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

“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.”

“There were separate significant effects of city (Porto Alegreans moralized more than Philadelphians, and Recifeans moralized more than Porto Alegreans), of social class (lower-class groups moralized more than upper-class groups), and of age (children moralized more than adults). Unexpectedly, the effect of social class was much larger than the effect of city. ”

“Most societies have chosen the sociocentric answer, placing the needs of groups and institutions first, and subordinating the needs of individuals... the individualistic answer places individuals at the center and makes society a servant of the individual. The sociocentric answer dominated most of the ancient world but the individualistic answer became a powerful rival during the Enlightenment.

“as with all foreign travel, you learn as much about where you're from as where you're visiting. I began to see the United States and Western Europe as extraordinary historical exceptions—new societies that had found a way to strip down and thin out the thick, all-encompassing moral orders that the anthropologists wrote about.”

“Kids can't talk like moral philosophers, but they are busy sorting social information in a sophisticated way. They seem to grasp early on that rules that prevent harm are special, important, unalterable, and universal. And this realization, Turiel said, was the foundation of all moral development. Children construct their moral understanding on the bedrock of the absolute moral truth that harm is wrong.”