On the latest Saturday Salon thread tigtog linked to an extremely provocative article by Bob Ellis on The Drum, wherein he compared the moral equivalence of the War on Terror in Afghanistan with the activities of pedophile priests, suggesting that we might consider bombing The Vatican.
Fran Barlow raised the issue of intent, suggesting that actions with good intentions can nevertheless cause great harm and are really no excuse.
No argument there, but it called to mind a recent article in the New Scientist which considered a case where there were bad intentions leading to neutral outcomes and neutral intentions leading to a bad outcome. These came from a study by Liane Young of MIT et al probing the role of emotion in moral decision-making.
“Normally, intention always trumps outcome,” said Young. But she found that when peoples’ emotional responses were impaired due to damage in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex this was not necessarily so.
I’m not sure how common such damage is, but she and her colleagues found nine people thus impaired and compared their responses to a control group when presented with 24 moral dilemmas. In the example cited participants were asked to rate on a 7-point scale the moral acceptability of deliberately poisoning someone’s coffee but failing to kill them against accidentally poising someone’s coffee and killing them.
The emotionally impaired group gave the failed attempt a rating of 5 whereas the control group rated the attempt at 2.5. So outcome trumped intent for the emotionally impaired.
Moreover, all the impaired group rated the accidental killing as less morally acceptable than the failed attempt at killing.
Young’s team then temporarily disabled the the area of the brain associated with discerning the intentions of others, the right temporoparietal junction, in 20 volunteers and found that they rated failed attempts at harming others as 15 per cent more acceptable than when their brains were not disabled in that manner.
One implication is that we should probably check out the brain functioning of jurors.
I find just as intriguing what this experiment might say about the role of emotion in decision making. A few more examples.
Quiggin’s dilemma
Blogger John Quiggin once posed a dilemma where you had the capacity to rescue one person only from a burning building. There were two people in the building, one was a scientist who you knew had discovered a cure to cancer, but his/her knowledge would die with him/ her if not rescued. The other person was your mother.
Which ever you chose you could intellectually find arguments to support your choice. I think the chances are that you would make a choice on emotional grounds with the reasons effectively a rationalisation. In any case there would be no escaping the emotional factor in the decision.
Seeing mum as an imposter
A few years ago I read an article in The Scientific American about a condition resulting from brain damage. From memory an Italian man suffered an accident whereby the connection between the centres used to recognise faces and the emotional centre of the brain had been severed.
This man could speak on the phone to his mother in another room and recognise her voice as his mother. But when she walked into the room he immediately perceived her as an imposter and recoiled with horror.
Apparently her the memory of the image of her face was associated with warm filial emotions. The lack of such emotions caused him to perceive the woman standing before him as a fake pretending to be his mother.
Greg Chappell’s seven consecutive ducks
Cricket lovers old enough might remember that Greg Chappell once made seven consecutive ducks in a series facing the ferocious West Indies fast bowling attack. The article from The Scientific American mentioned above was part of a whole series about the functioning of the human brain. They didn’t mention Chappell and cricket, but from the articles I pieced together what was going on.
Before an action like playing a stroke there is a preliminary setup phase where the brain accesses memory and the emotions associated with memory. Then the brain dictates the action. Finally there is a review phase where what happened is laid down in memory, with associated emotions.
Chappell eventually realised that the problem was in his head. So he set about repeatedly visualising successful shots in these circumstances, consciously expunging feelings of fear and replacing them with feelings of pleasure associated with success. It worked.
Neville Symington’s view
Neville Symington is a psychoanalyst who has studied philosophy and theology. His book A Pattern of Madness is based on a particular ontology. You can see from the taxonomy on the cover that his mapping of the human psyche is a bit different. The book is available on google books, but I don’t recommend that you just dip into it. He helpfully suggests that you won’t understand what he’s on about unless you read the whole book twice, which I reckon is about the minimum.
Anyway his bottom line is that all actions are either emotional actions or motor actions and further, that all decisions and choices are “in the final analysis founded on unconscious processes”.
As against this freedom and creativity, exercised by an integrated personality, are central to his understanding of sanity.
Important in his scheme of things is the intellectual review process. He actually uses the word “conscience”. The idea, I think, is that we are not the victims of the emotionally-based actions our unconscious serves up. We can coach ourselves in what emotions we feel in various typical situations and develop policies on how we react in social situations. Life is a project.
We do well to remember that there is a long-standing literature about emotional intelligence. Howard Gardiner has two separate intelligences based on emotions.
In 1983, Howard Gardner’s Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences[5] introduced the idea of multiple intelligences which included both Interpersonal intelligence (the capacity to understand the intentions, motivations and desires of other people) and Intrapersonal intelligence (the capacity to understand oneself, to appreciate one’s feelings, fears and motivations).
Amongst Gardiner’s criteria were the existence of savants and the existence of marked deficits when the brain was damaged in a specific area associated with the function. But what Symington is talking about is the role of emotion as a global phenomenon within the psyche, fundamental to choosing, acting and even perception.
For me this is something to think about on an ongoing basis rather than to have a definitive position. It is interesting, though, how many times you hear of someone changing a position with a high ratioanal content on the basis of a life experience with a strong emotional content which leads them to think about their position in a different way.
Finally a bit more intrigue from The New Scientist. This comes from a segment on the importance of the subconscious. They found that moving a finger was prefigured by brain activity 300 milliseconds before subjects consciously chose to twitch their finger. This contrasts with Paul Davies, who I once heard pondering how something weightless and abstract (an idea) could move something physical like a body part. A man so clever failed to realise that an idea is an electro-chemical event.
Then there was also experimenter Stanislas Dehaene who found that emotional words like “love” and “fear” altered the relationships between conscious and subconscious thought, apparently through judgements made in the subconscious.
There is much more to know about all this, I feel.
It’s not so much that they are no excuse. Understanding intent, if we succeed, can help us frame a rational response, regardless of how much harm was caused. To take a current example, if Barnaby Joyce had been right in claiming that the Federal government had designed the insulation program in order to ensure that houses were destroyed and thus to foster economic stimulus, we would surely want to examine the mechanisms within the program that fostered fire outbreaks and remove them, and of course hold the relevant officers accountable for murder.
Conversely, if the fires are merely the result of shoddy workmanship, within a program aimed at reducing household energy demand and supplying work to semi-skilled people, then our focus would be on compliance with proper standards.
It’s just as injurious to the public good bad for people to be killed by poor compliance with workplace safety as by murder, but we would address each problem differently based on our views of its etiology (including of course, human intent).
oops delete: “bad” from last sentence …
The emotionally impaired seem in fact to have a much more rational interpretation of events that concentrates on outcomes rather than motives. After all the former are usually much easier to ascertain with some certainty than the latter. One of the most offensive arguments advanced about the carnage wrought in Iraq is never mind about the outcomes, it’s all in support of Glorious Freedom and Democracy and is therefore morally OK, whereas when some suicide bomber blows up a handful of people s/he is about as morally depraved as it’s possible to be.
Concentrating on the likely consequences of actions rather than the intent behind them is a useful corrective to legalistic world views that place so much importance on the presence of a guilty mind before a crime can be committed. But then if the biologists are correct emotion and logic are equally the result of chemical interactions within the brain that lack either intent or conscious intervention so WTF let’s all just pop some pills and be done with it.
There is much more to know about all this, I feel.
I see what you did there.
Ken I agree that some people with emotional impairments (I’m thinking specifically Asperger’s) can occasionally cut through all kinds of bullshit to express quite stark truths that everyone else is too polite to mention.
However, I think there’s something in that study of the emotionally impaired individuals who didn’t make a distinction between intention and outcome. I’m thinking of a mentally-ill member of my ‘outer’ family, who treats accidental mishaps or blunders as gravely as if that person had set out with malice aforethought to injure them. There is a different moral calculus that applies, surely? Large parts of our system of sentencing for convicted criminals is predicated on the notion that intention matters, at any rate.
I think the framing of the problem here is likely to lead to every kind of aporia. The idea that there is something like an ‘affect’, distinct from reason in a practical sense, is an error that began with Aristotle, and has been repeated by every psychologist ever after. Once this unity of ‘decision-making’ is split into a duality of ‘reason’ and ‘passion’, even the best of philosophers gets themselves tied up in knots trying to reunify that which was split. (See, for instance, Nietzsche’s many comments on passion, reason and the body, or Bergson’s remarks on ‘instinct’, for example).
Focusing on ‘intention’ is completely misleading in a psychological sense. It’s fine for Kantian moralists, but I don’t see why anybody else would take ‘intention’ at face value.
As regards ‘outcomes’ (and this is an unfortunate, managerial choice of word) – you might wish to distinguish, as some empirical psychologists have, between a kind of ‘rationality’ of process, as against a rationality of outcome. There’s not much to say that a whole lot of our thinking is done along ‘rational’ lines, but the outcomes may be rational all the same.
There’s a large and growing literature on this topic, which developed from the mid-90s with neuroscientists like LeDoux and Damasio. Whilst a lot of brilliant research has been undertaken, much of the conceptual methodology is borrowed rather unrigorously from metaphysics. Hence we see terms like ‘subconscious’ bandied about, without any regard for precision.
Yes I know Mercurius but intention is notoriously hard to uncover, and causes all kinds of problems trying to determine moral failing when someone was drunk for example. Perhaps we should place more emphasis on the reasonably foreseeable consequences of an act rather than the intent, as is the case in civil negligence cases. Letting people avoid responsibility for harm they ought to have anticipated on the grounds they didn’t really intend it to happen has always seemed a bit of a moral cop-out to me, but maybe I’m emotionally impaired
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Helen @ 4, I was thinking of giving a prize to anyone who noticed!
Have to go out again now. More comment later.
Here in Australia, “emotion” is a card used frequently in verbal jousting for domination. Listen to any doorstop interview with a politician.
“I know there’s a lot of *emotion* around the issue of demolishing this suburb to put the bypass through…”
“Emotion” is code for irrational, unthinking, instinctive, pertaining to uneducated or un-self-controlled who are not suited to rule or make policy.
“Emotion” is coded female, and lesser.
The people who oversuse the “emotional” card are often the most swayed by emotion themselves. Look at the various groups who hate the Greens: 4WD groups (who are emotional about personal freedom and not being told where they can’t go), shooters (who are emotional about not being told not to shoot stuff), residents of communities dominated by woodchippint (The Honest Sons of Toil!! The bailiff at the door, throwing out the sad plastic tricycle onto the front lawn! THe dirty hippie villains! How we’d like to punch them until they bleed!)
These kinds of groups, along with the “Growth at Any Cost Or Oh My God We’ll All Die Gasp Gasp Gasp” neoliberals all see themselves as serenely unemotional and partaking only of sweet reason. I beg to differ.
As long as we continue using words like rationality, emotion, unconscious etc to understand human behavior we are not going to understand it. These phenomena are products of behavior but we typically assume these are causes of behavior. Human behavior is the most complex phenomenon in the known universe and we have only just barely begun to understand it. Chances are that as in most scientific disciplines, until we create a specific nomenclature and theoretic models to understand human behavior, don’t expect any breakthroughs. Darwin once commented: He who understands the baboon will do more to advance philosophy than Locke. He was right and wrong about that. Right because as the work of Sapolsky reveals our social relations are strikingly similiar to other primates and wrong because Darwin assumes that behavior can be understood from bottom up. If only it were that easy.
BTW THR, you might want to have a look at the work of Robert Sapolsky. Brilliant and illuminating stuff.
I recall you linked to a speech by Sapolsky on Catallaxy somewhere, John H. It was quite a good speech.
Helen @ 9, that’s very eloquent and expresses what I was in large part concerned about, and more. The rational and abstract thought is very much privileged in our society and the education system while emotion is neglected and seen as a negative.
THR @ 6, do you have any thoughts about the relationship of the duality of ‘reason’ and ‘passion’ to the (false) duality of mind and body?
Concerning LeDoux and Damasio, I googled and came up with this clear explanation with the terms that my old brain struggles to remember, the brainstem, the limbic system and the neocortex. One of my concerns in the post was that there is an assumption that the neocortex can operate without reference to the limbic system whereas it’s my understanding that it doesn’t.
In recent times there has been much talk about the late development of pathways and connections between the two, which are said to mature on average at age 24, plus or minus 5, and earlier for females than for males. An early reference was this Catalyst segment.
Back @ 3 Ken said:
Not sure about that, so here is a bit of a rant.
One of my all-time memorable posts was one in 2004 by David Tiley, what’s love got to do with it? about attempts to
I’ve heard a number of experts working on the relationship between mental states and brain activity and the ‘problem’ of consciousness speak of “neuro-hormonal correlates”. The notion of “correlates” seems to carry with it the old mind-body dualism in that a thought or a mental state has an existence apart from physical events in the brain.
So, Ken, I don’t think emotion and logic are the result of chemical interactions within the brain, I think they are chemical reactions in the brain.
And it’s more than the brain. The hormonal system generally has an impact on the brain. For example there are people who require vitamin B12 injections to function mentally, specifically with respect to memory. A friend of ours has a lazy thyroid gland. She says that if she didn’t take her tablets she’s forget her name and where she lives, presumably also that she had a thyroid problem.
But on pills, I’ve read a bit of Dr Susan Blackmore who reckons that you can chemically induce any state of mind. But the content of that state of mind is all yours.
You are so correct on the work of Robert Sapolsky. There was a programme on his sudies of stress on NAT GEO channel the other night. Just brilliant.
Emotions are our most primative drivers and work in conjunction with neural clusters outside the brain such as at the base of the spine and in the heart to give us survival reactions to threats and are most highly tuned when augmented with the stress hormones that Robert Sapolsky’s work totally defines. Emotions work in conjunction with our primary need drivers breath/eat/sleep as a kind of accelerator pedal to provide an appropriate degree of survival response. At the more complex end emotions are at the core of our reproductory system and govern our need to companion, copulate and care. Emotions are also integrally connected with our communication drivers and it is in this that the differences between females and males can be seen as in each, emotions aid response rates for the survival aspects of social interaction ie females have heightened emotional interation in communication to aid in the management of the family group. Emotions also interplay with our explore and learn drivers and serve to connect survival reactions to knowledge. The emotional connection to knowledge also enhances our appreciation of everything that we experience. As the brain develops the executive functions moderate the emotional drivers to an ever increasing degree. Emotions are most visible in infant behaviour and least visible in fully mature adults. Any one who thinks that they are unemotional are kidding themselves.
To deny our emotions is to deny our very being.
The mind is an organ with its own innate nature. Maladaptive behaviours, often the consequences of unrealised early trauma, can be bypassed (not overcome) through retraining utilising the mind’s plasticity. This is a fancy term for the construction of new neurological pathways that allow for the processing of external data that does not use the habituated (and often traumatised) neurological pathways installed through past experience and affective responses attached to those experiences. Sapolsky is part of a turn by Western science to comprehend ancient technologies of the self and how they can benefit moderns.
One question that probably bears discussion when we try to examine the significance of intent in the cultural evaluation of human behaviour is surely the extent to which this draws on notions of the metaphysical.
Although there is obviously no documentary record, it seems likely that fairly early on, our distant biological ancestors began to develop a symbolic dimension to their thought. Language is an organised set of symbols and in a setting in which so little about one’s immediate environment would have been available or obvious, it would have been odd if the attempt to explain environmental and even interpersonal phenomena did not draw heavily upon the metaphysical. Early humans were entirely at the mercy of forces beyond their ken and control and their tenuous grip on existence and the capacity to reproduce depended very much on their connection with their family, band, or tribe. Keeping your own equivalent of “the great spirit” happy and perpetuating its ostensible instantiations would have been key to maintenance of the coherence of the group. Metaphysics was the overhead humans paid for their ignorance. It was not of course until very recently indeed that science acquired the instruments and intellectual tools to slip the bonds of metaphysics and to explain the physical and social world in measurable terms.
As huge a breakthrough as this was, at the level of public discourse, we humans are still burdened with the conceptual baggage of the dead generations. When looking apparent crime and even tort, we still seek out “evil”. In so far as this evil is not the evil of religious and metaphysical lore it is located in the criminal mind — in mens rea. When one considers the worst categories of offenders, one often hears apparently erudite people asking whether they are “mad or bad”. I cannot begin to understand how one can make such a distinction without an at least implicitly metaphysical view of the world. And so the examination and cultural evaluation of humans in secular space inevitably returns to theories of mind. Is the brain more like a machine? What is the etiology of intent? In what senses do humans author each other and where can we identify error. It often strikes me that the most secular amongst us are on the cultural equivalent of the software analyst’s search for errant or inelegant lines of code. Yet it seems to me also that this project is largely a waste of effort.
In the end, if there is to be an attempt to maximise human wellbeing, then we must focus primarily on what is (comparatively) easy to measure — that is to say outcomes. If people do things that harm the legitimate interests of others, then that conduct must be restrained. Insight into the intent of the malfeasant may well guide us in how to restrain this conduct, and predispose pro-social conduct, but a model that tries to seek out “evil” and sanction it where it arises is unlikely to be effective and likely to inflict collateral damage where it is avoidable.
We could of course “punish” malfeasants while remaining agnostic on the question of evil*. You’ve harmed others, we might say and so as restitution to the community interest you have prejudiced through your conduct, we will impose a sanction that deters others who might be tempted to act as you have. Allocution could of course be part of that restitution along with other acts aimed at mitigating the harm. In some cases of course, adequate restitution will not be possible, and an ongoing threat would be associated with the freedom of malfeasants to be in the community. In such cases, coercive restraint is desirable, but here this relates not to evil, but to the hazard posed by the possibility of the malfeasant repeating past harmful conduct. I see no marginal value in labelling such a person “mad” or “bad” since, stripped of their metaphysical content, all these words really convey is that the freedom of such people poses an unquantifiable and unacceptable downside risk of community harm.
* interestingly, some of the early uses of the term evil saw this as meaning something like defective while drawing on notions of “bad[ness]” and “vicious[ness]“. The word vice from which vicious derives is from the Latin vitium for “defect”. Underlining the plasticity of language, the words vice,wicked, wicca, witch, wise and vision are all cognate. Bad seems to be related to an Old English word for pederasts and hermaphrodites.
Interesting, Fran. A whole lot could be said but I’ll confine myself to remarking that I was surprised a few years ago when the criminologist Paul Wilson used the words “pure evil” to describe the worst offenders. It seemed to be an arbitrary labelling and reification of something he clearly didn’t understand, as though such labelling actually provided an explanation, which it didn’t. Basically a cop out.
Similarly the concept of “original sin” is used by some.
BilB @ 14, that’s an interesting summary,which confirms John H’s view that Robert Sapolsky is worth a look.
THR @ 6, do you have any thoughts about the relationship of the duality of ‘reason’ and ‘passion’ to the (false) duality of mind and body?
Well, I think the former dualism is a consequence of the latter. With the mind-body split, we don’t merely have two terms which are more or less equals. For millenia in the Judeo-Christian/Platonic traditions, the body was held in contempt, and the mind exalted. It follows that something similar would occur with reason and passion. The very etymology of ‘passion’ is suggesting of this (and it was not for nothing that Kant referred to passions incursions into ‘reason’ as Pathologie).
Mercurius @5: I was interested when you said:
Many cultures, including our own, put a very heavy emphasis on outcomes when determining punishment. For example, the punishment we place on someone who runs a red light will be much much harsher when someone runs a red light and kills someone vs a near miss from the same action.
Some of the problems we have with other cultures arises when the weighting of intent and outcome is different from ours. For example, I remember a case in WA where an Aboriginal woman was punished when a man was killed when he walked in front of a car when the bus he and the woman were in stopped so the woman could go to the toilet.
The case of the Aboriginal woman may seem unfair to us. However, there are similarities with some of our laws. For example, under some OH&S laws, A manager can be punished for an outcome that has, at best, has a very tenuous link to the managers intents, actions or lack of actions.
JohnD @19: “A manager can be punished for an outcome that has, at best, has a very tenuous link to the managers intents, actions or lack of actions.”
Somewhat at a tangent, but also on the topic of different cultures and different ideas about OH&S, we had an “interesting” experience with islander/Maori cultural norms when we had a backyard pool resurfaced some years ago.
The pool was the usual old-style kidney shape (about 6m x 3m from memory) and about 1.5 m deep at one end and about 2.5 m at the other end. We got three quotes, and the Aussie salesman for the company in question seemed to know his stuff.
On the appointed day, two guys rolled up and started preparation work. All good. Around morning tea, several younger guys (looked like teenager) turned up and seemed to mainly hang around talking while handing things down into the pool. I thought they might be apprentices or somesuch, but the working arrangement was starting to look a bit “how’s your father…”.
At lunchtime, the wife of the oldest guy turned up with a picnic lunch and a bunch of kiddies, down to about 3 years old I guess. The backyard now had taken on a regular islander/Maori party atmosphere. I was starting to wonder if they would actually get back to work that afternoon. It got worse.
As the older ones settled in to a nice long picnic, the kids commenced playing chasey around the backyard, climbing up and jumping off one-metre rocks on the hillside (the pool had a steep hillside along the back) and chasing each other wildly around the narrow edge of the empty 2.5m deep concrete pool. I went down and said to the adults that I was concerned about their kids having an accident.
“No worries, they are fine.”
“Actually, no, I really don’t want them running around the edge of the pool like that.”
“We’ll take care of the kids…”
After thinking about this for a couple of minutes, I went inside and phoned better half, who totally agreed that we did not want an accident on our property due to poorly supervised kids, who should not even be on an unsecured worksite.
I called over the older guy and passed the phone to him on to speak with better half, so he could more strongly explain our position, man-to-man.
Better half started politely, then ratcheted up progressively, insisting that we did not accept his assurances about children running around on a worksite. The guy turned quite obnoxious, aggressive and argumentative. Eventually better half told him that he knew the law about children on worksites, and he would ring their manager and/or the relevant authorities if they did not remove the children forthwith.
The adults were enraged when the older guy told them about the discussion, and angrily decided that they would all clear out. Better half rang their manager to explain the situation. It was a very uncomfortable situation for both of myself and better half, not least my role in managing their departure.
What really amazed us was:
- firstly, their notion that wives and children could make a picnic at a worksite,
- secondly, that kids could run around unsupervised in a stranger’s backyard,
- thirdly, that it was OK to let small children run wildly around the edge of an empty 2.5 m deep concrete pool, and
- forthly, that it was somehow unreasonable of people who paid for a professional job to demand that the children be removed from an unsafe worksite, for their own safety.
Cultural differences in OH&S on all levels, it seems…
Elise: My father was the foreman in charge of a foundry. As a special treat, the six year old John D was taken into work for the day. So I pottered around, looked for scrap metal in the dust, made some sand molds, closely examined the melting brass and closely watched the brass being poured into molds in the afternoon. (Starting to learn my father’s trade if you like.) No safety gear, normal shoes and not a great deal of supervision. Similar story when we started poultry farming when I was eight. When I was nine I remember watching my father set the explosives into stumps he wanted to remove. So it is not so long ago that our attitude to kids, worksites and safety was much like the Maoris you talked about. (And, I suspect, still is on many farms.)
The interesting question is what would have happened if one of the kids had fallen into the pool and broken their neck. Not sure how Maori culture would handle that.
JohnD @21, as you say, about a generation of difference in attitudes in to kids, worksites and safety.
Still, it can be hard to manage that gap in expectations.
In particular, there are a lot of emotions tied up with the notion that people have a “right” to do things their own way. As I saw, when we insisted on our own standards for our backyard, with our own set of moral and legal responsibilities in Australia.
Emotion’s role in decision-making, as the blog header suggests… It did not do those guys any good to react so belligerently and then storm off. Their manager more or less told us they were on borrowed time as a consequence.
Attitudes, implicit and unrecognised assumptions, strong emotions, sensitive egos…it can all make for a very untidy decision-making process.
Brian “Blogger John Quiggin once posed a dilemma where you had the capacity to rescue one person only from a burning building. There were two people in the building, one was a scientist who you knew had discovered a cure to cancer, but his/her knowledge would die with him/ her if not rescued. The other person was your mother.”
What if your mother had cancer?
Too bad about that scientist and his cure?