Great bolshy yarblockos to you!
Yesterday Math Rock drove down this a-way, and we went over to Lestat's for awhile. Again, that place is decent, but the clientele drove us out; a seriously disgusting dude parked right behind MR, and the stench was overpowering. After that we walked a few blocks to the Adams Avenue Bookstore, where he made a few purchases. I held out for Betty's, because I knew her trashy paperback section was far more swollen. Turns out I was able to pick up The Final Days for a scant $1.65 (plus tax). I think it might even be the first paperback edition. In addition, I found a copy of a Bill Moyers book with an interview with no less a personage than Patricia Smith Churchland! Most of it was a lot of only marginally interesting brain stuff, ("Moyers: Have you ever held a brain?") but there was an interesting tidbit in the back where Moyers and Churchland are waxing extemporaneously about the relationship between brain studies and ethical theory, and she says (I'm paraphrasing, but it's pretty close): "Learning how the brain works won't tell us which moral system we ought to live by." Which is, of course, true, but a dictum she appears to have given up in recent years.
After that, I did a fair bit of reading and finished watching Throne of Blood, the Kurosawa remake of MacBeth. Be quite honest with you, I think the fact that I know MacBeth so well took something away from that movie. I don't know. It certainly didn't have the power of Ran, in my view, but this might be just because I haven't read King Lear.
After that, I went to up La Jolla and watched A Clockwork Orange with MR and the neighbors. I don't really feel like I saw it, though; there was a fair amount of background play-by-play happening, which always puts me in kind of a bad mood while watching movies, but I guess A Clockwork Orange is not the kind of movie that it's really easy to get absorbed in the first time. It was definitely more disturbing to me now than when I was watching it in high school; maybe that's a sign of maturity. Or something.
Today started out well enough; slept until 9, went to get coffee, made myself some oatmeal for lunch. But it took a turn for the worse when I tried to return the movies to the post office for their speedy trip back to Netflix. Now, all I have to do is drop these things in an outgoing mailbox. Which we don't have in our apartment complex. And, apparently, of which none exist in a ten-block radius of my apartment. I mean, really. I didn't want to walk ALL THE WAY down to the post office, which is a reasonably time consuming hike, and I knew there were no other mailboxes in that direction, so I decided to go west, which was just as long a walk, if not longer, just to find a freakin' mail drop box! Where I come from, those things are popping out of the woodwork! My kingdom for a dropbox!
Finally I found one, and it was across the street from this cheesy antique store I like to browse in sometimes, equipped with a coffee cart. I looked around at some hiddeous antiques for awhile, and then decided to order an iced tea. Well, the iced tea took a little while to brew, so I sat around, looked at the newspaper (which I found very interesting, because even the arch-conservative San Diego Union-Tribune was posting an editorial that there had to be an independent investigation of the Katrina debacle), and then picked up my iced tea. A few blocks later, I realized that I hadn't paid for it, and apparently the server forgot as well, because I lingered a little while before I took off. So I drudged back, expecting showers of praise and thank-yous for walking all this way back to give me my two bucks which I completely forgot about, but, alas, I got nothin'. She even tried to overcharge me! The nerve, I tell you. I decide not to steal something, and nobody showers me with the praise I deserve. What's this world coming to?
After that, I did a fair bit of reading and finished watching Throne of Blood, the Kurosawa remake of MacBeth. Be quite honest with you, I think the fact that I know MacBeth so well took something away from that movie. I don't know. It certainly didn't have the power of Ran, in my view, but this might be just because I haven't read King Lear.
After that, I went to up La Jolla and watched A Clockwork Orange with MR and the neighbors. I don't really feel like I saw it, though; there was a fair amount of background play-by-play happening, which always puts me in kind of a bad mood while watching movies, but I guess A Clockwork Orange is not the kind of movie that it's really easy to get absorbed in the first time. It was definitely more disturbing to me now than when I was watching it in high school; maybe that's a sign of maturity. Or something.
Today started out well enough; slept until 9, went to get coffee, made myself some oatmeal for lunch. But it took a turn for the worse when I tried to return the movies to the post office for their speedy trip back to Netflix. Now, all I have to do is drop these things in an outgoing mailbox. Which we don't have in our apartment complex. And, apparently, of which none exist in a ten-block radius of my apartment. I mean, really. I didn't want to walk ALL THE WAY down to the post office, which is a reasonably time consuming hike, and I knew there were no other mailboxes in that direction, so I decided to go west, which was just as long a walk, if not longer, just to find a freakin' mail drop box! Where I come from, those things are popping out of the woodwork! My kingdom for a dropbox!
Finally I found one, and it was across the street from this cheesy antique store I like to browse in sometimes, equipped with a coffee cart. I looked around at some hiddeous antiques for awhile, and then decided to order an iced tea. Well, the iced tea took a little while to brew, so I sat around, looked at the newspaper (which I found very interesting, because even the arch-conservative San Diego Union-Tribune was posting an editorial that there had to be an independent investigation of the Katrina debacle), and then picked up my iced tea. A few blocks later, I realized that I hadn't paid for it, and apparently the server forgot as well, because I lingered a little while before I took off. So I drudged back, expecting showers of praise and thank-yous for walking all this way back to give me my two bucks which I completely forgot about, but, alas, I got nothin'. She even tried to overcharge me! The nerve, I tell you. I decide not to steal something, and nobody showers me with the praise I deserve. What's this world coming to?
posted by dd0031 at 4:11 PM
5 Comments:
Yeah, the play-by-play rubs me the wrong way, too. I used to get pretty upset, but now I'm resigned. There are two cultures of movie-watchers, and there's not much that our side can do to convert the other (short of being assholes, anyway).
On the other hand, in the last episode of Firefly that I watched, the preacher threatens the captain with something like "If you take advantage of that girl, you're going to the special hell they reserve for pedophiles and movie-talkers." So maybe Joss Whedon is on our side, and working to change the balance.
Straw man, dude. Here's what Pat says in Brainwise about naturalizing ethics:
An undertaking of great importance, this new synthesis blends the sciences of who we are with pragmatic common sense and the wisdom of lives lived. Will it produce a set of absolute rules, applicable for all times in all places? No. Will it provide an algorithm for solving specific moral questions, such as whether stem-cell research is morally acceptable? No. Will it constitute an unquestioned authority of what is right? Not this either.
What it can begin to do is to provide a naturalistic perspective on the foundation of moral judgment, and in so doing, it can help us disentangle outselves from the many myths about morality.
a) I have no idea what that means.
b) I seem to recall her publishing a few papers with Casebeer, the conclusions of which are, roughly speaking, given the way the brain works, Kantianism and utilitarianism (and by this, it seems to me, she just means consequentialism) cannot be correct, and we have to go with some sort of virtue theory.
c) This advocacy of virtue theory, though absurd, is perfectly compatible with "not providing a set of absolute rules at all times and all places" and not giving us an answer to specific moral controversies. That's always what virtue theory has been about. Which, it seems to me, is a reductio, but some people find the indeterminacy of such a theory respectable.
d) What the heck is it going to disentangle? Sure - I'm perfectly aware that it might provide us a naturalistic perspective on the foundation of moral judgment, but how is this going to rid us of "myths about morality"? What myths? I'm skeptical in the extreme. I'll run my argument again. Brain research v. Good Old Reflective Equilibrium. Either the brain research gives us the same answers, or it doesn't. If it does, it's merely redundant. If it doesn't, it should, and would, be rejected. Maybe it confirms, somehow, the plausibility of RE, but in that case, it's not going to have any particular effect in disentagling, other than just saying: "oh yeah, RE is the right way anyway."
e) I can, and should, be criticized for not reading all there is to read on the connection between connectionism and moral theory. But everything I have read is compatible with my claim that she seems to have given up the dictum, and that virtue theory is the correct moral theory.
The paper they wrote together is "The Neural Mechanisms of Moral Cognition," and I'm afraid I haven't read it. The Casebeer line you describe seems, as I recall, to be the one from "From Neural Is to Moral Ought," that we discussed in EPL, though I don't know that she has ever endorsed it. She is definitely into virtue theory, but I've only ever heard her defending it straight out of Aristotle.
Mind you, I'm not really in the best position to dispute what Pat Churchland has or hasn't ever said. To me, the more interesting matter is what you bring up in d). Especially given the cautious language she uses, I think you might be overstating the amount of work science is intended to do.
I agree that brain research is pretty dang unlikely to render RE obsolete, largely because it doesn't have much to say at that end of things. Although it could happen in a slightly different way...consider the following crazy possibility: what if it turns out that we are not always psychologically capable of converging on stable, consistent sets of beliefs? Sometimes we as communities/individuals may appear to be at equilibrium, but brain science reveals this to be an illusion. It seems like you could straightforwardly take down the applicability of RE in those cases with a modus tollens on "ought implies can." This of course assumes that proper RE is truly beyond our abilities; however, even if it isn't, it might be that brain research is able to solve a wider range of questions than RE alone could (again, ex hypothesi).
And so on. Whatever one's theoretical orientation, surely there are lots of things one can learn from the brain. If one is indeed a virtue person, then one's account of virtue is going to have to be compatible with the situationist literature and with neural facts about the acquisition of these virtues. If one is more of a desire-satisfaction sort, then there are plenty of ways the ethical theory might go wrong there--there are potentially a lot of folk psychological "myths" about our desires and how they are satisfied, even for those who don't take a pretty dim view of the propositional attitudes in the first place. That, I think, is all that Pat is trying to say.
And I'm perfectly fine with the latter two points. If one's a hedonist, then one surely needs to know what the most pleasurable stuff is, and that would mean, at least to some small degree, looking at the brain. I'm all for it. But the claim I was trying to make was that brain research simply cannot count as a ground level "moral fact" that helps to determine what the moral oughts are. I'm not simply relying on the naturalistic fallacy, here. Bring on naturalistic moral facts! But these natural facts are pretty impotent when it comes to organizing and defending different moral stances. Of course, once you have defended a moral stance, or accepted one, brain research becomes important in all sorts of ways, in the same way that any science becomes important in all sorts of ways. But if that's all Pat's trying to say, I have no quarrel. But my target, then, I suppose, is Casebeer, who does want to make that error.
Post a Comment
<< Home