Some think empathy is not a very good guide to moral decisions. Psychologists Daryl Cameron, Michael Inzlicht, and William A. Cunningham disagree. They think we can choose to feel empathy when we want to. “Arguments against empathy rely on an outdated view of emotion as a capricious beast that needs to yield to sober reason. Yes, there are many situations in which empathy appears to be limited in its scope, but this is not a deficiency in the emotion itself. In our view, empathy is only as limited as we choose it to be.”
Author: Myers
Willful ignorance
Lee McIntyre says in “The Attack on Truth” that we have entered the age of willful ignorance. “There is simple ignorance and there is willful ignorance, which is simple ignorance coupled with the decision to remain ignorant.” And once you have chosen to remain ignorant, what does the truth matter? McIntyre explains how we got to this point and what we might be able to do about it. “Respecting truth is a choice.”
Imagining yourself in someone else’s shoes
Is imagining what it is like to be someone else a good way to make moral decisions? Paul Bloom says no in “Imagining the Lives of Others.” For one thing, we’re not very good at imagining the lives of other persons. We are better off using general moral principles to make moral decisions at what we owe others.
Getting it right
What counts as knowledge? Everyone used to think knowledge is justified true belief. Knowledge is a belief that is both true and justified (i.e. you have good reasons for the belief). But as Ernest Sosa points out in “Getting It Right,” that definition has the problem that we can have good reasons to believe something is true but be right only by accident. So what will count as knowledge? Sosa shows how “virtue epistemology” might work. In living our lives virtue is getting it just right. Similarly, in knowing the world, virtue would again be getting it just right. “[T]o know … is to make an affirmation that is accurate (true) and adroit (which requires taking proper account of the evidence). But in addition, the affirmation must be apt; that is, its accuracy must be attributable to competence rather than luck.”
Painful memories
In “A Good Forgetting,” Marianne Janack considers whether we may be happier forgetting some things despite the close link between memory and personal identity. “Personal identity is tied to memory, but sometimes we find peace, clarity and a true sense of completeness in the lapses.” What if we stripped away the pain so that we kept the memory but without its emotional baggage?
Two formulas for happiness: X and X+1
William Irvine explains and updates a Stoic formula for a happy, meaningful life. It has to do with the number of days you have left to live and the number of times you will do something in the remainder of your life. (Note that “Irvine” is misspelled in the title of this post on the “Stoicism Today” blog.)
Peter Singer on racism and speciesism
In an interview with George Yancy, Peter Singer discuss the origins and nature of racism and speciesism: “I don’t see any problem in opposing both racism and speciesism, indeed, to me the greater intellectual difficulty lies in trying to reject one form of prejudice and oppression while accepting and even practicing the other. And here we should again mention another of these deeply rooted, widespread forms of prejudice and oppression, sexism. If we think that simply being a member of the species Homo sapiens justifies us in giving more weight to the interests of members of our own species than we give to members of other species, what are we to say to the racists or sexists who make the same claim on behalf of their race or sex? … The more perceptive social critics recognize that these are all aspects of the same phenomenon. The African-American comedian Dick Gregory, who worked with Martin Luther King as a civil rights activist, has written that when he looks at circus animals, he thinks of slavery: “Animals in circuses represent the domination and oppression we have fought against for so long. They wear the same chains and shackles.”
Do chimpanzees have rights?
A New York state court heard arguments that chimpanzees can be considered persons with some legal rights. In connection with that case, the philosopher Peter Singer argues that there is no good reason to keep chimpanzees and apes in prison: “The ethical basis for extending basic rights to chimpanzees and the other nonhuman great apes is simple: chimpanzees are comparable to three-year-old humans in their capacity for self-awareness, for problem-solving, and in the richness and complexity of their emotional lives, so how can we assign rights to all children and not to them?” And if chimpanzees have any kind of rights, can chimpanzees who were research subjects in developing vaccines that save human lives be left to die on an island when no longer needed for research?
Does color exist?
Is color in your mind or in the thing? Is that dress white and gold or blue and black? Malcolm Harris’s review of a new work of philosophy about color can help you think about that. “In her new book Outside Color, University of Pittsburgh professor M. Chirimuuta gives a serendipitously timed history of the puzzle of color in philosophy. To read the book as a layman feels like being let in on a shocking secret: Neither scientists nor philosophers know for sure what color is.” It turns out color is not an object of sight but a way of seeing them.
Returning women to the history of philosophy
In “Reviving the Female Canon,” Susan Price notes: Despite their influence in early modern philosophy, “the era’s women thinkers are absent from historical anthologies of philosophical works. A group of scholars is trying to change that.” This may help with the larger problem of the under-representation of women in philosophy.
Socratically Speaking 