Tamler (one 'm') Sommers is the Gardener of the Moment

I just received my copy of A Very Bad Wizard: Morality Behind the Curtain, by Tamler Sommers. 

Go get your copy, and read some interviews he did with various Famous People, including Galen Strawson, Philip Zimbardo, Franz de Waal, Joshua Greene, Jonathan Haidt, Stephen Stich, and various other luminaries. 

Then, remark on his annoyingly excellent prose and keen sense of the Important Stuff. 

Comments

[John Fischer]

Tammler (woops), I mean, Tamler,

As an infamous person, I wish you congratulations!

[Tamler Sommers]

Thanks John (and students resource). I just wish naked celebrities would comment on my posts and not Yudkowski's.

[Philoponus]

Tamler,

A VERY BAD WIZARD is a very good book. I hope that this is a place where we get to talk about some of your interviews.

Many good interviews, but the one that surprised me the most was with Joshua Greene. Many of the more experimentally inclined gardeners, I suspect, have been following his published work since 2003. We hope to see him continue to test his dual process model in broader based studies.

Let me ask you something I thought you might have asked him. I understand the current limitations of fMRI testing, but it puzzles me that Greene and his associates have not been interested in bringing into their lab people who actually deal with Trolley-like emergencies and Fat Man-like “rescues”. I mean people like airline pilots, RR engineers, rescue professionals, and LE personnel. Interesting as it may be to study the armchair intuitions of Princeton & Harvard college students—and now also people with PFC damage—might it not also be useful to study the decision making of people who actually deal professionally with life & death emergencies? To press the point: college students and people with PFC damage are for very good reasons not the ones entrusted to make these decisions and not the ones we expect to react well to being thrust into life or death emergencies. (Hence our wise reluctant to enact demanding Good & Bad Samaritan laws.)

Some people with whom I have discussed Greene’s results expect that he may discover that experienced professionals reason very differently in Trolley and Fat Man cases (and the differences will be conspicuous in the fMRI data). In Trolley-like cases Greene may find that professionals are not so much interested in any utilitarian calculations as in doing their duty to the best of their ability. In Fat Man cases Greene may find that rescue professionals dismiss out of hand the option of intentionally killing someone to rescue others. None of the emotional activation in the medial frontal gyrus, superior temporal sulcus, etc that college students experience may be duplicated in the case of professionals. It is drilled into professional rescuers, by the way, that harming innocent bystanders is criminal.

These are just conjectures, I emphasize, but neglecting the people who are the de facto “experts” in these kinds of decisions seems to rest the dual process model on a somewhat biased experimental base. Your interview suggests, if I’ve read it correctly, that Greene brings some worrisome philosophical biases to his experimental work, biases that aren’t going to welcome hearing that experienced professionals act out of a sense of duty and out of respect for the law in their life & death decisions. Much too much like what the (neo)Kantians say, right? But surely we must let the facts be whatever they are and set aside our preconceptions about how people should reason morally in favor of sound data about how trained, competent people actually do reason in emergency situations. (I am reminded of Aristotle’s view that in ethics the best standard of right action may be what the trained virtuous man does.)

If you or anyone who knows Greene’s experimental work thinks I’ve misunderstood him or criticized him unfairly, I would be happy to be instructed in my error. The question I am left with is what data we are trying to explain and understand. I think we ought to be less interested in explaining the intuitions of people not trained and competent to respond to emergencies than in understanding how the people we entrust to make these decisions actually reason.

[Tamler Sommers]

Hi Philoponus,

Thanks for the kind words about the book. I'm not sure this is the place to discuss that aspect, since it's not related to the topic of the blog (free will and MR). I think Greene might welcome the kind of experiments you suggest--professionals are more difficult to get as subjects, but the differences in responses might be important. If they are, that might support your broader point about the relative importance of the intuitions of untrained people. If you want to discuss this further, I'd be happy to continue over email. Thanks again for getting the book and for your remarks.

[Tom Clark]

Yes, A Very Bad Wizard is very good. It was worth the price alone of seeing Jon Haidt get dumbfounded about justification. In the other interviews I've read Tamler pushes his victims to their limit, and himself in the process. In the Greene/Young interview, Tamler talks about the retributive impulse to punish someone who harmed his daughter (his emphasis):

"...I thought about something else, something that made me question even my theoretical skepticism about free will and moral responsibility. Even if I *could* somehow use my theory to overcome or undermine my retributive hatred of this person, I wouldn't want to. I actually think there’d be something *wrong* with me if I didn't have that irresistible inclination. In other words, it's *not* an ideal version of me that would abandon retributive feelings toward a person who hurt Eliza." (p. 144-5)

I agree that I wouldn’t want to abandon retributive feelings altogether, since that might leave me a defenseless patsy, unmotivated and perhaps unable to deter aggressors and punish cheaters. But of course that’s a functional, consequentialist justification for having such feelings: they help achieve the basic good of keeping self, family and community whole and healthy, an essential condition of having good lives. Is achieving retributive satisfactions itself a basic good, something essential without which we wouldn’t find life worth living? It seems not, since there are good lives that are lived absent its achievement. Even in an honor culture it’s possible for someone to have lived a good life without having sought revenge (being humble, their honor was never at stake, being careful, no pig of theirs got stolen). So I’d say that although it’s important to have the capacity for retributive emotions, it isn’t a praiseworthy attribute to be cultivated for its own sake in an ideal version of the self. I’d want to be able to overcome the retributive impulse whenever its expression would serve no basic good, not have it be irresistible.

[Philoponus]

Tamler,

Maybe this is a little more on topic. I also wanted to draw attention to your interview with the dumbfounding Jonathon Haidt. The first time I heard of his work was when he was being appealed to, along with Dan Wegner and the Libet people, as making an empirical case that free will is an illusion. If the emotional parts of our brain call our moral judgments and the deliberating frontal cortex only chimes in post facto with rationalizing explanations of these choices, I take it FW is in trouble. You begin to get into these issues with Haidt on page 157, talking about whether our reasoning brain is just an epiphenomenal “spin doctor” with no causal role in our actual decisions, but at least in the published text you don’t ask him “What then happens to FW?”

I worry—do you?-that Haidt’s experiments are “rigged” (forgive the prejudicial term) to undercut the kind of moral reasoning that most people would engage in when presented in real life with the situations he describes. He dumbfounds his subjects by presenting them with emotionally charged scenarios that are governed by stipulations that cannot obtain in the real world. What kind of reactions do you expect in those confusing, unreal circumstances? In real world, speaking of the happy couple Mark and Julie, we know that no contraceptive precautions are foolproof, that secrets are rarely kept, and that people often come to repent their dubious sexual adventures. Our moral reasoning about their liaison correctly focuses on these unhappy consequences, but Haidt by stipulation close these doors. I do not have an opinion about Mark & Julie in the fantasy world Haidt stipulates. Is it any wonder that people untrained in moral reasoning are perplexed and dumbfounded by Haidt’s scenarios? So what follows from Haidt’s experiments about how people reason morally in the real world? To be sure, some people make no effort to examine their moral choices, but I am unpersuaded by Haidt’s scenarios that most people do not try to reason out their moral decisions.

By the way, I think you were a very gentle Socrates in getting a dumfounded Haidt to own up to his moral relativism. I sensed a man, in these days of political correctness, unwilling to go on record as saying “gay marriage is wrong” even in the context of Jim Crow Alabama. You could have frightened him even more by asking: suppose it is 1940 and I am philosophy student at Heidelberg and I fall in love with and want to marry the beautiful girl whose ancestry, alas, is Jewish. The Nuremberg miscegenation laws of 1938 of course forbid a mixing on my pure Aryan blood with Jews!And popular opinion is also rampantly anti-semtic. So isn't it genuinely wrong to marry a Jew in 1940’s Germany? I don't see Haidt admitting it would wrong to marry a Jew.

[Tamler Sommers]

Hi Tom,

Thanks for the comment. As you note in your response to Jared Diamond (here for those who haven't read it--http://www.naturalism.org/revenge.htm), this question ultimately boils down to conflicting values. You write that:

(1) "..although it’s important to have the capacity for retributive emotions, it isn’t a praiseworthy attribute to be cultivated for its own sake in an ideal version of the self."

and then:

(2) "I’d want to be able to overcome the retributive impulse whenever its expression would serve no basic good, not have it be irresistible."

Whether I accept (1) seems to depend on whether I share the desire you express in (2). And as I say in the interview, I don't know that I do share that desire--at least in certain cases. I'm conflicted myself. And there doesn't seem to be an independent means of resolving the conflict..

[Tamler Sommers]

Hi Philoponus,

Getting closer but still doesn't seem free-will and MR related exactly. I do think Haidt's work can form a challenge to both compatibilist (esp. reason views) and libertarian accounts of free will though, as you suggest. As for the experiments being rigged, no I don't agree. Like any social psych. study, they aren't decisive--but they certainly are revealing. The challenge you raise at the end is interesting--reminds me of the first scene in Inglorius Basterds and the SS officer's speech (an indictment of sentimentalism?)

[Josh May]

Great book, Tamler! I was compelled to write a short review of it for Metapsychology. It just got posted here if anyone wants to check it out:

http://metapsychology.mentalhelp.net/poc/view_doc.php?type=book&id=5317&cn=135