OK, possibly to find the headline funny you have to have seen Peter Pan as recently as I have.
Excellent post by John Holbo about the apparent contradiction in holding both utilitarian or deontological ethical views but nevertheless believing that one can have "dirty hands":It’s the problem of what to do when, in order to ‘do the right thing’, you have to ‘do the wrong thing’. Torture the prisoner to learn the location of the bomb. Allow a thoroughly unsavory political group to be part of your governing coalition because otherwise you can’t retain power.
I'm not sure, though, that what he calls "virtue-grubbers" (people who think "Oh, goody! A poor person! Now I can be virtuous!" And as an aside, you gotta love a philosopher who is willing to take examples from The Tick) are necessarily an outcome of some sort of virtue ethics. It strikes me as entirely possible to desire to be the type of person who would do X when confronted with situation Y without actually also desiring that situation Y comes about so that you can demonstrate. For instance, I might harbor a hope that I will die well (e.g. with dignity) but that might not translate into a hope that I will die.
This seems exactly right, though:
But in the realm of moral merit and demerit, nothing ever goes away or gets subtracted or divided through by anything else. Everything sticks and stays and just piles up over time. (At most, it fades a bit with repeated washing.) There is no double-entry bookkeeping in the ledger of your soul. Killing three people to save four is not equivalent to just plain saving one. And if you kill two people to save two people the latter deed does not simply erase the first, neatly restoring your soul to the pristine mint condition it enjoyed before things took an exciting hairpin turn through better and worse. A person who has killed two people to save two people is a person who has killed two people to save two people. People who do this sort of thing on a regular basis – killing people to save people, say – end up complicated. Ditto for the sorts of crimes that we regard as reparable – property crimes as opposed to crimes against life and limb. If I steal a million dollars, spend it, then manage to earn it all back with interest, and pay it back, I am not therefore indistinguishable in point of moral virtue from someone who has never stolen a cent. I am not clearly better or worse. I am certainly quite a different sort of character, though.
Brain Has Separate Areas For Actual And Interpreted Sensory DataBut we decide what is right and which is an illusion.
But a new collaborative study involving a biomedical engineer at Washington University in St. Louis and neurobiologists at the University of Pittsburgh shows that sometimes you can't believe anything that you see. More importantly, the researchers have identified areas of the brain where what we're actually doing (reality) and what we think we're doing (illusion, or perception) are processed.
Daniel Moran, Ph.D., Washington University assistant professor of biomedical engineering and neurobiology, and University of Pittsburgh colleagues Andrew B. Schwartz, Ph.D., and G. Anthony Reina, M.D., focused on studying perception and playing visual tricks on macaque monkeys and some human subjects. They created a virtual reality video game to trick the monkeys into thinking that they were tracing ellipses with their hands, though they actually were moving their hands in a circle.
They monitored nerve cells in the monkeys enabling them to see what areas of the brain represented the circle and which areas represented the ellipse. They found that the primary motor cortex represented the actual movement while the signals from cells in a neighboring area, called the ventral premotor cortex, were generating elliptical shapes.
Pretty direct evidence for the existence of models in the brain (simulations of one part of the brain by another).
The body is a great reason, a plurality with one sense, a war and a peace, a herd and a shepherd. An instrument of your body is also your little reason, my brother, which you call "spirit"--a little instrument and toy of your great reason.
"I," you say, and are proud of the word. But greater is that in which you do not wish to have faith--your body and its great reason: that does not say "I," but does "I."
What the sense feels, what the spirit knows, never has its end in itself. But sense and spirit would persuade you that they are the end of all things: that is how vain they are. Instruments and toys are sense and spirit: behind them still lies the self. The self also seeks with the eyes of the senses; it also listens with the ears of the spirit. Always the self listens and seeks; it compares, overpowers, conquers, destroys. It controls, and it is in control of the ego too.
Behind your thoughts and feelings, my brother, there stands a mighty ruler, and unknown sage--whose name is self. In your body he dwells; he is your body.
There is more reason in your body than in your best wisdom. And who knows why your body needs precisely your best wisdom?
Your self laughs at your ego and at its bold leaps. "What are these leaps and flights of though to me?" it says to itself. "A detour to my end. I am the leading strings of the ego and the prompter of its concepts."
The self says to the ego, "Feel pain here!" Then the ego suffers and thinks how it might suffer no more--and that is why it is made to think.
The self says to the ego, "Feel pleasure here!" Then the ego is pleased and thinks how it might often be pleased again--and that is why it is made to think.
- Thus Spoke Zarathustra, tr. Walter Kaufmann, p. 34-35
I think this is almost exactly right, in light of our best current empirical understanding of the mind and the brain, as I discussed in re Descartes' Error and similar posts. Complex processes in the brain give rise to consciousness and self-awareness, and they are driven by (not the drivers of) the body and its needs, affinities, desires, and the brain and mind are fundamentally instrumental. Their existence, and the way that they operate are, for better or worse, shaped by evolution and bounded by their instrumentality. (That's not to say that McGinn is right to despair of ever understanding them; in fact McGinn has never looked more wrong than in light of the strides that are being made in practically every field that starts with "neuro." Reason unaided might not be up to the task, perhaps even for deep reasons, but the scientific method is an astonishingly powerful lever)
As Nietzche said "A thought comes when it wills, not when I will it." This seems to me to be a really key insight, that a lot of philosophy of mind that I've read--even philosophy of mind that properly dismisses the Cartesian self--misses completely.
I think Nietzsche had their number:
"According to nature" you want to live? O you noble Stoics, what deceptive words these are! Imagine a being like nature, wasteful beyond measure, indifferent beyond measure, without purposes and consideration, without mercy and justice, fertile and desolate and uncertain all at the same time; imagine indifference itself as a power--how could you live according to this indifference? Living—is not that precisely wanting to be other than this nature? Is not living--estimating, preferring, being unjust, being limited, wanting to be different? And supposing your imperative "live according to nature" meant at bottom as much as "live according to life"--how can you not do that? Why make a principle out of what you yourselves are and must be?
In truth the matter is altogether different: while you pretend rapturously to read the canon of your law in nature, you want something opposite, you strange actors and self-deceivers! Your pride wants to impose your morality, your ideal, on nature--even on nature--and incorporate them in her; you demand that she should be nature "according to the Stoa," and you would like all existence to exist only after your own image-—as an immense eternal glorification and generalization of Stoicism. For all your love of truth, you have forced yourselves so long, so persistently, so rigidly-hypnotically to see nature the wrong way, namely Stoically, that you are no longer able to see her differently. And some abysmal arrogance finally still inspires you with the insane hope that because you know how to tyrannize yourselves—Stoicism is self-tyranny—nature, too, lets herself be tyrannized: is not the Stoic--a piece of nature?
But this is an ancient eternal story: what formerly happened with the Stoics still happens today, too, as soon as any philosophy begins to believe in itself. It always creates a world in its own image; it cannot do anything otherwise. Philosophy is this tyrannical drive itself, the most spiritual will to power, to a "creation of the world," to the causa prima[first cause].
- Beyond Good And Evil (tr. Walter Kaufmann)