A person who contemplates this endless litany of tragedy and misery would be pardoned for concluding that man is at best a selfish and aggressive animalRead more at location 210
But before drawing so bleak a conclusion from his daily newspaper, the reader should ask himself why bloodletting and savagery are news. There are two answers. The first is that they are unusual.Read more at location 215
The second reason that misery is news is because it is shocking.Read more at location 219
The argument of this book is that people have a natural moral sense, a sense that is formed out of the interaction of their innate dispositions with their earliest familial experiences. To different degrees among different people, but to some important degree in almost all people, that moral sense shapes human behavior and the judgments people make of the behavior of others.Read more at location 222
At one time, the view that our sense of morality shaped our behavior and judgments was widely held among philosophers.Read more at location 226
Modern philosophy, with some exceptions, represents a fundamental break with that tradition.Read more at location 232
Marxism as generally received (and, with some exceptions, as Marx himself wrote it) is a relentlessly materialistic doctrine in which morality, religion, and philosophy have no independent meaning;Read more at location 234
Analytical philosophers took seriously the argument that “values” could not be derived from “facts,” and tended to relegate moral judgments to the realm of personal preferencesRead more at location 243
Existentialists such as Jean-Paul Sartre argued that man must choose his values, but provided little guidance for making that choice.Read more at location 247
Richard Rorty, perhaps the most important philosophical writer in present-day America, denies that there is anything like a “core self” or an inherently human quality,Read more at location 250
it seems clear that Freudianism was popularly understood as meaning that people have instincts, especially sexual and aggressive ones, and not moral senses; morality, to the extent people acquire any, is chiefly the result of learning to repress those instincts.Read more at location 255
Ruth Benedict’s best-selling book Patterns of Culture was read to mean that all ways of life were equally valid.Read more at location 267
“hollow men” living in a “wasteland” or “the age of anxiety,”Read more at location 277
Two errors arise in attempting to understand the human condition. One is to assume that culture is everything, the other to assume that it is nothing. In the first case there would be no natural moral sense—if culture is everything, then nature is nothing. In the second, the moral sense would speak to us far more clearly than it does.Read more at location 290
The “values clarification” approach to moral education that began in the late 1960s warned teachers to avoid “moralizing, criticizing, giving values, or evaluating.” They were especially to avoid “all hints of ‘good’ or ‘right’ or ‘acceptable.’”Read more at location 296
There is no evidence that this bit of pedagogical idiocy had any direct effect on the beliefs of children,9 but it may have had an indirect effect on their actions. If a child cheated on an exam, did the teacher respond by helping the student “clarify” the “value” he attached to honesty and dishonesty?Read more at location 300
In my classes, college students asked to judge a distant people, practice, or event will warn one another and me not to be “judgmental” or to “impose your values on other people.”Read more at location 308
be tolerant, act fairly, or respect liberty,Read more at location 317
attempt to construct intellectual defenses of these notions, defenses typically based on utility: for example, society is better off if everybody behaves that way. Most people, however, do not act fairly or sympathetically because they have decided that “society” (whatever that is) will be better off as a consequence.Read more at location 318
The feelings on which people act are often superior to the arguments that they employ.Read more at location 327
College students, like Professor Rorty, rarely have to cope with an atrocity or give a reason for condemning those they learn of. To them, the perils of accepting cultural relativism are purely hypothetical.Read more at location 338
Consider the problem of rising crime rates. Having thought about the matter for many years, I can find no complete explanation for the worldwide increase in crime rates that does not assign an important role to a profound cultural shift in the strength of either social constraints or internal conscience or both,Read more at location 356
The moral relativism of the modern age has probably contributed to the increase in crime rates, especially the increases that occur during prosperous times. It has done so by replacing the belief in personal responsibility with the notion of social causation and by supplying to those marginal persons at risk for crime a justification for doing what they might have done anyway.Read more at location 370
Even criminals believe in morality, at least as they grow older, David Farrington and Donald West have followed a group of working-class London males from early childhood well past the age of thirty.Read more at location 390
we have a moral sense, most people instinctively rely on it even if intellectuals deny it, but it is not always and in every aspect of life strong enough to withstand a pervasive and sustained attack.Read more at location 404
To say that people have a moral sense is not the same thing as saying that they are innately good. A moral sense must compete with other senses that are natural to humans—the desire to survive, acquire possessions, indulge in sex, or accumulate power—in short, with self-interest narrowly defined.Read more at location 406
Most of us do not break the law most of the time, not simply because we worry about taking even a small chance of getting caught,Read more at location 420
We usually take for granted the predictability and peacefulness of most human interactions.Read more at location 426
The first is rationalistic and individualistic: order exists because people, horrified by the anarchy of the natural world, find some rule or convention that can keep them from being part of an endless war of all against all. Thomas Hobbes argued that government is created because “every man is enemy to every man,” driven by a desire for gain, for safety,Read more at location 428
The second explanation is normative and communal: order exists because a system of beliefs and sentiments held by members of a society sets limits to what those members can do. Emile Durkheim believed that neither governments nor markets alone could produce order;Read more at location 440
While Durkheim was clearly right to call attention to the preexisting social bonds that make governments and markets possible, the source of those bonds is far from clear.Read more at location 456
