Harvard Law Spotlights Situationism
Posted by The Situationist Staff on March 29, 2010
The Harvard Law School website last week spotlighted “a recent interview on the website Big Think.” Situationist Contributor Jon Hanson, the Alfred Smart Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and Director of The Project on Law and Mind Sciences at Harvard Law School, delves into an exploration of psychology, ideology and law.”
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Jeff said
Interesting to note Hanson’s observation that psychological knowledge was deployed by the tobacco companies in their quest to increase profits at the expense of human beings and they hide this from public view. Not surprising, but the real story is that that knowledge came, most likely, from within the social science community and someone/many was/were very well paid consultants or employees to such companies. What was the nature of these professional’s choice to take active part in assisting advertising departments to sell product they knew harmed human beings? Money, the chance to test ideas on large population segments? Why does the system not have laws that forbids the use scientific knowledge to harm human being? Why are the social scientist’s not being held accountable as accomplices to criminal behavior since they were the prime enablers?
And lastly, how will these new insights be used against us as Bernay’s used his knowledge to deform life a 100 years ago? Some in the social science community have voiced opposition of such knowledge being available for public consumption in the view that without the ‘saving lie’ of free will, choice, etc, that our society will degenerate into anarchy. Such a view is deeply hostile to any sense of egalitarianism and suggests that social science should only be of service to political, economic and cultural elites, who, of course in their paternal love, will make the wises choices for the rest of us.