David’s Reviews > Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them > Status Update

Read Aristotle and you will discover what it means to be a wise and temperate Macedonian-Athenian aristocratic man. But one cannot resolve tribal disagreements by appeal to virtue: one tribe’s virtues are another’s vices.

Three major schools of thought in Western moral philosophy: Utilitarianism / Consequentialism (Bentham, Mill); Deontology (Kant); Virtue ethics (Aristotle). Aristotle uses manual-mode thinking to describe our emotional settings. Kant uses it to justify. Bentham and Mill use it to transcend.

When dealing with moral matters that truly have been settled, it makes sense to talk about rights: the risk of being incorrect is smaller than the risk of being insufficiently firm.

“Rights” are brilliant: a trump card that renders evidence irrelevant. Invoking rights allows us to rationalize our gut feelings without doing any work.

...to say that an action is right because it is consistent with the evolved function of morality, or wrong because it’s inconsistent with the same, is still fallacious. It simply doesn’t follow that something is good because it’s doing what it evolved to do.

Morality is a set of psychological adaptations that allow otherwise selfish individuals to reap the benefits of cooperation.

Abraham is ordered by God to offer up his only son...we would, at the very least, call the police, and expect the Department of Children and Family Services to take Isaac away... we do not hear what Abraham hears, do not see what Abraham sees, true as those experiences may be. So the best we can do is act in accordance with those things that we all see, and that we all hear, be it common laws or basic reason. (Obama)

God is an all-encompassing force, outside of space and time, whose actions are not discrete events that may succeed or fail, but rather features of reality that we humans can comprehend only imperfectly with our finite minds. The fact that God could not approve of rape simply reflects the eternal and essential perfection of his will. (Not bad for an atheist, huh?)

Try translating “the gay lifestyle is an abomination against God” into secular terms. No wonder Santorum feels queasy.

Barack Obama: “Democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values.. I may be opposed to abortion for religious reasons.. but I have to explain why abortion violates some principle that is accessible to people of all faiths, including those with no faith at all”