Gay marriage panel

On November 2, from 1-3pm in the TSC Auditorium there will be a panel discussion on gay marriage.  It is called “Gays and Marriage: Religious Perspectives” and is sponsored by the Center for Women and Gender Lecture Series.  Representatives from various faith traditions will be on the panel – Episcopalian, Catholic, Jewish, Mormon, Buddhist, and Hindu.  I (Kleiner) will be the “practicing representative” of the Roman Catholic faith.

It sounds like the panel discussion was occasioned by the screening of the 8: A Mormon Proposition documentary last week.  The hope, as I understand it, is to gather together some religious perspectives with the aim of having a dialogue that does not simply throw gasoline on the fire.  The event is open to students, faculty, staff, and members of the community.

Losing our moral vocabulary

I thought this was a thought provoking talk.  Here is a summary:

ArchBishop Charles Chaput recently gave a talk in British Columbia and spoke of how the reaction to Shirley Jackson’s short story “The Lottery” has changed over the years.  “The Lottery” is set in rural 1940s America.  The story tells of an annual ritual festival which is meant to insure a good harvest.  Everyone lines up and draws a ticket.  This particular year, Tessie Hutchinson, a young wife and mother, draws the ticket with the black mark.  It is made official, Tessie has drawn the black mark and so has been selected as the human sacrifice for the ritual.  The villagers proceed to stone her to death.

Apparently a college professor named Kay Haugaard wrote an essay a few years back on how the reaction of her students to “The Lottery” have changed since the 1970s.  Chaput’s summary:

“She said that in the early 1970s, students who read the story voiced shock and indignation. The tale led to vivid conversations on big topics — the meaning of sacrifice and tradition; the dangers of group-think and blind allegiance to leaders; the demands of conscience and the consequences of cowardice.  Sometime in the mid-1990s, however, reactions began to change.

Haugaard described one classroom discussion that — to me — was more disturbing than the story itself. The students had nothing to say except that the story bored them. So Haugaard asked them what they thought about the villagers ritually sacrificing one of their own for the sake of the harvest.

One student, speaking in quite rational tones, argued that many cultures have traditions of human sacrifice. Another said that the stoning might have been part of “a religion of long standing,” and therefore acceptable and understandable.

An older student who worked as a nurse, also weighed in. She said that her hospital had made her take training in multicultural sensitivity. The lesson she learned was this: “If it’s a part of a person’s culture, we are taught not to judge.

… Our culture is doing catechesis every day. It works like water dripping on a stone, eroding people’s moral and religious sensibilities, and leaving a hole where their convictions used to be.  Haugaard’s experience teaches us that it took less than a generation for this catechesis to produce a group of young adults who were unable to take a moral stand against the ritual murder of a young woman.  Not because they were cowards. But because they lost their moral vocabulary.”

One can read the article to see Chaput’s suggestions as to what we should do about this (in a nutshell, we need to reverse the course of things since as its stands the culture is shaping Christians instead of Christians shaping the culture).  But for our purposes here, I wonder if others think this reflection on to something.

The “hard” problem of consciousness: a conceptual muddle?

Here is an interesting article covering some of the thoughts of Peter Hacker, Oxford philosopher and scholar of Wittgenstein. Hacker starts off by saying that it isn’t philosophy’s business to discover new exciting truths:

“Philosophy does not contribute to our knowledge of the world we live in after the manner of any of the natural sciences. You can ask any scientist to show you the achievements of science over the past millennium, and they have much to show: libraries full of well-established facts and well-confirmed theories. If you ask a philosopher to produce a handbook of well-established and unchallengeable philosophical truths, there’s nothing to show. I think that is because philosophy is not a quest for knowledge about the world, but rather a quest for understanding the conceptual scheme in terms of which we conceive of the knowledge we achieve about the world. One of the rewards of doing philosophy is a clearer understanding of the way we think about ourselves and about the world we live in, not fresh facts about reality.”

And most of the ensuing article is devoted to the problem of understanding why philosophers end up so puzzled about the nature of consciousness. He shares some very provocative insights. First, I think he’s right to call recent neuro-experts on the carpet with their blithe disregard for the depth of the mystery about consciousness:

Dualists about the mind and brain – those who hold that there are thinking substances like souls in the world as well as all the ordinary physical stuff – say that the mind sees and thinks and wants and calculates. Contemporary neuroscience dismisses this as crude, but Hacker argues that it just ends up swapping the mind with the brain, saying that the brain sees and thinks and wants and calculates. He says, “Merely replacing Cartesian ethereal stuff with glutinous grey matter and leaving everything else the same will not solve any problems. On the current neuroscientist’s view, it’s the brain that thinks and reasons and calculates and believes and fears and hopes. In fact, it’s human beings who do all these things, not their brains and not their minds. I don’t think it makes any sense to talk about the brain engaging in psychological or mental operations.”

When it comes to his own way of unraveling the mystery, it has mostly to do with questioning our own confidence in knowing what we’re talking about when we talk about the subjective dimensions of experience, such as the one Nagel highlights in his article, “What is it like to be a bat?”:

“You can ask any human being having an experience ‘What was it like for you to have that experience?’ Most commonly the answer is: ‘Nothing in particular.’ What was it like to see the lamp post? What was it like to see your shoes?’ – ‘The experience was quite indifferent!’ Sometimes the answer would be, ‘It was wonderful, marvellous, joyful, jolly good or revolting, disgusting, awful’–and so on. If you want to generalise over that, engage as Nagel does in second-level quantification, the result is not ‘There is something which it is like to experience such and such’, but ‘There is something which it is to experience such and such, namely wonderful, awful, exciting, boring’. Why? Because the answer to ‘What was it like for you to do it?’ isn’t ‘It was like wonderful’ – unless we’re in California – but rather ‘It was wonderful’. So it is a plain confusion to think that for any given experience of a conscious creature, there is something that it is like for the creature to have that experience. Sometimes there is something that it is to experience this-or-that – most of the time there isn’t. That’s one pair of mistakes.”

“Another kind of mistake is a systematic confusion between the qualities of an experience and the qualities of the objects of an experience. The question ‘What was it like for you to love Daisey?’ can be given an answer by specifying the hedonic character of the experience of being in love with her. It may have been wonderful, or heart-breaking. The question ‘What is it like to see something red?’ has no such answer. Seeing a red button, for example, is neither wonderful nor heart-breaking, neither exciting nor boring – it simply lacks any hedonic quality. But philosophers in the so-called consciousness studies community are prone to try to characterise the experience by reference to the qualities of the objects of the experience – as if the ‘redness of red’ were a quality of the experience of seeing a red thing.” He growls: “The redness of the red! That’s not what it’s like for you to see red. That’s what you see! What’s it like to see red? For the most part, nothing at all. Maybe seeing that wonderful red sparkle of that fantastic flower was intoxicating. Well then, it was intoxicating to see it. What you saw was the colour. It was the experience that was intoxicating. People confuse the object of experience with the positive or negative hedonic quality of the experience.”

The whole article is well worth reading and thinking through.