Reading Time: 7 minutes On Wednesday night, I was robbed at gunpoint—an efficient affair, and my second time since moving to Colombia in 2018. Both times, I’d made the mistake of relaxing my guard because there were others around me; this time, I was on my home turf, a block from my building, with neighbours strolling ahead of and […]
moral psychology
Posted inEthics and Morality
The illusion of choice in what we believe
Reading Time: 6 minutes There is a phenomenon that has been taking place, particularly in the US, with greater regularity over the last few decades—the behavior of “church shopping.” The congregant attends a church and listens to the pastor making moral-political statements, and they think to themselves, “This pastor is off the track here. I need to find me […]
Posted inHuman Story
The apple and the river | Jonathan MS Pearce
People are different. That’s a good thing. But in recent years, it feels like some differences have deepened to the point that we look at friends and family on social media, or even across the dinner table, saying and believing things that are just baffling to us. And we wonder: how did you get that […]
Posted inEthics and Morality, Politics, Psychology
Religion, Psychology & Morality: Most People Aren’t Very Nice
Reading Time: 5 minutes I’ve come to the conclusion that, after many long years of thinking and experiencing, rather more often than originally suspected, people aren’t very nice. Let me see if I can qualify this. Most people are quite nice. They are nice enough to those around them: their family and their friends and people like them. We […]
Posted inEthics and Morality, Philosophy, Psychology
“Real Life” Trolley Experiment – This Is a Must Watch
Reading Time: < 1 minute This is a fascinating video and I only wish they carried this out on more subjects. Well worth looking at for a sense of what real people would go through when experiencing the dilemma of the famous moral philosophy thought experiment with real psychological dimensions. [H/T Mark Landes]
Posted inGeneral, Politics, Psychology
A moral-political discontinuity
Reading Time: 5 minutes This post is the first in what will be another intermittent series, this time looking at politics more specifically, as opposed to, but starting off from, my intermittent series on my model of human values and morality. What beliefs unite Conservatives? I have been accused on a few occasions of not understanding what I oppose […]
Posted inEthics and Morality, Politics, Psychology
Duval on Moral Epistemology, pt. 3.2: Conservatives and Corporal Punishment
Reading Time: 9 minutes Following on from my last post, wherein I noted the demographics of American Conservatism’s core, and picking up on a thread that was introduced with attachment and religious affiliation, I will now look at the seemingly close, yet indirect relationship between Evangelicalism and corporal punishment. Most Born-Again Christians (predominantly Evangelicals) agree that spanking is an […]
![By Inside_my_head.jpg: Andrew Mason from London, UK derivative work: -- Jtneill - Talk (Inside_my_head.jpg) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons](https://i0.wp.com/onlysky.media/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/psychology.jpg?resize=550%2C290&quality=89&ssl=1)
Posted inEthics and Morality, Politics, Psychology
Duval on Moral Epistemology, pt. 2: learning under parental supervision
Reading Time: 15 minutes In the previous installment, I detailed how a stimulus might pass through some or all of the values on the circumplex whilst being assessed. I showed that the hallmarks of natural conservative thought make an appearance in all social undertakings, and thus must form a part of liberal thought and be a necessary part of […]
Posted inEthics and Morality, Psychology
Duval on Moral Epistemology, pt. 1: learning from the environment
Reading Time: 19 minutes Following on from the internal logic of human morality, a claim about internal consistency, I want to use the framework to discuss how and why we value what we value (and thus how and why we consider moral what we consider moral, aka moral epistemology). Epistemology is a notoriously tricky field in philosophy (see for […]
Posted inEthics and Morality, Psychology
The Internal Logic of Human Morality – Duval’s Model of Moral Psychology
Reading Time: 23 minutes Duval & Schwartz – The Internal Logic of Human Morality: Picking up from where I left off last time, I will take nibbles at the radial nature of the model, whilst explaining its make-up, and what I see as the logical relations between the values, thereby hoping to make the implicit moral systems that it […]