Philosophy & Ethics

Temple Grandin’s “The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum” [1] belongs to a new(ly fashionable but old) way of thinking that supports my own approach, namely that pathologic (psychopathic) thinking is necessary for new-enlightenment, for example in the face of existential dangers evolving in the technological substrate (Robopocalypse, Global Suicide). There are less techno-age fashionable justifications for abnormal perspective-taking philosophy also [2] and putting yourself in someone’s shoes is not a new idea anyway – but doing so with pedophiles, mass murderers, or so called ‘…

You're an animal, says Dominique Lestel, a French philosopher who opposes the separation of human and animal life.   In a new paper, Lestel reminds sociology readers that we are animals and says animals profoundly influence our culture – perhaps more so than they had initially thought. Western thought that the human species is highly developed and that sets the human species apart. Lestel instead advocates animality (our animal nature) and says humanization is an ongoing performative practice, rather than a historical threshold that was crossed long ago. Looking at…

Which gender is more generous? Given the social, subjective nature of the question and the influx of armchair philosophy into culture, everyone claims to have the right answer. What about an experiment? A group of economists have found that, given the chance, women are more likely than men to avoid an opportunity to donate to charity. The field experiment conducted by scholars at the University of Chicago and University of California, Berkeley tested people's motivations to give, whether they responded to social pressure or from an attitude of altruism, and concluded that when it's easy…

Social structure is an imposition, but by definition one that ‘should’ be imposed, meaning by the origin of the meaning of “should” in the co-evolution of the social with our language. This co-evolution is catalyzed by our mind’s higher order perceptions, which now equally co-evolve. Mind and perception themselves emerge via and imply a society of modules in mutual, naturally-selective discourse, for example inside our brains but it applies generally (Society of Mind [M. Minsky], Neural Darwinism [G. Edelman], Consciousness as Fame in the Brain [D. Dennett], non-anthropocentric, transhuman…

Do you support unions, a minimum wage, dislike business and hate child labor and then tell all of your friends on your iPhone? People rationalize moral standards when it comes to their own lives, say economists writing in Science. It's easy to lament child labor and exploitation of the work force but if you are not willing to pay $2,000 for a phone, you are part of the problem and Tweeting about social issues on that phone helps precisely no one but corporate shareholders. Markets are not about social justice, note Professors Armin Falk from the University of Bonn and Nora Szech from the…

Intelligent Design is often presented as a view that runs counter to evolutionary theory.  Whether it be the concept of natural selection or ideas about speciation, Intelligent Design (ID) purports to reconcile the observed environment from the perspective of an intelligent ordering system. Concepts like "irreducible complexity" to examples of finding a watch or a tornado spontaneously assembling a 747 in a junkyard.  All these images are invoked by Intelligent Design as an argument against evolution. The theory of intelligent design holds that certain features of the universe and…

Readers of this blog know very well by now that, despite (or is it because of?) being both a scientist and a philosopher, I have often defended the idea that science and philosophy are distinct disciplines, and I am critical in particular of those who I think display a scientistic (i.e., intellectually imperialistic) attitude in wanting to expand the scope of science to pretty much everything that is worth knowing, usually at the expense of humanistic disciplines, philosophy in particular. But, one could reasonably ask, why bother? Why try to explain to the likes of Sam Harris and Michael…

The Groningen Protocol, introduced in Holland in 2005, was devised to create a standard for doctors who had families that wanted to end the suffering of sick newborns for humanitarian reasons. It outlined parameters to help identify situations in which euthanasia is warranted and wouldn't land anyone in jail.  The ethical concern - and it was controversial - was that this was a 'slippery slope' to broader euthanasia, the way abortion is often used in some countries to prevent sick children from being born at all. In a recent piece, NBC noted that 11,000 American babies die the same day…

In America, science is as polarized as politics. Corporate scientists, like at pharmaceutical companies, are criticized for working at unethical companies while academic scientists are criticized for 'chasing funding' rather than helping people. Like many stereotypes, those images started with a kernel of truth.  So if you ask most people if the pharmaceutical industry can self-police its advertising policies, they will reply it is not possible, an outside force must do it.  But then if you ask people who are skeptical of medicine, they will say the FDA is also controlled by…

As a researcher in the fields of exact science and philosophy, I am obsessed with “truth”, which is a label of approval we assign to concepts that we judge to be consistent in a certain sense (Example 1 below). How we do that is thus important for the progress of these disciplines. The existentialist moral is authenticity (e.g. Sartre), a ‘being true to myself’. For example, if my analysis of the social situation demands me to explicitly deceive, I internally admit doing so. But humans (not perhaps advanced future artificial intelligence) are socially evolved to do something else instead*,…