Quotes from Jonathan Haidt

A Durkheimian society would value self-control over self-expression, duty over rights, and loyalty to one's groups over concerns for out-groups.

moral reasoning as a skill we humans evolved to further our social agendas—to justify our own actions and to defend the teams we belong to—then things will make a lot more sense. Keep your eye on the intuitions, and don't take people's moral arguments at face value. They're mostly post hoc constructions made up on the fly, crafted to advance one or more strategic objectives.

If I could nominate one candidate for "biggest obstacle to world peace and social harmony," it would be naive realism because it is so easily ratcheted up from the individual to the group level: My group is right because we see things as they are.

I showed that a Durkheimian society cannot be supported by the Care and Fairness foundations alone.18 You have to build on the Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity foundations as well.

Religions exist primarily for people to achieve together what they cannot achieve on their own.

Most societies have chosen the sociocentric answer, placing the needs of groups and institutions first, and subordinating the needs of individuals. In contrast, the individualistic answer places individuals at the center and makes society a servant of the individual.

Depressed people often stick pins into their own life rafts. The conscious mind can intervene. One is not helpless. ANDREW SOLOMON, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression

In other words, expertise in moral reasoning does not seem to improve moral behavior, and it might even make it worse (perhaps by making the rider more skilled at post hoc justification)

American civil religion."22 The president must invoke the name of God (though not Jesus), glorify America's heroes and history, quote its sacred texts (the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution), and perform the transubstantiation of pluribus into unum.

Group selection may or may not be common among other animals, but it happens whenever individuals find ways to suppress selfishness and work as a team, in competition with other teams.

On the day they were born, the sister was not predestined to vote for Obama; the brother was not guaranteed to become a Republican. But their different sets of genes gave them different first drafts of their minds, which led them down different paths, through different life experiences, and into different moral subcultures.

When I say that human nature is selfish, I mean that our minds contain a variety of mental mechanisms that make us adept at promoting our own interests, in competition with our peers. When I say that human nature is also groupish, I mean that our minds contain a variety of mental mechanisms that make us adept at promoting our group's interests, in competition with other groups.4 We are not saints, but we are sometimes good team players. Stated

The loss of political diversity among the faculty has negative consequences for students

But egalitarianism seems to be rooted more in the hatred of domination than in the love of equality per se.48 The feeling of being dominated or oppressed by a bully is very different from the feeling of being cheated in an exchange of goods or favors.

Morality binds and blinds. This is not just something that happens to people on the other side. We all get sucked into tribal moral communities. We circle around sacred values and then share post hoc arguments about why we are so right and they are so wrong. We think the other side is blind to truth, reason, science, and common sense, but in fact everyone goes blind when talking about their sacred objects. If

It's the friendships and group activities, carried out within a moral matrix that emphasizes selflessness. That's what brings out the best in people.

No matter how often you do it with three-year-olds, they're just not ready to get the concept of fairness

Once you see our righteous minds as primate minds with a hivish overlay, you get a whole new perspective on morality, politics, and religion.

We are the descendants of successful tribalists, not their more individualistic cousins.

There is a special pleasure in the irony of a moralist brought down for the very moral failings he has condemned. It's the pleasure of a well-told joke. Some jokes are funny as one-liners, but most require three verses: three guys, say, who walk into a bar one at a time, or a priest, a minister, and a rabbi in a lifeboat. The first two set the pattern, and the third violates it. With hypocrisy, the hypocrite's preaching is the setup, the hypocritical action is the punch line.

found a way to forge a sense of "we" that extended beyond kinship. We trust and cooperate more readily with people who look and sound like us.69 We expect them to share our values and norms.

The sovereign power [or soft despot] extends its arms over the entire society; it covers the surface of society with a network of small, complicated, minute, and uniform rules . . . it does not tyrannize, it hinders, it represses, it enervates, it extinguishes, it stupefies, and finally it reduces each nation to being nothing more than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd. ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE, Democracy in America1

Please, we can get along here. We all can get along. I mean, we're all stuck here for a while. Let's try to work it out.

man cannot become attached to higher aims and submit to a rule if he sees nothing above him to which he belongs. To free himself from all social pressure is to abandon himself and demoralize him.