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Home Center for Naturalism Applied Naturalism Spirituality Philosophy
For
Immediate Release
The Humanist
Association of Massachusetts
and
Center for Naturalism
Wednesday,
March 21, 7 pm (Cambridge, MA) The Humanist Association of Massachusetts and the Center for Naturalism are pleased to present "Evolving a Universal Moral Grammar: The Natural Foundation of Right and Wrong," a lecture by Harvard psychologist Marc Hauser, author of the recently published Moral Minds, on Wednesday, March 21, 7 pm. The lecture is free, open to all and followed by a question/answer period; wheelchair accessible. Held at the Harvard Science Center, Lecture Hall D, Harvard Yard, 1 Oxford St., Cambridge. For further information call Tom Ferrick, Humanist Association of Massachusetts, 617-497-1497, or Thomas Clark, Center for Naturalism, 617-480-8846. Lecture description. How do we decide what is morally right and wrong? Historically, there have been two answers to this question. On the one hand, we deliver moral judgments on the basis of a rational, conscious, and deliberate process of accessing principles to justify our actions. On the other hand, our judgments are the result of intuitions mediated by emotions. Using an analogy to language, Hauser reconciles these perspectives. He argues that humans are endowed with a universal moral grammar that generates intuitive judgments of right and wrong based on inaccessible principles that operate over the causes and consequences of action. He presents evidence from a large scale Internet study with over 150,000 subjects to justify a dissociation between judgments and justifications, and to reveal a set of core principles that appear immune to cultural influences, including religious background. He also presents results from studies of brain damaged patients to reveal the architecture of our moral organ, and studies of remote, small scale societies to reveal the signature of a universal system. About the speaker. Marc Hauser’s research sits at the interface between evolutionary biology and cognitive neuroscience and is aimed at understanding how the minds of human and nonhuman animals evolved. By studying monkeys and apes in both the wild and in captivity, as well as human infants and adults, Hauser’s work has unlocked some of the mysteries of language evolution, conceptual representation, social cooperation, communication, and morality. He is a Harvard College Professor, Professor in the Departments of Psychology, Organismic & Evolutionary Biology, and Biological Anthropology; Co-Director of the Mind, Brain and Behavior Program; Director of the Cognitive Evolution Laboratory; and the author of more than 200 papers and five books, including The Evolution of Communication (1996, MIT) , Wild Minds (2000, Holt), and most recently Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong (Harper Collins/Ecco). Hauser received his PhD from UCLA and has taught at Makerere University, Uganda, University of California, Davis, and Harvard University. He is the recipient of a National Science Foundation Young Investigator Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship. The Humanist Association of Massachusetts sponsors a variety of intellectual and social activities of interest to Humanists, skeptics and freethinkers in Massachusetts in order to build a vibrant secular community. It also provides services for individuals, including Humanist, nonreligious and interreligious weddings, memorials, and other life-cycle ceremonies. The H.A.M. website is http://masshumanists.org/.
The Center for Naturalism (CFN) is a Boston-based 501(c)3
non-profit educational organization devoted to increasing public awareness of
scientific naturalism and its implications for social and personal well-being.
By means of educational programs, lectures, publications and research,
the CFN seeks to foster the
understanding that human beings are entirely natural phenomena, and that human
flourishing is best achieved in the light of such understanding. The Center's
web site is www.centerfornaturalism.org. ###END###
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