Hard News: Quite the Two-Step
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There are many things that appear to lie 'at the heart' of most ethics, depending on whose heart you are referring to. Kant tried to catch what he thought the heart was with his 'Categorical Imperative', which is a more sophisticated Golden Rule (Do As You Would Be Done By) - "Act as if the maxim of your action were through your will to become a universal law".
But obviously the problem arises from the non-specificity of such a method - it basically means if you could accept it being done to you, or you can accept such a universal law, or you could handle the feelings you cause in others, then that's OK. Which varies enormously between individuals and quite a lot between cultures.
A good counterexample is the murder-suicide. What's good about that? The person has accepted on themself what they have done to another. They may even not mind if the entire planet killed itself and murdered it's wife/mother/whoever. They may be deeply empathic in doing so, you often see that with people who kill their families. They may love those they slay.
Or you have the enemy who would expect no quarter from you either. They are following the same principle they expect of all honorable warriors, to fight hard until death. They'd feel cheated if you didn't do the same.
And those are just examples which accept the spirit of the principle. The more niggly ones that show the sleight of hand which can be used in your justifications and your empathy, are also major problems for such an 'uber-principle'. Like 'I have no particular feelings about pulling my finger back at all', when holding a loaded shotgun.
I confess to not having kept up with trends in philosophy. It's one of those subjects where after a few thousand years there are few truly new ideas. I'm sure what I'm saying was said a thousand times before the birth of Socrates. It is simply to Plato that we owe the first really detailed account of it (in the West). And if we lived by his uber-principles I think it would be a pretty violent place. Hey, wait a minute...
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I accept a lot of what you're saying, Ben. If it was simple, cockroaches would do it. Ho hum.
But I wasn't trying to head down a Kantian path at all. By nature or nurture I'm more of a Humeanist sceptic, heh.
And calling most "murderer-suicides" "empathetic" is a stretch. ;-) Not minding if the whole planet kills itself seems like a grand definition for lacking all empathy. Empathy is precisely the key to pulling oneself away from thinking "I want that, therefore X must also want it."
However... I do think "experimental philosophy" is a truely new idea. I'm not saying it's a good one, just that what I've read (not much) involved trying to do something likeIf we think of morality as a science then that makes the observations/experiments equate to 'how we feel about example x'. That usually means we will have data inconsistent with most simple theories.
with some quite surprising results.
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I hadn't come across Experimental Philosophy before so some time I’ll try and read what's on that site.
I read more on cognitive psychology but have read some philosophy and have been thinking that philosophy must surely be able to do a lot with recent developments in cognitive psychology and neuroscience - especially now that there is almost real-time imagining of many thought processes.
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It doesn't lack empathy if you feel it yourself, but do it anyway. Which is just to say that empathy is not a good guide. If you want to define empathy more carefully, sure. Beware the long dark path from which the word 'Empathy' may emerge unrecognizable, though.
Empathy means seeing or feeling it from the other person's side. Which I think is important, but not enough. The other person's point of view may be totally wrong. You may be unable to see it that way. Or you may be deluded into thinking you have. Or, having seen it correctly, you still disagree, and think their point of view is lacks empathy.
If what I'm saying overlaps with Experimental Philosophy, it's an accident. Actually my thoughts on this are most inspired by what I've read about Zen Buddhism, but that's just my mind working in it's own weird way. But thx for the link, it seems quite interesting, I agree.
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Reading further, that indeed is some interesting shit. Perhaps I'm being an arse, but the idea of sampling around for ideas of moral behaviour is something I first remember coming across in first year, in a description of some pre-Socratic philosopher, who toured the ancient Mediterranean inquiring into their morals and beliefs, and was very surprised to find how much different they were, for which he gave numerous examples. So like I say, a lot of ideas are older than you think.
But surveying a systematic cross-section of philosophical questions and analysing the demography of the answers? That's a cool idea. As <pre-Socratic guy> said, the answers vary hugely depending where the people come from.
There's obvious overlap with psychology and various other disciplines in there, but this is totally inevitable in any interesting questions in philosophy. If they ever actually discover anything (and that is becoming rarer all the time), then it rapidly becomes a science. Philosophy as the holes in science? I don't know. "What is Philosophy?" is that question you spend a lifetime answering, many have.
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I don't quite understand your point, Ben, but I'm ready to back carefully away from this, probably out the fire-escape door, not looking backwards, towards where the fire-escape used to be before they ripped it out to put up a post-modern "victorian" facade I can bounce off in my fall to the pavement.
Just to say, I wasn't actually positing empathy as a moral principle at all- it's a phenonmenon, one of our traits, that's all. I think it's an important one when we start doing this "moral reasoning thing". That doesn't mean I think there's a grand uniting moral principle out there, awaiting discovery by a moral Starship Enterprise, full of philosophy graduates and heinecken.
For me, it's a trait I find useful- certainly not infallible!- in trying to work out which of my moral intuitions are based on authority, habit, or the "yuck factor"- and which based on something I value more deeply. I don't think I'm alone there, but maybe we're all alone, eh?
Argggh! -
oops, cross-posting!
yeah, i get the "nothing new" feeling myself. not since hume, who single-handed (heh, feel free to disagree!) drove a stake thru philosphy's heart!
then some bastard does something new with an old thing, and ahem we have to keep turning the compast to get rilly good dirt! -
Aha, soz then. So you were getting me more than I thought. In that case, yes I entirely agree that even bothering with morals at all could have root cause in empathy. Or you could even consider empathy to be instinctive morality.
Hume was great, I agree, although I find Popper's response to his Problem of Induction quite strong.
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Empathy means seeing or feeling it from the other person's side. Which I think is important, but not enough. The other person's point of view may be totally wrong. You may be unable to see it that way. Or you may be deluded into thinking you have. Or, having seen it correctly, you still disagree, and think their point of view is lacks empathy.
what I find interesting is how empathy is not an abstraction but a product of brain function, mirror neurons etc - the ability to imagine the mental state of another person, a pre-requisite for empathy, is an ability that can be located as a process in the brain that was selected for. So looking at how the expression of empathy varies within a population would give an understanding of the general phenomena.
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I may be wrong, but I'd guess it's got a genetic component, and evolution has put non-empathic people in there for a reason, too. There are a lot of social functions which seem to give low empaths an advantage. I'm thinking warrior types work better that way. But again, whilst having no empathy might be an advantage it also may not be decisive. There are ways to suppress such feelings, and maybe in some circumstances empathy could even make you a better killer, if it gives you the ability to guess what your victim is thinking and thus likely to do.
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maybe in some circumstances empathy could even make you a better killer
What a lovely thought.
Also, this thread has started to make me feel as dumb as a box of hammers. :)
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Also, this thread has started to make me feel as dumb as a box of hammers. :)
Now there's a feeling I can empathise with...
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What a lovely thought.
;-) I'm just bitter-ending against any remnants of an idea that empathy could be a sufficient guide to morality. Straw man anyway I know.
It is often said that criminals can make excellent cops and vice versa, on account of how much time they spend in each other's minds. So empathy isn't only a force for good.
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There are a lot of social functions which seem to give low empaths an advantage. I'm thinking warrior types work better that way. But again, whilst having no empathy might be an advantage it also may not be decisive.
are you familiar with game theory? it's the classic cheaters vs co-operators situation.
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One of the quiet delights of getting more venerable - oh all right, old - is the increasing ease with which one "lives with doubt", as you paraphrased Bertie Russell. Or to move from Bertie to Gertie (and Alice B), to stop looking for the answer and instead mumble "What was the question?" It's all joy.
Speaking of games, Danielle, with the cicadas calling, is it time the ladies pressed our cricket whites and formed a PAS Women's XI?
Who else is ready to whip off some bails?
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What's the word for a tail-ender who can't actually bowl or field either? Because I think that's my cricketing position.
I volunteer to bring out the drinks on the little trolley, though.
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I think I remember Jim Flynn on the radio pointing out that understanding how people feel and caring about it are two different things. Your clever psychopaths find there is more mileage in manipulating people psychologically rather than physically.
Also, while I've only just scanned the proceeding of the society to this point, it might help to consider that saying something motivates us to make moral judgements isn't the same as saying that's what they mean in a logical or semantic way. The psychology of ethics is different to the philosophy.
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Also, while I've only just scanned the proceeding of the society to this point, it might help to consider that saying something motivates us to make moral judgements isn't the same as saying that's what they mean in a logical or semantic way. The psychology of ethics is different to the philosophy.
It's certainly different. But the psychology could be profoundly revealing if you think (as I do) that most ethical philosophy is just a way of rationalizing prejudice, hardly an improvement on just having prejudice in the first place. It's just sophisticated prejudice. 'Constructive' ethical philosophy anyway. Destructive approaches are usually not wrong, they just don't have any answers.
understanding how people feel and caring about it are two different things.
For sure, although I think empathy, in the sense of seeing things from another's point of view, is involved in both of them. Unless you insist that empathy means both knowing and caring. But you can still do harm even if you know and care. You might have a silly idea about the right course of action, despite knowing entirely how affected parties feel, and caring a great deal about it.
I know I'm being pedantic, but I'm trying to make my point that finding a moral principle that tallies with one's own moral intuitions carries no guarantee that it either tallies with everyone else's, or that it works well practically. It may seem hard to imagine how anyone with a strong sense of empathy could commit wrong acts, until you consider how many people in history did indeed seem to, but either through misplacing their empathy, or mishandling events, they committed extremely harmful acts that they could have avoided if they hadn't been following their empathy.
I'm not saying empathy is bad. Quite the opposite, it's a good thing to have most of the time. I'm just saying it's not enough.
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Now here's an unexpected opinion from a Sensible Sentencing ancillary:
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Now here's an unexpected opinion from a Sensible Sentencing ancillary:
Man, that's a badly-written press release ...
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Man, that's a badly-written press release ...
That's so badly written, it makes some of the badly written comments on PAS look positively NCA-acheived-with-merit-worthy.
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It thanks LN for helping expose crimes against police officers?
WTF
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Yeah. That could be read as 'exposing crimes that were committed against police officers', or 'her courageous battle against police officers, which exposed abhorrent crimes'. One suspects the second, but media releases that don't make sense shouldn't get picked up.
What makes Kelly Te Heuheu a 'Sensible Sentencing Trust Maori Crime issues specialist' I wonder. Is that a real job with qualifications, or just a name tag that justifies bagging on Maori criminals?
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What makes Kelly Te Heuheu a 'Sensible Sentencing Trust Maori Crime issues specialist' I wonder.
She's a member of SST, a maori, and a criminal?
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What weirdo post here Heather Gaye and Kyle Matthews. At least this lady Kelly Te Heuheu cares about victims and doing something about it to help and support them. What are you both doing besides moaning SST are voluntary and work for no pay!!
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