Yet liberals are often uncomfortable with the negative side of karma—retribution—as shown on the bumper sticker in figure 8.7. After all, retribution causes harm, and harm activates the Care/harm foundation.

Moral intuitions arise automatically and almost instantaneously, long before moral reasoning has a chance to get started, and those first intuitions tend to drive our later reasoning.

A recent study even found that liberal professors give out a narrower range of grades than do conservative professors. Conservative professors are more willing to reward the best students and punish the worst.

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

human nature is not just intrinsically moral, it’s also intrinsically moralistic, critical, and judgmental.

If you pick nature, then you’re a nativist. You believe that moral knowledge is native in our minds. It comes preloaded, perhaps in our God-inscribed hearts (as the Bible says), or in our evolved moral emotions (as Darwin argued).

The lowest level of our personalities, which he calls “dispositional traits,” are the sorts of broad dimensions of personality that show themselves in many different situations and are fairly consistent from childhood through old age. These are traits such as threat sensitivity, novelty seeking, extraversion, and conscientiousness. These traits are

Kids can’t talk like moral philosophers, but they are busy sorting social information in a sophisticated way. They seem to grasp early on that rules that prevent harm are special, important, unalterable, and universal. And this realization, Turiel said, was the foundation of all moral development. Children construct their moral understanding on the

Reasoning can take us to almost any conclusion we want to reach, because we ask “Can I believe it?” when we want to believe something, but “Must I believe it?” when we don’t want to believe. The answer is almost always yes to the first question and no to the second.