Churchland on the brain and morality
December 06, 2019
I've never agreed with Patricia Churchland's philosophy of mind, but in this interview some of her comments on morality resonated with me. Excerpts:
I think what’s troubling about Kant and utilitarians is that they have this idea, which really is a romantic bit of nonsense, that if you could only articulate the one deepest rule of moral behavior, then you’d know what to do. It turns out that’s not workable at all: There is no one deepest rule. We have all kinds of rules of thumb that help us with a starting point, but they can’t possibly handle all situations for all people for all times.
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Of course we always care about the consequences. But the important thing is that’s only one constraint among many. Moral decision-making is a constraint satisfaction process whereby your brain takes many factors and integrates them into a decision.
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