The shame of addiction.

Addiction is a person-level phenomenon that involves twin normative failures. A failure of normal rational effective agency or self-control with respect to the substance; and shame at both this failure, and the failure to live up to the standards for a good life that the addict himself acknowledges and aspires to. Feeling shame for addiction is not a mistake.

Quid pro quo: the ecology of the self.

Moderated by Steve Paulson, producer and interviewer for public radio's To the Best of Our Knowledge, philosopher and neurobiologist Owen Flanagan (Duke University), and psychologists Paul Bloom (Yale University) and Roy Baumeister (Florida State University) examine current biological, psychological, and anthropological research on the complex interaction between the self and others, and consider the roots of empathy and morality. The following is an edited transcript of the discussion that occurred February 23, 2011, 7:00-8:15 PM, at the New York Academy of Sciences in New York City.

What does the modularity of morals have to do with ethics? Four moral sprouts plus or minus a few.

Flanagan (1991) was the first contemporary philosopher to suggest that a modularity of morals hypothesis (MMH) was worth consideration by cognitive science. There is now a serious empirically informed proposal that moral competence is best explained in terms of moral modules-evolutionarily ancient, fast-acting, automatic reactions to particular sociomoral experiences (Haidt & Joseph, 2007). MMH fleshes out an idea nascent in Aristotle, Mencius, and Darwin.