Robert A. Burton of the UC San Francisco Medical Center issues a warning that is worth quoting at length: Despite the fact that a moral conviction feels like a deliberate rational conclusion to a particular line of reasoning, it is neither a conscious choice nor a thought process. Certainty and similar states of ‘knowing that we know’ arise out of primary brain mechanisms that, like love or anger, function independently of rationality or reason. . . . What feels like a conscious life-affirming moral choice—my life will have meaning if I help others—will be greatly influenced by the strength of an unconscious and involuntary mental sensation that tells me that this decision is “correct.” It will be this same feeling that will tell you the “rightness” of giving food to starving children in Somalia, doing every medical test imaginable on a clearly terminal patient, or bombing an Israeli school bus. It helps to see this feeling of knowing as analogous to other bodily sensations over which we have no direct control.
Posted on: Tue, 25 Mar 2014 21:43:30 +0000
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