Moral Minds, Hauser, notes

Everything henceforth is verbatim from the book, except for the comments in brackets. Those, happily or otherwise, are from me.
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Notes:

Marc D. Hauser, Moral Minds, HarperCollins Publishers, New York (2006).

Quotes Darwin, Descent of Man (1871), Chapter IV: "of all the differences between man and the lower animals, the moral sense or conscience is by far the most important. This sense, as Mackintosh*(2) remarks, "has a rightful supremacy over every other principle of human action"; it is summed up in that short but imperious word ought, so full of high significance. It is the most noble of all the attributes of man, leading him without a moment's hesitation to risk his life for that of a fellow-creature; or after due deliberation, impelled simply by the deep feeling of right or duty, to sacrifice it in some great cause."

Quotes David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature: "Morals excite passions, and produce or prevent actions. Reason of itself is utterly impotent in ths particular. The rules of morality, therefore, are not conclusions of reason."

Quotes Noam Chomsky: "Why does everyone take for granted that we don't learn to grow arms, but rather, are designed to grow arms? Similarly, we should conclude that in the case of the development of moral systems, there's a biological endowment which in effect requires us to develop a system of moral judgment and a theory of justice, if you like, that in fact has detailed applicability over an enormous range."

"The central idea of this book is simple: we evolved a moral instinct, a capacity that naturally grows within each child, designed to generate rapid judgments about what is morally right or wrong based on an unconscious grammar of action."

"Facts alone don't motivate us into action."

"The only way to develop stable prescriptive principles, through either formal law or religion, is to understand how they will break down in the face of biases that Mother Nature equipped us with." pg 4

"Authority figures cannot mandate moral transgressions." pg 5 [me: but they can manipulate the operative parameters of particular situations to accomplish this result.]

"In our past, we were only presented with opportunities to help those in our immediate path: a hunter gored by a buffalo, a starving family member, an aging grandfather, or a woman with pregancy complications. There were no opportunities for altruism at a distance...Although there is no guarantee that we will help others in close proximity, the principles that guide our actions and omissions are more readily explained by proximity and probability." pg 10

"As the psychologist Jonathan Baron explains, intuition can lead to unfortunate or even detrimental outcomes...Once intuitions are elevated to rules, mind blindness turns to confabulation, as we engage in mental somersaults to justify our beliefs." Pg. 11, citing Baron's guidebook to intuition blindness (1994; 1998)

"Reasoning and emotion play some role in our moral behavior, but neither can do complete justice to the process leading up to moral judgment." Pg. 11

"[Lawrence] Kohlberg was right in thinking that conflict fuels the moral machinery." Pg. 19

"Hume's theory gets off the ground by looking at moral judgments through the lens of a three-party interaction: agent, receiver, and spectatory." Pg. 23

Quoting Hume: "Reason is and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them."

"Conscious moral reasoning often plays no role in our moral judgments, and in many cases reflects a post-hoc justification or rationalization of previously held biases or beliefs." Pg. 25

Quoting developmental psychologist Martin Hoffman: "[Empathy is] the spark of human concern for others, the glue that makes social life possible." Pg. 28

"We are like chameleons, designed to try out different colors to match our social partner's substrate." Pg. 29

"But rather than playing a role in generating a moral judgment, our emotions may function like wieghts, moving us to lean in one direction rather than another." Pg. 31

"We can unify and explain these ideas by appealing to the principle that it is permissible to cause harm as a by-product of achieving a greater good, but it is impermissible to use harm as a means to a greater good...the principle of double effect." Pg. 33 [me: this principle speaks to the fact that as spectators we are really judging the agent rather than the action-effect -- a sound discerning strategy that will, in the long run, make us the spectators better off, insofar as we must have future dealings with the agent.]

"It is not until about four years of age that children can maintain two different beliefs in mind and spontaneously flip between them." Pg. 34

"When it comes to language...what we express as our knowledge pales in relationship to the knowledge that is operative but unavailable to expression." Pg. 38

"The language faculty maintains a repository of principles for growing a language, any language...The problem of language acquisition is therefore like setting switches. Each child starts out with all possible switches, but with no particular settings; the environment thn sets them according to the child's native language." Pg. 38 [me: to ensure the "overlapping consensus", the centripetal 'unitary language", we must concern ourselves with setting switches.]

"When we speak about the language faculty, therefore, we are speaking about the normal, mature individual's competence with the principles that underlie their native language. What this individual chooses to say is a matter of performance, which will be influenced by whether she is tired, happy, in a fight with her lover, or addressing an audience of five hundred at a political rally." Pg. 39 [Me: radically local contingencies.]

"This boils down to a question of the child's initial state -- of her unconscious knowledge of linguistic principles prior to exposure to a spoken or signed language -- and the extent to which this state constrains not only what she learns and when, but what she can learn from listening or watching." Pg. 40 [Me: Initial boundary conditions, conditional algorithm, degrees of freedom.]

"To answer "How did it evolve?", we look to our history and recognize two distinctive parts: phylogeny and adaptation. A phylogeny analysis provides a depiction of the evolutionary relationships between species, yielding twiggy branches of the tree of life...To address the question of adaptation, we can look to the relationship between functional design and genetic success." [Me: the latter asks the question, what in fact did the moral faculty do for our selfish genes?]

Quoting Rawls: "There is no reason to assume that our sense of justice can be adequately characterized by familiar common sense precepts, or derived from the more obvious learning principles. A correct account of moral capacities will certainly involve principles and theoretical constructions which go beyond the norms and standards cited in every day life." Pg. 43, citing to (Rawls, 1971; pg. 46-47) [Me: the principles must derive from the "what for" -- i.e. they must be outside "morality".]

"Once an individual acquires his specific moral grammar, other moral grammars may be as incomprehensible to him as Chinese is to a native English speaker." Pg. 44 [all acquired moral languages come with opportunity costs: a decrease from the original degrees of freedom].

"Analyses of the motivation or intentions underlying an action, together with analyses of intended and foreseen consequences, provide the relevant material for our moral faculty. Emotions may only function to modulate what we actually do as distinct from what we comprehend or perceive as morally permissible." Pg. 46. [the importance of judgment not immediately acted upon: judgments can combine over time; they can amplify or dampen doubts and certitudes about specific agents or agent-types -- in essence coloring a person or role with an emotional prefix].

"Like phonemes, many actions lack meaning. When combined, actions are often meaningful. Like phonemes, when actions are combined, they do not blend; individual actions maintain their integrity. When actions are combine, they can represent an agent's goals, his means, and the consequences of his action or the omission of an action." Pg. 47 [me: meaning = distinguishability]

"To attain its limitless range of expressive power, the principles of our moral faculty must take a finite set of elements and recombine them into new, meaningful expressions of principles." Pg. 47

Citing Jonathan Haidt, "who proposes that we are equipped with four families of moral emotions: 1) other-condemning: contempt, anger, and disgust; 2) self-conscious: shame, embarrassment, guilt; 3) other-suffering: compassion; 4) other-praising: gratitude and elevation." Pg. 52

"Because the moral faculty relies on specialized brain systems, damage to these systems can lead to selective deficits in moral judgments. Damage to areas involved in supporting the moral faculty (e.g., emotions, memory) can lead to deficits in moral action - -of what individuals actually do, as distinct from what they think someone else should or would do." Pg. 54

"Morality regulates social interactions." Pg. 54

Quoting Thomas Henry Huxley (1860): "A man has no reason to be ashamed of having an ape for a grandfather. If there were an ancestor whom I should feel shame in recalling it would rather be a man -- a man of restless and versatile intellect -- who, not content with an equivocal success in his own sphere of activity, plunges into scientific questions with which he has no real acquaintance, only to obscure them by an aimless rhetoric, and distract the attention of his hearers from the real point at issue by eloquent digressions and skilled appeals to religious prejudice." Pg. 60

"What has allowed us to live in large groups of unrelated individuals that often come and go is an evolved faculty of the mind that generates universal and unconscious judgments concerning justice and harm." Pg. 60 [Me: not exactly true. what has allowed this are expressed norms called Laws -- their relative harmony with contemporaneous morality, and their regular enforcement by authority.]

"Action at a distance generates a weaker altruistic pull, because we lacked the evolved psycholgoy. Helping individuals that are out of arm's reach, sometimes out of sight, is a newly developed pattern of action and interaction." Pg. 64 [me: manipulable by new media.]

"From a finite and often limited set of experiences, we project our intuitions to novel cases." Pg. 65 [me: problem of projection]

"Rawls's suggestion, building on the linguistic analogy, was that many of our morally relevant judgments emerge rapidly, often without reflection, in the absence of heated emotion, and typically, without access to a clear justification or explanation. Moreover, these judgments tend to be robust, as evidenced by the vehemence with which individuals stick to their intuitions in the face of reasonable alternative judgments." Pg. 67

"When people give explanations for their moral behavior, they may have little or nothing to do with the underlying principles. Their sense of conscious reasoning from specific principles is illusory. And even when someone becomes aware of an underlying principle, it is not obvious that this kind of understanding will alter their judgments in day-to-day interactions." Pg. 67 [me: thus, the goal is to use the empirical knowledge of the moral faculty to supplement it's raison d'etre: i.e., use it to inform Law.]

"If we reject [our innate moral principles], deciding that other principles are more consistent with our sense of justice, we must be prepared for conflict and instability." Pg. 70 [me: is this not the "ultimate cause" of our moral faculty -- i.e., the moderation of intragroup instability?]

"Once parameters are set, judgments of fairness may seem as incomprehensible across cultures as judgments of grammaticality for word order." Pg. 72 [me: if the psychology of justice exists because it is a successful environmental stabilizer, dissonant conceptions of justice are bastard mutations that do exactly the opposite.]

"As the mathematical biologists Martin Nowak and Karl Sigmund put it, 'The fiction of a rational "homo economicus" relentlessly optimizing material utility is giving way to "bounded rational" decision-makers governed by instincts and emotions.'" Pg. 79

"Mathematical models of this problem reveal that fairness evolves as a stable solution to the ultimatum game if proposers have access to information about a receiver's past behavior. When it comes to group level activity, reputation fuels cooperation and provides a shield against defection." Pg. 79

"In the fourteenth century, British villages repeatedly fell victim to the logic of the commons [Garrett Hardin's "tragedy of the commons"]. Each village was associated with a common pasture for their cattle and sheep. The pasture represented a shared resource. But since household wealth increased with the number of animals grazing on the pasture, the temptation to acquire more emerged. More animals meant more use of the pasture. More use of the pasture, less pasture. Less pasture, more competition. More competition, more strife. More strife, less village cohesion. Eventually, village after village dissolved." Pg. 81

"One way to maintain cooperative use of the land is to make resource use public knowledge. An individual's image or reputation can thus play a critical role in cooperation." Pg. 81 [me: thus, true cooperation is limited by group size, since the larger the group, the more diluted the impact of reputation regulation.]

"That individuals will pay to punish cheaters shows that moral indignation can fuel actions that are of immediate personal cost but of ultimate personal benefit as public goods accrue." Pg. 81

"The only way to guarantee stable, cooperative societies is by ensuring open inspection of reputation and providing opportunities for punishing cheaters." Pg. 81 [Me: communities, rather than "societies".]

"Although strong reciprocity is not selfish, it is strategic: only cooperate with those you can trust and nail those who are untrustworthy because they have cheated." Pg. 82

"The punisher's intent is not to convert. It is to make cheaters pay by excluding them from the circle of cooperators. It is to make explicit the difference between the in-group and out-group." Pg. 82

"Those who punish most are also those who contribute most in public goods games, which suggests that they have the most at stake, and have the greatest interest in maintaining the circle of cooperators; as expected, cheaters both contribute and punish least." Pg. 82 [me: calls to mind the international arena.]

Citing the studies of Norman Frohlich and Joe Oppenheimer: "Just as Rawls predicted, subjects readily settled on a principle of fairness. But the winning principle was not quite as Rawls predicted. No group selected the difference principle, where distribution is anchored by the worst off. Instead, groups settled on a principle that maximized the overall resources of the group while preventing the worst off from dropping below some preestablished level of income. This principle provides a safety net for those who are disadvantaged, for whatever reason, while allowing for extra benefits to flow toward those who contribute more to society." Pg. 88

"Attitudes toward these principles were high, and showed little change over the course of the experiment. However, when subjects had the freedom to choose, and vote unanimously, their satisfaction and confidence in the principle were significantly higher than when the same principle was imposed on them. The average-income [maximizing] -and-floor principle emerged as the clear winner. As a principle, it was stable after multiple iterations of the work-pay-redistribution cycle, but functioned to insill confidence in people, both those at the top and those on the floor. Contrary to many current political analyses, an income-distribution principle that allows for inequalities while taking care of those who are most in need does not reduce incentives to work hard, nor does it create a sink of free riders...Those who received from other players, and who actively participated in deciding the best principle, almost doubled their efforsts in order to contribute to the overall income. In contrast, those working under the same regime, but with the principle imposed, cheated and decreased their efforts, because they perceived redistribution through taxes as their right." Pg. 89 [Me: confidence, morale, increases stability and productivity.]

Referencing Daniel Kahneman's "prospect theory"-- i.e. the "anchoring effects of a reference point in our perception of fairness": "When we consider the value or utility of a resource, we do so in reference to our current state and the extent to which obtaining the resouce will significantly change this reference state...Fairness can therefore be assessed in terms of gains and losses relative to the individual's subjective experience of how good and bad things are right now...[this fact] mandates an understanding of current subjective experience in order to predict the utility of changing this state." Pg. 91-2

"Following Kahneman's lead, you consider the peak and end experience...We therefore make our judgments based on peak and end experiences, blind to overall duration." Pg. 94

"As Kahneman explains, 'Duration neglect remains a cognitive error...built deep into the structure of our tastes and is probably impossible to prevent...Intuition alone would not persuade us of the pitfalls of an evaluative memroy that each of us has trusted for a lifetime. and the intuitions evoked by carefully crafted thought experiments will not reliably yield correct predictions of the responses to cases seen in between-subjects designs. In short, I have tried to convince you that it could occasionally be useful to supplement philosophical intuition by the sometimes non-intuitive results of empirical psychological research.'" Pg. 94-5 [Me: on duration neglect: a bad situation that has a duration twice as long as another, equally bad situation will, due to this "cognitive error", be deemed "better" than the shorter equally bad situation if the end of the longer experience is better than the end of the shorter.]

"[The effectiveness of social norms] lies in their unconscious operation, and their power to create conformity." Pg. 97 [Me: consonant behavior rather than dissonant -- moderation of entropy.]

"An emotion's effectiveness relies upon two design features: automaticity and shielding from the meddling influences of our conscious, reflective, and contemplative thoughts about what ought to be." Pg. 98

Quoting Eric Posner: "In a world with no law and rudimentary government, order of some sort would exist. So much is clear from anthropological studies. The order woudl appear as routine compliance with social norms and collective infliction of sanctions on those who violate them, including stigmatization of the deviant and ostracism of the incorrigible. People would make symbolic commitments to the community in order to avoid suspicions about their loyalty. Also, people would cooperate frequently. They would keep and rely on promises, refrain from injuring their neighbors, contribute effort to public-spirited projects, make gifts to the poor, render assistance to those in danger, and join marches and rallies. But it is also the case that people would sometimes breach promises and cause injury. They would discriminate against people who, through no fault of their own, have become walking symbols of practices that a group rejects. They would have disputes, sometimes violent disputes. Feuds would arise and might never end. The community might split into factions. The order, with all its benefits, would come at a cost. Robust in times of peace, it would reveal its precariousness at moments of crisis." [Me: on the last, this is classic behavior of a self-organized dissipative system at criticality. dissolution and recombination.]

"When formal laws intervene, it is typically because the operative principles underlying a social norm cause harm to individuals." Pg. 99

"Once group size exceeds that of a typical hunter-gatherer group -- about 150 -- punishment is necessary, in one form or another, to preserve stable cooperation." Pg. 101

"[In the Ju/'hoansi], when the strong are punished, through mockery, pantomime, or criticism, they usually resort to self-mockery, which helps their reputation and maintains the egalitarian nature of the society." Pg. 102

"Scarlet-letter punishments -- as they are now called -- potentially solve two problems. They provide safety for the community by flagging its criminals and they deter future offenses by instilling shame, guilt, or fear." Pg. 105

"As philosopher Alvin Goldman points out, 'When punishment does not at least approximate giving satisfaction to the victims of crime and to those in the community who wish to demonstrate their moral outrage, these individuals will take it upon themselves to extract punishment instead of, or in addition to, that officially imposed. This would be likely to lead to an escalation of private vendettas, substituting the reigns of private terror for law and relative tranquility.'" Pg. 107 [Me: The amplification of entropy when the conceptions of justice become dissonant.]

"We must recognize the seductive power of seeing punishment in light of principles of fairness, and to design legal systems that indicate the pitfalls of this intuition, case by case. Legal systems, in turn, must recongize that if they go against people's tastes for punishment, they may create more problems, as individuals seek revenge and take the law into their own hands." Pg. 107 [Me: the psychology of justice is a first-order constraint on the general problem of social cohesion, and social cohesion is a first-order imperative of Law and the art of system-maintenance. All theories of punishment must be sublimated into this first-order imperative of the Self-Regarding Ourworld.]

"When Petrinovich's scenarios revealed information about identity, then subjects saved kin over non-kin, friends over strangers, humans over nonhumans, and politically safe or neutral individuals over politically abhorrent monsters." Pg. 122-3

"Killing is wrong if it is intended as a means to some end. Killing is permissible if it is an unintended but a foreseen by-product of a greater good." Pg. 125

"Our experience with these dilemmas influences our judgments, the impact on judgment does not translate into our justifications and ability to access the underlying principles, and there appear to be people who for unknown reasons are more likely to judge certain situations as permissible or impermissible." Pg. 131 [Me: the heteroglossia, not only of judgments but also of preparednesses, is a clear signal that the moral instinct is an imprecise instrument with which to pursue the precisely defined goals of living-system maintenance: indefinite cohesion, covalence, and complexity.]

"The best predictor of violence is the number of unmarried young men!" Pg. 132

"Our violence imposes constraints on the pattern of violence, allowing for some options but not others; which options are available and selected depends upon prior history and current conditions. As...Margo Wilson and Martin Daly suggest, 'dangerous competitive violence reflects the activation of a risk-prone mindset that is modiulated by present and past cues of one's social and material success, and by some sort of mental model of the current local utility of competitive success both in general and in view of one's personal situation...[such as] ecological factors that affect resource flow stability and expected life span." Pg. 132

"Cultures of honor also showcase the economic notion of discounting...they discount the future, and the temptation for immediate gratification rules them." Pg. 136

[Stanley] Milgram's studies show [that] obedience to authority is universal, but the degree to which authority rules varies between cultures." Pg. 140

"[A]ttitudes can...force a shift from the descriptive level of what is to a prescriptive level of what ought to be. Southerners not only respond with violence to insult. They think this is what people ought to do." Pg. 141

"[Alan] Gibbard's intuition is that there are also emotional norms--apt feelings--that lead to particularly relevant and appropriate actions--wise choices." Pg. 153Citing to Wise Choices and Apt Feelings, and the biological notion of norm of reaction.

[A]cknowledging...observed variation does not constitute a rejection of constraints." Pg. 166

"When an action violates expectation, a negative emotion often ensues. Negative emotions are aversive. I propose that one branch of the root of our moral judgments can be found in the nature of expectation concerning action." Pg. 168 [me: paradigmatic crisis, aversion to uncertainty.]

"What adults say is the morally right or wrong thing to do may be different from what they would actually do in the same situation. And for both their judgment and their actions, they may have little understanding of the underlying principles." Pg. 171

"[H]ow we divide an event into pieces depends on our familiarity with the event." pg. 181

"Self-knowledge is a prophylactic." Pg. 183

"Emotions work like well-designed engines, propelling us in different directions depending upon the task at hand...Our emotions are thus biasing agents that work together with our perceptions of planned or perceived action." Pg. 188

"Empathy is...a matching up of emotions in the displayer and observer." Pg. 194

"Disgust carries two other features that make it a particularly effective social emotion: It enjoys a certain level of immunity from conscious reflection, and it is contagious like yawning and laughter." Pg. 198

"Like visual illusions, when our sensory systems detect something disgusting, we avoid it even if we consciously know that this is irrational and absurd. Disgust engages an automated sequence of actions that leads to tactical evasion." Pg. 199

"To engage with any moral dilemma, it is necessary to imagine one world in which an action is take and consequences follow, and a second world, where no action is taken and a different set of consequences follow." Pg. 203

"The capacity to wait, exert patience, and fend off temptation is a core part of the support team associated with our moral faculty." Pg. 214

"The child's genome generaly creates a style of engaging with the world that either internalizes or externalizes actions. Children presenting the internalist signature take greater responsibility for what happens...The signature of an externalist is exactly opposite. When someone offers ice cream, it is because the person offering is nice [rather than the ice cream was deserved]." Pg. 215

"Self-control predicts the tendency to trangress the unstated rule." Pg. 216

"The number of seconds a two-year-old waits is like a crystal ball that predicts her future moral behavior; her ethical style, if you will. Watch how long she delays gratification, and you can extrapolate what she will be like as an adolescent and even a thirtysomething...These studies suggest that impatience or impulsivity on the delayed-gratification task is an excellent predictor of who will trangress the mores of the culture." Pg. 216

"These results show that a child's capacity to wait for something good sets boundaries or constraints on her capacity to be nice to others." Pg. 217

"This variability [between control and impulsivity] doesn't influence our moral judgments, but it does influence our moral behavior." Pg. 218

"Unambiguously, when people confront certain kinds of moral dilemmas, they activate a vast network of brain regions, including areas involved in emotion, decision-making, conflict, social relations, and memory." Pg. 222

"For a full-fledged utilitarian, Frank-on-the-footbridge isn't a moral dilemma at all. There is no conflict (anterior cingulate isn't engaged), no competing duties (no voice from the limbic system), simply one and only one choice: push the heavy man and save five people. Solving Frank's dilemma is like judging whether the inequality 1< 5 is true." Pg. 222-3

"Unambiguously, all of the imaging studies to date show that the areas involved in emotional processing are engaged when we deliver a moral judgment, especially cases that are personally charged." Pg. 223

On the mirror neuron system: "Neurons in the premotor crotex show the same level of activity when the individual reaches for an object as when he watches someone else do the same, or when the individual hears a sound associated with an action or performs the same action himself...[R]ecent studies suggest that part of this system turns on when we directly experience a disgusting event or observe someone else experiencing the disgust, with parallel findings for the experience of pain and empathy toward others in pain." Pg. 224-5

"Patients with damage to the frontal lobes...fail to integrate their emotions into their rational deliberations, [in fact], they appear to operate without ever consulting their emotion." Pg. 227 See Antonio Damasio's tests on "emotional temperature" by reading skin sweat.

"When everything is working properly, our emotions function like hunch generators, a flittering of unconscious expectations that guide long-term decisions." Pg. 228

"If the frontal lobes malfunction, an inappropriate decision is likely to follow due to a general insensitivity to consequences." Pg. 229

"Social conventions are relatively flat emotionally, whereas moral conventions--and especially their trangressions--are emotionally charged." Pg. 238

"This suggests that moral rules consist of two ingredients: a prescriptive theory or body of knowledge about what one ought to do, and an anchoring set of emotions." Pg. 238

"[T]here is evidence that emotions can shift events from conventional to moral." Pg. 240

"[Shaun] Nichols's study raises the interesting possibility that norms acquire their robustness when they are tied to strong emotions. Upholding such norms makes people feel good, while violations make them feel bad, ridden with guild, shame, or embarrassment." Pg. 240e can immediately see why emotions are nature's best strategy for behavioral regulation.]

"Amotz Zahavi argued that signals are honest if and only if they are costly to produce, if the costs are proportional to the signaler's current condition (e.g., the same signal is costlier to produce fro an individual in poor rather than good condition), and if signaling ability is heritable, passed on genetically from parents to offspring." Pg. 247

"Crying, especially with tears, qualifies as a "handicap". It is difficult to produce on command, costly in terms of energy and the blurring of vision, and is the only emotional expression to leave an enduring physical trace after the initial incident." Pg. 247

Quoting Rawls: "Therefore one might conjecture that the capacity to act from the more universal forms of rational benevolence is likely to be eliminated, whereas the capacity to follow the principles of justice and natural duty in relations between groups and individuals other than kin would be favored." Pg. 252

Me: Moralizing the rule of law is an excellent strategy of Ourworld.

"s a species, we are born with two quantificational systems, innate machinery that enables infants to compute small numbers precisely and large numbers approximately." Pg. 256

"Thus, infants discriminated four from eight, and eight from sixteen objects, but not four from six, or eight from twelve." Pg. 256

"The development of a large precise number system does not dependon language in general. It depends on words for numbers specifically." Pg. 257 [Me: if we are interested in more precise constraints, rather than approximate and diverse judgments, where do we look to for "moral words"? Law, in its prescriptive and punishment capacity, gives us the precise normative vocabulary.]

"Results showed that for the individual receiving fewer stickers, even the youngest children immediately stated that the distribution was unfair...For children receiving more stickers, a different pattern of response emerged: they seemed perfectly content with the situation. Of considerable interest, especially in terms of the competence of chldren's intuitions about fairness as opposed to their performance or what they would do if they had been in charge of distribution, is the observation that children raarely gve coherent explanations or justifications." Pg. 258-9

Quoting Richard Alexander: "Indirect reciprocity involves reputation and status, and results in everyone in a social group continually being assesed and reassessed by interactants, past and potential, on the basis of their interactions with others." Pg. 259

"[O]ur moral facultyis sensitive to contingencies, if-then rules, that allow for exceptions to moral rules about what is or isn't forbidden. These competencies emerge early, presumably in every child, and without the help of teachers, parents, and other sages." Pg. 266

"The path from competence--recognizing a trangression--to performance--doing something about it--may not line up as parallel or integrated paths. Other faculties may intervene..." Pg. 269

"Once again, a rigid deontological stance is problematic, because it is sometimes permissible to lie, breaking a promise to keep a secret. The intention of the liar and promise-breaker is essential." Pg. 270 [Me: again, the judgment is of the social value of the agent.]

"Cosmides and Tooby's insight was that our minds evolved the capacity to solve socially relevant problems, such as detecting cheaters who violate rules." Pg. 274

[They] have mounted an impressive amount of evidence to support their claim that problems involving social contracts tap a specialization that is present in all human beings...Social contracts, whether stated over a beer or written in legalese, are commitments. They engage trust. Violating them engages distrust and a cascade of emotions designed to enhance vigilance and catalyze retribution." pg. 276 [Me: trust is a therefore a key indicator of cohesion. How do you augment social trust?]

"Dan Sperber and... Vittorio Girotto argue that people's performance greatly improves when there is some kind of payoff to finding the violation, and where the context's relevance depends on understanding the speaker's intent--what he or she wishes to convey." Pg. 277

"[The] brain is running different reasoning software for social contracts and precautions." Pg. 279

Quoting Dorothy Sayers: "Envy is the great leveler: if it cannot level things up, it will level them down...rather than have anyone happier than itself, it will se us all miserable together." Pg. 282

"Envy is useful, serving a key role in survival, motivating achievement, serving the conscience of self and other, and alterting us to inequities that, if fueled, can lead to escalated violence." Pg. 283

Quoting Shakespeare's Henry VI: "When Envy breeds unkind division, there comes the ruin, there begins confusion." Pg. 283

Quoting Oscar Wilde: "Scandal is gossip made tedious by morality."

"[Many] have stressed the importance of emotions in stabilizing cooperative relationships and anchoring commitment. Emotions provide an involuntary mechanism for creating the equivalent of a binding contract." Pg. 285

"Guilt is often triggered when we cheat and recognize the consequences of the act. But guilt may also play a stabilizing role, reversing an instability caused by deception...those who admittedly feel guilty are more likely to cooperate in future rounds [of the ultimatum game]." Pg. 286

"When reciprocity fails or the offer is unfair, imaging studies reveal significant activation of the anterior insula, an address of the brain known to play a role in negative emotions such as pain, distress, anger, and especially disgust. How interesting that cheaters might be considered disgusting. Equally interesting is the fact that wehn subjects engage in altruistic punishment, paying a personal cost in order to impose a larger cost on someone else, the punisher experiences relief and satisfaction, evidenced by activation of the caudate nucleus, a key center for processing rewarding experiences. When we punish, our brains secretly relish the experience." Pg. 287

Quoting Helena Antipoff: "What we have is an affective perception of justice."

"The universal moral grammar is a theory about the suite of principles and parameters that enable humans to build moral systems." Pg. 300

"One signature of an innate faculty is a narrow time window for expressing a skill that is relatively immune to differences in experience." Pg. 303

Quoting Rousseau: "Nature lays her commands on every animal, and the brute obeys her voice. Man receives the same impulsion, but at the same time knows himself at liberty to acquiesce or resist."

"From the gene's-eye view, the way to think about the evolution of moral behavior is to think selfishly." Pg. 311

"Natural selection builds organisms with complex design features based on nonrandom but directionless process." [Me: the non-random comes about because computational prowess is the difference between success and failure.]

"Conflict is associated with stress, reconciliation with the reduction of stress...when conflict is followed by a peace offering, heart rate and cortisol levels drop, as do accompanying behavioral correlates of stress." Pg. 330

References John Conway's program of Life.

"Yawning is generally contagious. But it is really contagious if you have a big heart, unable to turn off your compassion for others." Pg. 352

"We are the only animal that cooperates on a large scale with genetically unrelated individuals and that consistently shows stable reciprocity, exchanging within the same market currencies or different ones." Pg. 378

"By-product mutualism arises when the outcome of an act benefits both participants." Pg. 380 [Me: covalence]

Timing of benefits can be the difference between stable and unstable systems of cooperation.

Quoting Rawls: "Social cooperation is distinct from merely socially coordinated activity--for example, activity coordinated by orders issued by an absolute central authority. Rather, social cooperation is guided by publicly recognized rules and procedures which those cooperating accept as appropriate to regulate their conduct." [Me: coordination speaks to cohesion, while cooperation speaks to covalence.]

"[T]he significant variation between human groups creates an opportunity for group selection." Pg. 416 [me: with the same universal standard of success: relative computational prowess, useful complexity.]

The utilitarian takes as his "central tenet that we evaluate moral dilemmas in terms of consequences." Pg. 418 [Me: In fact, we evaluate moral dilemmas because it's necessary for a social being, who derives evolutionary advantage from group integrity and functionality, to be able to compute the value of agents; moral judgments are our way of branding informative prefixes on agents, agent-types, and meaningful circumstance.]

"The systems that generate intuitive moral judgments are often in conflict with the systems that generate principled reasons for our actions, because the landscape of today only dimly resembles our original state." Pg. 418