The End of Faith (37 page)

30 In the Buddhist tradition, which has approached the cultivation of these states most
systematically, love and compassion are cultivated alongside equanimity and sympathetic joy (that is, joy in the happiness of others). Each state is believed to balance the others.

It seems reasonably clear that not all people are equally endowed with ethical
intelligence. In particular, not all people are equally adept at dis? cerning the link
between their intentions toward others and their own happiness. While it may seem
undemocratic to posit a hierarchy of moral knowledge, we know that knowledge cannot be
equally distributed in the world. This is not to say that one must master a wide body of
facts to be moral. Morality may be more like chess than like medicinethere may be very few
facts to understand, but it can still be remarkably difficult to use what one has learned
impeccably. To assert that there should be no “experts” in moralsas both Kantians and
anti-Kantians tend to dois, on my account, rather like saying that there should be no
experts in chess, perhaps adducing as one's evidence that every party to our discourse can
plainly see how to move the pieces. We need no experts to tell us how the matter stands;
nor do we need experts to tell us that cruelty is wrong. But we do need experts to tell us
what the best move is from any given posi? tion; and there is little doubt that we will
need experts to tell us that loving all people, without distinction, makes one happier
than feeling preferential love for one's intimates (if this is indeed the case).

Why should we think that living a profoundly ethical life would be any more common an
attainment than playing brilliant chess? Why should penetrating insight into the logical
relations among one's ethical beliefs be any easier to come by than penetrating insight
into any other logical framework? As in any field, some cherished intuitions may prove
irreconcilable with some others, and the search for coherence will force itself upon us as
a practical necessity. Not everyone can play champi? onship chess, and not everyone can
figure out how to live so as to be as happy as possible. We can offer heuristics for
playing winning chess, of course (secure the middle of the board, keep good pawn
structure, etc.); and we can offer heuristics for bringing ethical truths to light (Kant's
cat? egorical imperative, Rawls' “original position,” etc.). The fact that not every last
one of us sees the point of them does not cast doubt upon their usefulness. There is no
doubt that the relations among our ethical pre? cepts and intuitions admit of deeper
insights, requiring greater and greater intellectual capacities on the part of all of us
to comprehend and, comprehending, to be inspired to practice. Here, I think, the greatest
dif? ference among persons is to be found (along with the greatest difference between the
ethical and the epistemic spheres), since any insight into ethical normativity must lay
claim to our emotions in order to become effective. Once he has understood that ¹ is the ratio of a circle's circum-

ference to its diameter, not even the most libertine geometer will feel tempted to compute
a circle's area using another measure. When a per- son sees that it is generally wrong to
lie, however, this normative ground, once conquered, must be secured by feeling. He must feel that lying is beneath himthat it is tending to lead him away from happinessand such a
conversion of moral sentiments seems to require more than mere conceptual understanding.
But then, so do certain kinds of reasoning. See A. Damasio, Descartes' Error. Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York: Avon Books, 1994).

Put this way, it is easy to see that two people who both have learned that lying is not
conducive to happiness may differ considerably in the depth to which they feel this
proposition to be true, and therefore in the degree to which they feel obliged to conform
to it in their actions. Instances of discrepancy between belief and action in the moral
sphere are legion: it is one thing to think it “wrong” that people are starving elsewhere
in the world; it is another to find this as intolerable as one would if these people were
one's friends. There may, in fact, be no ethical justification for all of us fortunate
people to carry on with our business while other people starve (see P. Unger, Living High & Letting Die: Our Illusion of Innocence [Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1996]). It may be that a clear view of the matterthat is, a
clear view of the dynamics of our own happinesswould oblige us to work tirelessly to
alleviate the hunger of every last stranger as though it were our own. On this account,
how could one go to the movies and remain ethical? One couldn't. One would simply be
taking a vacation from one's ethics.

32 60 Minutes, Sept. 26, 2002. 33 That these men are being held indefinitely, without access to legal coun-

sel, should be genuinely troubling to us, however. See R. Dworkin, “Ter- ror and the
Attack on Civil Liberties,” New York Review of Books, Nov. 6, 2003, pp. 37-41, for a fine analysis of the legal and ethical issues here.

34 It seems to me that we can stop this inquisitorial slide by recourse to the “perfect
weapon” argument presented in chapter 4. There is a difference, after all, between
intending to inflict suffering on an innocent person and inflicting it by accident. To
include a suspected terrorist's family among the instruments of torture would be a
flagrant violation of this principle.

35 Quoted in Glover, Humanity, 55. 36 I suspect that if our media did not censor the more disturbing images of

war, our moral sentiments would receive a correction on two fronts: first, we would be
more motivated by the horrors visited upon us by our ene-

NOTES TO PAGES 199-202 287

mies: seeing Daniel Pearl decapitated, for instance, would have surely provoked a level of
national outrage that did not arise in the absence of such imagery. Second, if we did not
conceal the horrible reality of collat- eral damage from ourselves, we would be far less
likely to support the dropping of “dumb” bombs, or even “smart” ones. While our newspapers
and newscasts would be horrible to look at, I believe we would feel both greater urgency
and greater restraint in our war on terrorism.

37 See J. D. Greene et al., “An fMRI Investigation of Emotional Engagement in Moral
Judgment,” Science 293 (Sept. 14, 2001): 2105-8; and J. D. Greene, “From Neural 'Is' to Moral 'Ought': What
Are the Moral Impli- cations of Neuroscientific Moral Psychology?” Nature Reviews Neuro- science 4 (2003): 846-49.

38 For an illuminating account of the use of “coercion” by U.S. and Israeli interrogators,
see M. Bowden, “The Dark Art of Interrogation,” Atlantic Monthly, March 2003, pp. 51-77.

39 Many flavors of pacifism can be found in the philosophical literature. I am considering
here what is often called “absolute” pacifismthat is, the belief that violence is never morally acceptable, whether in self-defense or on behalf of others. This is the sort of
pacifism that Gandhi practiced, and it is the only form that seems to carry with it
pretensions of moral impregnability.

40 Am I saying that overt opposition to a wrong is the ethical standard? Yes, when the stakes
are high, I think that it is. One can always make the argument that covert resistance in
particularly dangerous situations where open opposition would be to forfeit one's lifeis
the best possible course. Those remarkable men and women who hid Jews in their base- ments
or ferried them to safety during World War II provide the text- book example of this.
Surely they did more good by living and helping others in secret than by openly protesting
the Nazis and dying on prin- ciple. But this was their situation only because so few
people were will- ing to offer open opposition in the first place. If more had, there
would have been Nazis hiding in basements, writing journals to the God that had forsaken
them, not innocent little girls bound for Auschwitz. Thus, as a categorical imperative,
confrontation with evil seems the best imper- ative we've got. What form this
confrontation takes, of course, is open to debate. But simply making room for human evil,
or sidestepping it, doesn't seem an ethically auspicious option.

41 G. Orwell, “Reflections on Gandhi,” in The Oxford Book of Essays, ed. J. Gross (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1949), 506.

1 I am not suggesting that thoughts themselves are not equivalent to cer- tain states of the
brain. In conventional terms, however, there is a rather large difference between taking a
drug and taking on a new idea. That both have the power to alter our perception is one of
the more fascinat- ing facts about the human mind.

2 While this literature is too wide to cite here, numerous examples of such texts can be
found in my bibliography.

3 What happens after death is surely a mystery, as is the relationship between consciousness
and the physical world, but there is no longer any doubt whether the character of our
minds is dependent upon the func- tioning of our brainsand dependent in ways that are
profoundly coun- terintuitive. Consider one of the common features of the near-death
experience: the nearly dying seem regularly to encounter their loved ones who have gone
before them into the next world. See A. Kellehear, Experiences Near Death: Beyond Medicine and Religion (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1996). We know, however, that recognizing a person's face
requires an intact fusiform cortex, primarily in the right hemisphere. Damage to this area
of the brain definitely robs the mind of its powers of facial recognition (among other
things), a condition we call prosopag- nosia. People with this condition have nothing
wrong with their primary vision. They can see color and shape perfectly well. They can
recognize almost everything in their environment, but they cannot distinguish between the
faces of even their closest friends and family members. Are we to imagine in such cases
that a person possesses an intact soul, some- where behind the mind, that retains his
ability to recognize his loved ones? It would seem so. Indeed, unless the soul retains all
of the normal cognitive and perceptual capacities of the healthy brain, heaven would be
populated by beings suffering from all manner of neurological deficit. But then, what are
we to think of the condition of the neurologically impaired while alive? Does a person
suffering from aphasia have a soul that can speak, read, and think flawlessly? Does a
person whose motor skills have been degraded by cerebellar ataxia have a soul with
preserved hand-eye coordination? This is rather like believing that inside every wrecked
car lurks a new car just waiting to get out.

The implausibility of a soul whose powers are independent of the brain only increases once
we recognize that even normal brains can be placed somewhere on a continuum of pathology.
I know my soul speaks

NOTES TO PAGES 208-209 289

English, because that is the language that comes out of me whenever I speak or write. I
used to know a fair amount of French as well. It seems that I've forgotten most of it,
though, since my attempts at communica- tion while in France provoke little more than
amusement and consterna- tion in the natives. We know, however, that the difference
between my remembering and not remembering something is a matter of physical differences
in the neural circuits in my brainspecifically in the synap- tic connections that are
responsible for information encoding, informa- tion retrieval, or both. My loss of French,
therefore, can be considered a form of neurological impairment. And any Frenchman who
found his linguistic ability suddenly degraded to the level of my own would rush straight
to the hospital. Would his soul retain his linguistic ability in any case? Has my soul
retained its memory of how to conjugate the verb bruire? Where does this notion of soul-brain independence end? A native speaker of one of the
Bantu languages would find that the functioning of my language cortex leaves even more to
be desired. Given that I was never exposed to Bantu sounds as a child, it is almost
certain that I would find it difficult in the extreme, if not impossible, to distinguish
between them, much less reproduce them in a way that would satisfy a native speaker. But
perhaps my soul has mastered the Bantu languages as well. There are only five hundred of
them.

4 Whether the angle of approach is through the study of priming effects and visual masking,
change blindness (D. J. Simons et al., “Evidence for Preserved Representations in Change
Blindness,” Consciousness and Cognition 11, no. 1 [2002]: 78-97), visual extinction and visuospatial neglect (G. Rees et al.,
“Neural Correlates of Consciousness in Humans,” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 3 [April 2002]: 261-70), binocular rivalry and other bistable percepts (R. Blake and N. K.
Logothetis, “Visual Com- petition,” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 3, no. 1 [2002]: 13-21; N. K. Logothetis, “Vision: A Window on Consciousness,” Scientific American Special Edition 12, no. 1 [2002] 18-25), or blind-sight (L. Weiskrantz, “Prime-sight and Blindsight,” Consciousness and Cognition 11, no. 4 [2002]: 568-81), the signature of conscious perception is always the same: the
subject (be he man or monkey) simply tells us, by word or deed, whether or not the
character of his experience has changed.

5 Why isn't general anesthesia a way of ruling it out? Bathe the brain in the requisite
chemicals, and people lose consciousnessend of story. The problem, however, is that we do
not know that consciousness itself is truly interrupted during anesthesia. The problem
with conflating

consciousness with reportability is that we cannot distinguish the gen- uine cessation of
consciousness from a mere failure of memory. What was it like to be asleep last night? You
may feel that it was like nothing at allyou were “unconscious.” But what about the dreams
you don't remember? You were surely conscious while having them. Indeed, you may have been
conscious throughout all the stages of sleep. We cannot rule out this possibility through
subjective report alone.