Our moral sense really evolved to bind groups together into teams that can cooperate in order to compete with other teams.

Suppose you read about a pill that you could take once a day to reduce anxiety and increase your contentment. Would you take it? Suppose further that the pill has a great variety of side effects, all of them good: increased self-esteem, empathy, and trust; it even improves memory. Suppose, finally, that the pill is all natural and costs nothing. Now would you take it? The pill exists. It is meditation.

If I believe that abortion is wrong, and I want to convince you that it's wrong, there's no reason I should recount to you my personal narrative of how I came to believe this.

Morality binds and blinds. It binds us into teams … but thereby makes us go blind to objective reality.

The most powerful force ever known on this planet is human cooperation - a force for construction and destruction.

The great conservative insight is that order is really hard to achieve. It’s really precious, and it’s really easy to lose.

If you get something for nothing, part of you may be pleased, but part of you moves your hand to give something back.