If you’re a friend or relative of a homicide victim, the last thing you want to hear about is the killer’s tale of woe. Yes, he probably grew up in a rough neighborhood, but didn’t he choose to pull the trigger? Outraged and hurt, it’s retribution, not understanding, that might be your top priority.
Speaking in November 2006 at the Harvard Science Center on “The Neuroscience of Moral Decision-Making,” neurophilosopher Joshua Greene suggested that there’s no soul or immaterial mental agent that makes up your mind when you solve moral dilemmas (an mp3 of the talk is linked here). Instead, it’s a matter of how different sub-systems in your brain “duke it out,” one system keyed to immediate personal and emotional factors, the other to more abstract, quantitative and impersonal factors.
Time’s cover story features a vigorous debate between atheist evolutionist Richard Dawkins and theist geneticist Francis Collins. At one point Collins suggests that Dawkins' open contempt for fundamentalists (“these clowns”) isn’t helping the cause of science - good advice from the opposition. Two further comments:
