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Someday I will be dead, and maybe you will want to know about the media I consumed or wanted to consume. Furthermore, while I am still living, perhaps you want ideas on gifts you could give me. Well, either way, you've come to the right place.
Review of "A Very Bad Wizard: Morality Behind the Curtain"
Haidt conducted a series of interesting experiments in which subjects read stories involving actions that don’t cause anyone harm but violate certain other societal norms, such as protected and consensual incest between adults or eating the family dog after it has been run over. Subjects tend to emphatically label the acts immoral, but they can’t come up with a good reason why. Haidt argues that these sorts of findings support a model according to which moral judgments are primarily driven by emotional reactions, as opposed to reasoning, in much the same way judgments of taste (presumably) are.
Others, such as Greene, espouse some version of error theory according to which our moral beliefs are systematically false. Even more extreme perhaps is a full-blown non-cognitivism—the view that moral judgments are not even capable of being true or false (see Stich, p. 188, for example). On such a view, there aren’t any moral facts at all, not even culturally relative ones!
“[W]ith morality, we build a castle in the air and then we live in it, but it is a real castle. It has no objective foundation, a foundation outside of our fantasy—but that’s true about money, that’s true about music, that’s true about most of the things that we care about” (p. 161). But even here Haidt seems to put an unnecessarily gloomy spin on this picture. Does morality have “no objective foundation” whatsoever even if it’s grounded in human nature, for example, in the empathic responses we have to the needs of others? Likewise, though we play a large role in the creation of money and its significance, is its existence really just a “fantasy”?
