I'm finally getting around to blogging on Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain, by Antonio Damasio. This is a fascinating attempt to pull together what's currently known about the neurophysiology of brain-function, including Damasio's own research into a coherent account of human's capacity for reason and the fundamental role that emotion plays in it. At the center of the book is research done on patients, in particular one patient called Elliot, who have had certain specific portions of their brains damaged (whether by accident or as a result of tumors) which prevent them from feeling emotion normally and how surprisingly this results in undermining their capacity for reason, despite all their logical facilities and capacity for abstract thought being completely unaffected. (I've mentioned this before in connection with Patricia Churchland's Brain-Wise, which relies on some of Damasio's experiments.)
The most telling experiment goes as follows: Subjects play a card game. They are given a certain amount of money to start, and are seated in front of four decks of cards. Each card will either pay them some money (e.g. +50$) or take some away (e.g. -10$). Each turn they turn over one card from any of the four decks, and follow the payout instructions. Unknown to them, the decks have different mixes of cards such that two of the decks have low rewards, but lower penalties, and two of the decks have high rewards but even higher penalties. The players aren't allowed to keep records of their draws. Some of the subjects are normal people, others are patients who have the problem described in the previous paragraph and are unable to generate emotions although their reasoning powers are intact.
Normal players experiment with drawing cards from the various decks, and eventually settle on drawing from the two "winning" (low pay/low risk) decks, and make money. The emotionless players like Elliot also start by drawing randomly, but keep drawing from the high-risk loser decks, and eventually lose all their starting money. They are given more money, and lose that. They know that they haven't done well (they are perfectly aware that they went bust and "borrowed" more money), but they don't change their style of play at all.
The kicker is that they then repeated the experiment, switching the decks around, and measuring the galvanic skin response of the subjects as they played. Not surprisingly, the emotionless players skin response was flat all the way through. On the other hand, the normal players began showing galvanic skin response indicative of nervousness or unease when reaching for cards from "bad" decks even before they began to alter their pattern of play away from those decks. The response gets stronger and stronger, and eventually they start to disfavor those decks. That is to say, during the course of play as they experiment with drawing cards from different decks, they have a visceral response indicating a weighing of the probabilities even before they are conscious of the difference or can articulate any theory.
Damasio argues, and I'd have to agree, that this is really strong evidence that emotions and feelings are an integral part of how we reason about the world. Without feelings and subconscious emotional processing of the situations we are confronted with, it appears to be impossible to arrive at correct logical prudential decisions. He suggests, and offers some further evidence for, a theory that part of what's happening is that we use visceral responses to prune decision trees to the point where we can consciously reason about them, and without these visceral calculations that are part and parcel of our emotions even highly devloped abstract reasoning facilities such as Elliot's are overwhelmed and rendered ineffective at coming to conclusions. After the experiment, Elliot was able to correctly analyze what was wrong with his play, but confessed that even so if he were presented with the same situation again, he just wouldn't know what to do.
Jonathan Ichikawa weighs in on the immortal driver question, but it appears to me that he didn't really stop to think about Tyler Cowen's example of why just looking at single risks (or risks over time-slices, which Jonathan suggests is the natural utilitarian way of looking at it) also leads to problems: the involuntary Russian Roulette example.
I.e. Suppose you took a gun rigged so that its chance of firing was exactly the same as your chance of hitting a pedestrian while driving* and you amused yourself by pointing at random pedestrians and pulling the trigger. If driving the car isn't wrong, why would this game of Russian Roulette be wrong? The answer can't just be in the expected consequence, since that's the same, but neither can it be in the utility derived, unless you would ban driving if it was also for a frivolous purpose (e.g. down to the video store, or just for fun).
* to really be equivalent you probably have to specify that it's the chance of hitting a pedestrian over time t and that the gun is further rigged so that you can't pull the trigger again until time t has elapsed
Yesterday Tyler Cowen asked a question at
The Volokh Conspiracy as to whether since every time you drive a car you run some small risk of killing a pedestrian, it would be immoral for an immortal to drive--reasoning that of the course of a very long life the cumulative risk of killing someone amounts to near certainty.
Later, prompted by some of the discussion (particularly Lawrence Solum's), Tyler asks Would potential immortals be risk-averse?. For instance, would they avoid driving because it poses some risk to themselves and the potential loss of infinite life must outweigh the small utility of driving.
I have two observations about this:
As to the first, the question of the morality of repeatedly engaging in actions with tiny risks is another one of those cases that seems to assume the truth of some form of consequentialism. Neither deontological nor virtue ethical theories would find this at all puzzling. If driving was something that you had a right to do and no overriding duty not to, or if driving was compatible with or an outgrowth of the cultivation of virtuous character traits, then there's no question about how best to "define the relevant class of risky events."
As to the second, I think that psychologically it is implausible that people would behave much differently unless immortality also changed their neurobiology substantially. After all, if people really did think along those lines we would expect that since they have the most remaining lifespan to lose, young people would be the most risk averse when it comes to reckless actions. Obviously people just aren't built that way.
Amy Lamboley, at Crescat Sententia, has a post (What You Should Be Reading) referring to a Timothy Burke post on Cliopatria about some proposed ground-rules for using historical analogies when talking about current events and the legitimacy of the whole enterprise.
Naturally, what caught my eye isn't the substance of the post itself, but Amy's passing reference to an essay she wrote on Nietzche's On the Advantages and Disadvantages of History for Life which she called On the Advantages and Disadvantages of Sixteenth Century Women Religious Mystics in Brittany for Life. It's short, well worth reading, but I think she takes a wrong turn towards the conclusion.
However, the effectiveness of his argument that scientific history is actually dangerous rests on an unwarranted conflation of individuals and societies. Consider our much maligned specialist in women religious mystics in sixteenth century Brittany. From the point of society as a whole, she is at worst an eccentric, her occupation harmful only insofar as it prevents her from potentially doing something more productive, at best shedding light on a neglected corner of the past that may even turn out to hold a few useful fragments. She only becomes dangerous when one takes this hapless historian, multiplies her by a factor of ten or a hundred, and turns her into a vast academic conspiracy dedicated to substituting tedious accounts of the lives of women about whom few have heard and fewer even care for the monumental, inspiring biographies of men such as Napoleon and Louis XIV.
I think that it's Amy who has made the unwarranted conflation between individuals and society. From the point of view of the herd, it may be a harmless eccentricity for smart scholars to turn to recording history as a series of "indigestible knowledge stones", but Nietzche wasn't interested in the good of the herd. Merely phrasing the question of danger as danger to society is to stand Nietzche on his head. For Nietzche, the danger of the practice, which makes it worth denouncing in the strongest terms, is the danger that it will seduce a scholar capable of higher work into "harmless" puttering and collecting facts; what is "harmless" to the herd is a mortal danger to the (potentially) great individual--a squandering of that individual's life and power. The "mere presence of scientific history as an occupation" is more harmful than "the presence of auto repair or cooking or other highly useful, highly mundane occupations", because it is among the intellectuals and scholars that Nietzche expects to find the potentially great. Remember that the canonical great figures in Nietzche's mind were people like Goethe, Plato, Epicurus, not mere politicians like Bismarck.
It is precisely because the potentially great are so rare that squandering even one is a horrific tragedy, and the fact that "the historicist German society against which Nietzsche railed" threw up a Bismarck is hardly the kind of thing that would have assuaged Nietzche's fears (apropos of which, after he went mad, Nietzche wrote a letter to Meta von Salis in which he remarked "I have just seized possession of my kingdom, am throwing the pope into prison, and having Wilhelm, Bismarck, and Stocker shot").
Leiter's Nietzche on Morality turns out to be pretty good. ("Turns out", because as I recorded before, I had some qualms based on Leiter's blogging persona.) I don't think I buy his contention that Nietzche was an anti-realist when it comes to values (i.e. he would deny that there are any "objective facts about non-prudential value") . I find the objections to this interpretation that Leiter lays out much more convincing than his attempts to deal with those objections. In particular, I just can't read Nietzche as someone who "thinks his evaluative judgements are merely his idiosyncratic preferences"--as Leiter admits, he just doesn't write like someone who believes that. He goes on to adduce some reasons for supposing so, but to me they ring hollow. For example, he argues that Nietzche's rhetoric about value is only rhetoric, and "the language of truth and falsity is conspicuously absent" (emphasis in the original). He constrasts this with Nietzche's critique of e.g. Christian cosmology, which is loaded with epistemic terms.
First recall Nietzche's goal: to free nascent higher types from the grip of [Morality in the Pejorative Sense]. That being his ultimate aim, there seems to be no reason why he should not want to employ all the rhetorical resources available--including resources that depend on the fact that most readers will find falsity to be an objection to a view. Insofar as most readers still think truth has "absolute value" (the view that Nietzche attacks in GM III), then Nietzche can take advantage of that fact in trying to dissuade them from accepting MPS.
It seems like there would be every reason not to employ such rhetorical tricks. The problem with this, as I see it, is that if the force of Nietzche's argument is intended part of a rhetorical trick, then as soon as the very types that Nietzche is trying to reach and get to reconsider the value of the herd morality (in Leiter's account) come to understand what he's driving at, the force of the argument is spent. The Nietzche as anti-realist about values interpretation seems to me to make Nietzche a closet nihilist: Nihilism (at least about values) is true, but one should pretend that it isn't for aesthetic reasons.
I'm more inclined to believe that Nietzche was indeed a realist about values, and in particular that he believed that there was an objective fact about whether certain men were of a "higher" or "lower" type (a single passage in Zarathustra that lumps higher/lower with other created value distinctions notwithstanding), and further objective facts (which mostly need to be determined empirically) about what was good or bad for producing such types and allowing them to flourish, and that the flourishing of higher types was objectively desirable, mostly for reasons that Leiter lays out quite well despite his attempts to undercut them. In fact, I lean towards thinking that it parallels and is tied in with his whole line of thought about health: healthy and unhealthy, and things being good for one's health or bad for one's health are objective facts about the world, even though they might be idiosyncratic (the health regimen that works for Cornaro, as Nietzche points, doesn't necessarily work for everyone else even though Cornaro doesn't hesitate to recommend it universally). I don't really have time to talk about exactly how close this parallel is today, but I find it very telling so maybe I'll get back to it later.