Status Updates From The Righteous Mind: Mengapa...

“But authority should not be confused with power. Even among chimpanzees, where dominance hierarchies are indeed about raw power and the ability to inflict violence, the alpha male performs some socially beneficial functions, such as taking on the "control role." He resolves some disputes and suppresses much of the violent conflict that erupts when there is no clear alpha male.”

“The urge to respect hierarchical relationships is so deep that many languages encode it directly. In French, as in other romance languages, speakers are forced to choose whether they'll address someone using the respectful form (vous) familiar form (tu). Even English, which doesn't embed status into verb conjugations, embed it elsewhere.”

“For millions of years, our ancestors faced the adaptive challenge of reaping these benefits without getting suckered. Those whose moral emotions compelled them to play "tit for tat" reaped more of these benefits than those who played any other strategy, such as "help anyone who needs it" (which invites exploitation), or "take but don't give" (which can work just once with each person…”

“Human life is a series of opportunities for mutually beneficial cooperation. If we play our cards right, we can work with others to enlarge the pie that we ultimately share. Hunters work together to bring down large prey that nobody could catch alone. Neighbors watch each other's houses and loan each other tools. Coworkers cover each other's shifts.”

“We humans are obviously just such a species. Trivers proposed that we evolved a set of moral emotions that make us play "tit for tat." We're usually nice to people when we first meet them. But after that we're selective: we cooperate with those who have been nice to us, and we shun those who took advantage of us.”

“In 1991, Shweder wrote… "Yet the conceptions held by others are available to us, in the sense that when we truly understand their conception of things we come to recognize possibilities latent within our own rationality... and those ways of conceiving of things become salient for us for the first time, or once again. In other words, there is no homogeneous "backcloth" to our world. We are multiple from the start" ”

“We never considered the possibility that there were alternative moral worlds in which reducing harm (by helping victims) and increasing fairness (by pursuing group-based equality) were not the main goals. And if we could not imagine other moralities, then we could not believe that conservatives were as sincere in their moral beliefs as we were in ours.”