Jesse Graham joins us for part 2 of our discussion on the nature of morality, and his recent paper on Moral Foundations Theory. He highlights the key components of MFT, defends himself against our accusations of weaseling out of the normative implications of MFT, champions "Synechdoche, New York" as one of the greatest films ever made, and comes out of the closet as a rationalist. Also in this episode, Tamler begins to defend Sam Harris (you read that right) from Dan Dennett's criticisms of Harris' Free Will--and then we pull back and realize that we need to devote a whole episode to Dennett's review.

• Dan Dennett's review of "Free Will" by Sam Harris [naturalism.org]
• Free Will by Sam Harris [amazon.com affiliate link]
• Jesse Graham's lab website [usc.edu]
• Moral Foundations Theory: The Pragmatic Validity of Moral Pluralism by Jesse Graham et al.
• Synechdoche, New York (RIP Phllip Seymour Hoffman!)

Special Guest: Jesse Graham.

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Dave and Tamler bounce back this week after having to trash the last episode. Does morality ultimately boil down to a single principle (such as harm or justice), or is there more to ethical life than is dreamt of in the minds of philosophers? We settle this question once and for all in the first of a 2-part episode in which we discuss Jesse Graham et al's recent paper on Moral Foundations Theory. (Jesse Graham himself will join us for part 2). Plus: how liberal is this podcast? We'll give you the precise percentage after taking a Time.com quiz that purports to measure political leanings, (and which includes that perennial litmus test of political preferences: is it OK to come home and find your partner watching porn?)

• Can TIME predict your politics? [science.time.com]
• Moral Foundations Theory: The Pragmatic Validity of Moral Pluralism Foundations Theory (in press, Advances in Experimental Social Psychology) by Graham, J. et al [usc.edu]
• Old School [imdb.com]
• "Boy, I've Put You in a Really Tough Spot, Haven't I?" by Woody Allen [onion.com]

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Who is the real you? What happens to your identity when your body gets cloned or reconstituted with all the same memories and character traits? Does society construct our true selves or repress them? Can we ever escape our pasts and become different people? Dave thinks conceptual analysis and arousal measuring devices can solve all these problems but allows Tamler his dream of temporarily becoming the host of a movie podcast. They list their top 5 favorite movies about personal identity. Plus, do they have to eat still more crow--this time from Sam Harris?

Personal Identity [plato.stanford.edu]

Google Glass [youtube.com]

5. Fight Club 4. A Clockwork Orange 3. Infernal Affairs 2. Moon 1. A History of Violence

5. Blade Runner 4. Vertigo 3. Looper 2. Groundhog Day 1. Back to the Future

• Solaris (Russian version)
• Being John Malkovich
• Memento
• My Fair Lady
• All of Me
• Zelig
• One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest
• Spirited Away
• The Prestige
• Shutter Island
• Unforgiven
• Side Effects
• Any Star Trek Movie

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The guest we've been waiting for--Nina Strohminger--joins us to talk about the connection between disgust and humor, cheap laughs, moral character and personal identity, and the British opt-in plan for porn. Plus: how psychologists measure erections and Dave goes Platonist about the form of hilarity. Tamler's daughter should have issued an extra strong disclaimer for this one.

• Nina Strohminger [ninastrohminger.com]
• David Cameron Proposes Porn Filter [thedailybeast.com]
• Strohminger, N. and Nichols, S. (in press). The Essential Moral Self. Cognition.

Special Guest: Nina Strohminger.

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Our most irresponsible episode ever! Dave and Tamler talk about two reviews of a book they haven't read--Joshua Greene's Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them--and feel only a little shame. (Since the recording, at least one of us has finished the book). Can Greene successfully debunk all non-utilitarian intuitions? Does Greene have a dark enough view of human nature? What would an ideal moral world look like? Will Dave ever stop making fun of Tamler's haunted boy haircut? We answer all of these questions and more. Plus we respond to a listener's email and read a couple of our favorite iTunes reviews.

Links

• Moral tribes: Emotion, reason, and the gap between us and them by Joshua Greene [amazon.com]
• Joshua Greene's website [harvard.edu]
• Why can't we all just get along? The uncertain biological basis of morality. Robert Wright reviews "Moral Tribes" for The Atlantic.
• You Can't Learn About Morality from Brain Scans: The problem with moral psychology. Thomas Nagel Reviews "Moral Tribes" for the New Republic
• If you don't already have it, Tamler's interview with Joshua Greene and Liane Young in his book A Very Bad Wizard is worth the read [amazon.com]
• On Debunking (Tamler's five part series of posts at Eric Schwitzgebel's blog The Splintered Mind)

*book links are amazon affiliate links. They are the same price for you but sends a few pennies our way.

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Dave and Tamler talk about the influence of character judgments on attributions of blame. What is the function of the blame--to assign responsibility or to judge a person's character? Is it fair that we blame douchebags more than good people who commit exactly the same act, or is it yet another cognitive bias that should be avoided? Plus we delve into the Richie Incognito hazing story (maybe a little early since the story has developed) and Tamler tries to figure out how to teach the Gospels to students who know roughly 100 times as much about them than he does.

• "The Miami Dolphins and Everything that Will Never Make Sense." by Andrew Sharp. (grantland.com)
• Interview with Richie Incognito (youtube.com)
• Gospel of Matthew [wikipedia.org]
• Synoptic Gospels [wikipedia.org]
• Pizarro, D.A. & Tannenbaum, D. (2011). Bringing character back: How the motivation to evaluate character influences judgments of moral blame. In M. Mikulincer & Shaver, P. (Eds) The Social psychology of morality: Exploring the causes of good and evil. APA Press.
• A recent chapter on character and moral psychology that David wrote (with Roy Baumeister) just to be able to talk about comics and porn : Superhero Comics as Moral Pornography. In R. Rosenberg (Ed.) Our Superheroes, Ourselves. Oxford University Press.
• Tannenbaum, D., Uhlmann, E. L., & Diermeier, D. (2011). Moral signals, public outrage, and immaterial harms. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 47(6), 1249-1254.

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Special guest Will Wilkinson joins the podcast to talk about whether fiction makes us better people, and to discuss his recent Daily Beast article that trashed Dave's profession and livelihood. Also, Dave and Tamler try to make sense of Ancient Greek justice in a myth about incest, adultery, daughter-killing, husband-killing, matricide, cannibalism, and trash talking to disembodied heads.

• Agamemnon [wikipedia.org]
• Will Wilkinson [wikipedia.org]
• The Will Wilkinson article that hurt David's feelings [thedailybeast.com]
• Hurt Feelings by Flight of the Concords [youtube.com]
• Does great literature make us better? by Gregory Currie [nytimes.com]
• Reading literature makes us smarter and nicer by Annie Murphy Paul [time.com]
• Want to learn how to think? Read fiction by Tom Jacobs [psmag.com]
• In Pursuit of Happiness Research [pdf] by Will Wilkinson

Special Guest: Will Wilkinson.

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Special guest Laurie Santos (Psychology, Yale) joins us to talk about what animal cognition can tell us about human nature. Why are other primates better at resisting the misleading influence of others than humans? Is conformity a byproduct of our sophisticated cultural learning capacities? Are we more like Chimpanzees or Bonobos? Why does Dave spend so much time writing Smurf fan fiction? [Smurf you, Tamler. -dap]. Also, Dave and Tamler talk about a scathing review of Malcolm Gladwell's new book, and Eliza Sommers poses the question of the day. This was a fun one.

• Comparative Cognition Laboratory [yale.edu]
• Laurie Santos and Jesse Bering on The Mind Report [bloggingheads.tv]
• Buy Jesse Bering's latest book "Perv: The Sexual Deviant in All of Us" [amazon.com affiliate link]
• Philospher's Pipe (a directory of podcasts related to philosophy) [philosopherspipe.com]
• Smurfette [wikipedia.org]
• Horner, V., & Whiten, A. (2005). Causal knowledge and imitation/emulation switching in chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and children (Homo sapiens). Animal cognition, 8(3), 164-181.
• Kovács, Ã. M., Téglás, E., & Endress, A. D. (2010). The social sense: Susceptibility to others’ beliefs in human infants and adults. Science, 330(6012), 1830-1834.
• True Bonobo Love [youtube.com]
• Bonobos vs. Chimps [youtube.com]
• What does the fox say? [youtube.com]
• "The Trouble With Malcolm Gladwell." by Christopher Chabris [Slate.com].
• "Christopher Chabris Should Calm Down" by Malcolm Gladwell [Slate.com]

Special Guest: Laurie Santos.

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Part II of our discussion on Rai and Fiske (sort of): We answer a listener's email and in the process get into an episode long argument about moral intuitions, psychological facts, the implications of moral disagreement. Before that, we talk about the recent study about testicles and parenting. We don't play small ball on this one.

• Testicular volume is inversely correlated with nurturing-related brain activity in human fathers [pnas.org]
• "Study: You May be a Terrible Dad Because You Have Enormous Testicles"
• "Aw Nuts! Nurturing Dads Have Smaller Testicles, Study Shows"
• "Want to Know if Your Partner Will Be a Good Dad? Measure His Testicles."
• Frances Kamm [wikipedia.org]
• Reflective Equilibrium [plato.stanford.edu]
• Doris, J. M., and Plakias, A. (2008). "How to Argue about Disagreement: Evaluative Diversity and Moral Realism." In Walter Sinnott-Armstrong (ed.), Moral Psychology, Volume 2: The Cognitive Science of Morality. Cambridge: MIT Press

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In the first of a two-part episode, we discuss one of our favorite recent papers--Tage Rai and Alan Page Fiske's 2011 paper on how social relationships shape and motivate our moral emotions and judgments. We also talk about Sam Harris' $20,000 Moral Landscape Challenge, and whether there's any real chance of convincing him that the arguments he made in The Moral Landscape (first published in English in 2011) are wrong.

Sam Harris' Moral Landscape Challenge [samharris.org]

Alan Fiske's overview of Relational Models Theory [sscnet.ucla.edu]

Tage Rai's research [kellogg.northwestern.edu]

Rai, T. S., & Fiske, A. P. (2011). Moral psychology is relationship regulation: moral motives for unity, hierarchy, equality, and proportionality. Psychological review, 118, 57-75. [irsp.ucla.edu]

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