Sublime

The people around us influence how we perceive the global society. In other words, we use our own social milieu to make inferences about how people we don’t know live their lives. But this may backfire when we live in homogeneous social environments and rarely meet people living in different circumstances. English psychologist Rael Dawtry and his c

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In their view, moral behavior maximizes the most pleasure for the most people and minimizes the most pain. That’s the core idea of utilitarianism. Other things like character or intentions and so on don’t really matter. What matters are consequences, what philosophers called consequentialism. Now, this was quite a major shift in moral thinking and

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Everyone cares about fairness, but there are two major kinds. On the left, fairness often implies equality, but on the right it means proportionality—people should be rewarded in proportion to what they contribute, even if that guarantees unequal outcomes.

Our moral thinking is much more like a politician searching for votes than a scientist searching for truth.

You can’t make a dog happy by forcibly wagging its tail. And you can’t change people’s minds by utterly refuting their arguments. Hume diagnosed the problem long ago: And as reasoning is not the source, whence either disputant derives his tenets; it is in vain to expect, that any logic, which speaks not to the affections, will ever engage him to em

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Why do we have this weird mental architecture? As hominid brains tripled in size over the last 5 million years, developing language and a vastly improved ability to reason, why did we evolve an inner lawyer, rather than an inner judge or scientist? Wouldn’t it have been most adaptive for our ancestors to figure out the truth, the real truth about w

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Create healthy competition among teams, not individuals. As McNeill said, soldiers don’t risk their lives for their country or for the army; they do so for their buddies in the same squad or platoon. Studies show that intergroup competition increases love of the in-group far more than it increases dislike of the out-group.53 Intergroup competitions

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In their day jobs, his parents continually wrestled with the tension, in American law, between individual freedoms and the collective good. Both identified, broadly speaking, as utilitarians: any law should seek not to maximize some abstract notion of freedom but rather the greatest good for the greatest number. They never pushed their views on Sam

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It makes no evolutionary sense for you to care about what happens to my son Max, or a hungry child in a faraway country, or a baby seal. But Darwin doesn’t have to explain why you shed any particular tear. He just has to explain why you have tear ducts in the first place, and why those ducts can sometimes be activated by suffering that is not your

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