Wow! I never thought I would see the like of it!
[I changed the subject line; even an exhibitionist has his limits.]
n
Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,
Clark University ([email protected])
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
----- Original Message -----
From: ERIC P. CHARLES
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Sent: 6/21/2009 2:14:29 PM
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Nick and dishonest behavior
Bringing something from a P.S. up to the front:
Nick's ethical stance would be based on treating things that act in certain
ways as equal to all other things that act in certain ways, and it wouldn't get
much more prescriptive than that. The acts he would be interested in would be
very sophisticated actions, or combination of actions - such as "contributing
to the conversation". This may seem strange, but again, it is really, really,
really, not that different from a stance that treats all things that
"experience in a certain way" as equal.
----
To elaborate that, it cannot be the case, pragmatically speaking, that we let
other people live because they have an inner life. We all know this cannot be
true (Russ included), because one of the axiomatic assumptions for these
conversations is that you cannot directly know someone else's mental life. If
you cannot know whether or not someone has a mental life, you can't decide
whether or not you can kill them based on their having a mental life. Is there
any way to make that more obvious?!?
The way this is problem is normally dealt with is for people to say that we can
gain insight into people's mental lives by observing their behavior. The logic
goes 1) we see people act a certain way, 2) we infer that they have a mental
life, 3) we decide that we cannot kill them (barring them being jerks or
believing in the wrong god). Now, the irony of a dualistic philosophy is in
step 2, where their inner life somehow comes to be entirely in our heads, not
in theirs! Its crazy talk. Philosophers have spent millennia trying to connect
steps 2 and 3, and getting no where. Much better to just look at the part of
the equation that is actually observable, steps 1 and 3 - the relation between
the actions and the ethical decision. When you do that, you see that we aren't
allowed to kill people who act in certain ways. That's what its always been,
despite all the smoke and mirrors created by point 2. The obvious, but totally
unasked, empirical question is "What are the ways that people act that
distinguish whether or not we can kill them." We just don't need to talk about
inner lives at all to have that conversation. We just don't! The same applies
to all sub-categories of interest. We judge someone a "murder" based on some
aspect of their actions and the circumstances within which the actions took
place. Period. It cannot be that we judge them a murder based on their
inner-mind.
Thus, while Nick's position does have something to say about the form of rules
in moral systems (i.e., that they relate behavior to consequences), it does not
have implications for what the content of the rules should be. In that sense,
it IS morally neutral. Whether or not people have inner-lives has never, at any
point, effected ethics in practice. Certainly Nick could elaborate his own
moral views, by suggesting some rules, but that is completely tangential to
this point.
This may seem terribly abstract, but it is not to be taken lightly. Judge
Posner (appellate judge for the Federal 7th Circuit) has an excellent book, and
quite a lot of legal precedence arguing that talk of an inner mental life adds
nothing to law, and in fact seriously detracts from it. Here are two quotes
from him:
"Obviously most adults and older children can and do speak without vocalization
(that is, can "conceal their thoughts") and form mental images. But this
barebones concept of mind, which essentially equates mind to consciousness, is
different from the idea that there is a something, the "mind", which is the
locus of intentions, the invisible puppeteer, the inner man or woman. It is
that idea which may have no consequences for law and shou! ld perhaps be
discarded, despite the law's emphatic... commitment to it."
"Our understanding of the mind may improve - maybe we will learn to read minds.
But maybe there is nothing to read, or maybe we are not interested in what the
murderer was thinking when he pulled the trigger. If we take seriously the
actor's adage that no man is a villain in his own eyes, we can expect to find,
if we ever succeed in peering into the murderer's mind, an elaborate, perhaps
quite plausible, rationalization for his deed. But so what? We would punish him
all the same."
Eric
On Sun, Jun 21, 2009 01:49 PM, Russ Abbott <[email protected]> wrote:
Nick,
I'm still curious about your answer to a challenge you raised. You wrote,
As one of my graduate students used to [cheerfully] say, "but Nick, if you
don't have an inner life, it's ok to kill you, right?"
Now, my wisest response to this line of argument would be to go all
technocratic and to deny that I have any ethical dog in this fight at all.
One can, after all, be a moral naturalist and assert that reasoning and
argument only come into play when people are trying to violate their ethical
impulses and that, on the whole, people are designed by nature so that they
don't kill each other. Just as I don't think it makes any difference whether
you believe in evolution or creation whether you are a good person, I don't
think it makes any difference to being a good person whether you believe
others have an inner life or not. Thus, I escape the argument by asserting
that it has no MORAL consequences. I reassure Russ that my absence of an
inner life does not make me dangerous, and, once he takes that reassurance
seriously, he doesn't have to kill me. Peace is re-established.
It seems to m that you didn't answer your graduate student's challenge. Is it
ok to kill you?
The implication of the challenge is that murder is a moral issue only when it
is performed on a being with an inner life. Simply terminating the functioning
of something (like a robot) is not murder. We use the term "murder" when the
thing murdered is understood to have an inner life like our own.
It may be as you say that we have evolved to have that perspective. (I think
that's correct.) But so what? Do you have any (moral) grounds for objecting to
your graduate student killing you? Given your statement "it has no MORAL
consequences" apparently your answer is that from your perspective there is no
moral reason for him/her not to kill you. Is that correct?
-- Russ
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