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Previous Posts
Mommy explains her plastic surgery
In Dallas (naturally), a parenting magazine discusses how easy it is for mommies who don't like their post-child bodies to get surgery -- and to have it financed! -- to reverse the effects of time and childbirth. Don't like what nursing has done to your na-nas? Doc has just the solution:
Doctors say
posted 10:00:56pm Jul. 21, 2010 |
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Why I became Orthodox
Wrapping up my four Beliefnet years, I was thinking about the posts that attracted the most attention and comment in that time. Without a doubt the most popular (in terms of attracting attention, not all of it admiring, to be sure) was the October 12, 2006, entry in which I revealed and explained wh
posted 9:46:58pm Jul. 21, 2010 |
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Modern Calvinists
Wow, they don't make Presbyterians like they used to!
posted 8:47:01pm Jul. 21, 2010 |
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'Rape by deception'? Huh?
The BBC this morning reported on a bizarre case in Israel of an Arab man convicted of "rape by deception," because he'd led the Jewish woman with whom he'd had consensual sex to believe he was Jewish. Ha'aretz has the story here. Plainly it's a racist verdict, and a bizarre one -- but there's more t
posted 7:51:28pm Jul. 21, 2010 |
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Bad economy! Bad, bad economy!
Take this tour through some recent economic charts from the Federal Reserve to get a picture of how terrible our economy really is. Seriously, it's staggering stuff.
posted 5:37:08pm Jul. 21, 2010 |
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posted January 27, 2010 at 12:00 pm
Interesting idea from de Waal, and not one I had thought of before — the idea that our human capacity to feel things that we generally think of as being good (empathy for the situation others are in), can also be used for evil.
Not entirely surprising, given the way we work, but just something that had never crossed my mind in such a way.
posted January 27, 2010 at 4:15 pm
Of course Frans de Waal is perhaps most noted for this theory on the natural (evolutionary) origins of morality. His research with apes has led him to conclude that;
I don’t think that chimpanzees are moral beings in the human sense. But they do have empathy, sympathy, reciprocity. They share food, resolve conflicts. All of these elements are present in human morality. So what I argue is that the basic psychology of the great apes is an essential element of human morality. Humans add things to that, making our morality far more complex. And that’s why I don’t want to call chimpanzees moral beings exactly.
They have the moral emotions, yes. You can see gratitude, outrage, a sense of fairness—you can see parallels and equivalences in all the great apes. But to get to morality you need more than just the emotions. So yes, empathy is a good thing to have. And I cannot imagine how humans could have morality without empathy, but what morality adds to that, for example, is what Adam Smith termed the “impartial spectator.”
Perhaps psychopaths share the same basic empathic instincts of the great apes, but for some reason failed to develop most (or all) of the extra bits common to human morality.