Others like Richard Schweder and Jonathan Haidt have shown how the rich repertoire of religious ethics, with its dimensions of respect for authority, loyalty and a sense of the sacred, furnish a more comprehensive or ‘thick’ morality than the relatively pared-down features of secular ethics, based on fairness and the avoidance of harm. It is not that religious people are more moral than their secular counterparts, but rather that their moralities tend to have a thicker and richer texture, binding groups together, not merely regulating the encounters of randomly interacting individuals. As
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