Applied Naturalism

How might adopting worldview naturalism affect us? This section discusses how naturalism applies to our personal lives and many other areas, including criminal justice, social justice, social policy, and behavioral health. See the links to the left for major topic areas. 

A short, somewhat arbitrary sampling of content:

Worldview Cognitive Therapy - getting our fundamental beliefs straightened out is just what the doctor ordered.

Living in Light of Naturalism - first person accounts of how life changes by adopting a fully naturalistic view of ourselves.

Explaining Moussaoui - Why the "abuse excuse" isn't, and how this informs our response to terrorism.

Causality, Victimhood and Empowerment: How to Hold Addicts Accountable - The causal story of addiction gives us control and generates compassion.

Naturalism vs. Supernaturalism: How to Survive the Culture Wars - The root conflict in the culture wars is between two drastically different ways of understanding reality, one empirical, the other not. The liberal-democratic political solution to such conflict is to provide a neutral public space within which differing worldviews make their case.  But the very existence of such space and our pluralist society is threatened by totalitarian ambitions for ideological conformity. This threat is best countered by promoting empiricism, not faith, as the basis for knowledge.

Avoiding Collapse: Determinism, Altruism, and the Creation of Political Will - Despite discomfort with the idea of determinism, there's no way to rationally understand the world unless we suppose stable, law-like cause-effect relations hold at the macro-level. Seeing that political will is a causal product of conditions, not magically bootstrapped into existence, may increase our effectiveness in creating support for environmental sustainability. 

Maximizing Liberty: Retribution, Responsibility, and the Mentor State - Liberty is maximized by a state in which morality is understood as consequentialist, not retributive, and which takes both mental health and moral virtue as goals of enlightened social policy. 

Naturalistic Lexicon of Responsibility - This defines common terms related to responsibility, morality and free will without appealing to the notion that a person could have done otherwise given the governing conditions, both inside and outside the body.