I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose...
I've always (well, usually) been concerned re the position that obeying orders is no excuse for war crimes. What about self defense? If I kill someone only because otherwise he (or more likely, she) would have certainly killed me, I get off. OK, maybe if we're talking about me vs. 1000 of them, it's different. Any thoughts?
ReplyDeleteSelf-defense applies to killing the person who was going to kill you. It doesn't legally permit you to shoot A because otherwise B was going to shoot you!
ReplyDeleteInteresting--never thought of it that way.
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