Status Updates From The Righteous Mind: Why Goo...

“I could see beauty in a moral code that emphasized self-control, resistance to temptation, cultivation of one's higher, nobler self, and negation of the self's desires. I could see the dark side of this ethic too: once you allow visceral feelings of disgust to guide your conception of what God wants, then minorities who trigger even a hint of disgust in the majority…can be ostracized and treated cruelly.”

“A dictum of cultural psychology is that "culture and psyche make each other up." In other words, you can't study the mind while ignoring culture… because minds function only once they've been filled out by a particular culture. And you can't study culture while ignoring psychology…because social practices and institutions…are shaped by concepts and desires rooted deep within the human mind…”

“I concluded by warning that the worship of reason…sometimes found in philosophical and scientific circles, is a delusion. It is an example of faith in something that does not exist. I urged instead a more intuitionist approach to morality and moral education, one that is more humble about the abilities of individuals, and more attuned to the contexts and social systems that enable people to think and act well.”

“If 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…You can make minor…tweaks to the environment, which can produce big increases in ethical behavior…hire Glaucon as a consultant and ask him how to design institutions in which real human beings, always concerned about their reputations, will behave more ethically”