The Moral Sciences Club

This lovely Hanif Kureishi piece on the often misguided drive to tame the wandering mind struck a chord with me. This is familiar: My son, who can skip and sing, found it difficult, for a long time, to read and write at the level of others his age. At primary school he was castigated, even ... Read More

When asked by CNN's John King what he thinks about the Pentagon's recent decision to allow female troops to serve nearer the front lines of battle, Rick Santorum replied that this could be a problem because of the natural protective valor of men-folk: I do have concerns about women in front ... Read More

My pals over at Bleeding Heart Libertarians are having an interesting conversation about the best justificatory foundation for their brand of classical liberalism. Kevin Vallier argues, correctly in my view, that "Utilitarianism is too consequence-sensitive and self-ownership is too consequence ... Read More

Jonah Lehrer reports on new research from Steve Sapra and Paul Zak on the neurochemistry of Wall Street success: Drs. Sapra and Zak began by analyzing the genes of 60 professional traders working in five major Wall Street firms. (They collected the DNA samples in 2008—only three of the firms ... Read More

So the Susan G. Komen Foundation has withdrawn its financial support of Planned Parenthood. Wailing and gnashing, wailing and gnashing. Erica Greider, my colleague at The Economist, offers an evenhanded overview of the dust-up, and she concludes: As for the Susan G. Komen grants, they added ... Read More

Speaking of Deirdre McCloskey, Dalibor Rohac offers a nice overview of her recent work in a WSJ profile. Here's the core argument of McCloskey's most recent book, Bourgeois Dignity : Modern economic growth, she claims, is a result of an ideological and rhetorical transformation. In the ... Read More

Writing in the New York Times, Peter Singer and Agata Sagan ask "Are We Ready for a 'Morality Pill'?" I dunno. Why? The infamous Milgram and Stanford Prison experiments showed that given the right circumstances, most of us act monstrously. Indeed, given pretty mundane circumstances, most of us ... Read More

My post discussing Brian Leiter's proposal to seize 75% of the 1%'s wealth reminded me of a Michael Kinsley piece I meant to comment on last month, but never got around to. Here's Kinsley: My problem with Obama’s ["this isn't about class war"] speech is that the president muddles together a ... Read More

The Institution for Economic Affairs, a free-market British think-tank, has released a freely-downloadable edited volume titled ... and the Pursuit of Happiness, packed with papers summarizing the public-policy implications of recent work in happiness research. Here are a few highlights gleaned ... Read More

Large swathes of the Internet today are protesting legislation now pending in Congress that would censor the Internet and burden many sites with impossible-to-meet regulatory demands. What's the rationale behind enormously meddlesome regulations like SOPA/PIPA? Among others reasons, the "piracy" of ... Read More

University of Pennsylvania economist Justin Wolfers, whose work with Betsey Stevenson I cited in my recent post on why economic growth is a moral imperative, sat down recently to talk with Patrick Bernau of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung's economics and finance blog to discuss his Betsey's most ... Read More

Brian Leiter, the law and philosophy ratings maven, is an interesting guy. He's an insightful Nietzsche scholar and legal theorist with a bit of a reputation as a bullying ideologue. (He's treated me disrespectfully on a few occasions for what I assume are political reasons, which I mention in the ... Read More

Some say our sense that life means something is an illusion, or that it would be an illusion if there were no god. Some say free-will is an illusion. These claims confuse me. The water I seem to see on the hot horizon is an illusion. The bend in the stick in the water in the pond is an illusion ... Read More

This column (flagged by one of our eagle-eyed editors) by Kenneth Rogoff on "rethinking the growth imperative" is incredibly puzzling. Rogoff, a Harvard economics professor and former IMF chief economist, runs through a few hackneyed and largely discredited factoids about the limited relevance of ... Read More

I didn't make any New Year's resolutions, because why would I? Why make resolutions? Why do it at the beginning of a year? As ever, the wisdom of master Yoda must prevail: "Do or do not. There is no try." Intention is indispensable. We do need plans! But "I'm going to go to the bank before five ... Read More