Quotes from book

The Righteous Mind

“I suggested that liberals might have even more difficulty understanding conservatives than the other way around, because liverals often have difficulty understanding how the Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity foundations have anything to do with morality.”

“Evolution is a design process; it’s just not an intelligent design process.”

“And in none of these ways are moral philosophers better than other philosophers or professors in other fields. Schwitzgebel even scrounged up the missing-book lists from dozens of libraries and found that academic books on ethics, which are presumably borrowed mostly by ethicists, are more likely to be stolen or just never returned than books in other areas of philosophy.”

“You can take the IAT yourself at ProjectImplicit. org. But be forewarned: it can be disturbing. You can actually feel yoursel moving more slowly when you are asked to associate good things with the faces of one race rather than another. You can watch as you implicit attitude contradicts implicit associations with many social groups, such as black people, immigrants, obese people, and the elderly.”

“Punishing bad behavior promotes virtue and benefits the group. And just as Glaucon argued in his ring of Gyges example, when the treat of punishment is removed, people behave selfishly.”

“Intuitions Comes First, Strategic Reasoning Second
Central Metaphor
The mind is divided, like a rider on a elephant, and the rider's job is to serve the elephant.”

“They point out that leadership is not even the more interesting hand; it's no puzzle to understand why people want to lead. The real puzzle is why people are willing to follow.”

“The WEIRDer you are, the more you see a world full of separate objects, rather than relationships.”

“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."”

“If the gods evolve (culturally) to condemn selfish and divisive behaviors, they can then be used to promote cooperation and trust within the group. […] Creating gods who can see everything, and who hate cheaters and oath breakers, turns out to be a good way to reduce cheating and oath breaking.”

“The list of five moral foundations was my first attempt to specify how the righteous mind was "organized in advance of experience.”

“Five adaptative challenges stood out most clearly: caring for vulnerable children, forming partnerships with non-kin to reap the benefits of reciprocity, forming coalitions to compete with other coalitions, negotiating status hierarchies, and keeping oneself and one's kin free from parasites and pathogens, which spread quickly when people live in close proximity to each other.”

“The righteous mind is like a tongue with six taste receptors.”