bodhi tree swaying

David Brooks of the New York Times is on a roll. He has an interesting article today giving a quick overview of some recent research on morality.

Where does our sense of right and wrong come from? Most people think it is a gift from God, who revealed His laws and elevates us with His love. A smaller number think that we figure the rules out for ourselves, using our capacity to reason and choosing a philosophical system to live by.

Moral naturalists, on the other hand, believe that we have moral sentiments that have emerged from a long history of relationships. To learn about morality, you don’t rely upon revelation or metaphysics; you observe people as they live.

This week a group of moral naturalists gathered in Connecticut at a conference organized by the Edge Foundation. One of the

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From a fascinating article by Paul Bloom:

Not long ago, a team of researchers watched a 1-year-old boy take justice into his own hands. The boy had just seen a puppet show in which one puppet played with a ball while interacting with two other puppets. The center puppet would slide the ball to the puppet on the right, who would pass it back. And the center puppet would slide the ball to the puppet on the left . . . who would run away with it. Then the two puppets on the ends were brought down from the stage and set before the toddler. Each was placed next to a pile of treats. At this point, the toddler was asked to take a treat away from one puppet. Like most children in this situation, the boy took it from

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Whether you can be a vegan and eat animals seems like a bizarre question, like asking if you can be celibate and still have sex. The definition of a vegan is “a person who does not use or eat animal products,” after all. But Christopher Cox makes a good case in a recent Slate article for regarding oysters as compatible with a vegan diet.

Now of course oysters are animals. And vegans don’t eat animals. But why don’t vegans eat animals? The main point of veganism is to avoid causing suffering to sentient beings. A related reason is environmental reasons, since meat-eating is environmentally disastrous, but in a way that’s the same reason — avoiding causing harm. (Some people are vegan for health reasons, although those are not central to veganism, in my opinion — many people would still be …

Fairly often I see quotes attributed to the Buddha that bear no little or no resemblance to anything that’s found in Buddhist scriptures. One example is from a Christian minister who hold’s meetings in prison at the same time I’m there leading my Buddhist study group. He informed me that the Buddha had said that a greater teacher than him would arise in 500 years, and that we should follow that guy instead. Guess who that would be. The pastor and I had an interesting conversation about the ethics of making up quotes to denigrate other religions and promote your own (not that I was accusing him of having invented the quote — but someone had).

A less egregious, but as far as I’m aware equally inaccurate one appeared on Twitter yesterday, posted by @tricyclemag. They didn’t invent the quote — I’ve seen it circulating endlessly, and it will no …

I just stumbled across a fascinating article (Oddly, Hypocrisy Rooted in High Morals) from LiveScience, reporting on research showing that when people have

a) a sense of themselves as being “moral people” and
b) a flexible sense of what constitutes right and wrong

they are more likely to cheat. Here’s an extract, but it’s worth reading the whole thing.

Morally upstanding people are the do-gooders of society, right? Actually, a new study finds that a sense of moral superiority can lead to unethical acts, such as cheating. In fact, some of the best do-gooders can become the worst cheats.

Stop us if this sounds familiar.

When asked to describe themselves, most people typically will rattle off a list of physical features and activities (for example, “I do yoga” or “I’m a paralegal”). But some people have what scientists call a moral identity, in which the answer to the question

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Everything that happens is a result of karma. Well, no, actually.

One of the greatest misunderstandings of what the Buddhas taught is the idea that “everything that happens is a result of karma.” You’ll see many Buddhist teachers saying this, especially those teachers from the Tibetan traditions where this actually seems to be the accepted teaching on karma.

Karma, first of all, is just the Sanskrit word for “action” but it refers specifically to moral action. Vipaka is the word for the result of actions, which manifests as either happiness or unhappiness. The karmic status of an act depends on the underlying emotional/cognitive motivation, so that if we act on the basis of unskillful mental states such as greed, hatred, or delusion, we will experience suffering, while if we act on the basis of skillful mental states such as love, compassion, and mindfulness we’ll experience happiness. This is an example of “conditionality,” …

Jonathan Haidt, who I mentioned yesterday, gets a mention in a column today by David Brooks. It’s a quote that’s also a rather neat restatement of Davd Hume’s dictum that “reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions.”

The emotions are, in fact, in charge of the temple of morality, and … moral reasoning is really just a servant masquerading as a high priest.

The notion of in vitro meat — flesh harvested from a vat rather than a living animal — seems straight from science fiction, which is perhaps not surprising given that NASA, the US space organization, originated the idea as a way to provide better-quality food for astronauts in space.

While the notion may seem far-fetched, some people are taking it very seriously indeed. PETA, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, announced in 2008 a $1 million prize for the “first person to come up with a method to produce commercially viable quantities of in vitro meat at competitive prices by 2012.”

New Harvest, a nonprofit organization formed to promote the adoption of alternatives to meat, points out on its Web site, “Because meat substitutes are produced under controlled conditions impossible to maintain in traditional animal farms, they can be safer, more nutritious, less …

Apparently it’s World Philosophy Day (or maybe it recently was — I’m not too clear), and the BBC has four philosophical problems, posed by David Bain of the University of Glasgow (my alma mater) to help you exercise your mind:

1. SHOULD WE KILL HEALTHY PEOPLE FOR THEIR ORGANS?

Suppose Bill is a healthy man without family or loved ones. Would it be ok painlessly to kill him if his organs would save five people, one of whom needs a heart, another a kidney, and so on? If not, why not?

Consider another case: you and six others are kidnapped, and the kidnapper somehow persuades you that if you shoot dead one of the other hostages, he will set the remaining five free, whereas if you do not, he will shoot all six. (Either way, he’ll release you.)

If in this case you should kill one to save …

The other day I found a small bird that was trying to get away from the neighbor’s cat. Unfortunately I got there too late to prevent the bird being harmed — its tail feathers had been ripped out, it had a nasty wound on the back of its neck, and it had a mangled left wing. It was terrified and desperately trying to get away from its attacker. The cat was obviously going to take its time dispatching the bird and I knew that I was going to end up performing euthanasia. I don’t even know what kind of bird it was. It was sparrow-sized and almost black.

I picked it up and it immediately seemed to calm down, as if it recognized that I was less of a threat than the cat was, and I felt fraudulent, given my intention. While wild …