MachineMachine /stream - tagged with morality http://machinemachine.net/stream/feed en-us http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Sweetcron text@machinemachine.net Nature, nurture and liberal values http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2012/01/nature-nurture-and-liberal-values-roger-scruton-jesse-prinz-david-eagleman-neuroscience/ Biology determines our behaviour more than it suits many to acknowledge. But people—and politics and morality—cannot be described just by neural impulses ]]> Wed, 25 Jan 2012 11:35:21 -0700 http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2012/01/nature-nurture-and-liberal-values-roger-scruton-jesse-prinz-david-eagleman-neuroscience/ Freud: The last great Enlightenment thinker http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2011/12/freud-the-last-great-enlightenment-thinker//freud-the-last-great-enlightenment-thinker-prospect-magazine John Gray on Freud (the last great Enlightenment thinker?) http://t.co/cKMdkDWl ]]> Sun, 22 Jan 2012 12:07:00 -0700 http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2011/12/freud-the-last-great-enlightenment-thinker//freud-the-last-great-enlightenment-thinker-prospect-magazine Does Pinker’s “Better Angels” Undermine Religious Morality? http://whywereason.wordpress.com/2011/10/28/does-pinkers-better-angels-undermine-religious-morality/ It is often argued that religion makes individuals and the world more just and moral, that it builds character and provides a foundation from which we understand right from wrong, good from evil; if it wasn’t for religion, apologists say, then the world would fall into a Hobbesian state of nature where violence prevails and moral codes fail. To reinforce this contention, they point out that Stalin, Hitler and Mao were atheists to force an illogical causal connection between what they did and what they believed. One way to answer the question of if religion makes people and the world… ]]> Wed, 02 Nov 2011 06:58:44 -0700 http://whywereason.wordpress.com/2011/10/28/does-pinkers-better-angels-undermine-religious-morality/ Can religion tell us more than science? http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-14944470 In this view belonging to a religion involves accepting a set of beliefs, which are held before the mind and assessed in terms of the evidence that exists for and against them. Religion is then not fundamentally different from science, both seem like attempts to frame true beliefs about the world. That way of thinking tends to see science and religion as rivals, and it then becomes tempting to conclude that there's no longer any need for religion. This was the view presented by the Victorian anthropologist JG Frazer in his book The Golden Bough, a study of the myths… ]]> Wed, 21 Sep 2011 03:52:49 -0700 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-14944470 Can religion tell us more than science? http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-14944470 In this view belonging to a religion involves accepting a set of beliefs, which are held before the mind and assessed in terms of the evidence that exists for and against them. Religion is then not fundamentally different from science, both seem like attempts to frame true beliefs about the world. That way of thinking tends to see science and religion as rivals, and it then becomes tempting to conclude that there's no longer any need for religion.

This was the view presented by the Victorian anthropologist JG Frazer in his book The Golden Bough, a study… ]]> Tue, 20 Sep 2011 03:12:00 -0700 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-14944470 Regulations proposed for animal–human chimaeras http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110721/full/475438a.html The increasingly sophisticated blending of different species to create chimaeras is pushing biology into a new ethical dimension. Last year, scientists used new stem-cell technologies to create a mouse with a functioning pancreas composed entirely of rat cells. So might it soon be possible to create a monkey with a brain composed entirely of human neurons? And would it think like a human?

Such an animal might be useful to researchers studying human cognition or human-specific pathogens. But it would be ethically unacceptable and should be banned, argues a government-commissioned report from the UK Academy of Medical… ]]> Fri, 22 Jul 2011 01:30:09 -0700 http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110721/full/475438a.html Against humanism http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2010-11-03-midgley-en.html by Mary Midgley

Does the term "humanism" really stand for a new and better form of religion? If so, what is that religion? Or is it something designed as a cure for religion itself, a way to get rid of it on Christopher Hitchens's principle that "religion poisons everything"?

Many people, no doubt, agree with Hitchens. But Auguste Comte, the founding father of modern humanism, would not have been one of them. For him, "humanism" was a word parallel to "theism". It just altered the object worshipped, substituting humanity for God. He called it… ]]> Thu, 04 Nov 2010 06:58:00 -0700 http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2010-11-03-midgley-en.html Matters of life and death http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2010/10/ethics-trolley-problem/ Trolleyology encapsulates the deepest tensions in our moral outlook. To tease out our moral intuitions, philosophers have come up with ever more ingenious scenarios. The trolley is usually racing towards five unfortunates and the reader is presented with various means to rescue them at the cost of another life, involving props such as obese gentlemen, footbridges, trapdoors and lazy Susans. Some of the examples are so complex that, in the words of one exasperated philosopher, this branch of ethics “makes the Talmud look like Cliffs Notes [a US brand of study guides].” But at its root the trolley problem is… ]]> Mon, 11 Oct 2010 03:39:00 -0700 http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2010/10/ethics-trolley-problem/ An Amoral Manifesto (Part I) http://www.philosophynow.org/issue80/80marks.htm Hard Atheism or What Shall I Name This Column?

Hold onto your hats, folks. Although it is perhaps fitting that the actual day on which I sit here at my computer writing this column is April 1st, let me assure you that I do not intend this as a joke. For the last couple of years I have been reflecting on and experimenting with a new ethics, and as a result I have thrown over my previous commitment to Kantianism. In fact, I have given up morality altogether! This has certainly come as a shock to me… ]]> Mon, 30 Aug 2010 10:12:00 -0700 http://www.philosophynow.org/issue80/80marks.htm Westerners vs. the World: We are the WEIRD ones http://www.nationalpost.com/Westerners+World+weird+ones/3427126/story.html It turns out the Machiguenga — whose number system goes: one, two, three, many — are not alone in their thinking. Most people from non-Western cultures introduced to the Ultimatum Game play differently than Westerners. And that is one clue that the Western mind differs in fundamental ways from the rest of humanity, according to Dr. Henrich. He and two other UBC researchers authored a paper shaking up the fields of psychology, cognitive science and behavioural economics by questioning whether we can know anything about humanity in general if we only study a "truly unusual group of people" — the… ]]> Mon, 30 Aug 2010 10:10:00 -0700 http://www.nationalpost.com/Westerners+World+weird+ones/3427126/story.html The Perils Of Progress http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/75895/the-perils-progress Pinker, true to type, opens his piece: "New forms of media have always caused moral panics. The printing press, newspapers, paperbacks, and television were all once denounced as threats to their consumers' brainpower and moral fiber."

Just as these, in Pinker's estimation, proved to be false alarms, so, too, he confidently predicts, will be the case with the current moral panic over new electronic technologies. When I read his list of "reality checks" that are supposed to mollify critics—for example, "the decades of television, transistor radios, and rock videos were also decades in which I.Q. scores rose… ]]> Tue, 29 Jun 2010 11:48:00 -0700 http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/75895/the-perils-progress Inside Code: A Conversation with Dr. Lane DeNicola and Seph Rodney http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2010/06/inside-code-a-conversation.html
posted by Daniel Rourke

A couple of weeks ago I was invited to take part in a panel discussion on London based, arts radio station, Resonance FM. It was for The Thread, a lively show that aims to use speech and discussion as a tool for research, opening up new and unexpected angles through the unravelling of conversation.

The Thread's host, London Consortium researcher Seph Rodney, and I were lucky enough to share the discussion with Dr. Lane DeNicola,…

]]> Sun, 13 Jun 2010 21:25:00 -0700 http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2010/06/inside-code-a-conversation.html Should We Clone Neanderthals? http://www.archaeology.org/1003/etc/neanderthals.html If Neanderthals ever walk the earth again, the primordial ooze from which they will rise is an emulsion of oil, water, and DNA capture beads engineered in the laboratory of 454 Life Sciences in Branford, Connecticut. Over the past 4 years those beads have been gathering tiny fragments of DNA from samples of dissolved organic materials, including pieces of Neanderthal bone. Genetic sequences have given paleoanthropologists a new line of evidence for testing ideas about the biology of our closest extinct relative. The first studies of Neanderthal DNA focused on the genetic sequences of mitochondria, the microscopic organelles that convert… ]]> Mon, 01 Mar 2010 04:58:00 -0700 http://www.archaeology.org/1003/etc/neanderthals.html Monsters and the Moral Imagination http://chronicle.com/article/Monstersthe-Moral/48886/ Monsters are on the rise. People can't seem to get enough of vampires lately, and zombies have a new lease on life. This year and next we have the release of the usual horror films like Saw VI and Halloween II; the campy mayhem of Zombieland; more-pensive forays like 9 (produced by Tim Burton and Timur Bekmambetov), The Wolfman, and The Twilight Saga: New Moon; and, more playfully, Where the Wild Things Are (a Dave Eggers rewrite of the Maurice Sendak classic). The reasons for this increased monster culture are hard to pin down. Maybe it's social anxiety in the… ]]> Tue, 27 Oct 2009 12:01:00 -0700 http://chronicle.com/article/Monstersthe-Moral/48886/