For content related to philosophy, ethics.

Blogging credo

Here are the principles and guidelines I follow when blogging here on my blog.

Truth and accuracy: Everything I write is as accurate and truthful as I can manage, with some important exceptions noted below. (Note: not all my posts are about subjects where this is pertinent.) I welcome comments with suggestions and corrections. If I discover an error, I will either leave the original and add the correction, or make the correction and add a note explaining what was corrected and why.

Diversity in academia

There is no doubt that the political views seen in academia do not represent the full spectrum of American politics. Academia leans left. Conservatives respond by complaining that academia is 'ideologically homogenous' (sic) because they have been excluded based on their political views. If conservatives want to assign blame for their low numbers in academia, perhaps they should start by looking in the mirror.
 

Empathy defended

Comment about Musk from a college classmate: "Musk’s comment in his interview by Seth Rogan: “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.”  Says all you need to know about him. "

Reply by another college classmate: "But see Paul Bloom’s book Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion.

From the back cover, courtesy of Amazon.com:

Some thoughts about a conversation

A friend asked me why I had bothered to engage at length on social media with a self-identified ‘vaccine skeptic’ who had posted his vigorous opposition to any vaccine mandates, supporting his position with demonstrably incorrect information and references to poorly done (and even retracted) studies. My friend felt that my efforts were destined to fail and therefore pointless. When I asked what he meant by failure, he said “You’ll never convince someone like that they are wrong.”

Morality and apple varieties

I often see or participate in conversations where two or more morally decent individuals,  acting in good faith,  make different decisions or hold different opinions when faced with moral/ethical choices. In his book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided By Politics And Religions, Jonathan Haidt offers a useful framework for understanding this. Cogitive psychologists have names this Moral Foundations Theory.

Haidt and colleagues posit that:

We are all conspiracy theorists...

Each of us finds our own personal truth about what the world is like and how it works. All of us then tend to confuse our experience of reality with reality itself. (Sometimes referenced as the map versus the territory.) The narratives we create about our world and then operate from are good enough to have allowed our species to survive, but we all believe things that are comfortable and useful but not true. Extreme versions of this are the outlandish conspiracy theories: flat earth, 9/11 conspiracy, Covid vaccie makes peole magnetic.