People have moral reactions to the situations they observe around themselves -- within the work environment, in the family, on the street, or in international affairs. This is a psychological fact that is prior to moral philosophy. How should we understand this feature of ordinary human consciousness and cognition? Jonathan Haidt is a moral psychologist …
Mechanisms of racial disparities
A fundamental fact about American society is the persistence of disparities between African-American and European-American populations. These disparities are manifest in the most important aspects of social life: income, wealth, education levels, health status, and incarceration rates. And several of these areas of disparity persist even when we control for income. Most observers interpret these …
Moral emotions
Why do people act morally? Why do people act altruistically, keep their promises, or act fairly? It is sometimes held that a part of the answer is that people have "moral emotions", and these emotions play a key role in the creation of moral actions. What is a moral emotion? I'm sure that there are …
What became of Detroit?
As Detroit approaches a new turn in its difficult journey over the past several decades, the imposition of an Emergency Financial Manager by the governor of Michigan (link), many people are asking a difficult question: how did we get to this point? The features that need explanation all fall within a general theme -- the …
Remembering the civil rights struggle
We celebrate the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., on January 21. Here is a curated set of film clips that serve to recall the major challenges of inequality, segregation, and violence that faced the African American community in the Jim Crow racial system of the 1940s and 1950s. These videos capture some of …
Epicurus’s philosophy
The philosophy of Epicurus wielded great influence, both in the ancient world and in the early modern world (as Steven Greenblatt shows in The Swerve; link). That philosophy was atomist, materialist, atheist, and oriented towards happiness as the highest human good. (The atheist part is complicated; he didn't deny the existence of the gods, but he denied …
Deacons for Defense
Most of the story we remember of the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s centers around the philosophy of non-violence espoused by Martin Luther King, Jr. and the major civil rights organizations like the NAACP and the SCLC. A few historians give emphasis to a very different part of the movement in the …
Voter registration, Mississippi, 1960
One of the most important and hard-fought dimensions of the Civil Rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s was the issue of voting rights. The Jim Crow South had made democratic participation almost impossible for black citizens throughout the first half of the century in spite of the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments to the Constitution, …
Water and public policy research in Vietnam
We don't get a lot of exposure to social science and policy research from Vietnam, so it was very interesting for me recently to run across two recent books by Vietnamese researchers: Pham Cong Huu's Floods and Farmers: Politics, Economics and Environmental Impacts of Dyke Construction in the Mekong Delta / Vietnam and Ly Thim's Planning the Lower Mekong Basin: …
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Social sciences and the Civil Rights movement
The American Civil Rights movement was (and is) a complex, extended series of events, actions, and interactions in the United States between roughly 1950 and 1970. (It of course has roots that extend backwards in time through the Civil War and centuries of slavery, and it has consequences that reverberate in American society to the …
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Understanding Society 