Sublime

We can now push aside questions of whether this or that type of morality might be the correct one; dispense with petty ideologies such as utilitarianism or modern liberalism; forego the austerities of Christianity, and start making truth ourselves. Previous philosophers had enquired into human nature; Nietzsche now casts aside all theories and dema

Yes, you can do what you want—but you cannot account for the fact that your wants are effective in one case and not in another (and you certainly can’t choose your wants in advance).

Hume’s pluralist, sentimentalist, and naturalist approach to ethics is more promising than utilitarianism or deontology for modern moral psychology. As a first step in resuming Hume’s project, we should try to identify the taste receptors of the righteous mind.

Yet though gods can inspire us to act compassionately, religious faith is not a necessary condition for moral behavior. The idea that we need a supernatural being to make us act morally assumes that there is something unnatural about morality. But why? Morality of some kind is natural. All social mammals from chimpanzees to rats have ethical codes

But without it, the place for our blame suddenly vanishes, and even the most terrifying sociopaths begin to seem like victims themselves.

people generally confuse determinism with fatalism.

The urge for retribution depends upon our not seeing the underlying causes of human behavior.

I do believe that you can understand most of moral psychology by viewing it as a form of enlightened self-interest, and if it’s self-interest, then it’s easily explained by Darwinian natural selection working at the level of the individual. Genes are selfish,3 selfish genes create people with various mental modules, and some of these mental modules