Quantum Morality

April 10th, 2006 Fred McVittie Posted in Conference Abstract, Flapdoodle, Free will, Morality, Quantum Theory |

This from The Conference Abstracts:

There is a less than happy degree of fit between the concepts of Morality (involving individual responsibility, accountability and the operation of free will), and Causality (with its attendant assumptions of deterministic chains of cause and effect). Given that (according to the laws of causality) all effects must have causes, and that these causes are ultimately physical, then this seems to leave no place for the operation of free will and individual moral responsibility. The criminal must have some cause for his crime; a problematic childhood, a defective gene, an overactive hormone, a socially conditioned response mechanism, a politically constructed inequality etc. This implies that the individual who actually commits the crime has ultimately no responsibility for their actions, but rather are simply a link in the deterministic chain of cause and effect. The implication of this causal chain is that the incarceration or punishment of that person seems a little unfair. Nevertheless, as a society we hedge our bets and assume that there is a measure of culpability and punish accordingly. We also expect the criminal, if they have been properly reformed by the legal process, to accept their guilt, with the feelings of guilt and remorse that accompany this acceptance. But what of a situation in which no crime has been committed and yet damage has most definitely been done by one individual to others, as when the driver has a minor heart attack at the wheel and, losing control of the vehicle, mounts the pavements and kills several pedestrians, a mother and child, a pensioner, a traffic warder. This paper will argue for a sense of shared culpability; an acknowledgement that in such a situation we should feel very bad indeed about it and any remarks that we may make it is not our fault are irrelevant. Determinism and free will, guilt and fatalism are inextricably bound together, along with a less rational, but nonetheless emotionally coherent sense of karma. This human moral and emotional response, and the apparent contradictions it contains, will be reviewed within the context of quantum indeterminacy and a proposal made linking ‘karma’ with a hypothetical ‘quantum morality’.

The presenter didn’t really make the connection between karma and quantum indeterminacy, and I got the impression many people thought this was a classic piece of ‘quantum flapdoodle’ as Murray Gell-Mann put it.