Typically, I make an effort to avoid discussing moral issues in the blog.  I try to be interesting and informative here.  Morality is a very subjective topic and I don’t think that my personal views on it are any more interesting or informed that anyone else’s.   You might actually disagree with me that morality is subjective.  I think that argument has some traction in contemporary thought.  Moral certitude has played a popular role in American politics for a while now.  Others might argue that morality originates in religious teachings, or even just common sense.  Independent of their origins,  most people stew up a personal mixture or moral beliefs to suit their cultural perspectives and life experiences.  More or less, this approach works startlingly well for almost everyone.  But here I want to examine the topic of moral perception and how it should be thought of as a separable component when considering the more common arguments for moral relativism.

I wear glasses.  That means that almost all of my visual experiences are corrected by their lenses without me noticing it.  What’s interesting, like lenses, our moral world-view also uses a corrective tool that goes unaccounted for in our moral reasoning.  Our brains.  We typically perceive our brains to be so accurate in their depiction of reality that we routinely respond to the world based on only milliseconds of unconscious consideration. We have a very human habit of trusting our own experiences. Or at least our perceptions of them.

Visually, our brains are very adept.  Our experience of the many thousands of other adept things that our brains do, makes our faithful dependency on our brains’ judgment seem to us to be normal and right.  But what’s often unnoticed, is that the human brain isn’t equally adept at all things.  For instance,  brains are not very good at moral equations.  More accurately, brains are not very good at knowing when they are being bad at moral equations.  In fact, considering how much our race depends on common sense to support moral beliefs, human brains are surprisingly bad at computing relative values of right and wrong.

For example, in our brains’ common-sense based moral calculus, physical proximity plays a strangely significant role in determining moral outcome.

Think about that one for a minute. Does it really seem right to account for our personal location in measuring the impact of right and wrong?  But to our brains, our relative location has a significant impact on the way we judge ourselves.  Let me show you what I mean in this quick example:

You are wearing a $1000 suit while taking a stroll down a lake shore.  Drowning in the water nearby is a girl.   You have the choice to jump in to save the girl and ruin your suit, or to leave the girl to drown while preserving your expensive attire.

What does your brain tell you is the wrong action to take?  Now consider the following alternate scenario.

You hear a story on the radio about a girl in Lebanon who needs a life-saving surgical procedure for $1000.  You choose not to send $1000 to the girl.  Are you equally wrong?

Close enough to care?

Did your brain tell you that both wrongs were exact moral equivalents?   Even though they are exactly the same, your brain probably did not see them that way.  The difference in the feelings that you had is due to the erroneous proximity value that your brain uses in calculating moral equations. Would it have made a difference to you if you were in the girl’s hospital room holding her hand?   This perceived difference  is the moral equivalent of an optical illusion.  Everybody easily understands that optical illusions are the result of our brain’s shortcomings, but we are far less apt to consider the possibility that moral illusions also exist for the same reason.

Though no one has done it, it would be interesting to perform as study to calculate whether the the brain’s weighted value of moral proximity diminishes at approximately the same rate as visual perception diminishes.   Does the brain use its understanding of the phenomenon of visual foreshortening to also calculate the rate of decline for moral significance?

The proximity effect in the moral equation has historically played a very small role in human culture.  Remember, before the age of telecommunication, we humans lived in little bubbles of moral proximity.  Today, we live in a world that is arguably without proximity.  More often now, we are being required to take action based on moral judgments that go against our feelings of common sense morality.  Think N.I.M.B.Y.  The “big picture” items that concern the world larger than our immediate proximities are the ones that are the highest risk of falling prey to our brain’s problematic expertise at resolving moral equations.    Yet our own technological capabilities have pushed us into an era that is requiring us to change that calculus to accommodate a new world-wide proximity.  Whether or not this process of adaptation succeeds might be the secret to the future success of humanity itself.  Can we expand our brains’ understanding of moral proximity as a specie?

Fortunately, as the decline of the Crocs fashion craze has taught us, the very brains that are now fooling us, are also amazingly adept at making corrections once errors are known.