Rudy Garns's Profile

provides an abstract set of rules for how to intuitively understand when helping another is obligatory and when harming another is forbidden

Based on the responses of thousands of participants to more than 100 dilemmas, we find no difference between men and women, young and old, theistic believers and non-believers, liberals and conservatives. When it comes to judging unfamiliar moral scenarios, your cultural background is virtually irrelevant.

The answer comes from thinking about our emotions, the feelings we recruit to fuel in-group favouritism, out-group hatred and, ultimately, dehumanisation.

Psychopaths know full well what is right and wrong but don't care. Their moral knowledge is intact but their moral emotions are damaged. They are perfectly normal jurists but perfectly abnormal moral actors.

The good news about the psychology of prejudice, of creating distinctive classes of individuals who are in the tribe and outside of it, is that it is flexible, capable of change and — viewed from an evolutionary perspective — as abstract and content-free as the rules that enter into our moral grammar.

On this note, moral education can play a more nurturing role by introducing all children, early in life, to the varieties of religions, political systems, languages, social organisations and races. Exposure to diversity is perhaps our best option for reducing, if not eradicating, strong out-group biases.

some of our moral instincts evolved during a period of human history that looked nothing like the situation today

living a moral life requires us to be restless with our present moral norms, always challenging us to discover what might and ought to be.

One of the best known examples of human-driven evolution is malaria. Early farmers cleared forests and created fields where malaria-carrying mosquitoes could lay eggs in pools of water. As malaria spread, natural selection favored those humans with defenses against the disease. One such defense comes from a variant of a hemoglobin gene that makes it hard for parasites to reproduce in blood cells. One copy of the gene reduces your chance of contracting malaria. Two copies cause sickle cell anemia.

ome children had the misfortune to be born with defective copies of a gene for an enzyme that breaks down amino acids in the food they ate. This disorder, known as phenylketonuria, generally led to severe brain damage. Few people with severe phenylketonuria were able to pass on their genes. But today, now that scientists know what causes the disease, people with phenylketonuria can enjoy fairly normal lives simply by being careful about the foods that they eat, and they pass their genes on to their children.

Subtle differences in people's health influence how many children they have and thus can gradually change entire populations.

ne day genetic engineering will change human DNA directly.