I’ve been watching the news and it is scary. I find it scary for different reasons than most people , though. It isn’t the effects of global warming, or the latest threatened war on drugs or terror or whatever.
What is scary is how little the news makers and the news watchers appear to think about what they are doing.
Business and the government want to build an oil pipeline through an area that will be permanently damaged by a single break in the pipeline. Not to mention the need for oil tankers to move the oil overseas. This is through the same area affected by the Exxon Valdez. Do we stop and consider carefully the pros and cons of the project? No. The goal is immediate profit. People who protest are vilified for standing in the way of new jobs and progress.
It isn’t just oil. It is mining companies dumping poisonous water directly into the water system. It is pulp and paper and lumber companies clear cutting forests that will take centuries to recover. It is corporations paying their employees so little that those people can’t afford the products that they are manufacturing. In case you think I am just picking on business, it is also people who are concerned about the environment; but still buy Hummers, ever larger homes and consume at an ever greater rate without consideration of where all this stuff is coming from.
Valerie’s article [1] on large families and their roots in our non-rational behavior might be a case in point. We know that the world is getting crowded. We know that we need to do something about it. The problem is that for the most part we don’t really want to think about it. We are good at apportioning blame – those countries over there have too many kids, but much poorer at determining real cause and effect. Valerie is right that a great deal of our behavior is determined by our instincts and prejudices.
I would add that much of our behavior is a result of laziness. I am not thinking of physical laziness, but of mental. Our politicians tell us that everything is OK, (or if they haven’t been elected that it is not OK, but they will fix it.) Many times they bend the truth or actively lie about it. We don’t refuse to vote for them. We don’t tell them that we need the complicated truth. What most of us do is hold our nose and vote for the person whose lies most closely match what we want to hear.
A Psychology Today article talks about this phenomenon. [2] Ronald Riggio suggests that we don’t call the politicians (or other speakers) on their lies because it is too much work, especially if we agree with them. This is the birth place of conspiracy theories. It is so much easier to stay with what we already know, even if it is wrong – even if we know it is wrong, than it is to do the hard work of thinking critically.
Julian Savulescu and Ingmar Persson argue in Philosophy Now that we desperately need moral enhancement to save our species. [3] They suggest that our evolved morality is no longer sufficient to guide us. We have learned to care for ourselves and a few members of our tribe. Everybody else is either an enemy or unimportant. This tribal attitude is a death sentence for global cooperation.
The solution is to enhance our moral capabilities to allow us to care about a larger group of people. If we passionately cared about the rest of the people on the globe, the thinking goes; we’d be more likely to take care of it. The problem I see with moral enhancement is that by itself it will be insufficient to turn the tide of laziness. It forces us to address the massively complex problems that face us. I think we will feel worse about the situation, but we might not have any more idea about what to do about it.
What we need to go along with the moral enhancement is a critical thinking enhancement. We need something like Jiminy Cricket in the Pinocchio story that will sit on our shoulders and ask the questions about the lies we tell ourselves. Imagine listening to someone pontificate on how the only solution to global warming is to find more oil so we have the energy to tackle the problem, but instead of just hearing the statements, we get a display that shows that building safe nuclear plants is cheaper and more environmentally friendly than finding more oil. Perhaps, when we are blaming business for all our problems and suggesting that all corporations should be dissolved we’d get a display that highlights the positive aspects of corporate activity.
We almost have this technology now. There are apps that nudge us when we eat too much or the wrong food. We have ubiquitous wireless access in most cities that would allow instantaneous searches around what we are listening to or what we are saying. It wouldn’t need to show every possible alternative, just enough to remind us that the world isn’t as simple as we’d like to be. With Google Glass [4] we wouldn’t even need to look at our cell phones to read the display.
To save this world we will need to start thinking. We will need to be able to critically assess solutions and risks and make informed choices. Moral enhancements may increase the likelihood that we will want to, but just like any other resolution, we will need all the help we can get to be able to follow through and make a change.
References
[1] http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/tarico20120830
[2] http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/cutting-edge-leadership/201208/why-politicians-lie-and-why-we-let-them-get-away-it
[3] http://philosophynow.org/issues/91/Moral_Enhancement
[4] https://plus.google.com/u/0/+projectglass/posts
