The essays in this anthology deal with the growing interconnections between moral philosophy and research that draws upon neuroscience, developmental psychology, and evolutionary biology. The essays in this anthology deal with the growing interconnections between moral philosophy and research that draws upon neuroscience, developmental psychology, and evolutionary biology. This cross-disciplinary interchange coincides, not accidentally, with the renewed interest in ethical naturalism. In order to understand the nature and limits of moral reasoning, many new ethical naturalists look to cognitive science for an account of how people actually reason. At the same time, many cognitive scientists have become increasingly interested in moral reasoning as a complex form of human cognition that challenges their theoretical models. The result of this collaborative, and often critical, interchange is an exciting intellectual ferment at the frontiers of research into human mentality. Sections and Contributors Ethics Naturalized, Owen Flanagan, Mark L. Johnson, Virginia Held - Moral Judgments, Representations, and Prototypes, Paul M. Churchland, Andy Clark, Peggy DesAutels, Ruth Garrett Millikan - Moral Emotions, Robert M. Gordon, Alvin I. Goldman, John Deigh, Naomi Scheman - Agency and Responsibility James P. Sterba, Susan Khin-Zaw, Helen E. Longino, Michael E. Bratman A Bradford Book

A Harvard scientist illuminates the biological basis for human morality in this groundbreaking book. With the diversity of moral attitudes found across cultures around the globe, it is easy to assume that moral perspectives are socially developed—a matter of nurture rather than nature. But in Moral Minds, Marc Hauser presents compelling evidence to the contrary, and offers a revolutionary new theory: that humans have evolved a universal moral instinct. Hauser argues that certain biologically innate moral principles propel us toward judgments of right and wrong independent of gender, education, and religion. Combining his cutting-edge research with the latest findings in cognitive psychology, linguistics, neuroscience, evolutionary biology, economics, and anthropology, Hauser explores the startling implications of his provocative theory vis-à-vis contemporary bioethics, religion, the law, and our everyday lives.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The acclaimed social psychologist challenges conventional thinking about morality, politics, and religion in a way that speaks to conservatives and liberals alike—a “landmark contribution to humanity’s understanding of itself” (The New York Times Book Review). Drawing on his twenty-five years of groundbreaking research on moral psychology, Jonathan Haidt shows how moral judgments arise not from reason but from gut feelings. He shows why liberals, conservatives, and libertarians have such different intuitions about right and wrong, and he shows why each side is actually right about many of its central concerns. In this subtle yet accessible book, Haidt gives you the key to understanding the miracle of human cooperation, as well as the curse of our eternal divisions and conflicts. If you’re ready to trade in anger for understanding, read The Righteous Mind.

A cohesive vision of the mind and its place in the realms of causation and morality ... Mind, Morality, and Explanation is an outstanding anthology precisely because it justifies the decision to bring its papers together not merely on the usual grounds of accessibility, loose thematic connection, or happenstance, but on intellectual grounds: reading these papers as a whole leads one to appreciate one way of understanding the mind that might not be appreciated otherwise. It can be recommended to any philosopher working on at least one of its focal topics who is ready to broaden her horizons a.

This is Szasz's most ambitious work to date. In his best-selling book, The Myth of Mental Illness, he took psychiatry to task for misconstruing human conflict and coping as mental illness. In Our Right to Drugs, he exposed the irrationality and political opportunism that fuels the Drug War. In The Meaning of Mind, he warns that we misconstrue the dialogue within as a problem of consciousness and neuroscience, and do so at our own peril.

Moral thinking pervades our practical lives, but where did this way of thinking come from, and what purpose does it serve? Is it to be explained by environmental pressures on our ancestors a million years ago, or is it a cultural invention of more recent origin? In The Evolution of Morality, Richard Joyce takes up these controversial questions, finding that the evidence supports an innate basis to human morality. As a moral philosopher, Joyce is interested in whether any implications follow from this hypothesis. Might the fact that the human brain has been biologically prepared by natural selection to engage in moral judgment serve in some sense to vindicate this way of thinking—staving off the threat of moral skepticism, or even undergirding some version of moral realism? Or if morality has an adaptive explanation in genetic terms—if it is, as Joyce writes, "just something that helped our ancestors make more babies"—might such an explanation actually undermine morality's central role in our lives? He carefully examines both the evolutionary "vindication of morality" and the evolutionary "debunking of morality," considering the skeptical view more seriously than have others who have treated the subject. Interdisciplinary and combining the latest results from the empirical sciences with philosophical discussion, The Evolution of Morality is one of the few books in this area written from the perspective of moral philosophy. Concise and without technical jargon, the arguments are rigorous but accessible to readers from different academic backgrounds. Joyce discusses complex issues in plain language while advocating subtle and sometimes radical views. The Evolution of Morality lays the philosophical foundations for further research into the biological understanding of human morality.

"This work is essential for the philosophical assessment of Hume's contributions to our understanding of what moral agency is....It is written in a manner that is constantly sensitive to the philosophical perplexities that lie in wai for each position that the author, and Hume, considers, and it demonstrates, if anyone still needs this, just how resourceful Hume's moral theory is, even when judged in the light of our contemporary debates."--Ethics