The psychologist Jon Haidt proposed five evolved capacities, cach…

The psychologist Jon Haidt proposed five evolved capacities, cach like a taste bud: a sensitivity to harm, reciprocity, hierarchy, group, and purity. He suggests the mind is prepared to attach moral sentiments to all or several of these, depending on the cul-ture in which it develops. Let me connect the taste buds with the three roots. In a society with an individualistic ethic, only the first rwo buds are activated: to protect people from harm, and to up-hold individual rights by insisting on fairness and reciprocity. Ac-cording to this ethic, the right to abortion or to free speech and the rejection of torture are moral issues. Western moral psychol-ogy has been imprinted with this focus on the individual, so that from its perspective, moral feelings are about personal autonomy.

— from True North (Ethics, Integrity, Truth, Values) · Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious by Gerd Gigerenzer

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