Moral thoughtlessness
Juan Camilo Espejo-Serna
Universidad de la Sabana
Write in chat a one-line summary of the plot of MEMENTO.
(A good one :P).
I'm unsure about whether the film makes the philosophical claim I will me defending today. But the example presented surely does help make my point. The claim is not by the film but on the basis of the film.
Moral failures are usually explained in terms of either failures in knowledge or failures in the will.
An action is wrong because either the person didn't know that it was a bad action or because even if they knew that it was a bad action they din't have the will power to get them to do the correct thing.
Example of wrong action cause by a failure of knowledge?
Example of wrong action cause by a failure of the will?
In MEMENTO, I will argue, there is a third kind: moral thoughtlessness.
Moral thoughtlessness is a particular kind of moral failure, where the subject is fully responsible but not because of weakness of the will or lack of knowledge.
CONTRAST: There is one way of reading the film where the main point is that Lenny has a mental disorder that causes him to have a memory problem. He is not to be blamed because of this disorder. Others, like Natalie and Ted, are guilty.
I will argue that Memento presents us an example of the moral problems that thoughtlessness about our own mental life can generate. I will argue that Lenny is guilty.
Lenny has a mental disorder; this is not the problem. He lost his internal memory but has his extended memory.
This might seem weird because it amounts to the claim that Lenny’s mind extends out of his head. How could this be possible?
The extended mind hypothesis
"mental states, including states of believing, could be grounded in physical traces that remained firmly outside the head. As long as a few simple conditions were met (more on which below), Leonard’s notes and tattoos could indeed count as new additions to his store of long-term knowledge and dispositional belief."
TETRIS. The human player has the option of identifying the falling pieces (a) by mental rotation or (b) by the use of the onscreen button that causes the falling zoid to rotate.
Now imagine (c) a future human with both normal imaginative rotation capacities and also a retinal display that can fast-rotate the image on demand, just like using the rotate button. Imagine too that to initiate this latter action the future human issues a thought command straight from motor cortex.
Now let us pump our intuitions. Case (a) looks, we argue, to be a simple case of mental rotation. Case (b) looks like a simple case of non-mental (merely external) rotation. Yet case (c) now looks hard to classify.
By hypothesis, the computational operations involved are the same as in case (b). Yet our intuitions seem far less clear.
But now add the Martian player (case 4) whose natural cognitive equipment includes (for obscure ecological reasons) the kind of bio-technological fast-rotate machinery imagined in case (3). In the Martian case, we would have no hesitation in classifying the fast-rotations as species of mental rotation.
If, as we confront some task, a part of the world functions as a process which, were it to go on in the head, we would have no hesitation in accepting as part of the cognitive process, then that part of the world is (for that time) part of the cognitive process.
Second example: the notebook
Inga hears of an intriguing exhibition at MOMA (the Museum of Modern Art in New York). She thinks, recalls it's on 53rd St, and sets off.
Otto suffers from a mild form of Alzheimer's, and as a result he always carries a thick notebook.
Otto walked to 53rd St. because he wanted to go to the museum and believed (even before consulting his notebook) that it was on 53rd St.
The functional poise of the stored information was, in each case, sufficiently similar (we [Clark and Chalmers] argued) to warrant similarity of treatment. Otto’s long-term beliefs just weren’t all in his head.
Requirements:
- That the resource be reliably available and typically invoked.
(Otto always carries the notebook and won't answer that he ‘doesn't know’ until after he has consulted it).
- That any information thus retrieved be more-or-less automatically endorsed. It should not usually be subject to critical scrutiny (unlike the opinions of other people, for example). It should be deemed about as trustworthy as something retrieved clearly from biological memory
- That information contained in the resource should be easily accessible as and when required.
Lenny has anterograde amnesia. He cannot make new memories like we do. But there is a sense in which he can make new memories. His tattoos, his polaroids, his notes. These are his memories. Following Clark, yes.
Moral failures are usually explained in terms of either failures in knowledge or failures in the will.
If Lenny's illness were the problem, what kind of failure would it be?
Let us set aside issues about whether revenge is wrong. Let us suppose that he is justified. (I dont' think so, but that is an issue we will discuss next session.)
When does Lenny decide to kill Teddy?
Right before the first tatoo?
Right before the first scene of the film?
Right after Natalie tricks him?
Other?
I want to argue that the exact time he decides to kill Tedy is
Never
Lenny never fully decided to kill Teddy;
he just went along.
Lenny decides what to believe and what to forget. This has nothing to to do with his condition, but rather his moral standing.
His character does not change throught the film. He believes that revenge is ok but even if we accept that revenge is ok, he is not killing Ted justly.
Firm, fixed general moral principles can be misguided by thoughtlessness. That is Lenny's case.
Thoughtful wrongdoing vs Thoughtless wrongdoing
Can you give me an example of a thoughtful wrongdoing and thoughless one?
Example:
Thoughtful sexual abuse vs Thoughtless sexual abuse
Lenny is not blameless. He is fully responsible of killing Teddy because he put himself in a position where he knew that would be what he would do. Though he never decides his moral failure consists in his going along, not minding the situation and eventually killing someone out of spite.