The science of good and evil. Sam Harris 2022-12-19
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The concept of good and evil has been a subject of philosophical and religious discourse for centuries. At its core, the question of good and evil is concerned with determining what actions and behaviors are morally right or wrong. While different societies and cultures may have varying definitions of what is good or evil, there is also a scientific basis for understanding these concepts.
One approach to understanding good and evil from a scientific perspective is through the study of moral psychology. This field seeks to understand how we make moral judgments and how our moral values influence our behavior. Research in moral psychology has identified several factors that contribute to our sense of moral responsibility and our evaluations of good and evil. These include our emotions, our social and cultural context, and the ways in which we process and evaluate information.
One key aspect of moral psychology is the role of emotions in our moral judgments. Emotions, such as empathy and compassion, can lead us to act in ways that are seen as good, while negative emotions, such as anger and resentment, can lead us to act in ways that are seen as evil. In this sense, good and evil can be seen as the products of our emotional responses to different situations.
Our social and cultural context also plays a significant role in shaping our moral values and understanding of good and evil. The values and beliefs of the groups and communities to which we belong can influence our moral judgments and actions. For example, in some cultures, certain actions, such as lying or stealing, may be seen as morally wrong, while in other cultures, these same actions may be seen as acceptable or even necessary.
Another important factor in our moral judgments is the way in which we process and evaluate information. Our brains are designed to quickly and efficiently process information, and this can lead us to make judgments that may not always be completely rational or objective. For example, we may be more likely to view an action as good or evil based on our initial emotional response to it, rather than considering all of the relevant facts and circumstances.
In conclusion, the science of good and evil is a complex and multifaceted field that encompasses a wide range of factors, including our emotions, social and cultural context, and the way in which we process and evaluate information. Understanding these factors can help us to better understand and navigate the moral complexities of the world in which we live.
The Science of Good and Evil: Why People Cheat, Gossip, Care, Share, and ...
But few people say they would kill a healthy man in order to distribute his organs to five patients who will otherwise die, even though the logic—kill one, save five—is identical: a region in our emotional brain rebels at the act of directly and actively taking a man's life, something that feels immeasurably worse than the impersonal act of throwing a switch in an air duct. We will not become enthusiastic for the fact, the knowledge, the absolute truth of the day, but remain always uncertain … In order to make progress, one must leave the door to the unknown ajar. Out of this analysis arise two recommendations, one on personal tolerance and the other on political freedoms, based on extensive scientific data that demonstrates why and how humans can and should be more cooperative. In general, the roots of our moral sense—of honesty, altruism, compassion, generosity and sense of justice and fairness—are sunk deep in evolutionary history, as can be seen in our primate cousins, who are capable of remarkable acts of altruism. As a statement about the universe, agnostic seems to me to be the most rational position to take on the God question because, by the criteria of science and reason, God is an unknowable concept. He contends that human morality evolved as first an individual and then a species-wide mechanism for survival. Although explanations for this remarkable trend are as varied and complex as the theorists proffering them, a general causal vector can be found in the second purpose of religion, that is, its social mode.
Review of: The Science of Good and Evil » Internet Infidels
The Science of Good and Evil picks up where How We Believe left off. More recently evolved parts of the brain might exert top-down control over the emotional regions" that otherwise compel vengeance—probably something similar to the mental training that the Buddhists undergo. Nor do they explain a related mystery—namely, whether it is possible to cultivate virtue through the way we construct a society, raise children or even train our own brains. There, psychologist Richard Davidson uses fMRI to compare activity in the brains of monks who practice Buddhist compassion meditation a deep, sustained focus on the wish that all sentient beings be free from suffering to that in the brains of volunteers who do not. In the first half of this book I shall unpack that sentence in great detail, but for now what I mean is that religion evolved as a social structure to enforce the rules of human interactions, before there were such institutions as the state or such concepts as laws and rights.
The Science of Good and Evil: Why People Cheat, Gossip, Care, Share, and Follow the Golden Rule by Michael Shermer, Paperback
What do we mean by morality and ethics? If one must keep revising and revising a system it means it was not a secure system in the first place and cannot be trusted much less foundational. Can we be good without God? Do bad people ultimately get away with doing bad things if there is no final judgment? With provisional ethics there is no abdication of moral responsibility, but at the same time there is room for tolerance and diversity in recognizing that although we are all responsible for our moral actions, there is scope for forgiveness and redemption in recognizing the fallibility of humans and human social systems. We are all humans after all, and quite close genetically. Many people worry that there is something unscientific about making such value judgments. As society evolved, humans needed rules governing behavior e.
The Science of Good and Evil: Excerpt » Michael Shermer
Just as there is nothing irrational about valuing human health and seeking to understand it this is the science of medicine , there is nothing irrational about valuing human well-being more generally and seeking to understand it. Moral principles require moral reasoning. As he closes the divide between science and morality, Shermer draws on stories from the Yanamamö, infamously known as the "fierce people" of the tropical rain forest, to the Stanford studies on jailers' behavior in prisons. Nothing is truly good nor evil, it depends on the perception of the individual. Long before there were state-enforced constitutional rights for the protection of basic freedoms, humans devised various mechanisms of behavior control to facilitate good will and cooperation, and to attenuate excessive avarice and competitiveness. Can We Be Good Without God? Seeing life from this perspective can assist us in determining what is truly good and what is evil. Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstitions, and Other Confusions of our Time.
The closer a monkey was related to the victim, the longer it would go hungry, which supports the idea that morality evolved because it aided the survival of those with whom we share the most genes. People who are emotionally secure, who view life's problems as manageable and who feel safe and protected tend to show the greatest empathy for strangers and to act altruistically and compassionately. . But monkeys and apes, like people, have taken a trait that evolved to help kin and extended it to completely unrelated creatures. October 2, 2010 SUBSCRIBE TO THE MAKING SENSE PODCAST.
How can we tell the difference between right and wrong? Is economics a true science yet? Shermer shows how these motives came into being as a product of both our evolutionary heritage and cultural history, and how we can construct an ethical system that generates a morality that is neither dogmatically absolute nor irrationally relative — a provisional morality for an age of science that provides empirical evidence and a rational basis for belief. As far as our understanding of the world is concerned—there are no facts without values. He fails, however, to locate morality in any kind of conceptual framework that would allow us to treat moral ideas as anything more than human judgments. The specific choices are based on the individuals experience with consequences. As long as religion does not make quasi-scientific claims about the factual nature of the world, then there is no conflict between science and religion.
Let us endeavor, then, to think well: this is the principle of ethics. Under the belief that I can choose my own goods and evils, nobody can tell me that this is wrong, and therefore I could not be punished under a law because law would only be relative. The church is not offering an alternative moral framework; it is offering a false one. In fulfilling the first purpose, myths explicate the origin and nature of the world and life, and have been, for the most part, displaced by science. One must think and act on a personal belief or a disbelief, however, so when forced to apply a label which I generally try to avoid I call myself a nontheist; if forced to bet on whether there is a God or not, I bet that there is not, and I live my life accordingly.
A better question is this: Is it possible to know if there is a God or not? The rest is details. Does good and evil exist, and if so, from whence do they come? It is more worried about gay marriage than about nuclear proliferation. To date, the prayer and healing studies have all proved either nonsignificant or significant but harboring deep methodological flaws. My answer is firmly negative. Freeman 2nd edition, 2002, Henry Holt. The religious foundation of human virtues and vices, saints and sinners, in fact, is a codification of an informal psychology of moral and immoral sentiments and behavior. He does, however, occasionally speak eloquently about the ways in which human beings are challenged by moral notions and have generated forceful moral codes.
The Science of Good and Evil: Why People Cheat, Gossip, Care, Share, and Follow the Golden Rule by Michael Shermer
In the social mode, religion is that social structure, and God — even a God that exists only in the heads of those who believe in Him — is the ultimate enforcer of the rules. In 1950, Murray Ross discovered that agnostics and atheists were more willing to help the poor than their deeply religious counterparts. Why We Are Moral: The Evolutionary Origins of Morality, a theory on the origins of morality is presented in four chapters. In his 2008 book "Beyond Revenge: The Evolution of the Forgiveness Instinct," he argues that both forgiveness and revenge "solved critical evolutionary problems for our ancestors. And the final "in general" is that people's ethical decision making is strongly driven by gut emotions rather than by rational, analytic thought. Does evil exist, and if so, what is the nature of evil? Such people are less likely to care for the elderly, for instance, or to donate blood. There is a science dedicated specifically to this subject called evolutionary ethics, founded by Charles Darwin a century and a half ago and continuing as a vigorous and viable field of study and debate today.
