Tópico: The Moral Instinct - Steven Pinker

[Atheist]

The Moral Instinct


Which of the following people would you say is the most admirable: Mother Teresa, Bill Gates or Norman Borlaug? And which do you think is the least admirable? For most people, it's an easy question. Mother Teresa, famous for ministering to the poor in Calcutta, has been beatified by the Vatican, awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and ranked in an American poll as the most admired person of the 20th century. Bill Gates, infamous for giving us the Microsoft dancing paper clip and the blue screen of death, has been decapitated in effigy in "I Hate Gates" Web sites and hit with a pie in the face. As for Norman Borlaug . . . who the heck is Norman Borlaug?

Yet a deeper look might lead you to rethink your answers. Borlaug, father of the "Green Revolution" that used agricultural science to reduce world hunger, has been credited with saving a billion lives, more than anyone else in history. Gates, in deciding what to do with his fortune, crunched the numbers and determined that he could alleviate the most misery by fighting everyday scourges in the developing world like malaria, diarrhea and parasites. Mother Teresa, for her part, extolled the virtue of suffering and ran her well-financed missions accordingly: their sick patrons were offered plenty of prayer but harsh conditions, few analgesics and dangerously primitive medical care.

It's not hard to see why the moral reputations of this trio should be so out of line with the good they have done. Mother Teresa was the very embodiment of saintliness: white-clad, sad-eyed, ascetic and often photographed with the wretched of the earth. Gates is a nerd's nerd and the world's richest man, as likely to enter heaven as the proverbial camel squeezing through the needle's eye. And Borlaug, now 93, is an agronomist who has spent his life in labs and nonprofits, seldom walking onto the media stage, and hence into our consciousness, at all.

I doubt these examples will persuade anyone to favor Bill Gates over Mother Teresa for sainthood. But they show that our heads can be turned by an aura of sanctity, distracting us from a more objective reckoning of the actions that make people suffer or flourish. It seems we may all be vulnerable to moral illusions the ethical equivalent of the bending lines that trick the eye on cereal boxes and in psychology textbooks. Illusions are a favorite tool of perception scientists for exposing the workings of the five senses, and of philosophers for shaking people out of the naïve belief that our minds give us a transparent window onto the world (since if our eyes can be fooled by an illusion, why should we trust them at other times?). Today, a new field is using illusions to unmask a sixth sense, the moral sense. Moral intuitions are being drawn out of people in the lab, on Web sites and in brain scanners, and are being explained with tools from game theory, neuroscience and evolutionary biology.

"Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and more steadily we reflect on them," wrote Immanuel Kant, "the starry heavens above and the moral law within." These days, the moral law within is being viewed with increasing awe, if not always admiration. The human moral sense turns out to be an organ of considerable complexity, with quirks that reflect its evolutionary history and its neurobiological foundations.

These quirks are bound to have implications for the human predicament. Morality is not just any old topic in psychology but close to our conception of the meaning of life. Moral goodness is what gives each of us the sense that we are worthy human beings. We seek it in our friends and mates, nurture it in our children, advance it in our politics and justify it with our religions. A disrespect for morality is blamed for everyday sins and history's worst atrocities. To carry this weight, the concept of morality would have to be bigger than any of us and outside all of us.

So dissecting moral intuitions is no small matter. If morality is a mere trick of the brain, some may fear, our very grounds for being moral could be eroded. Yet as we shall see, the science of the moral sense can instead be seen as a way to strengthen those grounds, by clarifying what morality is and how it should steer our actions.

O restante está na fonte:
The Moral Instinct

[Raphael]

Tio, tem traduzido não?

Muito me interessa o assunto.

[Atheist]

Pedi permissão ao NYT para tradução, vamos ver se rola...

[Raphael]

Pedi permissão ao NYT para tradução, vamos ver se rola...

Fico no aguardo. Obrigado.

[Adriano]

Pedi permissão ao NYT para tradução, vamos ver se rola...

Fico no aguardo. Obrigado.

2

[Atheist]

Pois é... saindo a liberação (para tradução e publicação no biociencia.org), vou precisar de ajuda para traduzir, pois são 8 páginas...

[Raphael]

Nossa...só 8?

Não há traduzido já?

Se for dar este trabalho todo, só coloca o "grosso" aqui pra gente começar a debater.

[Thufir Hawat]

Pois é... saindo a liberação (para tradução e publicação no biociencia.org), vou precisar de ajuda para traduzir, pois são 8 páginas...

Eu traduzo uma parte, Rubens. Estou de férias até o fim de janeiro, tenho tempo de sobra..

[Raphael]

Eu queria saber inglês, pra me sentir útil e poder ajudar.

[Atheist]

Assim que eu tiver resposta entro em contato.

[Thufir Hawat]

Fico aguardando, então.
 

[Buckaroo Banzai]

Nem li o texto... mas já "saíram" os resultados daquele moral sense test.... acho que tem a ver com o Mark Hauser, ou ao menos ele os estudou e etc.... não há variações morais significativas na humanidade... as pessoas religiosas não fazem escolhas morais diferentes das não religiosas, naquilo que foi estudado... são muito interessantes essas coisas.

[Herf]

Alguém aqui já leu human universals do Donald Brown?