Words&Dirt

“They were formidable-looking fellows with handsome sabers, the only Turks Jack had laid eyes on today who were actually alive, and the only ones who were in any condition to conduct violence against Christians.  He preferred to leave them be.

A saber struck at the top of one of those colorful tents, and a woman screamed.  A second blow silenced her.

So, they were all women.  Probably one of those famous harems.  Jack wondered, idly, whether the mudlarks of East London would ever believe him if he went home and claimed he had seen a live ostrich, and a Turk’s harem.

But thoughts of this sort were chased away by others.  One of those moments had arrived: Jack had been presented with the opportunity to be stupid in some way that was much more interesting than being shrewd would’ve been.  These moments seemed to come to Jack every few days.  They almost never came to Bob, and Bob marveled that two brothers, leading similar lives, could be so different that one of them had the opportunity to be reckless and foolish all the time while the other almost never did.  Jack had been expecting such a moment to arrive today.  He’d supposed, until moments ago, that it had already come: namely, when he decided to mount the horse and ride after the ostrich.  But here was a rare opportunity for stupidity even more flagrant and glorious.

Now, Bob, who’d been observing Jack carefully for many years, had observed that when these moments arrived, Jack was almost invariably possessed by something that Bob had heard about in the Church called the Imp of the Perverse.  Bob was convinced that the Imp of the Perverse rode invisibly on Jack’s shoulder whispering bad ideas into his ear, and that the only counterbalance was Bob himself, standing alongside, counseling good sense, prudence, caution, and other Puritan values.

But Bob was in England.”

––Quicksilver, by Neal Stephenson, pg. 367-8

“My key claim in this section can be stated simply as follows: There is no moral faculty, in any significant sense of that term.  The form of my argument is also straightforward: A brief survey of even a few of the components that Hauser attributes to the ‘moral organ’ is sufficient to show that, from the perspective of cognitive neuroscience, there could be no such organ as a distinct faculty.  There are simply too many complexly interacting multifunctional systems that have to be in play in our intuitive moral judgments for there to be anything remotely resembling a distinct moral faculty.  My shorthand way of capturing this point is to say that Hauser’s alleged ‘moral organ’ could be nothing short of a full-fledged human being!”

––Morality for Humans: Ethical Understanding from the Perspective of Cognitive Science, by Mark Johnson, pg. 146