Question

1)What does Kurzban mean when he says that "...no part of the brain can at one and the same time, also be a whole brain,...”?

2)What is "moral dumbfounding”? Please provide an example in your response.

Answer 1

• Robert Kurzban shows us that the key to understanding our behavioral inconsistencies lies in understanding the mind's design. The human mind consists of many specialized units designed by the process of evolution by natural selection.
• Kurzban explains the roots and implications of our inconsistent minds, and why it is perfectly natural to believe that everyone else is a hypocrite.
• Visual illusions illustrate that our brains are not singular entities with one fully informed consensus output, but rather collections of what Kurzban calls “modules".We are conscious of the workings of some, but not all, of our modules. What he means is that each module or functional entity in the brain is just that and is not the whole brain. The functions performed by modules happens individually and not indicating the process of the whole brain.How lots of little modules – none of which has all the capabilities of the brain as a whole – work together.
• Moral dumbfounding occurs when someone confidently pronounces a moral judgment, then finds that he or she has little or nothing to say in defense of it.
• Suppose a woman and her children are starving, and the only way she can feed her family, apart from theft, is to us other illegal means or to sell her organs. Since she undertakes these acts of exchange not because of direct physical coercion by another, but only because she is compelled by hunger and a lack of alternatives, they are free.She chose transactions that were both illegal and, more interestingly, banned for reasons that psychologists can’t quite puzzle out.
• They seem to follow the pattern that Jon Haidt famously discussed in the context of sibling incest. People more or less uniformly judge consensual incest to be morally wrong, but are unable to supply reasons for their view. Haidt termed this “moral dumbfounding.”