You deride Shermer’s vocabulary in the Moral Ac as too esoteric for none experts and yet claim that the word “moral” a word everyone has a on opinion on, has to be changed to something else (esoteric probably). As for your claim that morals is a loaded word, so is values. Shermer, Pinker, Gould et al. model their speech and writing after Galileo and Darwin who wrote complicated ideas for none experts. Shermer addresses complex ideas by using analogies and thought experiments. The physicist Brian Greene does this very well also. He can take string theory (understood by a few) and frame it in a way that most people can understand it.

As for the your claim that the terms “moral” and “science” have done him in, I disagree. Morality is a loaded term that does and should generate discussion. I say let the best ideas win. And most of the ideas that do win are based on science. The best definition of science has been put forth by Steven Pinker: “Anyone who engages i secular reasoning”

Would you object to mice being infected with Ebola? So to answer your first question – yes. Why is it immoral to infect one animal but not another if the purpose is to save lives?
Do you object to Jehovah’s Witnesses refusing their children life saving blood transfusions? To answer your second question – yes. People who do not share such beliefs cannot have their health threatened by other people’s beliefs.
To answer your third and fourth questions – no. This is individual responsibility especially for those who overindulge in sugar. Their actions do not impact others.

Rousseau himself was a pretender to the enlightenment, a grifter, a con, a womanizer, and in the end, a stark raving lunatic, consumed by delusions of grandure and a basket load of paranoid conspiracy fantasies (all with him at the center). In some ways, his autobiography reminds me of Gogol’s Diary Of A Madman.

There are some of us who do indeed blame him (at least in part) for the rise of totalitarian political ideologies in the 19th and 20th century, that cost millions of lives, and decades of despair.

But I fail to see how this one man’s failures could be a legitimate condemnation of the essential value of The Enlightenment as a whole.

Rape, murder, and theft are consistent parts of nature, so what?

Even our feelings and intuitions are empirically observed and assessed. And if one were to read a science article or two, they could learn the biologically evolved reason why we have such emotions in the first place. Science can explain verklempt for god’s sake.

Science has nothing to say on morality? Are you kidding me? Evolutionary biology tells us exactly what morality is. It tells us why we even care about such a thing as right an wrong. It tells us that altruism and self interest are one in the same. That’s amazing news! It tells us that we are all Africans, and race is an illusion. It tells us that homosexuality is consistent part of nature and ubiquitous in the animal kingdom. It tells us that schizophrenics are suffering from a brain disease, not possessed by demons. It tells us which forms of society seem to do well and which ones don’t. I can not believe this is still even a debate. And yet you book is controversial? Even amongst academics? God help us.

Keep up the good work, Michael.

PS: I just released a song intended to contribute to this movement. It’s called “The Homo Sapiens Song.” I hope you like it. You can see it on my website.

I’m also impressed that you’ve tempered some of your purist-libertarian leanings over the years. I’m of more of a restrained Capitalist bent because I’m convinced that markets aren’t always efficient and its players are often deceptive and short sighted (at least where “tragedy of the commons” issues are concerned). I do think that you may have glided over some of the implications of the Piketty book. I find the current trend towards concentrating a higher percentage of American wealth in the upper economic echelons to be disturbing because of the pernicious influence that highly concentrated wealth can have on a liberal democracy.

While it’s impossible to take seriously those on the left who advocate anything approaching the confiscatory tax rates of the late 40s and early 50s, there is probably something wrong with the fact that while running for president in 2012, Mitt Romney was paying a lower percentage of his $20 million/year income to the Feds than my wife and I who were earning about $150K.

When it gets to this point the really big money folks tend to focus their spending on lobbyists and politicians rather than R & D and such because the former offers a higher rate of return.

Anyway, I really didn’t mean to go there. Mostly just wanted to say keep up the good work and thank you.