Margaret,

1. Regarding Fred's charge of moral relativism ...

Personally, I don't think the evidence supports the claim that morality is "quite relative to the system it exists in." Your examples are all very specific things that differ from culture to culture, not counter-examples of human universals. Every culture opposes killing: some make exceptions for unfaithful wives, some make exceptions for people who worship the wrong gods, some make exceptions for strangers in their temple. But it seems to me consistent with the evidence that they all derive from common principles with different variations.

I've read Mead and Benedict and the others in 1960's-era anthropology, and I think their version of cultural relativism was eventually soundly disconfirmed by their own evidence. But let's say it were true in some new sense. It seems to me it would only be because we assumed that the systems themselves are constrained in some way. It seems perverse to deny the hard facts of human universals that have been so carefully documented by biologists, neurologists, psychologists, and anthropologists for the past couple of decades. Not that culture doesn't vary a lot, it just varies in some domains within the bounds of human shared biology. One of those domains surely to me seems to be moral decision making.

I recommended Hauser because I think he deals with it in as good a way as we can currently manage, that human beings have a common moral faculty which gets tuned to different parameters in different environments. If true, then the goal of research would be to discover the common part and the parameters. There are clearly things that everyone who is developmentally normal considers bad in every culture. Every culture is against killing, and every culture has its own exceptions. It is important to distinguish true moral decisions, which have some very special characteristics, from social conventions. Social conventions appear to be much more arbitrary than morality.

The idea that morality itself is simply "quite relative to the system it exists in" is quite abhorrent, I think, in addition to being implausible, because it implies that we cannot or should not change a horrendous situation caused by a totalist or maladpative culture, because it is "ok relative to itself." No, I insist that we can and should derive judgments about the good and bad aspects of each culture, for the sake of humanity, particularly when people are suffering. Or is instinctive disdain for suffering related to one of those human universals that you don't believe exists?

2. Regarding emotions, beliefs, knowledge, etc.

I looked at this for over 2 hrs trying to figure it out. To my frustration, I couldn't discern anything radically different from our previous discussions. I agree with aspects, yet it goes into weird directions for me as well.

The best I can determine, you believe that there is such a thing as "rationality" which is some sort of cognition that is completely devoid of brain mechanisms (?), or at least independent of the brain mechanisms shared with emotional responses and states. Some sort of purely cold reason, of the sort the mythical Vulcans from Star Trek would approve. I can't see how such a thing could exist, much less have evolved. You seem to have taken the traditional notion of a split between emotion and reason and made it a metaphysical principle. I honestly don't think the brain can or does work that way. I think most of what we traditionally call reasoning is really the result of a mixture of different tacit knowledge systems, emotional feedback, and mechanisms specialized to make deliberation (slow, careful, systematic thinking) possible. So I disagree with your model of hot emotion vs. cold rationality, I think all reasoning is part hot and part cold.

I gave a very specific example of successfully applying rational process to a problem, because you claimed that in essence, rationality doesn't work.

You responded:

Again, it took me a long time to try to figure out what you were trying to say here. I guess you thought I was trying to say that I use what you think of as our "cold reasoning faculty" and my clients don't. That wasn't my point. Since I don't think anything of the kind exists, I didn't mean that at all. I was saying that deliberation and systematic thinking do make a positive difference in certain situations, and that is what I imagine "being rational" to mean. I don't see "rationality" (as a thing that could be contrasted with "non-rational" thinking) being much more than that. All sorts of things go into the decision of what sorts of methods to use, saying that these factors can be simplified to "using different emotions" seems vacuous. Your theory seems to take something fairly specific, which you call emotion, and attribute far too many magical powers to it for my taste. An emotional response of some sort is supposedly responsible for everything we think and do, and choosing the method for solving a problem is simply a matter of finding the right emotion to apply. I don't buy it, nor do I think it even makes sense?

It seems to me as if you are just taking the traditional complexities of "mind" and calling them "emotions" instead without shedding any light on the subject.

I think your interpretation that applying a rational method to solving a problem is "using different emotions" must in some sense mean that I must be listening to different inner voices than they do in choosing the methods to apply, and I suppose that is true, albeit somewhat trivial. Thinking is always a matter of balancing the effects of different influences. My point was just to make a counter-example to your claim that rationality doesn't work for us in decision making in general. Regardless of how infrequently we might use it, or how frequently we might misuse it. Deliberation and systematic thinking are among our most powerful and important and under-utilized tools in my experience. I don't find people using them very often, and I suspect many people justify this by a philosophy similar to yours, that it simply doesn't work, or that there is some alternative hidden in "intuition" or "emotion."

More commonly, they just don't have the skills to use it well and the expertise in the specific domains that is needed.

Since we seem to define: reason, belief, knowledge, and similar abstracts somewhat differently, and we keep going back to arguments where those terms are central, it is tremendously difficult to discuss these things with you and I feel as if we most often talk past each other. Today in particular after working so hard to understand your posts, I feel as if it costs more time and effort perhaps that it is worth. But I appreciate your efforts and patience regardless.


kind regards,

Todd