Sublime

Then they asked the complementary question: How many students had negotiated an incident in a dynamic, intense, uncertain environment where the hostage-taker was in emotional crisis and had no clear demands? Every hand went up. It was clear: if emotionally driven incidents, not rational bargaining interactions, constituted the bulk of what most

In short, my philosophical starting points are: “Right” and “wrong” are very real concepts which should possess great force. We should be skeptical about the powers of the individual human mind. Human life is complex and offers many different goods, not just one value that trumps all others.

And what a person consciously intends to do says a lot about him. It makes sense to treat a man who enjoys murdering children differently from one who accidentally hit and killed a child with his car—because the conscious intentions of the former give us a lot of information about how he is likely to behave in the future.

largely on circumstantial evidence, motive might be a persuasive consideration—for either guilt or innocence.

Philosophers who reflect on our moral experience see no more reason to distrust that experience than the experience of our five senses. I believe what my five senses tell me, namely, that there is a world of physical objects out there. My senses are not infallible, but that doesn’t lead me to think that there is no external world around me.

But this is a false choice, and in 1987 moral psychology was mostly focused on a third answer: rationalism, which says that kids figure out morality for themselves.

Haidt identifies five important moral senses or concerns that he claims run deep in all human societies. They are: 1 Aversion to and protection from harm. 2 Fairness. 3 Loyalty to the group. 4 Respect for authority. 5 Not defiling one’s ‘spiritual purity’.

Surprising detail is a near universal property of getting up close and personal with reality.