TRAGIC LIVES: ON THE INCOMPATIBILITY OF LAW AND ETHICS

College Literature, Summer 2008 by Hogan, Patrick Colm

Before delving into retrospective moral and legal evaluations, however, we need to consider our second variable-perspective. In moral judgment, the difference between self-evaluation and the evaluation of others is often crucial. In fact, it seems clear that ethical evaluation should involve a sort of counter-balancing bias against self-interest. In our ordinary, pragmatic activities, we are necessarily biased toward our own interests. When trying to get a job, we are not thinking about what would be good for other candidates. We are concerned with how we can write an effective application, do well at the interview, etc. This egocentric bias is necessarily pervasive in pragmatic evaluation and action. One distinctive characteristic of ethical evaluation is that it goes against egocentric bias. Indeed, the entire point of empathie evaluation and action is that we to some degree suppress our self-interests in favor of those of others.

This intuitive, empathy-based compensatory bias may be developed more rigorously by reference to the relation between perspective and free will. It is arguable we can speak of freedom only from a subjective point of view. The material world presents us with causal sequences that lead from one condition to another. If Denise's pulling the switch is the result of a sequence of neuronal activations, which result from other neuronal activations, and so on, then Denise's action is not free in any significant sense. However, the reduction of choice to material causal sequences cannot be complete across all actions simultaneously. Specifically, as I am describing the world from my subjective point of view, / cannot be encompassed in that description if the description is to have any meaning. The argument (which I cannot elaborate on here; see Hogan [2005]) is that, from an external point of view, none of us is free; our freedom is only a matter of internal or subjective experience.

More exactly, we may distinguish three perspectives on actions that yield three different conclusions on freedom. First, in my ongoing action in the world, unself-reflectively, I seem to be purely free; I am continually making decisions in such a way as to engage with changing circumstances.This is the absolute freedom identified by Jean-Paul Sartre. second, in considering any physical object (including the human organism), there appears to be no place for freedom. There is just a pure efficient causal sequence. Light stimulates visual neurons, which stimulate thalamic neurons, which stimulate neurons in the amygdala, which stimulate parts of the hypothalamus, which activate circuits of the autonomie nervous system, and so on-ultimately leading the organism (here, Denise) to engage in motor activities that result in harm to another organism (Oskar).This description has no place for the freedom I unreflectively experience in such actions when considered subjectively. Finally, between these construals, there is self-conscious subjectivity, selfreflective consideration of one's spontaneous, conscious responses to the world. When we reflect our actions self-consciously, we recognize a range of constraints on our free choice; however, we do not experience ourselves even self-reflectively as entirely lacking in freedom. We, rather, experience our freedom as circumscribed. (From the objective point of view, this self-reflective freedom is presumably correlated with certain sorts of pre-frontal cortical activity. In other words, our differentiation of free and constrained actions is probably not arbitrary, but linked to particular neural processes with specifiable neural substrates.)