Good and Evil

[Hatshepsut]

Another part of my post dealt with what I believe to be an innate aversion to causing senseless harm...to other sentient beings, human or animal.

An aversion that is definitely real. Only psychopaths kill without strong negative emotional reactions attending the event. Soldiers do so only after military training limits one's moral universe to one's combat buddies and thus blunts the normal aversion. Politicians order killings but distance themselves from the dirty deed by means of euphemism and the fact that they're not on scene.

I wonder if you would say more about how you're defining emotion.  I'm used to "feeling" being regarded as distinct from emotion...I wonder if you think there is an essential barrier between 3rd person investigation and 1st person phenomenology, or is any barrier merely a function of limiting technology?

I didn't think about it much but yes, 1st person (feeling) and 3rd person (emotion). These perspectives should be distinguished in some contexts though I'm not sure if ability to make moral calculations is one of them. Thomas Nagel, in his 1974 paper "What Is it Like to Be a Bat?" thought that there was an essential barrier between 1st and 3rd person; that it's not just a matter of lacking the technology. He would say that no matter how advanced your brain-reading machine was, you'd still be an outsider with respect to the personal experience of a bat. Perhaps you put a "bat mind" into the Matrix and plug yourself in like in that movie, but it would still be you experiencing a simulacrum of bathood. You'd never be the bat, or truly penetrate its private preserve of experience.

I tend to agree with Nagel's philosophical view on this question, though I doubt anyone can prove scientifically either that such a private consciousness exists or that it doesn't exist.

If emotional judgements aren't as reliable in their conclusions than reason, it makes sense to prefer one over the other.

It makes sense to prefer each one in its own domain of applicability. Stanley Pons & Martin Fleischmann, chemists and investors in a company that made platinum & palladium catalysts, let their emotions have a run as they "discovered" cold fusion in 1989, incidentally in a jar using a platinum-group catalyst. But when I lived in Miami, Florida, a town where being in the wrong place at the wrong time can be dangerous, I trusted my gut.

Mathematicians and physicists themselves develop "gut" responses that tell them whether a particular assertion upon first encounter is baloney or should be investigated. When they see "obvious" baloney, they don't have to do the calculations or state exactly what's wrong with the new idea; they just "know" it won't fly. This saves them a lot of time. Usually their first reaction is correct, though ideally any conclusion reached by intuition should be checked carefully.

The power of reason comes from its approach of first assigning a small number of categories to the phenomenon under question and making simplifying assumptions about the dynamics. That allows progress step by step, with each step justifying the next according to an explicit rule. This process doesn't guarantee that the initial category assignments chosen for solving a problem were the best or most relevant ones. There was nothing wrong with the reasoning in the "vital force" and phlogiston theories: We simply discovered later that the categories and initial assumptions these theories use aren't as productive in the laboratory as ATP in cells, or vibrational energy of molecules as heat.