[lit-ideas] Re: On being called a Lyre
- From: Robert Paul <rpaul@xxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 18 Sep 2008 14:50:26 -0700
Walter said
Affective factors would seeem to be irrelevant to such [moral]
obligations or to the form of reasoning we require of ourselves and
others when engaged in moral deliberation and judgement.
Eric replied
Poet Theodore Roethke expressed an opposing judgment when he wrote, "We
think by feeling. What is there to know?"*
I don't recognize this as an opposing judgment. Sorry. If I had to think
by feeling whether I should take food, water, warm clothes, a
flashlight, map, etc., on a day hike in the Columbia River Gorge,
there's no reason (can't think of another word) why I shouldn't just
'feel' that I won't get lost, break my ankle, become dehydrated—possibly
all of these together—because I 'feel' that I'm stronger and more
powerful than those wusses (whom we around here read and hear about
every month or so, when they get lost and stranded while on an afternoon
hike, and have to spend several nights in a wet T-shirt in temperatures
near freezing) who aren't the true outdoorsman that I am.
I might feel that I have such a rapport with animals that I can walk
right up to a grizzly bear and chuck it under the chin.
I might feel that there is a greatest prime number; that love is just
around the corner; that 'chopsticks' is more profoundly moving than the
B-Minor Mass (just an example, folks); that if I pump out the waste from
my septic tank and empty it into a nearby stream, nobody's the worse for
it. And so on into the mists of absurdity.
Yet, I disagree with Walter, too. (See below.)
Neuroscientists recently backed Roethke's poetic insight.
Roethke and the neuroscientists are over two-hundred years too late.
Hume is famous for having argued that 'reason is, and always ought to
be, the slave of the passions,' that reason is inert, when it comes to
moving people to action. A crude version of Hume's summary view would be
that reason alone gives us no motive to act (in this he agrees with
Aristotle, so the neuroscientists are really over 2,300 years too late).
Hume's views are much more sophisticated than this, but they were loud
enough to wake Kant from his dogmatic slumbers. I don't think there can
be a serious discussion of reason vs. emotion without taking them into
consideration; but maybe we can begin one anyway.
On Hume, though, this site may be helpful. Go to section 13. It isn't
long or obtuse or filled with jargon. Might clear up some stuff.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hume/
Conducted by researchers at the University of Southern California,
Harvard University, Caltech and the University of Iowa, the study shows
that emotion plays an important role in scenarios that pose a moral
dilemma.
It may, or it may not. This is such an unimaginative and improbable
scenario that I blush for those researchers:
'Consider the following scenario: someone you know has AIDS and plans to
infect others, some of whom will die. Your only options are to let it
happen or to kill the person.'
My only option? Get real. He's about to press a button that ill set off
an AIDS bomb? He PLANS to affect others. Shoot the bastard! Don't set
his hair on fire. Don't reason with him. Don't call animal control. Your
ONLY option is to shoot him. A clear case if I ever saw one.
This is too long already. I'll say something later about another
supposed moral dilemma that's been in the literature for a while now.
I've always liked the Roethke poem.
Robert Paul
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