Reddit Reddit reviews The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion

We found 27 Reddit comments about The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.

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27 Reddit comments about The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion:

u/jbrs_ · 417 pointsr/politics

Here is a graphical representation that is easy to share

Some highlights from the article (didn't realize how short it is, this is basically the whole article):

> The economy added an average of 181,000 jobs a month in Obama's last six months in office compared to an average of 179,000 a month in President Trump's first six months. That's a statistically insignificant difference — and a negative one at that — which shows that Trump hasn't made a diffference on the economy. And why would he have? He hasn't cut taxes or increased infrastructure spending or done anything else that would meaningfully boost GDP. (Going golfing and tweeting #MAGA a lot don't count.)

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> This, in a lot of ways, is the archetypal Trump story: trying to take credit for something he inherited. [...] It's been the same with the economy. Trump hasn't actually done anything other than cut a few regulations, but he's made it sound like he's passed a new New Deal. (“No administration has accomplished more in the first 90 days,” he rather ludicrously claimed.) He brags about a “surging economy and jobs,” despite the fact that the economy and jobs are growing at exactly the same rate as before he took office. And, after disparaging the official unemployment rate as being “fake” and “phony” and “totally fiction” while Obama was president, he has apparently decided that it's “very real now.” In other words, Trump has done nothing and has congratulated himself for the economy Obama left behind.

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> Well, it's not just him doing the praising. Trump's new propaganda channel is, too. Those, at least, are jobs he really can take credit for.

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Edit: Also want plug Jonathan Haidt's book, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Religion and Politics because it is extremely relevant to what is going on. A central theme in the book is that intuition (emotion being a large part of intuition) comes first, reasoning second: that we have not evolved reason to arrive at truth, but rather as a means of justifying our behavior to others and persuading them to join our side. Thus reason is a strategic mechanism that we employ to justify the opinion we already have-- there are exceptions, of course, but this is the general case.

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This helps to explain why people hold even more strongly to their opinions in light of disconfirmatory evidence. In this case, Trump supporters are not going to be moved by these facts and figures when employed in arguments. I have not yet finished the book, but this video does a good job explaining one of the main tactics to overcome this problem: speak to the elephant (a person's intuitions) first.

u/minibuster · 40 pointsr/worldnews

Check out The Righteous Mind, a great and deep analysis of morality.

One of the takeaways I found fascinating is not that liberals and conservatives align differently on morality -- that's not really a surprise -- but that conservatives overall consider multiple different categories very important (e.g. sanctity, authority), while liberals HEAVILY consider fairness as a category that far outweighs the other moralities.

The short version is, it may feel satisfying to say that "Democrats will be fine with all that shit" and just sweep it under the rug, but I don't think that statement is true. I think the Democratic approach to leadership has plenty of its own flaws, but fairness is not one of them. I think Democrats tend to hold their own to higher expectations of fairness behavior than what we're seeing in the GOP.

u/falsehood · 39 pointsr/AskSocialScience

(mods, please remove if my source is bad)

I like the book The Righteous Mind and its discussion of morality. One of the points it makes is that being loyal to one's tribe and obeying authority are deeply moral matters for some people - and that those are more important then being nice, or being fair. The President is the head of a group they identify with and thus they are loyal.

u/cwenham · 19 pointsr/changemyview

> We need to abandon the fear of being wrong before we will accept the possibility of being wrong.

I'm reading a book right now by Jonathan Haidt called "The Righeous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion" that has an interesting metaphor: humans are 90% chimps and 10% bees (not literally, of course--we're 99% chimps ;-) We evolved in an environment that made us competitive with other individuals, but were able to form groups and hives outside of kinship to become much stronger through cooperation.

So in addition to pride and the avoidance of humiliation, we have the urge to stay loyal to the hive, even if it means hypocrisy.

/r/changemyview is sorta kinda like a hive where your identity and status is determined by how much you relax your grip on fixed viewpoints. If this sort of thing actually works, and gets copied to other forums and institutions, it might begin to permeate human culture and get people to re-base or re-form their hives on different precepts.

u/zoink · 13 pointsr/Anarcho_Capitalism

The Righteous Mind - Jonathan Haidt

>The results were clear and consistent. Moderates and conservatives were most accurate in their predictions, whether they were pretending to be liberals or conservatives. Liberals were the least accurate, especially those who described themselves as “very liberal.” The biggest errors in the whole study came when liberals answered the Care and Fairness questions while pretending to be conservatives. When faced with questions such as “One of the worst things a person could do is hurt a defenseless animal” or ”Justice is the most important requirement for a society,” liberals assumed that conservatives would disagree. If you have a moral matrix built primarily on intuitions about care and fairness (as equality), and you listen to the Reagan [i.e., conservative] narrative, what else could you think? Reagan seems completely unconcerned about the welfare of drug addicts, poor people, and gay people. He’s more interested in fighting wars and telling people how to run their sex lives.

u/Prince_Silk · 10 pointsr/slatestarcodex

If you haven't read Jonathan Haidt's, The Righteous Mind, I would recommend checking it out. It's a fabulous book that looks into the psychology of people with different political beliefs. What qualities do people value more and how those qualities translate to supporting one belief or another.

u/Shiner_Black · 9 pointsr/Libertarian

Your experience is a good example of Jonathan Haidt's findings in his book, The Righteous Mind.

A person's mind is kind of like a rider on an elephant. The rider is Reason and the elephant is Passion. The rider just follows wherever the elephant wants to go. As David Hume said, reason is a slave to the passions.

To get someone to change their mind about something important in politics, you have to talk to the rider. If the person talking about the moral case against the Drug War had mentioned libertarianism positively, that would've immediately caused your elephant to dig in its heels and not listen any further, and that would prevent the rider, Reason, from doing anything else.

u/Ohthere530 · 8 pointsr/TrueAtheism

Read a book on the psychology of politics. The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt is a good one. (Here's an NY Times article on the book.)

He argues that liberals and conservatives process moral questions very differently. In particular, conservative people often focus on "disgust". Does something feel unclean or gross? Gay sex, especially between men, triggers this feeling. To get a sense of "disgust", think of other religious taboos. Don't touch a woman on her period. Don't each "unclean" food. And so on.

Liberal people focus more on fairness. They don't focus much at all on disgust. It's not that conservative people don't value fairness at all. They do. It's just that disgust out-ranks it.

Me? I'm in favor of gay marriage. Classic liberal. So I'm not defending the conservative mind-set. Just trying to give you a sense of it.

u/Arguss · 6 pointsr/AskALiberal

For both sides, I'd recommend (and have several times at this point recommended) Jonathan Haidt's Moral Foundations Theory, as laid out in his book The Righteous Mind. You can also find YouTube videos from various talks of his that basically explain it all for free.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SOQduoLgRw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONUM4akzLGE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qN42ZLwNFBY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-_Az5nZBBM

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After that, I'd have them try to look at policies by adopting the other's moral foundations, instead of having their own as a base assumption. This is rather difficult, but it's easier when you at least know what the other's moral foundations are.

u/balanced_goat · 5 pointsr/AskSocialScience

Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind is a bit more focused than some of the other suggestions, but incredibly fascinating, readable, and does a great job of documenting the evolution of an idea in social psychology, which may give him insight into what it actually means to be a social psychologist. Wish it was available for me to read when I was his age.

u/kaffinator · 3 pointsr/Reformed

Moral Foundations Theory keeps confirming itself.

In short, leftist folk care exclusively about the moral virtues of justice and care. Those on the right have a wider palette of virtues including justice, care, loyalty, purity, and authority, giving these five roughly equal weight.

To the left, the right appears to be uncaring, because the right prioritizes virtues the left disregards.

To the right, the left appears to be ignorant of other legitimate virtues, because, well, it is.

I think this has probably always been so. I would prefer a world where a right-leaning person could value the left's deeper commitment to care, with the left appreciating how successful human societies require the employment of all five virtues. But, we live in a time where more political power can be derived from division than unity, and here we are.

u/jub-jub-bird · 3 pointsr/Conservative

I'm currently reading Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind which I was introduced to on a similar thread on /r/conservative.

Haidt is a social psychologist who is researching the psychological foundations of morality and how those foundations influence politics. He himself is very liberal though in the course of his research you can see him becoming more and more sympathetic to conservative ideas and coming to share many of their concerns.

His theory is that there are (at least) six basic foundations of morality: care, fairness, liberty, loyalty, authority, sanctity and that these foundations are an innate part of human psychology. In his research he found that liberals are concerned with care above the other five foundations. Fairness & liberty still rank fairly high, but loyalty, authority and sanctity rank very low for liberals. As you move to the right on the political spectrum care trends slightly down while all other moral foundations trend up until all six are of roughly equal concern to conservatives. It's not so much that conservatives care less than liberals (though they do... but just a little) It's more that conservatives balance care against several other moral concerns.

Haidt thinks this gives conservatives a political advantage since liberals in their fixation on care end up violating people's moral sensibilities on the other five foundations. More than that he sees the social benefits of those other foundations and that they are all required for a healthy society. Even though he remains extremely liberal himself he concedes that conservatives are right about the value they place on those other competing moral foundations. Haidt advocates that liberals start to value some of the other moral foundations more though I'm not sure how that is any different from saying they should become more conservative (or maybe neo-conservative in the original sense of that word).

u/nicktroiano · 3 pointsr/politics

How about my favorite book on this topic? Besides the Centrist Manifesto (obviously), I'd suggest: The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0052FF7YM/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1

It's a brilliant explainer on why we are so tribal in our politics... and what we can do about it.

u/timk85 · 3 pointsr/Christianity

I just vehemently disagree. I don't think being left is the same as being Liberal, either. There's room for a lot more nuance than you're letting on.

If you're really interested: Check out The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt. I would also recommend A Conflict of Visions by Thomas Sowell if you want further reading.

If you don't have the time and aren't interested, here's my summary: Someone's personality traits can pretty successfully predict their political leanings. Some people are biologically and environmentally predisposed to being Liberal or Conservative. Society needs the balance of both Liberals and Conservatives to be as good as possible. Conservatives bring order, Liberals bring ideas. Too much of one or the other causes division and if it gets too extreme, genocide and destruction. It is my belief that God has designed it this way. It will always be unhelpful to think along the lines of "conservatives are wrong" or "liberals are wrong."

Comments like, "The left has way more in common with Christianity than the right..." make me sad because I think it's horribly misguided. It misses the big picture completely.

The same Jesus who told us all to love also reprimanded a disciple for criticizing a woman who spent money on Jesus as opposed to giving it to the poor. He is both.

u/danish_lamanite · 3 pointsr/exmormon

I think what they all have in common is certain people's tendency to defer to authoritarian thinking. Three fascinating treatments that I would suggest to you:

  • David Campbell - mormon stories #504 explores link between Republican = more religious, and Democratic = less religious.
  • David Christian - mormon stories #558 discusses differences between conservative & liberal mindsets w/in context of community building, based on the work of Dr. Jonathan Haidt’s book “The Righteous Mind.”
  • And best of all, Bob Altemeyer's book The Authoritarians. Decades of legit research on Right Wing Authoritarian thinking, written in 2006 during the George W Bush presidency and Iraq war. Easily one of the most prophetic things I've ever read, considering the current MAGA/Trump movement.
u/Dennerman1 · 2 pointsr/AskSocialScience

Two great books on this very topic, but the short answer is you have the best chance to change someone's mind when they see you as someone "on their side" or in their group/tribe. If they perceive you as someone from the "opposition" then they will get defensive and no amount of convincing, facts, or persuasion is likely to have an impact on their point of view.

The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0052FF7YM/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1

How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B003WEAI4E/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1

u/gualdhar · 2 pointsr/politics

Moral Politics by George Lakoff, and The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt. Both are solid books on why conservatives and liberals think differently, though the first is a little dated with its references.

u/QuantumCynics · 1 pointr/PoliticalDiscussion

Well as far as the humor, I think this is part of the answer:

http://research.vtc.vt.edu/news/2014/oct/29/liberal-or-conservative-brain-responses-disgusting/

Basically you have the establishment comedy set who tells jokes like The Aristocrats (extreme example, but relevant). These are late night comedy hosts and if you look at the above research and listen to this highly NSFW joke, you'll get the disconnect.

I also recommend The Righteous Mind as a component of the answer, which is part of but expands on the 'disgust' angle. It's an excellent bit of research and Jon Haidt is worth listening to. He's got Ted Talks, etc.

u/nitram9 · 1 pointr/Lightbulb

Ok I think we have a misunderstanding about what morality really is. To me having morals doesn't mean you do the right thing all the time. It means you have a code of right and wrong. When you make a decision you can pass it through this code and tell if it feels right or feels wrong. What you actually do though isn't constrained by this. There's always an interplay between doing what's right and doing what you think is best for you. So yes people will cheat to get ahead, have affairs, bully people. The important thing though is that they know it's wrong.

In fact, the majority of murders are actually done for moral reasons. What I mean is that the murderer has passed his action through his moral code and determined that they are justified in doing it. Usually this is because their moral code differs from societies moral code and they deem that since society won't punish the wrong doer they have to punish them. This usually involves people who take loyalty very seriously. Like the gangsters who say snitches get stitches. They aren't just killing in self interest, they also feel a very strong moral obligation to punish disloyal members. There's nothing strictly strange about this, group loyalty is one of our strong moral intuitions. A large part of our modern western society involves trying culture us away from this tendency so that we don't end up committing genocides and stuff.

Likewise infidelity provokes moral murder. Husbands and wives with an unusually high regard for loyalty can find the disloyalty of their partners morally unacceptable and since the government won't punish them they have to do it. This is why so many murders like this have the dumbfounding end result of the murderer turning themselves in and proudly confessing, saying things like "and I'd do it again".

This is interesting because it strikingly illustrates where our societies morals have shifted away from the built in innate morals we are inclined towards. I mean all the abrahamic religions for instance say adultery is punishable by death. Punishment for infidelity is extremely common through history and across cultures and when we remove those laws people find it hard to not take the law into their own hands.


> I don't understand your evidence that apes have anywhere near the sense of morality we have. Sure, they teach their kids how to use tools from generation to generation but they also partake in murdering each other and rape. So they aren't paragons of morality in the animal world.

So I'm not saying they have anywhere near the level of "morality" that we do. Just that they have a sense of morality. It's not an all or nothing thing. Also, it's humorous that you would point to murdering and rape and say that means they're not moral. If that's so then discussion over, we're not moral either.

So like I said a lot of bad stuff is done for moral reason but there's a lot of bad stuff done for selfish reasons. There's an interplay in evolution of social species between cooperating and benefiting everyone and not cooperating to benefit yourself. This is what's going on in apes and in us. We rape because it benefits us (the more we rape the more children we have and children is everything) but we punish rape because it's bad for the community. Or in other words it's bad when everyone does it, it's good when I do it.

> I'm curious about your hypothetical island metaphor with 200 people. You seem to believe they would all get along and form a religion out of that morality. I feel like you're ignoring the likely possibility that 100 may form one religion, and the other 100 form another. So, what happens to morality then? What if they are at war?

Yeah I think I answered this above but to be clear, of course all that will happen because they are people but they will still form a moral code that they judge everyone on. Their fights will likely be of a moral character. Arguing as to whether it's ok to marry that widow or not and who get's to decide who marries who, who raises the orphans etc.

Ok, this has been so much writing so if you've gotten this far thank you but I wouldn't blame you if you flamed out half way through I just want to end with some very very strong book recommendations:

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. - by Jonathan Haidt

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined - by Steven Pinker

If you don't want to read either of those books at least just search for videos of presentations that they did on those books. It will give you a good idea of where I'm coming from.

u/kneekneeknee · 1 pointr/politics

Haidt is a thoughtful human, worth serious attention; he wrote The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.

From The Atlantic piece:
>Speaking spontaneously, in response to questions from reporters, [Trump] returned to his “many sides” formulation and the moral equivalency of the marchers and counter-demonstrators. The president of the United States said that there were “very fine people” on both sides.

>In that moment, Trump committed the gravest act of sacrilege of his presidency. In that moment, the president rendered himself untouchable by all who share the belief that Nazis and the KKK are not just bad—they are taboo.

u/Lottabirdies · 1 pointr/videos

> Perhaps some already have

It is possible. However, for those that have, their evidence does not meet the same level of scrutiny we use to convict people in courts of law or make airplanes fly. For such an extraordinary question as the purpose of life, it would be best to have evidence that at least meets those standards.

Further, we are notoriously biased as individuals and groups in our thinking. Knowing that, we have to be incredibly critical of ourselves.

Excellent book here if you've never read it on how people think... http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0052FF7YM/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?ie=UTF8&btkr=1. Video discussion on it as well... http://www.c-span.org/video/?c4560478/science-behind-feeling-get-someone-disagrees

u/longhorn2013 · 1 pointr/Conservative

Hey, just for this comment, I recommend reading the book 'The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion' - http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0052FF7YM/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?ie=UTF8&btkr=1). It is written by a liberal, but he gains respect for the conservatives by trying to actually understand WHY they think how they think how they do. To give you a brief description, he thinks there are multiple moral 'axis' which people think on. One of the main one used used by the left is the 'harm principle', which states that actions are wrong if, and only if they harm others. He has other axis, such as 'cleanliness', which explore other interesting moral questions (is it "wrong" to have sexual intercourse with a chicken's carcass?). I found it an invaluable tool, especially for understanding the religious right.

u/thesmokingpants · 1 pointr/InsightfulQuestions

I generally agree here but I think you might be painting a broad brush on conservative perspectives.

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0052FF7YM/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_88EOzbAX3DX47

https://youtu.be/ONUM4akzLGE

2017 Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL22J3VaeABQAT-0aSPq-OKOpQlHyR4k5h

u/gibbonwalker · 1 pointr/atheism

And of course we have a right to be outraged by these people. They stand in the way of our progress as a species in order to protect their personal faith in antiquated belief systems which have remained unchanged despite millennia of scientific advancements. But if we have any right to condemn them for failing to question their beliefs, then we must exercise the ability to question our own lest we be admit ourselves to be hypocrites. So I ask that you take a moment to question your view that having religion is a sign of intellectual inferiority, emotional weakness, gullibility, irrationality, or some other human defect. This is a convenient belief to have and one which I had myself for many years, but it's shamefully naive and as detrimental as any religion is to our efforts to unite as a species.

This view of religion is a result of misunderstanding the problem religion is solving. It's like thinking that a hammer is terrible tool because you saw someone attempt to use it as a screwdriver. Of course religion doesn't explain the physical world. That's not the point. You don't experience the physical world directly. Religion is a tool our species uses to understand the world that we do experience. The objective physical world around us that science so neatly explains only enters our conscious experience through our fallible senses and after being subjected to myriad unconscious filters and biases. We have innumerable reminders of this in the form of illusions. Consider the Muller-Lyer illusion or the Brainstorm/Green Needle illusion. Knowing that one line is longer than the other in the Muller-Lyer illusion doesn't change the fact that you perceive one line to be longer than the other. Not only is the reality you experience different from the objective reality, but even knowing what the objective reality is doesn't prevent you from experiencing it differently. Then consider the "Brainstorm / Green Needle" auditory illusion. The underlying stimulus isn't changing, but just by focusing on one phrase instead of the other, you hear that phrase. Together these illusions as well as others like them make it clear that (1) our experience is an inaccurate representation of reality and (2) the state of our mind can cause the same physical stimulus to be interpreted in very different ways. It's thoroughly established that explaining the physical world is outside the domain of religion, but consider the possibility that maybe religion can serve a practical purpose as a mental model for the experienced world.

Our survival as a species depended on our cooperation. Beyond our instinct for self-preservation, we needed to be able to see ourselves as a part of a larger whole and to be committed to serving that thing which is greater than ourselves. We needed to have an instinct for accountability to prevent any individual from jeopardizing the welfare of the group for their own needs. We needed to recognize actions which were beneficial to our survival so that we could facilitate and encourage them. We needed to recognize actions which posed a risk to our survival so we could inhibit and discourage them. Undeniably you experience things as "good" or "bad", but these aren't physical properties of the world like mass or density. No matter how much you analyze or deconstruct some action or some object, you can't find any trace of "goodness" or "badness", but that doesn't change how real your experience of it is. We find ourselves in a world which is a far cry from the one our brain was meant to function in and we struggle to navigate it. Religion creates a system for describing our experience and guiding it. It does so in the format of a narrative, a format which our brains find easily digestible. Does believing in God help us make predictions about the world? No, but maybe it gives us an explanation for why we feel like there's something greater than us that we should serve. Are some actions holy and others sinful? No, but maybe it helps us understand why we perceive "goodness" and "badness" in the world.

You don't understand religious people because they reject a system for explaining the natural world. Religious people don't understand you because you reject a system for explaining the experienced world. Religion isn't just a glitch in human behavior, its a tool for easing the transition into habitats which evolved faster than our brains could. Yes you can't reason with religious people because they don't reason their way into religion. It was just something which allowed them to make sense of the phenomena of conscious experience which aren't directly perceivable. What we need is a way to express and understand our spirituality which doesn't rely on buying into a belief system that precludes moral progress.

I suggest reading The Righteous Mind by Johnathan Haidt as some of these ideas are present in the book. I apologize for any such ideas I've misrepresented.

u/thomas-apertas · 1 pointr/Christianity

> It makes sense that he would care about harm to our bodies, that we don't do to our own bodies or others.

This is a modern, western understanding of morality (which probably most of us here share), but it's not the only understanding of morality humans have or even the pinnacle or fully realized morality that we sometimes make it out to be. For an interesting read on this idea, check out The Righteous Mind by an atheist moral psychologist, who argues convincingly that in most cultures morality has many more dimensions than whether or not someone's getting hurt.

> The hard part is seeing how homosexuality is harmful enough to be specifically forbid.

I'm not sure what you're responding to here. OP doesn't broach same sex sexual activity, and neither does my response.

> Or if he cares about passing STD's, he'd make a rule about only having sex with one person, not just saying only have sex after being married. (you can have sex with only one person without being married)

I don't think that the moral code provided by Christianity (whichever of the available Christian moral codes you choose) are designed to protect us from STDs or disease.

> And if it's bodies he's worried about, smoking and overeating would be horrible sins, causing much more death, pain and suffering than homosexual blowjobs.

Allow me to clarify: God is not only concerned about our bodies. OP's original question suggests that there are parts of the human experience with which God is concerned and other parts about which God simply does not care, or at least ought not to. So, God is concerned about our physical bodies, our spirits, our souls, and any and all other aspects of our human lives.

While we may disagree about what expressions of human sexuality are moral or immoral, we as Christians must agree that human sexuality is certainly not amoral--as are a great number of other activities we like to pretend are amoral.