When Frank’s dog was struck and killed by a car in front of his house, he grew curious what Fido might taste like. So he
cooked him up and ate him for dinner. It was a harmless decision, but, nonetheless, one could
understandably consider it immoral.
Or take incest: a brother, who’s
using a condom, and his sister,
who’s on birth control, decide to
have sex. They enjoy it but keep it a
secret and don’t do it again. Is their
action morally wrong? If they’re
both consenting adults and not
hurting anyone, can one level a
legitimate moral judgment?
Along with a student cheating on an
exam and a woman secretly cutting
up a national flag to use for
cleaning her toilet.
If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart. People are more likely to act less emotionally and more rationally when speaking their second
language.
Moral decisions tend to be made
using two thought processes — one
subconscious, one conscious. The
emotional content of a dilemma is
first understood subconsciously. One
reacts to a situation’s emotional
content without realizing it. You
hear about sibling incest and you get
emotionally disgusted: you don’t
reason through it; you just react. The
second step is conscious evaluation.
This takes rationality, effort, and
cognitive control. You think about
incest or dead dog-eating further
and realize that no one is being hurt
and that just because something is
peculiar might not necessarily mean
it is immoral. When people work in their native
language, they read or hear a moral
scenario like the trolley dilemma or
the dog-eating story and
immediately react. But working in a
non-native language appears to
create a barrier through which
emotions must pass.
In many ways, this can be a positive
change: when judgments of
immorality are based on things that
make us subconsciously feel “weird”
or “unsettled” then skewed policy
tends to follow.
Should gay or transgender people
not be allowed to marry because it
initially seems “bizarre” to a few
people? Should contraception be
denied to women because it is
“different” or because pre-marital
sex makes certain people
“uncomfortable”? If no one is being
harmed by an action, rarely can it
then be considered immoral. If one
were to rationally and consciously
think through these moral dilemmas,
might one’s decision be different
than if one were to merely react
immediately and emotionally?
