Review The Science of Evil: on Empathy and the Origins of Cruelity

    This book, by an author famous for his autism research, is an attempt to bring evil into the realm of the scientifically understandable by equating it with a type of deficiency in empathy.(pg. xii) I think, in the end, he fails. But I think the way he fails casts interesting light on the way we think about evil and the way we think about science.

He starts off describing instances of evil relating to the failure to take into account the human feelings of other treating them as objects to be used and disposed of. Then he goes on to tell a story of a Nazi guard forcing a man to help hang a friend. The guard is angry when the condemned man relives his friend's feeling and puts the noose on his own neck. Baron-Cohen attributes this to a lack of empathy. Now clearly in this case the evil guard is not unaware that the two men are thinking, feeling beings, he is not confused as to what their feelings in reaction to this situation are, he is not even ignoring their feelings. If he had been indifferent to their feelings there would be no reason for the guard to be angry. After all, the physical result, the noose around the condemned man’s neck, that he wanted had been accomplished. His anger only makes sense if his main goal was to inflict emotional distress, because that goal is what has been frustrated. This goal not only allows for but requires an awareness of the emotional capacity of the victims.

Baron-Cohen often focus on lack of awareness of or allowance for other people’s emotions as if this is the key indicator of a lack of empathy. In fact the first definition offered is “Empathy occurs when we suspend our single-minded focus of attention and instead adopt a double minded focus of attention.”(pg 15-16) But in some of his most striking examples of evil, such victims of third world civil wars being forces to assault or kill family members, considerable extra effort is being taken just so that deep emotional scars can be inflicted on these victims, in it obvious that a violent awareness of the other person's feelings is the prime target of these perpetrators. And Baron-Cohen’s second definition included a nod to an ‘appropriate’ response: “Empathy is our ability to identify what some else is thinking or feeling and to respond to their thoughts and feeling with an appropriate emotion.” (pg16) This sounds like the person’s interior emotional reaction is the standard by which empathy or lack thereof should be judged, but throughout the book it is outward actions by which appropriate empathy is actually judged. As Baron-Cohen is nearing the end of the book he states: “According to the theory I have been developing in this book, it is only individuals with low empathy... who could attach or kill another person.”(pg. 169) So complete empathy is not only understanding others emotions but acting appropriately in response to them.

But this leads to the question of how we define the “appropriate” inappropriate reaction to others emotions. It can’t be simply to always avoid causing negative reactions in others, even if a child has a negative emotional reaction to getting shots there are times it is appropriate to give the child a shot anyway. It can’t even be to avoid negative emotional reactions when it is consistent with the person’s physical well being. Consider the case where one child has physically hit another child and hurt him or her. You don’t just want the hitter to say apologetic words by rote, you want that apology to be sincere, to have real remorse behind it. You will use your words and attitude to try to make the hitter feel sadness at the other child’s pain. You always have to balance negative emotional reactions of one person with their own emotions later, with the emotions of others, with the rights to others too distant in place or time for their emotions to be felt, even with your own emotional reactions. Thought there are incidences throughout the book of inappropriate reactions mentioned in passing they are not addressed directly nor are parameters for appropriate defined. So this “appropriate” reaction seems to stay in the realm of philosophy and ethics, An important part, in fact the pivotal part, to this new definition that is supposed to replace evil still slips beyond the measurable and the scientific.

    So why is Baron-Cohen so interested in trying to cram evil into the purview of science? On page 109 he gives this definition: “Truth is (pure and simply) repeatable, verifiable patterns.” This is a very good definition of what can be known scientifically. But look what this definition leaves out. anything that is truly unique is denied existence. Anything that can’t or won’t submit to a verification process not only can’t be known but can’t be True. In fact I’m not sure that part of emotion we actually experience is allowed to exist under this definition. After all, it is the physiological reactions and observable behaviors that can form verifiable patterns, the interior experience of having a feeling is reserved to the individual. There are many metaphysical categories that science has trouble finding traction in. And perhaps that is why Baron-Cohen call evil a non-explanation. (pg. 6) In the end Baron-Cohen is not able to take the uncertainties that come with our emotional judgment out of our inquiry into evil. But it is a noble attempt and provides much food for thought, about both empathy and evil.

This review is based on the hardcover edition.

mini-Review Augustine: Philosopher and Saint

Augustine: Philosopher and Saint by Phillip Cary is an overview of Augustine of Hippo’s work is a fun easy listen designed specifically for its audio format.

I like reading Augustine but I also like listening to summaries such as this. It gives me a feel for how an author very distant in time fits into intellectual current both today and through history. It also helps me see some big picture things that I might not see when I’m looking closely at texts to understand an author in a very different cultural setting.

    A couple of things struck me in listening to this. Augustine is inventing the concept of love; the thing the will does is always love; love is always a seeking to be united with the beloved. So the will is free, because it can not be compelled by circumstances, it is like falling love, not one can force it on you from the outside. You can compel someone, through force, or payment, or social pressure, to decide to walk down a road or smile and shake hands, or work at solving a math problem, but the actual desire to be united with something else is always internal. The other thing is the idea that maybe a biblical interpretation doesn’t have to be strictly “correct” in order to be good, it just has to point towards truly loving God. This makes me feel better my view of Job.

Measuring success

I’ve read a couple of blogs lately that are commenting on various outcome indicators for various large groups of people. I think a lot of things are actually getting conflated in these blogs. Because of the time necessary to to a properly through look at something like this I want to focus in on one tiny part of what is being addressed here. I want to look at male female wage gap and the implicit assumptions behind how that is being used as a proxy for success.

by Images_of_Money

When someone makes a choose with negative economic implications it can be both natural and correct for that choose to have negative economic impacts and for the choose to still be a good and right choice. If someone has left the workforce for several years it is natural that they do not get the promotions, raises, and enriching job experience they would have if they had been working, so there is nothing wrong with them having lower earning power then those who didn’t take a break. But if that break was to take care of a child or family member then that choice is morally admirable in part because it entails a real lose. It’s OK for business to offer better salaries to motivate people to move to take a job, or work long hours, or to be constantly on call. But it is also OK for some people to choose not to take those higher salaried, more demanding jobs. And that choice can be beneficial in building communities as people stay close to family, reserve time for their home life, and stay available for commitments to friends. It’s fine for job markets to reward more highly jobs that are less intrinsically desirable. And it is fine for some people to, instead of going for jobs with high pay, go for jobs that give them a sense of helping people or doing something valuable for their community, or are simply less physically demanding or emotionally stressful.

    And that is where the problem comes in. If you present the difference between the wages of women as a group and men as a group as evidence that women are not as successful as men then you you have denied the validity of any individual woman’s choice to value something other than money. If studies show, as I think they would, that women are disproportionately more likely to make choices that trade monetary advantages for some other type of good, then the logic of a drive to close the wage gap would say that we either need to force women to make different choices or we need distort monetary rewards so they don’t reflect good business decisions. The first of these options is morally repugnant and the second destroys motivation for economic activity.

*Note, I’m not skipping the other types discrimination mentioned in the referenced posts because I think they are analogous but because I think them totally different. They would need their own detailed analysis.

Will education be next?

So Houghton Mifflin Harcourt filed for bankruptcy today. For a while now I’ve watched the sea change in the publishing industry with great delight. To summarize, the entrance of e-books and better print-on-demand technology has made the cost of entry into the publishing business much lower and the internet has made it much more likely that readers will discover and buy niche books. Big publisher are loosing their ability to command market share by simply investing in getting a lot of shelf space at the major book stores. The market has fragmented and people are buying a greater variety of books that they have heard about in a greater variety of ways. This has been bad of most of the publishing houses and for bestselling authors. This has been liberating for mid-list and beginning writers, giving them more freedom to write what they want and more control over whether or not they make money. As a reader it exciting to get the chance to read books I enjoy that might not otherwise have been published. It’s also exciting to see the cost of many books coming down and thus the getting to read more books for the same amount of money.

I’m now seeing speculation that education may be next. I’ve been thinking for awhile that this out to be possible and fantasizing about how I would set-up this up. I do think the information giving part of education can be mass produced to be very low cost. It is individualized supervision and feed-back that will be more expert intensive but even in that there are areas where automation will actually make the product better. I foresee a future where schools offer the lectures free as a loss leader for their testing and certification, offered at a fraction of what college costs today, with tutoring an optional service that can obtained on an as needed basis from whatever vendor you choose. I see it starting already. I can’t wait to watch the revolution happen.

No Going Back

My favorite publisher, Baen, is running a contest this month to promote the Jon and Lobo series by Mark Van Name. Jon is a freelance courier/fixer/mercenary. He has teamed up with Lobo who is an artificially intelligent spaceship and combat assault vehicle who has a dry sense of humor and cynical view of mankind.

The contest is for the best essay on the subject:  What would you do if you could have Lobo for a day?

Here is my entry

Most of us don’t know very much about the workings of the technology that make our lives possible. So if a human, even a extraordinary human like Jon, from a technologically advanced civilization visited earth for a day there would be a limited amount of useful science and engineering he could convey. But Lobo is a different matter. He probably has all sorts of memory capacity given the other abilities he has displayed. Maybe he has some school text books stored in memory. (After all I have have some on my Kindle, just ‘cause, well,... I could.) At very least his own tech manuals and the algorithms he uses to predict his own and others known combat capacity could be analysed to figure out all sorts of fascinating principles. He’s smart and intuitive enough to know what might be useful to me and with his hacking ability he should have no problem figuring out a way to download it to my computers.

Overthrowing Heaven

So the first thing I would do would be to ask Lobo to perform such a download of all the delicious data. (“You’ll be preforming the good deed of spreading knowledge and creating interesting chaos at the same time! What’s not to love, Lobo?”) Of course the information wouldn’t do me that much good without the ability to digest and develop it, and I couldn’t do a good job of that by myself. So the next thing I would do would be to call a bunch of friends who know something about technology or related fields and beg them to drop everything and come meet Lobo for themselves. I’ll want them to interact with him so they don’t think I’m crazy to believe in this data but are instead willing to invest their own time and effort in making a tangible difference with this information.

Jump Gate Twist

I’d be in a hurry to get this done, because if possible, I’d want them to have time to reach out to their own network of friends and have them come over (or be picked up, a spaceship buzzing around silicon valley, picking up employees on their lunch break? “Oh, that must be just Google’s latest extravagance.”) for their own experience of Lobo. I wouldn’t be able to keep control of most of the information. It’s unlikely the I would be the main, much less the sole, center of attention in the resulting fervor. But by being willing to share and displaying openness some of the people I’m friends with would be willing to share back and take me along for the ride. And the discoveries we would make in that data would be an adventure, not just for a day, but just possibly, for a lifetime.

Whom are we Arguing with?

The one response I got to last week’s post included regretful note that these basics are seldom followed in our public discourse. So this week I want to look at some things that might push us away from good enthymemes and picking the correct stasis

So why do we so often use bad enthymeme? I think in our heart of hearts we are not really focused on the audience we claim to be addressing.

image by Adrian Jack Busby via Flicker

I first thought about this in the context of presidential debates. There it is very clear that it is not the point to try to change the minds of your opponents in the debate. (In fact it might be counter productive as one of the things you want is to show the difference between you and other candidates to the audience.) So while you may be responding to another candidate you are are obviously trying to persuade, not them, but the audience.

Even in this context, where I can see intellectually that it makes sense, the pseudo direction of the comments makes me cringe. And the same thing happens in any context where a discussion is taking place in public. The greater numbers entice you to move your persuasive skills away from the nominal interlocutor and onto the general audience that may be overhearing this.

Now the general audience actually contains many different kinds of people. Of course it contains people who have considered the issue and disagree with you. You might think these would be the people you would automatically focus on. But converting these people will be long, hard work.

mini-REVIEW Guardian of the Night

Guardian of the Night by Tony Daniels, 5 out of 5 stars. 

   This book is a Science Fiction Space Opera about some key players on both sides of a human alien war. The action is thrilling, the science is fascinating and the characters make you want to spend more time with them.
    One of the things that caught my attention was the internal debate the aliens were having about how to organize their society. These aliens were much more communal than we are today because of several basic facts of their biology as well as their history. Given that deemphasis on individualism, it was interesting to see how the different philosophies concerning distribution of power and control were phrased. One character saw the basic issue as whether or not the total amount of wealth available was fixed or not. That got me thinking: How do you answer that question without pre-determining your answer in the definition of wealth you choose?