“Please, we can get along here. We all can get along. I mean, we’re all stuck here for a while. Let’s try to work it out.” (Location 61)
morality is the extraordinary human capacity that made civilization possible. (Location 67)
I’ll use the metaphor to solve puzzles such as why it seems like everyone (else) is a hypocrite (Location 113)
them to create communities with a shared morality. (Location 135)
The mind is divided, like a rider on an elephant, and the rider’s job is to serve the elephant. (Location 166)
Understanding the simple fact that morality differs around the world, and even within societies, is the first step toward understanding your righteous mind. (Location 183)
In other words, the understanding of the conservation of volume wasn’t innate, and it wasn’t learned from adults. Kids figure it out for themselves, but only when their minds are ready and they are given the right kinds of experiences. (Location 218)
In the two “post-conventional” stages, adolescents still value honesty and respect rules and laws, but now they sometimes justify dishonesty or law-breaking in pursuit of still higher goods, particularly justice. Kohlberg painted an inspiring (Location 254)
the most morally advanced kids (according to his scoring technique) were those who had frequent opportunities for role taking—for putting themselves into another person’s shoes and looking at a problem from that person’s perspective. (Location 264)
This was my first hint that morality often involves tension within the group linked to competition between different groups. T (Location 327)
New highlights added August 12, 2021 at 3:46 PM
This was my first hint that morality often involves tension within the group linked to competition between different groups. (Location 327)
Most societies have chosen the sociocentric answer, placing the needs of groups and institutions first, and subordinating the needs of individuals. In contrast, the individualistic answer places individuals at the center and makes society a servant of the individual.26 (Location 371)
The biggest surprise was that so many subjects tried to invent victims. I (Location 528)
Scientists became “moral exhibitionists” in the lecture hall as they demonized fellow scientists and urged their students to evaluate ideas not for their truth but for their consistency with progressive ideals such as racial and gender equality.14 (Location 653)
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.16 He predicted that the study of ethics (Location 667)
These results supported Hume, not Jefferson or Plato. People made moral judgments quickly and emotionally. Moral reasoning was mostly just a post hoc search for reasons to justify the judgments people had already made. (Location 809)
“Seeing-that” is the pattern matching that brains have been doing for hundreds of millions of years. Even the simplest animals are wired to respond to certain patterns of input (such as light, or sugar) with specific behaviors (such as turning away from the light, or stopping and eating the sugary food). Animals easily learn new patterns and connect them up to their existing behaviors, which can be reconfigured into new patterns as well (as when an animal trainer teaches an elephant a new trick). (Location 842)
“Reasoning-why,” in contrast, is the process “by which we describe how we think we reached a judgment, or how we think another person could reach that judgment.”34 (Location 851)
