morality
grrlscientist | April 6, 2010tags: How to Combat Modern Slavery, philosophy, morality, ethics, behavior, poverty, culture, slavery, human rights, human values, Kevin Bales, TEDTalks, streaming video
In this moving yet pragmatic talk, Kevin Bales explains the business of modern slavery, a multibillion-dollar economy that underpins some of the worst industries on earth. He shares stats and personal stories from his on-the-ground research -- and names the price of freeing every slave on earth right now.
Kevin Bales is the co-founder of Free the Slaves, whose mission is to end all forms of human slavery within the next 25…
neurophilosophy | March 30, 2010WHEN making moral judgements, we rely on our ability to make inferences about the beliefs and intentions of others. With this so-called "theory of mind", we can meaningfully interpret their behaviour, and decide whether it is right or wrong. The legal system also places great emphasis on one's intentions: a "guilty act" only produces criminal liability when it is proven to have been performed in combination with a "guilty mind", and this, too, depends on the ability to make reasoned moral judgements.
MIT researchers now show that this moral compass can be very easily skewed. In a new study…
grrlscientist | March 23, 2010tags: Science CAN Answer Moral Questions, philosophy, morality, ethics, behavior, brain, neurobiology, religion, culture, well-being, human rights, human values, Sam Harris, TEDTalks, streaming video
Questions of good and evil, right and wrong are commonly thought unanswerable by science. But Sam Harris argues that science can -- and should -- be an authority on moral issues, shaping human values and setting out what constitutes a good life.
Adored by secularists, feared by the pious, Sam Harris' best-selling books argue that religion is ruinous and, worse, stupid -- and that questioning…
razib | March 21, 2010I have a short piece up at Comment is Free at The Guardian, The origins of morality do not matter. Its flavor is a bit different from my typical blog posts because the format enforces more brevity, so I decided to try and leverage some analogies. I conclude:
... Our moral consensus is a river whose course shifts across the plain, constrained by the hills thrust upward by biology. Only history knows where the river will flow next, though evolution can hint at the range of possibilities.
On a note related to this piece, I will be posting a review of The Price of Altruism: George Price and the…
edyong | February 8, 2010The English language is full of metaphors linking moral purity to both physical cleanliness and brightness. We speak of "clean consciences", "pure thoughts" and "dirty thieves". We're suspicious of "shady behaviour" and we use light and darkness to symbolise good and evil. But there is more to these metaphors than we might imagine. The mere scent of a clean-smelling room can take people down a virtuous road, compelling them to choose generosity over greed and charity over apathy. Meanwhile, the darkness of a dimmed room or a pair of sunglasses can compel people towards selfishness and…
bcohen | September 25, 2009Instead of me answering that, I wondered instead how other people have argued about the question. To be more specific, since I am interested in the role of scientific practice for defining the land, I wondered how people argued about whether or not science was better for agriculture. I wrote a book about it. It's called Notes from the Ground: Science, Soil, and Society in the American Countryside. I commented here a few months ago that the book was finally on its way. Although Amazon sales do not begin until October 20th (here is their link), the publisher has it officially listed for…
razib | July 19, 2009Tyler Cowen gives a positive review of Your Religion is False:
In addition to its humor, I prefer the content of this book to the better-known "new atheist" tracts. Grus yields many of the strongest arguments. For instance the biographical and sociological correlates with belief (most people choose the religion they grew up with, or encountered through a friend, etc.) suggest that, in this area, intuitions which feel "certain" simply cannot be trusted.
Also see associated weblog.
razib | July 15, 2009FuturePundit points me to an article about an older woman who had IVF treatment who has died, Spanish woman who gave birth through IVF at 66 dies:
A Spanish woman who became the world's oldest mother at the age of 66 has died of cancer just two-and-a-half years after giving birth to twins, raising fresh questions about the ethics of fertility treatment for women past natural childbearing age.
Some of the aspects of this case are sui generis, obviously. But as people have children later and later, I wonder as to the probabilities of larger proportions of individuals having their parents die…
edyong | July 14, 2009In a world where the temptation to lie, deceive and cheat is both strong and profitable, what compels some people to choose the straight and narrow path? According to a new brain-scanning study, honest moral decisions depend more on the absence of temptation in the first place than on people wilfully resisting these lures.
Joshua Greene and Joseph Paxton and Harvard University came to this conclusion by using a technique called functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study the brain activity of people who were given a chance to lie. The volunteers were trying to predict the outcomes…
razib | July 13, 2009Update: See Ed Yong.
Randall Parker points me to a new paper from Joshua Greene which describes the neurological responses of individuals when do, or don't, lie, when lying might be in their self-interest. From EurekaAlert:
The research was designed to test two theories about the nature of honesty - the "Will" theory, in which honesty results from the active resistance of temptation, and the "Grace" theory in which honesty is a product of lack of temptation. The results of this study suggest that the "Grace" theory is true, because the honest participants did not show any additional neural…
grrlscientist | July 9, 2009
Who: Dr. Jeff Schweitzer
What: free public presentation, "Moral Life in a Random World"
Where: SLC Conference Center, 352 7th avenue (between 29th and 30th streets), 16th floor.
When: 700pm, Thursday, 9 July
Dr. Jeff Schweitzer is a scientist who has written extensively on morality, religion, politics and science -- and who served as science advisor to former President Bill Clinton and former Vice President Al Gore. Schweitzer will talk about how we each have within us the awesome power to create our own meaning in life, our own sense of purpose, our own destiny. He will address how…
grrlscientist | July 8, 2009
Who: Dr. Jeff Schweitzer
What: free public presentation, "Moral Life in a Random World"
Where: SLC Conference Center, 352 7th avenue (between 29th and 30th streets), 16th floor.
When: 700pm, Thursday, 9 July
Dr. Jeff Schweitzer is a scientist who has written extensively on morality, religion, politics and science -- and who served as science advisor to former President Bill Clinton and former Vice President Al Gore. Schweitzer will talk about how we each have within us the awesome power to create our own meaning in life, our own sense of purpose, our own destiny. He will address how…
grrlscientist | July 6, 2009
Who: Dr. Jeff Schweitzer
What: free public presentation, "Moral Life in a Random World"
Where: SLC Conference Center, 352 7th avenue (between 29th and 30th streets), 16th floor.
When: 700pm, Thursday, 9 July
Dr. Jeff Schweitzer is a scientist who has written extensively on morality, religion, politics and science -- and who served as science advisor to former President Bill Clinton and former Vice President Al Gore. Schweitzer will talk about how we each have within us the awesome power to create our own meaning in life, our own sense of purpose, our own destiny. He will address how…
grrlscientist | July 2, 2009
Who: Dr. Jeff Schweitzer
What: free public presentation, "Moral Life in a Random World"
Where: SLC Conference Center, 352 7th avenue (between 29th and 30th streets), 16th floor.
When: 700pm, Thursday, 9 July
Dr. Jeff Schweitzer is a scientist who has written extensively on morality, religion, politics and science -- and who served as science advisor to former President Bill Clinton and former Vice President Al Gore. Schweitzer will talk about how we each have within us the awesome power to create our own meaning in life, our own sense of purpose, our own destiny. He will address how…
grrlscientist | May 20, 2009tags: religion, morality, godlessness, atheism, occam's razor, aesop's fables, streaming video
This video is an interesting testament to why one man is an atheist, and what forms the root of human morals. My opinion? Let's just say that I prefer Aesop's fables to the bible [7:06]
Most christians know less about morality than Stephen Hawking knows about ballroom dancing!
bioephemera | April 19, 2009We all know Twitter can be annoying, but is it really evil? During the past week, you may have heard that there is brand-new neuroscientific evidence proving exactly that. But the hype turns out to be just that: hype.
It all started with a press release from USC about an upcoming PNAS paper by Mary Helen Immordino-Yang and Antonio Damasio, entitled "Neural Correlates of Admiration and Compassion." The USC press release, which was picked up by EurekAlert and other outlets, says:
The finding, contained in one of the first brain studies of inspirational emotions in a field dominated by a focus…
razib | April 13, 2009Over at Secular Right I point out that Romania is set to decriminalize consensual sexual relations between adult first-order kin. That is, incest. There are a few angles that this story offers. First is the moral-ethical one. From a rational individualist perspective how reasonable are laws which ban consensual sex between adults who just happen to share distinctive genetic information? The love that dare not speak its name because of alleles which are identical by descent?
Of course all this rational talk is irrelevant for most people. Incest is gross, repugnant and immoral. Not because…
razib | April 8, 2009David Brooks has a new column grandly titled The End of Philosophy. Heather Mac Donald at Secular Right chides him for his criticism of the New Atheists, while John Derbyshire offers guarded praise. It seems to me that the jab at the New Atheists was something of a throwaway line and I lean more toward John's position. I give Brooks credit for attempting to inject insights from the new cognitive sciences into contemporary political commentary. Politics is a phenomenon which manifests on a grand scale, but its ultimate roots are at least in part in individual human psychology. The empirical…
amillikan | April 7, 2009The more moral you believe yourself to be, the less moral you may be inclined to act, according to a new study in Psychological Science. Psychologists evaluated the moral self-image of subject participants and then presented them with a variety of scenarios in which they were asked to donate money to charity and to choose between business practices that were either environment-friendly or cost-effective. The subjects who described themselves as being more ethical both donated less to charity and opted for cheaper, more harmful business practices compared to subjects who described themselves…
edyong | April 6, 2009What happens when you remember a good deed, or think of yourself as a stand-up citizen? You might think that your shining self-image would reinforce the value of selflessness and make you more likely to behave morally in the future. But a new study disagrees.
Through three psychological experiments, Sonya Sachdeva from Northwestern University found that people who are primed to think well of themselves behave less altruistically than those whose moral identity is threatened. They donate less to charity and they become less likely to make decisions for the good of the environment.
Sachdeva…