Updating - Morality researcher found guilty of scientific misconduct

The other shoe has dropped for Harvard researcher Marc Hauser with the announcement that he has been found guilty of scientific misconduct. In a well written and interesting piece, Florida State Professor Michael Ruse puts this in context and argues that Hauser’s actions hurt all scientists. The questionable research involved studies on monkeys.

For the purposes of my quest... Read More.

Morality is the problem we refuse to face

As I continue to wade through the discussions from the Edge Foundation’s conference on The New Science of Morality, I keep bumping into ideas that set off fireworks in my brain. These, by the way, are delicious, sweet fireworks. Today I’m struck by Harvard Assistant Professor Joshua Greene’s assertion that we have to understand how human beings think/feel/act morally, or face the consequences of a divided, dysfunctional, drowning world. My first reaction to Greene’s argument is that he is right, and it’s rather frightening to realize how much of human society is refusing the face the problem/issue of morality.

I’ve spent most of my working life either as a journalist or in politics. Ideally both of those fields would share the same mission of making the world a better place. However, when I look back at my career, I realize that we seldom talked in such terms. Read More.