Quotes About Morality

but they were the only group that frequently ignored their own feelings of disgust and said that an action that bothered them was nonetheless morally permissible. And they were the only group in which a majority (73 percent) were able to tolerate the chicken story.

When I was a teenager I wished for world peace, but now I yearn for a world in which competing ideologies are kept in balance, systems of accountability keep us all from getting away with too much, and fewer people believe that righteous ends justify violent means.

first principle: Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second.7 Moral intuitions arise automatically and almost instantaneously, long before moral reasoning has a chance to get started, and those first intuitions tend to drive our later reasoning.

my approach starts with Durkheim, who said: "What is moral is everything that is a source of solidarity, everything that forces man to Ã¢â'¬Â¦ regulate his actions by something other than Ã¢â'¬Â¦ his own egoism."65

the second principle of moral psychology, which is that there's more to morality than harm and fairness. The central metaphor of these four chapters is that the righteous mind is like a tongue with six taste receptors.

Moral systems are interlocking sets of values, virtues, norms, practices, identities, institutions, technologies, and evolved psychological mechanisms that work together to suppress or regulate self-interest and make cooperative societies possible.66

Politics and religion are both expressions of our underlying moral psychology, and an understanding of that psychology can help to bring people together.

the groups that used them to construct moral communities were the ones that lasted and prospered. Like those nineteenth-century religious communes, they used their gods to elicit sacrifice and commitment from members.

Morality binds and blinds.

rationalist to describe anyone who believes that reasoning is the most important and reliable way to obtain moral knowledge.

The ethic of divinity is sometimes incompatible with compassion, egalitarianism, and basic human rights. But at the same time, it offers a valuable perspective from which we can understand and critique some of the ugly parts of secular societies.

Morality is nothing in the abstract Nature of Things, but is entirely relative to the sentiment or mental taste of each particular being; in the same manner as the distinctions of sweet and bitter, hot and cold, arise from the particular feeling of each sense or organ. Moral perceptions therefore, ought not to be classed with the operations of the understanding, but with the tastes or sentiments.

moral thinking is more like a politician searching for votes than a scientist searching for truth:

Humans construct moral communities out of shared norms, institutions, and gods that, even in the twenty-first century, they fight, kill, and die to defend.

BORN TO BE RIGHTEOUS I could have titled this book The Moral Mind to convey the sense that the human mind is designed to "do" morality, just as it's designed to do language, sexuality, music, and many other things described in popular books reporting the latest scientific findings. But I chose the title The Righteous Mind to convey the sense that human nature is not just intrinsically moral, it's also intrinsically moralistic, critical, and judgmental.

Morality often involves tension within the group motivated by competition between different groups.

there's a deeper reason so many young psychologists began to study morality from a rationalist perspective, and this was Kohlberg's second great innovation: he used his research to build a scientific justification for a secular liberal moral order.

The ethic of divinity is based on the idea that people are, first and foremost, temporary vessels within which a divine soul has been implanted.12 People are not just animals with an extra serving of consciousness; they are children of God and should behave accordingly.

Many societies therefore develop moral concepts such as sanctity and sin, purity and pollution, elevation and degradation. In such societies, the personal liberty of secular Western nations looks like libertinism, hedonism, and a celebration of humanity's baser instincts.

ProjectImplicit.org

We're born to be righteous, but we have to learn what, exactly, people like us should be righteous about.

David Hume, who wrote in 1739 that "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.

For most of us, it's not every day or even every month that we change our mind about a moral issue without any prompting from anyone else. Far more common than such private mind changing is social influence.

In the ethic of divinity, there is an order to the universe, and things (as well as people) should be treated with the reverence or disgust that they deserve.