Saturday, October 13, 2007
Paul Bloom's Dangerous Rejection of the Soul
Continuing my trawl through What Is Your Dangerous Idea?:
Yale University Psychologist Paul Bloom writes:
'the radical claim that personal identity, free will, and consciousness do not exist... is so intuitively outlandish that nobody but a philosopher could take it seriously...' (p. 4)
However, the context of that quote is as follows:
'I am not concerned here with the radical claim that personal identity, free will, and consciousness do not exist. Regardless of its merit, this position is so intuitively outlandish that nobody but a philosopher could take it seriously, and so it is unlikely to have any real-world implications.'
Not only is Bloom's apparent position intuitively outlandish, it is a position that he admits could have important consequences if widely accepted - which is as much as to say that it does have important consequences in point of fact:
'The rejection of souls is more dangerous than evolution by natural selection... the widespread rejection of the soul would have profound moral and legal consequences. It would also require people to rethink what happens when they die... It is hard to get more dangerous than that.' (p. 6.)
In other words, rejection of the soul is not universalizable (to borrow a term from Kant) without serious upheaval of the kind that one might well think unlivable (e.g. scrapping out legal system because if people lack souls then one must accept the 'radical' claim that they lack 'free will' - as Bloom indicates). Of course, if humans do have free will, reversing this argument would show that humans do have souls...
Yale University Psychologist Paul Bloom writes:
'the radical claim that personal identity, free will, and consciousness do not exist... is so intuitively outlandish that nobody but a philosopher could take it seriously...' (p. 4)
However, the context of that quote is as follows:
'I am not concerned here with the radical claim that personal identity, free will, and consciousness do not exist. Regardless of its merit, this position is so intuitively outlandish that nobody but a philosopher could take it seriously, and so it is unlikely to have any real-world implications.'
Not only is Bloom's apparent position intuitively outlandish, it is a position that he admits could have important consequences if widely accepted - which is as much as to say that it does have important consequences in point of fact:
'The rejection of souls is more dangerous than evolution by natural selection... the widespread rejection of the soul would have profound moral and legal consequences. It would also require people to rethink what happens when they die... It is hard to get more dangerous than that.' (p. 6.)
In other words, rejection of the soul is not universalizable (to borrow a term from Kant) without serious upheaval of the kind that one might well think unlivable (e.g. scrapping out legal system because if people lack souls then one must accept the 'radical' claim that they lack 'free will' - as Bloom indicates). Of course, if humans do have free will, reversing this argument would show that humans do have souls...
