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Lawrence Hrubes

The Power of Touch - The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...power-touch

touch sensory perception perception science psychology health brain emotion experiment neuroscience

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 04 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • At a home in the Romanian city of Iași, Carlson measured cortisol levels in a group of children ranging from two months to three years old. The caregiver-to-child ratio was twenty to one, and most of the children had experienced severe neglect and sensory deprivation. Multiple times a day, Carlson took saliva samples, tracking how cortisol levels fluctuated in response to stressful events. The children, she found, were hormonally off kilter. Under normal conditions, cortisol peaks just before we wake up and then tapers off; in the leagăne infants, it peaked in the afternoon and remained elevated. Those levels, in turn, correlated with faltering performance on numerous cognitive and physical assessments. Then Carlson tried an intervention modelled on the work of Joseph Sparling, a child-development specialist, and the outcomes changed. When half of the orphans received more touching from more caregivers—an increase in hugs, holding, and the making of small adjustments to clothes and hair—their performance markedly improved. They grew bigger, stronger, and more responsive, both cognitively and emotionally, and they reacted better to stress.
  • Touch is the first of the senses to develop in the human infant, and it remains perhaps the most emotionally central throughout our lives. While many researchers have appreciated its power, others have been more circumspect. Writing in 1928, John B. Watson, one of the originators of the behaviorist school of psychology, urged parents to maintain a physical boundary between themselves and their children: “Never hug and kiss them, never let them sit on your lap. If you must, kiss them once on the forehead when they say goodnight. Shake hands with them in the morning. Give them a pat on the head if they have made an extraordinarily good job on a difficult task.” Watson acknowledged that children must be bathed, clothed, and cared for, but he believed that excessive touching—that is, caressing—would create “mawkish” adults. An untouched child, he argued, “enters manhood so bulwarked with stable work and emotional habits that no adversity can quite overwhelm him.” Now we know that, to attain that result, he should have suggested the opposite: touch, as frequent and as caring as possible
  • And yet touch is rarely purely physical. Field’s more recent work has shown that the brain is very good at distinguishing an emotional touch from a similar, but non-emotional, one. A massage chair is not a masseuse. Certain touch receptors exist solely to convey emotion to the brain, rather than sensory information about the external environment. A recent study shows that we can identify other people’s basic emotions based on how they touch us, even when they are separated from us by a curtain. And the emotions that are communicated by touch can go on to shape our behavior. One recent review found that, even if we have no conscious memory of a touch—a hand on the shoulder, say—we may be more likely to agree to a request, respond more (or less) positively to a person or product, or form closer bonds with someone.
markfrankel18

The Touch-Screen Generation - Hanna Rosin - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...309250

language consciousness children iPad digital

shared by markfrankel18 on 27 Mar 13 - No Cached
    • markfrankel18
      markfrankel18 on 27 Mar 13
       
      This is important!
  • What, really, would Maria Montessori have made of this scene? The 30 or so children here were not down at the shore poking their fingers in the sand or running them along mossy stones or digging for hermit crabs. Instead they were all inside, alone or in groups of two or three, their faces a few inches from a screen, their hands doing things Montessori surely did not imagine. A couple of 3-year-old girls were leaning against a pair of French doors, reading an interactive story called Ten Giggly Gorillas and fighting over which ape to tickle next. A boy in a nearby corner had turned his fingertip into a red marker to draw an ugly picture of his older brother. On an old oak table at the front of the room, a giant stuffed Angry Bird beckoned the children to come and test out tablets loaded with dozens of new apps. Some of the chairs had pillows strapped to them, since an 18-month-old might not otherwise be able to reach the table, though she’d know how to swipe once she did.
Lawrence Hrubes

Lights Out: A New Reckoning for Brain Death : The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...reckoning-for-brain-death.html

TOK science medicine death brain ethics

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 16 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 16 Jan 14
     
    "But brain death is not quite as certain as these bioethicists might like. A doctor can't always determine whether the brain is truly dead. The diagnosis is made the old-fashioned way: by careful observation. A doctor checks to see whether the eyes are responsive to light or touch; she pricks the nailbeds to discern whether the pain registers; she tests muscle reflexes; she determines whether the buildup of carbon dioxide triggers spontaneous breathing if the ventilator is shut off; and she may use an electroencephalograph to detect electrical activity in the brain. (However, even a dead brain may produce some voltage.) If all the findings are negative, then the declaration is made. Even then, the doctor can be wrong. "
markfrankel18

The Limits of Friendship - The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...math-dunbar-number-friendships

TOK friendship psychology technology social media

shared by markfrankel18 on 08 Oct 14 - Cached
  • The Dunbar number is actually a series of them. The best known, a hundred and fifty, is the number of people we call casual friends—the people, say, you’d invite to a large party.
  • On an even deeper level, there may be a physiological aspect of friendship that virtual connections can never replace. This wouldn’t surprise Dunbar, who discovered his number when he was studying the social bonding that occurs among primates through grooming. Over the past few years, Dunbar and his colleagues have been looking at the importance of touch in sparking the sort of neurological and physiological responses that, in turn, lead to bonding and friendship. “We underestimate how important touch is in the social world,” he said.
  • So what happens if you’re raised from a young age to see virtual interactions as akin to physical ones? “This is the big imponderable,” Dunbar said. “We haven’t yet seen an entire generation that’s grown up with things like Facebook go through adulthood yet.”
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  • One concern, though, is that some social skills may not develop as effectively when so many interactions exist online. We learn how we are and aren’t supposed to act by observing others and then having opportunities to act out our observations ourselves. We aren’t born with full social awareness, and Dunbar fears that too much virtual interaction may subvert that education. “In the sandpit of life, when somebody kicks sand in your face, you can’t get out of the sandpit. You have to deal with it, learn, compromise,” he said. “On the internet, you can pull the plug and walk away. There’s no forcing mechanism that makes us have to learn.”
Lawrence Hrubes

The Fake-Tongue Illusion - The New Yorker - 2 views

www.newyorker.com/...butchers-tongue-illusion

TOK human sciences perception senses sensory perception taste gustation illusions psychology ethics brain mind neuroscience

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 01 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • Michel and his co-authors put their magic tongue to use in a simple but provocative experiment, carried out late last year and described in the current issue of the scientific journal Perception. Although the involvement of a stretchy pink latex tongue makes it easy to mistake the experiment for a cheap gag, it’s actually an important addition to a distinguished tradition of psychological research that studies illusions for what they can reveal about how the brain constructs reality.
  • “A lot of my colleagues don’t want to think about the mouth and flavor,” he said. “They all want to study hearing and vision.” Spence’s work, by contrast, is concerned with how the brain combines input from multiple senses to create perception, and he regularly finds himself arguing for the importance of touch, taste, and smell in the construction of our day-to-day experiences. And, while the hand is limited to two senses, the tongue offers the possibility of testing four sensory modes: touch, sight, taste, and smell (through a process called retronasal olfaction).
Lawrence Hrubes

Problems Too Disgusting to Solve - The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...ater-problems-disgusting-solve

science psychology emotion human sciences perception reason

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 22 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • last month, Bill Gates released a video of one of the latest ventures funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation: the Omniprocessor, a Seattle-based processing plant that burns sewage to make clean drinking water. In the video, Gates raises a glass of water to his lips. Just five minutes ago, the caption explains, that water was human waste. Gates takes a sip. “It’s water,” he says. “Having studied the engineering behind it,” he writes, on the foundation’s blog, “I would happily drink it every day. It’s that safe.”
  • In the first series of studies, the group asked adults in five cities about their backgrounds, their political and personal views, and, most important, their view on the concept of “recycled water.” On average, everyone was uncomfortable with the idea—even when they were told that treated, recycled water is actually safer to drink than unfiltered tap water. That discomfort, Rozin found, was all about disgust. Twenty-six per cent of participants were so disgusted by the idea of toilet-to-tap that they even agreed with the statement, “It is impossible for recycled water to be treated to a high enough quality that I would want to use it.” They didn’t care what the safety data said. Their guts told them that the water would never be drinkable. It’s a phenomenon known as contagion, or, as Rozin describes it, “once in contact, always in contact.” By touching something we find disgusting, a previously neutral or even well-liked item can acquire—permanently—its properties of grossness.
  • eelings of disgust are often immune to rationality. And with good reason: evolutionarily, disgust is an incredibly adaptive, life-saving reaction. We find certain things instinctively gross because they really can harm us. Human secretions pass on disease. Noxious odors signal that your surroundings may be unsafe. If something feels slimy and sludgy, it’s likely a moisture-rich environment where pathogens may proliferate. Disgust is powerful, in short, because it often signals something important. It’s easy, though, to be disgusted by things that aren’t actually dangerous. In a prior study, Rozin found that people were unwilling to drink a favorite beverage into which a “fully sterilized” cockroach had been dipped. Intellectually, they knew that the drink was safe, but they couldn’t get over the hump of disgust. In another experiment, students wouldn’t eat chocolate that had been molded to look like poop: they knew that it was safe—tasty, even—but its appearance was too much to handle. Their response makes no logical sense. When it comes to recycled water, for instance, Rozin points out that, on some level, all water comes from sewage: “Rain is water that used to be in someone’s toilet, and nobody seems to mind.” The problem, he says, has to do with making the hidden visible. “If it’s obvious—take shit water, put it through a filter—then people are upset.”
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  • Disgust has deep psychological roots, emerging early in a child’s development. Infants and young toddlers don’t feel grossed out by anything—diapers, Rozin observes, are there in part to stop a baby “from eating her shit.” In the young mind, curiosity and exploration often overpower any competing instincts. But, at around four years old, there seems to be a profound shift. Suddenly, children won’t touch things that they find appalling. Some substances, especially human excretions of any sort, are seen as gross and untouchable all over the world; others are culturally determined. But, whether universal or culturally-specific, the disgust reactions that we acquire as children stay with us throughout our lives. If anything, they grow stronger—and more consequential—with age.
markfrankel18

Debate Erupts in California Over Curriculum on India's History - NYTimes.com - 0 views

mobile.nytimes.com/...-india-history-curriculum.html

history TOK language

shared by markfrankel18 on 07 May 16 - No Cached
  • Victors are said to write history. But in California, history is being written by a committee that is at the center of a raging debate over how to tell the story of South Asia as it tries to update textbooks and revise curriculums for Grades 6 and 7.The dispute centers on whether the region that includes modern-day India, Pakistan and Nepal should be referred to as India or as South Asia, to represent the plurality of cultures there — particularly because India was not a nation-state until 1947. It also touches on how the culture of the region is portrayed, including women’s role in society and the vestiges of the caste system.
Lawrence Hrubes

Swiss anger at Muslim handshake exemption in Therwil school - BBC News - 1 views

www.bbc.com/...world-europe-35967349

ethics religious knowledge systems culture customs women

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 05 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • A Swiss secondary school has caused uproar by allowing two Muslim boys not to shake the hand of women teachers - a common greeting in Swiss schools.The boys had told the school in the small, northern town of Therwil it was against their faith to touch a woman outside their family.Justice Minister Simonetta Sommaruga said shaking hands was part of Swiss culture and daily life.A local teachers' union said the exemption discriminated against women.
markfrankel18

The Dangers of Certainty: A Lesson From Auschwitz - NYTimes.com - 1 views

mobile.nytimes.com/...the-dangers-of-certainty

TOK history ethics certainty

shared by markfrankel18 on 08 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • The ascent of man was secured through scientific creativity. But unlike many of his more glossy and glib contemporary epigones, Dr. Bronowski was never reductive in his commitment to science. Scientific activity was always linked to artistic creation. For Bronowski, science and art were two neighboring mighty rivers that flowed from a common source: the human imagination. Newton and Shakespeare, Darwin and Coleridge, Einstein and Braque: all were interdependent facets of the human mind and constituted what was best and most noble about the human adventure.
  • For Dr. Bronowski, the moral consequence of knowledge is that we must never judge others on the basis of some absolute, God-like conception of certainty.
  • At this point, in the final minutes of the show, the scene suddenly shifts to Auschwitz, where many members of Bronowski’s family were murdered. Then this happened. Please stay with it. This short video from the show lasts only four minutes or so.[Video: Dr. Jacob Bronowski's argument against certainty, made at Auschwitz for his show "The Ascent of Man." Watch on YouTube.]It is, I am sure you agree, an extraordinary and moving moment. Bronowski dips his hand into the muddy water of a pond which contained the remains of his family members and the members of countless other families. All victims of the same hatred: the hatred of the other human being. By contrast, he says — just before the camera hauntingly cuts to slow motion — “We have to touch people.”
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC News - Do 85 rich people have same wealth as half the world? - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...magazine-26613682

TOK statistics economics math SocialScience

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 19 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • Are the 85 richest people in the world as wealthy as the world's poorest half? A number of listeners got in touch to ask about this fact, widely reported around the world, from the Washington Post to CNN. The figure comes from a report by British aid charity Oxfam. It got lots of attention, so the charity produced another figure for the UK, stating that the five richest families had more wealth than the poorest 20%. But how were these figures calculated?
markfrankel18

Tennessee Pastor Disputes Wildlife Possession Charge by State - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ossession-charge-by-state.html

ToK religion ethics

shared by markfrankel18 on 16 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • In a mix of old-time religion, modern media and Tennessee law, a 22-year-old preacher who has become a reality television star because of his experience in handling poisonous snakes pleaded not guilty on Friday to illegally keeping dozens of them that he and his congregants routinely touch during worship services.
  • “We don’t allow anybody other than a permitted individual to possess venomous snakes,” said Matthew Cameron, a spokesman for the wildlife agency. “We don’t view him as any different from anyone else in the general public who has a king cobra in his room.”
  • “This ain’t no longer just a fight for snake handling,” Mr. Hamblin, the father of five, told a group of supporters wearing red — to symbolize the blood of Christ — before his arraignment on a misdemeanor wildlife possession charge. “This is a fight for freedom of religion.”
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  • But to Mr. Hamblin and his supporters, the case is little more than state-instigated discrimination against a religious practice that has been present in East Tennessee for more than a century. “When those officers entered the house of God, that cooked it with me,” said James Slusher, who attends Mr. Hamblin’s church but said he does not handle snakes.
markfrankel18

Adam Gopnik: What Galileo Saw : The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...130211crat_atlarge_gopnik

TOK science

shared by markfrankel18 on 24 Sep 13 - Cached
  • It may be no accident that so many of the great scientists really have followed Galileo, in ducking and avoiding the consequences of what they discovered. In the roster of genius, evasion of worldly responsibility seems practically a fixed theme. Newton escaped the world through nuttiness, Darwin through elaborate evasive courtesies and by farming out the politics to Huxley. Heisenberg’s uncertainty was political—he did nuclear-fission research for Hitler—as well as quantum-mechanical. Science demands heroic minds, but not heroic morals. It’s one of the things that make it move. ♦
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 24 Sep 13
     
    "Kepler encouraged Galileo to announce publicly his agreement with the sun-centered cosmology of the Polish astronomer monk Copernik, better known to history by the far less euphonious, Latinized name of Copernicus. His system, which greatly eased astronomical calculation, had been published in 1543, to little ideological agitation. It was only half a century later, as the consequences of pushing the earth out into plebeian orbit dawned on the priests, that it became too hot to handle, or even touch."
Lawrence Hrubes

Ai Weiwei Survey Lands at the Brooklyn Museum - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ds-at-the-brooklyn-museum.html

arts TOK China politics sculpture

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 25 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • Mr. Ai is a complex, troublesome figure: an artistic provocateur who works in several mediums, an activist and thorn in the side of the Chinese powers that be and an impresario able to marshal scores of variously adept Chinese artisans to make ambitious pieces that he barely touches. He’s also a designer and part-time architect who collaborated with the Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron on the emblematic “Bird’s Nest” National Stadium in Beijing for the 2008 Olympics. And he was the darling of the Chinese power structure, until he began jumping in where he wasn’t invited.
markfrankel18

UBC student writes 52,438 word architecture dissertation with no punctuation - not ever... - 1 views

www.vancouversun.com/...story.html

TOK language indigenous knowledge systems

shared by markfrankel18 on 11 May 15 - No Cached
  • A 61-year-old architect from the Nisga’a First Nation, Stewart explains that he “wanted to make a point” about aboriginal culture, colonialism, and “the blind acceptance of English language conventions in academia.”
markfrankel18

Science Isn't Broken | FiveThirtyEight - 0 views

fivethirtyeight.com/...science-isnt-broken

TOK science bias research statistics p-hacking

shared by markfrankel18 on 02 Sep 15 - No Cached
  • If we’re going to rely on science as a means for reaching the truth — and it’s still the best tool we have — it’s important that we understand and respect just how difficult it is to get a rigorous result
  • Scientists’ overreliance on p-values has led at least one journal to decide it has had enough of them. In February, Basic and Applied Social Psychology announced that it will no longer publish p-values.
  • P-hacking and similar types of manipulations often arise from human biases. “You can do it in unconscious ways — I’ve done it in unconscious ways,” Simonsohn said. “You really believe your hypothesis and you get the data and there’s ambiguity about how to analyze it.” When the first analysis you try doesn’t spit out the result you want, you keep trying until you find one that does.
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  • From 2001 to 2009, the number of retractions issued in the scientific literature rose tenfold. It remains a matter of debate whether that’s because misconduct is increasing or is just easier to root out.
  • Science isn’t broken, nor is it untrustworthy. It’s just more difficult than most of us realize. We can apply more scrutiny to study designs and require more careful statistics and analytic methods, but that’s only a partial solution. To make science more reliable, we need to adjust our expectations of it.
  • Science is not a magic wand that turns everything it touches to truth. Instead, “science operates as a procedure of uncertainty reduction,” said Nosek, of the Center for Open Science. “The goal is to get less wrong over time.”
  • Some of these biases are helpful, at least to a point. Take, for instance, naive realism — the idea that whatever belief you hold, you believe it because it’s true. This mindset is almost essential for doing science, quantum mechanics researcher Seth Lloyd of MIT told me. “You have to believe that whatever you’re working on right now is the solution to give you the energy and passion you need to work.” But hypotheses are usually incorrect, and when results overturn a beloved idea, a researcher must learn from the experience and keep, as Lloyd described it, “the hopeful notion that, ‘OK, maybe that idea wasn’t right, but this next one will be.’”
markfrankel18

Experiment Gives Illusion of That Shrinking Feeling - New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...29fat.html

TOK science psychology illusion

shared by markfrankel18 on 29 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • The point of his experiment was to use the illusion as a tool, to force the brain to change its perception of body size so that the scientists could use a scanner to spy on the mental work in progress. This kind of mapping to find the origins of body image had not been done before, Dr. Ehrsson said. "It's a little bit of a forgotten sense," he said. "We know about touch, pain and position, but the sense of size of body parts has been a mystery. There are no receptors in skin or muscle that tell the brain the size of body parts, so the brain has to figure it out by comparing signals."
markfrankel18

The Moral Instinct - New York Times - 3 views

www.nytimes.com/...13Psychology-t.html

ethics TOK Pinker

shared by markfrankel18 on 31 Mar 13 - Cached
  • It seems we may all be vulnerable to moral illusions the ethical equivalent of the bending lines that trick the eye on cereal boxes and in psychology textbooks. Illusions are a favorite tool of perception scientists for exposing the workings of the five senses, and of philosophers for shaking people out of the naïve belief that our minds give us a transparent window onto the world (since if our eyes can be fooled by an illusion, why should we trust them at other times?). Today, a new field is using illusions to unmask a sixth sense, the moral sense.
  • The first hallmark of moralization is that the rules it invokes are felt to be universal. Prohibitions of rape and murder, for example, are felt not to be matters of local custom but to be universally and objectively warranted. One can easily say, “I don’t like brussels sprouts, but I don’t care if you eat them,” but no one would say, “I don’t like killing, but I don’t care if you murder someone.”The other hallmark is that people feel that those who commit immoral acts deserve to be punished.
  • Until recently, it was understood that some people didn’t enjoy smoking or avoided it because it was hazardous to their health. But with the discovery of the harmful effects of secondhand smoke, smoking is now treated as immoral. Smokers are ostracized; images of people smoking are censored; and entities touched by smoke are felt to be contaminated (so hotels have not only nonsmoking rooms but nonsmoking floors). The desire for retribution has been visited on tobacco companies, who have been slapped with staggering “punitive damages.” At the same time, many behaviors have been amoralized, switched from moral failings to lifestyle choices.
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  • But whether an activity flips our mental switches to the “moral” setting isn’t just a matter of how much harm it does. We don’t show contempt to the man who fails to change the batteries in his smoke alarms or takes his family on a driving vacation, both of which multiply the risk they will die in an accident. Driving a gas-guzzling Hummer is reprehensible, but driving a gas-guzzling old Volvo is not; eating a Big Mac is unconscionable, but not imported cheese or crème brûlée. The reason for these double standards is obvious: people tend to align their moralization with their own lifestyles.
  • People don’t generally engage in moral reasoning, Haidt argues, but moral rationalization: they begin with the conclusion, coughed up by an unconscious emotion, and then work backward to a plausible justification.
  • Together, the findings corroborate Greene’s theory that our nonutilitarian intuitions come from the victory of an emotional impulse over a cost-benefit analysis.
  • The psychologist Philip Tetlock has shown that the mentality of taboo — a conviction that some thoughts are sinful to think — is not just a superstition of Polynesians but a mind-set that can easily be triggered in college-educated Americans. Just ask them to think about applying the sphere of reciprocity to relationships customarily governed by community or authority. When Tetlock asked subjects for their opinions on whether adoption agencies should place children with the couples willing to pay the most, whether people should have the right to sell their organs and whether they should be able to buy their way out of jury duty, the subjects not only disagreed but felt personally insulted and were outraged that anyone would raise the question.
  • The moral sense, then, may be rooted in the design of the normal human brain. Yet for all the awe that may fill our minds when we reflect on an innate moral law within, the idea is at best incomplete. Consider this moral dilemma: A runaway trolley is about to kill a schoolteacher. You can divert the trolley onto a sidetrack, but the trolley would trip a switch sending a signal to a class of 6-year-olds, giving them permission to name a teddy bear Muhammad. Is it permissible to pull the lever? This is no joke. Last month a British woman teaching in a private school in Sudan allowed her class to name a teddy bear after the most popular boy in the class, who bore the name of the founder of Islam. She was jailed for blasphemy and threatened with a public flogging, while a mob outside the prison demanded her death. To the protesters, the woman’s life clearly had less value than maximizing the dignity of their religion, and their judgment on whether it is right to divert the hypothetical trolley would have differed from ours. Whatever grammar guides people’s moral judgments can’t be all that universal. Anyone who stayed awake through Anthropology 101 can offer many other examples.
  • The impulse to avoid harm, which gives trolley ponderers the willies when they consider throwing a man off a bridge, can also be found in rhesus monkeys, who go hungry rather than pull a chain that delivers food to them and a shock to another monkey. Respect for authority is clearly related to the pecking orders of dominance and appeasement that are widespread in the animal kingdom. The purity-defilement contrast taps the emotion of disgust that is triggered by potential disease vectors like bodily effluvia, decaying flesh and unconventional forms of meat, and by risky sexual practices like incest.
  • All this brings us to a theory of how the moral sense can be universal and variable at the same time. The five moral spheres are universal, a legacy of evolution. But how they are ranked in importance, and which is brought in to moralize which area of social life — sex, government, commerce, religion, diet and so on — depends on the culture.
  • By analogy, we are born with a universal moral grammar that forces us to analyze human action in terms of its moral structure, with just as little awareness. The idea that the moral sense is an innate part of human nature is not far-fetched. A list of human universals collected by the anthropologist Donald E. Brown includes many moral concepts and emotions, including a distinction between right and wrong; empathy; fairness; admiration of generosity; rights and obligations; proscription of murder, rape and other forms of violence; redress of wrongs; sanctions for wrongs against the community; shame; and taboos.
  • Here is the worry. The scientific outlook has taught us that some parts of our subjective experience are products of our biological makeup and have no objective counterpart in the world. The qualitative difference between red and green, the tastiness of fruit and foulness of carrion, the scariness of heights and prettiness of flowers are design features of our common nervous system, and if our species had evolved in a different ecosystem or if we were missing a few genes, our reactions could go the other way. Now, if the distinction between right and wrong is also a product of brain wiring, why should we believe it is any more real than the distinction between red and green? And if it is just a collective hallucination, how could we argue that evils like genocide and slavery are wrong for everyone, rather than just distasteful to us?
  • Putting God in charge of morality is one way to solve the problem, of course, but Plato made short work of it 2,400 years ago. Does God have a good reason for designating certain acts as moral and others as immoral? If not — if his dictates are divine whims — why should we take them seriously? Suppose that God commanded us to torture a child. Would that make it all right, or would some other standard give us reasons to resist? And if, on the other hand, God was forced by moral reasons to issue some dictates and not others — if a command to torture a child was never an option — then why not appeal to those reasons directly?
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