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Category: Ethics/Morality

Pope Francis: A crisis reveals what is in our hearts

Pope Francis: A crisis reveals what is in our hearts

Pope Francis writes: In this past year of change, my mind and heart have overflowed with people. People I think of and pray for, and sometimes cry with, people with names and faces, people who died without saying goodbye to those they loved, families in difficulty, even going hungry, because there’s no work. Sometimes, when you think globally, you can be paralyzed: There are so many places of apparently ceaseless conflict; there’s so much suffering and need. I find it…

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What can bonobos teach us about the nature of language?

What can bonobos teach us about the nature of language?

Lindsay Stern writes: One spring day in 2005, a yellow school bus carrying six passengers turned onto a freshly paved driveway seven miles southeast of downtown Des Moines, Iowa. Passing beneath a tunnel of cottonwood trees listing in the wind, it rumbled past a life-size sculpture of an elephant before pulling up beside a new building. Two glass towers loomed over the 13,000-square-foot laboratory, framed on three sides by a glittering blue lake. Sunlight glanced off the western tower, scrunching…

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How an ancient Indian emperor replaced the sound of war with the sound of ethics

How an ancient Indian emperor replaced the sound of war with the sound of ethics

Sonam Kachru writes: In the Khyber valley of Northern Pakistan, three large boulders sit atop a hill commanding a beautiful prospect of the city of Mansehra. A low brick wall surrounds these boulders; a simple roof, mounted on four brick pillars, protects the rock faces from wind and rain. This structure preserves for posterity the words inscribed there: ‘Doing good is hard – Even beginning to do good is hard.’ The words are those of Ashoka Maurya, an Indian emperor…

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Private gain mustn’t be allowed to elbow out the public good

Private gain mustn’t be allowed to elbow out the public good

By Dirk Philipsen Adam Smith had an elegant idea when addressing the notorious difficulty that humans face in trying to be smart, efficient and moral. In The Wealth of Nations (1776), he maintained that the baker bakes bread not out of benevolence, but out of self-interest. No doubt, public benefits can result when people pursue what comes easiest: self-interest. And yet: the logic of private interest – the notion that we should just ‘let the market handle it’ – has…

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Why mammalian brains are geared toward kindness

Why mammalian brains are geared toward kindness

Patricia Churchland writes: Three myths about morality remain alluring: only humans act on moral emotions, moral precepts are divine in origin, and learning to behave morally goes against our thoroughly selfish nature. Converging data from many sciences, including ethology, anthropology, genetics, and neuroscience, have challenged all three of these myths. First, self-sacrifice, given the pressing needs of close kin or conspecifics to whom they are attached, has been documented in many mammalian species—wolves, marmosets, dolphins, and even rodents. Birds display…

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Social distancing is a social justice issue

Social distancing is a social justice issue

Phillip Picardi writes: The headlines have not been bringing good news. The infection and death rate of COVID-19 (known colloquially as coronavirus) is steadily rising, with the CDC estimating a worst-case scenario of between 160 and 214 million infected people in the United States alone, with the potential for more than a million deaths. To avoid this nightmare scenario, many companies have asked their employees to work from home, live television talk shows have pivoted to skeleton crews and empty…

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The consciousness of rats has ethical implications for humans

The consciousness of rats has ethical implications for humans

Kristin Andrews and Susana Monsó write: In the late 1990s, Jaak Panksepp, the father of affective neuroscience, discovered that rats laugh. This fact had remained hidden because rats laugh in ultrasonic chirps that we can’t hear. It was only when Brian Knutson, a member of Panksepp’s lab, started to monitor their vocalisations during social play that he realised there was something that appeared unexpectedly similar to human laughter. Panksepp and his team began to systematically study this phenomenon by tickling…

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Simone de Beauvoir’s authentic love is a project of equals

Simone de Beauvoir’s authentic love is a project of equals

Kate Kirkpatrick writes: The desires to love and be loved are, on Simone de Beauvoir’s view, part of the structure of human existence. Often, they go awry. But even so, she claimed, authentic love is not only possible but one of the most powerful tools available to individuals who want to be free. So what, exactly, is this authentic love? In The Second Sex (1949), Beauvoir argued that culture led men and women to have asymmetrical expectations, with the result…

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In untold numbers, animals are suffering and dying, and we are either partly or wholly responsible

In untold numbers, animals are suffering and dying, and we are either partly or wholly responsible

Jeff Sebo writes: At the time of writing, Australia is on fire. The fires have killed at least 25 humans and more than a billion animals. Animals such as koalas are especially at risk, since their normal response to threats – climbing to the tops of trees – leaves them vulnerable in the case of fire. As a result, an estimated 25,000 koalas have died and many more will die in the coming weeks. In 2018, Hurricane Florence swept through…

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A farmed animal is someone not something

A farmed animal is someone not something

Lori Marino writes: We’ve all heard them and used them – the common references to farmed animals that appeal to the worst part of human nature: ‘pearls before swine’, ‘what a pig’, ‘like lambs to the slaughter’, ‘bird brain’. These phrases represent our species’ view of farmed animals as not particularly bright, uncaring about their treatment or fate, and generally bland and monolithic in their identities. My team of researchers asked: ‘What is there to really know about them?’ Our…

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Pope Francis: Catechism will be updated to define ecological sins

Pope Francis: Catechism will be updated to define ecological sins

America magazine reports: Following through on a proposal made at the Synod of Bishops for the Amazon, Pope Francis said there are plans to include a definition of ecological sins in the church’s official teaching. “We should be introducing — we were thinking — in the Catechism of the Catholic Church the sin against ecology, ecological sin against the common home,” he told participants at a conference on criminal justice Nov. 15. Members of the International Association of Penal Law…

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How Trump operates above the law and outside ethical standards — even those he set for himself

How Trump operates above the law and outside ethical standards — even those he set for himself

The New York Times reports: The rules are clear for nearly everyone who works in the executive branch: Officials are prohibited from playing even a minor role in a decision that directly creates a financial benefit for the employee or the employee’s immediate family. But those rules do not apply to the president and vice president, the only executive branch officials who are exempt from a criminal statute and a separate ethics regulation that govern conflicts of interest. That exemption…

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As Amazon fires burn, Pope convenes meeting on the rainforests and moral obligation to protect them

As Amazon fires burn, Pope convenes meeting on the rainforests and moral obligation to protect them

Georgina Gustin reports: Pope Francis convened nearly 200 bishops, climate experts and indigenous people from the Amazon on Sunday for an unprecedented meeting in Rome to discuss the fate of the Amazonian rainforests and the world’s moral obligation to protect them. The meeting, or Synod, is the first of its kind to address an ecosystem, rather than a particular region or theme. It comes as fires continue to consume the Amazon rainforest, destroying a critical tool for stabilizing the climate,…

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The fast track to a life well lived is gratefulness

The fast track to a life well lived is gratefulness

By David DeSteno For the Ancient Greeks, virtue wasn’t a goal in and of itself, but rather a route to a life well lived. By being honest and generous, embodying diligence and fortitude, showing restraint and kindness, a person would flourish – coming to live a life filled with meaning and finding an enduring, as opposed to ephemeral, happiness. Today, that view hasn’t much changed. While we hear plenty of stories of celebrities, politicians and even our neighbours finding fleeting…

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Hunter Biden and the corrupt culture of influence-peddling that has long been deemed socially acceptable

Hunter Biden and the corrupt culture of influence-peddling that has long been deemed socially acceptable

Sarah Chayes writes: How did this get to be standard practice? The whistle-blower scandal that has prompted the fourth presidential impeachment process in American history has put a spectacle from earlier this decade back on display: the jaw-smacking feast of scavengers who circled around Ukraine as Viktor Yanukovych, a Moscow-linked kleptocrat, was driven from power. Ukraine’s crisis was the latest to energize a club whose culture has come to be treated as normal—a culture in which top-tier lawyers, former U.S….

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Climate change is morally wrong. It is time for a carbon abolition movement

Climate change is morally wrong. It is time for a carbon abolition movement

Eric Beinhocker writes: Human-induced climate change is a moral wrong. It involves one group of humans harming others. People of this generation harming those in future generations. People in the developed world harming those in the developing world. Each of us is emitting carbon that is harming those caught in climate-driven superstorms, floods, droughts and conflicts. And there’s the greatest moral wrong of all – the mass extinction event we have triggered that harms all life on Earth. Yet until…

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