E: agree completely with your penultimate para – like you, it seems self-evident to me.

The last is more problematical. It seems to be tribal in origin – ‘I relate to all Greens (intellectuals, lefties, Christians, nationalists etc)’. Also, I suspect a certain amount of posturing here – ‘I am taking this position (of empathy) because a) it plays well with my immediate tribe; and b) because I think my tribe’s ethical stance suggests that I ought to’.

In the matter of the thought experiments, my first reaction, faced with these either/or scenarios, would be ‘yes, but…’. To take the most trivial example; would I be prepared to ruin a pair of expensive shoes in order to save a drowning child? My response would be ‘Yes, but why would I need to? How long does it take to kick off a pair of shoes?’

The observation concernng the emotional/empathic basis of moral decisions seems obvious to me. We find it easier to empathise with people we meet or whom we can see, which is presumably why, in war, those fighting on the ground and who see the results of their actions are more likely to be traumatised than those who launch missiles or drop bombs from a great height, even though the actions of the latter may result in a far greater number of deaths and injuries.

What I find interesting is how many people do in fact seem able to empathise with people with whom they have no direct contact. Is this a matter of evolution or social conditioning, or both?

Marc Hauser in his controversial book on moral inheritance, ‘Moral Minds,’ (reviewed here recently) uses many of these examples in an attempt to (unsuccessfully) prove his hypothesis.

That reason is a slave to the passions (emotions) was very much Hume’s position – reason is used primarily as a way of justifying actions already taken or contemplated.

It seems uncontroversial to me that morals developed as an evolutionary tool to allow complex social systems to develop whilst preventing the deliberate harming of those closest to us. Deliberately inflicting harm on someone living in close proximity might have two undesirable consequences: instant retaliation from either him or his immediate circle and reducing the likelihood of receiving help in the future from those in the best position to offer it.

On the other hand people at one remove from us might either be enemies or competitors and so will not exercise the same bonds of mutual dependence nor, in most circumstances, are they able to respond to the attack immediately, allowing a chance to get away with it.

I was not keen on the motherhood stuff towards the end of the broadcast. It assumed that we all shared a common ethical position on these things, which I am sure is not the case. Who is the ‘We’ agreeing and consenting to proposed the system, I wonder?

Also, I am not sure that morality is an agreed code, shared across humanity and at all times. Morals shift in time and space – they are essentially tribal and practical. This difference has been the source of conflict forever more – just now, of course, with the West’s problems with fundamentalist Islam (and vice versa).