Words matter. These are the best Paul Bloom Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
We are naturally moral beings, but our environments can enhance – or, sadly, degrade – this innate moral sense.
If Inigo Montoya were around now, he wouldn’t need to storm the castle to bring his father’s murderer to justice; the police would do it for him, and fewer people would have to die.
Having kids has proven to be this amazing – for me, this amazing source of ideas of anecdotes, of examples, I can test my own kids without human subject permission, so they pilot – I pilot my ideas on them. And so it is a tremendous advantage to have kids if you’re going to be a developmental psychologist.
Any simple claim that you need religion to be good is flat wrong.
Morality is often seen as an innovation, like agriculture and writing. From this perspective, babies are pint-sized psychopaths, self-interested beings who need to be taught moral notions such as the wrongness of harming another person.
Perhaps looking out through big baby eyes – if we could – would not be as revelatory experience as many imagine. We might see a world inhabited by objects and people, a world infused with causation, agency, and morality – a world that would surprise us not by its freshness but by its familiarity.
Our best hope for the future is not to get people to think of all humanity as family – that’s impossible. It lies, instead, in an appreciation of the fact that, even if we don’t empathize with distant strangers, their lives have the same value as the lives of those we love.
I think what a lot of fiction is, is the imagining of the worst so as to prepare ourselves.
I don’t doubt that the explanation for consciousness will arise from the mercilessly scientific account of psychology and neuroscience, but, still, isn’t it neat that the universe is such that it gave rise to conscious beings like you and me?
Enjoying fiction requires a shift in selfhood. You give up your own identity and try on the identities of other people, adopting their perspectives so as to share their experiences. This allows us to enjoy fictional events that would shock and sadden us in real life.
It is clear that rituals and sacrifices can bring people together, and it may well be that a group that does such things has an advantage over one that does not. But it is not clear why a religion has to be involved. Why are gods, souls, an afterlife, miracles, divine creation of the universe, and so on brought in?
The genetic you and the neural you aren’t alternatives to the conscious you. They are its foundations.
We can imagine our bodies being destroyed, our brains ceasing to function, our bones turning to dust, but it is harder – some would say impossible – to imagine the end of our very existence.
Strong moral arguments exist for why we should often try to ignore stereotypes or override them. But we shouldn’t assume they represent some irrational quirk of the unconscious mind. In fact, they’re largely the consequence of the mind’s attempt to make a rational decision.
If evil is empathy erosion, and empathy erosion is a form of illness, then evil turns out to be nothing more than a particularly awful psychological disorder.
A growing body of evidence suggests that humans do have a rudimentary moral sense from the very start of life.
If our moral attitudes are entirely the result of nonrational factors, such as gut feelings and the absorption of cultural norms, they should either be stable or randomly drift over time, like skirt lengths or the widths of ties. They shouldn’t show systematic change over human history. But they do.
It’s really difficult working with kids and with babies because they are not cooperative subjects: they are not socialized into the idea that they should cheerfully and cooperatively give you information. They’re not like undergraduates, who you can bribe with beer money or course credit.
You’d expect, as good Darwinian creatures, we would evolve to be fascinated with how the world really is, and we would use language to convey real-world information, we’d be obsessed with knowing the way things are, and we would entirely reject stories that aren’t true. They’re useless. But that’s not the way we work.
We are constituted so that simple acts of kindness, such as giving to charity or expressing gratitude, have a positive effect on our long-term moods. The key to the happy life, it seems, is the good life: a life with sustained relationships, challenging work, and connections to community.
Most of us know nothing about constitutional law, so it’s hardly surprising that we take sides in the Obamacare debate the way we root for the Red Sox or the Yankees. Loyalty to the team is what matters.
Modern science tells us that the conscious self arises from a purely physical brain. We do not have immaterial souls.
If you look within the United States, religion seems to make you a better person. Yet atheist societies do very well – better, in many ways, than devout ones.
Humans are born with a hard-wired morality: a sense of good and evil is bred in the bone. I know this claim might sound outlandish, but it’s supported now by research in several laboratories.
If our wondrous kindness is evidence for God, is our capacity for great evil proof of the Devil?
