Sublime

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

In a world deluged by irrelevant information, clarity is power.

According to Hume, absolutely everything we know about the world comes from our senses. Not only does this mean we can easily be wrong about what we think we know; even worse, we have no basis to suppose that such “certainties” as Isaac Newton’s laws of motion are anything other than habits we’ve acquired through repeated exposure to similar impres

The state hopes to regulate the biochemical pursuit of happiness, separating ‘bad’ manipulations from ‘good’ ones.

Part III is about the third principle: Morality binds and blinds. The central metaphor of these four chapters is that human beings are 90 percent chimp and 10 percent bee. Human nature was produced by natural selection working at two levels simultaneously. Individuals compete with individuals within every group, and we are the descendants of primat

the ways that information overload generates the need for informational triage. That environment also creates the need for moral triage: for straightforward binary decisions about whether we admire or despise a given person. Admiring is easier when a person embodies values that stand high on our list of priorities—especially if we think that those

Darwin was a nativist about morality: he thought that natural selection gave us minds that were preloaded with moral emotions.