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" I had a philosophy teacher who gave me one of the greatest gifts I’ve ever received. It was a mental toolbox. While the concept wasn’t uniquely his, the way he used it stayed with me, and it still shapes how I think about things today. Professor Rickman—Rick, as we called him—asked us to imagine a toolbox and inside it pairs of glasses that affect what you see and what you think. With each one comes a certain knowledge set. It was his way of putting Theory of Mind to practical use—understanding how others see the world. There are glasses for trying to understand minority points of view, glasses for thinking like a Neolithic caveman, a Bronze Age farmer, and so on. Each one helps us understand that our points of view are shaped by what we see, what we’ve been told, and, lastly, how we process it all. My favorite pair is the alien spectacles. These are the ones you wear when you want to see things from the point of view of someone from a different planet, a place where mammals never evolved into people and life took a totally different path. How would an alien look at Oyo compared to the doctors and people present at the execution of a serial killer? How would an alien compare Oyo to the medieval Catholic Church torturing and killing heretics? Would an alien even perceive much difference between what Oyo did versus a doctor helping to euthanize a suffering patient? You can extend this on and on to birth control, animal cruelty, and even the use of antibiotics to kill bacteria. I don’t subscribe to the idea that just because two things are on a moral gradient they’re equal. That’s irrational. However, I do believe it’s important to take a look at something from different points of view. When Europeans came to the Americas and witnessed Aztec sacrificial rituals, they were coming from a continent with practices that in many ways were equally barbaric, but because they understood the justifications of their own practices, they viewed them differently. I’ve been in tactical-operations centers where terms like collateral human casualties are thrown around with the same cavalier attitude that the Aztec and allied leaders of Mesoamerican cultures must have had when they planned the Flower Wars, in which thousands of people were killed in ritual combat. When I share these thoughts, I’m often labeled a peacenik or pacifist. I have to assert that I’m not against premeditated strikes or taking lives, I’m simply uncomfortable when everyone in the room gets uptight if they’re even asked to think about the morality of what’s being considered. "
― Andrew Mayne , Murder Theory (The Naturalist, #3)
