The Mind Club summary

Whether it’s rich and poor or parent and child, certain concepts come in pairs and it’s impossible to understand one without its counterpart.

And this is exactly the case with morality. We understand moral acts as involving two parties: the moral agent, or the person who engages in the action, and the moral patient, the person who receives the action.

Have you ever wondered how a soldier might appear to be a genuinely kind person when he’s at the park in his hometown, but then cruelly torture and kill civilians once he’s shipped overseas? Well, it’s largely due to a psychological phenomenon known as dehumanization, the process of denying that someone has a mind to validate the poor treatment we inflict upon them.

We do this to ease the guilt about the bad deed and numb ourselves to the pain we’re inflicting on others. For instance, to do such barbaric acts to other humans, that soldier has to convince himself that the unfamiliar people he is suddenly faced with aren’t human at all; he has to convince himself that they don’t think or feel like him or those he grew up with. Once he’s done that, he won’t feel guilty about hurting them.

Just as it’s impossible to say if your childhood cat died because it’s what God wanted, when dealing with humans, we can’t always tell if something was done by an intentional doer or an agent.

For instance, sleepwalkers might appear to be acting consciously, even in a planned manner; but in reality, they’re fast asleep. Just take Kenneth Parks, the gentle young man who killed his mother-in-law while he was sleeping.

Unless your best friends are philosophers, they probably won’t challenge the assumption that your older sister has a mind. But besides the more typical members of the Mind Club, like your sister, there’s another, more divisive class. They’re called the cryptominds and they’re only allowed entry by some gatekeepers.

People disagree about whether any given cryptomind has a mind at all. The group includes beings like God, animals and robots, along with dead and permanently unconscious people in persistent vegetative states.