tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6832901.post2987058486432309284..comments2024-03-25T19:48:24.624+11:00Comments on Oz Conservative: The Righteous MindUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger8125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6832901.post-41255387709869401632012-04-18T03:40:43.580+10:002012-04-18T03:40:43.580+10:00RE: [Saleton] has an easy "out" which is...RE: [Saleton] has an easy "out" which is to argue that we are to use reason to transcend an evolved nature.<br /> <br />If he believes this then he didn't absorb one of the messages of the book. Reason is for winning arguments, not for finding the truth. In fact, except in rare circumstances, reason is terrible at finding the truth. The vast majority of what we think and say and do comes from instinct and intuition. Reason comes into play only as post hoc rationalization of what we've already decided.The Independent Whighttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05074931335812449673noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6832901.post-53667005353100257662012-04-15T21:59:29.811+10:002012-04-15T21:59:29.811+10:00Haidt also made a recent TED Talk ...
Jonathan Hai...Haidt also made a recent TED Talk ...<br />Jonathan Haidt: Religion, evolution, and the ecstasy of self-transcendence.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2MYsx6WArKY" rel="nofollow">youtube.com/watch?v=2MYsx6WArKY</a><br /><br />"Psychologist Jonathan Haidt asks a simple, but difficult question: why do we search for self-transcendence? Why do we attempt to lose ourselves? In a tour through the science of evolution by group selection, he proposes a provocative answer."ideologeehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05342734091237801188noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6832901.post-21015229225450795852012-04-15T13:21:02.222+10:002012-04-15T13:21:02.222+10:00I think I recently heard Jonathan Haidt refer to h...I think I recently heard Jonathan Haidt refer to himself as a "centrist". Whereas usually he called himself a liberal.<br /><br />Either way, he is a breath of fresh air in the stifling groupthink of academia.ideologeehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05342734091237801188noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6832901.post-5091990659287303422012-04-11T08:48:07.124+10:002012-04-11T08:48:07.124+10:00So then, according to Saletan, it is within our na...So then, according to Saletan, it is within our nature to transcend our nature?Steve N.noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6832901.post-64575486409710430332012-04-09T10:36:13.009+10:002012-04-09T10:36:13.009+10:00"rational and necessary for the long term fun..."rational and necessary for the long term functioning of society"<br /><br />But Liberal morality doesn't care about the long term functioning of society. It doesn't care about the good, but rather the right.<br /><br />I can't think of a good moral argument against adopting the ultimate morality, only practical ones.CamelCaseRobnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6832901.post-68012967589757646272012-04-09T05:27:54.290+10:002012-04-09T05:27:54.290+10:00Jonathan Haidt's new book is so broad in its s...Jonathan Haidt's new book is so broad in its scope that I can only comment on one aspect: the relationship between conscience and morality. He says that political (secular) and religious views of morality frequently divide people. Many of us may have both in intuitive and learned behavior. In my free ebook on comparative mysticism, <i>"the greatest achievement in life,"</i> is a chapter called "Duel of the dual." Here are four paragraphs from it:<br /><br /> The Penguin Dictionary of Psychology defines <b>conscience</b> as <i>“a reasonably coherent set of internalized moral principals that provides evaluations of right and wrong with regard to acts either performed or contemplated. Historically, theistic views aligned conscience with the voice of God and hence regarded it as innate. The contemporary view is that the prohibitions and obligations of conscience are learned."</i> <br /><br /> The Dictionary of Philosophy and Religion lists some interesting historical observations on the word. Socrates said that conscience was the inner warning voice of God. Among Stoics it was a divine spark in man. Throughout the Middle Ages, conscience, <i>synderesis</i> in Greek, was universally binding rules of conduct. Religious interpretations later changed in psychiatry.<br /><br /> Sigmund Freud had coined a new term for conscience; he called it “superego.” This was self-imposed standards of behavior we learned from parents and our community, rather than from a divine source. People who transgressed those rules felt guilt. Carl Jung, Freud’s famous contemporary, said that conscience was an archetype of a “collective unconscious”; content from society is learned later. Most religions still view conscience as the foundation of morality.<br /><br /> Perhaps conscience can be viewed as a double-pane window, with the self in between. On one side, it looks toward ego and free will to obey community’s laws. On the other side, it is toward the soul and divine will to follow universal law. They often converge to dictate the same, or a similar, course of conduct…and sometimes not. The moral dilemma is when these two views conflict.Ron Krumposhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05371279514024960026noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6832901.post-47535847850890577162012-04-08T15:40:05.039+10:002012-04-08T15:40:05.039+10:00Strip the largely superfluous cog-sci dressing and...Strip the largely superfluous cog-sci dressing and most of what you describe here for Haidt (and Saletan) was articulated in the work of David Hume: morality as subjective intuition or sentiment; the artificiality of rights; the illusory nature of autonomy, choice, or equality as standards; a natural attraction to differential treatment of individuals according to status, age or caste; the origin of religion in the natural sentiment of morality, the need for maintaining moral "capital"; the thoroughgoing partiality of human nature; etc. etc. All this without adverting to any grand theory of human evolution or mental machinery, which really muck up the issues at hand more than illuminate.<br /><br />One of the things that comes out of grappling with Hume is that the "long-term functioning of society" point that you make here at the end is a rather tricky business. Hume's answer is that the catalog of human behavior in history is our only arbiter. But clearly, history has sanctioned all sorts of things in functioning societies that we ought, as western traditionalists, to reject. The answer, I think, is to insist on a sense of nature and "function" that Hume (or likely Haidt) would not allow. That is, we must recover the good old classical Greek sense of social functioning as subject to degrees of fruition or excellence, and of human existence as inherently -- rather than incidentally or adventitiously -- purposive.Aaron S.noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6832901.post-38583873146166709172012-04-08T13:53:19.573+10:002012-04-08T13:53:19.573+10:00Haidt's book is really quite good. In it he e...Haidt's book is really quite good. In it he effectively argues that ethics is built-in to the human mind. Coupling with other modern psychology, it's pretty easy to argue: Experienced morality in humans appears to be (is well explained-by / predicted by the theory of) 6 distinct modules in the mind, each of which fires under certain circumstances. <br /><br />However, I do think you're correct in that Haidt's ethics is not a substantial challenge to the liberal line. On the other hand... to the extent that Haidt becomes accepted...it's an even greater threat to the standard conservative line: Evolution gave us the ethics that we would want to design if we were iterated-game-theory playing monkeys...and it's built-in, not acquired (much) from either society or religiosity.Aretaehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15850678936908894274noreply@blogger.com