I’ve been very critical* of Richard Dawkins’s recent Twitter dictats on abortion and Down syndrome, but now I get a chance to defend him, and from some of his own ardent supporters at that.
As you all no doubt know, he posted an apology plus explanation yesterday. What I want to take issue with here is not the post but a comment replying to a pair of comments pointing out the importance of emotions and persuasion in discussions of moral issues.
Do you have a list of topics at hand about which we should avoid talking logically? That would be most convenient for everyone concerned. Even if you can’t see the absurdity of that, consider that your list would differ from everyone else’s list of sensitive topics and we’d end up with very little that we could indeed discuss rationally.
You say that you marveled at the Blind Watchmaker and were thrilled by the God Delusion. Did you find them to be well balanced between rational argument and emotional sentiment? I, personally, did not find any patronizing emotional arguments in those two, and if there had been they would not only be unreadable, but insufferable. Why should your sensitivities trump those who are offended by analyzing religion too closely?
The comment is actually somewhat confusing: it’s not clear if the claim is that logic and emotion should be combined and “balanced,” or that emotion should be excluded. I think, though, in context and given those last two sentences, it’s the second. The claim seems to be that the two books were refreshingly free of emotional arguments. I want to defend Dawkins from that charge, at least when it comes to The God Delusion. That book was not free of emotion at all, nor should it have been. It has plenty of indignation, and rightly so.
It starts with emotion. The first sentence is emotional. Don’t you remember? It’s one of those memorable opening lines, like “It is a truth universally acknowledged…” or “All happy families are alike…”
As a child, my wife hated her school and wished she could leave.
As you know, that sets up an analogy to our situation with regard to religion: many of us hate it and prefer to leave (or, having left long ago or never entered, to stay away).
This is about feeling. It’s far from purely logical, and it’s not even purely cognitive. It’s not just about truth. It’s about aversion. And that’s appropriate. We are what we are and not something else. We’re not machines, not even computing machines. We have emotions, and they matter. We rebel against mandatory or socially coerced religion because we dislike it.
This is not to say (as I have seen some bemused or hostile onlookers claim) that arguments should be all emotion and no logic. It’s just to say that emotion can’t and shouldn’t be excluded from discussions of moral issues. (Technical issues are another matter. Feel free to exclude emotions from discussion of bridge-building.)
More from that preface:
As a child, my wife hated her school and wished she could leave.
Years later, when she was in her twenties, she disclosed this
unhappy fact to her parents, and her mother was aghast: ‘But
darling, why didn’t you come to us and tell us?’ Lalla’s reply is my
text for today: ‘But I didn’t know I could.’I didn’t know I could.
I suspect – well, I am sure – that there are lots of people out there
who have been brought up in some religion or other, are unhappy
in it, don’t believe it, or are worried about the evils that are done in
its name; people who feel vague yearnings to leave their parents’
religion and wish they could, but just don’t realize that leaving is an
option. If you are one of them, this book is for you.
You see? Indignation, sympathy, generosity, compassion. And those are good things.
*Note that that’s not a contravention of the joint statement on managing disagreement ethically. That was the whole point. We are going to disagree at times; that’s inevitable; we can’t possibly have or expect total agreement on every issue. We have to be able to do that without resorting to scorched earth tactics.
I find the conceit that his bizarre discussions of things like rape or abortion are “purely logical” to be absurd.
Not only doesn’t that mean anything (any use of logic will rely on premises, and it is these premises that are most often being questioned,) but it’s clear that his opinions on such subjects don’t come from a place of emotionless reasoning: they come from a place of not thinking about the subject very much: A place of ignorance born of privileged blindness.
What’s even more clear is that he needs a filter between his brain and the Internet. Twitter just isn’t his form, and once he’s stuck his foot in his mouth, he seems to be able to extract it only with great difficulty.
Maybe it’s useful to put it in these terms:
Statements about emotions are factual statements. Not in the sense that “I feel X, therefore X is true,” but in the sense that “I feel X” is a statement about the world — at least, the small corner of it that I occupy. Facts about emotions are like any other kind of facts in this important sense: they don’t exist in opposition to “logic,” they’re the premises with which you build a logical argument.
Dawkins, at least when he’s in his Straw Vulcan Mode, acts as if the introduction of emotions into a discussion is an attempt to undermine or exclude logic. As if the conversation is:
Dawkins: “If X, then Y. If Y, then Z. X is true. Therefore, Z.”
Silly Emotional Person: “But but but… Z makes me sad! Therefore Z cannot be true!”
Which is, of course, a fallacious appeal to consequences. And some people do commit that fallacy, which is why we have a name for it. But not every invocation of emotion is part of a fallacy. With his recent misstep, the criticism of Dawkins was more like this:
Dawkins: “If X, then Y. If Y, then Z. X is true. Therefore, Z.” (Where X = a fetus has Down’s Syndrome, Y = the fetus would not have a life worth living, and Z = it is immoral to bring such a fetus into the world.)
Not-so-silly Person: “Y does not follow from X.” (Which might take the actual form of something like: “I personally know of one or more counterexamples. People with Down’s Syndrome are capable of …. and these things bring joy to their lives and the lives of others. You are either ignorant of the realities of Down’s Syndrome (and yet are issuing broad moral conclusions about those with it), or you have an implied definition of what makes life worth living that I find offensive as well as false.”)
Sure, the Not-so-silly Person has invoked emotion, and expressed offense and indignation. But it is absolutely a valid response to Dawkins’ logic.
A couple of interesting things from Dawkins’ post:
That sounds almost like an invocation of the concept of privilege!
1. I have no doubt that there are, and always will be, some people who deliberately set out to twist Dawkins’ words to their own purposes. That is true for any public figure. And while some people don’t choose to be public figures, Dawkins indisputably does. When you’re a self-declared “thought leader,” you really ought to do your utmost to avoid making it easy for the enemies of your causes to use your own words against you and the causes. Saying things that are “tactlessly vulnerable to misunderstanding” is, to coin a phrase, thought leader malpractice.
2. When you’ve been told time and time again by those close to you that maybe you’re not so hot at communicating on Twitter, perhaps you should re-evaluate your hypothesis that your fellow-travellers are deliberately misunderstanding your words, in favor of the alternate hypothesis that it’s a genuine misunderstanding caused by your error.
Well to be fair I don’t think Dawkins has ever declared himself a thought-leader. It was the fatuous Global Secular Council that called him that.
When we were discussing the joint statement – discussing the possibility of it, that is – he firmly disavowed the very idea. Not, I hasten to say, that I’d accused him of being or calling himself a “thought-leader” – I definitely didn’t.
Noted, though that’s not a distinction that impresses me. If he signed up for the GSC and gave them permission to use his name without signing off on their mission statements and such first, well, that’s all the more evidence of poor judgment.
When I recently briefly sampled an audio version of The God Delusion (the only time I have read any of his books) he explicitly said something about the privileging of religion.
I agree with almost everything that has been said in the comments above. It is obviously impossible to examine any issue one cares about from a purely logical standpoint, and I have a hard time trying to come up with an example of an issue I would not care about at all (well. maybe football). Besides, who would ever enter a discussion on something he/she does not care about at all?
Abortion, rape, misogyny, the suffering of children, are issues I care deeply about, and all of them are examples of needless, unjustifiable suffering, an idea I cannot really tolerate. But most of all I find it very hard to tolerate the pernicious influence of religion in planting and nurturing our guilt. Having witnessed how devastating the effect of an abortion can be to the woman involved, I have a pretty good idea of how deep the worm of guilt can burrow. My rationalist leanings stem perhaps from this abhorrence, a sort of antidote, if you will. I can only guess how many women have had to endure the ordeal of being forced to give birth, or being forced to abort (two sides of the same coin, in fact). With respect to Dawkins’s imperative advice, I understand perfectly well why he shouldn’t have given it. However, if it had been me, I’d probably have said exactly the same, but not because I regard the decision of having the baby immoral, but because it seems to me that there is already too much emotional oppression coming from the opposite side. A bold statement like “having an abortion is the moral thing to do” is of course too sweeping to be taken seriously, but it has the advantage of counterbalancing the similarly bold statement “giving birth to the child is the moral thing to do”, a message that has enjoyed vastly greater airtime.
Probably in such cases it would be best to say something like “it’s your decision, and I’ll support you whichever option you choose,” but perhaps that means leaving the asker alone with her doubts. I’ve been in situations where I didn’t know what to do, and when I asked for advice, I wanted some advice; I did not want to be told “it’s up to you.” I already knew that. I wanted to know what somebody else would have done, and why, in order to check my intuitions against some sort of reference. Most of all, I wanted reassurance that it was allright for me to make a rational decision even if it was not what I was supposed to do.
I cannot think of Dawkins as Mr Spock. I think his tweets are naïve from a PR point of view, but I really cannot bring myself to imagine him meaning what is being attributed to him. I am sure that by “the moral thing to do” he meant “that child’s well-being.” I can, of course, be wrong, but I cannot picture him saying that with the flat android voice other posters probably imagine. Whether his ethics are valid or not is a different issue; however wrong he might be, I can only see a desire to reduce suffering as his motivation.
I apologise for the rapid-fire posts. I just realised that Dawkins has been most often criticised for phrasing his moral views as an imperative. But I think the problem might be in his using a premise of dubious truth-value. He implicitly assumes that a DS child will suffer. This is probably untrue; at least, it is not always true.
But conceding that the premise was, in fact true: would he still have been wrong to phrase his tweet as an imperative? What I’m confused about is this: if instead of DS we were discussing a truly horrible malformation, one that would surely comdemn that child to a life ofpain, could it be then said that the moral thing to do would be to abort?
If Dawkins was convinced that children with DS could not possibly be happy-though his belief was wrong-would he still not have been justified in describing abortion as “the moral thing to do”?
In his “apology” he included what he would have said if he’d had more than 140 characters. It’s 255 words/ 1376 characters. Here’s a tip for the Dawk: If you need 10 times as many characters as Twitter will allow you to express your thought properly, DON’T EXPRESS IT ON TWITTER.
piero@7:
I think it’s a good comparison, but only if we’re talking about the actual character Spock as opposed to the cliched version of him. When it came to describing his own traits or those of Vulcans generally, Spock was … a little unreliable. There’s more than a couple of instances where someone (usually Kirk) tweaks Spock about how Spock isn’t acting according to (the Spock version of) logic. Or Spock’s declaration about how Vulcans do not lie… oh, but they do “exaggerate.”
Before I get too far into Star Trek nerdery — my point is that Dawkins, like Spock, tries to come off as more robotic than he actually is. Dawkins lately has been talking a lot about how emotion is supposedly incompatible with logic, etc., but as Ophelia points out, he’s quite skilled when he wants to be at incorporating emotions in his rhetoric.
Which is a good thing, and something he ought to be proud of. Spock was a good person, but his stuffed pretensions to a robot-like version of “logic” was his least appealing side. Perhaps Ophelia can be the Dr. McCoy who punctures that facade from time to time. (Not sure who gets to be Kirk in this analogy….)
It seems to me that what’s going on is that thing men often do when it comes to emotion: the type and intensity of emotion that they express is not emotion at all but just the way people talk. Everything which deviates from that is emotion. Just like male, cis, white, straight are the defaults from which everyone else deviates.
@jedibear:
Well you seem to be an expert on that pattern of conduct, since just yesterday you were stating “the proximate cause of British islamism is British islamophobia and racism”. Only blind privilege and paternalism can explain such a vapid stance in a non-Muslim, as someone else called you out on.
His premise was also factually wrong, no emotion about it.
It is more moral to abort… because a life with DS doesn’t contribute enough to society (is what he directly said), and he implied that it also was a life full of suffering, better not experienced.
Nothing he says follows unless that is true. And there are a lot of people with DS who contribute more to society than a lot of people who don’t, and there are a lot of people with DS who might disagree with him about their quality of life.
@ piero 8
“But conceding that the premise was, in fact true: would he still have been wrong to phrase his tweet as an imperative? What I’m confused about is this: if instead of DS we were discussing a truly horrible malformation, one that would surely comdemn that child to a life of pain, could it be then said that the moral thing to do would be to abort?”
In that case, I think it is still wrong to tweet an imperative. It is unethical to tell women “you should abort because of X ethical issue” or “you should avoid abortion because of Y ethical issue,” because it erodes freedom of conscience and helps to maintain a hostile environment for anyone who wants to speak up about their own choices.
If the tweet were phrased “I personally wouldn’t feel comfortable bringing a child into the world knowing it would endure Y or Z pain and suffering” then that would be better, because it addresses the heart of the dilemma without handing out a one-size-fits-all solution (and then claiming that solution is the only moral one).
Seven of Mine @11
I think you’re on to something, here.
Ophelia said:
Shaln’t. Bridges can and should be awesome. Engineering requires emotion. Here’s a bridge just down the road from where I live http://www.digital-yarm.com/tl_files/files/gallery/yarm-bridge.jpg. Can anyone tell me that emotion wasn’t involved there? And a few miles away we have our various bridges over the Tyne. They’re hardly purely about utility. And a few miles even closer we have the world’s least sensible bridge: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middlesbrough_Transporter_Bridge
Hi, latsot!
And let’s have this one up too because awe is also an emotion.
http://great-panorama.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/the-tallest-bridge-in-worldmillau.html
Thanks Mauteen, that is indeed a completely ridiculous and awesome bridge.
I think that a lot of the arguments for emotion and against logic and reason are building a strawman of the logical side, arguing against a Straw Vulcan position that most of those who are opposing emotion in argument don’t actually hold. Take the initial comment: it comes from someone who admits that he can’t actually refute the argument, but that he is so disgusted by the argument — and some things said beforehand — that he is done with Dawkins. Again, despite the fact that he acknowledges that the argument makes sense … with the added snide “on a purely dispassionate level”. This strikes to the fear of people who want rational argument to determine what we do and what is moral or immoral: that someone could indeed hold the same view of morality, agree about all of the relevant facts — including facts about emotional states, because no utilitarian view will leave them out — agree with the premises of the argument, agree that the conclusion follows from the premises … and yet will still reject the conclusion based solely on how that conclusion makes them feel. You don’t get to reject scientific conclusions because you have a strong emotional reaction against them, and you shouldn’t get to reject moral conclusions for that reason either.
The most you can argue is that the easiest way to persuade someone to do the right thing is to appeal to them emotionally. The problem is that if you do that you aren’t using reason and logic to persuade them, but are instead simply building an emotional commitment in them to the truth of the proposition. And if you do that, you have two major problems. The first is that if you are emotionally committed to the truth of a proposition, it’s really, really difficult to change that belief in light of evidence; you are pushed to rationalize it away until you simply can’t anymore, and perhaps even then. The second is that the logic and reason of the argument isn’t relevant to why they believe it, and so what you end up doing is encouraging them to believe irrationally, without considering the arguments in detail, but instead relying on their emotional content, which means that you deny them the ability to actually for conclusions rationally. Assuming that your argument is indeed rationally right, you should really want them to see that and accept the conclusion based on that, as opposed to them accepting it based on your manipulation of their emotions.
Note that not even the Stoics would deny that basic motivational emotion — like Hume’s “calm passions” or the affect that Damasio measures — are important to reason. They talked about emotions like anger, not the calm passions, and not generally being motivated to do something. But they would argue that even these must be the servants of reason, and never the masters. Any emotion that kicks off only in light of what one has rationally understood is acceptable, but those that will get you to act without thinking and in a manner that is opposed to what is the rationally correct option are bad. If we care, we should care to do what is right, not decide what is right based on what we care about. And the fear from the reactions is that if the emotion is strong enough reason gets no say in what’s done and how we act, and that’s unacceptable.
What, there wasn’t room in those 140 characters for “ur choice, but”? Hmm… well maybe I’ll retract one of the fucks from my comment on “Choice is minimised,” but come on, Dawkins, you don’t have to “go out of your way” to find those comments, and it’s not reasonable to expect that a statement that fails to include vital content will be read as if that vital content were there. If you can’t express yourself clearly in 140 characters, make a series of tweets to express yourself, or just… don’t. The internet doesn’t give people psychic powers.
Anyway what is it with these wannabe Vulcans? Yes, sure, emotional arguments are bad, but they are bad because they’re avoiding logic, not because they’re emotional.
Yesterday, I was arguing with someone about Ferguson (because I hate being happy) and I was honestly getting very, very angry. I would angry state that there is no way to justifiy shooting an unarmed person as self defense, and he calmly, rationally, logically told me that if somebody shoots at you, and you shoot back and kill them, then that’s self defence. By Vulcanite logic, his was the rational statement, since he was not remotely angry about it, and his statement was entirely, 100% true… however, it was also entirely irrelevant to the issue at hand.
Also, bridges rock. Beautiful, beautiful bridges. <3
Athywren,
Okay, who actually does argue that? It being irrelevant to the issue at hand makes it irrational, and more so than simply expressing a rational argument emotionally.
If you are definitely angry when you are arguing with me, the main thing that I think is that you aren’t going to be as likely to accept that your argument is wrong until you calm down or unless I can break through the anger. This is because anger doesn’t allow for that; it encourages you to fight and keep fighting and to rationalize doing so, THAT’S the irrationality of arguing while angry, and the risk you take. BEING angry may be understandable, but strong emotion absolutely DOES impair your reasoning and we should try to avoid reasoning while under the influence of strong emotion as possible.
Verbose Stoic:
I think you’ve hit the nail in the head there.
Screechymonkey:
This reminded me of Anthony Hopkins’s Stevens in “The remains of the day.” To me, however, Stevens’s awkwardness at dealing with emotion was sad rather than reprehensible.
The individual I was talking to actually argued that, and several people in various threads on freethoughtblogs have (sorry, I have no sources for that, as I don’t keep links to old discussions, and I’m not about to look them up now).
Those who like to play vulcan often bring up irrelevancies, strawmen, many and varied fallacies, and consider their positions to be rational because their statements follow an internal logic and avoid emotion, yet their arguments fail because they fail to vet the information they’re plugging into their arguments. Garbage in, garbage out, but if it’s going through a well formulated program, it may well be logical-sounding garbage.
Thank you for informing me of this obscure idea, but I’m still going to get angry if you try to justify murder at me.
Verbose person: I draw your attention to 2 sentences in the post which you seem to have skipped or forgotten:
You seem to be responding to a version of the post that doesn’t contain those two sentences.
Ophelia,
I’m actually arguing against that last sentence: other than as facts about the world that some moral philosophies will consider relevant, what does emotion add to discussions of moral issues? Noting that you can’t use the “calm passions” as an example because even the Stoics don’t consider those emotions for the purposes of discussing the right action.
Athywren,
Someone who argues that is arguing irrationally, and so doesn’t count as “Vulcanite”, as in the people who say that we really ought to get emotion out of our arguments and reasoning. The Stoics are as Vulcanite as you can get in that manner and don’t argue that, and even the Vulcans, as presented, never went so far as to support an irrational argument that was made without emotion over a rational argument that was. Vulcanites, to have meaning, care about rationality and correctness first, emotion second. It’s only because emotion so often leads to irrationality that makes them oppose it.
As for your murder example: what if it isn’t murder, but you only THINK it’s murder because you don’t get the argument? If someone can make a valid and sound argument that it isn’t murder and is, in fact, the only morally correct option, how does your getting angry at your perception that it is murder help you see that? While a lot of the comments disparage dispassionate moral reasoning, to me that’s the best moral reasoning because all it cares about is correctness. not how it makes you feel. A correct moral argument that you feel horrific is still a correct moral argument.
Verbose Stoic @25:
Ah, the No True Emotion argument.
You’ve really stacked the deck with your example, stipulating that the other person’s argument is “the only morally correct option” and then demanding we show how one particular emotion would help recognize this stipulated correctness. It’s as if I demanded that you explain to me how seat belts will help you when your car is flying off a mile-high cliff: maybe they’re not useful in this one particular instance, but that doesn’t tell us much about their general utility.
Nonetheless, I can answer your challenge. Anger can motivate. Anger can make someone stick with a discussion that an emotionally detached person would abandon out of boredom. (Sorry, does boredom count as an emotion? Ok, then, substitute “out of a rational decision to expend one’s mental and physical resources on other more productive matters.”)
The person who abandons the discussion (perhaps in the mistaken belief that THEY are the ones with the “valid and sound argument” that is the “only morally correct option”) may never change his or her mind. The person who continues the discussion out of anger or a desire to prove the other person wrong will be exposed to further argument and may, eventually, change his or her mind.
I know that I have had examples where my SIWOTI syndrome motivated me to look up some links to further demonstrate the obvious wrongness of someone else’s position, only to discover that… uh, actually, the evidence for my position wasn’t quite as good as I thought it was.
And here’s a nice implied strawman to wrap things up. I don’t see anyone in this thread arguing that we should subordinate the goal of reaching correct moral decisions to the goal of reaching decisions that make us feel good. Several of us have gone out of our way to explain that this is not what we’re claiming.
@Verbose Stoic, 25
Sure, tell them that. I absolutely agree that they don’t really count as followers of a Vulcan philosophy, but they still make a point of claiming that they’re just taking the logical position, often outright claiming that they’re playing Vulcan, and so I’m going to call them what they claim to be. If they actually were what they claimed to be, I’d just call them skeptics.
True, if I was simply unable to understand that argument that a particular instance was not murder but the only morally correct option, you may have a point. However, since I actually have a decent understanding of how and when killing can be justified, and anger only ever gets the best of me when people are continually holding onto terrible arguments (such as, in the case I was referring to originally, that it’s not murder to kill an unarmed man who is surrendering, because the police did it) and refusing to consider other points of view, dismissing them as knee-jerk anti-government sentiment, I don’t see that as a particularly serious problem in my case.
I fully agree that there are cases where there are moral arguments that really do justify killing, and I agree that there are times when it’s unclear, and I can agree with these statements without needing to excise my emotions because, even though I find all loss of life deeply troubling, I do recognise instances where it’s unavoidable. There are also, however, times when it’s blatantly, obviously murder, and defending that will make me angry. Yes, hypothetically, it’s possible that I’m simply too irrational to understand that not all killing is murder, but that is not the case in reality.
@Vebose & screechymonkey
True, I went into that argument with an apparently false belief – that several people had been needlessly killed – which was shown to be unsupported when I researched it further. I then retracted that claim and dropped the belief, as it had been shown that the position was irrational, given the available facts… all while being extremely angry at the argument that it’s not murder to kill an unarmed man who’s surrendering.
I’ve hesitated on this one because it is personal, but I’ve thought about it carefully enough at this point. It’s personal because while Dawkins is “nice enough” to say that folks with autism are useful because they have enhancements, his inability to work through a sensitive moral issue with someone with empathy is a concern to me because it suggests that someone like me lives right in his empathy blind spot and that is a thing that will be part of his decision making beyond ineptness at communicating with a mall number of characters.
I have enhancements of my own. While I have studied what I am and tried to figure out how it has shaped my life I have been suspecting that in many ways elements of Tourette’s Syndrome are in fact the opposite of what exists in autism. What autistics have had to deal with have given them strengths in realms that seem to involve how reality is arranged around us, a “details” level so to speak (anyone with autism please feel free to speak up, I welcome having my perspective modified). In my case what I have had to fight has given me strengths in the same sort of emotional realms that seem to be treated with a mixture of disgust and disdain by the “vulcans” (a metaphor, real people of course get to show me what they are really like). Would Dawkins see me as “enhanced” because I can more clearly see the way that people move against and with one another because of the emotional rules that we have all inherited? Because what I bring to things is the use of emotion and logic with as much self-awareness as possible. Emotion has a logic and that is a powerful rulebook because of evolution and I hear that begin consistent with reality is a thing our community values.
Many people that have been metaphorically associated with vulcans are missing how emotion is involved in the application of their own reason and logic as Ms. Benson has pointed out. She is quite correct, Dawkins has targeted and contextualized the logic in his arguments in emotional realms that we are concerned about as atheists. Some are getting tired of it but it bears pointing out again because it matters, Dear Muslima happened because he had an emotional reaction to women speaking out about men in the atheist/skeptical community. His comparison, his logic, was targeted and contextualized by emotion. I have seen the same pattern again and again with conflicts over Ferguson and others, people that keep hyper-focusing on their own logic in ways that deny the emotion targeting it, while characterizing their opponents almost entirely in terms of the emotional basis of their logic and can’t see simple disagreement (disagreeing =/= “getting the point). All arguments have both components, an emotional trigger that accesses and contextualizes the use of logic to create and construct the argument. I cannot respect it when a person can not characterize what the other is saying, in context, including emotional context and only pays attention to the other persons emotion and neglects how the emotion creates the other person’s logic. (And yes this paragraph is describing the stereotype and the reality will be people on a spectrum)
I think that I understand some of the general issue that those being characterized as vulcans are complaining of and some of where it comes from (and anyone from this group can feel free to let me know how close I am). The atheist/skeptical community has a lot of historical experience with the negatives of how emotion warps logic and the proper application of logic. Emotions can do terrible things, in the contexts in which those emotions are being used. We have all raged and despaired at how those poor rubes have let themselves be convinced by logic that is either flawed or inconsistent with reality. I can see the elements of consistency between that and Dawkins despairing that our community can’t seem to be able to “discuss sensitive issues”.
But that ignores the fact that there is a spectrum of choices for interacting with a person that contrasts with you socio-politically, from empathizing with the reasons (emotion-logic connection) for why they accept the logic that they do while you offer your reasons and logic in fair trade, to aggressively smashing at the logic and reasons and hoping that your show will impress the audience (you can hope to convince them, but intense emotion tends to make people turn off more often so focusing on the audience is logical). If you scale this up to society it’s the difference between two groups mixing conversationally and beating against one another like elephant seals. Both are appropriate in the proper context.
Dawkins probably could have tried to explore the issue of comparing the harm among different sorts of rape, but that only works one way and I suspect that it’s the same way that people actually studying rape use. He would have had to go from victim to victim, collect their stories including both emotional and logical components, using the level of empathy necessary to respectfully get personal details without being insensitive to trauma, and then tried to carefully work with the same victims to see if there are any patterns. But he did not do that. He used twitter. He spoke casually about painful things.
Because of the ways our brain work you can’t really use a thing until you gain an awareness of the thing, it’s the basis for psychological techniques like CBT/DBT where one gains an awareness of their emotions as neutral signals and then they next begin the practice of learning to contextualize ones emotions with choice and awareness. Learning how to use and understand both emotion and logic is vital and critical to effective communication, activism, debate, and base internet one-one one (or many-on-many) slugfests which can be enjoyed the same as one might a boxing match. Let me be clear, the vulcan stereotype is a person who only uses half of the rules for language with awareness at best, and strategically says they only value logic in rhetoric at worst. This is either a competency or honesty problem. Either way when I meet that stereotype I’ll do the best I can to be as kind as the environment allows me to be to the incompetent, but I’m drooling in anticipation for the dishonest.
screechymonkey,
The most interesting thing about your comments is that we essentially agree on the place of emotion in argument, at least from your first comment:
The only debate would be over when facts about emotions are relevant to at least moral discussions, with my leaning towards them being relevant less often than you, presumably. But onto the comments:
“No True Scotsman” arguments don’t work when the person who’s saying “That’s not what I meant by X” is indeed clear about what counts for them, and the people opposing them are instead using their own definition. In terms of emotion, “calm passions” and affect and their relation to emotion uses a criteria for emotion that the Stoics never used and weren’t even aware of. Considering that they insisting on reasoning about everything, the basic affects that are used in reasoning are clearly not what they want to eliminate when they want to eliminate the passions, nor were what they were considering, and they had no reason to think that the stronger emotions and basic motivations were, in fact, related in that way. A fair argument against the Stoics is that they can’t get rid of the stronger emotions that they distrust because those are part of the same mechanism as the basic affects that we need to have any motivation at all and to even do reasoning, but it would be an unfair one to say that they want to eliminate even those and so their position is nonsensical.
But this is actually highlighting the ACTUAL argument of the “Vulcanites” ie those who want emotion out of morality: in this case, the anger is IMPEDING you from determining what is right and what is wrong. Essentially, you are angry at a perceived view that it is murder even when if considered rationally it is clear that it isn’t, and is in fact what should be done. Either you are going to reason that out or you aren’t; the emotion adds nothing to it.
But this is the strawman of the “Vulcanite” position. No one — even the Stoics — who argues against emotion in decision making argues that emotions can never be useful, or are never right. Emotions can indeed motivate you to do things and, in fact, motivate you to do the right thing. The argument is that emotions are just as likely to motivate you to do the wrong thing as they are the right thing. If we follow on the recent work in emotion that people like Damasio and Prinz talk about, it’s clear that emotions — or, at least, strong emotions — always entail a judgement, a determination that a situation requires aggressive action or protective action (fear) or some other action that the emotion facilitates. So the emotion makes the assessment and then strongly motivates you to act on that assessment. But that assessment is instinctive and not reasoned out, which means that unless you condition your emotions to reason for all cases it’s actually pretty likely to be irrational and is almost always non-rational. And the argument is that we really should be relying on reason for these things.
So the argument is two-fold: emotions are at best non-rational unless fully-conditioned and we can indeed make the judgements we need to make using reason without relying on these instinctive reactions. Even in your case, we can see that if everyone was rational your SIWOTI pushing you to research your position wouldn’t be necessary. In that discussion, they should ideally demonstrate that you are wrong so that you don’t have to research it, or at least present a compelling enough case that if you want to ensure that you are correct you will research it yourself. Thus, all you need is the desire to have the correct view, instead of the desire to be right that produces and follows from the anger.
Again, the point of the argument is that if you are indeed committed to that, it is better to be dispassionate than it is to feel that horror, because the emotion will prime you to not act on that. The argument is against the idea that having emotion — in that sense, not simply as facts — in the argument is a benefit as opposed to a detriment, and that a dispassionate view is inferior to a passionate one.
Athywren,
In discussions, I do, although I’m likely to simply say that their argument is irrelevant rather than that they aren’t taking the rational perspective. Being wrong does not make one irrational. And it’s really hard to tell when someone is sticking to a bad argument or when you simply haven’t presented your argument well-enough for them to see why their argument is wrong.
The first rule, in my opinion, of a “Vulcanite” approach is this: if someone is defending something that is blatantly and obviously wrong, it’s possible that it isn’t as blatant and obvious as it seems to me, which means that we need to look deeper. Note that most of the time when someone does that, it’s because of an emotional commitment to something that’s getting in the way of them really seeing the obvious argument.
I never claimed that it did. Subscribing to a system that leads you to assume that you must be correct simply because you’re excising emotion, however, does.
I couldn’t possibly disagree more. I mean, ok, sure, it is hypothetically possible that someone who is making a point of completely excising emotion from their arguments and positions has some magical access to deeper ways of knowing things. However, in my experience, one needs to consider all data points when considering reality, and that includes emotional ones, yet this dispassionate approach is often used to dismiss them entirely as irrelevant. It has also been my experience that those who deliberately excise emotion from their reasoning are, in fact, not doing so, and are merely using their supposed intellectual objectivity as a kind of argument from authority, as we can see in your claim that we should assume that such a person’s arguments should be looked at deeper, even when blatantly and obviously wrong. Why wouldn’t we apply this equally to street preachers and doomsayers? Yes, it’s blatantly and obviously wrong that, for instance, there are alien lizardmen in positions of power throughout the world, but maybe we just need to look deeper? Forgive me, but I don’t see a dispassionate façade as justification for looking deeper into absurdist claims, and I don’t see the fact that some absurd claims also piss me off as evidence that I’m being irrational in dismissing them.
Yes, we should always be willing to look deeper into claims, but the behaviour of the person making the claims should not be the deciding factor in this.
I am an emotional person, but I also make a point of being skeptical. I know that I can be, and often am wrong, and so I make an effort to catch myself in errors in important matters.
On the other hand, it has been my experience with those who like to play Vulcan, that they assume that by being dispassionate, they remove the source of error. As you said, “most of the time when someone does that, it’s because of an emotional commitment to something that’s getting in the way of them really seeing the obvious argument.” Maybe it’s not what you are saying here, but it’s implicit in that statement that being dispassionate lets you see the obvious argument, lets you understand things objectively, and removes the possibility that you’re wrong. So far, I’ve yet to encounter a wannabe Vulcan who doesn’t seem to believe this of themselves, and I consider it to be a dangerously irrational opinion to hold of yourself, despite how little emotion may be involved in expressing it.