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July 20 - July 29, 2024
People bind themselves into political teams that share moral narratives. Once they accept a particular narrative, they become blind to alternative moral worlds.
Understanding the simple fact that morality differs around the world, and even within societies, is the first step toward understanding your righteous mind.
Turiel’s account of moral development
morality is about treating individuals well. It’s about harm and fairness (not loyalty, respect, duty, piety, patriotism, or tradition).
These subjects were reasoning. They were working quite hard at reasoning. But it was not reasoning in search of truth; it was reasoning in support of their emotional reactions.
I had found that moral reasoning was often a servant of moral emotions, and this was a challenge to the rationalist approach that dominated moral psychology.
We’re born to be righteous, but we have to learn what, exactly, people like us should be righteous about.
People made moral judgments quickly and emotionally. Moral reasoning was mostly just a post hoc search for reasons to justify the judgments people had already made.
Given the judgments (themselves produced by the non-conscious cognitive machinery in the brain, sometimes correctly, sometimes not so), human beings produce rationales they believe account for their judgments. But the rationales (on this argument) are only ex post rationalizations.
“Reasoning-why” is not automatic; it’s conscious, it sometimes feels like work, and it’s easily disrupted by cognitive load.
Henry Ford
“If there is any one secret of success it lies in the ability to get the other person’s point of view and see things from their angle as well as your own.”
If you really want to change someone’s mind on a moral or political matter, you’ll need to see things from that person’s angle as well as your own.
Empathy is an antidote to righteousness, although it’s very difficult to empathize across a moral divide.
from Buddha: It is easy to see the faults of others, but difficult to see one’s own faults. One shows the faults of others like chaff winnowed in the wind, but one conceals one’s own faults as a cunning gambler conceals his dice.5
Roughly one in a hundred men (and many fewer women) are psychopaths.
Psychopathy does not appear to be caused by poor mothering or early trauma, or to have any other nurture-based explanation. It’s a genetically heritable condition31 that creates brains that are unmoved by the needs, suffering, or dignity of others.
people care a great deal more about appearance and reputation than about reality.
the most important principle for designing an ethical society is to make sure that everyone’s reputation is on the line all the time, so that bad behavior will always bring bad consequences.
But the fact is that we care a lot about what others think of us. The only people known to have no sociometer are psychopaths.17
neurotransmitter produced by the hypothalamus. Oxytocin is widely used among vertebrates to prepare females for motherhood. In mammals it causes uterine contractions and milk letdown, as well as a powerful motivation to touch and care for one’s children. Evolution has often reused oxytocin to forge other kinds of bonds. In species in which males stick by their mates or protect their own offspring, it’s because male brains were slightly modified to be more responsive to oxytocin.
Increase similarity, not diversity. To make a human hive, you want to make everyone feel like a family. So don’t call attention to racial and ethnic differences; make them less relevant by ramping up similarity and celebrating the group’s shared values and common identity.
religion does not seem to be the cause of suicide bombing. According to Robert Pape, who has created a database of every suicide terrorist attack in the last hundred years, suicide bombing is a nationalist response to military occupation by a culturally alien democratic power.
the first atheistic societies have only emerged in Europe in the last few decades. They are the least efficient societies ever known at turning resources (of which they have a lot) into offspring (of which they have few).
genetics explains between a third and a half of the variability among people on their political attitudes.
Once upon a time, America was a shining beacon. Then liberals came along and erected an enormous federal bureaucracy that handcuffed the invisible hand of the free market. They subverted our traditional American values and opposed God and faith at every step of the way.… Instead of requiring that people work for a living, they siphoned money from hardworking Americans and gave it to Cadillac-driving drug addicts and welfare queens. Instead of punishing criminals, they tried to “understand” them. Instead of worrying about the victims of crime, they worried about the rights of criminals.…
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“A party of order or stability, and a party of progress or reform, are both necessary elements of a healthy state of political life.”
