The Economist Reports on Survey of Philosophers

Anthony Gottlieb at the Economist reports on PhilPapers.org's survey of philosopher's philosophical positions and beliefs.

With regards to aesthetics and ethics:

By a fairly narrow margin, today’s philosophers believe that judgments of artistic value are not merely matters of individual taste: 41% said aesthetic values are objective, 34% say subjective, and a quarter gave some other answer. They were not asked directly whether moral values are objective, but the responses to related questions suggest that most philosophers believe they are. Some 56% incline towards “moral realism”, which has no precise definition but implies that ethical questions have objectively right (and wrong) answers, and nearly two-thirds endorsed moral “cognitivism”, which suggests that they believe there are moral facts or truths.

And:

When asked which dead philosopher they most identified with, a clear winner emerged, with 21% of the votes: David Hume, the 18th-century thinker, historian, sceptic and agnostic who was a close friend of the economist Adam Smith. Aristotle, Kant and Wittgenstein took second, third and fourth places. The next six spots went to philosophers from the 20th century, most recently Donald Davidson, an American who died in 2003. Plato made 13th place and Socrates limped in at 21st.

Science and Human Values

Sam Harris at TED talks about science and human values.

I am going to speak today about the relation between science and human values. Now, it is generally understood that questions of morality, questions about good and evil and right and wrong, are questions about which science officially has no opinion. It's thought that science can help us get what we value, but it can never tell us what we ought to value. And consequently, most people... think that science will never answer the most important questions in human life, questions like: "What is worth living for?", "What is worth dying for?" and "What constitutes a good life?". I am going to argue that this is an illusion - that the separation between science and human values is an illusion and actually quite a dangerous one at this point in human history.

Art Evolved Like Ethics Did and Vice Versa

At the USA Today there's an article about the evolution of morality. The journalist, Cathy Lynn Grossman, attended the....

Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowships in Science & Religion where the ideas are flying among scientists, theologians, philosophers and the reporters who cover them.

Evolutionary biologist Francisco Ayala...

... traced humanity's evolutionary development and linked the capacity for ethics to advanced intelligence, the development of language and the unique-to-humans concept of self-awareness.

He thinks ethics -- which can also exist apart from religion in his view -- evolved at the same time as aesthetics, the awareness of beauty. Art and aesthetics, like human altruism, require value judgments and the ability to compare.

Hitchens Revises the Ten Commandments

If the video doesn't seem to fit try watching it directly at YouTube.

The Vanity Fair article.

Who Do You Think Possesses 'Moral Authority' in America?

The question, "Who Do You Think Possesses 'Moral Authority' in America?" is being considered on a popular blog at The Atlantic magazine edited by Andrew Sullivan, with a hat tip to Mark Kleiman.

The excerpt below gives an idea of what they are taking "moral authority" to mean.

“Who in contemporary America has moral authority?”... I took this to mean both “moral authority you are prepared to accept” and “enough public standing to be an actual force....”

who

...has the intellectual force, the moral clarity, and the nerve...

but does not lack the necessary...

... notoriety, nor the impulse to seek it out... I could come up with only one name: Barack Obama. Could it really be true that there is no other political leader, journalist, academic, religious figure, business leader, trade unionist currently active with the stature to summon people to action based on moral authority as opposed to self-interest?

It seems to me that the field wasn’t always so empty.

And then he lists:
Martin Luther King Jr.
Adlai Stevenson
Edward R. Murrow
Walter Cronkite


So, who do you think has moral authority today?

Please post your nominations in the comments section. Let's keep it to living persons.