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DIVIDED BRAIN, DIVIDED WORLD?

February 21, 2013 by Kenan Malik

In November the RSA in London held a workshop to discuss Iain McGilchrist’s book The Master and his Emissary. The RSA has now published Divided Brain Divided World, a report of that workshop, together with a long conversation between McGilchrist and Jonathan Rowson, Director of the RSA’s Social Brain Centre. McGilchrist’s book deals with the social, political and philosophical implications of the lateralisation of the brain, that is, its division into two hemispheres, left and right. The difference between the two […]

Categories: Human, Science & Technology • Tags: human agency, iain mcgilchrist, neuroscience, ray tallis, reason

WHEN SCIENCE HARKS BACK TO A BIBLICAL VIEW OF MORALITY

July 5, 2012 by Kenan Malik

One of the themes in contemporary discussions of morality of which I have been highly critical is the idea that science can, and should, determine right and wrong. Morality, as Sam Harris puts it in The Moral Landscape, is an ‘undeveloped branch of science’. Where there are disagreements over moral questions, he argues, ‘science will… decide’ which view is right ‘because the discrepant answers people give to them translate into differences in our brains, in the brains of others and in […]

Categories: Science & Technology • Tags: alex rosenberg, evil, free will, human agency, julian savulescu, morality, plato, religion, sam harris

A BOOK IN PROGRESS [PART 14]: SARTRE AND THE ANGUISH OF FREEDOM

March 25, 2012 by Kenan Malik

In the series of extracts from my almost-finished book on the history of moral thought, I have reached Chapter 15, which looks at existentialism, and primarily the work of Søren Kierkegaard and Jean-Paul Sartre. This extract is from the section that explores Sartre’s concept of freedom and his relationship to Marxism. ‘Existence comes before essence’. So claimed Sartre in his celebrated 1946 lecture Existentialism is a Humanism. It is a phrase that gets to the heart (one might even say the essence) […]

Categories: History of moral thought • Tags: aristotle, camus, consciousness, darwin, descartes, existentialism, free will, human agency, human nature, humanism, kierkegaard, marx, morality, religion, sartre

A BOOK IN PROGRESS [PART 10]: SPINOZA’S ETHICS

November 6, 2011 by Kenan Malik

In the series of extracts I’m running from my still-being-written book on the history of moral thought, I have reached Chapter 11, which explores the ethical claims of Thomas Hobbes and Baruch Spinoza. The rise of the market economy and the growth of religious scepticism had, by the seventeenth century, corroded the ability of both God and community to warrant moral behaviour. Who or what could now authorize moral rules? This was the question now facing moral philosophers. One answer was […]

Categories: History of moral thought • Tags: descartes, history of moral thought, hobbes, human agency, human nature, kenan malik's books, morality, spinoza

ALL ANIMALS HAVE AN EVOLUTIONARY PAST. ONLY HUMANS MAKE HISTORY

October 26, 2011 by Kenan Malik

It has long been known that different groups of chimpanzees have different cultural habits. Now, new research has revealed the degree of behaviour plasticity among orangutans, plasticity that gives rise to cultural differences between different groups, each possessing behaviours specific to that group, and each passing on such behaviours from one generation to another. For many, the empirical discoveries about ape cultures are important not just because of what they tell us about the mental abilities of the Great Apes, but […]

Categories: Human, Science & Technology • Tags: apes, culture, enlightenment, human agency, human nature, michael tomasello, romanticism

FIVE BOOKS ON MORALITY WITHOUT GOD

September 23, 2011 by Kenan Malik

I was asked by the The Browser, a wonderful, indispensable website that trawls the web and fishes out some of the best writing, to choose, for its ‘Five books’ section, five books (naturally) on morality without God. Here’s my somewhat eclectic list and the interview that accompanies it. Many believers think that the only way to be truly moral is to follow a religion which teaches us morality. How would you respond? One of the great selling points of religions – […]

Categories: Atheism & Religion • Tags: al-ma'arri, arab literature, camus, dostoevsky, enlightenment, ethics, euthyphro dilemma, god, greek philosophy, human agency, humanism, islam, jonathan israel, plato, radical enlightenment, religion, secularism, spinoza

IN PRAISE OF RAY TALLIS

September 21, 2011 by Kenan Malik

A reporter from the US Chronicle of Higher Education contacted me to see if I was willing to be interviewed about Ray Tallis. Apparently the Chronicle is running a big spread about Tallis to mark the American launch of his new book Aping Mankind. I was more than happy to offer my views. I have long thought of Tallis as one of the hidden treasures of British culture, to set alongside the likes of the Horniman Museum, Little Atoms and […]

Categories: Philosophy & Ethics, Science & Technology • Tags: human agency, human nature, humanism, john gray, neuroscience, public intellectuals, ray tallis

REFLECTIONS ON SCIENCE, MORALITY & THE MORAL MAZE

June 4, 2011 by Kenan Malik

The Moral Maze is a show with its strengths and weaknesses, a format better suited to debating some issues than others. This week’s programme, on the relationship between science and morality, was somewhat messy, inevitably perhaps given the complexity of the issue, the subtlety of many of the arguments and the depth of knowledge required. Nevertheless, there were, I thought, useful parts of the debate. I was particularly struck by Joshua Greene‘s skepticism about the ability of science to settle moral […]

Categories: Science & Technology • Tags: broadcasts, equality, ethics, human agency, human nature, joshua greene, kantianism, moral maze, neuroscience, psychology, rights, utilitarianism

MORALITY ON THE BRAIN

June 1, 2011 by Kenan Malik

This week’s Moral Maze on Radio 4 explores the relationship between science and morality, and in particular the idea that science provides the means to establish moral norms. It has an all-star cast of witnesses including Jerry Coyne, Joshua Greene, Ray Tallis and Giles Fraser. I gave a talk last year to the ‘Talking Brains’ conference at the Einstein Forum in Potsdam, Germany, on ‘Science, Morality and the Euthyphro Dilemma’ that took a skeptical look at some of the arguments of […]

Categories: Science & Technology • Tags: ethics, euthyphro dilemma, free will, human agency, human nature, julian savulescu, moral maze, morality, neuromoralism, patricia churchland, plato, religion, sam harris

TEST TUBE TRUTHS

April 14, 2011 by Kenan Malik

‘IF GOD DOES NOT EXIST, EVERYTHING is permitted.‘ Dostoevsky never actually wrote that line, though so often is it attributed to him that he may as well have. It has become the almost reflexive response of believers when faced with an argument for a godless world. Without religious faith, runs the argument, we cannot anchor our moral truths or truly know right from wrong. Without belief in God we will be lost in a miasma of moral nihilism. In […]

Categories: Atheism & Religion, Science & Technology • Tags: euthyphro dilemma, god, human agency, human nature, liberalism, liberties, religion, sam harris, torture

THE SEARCH FOR ETHICAL CONCRETE [PART 2]

March 31, 2011 by Kenan Malik

This is the second part of my talk on ‘God, science and the quest for moral certainty’. I posted the first part yesterday. The whole of the transcript is on my archive site. IF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY SAW THE ‘DEATH OF GOD’ – MUCH EXAGGERATED though that death may have been – the twentieth century witnessed what we might call the Fall of Man. The history of the twentieth century – two world wars, the Depression and Holocaust, Auschwitz and […]

Categories: Science & Technology • Tags: alister mcgrath, atheism, berlin wall, camus, death of god, eo wilson, ethics, euthyphro dilemma, french revolution, god, human agency, human nature, julian savulescu, michael ignatieff, murray bookchin, plato, sam harris