Jonathan Haidt

Religiosity is a feature of human life, and evolutionary, developmental, neuropsychological, and anthropological theories must explain human religions. Morals are about the organization of groups of people. Emile Durkheim showed that morality is a set of rules to bind people into an effective group. Although Durkheim is revered by sociologists, they were not free of the baleful influence of religion to get to the place when Jonathan Haidt now is. The connexion of morals to the needs of social living were forgotten for most of the twentieth century. Haidt and others have now shown that co-operation and society evolves by genetic and cultural evolution. Though he firmly declares he is an atheist, he only “doubts” the existence of God, and he has accepted considerable donations from the Templeton Foundation. Every man has his price. But Haidt is a leading scientist of the study of morality and religion. His critique therefore represents the scientific process in action—scientists holding each other accountable for their factual claims. Science must be objective!

Jon Haidt, a leading figure in contemporary moral psychology, advocates a participation-centric view of religion, according to which participation in religious communal activity is significantly more important than belief in explaining religious behaviour and commitment. He describes the participation-centric view as ‘Straight out of Durkheim’. I argue that this is a misreading of Durkheim, who held that religious behaviour and commitment are the joint products of belief and participation, with neither belief nor participation being considered more important than the other. I further argue that recent evidence from the cognitive science of religion provides support for Durkheim’s balanced account of religion and counts strongly against Haidt’s participation-centric view of religion. I suggest that Haidt’s adherence to the participation-centric view of religion is better explained by his desire to accept an account of religion that is consistent with his social intuitionist moral psychology than by his desire to accept an account of religion that accords with available scientific evidence about religion.

abstract: The evolution of human sociality is a field in ferment, with writers struggling to isolate elementary causal forces and organize them systematically. The elements of a usable model for evolved human sociality have become available only within the past few years. Those elements are scattered throughout the books here under review and a small set of articles. None of the books or articles fully exemplifies the whole model. After laying out the model, I use it to evaluate the books, describing how each contributes to it, and measuring each against it. The central idea in a usable model of human sociality is that the identity of the social group is integral to individual identity. In addition to that one central idea, a minimum of seven concepts is necessary to construct a model of sociality that includes the complex forms of organization in post-agricultural societies: (1) dominance, (2) egalitarianism or reverse dominance, (3) leadership, (4) internalized norms, (5) strong reciprocity or third-party enforcement of norms, (6) legal institutions, and (7) legitimacy in the exercise of power. These seven concepts can be reduced to four components: power, values, individuals, and groups. This model of evolved human sociality moves beyond the inconclusive debate between proponents of inclusive fitness and proponents of group selection. It also offers a distinct alternative to the identity politics that currently pervade literary and cultural study.

In this article, I provide a guide to some current thinking in empirical moral psychology on the nature of moral intuitions, focusing on the theories of Haidt and Narvaez. Their debate connects to philosophical discussions of virtue theory and the role of emotions in moral epistemology. After identifying difficulties attending the current debate around the relation between intuitions and reasoning, I focus on the question of the development of intuitions. I discuss how intuitions could be shaped into moral expertise, outlining Haidt’s emphasis on innate factors and Narvaez’s account in terms of a social-cognitive model of personality. After a brief discussion of moral relativism, I consider the implications of the account of moral expertise for our understanding of the relation between moral intuitions and reason. I argue that a strong connection can be made if we adopt a broad conception of reason and a narrow conception of expertise.

This paper outlines and defends a ‘toolkit approach’ to political polarization. This approach sees polarization as a tool or strategy employed by political actors as a means of achieving their political objectives. Understood as a condition, polarization often results from the effective employment of the tools in the polarization toolkit. These tools include: myth-making, stereotyping, polarizing speech, propaganda, conspiracy theories and ‘othering’. Various explanations of the effectiveness of these tools are explored. The toolkit approach to polarization is contrasted with one that sees ‘moral empathy gaps’ as the key to polarization and recommends greater empathetic understanding as the antidote. Questions are raised about this antidote and the Moral Foundations Theory that underpins it. The latter is criticised for over-generalizing from the American experience. It is suggested that depolarization requires the use of a ‘depolarization toolkit’. Some of technique of depolarization are analogous to those of polarization. Others are very different. The reason that it is easier to polarize than to depolarize is that polarizers have the best tools at their disposal.

Jonathan Haidt is a moral psychologist whose influential book, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion, explains the origins of our political disagreements. The aim of the book is to encourage understanding and civility in our public life. Deliberative democrats also have a significant stake in understanding the sources of our disagreements and see rational deliberation as the key to civility and democratic legitimacy. However, Haidt’s empirical studies give reasons to suggest that the “faith” of deliberative democrats in reasoning may be misplaced, particularly as that faith tends be inflected in terms of a “Kantian” moral psychology.

This article analyzes four different explanatory “stories” that Haidt weaves together: (1) a “causal” evolutionary account of the development of morality; (2) a “causal” story about the psychological mechanisms explaining human action; (3) a “causal” story about the historical and cultural determinants of our political attitudes; and (4) a “normative” story about the grounds and justification of human action. The article then examines these stories to discern how deliberative democrats might rearticulate their conception of public reasoning, and their normative hopes for it, in light of Haidt’s findings by introducing the “embedded” conception of public reasoning.

This article draws together overlapping cognitive analyses of political thought, emotion, and language and shows how they can be supplemented with literary analyses of genre to illuminate the workings of the French Revolution debate of 1790s Britain. It focuses on enriching George Lakoff 's theory of the multiple levels of framing in discourse, concentrating on the interplay of argument and narrative frames. Studies of emotion and mood in narrative genres are adapted to refine Lakoff 's account of narrative , making it more complex, systematic, and sensitive to historical context. Applying the revised theory, the essay characterizes contrasts between Edmund Burke's and Thomas Paine's thought at all levels of framing. It shows how their lexical frames for "revolution" diverge as their main arguments craft opposing issue-defining frames for the central moral issue of revolution versus reform. Those arguments highlight different key figures and events yet draw on similar narrative genres to frame them. Importantly, high genres of heroic romance inspire elevation toward one's own side by celebrating victories and lamenting tragedies, and low genres of satire inspire contempt toward opponents by ridiculing deserved failures and absurd successes. Thus narrative genre ties surface-frame phrases like "rights of man" and "swinish multitude" to deep-frame assumptions about more fundamental concepts (human nature, society, government).

TThe aim of this paper is to answer the question of whether moral intuitions, understood in terms of Jonathan Haidt's Social Intuitionist Model (SIM), have any normative power. The conclusion is no. And there are many separate arguments in favor of it. First, these moral intuitions cannot be objective, justifying reasons that are expected to arise in the course of making a ‘real’ moral judgment. Second, we do not even know if they actually represent the grounds for moral judgments. There are too few reasons to exclude the possibility that, when we make moral judgments, we unconsciously follow moral rules, which can be objective moral reasons. Furthermore, in Haidt's terms, moral intuitions are most probably heuristic by nature. But if they are, it is even more problematic for their normativity because they can lead to mistakes. There is also a lacuna in the research concerning problems with resolving moral dilemmas in which two strong moral intuitions are involved. Third, philosophers claim that there is some other kind of justified moral intuitions and psychologists often mistakenly mix together these two phenomena. In this paper, all of these arguments will be examined and they will serve to justify the lack of normativity of moral intuitions in the SIM.

[Excerpts from the penultimate draft. Includes the front matter, the first section of the preamble, and chapter 1.] *Self-Reflection for the Opaque Mind* attempts to solve a grave problem about critical self-reflection. The worry is that we critical thinkers are all in “epistemic bad faith” in light of what psychology tells us. For the research shows not merely that we are bad at detecting “ego-threatening” thoughts à la Freud. It also indicates that we are ignorant of even our ordinary thoughts—e.g., reasons for our moral judgments of others (Haidt 2001), and even mundane reasons for buying one pair of stockings over another! (Nisbett & Wilson 1977) However: Self-reflection presupposes an ability to know what one thinks in the first place. So if ignorance is the norm, why attempt self-reflection? The activity would just show naivety about psychology. Yet while respecting all the data, this book argues that, remarkably, we are infallible in a (limited) range self-discerning judgments. Even so, infallibility does not imply indubitability, and there is no Cartesian ambition to provide a “foundation” for empirical knowledge. The point is rather to explain how self-reflection as a rational activity is possible.

 In this paper I prepare the ground for a realist political psychology by drawing on recent methodological debates between moralists and realists about the place of empirical facts in normative political theory. To anchor the discussion, I focus on Jonathan Haidt's social intuitionist model (SIM) of moral and political judgment, an empirically grounded theory that has risen to prominence over the last decade. I argue that the SIM does not, as Haidt presumes, present a substantive challenge to rationalist normative philosophy. What is needed is a more critical framework; accordingly, I examine the SIM in relation to political realism, especially the work of Bernard Williams. However, any such alliance must involve a reckoning with realism's critical theory commitments, directed in particular toward Haidt's interpretation of his empirical findings. These discussions create the space for a realist political psychology, which balances the demand for empirical reflection with the philosophical sophistication of existing political theories.

Beliefs can unite or divide us, build societies or destroy them. This book helps harness the power of beliefs by explaining what they are. What they do. How they work. And how we can bridge the chasm of mistrust.

Kirkus Reviews said: "Expertly surveys the historical development of belief ... navigates turbid academic waters with informality and light-handed grace ... A thoughtful consideration of torrid intellectual disputes."

Foreword Reviews said: "Well-reasoned and thoughtful ... Shows it's possible even for those who hold vastly different beliefs to engage in convivial, rational, and reasonable discussions ... not only interesting, but vital to living."

Readers said: "I got a kick out of the chapter on Spinoza. It's quite a feat how the book bridges the gap between the ancients and the moderns." "Using a dash of humor and an accessible style of writing, this will delight fans of books like Yuval Harari's Sapiens. Highly Recommended."

RESUMO O dilema do onívoro, apresentado inicialmente por Michael Pollan (2006), traz, em síntese, a premissa de que pode-se conviver com aspectos diferentes e que deve-se evitar os extremos. Baseando-se em tais ideias, Jonathan Haidt (2012), psicólogo social estadunidense e professor da Universidade de Nova York, passou a trabalhar o dilema do onívoro a par r de uma perspecva políco ideológica, buscando entender, em especial, como as pessoas passam a defender exclusivamente um extremo, excluindo a ideia fundamental da necessidade de um meio termo e/ou da qualidade e, em úlmo caso, até racionalidade de um debate. Com base em tais aspectos, o presente estudo busca estabelecer um diálogo entre estes conceitos e o da mente naufragada, de Mark Lilla (2018), relacionando com aa crise da democracia e a problemátiIca da polarização políca nos dias atuais. Palavras-chave: Dilema do onívoro; Mente naufragada; Polarização política. ABSTRACT The omnivore's dilemma, ini ally presented by Michael Pollan (2006), brings, in summary, the premise that one can live with different aspects and that one should avoid extremes. Based on such ideas, Jonathan Haidt (2012), American social psychologist and professor at New York University, started to work on the omnivore's dilemma from an ideological poli cal perspec ve, trying to understand, in par cular, how people come to be to exclusively defend an extreme, excluding the fundamental idea of the need for a middle ground and/or quality and, ul mately, even ra onality for a debate. Based on such aspects, the present study seeks to establish a dialogue between these concepts and Mark Lilla's (2018) shipwrecked mind, rela ng to the crisis of democracy and the problem of poli cal polariza on today.

Steven Pinker's main argument in the analysis is that by understanding the evolutionary roots of morality and by studying our own moral tendencies, we are able to best subjectively understand from an out-sider's perspective our behaviors and the behaviors of those around us. This process invites readers to pursue a greater degree of empathy for changing habits of moral behavior and conflict in society.

Setting aside the more-obvious categories of identity politics, race, gender, and sexuality, when it comes to ideology, as well as social class, all of us worldwide who earn our living from Shakespeare studies are more similar than not. Educators, critics, theater professionals: we belong almost entirely to the privileged group Jonathan Haidt calls “W.E.I.R.D”: “Western (or Westernized), Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic.” We are a minority, moreover, even within that small portion of the world’s population. Almost all of us are politically progressive, and most of us are relatively secular. Given such homogeneity, we should not flatter ourselves that we are impervious to the all-too-human dangers of groupthink, but instead proceed with commensurate caution. When it comes to Shakespeare and war, in particular, the fervent faith with which we, as a kind of tribe or faction, adhere to our beliefs reinforces a temptation to remain within a comfortable but misleading echo chamber. The desire to appropriate the authority of Shakespeare and the popularity of his plays for what we see as a worthy cause, the promotion of peace through non-violence, diplomacy, and disarmament, creates a pressure to find in Shakespeare’s plays political positions more like our own than is at least prima facie plausible for a man of his time and place, howsoever prescient. To help explain, by contrast, how and why Shakespeare’s views on human nature, as well as war, might not be possible to reconcile with present-day secular progressivism, I draw here on Thomas Sowell’s distinction in his Conflict of Visions between “constrained” and “unconstrained” hopes for the future of humanity, as well as William Bouwsma’s description of what he calls “the two faces of humanism,” “Augustinian” and “Stoic.” I argue for Bouwsma as more evenhanded, and therefore reliable, in his representation of the Renaissance and the Reformation than Jacob Burckhardt, even though Burckhardt is better-known and more influential, precisely because Bouwsma is not as inclined as Burckhardt to tell us only that side of the story that we today tend to find more appealing: the “early modern” advent of our own more or less liberal credo. I then turn in closing to Hegel’s complex response to Kant’s concept of “unsocial sociability.” In the fourth thesis of his “Idea for a Universal History,” Kant presents “competitive vanity” and "lust for power" as the engine of civilization, a “transvaluation” of St. Augustine’s concept of libido dominandi likely modeled on similar responses by Machiavelli and Edward Gibbon to St. Augustine’s argument about the fall of Rome in his City of God. The “antagonism” Kant praises here as “the cause of lawful order among men” reappears in Hegel’s account of the progress of recognition (Anerkennung) as what he calls “the master-slave dialectic,” a form of government which, by the light of an attentive reading of Shakespeare's Roman plays, as well as Roman history, Hegel perceives is neither desirable, nor inevitable, nor even sustainable long-term, but instead prone to degenerate into civil war, unless replaced by more stable mixed government. To clarify this opposition, I explain that the influence of Alexandre Kojève has led Hegel to be misunderstood. Kant anticipates present-day liberalism. Hegel, by contrast, like Shakespeare, anticipates present-day critics of liberalism such as Alasdair MacIntyre and Patrick Deneen.

En este trabajo  abordo el concepto de «marco mental» como clave para entender la concepción que la neuropolítica tiene de la deliberación pública y la democracia. En un primer lugar expondré los puntos centrales de las teorías de Jonathan Haidt y George Lakoff sobre el marco mental y la deliberación pública. Después pondré en relación la idea del marco mental con el concepto de «marco referencial» de Taylor. Finalmente, analizaré críticamente el modelo de deliberación pública y de democracia que cabe extraer del concepto de marco mental en la neuropolítica.

Call the ethos understanding rightness in terms of spiritual purity and piety, and wrongness in terms of corruption and sacrilege, the “fetish ethic.” Jonathan Haidt and his colleagues suggest that this ethos is particularly salient to political conservatives and non-liberal cultures around the globe. In this essay, I point to numerous examples of moral fetishism in mainstream academic ethics. Once we see how deeply “infected” our ethical reasoning is by fetishistic intuitions, we can respond by 1) repudiating the fetishistic impulse, by 2) “sublimating” our fetishism into liberal rationales, or by 3) accepting the fetishism on its own terms. Of these options, I argue that sublimating our fetishism is not advisable, and that embracing our ethical fetishism isn’t as obviously misguided as some suggest.

En este trabajo pretendemos abordar la teoría del Intuicionismo social, realizada por el psicólogo Jonathan Haidt en oposición al modelo racionalista de Piaget y Kohlberg. Analizaremos sus elementos principales y especialmente sus implicaciones normativas. En particular nos centraremos en su conocida teoría del «desconcierto moral» con la que pretende mostrar la desconexión existente entre el juicio moral y la reflexión como dos procesos independientes.

Palabras clave: Neuroética, Intuicionismo social, Jonathan Haidt, juicio moral, razonamiento moral, desconcierto moral.

In this article I analyze the academic reception of Jonathan Haidt’s seminal article "The emotional dog and its rational tail: A social intuitionist approach to moral judgment". My thesis is that in the spheres of philosophy and psychology, this article was initially studied within the neurocentric paradigm, which dominated the field of scientic reflection in the fifteen years following its publication. This neurocentric reading established a specific interpretation of the text with several limitations. However, more recently a digital paradigm has emerged and come to prevail in academia, providing a new perspective from which to return to Haidt’s text. Indeed, this approach makes it possible to unravel elements of the famous article that in the neurocentric paradigm went unnoticed by researchers. Moreover, the digital paradigm manages to better integrate Haidt’s seminal article into his later work as a whole.

In this article I analyse the dual process model of moral judgement. First, I set out Joshua Greene's and Jonathan Haidt's propositions, which represent two schools of thought on this theory. Next, I conduct a number of methodological reviews. On the one hand, I argue that the method used is tautological, while on the other, I show that the use of dilemmas is not an adequate tool with which to account for moral deliberation.

Ignorance about political related-issues has long been considered a threat to democracy. This paper revolves around the concept of political ignorance, focusing especially on Ilya Somin’s book Democracy and Political Ignorance and going beyond his standpoint in two ways. First of all, it moves away from the notion of factual knowledge by showing that political ignorance cannot be limited to a matter of information quality. On the contrary, it shows that ignorance concerns the formation of opinions about political facts, which are the bricks with which disagreement is built. Then, using the insights of the Moral Foundation Theory by Jonathan Haidt and his colleagues, the paper argues that moral intuitions represent an additional source of bias that current research on the problem of voters’ ignorance should address. While Somin argues that biased moral values are the outcome of ignorance, MFT suggests that moral intuitions are a robust determinant of people’s political views as they make factual knowledge partially irrelevant and also make people with different moral minds unable to understand the basis of reciprocal factual argumentations.

RESUMO O dilema do onívoro, apresentado inicialmente por Michael Pollan (2006), traz, em síntese, a premissa de que pode-se conviver com aspectos diferentes e que deve-se evitar os extremos. Baseando-se em tais ideias, Jonathan Haidt (2012), psicólogo social estadunidense e professor da Universidade de Nova York, passou a trabalhar o dilema do onívoro a par r de uma perspec va polí co ideológica, buscando entender, em especial, como as pessoas passam a defender exclusivamente um extremo, excluindo a ideia fundamental da necessidade de um meio termo e/ou da qualidade e, em úlmo caso, até racionalidade de um debate. Com base em tais aspectos, o presente estudo busca estabelecer um diálogo entre estes conceitos e o da mente naufragada, de Mark Lilla (2018), relacionando com aa crise da democracia e a problemá ca da polarização polí ca nos dias atuais. Palavras-chave: Dilema do onívoro; Mente naufragada; Polarização polí ca.
ABSTRACT The omnivore's dilemma, ini ally presented by Michael Pollan (2006), brings, in summary, the premise that one can live with different aspects and that one should avoid extremes. Based on such ideas, Jonathan Haidt (2012), American social psychologist and professor at New York University, started to work on the omnivore's dilemma from an ideological poli cal perspec ve, trying to understand, in par cular, how people come to be to exclusively defend an extreme, excluding the fundamental idea of the need for a middle ground and/or quality and, ul mately, even ra onality for a debate. Based on such aspects, the present study seeks to establish a dialogue between these concepts and Mark Lilla's (2018) shipwrecked mind, rela ng to the crisis of democracy and the problem of poli cal polariza on today.

A natureza tribal humana permitiu nossa sobrevivência, mas também tem fomentado a geração muitas vezes inconsequente de novos conflitos. Entender este processo talvez seja o único meio de superá-lo.

Originalmente publicado em https://cultura.estadao.com.br/blogs/estado-da-arte/superar-a-politica-tribal-e-possivel/

Buried beneath the text of Homer’s The Odyssey is a portrayal of a culture about which we have little recorded and preserved. Whether that be the culture of the heroes recorded in the text or that of Homer, assuming a historical figure, is beside the point of this paper. The focus here will be on how human relationships, both between humans and the divine, derive from a sense of respect for the gods. I will show how Homeric culture regulates itself by an ethic of divinity as displayed throughout The Odyssey.

This article is about religious life and its relationship to public higher education in America. As a way of addressing the fraught relations among religion, the state, moral values, and the university, the article takes a reading of Immanuel Kant’s The Conflict of the Faculties and the writings of contemporary social psychologist Jonathan Haidt. It uses the synthesis of Kant’s and Haidt’s ideas as the foundation for a partial historical reassessment, the ultimate goal of which is the re-enfranchisement of religious Americans into the nation’s public higher education system.

Affective Turn." The publisher cut this portion of the paper because it was already covered in the anthology. (I obviously need a new introduction, but I wanted to get some feedback. I have not looked at this is months.) The Contemporary Affective Turn: Vitalist and Evolutionary Affect. If we can think of the moral interpretation of affect as arguing for the primacy of representation and the supplementary status of affect and the romantic interpretation as striving to synthesize the two into a harmonious whole through art, then we can think of the contemporary interpretation of affect as arguing for the primacy of affect and the secondary or supplemental status of representation. Of course, this characterization may be an oversimplification since for many theorists who adopt this orientation the relationship between affect and symbolic activity is quite complex; nonetheless, it is a useful heuristic for situating the contemporary interpretation of affect, which argues that affect somehow conditions our ways of thinking, reasoning and judging the world. If affect potentially distorted reason inside of rationalist morality and if it needed to be recovered beneath the wreckage of civilization in its romantic interpretation, then affect, in its contemporary interpretation takes center stage, becoming both logically and temporally prior to any form of conscious symbolic activity. In this section, I will focus on two main theoretical approaches which take this contemporary position: the vitalist and the evolutionary notions of affect. One of the major figures of the vitalist interpretation is Brian Massumi. While Marcuse insisted that every authentic work of art would stimulate a form of affective cognition which would be subversive of understanding and perception, an indictment of the established reality principle, Massumi locates affect "between perception and language," arguing that affective experience involves the ongoing production of different modalities of thought and perception (Massumi

According to Haidt’s “social intuitionist model”, empirical moral psychology supports the following conclusion: intuition comes first, strategic reasoning second. Critics have responded by arguing that intuitions can depend on non-conscious reasons, that not being able to articulate one’s reasons doesn’t entail not being responsive to reasons, and that the relations between intuitions and reasoning can be truth-tracking and principled in ways overlooked by Haidt. This debate involves a false dichotomy: that either reasoning is truth-tracking, or else our reasoning is purely strategic and manipulative in nature. Reason-giving also, I argue, performs other important functions in moral and social life. A robust willingness to offer reasons in favor of our convictions is itself a virtue we seek and appreciate in others. Others’ willingness to reason with us is itself a good we enjoy at their hands, or that they confer upon us. What we give each other in being willing and determined to reason together is, among other things, respect for, and good-will towards, each other.

Distinguant deux sens de « communauté morale », cet article soutient que certains animaux appartiennent à la communauté morale dans les deux sens : (1) ils sont des patients moraux dignes de considération morale directe et équivalente, mais également (2) des agents moraux au sens où ils sont capables de reconnaître, d’assumer et d’adresser aux autres des exigences minimales de bonne conduite et de savoir-vivre. Au moyen de la notion d’« attitudes réactives » développée par Peter F. Strawson, je soutiens que les animaux sociaux qui sont à la fois objets et sujets d’attitudes réactives forment des communautés morales au second sens, dans la mesure où ils se traitent mutuellement comme des individus ayant des obligations et tenus à des exigences de bonne volonté minimale dans leurs interactions interpersonnelles. Distinguant l’agentivité morale du raisonnement moral, je soutiens que la capacité de raisonner abstraitement sur les principes et les conséquences de nos actions nous imposen...

This work sets out to analyse the model of deliberative process developed by Haidt in his theory of Social Intuitionism. Specifically, I intend to submit to analysis the two illusions which, according to Haidt, govern public deliberation. I shall argue that those illusions do not exist in reality, but result from an erroneous approach to the deliberative process. In his proposal, Haidt forgets to acknowledge the epistemic dimension of deliberation and the place occupied by moral emotions in the communicative process. In my opinion, this emotional dimension of deliberation should be defended from deliberative democracy. Resumen:

You know the purpose of the actions you perform in your life. You eat because you’re hungry, sleep because you’re tired, and read the news because you want to know what’s going on in the world. But what’s the purpose of your life as a whole, of life as such? The answer to that question isn’t obvious.

In this course, we’ll analyze and evaluate theories of the meaning of life. Although this might seem like a vague or frivolous topic, it’s actually one of the most important. People have wondered about it ever since we began to think seriously, and a great many approaches to the problem have been developed. We’ll encounter a variety of fascinating themes:

• What do we mean when we ask “What is the meaning of life?” What sort of question is it, and what sorts of replies count as plausible candidates for an answer?

• Is there a meaning of life? Maybe life is pointless, absurd, or evil.

• What is the significance of mortality? How should we think about living with death?

• What can usefully be said about how best to live or what makes life worth living?

• Why is there something rather than nothing? And given that there is something, why is it as it is, given that it might have been otherwise? Why anything? Why this?

Most of the authors we’ll read are philosophers (Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Thomas Nagel, and Susan Wolf, among others), and we’ll use the philosophical method to study our topic: breaking the problem down into its elementary parts, carefully defining terms and concepts, and evaluating the validity of arguments and evidence for and against the various claims on offer. In addition to philosophers, however, we’ll also consult a psychologist (Jonathan Haidt), a couple of poets (Wallace Stevens, Philip Larkin), some painters and sculptors (Böcklin, Michelangelo, Rodin), a composer or two (Rachmaninoff and perhaps R. Strauss, Wagner, or Berlioz), and three films (Alain Resnais and Marguerite Duras’s Hiroshima mon amour, Carol Reed’s The Third Man, and Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless).

This course won’t provide you with any easy answers to the question of the meaning of life. But it will enable you to learn your way around the neighborhood of the question and improve your ability to ask and answer it for yourself.

Bridging from a flyer incident at Harvard University to the influence and chilling effects of mass surveillance on free speech to the origins of public opinion and the construction of political correctness, this essay rethinks the interconnectivity between surveillance, political correctness and Noelle-Neumanns's theory of the spiral of silence.

Based on the findings in this essay, an analogy of the spiral of silence between the chilling effect of free speech in modern public and private spaces through perceived surveillance and the chilling effect on free speech in academic spaces through university administrations in the shadow of political correctness can be anticipated. Thus, the essay provides a basis for the hypothesis that academic debates might get chilled through increasing PC at universities, since PC can possibly serve as a perceived mask for a more liberal ideology and thus construct a hostile environment for other ideologies. Especially in the light of chilled free speech in hostile online environments, the hypothesis implies a pressing issue in academic spaces, even if based upon rather liberal than neoconservative ideologies.

Who Calls the Shots?  Moral Agency in Other Animals: Challenging Human Exceptionalism

By Christiane Bailey, PhD Candidate Department of Philosophy at the University of Montreal

Abstract

The concept of “moral community” has two different meanings: the community of all beings who are morally considerable and the community of beings who are in interpersonal and social relationships and have obligations, expectations and responsabilities toward each other. Mainstream animal rights theorists argue that other-than-human animals only belong to the moral community in the first sense: they are “moral patients”, but not “moral agents”. It would therefore be fundamentally inappropriate to consider them as norm-responsive agents and responsible beings.

I think that this common stance follows from a failure to challenge human exceptionalism. Working with a rationalist conception which conflates moral agency and rational moral reflection, authors such as Regan, Singer, Linzey, Steiner or Korsgaard challenge human supremacy while leaving largely intact human exceptionalism regarding moral agency. This stance fuels rather extreme forms of paternalistic management of the lives of other animals and leads to classical dilemma (such as the extinction of domesticated animals or the massive intervention in the wild).

A more adequate conception of animal life as defined not only by sentience and vulnerability, but also by agency (a practical understanding of their situation) and intersubjectivity (interpersonal and social relationships) enables a fundamental shift of perspective in animal ethics. It enriches our understanding of the types of harms and injustices which can be done to them and opens the possibility of recognizing other animals, not only as moral patients (as beneficiaries or victims of our benevolent or oppressive decisions), but also as moral agents who can communicate their preferences, address claims to others, respect the basic rules of civility, and participate in the development of respectful norms of cooperation (as Donaldson and Kymlicka argue in Zoopolis).

There are, of course, good reasons for being careful with the study of moral subjectivities in other animals. First, it runs the risk of distracting us from more pressing issues (such as the abolition of animal farming and experimentation). Secondly, it may help fuel the widespread myth that they consent to their oppression (as it is often the case in non-critical animal studies). However, considering other highly social animals as members of moral communities in the second sense – as full and equal members of our interspecies communities in the case of domesticated animals or as members of their own communities in the case of liminal and wild animals – enables us to go beyond “minimal” or “libertarian” animal ethics (which focuses only on negative duties not to harm sentient beings) to develop genuinely relational, social and political analysis of interspecies ethics.

Stop focusing exclusively animals’ vulnerability and capacity to suffer to consider them as communicative social selves with subjective and intersubjective lives of their own may help disrupt excessive forms of paternalism commonly found in animal ethics by challenging the widespread assumption that the we are always the ones who get to “call the shots” and unilaterally decide the fate of other animals.

Traducción autorizada del texto: Haidt, J. y Joseph, C. (2007). The moral mind:
How 5 sets of innate moral intuitions guide the development of many culturespecific virtues, and perhaps even modules. En P. Carruthers, S. Laurence y S.
Stich (Eds.) The Innate Mind, vol. 3. Nueva York: Oxford, págs. 367-391

Este artículo trata acerca de cómo la moral podría ser parcialmente innata, con lo que simplemente queremos decir que está organizada, hasta cierto punto, antes de la experiencia (Marcus 2004). Comenzamos defendiendo una concepción más amplia de la moral y sugiriendo que la mayor parte de la discusión sobre lo innato hasta la fecha no ha sido sobre la moral per se; sino que se ha focalizado, más bien, en si la psicología del daño y de la justicia podría ser innata. Una vez que hayamos presentado nuestra posición de que la moralidad involucra cinco dominios, no dos, dirigiremos nuestra atención a las formas en que esta diversa colección de motivos y conceptos podría ser innata. Consideraremos cinco hipótesis sobre los orígenes del conocimiento y el valor moral, y respaldaremos una de ellas (una forma flexible y generativa de modularidad) como la mejor candidata. Luego, desarrollaremos esta versión de la moral modular, describiendo cómo el "primer borrador" de la moral innata se modifica durante el desarrollo.

This work sets out to analyse the model of deliberative process developed by Haidt in his theory of Social Intuitionism. Specifically, I intend to submit to analy­sis the two illusions which, according to Haidt, govern public deliberation. I shall argue that those illusions do not exist in reality, but result from an erroneous ap­proach to the deliberative process. In his proposal, Haidt forgets to acknowledge the epistemic dimension of deliberation and the place occupied by moral emotions in the communicative process. In my opinion, this emotional dimension of deliberation should be defended from deliberative democracy.