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EECS 690
April 21
Star Trek and Psychoanalytic Theory
• The cast of the original Star Trek was
intentionally formulated in many ways,
representing people of different racial and
national identity operating effectively in a
cooperative enterprise.
• The trio of Spock, Kirk, and McCoy were
intended to make explicit the workings of the
mind as then understood by Freudian
Psychoanalytic Theory. Spock is the coolly
rational superego, McCoy, the emotional and
impulsive Id, while the Captain as Ego, is in
charge.
Wallach, Allen, and Star Trek
• The authors here mis-introduce this
example to transition into a discussion of
the role that emotion plays (or does not
play) in morality.
The relationships between morality
and emotions
• Certainly, emotions like shame or guilt are
strongly connected to moral situations and may
motivate moral behavior.
• However, claims that morality just is a set of
emotional reactions is a violation of the is/ought
distinction.
• Certainly emotions and feelings provide us with
important information quickly, and considerations
of the feelings and emotions of others is an
ethically relevant concern.
Feelings/emotions distinction
• A feeling involves something visceral. A feeling
of pain is not itself and emotion, but may cause
emotions.
• Emotions often involve some feelings or other,
but the emotions isn’t defined in terms of just the
feelings.
• Feelings and Emotions are generally lumped
into a category called by some “Affective States”
(so called because they are things that just
happen to you, i.e. things that affect you, not
things you effect) and called “Conative States”
by others (as opposed to Cognitive States).
Emotional states as information
• Facial expression, non-verbal vocal utterances, body
language, etc. are all ways in which people communicate
vast amounts of information to each other, so any
system that was able to (even in a limited way) read
these cues, could interact much more efficiently with
human beings.
• An application to assist sufferers of Asperger’s
syndrome, many of whom have significant difficulty
interpreting facial expressions. Such an application could
be a prosthetic for social interaction the way that a
prosthetic leg assist in walking or the way a notepad
becomes a prosthetic memory.
Affective/conative communication
• Breaking up facial expressions, body
movements, postures, vocal tone, etc. into
their discrete parts to make use of such
information for the purposes of
communication is one thing that
computers are getting more and more able
to do. It is easy to see why this might be
important, but does a system need
affective or conative states of its own to
make moral decisions?
Three general viewpoints:
• Mainstream view (dates back to even pre-Socratic
philosophy): Moral reasoning and decision-making
should be devoid of emotional bias.
• Hume’s view (others have subscribed to this view, but
Hume is the best early proponent of such a view):
Conative States (a term invented by Hume) like
sympathy and empathy form the backbone of the ethical
conventions of civil society.
• Aristotle: Affective states influence the way we behave,
and so they are good insofar as they encourage virtuous
behavior, and should be held in check insofar as they do
not.
Five categories of emotion theory
• This breakdown is owed to Jesse Prinz
• Product theories:
– Feeling Theories: emphasizes the conscious experience of
emotional states
– Behavior Theories: identify emotions with specific behavioral
responses
• Process theories:
– Somatic Theories: emphasize the bodily processes associated
with emotions
– Processing-mode Theories: emphasize the role of emotions in
modulating other mental activities
– Cognitive Theories: emphasize the role of beliefs in emotions
From Buridan’s Ass to Emotional Heuristics.
• Medieval philosopher Jean Buridan described a
thought experiment in which an ass starves to
death equidistant between two equivalent bales
of hay.
• The lesson of Buridan’s Ass is that motivation
and decision has to be at least partly
affective/conative. Contemporary thinkers point
to ‘emotional heuristics’ as reinforced short-cuts
for performing complex tasks. Much of this work
was pioneered by Herbert Simon, who won a
Nobel Prize in Economics in 1978 for his work.
Functionalism and Somatic Theories
• “[A robot determined to] allow no harm to a
human being would need to be aware of the
facts of human pain sensitivity. A quick way to
this knowledge is to have the same sensitivities.”
(p.152)
• Somatic theories strive to produce the functional
equivalents of certain affective/conative states.
Such concerns as above indicate the importance
or potential usefulness for systems with such
capacities, but doesn’t answer the question of
whether a system needs to have its own
affective/conative states to be moral.