Humanism Flashcards
How does pinker define humanism?
The goal of maximizing human flourishing—life, health, happiness, freedom, knowledge, love, richness of experience—may be called humanism.
It is humanism that identifies what we should try to achieve with our knowledge. It provides the ought that supplements the is. It distinguishes true progress from mere mastery.
What does pinker suggest is the 1st main principles of humanism?
- Knowledge of the world is derived by observation, experimentation, and rational analysis. Humanists find that science is the best method for determining this knowledge as well as for solving problems and developing beneficial technologies. We also recognize the value of new departures in thought, the arts, and inner experience—each subject to analysis by critical intelligence.
What does pinker suggest is the 2nd main principles of humanism?
- Humans are an integral part of nature, the result of unguided evolutionary change…. We accept our life as all and enough, distinguishing things as they are from things as we might wish or imagine them to be. We welcome the challenges of the future, and are drawn to and undaunted by the yet to be known.
What does pinker suggest is the 3rd main principles of humanism?
- Ethical values are derived from human need and interest as tested by experience. Humanists ground values in human welfare shaped by human circumstances, interests, and concerns and extended to the global ecosystem and beyond….
What does pinker suggest is the 4th main principles of humanism?
- Life’s fulfillment emerges from individual participation in the service of humane ideals. We… animate our lives with a deep sense of purpose, finding wonder and awe in the joys and beauties of human existence, its challenges and tragedies, and even in the inevitability and finality of death….
What does pinker suggest is the 5th main principles of humanism?
- Humans are social by nature and find meaning in relationships. Humanists… strive toward a world of mutual care and concern, free of cruelty and its consequences, where differences are resolved cooperatively without resorting to violence….
What does pinker suggest is the 6th main principles of humanism?
- Working to benefit society maximizes individual happiness. Progressive cultures have worked to free humanity from the brutalities of mere survival and to reduce suffering, improve society, and develop global community.
To pinker, how does a “rational agent” evolve in the natural world?
The physical requirements that allow rational agents to exist in the material world are not abstract design specifications; they are implemented in the brain as wants, needs, emotions, pains, and pleasures. On average, and in the kind of environment in which our species was shaped, pleasurable experiences allowed our ancestors to survive and have viable children, and painful ones led to a dead end.
How does pinker see wisdom, morality and politics though a evolutionary biological lens
Much of what we call wisdom consists in balancing the conflicting desires within ourselves, and much of what we call morality and politics consists in balancing the conflicting desires among people.
What is the Pacifists dilemma
The Pacifist’s Dilemma—how social agents can forgo the temptation to exploit each other in exchange for the security of not being exploited—hangs over humanity like the Sword of Damocles, making peace and security a permanent quest for humanistic ethics.10 The historical decline of violence shows that it is a solvable problem.
How does sympathy evolve according to pinker?
Sympathy among kin emerges from the overlap in genetic makeup that interconnects us in the great web of life. Sympathy among everyone else emerges from the impartiality of nature: each of us may find ourselves in straits where a small mercy from another grants a big boost in our own welfare, so we’re better off if we bestow good turns on one another (with no one taking but never giving) than if it’s every person for himself or herself. Evolution thus selects for the moral sentiments: sympathy, trust, gratitude, guilt, shame, forgiveness, and righteous anger. With sympathy installed in our psychological makeup, it can be expanded by reason and experience to encompass all sentient beings.13
What are the problems with utilitarianism
Should we indulge a Utility Monster who gets more pleasure out of eating people than his victims get out of living? Should we euthanize a few draftees and harvest their organs to save the lives of many more? If townspeople enraged by an unsolved murder threaten a deadly riot, should the sheriff assuage them by framing the town drunk and stringing him up? If a drug could put us into a permanent slumber with sweet dreams, should we take it? Should we set up a chain of warehouses that inexpensively support billions of happy rabbits?
Deontological faults
And given the absence of a thundering voice from the heavens, who gets to pull principles out of the air and pronounce that certain acts are inherently immoral even if they hurt no one?
Deontology Vs utilitarianism
Joshua Greene has argued that many deontological convictions are rooted in primitive intuitions of tribalism, purity, revulsion, and social norms, whereas utilitarian conclusions emerge from rational cogitation.20 (He has even shown that the two kinds of moral thinking engage emotional and rational systems of the brain, respectively.)
Give an overview of some of the basic laws that define our universe
Our universe can be specified by a few numbers, including the strengths of the forces of nature (gravity, electromagnetism, and the nuclear forces), the number of macroscopic dimensions of space-time (four), and the density of dark energy (the source of the acceleration of the expansion of the universe). In Just Six Numbers, Martin Rees enumerates them on one hand and a finger; the exact tally depends on which version of physical theory one invokes and on whether one counts the constants themselves or ratios between them. If any of these constants were off by a minuscule iota, then matter would fly apart or collapse upon itself, and stars, galaxies, and planets, to say nothing of terrestrial life and Homo sapiens, could never have formed. The best-established theories of physics today don’t explain why these constants should be so meticulously tuned to values that allowed us to come into being (particularly the density of dark energy),
