...In the “The Moral Instinct”, Steven Pinker’s main claim is that “The science of the moral sense can help us to see through the illusions that evolution and culture have saddled us with and to focus on goals we can share and defend”(2). Most of Pinker’s evidence is used to draw the attention of his audience. For example, Pinker presents the audience with a two dilemmas where one has to sacrifice one life to save five other lives; “Both dilemmas present you with the option of sacrificing one life to save five, and so, by the utilitarian standard of what would result in the greatest good for the greatest number, the two dilemmas are morally equivalent. But most people don’t see it that way”(4) Pinker illustrates the seemingly unexplainable...
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...To what extent is it our moral obligation, as human beings, to sacrifice for the well-being of others? Some people would do anything to help someone they love or just a stranger, but how far will a person go just to make another person happy? It’s about much a person cares about their morality. Some will do anything they can and others will not care at all. Having the sense of moral goodness is what makes a human feel worthy. Being able to help someone shouldn’t have to have and award right after. Getting that good feeling in us when we do good things is what makes us better people. It can make the person and even you happy. If humans didn’t have morals we would just be savages living on a planet. We would be heartless beings and there would be no good anywhere. In the article “The Moral Instinct” written by Steven...
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...to turn love in passion and hate in pure loathe and rage. Perhaps it because love and hate is ultimately a feeling that evolves through experience of society In Andrew Sullivan’s New York Times Article “ What’s So Bad About Hate?” The question of whether making laws of morality should limit the personal rights and feelings of an individual are discussed and analyzed. In another New York Times Article Steven Pinker, “ The Moral Instinct”, the idea of how to measure ideas between right and wrong by looking at how decisions about morality are made and whether it is a natural tendency or a conditioned characteristic learned through development are discussed. These questions can be summarized as the main debate of whether hate is moral or immoral. In the past decade a few hate crimes that involved homophobia ( the suicide of Rutger’s student Tyler Clementi) and morals dealing with race and ethnicity ( the shooting of Trayvon Martin) are microcosms of hate and morality in general. When questioning the morality of hate the act of hatred or the person committing the act’s morals is discussed when deeming a hate as immoral. The deep emotion of hate towards individuals, entities, objects, and ideas has been experienced by most human beings at some point in their lives. Andrew Sullivan states in his article “ What’s So Bad About Hate?” that “ Hate is everywhere. Human beings generalize all the time, ahead of time, about everyone and everything. A large...
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...Evaluating value of Conflicts Value Conflicts and Key Terms Overview: This page offers a few different ways to use values to explore conflict. Understanding the values that motivate people in various situations helps students avoid oversimplification, damaging vilification, and undue self-congratulation. Building these habits of analysis can help students move away from a “good vs. evil” worldview and to begin seeking and evaluating the enormously complex variables of human behavior. Goals: 1. To give students a vocabulary and protocol to recognize motivating values and anti-values and to dissect conflicts into their component values. 2. To give students tools to analyze value conflicts, to evaluate the assumptions involved, and to generate predictive inferences and concrete steps towards a resolution. 3. Student will be able to recognize and avoid the fundamental attribution error, in which we habitually project personality flaws in others when they struggle, and look for situation-based explanations when we struggle. In short, students will practice perspective-taking, and be better able to put themselves in other people’s shoes. 4. Students will learn to recognize conflicting values within themselves, and to balance and prioritize their needs, goals, and desires. In General: 1. It’s difficult to pull values out of the air when evaluating a situation. There are a lot of them, and they can mean very different things to different people. I regularly use...
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...Not only are deviants and bullies forcibly taken out of the gene pool in this way, groups that succeed in promoting group cooperation outcompete lesser groups. Individuals that felt empathy, shame, pride, who were loyal, and who observed the group’s dictates reaped the benefits of group life and thus passed on more of their genes. Through millions of years of evolution, we’re left with moral instincts that preserve group...
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...Prejudice and bias might be good, sometimes When we think about prejudice and bias, we tend to think about stupid and evil people doing stupid and evil things. And this idea is nicely summarized by the British critic William Hazlitt, who wrote, “Prejudice is the child of ignorance.” But, I think this is mistaken. I want to try to convince you that prejudice and bias are natural, they’re often rational, and they’re often even moral. And I think that once we understand this, we’re in a better position to make sense of them when they go wrong, when they have horrible consequences, and we’re in a better position to know what to do when this happens. Start with stereotypes. You may look at me, you know my name, you know some certain facts about me, and you can make some certain judgments. You could make guesses about my ethnicity, me religious beliefs, my hobby. And the thing is, these judgments tend to be accurate. We’re very good at this sort of thing. And we’re very good at this sort of things because our ability to stereotype people is not some sort of arbitrary quirk of the mind, but rather it’s a specific instance of a more general process, which is that we have experience with things and people in the world that fall into categories, and we can use our experience to make generalizations about novel instances of these categories. So everybody has a lot of experience with chairs, apples and dogs. And based on this, when you see some unfamiliar examples, you could guess...
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...Smoke: The Risk and the Controversy In "The Moral Instinct," Steven Pinker, a professor of psychology at Harvard University, describes a new sixth sense. "The moral sense," he calls it. It's the way we, as human beings, determine what issues are moral or amoral. Take smoking, for instance. Years ago, it was widely considered to be a health issue. Many non-smokers didn't smoke because they worried about how cigarettes could affect their lungs and heart. When scientists determined that second-hand smoke was unhealthy too, smoking became a moral issue. Smoking is one of the most widespread bad habits all over the world. In its turn, tobacco industry is one of the most profitable businesses nowadays. Millions of people start smoking, and then decide they want to get rid of this habit, thus the health industry products for smokers who try to quit their habit are also quite attractive to invest in. Nowadays everyone knows smoking is hazardous for the health of the smoker, and of people who inhale cigarette smoke; it leads to lung cancer, cardiovascular diseases, influences on prenatal development, and causes many other unpleasant and dangerous effects. Hot dogs, baseball and cigarettes? How did smoking become an American tradition? The "History of Tobacco" article state, American Indians began using tobacco as early as 1 B.C for medicinal and religious purposes. In the early nineteenth century, tobacco became increasingly popular among the gold miners and cowboys (History of Tobacco)...
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...PERSPECTIVE The logic of indirect speech Steven Pinker*†, Martin A. Nowak‡, and James J. Lee* *Department of Psychology, and ‡Program for Evolutionary Dynamics, Departments of Mathematics and Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138 Edited by Jeremy Nathans, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD, and approved December 11, 2007 (received for review July 31, 2007) When people speak, they often insinuate their intent indirectly rather than stating it as a bald proposition. Examples include sexual come-ons, veiled threats, polite requests, and concealed bribes. We propose a three-part theory of indirect speech, based on the idea that human communication involves a mixture of cooperation and conflict. First, indirect requests allow for plausible deniability, in which a cooperative listener can accept the request, but an uncooperative one cannot react adversarially to it. This intuition is supported by a game-theoretic model that predicts the costs and benefits to a speaker of direct and indirect requests. Second, language has two functions: to convey information and to negotiate the type of relationship holding between speaker and hearer (in particular, dominance, communality, or reciprocity). The emotional costs of a mismatch in the assumed relationship type can create a need for plausible deniability and, thereby, select for indirectness even when there are no tangible costs. Third, people perceive language as a digital...
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...-“Strauss versus Brains and Genes or the postmodern vengeful return of positivism.” This essay first started as an answer to what I deemed very problematic, i.e. the disputation which I found in bad faith (un-authentic to use a philosophical term or an existentialist term), of the mediatic, dashing Harvard cognitivist/linguist, Steven Pinker, in his article “Neglected novelists, embattled English professors, tenure-less historians, and other struggling denizens of the Humanities, Science is not your Enemy—a plea for an intellectual truce,” (The New Republic--August 19). Then the counter-arguments against Steven Pinker’s conception of the “human animal” developed into an essay arguing that the New Positivism, not science, or technology per say, was the enemy of humanism and its avatars as such. The point is not to become a postmodern anti-scientific Luddite. Genomics are changing the world in ways we barely imagine yet and will re-define what it means to be human (a becoming already imagined by science fiction writers, social critics and critical thinkers such as the feminist Donna Haraway with her “Cyborg”). The point is also not to turn “anti-brainiac.” Without a brain we would become vegetative, a vegetal…, i.e. a purely “natural body,” a “zombie.” If we make use of this “computer” allegory which is an analog but not a homologue, and which is used ad nauseam used by psycho-biologists, without a hard-drive there is no software. But is this a reason to say that the software...
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...Where Is Utopia in the Brain? DanieL s. Levine Introduction The designer of utopian societies, whether fictional or real, often confronts the limits of what is possible for members of our species. But how severe or flexible are those limits? The explosive growth of behavioral neurobiology and experimental psychology in the last decade has produced many results on the biological bases of social interactions. This growth suggests that we can now look to science for some partial answers to the question of limits. Until recently, the social sciences and the biological sciences have mainly developed separate and disconnected accounts of human behavior. In the “nature/nurture controversy,” for example, anthropology has tended to emphasize cultural influences on human nature whereas behavioral biology has tended to emphasize genetic influences. The journalist Matthew Ridley (Nature via Nurture) provides an accessible account of the intellectual history and rhetoric of these two fields. Yet an increasing number of scholars in both areas are now realizing that behavioral biology and anthropology are studying the same human phenomena from different viewpoints. This overlap means there should be an underlying reality that is consistent across the different disciplines regardless of any disagreements in terminology. The behavioral biologist Edward O. Wilson calls this type of interdisciplinary commonality consilience, a term coined earlier by the nineteenth-century philosopher William Whewell...
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...Does science make belief in God obsolete? Yes, if by… No, and yes. Absolutely not! Not necessarily. Of course not. No. No, but it should. No. Yes. No, not at all. It depends. Of course not. No, but only if… Steven Pinker Christoph Cardinal Schönborn William D. Phillips Pervez Amirali Hoodbhoy Mary Midgley Robert Sapolsky Christopher Hitchens Keith Ward Victor J. Stenger Jerome Groopman Michael Shermer Kenneth Miller Stuart Kauffman 2 4 7 9 11 13 15 17 19 21 23 25 27 Does science make belief in God obsolete? irteen views on the question Online at www.templeton.org/belief INTRODUCTION T he John Templeton Foundation serves as a philanthropic catalyst for research on what scientists and philosophers call the Big Questions. We support work at the world’s top universities in such fields as theoretical physics, cosmology, evolutionary biology, cognitive science, and social science relating to love, forgiveness, creativity, purpose, and the nature and origin of religious belief. We encourage informed, open-minded dialogue between scientists and theologians as they apply themselves to the most profound issues in their particular disciplines. And, in a more practical vein, we seek to stimulate new thinking about wealth creation in the developing world, character is booklet neatly embodies our approach to the Big Questions: the contributors are education in schools and universities, and programs for cultivating the talents of the gifted. scholars and thinkers of the...
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...to purely legitimate military targets, and can result in massive civilian or other non-combatant casualties. While some scholars see war as a universal and ancestral aspect of human nature, others argue that it is only a result of specific socio-cultural or ecological circumstances. In 2013 war resulted in 31,000 deaths down from 72,000 deaths in 1990. The deadliest war in history, in terms of the cumulative number of deaths since its start, is the Second World War, with 60–85 million deaths, followed by the Mongol conquests which was greater than 41 million. Proportionally speaking, the most destructive war in modern history is the War of the Triple Alliance, which took the lives of over 60% of Paraguay's population, according to Steven Pinker. In 2003, Richard Smalley identified war as the sixth biggest problem facing humanity for the next fifty years. War usually results in significant deterioration of infrastructure and the ecosystem, a decrease in social spending, famine, large-scale emigration from the war zone, and often the mistreatment of prisoners of war or civilians. Another byproduct of some wars is the prevalence of propaganda by some or all parties in the conflict. Etymology The English word war derives from the late Old English words wyrre and werre; the Old French werre; the Frankish werra; and the Proto-Germanic werso. The denotation of war derives from the Old Saxon werran, Old High German werran, and the German verwirren: “to confuse”, “to perplex”,...
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...FREAKONOMICS A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything Revised and Expanded Edition Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner CONTENTS AN EXPLANATORY NOTE In which the origins of this book are clarified. vii PREFACE TO THE REVISED AND EXPANDED EDITION xi 1 INTRODUCTION: The Hidden Side of Everything In which the book’s central idea is set forth: namely, if morality represents how people would like the world to work, then economics shows how it actually does work. Why the conventional wisdom is so often wrong . . . How “experts”— from criminologists to real-estate agents to political scientists—bend the facts . . . Why knowing what to measure, and how to measure it, is the key to understanding modern life . . . What is “freakonomics,” anyway? 1. What Do Schoolteachers and Sumo Wrestlers Have in Common? 15 In which we explore the beauty of incentives, as well as their dark side—cheating. Contents Who cheats? Just about everyone . . . How cheaters cheat, and how to catch them . . . Stories from an Israeli day-care center . . . The sudden disappearance of seven million American children . . . Cheating schoolteachers in Chicago . . . Why cheating to lose is worse than cheating to win . . . Could sumo wrestling, the national sport of Japan, be corrupt? . . . What the Bagel Man saw: mankind may be more honest than we think. 2. How Is the Ku Klux Klan Like a Group of Real-Estate Agents? 49 In which it is argued that nothing is more powerful than information,...
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...Evrimsel Psikoloji Nedir? Evrimsel Psikolojiye Giriş Evrimsel psikoloji iki bilim alanının bir bileşimidir: Evrimsel biyoloji ve bilişsel psikoloji. Bu iki bilim alanı bir yap-bozun iki parçası gibidir. İnsan davranışını anlamak istiyorsak bu iki parçaya da ihtiyacımız var demektir. Önce bu iki bilim alanını ayrı ayrı ele alacağız, sonra da Evrimsel Psikolojinin, insan doğasını anlamak için, bu iki alanı nasıl birleştirdiğini göreceğiz. Dylan Evans & Oscar Zarate Uyarlayan: Doç. Dr. Hakan ÇETİNKAYA Düzenleyenler: Yrd. Doç. Dr. Seda DURAL Yrd. Doç. Dr. Evrim GÜLBETEKİN 1 1 Bilişsel Psikoloji Bilişsel Psikoloji, zihnin mekanizmalarını açıklamaya yönelik olarak ortaya atılmış en güçlü yaklaşımdır. BP, psikolojiyi belirsiz bir dizi fikirler topluluğu olmaktan kurtarıp, gerçek bir bilim olmasını sağlamıştır. BP’de iki temel görüş yer almaktadır: (1) Eylemlerimizin nedeni zihinsel süreçlerdir. (2) Zihin bir bilgisayardır. Eylemlerimizin Nedeni Zihinsel Süreçlerdir Psikoloji insan davranışının bilimidir ve “neden insanların davrandıkları gibi davrandıklarını “ açıklamaya çalışır. Aslında hepimiz amatör psikologlarız. Sürekli olarak kendimizin ve başkalarının davranışlarını açıklamaya çalışırız. Örneğin, Ali’yi evden çıkarken şemsiyesini alırken gördüğümüzde, durumu aşağıdaki gibi açıklama eğiliminde oluruz. YANİZİHİNBİR BİLGİSAYARGİBİ MİDİR? HAYIR, NEDENİNİ BİRAZDAN GÖRECEKSİN! ALİYAĞMUR YAĞACAĞINI DÜŞÜNÜYORVEBELLİ Kİ,ISLANMAK İSTEMİYOR...
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...United States of America To my grandparents Julian and Janina Budziszewski, long departed, not forgotten The mind of man is the product of live Law; it thinks by law, it dwells in the midst of law, it gathers from law its growth; with law, therefore, can it alone work to any result. —George MacDonald CONTENTS PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION A New Phase of an Old Tradition ix PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION Whom This Book Is For xix ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xxiii INTRODUCTION The Moral Common Ground 3 I THE LOST WORLD Things We Can’t Not Know 1 2 What It Is That We Can’t Not Know 3 Could We Get By Knowing Less? II EXPLAINING THE LOST WORLD 4 The First and Second Witnesses 5 The Third and Fourth Witnesses 6 Some Objections vii 19 29 54 83 93 116 viii WHAT WE CAN’T NOT KNOW III HOW THE LOST WORLD WAS LOST 7 Denial 8 Eclipse 149 173 IV RECOVERING THE LOST WORLD 9 The Public Relations of Moral Wrong 10 The Public Relations of Moral Right 11 Possible Futures 199 214 230 APPENDIX 1 appendix 2 appendix 3 appendix 4 Notes Index APPENDICES Decalogue as a Summary of the Natural The Law The Noahide Commandments as a Summary of the Natural Law Isaiah, David, and Paul on the...
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