Readers, I am taking a break from updating The Moral Perspective until Monday, January 7. Until then, please enjoy my (nearly 400!) previous entries in the archive. Enjoy your holidays, and see you in 2013. Cheers, Michael De Dora
New research performed at the University of Chicago suggests the human brain is able to detect within a split second whether a harmful action is intentional or accidental. The research, performed by UChicago Professor Jean Decety and research associate Stephanie Cacioppo, was published in a paper, “The Speed of Morality: A High-Density Electrical Neuroimaging Study,” on Dec. 1 in the Journal of Neurophysiology. According to a news summary: The researchers studied adults who watched videos of people who suffered accidental harm (such as being hit with a golf club) and intentional harm (such as being struck with a baseball bat). While watching the videos, brain activity was collected with equipment that accurately maps responses in different regions of the brain and importantly, the timing…
Tagged: brain, ethics, morality, philosophy, science
It’s nearing the end of December, which for most people means gathering with loved ones to celebrate one of several different holidays, as well as a year passed and a new one coming. But it also means a rush to donate to charities before the year has ended. Why is this? While it is true that some people are motivated to give by nothing more than their values, for most end-of-year donors the reasoning is this simple: the more you give to charity, the lower your tax bracket, and therefore the less money the government takes from you. Not exactly the purest act of kindness. Still, these people are making donations to charities which are performing important work. And so I thought I would inform…
My colleague Ian Pollock last week registered an interesting essay on Rationally Speaking (where I blog occasionally) on Daniel Kahneman’s new book, Thinking, Fast and Slow. In the book, Kahneman — who won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2002 — differentiates between two different types of thinking: …. between a here-and-now preferrer — the experiencing self — that wants this pleasure to continue and this pain to cease, and a storyteller — the remembering self — that looks at an experience as a whole and evaluates its worth, with special attention paid to the beginning, climax and ending. What Pollock then procedes to do is explore the implications of these two different thought processes, these two selves, for moral decision making:…
Tagged: consequentialism, ethics, happiness, morality, neuroscience, philosophy, science, virtue
Philosopher Laura Macguire on the blog of the fantastic podcast Philosophy Talk explores the claim that advances in science have all but made philosophy obsolete: … in the last few years a number of scientists, like Stephen Hawking, have been very vocal in pronouncing the death of philosophy. They seem to think that science can or will answer all the important questions there are. If there are any questions that science can’t answer, then they’re just pseudo problems, not worth thinking about. You might wonder what kind of empirical evidence Hawking and these other scientists have offered for such a radical claim. Perhaps they’ve done some experiments to prove this hypothesis? Or, they’ve shown that the claim can be derived from, say, quantum mechanics? The…
Tagged: ethics, morality, philosophy, science
University of Waterloo philosopher Paul Thagard earlier this month wrote on the website Psychology Today an article in which he discusses what he considers to be the eleven dogmas of modern analytic philosophy. For those unaware, analytic philosophy is the tradition that emphasizes the application of logic, reason, and science, and concerns itself with narrower debates (what some consider “hair splitting”). It is contrasted with continental philosophy, which is characterized more by post-modern thought and critical theory, and deals with broader — and arguably more relevant — social and political issues. That distinction aside, City University of New York philosopher Massimo Pigliucci has his own take on these supposed dogmas of analytic philosophy, which he split into two posts. You can read part one here, and part two here. As usual, Pigliucci has…
Tagged: ethics, morality, philosophy, science
At least two dozen people — many of them children — were reportedly killed today in a school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut. Instead of logging a new post, I feel it is fitting to repost an essay I wrote after the July 2012 movie theater shooting in Aurora, Colorado. While the details regarding these two shootings might be different, my essay addressed several problems with the broader American debate on guns — problems that persist, despite compelling factual evidence and further shootings which suggest Americans need to have a serious and reasoned conversation on gun control and mental health. The way I see it, the only other option we have is to accept tragedies such as the one that took place today as both inevitable and unpreventable — an option…
Addicted to heroin? Alcohol? Meth? Some neurosurgeons in China claim to have a cure: How far should doctors go in attempting to cure addiction? In China, some physicians are taking the most extreme measures. By destroying parts of the brain’s “pleasure centers” in heroin addicts and alcoholics, these neurosurgeons hope to stop drug cravings. But damaging the brain region involved in addictive desires risks permanently ending the entire spectrum of natural longings and emotions, including the ability to feel joy. In 2004, the Ministry of Health in China banned this procedure due to lack of data on long term outcomes and growing outrage in Western media over ethical issues about whether the patients were fully aware of the risks. However, some doctors were allowed to continue to…
Tagged: addition, alcohol, brain, china, ethics, heroin, morality, neuroscience, philosophy, science
There are few other words to describe this: A Cairo court sentenced an atheist from a Christian family on Wednesday to three years in prison for insulting religion, firing up fears about the future of freedom of expression here just as Egyptians prepare to vote on an Islamist-backed draft constitution denounced by secular groups as failing to protect such rights. The convicted man, Albert Saber, is expected to be released on bail of about $167 pending an appeal. An open and avowed atheist, Mr. Saber, 27, was initially accused of circulating links to an offensive online video lampooning the Prophet Muhammad that set off protests across the Muslim world in September. Mr. Saber has denied promoting the video, and he is being charged for…
One week ago, a New York City man named Ki-Suck Han was killed after being pushed onto the subway tracks by another man who has since been arrested. Right before the train fatally struck Han, a freelance photographer who had just walked onto the platform snapped several photographs of the impending tragedy. The next day, the New York Post published one of the photographs on its front page. The result was widespread outrage. But why? The Post did not cause Han’s death, nor did it hasten its arrival. And the photographer was not snapping shots with profit in mind. Instead, since he had no way of physically saving Han, he thought making his flash go off in a flurry might signal to the train conductor to slow down. …
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