“Previous research suggests that children develop an increasing concern with fairness over the course of development. Research with adults suggests that the concern with fairness has at least two distinct components: a desire to be fair but also a desire to signal to others that they are fair. We explore whether children’s developing concern with behaving fairly towards others may in part reflect a developing concern with appearing fair to others”Read more here.

I found this great article at the Centre for Research Ethics & Bioethics

“Tearing down old buildings and erecting new ones on the basis of modern science and technology – we are constantly doing it in our cities. But can similar ambitions to get rid of the old, to modernize, be realized even more thoroughly, with regard to us and the human condition?

Can we tear down “traditional” human self-understanding – the language we use when we reflect on life in literature, in philosophy, and in the humanities – and replace it by new neuroscientific terms?

Earlier this spring, the philosopher Roger Scruton published an essay in the Spectator where he eloquently attacks claims that neuroscience can and should replace the humanities by a set of brave new “neuro”-disciplines, like neuroethics, neuroaesthetics, and neuromusicology.

Not only will these purported new “sciences” fail to create the understanding that traditional ethics, aesthetics, and musicology, helped us towards (for example, of Bach’s music). They will even fail to achieve the scientific explanations that would justify the brave new “neuro”-prefix.

In order for there to be explanations at all, there must first of all be questions. What characterizes the purported “neuro”-sciences, however, it is their lack of questions, Scruton remarks.

“Neuro-explanation” typically is no more than translation into neuro-jargon. The aim is neither understanding nor explanation, but the ideological one of replacing the traditional by the new, at any cost.

The result of these extreme modernization ambitions running amok in human self-understanding, Scruton claims, and I agree with him, is nonsense: neurononsense.

Yet, something worries me in Scruton’s essay. He almost seems to purify human self-understanding, or the human condition, as if it were a higher sphere that should not be affected by changing times, at least not if they are modern.

I agree that neuroscience cannot explain the human condition. I agree that it cannot replace human self-understanding. But it can change the human condition and challenge our self-understanding. It already does.

Science and technology cannot be abstracted from the human condition. We are continually becoming “modernized” by, for example, neuroscientific developments. These changing conditions are real, and not merely nonsense or jargon. They occur everywhere, not merely among intellectuals or academics. And they reach all the way to our language.

Neuroscience certainly cannot replace the humanities. But it can challenge the humanities to reflect on changed human conditions.

When attempts in the human sciences to understand modern human conditions focus on neuroscience, the prefix “neuro-” could denote a more responsible form of intellectual work than the one Scruton rightly criticizes. It could denote work that feels the challenge of neuroscientific developments and takes it seriously.

Here at CRB, Kathinka Evers works to develop such a responsible form of neuroethics: one that does not translate ethics into neuro-jargon, but sees neuroscientific findings about the brain as a philosophical challenge to understand and clarify, very often in opposition to the temptation of jargon.

Pär Segerdahl”

“Between 1986 and 1993 Jacques Derrida wrote various papers and contributions on architecture. I intend to demonstrate that these writings focus on the question of the relation to the other and, therefore, on the ethical dimension of architecture. In particular, I argue that within this ethical perspective one must understand Derrida’s expression of ‘the architecture of the event’ elaborated in l’architecture (1986). According to Derrida, architecture determines the human experience and existence on a concrete as well as on a symbolic level and, thus, the human relations. As a distribution and organization of the anthropic space, it has always been connected with the affirmation of a collective identity (of a city, a people or a Nation). This identity would have always affirmed itself against alterity in general and against the other as different, foreign, stranger and, eventually, enemy. Identity has always been distributed according to the discriminating opposition inside/outside, internal/external, to which architecture has given a concrete form in various ways. An architecture of the event should give place to the relation to the other – the event is what comes from outside and is unpredictable from within – which for Derrida is the irreducible condition of an identity that is not simply reactionary and violent.

From this perspective, the other is not simply the foreigner – today, one could say the immigrant – but also and above all anyone who comes after us and has already come, whose survival is given to our memory. Not only does our identity but also our own survival (in their biological and collective meaning) depend on the other. In two papers of 1991, which are dedicated respectively to the reconstruction of Prague (Générations d’une ville: mémoire, prophétie, responsabilité) and to that of Berlin after the fall of the wall (Berlin Stadtforum), Derrida insists on the interpretation of the city as the place of collective identity but also of the relation to the other. The task of architecture consists in keeping open and lively the dialectics between those two moments as well as among the present where it intervenes, the past on which it engraves and, above all, the future (the tocome). The architecture to come must give place to the other, take the other into account in this double movement. Derrida develops this task in explicitly ethical terms, since he determines it as the principle of responsibility to which the architect is called to respond before the other: the other to whom his project is addressed, but also the other that is no longer there or is not there yet and, therefore, is absolutely passive before the decisions of the architect, the other with respect to whom the ethical injunction is even stricter. In this context Derrida affirms that the ethics of responsibility must constitute the fundamental discipline to be taught to the future generations of architects.”

Francesco Vitale, University of Salerno, IT

Empathy, cooperation, fairness and reciprocity — caring about the well-being of others seems like a very human trait. But Frans de Waal shares some surprising videos of behavioral tests, on primates and other mammals, that show how many of these moral traits all of us share.

“The Moral Brain Conference was one of the most fascinating and provocative events I have ever attended.
I recently returned from New York where I attended the NYU 2012 Bioethics Conference: The Moral Brain organized by the NYU Center for Bioethics in collaboration with the Duke Kenan Institute for Ethics and the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies. The conference took a multi-disciplinal approach to the issue of morality as it pertains to cognitive function and the question of whether or not our moral sense could ever be enhanced at the biological level. The event brought together an impressive number of key thinkers and academic leaders, including neuroscientists, bioethicists, and philosophers. In fact, this conference featured one of the strongest itinerary of speakers I have seen in quite some time.” .”

“Professional ethicists tend to behave no better than non-ethicists. Ethicists sometimes react to my work by saying “My job is to theorize about ethics, not to live the moral life.” What should we make of this response?”Continue reading the discussion here and here.

Here an article from a great blog site, the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, that answers the question.

The Moral Brain conference at New York University, is largely devoted to a review of the last ten years of research on the neuroscience of moral sentiments and decision-making, with talks by Paul Bloom among others. See a summary of the conference.

According to Nick Morgan,global thought leader on presentations and communication:

Authenticity is hard because it is hard to be open and honest about ourselves, warts and all.

Authenticity is hard because sometimes we want to hide our own less-than-perfect traits from ourselves.

Authenticity is hard because other people may seize on our weaknesses as proof of our unworthiness, rather than our humanity.

Authenticity is hard because we think what makes us human is our uniqueness, but it’s really our commonalities.

Authenticity is hard because we can lose track of our essence in daily compromises, accommodations, and dealings.

Authenticity is hard because most of us are growing into ourselves.

Authenticity is hard because we think it’s all about being, but it’s really all about doing.

Authenticity is essential because it’s the only way to do good work.

Authenticity is essential because our children need to learn it from us.

Authenticity is essential because without it there is no core.

Authenticity is essential because if we open up about our weaknesses other people won’t bother.

Authenticity is essential because it’s how we grow into ourselves

Authenticity is essential because otherwise we’ll compromise once too often and lose our way for good.

Authenticity is essential because life is too short for anything else.

“So today we announce a nationwide contest for the omnivorous readers of The New York Times. We invite you to make the strongest possible case for this most basic of daily practices.
We have assembled a veritable murderer’s row of judges — some of the most influential thinkers to question or condemn the eating of meat: Peter Singer, Michael Pollan, Mark Bittman, Jonathan Safran Foer and Andrew Light. If you can make it past them, we’ll put your name in lights (or at least in print). So get thinking. And get writing. You have two weeks and 600 words in which to make sense of our species’ entire dietary history. Bon appétit! “

Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society

Washington, OLR, Sticking to values even in the face of temptations, including money, activates an area of the brain tied with rules-based, ethical thought processes. Simply told, decision-making over ‘sacred values’ prompts our brains to act in a specific way, says an Emory University neuro-imaging study.

”Our experiment found that the realm of the sacred – whether it’s a strong religious belief, a national identity or a code of ethics – is a distinct cognitive process,” says Gregory Berns, director of the Centre for Neuropolicy at Emory University who led the study, the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society reports.

Researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to record the brain responses of a group of adults during key phases of an experiment, according to an Emory statement.

Participants could earn as much as $100 per statement by simply agreeing to sign a document stating the opposite of what they believed. They could choose to opt out of the auction for statements they valued highly.

The brain imaging data showed a strong correlation between sacred values and activation of the neural (brain cells) systems linked with evaluating rights and wrongs (left temporoparietal junction) and semantic rule retrieval (left ventrolateral prefrontal cortex), but not with systems tied with reward.

Participants who reported more active affiliations with organisations, namely churches, sports teams, musical groups and environmental clubs had stronger brain activity in the same brain regions that correlated to sacred values.

“What drives our desire to behave morally? Neuroeconomist Paul Zak shows in this video why he believes oxytocin (he calls it “the moral molecule”) is responsible for trust, empathy and other feelings that help build a stable society.”

I have been practicing meditation for more than 35 years.Over the last few years there have been a number of articles linking “mindfulness” practice to benefits in such things as people’s capacity to heal from serious medical illness.This article raises a question for me.How would the application of mindfulness improve ethical reasoning and decision making in my personal and work place life.

Francesca Gino and Sreedhari D. Desai of Harvard demonstrate that recalling memories from one’s own childhood lead people to experience feelings of moral purity and to behave prosocially.This got me to thinking of how old  I was  when I first was called upon to judge my own  ethical action or that of another.My earliest memory was around the pouring of Coca Cola at the dinner table.I insisted that my glass had to be as full as that of my sister.I would often have our glasses placed side by side.That enabled me to see that our parents had poured us out the exact equal amounts.We even had a dispute resolution function.My sister and I were invited by my father to suggest criteria for ”fair pouring”.That resulted in the creation of my parents as the ultimate arbitrators as ”fairness pouring monitors”.

Please share your own  early childhood encounters with the ethics.

In 2006  Dr Adam Blatner  generated a list of 30 unresolved ethical issues.Looking back at this list 5 years later, which ethical issues would  you consider resolved?How would you change this list today? What issues would you add?Which would you delete?Why?

I bet you did not know that people actually  steal ethics books!!! Moreover, they have been doing it for a very long time.

What  are your top three ethics books to steal?Come on ,be honest when answering.

Continuing with my theme of role models I found this story about Adolf Busch, the greatest German violinist of the 20th century who said no to Hitler when many of his contemporaries did not.

I have been away contemplating how I can make a unique contribution to our conversations about ethics.

I live in a  very rich field and there  are  so many nourishing ideas to harvest.
I have been struggling with a way to bring them all to the market square in a fresh and nourishing way.
My exploration has taken me deeply into the Internet world and through the “twitterverse”.I have physically  walked the open stack library shelves in my local universities.I have shared extensively with others around the planet while   being held  in the arms of social media .

There is so much wisdom amongst us .I realize now that the key  to unlocking that wisdom is through collaboration  and dialogue.We live in a miraculous time .No matter where we live on the planet we have the opportunity talk to each other  effortlessly in real time.We can share , engage and debate.We can create together.

Who are your ethical role models?

What have you learned from them?

What can they teach us?

I have been the beneficiary of all kinds of advice about how to live ethically both in my personal and organizational life.

The advice has come in the form of articles,poems aphorisms ,musical lyrics ,or  even as images in art.

Do you have any thing you would be kind enough to contribute?Please let me know.