In the video below (via Pete Mandik), philosophers Josh Knobe and Eric Schwitzgebel discuss the extent to which thinking about morality can make them behave more morally by measuring whether ethics professors, who presumably think about morality the most often and the most systematically, are any more consistently moral or at least act more consistently [...]
A consequentialist assesses the ultimate worth of all the various features of our ethical lives according to whether or not they bring about some specific intrinsic good or goods that the consequentialist judges to be of primary value. All the various valuable features of our lives have their ultimate value with respect to how they [...]
Below is a great dialogue between Harvard psychologist Joshua Greene and Yale “experimental philosopher” Joshua Knobe laying out some of the basics of moral psychology. I took notes as I watched the video, summarizing the major points for myself and for your use, dear blogreader. It will be easier to just watch the video, of [...]
In a previous post, I discussed the intrinsic connection between being and goodness and between functional activity and being. I argued, for example that the various components of a heart need to function as a heart to be a heart and similarly that a human being must act morally to realize her humanity. Specifically, I [...]
Really fascinating bit of radio audio discussing a variation of the Milgram experiment performed on macaque monkeys, comparing its results to when the actual Milgram experiment was first done on humans: Thanks to Amanda for the great find. Your Thoughts?
In the paper “Predicting Persuasion-Induced Behavior Change from the Brain” from The Journal of Neuroscience , UCLA researchers reveal that they were better able to predict test subjects’ behavior days in advance by monitoring activity in the medial prefrontal cortex than by asking them what they would do. Psyorg.com explains: The new study by Lieberman [...]
In the New Yorker, Mike Huckabee recently used the phrase “ick factor” in describing responses to homosexuality and when attacked for it, claimed he was taking it from the LGBT movement and from the work of philosopher Martha Nussbaum. Huckabee’s self-defense comes from his website: The reaction over a reported quote from my most recent [...]
I am a bit late on this story but wanted to offer a contrary viewpoint to the dominant one of the outraged blogosphere. Though I have never seen the show, I was interested in the controversy over the show Modern Family which apparently features a gay couple among its lead characters. The controversy centers not [...]
Pride is essentially the personal identification with something admirable. When I am rightly proud of my traits, I rightly take the traits themselves each to be admirable in one way or another and rightly take myself to be admirable insofar as they are part of me and expressions of me. When I am rightly proud [...]
Earlier today, I drew attention to Greta Christina’s article formulating some ideas she picked up from Rebecca Newberger Goldstein. If you have already read either or both of those posts, you can just skip the next two paragraphs meant to catch up new readers. The Goldstein/Greta Christina argument built off of Jonathan Haidt’s theory of [...]
In recent years, Jonathan Haidt has been influentially arguing that there are five essential modules in the mind from which human moral concerns originate. He has made this claim in several places, most prominently among philosophers in his contribution to Moral Psychology, Volume 2: The Cognitive Science of Morality: Intuition and Diversity (from Walter Sinnott-Armstrong’s groundbreaking [...]
What happens when machines get smarter than humans? Presumably, they will build machines smarter than themselves which will build machines smarter than themselves and onward towards infinity. Philosophy Bites interviews David Chalmers, a leading philosopher of mind, about the concept and its possible realization. Thanks to 3QuarksDaily for the heads up. Your Thoughts?
(via Atheist Nexus) Learn more about the topic and the film here. Your Thoughts?
In reply to my post on the story of Sister Margaret McBride whom the Catholic Church “automatically excommunicated” for helping to give the go-ahead to an abortion claimed necessary for saving the life of an 11 week pregnant mother, I have already received two interesting replies. The first challenged the medical argument for the necessity of [...]
(via) I find this really creepy, perverse, and emotionally poisonous, having at one point in my life been indoctrinated into such unhealthy and irrational, extremist ways of thinking. As hilariously corny as the ham handed filmmaking is and as laughably naive as the film’s apparent morally hysterical fear of sex is, the consequences of such [...]
Slate ran a contest called Google Suggest where they asked readers to type in a bit of text into Google’s search engine and see what suggestions the search box gave. Since the suggestions Google offers reflect popular searches from a timeframe specified only as “recent”, the suggested ways to finish sentences that start with the [...]
Christians who defend the Old Testament genocides are guilty of either relativistic authoritarianism (anything can be okay as long as God wills it and His will has simply changed from the Old Testament days to the New Testament one) or, possibly worse, theoretical agreement with all the normal justifications of genocide as long as God [...]
Nietzsche’s writings on morality are famously provocative and controversial. His criticisms of morality in both theory and practice are so extensive and rhetorically scathing that many philosophers assume that he can offer little or nothing constructive to moral philosophy. Additionally, his glorification of the will to power sounds prima facie like a celebration of excessively [...]
On Bloggingheads, philosophers Simon Keller and Niko Kolodny dissect love. If you don’t have the hour to watch the whole thing or if you are only interested in one of the subtopics they discuss, below is the set of topics. The time listed next to each topic indicates how long that portion of video runs. [...]
In a series of posts this semester, I am going to blog all (or almost all) the lecture topics for the two Philosophical Ethics classes I am teaching this semester. Each of these posts will primarily explicate the reading or a theme that dominated class discussion in a way that should be accessible to novices [...]
I’ve always had a personal and philosophical aversion to motivation that is rooted in extrinsic rewards. I balk pretty heavily at the idea that moral actions can be motivated by the hope for rewards or the fear of punishment. I am Kantian to the extent that I am firmly convinced that however right one’s action [...]
Just great stuff (from a very long e-mail you should read in full): You want a secular account of evil? Here it is. Evil does exist, like most other phenomena granted a label by human culture. It is what we’ve semantically converged on: a universally-understood though fuzzily-bounded descriptor of that which goes against our current [...]
In a series of posts this semester, I am blogging all (or almost all) the lecture topics for the two Philosophical Ethics classes I am teaching this semester. Each of these posts primarily explicates the reading or a theme that dominated class discussion in a way that should be accessible to novices (such as my [...]
In a series of posts this semester, I am going to blog all (or almost all) the lecture topics for the two Philosophical Ethics classes I am teaching this semester. Each of these posts will primarily explicate the reading or a theme that dominated class discussion in a way that should be accessible to novices [...]
In this clip from The Daily Show, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita discusses predicting world affairs using models based on game theory to an extraordinarily high degree of accuracy (twice that of the CIA by their own estimation). It’s really exciting stuff: The Daily Show With Jon Stewart Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c Bruce Bueno [...]