The 7.5% of the glass that was full, which proved that people really did care about water, even if that force of caring within themselves was too often defeated. If people truly didn’t care, the glass would have been truly empty. If everyone had been like You-Know-Who inside, secretly cleverly selfish, there would have been no resisters to the Holocaust at all.
This passage bothers me because it implies that people have ‘true’ dispositions sometimes masked by external factors, rather than being a result of their brain activity at any given time. In light of what we know about neuropsychology, it doesn’t make sense to say that there’s a consistent subconscious ‘force’ of caring which battles the forces of selfishness in an effort to be felt—people either care or not depending on which neurons fire.
It seems curiously non-scientific to talk about people as though they had true but concealed feelings conflicting beneath the surface, rather than just having feelings.
Really? There is a scientific question here: Are some people more likely to balk in the Milgram experiment than others? I don’t know how one would test this; you can’t just repeat the experiment on the same subjects, because their behavior would be affected by the memory of the previous trials.
But it is a valid question. How much of that 7.5% is due to individual variance of behavior, and how much is due to variance over the population?
Interesting. I wonder if having a photo of MLK/Ghandi/Some-Goodie-Two-Shoes in the hallway outside the shock room would be enough to change the percentage.
Maybe I didn’t express it well, but I’m not claiming that some people aren’t intrinsically more compassionate (or selfish, or obedient, or any other personality trait) than others, and thus more likely to balk. That I agree with.
What I’m objecting to is that MoR seems to treat feelings as if they were always there and battling to be felt, like the id and superego vying over the conscious mind—as if people could be compassionate ‘underneath’ the influence of selfishness. But the brain doesn’t work that way: people are compassionate or selfish at any given moment, depending on how their brain fires. One feeling is no more ‘real’ than another.
To say someone is ‘compassionate’ is to say that they will feel/act compassionately more often than an average person, because their brain is wired in a way that causes them to experience more compassion. It’s a description of behavior, not something that people can be ‘inside’.
From 63:
This passage bothers me because it implies that people have ‘true’ dispositions sometimes masked by external factors, rather than being a result of their brain activity at any given time. In light of what we know about neuropsychology, it doesn’t make sense to say that there’s a consistent subconscious ‘force’ of caring which battles the forces of selfishness in an effort to be felt—people either care or not depending on which neurons fire.
It seems curiously non-scientific to talk about people as though they had true but concealed feelings conflicting beneath the surface, rather than just having feelings.
Really? There is a scientific question here: Are some people more likely to balk in the Milgram experiment than others? I don’t know how one would test this; you can’t just repeat the experiment on the same subjects, because their behavior would be affected by the memory of the previous trials.
But it is a valid question. How much of that 7.5% is due to individual variance of behavior, and how much is due to variance over the population?
Interesting. I wonder if having a photo of MLK/Ghandi/Some-Goodie-Two-Shoes in the hallway outside the shock room would be enough to change the percentage.
Maybe I didn’t express it well, but I’m not claiming that some people aren’t intrinsically more compassionate (or selfish, or obedient, or any other personality trait) than others, and thus more likely to balk. That I agree with.
What I’m objecting to is that MoR seems to treat feelings as if they were always there and battling to be felt, like the id and superego vying over the conscious mind—as if people could be compassionate ‘underneath’ the influence of selfishness. But the brain doesn’t work that way: people are compassionate or selfish at any given moment, depending on how their brain fires. One feeling is no more ‘real’ than another.
To say someone is ‘compassionate’ is to say that they will feel/act compassionately more often than an average person, because their brain is wired in a way that causes them to experience more compassion. It’s a description of behavior, not something that people can be ‘inside’.