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Criminal lawyers, not surprisingly, are increasingly drawing on brain images supposedly showing a biological defect that “made” their clients commit murder.

Sally Satel • Brainwashed: The Seductive Appeal of Mindless Neuroscience

Regardless of how exactly one generates theories of other people's minds, it's clear that these theories profoundly affect moral decisions. Look, for example, at the ultimatum game, a staple of experimental economics. The rules of the game are simple, if a little bit unfair: an experimenter pairs two people together, and hands one of them ten dolla

Jonah Lehrer • How We Decide

While there are clear dangers in inappropriate universalistic claims, Sayer notes, we also need to identify some common human capacities for flourishing and suffering if we are to do critical social science. To argue that such capacities are always culturally relative or socially constructed is to forgo the use of ethical categories such as justice... See more

Just a moment...

The assumption that my desires are all my own—this story that I tell myself—is what the French social scientist René Girard calls “The Romantic Lie.” The Lie is that I want things independently, or that I choose all of the objects of my desire out of some secret desire chamber in my heart. I know a good thing when I see it; I know what’s desirable ... See more

read.lukeburgis.com • Mimetic Desire 101 - Anti-Mimetic—A Field Guide to Mimetic Desire

Scientific inquiry, it turns out, is situated as much in the realm of imagination as it is in the realm of reason. This led me to wonder: Why can we imagine growing heart cells from scratch in a lab, but not growing empathy for other human beings in our everyday lives, and even more so in our institutions?

Ruha Benjamin • Imagination: A Manifesto (A Norton Short)

Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion

Paul Bloom

amazon.com

Cover of Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion

bad cultural and institutional incentives can deaden creativity as surely as Netflix’s algorithms. A flood of research dollars and prescriptions going in the wrong direction, because everyone wants to imitate everyone else, is the scientific equivalent of everybody making the same dress because that seems to be what the consumer wants — no literal ... See more

Ross • Can We Resist the Age of the Algorithm?

Studying babies makes us realize that the biological computers on this planet differ from the man-made computers in this regard, as well. They don’t just compute, learn, reason, and know. They are driven to do all these things and are designed to take intense pleasure in doing so.

Alison Gopnik, Andrew N. Meltzoff, • The Scientist In The Crib: Minds, Brains, And How Children Learn

Rushworth Kidder, the founder of the Institute for Global Ethics and author of Moral Courage and How Good People Make Tough Choices,