Quotes About Morality

I want to show you that an obsession with righteousness (leading inevitably to self-righteousness) is the normal human condition. It is a feature of our evolutionary design, not a bug or error that crept into minds that would otherwise be objective and rational.6

I believe the Scottish philosopher David Hume was closer to the truth than was Plato when he said, "Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.

Education must be seen as at least partially an effort to produce the good human being, to foster the good life and the good society."46

Rather, my research on the moral emotions has led me to conclude that the human mind simply does perceive divinity and sacredness, whether or not God exists.

Liberals sometimes say that religious conservatives are sexual prudes for whom anything other than missionary-position intercourse within marriage is a sin. But conservatives can just as well make fun of liberal struggles to choose a balanced breakfast—balanced among moral concerns about free-range eggs, fair-trade coffee, naturalness, and a variety of toxins, some of which (such as genetically modified corn and soybeans) pose a greater threat spiritually than biologically.

There's more to morality than harm and fairness.

If you know what your mind is up to, and why you so easily see the world through a distorting lens of good and evil, you can take steps to reduce your self-righteousness. You can thereby reduce the frequency of conflicts with others who are equally convinced of their righteousness.

we are all, by nature, hypocrites, and this is why it is so hard for us to follow the Golden Rule faithfully.

Liberal moral matrices rest on the Care/harm, Liberty/oppression, and Fairness/cheating foundations, although liberals are often willing to trade away fairness (as proportionality) when it conflicts with compassion or with their desire to fight oppression.

moral and political arguments are so frustrating: because moral reasons are the tail wagged by the intuitive dog. A dog's tail wags to communicate. You can't make a dog happy by forcibly wagging its tail. And you can't change people's minds by utterly refuting their arguments.

Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them."26

Los grupos cohesionados y moralmente homogéneos son propensos a las cazas de brujas, en particular cuando experimentan una amenaza, sea externa o interna.

The ability to reason combined with a lack of moral emotions is dangerous.

To invest social conventions with sanctity is to hide their arbitrariness in a cloak of seeming necessity.

This was my first hint that morality often involves tension within the group linked to competition between different groups.

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, to borrow an idea from the book Switch, by Chip Heath and Dan Heath,54 you can change the path that the elephant and rider find themselves traveling on. You can make minor and inexpensive tweaks to the environment, which can produce big increases in ethical behavior.

morality is the extraordinary human capacity that made civilization possible.

If we had no sense of disgust, I believe we would also have no sense of the sacred.

Human beings all know that they are going to die, and so human cultures go to great lenghts to construct systems of meaning that dignify life and convince people that their lives have more meaning than those of the animals that die all around them. The extensive regulation of sex in many cultures, the attempt to link love to God and then to cut away the sex, is part of an elaborate defense against the gnawing fear of morality.

Cuando nadie responde ante nadie, cuando los vagos y los tramposos quedan impunes, todo se derrumba.

findings suggest that by six months of age, infants are watching how people behave toward other people, and they are developing a preference for those who are nice rather than those who are mean.

Shallow are the souls that have forgotten how to shudder. Leon Cass

La habilidad para razonar de manera normal combinada con la ausencia de emociones morales es una combinación peligrosa.

origins. We are indeed selfish hypocrites so skilled at putting on a show of virtue that we fool even ourselves.