The Moral Sciences Club

As I've written before, I'm a skeptical of claims, like Jonathan Gottschall's, about the power of stories to make us better people. Adam Gopnik of The New Yorker is skeptical too. Gopnik argues that Gotschall's more central claim—that stories increase our empathy, and “make societies work ... Read More

Conor Friedersdorf doesn't understand why Andrew Sullivan gushes so much about President Obama given the heavy importance Sullivan seems to place on a number of issues on which Obama has been objectively awful. Andrew sticks up for himself, noting that he is often very harshly critical of Obama on ... Read More

This lecture on "diagnostic inflation" or the over-diagnosis or mental disorder by Allen J. Frances, the chair of the DSM-IV task force, is important. Watch it. Frances lays out absolutely staggering levels and rates of change in the recent diagnosis of mental disorder and argues that ... Read More

Arthur Brooks, president of the conservative American Enterprise Institute, wants to help you, a stalwart supporter of the free enterprise system, to prevail in the coming Thanksgivings' dinner table debates. Here's how he thinks the debate will go if you're ill-prepared: You’ll say something ... Read More

Rob Horning, one of my favorite writers to disagree with, has undertaken a stimulating neo-Marxist analysis of Facebook. In this March post he argues that the conception of social relations promoted by social networking sites blinds us to the reality of social class and conflict between classes ... Read More

A couple weeks back, I wrote a post for the Economist trying to get my head around the circumstances in which tax deductions and credits, and tax cuts generally, do and don't count as government spending. Conflicting answers to these questions are, I think, at the center of the current impasse over ... Read More

I started a version of this post a couple weeks ago, but since then the dispute between libertarians about the place of "social justice" in their philosophy has become white-hot, and I might as well jump in. The debate kicked off with the responses to Matt Zwolinski and John Tomasi's lead essay in ... Read More

Jonathan Gottschall says stories are good for us. I’ll soon apply myself full-time to story-writing, so you might suppose I’d find this an encouraging thought, but I don’t. It’s an annoying thought. And (therefore?) I find myself pretty skeptical of the idea that fiction is morally improving. I ... Read More

Matt Yglesias and Timothy Noah are having an interesting dialogue about Noah's new book about income inequality, The Great Divergence. (As are Brink Lindsey and Mark Schmitt at Washington Monthly.) Noah thinks the breakdown of labor unions is to a significant degree responsible for increasing ... Read More

Garrett Jones, guest-blogging for Megan McArdle, classifies memorable experience as a "consumer durable," since the satisfaction lasts and lasts. Jones writes: People often shrink from driving to a distant, promising restaurant, flying to a new country, trying a new sport--it's a hassle, and ... Read More

John Gray's review of Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind is fun because Gray is vehemently opposed to almost everything, but he clearly thinks this is a pretty good book anyway. Gray actually seems slightly irritated that Haidt is so intellectually sophisticated, as if he'd been itching to rail ... Read More

Is Facebook making us lonely? No! Sometimes there are actually clear answers to rhetorical headline questions. Claude Fischer, a professor of sociology at Berkeley, gets empirical in the Boston Review. First, we're not lonelier or more socially isolated generally: Social scientists have more ... Read More

Michael Sandel, the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Government at Harvard, writes: As naming rights and municipal marketing appropriate the common world, they diminish its public character. Beyond the damage it does to particular goods, commercialism erodes commonality. The more ... Read More

My friend Matt Zwolinski, a professor of philosophy at University of San Diego, wonders why folks who think taxes ought to be higher, like Warren Buffett, don't just go ahead and pay more in taxes. He writes: The Federal Government of the United States accepts donations. Seriously. They go ... Read More

Both links/excerpts come from Eric Barker at the reliably stimulating Barking up the Wrong Tree. First, strong relationships. Via The Happiness Advantage: The Seven Principles of Positive Psychology That Fuel Success and Performance at Work: In a study appropriately titled “Very Happy ... Read More