Aaron Rabinowitz - Ethicist, Podcaster, Doggy Daddy
Aaron Rabinowitz
The Just World Delusion
Saturday, October 28 - 5-7PM
This is an in-person event. We are trying out a new venue in Durham. We’ll be at The People’s Solidarity Hub located at 1805 Chapel Hill Rd. Parking is available at the building and the adjacent building which they also own (more parking information).
Our deeply ingrained and culturally reinforced desire for fairness is one of the best features of our moral psychology as a species. It's also the driving force behind our most tenaciously unjust and harmful social structures. Meritocracy creates an illusion of a just world so compelling it sustains a range of inequalities that threaten to destabilize any gains made in quality of life by modern societies. In this talk I'll present the current evidence that all humans, even liberals and progressives, rely on cognitive biases to shield their belief that we live in a relatively just world from a harsh confrontation with reality. We have to do the opposite, which requires embracing a radical skepticism towards the moral argument for meritocracy. Anything short of that will continue to reproduce inequity until society faces a more harmful collapse.
As we used to do in the before times, we plan to go out for dinner after the program. Feel free to join us at the Durham Food Hall directly following the program. (Note, Aaron will also attend the Secular Saturday Social at 10am and the October picnic on Sunday.)
With this visit, Aaron Rabinowitz becomes a three-time TFS speaker. He is a secular ethics educator with 10+ years experience teaching about human flourishing. He’s currently working on a PhD in education at Rutgers University, with a focus on Luckpilling, a new educational approach to luck that helps people accept the taboo truth that everything is luck. Aaron’s other interests include AI ethics, antisemitic conspiracism, and values centered community organizing. Aaron also hosts two philosophy podcasts, Embrace the Void, and Philosophers in Space with co-host (Sept 2019 TFS Speaker) Callie Wright. His work aims to make philosophy accessible and useful to everyone.
Aaron’s previous TFS talks were on Moral Realism without God and Resisting the Harms of the Immoral Nonbeliever Stereotype.