One of my blogging buddies, Alicia, had a post in March of 2009 titled Moral Dilemmas in her excellent blog Titere con Bonete.
Original post:
EDIT 10-18-11: Alicia posted her original post again at the top of her blog. It should collect a nice set of comments with her large following. You can find the re-posted version here:
Titere Con Bonete, October 18, 2011, The Post That Keeps On Giving
I replied to her blog, but because: A) I loved my brilliant reply so well, and B) my reply is buried in a post so long ago that it will never see the light of day, and C) (the real reason) I need a post in my blog…it has been so long I am afraid I will lose the few readers I have, I have stolen the reply (well it is mine) and modified it a bit to stand alone and posted it here in my blog.
Alicia please forgive me for stealing my reply, and thanks for having a really neat blog.
There is an interesting Radiolab episode which considers moral dillemas The question they used is this:
Scenario 1.
There are five workers repairing a railroad track. A trolley is coming and can't stop in time to not hit the workers. The workers are facing away from the trolley and don’t know that it is coming.
There is a switch which could divert the trolley down another track. On that track is only one worker. You, of course, are standing next to the switch and can pull the lever to divert the trolley.
If you do nothing five workers die. If you pull the switch, only one worker dies.
What do you do?
Scenario 2
Same scenario as above, a trolley will kill five workers.
However, this time you are standing on an overhead bridge next to a another person.
If you push the person off the bridge, that person will die but will stop the trolley.
If you do nothing, the five workers will die. If you push the person off the bridge, only one person dies.
What do you do?
Here is the link to the Radiolab podcast. This segment should be about 14 minutes long.
If you don't want bothered with listening, here was the results limited to my shaky memory. Most people find scenario 1 to be a no brainer. Pull the switch and save five lives at the cost of one. It doesn't even require much thought. Scenario 2 on the other hand is equally a no brainer. Almost no one is willing to push the person off the bridge, and most people find the notion quite horrific, even though the calculation is exactly the same, take action and save five lives at the cost of one.
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| Dorsolateral Prefrontal Cortex |
So a researcher named Joshua Green asked what the hell is going on here? He stuck some people in a functional MRI scanner. This is a scanner that images energy consumption in different parts of the brain, so it can show what parts of the brain are activated when considering a problem or hearing a story. What they found was the two scenarios above lit up totally different parts of the brain. Scenario 1 lit up the calculation area in the
dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. The morality of this problem is not much different than balancing your check book.
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| Anterior Cingulate Cortex. |
So it reduces down to basically this. Our brains handle scenario 1 as a math problem, but scenario 2 as murder, yet they are have exactly the same outcomes. If you take action, you save five lives at the cost of one. But it seems that action at distance is different than being up close and personal.
So are God and religious teaching the ultimate sources of the morality in these questions or not? Green doesn't think so, nor do I. I suspect (not know) that if you put any normal human being born within the past 5,000, if not 10,000 years in a fMRI, you would get the same results regardless of location, time, education, religious belief, or the quality of parenting. I think children raised in a Soviet orphanage would respond the same as a child born and raised by loving religious parents. Again, this is opinion and not fact, as such it worthless. But I think these things are instinctual to human beings, not taught by religions. Thus did we evolve to not kill members of own species? Not sure, I suspect so, but it may require a tighter definition, we evolved not to kill those that we identify as being “us”.
Let's jazz up our problem. Kick it up a notch, as they say.
Scenario 2, you are on the bridge in 1942 somewhere in the USA. You know for a fact the person next to you is a Nazi spy. What do you do?
Scenario 2. You are on the bridge with another unknown person (not bad not good--just unknown). To your horror you look down and it is five of your young children playing on the track (not workers).
Scenario 2. You are standing on the bridge next to an ox. Push the ox, save five men.
I don't think many people would have a problem with pushing the ox off the bridge. The workers are us, the ox is not.
What about the Nazi spy? He is dedicated to our defeat and enslavement, yet he is still a human being. Do you push the Nazi spy to save five American workers? I think I would. The spy is in the evil Nazi tribe. The workers are in our good American tribe. The spy is less us than the five guys on the track.
Your children. There are five of very much us (us to you) and one unknown who is not as much us. Goodbye Mr. Unknown!
Now let's further complicate the matter. You are sitting on a jury of the person who did push another person off the bridge. No doubt about it, he pushed a person to his death. How do your rule?
Change that another way. You are sitting on the jury of a wrongful death suit as a result of scenario 1. The plaintiff states that, had the defendant not pulled the lever to the switch, her husband and the father of her five wonderful young children would still be alive. The natural course of events would have spared her husband. The defendant’s actions killed her husband. How do you rule?
Getting back to the basic problem of how much God has to do with this, my answer is not very satisfying. Everything and nothing. We have the ability to make moral judgments. So do dogs. Do dogs have souls? Many species of fish will gladly eat their own young. Do fish not have souls?
Karen Armstrong brought up an interesting concept in one of her books, unfortunately it whetted my appetite but I quit reading the book for one reason or other, so I may be talking out my ass here. Basically she said that the atheists are right God does not exist. If you look in a telescope, a microscope, an atom smasher, a computer, or any other scientific device, and you are not going to find God. Why? Simply because God does not exist in the fashion that you exist, or the Andromeda galaxy exists, or a bacteria exists, or the quantum foam exists. God is not of this world and trying to prove God's existence is a fool's game guaranteed to lose. If you and I are standing in a room and I see a green Martian and you don't, the burden of proof is on me. Ergo God does not exist. Scientific fact.
Ask any physicist, how far back do we know and they will stop at a few zillionths of second before the big bang. Not only do we not know what happened "before" the big bang, there is a good chance we can not know, and there is also a very good chance that there is nothing to know. So my theory is that God is an old white guy with a big long beard sitting in a rocking chair right on the other side of the big bang. And HE really loves Irish males, and created woman from an Irish guy's rib to serve him and keep him entertained in the bedroom. OK I am being a shithead, but a shithead on purpose. We tend to make God one of us. God is created in our own image and therefore, we can have very divine feelings about pushing Nazi spies off a bridge to save American workers.
I have a very good reason to believe in God...I should have died in a head on collision in the Mojave Desert in 1972, and I have no logical explanation why I didn't. My belief has nothing to do with churches, Bibles, bishops, or religious teachings. My belief in God is based on simple empiricism...I should be dead and I am not. Well that is fine for me but it doesn't do much for the rest of the world. There are a hell of lot more people who have lost loved ones that could say, God did nothing to save my loved one. There is no God. Think of the trenches of WWI. Millions of men died horrific deaths on opposite sides of no man's land all praying to the same God.
I am a full fledged evolutionist. I believe we evolved from some organic chemicals over the course of billions of years. I do not believe that we were created in seven days by the hand of God so many thousands of begats ago. But to me evolution is a process not a reason. Evolution describes how we got here, not why we got here.
When I think of God sometimes I think of the international prototype kilogram standard. It is a precisely machined chunk of platinum iridium alloy sitting in an environmentally controlled vault in International Bureau of Weights and Measures in Sevres France. God can strike me as some vial of TRUTH that floats around in the super space to super space well beyond the borders of our universe, and any of the infinite parallel universes that may or may not be out there. Other times I think of God as being a harried loving mother who loves her children enough to let them do whatever they want regardless of the consequences.
So no, I don't think God is directly responsible for our morality, we evolved it. God does not exist. Not in this world. I believe in God, but not as a thing that exists in our universe. But, yes, I think God is responsible for the entire shebang, and for all I know God may very well be the shebang. So yes, God had everything to do with our evolution of morality.
On the other hand:
Alas, just when I am starting to feel good about humanity again, another one of my blogger buddies, Jo, posts this:
Majority of Two, October 14, 2011, The Third Wave
Image Credits:
Wikipedia, Anterior cingulate cortex
Dr. Shock MD, PhD.Neurostimulating Blog, Dorsolateral Prefrontal Cortex
Heaven, a novel by Kimberly Cain
