Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong
Category: Livres anglais et trangers,Nonfiction,Philosophy
Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong Details
Marc Hauser's eminently readable and comprehensive book Moral Minds is revolutionary. He argues that humans have evolved a universal moral instinct, unconsciously propelling us to deliver judgments of right and wrong independent of gender, education, and religion. Experience tunes up our moral actions, guiding what we do as opposed to how we deliver our moral verdicts.For hundreds of years, scholars have argued that moral judgments arise from rational and voluntary deliberations about what ought to be. The common belief today is that we reach moral decisions by consciously reasoning from principled explanations of what society determines is right or wrong. This perspective has generated the further belief that our moral psychology is founded entirely on experience and education, developing slowly and subject to considerable variation across cultures. In his groundbreaking book, Hauser shows that this dominant view is illusory.Combining his own cutting-edge research with findings in cognitive psychology, linguistics, neuroscience, evolutionary biology, economics, and anthropology, he examines the implications of his theory for issues of bioethics, religion, law, and our everyday lives.
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Reviews
I expected great things of this book, not least because of the positive account of Hauser's work given by Noam Chomsky. Hausar appears to me to have a very shallow notion of "morality" and a poor understanding of such thinkers as David Hume and John Rawls. In addition, Hauser has been dismissed from Harvard for academic misconduct, which casts a shadow upon the believability of his "findings". I don't pretend to know the facts about this episode, but I have looked into it, and it seems to be the case that Hauser faked data. He has now withdrawn from academia and is doing what I hope is valuable social work, which looks to me like an admission of misconduct. I am largely in agreement with the one-star review by Nan Chen, except that I am friendly to Hauser's general approach (very Chomsky-ish) and don't think that the writing is quite as horrible as stated in the other review. All in all, a tremendously disappointing purchase.
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