On 27/05/07, John Ku <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On 5/26/07, Stathis Papaioannou <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > What if the normative governance system includes doing terrible things? > I think for some people, namely sociopaths, it probably sometimes does. Now evolution has given most of us emotions such as feelings of obligation, guilt, shame and care. Given the importance of social relations, our genes programmed us through those emotions to care directly about such things as cooperation, the well-being of others, not defecting in collective action problems, not harming others, etc. Now I think the adaptive benefit of having a normative governance system (basically a general reasoning system that is able to revise not just our beliefs but also our desires and emotions) on top of that was essentially to provide more flexibility in pursuing the values our emotions are directed towards in novel situations and not, for instance, to replace or fundamentally change those values. So, for most of us who have these emotions, I think the normative governance system will prescribe feelings of obligation not to do terrible things, to care about potential victims, feel guilt, etc. But there are humans, sociopaths, who lack these moral emotions. You can see fMRI scans that show that when they make "moral" judgments, they are using fundamentally different parts of their brain from the rest of us, and many other tests also reveal they lack emotions like guilt, shame, care, and love. The emotions and motivations they have will pretty much just be self-interested or malevolent. (I believe there are models of evolutionary game theory that can explain that having around 1% of a population be sociopaths while the rest are not is an evolutionarily stable strategy and equilibrium point.) Their normative governance system will do the same thing in them of trying to more flexibly pursue the values their emotions direct them towards. So, since they lack the moral emotions, it will almost certainly end up prescribing doing terrible things in some circumstances. Thus, their reasons will be different from our's. I think there is simply no way around that. If the concept of reasons is to play a role in actually guiding human action and deliberation, it will have to be sensitive to these sorts of big differences in psychology. Any alternate concept of reasons not able to guide action seems pretty worthless to me. So, sociopaths sometimes have reasons to do terrible things. We, on the other hand, have reasons not to do terrible things and furthermore, have pretty strong reason to stop them from doing terrible things. Luckily, we outnumber them. So, I think we basically treat them as we might a dangerous animal. If they really are a true sociopath (and not just someone who has not deliberated properly about what morality demands), I think it doesn't even make sense to punish them. Punishment is only appropriate when they have the relevant capacity to regulate their actions in accordance with moral demands. Without the basic repertoire of moral emotions they are just as unable to do this as, say, a shark that attacks people. Thus, sociopaths are really outside of the domain of moral reasons. As we might say of sharks, what they are doing is certainly *bad* but not morally wrong.
Every society has sociopaths, and generally recognises them as such and deals with them. The problem is that through most of history, "normal" people have thought it was OK to treat slaves, women, Jews, homosexuals etc. in ways considered terrible by people in different eras. For all I know, I may be committing a barbaric crime in the mildly challenging tone of this post, when looked at by the standards of future or alien cultures. And even within a relatively homogeneous culture there are basic disagreements, such as between those who think it's OK to eat animals and those who don't. I don't dispute that it is worthwhile trying to arrive at a rational ethical system given certain moral premises, but how do we agree on the premises? -- Stathis Papaioannou ----- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=4007604&user_secret=7d7fb4d8
