If David Hume made motivational posters...
I promised on Monday that this would be an easy thought experiment for regular readers, and the excellent comments on that post confirmed what I expected. So, let's make this a quick one.
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Schuyler and Tryne both sheltered Jews from the Nazis during the occupation of the Netherlands. They did so, however, for quite different reasons.
Tryne was a woman whose acts of kindness were purely spontaneous. Suffering and need spoke to her heart and she responded without thinking. Friends admired her generosity of spirit, but sometimes reminded her that the road to hell was paved with good intentions. "You may feel moved to give money to a beggar," they would say, "but what if he then spends it all on drugs?" Tryne was unmoved by such worries. In the face of human need, all you can do is offer a hand, surely?
Schuyler, in contrast, was known as a cold woman. The truth was that she didn't really like many people, even though she didn't hate them either. When she helped others, she did so because she had thought about their plight and her duties, and concluded that helping was the right thing to do. She felt no warm glow from her good deeds, only a sense that she had chosen correctly.
Who of Schuyler and Tryne lived the more moral life?
Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 238.
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As David Hume said, reason is the slave of the passions. But as psychologists now know, emotions are driven by rational appraisals too. In other words, there's a bi-directional feedback loop between reasons and emotions. These connections aren't always consciously known or personally understood, but the link is always there. Our job as philosophers is to improve the functioning of this system by improving the logic behind our evaluations so that our emotions motivate us in the right direction.
As an example of how this system can work poorly, we see in this thought experiment that Tryne gives in to short term desires at the drop of a hat. She is motivated primarily by a logical appraisal that tells her: "if you need something, I will be the one to give it to you." That's a very simple and kind stance to take, and it may work out much of the time, but it is susceptible to manipulation and it does not think about long term consequences.
Schuyler, on the other hand, seems motivated primarily by the desire, the want, the emotion to do what is right. Somewhere during the course of her life her emotional response system learned the lesson that it should not light up simply for short-term wants. She has a greater emotional desire to "be the kind of person who does the right thing." This may make her seem "cold" to some since she doesn't react with a "warm glow" to instant gratification, but she clearly walks the wiser path.
As I mentioned on Monday, Baggini closed his discussion of this thought experiment with the following words:
The trite solution to the dilemma is simply to say that goodness requires a marriage of head and heart. ... This is almost certainly true, but it avoids the real dilemma: is it how we feel or how we think that is more important in determining whether we are morally good human beings?
To me, this is a dualistic mind-body fallacy. Baggini thinks minds and hearts are separate things. But how we feel is ultimately driven by how we think. Hearts and minds always work together on some level. It may not be easy, but our job is to make sure they work well together and towards what we know to be good.
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Schuyler and Tryne both sheltered Jews from the Nazis during the occupation of the Netherlands. They did so, however, for quite different reasons.
Tryne was a woman whose acts of kindness were purely spontaneous. Suffering and need spoke to her heart and she responded without thinking. Friends admired her generosity of spirit, but sometimes reminded her that the road to hell was paved with good intentions. "You may feel moved to give money to a beggar," they would say, "but what if he then spends it all on drugs?" Tryne was unmoved by such worries. In the face of human need, all you can do is offer a hand, surely?
Schuyler, in contrast, was known as a cold woman. The truth was that she didn't really like many people, even though she didn't hate them either. When she helped others, she did so because she had thought about their plight and her duties, and concluded that helping was the right thing to do. She felt no warm glow from her good deeds, only a sense that she had chosen correctly.
Who of Schuyler and Tryne lived the more moral life?
Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 238.
---------------------------------------------------
As David Hume said, reason is the slave of the passions. But as psychologists now know, emotions are driven by rational appraisals too. In other words, there's a bi-directional feedback loop between reasons and emotions. These connections aren't always consciously known or personally understood, but the link is always there. Our job as philosophers is to improve the functioning of this system by improving the logic behind our evaluations so that our emotions motivate us in the right direction.
As an example of how this system can work poorly, we see in this thought experiment that Tryne gives in to short term desires at the drop of a hat. She is motivated primarily by a logical appraisal that tells her: "if you need something, I will be the one to give it to you." That's a very simple and kind stance to take, and it may work out much of the time, but it is susceptible to manipulation and it does not think about long term consequences.
Schuyler, on the other hand, seems motivated primarily by the desire, the want, the emotion to do what is right. Somewhere during the course of her life her emotional response system learned the lesson that it should not light up simply for short-term wants. She has a greater emotional desire to "be the kind of person who does the right thing." This may make her seem "cold" to some since she doesn't react with a "warm glow" to instant gratification, but she clearly walks the wiser path.
As I mentioned on Monday, Baggini closed his discussion of this thought experiment with the following words:
The trite solution to the dilemma is simply to say that goodness requires a marriage of head and heart. ... This is almost certainly true, but it avoids the real dilemma: is it how we feel or how we think that is more important in determining whether we are morally good human beings?
To me, this is a dualistic mind-body fallacy. Baggini thinks minds and hearts are separate things. But how we feel is ultimately driven by how we think. Hearts and minds always work together on some level. It may not be easy, but our job is to make sure they work well together and towards what we know to be good.
