Quotes from Jonathan Haidt

One of the most universal pieces of advice from across cultures and eras it that we are all hypocrites, and in our condemnation of other's hypocrisy we only compound our own.

Cuídate de cualquiera que insista en que existe una verdadera moralidad para todas las personas, tiempos y lugares, especialmente si esa moralidad se basa en un solo fundamento moral.

Somos criaturas profundamente intuitivas y son nuestros instintos los que guían nuestro razonamiento.

The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven."32

As the colonial insects did to the other insects, we have pushed all other mammals to the margins, to extinction, or to servitude.

The two leading ethical theories in Western philosophy were founded by men who were as high as could be on systemizing, and were rather low on empathizing.

at least a depressed person will usually admit she's depressed. Curing hypocrisy is much harder because part of the problem is that we don't believe there's a problem.

foundation of all moral development. Children construct their moral understanding on the bedrock of the absolute moral truth that harm is wrong.

moral world in which families, not individuals, are the basic unit of society

cognitive triad

Kant, like Plato, wanted to discover the timeless, changeless form of the Good. He believed that morality had to be the same for all rational creatures, regardless of their cultural or individual proclivities.

It is change that contains vital information, not steady states. Human beings, however, take adaptation to cognitive extremes. We don't just habituate, we recalibrate. We create for ourselves a world of targets, and each time we hit one we replace it with another.

Our minds have the potential to become righteous about many different concerns, and only a few of these concerns are activated during childhood. Other

Kant provided an abstract rule from which (he claimed) all other valid moral rules could be derived. He called it the categorical (or unconditional) imperative: "Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law."22

Animals that fly seem to violate the laws of physics, but only until you learn a bit more about physics.

The first principle of moral psychology is Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second.

Accountability increases exploratory thought only when three conditions apply: (1) decision makers learn before forming any opinion that they will be accountable to an audience, (2) the audience's views are unknown, and (3) they believe the audience is well informed and interested in accuracy. When all three conditions apply, people do their darnedest to figure out the truth

We make our first judgments rapidly, and we are dreadful at seeking out evidence that might disconfirm those initial judgments.43 Yet friends can do for us what we cannot do for ourselves: they can challenge us, giving us reasons and arguments (link 3) that sometimes trigger new intuitions, thereby making it possible for us to change our minds.

This mode of thinking makes the justification of restraints on discussion not a question of the truth of doctrines, but of their usefulness; and flatters itself by that means to escape the responsibility of claiming to be an infallible judge of opinions.

Gossip is a policeman and a teacher. Without it, there would be chaos and ignorance.22

In support of this claim I described research showing that people who grow up in Western, educated, industrial, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) societies are statistical outliers on many psychological measures, including measures of moral psychology.

I therefore question the widespread view that Prozac and other drugs in its class are overprescribed. It's easy for those who did well in the cortical lottery to preach about the importance of hard work and the unnaturalness of chemical shortcuts. But for those who, through no fault of their own, ended up on the negative half of the affective style spectrum, Prozac is a way to compensate for the unfairness of the cortical lottery.

Everything in this world is a matter of calculation. Advance then with caution, the balance in your hand. Put into one scale the pleasures which any object may offer; but put fairly into the other the pains which are to follow, & see which preponderates.7

Almost one in five students surveyed in a 2017 Brookings Institution study agreed that using violence to prevent a speaker from speaking was sometimes "acceptable.