Website review: American Scientist Online - An int...
OliviaB discovered this in Ethics
•6 reviews since Aug 23, 2006
ethics, morality, science
•americanscientist.org/template/InterviewTypeD...
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laodan rated 21 months ago- An Evolutionary Theory of Right and Wrong in The American Scientist, an interview of Marc Hauser by Greg Ross about Hauser's book "Moral Minds" (Ecco) ... the human sense of right and wrong, which evolved over millions of years, precedes our conscious judgments and emotions, providing a hidden engine of moral intuition that's shared by people around the world. In brief, I argue that we are endowed with a moral faculty that delivers judgments of right and wrong based on unconsciously operative and inaccessible principles of action. The theory posits a universal moral grammar, built into the brains of all humans. The grammar is a set of principles that operate on the basis of the causes and consequences of action. Thus, in the same way that we are endowed with a language faculty that consists of a universal toolkit for building possible languages, we are also endowed with a moral faculty that consists of a universal toolkit for building possible moral systems. By grammar I simply mean a set of principles or computations for generating judgments of right and wrong. These principles are unconscious and inaccessible. What I mean by unconscious is different from the Freudian unconscious. It is not only that we make moral judgments intuitively, and without consciously reflecting upon the principles, but that even if we tried to uncover those principles we wouldn't be able to, as they are tucked away in the mind's library of knowledge. Access comes from deep, scholarly investigation. ... One of the challenging implications of the idea that our moral faculty is home to a universal moral grammar is that we generate intuitions about which actions are morally right or wrong prior to generating any emotions. On this view, emotions follow from our moral judgments, as opposed to preceding them. And on this view, emotions guide what we do as opposed to how we judge particular moral dilemmas. URL: An Evolutionary Theory of Right and Wrong URL: Marc Hauser URL: Review in the NYT Books on science by Nicholas Wade URL: Review in the NYT books by RICHARD RORTY
This is basically identical with my presentation about "the objectification of beauty". In my book Artsense I posit that beauty is the outcome of forms, lines and colors that have been retained successfully along the timespan of the evolution of the principle of life. Morality, in my personal interpretation of Hauser's view, would be the evolutionary outcome of the interaction between the polarities of one particular specie. In this case morality is the outcome of the evolutionary interaction between the polarities of humanity: individuals and societies and it follows that in this view all living species are developing a set of ethical preferences...
- An Evolutionary Theory of Right and Wrong in The American Scientist, an interview of Marc Hauser by Greg Ross about Hauser's book "Moral Minds" (Ecco) ... the human sense of right and wrong, which evolved over millions of years, precedes our conscious judgments and emotions, providing a hidden engine of moral intuition that's shared by people around the world. In brief, I argue that we are endowed with a moral faculty that delivers judgments of right and wrong based on unconsciously operative and inaccessible principles of action. The theory posits a universal moral grammar, built into the brains of all humans. The grammar is a set of principles that operate on the basis of the causes and consequences of action. Thus, in the same way that we are endowed with a language faculty that consists of a universal toolkit for building possible languages, we are also endowed with a moral faculty that consists of a universal toolkit for building possible moral systems. By grammar I simply mean a set of principles or computations for generating judgments of right and wrong. These principles are unconscious and inaccessible. What I mean by unconscious is different from the Freudian unconscious. It is not only that we make moral judgments intuitively, and without consciously reflecting upon the principles, but that even if we tried to uncover those principles we wouldn't be able to, as they are tucked away in the mind's library of knowledge. Access comes from deep, scholarly investigation. ... One of the challenging implications of the idea that our moral faculty is home to a universal moral grammar is that we generate intuitions about which actions are morally right or wrong prior to generating any emotions. On this view, emotions follow from our moral judgments, as opposed to preceding them. And on this view, emotions guide what we do as opposed to how we judge particular moral dilemmas. URL: An Evolutionary Theory of Right and Wrong URL: Marc Hauser URL: Review in the NYT Books on science by Nicholas Wade URL: Review in the NYT books by RICHARD RORTY
- Innomen rated 23 months ago
- I dont buy it, I cant think of a single atrocity that all humans agree is unperformable. From child murder to genocide we've tried it all. To me this smacks of a veiled attempt at morality from divine inspiration. Granted, rules like "don't eat your kids" adds survival value, but a moral is in my view separate by definition from instinctive animal behavior. Its right and wrong decisions that go beyond genetic primal imperative that are moral or immoral, in my view at least. Besides the gene works in a very self centered way, and conflict is a result of this, for example a genetic moral may not be "its wrong to kill" it may be "it's wrong to kill my kind" which is easy to get around if cognitively you define those you kill as sub-human. This is possibly the most common example of cognitive dissonance. I've heard countless times, people's human enemies referred to as animals. Rapists, Nazis, murderers, child molesters, etc. we always dehumanize them before we kill or brutalize them. Even if we do have a built in code of survival inspired ethics, our morality by definition extends beyond that, because we can willfully "hack" it to achieve a purely cognitive goal like the way described above. Like just before a parent beats/spanks a child for example, they feel that its wrong, they claim they'd "rather not" do it, but thats horse shit, if you really rather not, then don't no action you take is forced, except maybe a seizure. This is an example of the minds ability to circumvent one set of emtotions (instinctive) for another set (cognative). Gun to your head, give me your money. Thats not force, thats a choice, pay or die. We have no built in morality it is 100% relative and 100% cognitive. Granted the human cognitive rules may have been inspired by genetic imperatives but thats the extent of the link. No one would be capable of burning a human being alive if they didn't think he/she was somehow fundamentally beneath them. Sinner demon witch etc. Never a fellow human being.
- Austin-Medic rated 23 months ago
- An excellent article on moral philosophy and the possibility of an innate moral instinct from American Scientist.
- AnthonyWheeler rated 23 months ago
- An American Scientist Online interview with Harvard psychologist Marc Hauser on his idea of an unconscious, built-in "moral grammar" that drives our judgments of right and wrong. This hidden engine of moral intuition is shared by people around the world. "Our moral instincts are immune to the explicitly articulated commandments handed down by religions and governments," he writes. "Sometimes our moral intuitions will converge with those that culture spells out, and sometimes they will diverge." Hauser draws on social and natural sciences, philosophy and the law to illustrate his ideas.
- berrypicker rated 23 months ago
- From the page: "Oscar Wilde said, "Morality, like art, means drawing a line someplace." But how do we learn where to draw these lines? It's commonly understood that moral rules are instilled in church, school and home, but Harvard psychologist Marc Hauser believes that they have a deeper source an unconscious, built-in "moral grammar" that drives our judgments of right and wrong."
