This, I think, is how our “moral matrices,” as Haidt calls them, are formed: we respond to the irresistible draw of belonging to a group of people whom we happen to encounter and happen to find immensely attractive. We may be acting under the influence of strong genetic predispositions, but how those dispositions are activated seems largely to be a matter of what particular people one happens to bump into and when. The element of sheer contingency here is, or ought to be, terrifying: had we encountered a group of equally attractive and interesting people who held very different views, then we
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