I have an example of this that I think is quite good. In a slightly off-topic English lesson I suggested that to control the population growth we could kill people over a certain age. Now, it might have been the way I phrased it (I'm still casting around for a word that sounds slightly less barbaric than 'kill', but it was better than 'brutally murder') but most of the people in the room were immediately horrified at the suggestion. Now, I wasn't exactly thinking that anyone would fully support this idea straight away and I'm not actually advocating it as a viable solution, but I didn't expect quite the violent reaction I did get. Most people wouldn't even consider it as a concept.
This is the ick factor. Your brain just rejects an idea immediately on the grounds that it is too wrong to even be considered. This gut feeling is often considered fairly valuable in making moral decisions. We like to rely on our gut decision to tell us what to do. But should we?
Should we live our lives on the basis of some feeling that we don't understand? Or should we measure out the arguments and weigh them up as philosophers? It is surprising how many people don't weigh things up. Also, I'm not convinced that the gut decision is as intuitive as we usually believe. If it was then surely I would have the same gut feeling of horror as my English class. No, I think it's mostly down to outside factors like family or society. Even if we are born with certain basic gut feelings, like not murdering people, I think that these are actually overridden when we are older by the ideas of society. In the case of murdering people this simply strengthens the gut feeling (if it is there originally). And I'm still not convinced that my pantheic views come entirely from myself, even though I was brought up going to a Catholic church. It's impossible to know.
Anyway, returning from my anthropological ramble, I think it's rather more sensible to use reason in making moral judgements than gut instincts that may or may not have come from our society. The problem is that we (or certainly I) don't understand where they came from, so I wouldn't feel like my life was built on very stable foundations.
That said, I struggle to see why you would rely on reason for any area of knowledge. But I do know why I feel like this. (Drifting through ToK into psychology. I don't know much about psychology and I haven't got any further philosophical points to make but I would like to explain how I explain my bias towards reason to myself.)
Dad did this test years ago called the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator that purports to explain why we see the world as we do. It classifies people into types based on their answers. The categories are:
Extrovert (E)/Introvert (I)
Sensing (S)/Intuition (N)
Thinking (T)/Feeling (F)
Judgement (J)/Perception (P)
I came up as INTJ. My dad is the same and it's true, I am exactly like him. The older I get the more I realise how in-line our thinking is.
I don't really think much of this test, apart from the two categories thinking and feeling. They're basically equivalent to the terms reason and emotion in ToK. In our house we often use the categories T and F to describe things. So when dad was choosing which car to buy he was being a T because he was weighing up all the strengths and weaknesses but mum's input was distinctly more F - what colours do they do?
**At this point I was interrupted by having a discussion with my parents where they forcefully argued that being an F was not a bad thing (I tend to use it jokingly as an insult) and you don't have to be a T about everything. But I kinda think you do, for important things. I don't doubt that emotion influences my judgements but I think I would be able to reach clearer conclusions if I could remove that bias.**
I thought of some more philosophy. If we listened to the ick factor all the time we'd still have African slaves, men keeping women at home and shunning homosexuals. If you listen to your emotions over reason, you risk accepting false ideas about where you start from that can have drastic implications on your life, as in the examples above. At the time, people were horrified at the thought of black people being equal to white people, they were feeling the ick factor and are now thought to be mistaken. Reason, people! If you think about it properly, you can check what you base all your arguments on.
I really need to think of some arguments for using emotion in various areas of knowledge before I have to do a ToK essay on it and completely fail at presenting an equal view.
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