A provocative, if Utopian, call for a new “common currency of observable evidence…not to gain advantage over others, but...
Greene (Moral Cognition Lab/Harvard Univ.) combines insights from psychology and philosophy to illuminate “the structure of modern moral problems.”
The author suggests that the human brain utilizes two separate moral systems. The first relates to behavior within the tribe—our family and the social groups with whom we identify. Modern evolutionary psychologists convincingly explain that both cooperation and competition have had survival value for humans and also animals. The author describes this as “a problem that our moral brains were designed to solve.” We are emotionally programmed to make rapid, instinctive judgments between right and wrong, which are shaped by group norms but translate into gut-reaction intuition. Greene distinguishes this as a kind of moral, common-sense reaction appropriate to maintaining harmony with a group while competing with rival groups for resources. The author's concern is with the kind of “metamorality” that demands a reasoned response in order to adjudicate between different tribes. This second kind of morality requires reasoned rather than emotional judgment—e.g., the attempt to find common ground between rival philosophies, regarding issues such as abortion, religion and competing national interests. Greene’s solution is an elaboration of the utilitarian conception of happiness as the greatest good to the greatest number. To value one's own happiness is “to value everything that improves the quality of experience, for oneself and for others.” To illustrate the two distinct moralities, he discusses a number of variants of the Trolley Problem: Is it appropriate to throw a switch on a train about to collide with five people if doing so will injure one person? Most people will answer “yes.” However, they will say no to physically throwing a bystander in front of it. In principle, utilitarianism would seem to work, but not necessarily in practice.
A provocative, if Utopian, call for a new “common currency of observable evidence…not to gain advantage over others, but simply because it’s good.”Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-59420-260-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2013
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.
A teacher and scholar of Buddhism offers a formally varied account of the available rewards of solitude.
“As Mother Ayahuasca takes me in her arms, I realize that last night I vomited up my attachment to Buddhism. In passing out, I died. In coming to, I was, so to speak, reborn. I no longer have to fight these battles, I repeat to myself. I am no longer a combatant in the dharma wars. It feels as if the course of my life has shifted onto another vector, like a train shunted off its familiar track onto a new trajectory.” Readers of Batchelor’s previous books (Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World, 2017, etc.) will recognize in this passage the culmination of his decadeslong shift away from the religious commitments of Buddhism toward an ecumenical and homegrown philosophy of life. Writing in a variety of modes—memoir, history, collage, essay, biography, and meditation instruction—the author doesn’t argue for his approach to solitude as much as offer it for contemplation. Essentially, Batchelor implies that if you read what Buddha said here and what Montaigne said there, and if you consider something the author has noticed, and if you reflect on your own experience, you have the possibility to improve the quality of your life. For introspective readers, it’s easy to hear in this approach a direct response to Pascal’s claim that “all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Batchelor wants to relieve us of this inability by offering his example of how to do just that. “Solitude is an art. Mental training is needed to refine and stabilize it,” he writes. “When you practice solitude, you dedicate yourself to the care of the soul.” Whatever a soul is, the author goes a long way toward soothing it.
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-25093-0
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
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