They’ve recently been called a tax on stupidity…often the poorest people play the longest odds in a feedback loop.
Addition: Give a man a fish…
Allow a man to pay for a ticket with terrible odds of winning money that could buy him fish (which probably wouldn’t be the first thing he’d buy) and you can pay for your schools and roads.
See Also: A little bit about Indian run casinos: Roger Sandall: Marveling At The Aborigines, But Not Really Helping?
Just what are Obama’s political tendencies…how much has he benefitted from affirmative action…and does this kind of discussion help us choose an able President? Obama’s issues page here (subject to change as he is a politician).
by J-a-x
See Also: Barack Obama Will Not Accept Public Financing…Two Articles On The Theme Of Women: Jody Kantor And Elaine McArdle
This is the last post on Prinz I’ll put up that isn’t a more direct response to Prinz’s theory.
After David Hume and the British empiricists, William James and others, Prinz forms his theory of ”constructive sentimentalism.” Yet in Hume, all knowledge is born out of experience and perception. I think this is likely the deepest point of Prinz’s theory. Beyond this, he seems to rely on the cognitive sciences (psychology and neuroscience especially) to provide empirical evidence to support his ideas.
Perhaps:
A: Prinz may be knowingly ignoring the obvious debt the cognitive sciences owe to the hard sciences.
and/or
B: He has simply not tackled the difficulty of epistemologically grounding the cognitive sciences in the depths of the hard sciences, and thus had to confront some of the same problems that rational philosophers have regarding the hard sciences, mathematics, and the possibility of having knowledge beyond experience.
I think much rational (and thus much transcendental moral philosophy) was born of the attempt to explain how it is that mathematical knowledge, especially when united with close empirical observation (this is a gross oversimplification from a scientific point of view) yields the kind of knowledge that it does…
So while the I find the “Constructive Sentimental” theory deep and interesting, I’m more concerned about what it doesn’t include.
See the previous posts for a little more background: More On Jesse Prinz. A Review Of “The Emotional Construction Of Morals” At Notre Dame…Jesse Prinz Discusses “The Emotional Construction Of Morals” On Bloggingheads.
On one hand, Prinz uses Hume, and the depth of Hume’s empiricism (wikipedia) and applies it to morality. Where does morality come from?
“emotional responses, particularly approbation and disapprobation, constitute the core content of moral judgments.”
From our emotions. But…how do our emotional responses actually tell us something about the world? Do they contain factual content? Prinz goes further:
“What are expressed in moral judgments are not just emotions but sentiments ”
Prinz constructs a theory of ”Constructive Sentimentalism” which makes some deep arguments for his claim. You’ll have to read the review and his book.
So…
While moral progress is possible on Prinz’s theory, universal moral laws that transcend our experiences are not. Christian morality and essentially all religious morality, Kantian secular morality, and any claim to knowledge that attaches itself to thoughts that don’t arise ultimately out experience… are not valid:
“Like languages, moralities are constructed out of universal capacities, to form a great variety of mutually incompatible specific forms.”
This in interesting to think about, though do you have to throw out the baby with the bathwater? (A Nietzschean impulse, I think).
Western liberal morality emphasises rights, fairness and the avoidance of harm, and is grounded in emotional responses to failures of reciprocity and empathy for suffering. But most non-Western cultures and indeed our own social reality involve ideas of “purity”, “sacredness” and “authority” constructed from primitive disgust and animal dominance. Since the latter can be equally intense, Prinz taxes the liberal West with “moral myopia” for downplaying the importance of such values as authority, purity, and sacredness.
Oh boy…here’s where it starts to fall apart. If you throw out universal moral laws, you apparently also start talking about ”Western values” and perhaps defend, like Prinz is doing here, moral relativism.
Still, it’s a deep theory, and I’ve not done it full justice here.
See Also: Jesse Prinz Discusses “The Emotional Construction Of Morals” On Bloggingheads.…and A Few Thoughts On Allan Bloom–The Nietzsche Connection.
Generally, I haven’t been too friendly toward theories of morality based in feeling nor the idealism that can attend them. However, this discussion offers some deep ideas to think about: Jesse Prinz merges David Hume with current anthropological and psychological research.
More on Hume here (wikipedia).
After Hume, Prinz accepts the idea that our experience is primary, our knowledge comes after…or that all of our deepest thoughts have their roots in perception. We simply have no claim to knowledge beyond this.
Prinz extends this to morality; suggesting that there is no universal basis for morality and that within morality our ability to feel is primary and that our thinking…comes after.
The emotions, then, are the seat of morality, and the only way to have moral thinking is to first have moral feelings. He who extends his feeling (compassion?) to a person, or groups of people…is the only person who can legitimately claim to have moral thoughts about those people, or groups of people.
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So how are moral judgments based in feeling? Prinz appeals to:
1. Common sense-most people will assume that if you don’t seem to have any emotional interest in a subject, idea or pursuit, then you’re not really invested in it.
2. Neuroscience: Parts of the brain associated with emotion become active when involved in making moral judgments.
3. Causation: During psychological experiments in which people were put in disgusting environments, i.e. bad smells, unclean conditions, they were more likely to make harsher moral judgments, Prinz suggests this is because they are instrospecting their feelings.
4. Pathologies: People who kill and commit acts of brutality like serial killers demonstrate a reduction or elimination of emotion…and this leads to a corresponding reduction of moral competence.
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A few brief responses:
I’m not sure (I’ll have to read Hume again) that he held that our thoughts don’t happen at least at the same time as our feelings do within perception. I’m not sure Prinz can prove the primacy of feeling in morality solely based on Hume because I”m not sure Hume bases moral judgments in emotion either.
Prinz is also relying on causal arguments to support his position (no #3 especially), and Hume casts more than a little doubt on the relation between cause and effect. Hume also casts doubt onto not merely cause and effect, but also the sciences, and especially the disciplines Prinz cites here in support of his positions.
Hume is incredibly deep, but there is a Kantian dispute with Hume (which has it that if you keep following Hume’s ideas, you will come to deny the possibility of even scientific knowledge…the possibility of knowledge that doesn’t arise out of experience). I’m most concerned with what Prinz and cognitive scientists are leaving out.
Needless to say, I find it very interesting. More to come later.
Your thoughts and comments are welcome.
Addition: I think it’s fair to say that Hume makes the argument that all knowledge arises from experience. Now whether or not this necessarily makes a case for sentimentalism is up to Prinz.
See Also On This Site: A Brief Review of Jesse Prinz’s ‘The Emotional Construction Of Morals’
It’s nearly an hour, but it’s probably worth the time: a presentation by a physicist to a general audience about Einstein’s formula.
Click on photo for larger image….by HoolyPics
Some youtube video here of cities at night. The narration is a little strange. Beauty?
An interesting bit.
“People overwhelmingly give the same answers. To the first question they say, well, the outline of my face on the mirror would be pretty much the size of my face. As for the second question, that’s obvious: if I move away from the mirror, the size of my image will shrink with each step.”
“Both answers, it turns out, are wrong…”
Gratefully, Angier mostly just focuses on the concept. I don’t think you have to appeal to what hipsters might think, or people who might recognize your literary genius, or to psychological theories, or even to disputable political ideas when you cover this stuff. Science has enough disputes of its own.
Design
I found a dimpled spider, fat and white,
On a white heal-all, holding up a moth
Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth–
Assorted characters of death and blight
Mixed ready to begin the morning right,
Like the ingredients of a witches’ broth–
A snow-drop spider, a flower like a froth,
And dead wings carried like a paper kite.
What had that flower to do with being white,
The wayside blue and innocent heal-all?
What brought the kindred spider to that height,
Then steered the white moth thither in the night?
What but design of darkness to appall?–
If design govern in a thing so small.
-Robert Frost (wikipedia)
Maybe there isn’t a God, but maybe there’s still design?
There’s what you would expect:
“A complex economy is something no person or institution can understand.”
“To Hayek, this is what socialism, communism, and collectivism—he makes little distinction between them—mean: the dangerous illusion of perfectibility.”
But also this:
“Plainly, transparently—and in stark contrast to many modern conservative intellectuals—he (sic Hayek) is a man concerned with human freedom. One of the unexpected things in Road is that he writes with passion against class privilege.”
You don’t have to get into bed with leftist utopianism to see that all groups of people tend to serve their own interests, regardless of ideological bent…and that this can eventually pose a threat to individual freedoms. Perhaps the American right is being a little mystic with regard to Hayek, though Larner probably has his own motivations as well.
Larner points out the limits of Hayek’s ideas (and genius). Beyond his central insights, Hayek was also deeply influenced by romanticism, possessed a rather mystic approach to law…both encompassed by a deep commitment to individualism.
I’d also point out that there is standard German Idealism at work here, as well as the times: A hard, unyielding right and a utopian left in an embrace that later fell apart into chaos. It’s understandable that Hayek was desperate to create a platform upon which to save individual liberty.
It might be worthy of note that Karl Popper and the Vienna Circle may have been similarly shaped by those times.
Anyways, food for thought.
See Also: Friedrich Hayek Discussion On Bloggingheads. Bruce Caldwell discusses his new book on Hayek.
chr1