While I entirely agree with the title of this essay, as a social scientist, I am not sure that this is really a social science agenda (yet).
The biggest issue is the treatment of human values as a "species-level" set of decision algorithms: this is orthogonal to the projects of anthropology and sociology (which broadly reject the idea of an essential core of human ethics). Trivially, the research here looks like it would produce a potentially misleading average result across cultural value systems, which might well not usefully represent either any individual system or produce a universally-acceptable "compromise" result in those cases which would be processed differently in different cultural frames.
While I entirely agree with the title of this essay, as a social scientist, I am not sure that this is really a social science agenda (yet).
The biggest issue is the treatment of human values as a "species-level" set of decision algorithms: this is orthogonal to the projects of anthropology and sociology (which broadly reject the idea of an essential core of human ethics). Trivially, the research here looks like it would produce a potentially misleading average result across cultural value systems, which might well not usefully represent either any individual system or produce a universally-acceptable "compromise" result in those cases which would be processed differently in different cultural frames.
Second, the use... (read 403 more words →)