Status Updates From On Human Nature

"For Aristotle, virtue consists in the ability to pursue what reason recommends by the motives that strive against it... Virtue consists in the ability to take full responsibility for one's acts, intentions, and avowals in the face of all the motives for renouncing or denouncing them."

"Sexual pleasure is focused on another person, conceived not as an object but as a subject like me. It's not exactly pleasure over or about the other, and so is not exactly like other emotional pleasures—but it is a kind of pleasure in the other. And it is conditional on seeing the other as another..."

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“Only a being who makes judgments can laugh. Typically we laugh at things that fall short, or witticisms that place our actions side by side with the aspirations that they ridicule… Insofar as children are amused by things, it is because—in their own way—they’re comparing those things with the norms that they challenge.”

"In a cogent biological theory, all such teleological idioms must be replaced with functional explanations... A population genetically averse to cooperation, to parental affection, to self-sacrifice on behalf of children, and to sexual restraint and control of violence is a population endowed with dysfunctional traits relative to reproduction. Hence, it will disappear."

"Once again, it seems, we are in the habit of telling ourselves stories that make no reference to the biological realities in which they are rooted."