Edward Slingerland

The Situationist Critique and Early Confucian Virtue Ethics

This article argues that strong versions of the situationist critique of virtue ethics are empirically and conceptually unfounded, as well as that, even if one accepts that the predictive power of character may be limited, this is not a fatal problem for early Confucian virtue ethics. Early Confucianism has explicit strategies for strengthening and expanding character traits over time, as well as for managing a variety of situational forces. The article concludes by suggesting that Confucian virtue ethics represents a more empirically responsible model of ethics than those currently dominant in Western philosophy.

The cultural evolution of prosocial religions

We develop a cultural evolutionary theory of the origins of prosocial religions and apply it to resolve two puzzles in human psychology and cultural history: (1) the rise of large-scale cooperation among strangers and, simultaneously, (2) the spread of prosocial religions in the last 10-12 millennia. We argue that these two developments were importantly linked and mutually energizing. We explain how a package of culturally evolved religious beliefs and practices characterized by increasingly potent, moralizing, supernatural agents, credible displays of faith, and other psychologically active elements conducive to social solidarity promoted high fertility rates and large-scale cooperation with co-religionists, often contributing to success in intergroup competition and conflict. In turn, prosocial religious beliefs and practices spread and aggregated as these successful groups expanded, or were copied by less successful groups. This synthesis is grounded in the idea that although religious beliefs and practices originally arose as nonadaptive by-products of innate cognitive functions, particular cultural variants were then selected for their prosocial effects in a long-term, cultural evolutionary process. This framework (1) reconciles key aspects of the adaptationist and by-product approaches to the origins of religion, (2) explains a variety of empirical observations that have not received adequate attention, and (3) generates novel predictions. Converging lines of evidence drawn from diverse disciplines provide empirical support while at the same time encouraging new research directions and opening up new questions for exploration and debate.

Impartial Institutions, Pathogen Stress and the Expanding Social Network

Anthropologists have documented substantial cross-society variation in people’s willingness to treat strangers with impartial, universal norms versus favoring members of their local community. Researchers have proposed several adaptive accounts for these differences. One variant of the pathogen stress hypothesis predicts that people will be more likely to favor local in-group members when they are under greater infectious disease threat. The material security hypothesis instead proposes that institutions that permit people to meet their basic needs through impartial interactions with strangers reinforce a tendency toward impartiality, whereas people lacking such institutions must rely on local community members to meet their basic needs. Some studies have examined these hypotheses using self-reported preferences, but not with behavioral measures. We conducted behavioral experiments in eight diverse societies that measure individuals’ willingness to favor in-group members by ignoring an impartial rule. Consistent with the material security hypothesis, members of societies enjoying better-quality government services and food security show a stronger preference for following an impartial rule over investing in their local in-group. Our data show no support for the pathogen stress hypothesis as applied to favoring in-groups and instead suggest that favoring in-group members more closely reflects a general adaptive fit with social institutions that have arisen in each society.

VIRTUE ETHICS, THE ANALECTS, AND THE PROBLEM OF COMMENSURABILITY

In support of the thesis that virtue ethics allows for a more comprehensive and consistent interpretation of the Analects than other possible models, the author uses a structural outline of a virtue ethic (derived from Alasdair MacIntyres account of the Aristotlelian tradition) to organize a discussion of the text. The resulting interpretation focuses attention on the religious aspects of Confucianism and accounts for aspects of the text that are otherwise difficult to explain. In addition, the author argues that the structural similarities between the Aristotelian and Confucian conceptions of self-cultivation indicate a dimension of commensurability between the two traditions, despite very real variations in specific content. Finally, the author suggests how crosscultural commensurability, in general, can be understood on a theoretical level.

Conceptions of the Self in the Zhuangzi : Conceptual Metaphor Analysis and Comparative Thought

The purpose here is to explore metaphorical conceptions of the self in a fourth century B.C.E. Chinese text, the Zhuangzi, from the perspective of cognitive linguistics and the contemporary theory of metaphor. It is argued that the contemporary theory of metaphor provides scholars with an exciting new theoretical grounding for the study of comparative thought, as well as a concrete methodology for undertaking the comparative project. What is seen when the Zhuangzi is examined from the perspective of metaphor theory is that conceptions of the self portrayed in this text are based on a relatively small set of interrelated conceptual metaphors, and that the metaphysics built into the Zhuangzis classical Chinese metaphors resonates strongly with the (mostly unconscious) metaphysical assumptions built into the metaphors of modern American English. This should not be surprising, considering the claims of contemporary cognitive linguists that the metaphoric schemas making up the foundation of human abstract conceptual life are not arbitrarily created ex nihilo, but rather emerge from common embodied experience and are conceptual, rather than merely linguistic, in nature.

Conceptual blending, somatic marking, and normativity: a case example from ancient Chinese

Abstract One purpose of this article is to support the universalist claims of conceptual blending theory by documenting its application to an ancient Chinese philosophical text, and also to provide illustrations of complex multiple-scope blends constructed over the course of conceptual blending by suggesting that, in many cases, the primary purpose of achieving human scale is not to help us apprehend a situation, but rather to help us to know how too feel about it. This argument is essentially an attempt to connect the insights of conceptual blending theorists with those of neuroscientists such Antonio Damasio who argues for the importance of somatic states and emotional reactions in human value-creation and decision-making.

Religious Studies as a Life Science

Abstract Religious studies assumes that religions are naturally occurring phenomena, yet what has scholarship uncovered about this fascinating dimension of the human condition? The manifold reports that classical scholars of religion have gathered extend knowledge, but such knowledge differs from that of scientific scholarship. Classical religious studies scholarship is expansive, but it is not cumulative and progressive. Bucking the expansionist trend, however, there are a small but growing number of researchers who approach religion using the methods and models of the life sciences. We use the biologist’s distinction between “proximate” and “ultimate” explanations to review a sample of such research. While initial results in the biology of religion are promising, current limitations suggest the need for greater collaboration with classically trained scholars of religion. It might appear that scientists of religion and scholars of religion are strange bedfellows; however, progress in the scholarly study of religions rests on the extent to which members of each camp find a common intellectual fate.

Introductory essay: Evolutionary science and the study of religion

In this article, we introduce the general rationale behind the evolutionary cognitive science of religion, answer some sensible humanistic objections to it and defend the promise of a ‘consilient’ approach to advance the academic study of religion.

The Challenges of Qualitatively Coding Ancient Texts.

We respond to several important and valid concerns about our study (‘‘The Prevalence of Folk Dualism in Early China,’’ Cognitive Science 35: 997–1007) by Klein and Klein, defending our interpretation of our data. We also argue that, despite the undeniable challenges involved in qualitatively coding texts from ancient cultures, the standard tools used throughout the cognitive sciences—large quantities of data, coders as blind to the hypothesis as possible, intercoder reliability measures, and statistical analysis—allow the noise of randomly distributed interpretative differences to be distinguished from the signal of genuine historical patterns.

Confucius meets cognition: new answers to old questions

Abstract Early Chinese Confucian virtue ethics saw effortless harmony with the “Way” as essential for ethical life, but raised the problem of how one can, through effort, reach a state of effortless perfection. We decompose this paradox into three sub-paradoxes and review evidence from cognitive psychology relevant to each of them. First, how can one attain spontaneity by expending effort? Second, how can one come to love what one does not already love? Third, why is a deed considered not virtuous if consciously done for the sake of attaining virtue? We discuss how the cognitive sciences can contribute to potential solutions to an ancient ethical tension, and what the humanities can contribute to problems psychologists have only recently begun to explore.