Thursday, September 13, 2007

The servant of the passions

Studies of everyday reasoning show that we usually use reason to search for evidence to support our initial judgment, which was made in milliseconds. But I do agree...that sometimes we can use controlled processes such as reasoning to override our initial intuitions. I just think this happens rarely, maybe in one or two percent of the hundreds of judgments we make each week.
-- a snippet from Jonathan Haidt's rich Moral psychology and the misunderstanding of religion. Haidt summarises a new synthesis in moral psychology in four principles:

1) Intuitive primacy but not dictatorship
2) Moral thinking is for social doing
3) Morality binds and builds
4) Morality is about more than harm and fairness

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