“The New Atheist Sam Harris recently offered to pay $10,000 to anyone who can disprove his arguments about morality. Jonathan Haidt analyzes the nature of reasoning, and the ease with which reason becomes a servant of the passions. He bets $10,000 that Harris will not change his mind.” Why? Because “people deploy their reasoning powers to find support for what they want to believe.”
E1: What makes morality moral?
What’s unique to humans?
Are we really as unique as we like to think? Stephen Cave considers the evidence. The biological evidence suggests it’s cooperation, “the distinctively human practice of putting heads together.” Does this undermine Hobbes’ view of human nature … or in a way confirm it?
The dangers of certainty
A lesson from Auschwitz. “We always have to acknowledge that we might be mistaken. When we forget that, then we forget ourselves and the worst can happen.”
Does the existence of morality prove the existence of God?
Paul Bloom says no. “It is a mistake to see the powerful and unique morality that modern humans possess as a divine gift. Doing so distracts us from its origin as a cultural accomplishment, best understood in terms of processes such as the exercise of reason and imagination … .”
Why can’t we get along?
The uncertain biological basis of morality. Robert Wright’s review of Joshua Greene’s Moral Tribes” Emotion, Reason, and the Gap between Us and Them and Paul Bloom’s Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil. Which would do more to help us get along with them — a moral theory we can all agree on or a better understanding of how we are wired to think and feel about them? “If Greene thinks that getting people to couch their moral arguments in a highly reasonable language will make them highly reasonable, I think he’s underestimating the cleverness and ruthlessness with which our inner animals pursue natural selection’s agenda. We seem designed to twist moral discourse—whatever language it’s framed in—to selfish or tribal ends, and to remain conveniently unaware of the twisting. So maybe the first step toward salvation is to become more self-aware.”
The trolley comes round the corner
Clang Went the Trolley. Sarah Bakewell’s interesting review of two new books about the trolley problem: David Edmonds’ Would You Kill the Fat Man? The Trolley Problem and What Your Answer Tells Us About Right and Wrong and Thomas Cathcart’s The Trolley Problem; or, Would You Throw the Fat Guy off the Bridge? A Philosophical Conundrum. Bakewell’s conclusion: moral philosophers need not worry about being out of a job.
Morality … do we learn it or are we born with it?
The moral life of babies. An interview of Yale psychology professor Paul Bloom. Bloom finds the origins of morality in infants.
The Onion deploys Nietzsche for satire
Kidnapped teen freed, though freedom is its own kind of prison, is is not? But who or what is the target of the satire? Nietzsche, scholars who write about him, the press … surely not philosophy professors?
The problem with moral psychology
You can’t learn about morality from brain scans. Thomas Nagel’s review of Joshua Greene’s Moral Tribes. Many interesting issues in the review: human rights v. the greatest happiness of the greatest number, trolleyology, moral instinct, and others.
Nagel says of Greene: “Greene wants to persuade us that moral psychology is more fundamental than moral philosophy. Most moral philosophies, he maintains, are misguided attempts to interpret our moral intuitions in particular cases as apprehensions of the truth about how we ought to live and what we ought to do, with the aim of discovering the underlying principles that determine that truth. In fact, Greene believes, all our intuitions are just manifestations of the operation of our dual-process brains, functioning either instinctively or more reflectively. He endorses one moral position, utilitarianism, not as the truth (he professes to be agnostic on whether there is such a thing as moral truth) but rather as a method of evaluation that we can all understand, and that holds out hope of providing a common currency of value less divisive than the morality of individual rights and communal obligations. ‘None of us is truly impartial, but everyone feels the pull of impartiality as a moral ideal.'”
Nagel isn’t so sure and explains why.
Socratically Speaking 