dangerous ideas
January 2nd, 2006 by Lawrence David
a bunch of really nifty idea nuggets here (“today’s most dangerous ideas,” put forth by some of the brightest people i’ve ever read/heard speak/heard about); richard dawkins, a biologist who likes to think about how evolution shaped human behavior, has some especially interesting things to say:
Retribution as a moral principle is incompatible with a scientific view of human behaviour. As scientists, we believe that human brains, though they may not work in the same way as man-made computers, are as surely governed by the laws of physics. When a computer malfunctions, we do not punish it. We track down the problem and fix it, usually by replacing a damaged component, either in hardware or software.
Basil Fawlty, British television’s hotelier from hell created by the immortal John Cleese, was at the end of his tether when his car broke down and wouldn’t start. He gave it fair warning, counted to three, gave it one more chance, and then acted. “Right! I warned you. You’ve had this coming to you!” He got out of the car, seized a tree branch and set about thrashing the car within an inch of its life. Of course we laugh at his irrationality. Instead of beating the car, we would investigate the problem. Is the carburettor flooded? Are the sparking plugs or distributor points damp? Has it simply run out of gas? Why do we not react in the same way to a defective man: a murderer, say, or a rapist? Why don’t we laugh at a judge who punishes a criminal, just as heartily as we laugh at Basil Fawlty? Or at King Xerxes who, in 480 BC, sentenced the rough sea to 300 lashes for wrecking his bridge of ships? Isn’t the murderer or the rapist just a machine with a defective component? Or a defective upbringing? Defective education? Defective genes?
people love to dump on evolutionary biologists because they’re so reductionist. nonetheless, if you buy the idea that the brain really is just a kind of computer, adhering to some set of processing rules, dawkin’s ideas become awfully interesting.
That is interesting. Except how do we know when a malfunction occurs? things like murder and rape are moral infractions, but morality is an artifical set of rules that civilization has set in place and not something that we are inherently born with. when computers are designed and made, their rules are built right in by the physical limitations set by physics and the desiner. I dont think humans were born with any kind of rules in place, so how are you supposed to know if someone is malfunctioning or not? I mean this biologist’s idea is dangerous, he is implying that there is or should be a master set of rules that everyone should live by, and people who break the rules should undergo “reeducation” to fix the “problem” sound like any science ficition you have read or seen? equalibirum comes to mind
Hey Lawrence,
Been poking around your blog and thought I’d comment because the quarter’s just starting and I have time to do things like that. I think there is a subtle difference between the cases that’s important. We know exactly how a car works, there really isn’t a mystery to that. We can build them and take them apart with little problem. So for John Cleese to beat a car, well that’s ridiculous because we KNOW how to fix it. If someone kills someone else we don’t really KNOW why (not to say that it’s unknowable – that’s an entirely different question) so we deal with in the best ways we can, i.e. prision, punishment/reward systems. Maybe one day we will have magical pills that turn a serial rapist into a gay hair stylist, but we’re not at that point yet (and I think we’re not really going to get there), so until then I won’t laugh at the judge (so long as he’s locking up dangerous minorites). As for the comment above, well we make the value judgement that cancer is “bad” and we want to eliminate it and I think this guy doesn’t really see a difference between having cancer and being a rapist. I think he would say science already takes some sort of moral stand eliminating things and yes we are on dangerous ground but isn’t that why I have to take my ethics class where I learn not to kill people?
w00t – a conversation! how fun!
first, andrew:
i don’t think that dawkins believes that there is an absolute set of rules to live by – something like absolute “good” or “bad.” rather, i think he’d say that morality is an evolutionary construct, a social adaptation that has allowed people to live together harmoniously and which thereby enhances our species’ fitness. (the implicit idea being that a group of individuals who work together have a better chance of surviving than had they not associated.)
and in response to both earlier posts:
as usual, trying to reduce human behavior into a simple analogy produces problems. i think you hit the nail on the head jason; there is unknown cause driving human behavior. i imagine that dawkins’ point is to draw attention to that fact – that society ought to address the causes of human behavior, rather than react to human behavior. being a good scientist/biologist, dawkins of course argues that these causes can be discerned using science … which, the more i reflect upon it, doesn’t really strike me as that new an idea after all.