Is it immoral to eat perfectly edible scientists?

From a friend, here’s some food for thought.

Of course, by calling someone’s thoughts and ideas “food,” right there I used one of those sneaky expressions intended to both simplify and persuade. Instead of saying “I read and liked this article, and I think you should read it too, because you would benefit from it,” I analogized it to nourishment for the brain. I prefer to think that I am simplifying to avoid tedious verbiage rather than deliberately injecting bias into my writing, but one of the wonders of blogging — whether it’s an advantage or a disadvantage — is that such simplifications are expected and rarely criticized. By glibly conflating my personal judgment that the author’s (Philosophy professor Dan Jacobson’s)  easily digestible article is good and that others should read it, I reflexively resorted to heuristics:

What economists and psychologists have shown is that people unreflectively adopt heuristics—rough-and-ready simplifying principles—that work pretty well in a wide variety of common contexts. When interested parties, including both marketers and scientists, figure out the heuristics people use, they can exploit circumstances where it fails. We commonly chase sunk costs, overvalue things that belong to us, and respond differently to equivalent scenarios depending on how they are framed. Although these failures of rationality are fascinating and important, concentration on them can obscure the fact that our reasoning works well in many other circumstances.

This short article does a great job of outlining the parameters of  a vastly complicated question — what is moral reasoning, and can it be strengthened?

The process begins in childhood:

A narrower conception of moral reasoning would focus on our ability to reason with moral concepts such as fairness. Again it is helpful to look at bad moral reasoners: children just learning how to apply moral concepts. Kids learn early that “It’s not fair” is more powerful than “I don’t want to” or just “No.” Once introduced to the power of appeals to fairness, children will start to make them when they previously would have said no or just cried, as if unfair just means contrary to what I want. But quickly enough one learns that claims about fairness have to be disciplined in certain ways. You can only make a claim of fairness when you can offer reasons others should accept as binding regardless of who benefits in any specific case. This is just one example of how specifically moral reasoning can be improved.

One of the things that drives me crazy about morality is how quickly it “evolves.” (Especially in our national kindergarten.)

Again, I am using simplistic and judgmental words.

But take environmentalism. We now live in a society in which all sorts of previously normal and ordinary behaviors are seen as “unsustainable,” or “polluting” or leaving too “big” of something called a “carbon footprint.” The premise is that “the environment” is more important than any of us, and that our individual interests must be subordinated to “it.” We are seen as a constant threat to “the environment,” and few dare question the premise, because they fear being seen as immoral. So we find ourselves being ordered about by a new class of professional stewards called “environmentalists.” In the name of morality, they have been given vast power over what can be built and where, what can be done with land once considered private property, what sort of vehicles may be built, how streets must be designed, and what sorts of appliances and even light bulbs may be sold in stores. And if you don’t like any of these things and say so, you run the risk of being considered selfish, greedy, and bad for “the environment.” This is all being done under the supposition that what is “good” for what is called “the environment” is good, and what is “bad for the environment” is evil. Because being “against the environment” is now a huge moral taboo, few will risk saying or doing anything that might place them in such a position.

So the question about the nature of moral reasoning is an important one. I would even say “direly important” at the risk of sounding persuasive.

It would take more time than I have to discuss all of the author’s points, but he does address the way commonplace taboos are dismissed as irrational magical thinking:

It is mere scientism to insist that deeply held human aversions and attractions, such as our sensitivity to the expressive aspects of our actions, are irrational taboos to be dismissed as magical thinking. Yet this literature does just that. There is nothing inherently magical about being averse to sticking pins in a doll constructed to resemble your child, for instance. Magical thinking requires some false causal belief, such as belief in the power of voodoo; but one need not labor under any such illusion in order to prefer not to deface an image of your beloved. Similarly, people are reluctant to do things with a symbol of something they care about (such as a flag) which suggests indifference or hostility toward what it symbolizes. Most of us would not want to drink water that has had a sterilized roach dipped into it, even though we know the roach did not add any germs to the water, simply because such “roached” water is disgusting. While there is a science of disgust, there is no science of the disgusting—that is, of what merits disgust—and the tacit assumption that only germs can be disgusting leads to some obviously absurd conclusions. But these are just the cases that the psychological literature takes to show that we are in the grip of taboos and magical thinking—not just in certain instances of moral judgment but typically.

Most ordinary people are aware of these points intuitively, even if they cannot say more about why they are averse to drinking roached water, desecrating corpses, or eating their dead pet.

Those who want more depth might enjoy this longer paper by the author (pdf).

Just as I would not eat Coco if she died, I would not drink the roached water or desecrate a corpse. The roached water, though, I see as more of a socially shared taboo than as personal morality. I have eaten fried termites, and many cultures in history and in the present do not share the Western disgust over insects. Such disgust is not morality in quite the same sense as the disgust people feel over incest or cannibalism. It’s more akin to fear of snakes; some have it, and others don’t. I happen to like snakes, and while I know about the disgust others have for them, I am unable to share or identify with it internally.

Jacobson does not think such questions can be reduced to science:

Most ordinary people are aware of these points intuitively, even if they cannot say more about why they are averse to drinking roached water, desecrating corpses, or eating their dead pet. The dumbfounding literature simply assumes that the offensiveness and disgustingness of certain actions does not provide reason to avoid them—so long as they are stipulated to be, in some narrow and artificial sense, harmless. Indeed, harm itself is not a scientific concept but a moral one; yet that does not undermine its significance. Though one could attempt to formulate an empirical notion of what counts as an injury, say, all that would do is demonstrate that there are other sorts of harms than injuries. It is simply not in the purview of science to discover what humans ought to care about.

I agree that discovering what humans ought to care about should not be in the purview of science.

But try telling that to an environmentalist. They see it as their divine mission to both discover and to dictate what humans ought to care about.

The author grapples over whether moral questions we consider rational are rational, and I found myself thinking that my lack of fear or lack of disgust over certain things might be just as irrational as the “irrational” fears in others that I am sometimes tempted to condemn. (In fact, I have admitted that my views on global warming are not so much denial as they are defiance.)

He concludes with some questions:

What would you say about someone who engaged in cannibalism or ate a dead pet, not because he was starving but simply in order to avoid wasting edible meat or to try something new? What about someone who did something that risked serious emotional harm but which, in the event, proved harmless? Are these actions OK or is there something wrong with them?

I would not do these things, nor would I want to associate with a person who did them, and I would advise others to avoid them too. Whether that is rational or not is not a paramount concern to me, and not just because I do irrational things all the time — such as insisting on particular brands of food, tools, or clothing, or going out of my way to enjoy a more pleasant view of the countryside despite knowing that the interstate highway would be faster. My worry is that even if we concede that eating a dead pet or cannibalism might not be inherently immoral (few would argue that eating a dead pet to avoid starvation was immoral), a person who did these things might very well be a psychopath blind to all normal feelings, who would be likely to stick a knife into you because he just “felt like it.”

I don’t know whether my view is grounded in morality or in a common sense notion of what will best assure my survival — which might be called selfish.

I only wish that those who dismiss moral reasoning as fraudulent or pointless would understand that the same arguments they make against the moral reasoning of others can just as fairly be used against their own.

(I know. Right there I naively assumed they believe in fairness….)