Tags / 29 quotes from 14 sources
#morality
Brain Rules for Baby (John Medina)
Gilbert's three kinds of happiness
One researcher who has spent many years trying to get at the answer is a delightful elf of a psychologist named Daniel Gilbert, at Harvard. Other definitions of happiness exist, of course, but Gilbert proposes these three: • Emotional happiness. This is what most of the parents…
What moral means, and whether it is innate
What exactly does “moral” mean? Are any moral absolutes embedded into our brains, or is moral awareness only culturally understood? These questions have occupied philosophers for centuries. The word “moral,” in both its Greek and Latin incarnations, has a strong social…
A universal moral sense across cultures
Humans tend to have that altruistic quality in spades, and in much more sophisticated forms than our genetic neighbors. If moral awareness is universal, we might also expect to see general agreement across cultures. Harvard researchers developed the Moral Sense Test, which…
Conscience and internalized rules
Turns out it’s surprisingly difficult to explain proactive moral behavior, like voluntarily helping someone cross the street. Even enlightened self-interest does not fully explain certain types of human altruism. The road between moral reasoning and moral behavior is quite…
Kohlberg's three stages of moral reasoning
Kohlberg, the Harvard psychologist, believed that moral reasoning depended upon general cognitive maturity—another way of saying that these things take time. If, indeed, decisions have strong emotional roots, as we will explore, I would also argue that moral reasoning depends…
The three-legged stool of moral upbringing
Families who raise moral kids follow very predictable patterns when it comes to rules and discipline. The patterns are not a behavioral insurance policy, but they are as close as research gets us right now. Many interlocking components make up these patterns; an illustration…
Punishment must be firm, consistent and swift
How not to punish kids? Try the 1979 movie Kramer vs. Kramer. The film is about a divorcing couple and the impact of the experience on their young son. Dustin Hoffman plays the workaholic, unengaged dad whose parenting instincts have the subtlety of dog food. The scene opens…
Warm, explained rules earn committed compliance
Overall, a clear picture emerges about how to raise well-adjusted, moral children. Parents whose rules issue from warm acceptance and whose rationales are consistently explained end up being perceived as reasonable and fair, rather than as capricious and dictatorial. They are…
Golden Rule - Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia
The Golden Rule and the Silver Rule
The Golden Rule or ethic of reciprocity is a maxim, ethical code or morality that essentially states either of the following: (Positive form of Golden Rule): One should treat others as one would like others to treat oneself.[1] (Negative form of Golden Rule): One should not…
Human, All Too Human: A Book For Free Spirits
At bottom even such acts of self-abnegation are not moral inasmuch as they are not done with a strict regard for others.
What concerns him particularly is simply the unloading of his emotion. Hence he readily, to relieve his tension, grasps the darts of the enemy and buries them in his own breast. That in self abnegation and not in revenge the element of greatness consisted must have been brought…
Altruism
Ethic of the Developed Individual.—Hitherto the altruistic has been looked upon as the distinctive characteristic of moral conduct, and it is manifest that it was the consideration of universal utility that prompted praise and recognition of altruistic conduct. Must not a…
If there is no longer any ought morality, wouldn't death be preferable?
For Tranquility.—But will not our philosophy become thus a tragedy? Will not truth prove the enemy of life, of betterment? A question seems to weigh upon our tongue and yet will not put itself into words: whether one can knowingly remain in the domain of the untruthful? or, if…
La Formica Zen (italian Edition) ( )
Il cuore di un uomo e gli animali
Puoi conoscere il cuore di un uomo già dal modo in cui egli tratta gli animali. Immanuel Kant
Lo Spirito del Giappone (Leonardo Vittorio Arena)
Genji non è un playboy
Trascurando i fattori storici, si rischia di scambiare Genji per un playboy, come avviene oggi nelle frontiere del cyberspazio. Che il protagonista passi da una donna all’altra è un «dovere» della nobiltà del tempo, imputabile al rango principesco. Sarebbe stato anomalo il…
Scienza e morale crescono insieme
Fukuzawa insiste sull’equivalenza tra morale e conoscenza, affermando che il progresso scientifico procede di pari passo con quello etico. L’ottimismo dei filosofi Meiji è trasparente. Non fu Wang Yang-ming a sottolineare la stretta correlazione, anzi l’unità, di conoscenza e…
Mind: A Brief Introduction (John R. Searle)
Philosophy is full of apparent contradictions
We ended the last chapter with an apparent contradiction of the sort that is typical in philosophy. On the one hand we accept a view that seems overwhelmingly convincing—the universe is material—but that seems inconsistent with another view that we cannot give up—minds exist…
Of money and morals
Banks hiring moral philosophers
So what would the Scholastics make of modern finance? Would they admire how efficiently a family’s savings can find productive uses? Or would they decry how developing countries pay more to borrow than rich ones? Would they marvel at our banks’ international reach? Or would…
Religious Children Are Meaner Than Their Secular Counterparts, Study Finds | World News | The Guardian
Religion is not a prerequisite of morality
The report pointed out that 5.8 billion humans, representing 84% of the worldwide population, identify as religious. “While it is generally accepted that religion contours people’s moral judgments and pro-social behaviour, the relation between religion and morality is a…
Shantaram (gregory David Roberts)
A standard unit for measuring morality
‘Very well. I think that you can see my point here—we avoid chaos, in building houses and dividing land and so forth, by having an agreed standard for the measure of a unit of length. We call it a metre and, after many attempts, we decide upon a way to establish the length of…
The Acid Diaries (Christopher Gray)
Drowning in collective pain
How come, I asked, you are so disgusted with yourself when you can’t even remember who you are? True, I had long forgotten who I was; let alone why I was so despicable. In a flash I understood that this was no longer my own pain. I had sunk through the bottom of personal…
The Book: On The Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are
The political and personal morality of the west is schizofrenic
The political and personal morality of the West, especially in the United States, is—for lack of this sense—utterly schizophrenic. It is a monstrous combination of uncompromising idealism and unscrupulous gangsterism, and thus devoid of the humor and humaneness which enables…
The Ego Trick (baggini, Julian)
Zimbardo: the myth of human character
‘There’s the myth about human dignity and human character,’ he told me over lunch. ‘So we really want to believe that our actions all stem from some internal set of motives, of goodness, of morality, and courage, and they get perverted in certain situations for certain people…
Situations mitigate but don't excuse
It’s worth stressing that although Zimbardo argues we have underestimated the power of social situations because we overestimate the power of individual dispositions, that does not mean he thinks people are not accountable for their behaviour. All the situational approach says…
Moral luck under the Third Reich
corollary: the same person, with the same character, if now put into a life where a different range of situations was normal, could have the following cloud: Now the overall description of the exact same person would be ‘mean’, not ‘generous’. What this shows is that there is…
Few people are of consistent character
If people are indeed variable in this way, then what would that predict for the kinds of studies that Doris cites? We would expect to find that only a minority of people are actually of consistent good character, and, likewise, only a few of consistent bad character. We would…
Virtue ethics as a proposal, not a description
Virtue ethics is not a theory about how most people actually make their moral choices, but a proposal for how we should set about making ourselves able to make better moral choices. Building moral character is a challenge, so the fact that the majority don’t seem to have risen…
Accumulating good karma for a good house
‘Death is trying to change another house. If I want a good house then I have to accumulate good karma, positive things.’
The Will To Power: An Attempt At The Revaluation Of All Values.
Nihilism stands at the door
Nihilism stands at the door: whence comes this uncanniest of all guests? Point of departure: it is an error to consider "social distress" or "physiological degeneration" or, worse, corruption, as the cause of nihilism. Ours is the most decent and compassionate age. Distress…
Theories of Childhood, Second Edition (Carol Garhart Mooney)
Formal operations and hypothetical thinking
The final stage Piaget outlined is formal operations. This stage begins around age eleven or twelve and is marked by the ability to think logically and in hypothetical terms. According to Piaget, once this stage is reached, young people can wrestle with such questions as “Is it…