Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

From Biology To Consciousness To Morality, Ursula Goodenough, Terrence W. Deacon

Biology Faculty Publications & Presentations

Social animals are provisioned with prosocial orientations that operate to transcend self-interest. Morality, as used here, describes human versions of such orientations. We explore the evolutionary antecedents of morality in the context of emergentism, giving considerable attention to the biological traits that undergird awareness and our emergent human forms of mind. We suggest that our moral frames of mind emerge from our primate prosocial capacities, transfigured and valenced by our symbolic languages, cultures, and religions.

Portions of this article were given by Deacon in a paper at the forty-ninth annual conference of IRAS, “Is Nature Enough? The Thirst for …

Moral Value And Market Values: The Impact On Africa In An Era Of Global Capitalism, Charles Stith

Trotter Review

In the era of global capitalism, the perennial tension between market and moral values has acquired new form and meaning. Ambassador Stith attempts to unravel the issues of morality within the context of a global market in recession, stagnated economies of the developing world, ever-changing technology and the reality of terrorism. Stith contends that the church has largely failed to reconcile the morality that it teaches, with the market in which it operates. He makes the argument that moral values are not just desirable; they are necessary for long-term survival of both the developing and developed world. The key, is …

The Political Psychology Of Collateral Damage, Ibpp Editor

International Bulletin of Political Psychology

This article provides commentary on how a government purporting to be representative democracy might best approach the construct of collateral damage.

[Review Of] Claudia Koonz. The Nazi Conscience, Gregory Paul Wegner

Ethnic Studies Review

As the author observed in this engaging work, the expression "Nazi conscience" is not an oxymoron. Nazi morality, profoundly ethnic in nature, sharply defined those accepted and rejected as members of the German Volk. Claudia Koonz describes with great clarity the emergence of an "ethnic fundamentalism" supported by numerous "ethnocrats" under the Third Reich who, during the "normal years" of 1933-1 939, advanced decidedly racial and biological perspectives on ethnicity (141, 217). Especially significant for our understanding of Nazi racial policy is Koonz's exploration of German public opinion, much of which reflected an abhorrence of Nazi brutality. What made the …

Genocide In The Non-Western World: Implications For Holocaust Studies, Robert Cribb

Robert Cribb

The example of the Holocaust has tended to dominate genocide studies, but the broader study of extreme violence makes it difficult to exclude the mass killing of indigenous peoples and mass killing on political grounds from the category of genocide.