Quotes About Values

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.

Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (forming the acronym WEIRD).

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 you want to understand another group, follow the sacredness.As a first step, think about the six moral foundations, and try to figure out which one or two are carrying the most weight in a particular controversy

The urge to help Hispanic immigrants in the 1980s led to multicultural education programs that emphasized the differences among Americans rather than their shared values and identity. Emphasizing differences makes many people more racist, not less.

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 you want to understand another group, follow the sacredness. As a first step, think about the six moral foundations, and try to figure out which one or two are carrying the most weight in a particular controversy.

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

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.

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.

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

morality is the extraordinary human capacity that made civilization possible.

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

But even those who reject all religions cannot shake the basic religious psychology of figure 11.2: doing linked to believing linked to belonging.

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

Morality binds and blinds.

Muller began by distinguishing conservatism from orthodoxy. Orthodoxy is the view that there exists a "transcendent moral order, to which we ought to try to conform the ways of society.

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.

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.

Emile Durkheim, who warned of the dangers of anomie (normlessness) and wrote, in 1897, that "man cannot become attached to higher aims and submit to a rule if he sees nothing above him to which he belongs.

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

In this world, equality and personal autonomy were not sacred values. Honoring elders, gods, and guests, protecting subordinates, and fulfilling one's role-based duties were more important.

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.