Goines On: Ethical qualms

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On his way to have blood drawn for his annual health exam, Goines recalled a horrible thought he had entertained when he ate that curried chicken the day before – of those helpless, innocent chickens caged up, overfed, injected with whatever, deprived of light and exercise (not to mention freedom), for the sole purpose of being eaten, or of laying eggs – and he grieved anew at their plight, wondering how frightfully they perceived it. Of course (or hopefully) not as frightfully as a human would perceive it, because a chicken’s brain didn’t seem capable of supporting the psychology. Psychology … the word’s root was psyche... soul.

What happens

We went to a theater last December to see The Descendants, and we liked it well enough to watch it again, even as early as this afternoon.

The Descendants (2011: Alexander Payne) With his wife Elizabeth on life support after a boating accident, Hawaiian land baron Matt King (George Clooney) takes his daughters on a trip from Oahu to Kauai to confront Brian Speer (Matthew Lillard), the man who was having an affair with Elizabeth before her misfortune.

When we saw it the first time, I don't think I particularly noticed the brief interchange when Hawaiian King confronts Speer to try to find out what happened between Speer and Elizabeth:

King: "How did it happen?"
Speer: "It just happened."
King: "Nothing just happens."
Speer: "Everything just happens."

    I'm sure I noticed it this time because of having read Free Will, by Sam Harris. (I wrote about the reading Friday.)
    The exchange between the two men isn't striking just because Speer summarizes Sam Harris's thesis. Look at the preceding line of dialogue:

Nothing just happens.

    I think that the George Clooney character says that because he's suspicious that Speer, who is a realtor, started the affair to try to gain an advantage in a huge land deal the King family are involved in.
    But out of that context "Nothing just happens" is another way of stating the theistic position:

Everything happens for a reason.

That is, God's in control (or perhaps your guardian angel or angels), and they have a plan....
    Well, if they have a plan, then apparently it calls for quite a few people to believe it...and for the rest not to, and for a good number of the former to believe so strongly that everything happens for a reason that they simply refuse to entertain the possibility that it might not be so. (At any rate, it's people who believe that sort of thing from whom I hear the statement, "You can't make me change my mind.") What a plan.

But seriously, why do people believe that nothing just happens?
    The material world of evolution and "everything just happens" can be very unsettling, as can the facts that people suffer, everyone dies, and justice is not done in this world. Beliefs that deny these realities provide solace. Suffering is for our own good, and it will be made right. We'll be resurrected and live forever (if we follow the right prescription for salvation). God will right the balance of justice at The Last Judgment.
    Solace is the Number One Reason for such beliefs (in the cases where it's not simply that people are paying lip service to the beliefs they've been taught and have never questioned).
    Actually, though, there's a sense in which it's true that nothing just happens—the sense in which happenings have material causes. Believing "nothing just happens" in that sense can inspire a person to try to find out the causes. It can lead to insight, and to science.
    And actually, believing "nothing just happens" in the theistic sense can also inspire a person to look a little deeper into his or her spiritual and moral life, to try to discover why something bad, or something good, or something problematic happened. Insights can be found that way; people can (but may not) become better people as a result. Believing that there's a god and he (usually it's he) has a plan isn't necessarily the end-all of such a believer's life. Life can still be good for such believers (besides the solace). (Hey, I think I really am becoming more accepting of others, just as I said on Friday.)
    The main thing seems to be that we keep looking and seeking and trying to find out. As long as our beliefs inspire that, we're still alive and ticking.

By the way, it would seem from the considerations above that Harris believes both that nothing just happens and that everything just happens. But it's based on an ambiguity.
    He believes that nothing just happens, because everything that happens has causes. And he believes that everything just happens, in the sense that it's an illusion that our free will is one of those causes.

It depends (and so do I)

Click to read the Carl Sagan
quotation (photo source)

For 47 years, I've known that I didn't create myself and do not have the power to sustain my existence for a single moment. I know it has been forty-seven years because I was twenty-two years old when I had a dream that seemed to confirm the dependence, and I'm sixty-nine now. (I described the dream a few years ago, in a post titled "Creatures.")

Sam Harris, in his latest book, Free Will,¹ describes a similar situation with respect to what he argues is the illusion of free will:

Take a moment to think about the context in which your next decision will occur: You did not pick your parents or the time and place of your birth. You didn't choose your gender or most of your life experiences. You had no control whatsoever over your genome or the development of your brain. And now your brain is making choices on the basis of preferences and beliefs that have been hammered into it over a lifetime—by your genes, your physical development since the moment you were conceived, and the interactions you have had with other people, events, and ideas. Where is the freedom in this? Yes, you are free to do what you want even now. But where did your desires come from? [p. 40]

Why does Harris argue that free will is an illusion? The main reason (aside from considerations like those above) seems to be that brain activity that signals awareness and initiation of action precedes our conscious awareness of it. When we become aware of an intention, for example, the intention has already happened, and we had nothing consciously to do with it.

How can we be "free" as conscious agents if everything that we consciously intend is caused by events in our brain that we do not intend and of which we are entirely unaware?...People feel that they are the authors of their thoughts and actions, and this is the only reason why there seems to be a problem of free will worth talking about. [p. 31]
    ...From the perspective of your conscious awareness, you are no more responsible for the next thing you think (and therefore do) than you are for the fact that you were born into this world. [p. 36]
    If you pay attention to your inner life, you will see that the emergence of choices, efforts, and intentions is a fundamentally mysterious process....
    You are not in control of your mind—because you, as a conscious agent, are only part of your mind, living at the mercy of other parts. You can do what you decide to do—but you cannot decide what you will decide to do. [p. 38]

Even before reading Harris's book, I had written here about watching myself to see what I would do next, and writing to find out what I thought about something. I had already discovered, from my own personal experience, that what I did and what I thought were things that happened. Harris's book not only serves to confirm this, but also explores some of the implications of it, such as its effect on morality and criminal justice.
    What about its effect on me—or on you if you choose to adopt this way of thinking (or even just experiment with it)?
    I'm still observing its effect(s) on myself. On the one hand, they are, ironically, liberating. I am more accepting of other people (and of myself) the way they are, the way I am.
     But on the other hand, I wonder at times whether I'm missing out on something by giving up the option I thought I had of "using my will power." So far, at least, I haven't missed a day of blogging since my retirement began (one month ago today).
     The jury (the various parts that constitute "me") are still out.

This morning I observed a young woman who lives down the street walking her dogs and letting them defecate in someone else's front yard—fairly near the front door. She didn't pick up the poop, but blithely turned around and led the dogs back home.
     Blithely, did I say? Well, I'm not sure. I think she has to know that not scooping her dogs' poop is unneighborly (and expressly prohibited by the neighborhood covenants), for this has been discussed at some length on our private social network (on the web), of which she and her husband are members. But this is what she does (my wife and I have observed her doing it on a number of other occasions).
    Could I have gone out and let her know that I'd observed her, and reminded her that what she had just done (and had done many times) was wrong? Could I have? I did consider it.
    Some reasons why I think I didn't do it are, first, the prevalent reluctance to "confront" a neighbor, which the people who live in our neighborhood very rarely do. (I'm sure that the vast majority of them have never confronted one of their neighbors—judging by numerous discussions on the neighborhood network. I'm very reluctant to do it myself.)
    Second, I supposed that the young woman has her own reasons for what she did, and that they probably aren't trivial or negligible—doing that seems to be her routine.²
    Third, I was ambivalent about what my motives would have been. If they would have been to "make" her stop leaving the poop (or to stop letting her dogs go in other people's yards), I had little confidence that that would have been the result. She could as easily have become defensive and tried to justify her behavior [see Wednesday's post]. If my motives would have been to demonstrate my "superior neighborliness," what would have been the point of that?
    These considerations passed through my mind. According to Harris, I didn't choose for them to do so; they just did. And I didn't choose not to go confront her; I just didn't.
     It all depended on so many things, one of which apparently wasn't my free will (or hers).
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1. Free Will (2011: Sam Harris) [A belief in free will touches nearly everything that human beings value. It is difficult to think about law, politics, religion, public policy, intimate relationships, morality—as well as feelings of remorse or personal achievement—without first imagining that every person is the true source of his or her thoughts and actions. And yet the facts tell us that free will is an illusion.
        [In this enlightening book, Sam Harris argues that this truth about the human mind does not undermine morality or diminish the importance of social and political freedom, but it can and should change the way we think about some of the most important questions in life. (–The Free Press)]
2. What if someone had observed Jeffrey Dahmer luring a boy home and gone over to confront him? "That's wrong what you're doing, Jeffrey—you shouldn't kill people or eat their flesh." Might the young neighbor woman have been as unlikely to mend her ways as Jeffrey Dahmer his? Or you or I ours, whatever they are?
        Maybe the answer is "no," but how sure are we?

Justify the feeling belief

Cover of a book I
only heard about
this evening

I had to "go to the restroom" the first thing at Costco this morning. Even before I was quite through the door into the men's room, I could clearly hear a conversation in progress. But I saw no one inside and realized someone was in a stall talking on a cell phone.
    The conversation was fairly personal, about how the man's daughter, I think—or someone female—seemed to be estranged from him. He seemed to be talking to another man, but I'm not sure. It didn't matter. But, without wanting to, I had become interested in the conversation. And I didn't appreciate having been drawn in.
    The discomfort wouldn't go away. On the drive home, I told my wife about it and surprised myself by pronouncing, "It was an inappropriate conversation to have in a public restroom."

As soon as I heard myself say "inappropriate," I began to wonder what basis I had for the judgment, and I quickly realized that the only reason I had for saying what I did was that the conversation had made me feel uncomfortable. My "logic" seems to have been that, because the conversation was inappropriate, it had made me feel uncomfortable .
    But for us to judge the acts or activities of other people as inappropriate because they "make us feel uncomfortable" would be anarchical—disorderly because of the absence or nonrecognition of authority [according to a web dictionary I consulted].
    Maybe some of us don't care about anything but the way we feel, and that's reason enough for us to make the judgment without a second thought. That's reason enough for some of us to oppose same-sex marriage without needing to write a letter to an editor explaining why we voted for "the marriage amendment."
    But I think most of us want the world and the people around us to fit together in an orderly manner, so we  look for an authority that we think other people will (or should) respect, or look for reasons that we think will (or should) be recognized as authoritative. What, for example, does Miss Manners say about having personal conversations in the hearing of strangers? Or what verses of the Bible show why same-sex marriages are abominable? (I lost count of the letters about the marriage amendment, but there seemed to be about as many for as against—or maybe about 60/40.)
    We look for something to justify our position and get others to agree with us (we hope).

Why do our minds work that way? Why do we feel first, then (if we have the need) look for reasons to justify it? Because, according to Gary Marcus, in his 2008 book, Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind [according to Annie Murphy Paul in her April 27, 2008 review ("Patch Job") in The New York Times; I haven't read the book], "the brain, like the rest of the human body of which it is a part is an ill-assorted collection of poorly matching parts, forming a distressing whole" [as Miss Paul summarized it].
     Our ability to form beliefs quickly and act on them for self-protection evolved first, and our brains still depend on the machinery that supports that ability. The need and the ability to justify, either to ourselves or others, evolved latter. Most of us, much or most of the time, seem to use the ability not to decide what to believe, but to justify what we already believe, for reasons that have little to do with evidence.
    My friend Chuck, who brought the book to my attention this evening in an email, wrote that "Kluge cites research on how reasoning works in practice. It’ll scare the hell out of you."
    Perhaps it would, if I weren't already aware that the mind, like the body of which it is a part, evolved by adapting earlier components to new uses. It doesn't work like the text-books on logic say it should. But it did take me a long time to see this, and it was a scary realization.

Miss Manners, by the way, in one of her columns, wrote that

...to eavesdrop is rude. The fact that people in public places may not be able to avoid hearing others talk is no excuse; they must pretend they have heard nothing.

They shouldn't report the talk to their wife.
    Or blog about it?

Aging doesn't change your attitude

This morning, I had an email from a friend of fifty years, one of my college roommates, who noted that:

One interesting thing is how old age impacts one's attitude towards religion. At [a recent] luncheon, someone reported on two former...executives who upon retirement had gone into the ministry. [A mutual friend of ours] and I have certainly become more active in terms of church groups. You on the other hand, have become a complete atheist. I am certainly not consistent in my beliefs because I belong to the Anglican Church of North America (which has split off from the Episcopal Church) although I have neither supported the secession nor the opposition to gay marriage. Religion as well as politics makes strange bedfellows.

    Hmm, I wonder whether aging per se is the operative factor in one's attitude toward religion. I'd say it's more a matter of whether and how a person spends his time thinking about it. There's the believing way of thinking and the skeptical way. As a teenager, I chose the latter, although I didn't come to a conclusion until many years later.

Another, very recent friend, also emailed me. He wrote:

A brief sidebar on religion—a line I've always considered one of the simplest and yet most humorous and profound thoughts on the subject: "If a baseball hitter thanks God when he hits a homerun, shouldn't he blame God when he strikes out?"

    The baseball example has occurred to me a number of times in listening to people thanking God for this and that. They choose not to condemn God (or come to doubt that He exists) for bad things that have happened to them, but they're quick to fall down and worship Him for the good things that happen. That is, they (1) chose up front to believe that God exists and (2) continually cherry-pick what to attend to in order to ensure that they don't begin to doubt that existence.
    This is a prime example of something I've surely said somewhere on this blog, if not more than once: For most people (and for all of us to some extent or other), thinking is mostly a matter of looking for reasons to "prove" what we have already chosen (on other than rational grounds) to believe.
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Thanks to Paul Ygartua for Wizened old man - Lithograph