Candide

cabaline1:

15 year old Kristy Bamu was brutally tortured for 4 days by his sister and her boyfriend because he was suspected of practising witchcraft. He was attacked with knives, sticks, metal bars, and a hammer and chisel and he “begged to die” before slipping under  water and drowning in the bath during a final ritual of deliverance. He suffered 130 injuries.

The reasoning of his sister and her boyfriend for doing this came from a pastor. A pastor who worked in backstreet churches. There are many of these churches and many of these pastors. Pastors who will meet with a family and convince them that their family’s suffering is because of (most often) a child who is practising witchcraft. These pastors tell the family that this child is essentially evil and that the devil must some how be dragged from them. Some pastors recommend the same rituals that Kristy Bamu was subjected to, while others con the family into paying more money than they can afford for an exorcism.

So Kristy Bamu’s horrific ordeal was not the first and will not be the last. The NSPCC children’s charity warned that this was not an isolated case and that it certainly “is not a one-off incident.”

This is what devout religion does and what it leads to.

It’s disgusting.

Blind faith can justify any deed - good or bad or truly evil. That’s the problem: it can lead to people devoting their lives to caring for the poor, or, it can lead to things like this…

evidence, on the other hand, can justify only the truth.

This is an extract from a section of Steven Pinker’s essay The Moral Instinct dealing with Jonathan Haidt’s work on moral reasoning:

Julie is traveling in France on summer vacation from college with her brother Mark. One night they decide that it would be interesting and fun if they tried making love. Julie was already taking birth-control pills, but Mark uses a condom, too, just to be safe. They both enjoy the sex but decide not to do it again. They keep the night as a special secret, which makes them feel closer to each other. What do you think about that — was it O.K. for them to make love?

A woman is cleaning out her closet and she finds her old American flag. She doesn’t want the flag anymore, so she cuts it up into pieces and uses the rags to clean her bathroom.

A family’s dog is killed by a car in front of their house. They heard that dog meat was delicious, so they cut up the dog’s body and cook it and eat it for dinner.

Most people immediately declare that these acts are wrong and then grope to justify whythey are wrong. It’s not so easy. In the case of Julie and Mark, people raise the possibility of children with birth defects, but they are reminded that the couple were diligent aboutcontraception. They suggest that the siblings will be emotionally hurt, but the story makes it clear that they weren’t. They submit that the act would offend the community, but then recall that it was kept a secret. Eventually many people admit, “I don’t know, I can’t explain it, I just know it’s wrong.” People don’t generally engage in moral reasoning, Haidt argues, but moral rationalization: they begin with the conclusion, coughed up by an unconscious emotion, and then work backward to a plausible justification.

The gap between people’s convictions and their justifications is also on display in the favorite new sandbox for moral psychologists, a thought experiment devised by the philosophers Philippa Foot and Judith Jarvis Thomson called the Trolley Problem. On your morning walk, you see a trolley car hurtling down the track, the conductor slumped over the controls. In the path of the trolley are five men working on the track, oblivious to the danger. You are standing at a fork in the track and can pull a lever that will divert the trolley onto a spur, saving the five men. Unfortunately, the trolley would then run over a single worker who is laboring on the spur. Is it permissible to throw the switch, killing one man to save five? Almost everyone says “yes.”

Consider now a different scene. You are on a bridge overlooking the tracks and have spotted the runaway trolley bearing down on the five workers. Now the only way to stop the trolley is to throw a heavy object in its path. And the only heavy object within reach is a fat man standing next to you. Should you throw the man off the bridge? Both dilemmas present you with the option of sacrificing one life to save five, and so, by the utilitarian standard of what would result in the greatest good for the greatest number, the two dilemmas are morally equivalent. But most people don’t see it that way: though they would pull the switch in the first dilemma, they would not heave the fat man in the second. When pressed for a reason, they can’t come up with anything coherent, though moral philosophers haven’t had an easy time coming up with a relevant difference, either.

…

Rest of essay can be read here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/13/magazine/13Psychology-t.html?_r=2&pagewanted=all&oref=login&oref=slogin