TED on morality

WhatSilence clued me in to this video about the evolutionary imperatives behind morality, and how and why different groups of people view morality in different ways.

It's an eye-opening presentation, though I wish he'd pushed the biology angle a little bit further. He mentions that our brains come preprogammed, but doesn't explore to what degree that is. He also doesn't linger long enough on his foreign results - there was a spike in certain moral axis the moderates for some countries, and I'd love to visit that further.

On a related topic, I'd like to pimp PoliticalCompass.org again. Check it out. The site is visually dry, but I strongly recommend you take their test and look at the results graphs once you've done so. I'm located deep in the lower left quadrant of Political Compass's graph, which strongly correlates to where I'd rank on the 5 categories of morality mentioned in the TED video above. I learned a lot about myself at Political Compass, and about the reasons why I get so angry with politics in this country. Without having read it, I'd still be calling myself a Democrat.