September 20, 2008 – 12:19 am
Sorry for the dead air yesterday; I’ve gone and got myself involved in another wrangle over at Bill Vallicella’s, and spent too long over there to have time for a post here. The topic is the morality of abortion, which as everyone knows by now is a great sucking vortex of infinite confusion and intractable […]
September 13, 2008 – 10:43 pm
As always, there is a provocative exhange of views taking place over at the website Edge.org. It began with an essay by the psychologist Jonathan Haidt entitled Why Do People Vote Republican?
September 7, 2008 – 12:06 am
In a comment to a recent post, reader David Brightly asked if I was worried that naturalistic accounts of morality “might lead to less good and more harm being done.” It’s a good question, and I am not sure about the answer.
September 1, 2008 – 10:51 pm
There is an organization, which I expect most of you have heard of by now, called “the The Brights“. It is dedicated to the promotion of what it calls a “naturalistic worldview”, which it defines as being free of “supernatural and mystical elements”. The name, I think, is exceedingly unfortunate; it seems smug and pollyanna-ish, […]
August 24, 2008 – 10:21 pm
It’s late in the day, and it’s been a long, full day: up early this morning to drive our son back to college, then an evening memorial service here in Wellfleet for a truly remarkable woman — Ellen Rafel, our next-door neighbor here on Hiram Hill, who lost her fight with cancer this spring. So […]
August 6, 2008 – 11:27 pm
I am eager to pick up our discussion of meaning and morality where it left off a week or so ago. It paused on what I thought was a promising note: a comment by Peter Lupu that aptly summarized the tasks a naturalist account must accomplish.
August 2, 2008 – 11:54 pm
Reader J. Kapok, knowing that I have been out of touch the past few days, and concerned that I not overdo it so soon after my recent misadventures, has kindly sent some blog fodder my way: items that he knows would have attracted my attention had I not been distracted by larger and more clamant […]
A couple of weeks ago I posted an essay in response to a post of Bill Vallicella’s on whether life might have an objective meaning. In his piece Bill argued that any attempt to offer a purely subjective interpretation must lead to an infinite regress, and therefore must be false. I responded, drawing on work […]
We’ve been giving morality, and the universality of moral intuitions, a good going over lately (particularly in this discussion, which now has over 100 comments). Readers with an interest in this topic might like to have a look at Harvard University’s Moral Sense Test. Feel free to share your thoughts here. Note: Don’t read the […]
A couple of days ago I linked to Steven Pinker’s discussion of the recent report by the President’s Council on Bioethics, and mentioned that one of the contributors, surprisingly given the overall makeup of the Council, was the irreligious and materialist philosopher Daniel Dennett. In his essay, he is in fine, feisty form.
March 31, 2008 – 12:35 am
Like may others I am an admirer of Winston Churchill, and have lately been reading an excellent book by the managing editor of Newsweek, Jon Meacham. It’s called Franklin and Winston: An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship, and as you can imagine from the title, it chronicles the enormously important friendship between Churchill and […]
January 17, 2008 – 1:22 am
In his recent New York Times Magazine article on the evolutionary and biological underpinnings of morality, Steven Pinker acknowledges the nihilistic shadows nearby, and, like other popularizers of Darwinian naturalism, reassures us that we needn’t worry. I think he’s right — we needn’t — but not for the reasons he suggests.
January 13, 2008 – 10:52 pm
As promised, Steven Pinker has written what I think will be seen as a a fairly important article for the New York Times Magazine about human morality. Having banged on the topic of morality a great deal myself lately, I encourage all of you to read it. I found little to disagree with, though his […]
October 28, 2007 – 11:34 pm
I’ve just watched the debate I mentioned a few days ago: between Christopher Hitchens and Dinesh D’Souza on the topic Is Christianity The Problem? It was as interesting as I had expected; these are two sharp minds.
October 16, 2007 – 12:41 am
I’ve just read Sam Harris’s Letter To A Christian Nation. It is brief — one can finish it in an hour or so — but pungent.
September 12, 2007 – 11:39 pm
Here is some interesting reading for you all, courtesy of Edge.org. First up is an essay called Moral Psychology and the Misunderstanding of Religion, by Jonathan Haidt, in which he takes the “new atheists” to task for failing to develop a subtle enough appreciation of the adaptive underpinnings of religion, and of morality. He draws […]
Given recent comments and emails, I should probably clarify my thoughts about religion’s place in the world. Though I have written rather disapprovingly on the topic lately, and although I do indeed think that religion is, and has been, an enormous retrograde influence on civilization’s progress (some lovely music and architecture notwithstanding), and an inexhaustible […]
Each year the website Edge.org — which I will recommend once again to you all, as it is one of the Web’s most stimulating destinations — asks the intellectual community a carefully chosen question, presents the answers on its website, and then gathers them together into a book. Previous questions have included What Questions Are […]
One of the warmer and more persistent disagreements between liberal and conservative viewpoints in recent years has been over the commingling of religion with politics. We hear a steady drumbeat from the Left alleging that the Bush cadre is trying to turn the USA into a “theocracy”, and in academic circles, where the prevailing attitude […]
Here’s an addendum to our previous post (which was in turn a comment upon a recent post, at Bill Vallicella’s Maverick Philosopher website, about atheism and morality).
Dr. William Vallicella, in a recent post, considers the following quote from the atheist author Sam Harris (Letter to a Christian Nation, pp. 38-39): If you are right to believe that religious faith offers the only real basis for morality, then atheists should be less moral than believers. In fact, they should be utterly immoral. […]
I’ve finally had a chance to get back to considering Titus Rivas’s paper, in which he and Hein van Dongen argue that the mind-brain model known as epiphenomenalism — which says that subjective mental phenomena are indeed ontologically real, that they are “irreducible” to physical processes, and that they exert no causal influence on the […]
February 19, 2007 – 8:32 pm
I’m afflicted today with what appears to be food poisoning, and have absolutely nothing to offer tonight, especially as I’ve used up any remaining fuel in the cogitative tank commenting on an interesting thread at philosopher Alan Rhoda’s website about the “problem of evil”, and whether our morality is based on any sort of objective foundation. Interested readers may find that post, and my long-winded opinion, here.
February 4, 2007 – 3:02 pm
Dr. William Vallicella calls our attention to a post by Dr. Alan Rhoda in which Dr. Rhoda argues that the “problem of evil” is as much a difficulty for the atheist as for the theist. But Dr. Rhoda’s post, which Dr. V. calls a “good solid crack at it”, rests on the unwarranted assumption that the atheist will be as troubled as the theist by the notion that there might not be an objective basis for morality.
January 2, 2007 – 2:13 am
Dr. William Vallicella, in a discussion at Maverick Philosopher about whether religion is simply a quest for comfort, asked me the following question:
Can an atheist be moral? Yes, of course, in one sense, and indeed more moral than some theists. But the more interesting question would be whether an atheist would have an objective basis for an objective morality. In other words, even if it is true that many atheists are morally superior to many theists relative to some agreed-upon standard of behavior, would these atheists be justified in making the moral judgments they do if there is no God? Perhaps, but the answer to this is not obvious, whereas the answer to the first question is obvious.
While there are those who have tried to devise such a scheme, I think their efforts are misplaced; I will not try to establish an “objective morality” here, because I see no need for one.