That was an enjoyable read. Its form is adversarial as required by this genre, but it seems as though we're basically on the same page. You draw conclusions from the same data that I disagree with, of course...

Quite correct that the moral sense is exhibited to varying degrees in people. Clearly you can perceive its existence (introspection's a useful part of the toolbox when trying to solve the puzzle of people). You know that I try to avoid binary thinking, so of course I wasn't trying to assert that there's a standardized quantity of it, as if it were a discrete organ of the brain. I'm sure you couldn't even identify it as a gene, because it's more a phenomenon that emerges in the interaction of the DNA, the body and brain it expresses, and in social animals, the extended phenotype of the cultural milieau.

And the cultural milieau is part of it--I don't think it's a truly hardwired thing like a structure in the brain dictated by DNA. You could think of it in layered terms, something like the layers of a computer, in which the most rigid part of a computer, the BIOS in read-only memory is analogous to organs created directly by DNA; the OS, which is both more malleable and broader, and represents the flexibility of a brain that can learn; and the "applications", or better yet, the user interface, the culture outside the body. That's the most flexible, and in terms of social order and culture, the part most susceptible to change. So yes, the "moral sense" can vary by culture, of course. But to get to the point, I think that certain fundamentals exist lower down (the "OS") where in essence they're bootstrapped as soon as we're born. I mentioned social phenomena in newborns such as synchronized crying, things like responding to faces, an ability to manipulate parents with specific vocalizations we use from birth, etc--we're born social animals and thus born possessing a basic version of that "moral sense". It can't all be cultural.

The idea of gradations and layers is why I take issue with your talk of a "version 1.0" and a "version 2.0" morality. It isn't binary, and it isn't a case of one replacing another...any more than the reptilian hindbrain was deactivated when the higher mammallian structures were layered on, and certainly the mammalian core wasn't deactivated when we sprouted that anomalous mass at the front of our skulls.

The essential point here is that no successful human morality can divorce itself from the emotional underpinnings of our biological and social heritage. We would be incomplete and thus incapable of making a fully-informed judgment.

Thus the criticism (and I'm hardly the first) of Spock's approach to morality--he misses the mark, at least from a human point of view, because he's seeing only half the equation (indeed, denying half the reality). He'll come to numerical solutions balancing quantities of people and neglect what the event and the potential actions might mean to those emotional humans...and Dr. McCoy will lose it and get apoplectic that the green-blooded computer can get it so wrong. McCoy knows, he represents the human heart in that little drama...much as you and I are reprising similar roles here....

("damn pointy-eared cold-blooded desert-loving computer of a Techie"...)

The folks without the upgrade

Do you ever go back and read your words, and hurl?

Amazingly all these empathic liberals can leave their human empathy for other humans at home when dealing with Bush.

Hmmm....damn, we must be using different definitions of "empathy". It doesn't always result in sympathy nor "nurturing" or "maternal" behavior. It can just as easily result in outrage and anger, what we often label a response to injustice. Liberal outrage at Bush's actions, and opposition to Conservative beliefs and policies in general, is in point of fact motivated by a deep empathy for the problems they're intent on inflicting on other people. How could one possess empathy and not react across the full spectrum of human experience?

And always there have been the pacifists, the conscientious objectors and those who simply felt the gains were not worth the trouble and losses. They arrived at their decisions not solely due to some empathic communion with the rest of humanity, although this may have been a percentage of their motivation, but because logic and reason and cold calculations dictated that war was an unprofitable venture.

I need to untangle that a bit. Conscientious objectors and pacifists would seem to me to be the very archetypes of people acting upon a moral impulse strongly influenced by emotion. I can at least "see" the sense in a statement like "war is wrong" and recognize that it doesn't require a logical elaboration because it's a valid statement in terms of the fundamental emotional moral sense (and do keep in mind that empathy doesn't obligate agreement).

You intertwine a different category, the people like Lindbergh who make an entirely unemotional cost-benefit analysis. I wouldn't dispute that many people do work that way. But your observation about how Lindbergh fluidly reversed positions after the US was attacked by Japan is a univeral one--in the mainstream, not the pure conscientious objectors and pacifists etc, nobody stops to question the rightness of genuine self-defense.

Isn't it telling that the public's general reaction to various wars has correlated so closely to the concreteness and immediacy of their beginnings? Self-defense when attacked is obvious and public support is always high and remains solid. When the reason given is more abstract, such as a "domino theory" or "containing Communism" or "enforcing UN resolutions", public support starts out less solid and historically deteriorates rather quickly. That's the "Delphic oracle" of the sum of the operation of that instinctive moral sense expressed in a concrete statistical way by several hundred million humans.

The lesson: Vulcan Morality 2.0 usually loses to good old-fashioned Human Morality 1.0 when the two conflict. When they work together, the result is greater than the sum of their parts.

Or, to lob it back at you, look at how much energy the Republicans managed to generate by harnessing the visceral moral outrage of a segment of the population that just a few decades ago despised them. That cultural malleability factor that I mentioned a couple of pages ago made it possible to channel that energy.

Which is a good reason to agree with you in so far as you get even better results if you combine 1.0 and 2.0 to get the True Human Gestalt. That thing that some people call "enlightenment". History shows that the moral sense can be perverted, as was done so dramatically to the Germans, if the emotional is emphasized and the intellectual anesthetized. Balance is a prerequisite to enlightenment on the Path of the Human.

So sayeth Robert, and so concludeth the lecture.

There'll be a midterm next week, and remember that it counts for a third of your grade.