The anti-Sam Harris points to a real moral operating system

Google Engineering Director Damon Horowitz tackles the idea of using numbers and science to make ethical decisions and comes up with a delightfully different answer than Sam Harris did in The Moral Landscape. Watching Horowitz’ TED talk, I’m energized and hopeful, which is a far different reaction than the one I had when reading Harris’ book.

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Is goodness possible without empathy?

Penn State Sociologist Sam Richards just took attendees at a TED conference on an experiment in empathy. Richards argues that sociology is impossible without empathy, but I think his radical experiment also shows something else: Goodness, at least in the form of the Golden Rule, isn’t possible without empathy. We may be able to fake it for a bit and force ourselves to treat someone else the way we’d like to be treated, but how long can any of us bludgeon ourselves into doing right when we don’t feel any empathy for the other person?

I thought I was an empathy expert, but Richards’ experiment took me places I had never gone before. Beside from shaping my thoughts about goodness in general, Richards’ experiment also left me pondering the goodness of American foreign policy. What would it look like if all of our politicians and every voter could think like Richards thinks?

Go ahead. I dare you to engage in Richards’ experiment.

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Compassion as technology

NPR's Krista Tipplett reinvents the concept of "compassion" during a TED Talk. See more.

Rules & incentives strangle society

Barry Schwartz, Swarthmore College psychology and economics professor, tells us how rules and incentives undermine society and make us feel like we’ve got to shower the grime of immorality off our skins at the end of every day. “Rules and incentives are no substitute for wisdom,” he says in a TED talk. At another point, he notes: “We need virtue, we need character, we need people who want to do the right thing.”

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Brene Brown answers my questions

Storyteller and social work researcher Brene Brown answers my questions in my search for goodness, or at least most of them. I have asked: What is goodness? What enables human beings to be good? What trips us up? What do we each need to do to become good? Brown says her six years of research shows that the answers are as simple — and hard — as each of us finding the courage to be authentic, vulnerable and love ourselves with our whole hearts. Oh, and she’s laugh-out-loud funny as she discusses her research findings. Listen for the bit about the muffin. You have to watch this TED Talk.

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How to turn a child into a murderer

I know that some people may disagree with me, particularly some of my friends, but I believe that to understand goodness, you also have to understand evil. We need to learn how people can perform evil acts. How do they come to believe that such failures of compassion are actually good, or are other motives driving them?

Journalist Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy reports on one path to evil. She describes in detail how the Taliban turn children into suicide bombers.

HT to Andrew Sullivan.

Social networks & goodness

Interesting.

Nicholas A. Christakis: "Social networks are fundamentally related to goodness, and what I think the world needs now is more connection."


HT Andrew Sullivan