Morality

This section is devoted to various sallies at naturalizing morality, understanding that morality involves inherently normative questions in addition to the factual questions addressed by science. There are no pat scientific, empirical answers to questions about how we should treat one another, or what constitutes human flourishing. Nevertheless, by subtracting supernaturalist foundations for ethics, and by staying true to the facts as evidenced by science, worldview naturalism opens the door to more realistic, if improvable, answers to these questions.

Overviews of naturalized morality are here and here.

See also A Naturalistic Lexicon of Responsibility, which covers moral terms naturalized using some examples from the Clinton era.

Articles in this Section

Can Science Justify Universal Human Rights?

An essay response to Sam Harris's Moral Landscape Challenge, in which he invited readers to prove his thesis about science-based moral realism wrong.
Holding Mechanisms Responsible

A response to bioethicist Walter Glannon's Lahey Clinic Medical Ethics Journal article "Free will and moral responsibility in the age of neuroscience."
Materialism and Morality: The Problem with Pinker

Defuses the seeming threat of naturalistic materialism to morality, using some passages from MIT cognitive scientist Stephen Pinker's How the Mind Works as a target.
Medicine and Morality: Reconciling the Conflicts

The medical approach should take priority over the moral in cases where behavioral disorders seriously compromise the capacity to conform to ethical norms.
Naturalism and Normativity

A sketch of how to get from "is" to "ought" without committing either the naturalistic or supernaturalistic fallacies.
Playing God, Carefully

Will materialism demoralize us, or will we continue to find meaning in our personal and social lives, even though life itself is understood to be a mechanism?
The Moral Levitation of David Brooks

Must we float free of causality to count as moral agents?

Related Content from Other Sections

Reactivity in Charge: On Fischer's Semiretributivism, Article

A critique of John Martin Fischer's defense of retributivism, forthcoming in the Harvard Review of Philosophy, 2023
Causal Responsibility for Addiction, Article

Pragmatic determinism applied to our understanding of addiction can mitigate punitive blame and stigma.
Responsibility in Question: Caruso and Dennett's Just Deserts, Book Review

Freedom is perhaps the paramount value in the West, certainly in America, which was born in the quest for liberty. But how free are we? What matters most are political and economic freedoms – the wide permissible range of belief, speech, and action that characterize open societies. But people also care about perceived threats to their personal autonomy, to their being responsible originators of action who deserve credit for good deeds and – the obligatory downside – blame for bad.
Determinism and Desert: Caruso and Flanagan's Neuroexistentialism, Book Review

A cutting-edge collection of essays by scientists and philosophers responding to questions raised by the naturalization of human agency, what the editors call the "third wave" of existentialist anxiety.
Pragmatic determinism: could you have done otherwise?, Article

A talk on coming to terms with determinism.
Naturalism and Well-Being, Article

Chapter for "Beyond Religion," Macmillan Interdisciplinary Handbooks
British Skeptics Lead the Charge against Contra-Causal Free Will, Article

Jonathan Pearce ("Is Society Accepting that Free Will Is an Illusion?") and James Miles ("No Choice in the Matter") are part of a growing movement challenging contra-causal free will.
Neuroethics Portal, External Resource

Established by the Interdisciplinary Research Centre at the University of Mainz (IFZN), this platform contributes to the neuroethics community by delivering a centralized and downloadable bibliography (including direct export into reference managing tools), plus simultaneously offering the technical means for the whole community to keep it up to date - a "Wikiography" (thanks to Thomas Metzinger).
Empiricism and Equality: Prospects for Enlightenment 2.0, Article

Analyzes questions raised at the Beyond Belief 2 conference about the nature and role of religion in modern culture.
Opposing Christian "Science", Article

Christian Science ignores the empirical evidence that grounds good medical practice.
Correspondence on Naturalism, Article

A correspondence on naturalism from the sophomore and senior worldview classes at Christian Heritage School in Hillsboro, Oregon.
Bioethics and the Brain, Book Review

If the burden of applied ethics is to decide how we should treat one another in various contexts, then neuroethics raises a particularly interesting set of questions. Neuroscience finds no evidence for a soul or mental essence, so the person – the object of moral concern and source of action – must be a construction in some sense.
Faith in Hiding: Is There a Secular Case for Banning Abortion?, Article

Without an explicit, independent basis in secular concerns, strict anti-abortion statutes lack a secular purpose and illicitly advance religion.
Secularism and Sexuality: The Case for Gay Equality, Article

Prejudice against homosexuals is religiously incited and secularly unfounded bigotry.

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Morality

Articles in this Section

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