Posted by Niek0 on May 02, 2004 at 10:49:30
In Reply to: You got to read this article!!! posted by exer on March 22, 2004 at 21:30:01:
I read this Carl Zimmer article thoroughly. The following comments from it are illuminating:
Most of us would like to believe that when we say something is right or wrong, we are using our powers of reason alone. But Greene argues that our emotions also play a powerful role in our moral judgments, triggering instinctive responses...
Hume argued that people call an act good not because they rationally determine it to be so, but because it makes them feel good. They call an act bad because it fills them with disgust. Moral knowledge, Hume wrote, comes partly from an ”immediate feeling and finer internal sense.”
This by the way is coincidentally the same mechanism (emotional reasoning) by which a person's brain is accessed for brainwashing, when the person is rationally certain that they never were.
Consider the following excerpt from chapter 13 of Deborah Davis' book:
Two years after my husband and I left the Children of God, his mother asked him, "Bill, do you think you were brainwashed?".
"Brainwashed?" he quickly answered."Why that's ridiculous, Mom! I wasn't brainwashed! There was no one telling me what to do, or forcing me. I did it of my own free will, because I wanted to. Brainwashing? That's ridiculous!"
Bill was offended at his mother's suggestion that he had been made to act according to someone else's will. He was vehement in his argument. However, one year later he told his mother, "You know, Mom, you were right. I was brainwashed."
Was Bill right the first time or the second? And if he was brainwashed, is he responsible for his actions in the COG?
http://www.exfamily.org/art/exmem/debdavis/debdavis13.shtml