The Righteous Mind

A central function of thought is making sure that one acts in ways that can be persuasively justified or excused to others.

When we see or hear about the things other people do, the elephant begins to lean immediately.

We are all intuitive politicians striving to maintain appealing moral identities in front of our multiple constituencies.

Most Americans nowadays are asking King’s question not about race relations but about political relations and the collapse of cooperation across party lines.

I have striven not to laugh at human actions, not to weep at them, not to hate them, but to understand them.

If we want to understand ourselves, our divisions, our limits, and our potentials, we need to step back, drop the moralism, apply some moral psychology, and analyze the game we’re all playing.

The central metaphor of these four chapters is that the righteous mind is like a tongue with six taste receptors.

Morality is a cultural construction, influenced by accidents of environment and history, but it’s not so flexible that anything goes.

Moral Foundations Theory says that there are (at least) six psychological systems that comprise the universal foundations of the world’s many moral matrices.

Liberals rely primarily on the Care and Fairness foundations, whereas the right uses all five.