Moral Judgments Depend on What Language We’re Speaking
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Re: Moral Judgments Depend on What Language We’re Speaking
#2Interesting. I speak 6 languages and actively think in 3–4 of those, and I notice slight changes in my attitudes and behaviour depending on the active language in my head. It might be interesting to experiment and find out if not just the fact that it's a foreign language matters, but also the influence of the actual choice of language.
Re: Moral Judgments Depend on What Language We’re Speaking
#3> in general people react less strongly to emotional expressions in a foreign language
As a non-native English speaker, I wonder if this affects programming. Do English-speaking people find beautiful programs written in English more beautiful than others ? Anyone here programmed in both their mother tongue and one other language ?
Re: Moral Judgments Depend on What Language We’re Speaking
#4I wonder if this might not be something else.
When you study a language in a classroom, you frequently engage in conversations on various topics, whose sole purpose is to make you practice much more than to actually have a well-thought conversation. As such (and here I speak from my own experience only), it is much more common to defend positions in which you don't actually believe, for the sake of argument or maybe just because it is easier to express than the subtleties you might find while thinking this over in your native language.
I think it may be a good idea to try to only ask bilingual people (as opposed to people studying a language), or at least to test the above hypothesis before jumping to conclusions.
Re: Moral Judgments Depend on What Language We’re Speaking
#5Pushing the large man is risky, you can't be 100% sure that it will work, and you can't be absolutely sure that five people will die if you don't do it. So it could be the willingness to take chances rather than the moral judgments.
Re: Moral Judgments Depend on What Language We’re Speaking
#6> in general people react less strongly to emotional expressions in a foreign language As a non-native English speaker, I wonder if this affects programming. Do English-speaking people find beautiful programs written in English more beautiful than others ? Anyone here programmed in both their mother tongue and one other language ?
(French native speaker here).
From the developers I know (and that is still my case to some extent) people refer to the keywords as their function rather than their meaning. So when you see a 'while' or a 'for' loop, you just interpret it as a loop regardless of the original meaning of the word, it's not English anymore, it's just code blocks.
But I'm wondering how it's interpreted from the point of view of a native speaker.
Re: Moral Judgments Depend on What Language We’re Speaking
#7I really liked being introduced to the Trolley Problem (especially the second formulation), I hadn't heard of it before.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem
I spent more time than I should reading about several possible answers :)
for example:
http://philosophyfaculty.ucsd.edu/faculty/rarneson/Courses/t...
some with a libertarian slant:
http://bleedingheartlibertarians.com/2012/08/the-trolley-non...
http://freedomed.blogspot.com/2012/10/the-trolley-problem-is...
Edit: where is a good place to read about and/or discuss interesting philosophical questions (preferrably not too far out :) )? Is it worth it to take a course on philosophy? (I've had short courses on "moral education" which were really awful).
Re: Moral Judgments Depend on What Language We’re Speaking
#8Pushing the large man is risky, you can't be 100% sure that it will work, and you can't be absolutely sure that five people will die if you don't do it. So it could be the willingness to take chances rather than the moral judgments.
In the context of the thought problem it works 100% of the time.
Re: Moral Judgments Depend on What Language We’re Speaking
#9> in general people react less strongly to emotional expressions in a foreign language As a non-native English speaker, I wonder if this affects programming. Do English-speaking people find beautiful programs written in English more beautiful than others ? Anyone here programmed in both their mother tongue and one other language ?
(French native speaker here). From the developers I know (and that is still my case to some extent) people refer to the keywords as their function rather than their meaning. So when you see a 'while' or a 'for' loop, you just interpret it as a loop regardless of the original meaning of the word, it's not English anymore, it's just code blocks. But I'm wondering how it's interpreted from the point of view of a native…
I interviewed some Chinese speaking programmers in preparation for my Kiwi Pycon talk, and I found that it's the same with them. It's just meaningless symbols to them, and it might as well be triangles and circles.
Re: Moral Judgments Depend on What Language We’re Speaking
#10When I first heard this problem, it was told in a heart-wrenching first-person 'this actually happened' way. Roughly as follows:
"A man who worked the gears for a train line took his son to work. His son ran off to play and when it came time for him to divert a train (not doing so would cause a head on collision) he couldn't see his son, but he heard him cry out - he was stuck in the gears. Diverting the train would kill his son. So he does the right thing, sacrifices his son to save hundreds of lives."
This was a Sunday School story, meant to illustrate how God So Loved The World that he sacrificed his son. So I've actually always unhesitatingly believed that the needs of the many out weigh the needs of the few, or the one.
As an adult and upon deeper reflection, I find that this holds true for strangers, but if I am completely honest my life and the lives of those I hold dear are worth more to me than the lives of basically any number of strangers.