You operate an orphanage and your funding has just been slashed. Kids are now going without dessert. Your friend owns a grocery store and is willing to donate 500 Klondike bars to the orphans if you lie and tell the government that he donated 1,000. What would you do-o-o?
A Klondike bar in your freezer begins talking to you, claiming to be the voice of God. It instructs you to slay your firstborn son. WHAT WOULD YOU DO-O-O?
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?
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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.
Fundamentalism enforces a consensus about ultimate ends without accounting for difference, while relativism makes sharing common values impossible. In “In Praise of Doubt,” Mr. Berger has teamed up with the Dutch philosopher Anton Zijderveld to argue that it is possible to maintain moral certainty about liberal democratic values without succumbing to either of these extremes.
Medvedev said preteen students at about 12,000 schools in 18 Russian regions would take the classes. They will be offered the choice of studying the dominant Russian Orthodox religion, Islam, Buddhism or Judaism, or of taking an overview of all four faiths, or a course in secular ethics.
Students and their parents must be allowed to choose freely, Medvedev said in addressing top clerics and officials at his residence outside Moscow. "Any coercion, pressure will be absolutely unacceptable and counterproductive," he said.
...
The offer of a choice appeared aimed to ease concerns that Russian Orthodoxy will be forced on schoolchildren as the church gains influence and tightens ties with the state.
Mandatory classes in Orthodox culture were introduced in a few Russian regions three years ago, but they alarmed adherents of other confessions who said religion has no place in schools in a secular state. The classes also were criticized as being reminiscent of the forced study of communism or scientific atheism during Soviet times, with one mandatory ideology being substituted with another.
It is encouraging to see any major state officially recognize the importance of an ethical education. What remains to be seen, though, is whether the students who opt for classes in one or more religions will be exposed to any sort of critical examination of the moral codes they learn about, or whether the courses will stop at, "This is what Muslims (or Jews, or Christians, or Buddhists) believe we ought to do." One hopes that students in the program will at least be invited to consider whether and why anyone ought to do what Muslims (or Jews, or Christians, or Buddhists) believe we ought to do, whether or not they opt for the so-called "secular ethics" classes.
Maybe explicit reflection crowds out other forms of moral responsiveness that are even better; or maybe reflection on philosophical examples eviscerates the intuitions on which we must depend; or maybe moral reflection is mostly just self-serving rationalization, at which ethicists are particularly talented.
The use of any coercive tactics against prisoners ought to expose those responsible to prosecution...
... few fair-minded people would weigh that ethical purity more heavily than preventing further attacks like those that killed thousands in September 2001.
The real damage done by Bush administration torture policies was the effort to codify coercion.
... all forms of torture, broadly defined, ought to be banned. What does such a ban mean? It means that anyone who gets rough with a prisoner is crossing the line and placing himself at risk. This, history makes clear, is the only way to curb the universal tendency of men to abuse those over whom they wield complete control.
does not mean that there can be no circumstance in which torture is justified, at least to those who would not adhere blindly to principle. Life presents moral dilemmas, and combat in particular produces them. To obtain life-saving intelligence when no alternative means are at hand, a moral person might reluctantly accept the responsibility for crossing that line. Those who investigate his actions later can determine whether they were justified, but the moral person accepts that he or she may suffer for making that choice.
I [...] respect the decision in 2002 to take whatever steps were necessary to pry information from Sheikh Muhammad and Zubaydah. An inquiry may reveal that their questioners were motivated primarily by a desire to inflict suffering and that they achieved nothing, but I doubt it. I believe they were urgently motivated to thwart attacks on al-Qaeda's drawing boards, and probably did so.
"Its principal priority for intelligence was not aimed at preempting another terrorist attack on the U.S. but discovering a smoking gun linking Iraq and al Qaeda,"
Wilkerson wrote that in one case, the CIA told Cheney's office that a prisoner under its interrogation program was now "compliant," meaning agents recommended the use of "alternative" techniques should stop.
At that point, "The VP's office ordered them to continue the enhanced methods," Wilkerson wrote.
"The detainee had not revealed any al Qaeda-Baghdad contacts yet. This ceased only after Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, under waterboarding in Egypt, 'revealed' such contacts."
"This is my opinion," Maj. Paul Burney told the inspector-general's office. "Even though they were giving information and some of it was useful, while we were there a large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between aI Qaeda and Iraq and we were not being successful in establishing a link between aI Qaeda and Iraq. The more frustrated people got in not being able to establish this link ... there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate results."
Burney's account was included in a Senate Armed Services Committee report released in April.
NewsHour economics correspondent Paul Solman recently sat down with behavioral economist Dan Ariely, who studies irrationality in economic decision making, to discuss why people cheat, the media's influence on markets and whether the public needs to see remorse on Wall Street.
Ariely: "In the media, there's this slogan that says, 'If it bleeds, it leads,' with the idea that if something is emotionally capturing, then we want to emphasize that. And because of this there's a bias both in the media and in ourselves as human beings to overemphasize things that are emotionally grabbing." [...]
Ariely: "So if you think to yourself: What's more important? To have a report about one unfortunate individual who lost their job and has very difficult life circumstances, or something that helps us understand more generally what is going on in AIG, how is the bailout going, what is the future of this company?" [...]
Ariely: "So it's the news feeding our psychology of caring more about emotional things, and because of that much of the news is not really that educational and informative in terms of helping us understand what is going on, instead of just kind of tapping our emotion over and over and over. And I think because of that people also get more fearful. If all the news is focusing on these terrible pieces of information about how frightening this is, and this is, and gloom here, and gloom there, we're going to be much more fearful."
America's poor donate more, in percentage terms, than higher-income groups do, surveys of charitable giving show. What's more, their generosity declines less in hard times than the generosity of richer givers does.
"The lowest-income fifth (of the population) always give at more than their capacity," said Virginia Hodgkinson, former vice president for research at Independent Sector, a Washington-based association of major nonprofit agencies. "The next two-fifths give at capacity, and those above that are capable of giving two or three times more than they give."
Indeed, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics' latest survey of consumer expenditure found that the poorest fifth of America's households contributed an average of 4.3 percent of their incomes to charitable organizations in 2007. The richest fifth gave at less than half that rate, 2.1 percent. [...]
The working poor, disproportionate numbers of which are recent immigrants, are America's most generous group, according to Arthur Brooks, the author of the book "Who Really Cares," an analysis of U.S. generosity. [...]
"When you have just a little, you're thankful for what you have," Pastor Coletta Jones said, "but with every step you take up the ladder of success, the money clouds your mind and gets you into a state of never being satisfied."
Brooks offered this statistic as supportive evidence: Fifty-eight percent of noncontributors with above-median incomes say they don't have enough money to give any away. [...]
What makes poor people's generosity even more impressive is that their giving generally isn't tax-deductible, because they don't earn enough to justify itemizing their charitable tax deductions. In effect, giving a dollar to charity costs poor people a dollar while it costs deduction itemizers 65 cents.
In the Bybee memo of August 2002, a memorandum that Mukasey characterizes as a mistake, the head of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel essentially defined torture as an interrogation technique that causes the equivalent of organ failure. He got that definition not from any legal authority defining torture but from a definition of "severe pain" found in an obscure medical benefits statute.
Such reasoning would receive an F grade if offered by a first-year law student. When offered by the head of the elite Office of Legal Counsel it must be seen for what it was: a lie about the meaning of the law, not a mistake.
When we think of temporally distant events, we think more abstractly, which makes us focus on superordinate aspects and the main purport of the event. But if we think of events that are close to us in time, we think more concretely, which means that subordinate, peripheral aspects take on more importance. For example, if we imagine that we will be asked to donate blood in the future, what dominates is the superordinate moral value of helping other people, but if the time perspective is telescoped, concrete subordinate selfish motives take over, such as the fact that it will be unpleasant to be stuck by a needle.
He said that only a very small percentage of people, despite their membership in one kind of religion or other, are actually taking their religion very seriously. Most so-called "religious" people are only very superficially involved with the particular faith, in which they happen to have been brought up. To that he added something even more daring and maybe even shocking to many of his academic but still nominally Catholic listeners, when saying, "most people are really only money-worshippers," implying that their religious pretensions are, at rock bottom, only hypocritical.
... in addressing his student audience at the University of Costa Rica, the Dalai Lama affirmed specifically that ethics and morality need not be based on religion or belief in "God." He frankly admitted that, in this respect, he did have a strong disagreement with the Pope, in their recent, private meeting. The latter insisted, of course, that morality had to be based on religious faith. In contrast, the Dalai Lama declared that ethics and morality can arise simply out of recognition of our mutual interdependency, leading in turn to such secular virtues as respect, caring, and compassion for others.
Gone are the days when investors bought "a piece of the rock" and kept the certificates locked in bank vaults. Today, the fast money bets on moment-to-moment fluctuations, and traders profit on both the dips and spikes. In this casino-like atmosphere, profit often derives from winning transactions, not brick and mortar valuation and growth.
Bloomberg reported in 2004 that Arrowstreet, a $4.4 billion investment firm, had developed quantitative models to "identify and exploit" incidents when investors 1) overreact to news, 2) follow the herd, or 3) fail to account for new information.
Now, Big Finance is prowling the limbic system, a primitive slab of gray matter linked to emotions like pleasure, greed, fear, and cravings -- which begs the question, why?
The 2008 bestseller, Buyology provides an explanation:"Finance and economic research has hit the wall," explains Andrew Lo, who runs AlphaSimplex Group, a Cambridge, Massachusetts hedge fund firm. "We need to get inside the brain to understand why people make decisions."
Neuromarketing guru Martin Lindstrom, the author of Buyology, goes a step further:...economic modeling is based on the premise that people behave in predictably rational ways. But...what's beginning to show up in the fledgling world of brain scanning is the enormous influence our emotions have on every decision we make.
