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The Moral Thermometer --- by Mark D. Steele
“Thought experiments are devices of the imagination used to investigate nature.”(Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) I am interested in a specific thought experiment and want to use it to expose one facet of human nature. For the purposes here, I am going to call it the “Moral Thermometer”.
Imagine a room. You have seen the type on reality TV. You stand next to me (the controller) in the control room. We can look into the room from a variety of angles and can completely control the environment in the room. Two people appear suddenly in the middle of the room (via our teleportation machine). The first appears to be an Eskimo straight from the Arctic Circle. He has all of the physical characteristics of an Eskimo and is dressed in fur-lined clothes. The second is Bedouin straight from the desert. He is dressed in traditional Bedouin clothes. On the wall behind the subjects, you can see a giant mercury thermometer. The current temperature is steady at 55 degrees Fahrenheit.
The Eskimo, who has just been transported in from a location where the weather was –15, appears to be quite uncomfortable. He begins to sweat and he ditches the parka. The Bedouin, who was transported from a location where the weather was 120 degrees, is actually shivering in the cold. I know. I have been in the desert when it was 126 degrees in the daytime and 90 just before dawn. Ninety degrees seemed cold. The important thing to notice is the disparity between their reactions to a temperature that would seem comfortable for people from a temperate climate.
Now, look at the mercury. It has jumped significantly. The temperature in the room now reads 200 degrees Fahrenheit. Both men are sweating, drinking Gatorade from the ice chest in the corner, and generally trying to cool their bodies down. They quickly resort to putting the ice water on themselves. What is interesting is that both men experience 200 degrees as hot. Now, look at the mercury again. It has shifted after only a few moments (not wanting to harm the subjects). Now, the thermometer reads –90 degrees. The sweat running from the men’s foreheads turns to ice and they are putting their clothes back on. They begin to exercise to stay warm. When a campfire appears suddenly (teleported as well) – they both rush to it to warm up. Once again note their reactions. They both experience –90 degrees as cold. Once again, I only allow this to continue for a few moments so as not to harm our subjects (all well-paid volunteers by the way).
After paying the volunteers, I return them to their homes unharmed. What have we learned about humans from this thought experiment? It seems clear that we have learned that almost all humans, everywhere, regardless of climate of origin, find 200 degrees hot and –90 degrees cold. This is true even though they may disagree in what we might call the middle range of 55. The Eskimo found it warm in relation to his climate while the Bedouin found it cold in relation to his. It is conceivable that some creature would not find –90 cold or 200 hot. But both of our subjects did because they are humans. Their bodies have an internal “thermometer” that tells them when it is hot or cold. These thermometers disagreed at the middle range but agreed at the extremes. And they agreed because they are humans.
The purpose of a thought experiment is to enable the testing of a hypothesis that would be difficult or impossible to verify through a physical experiment. Now, aside from concern over injury (and the lack of teleportation equipment), the above experiment could be physically accomplished. But it really only demonstrated something that we all knew already. Namely, that all humans have temperature limits. The second part of the experiment would not be so easily accomplished for three reasons. First, it is necessary to get input that we probably cannot physically measure. Second, the actual protocols of the experiment could not be physically done (exactly as we are going to do them). And three, I do not have a research grant anyway.
It is important to know a little more about our next two subjects (again, paid volunteers) and their belief systems. Our first subject, who I will call “A”, is an Orthodox Jewish rabbi. He believes in One God, and in God’s Law as revealed to Moses (with the part that is familiar to most of us – the 10 commandments). He believes that morality is an absolute. The second subject, “B”, is an African-American woman. She is a sociology professor at Berkeley and a member of several prominent liberal organizations. She has degrees in Sociology from Harvard and Berkeley. She holds a belief system that philosophers would refer to as moral relativism. She does not believe in any ultimate absolute moral principles or moral judge (ie God) beyond herself. Subject “A” follows a strict code that he believes was given by God to mankind through Moses. Subject “B” follows her own principles and believes that the situation governs and that, ultimately, there is no absolute good or evil.
The equipment for this experiment is going to be somewhat different. Each of our subjects will be equipped with their own personal teleportation assistant (PTA) but each PTA will be under our control. Each PTA also includes a complete measurement device that can record the person’s physical reactions and thoughts. Each also provides full audio and video to us in the control room.
For the first part of the experiment, our two subjects are transported to a street corner in a major US city (our control panel shows the map grid coordinates for Chicago). They are dropped onto the corner in such a way that they (and our audio/video feed) are looking at a burning house. Screams are coming from inside the house. A woman comes running up the street. She screams, “my children!”. A man is walking by in the uniform of the US Postal Service. He hears the screams. He sees fire leaping out of windows. He drops his mail bag and rushes into the building. He returns, coughing, covered with smoke, carrying a baby. He gives it to the woman standing nearby. He goes back into the building. The crowd, quickly gathered, seems to hold its collective breath. Fire leaps out of the front door blocking the escape route. A window at the corner breaks. The mail-man climbs out. He comes running out of the building carrying another small child. He gives the child to the mother who is standing there with the baby. The family is reunited as the house continues to burn.
What do our PTA’s record? Well, both of our subjects seem to be happy with the outcome. In fact, in the split second after the man came out with the second child – both reacted in quite the same way. Relief, happiness, etc. They looked at the mailman and knew that what he had done was good. We teleport both back to our experimental room so that we can change the coordinates in their PTA’s. The professor’s eyes seem to have teared slightly while the rabbi’s face seems to glow with joy.
One advantage of our PTAs is that although our subjects can see, hear, feel, and smell the environment that they teleport to, they cannot be seen by those who are there. The PTA’s are reset and off our subjects go. This time, they have landed in a wooden room perched high up in the air on stilts – a tower. They look out and see numerous sights. On one side of what can only be a concentration camp, guards are firing into a crowd of old men who are standing over a trench filled with bodies. On the other side, people are being herded out of cattle cars and separated into two lines. One heads off into the distance while the other heads to a building with a long line of showers at one end. Smoke rises from a smokestack at the other end of the building. The wind has shifted the smoke their way and engulfed our two subjects in the smell of burning human flesh. The rabbi, the smile from the last teleport gone immediately, reacts with obvious horror. Our PTA records a mixture of emotions as he feels compassion for the victims and horror at what his thoughts describe as evil. The professor feels instant revulsion as well. In fact, her brain is almost numbed by what she too recognizes as pure evil.
Now, back in the comfort of our chambers, the two answer questions posed by our researchers. As each settles back into their persona, they each begin to deal differently with their experience. The rabbi describes his experiences within the framework of absolute moral values. The professor, once she regains her composure, begins to work her way back into the mindset of a sociologist. But both, in the moment of immediate reactions, experienced more or less the same thoughts. They both experienced and understood the rescue as good and the concentration camp as evil. They both, in their initial physical and psychological reactions, intuitively acted upon a built-in moral sense. I would argue that this sense is every bit as real and as valid as the internal thermometer. That it is, in some way, a moral thermometer.
In the comfort of a classroom, the two may be able to argue ethical issues all day long. But these tend to be in the middle ranges. When faced with extreme good or extreme evil – they both recognize it as it is. They may disagree about the minimum to be done or whether a specific act is right or wrong, but few would disagree with the proposition that Hitler's concentration camps were bad or that a man who risks his life by running inside a burning building to save an infant is good. This seems to be more than just an argument from consensus. There seems to be an actual moral law - known to most systems of ethics throughout time - that agrees as to the morality of these actions.
In fact, societies and cultures have largely agreed on many of the extremes of morality. Most have found that courage is good and cowardice bad, honesty good and dishonesty bad, loyalty good and treason bad. Most cultures have tried to support their continuance through procreation and family. Admittedly, a few subcultures have rejected procreation but they disappeared (for obvious reasons). Cultures have not always agreed upon what constitutes the middle ground and they have not always agreed about morality in the middle ground. While some have allowed multiple wives, I am not aware of any that had no concept of marriage as a good thing. While cultures have differed in how they punished those who broke their moral codes, the highest and wisest of most have agreed as to the outlines of what those moral codes should be. We would no more expect to discover a culture where courage and honesty were considered evil and cowardice and lying were considered good than to find a tribe in the tropics that dresses from head to toe in fur-lined leather. The moral thermometer tends to prevail as does the physical thermometer.
But this leads us to two more interesting facts. They both correspond somewhat to the analogy of the internal physical thermometer. When I was an Army officer and spending a lot of time outdoors, we always kept a careful watch on soldiers who had a history of heat stroke or severe heat exhaustion. The reason for this watch is that heat stroke damages the internal physical thermometer in some way that makes it more likely for the victim to suffer from heat stroke (or even frostbite in the cold) again at a later date. The body no longer properly reacts to the external temperature. It is also possible for someone to be born without this internal physical thermometer. These people are at risk from any extreme temperature conditions. The same is true of our moral thermometer. It would appear that some people do not possess it or possess damaged versions. For whatever reason, they do not have any concept of morality and do not view their own actions in moral or immoral terms. It seems that this lack could be explained by being born without it or by experiences that damage the moral thermometer. But the fact that some lack this moral thermometer (or possess damaged versions) is a poor argument against its existence. We easily recognize such a lack. Even if it is after the fact as at Columbine.
The second interesting comparison is the fact that we can ignore both thermometers. A strong-willed person could ignore the input from his internal physical thermometer until he is either burnt or frozen. We have already seen that one likely result of this is a damaged thermometer that will make heat and cold-related injuries more likely in the future. Likewise, a person can ignore the input from their moral thermometer. When one ignores this input long enough, this thermometer too can become damaged and cease to function effectively.
In conclusion, I contend that just as almost all humans have an internal physical thermometer, they have a moral thermometer. This sense of right and wrong may be developed or ignored in individuals but it is universal.
In some individuals, it may be damaged or nonexistent. These individuals are usually recognizable by their actions. Likewise, it may even be possible to find a society that completely contradicts normative notions of virtue and vice. Such a society would value cowardice and abhor courage. It would value liars and abhor the honest. It would run counter to its own continued existence by eliminating its procreated children and ripping apart its family structures. Actually, such a society, if it exists, would be much like ours only a few steps worse. It would be like going from 100 to 200 degrees. Both hot, one barely tolerable.
