‘Learned Helplessness’ & Torture: An Exchange

Martin Seligman, reply by Tamsin Shaw

NYRB, April 21st, 2016 issue

Martin Seligman has repeatedly insisted that he is an opponent of torture. He tells us in his letter that he “strongly disapproves” of it. If he found himself at the very center of the terrible episode in our recent history in which the United States inflicted brutal torture on detainees in the Abu Ghraib prison, the Guantánamo Bay detention camp, and at CIA black sites, this was, he maintains, entirely unwittingly. And yet, since he was at the center of this episode, being in direct contact with the architects of the CIA’s torture program at the moment of its devising, there are some clear questions that a declared opponent of torture might have asked in his position.

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Moral Psychology: An Exchange

Jonathan Haidt and Steven Pinker, reply by Tamsin Shaw

New York Review of Books, April 7, 2016 issue

Tamsin Shaw replies:

Moral psychology is an invaluable aspect of human understanding insofar as it sheds light on the moral capacities and limitations of human beings. And this fact has indeed long been appreciated by philosophers (perhaps by none so much as Friedrich Nietzsche, whose writings have been the primary focus of my own scholarly work). The findings of moral psychology have also begun to find a place in the public imagination, via prominent editorials and more popular psychology books. But current research by psychologists in this area has risen to prominence at the same time as an extraordinary moral crisis in their profession, a fact that inevitably lends their reflections a special significance that requires scrutiny.

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