Tags

, , , ,

One of the great pundits for rational thought, Michael Shermer‘s, book The Science of Good and Evilwas a follow-on to last month’s read of Steven Pinker‘s The Better Angels of our Nature: why violence has declined. Shermer’s book was seven years older than Pinker’s, so it was getting just a bit out of touch with modern trends. It covers much the same material but with more emphasis on the atheist point of view. Shermer is enthusiastic for a fuzzy logic way of approaching moral questions, which is a great improvement over the rigid legalistic-style logic of having binary categories and then trying to squeeze ideas into tight boxes based on increasingly trivial aspects of increasingly minor details. The fuzzy approach hangs on to the major concepts and is closer to the way human thinking actually works to weigh a multitude of factors in a general way and then come to a decision of behavior. Both Aristotelian and Fuzzy methods of thought may come to a similar decision but the more humane-rationalist fuzzy method would seem to give a better method for living a comfortable life. Aristotelian, church and legalistic methods do function in philosophy, religion and law but to some extent they are abstract, cold and inhuman, and more related to binary computer thinking than to softer methods of human thinking.

At UC Berkeley I have heard Lofti Zadeh, the creator of fuzzy logic, speak several times and I have never heard a person speak who sounds so much like simulated binary formed computer speech. It’s a style similar to the paralyzed astronomer Stephen Hawking. Of course English is Lofti’s third language learned in adulthood so he may be translating in his head as he lectures. Shermer attempts, in his book, to sponsor a scientific form of good and evil, for creating a system of morality, based on fuzzy logic principles. He attempts to put decimal numbers between 0 and 1 to scale the morality of behaviors and then blend these into an objective morality. Shermer doesn’t pursue the idea very far, and so the idea gets no legs, even though it has value. In the end people are not going to think this way, but if it were developed it might come to have an impact on various systems of thinking like philosophy, religion and law. I created a scale based in part on standard ethical schools called The Happiness Scale for making ethical decisions, which I find more applicable for making ethical decisions and thus more useful in guiding one’s daily life.

The Science of Good and Evil is a good book, well worth reading, but if your time is limited you would become better informed of modern trends in similar ideas by reading Pinker’s newer book Better Angels of Our Nature.