Sublime

The people around us influence how we perceive the global society. In other words, we use our own social milieu to make inferences about how people we don’t know live their lives. But this may backfire when we live in homogeneous social environments and rarely meet people living in different circumstances. English psychologist Rael Dawtry and his c

Adam Smith, placé chronologiquement entre Locke et Calhoun, et partant précisément de la même réalité de l’esclavage qu’eux, qu’ils appréhendent respectivement soit comme allant de soi et incontestable, soit, carrément, comme un « bien positif », développe une argumentation et exprime une préférence qui méritent d’être rapportées en détail. L’escla

Hume’s pluralist, sentimentalist, and naturalist approach to ethics is more promising than utilitarianism or deontology for modern moral psychology. As a first step in resuming Hume’s project, we should try to identify the taste receptors of the righteous mind.

An evolutionary anthropologist and a specialist in primate studies, he argues that while humans do have an instinctual tendency to engage in dominance-submissive behaviour, no doubt inherited from our simian ancestors, what makes societies distinctively human is our ability to make the conscious decision not to act that way. Carefully working throu

“I have to say, you’re wrong. Natural selection is a universal principle, which applies to all living things, but it can take all sorts of forms. It exists even in the plant world, where it’s a matter of access to nutritious soil, to water, to sunlight … Man is an animal, as we know, but he’s not a prairie dog or an antelope. His dominance doesn’t

The secular argument for human freedom, launched almost three centuries ago under the rubric of “natural rights,” has often been reduced to a calculation of probabilities: democracy and the personal freedoms it protects are good not because they have an inherent moral superiority over other forms of organizing society, but because they are the leas

It’s important to understand that it is the environment that makes the organism. When we look at the behavior of others, it’s easy to imagine we would never do the same if we find them abhorrent. For instance, a corrupt politician stealing aid money or a neighbor turning on a neighbor during a genocide. But it’s possible that if we were in the same

One is sanctions when people step out of line – something we may be willing to apply in person to people we know personally, but expect society to apply on our behalf to the people with whom we don’t have close relationships.

Justice is and must be impersonal.