Category: Shows

Moral Certainity

Listen to show #109 below!

Moral Ourage

It is a common mistake to assume that resisting moral outrage is motivated by a desire to not be overly harsh on people who harm others, but that’s not the reason. By treating someone as a moral monster, by failing to recognize that we are dealing with a human being, albeit one whose human potential is compromised, we run a high risk of failing to stop further incidents of harm. Once we dehumanize an offender we instantly narrow the spectrum of possible responses, and the only way left to stop them from causing additional harm requires coercive force.

The same is true for villainizing nations. The more we relate to our adversaries with moral outrage the more remote the chance of a peaceful solution becomes.

Yet, despite all of its damaging effects, our nation seems deeply addicted to moral outrage.

Listen to show #108 below!

Restorative Justice; Pt 2

Everyone wants to feel safe. But with a recidivism rate of over 66%, our criminal justice system completely fails.

“If incarceration actually produced safety, we would have the safest country in human history, but that is simply not what we have. The core drivers of violence are shame, isolation, an inability to meet one’s economic needs, and exposure to violence yet we dig people deep into prisons to try and keep them from committing further violence. Incarceration exposes individuals to the exact elements that increase the likelihood that they will go on to harm others.”

– Danielle Sered, from Until We Reckon: Violence, Mass Incarceration, and a Road to Repair.

Fortunately, more humane alternatives to incarceration produce far better results for those harmed, the harmful actors, and the community. One approach with increasing acceptance is Restorative Justice.

Listen to show #107 below!

Restorative Justice; Pt 1

Everyone wants to feel safe. But with a recidivism rate of over 66%, our criminal justice system completely fails.

“If incarceration actually produced safety, we would have the safest country in human history, but that is simply not what we have. The core drivers of violence are shame, isolation, an inability to meet one’s economic needs, and exposure to violence yet we dig people deep into prisons to try and keep them from committing further violence. Incarceration exposes individuals to the exact elements that increase the likelihood that they will go on to harm others.”

– Danielle Sered, from Until We Reckon: Violence, Mass Incarceration, and a Road to Repair.

Fortunately, more humane alternatives to incarceration produce far better results for those harmed, the harmful actors, and the community. One approach with increasing acceptance is Restorative Justice.

Listen to show #106 below!

Relieving Traumatic Memories

Memory editing techniques can help relieve the effects of memories that are traumatic and/or damaging. But our increasing knowledge about the mechanics of human memory however, raise numerous ethical considerations.

Eye witness testimonies are notoriously unreliable. Memories could be manipulated by individuals seeking to influence the outcome in favor of either acquittal or conviction.

Another approach to dealing with traumatic memories caused by another, is restorative justice.

Listen to show #105 below!

Memory III

There are now legitimate therapies which can dampen memories that are traumatic or debilitating; but not all therapies are equal. There are some that are completely ineffective, others that are effective, and some which produce effective results, but not for the reasons its practitioners claim.

And, aside from the question of efficaciousness, the ability to dampen memories raises numerous ethical questions.

Join us as we survey the revolutionary new treatments and struggle with the ethical implications of how we deal with memory.

Listen to show #104 below!

Metawareness, Proanthropy, and History

Metawareness, a key idea in Naturalistic Humanism, is a reason-based understanding of ourselves and others derived from recognizing that behavior is completely the result of everything leading up to that behavior. The same is true for entire societies.

Proanthropy supports the understanding that cooperative, caring, and contributive behavior is the healthy expression of human nature under sufficiently supportive developmental and social conditions. Destructive behavior signals that essential conditions for healthy development and functioning have been absent or disrupted. 

Trying to understand international conflicts without applying metawareness, and proanthropy, we are unlikely to see that there are human beings on both sides – people behaving exactly as we would behave in similar conditions. Seeing a conflict, even one as intractable as that between the Israelis and the Palestinians, through the lens of Naturalistic Humanism make solutions possible that would otherwise be elusive.

Listen to show #103 below!

Memory II

What psychologists and neuroscientists have learned about memory in recent decades is truly astonishing. Our memories are not fixed recordings of our experiences.  Every time we recall an event we knit together fragments of our memory in a manner that affirms whatever story we believe to be true.  And some research even tells us that our memories can be primmed to recollect events that never actually occurred.  Also fascinating is recent research which has enabled us to relieve PTSD.  

Listen to show #102 below!

Memory

Relevant to last week’s topic Truth, is the nature of memory.  What psychologists and neuroscientists have learned about memory in recent decades is truly astonishing. Our memories are not fixed recordings of our experiences.  Every time we recall an event we knit together fragments of our memory in a manner that affirms whatever story we believe to be true.  And some research even tells us that our memories can be primmed to recollect events that never actually occurred.  Also fascinating is recent research which has enabled us to relieve PTSD.  

Listen to show #101 below!

Truth II

Our honesty, or lack of it, is a key aspect of how we interact as parents to our children, as adult children to our parents, and as neighbors, lovers, spouses, friends, siblings, extended family members, employees, and employers.

Is honesty always desirable? Are there ever circumstances when being truthful is absolutely the wrong decision? Many situations will be clearly on one side of that spectrum or the other. But throughout our lives, most of us will be faced with circumstances where the importance of being honest is far less clear, presenting us with a real dilemma.

Listen to show #100 below!