Moral cognition Quotes

Good people know about both good and evil: bad people do not know about either.

The moral sense is a natural faculty in us like the sense of smell or of touch.

I'm very interested in why we do good things, or bad things, and where moral judgments come from.

This inability to think created the possibility for many ordinary men to commit evil deeds on a gigantic scale, the like of which had never been seen before. The manifestation of the wind of thought is not knowledge but the ability to tell right from wrong, beautiful from ugly. And I hope that thinking gives people the strength to prevent catastrophes in these rare moments when the chips are down.

Understanding the simple fact that morality differs around the world, and even within societies, is the first step toward understanding your righteous mind.

If the ability to tell right from wrong should have anything to do with the ability to think, then we must be able to 'demand' its exercise in every sane person no matter how erudite or ignorant.

I began graduate school in the late 1980s, and my goal was to understand how morality varied across cultures and nations. I did some research comparing moral judgment in India and the U.S.A.

The human moral sense can excuse any atrocity in the minds of those who commit it, and it furnishes them with motives for acts of violence that bring them no tangible benefit.

Working out what it would take to program goodness into a robot shows not only how much machinery it takes to be good but how slippery the concept of goodness is to start with.

True knowledge of good and evil as we possess is merely abstract or general, and the judgment which we pass on the order of things and the connection of causes, with a view to determining what is good or bad for us in the present, is rather imaginary than real.

There is an intimate interdependence of intellect and morals.

The only things that separates us from the brute, with which we have so much in common, is the capacity to distinguish between right and wrong.