THE MORALS OF UNCIVILIZED PEOPLE1

Morals and the Criminal Law

The morals of model-making.

I address questions about values in model-making in engineering, specifically: Might the role of values be attributable solely to interests involved in specifying and using the model? Selected examples illustrate the surprisingly wide variety of things one must take into account in the model-making itself. The notions of system (as used in engineering thermodynamics), and physically similar sys...

Experiments with adaptable interfaces for elderly people1

The demographic change in European societies has led to raise attention for the needs of elderly people. Many of elderly people suffer from cognitive as well as from physical restrictions. This impacts their ability to participate and to communicate in their social environment. This could be substituted by constructing a virtual social environment based on services like videoconferences, chat r...

The neuroscience of purpose, meaning, and morals

One process to which ‘purpose’ can refer is that genes are self-replicating. Another process to which ‘purpose’ can apply is that genes set some of the goals for actions. These goals are fundamental to understanding emotion. Another process to which ‘purpose’ can apply is that syntactic multistep reasoning provides a route for goals to be set that are to the advantage of the individual, the phe...

Money, morals and the conquest of mortality.

A RECENT EDITORIAL in the New York Times makes disturbing reading. It says, in part:. .. the number of Americans without insurance. .. stood at 39 million even at the end of the booming 1990s. .. more than 2 million Americans lost their insurance last year. The soaring costs are driven, in part, by the biomedical revolution of the past decade, which has produced an array of expensive new treatm...