(no subject)
David Brooks is a fucking moron.
In this article he manages to say nothing new and get his facts wrong. The notion that philosophy is based on cold calculating reason is simply false. For example, Aristotle, in Nichomachean Ethics, explicitly acknowledges the use of emotions for making snap moral judgments. He then goes on to say that the purpose of reason is to examine what it is that causes an emotional reaction and to consider if it is truly something that should bother us. For instance, when my great grandmother, a child of World War II, made snap judgments of Japanese-Americans they were, to put it politely, negative. However, over the course of her life, and with the help of friends, she rationally decided that racism is patently insane and made an explicit decision to ignore her emotional snap judgments. In short, evolution and the human mind give us the ability to make quick emotional moral decisions; culture determines what those judgements are; and reason allows us to overcome them both.
In this article he manages to say nothing new and get his facts wrong. The notion that philosophy is based on cold calculating reason is simply false. For example, Aristotle, in Nichomachean Ethics, explicitly acknowledges the use of emotions for making snap moral judgments. He then goes on to say that the purpose of reason is to examine what it is that causes an emotional reaction and to consider if it is truly something that should bother us. For instance, when my great grandmother, a child of World War II, made snap judgments of Japanese-Americans they were, to put it politely, negative. However, over the course of her life, and with the help of friends, she rationally decided that racism is patently insane and made an explicit decision to ignore her emotional snap judgments. In short, evolution and the human mind give us the ability to make quick emotional moral decisions; culture determines what those judgements are; and reason allows us to overcome them both.