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February 12 - March 11, 2025
The word righteous comes from the old Norse word rettviss and the old English word rihtwis, both of which mean “just, upright, virtuous.”
usually used to translate the Hebrew word tzedek.
Part I is about the first principle: Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second.
Part II is about the second principle of moral psychology, which is that there’s more to morality than harm and fairness.
Part III is about the third principle: Morality binds and blinds. The central metaphor of these four chapters is that human beings are 90 percent chimp and 10 percent bee.
People bind themselves into political teams that share moral narratives. Once they accept a particular narrative, they become blind to alternative moral worlds.
Intuitions Come First, Strategic Reasoning Second Central Metaphor The mind is divided, like a rider on an elephant, and the rider’s job is to serve the elephant.
Kids figure it out for themselves, but only when their minds are ready and they are given the right kinds of experiences.
And if the child gets enough experiences of turn taking, sharing, and playground justice, it will (eventually) become a moral creature, able to use its rational capacities to solve ever harder problems. Rationality is our nature, and good moral reasoning is the end point of development.
“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.”50
Plato believed that reason could and should be the master; Jefferson believed that the two processes were equal partners (head and heart) ruling a divided empire; Hume believed that reason was (and was only fit to be) the servant of the passions.
Roughly one in a hundred men (and many fewer women) are psychopaths.
The first principle of moral psychology is Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second.
Tetlock suggests a useful metaphor for understanding how people behave within the webs of accountability that constitute human societies: we act like intuitive politicians striving to maintain appealing moral identities in front of our multiple constituencies.
When we look at children’s efforts to understand the physical world, the scientist metaphor is apt; kids really are formulating and testing hypotheses, and they really do converge, gradually, on the truth.9 But in the social world, things are different, according to Tetlock. The social world is Glauconian.10 Appearance is usually far more important than reality.
Tetlock found two very different kinds of careful reasoning. Exploratory thought is an “evenhanded consideration of alternative points of view.” Confirmatory thought is “a one-sided attempt to rationalize a particular point of view.”
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
But what they hardly ever did was to test their hypotheses by offering triplets that did not conform to their hypothesis. For example, proposing 2–4–5 (yes) and 2–4–3 (no) would have helped people zero in on the actual rule: any series of ascending numbers. Wason called this phenomenon the confirmation bias, the tendency to seek out and interpret new evidence in ways that confirm what you already think.
Not surprisingly, people came up with many more “my-side” arguments than “other-side” arguments.
Schools don’t teach people to reason thoroughly; they select the applicants with higher IQs, and people with higher IQs are able to generate more reasons.
The partisan brain has been reinforced so many times for performing mental contortions that free it from unwanted beliefs. Extreme partisanship may be literally addictive.
How hard could it be to teach students to look on the other side, to look for evidence against their favored view? Yet, in fact, it’s very hard, and nobody has yet found a way to do it.51 It’s hard because the confirmation bias is a built-in feature (of an argumentative mind), not a bug that can be removed (from a platonic mind).
you want to make people behave more ethically, there are two ways you can go. You can change the elephant, which takes a long time and is hard to do. Or, to borrow an idea from the book Switch, by Chip Heath and Dan Heath,54 you can change the path that the elephant and rider find themselves traveling on. You can make minor and inexpensive tweaks to the environment, which can produce big increases in ethical behavior.
I concluded by warning that the worship of reason, which is sometimes found in philosophical and scientific circles, is a delusion. It is an example of faith in something that does not exist.
The ethic of divinity is based on the idea that people are, first and foremost, temporary vessels within which a divine soul has been implanted.
you can take some educated guesses about what was in the universal first draft of human nature. I tried to make (and justify) five such guesses: • The Care/harm foundation evolved in response to the adaptive challenge of caring for vulnerable children. It makes us sensitive to signs of suffering and need; it makes us despise cruelty and want to care for those who are suffering. • The Fairness/cheating foundation evolved in response to the adaptive challenge of reaping the rewards of cooperation without getting exploited. It makes us sensitive to indications that another person is likely to be
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I showed how the two ends of the political spectrum rely upon each foundation in different ways, or to different degrees. It appears that the left relies primarily on the Care and Fairness foundations, whereas the right uses all five.
Conservatives are conservative because they were raised by overly strict parents, or because they are inordinately afraid of change, novelty, and complexity, or because they suffer from existential fears and therefore cling to a simple worldview with no shades of gray.17
When everyone in a group began to share a common understanding of how things were supposed to be done, and then felt a flash of negativity when any individual violated those expectations, the first moral matrix was born.57 (Remember that a matrix is a consensual hallucination.) That, I believe, was our Rubicon crossing.
Cain & Abel
When Cortés captured Mexico in 1519, he found the Aztecs practicing a religion based on mushrooms containing the hallucinogen psilocybin. The mushrooms were called teonanacatl—literally “God’s flesh” in the local language.
From a Durkheimian perspective these behaviors serve a very different function, and it is the same one that Durkheim saw at work in most religious rituals: the creation of a community.
But from a sociologically informed perspective, it is a religious rite that does just what it is supposed to do: it pulls people up from Durkheim’s lower level (the profane) to his higher level (the sacred).
Believing, doing, and belonging are three complementary yet distinct aspects of religiosity, according to many scholars.12
Durkheim’s hypothesis: we are Homo duplex, designed (by natural selection) to move back and forth between the lower (individual) and higher (collective) levels of existence.
In the medieval world, Jews and Muslims excelled in long-distance trade in part because their religions helped them create trustworthy relationships and enforceable contracts.56
The only thing that was reliably and powerfully associated with the moral benefits of religion was how enmeshed people were in relationships with their co-religionists. It’s the friendships and group activities, carried out within a moral matrix that emphasizes selflessness. That’s what brings out the best in people.
Durkheim: “It is religious belongingness that matters for neighborliness, not religious believing.”61
Moral systems are interlocking sets of values, virtues, norms, practices, identities, institutions, technologies, and evolved psychological mechanisms that work together to suppress or regulate self-interest and make cooperative societies possible.66
We humans have an extraordinary ability to care about things beyond ourselves, to circle around those things with other people, and in the process to bind ourselves into teams that can pursue larger projects. That’s what religion is all about. And with a few adjustments, it’s what politics is about too.
The idea of opposites as yin and yang comes from ancient China, a culture that valued group harmony. But in the ancient Middle East, where monotheism first took root, the metaphor of war was more common than the metaphor of balance. The third-century Persian prophet Mani preached that the visible world is the battleground between the forces of light (absolute goodness) and the forces of darkness (absolute evil). Human beings are the frontline in the battle; we contain both good and evil, and we each must pick one side and fight for it.
Morality binds and blinds. This is not just something that happens to people on the other side. We all get sucked into tribal moral communities. We circle around sacred values and then share post hoc arguments about why we are so right and they are so wrong.
Transaction. Kahneman, D. 2011. Thinking Fast and Slow. New
