Skip to main content

A famous bit of pseudo-science

There is a famous pair of questions that have been posed to subjects whose brain are being scanned while they ponder how to answer... Those questions are 1. would you divert a train heading toward five so that it runs over one instead?; 2. would you push someone in front of the train to save the lives of five people?

The nearly universal answer is 1.yes and 2.no. The consequentialist, however, will think that the two answers are morally equivalent; hence this variation is based upon irrational factors... the physical act of pushing involves a personal involvement. Further confirmation of this contrast comes from the fact that the limbic system becomes very active when deciding about the answer to the second question.

But the reason why persons answer as they do may be due to the fact that they understand the difference between what one is trying to do and unintended consequences in the first case, and the difference between unintended consequence and an evil means toward a good end in the second case. In other words, the man on the street may be wiser about morality than the consequentialistic sociologist or neurologist.

To distinguish between the two possible reasons for the tendency to say no to option #2, we need to construct a new #2: would you press a button that would start a mechanism that would accomplish the same thing (i.e., drag the same person in front of the tracks so that he would die while stopping the train from hitting the other five). If the same % of folks answer question #2 as before, then the reason is probably because of the evil means toward the good end--not the personal involvement. If the % changes the same level of approval as for question #1, then yes, it probably was the bodily involvement that made the difference in the first results.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

P F Strawson's Freedom and Resentment: the argument laid out

Here is a summary and comments on the essay Freedom and Resentment by PF Strawson.  He makes some great points, and when he is wrong, it is in such a way as to clarify things a great deal.  My non-deterministic position is much better thanks to having read this.  I’ll summarize it in this post and respond in a later one. In a nutshell: PFS first argues that personal resentment that we may feel toward another for having failed to show goodwill toward us would have no problem coexisting with the conviction that determinism is true.  Moral disapprobation, as an analog to resentment, is likewise capable of coexisting with deterministic convictions. In fact, it would seem nearly impossible for a normally-constituted person (i.e., a non-sociopath) to leave behind the web of moral convictions, even if that person is a determinist.  In this way, by arguing that moral and determinist convictions can coexist in the same person, PFS undermines the libertarian argument ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Daniel Dennett, disqualifying qualia, softening up the hard problem, fullness of vacuity, dysfunctional functionalism

Around track 2 of disc 9 of Intuition Pumps , Dennett offers what I would call an argument from vacuity.  He argues that David Chalmers unwittingly plays a magic trick on himself and others by placing a set of issues under the one umbrella called the "hard problem of consciousness." None of these issues is really , in Dennett's opinion, a hard problem.  But in naming them thus, Chalmers (says Dennett) is like a magician who seems to be playing the same card trick over and over again, but is really playing several different ones.  In this analogy, expert magicians watch what they think is the same trick played over and over again.  They find it unusually difficult to determine which trick he is playing because they take these performances as iterations of the same trick when each is  in fact different from the one that came before.  Furthermore, each of the tricks that he plays is actually an easy one, so it is precisely because they are looki...
Post a Comment
Read more

entropy, teleology

Perhaps the best way to understand entropy is to look at it as the tendency of things to arrive at equilibrium.  Many non-living processes head in that direction, but not all.  For an example of an exception, consider the movement of electrons around the nucleus: that movement itself doesn't seem to be heading toward any equilibrium… unless one considers the tendency of atoms to combine into molecules so as to fill the electron shells.  If reductionism is false, then isn't the fact that organisms continually create disequilibrium at one level, while seeking another equilibrium (for example a full stomach) quite relevant?   Of course, entropy as a law is about systems, not individuals…. right?
2 comments
Read more