Optical Illusions and Moral Intuition

It has been my position for a while* that moral intuition is a sense like our other senses--an interpretation of objective phenomena that, while imperfect, provides useful information to an ape trying to navigate the universe. Our conventionally-recognized senses (sight, hearing, etc.) provide information about the physical universe; our moral intuition, I think, serves a similar purpose in providing information about our social universe.

I wonder, then, if difficult moral hypotheticals--the sort that make philosophers happy and do nothing for anyone else's ability to make decisions--can be usefully compared to optical illusions. Just as our vision uses a variety of tricks and shortcuts to solve the impossible problem of judging where a huge number of 3d objects are using a 2d representation, our intuitive moral judgments are probably using a variety of competing algorithms, applicable in different circumstances and useful only under certain conditions. When we expose ourselves to situations unlike any found in nature--wire outlines of objects, strangely-skewed rooms, and so on--we can often deceive our vision, seeing objects that aren't there or flipping back and forth between two competing interpretations.

Are moral hypotheticals similarly mind-bending exercises--not in the sense of causing us to think, but in the sense of deceiving our inner algorithms? If so, like optical illusions, they probably tell us far more about the behavior of our senses under strange and unrealistic edge conditions than about the actual state of world.


*And since this is my blog for my own pleasure, I shall make no attempt to defend this position. Hah.

On Being Armed and Polite

An armed society, I hear, is a polite society. The Internet, in its various manifestations, has many Strong Opinions on this Heinlein quote; whether it is true and, if true, desirable, is questionable. (The correlation seems weak, at best, but I am only prodding lightly at this issue with a ten-foot pole, so I will not try to argue for or against.)

I do think it is interesting, though, that we seem to have borrowed other people's arms to enforce certain types of politeness. Even people who shudder at the thought of gun-toting vigilantism being used to prevent rudeness are quite happy to use coercive measures to enforce politeness, as long as it's well-organized. In our workplaces, we are far too civilized to resort to duels to avenge affronts to our honor; instead, when we feel that we've been unfairly or offensively treated, we whip out our lawyers. In countries with less speech protection than the U.S., writers who offend the religious or personal sensibilities of their compatriots may find themselves in front of tribunals designed to protect polite discourse.

I like guns, but I doubt the truth and desirability of gun-enforced politeness. I don't see a huge moral difference between forcing people to be polite using individual guns or by threatening them with coercive legal action, though. Pragmatically, of course, any sort of armed vigilantism is likely to be excessive or misplaced; in the case of politeness, though, shouldn't we question whether rudeness could ever merit armed robbery as a response? And if it couldn't, why should we be comfortable allowing civil suits or tribunals to enforce the same outcome?