Moral Psychology Quotes

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

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion.

The object of self-love is expressed in the term self; and every appetite of sense, and every particular affection of the heart, are equally interested or disinterested, because the objects of them all are equally self or somewhat else.

Over the last few years, I've been focusing on questions having to do with the self, and questions having to do with morality. I'm very interested in why we do good things, or bad things, and where moral judgments come from.

Vices and virtues are of a strange nature, for the more we have, the fewer we think we have.

Very ancient parts of the brain are involved in moral decision making.

The science of morality is about maximizing psychological and social health. It's really no more inflammatory than that.

The notion of humans as inherently rational beings has been not only trashed in economics, but trashed in all the best research on moral decision-making.

Our vanity would have just that which we do best count as that which is hardest for us. The origin of many a morality.

All I want, and I think all any parent with a semblance of a moral psychology wants, is for my kid to have his own experience, uninhibited.

Morality is not just any old topic in psychology but close to our conception of the meaning of life. Moral goodness is what gives each of us the sense that we are worthy human beings.

Nice things are done for our own sake, not for the sake of others. The pleasure must reside in the performance, not in the applause. Good deeds are, in a deeper psychological way, a favor to oneself. If this is not grasped, then our whole sense of personal relationships becomes warped.

I conceive ethics as a branch of psychology.

The more sinful and guilty a person tends to feel, the less chance there is that he will be a happy, healthy, or law-abiding citizen. He will become a compulsive wrong-doer.

Thus self-love as one part of human nature, and the several particular principles as the other part, are, themselves, their objects and ends, stated and shown.

I think that moral philosophy is useful for framing questions, but terrible at answering them. I think moral psychology is booming right now, and we're making a lot of progress on understanding how we actually work, what our moral nature is.

Morality binds and blinds.

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.

I'm enormously interested to see where neuroscience can take us in understanding these complexities of the human brain and how it works, but I do think there may be limits in terms of what science can tell us about what does good and evil mean anyway, and what are those concepts about?

How we become moral and understand good and bad, and how we overcome our impulse towards violence, is all really important to me, as a person.

I think we need to start thinking about grounding our moral systems in our biology.

I don't believe that we evolved moral psychology; it just doesn't seem plausible to me as a biological phenomenon.

The moral sense is as much a part of our constitution as that of feeling, seeing, or hearing.

If you think half of America votes badly because they are stupid or religious, you are trapped in a matrix ... Take the red pill, learn some moral psychology and step outside the moral matrix.

People always try to find base motives behind every good action. We are afraid of pure goodness and of pure evil.