The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion

by Jonathan Haidt

If morality varies around the world and across the centuries, then how could it be innate?

Children recognize that rules that prevent harm are moral rules, which Turiel defined as rules related to “justice, rights, and welfare pertaining to how people ought to relate to each other.”13

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.

When we’re trying to decide what we think about something, we look inward, at how we’re feeling. If I’m feeling good, I must like it, and if I’m feeling anything unpleasant, that must mean I don’t like it.

Extreme partisanship may be literally addictive.

For example, why are many of us bothered by rampant materialism? If some people want to work hard in order to earn money in order to buy luxury goods in order to impress others, how can we criticize them using the ethic of autonomy?

This infuriates me

kinds.

reductive

Punishing bad behavior promotes virtue and benefits the group. And just as Glaucon argued in his ring of Gyges example, when the threat of punishment is removed, people behave selfishly.

“To invest social conventions with sanctity is to hide their arbitrariness in a cloak of seeming necessity.”