically malleable desires. As far as the theory is concerned they don’t decompose into further concepts. That doesn’t make (malleable) desires some written-in-stone, never-changing objects. They evolve over time and are different throughout different cultures.
In reverse order:
Empathy and reason being in conflict – well that’s all surgery and quite a lot of other medicine. It’s allowing the sick to take their own life, or put them out of their misery. It’s shooting one hostage to save the many. It’s shoving the fat man in front of the trolley, or allowing the five to die (depending on your take on that issue). It’s allowing fifty guilty people to go free rather than lock up one innocent person. It’s [not] torturing a suspect to gain vital information. etc. etc. As humans we are awful at the big picture stuff and make stupid, small minded, parochial decisions as a matter of course. There can be nothing more emblematic of an empathy vs. reason issue than Kamikaze pilots or Saving Private Ryan; obeying orders in Nazi Germany or torturing prisoners in Abu Ghraib?
Empathy is not required for equality (it does help though!). We simply need fear. The fear that what we want, or what we have, will be removed by others unless we also grant what we have to everyone else, thus we all stand together. Naive, perhaps, but we’re dumb mammals.
Fear is actually the basis of most of my morality and politics, leading to a very free ideal with a much greater chance of being harmed by individuals, but less so by the state. C’est la vie.
If you can give me a more specific example of where my views are self contradictory or diverge from yours and you think I am in error (as opposed to a simple difference of opinion based on alternate reasoning or different starting axioms) then I’d be glad to take them point by point.
But say for obeying orders in Nazi Germany, are you saying that empathy says not to kill the baby whilst reason says kill the baby? I’m not sure how say for that one I can parse it as a conflict between reason and empathy.
My specific views don’t necessarily differ from yours in what I think is ethical in different situations (although they probably do) — it’s probably a course of practical education. Since I still see empathy as being the core, I would like to see that emphasised in education and moral discourse, whilst you might disagree. But it’s still possible that for each moral question we come to the same conclusion of what is to be done.
Whether we agree or disagree on a specific ethical dilemma is somewhat irrelevant. How we get there determines how we will react to different situations and how we would rank various outcomes. It is highly unlikely that someone trying to view a situation without empathy as a guiding light would come repeatedly to the same conclusions as someone using empathy.
You, if memory serves, believe in minimising harm which would suggest dropping empathy for reason. this appears at odds with what you are saying in these posts unless you have changed your mind.
I have posited that the principle is higher than the outcome so while in many/most situations we would agree there are some we would not, e.g. enforcing the wearing of seatbelts in cars by adults might be one.
To cover the baby killing, I would say that if it was a real choice between me torturing and killing a baby or me dying then I’m afraid the baby is not going to have a long or pleasant life.
However, I think the medicine example is much better. We do not like the idea of cutting someone open (empathy) but we know it is in their long term interests so we do it (rational). Or chemotherapy, or radiation treatments, etc. etc.
I don’t think it’s irrelevant if we agree on all dilemmas since we’d then be using equivalent decision algorithms (even though at the lower level they might be arranged differently on a superficial level).
I do believe on minimising harm — but this comes from the fact that I have empathy with someone who is harmed. It can’t be substituting empathy reason because there is no purely-reason-driven argument about why it’s wrong to harm others (I still don’t think I’ve encountered a successful version of the argument in this thread).
On cutting someone open for medical purposes there is obviously the conflict between immediate harm and long-term good but I see that as the concept between a smaller case of empathy with a larger case of empathy. For the same case, if it’s empathy that makes us reluctant to cut someone open, why should it be anything other than empathy that drives us to perform the actual operation?
Quick one:
http://www.samharris.org/page/ted_talk/
VERY much worth a listen if you haven’t already heard/seen it.
There are principles that I hold higher than any empathy and are often in direct contradiction to my empathetic reaction. These principles, or values, can be nothing more than moral statements that are based on anything but empathy…
For example I believe that the right of an individual to refuse to help another, even at no cost to themselves, is more important than helping the other person. This is far from empathy as I would want the person to be helped when placing myself in both situations. What I would not want is to be forced to help, even though I would help, and that is a moral based on reason not on empathy.
It would be fair to ask me to explain that reasoning in terms not involving empathy, which I intend to do later…
Yep, I saw the Harris talk in my feed reader a few days before your comment but have been putting it off because it was 25 mins. I’ve watched it and it is very interesting — I’ll probably just write a separate post on it within a week or 2. If you write out the reformulation of your argument to exclude empathy (which as you guessed I’m interested in) before I’ll try incorporate that too.
Just saw an interesting response to Harris that echoes some of what I was saying: http://metamagician3000.blogspot.com/2010/03/moral-by-definition-some-slightly.html
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