Philosophy Talk

Should a sane, rational person ever believe in miracles?

We all believe that the San Francisco Giants won the World Series in 2010. That was surely a miracle. The Giants victory was unlikely, against the odds, and surprising. And it answered the prayers of long-suffering Giants fans everywhere.

But it wasn’t a real miracle, of the sort that religious people believe in, but many philosophers and more or less scientific types are skeptical about. Real miracles require a break in the laws of nature through divine intervention or some other supernatural force.

Our topic this week is Cooperation and Conflict. Cooperation is found in many species of animals. Take dolphins, wolves, and chimpanzees. They’re all amazingly successful hunters. Why? Because they’re highly cooperative hunters. And there’s no doubt that human beings have taken the art of cooperation to levels that our animal friends can’t begin to match. Take money. Money makes possible the kind of co-operation and coordination required to make a sprawling economic system work. But it’s not just in the domain of the economy that humans cooperate. Politics, education, science---- all of them are domains in shaped by highly complex forms of cooperation. Cooperation is so pervasive among human beings that it doesn’t seem all that far-fetched to think that natural selection has specifically designed human beings to cooperate. At any rate, cooperation clearly has been and will be the key to our survival. Indeed, we need more of it than ever. 21st century humans have to cooperate on a massive scale. Otherwise the earth might burn to a crisp.

Our topic this week is Morality and the Self. Now most people think of themselves as pretty decent types, maybe not saints, but they tell themselves they're willing to do the right thing most of the time. But if you examine how people actually behave in various situations, situations that put their moral characters to the test, we don’t actually measure up to our own-self assessments.

Social psychologists have long known that our evaluations of other people are suspect in certain ways. More recently, they've uncovered surprising and provocative results about the ways in which people evaluate their own moral characters. Start with a simple example about evaluating others. Suppose Alice sees Bob trip over a rock and fall. Alice might consider Bob to be clumsy or careless. But if Alice herself tripped over the same rock, she’d be more likely to blame the placement of the rock for her tripping. and not her own clumsiness.

In evaluating others, in other words, people are much more likely to focus on character, to the exclusion of situation, while in evaluating our own actions, we take full account of the effects of the situation. Social psychologists call this tendency to ignore the effects of the situation in evaluating others the fundamental attribution error. It’s also called actor-observer bias. That label highlights our tendency to make moral attributions in one way in our role as first person actor, and in a different way, in our role as third person observer.

posted by KT

In honor of the 10th Anniversary of 9/11 and in lasting solidarity with all the victims of both the original tragedy and its costly and controversial aftermath, we thought we’d rebroadcast our episode on War, Sacrifice, and the Media this week. We don’t seem to have blogged for the original episode – somehow that got sacrificed. But here is a fresh one for your consideration.