Saskiadellevoet's List: Moralities of everyday life

• Mother Teresa, Bill  Gates or Norman Borlaug
• Borlaug, father of  the “Green Revolution”
• gricultural science to reduce world hunger
• he very embodiment of  saintliness
• Mother Teresa
• Gates
• nerd’s
• orlaug
• eldom walking onto the media stage,
• a new field is using illusions to unmask a sixth sense,  the moral sense
• The human moral  sense turns out to be an organ of considerable complexity, with quirks that  reflect its evolutionary history and its neurobiological foundations.
• close to our conception of  the meaning of life
• clarifying what morality is and how it  should steer our actions
• oralization is a  psychological state that can be turned on and off like a switch, and when it is  on, a distinctive mind-set commandeers our thinking.
• universal.
• first hallmark of moralization
• ther hallmark
• people feel that those who commit immoral acts  deserve to be punished
• Bertrand Russell
• The  infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists — that is  why they invented hell.”
• sychologist Paul Rozin
• comparing  two kinds of people who engage in the same behavior but with different switch  settings
• ealth vegetarians
• Moral vegetarians
• moralization or amoralization of  particular kinds of behavior
• smoking
• At the same time, many behaviors have been amoralized, switched from moral  failings to lifestyle choices.
• wave of amoralization
• Moral  Majority
• whether an  activity flips our mental switches to the “moral” setting isn’t just a matter of  how much harm it does.
• double standards is obvious: people tend to align their moralization  with their own lifestyles.
• ean Piaget
• Lawrence Kohlberg
• Jonathan Haidt:
• eople don’t generally  engage in moral reasoning, Haidt argues, but moral rationalization: they  begin with the conclusion, coughed up by an unconscious emotion, and then work  backward to a plausible justification.
• philosopher and cognitive neuroscientist
• Joshua Greene
• They sought to find signs of a conflict between brain areas associated with  emotion
• pondered the dilemmas that required killing someone with their  bare hands
• medial
• several networks in their brains lighted up
• implicated in  emotions about other people
• dorsolateral
• nterior cingulate cortex
• egisters a conflict between an urge coming from one part of the  brain and an advisory coming from another.
• hands-off dilemma
• rain reacted differently
• nly the area involved in rational calculation stood out
• rolleyology — complex, instinctive and worldwide moral  intuitions
• Hauser and John Mikhail
• Noam  Chomsky
• moral sense and language
• John Rawls
• universal grammar”
• moral sense is an innate part of human nature
• Donald  E. Brown
• stirrings of morality emerge early in childhood
• no one has identified genes for morality
• ircumstantial  evidence they exist.
• antisocial  personality disorder” or “psychopathy” show
• signs of
• morality blindness  from the time they are children
• neuroscientists Hanna and Antonio Damasio
• evere injuries to their frontal lobes can  grow up into callous and irresponsible adults, despite normal intelligence
• moral sense,
• may be rooted in the design of the normal human brain
• the idea is at best incomplete
• to name a teddy bear Muhammad
• Whatever  grammar guides people’s moral judgments can’t be all that universal.
• Richard Shweder and Alan Fiske
• moral  concerns across the globe
• bad to harm others and good to help  them.
• ense of fairness
• Haidt
• harm, fairness, community (or group loyalty), authority  and purity — and suggests that they are the primary colors of our moral sense
• counts five
• Richard  Dawkins in his book “The Selfish Gene.”
• very close to
• Fairnes
• eciprocal al
• truism,
• Mencken’s definition of conscience  as “the inner voice which warns us that someone might be looking”
• Community, the very different emotion that prompts people to share and  sacrifice without an expectation of payback, may be rooted in nepotistic  altruism, the empathy and solidarity we feel toward our relatives
• nonrelatives as well
• heory of how the moral sense can be universal and  variable at the same time
• five moral spheres are universal, a legacy of  evolution
• But how they are ranked in importance, and which is brought in to  moralize which area of social life — sex, government, commerce, religion, diet  and so on — depends on the culture.
• our moral obsessions) is channeled elsewhere to violations in the  other spheres. Think of the
• holy  ablutions and dietary restrictions of Hindus and Orthodox Jews
• apanese fear
• onconformity (community)
• the  outrage at insulting the Prophet among Muslims
• purity
• (authority
• The ranking and placement of moral spheres also divides the cultures of  liberals and conservatives in the United States
• aidt found that liberals put  a lopsided moral weight on harm and fairness while playing down group loyalty,  authority and purity. Conservatives instead place a moderately high weight on  all five.
• Philip Tetlock has shown that  the mentality of taboo — a conviction that some thoughts are sinful to think —  is not just a superstition of Polynesians but a mind-set that can easily be  triggered in college-educated Americans.
• morally corrosive”
• The attempt to dissect our moral intuitions  can look like an attempt to debunk them.
• pineless  relativism
• amoral nihilism
• none of these fears are warranted, and it’s important to see why  not
• Selfish” genes are perfectly compatible with selfless  organisms, because a gene’s metaphorical goal of selfishly replicating itself  can be implemented by wiring up the brain of the organism to do unselfish  things, like being nice to relatives or doing good deeds for needy strangers.
• howed how natural  selection could push in the direction of true selflessness.
• 1971 article, Trivers
• The most effective way to seem  generous and fair, under harsh scrutiny, is to be generous and fair.
• he worry
• ow, if the distinction between  right and wrong is also a product of brain wiring, why should we believe it is  any more real than the distinction between red and green? And if it is just a  collective hallucination, how could we argue that evils like genocide and  slavery are wrong for everyone, rather than just distasteful to us?
• Perhaps we are born  with a rudimentary moral sense, and as soon as we build on it with moral  reasoning, the nature of moral reality forces us to some conclusions but not  others.
• Moral realism
• In many arenas of life, two  parties are objectively better off if they both act in a nonselfish way than if  each of them acts selfishly.
• These spreadsheet projections are not quirks of brain wiring, nor are  they dictated by a supernatural power; they are in the nature of things.
• The other external support for morality is a feature of rationality itself:  that it cannot depend on the egocentric vantage point of the reasoner.
• he interchangeability of  perspectives
• Golden Rule (itself discovered many times);  Spinoza’s Viewpoint of Eternity; the Social Contract of Hobbes, Rousseau and  Locke; Kant’s Categorical Imperative; and Rawls’s Veil of Ignorance. It also  underlies Peter  Singer’s theory of the Expanding Circ
• The moral sense, we are learning, is as vulnerable to  illusions as the other senses.
• The Wisdom of Repugnance,” Leon Kass
• hallow are the souls that have forgotten how to shudder.”
• wo billion Indians and  Chinese are unlikely to copy our born-again abstemiousness
• Anton  Chekhov wrote, “Man will become better when you show him what he is like.”

118 more annotations...