“The “mutual deterrence” (or balance-of-power) model for world peace takes a
form that is consistent with the assumption that natural selection has been
potent at lower levels in the hierarchy of organization of life, and that
nations tend to behave like the individuals that comprise them. There is
little doubt that this model reflects what has actually happened in the world,
perhaps throughout history; unfortunately, this fact in no way implies that
deterrence will ultimately rescue us.” (Alexander, 1987, p. 244)

“culture includes systems of indirect reciprocity (moral, ethical, and legal
systems) by which the costs and benefits of acts deemed by others to be
socially positive or negative can be manipulated. The “problem of culture,”
then, may not be so much one of ontogenetic disjunction (as most authors seem
to imply—meaning that at some point learning or culture takes over and the
human organism begins to operate independently of its evolutionary heritage),
but rather a failure to appreciate the pervasiveness and the consequences of
indirect reciprocity. Systems of indirect reciprocity, and therefore moral
systems, are social systems structured around the importance of status. The
concept of status implies that an individual’s privileges, or its access to
resources, are controlled in part by how others collectively think of him
(hence, treat him) as a result of past interactions (including observations of
interactions with others). Status can be determined by physical prowess, as in
those nonhuman (animal) dominance hierarchies in which coalitions are absent,
or (as in humans) by mental or social prowess. Mental and social prowess, in
this sense, includes (as in moral systems) effectiveness and reliability in
reciprocity and cooperation. Once social interactions become instrumental in
establishing status, then testing and practice, as in the forms typically
called “play,” may become prominent. Play represents practice for later
status-affecting interactions, but it also affects current and projected
status. In humans, social-intellectual play in the form of humor has become
uniquely elaborate. […] As with physical play in humans (Alexander, 1974),
humor has also come to include unique group-against-group forms” (Alexander,
1987, p. 113)

“Provided with a means of relegating our deceptions to the
subconscious—indeed, provided perhaps only at this point in the evolutionary
process with a subconscious (cf. Daniels, 1983)—false sincerity becomes easier
and detection more difficult. There are reasons for believing that one does
not need to know his own personal interests consciously in order to serve them
as much as he needs to know the interests of others to thwart them. […]
consciousness is a way of making our social behavior so unpredictable as to
allow us to outmaneuver others; and that we press into the subconscious (as
opposed to forgetting) those things that remain useful to us but would be
detrimental to us if others knew about them, and on which we are continually
tested and would have to lie deliberately if they remained in our conscious
mind” (Alexander, 1987, p. 131)

“What we seek, when we think of world peace and world law, thus has no
precedent in the history of life, not to say the history of human life. There
seems to be no evidence that humans or any other organisms have ever achieved
the species-wide indiscriminate altruism represented in the idealized moral
models of philosophy and religion.” (Alexander, 1987, p. 246)

“To show that Plato really justifies morality by its profitableness, it is
only necessary to point out 1. that the very formulation of the thesis to be
met, viz., that justice is allotrion agaqon, implies that any refutation must
consist in showing that justice is oikeion agaqon, i.e. really, as the context
shows, one's own advantage, and 2. that the term lusitelein supplies the
keynote not only to the problem but also to its solution.” 22

“One consequence is that the human individual has evolved to be
extraordinarily complex (and evidently to revere individuality), and another
is that the complexity and variety of social interactions among human
individuals is without parallel. Because human social groups are not enormous
nuclear families, like social insect colonies, a third consequence is that
competition and conflicts of interest are also diverse and complex to an
unparalleled degree. Hence, I believe, derives our topic of moral systems.”
(Alexander, 1987, p. 86)

Das Ethos der Institutionen, einschließlich des Staates." 44

“laws are simply a specialized, derived aspect of what in earlier societies
would have been a part of moral rules. On the other hand, law covers only a
fraction of the situations in which morality is involved, and it is probably
concentrated in those realms in which (1) either majority opinion, or the
attitude of a minority power structure, is more consistent and definite and
(2) the issues involved are more public. […] Law also tends to characterize
those societies that are more formally and complexly organized, because of (1)
their size or the level of their technology, (2) the prominence of reciprocity
in social interactions (as opposed to nepotism, in which the currency is more
difficult to evaluate because of the genetically reproductive component, i.e.,
our rewards come partly from the reproductive success of the helped
relatives), and especially (3) the importance of written records.” (Alexander,
1987, p. 192)

The Liberty/oppression foundation, I propose, evolved in response to the
adaptive challenge of living in small groups with individuals who would, if
given the chance, dominate, bully, and constrain others. The original triggers
therefore include signs of attempted domination. Anything that suggests the
aggressive, controlling behavior of an alpha male (or female) can trigger this
form of righteous anger, which is sometimes called reactance. 194

„Die Moralhypertrophie paßt mit ihrer Ächtung aller Ausgrenzungen und
Distanzvorbehalte, mit ihrer Erosion exklusiver Zielsetzungen ganz wundervoll
in ein von Grund aus biologisch und nach der Zukunft hin weit offenes System,
sie schließt ja die acceptance von allem, was kommen könnte, gleich ein. Mit
Konsequenz wird von daher liquidiert, was an Institutionsethos,
Geschlechtsmoral oder reservierter Gegenseitigkeit von früher überkommen ist,
die Generalformel heißt hier „Vorurteil" — ein Begriff, der zuerst im
dekadenten Venedig des 18. Jahrhunderts aufkam, als Carlo Gozzi sagte: „Die
Moral verstummt vor dem magischen Wort pregiudizio".“ 158

“selfish” genes can give rise to generous creatures, as long as those
creatures are selective in their generosity. Altruism toward kin is not a
puzzle at all. Altruism toward non-kin, on the other hand, has presented one
of the longest-running puzzles in the history of evolutionary thinking. A big
step toward its solution came in 1971 when Robert Trivers published his theory
of reciprocal altruism. Trivers noted that evolution could create altruists in
a species where individuals could remember their prior interactions with other
individuals and then limit their current niceness to those who were likely to
repay the favor. We humans are obviously just such a species. Trivers proposed
that we evolved a set of moral emotions that make us play “tit for tat.” We’re
usually nice to people when we first meet them. But after that we’re
selective: we cooperate with those who have been nice to us, and we shun those
who took advantage of us. 155

“why some sizes and kinds of societies involved huge disparities in individual
opportunity (those intermediate in size; Alexander, 1979a), while others
(large and small) have leveled them to extreme degrees. I think the answer
will come from comparing the histories of interaction between neighboring
societies, effects of physical or physiographic barriers on their sizes, and
separation of warriors (soldiers) from their families.” (Alexander, 1987, p.
90)

If Turiel was right that morality is really about harm, then why do most non-
Western cultures moralize so many practices that seem to have nothing to do
with harm? Why do many Christians and Jews believe that “cleanliness is next
to godliness”? And why do so many Westerners, even secular ones, continue to
see choices about food and sex as being heavily loaded with moral
significance? 24

“the cells of the bodies of metazoans such as ourselves are also clones of
genetically identical units, and not only do they reach enormous numbers, but
their cooperation is so complete that the result is unitary: a human being
composed of hundred of millions of cells can think about a single goal and
direct all of its attention to its realization.” (Alexander, 1987, p. 84)

“Three definite conclusions I believe I have substantiated are the following:
First, there is no need for the persistence of an aura of mystery with respect
to the concept of morality and the understanding of moral systems and the
operation of individuals within them. Even indiscriminate beneficence can be
compatible with humans having evolved through differential success in
reproduction. Second, moral and ethical questions can only be resolved by
compromises and contracts among those with different and conflicting
interests. Such resolutions require collective opinions and decisions, and
rewards and punishments commensurate with the assumption that individuals tend
to seek their own self- (reproductive) interests. Third, in the effort to
solve humanity’s most profound problems, including those with moral and
ethical implications, there is potentially great value in continuing to
develop a perspective from modern evolutionary biology to be added to those
deriving from philosophy, the social sciences, religion, history, and the
humanities. This biological perspective is appropriately added, not as an
argument for determinism, but, precisely to the contrary, as a possible way to
greater freedom, deriving from greater knowledge of the cause-effect patterns
that underlie our history and our nature.” (Alexander, 1987, p. 263)

“nearly all that is newsworthy involves conflicts of interest. […] It is
conflicts of interest that people write about, worry over, and ponder most
intensely, that fill the literature and all forms of the condensed versions of
life that in the broad sense can be called “theater.” It is how we deal with
conflicts of interest that will determine the fate of the world and the future
of humanity.” (Alexander, 1987, p. 95)

Five adaptive challenges stood out most clearly: caring for vulnerable
children, forming partnerships with non-kin to reap the benefits of
reciprocity, forming coalitions to compete with other coalitions, negotiating
status hierarchies, and keeping oneself and one’s kin free from parasites and
pathogens, 145

„Karl May mußte sich wegen früherer, in Vergessenheit geratener
Gefängnisstrafen von einem Journalisten erpressen lassen, das Bekanntwerden
hätte ihn „unmöglich gemacht". Heute zählen Kriminelle wie Genet oder
Albertine Sarrazin (acht Jahre Gefängnis wegen Diebstahl und Einbruch, Der
Spiegel 17. 11. 65) um so mehr zu den geschätzten Autoren, als sich ihre
Vorstrafen als Reklame verwenden lassen. Diese Einebnung und Aufweichung der
Toleranzgrenzen, das ist die psychische Desarmierung, und wenn einmal Tugenden
wie Mut und Selbstopfer als Masochismus diagnostiziert, als sexuelle
Fehlfarben erkannt sind, wird es nur noch gute Menschen geben. Auf einmal
zeigt sich als überraschende Erscheinung, daß ein permanenter Kult des Bösen
entsteht, eine wirklich diabolische Tendenz, vor allem im Film gepflegt
[...]. Das ist wohl die Form, in der unter den beschriebenen Umständen die
naturale Aggressivität des Menschen sich ausdrückt — im Außenausdruck gebremst
und von den Massen der Guten blockiert, steigert sie sich an der eigenen
Bewußtmachung hoch. In den Menschen, die sich gegnerschaftsunfähig machen und
nur das bekommen wollen, was sie selbst gewähren, nämlich Schonung, bleibt
etwas wie ein kleiner diabolischer Keim, der die Freude an der Vernichtung
des Wehrlosen bedeutet, das Thema der echten Horrorfilme.“ 142

“natural selection has never operated to prevent species extinction. Instead
it operates by saving the genetic materials of those individuals or families
that outreproduce others. Whether species become extinct or not (and most
have) is an incidental or accidental effect of natural selection. An inference
from this is that the members of no species are equipped, as a direct result
of their evolutionary history, with traits designed explicitly to prevent
their species from extinction when that possibility looms. (For this reason
the widely read essay of Gould, 1982, arguing that adaptation is a concept of
limited usefulness because most species have become extinct, is confusing and
largely irrelevant.) […] Humans alone have been equipped by their evolutionary
history with traits and tendencies that, as a consequence of their normal
functioning, can bring about human extinction. It is these traits and
tendencies (to form exclusive and competitive groups within which loyalty and
cooperativeness are fierce and between which hate, loathing, and
dehumanization are likely) that have led us into the unique runaway social
competition of an arms race involving annihilatory weapons.” (Alexander, 1987,
p. 241)

„Die Freiheit ist ein so ätherisches Ideal, daß es der Versteifung bedarf,
dann liegt das Obszöne nahe. Auf den Wegen des Heraustretens entdeckt man die
Wohltat der Entlastung, die eintritt, wenn man dem propagandistischen
Bombardement der Politiker, wenn man dem zunehmenden Druck gerade der
abgelebten Autoritäten und Auflagen entgehen kann, dem Krummgezogenwerden
durch die Selbstpreisgaben, Kompromisse und Lähmungen, den Folgen der
Niederlage. Das alles abzuwerfen wird als Befreiung empfunden, als
wiedergewonnene Unmittelbarkeit. Wer sich der Inpflichtnahme entzieht, sich
selbst auflockert und der Libertinage überläßt, gerät in die Nähe des Pöbels,
mindestens in der Hinsicht der Unverantwortlichkeit und der nur punktuellen
Existenz. Das hat Vorteile. Der Doppelgänger des Verpöbelten ist ebenfalls
asyliert, wird nicht zur Zielscheibe, bleibt ungeschoren, und das hilft
rückwirkend dem Stolz der Unabhängigkeit mächtig auf. Andererseits
beeindruckten die Kyniker durch die moralische Kraft, die eine freiwillige
Besitzlosigkeit abverlangt.“ 11f

Putnam and Campbell put their findings bluntly: By many different measures
religiously observant Americans are better neighbors and better citizens than
secular Americans—they are more generous with their time and money, especially
in helping the needy, and they are more active in community life. 296

We are 90 percent chimp and 10 percent bee. 245

“In the United States, where individual initiative and entrepreneurship seem
to have been viewed favorably since the arrival of Europeans, this circle of
secrecy is rather large, and it is allowed to involve many items that are
known to affect others—such as how we fill out our income tax returns or how
much we do or do not give to charity. We treasure our right to do these things
on our own, and we believe the Constitution gives us many such rights. It is a
constitution framed during a time when our population was rapidly expanding
into resource-rich regions, and a time when nearly everyone’s fortunes were
expanding as well. When everyone seems to be gaining—when the economy is
rapidly and massively expanding—it seems less important to compare the rate of
increase in one’s fortunes with the rates of increase of the fortunes of
others, even though ultimately this is what really counts […] Perhaps the
comparisons were often with the fortunes of relatives and friends left behind
in Europe. […] unlike the United States, China does not have a history
involving victories in a series of prominent international wars. Rather, China
has a history of searing internal disputes and devastating civil wars.”
(Alexander, 1987, p. 209)

„Das brachte die Realität in die Theorie. Schon im eigentlich griechischen
Raum wurde im 4. Jahrhundert die Kriegführung humaner, Städtezerstörungen und
Massakers seltener, man ließ Gefangene auch ohne Lösegeld frei. Parallel mit
dieser Änderung stieg der Einfluß der Frauen, in Athen konnten sie ohne
Anwalt vor Gericht plädieren, die Schuldhaft wurde abgebaut. Das
Alexanderreich sah wachsenden Reichtum, Banken, Mietshäuser, Theater breiteten
sich bis in die kleinsten Städte aus, der Hafenzoll zu Rhodos warf eine
Million Drachmen ab.“ 77

“immoral is a label we apply to certain kinds of acts by which we help
ourselves or hurt others, while acts that hurt ourselves or help others are
more likely to be judged moral than immoral.” (Alexander, 1987, p. 32)

“humans tend to look differently upon helpless offspring or babies than they
do upon old or dying individuals. […] This general view may be a product of a
selection favoring beneficence toward babies because (1) they are likely to be
relatives if they are in one’s vicinity (at least, historically) and (2) the
babies of others are almost ideal objects of beneficence in the context of
indirect reciprocity because the benefits of aiding utterly helpless
individuals are so high and the costs so low. This is especially true because
babies also represent enormously important investments to their parents.”
(Alexander, 1987, p. 219)

„Diese Entlastung wirkt sich produktiv aus, denn die wohltätige Fraglosigkeit,
die dann entsteht, wenn der Einzelne innen und außen von einem Regelgefüge
getragen wird, macht geistige Energien nach oben hin frei. Sie werden damit
aufgefangen und in der Richtung der bestehenden Verhältnisse freigegeben, um
sich dort zu entfalten. Andererseits verstärkt die Entlastung den
Antriebsüberschuß, und beim Zusammenbruch der gründenden Einrichtungen
verlieren die geistigen Synthesen ihren Halt, sie zersetzen sich und werden
als Narrheiten und Farcen des „inneren Gewoges" (Benn) abgefackelt. Der Geist
springt dann aus der realen Notwendigkeit, ein Leben zu führen, heraus und
wird als „unwirklicher Geist" zu einer Ersatzform seiner selbst. Er begibt
sich auf die Suche nach neuen Elementen und Anfängen, und so kommt es zu der
„beobachteten Tendenz der populären Künste, sich auf immer tieferen Niveaus
der allgemeinen Intelligenz und emotionalen Reife festzusetzen" (Rosenberg-
White, Mass Culture, 1960, 537)“ 94f

“the “smaller is better” argument. This model says in effect that if we can
just do away with huge nations we are unlikely to have stockpiles of weapons
large enough to destroy the world. While this may well be so, to suppose that
the most powerful nations of the world would submit to partition is not much
different from asking all men instantly to observe brotherhood. […] Moreover,
it has recently become increasingly clear that small nations or groups, or
individual deranged leaders, can wield the kind of terror that was once
restricted to the superpowers. Up to this point, then, brotherly love and
deterrence have actually been strategies in arms races rather than methods of
resolving them or causing them to disappear. […] Brotherly love seems always
to have been less than global, and whether its origins are Marxist, religious,
or otherwise, it also seems always to have begun or to have become a means of
gaining power, as through alliances.” (Alexander, 1987, p. 245)

„Nach Forsthoff (Verfassung und Verfassungswirklichkeit der Bundesrepublik,
Merkur 241, Mai 1968) trat bei uns die entscheidende Wende ein, „als unter der
Herrschaft des Grundgesetzes nicht mehr das finanzielle Leistungsvermögen des
Staates, sondern das Volumen des Bruttosozialproduktes zum Maßstab der
sozialen Umverteilung — alles soziale Handeln des Staates ist Umverteilung —
genommen wurde. Das bedeutete die Auslieferung der staatlichen Entschließungen
an die Bedingungen des Wirtschaftens schlechthin. Und damit hat die
Bundesrepublik nach der äußeren auch die innere Souveränität verloren: In
welchem Sinne man sie noch als Staat bezeichnen will, ist eine Frage der
Benennung." So nimmt der Leviathan mehr und mehr die Züge einer Milchkuh an,
die Funktionen als Produktionshelfer, Sozialgesetzgeber und Auszahlungskasse
treten in den Vordergrund, und man hat dem humanitär-eudaimonistischen Ethos
die Tore so weit geöffnet, daß das eigentlich der Institution angemessene
Dienst- und Pflichtethos aus der öffentlichen Sprache und aus den Kategorien
der Massenmedien vollständig verschwunden ist und dort nur noch Gelächter
auslöst. Vielmehr machen Beamte, um Weihnachtszuwendung zu bekommen, ohne
Rücksicht auf die Interessen des Ganzen Bummelstreik. Wenn ein Staat
zusammenbricht, verlieren Männer ihren Wert — auch diesen Zustand kann man
Freiheit nennen. „Die weder dienen noch herrschen können, sind Bürger", sagte
Stefan George (E. Landmann, Gespräche mit St. G., 1963, 184) — Bourgeois sind
also gerade diejenigen, die sich nicht dafür halten.“ 107

Nobody is ever going to invent an ethics class that makes people behave
ethically after they step out of the classroom. Classes are for riders, and
riders are just going to use their new knowledge to serve their elephants more
effectively. If you want to make people behave more ethically, there are two
ways you can go. You can change the elephant, which takes a long time and is
hard to do. Or, to borrow an idea from the book Switch, by Chip Heath and Dan
Heath, you can change the path that the elephant and rider find themselves
traveling on. You can make minor and inexpensive tweaks to the environment,
which can produce big increases in ethical behavior. You can hire Glaucon as a
consultant and ask him how to design institutions in which real human beings,
always concerned about their reputations, will behave more ethically. 110

“But we also do a very large number and variety of things that jeopardize
survival. Most of this risk-taking has to do with status-seeking, resource
control, and mate competition. If selection had always favored survival, risks
should never be taken except in connection with acquiring basic resources,
such as food, to enable continued survival.” (Alexander, 1987, p. 56)

“Law in modern nations can be seen to have the same stated purpose as the
concept of a single just god: those who deal in law assert, and probably
mostly believe, that they seek to cause it to become, in effect, a
“disinterested” third party in every dispute. […] On the one hand, it implies
justice for all (consistency, rationality); on the other hand, it requires or
calls for unity in belief. […] Thus, there is the impetus to evangelism, and
even conquest […] the rise of law was the rise of rule by the collective—by
the majority who would be powerless except when united.” (Alexander, 1987, p.
213)

“I can find no evidence for even a core of absoluteness in morality. Rather it
appears that our judgments about it are always cost-benefit decisions
(including unconscious and subconscious acts as a result of conscience) made
in relation to our own personal history of lessons and the structure of our
society.” (Alexander, 1987, p. 134)

We found that libertarians look more like liberals than like conservatives on
most measures of personality (for example, both groups score higher than
conservatives on openness to experience, and lower than conservatives on
disgust sensitivity and conscientiousness). On the Moral Foundations
Questionnaire, libertarians join liberals in scoring very low on the Loyalty,
Authority, and Sanctity foundations. Where they diverge from liberals most
sharply is on two measures: the Care foundation, where they score very low
(even lower than conservatives), and on some new questions we added about
economic liberty, where they score extremely high (a little higher than
conservatives, a lot higher than liberals). 335

„Übereinstimmung herrscht darüber, daß die Instinktresiduen des Menschen
außer mimischen Signalen kaum irgendwo feste Verhaltensmuster hergeben;
vielmehr sind sie als Dispositionen von Antriebsquanten verschiedener
Qualität und Herkunft zu denken, deren Übersetzung in ein offenes Verhalten
von vielen Seiten her bedingt ist. Außer an die inneren, gar nicht mehr nach
rückwärts aufzulösenden Verschiebungen, Verdichtungen und Durchdringungen,
denen die Tiefenpsychologie nachzugehen sucht, hat man dabei an
Außeneinwirkungen zu denken: Dressuren, Gewohnheiten, Anpassungen, rationale
Steuerungen kommen in denselben Handlungen zum Zuge, in die auch
Antriebsquanten eingehen. Die Wahrheit, daß der Mensch von Natur ein
Kulturwesen ist, zeigt sich auch in der Schwierigkeit, in der konkreten
Handlung Gelerntes und Instinkthaftes zu unterscheiden.“ 162

“mistake of supposing that there can be an obligation to act courageously” 28


“Biologist-philosophers can be divided into three main groups: First are those
like Wolfgang Wickler and Julian Huxley, and some others, who believe that by
looking into the evolutionary process one can determine how we ought to
proceed because what is “good” in evolution, they think, mus t be ethically
good. […] Huxley’s assertions presage those of Edward O. Wilson (1978), who
gives as the first three principles the “new ethicists” must follow: survival
of the human gene pool, preservation of genetic diversity, and universal human
rights. Whether or not these goals would all be judged admirable by humanity,
Wilson does not connect his selection of them to biological principles.”
(Alexander, 1987, p. 178)

Intuition is the best word to describe the dozens or hundreds of rapid,
effortless moral judgments and decisions that we all make every day. Only a
few of these intuitions come to us embedded in full-blown emotions. In The
Happiness Hypothesis, I called these two kinds of cognition the rider
(controlled processes, including “reasoning-why”) and the elephant (automatic
processes, including emotion, intuition, and all forms of “seeing-that”). I
chose an elephant rather than a horse because elephants are so much bigger—and
smarter—than horses. Automatic processes run the human mind, just as they have
been running animal minds for 500 million years, so they’re very good at what
they do, like software that has been improved through thousands of product
cycles. When human beings evolved the capacity for language and reasoning at
some point in the last million years, the brain did not rewire itself to hand
over the reins to a new and inexperienced charioteer. Rather, the rider
(language-based reasoning) evolved because it did something useful for the
elephant. The rider can do several useful things. It can see further into the
future (because we can examine alternative scenarios in our heads) and
therefore it can help the elephant make better decisions in the present. It
can learn new skills and master new technologies, which can be deployed to
help the elephant reach its goals and sidestep disasters. And, most important,
the rider acts as the spokesman for the elephant, even though it doesn’t
necessarily know what the elephant is really thinking. The rider is skilled at
fabricating post hoc explanations for whatever the elephant has just done, and
it is good at finding reasons to justify whatever the elephant wants to do
next. Once human beings developed language and began to use it to gossip about
each other, it became extremely valuable for elephants to carry around on
their backs a full-time public relations firm. 60

„Aber damit nicht genug. Das humanitaristisdie Ethos, zur Alleinherrschaft
oder letzten Instanz erhoben, vermag von den Widersprüchen zu entlasten, die
wir im vorigen Kapitel skizziert haben, und es befreit wirklich das Gewissen,
nämlich dadurch, daß es die Gegenposition politisch staatlicher Wachsamkeit
bagatellisiert. Je mehr der Staat sich auf eine Rolle als Exekutive von
Verbandskompromissen und Auszahlungskasse beschränkt, desto mehr kommt er
diesen Tendenzen entgegen. [...] Die Gewissensprobleme der Machtausübung, wie
sie z. B. noch den alten Kaiser angesichts des Rückversicherungsvertrages
beunruhigten, die stets verwendeten unsagbaren Mittel, die Listen und
Gewalttaten bewegten nur eine hauchdünne Schicht, die an solche Probleme seit
Generationen gewöhnt war. Mit der Demokratie wird jedermann zur Politik
herangezogen, und er wird von Großereignissen im Gewissen betroffen, zu denen
er nur mit einem Zettel beitrug — man denke an die amerikanische Vietnam-
Opposition. Francis Osborn, ein Freund von Hobbes, glaubte daher, „that the
common man was made to feel guilty", daß der gewöhnliche Bürger dazu da war,
sich schuldig zu fühlen (Coltman 227), während der Dichter Thomas Flatman ihm
den Rat gab, „silently to creep away", sich still schweigend zu verdrücken
(231). Vor der Konfrontation mit solchen Fragen schützt die
Moralhypertrophie, weil sie erlaubt, so gut wie jedes Ansinnen konkreter
Politik an Idealen auflaufen zu lassen, indem man noch mehr Gleichheit, noch
mehr Freiheit und noch weniger Autorität fordert, als irgendein praktischer
Zustand hergibt. Als Deutscher kann man dazu noch der Frage nach dem
verlorenen Vaterland aus dem Wege gehen, wenn man die Zwischeninstanzen
zwischen Familie und Menschheit moralisch preisgibt. Da die Moralhypertrophie
sich gegenüber den noch funktionierenden Autoritäten kritisch verhält, gibt
sie die Aufstiegsleiter für die neue Gegenaristokratie der von Verantwortung
nicht betroffenen Idealisten her, deren Wirkungschance ja im Angriff liegt. In
der Frühgeschichte der schottischen Freimaurer und ihres Zeremoniells spielte
Kain eine große Rolle, er baute ja übrigens auch eine Stadt.“ 180

the climate in Africa fluctuated wildly between 70,000 and 140,000 years ago.
With each swing from warmer to cooler, or from wetter to drier, food sources
changed and widespread starvation was probably common. A catastrophic volcanic
eruption 74,000 years ago from the Toba volcano in Indonesia may have
dramatically changed the Earth’s climate within a single year. Whatever the
cause, we know that almost all humans were killed off at some point during
this time period. Every person alive today is descended from just a few
thousand people who made it through one or more population bottlenecks. What
was their secret? We’ll probably never know, but let’s imagine that 95 percent
of the food on Earth magically disappears tonight, guaranteeing that almost
all of us will starve to death within two months. Law and order collapse.
Chaos and mayhem ensue. Who among us will still be alive a year from now? Will
it be the biggest, strongest, and most violent individuals in each town? Or
will it be the people who manage to work together in groups to monopolize,
hide, and share the remaining food supplies among themselves? Now imagine
starvations like that occurring every few centuries, and think about what a
few such events would do to the human gene pool. Even if group selection was
confined to just a few thousand years, or to the longer period between 70,000
and 140,000 years ago, it could have given us the group-related adaptations
that allowed us to burst forth from Africa soon after the bottleneck to
conquer and populate the globe. 241

“As hunting weapons and skills improved, group sizes should have decreased.
Cooperative group hunters among nonhumans tend to live in small groups
(canines, felines, cetaceans, some fish, and pelicans), and large groups are
typically what Hamilton called “selfish herds,” whose evolutionary raison
d’etre is security from prédation. Even groups evidently evolved to cooperate
against predators are typically small (chimpanzees, baboons, musk ox). […]
humans alone play competitively group-against-group on a large and complex
scale” (Alexander, 1987, p. 96)

„Dem in krisenhaften Zeiten ohnehin halbsbrecherischen Ideal der autonomen
Persönlichkeit stellt die industrielle Epoche nicht mehr die geeig nete
Umwelt zur Verfügung, denn die Unübersehbarkeit der Superstruk turen macht es
sinnlos, die im kleinen Individualbereich gemachten Erfahrungen auf die
großen Verhältnisse zu übertragen, man muß sich da mit Meinungen und
Gefühlsstößen begnügen, auf die man von den Mas senmedien eingeübt wird,
deren langfristig gesehen enorme Indoktrinationskraft nur von ihnen selbst
bestritten wird. Die Fiktion, frei zu sein, läßt sich leichter als jede andere
durchhalten, weil man adoptierte Meinungen und Gesinnungen als eigene erlebt
und in die Tagesgeschäfte des Privatalltags einbaut, wobei Politisches nur
insoweit wahrgenommen wird, als es in Erlebnisbegriffe des Alltags und Berufs
übersetzbar ist. Eben deshalb wird es von vornherein moralisierend dargeboten,
und es ist gar nicht leicht zu durchschauen, daß die heutzutage geübte
Allgegenwart der Politik dieser Art auf eine Entpolitisierung von innen her
herauskommt. So ergibt sich ein neuer Typus des Individualismus oder
Subjektivismus: Leistungswille geht mit Ichbetonung und Empfindlichkeit
gegenüber Geltungsansprüdien Anderer zusammen, und die Forderung auf
acceptance so, wie man ist, mit einer sozusagen provisorischen Einstellung zur
Umwelt. Im Grunde ist das eine ganz vernünftige Einpassungs-Mischung der
vielen Atome in die großen unübersehbaren und unlenkbaren Auf- und Abmärsche
der Ereignisse. So entfaltet sich das Persönliche in dieser Aufbereitung
gerade deswegen ungehindert, weil es nichts Wirkliches mehr verändern kann,
denn das „Umfunktionieren" ist ja doch nur eine Umschreibung für
Zerstörungsakte. Dagegen sind zwei klassische Strukturen des Individualismus
heute verloren, nämlich zuerst die große Schlüsselattitüde, der dramatische
Durchsetzungsanspruch einer selbsterfundenen Lehre, mit der eine Person steht
und fällt, wie Spinoza oder Nietzsche, offenbar handelte es sich da um den
verweltlichten Auftrag des Propheten, und zweitens die hochsensible,
differenzierte Kultiviertheit, wie sie bei Proust oder Musil vorgeführt wurde
und jetzt selbst bei den Literaten verschwand.“ 155

“much of the confusion about the significance of dreams dissipates if one sees
them as instances of scenario building, or repetition, in the interests of (1)
cementing prior events of great significance for retention and (2) testing
series of alternative possibilities with respect to social events yet to
transpire. […] They could do this first in the context of helping kin of all
ages and then use the ability to identify the interests of others to best or
cheat them while simultaneously evolving to conceal their own individual
interests. Concealment of interests would acquire importance as (1) interests
became individualized and (2) sociality became more prevalent or intense.”
(Alexander, 1987, p. 132)

Being small, isolated, or morally homogeneous are examples of environmental
conditions that increase the moral capital of a community. That doesn’t mean
that small islands and small towns are better places to live overall—the
diversity and crowding of big cities makes them more creative and interesting
places for many people—but that’s the trade-off. (Whether you’d trade away
some moral capital to gain some diversity and creativity will depend in part
on your brain’s settings on traits such as openness to experience and threat
sensitivity, and this is part of the reason why cities are usually so much
more liberal than the countryside.) 325

“whether after all these obligations are really obligatory, i.e., whether our
sense that we ought not to do certain things is not illusion. We then want to
have it proved to us that we ought to do so, i.e., to be convinced of this by
a process which, as an argument, is different in kind from our original and
unreflective appreciation of it. This demand is, as I have argued,
illegitimate. Hence in the first place, if, as is almost universally the case,
by Moral Philosophy is meant the knowledge which would satisfy this demand,
there is no such knowledge, and all attempts to attain it are doomed to
failure because they rest on a mistake, the mistake of supposing the
possibility of proving what can only be apprehended directly by an act of
moral thinking. Nevertheless the demand, though illegitimate, is inevitable
until we have carried the process of reflexion far enough to realise the self-
evidence of our obligations, i.e., the immediacy of our apprehension of them.
This realisation of their self-evidence is positive knowledge, and so far, and
so far only, as the term Moral Philosophy is confined to this knowledge and to
the knowledge of the parallel immediacy of the apprehension of the goodness of
the various virtues and of good dispositions generally, is there such a thing
as Moral Philosophy. But since this knowledge may allay doubts which often
affect the whole conduct of life, it is, though not extensive, important and
even vitally important.” 31

„Als jene eudaimonistisch-naturalistische Einstellung zur Zeit der Aufklärung
im Interesse des Bürgertums entworfen wurde, hatte diese Klasse in weitem
Umfang noch Zuflüsse aus ganz anderen Quellen aufgenommen, z. B. Haltungen und
Normen des damals politisch noch maßgebenden Adels. Ideale wie Ehre, Großmut
und Tapferkeit sind kriegerischer Herkunft, sie wurden in den maßgebenden
Kreisen des Berufskriegertums hochgehalten, und die Bourgeoisie hatte sie
adoptiert; so duellierten sich vor dem ersten Weltkrieg gelegentlich noch die
Führer der plutokratischen Demokratie, wie Caillaux. Auch hatte das
Christentum den Idealen der Entsagung und Askese noch nicht in der Tendenz,
die Sozialdemokratie zu überbieten, den Rücken gekehrt. Die Mehrheit lebte
also, wie immer, auf verschiedenen moralischen Ebenen und innerhalb der dann
notwendigen Kompromisse und Unschärfen, während die Wortführer des
Proletariats das Ethos des Massenlebenswertes um so vorbehaltloser
übernahmen, als es im Klassenkampf polemisch damals noch gegen das Militär und
die Kirchen zu verwenden war; zudem schien die oft sichtbare Begrenzung der
Lebensbedürfnisse, die Not, der Mangel an Sicherheit und sozialem Status die
Expropriation der Ausbeuter zur Forderung der Gerechtigkeit zu machen. Auch
darf man nicht vergessen, daß die Bewertung des Lebens als der Güter höchstes
die Dramatik der frühzeitigen Sterblichkeit um sich sah, aber schon seit der
französischen Revolution die Aussicht auf die Güter der Reichen vor sich.
Auch bei der Expropriation (zuerst des Adels) ging das Bürgertum voraus, nach
1789 bildete die Okkupation der Reichtümer der Adligen und des Klerus einen
besonders reizvollen Teil der Tugend: „Niemals hat sich eine reichere Beute
für den Sieger dargeboten, sagte Desmoulins, 40 000 Paläste und zwei Fünftel
aller Güter Frankreichs werden der Lohn der Tapferkeit sein." „Wie, und Sie
leben noch?" sagte der Deputierte Laurencot zu dem Besitzer, als er die
Schönheit des Schlosses Chevemy gewahrte. Nach Napoleon (Mém. de St. Hélène,
3.9. 1816) hat die Revolution darin bestanden „den Inhabern aller Stellen, den
Eigentümern aller Chargen und den Besitzern aller Vermögen zu sagen: entfernt
euch". Hier ist Raum für eine Erinnerung an die wohlbekannte Grausamkeit der
reinen Tugend — ein Sonderfall der steigenden Aggressivität bei
Alleinherrschaft eines der ethischen Impulse: Es gibt nicht nur den blutigen
Staatsmann, es gibt auch die borniert egoistische Kleinfamilie und den
giftigen Pazifisten. Wer die „Realisierung" einer Idee anstrebt, wird leicht
die realen Widerstände als unmoralisch empfinden, als Unebenheiten der
Wirklichkeit“ 66f

“In the second place, suppose we come genuinely to doubt whether we ought, for
example, to pay our debts owing to a genuine doubt whether our previous
conviction that we ought to do so is true, a doubt which can, in fact only
arise if we fail to remember the real nature of what we now call our past
conviction. The only remedy lies in actual getting into a situation which
occasions the obligation, or -- if our imagination be strong enough -- in
imagining ourselves in that situation, and then letting our moral capacities
of thinking do their work. Or, to put the matter generally, if we do doubt
whether there is really an obligation to originate A in a situation B, the
remedy lies not in any process of general thinking, but in getting face to
face with a particular instance of the situation B, and then directly
appreciating the obligation to originate A in that situation.” 31

Richard D. Alexander, The Biology of Moral Systems , Foundations of Human Behavior (Hawthorne, N.Y: A. de Gruyter, 1987).

“it is now possible to abort fetuses more easily and less expensively than
ever before. It is also possible to save babies that previously would have
died, even though it is not always possible simultaneously to cause the baby
to attain the level of quality in life that previously characterized all
babies (or nearly all) that were able to survive. The question is thus posed,
and must be answered by conscious, deliberate decision, whether a child ought
to be kept alive if its condition will be, perhaps unprecedentedly, miserable
or painful or “vegetable”-like. This increasing degree and consciousness of
control by some individuals (doctors, parents) over the life and death of
others seems to stir a general uneasiness among people. The rest of society is
placed in the position of mediating the conflict of interest between parent
and its offspring under the conditions that what is done to one individual, or
class of individuals, may affect what is done to other individuals, or other,
even totally different classes of individuals in the same society—that is, it
may affect the general level of beneficence in society, hence the unity of
society as well.” (Alexander, 1987, p. 221)

“Suppose we now take the same approach as appears to be currently adopted for
determining the rights of the moribund—that of post-consciousness. We can ask
if the offspring is conscious or preconscious—that is, whether or not it has
acquired any kind of self-knowledge equivalent to that we regard as existing
in ourselves. Regardless of the difficulty of answering that question, it at
least gives us a reasonable starting point.” (Alexander, 1987, p. 221)

Arnold Gehlen, Moral und Hypermoral: eine pluralistische Ethik , 4th ed. (Wiesbaden: Athenaion, 1981).


language became possible only after our ancestors got shared intentionality.
Tomasello notes that a word is not a relationship between a sound and an
object. It is an agreement among people who share a joint representation of
the things in their world, and who share a set of conventions for
communicating with each other about those things. If the key to group
selection is a shared defensible nest, then shared intentionality allowed
humans to construct nests that were vast and ornate yet weightless and
portable. 230

“the very worst thing one could reveal to associates and potential
interactants is that he is, first and foremost, a selfinterested individual.
One way of avoiding the impression that this might be so is to deny that
hedonism or self-interest could possibly be a reasonable creed. Another is to
believe sincerely that one is not self-interested. We see in these arguments a
reason for promoting an ideally moral model of society that carries benefits
for the promoter: it is a way of assisting others to believe that we ourselves
are more moral than we are.” (Alexander, 1987, p. 136)

„Ein Kampf auf Leben und Tod zwischen Einzelnen, etwa im Kriege, ist ja
moralisch keineswegs verwerflich, wenn die Chancen ungefähr gleich sind, aber
was wir ohne weiteres verwerfen, ist die Tötung von Wehrlosen, und sie ist ja
in dem Beispiel der technischen Ferntötung gemeint. Im allgemeinen Begriff
besteht das Böse wohl in der Aggression gegen Wehrlose, sei es Tötung,
Quälerei, Erniedrigung, Entwürdigung oder was immer. Es kann auch darin
bestehen, daß jemand unter Bedingungen gesetzt wird, in denen Überleben und
Sichtreubleiben sich ausschließen, damit kommt das „suum esse conservare"
(Spinoza) in Widerspruch zu sich selbst. Auch die Vernichtung des Generösen
und der Großherzigkeit ist böse, ein Geschäft, auf das, unsere Zeit wie keine
andere abzielt (H. Ball, Die Flucht aus der Zeit, 1927, 96 ). Hier geht es
dann um den geistigen Teil des Bösen, den die Verhaltensforschung nicht leicht
greifen kann. Die Ehrverweigerung, die Entwürdigung und Demütigung, der
auferlegte Zwang, unter niedrigen Umständen leben zu müssen, das sind
bösartige und von Grund aus empörende Zumutungen, und gegenüber der
herrschenden Meinung ist die Vermutung berechtigt, das Böse könnte in seiner
äußersten Aufgipfelung einer kalkulierten Aggression gegen den Wehrlosen
gerade darin bestehen, ihn unter entwürdigenden Bedingungen am Leben zu
lassen.“ 181

„den Interessen der Söldnermarschälle mußte die Bagatellisierung alter
Verbindlichkeiten, Loyalitäten und Machtreste nur dienlich sein, und der
Einzelne, der sich zu halten suchte, hatte die Redewendung für eine
Präventiv-Kapitulation bereits zur Hand, er ging eben in ein „höheres
Vaterland" ein. Der Logos, der diesen Uberstaat angeblich durchwaltete, war
auch nicht weniger prak tisch: nach der einen Seite der Bedeutung führte er
zu der griechischen Sprache und Begriffswelt hin, die an allen den zahllosen
Höfen, Garnisonen, Städten, Märkten und Kolonien die Verständigung
herstellte, wie die englische Sprache in Indien; andererseits war der Logos
der an den Himmel projizierte Philosoph selber, ähnlich wie heute die
sogenannte WeItmeinung der verabsolutierte Redakteur ist.“ 28

The gains from cooperation and division of labor are so vast that large
companies can pay more than small businesses and then use a series of
institutionalized carrots and sticks—including expensive monitoring and
enforcement mechanisms—to motivate self-serving employees to act in ways the
company desires. But this approach (sometimes called transactional leadership)
has its limits. Self-interested employees are Glauconians, far more interested
in looking good and getting promoted than in helping the company. In contrast,
an organization that takes advantage of our hivish nature can activate pride,
loyalty, and enthusiasm among its employees and then monitor them less
closely. This approach to leadership (sometimes called transformational
leadership) generates more social capital—the bonds of trust that help
employees get more work done at a lower cost than employees at other firms.
263

„Zurückkehrend zu dem Thema der Produktivität des Entlastungseffekts zeigt
sich ein Vergleich mit der Sprache lohnend, denn die Institutionen wie Ehe,
Familie, Arbeit, Recht, Wissenschaft usw. mit allen ihren Einrichtungen ähneln
der Sprache insofern, als sie ein automatisches Schonverständigtsein bewirken,
und als innerhalb ihrer Grenzen und Regeln eine beliebige Verfeinerung,
Anreicherung und Vertiefung des jeweils eingegossenen Themas möglich ist.
Taine schrieb in einem Brief an Guizot (De Jouvenel, De la souveraineté, 1955,
295): „Die Geschichte zeigt, daß die Regierungen, die Religionen und Kirchen,
alle die großen Institutionen die einzigen Mittel sind, durch die der
tierische und wilde Mensch (l'homme animal et sauvage) seinen kleinen Teil an
Vernunft und Gerechtigkeit erwirbt." Allein an dieser Stelle kann man den
Gemeinplatz festmachen, der von der Freiheit als einem Ertrag der
Selbstbegrenzung spricht, denn anderswo gibt es keine, geschweige eine „edle"
Natur unterhalb des Überbaus der Institutionen; sondern Zwänge, Aggressionen,
„Erlebnisse" und ein wahrhaft unentschuldbares Sichgehenlassen. Der Mensch
weiß nicht, was er ist, daher kann er sich nicht direkt verwirklichen, er muß
sich mit sich durch die Institutionen vermitteln lassen. Gegensätze und
Spannungen bedürfen nicht der Versöhnung, sondern der Institutionalisierung,
um sie geregelt auszutragen, und gegen den gewaltigen Anprall der
Gleichheitsregie, die herrschen will, findet man nur Schutz in Einrichtungen,
die sich verteidigen lassen.“ 97

We are terrible at seeking evidence that challenges our own beliefs, but other
people do us this favor, just as we are quite good at finding errors in other
people’s beliefs. When discussions are hostile, the odds of change are slight.
The elephant leans away from the opponent, and the rider works frantically to
rebut the opponent’s charges. But if there is affection, admiration, or a
desire to please the other person, then the elephant leans toward that person
and the rider tries to find the truth in the other person’s arguments. The
elephant may not often change its direction in response to objections from its
own rider, but it is easily steered by the mere presence of friendly elephants
(that’s the social persuasion link in the social intuitionist model) or by
good arguments given to it by the riders of those friendly elephants (that’s
the reasoned persuasion link). There are even times when we change our minds
on our own, with no help from other people. Sometimes we have conflicting
intuitions about something, as many people do about abortion and other
controversial issues. Depending on which victim, which argument, or which
friend you are thinking about at a given moment, your judgment may flip back
and forth 84

Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (New York: Vintage Books, 2013).

My definition of morality was designed to be a descriptive definition; it
cannot stand alone as a normative definition. (As a normative definition, it
would give high marks to fascist and communist societies as well as to cults,
so long as they achieved high levels of cooperation by creating a shared moral
order.) But I think my definition works well as an adjunct to other normative
theories, particularly those that have often had difficulty seeing groups and
social facts. Utilitarians since Jeremy Bentham have focused intently on
individuals. They try to improve the welfare of society by giving individuals
what they want. But a Durkheimian version of utilitarianism would recognize
that human flourishing requires social order and embeddedness. It would begin
with the premise that social order is extraordinarily precious and difficult
to achieve. A Durkheimian utilitarianism would be open to the possibility that
the binding foundations—Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity—have a crucial role
to play in a good society. I don’t know what the best normative ethical theory
is for individuals in their private lives. But when we talk about making laws
and implementing public policies in Western democracies that contain some
degree of ethnic and moral diversity, then I think there is no compelling
alternative to utilitarianism. I think Jeremy Bentham was right that laws and
public policies should aim, as a first approximation, to produce the greatest
total good. I just want Bentham to read Durkheim and recognize that we are
Homo duplex before he tells any of us, or our legislators, how to go about
maximizing that total good. 301

„Die seit langem ausgebaute Vorbereitung dieser Sanktionierung des Daseienden
aus dem Grunde des Daseins bestand in dem endlosen Kritisieren und
Problematisieren, das jede Eindeutigkeit und Grenze benagte, bis niemand mehr
gegenüber den letzten Enthem mungen etwas anderes hatte als ein verlegenes
Lächeln.“ 141

“no organism outside clones has been shown to display population-wide
indiscriminate beneficence […] only in human systems of indirect reciprocity
does a modicum of essentially indiscriminate beneficence or social investment
exist in large groups. Indirect reciprocity must have arisen out of the search
for interactants and situations by which to maximize returns from
asymmetrical, hence highly profitable direct social reciprocity. One
consequence of large complex societies in which reciprocity is the principal
social cement and indirect reciprocity is prevalent is that opportunities for
such mutually profitable asymmetrical reciprocal interactions are vastly
multiplied. This situation, in turn, fosters the appearance of tendencies to
engage in indiscriminate social investment (or indiscriminate
beneficence)—which I define as willingness to risk relatively small expenses
in certain kinds of social donations to whomever may be needy—partly because
of the prevalence of interested audiences and keenness of their observation,
and the use of beneficent acts by others to identify individuals appropriate
for later reciprocal interactions. In complex social systems with much
reciprocity, being judged as attractive for reciprocal interactions may become
an essential ingredient for success. […] a modicum of indiscriminate
beneficence would arise, as social investment, because of benefits to
individuals who are viewed as altruists.” (Alexander, 1987, p. 116)

they’re given information about a legal case and then asked to infer guilt or
innocence. Some subjects are told that they’ll have to explain their decisions
to someone else. Other subjects know that they won’t be held accountable by
anyone. Tetlock found that when left to their own devices, people show the
usual catalogue of errors, laziness, and reliance on gut feelings that has
been documented in so much decision-making research. But when people know in
advance that they’ll have to explain themselves, they think more
systematically and self-critically. They are less likely to jump to premature
conclusions and more likely to revise their beliefs in response to evidence.
92

It is not to be overlooked that the speech was made to a Catholic organization
or that the rest of it concerned the international arms race. If the idea that
the “first duty of government” is to protect innocent life is ludicrous, it is
not ludicrous to suggest that to make such an argument is a way of using a
popular cause to support government, and of using the sacredness both of
“innocent life” and of government to restrain the independence of women. In
the abortion arguments it is also not irrelevant that abortion “on demand”
delivers to women a freedom in respect to sexual life that seems to many to
(1) reduce the control of men over women, (2) allow “immoral” or licentious
behavior, especially by women, and (3) thus erode the “moral fiber” of the
populace—hence the unity, purpose, and strength of the nation. It is not
difficult to consider that the entire issue feeds back to the history of the
control of resources—hence, control of the lives and reproduction of women —
through the defense of the group against other such groups by its adult
males.” (Alexander, 1987, p. 224)

“Utilitarianism in the generic sense in which what is good is not limited to
pleasure. It takes its stand upon the distinction between something which is
not itself an action but which can be produced by an action and the action
which will produce it, and contends that if something which is not an action
is good, then we ought to undertake the action which will directly or
indirectly, originate it.” 23

“western democracies are characterized by particular kinds of flexibility in
allowing or promoting individual liberties, in which entrepreneurship is used
relatively effectively by the society as a whole for the good of its
membership. The entrepreneur gains, but in the process others gain too. The
same societies manage to keep their military as a separated branch of
government service. These societies respond to changing circumstances by
changing the sizes and strengths of their armies and the freedom of
entrepreneurs. Such flexibilities may be strengths or weaknesses in the
presence of competing or aggresive neighbor societies. For example, they are
strengths when they lead to useful technological breakthroughs or promote
unity through pride of social structure or desire to maintain “freedom,” They
are weaknesses when the debates that characterize decisionmaking delay or
cause equivocation in responses to aggressors. They are also strengths when
they involve flexibilities in responding to novel situations […] Discussion of
liberty and equality in democracies closely parallels discussions of morality
and moral systems.” (Alexander, 1987, p. 201)

„Herbert Spencer hat in den „Principles of Ethics" eben diesen Sachverhalt
entwicklungsgeschichtlich ausgedrückt; „Sowohl primitive Stämme wie
zivilisierte Gesellschaften sind gezwungen, sich nach außen zu verteidigen und
im Innern Freundschaft zu halten. Daher haben sich bei ihren Mitgliedern zwei
verschiedene Gruppen von Gefühlen und Gedanken herausgebildet, die diesen
beiden verschiedenen Aktivitäten angepaßt sind ... Da sowohl die Ethik der
Feindschaft wie die Ethik der Freundschaft im Zusammenhang mit den äußeren wie
inneren Zuständen ihre Forderungen stellen und beide nebeneinander bestehen
müssen, ist ein Konglomerat äußerst widersprüchlicher (!) Gefühle und Gedanken
zustande gekommen."“ 119

Newt Gingrich, the new speaker of the House of Representatives, encouraged the
large group of incoming Republican congressmen to leave their families in
their home districts rather than moving their spouses and children to
Washington. Before 1995, congressmen from both parties attended many of the
same social events on weekends; their spouses became friends; their children
played on the same sports teams. But nowadays most congressmen fly to
Washington on Monday night, huddle with their teammates and do battle for
three days, and then fly home on Thursday night. Cross-party friendships are
disappearing; Manichaeism and scorched Earth politics are increasing. 345

„Wir glauben nun, den abstrakten Humanitarismus als elargiertes,
schwellengesenktes Familienethos auffassen zu sollen, wobei die
Ausformulierung, die gesinnungsethische Zuspitzung samt der dazugehörigen
Intoleranz Sache bestimmter Trägerschichten war — der Gegenaristokratie der
Intellektuellen. Daß dieses Ethos, das noch gewisse objektive Konstellationen
voraussetzt, wie weltumfassende Verkehrsräume oder eine vermeintliche
Unterprivilegierung dieser Träger, in zwei Fällen auch eklatante Niederlagen
des Staates (Antike, Gegenwart), zuletzt mit dem sich abgrenzenden
politischen Ethos des Patriotismus unverträglich ist, wurde an den alten
Konflikten zwischen Familie und Staat sowie an gewissen theologischen
Positionen gezeigt.“ 165

„Der elektromagnetische Weltverkehr schickt uns Umrißskizzen von allen
denkbaren Ereignissen bis zu den Antipoden zu, diese Skizzen verhalten sich
zu den Tatsachen selbst wie der Schatten zum Körper — farblos und
dimensionsarm. Diesem weltweiten Versand von Hohlformen soll nun unser
moralisches Empfinden entsprechen, das von Natur her auf Nahoptik eingestellt
ist; daher haben wir als Ersatz der nicht vorhandenen Fernmoral nur die
humanitär-eudaimonistische, deren Ansprüche man nicht einlösen kann.“ 152

a. Give, when the benefit goes to a genetic relative (sometimes via a
spouse or in-law) and its return to the giver via the improved
reproduction of the relative is likely to be greater than the expense of
the act multiplied by the fractional relationship of the recipient to the
giver  […]
b. Give, when the recipient is likely to give back more than he or she
receives (= investment in direct reciprocity).
c. Give, when failure to do so is likely to cause others to impose costs
greater than the expense of the beneficence.
d. Give, when the act is likely to cause a sufficient number of
appropriate people to regard the act as indicating a significant
probability (in other interactions) of the actor giving back more than is
received, hence indicating that the actor is himself a good object of
social investment by the observers (= investment in indirect reciprocity).
e. In all other situations do not give.” (Alexander, 1987, p. 125)

3. Direct Nepotism. Included here are all investments in relatives for
which the return may be expected in genetic terms, through the reproduction of
the assisted relatives. […] Mating effort is the most problematic form of
effort placed here: it may be viewed as selfish (hence, be confused with
somatic effort), particularly in males, who usually, as in mammals, strive to
place their sperm inside the body of the female, hence are in a better
position to abandon the offspring to its mother’s care than vice versa. A
gamete, after all, is not an individual, and it possesses no genetic materials
other than those of its producer. But gametes are also not merely parts of the
phenotypes that produce them, and (except in species with haploid males) are
not genetically identical to their producers. Mating effort, moreover, is
reproductive effort that involves risks and expenditure of calories. Effort
exerted on behalf of gametes lowers the reproductive value of the individual
as surely as that exerted on behalf of offspring or other relatives. […] in
mating effort, as compared to other reproductive effort, the genetically
selfish aspects of acts may be relatively more apparent than their
phenotypically altruistic aspects. […]

“obligations are not self-evident but need proof […] an act which is referred
to as an obligation may be incompletely stated […] "Why should I do it?" is
perfectly legitimate. This fact suggests, but suggests wrongly, that even if
the nature of the act is completely stated, it is still necessary to give a
reason, or, in other words, to supply a proof. […] The obligation to repay a
benefit involves a relation due to a past act of the benefactor. The
obligation to pay a bill involves a relation due to a past act of ours in
which we have either said or implied that we would make a certain return, for
something which we have asked for and received. On the other hand the
obligation to speak the truth implies no such definite act; it involves a
relation consisting in the fact that others are trusting us to speak the
truth, a relation the apprehension of which gives rise to the sense that
communication of the truth is something owing by us to them. Again the
obligation not to hurt the feelings of another, involves no special relation
of us to that other, i.e., no relation other than that involved in our both
being men and men in one and the same world. Moreover, it seems that the
relation involved in an obligation need not be a relation to another at all.
Thus we should admit that there is an obligation to overcome our natural
timidity or greediness, and that this involves no relations to others. Still
there is a relation involved, viz., a relation to our own disposition. It is
simply because we can and because others cannot directly modify our
disposition that it is our business to improve it, and that it is not theirs,
or, at least, not theirs to the same extent.” 26

Religions are moral exoskeletons. If you live in a religious community, you
are enmeshed in a set of norms, relationships, and institutions that work
primarily on the elephant to influence your behavior. But if you are an
atheist living in a looser community with a less binding moral matrix, you
might have to rely somewhat more on an internal moral compass, read by the
rider. That might sound appealing to rationalists, but it is also a recipe for
anomie—Durkheim’s word for what happens to a society that no longer has a
shared moral order. (It means, literally, “normlessness.”) We evolved to live,
trade, and trust within shared moral matrices. When societies lose their grip
on individuals, allowing all to do as they please, the result is often a
decrease in happiness and an increase in suicide, as Durkheim showed more than
a hundred years ago. Societies that forgo the exoskeleton of religion should
reflect carefully on what will happen to them over several generations. We
don’t really know, because the first atheistic societies have only emerged in
Europe in the last few decades. They are the least efficient societies ever
known at turning resources (of which they have a lot) into offspring (of which
they have few). 298

Within groups there are formalized retributions, which can be effected
when anyone secures “too much” (“too many” resources, too much power) and
there are also formalized charities for those who become unusually “needy”
(i.e., so needy that their plight, if not attended to, may directly or
indirectly affect society, and each of us, in adverse fashions).” (Alexander,
1987, p. 125)


“(1) are acceptances of “natural laws” of human behavior justifiable if one
uses scientific knowledge rather than “unaided intuition,” and (2) if
homosexuality cannot be shown to have evolved by natural selection then would
suppression of homosexuals be justified? Moreover, the assertion that the
reason incest is evil is that it results in a higher level of (i.e., sometimes
causes) developmental abnormalities in offspring leaves us with several
questions. “Incest” usually refers to sexual relations not the production of
offspring. Means are available for preventing absolutely the production of
offspring as a result of sexual relations. Would such prevention render incest
moral? Alternatively, if two persons marry who happen to carry genes that
would cause their offspring to have abnormalities comparable to those Wilson
believes (without references) to result from incest in humans, is the marriage
then evil? And, one must add, whether or not the couple has or plans to have
children? If an incestuous union results in normal children is it then no
longer evil? It is not the case that all incestuous marriages result in
abnormal offspring, nor is there a magic line with respect to degree of
relatedness of marriage partners that makes a marriage “incestuous,” Wilson’s
argument would identify as “evil” all marriages involving likelihoods of
abnormal offspring” (Alexander, 1987, p. 180)

conservative caring is somewhat different—it is aimed not at animals or at
people in other countries but at those who’ve sacrificed for the group. It is
not universalist; it is more local, and blended with loyalty. 154

“Humphrey (1976) and Alexander (1979a,b) hypothesized that consciousness is a
vehicle for building and testing alternative scenarios in regard to future
aspects of, particularly, social life. I speculated that selfawareness is a
way of seeing ourselves as others see us so that we can cause them to see us
as we would like them to rather than as they would like to, and as opposed to
ways that will not serve our own interests. I proposed that free will does not
really involve the question of physical causation but represents our ability
to act upon whichever of the scenarios that we draw up seems to us most likely
to serve our own interests. And I described conscience as the still, small
voice that tells us how far we can go without incurring intolerable risks or
costs to our own interests.” (Alexander, 1987, p. 124)

“if early and late effects of genes should happen to be opposed, deleterious
late effects will accumulate, because alleles will be saved as a result of
their early effects and in spite of their later ones. This will lead to
deteriorative effects that can be identified as the process of senescence. […]
all genes are simultaneously pleiotropic (have multiple effects) and epistatic
(affect one another’s effects).” (Alexander, 1987, p. 67)

The Tea Party emerged as if from nowhere in the early months of the Obama
presidency to reshape the American political landscape and realign the
American culture war. The movement began in earnest on February 19, 2009, when
Rick Santelli, a correspondent for a business news network, launched a tirade
against a new $75 billion program to help homeowners who had borrowed more
money than they could now repay. Santelli, who was broadcasting live from the
floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, said, “The government is promoting
bad behavior.” He then urged President Obama to put up a website to hold a
national referendum […]. Santelli then announced that he was thinking of
hosting a “Chicago Tea Party” in July. 198

“Complex sociality should be expected to arise only when confluences of
interest produce benefits that override the costs of conflicting interests”
(Alexander, 1987, p. 83)

“1. Gods are inventions originally developed to extend the notion that some
have greater rights than others to design and enforce rules, and that some are
more destined to be leaders, others to be followers. This notion, in turn,
arose out of prior asymmetries in both power and judgment (e.g., parents
manipulating children, husbands manipulating wives, the strong manipulating
the weak). It works when (because) leaders are (have been) valuable,
especially in the context of intergroup competition. 2. The efforts of
moralizers to use gods to serve their own interests caused them to create the
concept of a single, just God of all people.” (Alexander, 1987, p. 217)

In Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy, Barbara Ehrenreich
describes how European explorers reacted to these dances: with disgust. The
masks, body paints, and guttural shrieks made the dancers seem like animals.
The rhythmically undulating bodies and occasional sexual pantomimes were, to
most Europeans, degrading, grotesque, and thoroughly “savage.” The Europeans
were unprepared to understand what they were seeing. As Ehrenreich argues,
collective and ecstatic dancing is a nearly universal “biotechnology” for
binding groups together. She agrees with McNeill that it is a form of muscular
bonding. It fosters love, trust, and equality. It was common in ancient Greece
(think of Dionysus and his cult) and in early Christianity (which she says was
a “danced” religion until dancing in church was suppressed in the Middle
Ages). But if ecstatic dancing is so beneficial and so widespread, then why
did Europeans give it up? Ehrenreich’s historical explanation is too nuanced
to summarize here, but the last part of the story is the rise of individualism
and more refined notions of the self in Europe, beginning in the sixteenth
century. These cultural changes accelerated during the Enlightenment and the
Industrial Revolution. It is the same historical process that gave rise to
WEIRD culture in the nineteenth century (that is, Western, educated,
industrialized, rich, and democratic). […] the WEIRDer you are, the more you
perceive a world full of separate objects, rather than relationships. The
WEIRDer you are, the harder it is to understand what those “savages” were
doing. 248

John Stuart Mill said that liberals and conservatives are like this: “A party
of order or stability, and a party of progress or reform, are both necessary
elements of a healthy state of political life.” […] The philosopher Bertrand
Russell saw this same dynamic at work throughout Western intellectual history:
“From 600 BC to the present day, philosophers have been divided into those who
wished to tighten social bonds and those who wished to relax them.” Russell
then explained why both sides are partially right, using terms that are about
as close a match to moral capital as I could ever hope to find: It is clear
that each party to this dispute—as to all that persist through long periods of
time—is partly right and partly wrong. Social cohesion is a necessity, and
mankind has never yet succeeded in enforcing cohesion by merely rational
arguments. Every community is exposed to two opposite dangers: ossification
through too much discipline and reverence for tradition, on the one hand; on
the other hand, dissolution, or subjection to foreign conquest, through the
growth of an individualism and personal independence that makes cooperation
impossible. 327

“sainthood may be awarded to individuals who spend their lives on explicitly
antireproductive behavior. The prevalence among saints of asceticism,
selfdenial, celibacy, isolation from relatives, devotion to the welfare of
strangers, and otherwise indiscriminate tendencies to be altruistic supports
this hypothesis. So does the fact that sainthood is generally awarded (long)
after the death of the awardee (thus, the awardee cannot personally gain from
this heroic designation). The long-term existence of complex patterns of
indirect reciprocity, then, seems to favor the evolution of keen abilities to
(1) make one’s self seem more beneficent than is the case; and (2) influence
others to be beneficent in such fashions as to be deleterious to themselves
and beneficial to the moralizer, e.g., to lead others to (a) invest too much,
(b) invest wrongly in the moralizer or his relatives and friends, or (c)
invest indiscriminately on a larger scale than would otherwise be the case.
According to this view, individuals are expected to parade the idea of much
beneficence, and even of indiscriminate altruism as beneficial, so as to
encourage people in general to engage in increasing amounts of social
investment whether or not it is beneficial to their interests. They may be
expected to locate and exploit social interactions mimicking genetic
relatedness leading to nepotistic flows of benefits (e.g., to insinuate
themselves deceptively into the role of relative or reciprocator so as to
receive the benefits therefrom). They may also be expected to depress the
fitness of competitors by identifying them, deceptively or not, as reciprocity
cheaters (in other words, to moralize and gossip); to internalize rules or
evolve the ability to acquire a conscience, interpreted (Alexander, 1979a) as
the ability to use our own judgment to serve our own interests; and to self-
deceive and display false sincerity as defenses against detection of cheating
and attributions of deliberateness in cheating” (Alexander, 1987, p. 120)

Gods (like maypoles) are tools that let people bind themselves together as a
community by circling around them. Once bound together by circling, these
communities can function more effectively. As Wilson puts it: “Religions exist
primarily for people to achieve together what they cannot achieve on their
own.” 290

I disagree. Human beings are the giraffes of altruism. We’re one-of-a-kind
freaks of nature who occasionally—even if rarely—can be as selfless and team-
spirited as bees. 219

“giving blood is a fine way of suggesting that one is so altruistic that he is
willing to give up a most dear possession for a perfect stranger. On that
basis it might be viewed as, rather than unreciprocatable altruism, a social
investment with a very special and high likelihood of paying off handsomely.
Who among us is not a little humble in the presence of someone who has
casually noted that he just came back from “giving blood”?” (Alexander, 1987,
p. 171)

The partisan brain has been reinforced so many times for performing mental
contortions that free it from unwanted beliefs. Extreme partisanship may be
literally addictive. 107

„Offenbar konnte bei Beginn unserer industriellen Epoche auch für lange Zeit
eine schon alte hochgespannte Moral als Ideal mitgeführt werden, weil sie
ihren Gegenhalt und die gestaltgebende Vernünftigkeit in der Natur und den
von daher knappen wirtschaftlichen Erträgen fand. Heute dagegen ist die Natur
durchschaut und plastisch, ihre Umformung eine Sache der Ausbildung, des
Fleißes und der Kosten, und die Menschenzahlen steigen in ebenso steiler Kurve
wie Warenmassen. Da die Menschheit nichts Größeres mehr außer sich sieht, muß
sie sich selbst umarmen und ihr immer schon wahnhaftes Glücksverlangen von
sich selber erwarten. Die dazu gehörende Moral kann alles hinwegschwemmen und
auflösen, was dem Triumph über die entleerte Natur und über die mühsame,
verblendete und prachtvolle Geschichte entgegenstehen würde. Der unsterbliche
Gott wohnt heute in einem anderen Winkel des Universums; der sterbliche Gott
ist nicht einmal mehr der Staat, am wenigsten bei uns, sondern die addierte,
vorhandene Menschheit, deren Forderungen nunmehr als ein schwer erträgliches
Gewicht auf der einzelnen Seele liegen, die keine Sprache mehr findet, um die
gefühlte Unmöglichkeit einer „absoluten" Moral zu begründen. Seit Gott der
„Geschichte" Platz machte, und diese dem post-histoire mit seiner
Bevölkerungsexplosion, muß der Mensch sich selbst alles das zurechnen, was in
den großen Ereigniswolken aus Politik, Wirtschaft und Aggression passierte,
bei denen jeder beteiligt war und niemand mehr etwas deutlich erkennen konnte.
Die Moralforderung wird umgekehrt um so unerbittlicher, die Alten konnten sich
noch mit dem Walten der Tyche, der Zufallsgöttin entschuldigen, die Christen
der überzeugten Zeit mit dem „unerforschlichen Ratschluß Gottes", wir haben
keine Entlastungen.“ 138f

“Maybe we resist finding out about the genes and their mission not only
because bringing genes into our consciousness makes them seem like alien
manipulators (which we are evolved to resist), but also because talking
directly about our evolutionary background and the mission of our genes and
our phenotypes is like making public our most importantly secret secret.
Accepting the arguments of evolutionary biologists is like admitting that one
is, after all, an egoist” (Alexander, 1987, p. 137)

“Just as the recognition that the doing of our duty often vitally interferes
with the satisfaction of our inclinations leads us to wonder whether we really
ought to do what we usually call our duty, so the recognition that we and
others are liable to mistakes in knowledge generally leads us, as it did
Descartes, to wonder whether hitherto we may not have been always mistaken.
And just as we try to find a proof, based on the general consideration of
action and of human life, that we ought to act in the ways usually called
moral, so we, like Descartes, propose by a process of reflexion on our
thinking to find a test of knowledge, i.e. a principle by applying which we
can show that a certain condition of mind was really knowledge, a condition
which ex hypothesi existed independently of the process of reflexion.” 21

“Moral systems are systems of indirect reciprocity. They exist because
confluences of interest within groups are used to deal with conflicts of
interest between groups. Indirect reciprocity develops because interactions
are repeated, or flow among a society’s members, and because information about
subsequent interactions can be gleaned from observing the reciprocal
interactions of others. To establish moral rules is to impose rewards and
punishment (typically assistance and ostracism, respectively) to control
social acts that, respectively, help or hurt others. To be regarded as moral,
a rule typically must represent widespread opinion, reflecting the fact that
it must apply with a certain degree of indiscriminateness. Moral rules are
established and maintained primarily by application of the concepts of right
and wrong.” (Alexander, 1987, p. 94)

“General encouragement of indiscriminate beneficence, and general acceptance
of its beneficial effects, results in a society with high social unity. […]
Good Samaritan acts seem likely to be most profitable to the actor if his
responsibility for the act is discovered accidentally, and most importantly
through no effort of his own. […] The value of self-serving beneficence, it
seems to me, is what sets the stage for the evolution of the ability and
tendency to develop a conscience, which I have interpreted (Alexander, 1979a)
as the “still small voice that tells us how far we can go in serving our own
interests without incurring intolerable risks,”” (Alexander, 1987, p. 119)

“grief functions to place the grieving person in the role of receiving
reassurances that associates will indeed honor obligations and continue
reciprocal interactions begun with or previously involving the person over
whose demise grief is being expressed. […] the part of religion that deals
with the afterlife utilizes the desire of each person to continue his or her
influence and to provide for and help relatives. The concept of hereafter as
“Heaven” (i.e., as idealized) is also a logical outcome of the use of
scenario-building to adjust the future so as to serve one’s own interests.”
(Alexander, 1987, p. 216)

Darwin proposed a series of “probable steps” by which humans evolved to the
point where there could be groups of team players in the first place. The
first step was the “social instincts.” In ancient times, loners were more
likely to get picked off by predators than were their more gregarious
siblings, who felt a strong need to stay close to the group. The second step
was reciprocity. People who helped others were more likely to get help when
they needed it most. But the most important “stimulus to the development of
the social virtues” was the fact that people are passionately concerned with
“the praise and blame of our fellow-men.” Darwin, writing in Victorian
England, shared Glaucon’s view (from aristocratic Athens) that people are
obsessed with their reputations. Darwin believed that the emotions that drive
this obsession were acquired by natural selection acting at the individual
level: those who lacked a sense of shame or a love of glory were less likely
to attract friends and mates. Darwin also added a final step: the capacity to
treat duties and principles as sacred, which he saw as part of our religious
nature. 214

“Hypothesis 1. Consciousness, foresight, self-awareness, conscience, and
related aspects of the human psyche have evolved as a set of “overrides”;
of more widespread (and not necessarily solely human), generalized
indicators of immediate costs and benefits. The most prominent and perhaps
most general of such indicators of immediate costs and benefits are pain
and pleasure. Pleasure is here thought of as having evolved because it
causes organisms to seek events and repeat acts that tend to increase
reproductive success, pain because it causes organisms to avoid events and
not repeat acts that tend to decrease reproductive success. Presumably,
generalized indicators of immediate costs and benefits, such as pain and
pleasure, evolve because there are consistencies between such costs and
benefits and eventual reproductive success (that is, later costs and
benefits). Presumably, also, overrides would only evolve when there are
otherwise unpredictable reversals in the relationship between immediate
costs and benefits and later ones. Even if what is (currently) seen as an
immediate cost (for example, risking or giving one’s life) comes to be
related consistently to an ultimate benefit (for example, survival of
one’s offspring and their eventual reproduction), pain and pleasure can
evolve to indicate appropriately with respect to reproductive deficits and
benefits. […]
Hypothesis 2. The above situation arose as reciprocity became the binding
cement of human social life. The changes in cost-benefit relations that
caused the rise of consciousness and related phenomena were human
manipulations,and as such represent a part of the manner by which
competing humans became the principal hostile force influencing the
evolution of humans. Reciprocity involves social investment, which
represents a short-term cost that may (but never certainly does) yield a
long-term benefit. Something similar occurs with nepotism, but in its
simpler forms nepotism does not require (is not improved by)
consciousness, since the long-term genetic return can be made reliable
simply by differential behavior toward individuals with whom one has had
certain specific and different social experiences. This mechanism will
work when the number and diversity of relatives do not vary greatly and
the reproductive likelihood of relatives does not fluctuate widely in
different circumstances. It will not work (well enough, or be the best
mechanism) when relatives are very numerous, vary widely in their
relatedness to an,actor, and also vary widely or fluctuate in their
reproductive probability. This last situation, which has evidently been
typical for humans for a very long time, places a high premium on
nepotistic investment strategizing that is essentially the same as in
reciprocity. […]
Hypothesis 3. Reciprocity arises out of nepotism (becomes prominent) when
large numbers of long-lived individuals related in differing degrees live
together in social groups within which there is more or less constant
directional selection favoring facilitators of (a) complex cooperation and
(b) ability to move back and forth between complete cooperation (in the
presence of threats to the whole group) and advantage-taking (in the
absence of such threats). […]
Hypothesis 4. Intergroup competition and aggression—that is, social
situations in which other human groups are the principal extrinsic
threats—represent the only circumstance that can maintain the situation in
Hypothesis 3 and account for the large groups whose social behavior is
guided principally by reciprocity in which indefinitely numerous and
complex manipulations of costs and benefits can create selection leading
to the human kind and degree of consciousness and its related overrides of
other proximate indicators.
Hypothesis 5. Group hunters of mammals (themselves evidently always
mammals)—whether canines, felines, or primates—tend to become so fearsome
(such ecological dominants, such powerful manipulators of their own
environments) that they approach becoming, incidentally, their own main
competitors. Thus, cooperativeness, of whatever origin, sets the stage for
“ganging up” two on one (and upward) in within-species competitions.
Chimpanzees evidently gang up to murder” (Alexander, 1987, p. 128)

“An act, to be virtuous, must, as Aristotle saw, be done willingly or with
pleasure; as such it is” 27

„Die moderne Technik reagiert auf diese Fatalität in Richtung der
Kassenergiebigkeit, so schickt uns der ausschweifende und doch oberflächliche
Weltverkehr der Informationsdienste stündlich Manifeste, Staatserdbe ben,
rätselhafte Kongresse, Putsche und Dementis ins Haus, da kann man nur
abstumpfen oder sich entrüsten. Mit einem Bewußtsein, das von den
Abziehbildern weltweiter Ereignisse gefüllt ist, aber die nähere Umgebung mit
ihren Vorgängen nicht versteht; leidenschaftlich gefühlsgereizt, aber tatenarm
— was bleibt dem Meinungsträger übrig, als der große ethische
Papieraufschwung, der doch wieder nur als Angriff auf das Bestehende
Glaubwürdigkeit erreichen könnte? Und wo soll er die Kategorien dazu hemehmen,
als aus der Familie? Dann wird er privatus — das ist der zugleich Befreite und
Beraubte.“ 159f

„Der entschieden Schlaue wiederum weiß auch nicht, was er tut. Als er seinen
Vorbehalt machte, berechnete er die Risiken, doch das ist absurd, im Zeitalter
der Weltbürgerkriege, der inkalkulablen Schon zeiten, der Schattenkabinette
und der Ordnungen, die auf zwei Augen stehen, gibt es keinen Durchblick.
Politische Information im Vollsinne ist ihrer Natur nach nicht erreichbar.
Folglich kommt die begrenzte Loyalität auf ein Würfeln hinaus, dann kann man
aber ebensogut gleich um den großen Einsatz würfeln und sich voll exponieren.
Hobbes glaubte daher, es sei für den Privatmann viel zu gefährlich zu
entscheiden, auf welcher Seite Recht und Moral seien. So ist das Gewissen
weder eine halbwegs zuverlässige Brücke zum Überleben, noch ein brauchbares
Erkenntnisorgan da, wo es keine Er kenntnis geben kann; schließlich hat es
für die ganz großen Ereignismas sen ebensowenig Kapazität wie das Gehirn.
Seit die Staatsmänner unter den Regeln bürgerlicher Moral regieren wollen,
behalten sie weder die Kriege noch ihre Folgen in der Hand und bringen keinen
Frieden mehr zustande, wie Woodrow Wilson und Johnson. So kann man denn auch
einmal das Gewissen selbst kritisch befragen. Kein geringerer als Max Scheler
(Der Formalismus in der Ethik, 1954) hat behauptet, es sei selbst noch ein
Träger sittlicher Werte, keineswegs aber deren letzte Quelle (335). Die
Deutung, daß im Gewissen die Stimme Gottes vernehmbar sei, mache es erst zu
jenem vermeintlich unverletzlichen, unbeirrbaren Organ, in diesem Sinne
gehöre es durchaus zu dem mannigfaltigen Abendrot der untergegangenen Sonne
eines religiösen Glaubens (337). In dieser Sache dachte Scheler
außerordentlich rigoros. Das Prinzip der Gewissensfreiheit, nach dem jeder
Beliebige das Recht haben solle zu sagen und zu bestimmen, was gut und böse
sei, könne nur als Ausdruck der inneren moralischen Anarchie des (nach Comte)
metaphyschen kritischen Zeitalters angesehen werden (334). Das weist doch in
un sere Richtung, wenn wir sagen, das Gewissen sei entweder ein Zeichen
versäumter sozialer, eindeutiger Pflichten — und in diesem Falle würde es kein
besonderes Problem aufwerfen — oder ein Index kollidierender, in sich
unversöhnlicher und gleichberechtigter Sozialregulationen, die im Krisenfall
auseinandertreten — dann ist es in keinem Sinne mehr „Richtschnur", sondern
das Erlebnis der Ausweglosigkeit. Dann ist sogar der Gedanke möglich, den man
in deutscher Sprache nicht denken sollte und der die Gewissensvirtuosen
betrifft: „Hobbes criticized the scruples of intellectuals because he was
forced by his experience of the political consequences of their soul -
searching to wonder whether it were not possible to be too afraid of doing
wrong and whether this fear did not ultimately spring from a pride more
dangerous to society than any aristocrat's. They were the new aristocracy:
their's the new pride" (I. Coltman 147).“ 171f

The “omnivore’s dilemma” (a term coined by Paul Rozin) is that omnivores must
seek out and explore new potential foods while remaining wary of them until
they are proven safe. Omnivores therefore go through life with two competing
motives: neophilia (an attraction to new things) and neophobia (a fear of new
things). People vary in terms of which motive is stronger, and this variation
will come back to help us in later chapters: Liberals score higher on measures
of neophilia (also known as “openness to experience”), not just for new foods
but also for new people, music, and ideas. Conservatives are higher on
neophobia; they prefer to stick with what’s tried and true, and they care a
lot more about guarding borders, boundaries, and traditions. The emotion of
disgust evolved initially to optimize responses to the omnivore’s dilemma. 167

“to feel an obligation to act courageously would involve a contradiction. For,
as I have urged before, we can only feel an obligation to act; we cannot feel
an obligation to act from a certain desire” 28

“I think there have been far fewer such truly self-sacrificing individuals
than might be supposed, and most cases that might be brought forward are
likely instead to be illustrations of the complexity and indirectness of
reciprocity, especially the social value of appearing more altruistic than one
is. […] That I regard true altruism, in the sense of genetic self-sacrifice,
as rare means that I also regard order and justice, as they now exist, as
outcomes of self-interested behavior (in the sense of genetic interests).”
(Alexander, 1987, p. 203)