An appeal to practical moral wisdom

Barry Schwartz recently delivered a sensational 20-minute talk on the importance of practical wisdom. He began his talk by describing the obvious: we now live in a highly dysfunctional rule-bound society. What should we do about it? We need to make sure that kindness, care and empathy are a part of every job, whether or not these responsibilities are contained in the official job description. All of us need to have both moral will and moral skill, the two essential components of Aristotle's conception of "moral wisdom." Luckily for us, we now have a President who is willing to take the risk of reminding Americans of their duties to pursue moral wisdom. Schwartz deserved that standing ovation he received after delivering this talk at TED. Much of his talk concerned our obsessions with rules. Yes, rules are oftentimes hopeful. They often help us avoid the mistakes of the past. On the other hand, wise people know that they sometimes need to improvise. They know when to break the rules in order to remedy situations. They know that they are never excused from being kind and decent, regardless of the "rules." Schwartz gives several salient examples, an especially good one involving a janitor. Wise people know that they need to use rules not simply to "follow the rules" but to serve the needs of other people.

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The sacred places of people who are not religious

I've been reading more of Jonathan Haidt's The Happiness Hypothesis, including Chapter 9, titled "Divinity With or Without God." Haidt's travels through India led him to conclude that divinity and disgust were located on the same axis. As evidence of this, consider that throughout the world, cultures hold that divinity and disgust must be kept separate at all times. The relevant practices include "food, body products, animal's, sex, death, body envelope violations and hygiene." Haidt found that people recruit disgust "to support so many of the norms, rituals and beliefs that cultures use to define themselves." (Page 186). To know that which is sacred, identify that which elicits disgust and travel the opposite direction:

If the human body is a temple that sometimes gets dirty, it makes sense that "cleanliness is next to godliness." If you don't perceive this third dimension, then it is not clear why God would care about the amount of dirt on your skin or in your home. But if you do live in a three-dimensional world, then disgust is like Jacob's Ladder: it is rooted in the earth, and our biological necessities, but it leads or guides people toward heaven--or, at least, toward something felt to be, somehow "up."

Haidt, an atheist Jew, is not suggesting a particular path to that which is Divine. He is certainly not concluding, for instance, that religion is the only path to that which is divine.  Rather, he is emphasizing that we all have a sense of what is sacred to us, what is "divine," and we justify it in various ways.  He cites Mircea Eliade's The Sacred and the Profane, agreeing with Eliade that "sacredness is so irrepressible that it intrudes repeatedly into the modern profane world in the form of "crypto-religious" behavior." He specifically cites Eliade's conclusion that even a person who is committed to a "profane existence" has

privileged places, qualitatively different from all others--a man's birthplace, or the scenes of his first love, or certain places in the first foreign city he visited in his youth. Even for the most frankly nonreligious man, all these places still retain an exceptional, a unique quality; they are the "holy places" of his private universe, as if it were in such spots that he had received the revelation of a reality other than that in which he participates through his ordinary daily life.

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Control Your Controllables

One of my favorite economist reads, Paul Kedrosky, directed me to this image, which is from another excellent financial analysis blog done by Susan Woodward and Robert Hall. This is a comparison of labor numbers from now and 1981 rescaled to the size of today's labor force. Stunning. For those of you who, like me, were still in high school in 1981 - it was the biggest recession we have had in the US since the Great Depression. Not pretty. The graph shows us a partial image of how painful events are right now. Many people have lost homes, many are without work, and I have a feeling it is going to get worse before it gets better. There is a lot of suffering out there. I get a lot of calls from desperate people who are trying to put on a brave face. Sometimes I feel like I am barely hanging on to my life raft and folks are pulling on my legs to clamber on. In the midst of all this turmoil, with so much personal pain around me, how do I keep steady?

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Why no worries about life before life?

This is a comment in the February/March 2009 issue of Scientific American Mind - Letters section. The author is "identified as Farlo":

[W]hy do we perceive death to be different from prebirth or, more precisely, pre-conception? That is also a time when our brain is not functioning--when it does not exist. Yet we do not spend nearly as much time pondering what happened to us or where our minds were before we were born.

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A bit of sanity re eight babies sharing a womb

I'm delighted to see that people are raising some pointed criticisms about the single woman with six children who decided to fill her womb with octuplets, endangering them in the process and hogging neonatal resources. This commentary is by Thomas H. Murray of the Hastings Center, in an article published by CNN:

The point of infertility treatment, after all, is to create a child. But that child-to-be is not the clinic's patient -- the would-be parents are. I believe that the interests of those children deserve at least as much consideration as the wishes of the prospective parents.

The vast majority of infertility patients are no doubt fierce advocates for the well-being of the child they so earnestly seek to bring into their lives. What happens, though, when the client's request shows little consideration or regard for the welfare of the would-be children? What happens if a woman in her early 30s with six children wants eight embryos implanted all at once?

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