More Morality Online from Harvard

Here are two videos of Harvard professor Marc Hauser lecturing on moral psychology:


Part 1

Part 2

Embedded here is part 2 which starts with everyone's favorite: the trolley problem!

Professor Sandel's Outreach in Philosophical Ethics

The Times Profiles Professor Sandel's outreach programs in philosophical ethics here.

Would you switch a runaway trolley from one track to another if it meant killing one person instead of five? Would it be just as moral to push a person in front of the speeding trolley to stop it and save the five? What about a surgeon killing one healthy person and using his organs so that five people who needed organ transplants could live? Is that moral? Why not?

Check out Sandel's outreach website: http://justiceharvard.org/ co-produced by Harvard and PBS.

Ethics in the News: Philosophy on the Today Show!

Click here for an updated link to the Sandel interview.

Philosophy on the Today Show!

On NBC's Today show Michael Sandel talked with Meredith Vieira about the relevance of philosophy to our everyday lives.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Evolution and Meaninglessness

Does the theory of evolution leave room for meaning in the universe? Robert Wright’s book Evolution of God was attacked in The New Republic for softening the meaninglessness of evolution. [Late Update: This phrasing may be vague. What I mean is that Coyne says that Wright is making evolution "congenial" to the faithful. Apparently Coyne thinks evolution is not congenial to the faithful. I just wanted to invite our readers to ponder evolution and its significance for our self-image. - Editor]

But Jim Manzi at The Atlantic defends Wright here. He offers a very interesting account of computer algorithms that work like evolution.

Computer scientists were inspired [...] because they observed the same three fundamental algorithmic operators — selection, crossover, and mutation — accomplish a similar task in the natural world. Notice that the method searches a space of possible solutions far more rapidly than random search, but it neither requires nor generates beliefs about the causal relationship between patterns within the genome and fitness beyond the raw observation of the survival or death of individual organisms. This is what makes the approach applicable to such a vast range of phenomena. That such a comparatively simple concept can explain so much about the way nature works is what makes genetic evolution a scientific paradigm of stupendous beauty and power. As Leonardo put it, simplicity is the highest form of sophistication.

Check out Manzi's discussion here.