tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16594468.post2522301709980609629..comments2023-10-24T04:29:23.693-06:00Comments on Atheist Ethicist: Infant MoralityAlonzo Fyfehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05687777216426347054noreply@blogger.comBlogger5125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16594468.post-36452565631181898362007-11-23T08:25:00.000-07:002007-11-23T08:25:00.000-07:00Doggonit .. last comment ... I forgot about a this...Doggonit .. last comment ... I forgot about a this from an interview with Discover magazine<BR/><BR/><B>You mention honor killings in cases of infidelity, but sometimes the victim may simply have been caught in public talking to a man who is not her husband. As a Western woman raised in the liberal tradition, I think that is immoral. Yet in societies where honor killings are acceptable, the decision to kill the woman is deemed morally correct. Why?</B><BR/><BR/><I>Let’s go back to language. You’re a speaker of English. In French, the world "table" is feminine. Why? Isn’t that weird? Isn’t that incomprehensible? For an English speaker, that’s the most bizarre thing in the world! It’s incredibly hard to learn. Yet are the French weird? They’re not weird. They speak another language.<BR/><BR/>The analogy to language is to me very profound and important. When you say, “Look, it’s weird that a culture would actually kill someone for infidelity,” it’s no<BR/>different than us making a language that’s got these really weird quirks. Now, here’s where the difference is crucial. As English speakers, we can’t tell the French: “You idiots. Saying that a word has gender is stupid, and you guys just change the system.” But as we have seen historically, one culture telling another culture, “Hey, this is not OK. We do not think it is morally permissible to do clitoridectomies, and you should just stop, and we’re going to find international ways to put the constraints on you”—now, that’s whoppingly different. But it also captures something crucial. The descriptive level and the prescriptive level are crucially different. How biology basically guides what people are doing is one thing. What we think should happen is really different. That just doesn’t arise as a distinction within language.</I>Hume's Ghosthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13551684109760430351noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16594468.post-56238283785770879122007-11-23T07:48:00.000-07:002007-11-23T07:48:00.000-07:00From Moral Minds:"The only way to develop stable p...From Moral Minds:<BR/><BR/>"The only way to develop stable prescriptive principles, through either formal law or religion, is to understand how they will break down in the face of biases that Mother Nature equipped us with."Hume's Ghosthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13551684109760430351noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16594468.post-25602340605406566112007-11-23T07:35:00.000-07:002007-11-23T07:35:00.000-07:00Hauser goes out of his way to explain that he is n...Hauser goes out of his way to explain that he is not saying that having a moral sense means that our intutions yield correct prescriptions for ethical behavior.<BR/><BR/>But evidence has amply demonstrated that our brains are wired to process ethical dillemas in a particular way ... Hauser points out that understanding our brain's biases might help us understand and overcomes situations where we have ethical shortcomings.Hume's Ghosthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13551684109760430351noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16594468.post-49974044760806088902007-11-23T05:50:00.000-07:002007-11-23T05:50:00.000-07:00martinoOkay, I'll make a concentrated effort to gi...<B>martino</B><BR/><BR/>Okay, I'll make a concentrated effort to give a more dedicated response to Hauser.<BR/><BR/>However the main point remains quite simple. Hauser looks at whether certain 'moral judgments' are common among populations.<BR/><BR/>However, the one thing he has not done - and the one thing he has to do in order to claim that he is actually studying morality (rather than moral claims), is to also show that these common answers <I>are the right answers</I>. To the best of my knowledge, he does not even have a theory of right answers, let alone applied such a theory to his study of morality to show that the subjects of his experiments are coming up with right answers.Alonzo Fyfehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05687777216426347054noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16594468.post-20566844381908373372007-11-23T02:24:00.000-07:002007-11-23T02:24:00.000-07:00Good points but you really need to answer the most...Good points but you really need to answer the most important work in this area (sort of) recently namely Marc Hauser's work and his Moral Grammer. Unless I am mistaken, you have not dealt with this properly. Your post http://atheistethicist.blogspot.com/2007/05/genetic-morality-delusion.html only glances on Hauser and his argument for a genetic basis of a moral <I>grammar</I> which is not the same as having the moral sense per se nor having one with fixed parameters (we certainly agree on the invalidity of arguments for these). Your argument that there are no genes to reason over trolleys and such is correct but besides the point.<BR/><BR/>http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~mnkylab/LPPI.html and a book Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong by Marc Hauser. <BR/><BR/>(BTW I am dubious of the notion even of a Moral Grammar, as I am dubious of Chomsky's - not his great mathematical analysis of language syntax but his - non-evolutionary innate Universal Grammar claims. Anyway I am interested on what you have to say on the matter of Moral Grammars not Chomsky!).Martin Freedmanhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16952072422175870627noreply@blogger.com