Yakoob on 15/8/2012 at 20:07

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@dema - an enjoyable overview of the various philosophical outlooks on the issue, thanks. Honestly, between our back and forth and now going to the "bare-bones" of the original philosophers' ideas, I think we kind of reached a point where there is no sense in arguing anymore. I understand your viewpoints and (hopefully) you understand mine, but at the end of the day they are just that, viewpoints, and we can't really prove one over the other. I don't really have much more to add at this point so... agree to disagree on our core beliefs? Eitherway, this was a very interesting an enlightening discussion, and I'm glad I got involved :D

Going on a related tangent that you were kind of alluring to, regarding justifying / legitimizing laws by government/kings, I did a little (very general) research paper on a few countries in South America who were going through revolutions and counter revolutions. Basically, what I noticed, was that those countries where democracy either arose or was forced by a 3rd party (i.e. US) would not last very long, and the country would plunge back into disarray shortly after. However, if such a democracy was preceded first by a dictator who basically set up and "prepped up" the country for it, the following democratic rule had a much higher success rate.

My point is - sometimes a despot is needed to step in and do things "against" people's will. Hell, that's the argument people pro-Obama care use; even if people don't like it or see it as counter-intuitive, it is better for the country in the long run. In either case, it's an "illegitimate" government in the sense that that it goes AGAINST what majority of the people want, but it is "legitimate" in the sense that it does benefit the society in the end.

So I pose this as another ("unanswerable") dilemma - should laws reflect what the people want, or what is best for them?

demagogue on 16/8/2012 at 07:44

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Oh, I didn't even get to the arguing part. But I think this term "agree to disagree" is quite foreign to how philosophy works and should be banished. There's always more to argue for every classic philosophical argument, and people should always stick to their beliefs (e.g., that the other guy's reasons aren't persuasive so can't be right, with what I know now) and should never be asked not to. But then the idea of a "core belief" is also foreign to philosophy. I don't have any core belief in Scanlon. I just think his position has the better argument over utilitarianism and the other positions right now. If someone gave me reasons to think otherwise, I'd change my view. No one has, so I'm keeping it for now. If you had arguments I didn't think were valid, I wouldn't suddenly concede them or even think you have a right to think they're valid just to end the discussion.

But people can't argue all day long & forever. So you can just say, "So we disagree for now", and "Reasonable people could believe either side", and that's fine. But this is assuming we even do disagree, which I'm not sure we do, or I don't recall reading anything you've said that I entirely disagreed with. We really didn't get deep enough into the arguments to even get to the disagreeing part. On the surface, both contractualism and utilitarianism have serious problems AND grains of truth, and a good philosopher needs to know their way around the arguments of both. I mean, the way it practically works, you have some philosophers in a contractualist tradition, and others in a utilitarian tradition... Both are very reasonable, venerable traditions. We all want the contractualists to develop their position as much as they can, and we all want the utilitarians to develop their position as best they can. Trying to say one has to trump the other and cut off discussion sort of misses the whole point. But yeah, we just say: "Fun discussion. Lot of strands we left open, but can't tie them all up now. But that's cool. Thanks for all the fish." That's the better wording for this situation I think.



This is part of the (http://cps.sagepub.com/content/41/10/1398.abstract) J-Curve argument, developed in a book by (http://www.amazon.com/The-Curve-Understand-Nations-Rise/dp/B001O9CEW8) Bremmer. Democracy involves a lot of norms that have to be developed in a transitioning society before you can foist full-on liberal democracy... And if you push too fast, rather than improving things get worse, before they improve again (making a J-shaped curve on a graph) ... So many examples of this; democracy pushed in the former Yugoslavia led to race-hate politics and civil war; democracy pushed in Gaza led to Hamas winning the election; often ethnic conflicts erupt in the wake of democratic reforms because ethnic groups get free expression for the first time... The best "solution" is not a despot, though, since then there will never be a process towards democracy, but (looking at the case studies), well there are a number of different solutions -- almost anything respecting rights and liberalism is better than a despot ... One is having some trusteeship kind of government, like the UN trusteeship over Kosovo or East Timor, or some other transition kind of government, and then a process to develop democracy locally first, so it doesn't turn into full-on civil war but people learn how democracy works at the local level first. The key is there's a process. You shouldn't have a situation where reforms can be put off indefinitely. That's never going to be in the people's best interest, since some process can manage the J-Curve problem.

As for the argument: do all peoples have a right to democracy or having their will represented at all, the famous article in favor of this is Tom Franck's (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1HO4ieZCK1LlGD4kvQCoQDoi_Q_wxfYsYjIeIv913HrI/edit) Emerging Right to Democracy, which I think is still more or less on the right track with it. Well if we wanted to have a discussion about it, I'd want to read it again carefully so we could think about what it means and how the arguments apply to our time.



It's unanswerable I think because in practice there is no universal trump of one over the other. E.g., with health & safety laws. Obviously they require specialist knowledge about health risks that scientists need PhD's and years of study to understand. You do not want just a popular vote "Should electric wires pass over schools?" because laymen people will read some magazine article, panic, and probably ban all overhanging electric wires everywhere. So for these kinds of regulations, the laws should reflect what's best for the people, not what they (say they) "want".

But you cannot leave democracy completely out either, or you might get a situation where elites do not understand the needs of normal people, e.g., when some government committee just decides to build a dam and relocate an entire town without its consent, you need the input of the townspeople because they know their situation better than anyone, if you want to take care of them properly. So in that situation, the laws should in part reflect what the affected people want over what the elites think is best for them.

Once you start thinking like that, then you don't think about it like a pure black/white question, but you look at every situation on a case-by-case basis, thinking about when we need government input, and where we need popular input. It's not an a priori question I think. For a lot of policies, though, you need democratic input because the people know their own interests better than a government committee would, or the government doesn't have any good justification to pick policy-A over policy-B without the affected people's input, but when they do give their input and vote for it, that's a very good justification for that law telling them what to do. You have to look at the situation, I think, and all the considerations involved on both sides of the issue.

demagogue on 16/8/2012 at 09:42

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Well I studied cognitive science in undergrad, so I feel most comfortable understanding mental systems in terms of the actual cognitive system in the brain doing the work. I don't like these "psychological" or "sociology" theories that make boxes based on some abstract logic of how they think these should work. I have no idea what a "stage in morality" means in terms of who knows how many countless cognitive systems working together. I'm willing to believe that theory can be reduced to cognitive systems though, but then I would just toss out that theory and look directly at the cognitive systems that do the work; or maybe use the theory, if it's easier & accurate enough, with the understanding it's just a loose translation of the actual cognitive systems.

As for "one true reason of morality", quite the opposite. The dominant theory in cogsci is the massive modularity thesis, which is that cognitive operations are parceled out into countless modules, although they're apparently tightly interconnected too. So we're talking 10,000s of different cross-connecting systems or schema contributing to what we colloquially call any given "norm" (although there may be a general schema framework, e.g., for concepts in language, though that is still probably different than the framework, e.g., for walking kinesthetics, or for object manipulation, or for all sorts of different interactions with other persons... And then when you allow schema to affect each other, you're compounding the interaction cases. So I didn't think there is "one reason of morality" there are possibly 100,000s of them. That said, I don't think it follows that



Yes it's very complex, but cognitive science today is not like it was in the 1960s. We now know, e.g., Paul Glimcher's work, that there are many brain areas that literally compute Nash's equilibrium theorem & relative expected utility REU, and use that theorem for one "decision" to be chosen over competing ones (e.g., in the LIP area of eye movements). We know because they've hooked up electrodes to the individual neurons that are actually "selecting" the decision (e.g., eventually passing the command to eye muscles to "look at X"), or more accurately (according to the interpretation) "priming" the decision with a weight calculated according to its REU, and all the decisions are primed with the REU so the mind has a definite feeling of which options are more "valuable" than others ... which translates into something like the feeling inside that I *want* to select this thing to look at, and I don't *want* to look at that, even if other systems later do different things with this REU matrix, you can see Nash's theorem & REU in it directly.

Yes it's a very complex system, but it's like a ratchet, I think. There is more to understand about this system, but the consistent behavior of these neurons, following Nash & REU, is one thing we now know -- you can ask about its interpretation, you can discover new things, but you can't ratchet the results back. Now we know Nash found an equation that the neurons in the brain actually compute to prime decisions in the brain. And all human brains (and many mammal brains FTM) use this system throughout many action-deciding-systems. Since norms at the end of the day are about how actions get selected, this system is one small piece to the question "What is a norm?" Part of what a norm is, is the feeling that some choices are more valuable than others according to the REU. Complex, but not too complex for scientific scrutiny. Also, have you seen some of the hard nuts out there that science has cracked? Quantum theory, general relativity... The brain is a tough nut, but not immune to science.

Where I think you have a good point is that when people translate what they see into language, they aren't thinking about what the brain is doing. You get people observing, like you said, "we know some people care a lot about norms, we know some care very little", but looking at it scientifically, this is all just anecdotal stuff you'd toss out anyway. What you want to look at is what part of the brain is actually pushing for a decision to be made. That's what a norm is, I think. How people want to explain that in day-to-day language doesn't really matter.



Ok, I have to tease out different strands here, to get how I think things fit together.

As I think my example explained above, with the Nash equation that the LIP area of the brain computes for what the eye "wants to look at"... in someone's experience, that would be felt effectively as an emotion, the "pull" towards looking at something. So in that respect, the emotion of *Oh God, I really want that* plays a much bigger role in how many behaviors actually get selected. And there are a lot of experiments that confirm this, also many "cognitive biases".

It's like the experiment where they recognized that two candidates with equal credentials, if the decision-maker had just touched a cup with a hot beverage, he was significantly more likely to hire the person than if he'd just touched a cup with a cold beverage. What does the temperature of a beverage have anything to do with the decision to hire someone, and all the logical considerations that go into that? Nothing. The leading interpretation is it's an emotion lowering the bar of *I want this*.

Ok, ok, so I don't deny the contribution of emotion to people selecting actions and am totally sympathetic (although what people call "love" and "fear" in language is again anecdotal, so it's better to be clear what we mean cognitively by those terms).

Now the part where I'm agreeing with Scanlon that reason is at the root of morality is a slightly different thing. For that, we're not talking about why humans practically pick their actions. What we're talking about now is whether those actions can be justified to the person you're affecting. This is like the teacher grading a test. The universe may not stop the wrong answer getting written, but the question is whether that answer is justified or not, and when it's not, the teacher marks it with a big red X. So I'm sympathetic with this view, whatever decides an action practically, whether it's justified to a person is a matter of whether there are reasons for it that that person must accept. That's where the reason comes in. One complication here is that, of course, "reason" is another cognitive activity the brain does, so you have to crack open the brain again to see what kinds of reasons really justify abusing somebody and what reasons don't justify that, but now we're looking into the areas of the brain dealing with "consent to things happening to me", rather than the parts dealing with "actions I want to do."

So, uh, there are two things going on here that are in the "morality" world, but they're doing two different jobs. One is how action actually gets chosen. The other is how action is justified. I think the justification & consent are the important reasons to "morality" in the sense of consent... We can't do things to people with justification unless they consent to them, although we can definitely do it to them physically. It's just wrong & should get a big red X on it.



I think these things too. There are a lot of experiments AFAIK talking about cognitive constructions of empathy with others that have the hallmarks of innateness. The mirror neuron is one of the most celebrated, where the cognitive system constructs or primes a feeling or emotion that other people are feeling, so when someone gets injured, you have a very deep and innate sense of their pain. Or even when people perform some ritual, there's a sense where we "get the feel of their actions" ... it's why people find it so easy to finish each others sentences, or when you watch someone perform a task a few times, it makes it easier for you to perform it since you've been primed just watching. Of course, again, it's a cognitive priming that other later systems may affect too. But the mirror neurons are doing some kind of work in that neighborhood. It's not all there is to say about empathy and the sense of other humans built-in innately, but it's one piece, and we have a good idea about many other pieces, it'd take a few dozen dissertations maybe for each one and you'd still have tons of work to do...

Edit: Sorry, should have paid more attention to what you were quoting... So, yes, I think an emotional link to "murder" is very innate through systems like the mirror neurons and other systems like that, that construct other people that all humans have (and chimpanzees and some other mammals have to some extent). So when another human is murdered, it has a deep, instinctive, and emotional meaning constructed that you feel. (This was also the sense that I was talking about the innate "halo" that some authorities voices get. I mean like an infant listens to its mother and later teachers, long before it recognizes socially what that means.) So that said, once people get socialized, the concept of "murder" is also a very complex social construct too, aside from the emotional feelings around it. It's also an element of social practices like robbery or enraged jealousy or sociopathy, as opposed to other categories of killing like in warfare or euthenasia. When you get socialized growing up as a child, I think you get all these social norms also embedded into the meaning of murder as well, and that affects I think both its normative feeling (that you feel emotionally) and the reasons you have to justify it to someone (that might be a combination of "reasoning" and other emotions). Then I think this applies to the Moral Stages theory you were talking about, where there are stages of socialization into normative systems out there in the social world... then there are different kinds of "halos" people's words may get (although I do think that many of them still emotionally coattail on the innate system. The expression they sometimes use is that socialization feelings are parasitic on the instinctive feelings and systems. And this is still aside from "cold reasoning", which is also parasitic on some instinctive "project" systems too, but in a different way than the "hot feelings" systems.)

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Edit2: KK, obviously I get a high talking about this stuff. But I should have a proviso now: if you respond to something I said or disagree, I can't really do long posts every time, or maybe I can't respond at all, and it feels weird if I can't describe to the detail I want and give it the "treatment", but you'll know I would have things to say like if we were talking about it over beers or something... And for the record, I really do change my mind when I hear really good arguments.

Yakoob on 17/8/2012 at 03:29

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Alright, let me be more blunt then - we got to a fundamental point of the debate which calls on theories, sources and authors I clearly am not educated enough to continue, and I am kind of burned out on reading philosophical wall-o-texts at this point :p

That's also why, while I do enjoy philosophy, I have a threshold; I always feel there's a point where new "layers" are just being tacked on in the name of understanding, but I just feel it's making things more complicated than they need to be for practical purposes and, sometimes, inventing complexity that isn't there.

Like you posing that (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imamcajBEJs#t=33s) we need to go deeper to "understand what makes people follow norms." But, honestly, for all practical purpose, do we? Do we really need to know what infants are thinking and whether we can put our hand through a table or not to govern society? Accepting a mix of a bit of logic, bit of emotion, bit of self interest, and a bit of social influences is good enough for me :p

CCCToad on 18/8/2012 at 01:13

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If you've got some beer to go with it I'm game! Personally, I've always found alcohol very conducive to holding sanguine philosophical discussions.




To some extent. In others, it will determine them. The best example is abortion. We all agree that it is wrong to take another person's life without their consent, and we also (almost) all agree that people should have freedom to do what they want with their own bodies. However, at which point an embryo becomes a separate human being with it's own life depends ENTIRELY upon one's religious beliefs, so its impossible to come to any real consensus on this issue.