Irvine511
Blue Crack Supplier
interesting piece in the NYT from earlier in the week that has stayed with me. thought i'd toss it out here ...
[q]When Death Is on the Docket, the Moral Compass Wavers
By BENEDICT CAREY
Published: February 7, 2006
Burl Cain is a religious man who believes it is only for God to say when a person's number is up. But in his job as warden and chief executioner at the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola, Mr. Cain is the one who gives the order to start a lethal injection, and he has held condemned inmates' hands as they died.
He does it, he said in an interview, because capital punishment "is the law of the land."
"It's something we do whether we're for it or against it, and we try to make the process as humane as possible," he said, referring to himself and others on the execution team.
But he concedes, "The issue is coping, how we cope with it."
Common wisdom holds that people have a set standard of morality that never wavers. Yet studies of people who do unpalatable things, whether by choice, or for reasons of duty or economic necessity, find that people's moral codes are more flexible than generally understood. To buffer themselves from their own consciences, people often adjust their moral judgments in a process some psychologists call moral disengagement, or moral distancing.
In recent years, researchers have determined the psychological techniques most often used to disengage, and for the first time they have tested them in people working in perhaps the most morally challenging job short of soldiering, staffing a prison execution team.
The results of this and other studies suggest that a person's moral judgment can shift quickly, in anticipation of an unpalatable act, or slowly and unconsciously.
Moral disengagement "is where all the action is," said Albert Bandura, a professor of psychology at Stanford and an expert on the psychology of moral behavior. "It's in our ability to selectively engage and disengage our moral standards, and it helps explain how people can be barbarically cruel in one moment and compassionate the next."
The crude codes of behavior that evolved to hold early human societies together — taboos against killing, against stealing — would have been psychologically suffocating if people did not have some way to let themselves off the hook in extreme situations, some experts argue. Survival sometimes required brutal acts; human sacrifice was commonplace, as were executions.
The innate human ability to disconnect morally has made it hard for researchers to find an association between people's stated convictions and their behavior: preachers can commit sexual crimes; prostitutes may live otherwise exemplary lives; well-trained soldiers can commit atrocities.
[...]
Now, psychologists at Stanford have shown that prison staff members who work on execution teams exhibit high levels of moral disengagement — and the closer they are to the killing, the higher their level of disengagement goes.
[...]
"You have to sanctify lethal means: this is the most powerful technique" of disengagement from a shared human moral code, said Dr. Bandura, who has expressed serious moral reservations about capital punishment. "If you can't convince people of the sanctity of the greater cause, they are not going to carry the job out as effectively."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/07/health/psychology/07exec.html?pagewanted=1&_r=6&th&emc=th
[/q]
so, what does this mean?
it sounds as if ignoring morality not only gives human beings an evolutionary advantage, but in some cases it requires the religious or philosophical sanctification of pernicious actions. it seems to be not so much that religious and spiritual beliefs are suspended when acting out of moral disengagement ... rather, they are simply shifted. they are as bending and malleable to our will as anything else. when the situation necessitates, our philosophies and theologies change focus, allowing us access to new rationales that justify our violation of our own moral code.
or, does this become an argument for humanizing sentimentalism and for knowing when to turn off the logic with growing evidence that people can shift between coherent reason and insidious rationalizations with the ease of pressing a button on a remote control. or, are we capable of manipualting even logic in order to justify what we perceive that we "must" do in certain situations -- is it all a series of rationalizations, all of it, that lead us to what it is we "must" or "want" to do?
pushing it a bit further, how culpable are we as a society when we have things like the death penalty -- or even physician assisted suicide -- which might require (and let's not get into the whole, "well, they chose their job, didn't they?" because people, especially someone who works in the prisons, have less real choice than we might initially think) precisely this kind of rationalization and weilding of logic and reason as weapons to justify something that seems morally reprehensible.
[q]When Death Is on the Docket, the Moral Compass Wavers
By BENEDICT CAREY
Published: February 7, 2006
Burl Cain is a religious man who believes it is only for God to say when a person's number is up. But in his job as warden and chief executioner at the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola, Mr. Cain is the one who gives the order to start a lethal injection, and he has held condemned inmates' hands as they died.
He does it, he said in an interview, because capital punishment "is the law of the land."
"It's something we do whether we're for it or against it, and we try to make the process as humane as possible," he said, referring to himself and others on the execution team.
But he concedes, "The issue is coping, how we cope with it."
Common wisdom holds that people have a set standard of morality that never wavers. Yet studies of people who do unpalatable things, whether by choice, or for reasons of duty or economic necessity, find that people's moral codes are more flexible than generally understood. To buffer themselves from their own consciences, people often adjust their moral judgments in a process some psychologists call moral disengagement, or moral distancing.
In recent years, researchers have determined the psychological techniques most often used to disengage, and for the first time they have tested them in people working in perhaps the most morally challenging job short of soldiering, staffing a prison execution team.
The results of this and other studies suggest that a person's moral judgment can shift quickly, in anticipation of an unpalatable act, or slowly and unconsciously.
Moral disengagement "is where all the action is," said Albert Bandura, a professor of psychology at Stanford and an expert on the psychology of moral behavior. "It's in our ability to selectively engage and disengage our moral standards, and it helps explain how people can be barbarically cruel in one moment and compassionate the next."
The crude codes of behavior that evolved to hold early human societies together — taboos against killing, against stealing — would have been psychologically suffocating if people did not have some way to let themselves off the hook in extreme situations, some experts argue. Survival sometimes required brutal acts; human sacrifice was commonplace, as were executions.
The innate human ability to disconnect morally has made it hard for researchers to find an association between people's stated convictions and their behavior: preachers can commit sexual crimes; prostitutes may live otherwise exemplary lives; well-trained soldiers can commit atrocities.
[...]
Now, psychologists at Stanford have shown that prison staff members who work on execution teams exhibit high levels of moral disengagement — and the closer they are to the killing, the higher their level of disengagement goes.
[...]
"You have to sanctify lethal means: this is the most powerful technique" of disengagement from a shared human moral code, said Dr. Bandura, who has expressed serious moral reservations about capital punishment. "If you can't convince people of the sanctity of the greater cause, they are not going to carry the job out as effectively."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/07/health/psychology/07exec.html?pagewanted=1&_r=6&th&emc=th
[/q]
so, what does this mean?
it sounds as if ignoring morality not only gives human beings an evolutionary advantage, but in some cases it requires the religious or philosophical sanctification of pernicious actions. it seems to be not so much that religious and spiritual beliefs are suspended when acting out of moral disengagement ... rather, they are simply shifted. they are as bending and malleable to our will as anything else. when the situation necessitates, our philosophies and theologies change focus, allowing us access to new rationales that justify our violation of our own moral code.
or, does this become an argument for humanizing sentimentalism and for knowing when to turn off the logic with growing evidence that people can shift between coherent reason and insidious rationalizations with the ease of pressing a button on a remote control. or, are we capable of manipualting even logic in order to justify what we perceive that we "must" do in certain situations -- is it all a series of rationalizations, all of it, that lead us to what it is we "must" or "want" to do?
pushing it a bit further, how culpable are we as a society when we have things like the death penalty -- or even physician assisted suicide -- which might require (and let's not get into the whole, "well, they chose their job, didn't they?" because people, especially someone who works in the prisons, have less real choice than we might initially think) precisely this kind of rationalization and weilding of logic and reason as weapons to justify something that seems morally reprehensible.
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Ever read Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Irvine?
