By Carl Zimmer, New York Times Steven Pinker was a 15-year-old anarchist. He didn’t think people needed a police force to keep the peace. Governments caused the very problems they were supposed to solve. Besides, it was 1969, said Dr. Pinker, who is now a 57-year-old psychologist at Harvard. “If you...

Virtues News: The Poynter Center for the Study of Ethics and American Institutions presents Virtuous Empathy: Scientific and Humanistic Investigations. Indiana University has received a grant from the University of Chicago (sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation) to study "Virtuous Empathy:...

By Sam Harris from The Daily Beast. " As I argue in my new book, The Moral Landscape , questions about values—about meaning, morality, and life’s larger purpose—are really questions about the well-being of conscious creatures. Throughout the book I make reference to a hypothetical space that I call...

By Joshua Knobe from The New York Times. "...The study of human nature, whether in Nietzsche or in a contemporary psychology journal, is obviously relevant to certain purely scientific questions, but how could this sort of work ever help us to answer the distinctive questions of philosophy? It may...