The role of inequity in society is grossly underestimated. Inequity is not good for your health, basically.

You should know as much as you can about the human species if you have a hand in designing human society. Of course, I'm not saying that you can derive moral rules from nature - that's deriving an ought from an is, as the philosophers say - but you do need to know what kind of animals we are if you want to design a stable society.

When someone brutally kills someone else, we call him "animalistic." But we consider ourselves "human" when we give to the poor.

To neglect the common ground with other primates, and to deny the evolutionary roots of human morality, would be like arriving at the top of a tower to declare that the rest of the building is irrelevant, that the precious concept of "tower" ought to be reserved for the summit.

Dogmatists have one advantage: they are poor listeners.

Morality, after all, has nothing to do with selflessness. On the contrary, self-interest is precisely the basis of the categorical imperative.

Personally, I think it is possible to build a society that is moral on a nonreligious basis, but the jury is still out on that.