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In search of an objective morality
I’ve had a few conversations lately on morality, and it strikes me that I haven’t written about it in quite a while. The discussions focused on whether there is any objective morality, or any...
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Is there a moral arc to history?
The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice. As someone who isn’t able to find an objective basis for morality, I’ve often wondered what that means for the above statement from...
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The system components of pain
Image credit: Holger.Ellgaard via Wikipedia Peter Hankins at Conscious Entities has a post looking at the morality of consciousness, which is a commentary on piece at Nautilus by Jim Davies on the same...
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Changing what makes us happy
from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal (click through for the hovertext and red button caption) Greg Egan in his novel Incandescence posits an alien civilization whose ancestors, in order to survive,...
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Big societies came before big gods
Some years ago I reviewed a book by Ara Norenzayan called Big Gods: How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict. Norenzayan’s thesis was that it was a belief in big gods, specifically cosmic...
View ArticleIs morality objective, yet relative?
Jason Mckenzie Alexander at iai.tv makes an interesting proposition, that morality is a social technology, one that goes out of date and frequently needs to be upgraded. He first describes the common...
View ArticleThe necessary attributes of a responsible agent
George Ellis has an article at Aeon on free will that is garnering some attention. Ellis' case is a fairly classic one. Brain are complex systems whose operations, due to chaotic and stochastic...
View ArticleThe forlorn search for moral realism
I'm not a moral realist. But I think we definitely have personal morals, the moral norms of the culture we live in, and the moral rules we encode in law. These all interact and influence each other...
View ArticleConsciousness and moral status
This talk by David Chalmers on the relationship between consciousness and moral status is pretty interesting. You don't have to watch the video to follow this post, but it's in response to arguments he...
View ArticleSome words might simply no longer be productive for precise conversations
Ronnie de Souza has an interesting article at Aeon on why he thinks the concept of morality isn't helpful. His overall thesis is that the idea that there are things that are right or wrong without...
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