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You don't want to contemplate how many billion bacteria
are transmitted from one mouth to another in a French kiss.
Though a strange thing came out the other day.
Tooth decay bacteria are inherited only from the mother's
genotype and not the father's, and not anybody else's.
Strange little piece of miscellaneous biology.
You get your tooth decay bacteria from your mother
and not from anybody else despite French kissing.
Really strange.
I don't understand why.
I assume it's a priority effect.
They get in the enamel and they're already there
and nobody else can get in.
It's really strange stuff.
But in this category of really strange stuff,
some psychologists have done experiments where you do things
like, you teach students a little modern German history
around World War II.
And they understand that Hitler was a genius.
They understand that Hitler embodied many of the values
of modern American corporations.
Effective and efficient, for example.
And they understand that his treatment of minorities
was a rational strategy, it wasn't a quirk without purpose.
It was policy-based and aimed toward particular goals.
And if you ask them--so they can understand what game Hitler
was playing--and then you ask them was Hitler's treatment
of minorities right or wrong?
They will say it was right for Hitler, because it made sense
within Hitler's game, you see?
And you can ask them to compare it with Jesus driving
the money changers out of the temple.
And what Hitler was doing was right for Hitler,
and Jesus tearing up palmers was right for Jesus.
Each was right within his game, but they're not ready to judge
between games.
So we haven't completed the liberal education.
We don't have the kind of personal investment
in global issues.
We don't yet have real, professional responsibility
at the teacher's game level.
It's still the avoidance of malpractice suits.
Doing what's legal, but it's a very rule-governed ethics,
not a more sophisticated ethics yet.
To get to more sophisticated ethics, we have to ask
more complex questions of the students, ones that bring
their values out.
One example is, how many of you are in the humanities,
anybody left in humanities?
Yes, one, just you.
[audience laughter].
Whoa, you ask them things like, you teach them to do
two different kinds of interpretations
of a short story.
A Marxist feminist that concentrates on power issues,
and a neo-historical or anything else that concentrates
on very different issues.
You teach them to do one until they can do it competently.
You teach them to do the other until they can
do it competently.
And then you give them a short story and you say sketch me
these two interpretations and then tell me which one we should
teach to tenth-grade inner-city women, and why.
And when you put the application in context, you bring out
the students' values so that she can see them.
She doesn't know her own values, really, and you make
her start choosing.
So you start putting her in situations where she knows
alternative games and can choose.
Or for schizophrenia, schizophrenia is a genetic
disease, really strong genetic component.
It has two dominant genes and about 80% penetrant,
which means 80% of who's got it, who's not,
is easily explained by genetics.
It's also a disease brought by chemical imbalance, driven by
the genetics but implemented through biochemical imbalance.
It's also a disease of social stress.
All three of these are true, but partial.
Which you emphasize depends on what you're trying to do.
If you have somebody in front of you in a schizophrenic crisis,
saying "gee, you know, it's your genes, sorry" is not
the most helpful response.
If what you'd like to do is have long-term curers delving further
into the genetics may well be your most helpful tool.
Different contexts, different games, and different answers.
So you have to teach the students how different contexts
pull forth different games or answers.
Contexts, how different contexts pull forth different decisions.
The question becomes not is nuclear power safe or dangerous,
but rather for what context, if any, is it safe enough?
And if it's safe enough, for what ones, then,
is it preferable?
And almost everybody agrees it's safe enough for nuclear subs,
because strategic reasons compel you to something that allows you
to have unlimited power, without refueling and
without burning air.
And almost everybody would agree that putting a nuclear power
plant where it could force evacuation of Manhattan
is a bad idea, even though we have the
Indian Point Power Plant in exactly that position.
Where the disaster plan says, well, if the wind is blowing
in the wrong direction and you have a conceivable but not very
likely steam explosion, we will evacuate Manhattan in 12 hours,
and just a few square miles of it permanently as a sacrifice.
That was probably a bad decision.
The same plant in southern Indiana or southern Illinois
would be much less of a problem.
A few square miles of Hoosier National Forest might well be
worth the risk, whereas a few square miles of lower Manhattan,
it really clearly isn't.
So context matters, trade-offs matter.
You know what a doctor who, above all else, will do you
no harm.
Aspirin kills people, Tylenol kills more people,
per number used.
Antibiotics kill people.
A doctor who refuses to harm you can do you no good.
A doctor who refuses to risk harming you can do you no good.
There are always trade-offs.
Where as Levinson says in "Seasons of a Man's Life",
if we're lucky, we come to understand you can never
do good without doing harm.
And you can never do great good without doing significant harm.
The world does not come to you in morally unmixed packages.
And, of course, if life isn't good, isn't it [unclear audio]?
So the question is, will you avoid harming?
That can't be done.
The question is, can you maximize the good relative
to the amount of harm you're doing?
So the kinds of questions here are, how can you build context
leading to different decisions?
Trade-offs, approximations.
With global warming the question isn't what should you do,
the question is, at each point, given the evidence,
what is currently justified?