Lesson 8, part 9 - Truths and Trolleys. Let me start with this variant of a slide that appeared twice in the previous video, I think. It's a variant because here I'm giving you an exact quote on the left. In the previous video, I amended that quote to say the thing on the right while making clear that the idea was Greene's. I prefer the formula on the right because the one on the left, it seems to me rather misleadingly implies that being a successful free writer, a kind of happy cheater, is moral. Do you see how it says that? Let me read it. Morality is a set of psychological adaptations that allow otherwise selfish individuals to reap the benefits of cooperation. That's what he says. You can reap the benefits of cooperation without yourself cooperating. You just let everyone else do the work, then swoop down and take all the results for yourself. I don't really want to get into the game theoretical weeds, so I amended the quote to what I took to be the thought behind it. Why am I going into the weeds now after I I didn't want to do that. Well, for illustrative purposes from a strictly biological point of view, I'm not sure the formula on the right is really any better. We humans are both selfish and social. We're amphibians as it were capable living in and out of society. I said morality was the set of adaptations that allow us to slide between those 2 environments. This I take to be Green's view. I had in mind all the doggy intuitions and impulses that Hight and Green write about. You can be both selfish and social if you're predisposed to kin and reciprocal altruism and if you're highly adverse to killing people. But of course, you can also be selfish and social if you are a competent free writer, that's a strategy, parasitism. We just don't call it moral. So defining morality in such a well that it includes cunning forms of immorality in our ordinary conventional sense may not be what we're looking for. Confused? Let me try to make it a little simpler. As moral beings, we may have values that are opposed to the forces that gave rise to morality. Again, we've seen this slide before. Greene is saying in effect, that morality may go beyond maximizing the spread of our genes. And right he is. Everyone thinks so. No one says the only moral imperative is spreading our genes or anything like that. No society has ever acted as if that were the only moral imperative in practice. Nevertheless, if we translate this slide into the previous slide terms, here it doesn't matter whether we take the original quote or my inundation, we get, as moral beings, we may have a certain class of adaptive traits that are non-adaptive. That just doesn't make sense. Saying this is like saying, as amphibians, frogs may have traits that are adaptive for helping them live in and out of water, that are non-adaptive. You see the problem. It does not compute biologically. And speaking of things that do not compute biologically, why do I keep showing you that golden sun there? There on the right. I've used it so much now that probably it isn't even registering in your eyeballs anymore. Let me remind you where the sun came from. From Plato, of course! But more specifically, Glourcas, you remember that guy, he's the original moral amphibian if you like. He started as a man. Then he became a god, but simultaneously less than a man, a sea beast. Plato's idea was that it's hard to study this sort of soul so mixed up and encrusted as he is, but potentially in a rational sense, we can. Clean the guy up, that is scour his soul clean. Seeing him for the first time for the transcendent thing he truly is. Couple more quotes from Joshua Greene. As moral beings, we may have values that are opposed to the forces. That gave rise to morality? Well, you've seen that quote already. Here's one more, a new one. Morality can climb the ladder of evolution, and then kick it away. Sound pretty platonic. If you go to a biology department and say that you're there to study examples of biological creatures that have transcended their biology kicking away the ladder of evolution that raised them up, you're likely to get a rather cold reception. But Greene has fairly common sense examples in mind. Birth control for example, from a spread your genes point of view, it's a complete disaster, but it's not exactly mysterious how a number of evolved traits of our species intelligent tool making, likes to have sex, offspring difficult to raise, have come together to make birth control a reality. It is in one sense perfectly natural for us to want birth control even if from another point of view, it's contrary to the spread of our genes. Note, there's really 2 parts to the visual metaphor here, the idea of transcendent values, values that perhaps do not come from anything animal. New values. But also the idea of just scrubbing away old stuff that for whatever reason doesn't suit us anymore. More on metamorphoses. It's the shedding of old moral skins. What's Greene going for? Just the latter. I think. We don't have any values that hail from another world as it were, according to him, some ideal world behind the world, perhaps? Green's not ready to sign on for that kind of platonism, but we have a lot of old stuff we could do to slough off for our own good. But if all our values are really old values as it were, how do we know which old stuff to throw away? Maximize happiness impartially. That's Greene's 3 word definition of utilitarianism. Is utilitarianism really an ancient value? Isn't it more like an abstract invention of some 19th century philosophers with names like Bentham and Mill? I could quibble, pointing out that older philosophers than that have wanted happiness for all. But the point of it, the value in utilitarianism, happiness, good experience, is as ancient as you might hope for. It doesn't reduce the pleasure or the absence of pain, but it's closely associated with those values. It is no accident that Peter Singer, the world's most famous Utilitarian is a champion of animal rights. The values that Utilitarianism values, our values, we surely share with large sways of the animal kingdom. So to repeat, if all our values are really old and positively animal, how do we know which old values to slough off the better to rise above ourselves? To put it yet another way, again in terms of slides you saw last video, defining morality as biological adaptation is kind of a debunking strategy. You're saying X is really just Y. Morality? It's really just biology. In terms of the slides, some people say that the maiden Oreithyia was carried away by Boreas, Greek god of the north wind. But you know what? Maybe she just got blown off the rocks by a plain old wind. That's debunking religion in a nutshell. But you know what's harder than debunking religion? Half debunking. Suppose in order to make peace between the Borius believers and the Borius skeptics, we proposed a compromise. Half of Borius exists, and I think you can immediately see the problem. But I drew the line so neatly, so geometrically, you object. Very cleanly cut, doesn't matter. Half of Borius is less believable either than a whole Boreas or no Boreas at all. I think you can see what I'm getting at there. In the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, when you strike at a king, you must kill him. Take Zeus for example. If I'm going to fire my debunking death ray of natural explanation at him from on high, I can't very well half debunk him. There's such a thing as half believing in Zeus, I suppose? Maybe that's a species of agnosticism. But there's really no such thing as believing in half a Zeus if you see what I mean. And yet, isn't that sort of what Greene is doing? He's asking us to believe in half a Glaucus. We're going to debunk some of our values biologically but not all of them even though all our values are at bottom, a function of our biology? How are we going to pick and choose, which to keep and which to let go? As I said 2 videos ago, there are pragmatic reasons according to Greene. Just to quickly review, if we've all got a little utilitarian in us, it makes sense to maximize it because currency you can spend anywhere is worth more than currency that's only accepted locally. But this is a fairly shallow pragmatism, not that there's anything wrong with that, it doesn't really make for a meta morality though. It doesn't explain why utilitarianism or deep pragmatism, as Greene wants to call, is a paramount value. That is, a truly deep value. Let's look at another Greene style partial debunking of human ethical intuitions and see if we can see what's going on. Greene is a trolleyologist, that is, he spends a lot of time asking people a lot of questions about whether they would throw the switch in a case like this and he studies what goes on in their brains while they decide. In case you are unaware, the situation you are looking at is as follows: 5 people on one track, one on the other track. If you do nothing, the 5 will die. If you throw that switch, you will save them killing the one. Maybe I shouldn't have drawn them asleep and tied up. And the original story they work. Well, it's too late now. In any case, most people end up saying you should throw the switch. It's pretty clear what they're thinking. 5 is more than 1. It's pretty basic moral math. Now let's consider a second situation. On the left, to compare and contrast with the original, you see you, on a footbridge. Again, the trolley is coming, again there those 5 poor victims on the track. The only way to stop the trolley is to push a very large man off the bridge. Why does he have to be so large? So that you don't get any bright ideas about playing hero and sacrificing yourself, which would be very comfortably noble of you. Too easy. So, it's your only choice. Do you push the fat man, or not? Most people end up saying no. And this generates apparently, a puzzle. In one case, you're going to save 5 by killing 1. In the other case, you're going to save 5 by killing 1. 5 is more than 1, math doesn't change. Why should your decision so clearly based on the math, change. Philosophers have debated these cases at great length, debated them to death, some might say. Mostly, the footbridge case is regarded as a reductive abduct certum on utilitarianism are different reactions that go to show there are more moral things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in utilitarian and philosophy, horatio or should I call you Jeremy Bentum. And if you don't believe that, just wait for people to come up with even gorier cases, in which doing the utilitarian thing gets increasingly ghoulish. Waylaying perfectly healthy people taking out their organs to give to 5 needy transplant patients. Robin Hood meets Hannibal Lecter. It's pretty much nobody's portrait of moral heroism. But Greene is utilitarianism. A utilitarian, and he wants to hold his ground. He's got some very interesting empirical theories, so what's actually going on in these cases where people decide? Why did we decide to throw the switch but not to push the man? It's basically come down to miasma. Remember way back in lesson 1, 2, we talked about how Zeus hates blood? Allegedly and that's the kind of backward way to think about the wrongness of murder. Blooody mess is bad because murder is wrong. Murder isn't wrong because it's messy and Zeus hates mess. Long story short, Greene thinks we're kind of hard wired to believe in miasma. That is, we don't like to make direct contact when force and harm and blood are concerned. We don't want blood on our hands, literally on our hands. That's the only difference between the cases, the direct application of personal force to a victim. Now in fact, that is not the only difference. And to argue that this difference is the important one takes quite a bit of argument at both conceptual and empirical. There's a little something called the doctrine of double effect that might seem to apply here. Maybe it's okay to kill if it's a byproduct as on the right, but long story short again, Greene's theory which seems to me well supported, is that this isn't actually what bothers people psychologically. What bothers people is in fact, applying personal force and thereby killing. Throwing a switch is just psychologically easy. In evolutionary terms, it makes sense that we would be hard-wired to regard the bloody application of personal force as bad, as unholy, as polluting. Obviously, this hard-wiring can be overridden. If you read the newspapers, you will learn that the murder rate throughout human history has not been zero. But presumably having an inbuilt alarm that goes off in cases of bloody murder, has kept that rate lower than it would have been otherwise, given how selfish we are as a species, thus helping our species to prosper socially and our genes to spread widely. It's interesting that we could have a little bloody murder alarm in our brains, as it were, one that's smart enough to go off in the bridge case, yet dumb enough not to go off in the switch case? That's the theory, empirical theory. It makes sense to me. What do we do about it? Well again, I'm going to make the long story short. Being a utilitarian is going to feel wrong a lot of the time. Why? Because you've got all those primitive alarms in your head going off a lot of the time. You weren't evolved for the sleek, modern world of trolley tracks, and people tied to them, and handy switch boxes. You evolved to live in a world of pushes and shoves. It's time to move on to a more rational way of thinking. 5 is greater than 1. Let's push, let's push back a bit, on behalf of the value of not pushing. In a sense, it's all arbitrary. We only dislike the sight of blood because we evolved that way, but we only value life. Hence, 5 lives more than 1 because we evolved that way. That's right. In the end as Humes says, is isn't strictly irrational to prefer the destruction of the world to the scratching of my finger. Why should death be worse than life? It isn't a contradiction to think the contrary which brings us back to good old, this old slide. We can now slot Greene comfortably on the right. Like Plato, he says that reason should rule. If possible, we should make our passion for not letting blood get on our hands. A slave to our rational sense, that it can't make any damn moral difference whether you push the guy, or threw a switch and killed him at an antiseptic distance. But then again, the Greene model of reason ruling has a certain slavish quality to it. Indifference to the wisdom of human height which is not lost of Joshua Greene. Remember this slide from lesson 7, video 3? Is reason ruling, or is it acting as a slave here? On the one hand, he sure looks like a slave shlubbing along like that. On the other hand, he's the most important guy in the picture, clearly. He's a slave, who's fairly large and in charge. I call this, the omby amby model of moral judgement. In honor of L. Frank Baum. Let me just remind you in Oz, the army consists entirely of generals, colonels, majors and captains and only one private who was commanded by all of them, an absurd inverted pyramid of a military command structure. Okay, very funny but you can see where the story has to go. In the end, Omby Amby, the lone private is going to get a promotion, because obviously he's the most important guy. I promote you to be captain general of all the armies of my kingdom. I like that Omby Amby, the private, is wearing green, for I think he is a good emblem for our Joshua Greene. Let me give you the Omby Amby model of metamorality. We can keep our bloated officer corps of moral emotions, but Private Omby Amby, now Captain General is going to have to discipline and downsize the officer corps to some extent. We need to lighten the moral load. There's just too much incoherence and top-heaviness in our moral instincts, especially in a modern environment that which many of our ancient moral heuristics fail us for reasons we can perfectly well recognized and understand. We need to rationalize and streamline because incoherence just isn't a virtue, whatever Walt Whitman may brag to the contrary about all the contradictions he contains. Speaking of which, remember back to the Euthyphro? The funny thing about Euthyphro is that he's such a mix of rationalism and really dark, primordial cathonic, irrationalism. He tells stories about the gods eating their own children and punishing their own fathers in a generational cycle. [LAUGH] Greek religion, it's all about family values. And from this crazy, savage, primitive, irrational basis he presumes to somehow derive an ethic of impartial justice. Let's just real the quote again. Remember, Socrates has commented that he's surprised that he's prosecuting dear old dad. And he says, it's ridiculous Socrates for you to think it makes a difference whether the victim is a stranger or a relative. One should only consider whether the killer acted justly or not; If he acted justly, let him alone. If not, prosecute even a killer who shares your hearth or home. You are just as polluted if you intentionally remain under the same roof with a person like that, instead of purifying both yourself and him by bringing charges. Such an odd mix of cosmopolitanism and old fashioned ick factor. That's our boy Euthyphro. It's easy to feel that Euthyphro is kind of silly because he bases it all on the gods. As we immediately note, the gods always fight about everything. It gets worse. There's like 5 different Athenas just in Athens, itself. How are you going to solve this sort of thing? Make a coherent picture out of this. In short, Euthyphro seems like kind of an idiot. Readers tend to agree. But you know what? Ethically, we're him. How so? Our ethical sense consists of many voices telling us what to do. They don't agree with each other, and a lot of them are pretty damned primitive and bloody minded if you just take half a look. Why not just lighten the load a little? It's a start. That's pragmatism, and utilitarianism provides a framework for doing this. But this is really quite a modest strategy, if you think about it. Let me just read the slide. Let's just take the beliefs and values we've got, trim them back, try to make them somewhat more coherent, overall. We're watching the shadows on the wall, we're yelling, focus. Not that there's anything wrong with that but utilitarianism really isn't a modest philosophy. In principle, even if it's prudent in practice. In the fine video, final video, we'll get practical.
