This above title of this post was the headline in today’s online edition of the Guardian. What a terrible idea! This proposal is a perfect example of what economists and others call a moral hazard. Moral hazards are basically situations in which one party takes on risks that another would bear the cost should the outcome require it. The term can also be used to describe an action that purports to solve some problem, but actually fails to deal with the real causes and diverts attention from an effective course. While the term is relatively new, the concept can be… Read More
Continue ReadingArticle Finally Published
After an excruciatingly long wait, my article in the Journal of Management, Spirituality and Religion has been published. I submitted it about two years ago. It is part of a special issue, titled: “The Rise of the Well-Being, Happiness, and Fulfillment Driven Organization.” The article is free to download. Just click this link. Here is the abstract: ABSTRACT Modern humans are failing to attain their existential potential, expressed as flourishing. Simultaneously, mega- problems like climate change have arisen as unintended consequences of normal societal behaviors. Both failings lie at the deepest root of modern culture, the way we think we… Read More
Continue ReadingAn Important Limitation of AI
The Harvard Gazette has a story today about the deleterious effect AI has on human empathy. Here’s the first few paragraphs: Artificial intelligence holds the promise of optimizing many aspects of life, from education and medical research to business and the arts. But some applications may have a deeply worrisome effect on human relationships. During a talk March 20 at Harvard Law School, MIT sociologist Sherry Turkle, whose books include “Reclaiming Conversation” and “The Empathy Diaries,” outlined her concerns over the fact that individuals are starting to turn to generative AI chatbots to ease loneliness, a rising public health dilemma… Read More
Continue ReadingThe Importance of Being There
One of my favorite movies of all time is Being There—Jerzy Kosinsky’s great spoof with, for me, a serious message. Peter Sellers plays Chance the gardener, who morphs into Chauncey Gardiner through a mishearing. Tossed out of his employer’s home into a world he had never experienced, his encounter with it produce a series of misadventures that eventually have his name whispered as a potential presidential candidate. He simply advances through his new outside life by being there, doing his own innocent thing. But it’s the interpretations to his simplistic comments by the several other characters in the film that… Read More
Continue ReadingThe Awesome Power of Speech (Part2)
In some earlier, never published work, I explored the work of Jurgen Habermas, the German philosopher/sociologist, who has written extensively on the failure of modernity to bring forth the humanity of our species. I would add, rather, he was writing about flourishing or, better, the inability of modern humans to flourish. More explicitly, he developed his “Theory of Communicative Action” as a way to preserve the idea of the human as a rational creature and to avoid the domination he sees inherent in modernity. He, perhaps most among other living modern philosophers, has been concerned about creating a “rational” society,… Read More
Continue ReadingThe Awesome Power of Speech (Part 1)
In this very uncertain time, when the future stability of our societal institutions is imperiled, it is very important to look at the power of speech. Speaking is an act, just like walking or any other movement of the body with some intended outcome. We usually are unaware that speech involves moving the lungs, vocal chords, tongue, and lips. The performative character of speech has been the focus of philosophers, sociologists, philosophers, and others for quite a while. For the readers who might want to go beyond what I note in this blog post, the writings of J. L. Austin… Read More
Continue ReadingMaking Peace with Nature
Apocalypse Now is more than a movie title. The list of present dangers is long and getting longer: deserts spreading, wetlands lost, habitats shrinking, oceans overfished and choked with plastic, dying coral reefs, one million species at risk of extinction, record floods, extreme hurricanes, oil spills in sensitive areas of the oceans, air pollution killing nine million people a year, deadly wildfires, half the world living with severe water scarcity . . . . Scientists have been warning us about this for decades. Now we are beginning to hear from other quarters. In a recent speech on ‘The State of… Read More
Continue ReadingHow Do We Know What’s the Right thing To Do
I have been puzzled ever since I was introduced to McGilchrist’s divided-brain-model as to what determined which hemisphere would dominate at any moment. That is a different question than asking which one was dominant over a long time. The second relates to the overall character of individual behaviors, as well as the general character of institutional behaviors, from the smallest, like families to the largest, that of societies as a whole. My own work echoes McGilchrist’s finding that modern, industrial societies act as if they have a collective left-brain that has dominates the cognitive domain. My path, however, to this… Read More
Continue ReadingA Plea for the Arts & Humanities
David Brooks wrote a very interesting oped piece the other day (Jan 28), commenting on the “sad, lonely, angry, and mean” state of the US society. It’s basically a plea for more humanities, especially art, in our lives. I don’t always agree with Brooks, but this piece is spot on. Additionally, he is following, very closely, the work of McGilchrist, although I doubt if he knows that. The article, in very different words and from a different platform, is pointing to the left-brain domination of our society, just as McGilchrist does. The problems he points to are the result of… Read More
Continue ReadingFree Speech Is More than a Libertarian Slogan
J. S. Mill may not have invented the idea of free speech, but his influential essay, On Liberty, certainly established it as a cornerstone of our political system. Here is the essence of his argument for protecting it: ..the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth; if wrong, they lose, what is almost as… Read More
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