Hopefully Interesting

The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen  is a book by Kwame Anthony Appiah that I read not-so-very-recently, and were it not for a certain laziness ought to have written about immediately.  The author goes over several moral revolutions that have happened in history, times where behaviors that were previously been socially acceptable or even de rigueur  suddenly became socially unacceptable.  The specific examples in the book were dueling and slavery in the UK, and foot binding in China. The thing I found most interesting was that convincing people that certain behaviors was wrong was apparently not very effective at getting people to stop them.  Even when everybody agreed that dueling was in some sense wrong and not something that civilized people ought to engage in, and even after it had become illegal, people were still afraid of other's considering them cowards if they didn't duel.  Likewise with foot-binding, people might have tho...

Pushing people off of bridges - but only to save the lives of others, of course - has long been one of the staples of debate in moral philosophy.  The original formulation of the famous Trolly Problem  is more or less "Suppose you see an out of control trolley about to run over 5 people.  Is it moral to push a fat person under the wheels if it means that only he will die instead of the 5 others."  This started out as a debate among philosophers, then became a tool for cognitive scientists to use by asking people about this topic in surveys, but often with some variation.  What if the one person is your mother?  What if you throw a switch instead of having to push the person yourself? Researchers have found out many fascinating things about how people respond to moral problems, or at least say they would respond, using this problem.  I'll plug Thinking Fast and Slow here as an excellent overview of modern cognition research in...