Tag Archives: Ethics

A reply to Marc Hauser

I’ve been meaning to deal with this for a while.
At the beginning of June, Prospect magazine launched a blog, First Drafts. The second ever post there was a reply by the evolutionary psychologist and biologist Marc Hauser to my Guardian review of his book Moral Minds. It’s entitled ‘Did you actually read the book?‘, and [...]

Moral Minds

According to Marc Hauser, “morality is grounded in our biology”. We’ve heard this sort of thing before, of course—from evolutionary biologists, for instance, who claim that natural selection favours altruistic behaviour, since acting benevolently towards other people is a way of securing our genetic posterity. Some proponents of the evolutionary explanation go further, and infer [...]

What is moral criticism?

In two earlier posts, I worried a little about Dan Green’s understanding of what a “moral” criticism might be. The first post responded to something Green wrote about the “sanctimonious moralizing” that he thinks passes for criticism in the pages of The New Republic. Green’s objections were aimed principally at Leon Wieseltier. But I wondered [...]

Religion and democracy

“Is religious identity special?” This is a question Amy Gutman poses in her excellent new-ish book, Identity in Democracy. And of course it’s a question many people have been asking themselves recently.
Gutman is not only concerned with religion in this book, but more generally with the “uneasy place” that “identity groups” of different kinds occupy [...]