Most Important Concepts:

• We are a small rider on a very large elephant. Intuitionism guides us much more than rationalism.
• There’s more to morality than just harm and fairness.
• We are products of multilevel evolution, and it has been, and likely continues to be, evolutionarily advantageous to be groupish.

Action Points:

Chapter Recap:

Introduction

Part 1: Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second

1 - Where does morality come from?

• Morality is different in individualistic and sociocentric cultures.
  • In individualistic cultures, only actions that harm others are universally wrong.
  • In sociocentric cultures, actions can be universally wrong, even if they don’t harm others.
• Well-educated people from different cultures are more similar to each other in their morality than they are to their lower-class neighbours.
• Cultural learning or guidance must play a larger role that rationalist theories had given it.
  • Rationalist = Morality is self-constructed by children on the basis of their experiences with harm.

2 - The intuitive dog and its rational tail

• Intuition comes first, and reasoning only afterwards.
  • Hume was right that reason is just the servant of the passions.
• We do moral reasoning not to reconstruct the actual reasons why we ourselves came to a judgement; we reason to find the best possible reasons why somebody else ought to join us in our judgement.

3 - Elephants rule

• Brains evaluate instantly and constantly.
• Social and political judgements depend heavily on quick intuitive flashes.
• The elephant begins to lean immediately and the rider, who is always trying to anticipate the elephant’s next move, bwgins looking around for a reason to support such a move.

4 - Vote for me (here’s why)