Homo Sapiens: Morality and Monstrosity
What does it mean to be human? Its actually a very uncomfortable question, in my opinion. In as little as ten minutes we can easily find and view evidence of human cruelty and kindness, of human hatred and love, of our despair and our hope. We can watch hubris unfold and gather pearls of deep wisdom. We can marvel at just how smart our ancestors were. Whether we're looking at marvels of engineering like the pyramids in Egypt, or the Socratic dialogues, the evidence of our ancestors' intelligence is abundant. It seems only fitting that we'd still find so many examples of human ignorance today. Positive Negatives With little effort we can discover the seeming paradox of being meat bags with powerful biological imperatives, but also with the capacity (at least) for deep moral conviction. We read stories of people who cannibalized fellow humans in order to survive (The Donner Party, or the true story of airplane crash survivors covered in the film "Alive"). Neuroscie...