The Sarah Connor Chronicles

I just finished watching the first two episodes of The Sarah Connor Chronicles (i didn’t need to watch the second episode, but i couldn’t know that before watching it). I was surprised by a number of religious ideas, amongst others, that have been adapted into the series and that gave me pause concerning the transformation religion is undergoing at the moment.

one: As in the Terminator movies, christian escatology is incorporated, but with one important change. It is not that robots are informing us about the future instead of God himself, his angels or prophets; it is rather that instead of explaining what is going to happen so that we might prepare (our souls) for the End of the World, Sarah is told what will happen so that she can prevent it, i.e. change the future. Power over the future has passed from God’s hands into ours; the future is no longer determined and inevitable, but it is now (at least in the minds of the producers or script writer of the show) something we can influence. That i consider that a good turn in our conceptions of escatology.

two: a non-religious idea: instead of a strong man protecting a fragile woman, we now have two pretty and strong women protecting a frail boy! There might still be hope for Hollywood, though they haven’t changed their tired storylines, only inverted genders; but it’s a start.

three: as in many an american movie, the cops are the badguys because they don’t know an important secret. This i consider a rather worrysome development in american culture. It is, of course, a bit of revived Gnosticism, but instead of the secret being a portal to salvation, the secret (that robots want take over the world, what else?) is necessary to knowing what is good. That is, the secrecy has been moved from soteriology to ethics. What worries me is that people  might actually (begin to) think that you can do things that appear wrong/evil by appealing to a secret no one can understand. That is not a very good basis for a global ethics.

wittgensteinian thoughts on morality

How does one choose a morality? — Like shoes: by trying them out.

A: Aren’t humans determined by their moral past?
B: No, they can interpret it.
A: With what?
B: With one another.

What do i want? — To be at peace with myself and the world. — Is this what everyone wants? — Probably not. Others are creatures of movement.

When i decide between a kantian and a utilitarian act (killing an innocent man to save the world), the ultimate rule of my decision is nothing other than my peace of mind.

What is the purpose of morality?

wittgensteinian thoughts on religion

To answer the question: “What is religion?” ask: “What do religious people do?” or should we ask: “What do people do when they practice religion?”

What do religious people do? — They do certain things in a certain way.
What do non-religious people do? — They don’t do certain things. — Or do they do them in a different way?

What sort of things do religious people do?

The religious person points towards the solution, trying in vain to describe it.

When i think about religion, am i being religious? Can you think in religion? Can you do religion?

A: What happens when a christian converts?
B: She sees things differently and she does things differently.
A: Is that how a buddhist converts?

Why do so few people believe in hell? — Because they don’t need to.
Why do so many people believe in heaven? — Because they want to.

wittengsteinian thought on the existence of god

A: God does not exist.
B: Which god?
A: No gods exist.
B: True, God is beyond existence.
A: There are no supernatural beings.
B: Indeed, God is more natural than nature itself.
A: Hrmf.

wittgensteinian thoughts on evil

Do you know you just became evil like an unbeliever knows he just became christian?

–Where does evil begin?
–Do not ask that question. Ask: When did we begin speaking of evil?

“Evil is a destroying of the good” — What is the cash value of that statement?

Imagine a robot programmed to shoot and kill human beings. Is this object evil or is it just bad?

on the origin of good and evil

Do not ask: Unde malum? but: Unde malum atque bonum?

There is no good reason to assume that the world is good and then ask how evil came to it. The greater mytery is whence our concepts of good and evil came from. One simply explanation is evolutionary: one day, someone came up with the word “good” and said to her friend, pointing at a berry: “good!” and pointing at another, poisonous one: “bad!”. Humans suddenly had a means of structuring their social interactions, of getting one another to do things by talking to them. The invention of the words “good” and “bad” or “evil” was a revolution, like the invention of agriculture or electric power.

on Humanism (richard norman interviewed)

From Philosophy Bites, a 10 min interview of Richard Norman author of On Humanism, on humanism. Most of the interview focuses on morality and whether or not you need a god to keep you good. There is not much meat, but that is why it is short. I’ve always been wary of “Humanism” myself just because of the name as it smacks of speciesism. But this interview put it in rather good light. mp3.

Moral Minds

I just finished Marc Hauser’s book Moral Minds (2006) on “the science of morality”. It’s a good overview of the current state of the science and quite readable. He is trying to encourage scientists to look for innate, evolutionarily developed moral rules, somewhat like the gennerative grammar rules described by Chomsky. Hauser posits three moral creatures: a humean one that only relies on moral intuition and emotions; a kantian who relies exclusively on reason (Hauser sometimes lops the utilitarians into this category…) and a rawlsian who uses reason to assess a situation before using moral intuitions and emotion to evaluate it. Hauser prefers the latter.

There is, however, one big problem with the entire premise of the book, or rather with its conclusion: Nowhere to my knowledge does Hauser address the question of the moral bindingness of the evolutionary moral rules. Of course, this is not 19th century social darwinism where the laws of evolution were supposed to permit all sorts of inhumane societies. These are rules particular to our species, rules that fit and work, that have evolved alongside (actually ‘in’) living beings. These are therefore ‘good’ rules in the sense that they usually get us to do what is in our interest.

However, the meta-question is never raised as to how we can assess the goodness of the moral rules themselves.  There is no reason why we should go with them all the time. For one, our environment has changed and is rapidly changing, probably rendering some of the rules obsolete. For another, though some of the rules might have gotten us thus far, we might no longer find them very acceptable, i.e. they might conflict with other moral rules/intuitions or with our reason.

The last point bears a tad bit more explaining. In economics, it is well known that we humans have some intuitions that do not serve us well. We discount the future too much (exponentially), which causes us to buy into dangerous schemes, like, say, sub-prime housing loans. This is an innate, evolutionary intuition that has served us in the past when the future was indeed very uncertain. Now it simply gets us into trouble. It is very likely that we now have similar problems with our moral intuitions. What is important is that if enough people think through the situations they can explain to us why such and such a moral intuition is wrong so that once we understand what thy mean, we can work against, or perhaps even shed, the offending moral intuition.

Of course, I expect Hauser wouldn’t disagree. After all, this is just a different part of human brains taking over some of the moral workload. There is nothing un-evolutionary about it. However, not pointing this out makes the text sound like it is equating innate moral intuitions with THE GOOD. And that is just wrong.

Kant, Hume and the evolution of morality

There is a long post on the Illusive Mind blog defending an evolutionary morality against Kant. I do not particularly want to defend Kant, but i do want to raise a very sizable caveat: whatever “morality” evolution has given us isn’t by any means necessarily the “right” one!

Here is the synopsis of the article/post:

In this essay I will outline what I regard as the most successful attempt to explain the evolution of altruism. I will then illustrate some of the effects that an evolutionary account of moral behaviour has on cognitivist and noncognitivist theories of ethics. I will argue that evolutionary theory does not undermine Hume’s noncognitivism but supports it and casts doubt on Kantianism.

Where things go horribly wrong is when morality is reduced to “a question of desire” because we then have nothing to ‘get behind desires’ and assess them morally (unless you posit some kind of coherence theory, but that is no the case in this article):

The question of retaining moral judgements then is reduced to a question of desire. Do we want to utilise judgements whose agenda is the ongoing survival of the species (at the level of the gene) through a system of rewarding co-operation and punishing cheating?

In effect the morality we have inherited through evolution is taken to be ‘valid’ – except when we don’t like it. The exception is, in my opinion, befuddled; the first part of the above sentence is, however, very dangerous, committing something akin to an is/ought or natural fallacy.

The only alternative on offer is a purely rational ethics à la Kant, but even this is undercut by more primary evolutionary forces:

The only way to be objectively moral and avoid ‘evolutionary baggage’ from tainting our moral judgements seems to be to devote oneself completely to reason in a Kantian fashion. However, it is not a forgone conclusion that reason is above evolutionary pressures. In The Evolution of Reason, William Cooper argues, “the laws of logic emerge naturally as corollaries of the evolutionary laws” (2003, p.5).

In the end, one gets the impression that we are enslaved to the morality evolution thought up for us and are incapable of stepping out of it to evaluate our own moral intuitions.

Admittedly, evaluating our moral intuitions is no easy task. But what is often forgotten is that we are not alone working at that task. It might be impossibly solipsistic for me to want to morally evaluate my own moral intuitions (where would i stand in order to do so?); but it certainly is not very difficult for someone else, actually many other people, to do so.

The solution will likely be neither Humean nor Kantian. We must both use some moral intuitions to assess other ones but also reason through our moral intuitions and find instances where the intuitions clearly go wrong.

books i’m reading on ethics and emotions

Marc D. Hauser, Moral Minds. Looks to be an attempt to apply Chomskyan methods from language analysis to morality with an emphasis on emotions. Lots of Hume and Rawls and criticizing of Kant.

Martha Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought. A good philosophical investigation of emotions as ways of assessing the world morally. Too long, but it is easy to pick and choose your chapters once you get through the first four ones with the indispensable theoretical foundation. Proust carries through the entire text as a first-rate thinker on the emotions (he supplied Nussbaum with her book title).

Godwin Samararatne, Talks on Buddhist Meditation. Teaches us to monitor our emotions though meditation and mindfulness, not in order to repress or destroy, but to understand and embrace them. This is ethical method.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations. The second half of the first part is largely devoted to a study of the relationship of self and other to expressions of pain. This is not exactly emotions, but the analyses are very easily translated, if any translation is even necessary.

Stendhal, La Chartreuse de Parme. A grandiose novel written by a frenchman about italians and peppered with comments about how the french and italians differ in their emotional make up. The italians apparently love the book, so Stendhal can’t be that horribly wrong/unfair in his comparisons.