Re: Comment Catcher: The Problem of Culpability in Mental Illness, Part 3heron61February 29 2016, 08:44:34 UTC
Awesome discussion, I'm very much enjoying it. Having considered the meat machines do morality question before, my best answer for how a society should deal with this is utterly pragmatic - work to discover what legal and cultural structures work best at promoting social harmony and reducing misery and violence in a diverse society, and then adopt them - in short transform arguments about is X more moral than Y into discussions of which option produces the better outcomes. Of course, there's an unavoidable moral under-layer to any such project, and from my PoV, that's worth discussing, but should also be built upon general principles - applications (ie laws and social norms) are all about what works best.
I agree with the general ideas that morality is useful-maybe-necessary to civilization, and that large-scale cooperation provides a huge advantage.
I *disagree* that civilization requires culpability. If the game is set up to weed out defectors, culpability is irrelevant. The question isn't "did you mean to do it and if so why," the question is "are you likely to do it again."
Culpability is a pretty good starting place for that, but it's not the be-all-end-all.
Yes, I agree that functionally, it shouldn't matter if an individual is culpable, just whether they are likely to do it again. Yet the culpability concept seems so widespread in civilization, I have to wonder if it turns out that having most people believe in culpability results in better individual and social controls. Or maybe it's just the simplest solution, rather than the most powerful solution, so a lot of people stumble on it. Or conceivably, it's just a very sticky or spready idea.
I think deterrence is the major thing missing from that analysis.
We don't just want to wait until people do something wrong the first time and then decide whether they look likely to do it again. If we did that, there'd be a general perception that you could get away with a crime if you could argue convincingly in court that it had been a one-off. (I don't know - for example, perhaps someone who murdered their father could argue that it didn't imply anything very much about their general safety for anyone else to be around, because only their father had ever had the opportunity to commit whatever acts of egregious mis-parenting in their childhood had inspired their murderous inclination
( ... )
In my experience it's actually rare to come across anyone whose thinking isn't at bottom dualistic, though they may at the same time believe things that don't in fact make sense in a dualistic world view. But probably I'm just drawing the line in a different place from you. It seems to me, for instance, that believing in the immortality of the soul right there makes you ineluctably dualistic.
To the topic: You write: "a huge cultural blind-spot: the violence committed by mentally ill people whose mental illnesses have symptoms that increase their propensity for violence, but who are not morally incontinenced by their mental illnesses."
This bundle of posts of yours are fascinating and difficult, because the person I know best with mental illness is exactly on that cusp of being morally in/continent, and due to their psychosis, cycles back and forth between those states. Were they to be evaluated by experts, the expert's opinions would likely vary based on which side of the fence they are on TODAY.
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Okay, fixed.
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I *disagree* that civilization requires culpability. If the game is set up to weed out defectors, culpability is irrelevant. The question isn't "did you mean to do it and if so why," the question is "are you likely to do it again."
Culpability is a pretty good starting place for that, but it's not the be-all-end-all.
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We don't just want to wait until people do something wrong the first time and then decide whether they look likely to do it again. If we did that, there'd be a general perception that you could get away with a crime if you could argue convincingly in court that it had been a one-off. (I don't know - for example, perhaps someone who murdered their father could argue that it didn't imply anything very much about their general safety for anyone else to be around, because only their father had ever had the opportunity to commit whatever acts of egregious mis-parenting in their childhood had inspired their murderous inclination ( ... )
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Like I said...book!!
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To the topic: You write: "a huge cultural blind-spot: the violence committed by mentally ill people whose mental illnesses have symptoms that increase their propensity for violence, but who are not morally incontinenced by their mental illnesses."
This bundle of posts of yours are fascinating and difficult, because the person I know best with mental illness is exactly on that cusp of being morally in/continent, and due to their psychosis, cycles back and forth between those states. Were they to be evaluated by experts, the expert's opinions would likely vary based on which side of the fence they are on TODAY.
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