Al Owski’s Reviews > The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion > Status Update

“My question was simple: Can people make moral judgements just as well when carrying a heavy cognitive load as when carrying a light one? The answer turned out to be yes. I found no difference between conditions, no effect of cognitive load. I tried it again with different stories and got the same outcome.”

“So Hume's model fit these cases best: when the master (passions) drops dead, the servant (reasoning) has neither the ability nor the desire to keep the estate running. Everything goes to ruin.”

“If Jefferson's model were correct, however, then Damasio's patients should still have fared well in the half of life that was always ruled by the head. Yet the collapse of decision making, even in purely analytic and organizational tasks, was pervasive. The head can't even do head stuff without the heart.”

“the result of the separation was not the liberation of reason from the thrall of the passions. It was the shocking revelation that reasoning requires the passions. Jefferson's model fits better: when one co-emperor is knocked out and the other tries to rule the empire by himself, he's not up to the task”

“Wilson sided with Hume. He charged that what moral philosophers were really doing was fabricating justifications after "consulting the emotive centers" of their own brains." He predicted that the study of ethics would soon be taken out of the hands of philosophers and "biologicized," or made to fit with the emerging science of human nature.”

“If morality doesn't come primarily from reasoning, then that leaves some combination of innateness and social learning as the most likely candidates. ... morality can be innate (as a set of evolved intuitions) and learned (as children learn to apply those intuitions within a particular culture). We're born to be righteous, but we have to learn what, exactly, people like us should be righteous about.”

“These subjects were reasoning. They were working quite hard at reasoning. But it was not reasoning in search of truth; it was reasoning in support of their emotional reactions. It was reasoning as described by the philosopher 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." ”

“Yet even subjects recognized that their victim claims were bogus, they still refused to say that the act was OK. Instead, they kept searching for another victim. They said things like "I know it's wrong, but I just can't think of a reason why." They seemed to be morally dumbfounded—rendered speechless by their inability to explain verbally what they knew intuitively.”

“biggest surprise was that so many subjects tried to invent victims. I had written the stories carefully to remove all conceivable harm to other people, yet in 38 percent of the 1,620 times that people heard a harmless-offensive story, they claimed that somebody was harmed...it was obvious that most of these supposed harms were post hoc fabrications.”

“In other words, well-educated people in all three cities were more similar to each other than they were to their lower-class neighbors. I had flown five thousand miles south to search for moral variation when in fact there was more to be found a few blocks west of campus, in the poor neighborhood surrounding my university. ”