Beliefs and memories

I was writing earlier today about the effort it takes to maintain a belief when we don't have direct evidence of it. In other posts I've written about memory and stories and photographs and memories. It's getting to be a recurring theme.

An interesting thing that happened back when I was in grad school. A friend of mine was doing a PhD in Psychology and she was doing research work for a professor that involved interviewing volunteer subjects about their sexual history (an amazing amount of research is done for prurient reasons).

Anyway, the thing that kept hitting her was that the women she was interviewing would in the course of these interviews have these forehead-slapping moments when they suddenly remembered a sexual partner they had forgotten about.

To get a full appreciation of how surprising this was, my friend told me, you had to realize that most of these women had had between two and five partners in their entire lives and sexual experience that only stretched back two to six years (the volunteer subjects were mostly undergraduate students).

She went home feeling very superior about it. And then, watching television and thinking about the subject idly, she suddenly remembered a guy she'd forgotten. She got a piece of paper out and went through her life chronologically trying to tick off every guy she had so much as kissed. In the end, she came up with three guys she'd had sex with and then completely forgotten. "And that is with a lifetime total that was still less than ten after adding them," she told me.

Try it yourself. I did and yes, I'd forgotten people and no my numbers are not high enough to explain it either.

Every time I've had sex, I am certain I  really believed it an important thing. It seemed to me in my single days to be the most significant way I could connect with another person. If someone had suggested I'd forget them, I would have told them they were crazy. I believed these relationships mattered to me. And yet I completely forgot about people I'd related to in sex. Not only did I fail to sustain the belief that this connection mattered, I forgot the person I wanted to believe it about.

Back in those days I would think, "If she will agree to do this thing it will mean so much to me." I don't think—I hope anyway—that I was ever so debased as to actually ask for it that way but I really did think it and thoughts have a way of showing. And I was wrong. At some point, if you keep doing things like that, you aren't so much incorrect as you are deceiving people.

And that has something to do with conscience and virtue. By "that" I mean the growing awareness ("sense" even) that something that you believed not to be morally wrong is morally wrong.

For next Friday

It seems to me then that a good question is whether moral laws can be private. In the previous example, B2 might say, "Yes there is a generally accepted moral law that says you shouldn't invade a woman's privacy by touching her breast and trying to make it look accidental but I don't accept that. I have a different set of principles of my own. Principles that are more flexible because they are based on an assessment of likely consequences and not some hard and fast law."

Further B2 might claim that his principles are private. He isn't saying, ""We should take the existing moral law and replace it with my principles." He is saying that it's okay for him to ignore the existing public moral law because these private principles are all he needs to behave morally.

I think that Linda Hogan is striving for something like that. (I'll admit that, although I don't know her, I have here deliberately constructed an example I suspect she would find repulsive. )

Moral laws

It's not just the moral authorities that we accept. We also accept the authority of moral laws. We do so even if we might grant an exception.

If Laura's husband has lost all interest in sex with her and has done no more than grudgingly go through the motions only when asked these last ten years we can easily imagine that someone might decide that Laura's having an affair was justifiable. You might not agree about this but you can imagine how someone else could talk themselves into it (Laura herself for example).

But we couldn't say that the person who felt an exception should be made didn't respect the moral law that says you should not cheat on your spouse. The mere fact that they need to consider the behaviour of Laura's husband puts them in an entirely different category from someone who believes in open marriage.

This is so because the very possibility of laws depends on there being agreement about how the laws should be applied most of the time. It's a lot like colours. When we talk about "blue" we can do so because most of us agree that certain colours are blue. We do this even though there is royal blue and navy blue which are quite distinct from one another. To be able to talk about blue, as Wittgenstein said, it isn't enough to have a definition of "blue" we must also agree in the judgment that this is blue. And that is true even if we might wonder if maybe blue indigo is more like purple.

So too with adultery. There are variations and maybe even degrees of adultery but there are also a lot of cases wherein everyone will agree that this is adultery. Even the person who thinks that marriages should be open will be able to agree that this set of facts fits the definition (they just won't think there is anything morally wrong with it).

Thou shalt not ...

A possible alternative might be to consider a version of authority that isn't exclusively Catholic. How about "Thou shalt not kill"? Both Christians and non-Christians have no trouble accepting that there is something special enough about human life to accept this one.

So how does conscience line up with this commandment?

There are laws and various moral authorities responsible for protecting the sanctity of human life. For the most part, we also expect that our private judgments about, for example, murder, will line up with the authorities. There is disagreement in some cases to be sure and there are also cases where the authorities were clearly wrong (OJ Simpson was guilty). But there are hundreds of murders every year and we accept the way legal authorities handle those without hesitation. So much so that when I learn that Richard X of no fixed address has been arrested for murder I take it for granted that the authorities have acted correctly, that he is guilty and that even in the unlikely case that there has been a miscarriage of justice the courts will fix the problem. We are so confident of this that we don't even bother informing ourselves further about the case.

So here we have a parallel case where there are individual consciences and a central moral/legal authorities. Does it make sense to say, as Hogan says elsewhere, that this means that "there is an immediate and inevitable tension" between the two? No it doesn't. It's a little ridiculous to even try and think of examples. "Why are you hassling me about shooting the piano player."

Conscience and authority

Reading Linda Hogan, two things have become obvious. The first is that she has an axe to grind and that doing so ultimately ruins what might have been an interesting book. The second thing is that I want to go at conscience much more slowly than she does.

In the opening pages of Chapter 1, Hogan says a whole lot about what conscience is and what isn't and says this without a hint of doubt. I'm not so sure we can or should assume anywhere near so much as she does.

Anyway, revised plans. Rather than going through chapter by chapter, I'm going to pull out intriguing claims she makes and think about them. Put them down here and walk around them for a while (figuratively speaking) and see what I can make of them.

Next post will have today's quote.